I stop short of the mailbox and gaze out at the property. It’s Sleeping Beauty’s dude ranch: a low lodge, a row of cabins, a collection of horse pastures with cobbled fencing, all buried under a tangle of blackberry brambles. It doesn’t look like the pictures from the website. The advertisements—Your Wedding Here! A Fun Place for the Family! It looks like it’s been cast under a spell.
There is a small parking lot on the right. I can see your parents’ house, deep brown clapboard with red accents. A single vine snakes up one side, pointing at a window where a golden telescope winks.
I shut off the engine when I see the hounds of the Baskervilles rushing toward me en masse. Behind them is a woman on a red ATV, kicking up dust, riding like a witch somewhere over a rainbow. The dogs surround the car, so I don’t open the door. I just roll down the window as the ATV curves in front of me and I recognize your mother’s face from the website.
I remember everything you said about her.
Episode 7: My mother has a tincture for every problem.
Episode 66: My mother is a “truther.” She believes every fact is a lie spawned by the government to target her specifically.
Episode 54: The Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard: I get that. I get that so much.
She must be over sixty. She has winding dark hair with the kind of volume you only see in commercials. Her roots are gray and her eyebrows are blond and it surprises me that she chooses this matte, lifeless color.
The swarming dogs are rough and sickly, coarse fur full of burrs, bodies warped by uneven lumps like tumors. One is wheezing so loudly, I think it should be read its last rites.
“What are you doing here?” she demands like we know each other personally.
I think of you, what you told me. My mother likes strong people. Cold people, like her.
I try to be strong and cold, but my lips are weak, my face collapses and my voice makes a plaintive whine when I say, “I heard you might have work?”
“Where did you hear that?” she says like that is more pertinent than whether or not she does.
“The store, um, just down the road.”
“Where?”
“In Happy Camp.”
“Don’t talk to those people about us. Those people hate us. They’ve always hated us.”
I glance around me, searching for clues. The air is different here, as if the pressure dropped and we are in our own separate universe, a bubble of life surrounded by trees. The highway is below us, but I can’t hear it now. The sky is above us, but it looks pushed back. The air has a rich quality that makes me want to breathe deeply.
“Um, do you? Have work?” I want to ask about you. I want to ask about you right away, but I can’t. I have to play it safe. I have to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.
She scoffs. Her head rocks slightly on the exhale. “What can you do?”
“Anything,” I say. “I can do anything.” I am qualified in almost nothing. I dropped out of college when I met my husband. I have never earned more than minimum wage. But this looks like a place where that might be a good thing.
You told me that your mother liked her people strong, but I can see she is drawn in by my weakness, like a shark by the scent of blood.
She leans in. “Work hard?”
“All I do is work.” This is a lie. All I do is listen to murder podcasts and obsessively check my phone. I want to check it now, even though I don’t have service.
“Where’d you come from? What about your family?”
“I’m thirty-three,” I say like that explains it.
She jerks the key and shuts off the engine. My adrenaline is so high, I hadn’t even noticed the sound, how loud we’ve been talking. We drop into the silence.
“Adelaide, but everyone calls me Addy.”
I consider giving her a fake name, but it crosses my mind that I want to get paid, even if I am here for you. “Sera.”
“Well, Sera.” She takes off her gloves and wipes her hands on her leg as if preparing to shake my hand, but she doesn’t. Her hand stays on her knee. “Do you know anything about horses?”
“I’ve been riding since I was five.”
“English, Western?”
“English.”
“That’s okay. If people know English, they can usually do Western,” she says like she wants me to succeed. “Why don’t you hop on back and I can show you the place?”
As I unbuckle my seat belt, I am slightly unmoored by how easy this is. Is it fate, or is it a red flag? I open my car door carefully, and the dogs swirl around my feet. I try to pet them as they pass, but they’re lumpy and odd, like they have bones and body parts ordinary dogs don’t.
She scoots forward and starts the engine as I climb awkwardly on behind her. The ATV jumps and I make a grab, grab her by mistake and she laughs, a solid bark. “You can hold on to the back.” She means the basket behind us, but she jerks forward before I catch it. It is filled with cleaning products and potions that clatter together when we move. She laughs again and I scramble, wind my fingers through the bars and hold on tight as the ATV shoots forward.
We off-road across the overgrown lawn, over bumps and dips that jar my carsick head. It strikes me suddenly that this is too easy, that there is something wrong with being so desperate for workers that they hire people off the street, with no family or friends to recommend them. And then I think of the woman at the coffee shop, how she didn’t mention this place. That must have been intentional. This is a small town and you went to Happy Camp High School and there is no way that woman didn’t know this place existed, but she didn’t mention it. And your mother said the people in Happy Camp hate them.
We break free of the lawn, and we sail down a dirt road, a cloud of dust roaring up behind us, gravel spitting up from beneath the wheels, and your mother says, “We don’t drive this fast when guests are here.” I don’t know why we have to drive this fast now.
And my wrists are twisted awkwardly and they wrench as we take a fast turn and I hiss and readjust them and your mother just laughs; she laughs like she can feel my pain and it tickles her.
* * *
—
We curve to a stop in front of an old tack room with antique farming equipment nailed to the wall: scythes, crooked axes, saws with thin, grated teeth. She bumps me back as she climbs off. I glance up.
“Why are those vultures circling?”
She narrows her eyes against the sun, peers up at the spot where they float in lazy circles. “That’s normal out here,” she assures me with a confidence that chips like a lie. “Things die all the time. This is the wilderness.”