Chapter One: The Whistle
Chapter One: The Whistle
The sign at the edge of town says POPULATION 2,114, but nobody has repainted the number in years. Laurel thinks it’s been wrong since before she was born — wrong in the sense that it’s too high, or too low, she’s never decided which.
The mill stopped running last spring. Nobody says why, exactly. People talk around it, the way you talk around a name you’ve agreed not to say. One day the trucks stopped coming up Route 9, and the men who used to eat lunch on the loading dock stopped being men you saw at the grocery store, and that was that. The whistle still blows at six and six, morning and evening, on its own, though there’s no one left inside to pull the cord. Laurel has walked past the mill at 5:58 in the evening and stood at the fence and watched the building — dark, dead-windowed, silent — and at six exactly, the whistle has sounded anyway, long and flat, rolling down over the valley like it always did.
She has stopped asking her mother about it. Her mother’s answers have gotten shorter over the year, then shorter again, until now they are barely answers at all — a shrug, a change of subject, a sudden need to check something in the oven. It isn’t that her mother doesn’t know. Laurel has come to understand that not-knowing and not-saying look almost the same from the outside, but they are not the same thing, and her mother has stopped even pretending otherwise.
Laurel and Dee sit on the hood of Dee’s mother’s car, parked at the tree line where Route 9 goes soft and turns to gravel, and watch the fog come down off the ridge earlier than it should. It moves wrong, Laurel thinks. Fog is supposed to rise up out of low ground, out of creek beds and hollows, at dawn, when the air is cold and the ground is warm. This fog comes down from above, off the ridgeline, in the middle of the afternoon, pouring over the treetops the way water pours from a tipped glass.
“You hear that?” Dee says. She hasn’t looked away from the ridge the whole time they’ve been sitting here.
“The whistle?” It’s a little after six. The sound is still rolling out toward them, thinning as it goes.
“No. Under it.”
Laurel listens. Underneath the whistle, if she holds very still and doesn’t breathe too loud, there is something else — a hum, low and even, not quite a machine sound and not quite a living sound, like the noise a refrigerator makes from two rooms away, except there is no refrigerator, there is no house, there is only the tree line and the gravel and the two of them sitting on the warm hood of a car that smells faintly of vinyl and Dee’s strawberry shampoo.
“It’s been there eleven days,” Laurel says. “I’ve been counting.”
Dee doesn’t ask her why she’s been counting. That’s one of the things Laurel has always loved best about Dee, though loved isn’t quite the right word, and Laurel has never found the right one. Dee simply nods, like eleven days is a fact worth having, filed away next to all the other facts they’ve been quietly collecting since the spring — the number of houses with lights on at night, now down to less than half; the number of days since anyone new pumped gas at the Sunoco; the number of times the reverend at First Baptist has, mid-sermon, gone silent and simply stood there, mouth slightly open, for whole unbearable minutes before picking back up exactly where he left off, as though nothing had happened at all.
“My dad says it’s the wind,” Dee says. “Coming through the old flume up at the mill. Says it always did that, even before, we just never noticed ’cause of all the machine noise covering it up.”
“Do you believe him?”
Dee is quiet for a moment. The fog has reached the near tree line now, curling around the trunks low to the ground, moving with a strange, unhurried purpose, like something searching room by room in a house it already knows the layout of.
“I believe he wants me to believe him,” Dee says finally. “That’s not the same thing.”
They sit until the fog reaches the edge of the gravel, close enough that Laurel can feel the temperature drop against her bare arms, and then Dee starts the car, and they drive back into town with the windows up, not talking, the radio tuned to a station that plays only static now, which neither of them bothers to change, because somehow the static feels more honest than silence would.
At the town sign, Laurel makes Dee slow down, the way she always does now. POPULATION 2,114.
“Same as this morning,” Laurel says.
“Good,” says Dee, though neither of them believes, anymore, that good is a thing the number can be.
