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A Novel
by Emily Ruskovich
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Well, at least Ann imagines they did.
One day in August, the whole family got into the truck. Wade at the steering wheel, where Ann is sitting now, Jenny next to him, their daughters, June and May, nine and six, crammed in back with a jug of lemonade and Styrofoam cups, which they carved pictures into with their fingernails. The girls probably wanted to ride in the truck bed, but their mother would have said it was not safe on the highway. So they sat facing each other in the cab with their backs against the windows, bumping their knees, probably fighting.
They forgot all about the mice. They didn't notice anything at first, driving slowly over the dirt roads. But once they reached the highway in their town of Ponderosa, a smell like decay and burning hair, skin and seeds sizzling on a hot engine, entered through the vent and filled the whole cab of the truck until the little girls were gagging and laughing and pushing their freckled noses out their windows.
They had to drive on with their windows down, tolerating the smell, for the hour drive through the Nez Valley, past Athol and Careywood, then up the long road nearly to the top of Loeil, the mountain where the birch wood was already cut and piled, ready to be loaded. Their hair and clothes, and Wade's gloves, held the burned smell in their fibers. Ann pictures June and May. They wait in the sun while their mother rolls the birch logs onto the truck bed and their father stacks them there. The girls lean against the tires, slapping horseflies on their legs, pouring lemonade into the dust.
The smell would have been there on the way back, too. It is the one constant. It connects two things in Ann's mind that she can't manage to connect otherwise—the drive up the mountain and the drive back down. The drive back down is the part Ann comes here to try to understand.
There would have been things Wade had to consider, before he could take control and go for help. Practical things. Shutting the tailgate, for example, so the logs wouldn't roll out. He would have had to remember to hold the handle up and then push in—there was a trick to it—in order to lock the tailgate. That he would remember, that his fingers could do what they were supposed to do even in the midst of his horror, has something to do with the reason Ann loves him. One day, perhaps, everything will be gone from his mind except the trick of the tailgate latch, and Ann will love him still.
She thinks of how easy it would have been to get lost on the way back down, since they'd gotten lost so badly on the way up. How could anything have looked familiar? The narrow, grassy roads. The crudely made road signs nailed to trees: That he had read them an hour before seemed impossible to her. All of it seemed impossible. The summer sky, the snapping of twigs under the truck's tires. The smell of grease and honeysuckle. Jenny's breath fogging the window.
Ann has had to imagine most of it, everything beyond the facts Wade told her or she heard on TV. She did try very hard during those early days to keep the radio and TV off, so that everything she knew she knew from Wade. What Wade wanted to tell her, she would keep. But she wouldn't let herself go searching; she wouldn't let herself ask.
But all of that is different now that Wade is forgetting. She wants to ask him if he and Jenny spoke, before his memory is lost for good. Did Jenny look out the side window or straight ahead? Or did she look at him?
At what point did he rip down the rearview mirror?
No, Ann thinks, it isn't even the drive back. It is his getting into the truck at all. Opening the door and getting in. Jenny there with the cup of lemonade shaking in her hand—or maybe not shaking, maybe perfectly still. Maybe the cup empty. Maybe the lemonade spilled on her lap like the droplets of water now on Ann's thigh, in the shape of something harmless, something that the child in the backseat might have drawn.
Excerpted from Idaho by Emily Ruskovich. Copyright © 2017 by Emily Ruskovich. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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