The Courage Tree

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Her mother let out a cynical laugh. “Do you hear yourself, Janine?” she asked. “You have put Sophie in danger. Repeatedly. What do you call this weekend away? What do you call putting Sophie in a harebrained study to use herbs to cure—” she used her hands to put quotes around the word cure “—end stage kidney disease? You’ve gone out of your way to put Sophie in danger.”

“Mom,” Joe said. “Maybe that’s going too far.”

Maybe? Janine’s eyes burned from the assault.

“It’s insane that you stopped doing her nightly dialysis.” Her mother wasn’t quite finished.

“She doesn’t need it every night anymore,” Janine said.

“Your mother might be exaggerating a bit,” her father said, in his even, controlled voice, “but we do need to talk about this. About what’s been going on the past few months.”

“What do you mean?” She tightened her arms across her chest. How much did they know?

“We’ve been talking with Joe about what to do when Sophie gets back,” her father continued. He was tall and gangly and always looked like a little kid whose body had grown too quickly for him to handle with grace. “We really think Joe should have custody of her,” he said. “I mean, you could still have her live with you much of the time, the way you do now, but when it comes to making the medical decisions and…decisions like this one, about the Scout camp and all, we think Joe should be the one to make them.” Her father’s calm disappointment in her cut even deeper than her mother’s shrill accusations.

Joe moved next to her, touching her hand where it gripped her elbow.

“Let’s not talk about it now,” he said to her parents. “Don’t even think about it tonight, Janine. Right now, let’s just focus on getting Sophie back.”

He was the voice of reason, and his kindness seemed genuine, but she knew better than to trust him. Behind her back, he was conspiring with her parents. She took a step away from him to pick up her purse from the table. “I’m going to the cottage,” she said, heading for the door.

“What?” her mother said. “We need to stay right here until we hear some news.”

“I can be reached just as easily in the cottage,” she said.

Joe rested his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

She shook her head without looking at him, then walked through the mudroom and out to the driveway.

Walking through the darkness toward her cottage, she bristled from the encounter with her family, and she was glad Joe hadn’t tried to follow her. Having Joe with her was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t need to hear any more about his plans to assume custody of Sophie. She didn’t need any more blame. It had been this way her entire adult life: her parents and Joe against her. Over the years, their disapproval of her had crystallized into something hard and unmovable. Even now, when they should be pulling together with her, fighting on the same side of this war, she felt like their enemy.

Once in the cottage, though, she would call Lucas. That’s where she would find her advocate. That’s where she would find her strength.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Zoe held a match to the kindling at the bottom of the fire and watched as the wood began to flame. She was getting good at this. Very good, actually. For someone who had never built a fire in her life—in spite of having had four fireplaces in her Malibu house and six on Max’s dream ranch in Montana—she could now call herself an expert.

Resting near her on the ground was a pot filled with water, uncooked rice and chunks of the rabbit she’d killed that morning. She moved the pot to the small grill she’d laid over the fire pit and sat down on one of the flat rocks to wait for the water to boil.

She could not yet claim to be comfortable with the whole meat preparation process, but she was getting there. As of today, she had killed six animals: two rabbits, three squirrels and, amazingly, a porcupine. She had shot at many more, and she felt worse about those she’d merely terrorized with her bullets than those she had killed with one clean, quick shot. Still, this slaughtering and eating did not come easily to someone who had been a vegetarian for a dozen years. She’d been such a champion of animal rights that she’d refused to wear leather shoes, and she’d even been arrested for protesting in front of stores that sold fur. Ah, yes, if only PETA could see her now, she thought, boiling a rabbit she had killed, skinned and gutted herself.

She’d left the lid to the pot inside—the tiny, rundown cabin she had quickly come to think of as her home, so she got to her feet and walked inside. When she returned to the small clearing carrying the lid, she spotted a large dog standing a couple of yards from the fire, and she froze. It was the dirty yellow dog this time, as opposed to the huge black bear of a dog who had visited her a few days earlier. Both of them had temperaments as nasty as their matted and unkempt coats. When she’d first seen the dogs, she’d feared they belonged to someone living nearby and that she was not alone in these West Virginia woods. But their hungry, neglected appearance made her think they were probably wild.

The yellow dog looked in her direction, silently baring his teeth.

“Scram!” she shouted at him. “Get lost!” She banged the lid against the flat rock, and that seemed to work. The dog turned around and trotted off into the woods.

It was her fault the dogs hung around the shanty. She’d made a tactical error with them in her early days out here. She had killed her first animal, another rabbit, and she’d had to force herself to go through the motions of preparing it to eat. Following the instructions in one of the wilderness survival books she’d brought with her, she told herself she had no choice: she would need protein to be able to live out here. Despite the fact that she’d fashioned an impressive spit above the fire and that the aroma of the cooked rabbit had actually made her mouth water, she had not been able to make herself chew and swallow the meat. Instead, she’d tossed it into the woods. That night, she’d lain awake, weeping quietly over the life she’d taken for no good reason, and listened to animals—wild dogs, she knew now—fighting over the carcass in the darkness.

The next time, though, she was hungrier and more determined. Marti was a meat eater, and Zoe knew she would have to be able to kill and cook meat to feed her. On that day, she killed and ate her first squirrel. She’d also caught a small, dark-scaled fish in a net she’d brought with her, and she’d managed to get that down despite the fact that it bore no resemblance to any other fish she’d ever eaten and could have been poisonous for all she knew.

The water was boiling, and she leaned forward to stir the stew before covering it with the lid. The fire pit was in the exact center of the small clearing, just a few yards in front of her shanty. That was what she called the dilapidated cabin, finding shanty a far prettier word than hovel or shack, which would have been a more accurate description of the building. Her little shanty was hidden so deeply in the forest that Zoe was certain no one would find it unless they actually knew it was there.

She herself had found the structure through a painstaking search of these wooded West Virginia mountains back in early April, when she and Marti first agreed on their plan. She’d actually discovered several abandoned cabins, but this one had appealed to her most, both practically and aesthetically. On the practical side, it was far from the nearest road, a good five miles, and even that road was barely paved and rarely traveled. The nearest main road was a couple of miles beyond that one. This cabin was as far from civilization as Zoe had ever been, and she was frankly thrilled by the distance between her and the rest of the world. That world thought she was dead. It held nothing for her any longer.

Her shanty would never appear in Better Homes and Gardens, but it was still more appealing than some of the other shacks she’d seen. Some of them were little more than decrepit piles of rotting wood, while this one had a little character. It was a log cabin and looked as old as the mountains themselves. The logs were separated by a mortar that had once been white, but was now green with moss on two adjacent sides of the house, dirty and crumbling on the others. The roof was rotting, and she’d initially covered the decaying wood and scraps of tin with the tarp she’d brought along with her. But then she realized that, if anyone should find his way to her little clearing, the bright-blue tarp would give away the fact that someone was living in the shanty, so she took it down. Now, when it rained, she put a couple of buckets beneath the worst spots in the roof and let it go at that.

Inside the front door of the shanty was, what she called for want of a better term, the living room, which ran the width of the building. Behind that, an identical room served as a bedroom. And that was it. A two-room log cabin, both rooms together nearly equaling the size of her Malibu bathroom.

But the shanty had what she was coming to think of as amenities. Remarkably clear water ran from a rusty old pump in the overgrown yard. A wood-burning stove in surprisingly good shape sat on the floor in the main room, its chimney pipe winding its way through a leaking hole in her roof. The pipe was round, the hole square, and that about summed up the care that had been taken by whomever constructed this place. She’d used the stove only once to cook on, but it heated the entire shanty, and she knew she would have to do her cooking outside until the cooler months. At least she and Marti would not freeze here in the winter.

There was a sofa in the living room, and once she’d gotten over the revolting, disintegrating fabric and protruding tufts of stuffing, she was grateful for a place to sit. She’d brought a dozen or so sheets with her, and she threw a cream-colored one over the sofa and thought that it looked like it came straight out of some campy catalogue—as long as no one noticed the splintery wooden floor beneath it and the lack of glass in the window behind it.

Not far from the house, but hidden behind a shield of brambles and vines, was an outhouse. It tilted to one side, giving her vertigo when she sat inside it. The outhouse had smelled nearly as fresh as the forest when she’d first arrived, a testimony to how long it had been since anyone had called this place home.

When she’d first stepped inside the cabin, the floor had been covered with debris—branches and twigs and rotting leaves that had fallen or blown through the gaping holes in the roof. Mice skittered away from her broom, and she remembered reading something about mice droppings causing that flesh-eating virus, so she’d covered her nose and mouth with a kerchief, unsure if that would help. Unsure if it really mattered. She just needed to live long enough to save her daughter. After that, death could come anytime, and she truly wouldn’t mind.

Once she’d emptied the back room of its tree branches and leaves, she discovered four sleeping palettes on the floor, one in each corner. She’d brought two air mattresses with her, which she inflated on the palettes against the far wall. Then she tore one of the king-size sheets and made the palettes and mattresses up as best she could. She’d stepped back to look at them and was amazed at how much the simple sight of those two low beds, dressed in Egyptian cotton, pleased her. She was glad she’d thought to bring these lavender sheets; they were the only ones that did not remind her of Max, since he’d always hated the color and she had used them only on the guest beds. She hadn’t wanted to bring any tangible traces of her grief with her. Living here would be hard enough without adding mourning to her list of things to do. Once she’d left Malibu, once she’d pulled the car out of the driveway and headed for the mountains, she knew she was leaving Max behind forever. She was leaving everything behind—except her duty as a mother.

She’d been in the shanty for over a month now, but she’d been planning this trip, this new life, for weeks prior to her “suicide.” She’d been planning it ever since Marti had written her, telling her she was being transferred to the prison at Chowchilla. It had been unbearable to picture Marti in prison anywhere, but Chowchilla, with its reputation for abusive guards, toughened prisoners and intolerable living conditions, was out of the question. Zoe had lain awake all that night, Marti’s letter in her hand, a bizarre plot taking shape in her mind.

She’d gotten out of bed to walk downstairs to the study, a room she’d been avoiding ever since Max’s death. Sure enough, the Persian rug and the burgundy walls lined with books and awards still held his scent, that musky scent of cigars, as though he’d just left the room for a moment. Standing stock-still in the doorway of the room, she’d had to shut her eyes and remind herself that he was dead. This was the room where she’d found him, crumpled on the floor near the hearth, the way a blanket would crumple if you dropped it, limp and folded in on itself. She’d known instantly that he was dead, and yet she’d screamed his name over and over as if he could hear her. It had been his third and final heart attack. The cigars were to blame, she’d thought. Or maybe the pace he’d insisted on holding himself to. He’d been seventy years old and still producing a movie a year, still insisting on having his hand in every aspect of it, from the casting to the final cut. She did not, however, blame herself, except for not checking on him sooner when he hadn’t come up to bed that evening. She had been a good wife to him, and he had been the finest of husbands. A forty-year-old marriage in Hollywood was something to point to with pride. Yet, she’d hoped to see fifty years with him, and maybe more.

She could not be the single woman again, not at sixty. Not with the paparazzi following her every move, noting each new wrinkle, each gray root marking the birth of every dark-blond hair on her head. She’d been known for that long, thick, shimmery blond hair since she was a little girl, and she had not been able to let go of it. She’d had three surgeries on her face already, and she was sick of the doctors and the recovery time and the fact that she no longer looked like herself. And now the wrinkles were starting again and the tabloids were taunting her. They criticized the extra pounds she’d put on. Last year, one of them had described her as a mountain. A mountain! Only Max had still seemed to think she was beautiful and desirable and valuable, and when he died, there was no one to tell her the tabloids were simply wrong and mean-spirited. She’d been an actress and a singer since she was three years old, well-known enough to go by her first name alone, like Cher and Madonna and Ann-Margret. Only those women were aging far better than she was. Escape began to sound marvelous. She would not have to endure growing old in the unforgiving spotlight.