The Wilds by Julia Elliott Read Free Book Online Page B

clever cabinet, a stash of top-notch liquor behind the wet bar. Showing her around, Pip pointed out every last effect, all bought with his grandfather’s money. Something bothered her: the way he slapped her rear like a rake on Dallas , the wayhe smoked afterward in the air-conditioned bedroom. Hiding his saggy gut under the sheet, he kept checking himself out in the mirror. He ran his fingers through his gelled hair.
    As Pip went on about the Corvette he wanted to buy, she thought about Bob, how, in the past, he was always quietly tinkering with something. And then poor Pip started up on Korea, told her about coming back home after starving in that bamboo cage, eating for a solid year in a trance, waking up one day to the shock of three hundred pounds. He’d lost the weight and gotten married. But then he gained it back, got divorced, lost it again—his whole life staked to that tedious fluctuation.
    That night when she got home, Bob turned from the television and spoke to her.
    “Look at this joker,” he said, pointing at Ronald Reagan, the movie star who was running for president, the one who looked like a handsome lizard.
    The next day Bob bathed himself and rolled out onto the screened porch. Watching the lake, they shelled field peas all morning. She knew that Pip would come flying out of the blue in his boat, and when he did, Bob cleared his throat and said nothing.
    Pip’s boat appeared every afternoon for the next week. They’d hold their breath and wait for the high whine of his motor to fade.
    Bob started doing his leg exercises, made an appointment with the hotshot therapist in Columbia. In two years he could get around the house with a walker. By Reagan’s second term he was ambling with a cane. He took care of the chickens, started dabbling with quail. And every year they sold more land, acre by acre, until all they had was their cottage—mansions towering on every side, the lake a circus of Jet Skis, houseboats so big they blotted out the sun.
    Bob and Elise got old on the lake, their son breezing in twice a year to say hello. And they planned to die there, right on the water, even though the place was turning to shit.

    Elise fingers the scab on her arm. It’s been a week since she gouged the microchip out with the sharp scissors she nabbed from the Dementia Ward desk. All this time she’s kept the fleck of metal in her locket and nobody’s said one word. The nurses know better than to touch her locket, a thirtieth-anniversary gift from Bob—not a heart, like you’d expect, just a circle of gold that opens via a hinge, a clip of Bob’s gray hair stuffed inside as a sweet joke. To thirty more years of glorious monotony , Bob said, and they laughed, opened another jar of mulberry wine.
    A tech nurse escorts Elise out to the pear orchard. Just as soon as she’s released into the flock of seniors, Pip Stukes comes swaggering across the grass.
    “Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin’?”
    Elise takes his arm as usual and they promenade across stepping-stones, over to their favorite bench. Pip talks about his son, who dropped by this morning with Pip’s grandbaby, now a grown girl. He talks about the artificial bacon he had for breakfast and the blue jay that perched on his windowsill. Then he goes quiet and just stares at her, filling the space between them with sighs. It’s warm for November. The mums have dried up and the pear trees drop their last red leaves. When Pip leans in to kiss her, Elise embraces him, keeping her lips off limits while hugging him close enough to slip the microchip into his shirt pocket.
    She sits back and smiles. It feels good to be invisible.
    “You remember that island?” says Pip.
    Elise nods, touches his cheek, stands up on her robot legs, and then walks off into the canna lilies. Behind the dead flowers are two big dumpsters and, if she’s calculated correctly, a door leading into the Dogwood Library.

    When Bob wakes up, she’s standing there in a shaft