Lauren Groff - Arcadia

Handy comes home on bail. Bit watches with Abe and Hannah from their bedroom window as he steps from the Chevrolet. He seems shrunken, and when Helle and Leif and Ike run to him at the bottom of the hill, they are all taller than their father.

Why is nobody else down there welcoming Handy back? Bit says.

We’re all fed up with Handy’s shit, Hannah says. I’m not the leader, but my word is your command. Everyone must work, but freeloaders are welcome in Arcadia. Fucking Cockaigne Day. A community based on work, but I get to spend all day up in my fancy room, high as a kite, sticking my dick into any of the chicks who will lay down in front of me.

Hannah, Abe says.

Hannah snaps, What? I know you think the same thing.

Yes, he says. I’ve never heard you say the word dick before. Cussing becomes you.

She says, Ha! and kisses him, very slowly, on the forehead.

Now she sits on the bed and says, Stone family meeting. Item one and only. Do we stay or do we go?

For an hour, they debate. Carefully, cautiously. With Handy out of the picture, they can change Arcadia; if they stay, they will have to shoulder the crippling debt. If everyone works their asses off, they can survive the winter; how can they work with so few people left? They love Arcadia with all their hearts; their hearts are so very tired.

They decide to not decide. They will stay, and if staying becomes unbearable, they will go.

Bit tries to wait for Helle at night. They have to talk, but she doesn’t come back from wherever she is disappearing to. In the mornings, he sits outside the room she shares with Jincy and Muffin, but she doesn’t emerge. She is a smooth white fish, darting away from him. He wakes at midnight shaking from another nightmare, and rises. The moon is full and cold. He tries to run but gives up, the rock in his stomach too heavy. He finds his way into the thick, watchful woods. There is the familiar press upon him, the eyes from the dark. The menace could kill him. He walks until he finds himself at Verda’s and knocks on her door. She is up sleepless also, making cornbread muffins. He sits at the woodstove in her blanket, Eustace curled around his feet. Verda reads him and says nothing. At last, after he has picked apart his muffin and held the tea until it is lukewarm, she says, Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it.

He doesn’t say anything.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know.

In the morning, the Pink Piper roars to life. Peanut and Clay have spent all night getting it into working shape. Astrid is going back to the Midwifery School in Tennessee with all the Pregnant Ladies, the midwives. She and Handy have one last kiss on the porch. He says, I hate that this whole thing is over.

Still, there is — what? the release of losing? the hope in devastation? — in his face.

The lawyer will be in touch, you know, Astrid says.

She kisses her children. When Helle says, Take me with you, Astrid says, You must have your year in Norway. It will be grand for you. Margrete is very tough and will help you mend your ways, my girl. You are too wild.

Ike, unabashed, weeps, and Bit can do nothing but pat his shoulder until he calms.

When Astrid boards the bus, Lila goes with her. Hiero stays. Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit’s hands.

Titus and his family drive off before lunch, cramped in a Volkswagen van that had been such a beater even the Motor Pool had left it for dead at one corner of the lot. It may be, Bit thinks, the van he was born in. Jincy and Wells hitch into Syracuse, but not before Jincy bends to hug Bit. I love you, she says. I’ll find you. At a loss, he kisses her hands again and again, his wild-haired sister. Muffin goes with her mothers, screaming. The Free Store is unmonitored for two days until Abe presses people into shifts there, and in that time, things are taken from the shelves with nothing to replace them. Good things: knives and pouches of tobacco, candy bars and handkerchiefs, handmade pillows and afghans, gone. They wake to find more people missing. Tarzan. Peanut. Clay. Harrison, whose charges are dropped. More and more, faster and faster. The Ado Unit echoes, rooms empty. Only two hundred people eat supper that night.

Handy disappears the afternoon he is supposed to return for his trial. For hours, Cole and Bit and Dylan talk over Handy’s flight through Vermont, up into Canada, growing breathless at the thought of his being an outlaw. But Helle and Ike trail back into the Common Room at midnight, limp. With a weary air, Helle says, I drove us. And we went all the way to Niagara Falls after we dropped him off, just to see the waterfall.

They stare at her. You took Handy to Canada? Cole says.

I wanted to keep going to Canada, says Ike. But he insisted on going to the jail.

And you know what he said? Helle says. Right as he got out of the car? He said, Be good, kiddos, that’s what he said.

There was no Stay strong, and brave, my beautiful children . No I love you, Ike says, trying to make a joke of it.

Helle looks at her brother with Astrid’s cold eyes. That’s because he doesn’t, she says.

Bit grabs Helle’s hand as she stands to go to bed with the other girls. She sits back down beside him and watches the doors close. You’re mad at me, she says when they are alone.

I am, he says. He means, he thinks, stealing the marijuana; but when he says it, he sees the pool of darkness, the bodies silvered with moonlight.

She opens her mouth, she closes it again. When she speaks, she seems unstuffed, a pillow that has lost its feathers. I thought you knew who I was. I’m so sorry, Bit, she whispers. I didn’t know you thought we were together like that.

Together? he says.

She frowns. Isn’t that what you mean? Me with other boys.

No, he says, though his heart mutters, Liar.

What, then? she says.

The pot, he says. That you stole. That we couldn’t fucking sell, Helle, and now we’re as poor as ever. You’re the only one I told.

She hunches her thin shoulders up until her neck is gone. She closes her eyes and seems to shrink. When she pulls herself to standing, she says, Does it really even matter? I mean, she says, gesturing out at Arcadia with both hands, does it? In the end?

Bit is on the rock in the Pond as the other Ados dabble in the too-warm water. He feels old. The spores of milkweed gust in on the wind and fold themselves flat when they touch the surface. On boulders a hundred feet away, Armand Hammer sits, king of the Runaways. His buddies strip off, dive into the pond. Alone, he pulls from a knapsack at his feet the biggest plastic bag of marijuana Bit has ever seen. Armand sees Bit looking and grins, his upper lip touching the nail that sticks through his nose.

Want some? Armand calls out. Ten bucks for the whole bag. I got a shitload more in the woods.

Where did you get that? Bit says.

Armand shrugs and says, Someone told me some asshole was using the Sugarshack to cure it. And so I helped myself.

It’s not yours, Bit says.

Armand says, What’s your deal, man? It’s a fucking commune, it’s everyone’s.

Bit doesn’t know how he gets from his rock to Armand’s so fast. He doesn’t know how hard a face can feel against a hand, how teeth can split a fist, how fury can make even Bit, a half a head smaller than Armand and forty pounds lighter, the stronger boy. He hits until something goes loose in his head, and he flies backward, a trickle forming in his eyes, and he sees Cole and Ike and Dylan and Harrison and Fiona come sealing wetly up out of the water, hopeless skinny hippie kids about to get knocked off their blocks. From where he lies in the cool space between two boulders, Bit sees Helle standing, white and apart, not even looking at the fracas. She is looking only at Bit. She bends as if from a great height, and he closes his eyes to feel her fingers on his face.