The dancer told Lavender about the communes. Take a drive up the coast, and you’ll find them. The area was littered with self-sustaining homesteads like Gentle Valley, havens that promised healing and togetherness. It was pure luck that Lavender had not stumbled into one of the communities that had turned quickly feral or cult-like—in the last twenty years, nearly all the others had imploded. Leadership flaws. Male ego. It was dumb, beautiful luck that of all the communes Lavender could have found, she stopped at Gentle Valley: a group of thirty women that had since grown to sixty, established by a pair of psychologists, Juniper and Rose. Their mission statement aligned vaguely with second-wave feminism, a small-scale dismantling of the patriarchy and its many accoutrements, with a focus specifically on behavioral therapy for traumatized women. Rose had since died, but Juniper still ran sessions from the Sequoia building. The women of Gentle Valley lived entirely off the land, supplemented with income from the hammocks they wove from natural materials and sold to health goods and tchotchke stores across the country. Lavender loved Gentle Valley’s motto, so inarguably appealing: Eyes wide, heart open.
Lavender still missed men, sometimes. The gruff of them. Their unruliness. Occasionally, Juniper allowed a man to stay for a while, a brother or a son or a husband, as long as it was clear the mountain still belonged to women. During these periods, the energy shifted, tensed. Lavender thought sometimes about that question—so what’s your deal, exactly?—and she loved Gentle Valley for the fact that here, it didn’t matter.
On that day twenty-three years ago, Lavender had stepped off the whining bus and onto the gravel road that led into the valley. When she saw the Sequoia building for the first time, glistening statuesque with its solar-paneled roof, Lavender burned with weariness, and awe at the natural perfection of the place. The trees, gigantic and swaying, like soldier guardians. The smell, like fresh grass and wildflowers. In one hand, she clutched the small duffel of her belongings, and in the other, she clutched her stomach. Her body had never gelled back into its own shape—it wrinkled and folded in ways that reminded her constantly of where she’d been. What she’d left behind. Lavender grabbed a fistful of skin from her belly, clutching the flesh, proof of a past life, as she walked into the dust.
*
Now, Lavender buckled herself into the front seat of the van. The women from therapy were lined up at the edge of the valley path—one by one, they approached, whispering lines of poetry through the open window. Rilke from Lemon, Yeats from Brooke, and some Joni Mitchell lyrics from Pony. Faced with the prospect of the outside world, Lavender considered how strange they looked, lined up in their homemade clothing, hair shorn identically to reveal sturdy, stubbled scalps （Juniper encouraged them to embrace the unfeminine）。 When it was Sunshine’s turn, she uncurled Lavender’s fingers to place a figurine in the center: the lucky Buddha that sat on Sunshine’s nightstand.
The day was bright, crisp, cloudless. A perfect California autumn. As Harmony maneuvered the van down the long dirt road, Lavender examined the translucent jade Buddha. It looked graceless in her palm, hokey and small. She tucked the figurine into the pocket of her shirt, then took a quavering breath as she traced the edges of the manila folder.
She did not need to open it. She’d memorized most of the pages. They were comforting, in the van’s distinct claustrophobia—reports Lavender knew by heart, phone numbers she’d copied mindlessly, printed emails she’d labored over in the back office of the Sequoia building. It all culminated now in a nauseous sense of understanding, as Lavender fiddled with the folder in her lap: she had lost control. She didn’t want this. She had let the women’s kindness obscure everything, and now she was careening into her own nightmare.
Still, there was the name. Once she heard that name, Lavender knew she would never forget it.
Ellis Harrison.
*
What’s the worst that could happen? Harmony had asked, as she convinced Lavender to hire the private investigator. What’s the worst thing you could find?
Lavender liked to imagine that her children were happy. That her boys had found their own ways to exist in the world, that they were soft and satisfied. This was as far as she would go. This was the reason she’d swaddled herself so forcefully in the isolation of Gentle Valley—here, she did not have to look. She did not have to wonder about the long tentacles of a choice she’d made when she was a different person, practically still a child. She did not have to see how the arms of that choice had reached into the world, the infinite number of realities they might have sculpted.