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Back The Wilderwomen
Chapters (37)
  1. Copyright Notice
  2. Dedication
  3. BEFORE
  4. AFTER
  5. ONE THOUGHTS ON SUN HATS
  6. TWO TIME FOR CAKE
  7. THREE TWELVE MONTHS
  8. FOUR PSYCHIC KARAOKE
  9. FIVE A SECOND SLEEPING BAG
  10. SIX SIX MONTHS
  11. SEVEN THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE PANCAKE
  12. EIGHT SIX MONTHS
  13. NINE FOLLOW THE MUSIC
  14. TEN THE STARS ARE BRIGHTER IN THE DESERT
  15. ELEVEN SIX MONTHS
  16. TWELVE EVERY STAR HAS A SONG
  17. THIRTEEN PSYCHIC KARAOKE
  18. FOURTEEN ONE MONTH
  19. FIFTEEN A WELL-TRAVELED HAT
  20. SIXTEEN JOEL VS. THE VOLCANO
  21. SEVENTEEN TWO WEEKS
  22. EIGHTEEN HOUSE OF MEMORIES
  23. NINETEEN IF TREES COULD TALK
  24. TWENTY THREE DAYS
  25. TWENTY-ONE SEARCH PARTY
  26. TWENTY-TWO NOT THE SAME ZADIE
  27. TWENTY-THREE WAVES OF SMOKE
  28. TWENTY-FOUR THE DAY OF
  29. TWENTY-FIVE THE SKY IS FULL OF BIRDS
  30. TWENTY-SIX NEST
  31. TWENTY-SEVEN
  32. EPILOGUE
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT A SONG ABOUT A BIRD
  34. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  35. Also by Ruth Emmie Lang
  36. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  37. Newsletter Sign-up

Zadie stared at the picture of the woman on the box. Her hair was the color of toilet bowl cleaner. She was in love. “Let’s do it.”

Nora and Zadie ordered a pizza and took turns painting dye onto each other’s roots. While they waited for their hair to transform from that of mere mortals to that of mythic sea creatures, they watched Splash on the motel TV and laid the seashells they’d collected that day out on the bedspread. For three inimitable hours, Zadie forgot all about their fight the week before. She felt like a kid again, watching birds outside her window as her mom hummed softly and swayed, and swayed, and swayed until Zadie was too big to fit in her arms anymore. Now that they were the same height, they could sway together. They could dance if Zadie let them.

EIGHTEEN HOUSE OF MEMORIES

It smelled like rain, like exhumed earthworms and peckish robins; high, fast rivers and overflowing storm drains that turned into their own little creeks in the gutters of roads. It smelled like growth, not bullish leaps of progress, but infinitesimal shifts in color and shape, seedling to flower in many thousands of blinks of an eye. Rain meant change and change was coming. Finn could feel it.

They were winding down a two-lane highway that had been blasted out of a mountainside a hundred years ago by railcars hauling explosives. Not hundreds, but millions of years’ worth of sediment towered on either side of them like castle walls, and ahead, the base of an evergreen mountain, the top of which was hidden behind a dense fog that looked like a plume of uncarded wool.

Joel had offered to give Zadie a break from driving and was now behind the wheel. “Almost there,” he said as he glanced over at the GPS on his phone. Finn was quiet. She didn’t need a GPS to know they were getting close. She could feel it in her gut the same way she could sense a memory. I’ve been here before, she thought, even though she hadn’t.

Joel took the next exit onto a narrow unmarked side road that shimmied its way through a jungle of red cedar, hemlock, and giant prehistoric ferns. The house, according to whatever satellite was still able to send them coordinates, was tucked at the end of the road, three miles deep into the forest and about fifteen from the nearest town. “I can’t believe we still have a signal,” Finn remarked. Then, as fate once tempted is wont to do, the signal dropped.