Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“Good,” Sunny said, and took Josie’s hand. “Come home and have some dinner with us tonight. I want to introduce you to someone.”

So Josie called home, told her mother the truth — that she was eating dinner with her dentist, and because her mother had lost all hold on propriety, she agreed, told her to be home by ten. Josie rode in the backseat, Sunny’s car old but clean, Helen in the front seat, Josie feeling very much like they were in a getaway car, sure that the three of them would be thereafter best friends and an inseparable trio. She entered Sunny’s house, walking between Sunny and Helen as if being protected, like a president or pope.

“Samantha!” Sunny yelled, and a girl tromped down the stairs and stopped midway. She was the girl from the picture.

—

So Josie was Helen and Sunny’s second project. The realization knocked her back. Samantha had been taken in a year before, fleeing a mother who beat her and a trucker father who had photographed her in the shower. Samantha lived forty miles away, and Helen had been alerted to her case by a high school counselor there. Samantha’s emancipation process was quick. Now Samantha was home-schooled in some self-guided arrangement that Josie didn’t immediately understand. She didn’t understand, either, why Sunny hadn’t told her about Samantha before the emancipation discussions had begun.

“I couldn’t tell you about Samantha before we were sure,” Sunny said. After dinner that night, Sunny had suggested a walk, and so, under a dark canopy of trees, she explained Samantha’s situation. “It’s best if she keeps a low profile. We have the restraining order on her dad, but it’s best not to risk it. You understand? Does the existence of Samantha change your mind about all this?”

It did. During the drive from Sunny’s office to her home, Josie had believed Sunny was taking her in an act of bravery, of wild and even irresponsible courage. But it was more mechanical than that. She and Helen had a system.

“You coming to me after Sam was serendipity,” Sunny said, trying to return the situation to something closer to a fairy tale. “You two are only a year apart, and could make each other stronger.”

Or we could drag each other into a succession of feral teenage dramas, Josie thought.

“I know it’s awkward,” Sunny said that night and often thereafter. “But it’s quiet here, and safe.”

It was awkward. Josie and Samantha were put in the same room, meaning Samantha’s room had been instantly halved and her personal space evaporated. “What have those two sluts done now?” she muttered to herself while loudly moving her belongings around the room to make way for Josie’s. She cooperated, seething, competitive one month, then aloof, prone to occasional eruptions. Josie stayed in her school, and they had different friends, so their contact was incidental, and avoidable. Sam treated Josie like a freeloading drifter who had come in from the rain to share a room she’d paid for.

Eventually there was detente, and they revealed each other’s weaknesses, only to have them exploited later. They were smart and angry girls who were not properly grateful to Sunny or Helen, who argued with their teachers, who flirted with each other’s boyfriends, who stole or broke each other’s things.

But their home was sane and calm, and Josie’s own emancipation was accomplished without resistance. “I laid out the pros and cons for your mom,” Helen said one day, and Sunny smiled — the implication was that they’d utterly overpowered Josie’s mother; it gave Josie a twinge of guilt. Josie visited her mother every month for the next year, and their meetings, always at a highway Denny’s situated between their two towns, were cordial and tense, and they talked mostly about how good it would be in a few years, when all was settled, when whatever resentment had burned off between them and they could return to each other as adults and equals. Ha.

There were some whispers about Sunny and Helen, just what they were up to — building some kind of cult, one lost teenager at a time? Were they lesbians? Were they lesbians starting a lesbian cult? But after Josie there were no more strays, not that year at least. Eventually Sunny’s home became a known haven for young women fleeing calamity, and the power of Sunny’s interest in Josie was diluted by all the girls who followed. Sunny knew it, and worried Josie and Sam would feel neglected. Don’t worry, Josie told her. Never worry.

IN A FLURRY JOSIE WOKE THE KIDS, got them in their seatbelts and drove up the Spit and back to the Cliffside RV park, to meet Sam. They were late, stupidly late. In twenty minutes Josie was putting on their shoes in the parking lot, Ana’s like little rubber bricks, and then they were all standing atop the bluff, looking down at Sam, who was with about twenty others, a barbecue in full swing on the beach below, all to welcome Josie and her children.

“Sorry!” Josie yelled down, as they made their way down the steep path, trying to smile, trying to laugh, as if they were all in this together, the Alaskan way, a life without schedules and set times for beach barbecues. “We fell asleep!” Josie said brightly, trying to make it sound adorable, as Paul and Ana dragged groggily behind her, so she kept a smile frozen on her face as they jumped the last feet from the path to the beach. Sam was quickly upon her, swallowing her in a wooly embrace, her hair and sweater smelling of woodsmoke. She was wearing shorts, boots with the laces open, and a handknit black sweater. Her hair was windblown and unwashed.

“Don’t worry, you’re only an hour late to your own party,” she said, releasing Josie and grabbing Ana and lifting her high. “You’ve never met me but I plan to eat you,” she said, and Ana’s eyes went electric, as if alerted to another of her wild breed. Sam kissed Ana roughly on the ear while eyeing Paul more cautiously. “Is this Paulie?” she said, and put Ana down. Paul faced her, and seemed to be accepting the possibility that Sam would lift him, too. But she didn’t. She squatted in front of him and held his face with two red hands. “I always remember those eyes of yours,” she said, and then stood up.

The barbecue was being held close to the bluff, on a vast beach at low tide, the beach striped in orphaned strands of ocean water, silver in the low light. Across the water were the Kenai Mountains, but no one paid them any attention. The rest of the guests were accustomed to all this rugged beauty, all this driftwood and all these round grey stones, the vast tree trunks hollowed by the sea and bleached in the sun. There were introductions to everyone assembled — a mix of scruffy people who worked for Sam, scruffy people who had worked for her in the past, parents of her twins’ friends, and neighbors, most of whom wore down vests or wool sweaters, all of them in old boots. All along, one man seemed to be standing very close to Sam, and Josie guessed this was some kind of boyfriend. Josie tried to remember Sam’s approach to marriage. She’d been at Sam’s wedding, to a commercial fisherman named JJ, but hadn’t seen him since. Was it an open marriage? Something like that.

This man in front of her, leaning into Sam with obvious familiarity, could have been ten, fifteen years younger, but a thick rust-colored beard made it hard to tell. Sam introduced him last.

“This is Doug,” she said, and held his hand up, high over her head, as if he’d just been declared the winner.

No. It wasn’t an open marriage. Now she remembered. JJ was away for months at a time, and they’d made an arrangement: whatever happened while he was away on these trips didn’t count. No questions could be asked, and he had only one request: No one she fooled around with could be anyone he knew. But here they were, among all of their mutual friends, and there was this man, Doug, who to all seeing humans was sleeping with her.