After the moose, I had to reverse down the mountain. The road twisted under my tires until I found a turnout where I could straighten my truck and fly. I practiced the breathing my nurse taught me when I was giving birth to Wren. The moose’s white veiled eyes rolled around in my mouth the whole way down. I kept getting sick on myself, the air thick with illness. When I pulled in front of my house I threw myself onto the lawn and retched there for a while. The sky was lighter and fluid, just overcast. The day was mundane and blank. When I was empty and exhausted, I heaved myself into the house, got naked, the smell of the mountain seeping from my pores, and worried I would die before she got home from kindergarten.

***

I started as the town Slam Collector as a way to get to Park Ranger. The Parks Department hired me when I told them I wasn’t squeamish, and I accepted because I wanted to show what I could do. My job was to drive the mountain roads and look along the shoulders, and when I found a slam, I would scoop it off the road with one good push of the shovel. When people hit an animal, they usually didn’t know who to call, or that there was someone to call, so they would just leave it there. I was keeping the pileup at bay. There were always more slams in the spring and summer, something about the warm weather made the animals absent-minded. They would sit in the road and not move when a car came. It happened in the winter, too, but I wouldn’t find the animals until spring when the snow had melted and their crystallized fossils were on the side of the road, pushed aside by the plows.

When I was tired of driving, I would walk around the woods along the mountain road, Route 90, and listen to the birdcalls and look into the woodpecker holes of the tree trunks. I had a verse I would say to myself, about how God hangs the clouds poised, and as I said it I would look up through the branches and note how He did it. On my walks, the town felt far away and though I could see the highway snaking in the valley, I felt I’d discovered the mountains myself.

He made them and I would keep them clean.

I met Oscar then. He was big on hunting and every time before sex, in order to get himself riled up, he would tell me about it, when he would watch a deer look his way just as the bullet released from his shotgun, and there would be this moment of recognition, the deer would look him right in the eyes just before the ultimate release, and they would be suspended in ecstasy and companionship. He imagined the deer and held me down by the back of the neck. Afterwards the two of us would lie there together, and his big chest and the rise and fall of his stomach felt like walking in the woods. Up and down, all breath and brown hair. I made myself a crown of birch leaves for our wedding and he found a feather on the ground and put it in his belt loop. When I got pregnant the guys at the rescue squad got us a Park Ranger onesie and Oscar’s friends gave us a tiny hunting beanie. My daughter would gurgle to me from inside my body during our walks on the ridge and we cooed at the river together from above.

They told us plastics would secure our futures. A new plant opened up in town and Oscar took them seriously, took the first job they offered. After a year he got promoted to Hydraulic Press Operator and his chest puffed out further, and he liked coming home to tell me about his machines, even if they weren’t really his. He liked to feel like that. At night we were warm and clumsy against each other and we doted on each other in our own way. He gave me my own can of chili and I would let him use the softer towel. The future was growing in my belly. Some days he would take me out for long drives into the hill towns. We would talk about what she might be like, the baby, whether she would have his mother’s temper or my mother’s weight problem, what size fruit she was that month, apple, papaya, watermelon. He would pat my belly and say that’s one sweet berry. She was growing and I wanted to name her after the woods, so we agreed on Wren.

When she was born I held her in my arms and her head was coned from the pressure. Her nostrils and eyelids like the uncurling of a new fern. We sat there in the hospital and stared at her for a long time, and I knew Oscar felt himself get big with importance and I was soft with milk and strong with extra blood. Wren nursed easily and quietly.

***

That day I dropped her off at school. The plastics plant had just closed, laid Oscar off, and he was sleeping all the time. Before leaving the house I watched the weatherman answer all of my questions. It was February and below freezing. Wren was five and I hadn’t made it to Park Ranger, but I had been Slam Collector long enough that no one was keeping track of where I was or when I came and went, so I took the long route to climb the ridge. I got above alpine level and watched the trees become shrubs, hit the first knobbed summit, and then the road sank back down, dipping into the pines. I hadn’t seen a slam in weeks at that point; the critters had all been hibernating, I assumed, coaxed to sleep. That morning Wren had been singing a song to herself over her cereal, something about her and Mommy eating the pink pepper flowers, and I sang her hymn to myself now, too. She had crawled into the bed the night before and I let her sleep there with us, and her soft breathing made the room feel rooted to the Earth.

Further along on Route 90 the air stopped moving. Fog, out of nowhere. The hills were cloaked in white. It was getting thicker the higher up I got, opaque enough I couldn’t see much in front of me. I thought maybe the first snowstorm was coming. I slowed the truck down and felt a thump, a little squelch. I got out and found a raccoon, panting its last, and it was disturbingly skinny, maybe a baby, small enough to be a rat or a mouse. Little fingernails on its paws. A quick swipe of the shovel into the truck and a douse of hand sanitizer. That was pretty much the job.

I kept on up the road. Another bump, this time a fox, its downy fur matted and graying. The air was solid now. I considered parking until the afternoon sun burned the fog off the mountain, but I couldn’t remember what the weatherman had told me, and I was worried the sun wouldn’t come. A few more yards up the swallowed road and another bump, a skunk, its bottom fangs blackened and too large for its mouth.

Putrid, half-vaporized carcasses, their smell misting into the car seats. It seemed like my cargo was dead on the road before I hit it, like the bodies had some flesh-eating disease and had been there a while. I still couldn’t see far, the fog was so dense. And it was dead quiet around the truck, too, and I tried to imagine the woods lining the road, see the birches tickling each other above me, but I couldn’t see or feel anything. With each curve along the road the stench solidified. Soon I was gasping. I accelerated and began to ignore the bumps under the truck’s wheels. I was racing to the next summit, couple miles more, willing the sun to break cloud cover.

The smell of the road and the whiteness of the fog started to mess with me. I was getting dizzy as I climbed—the road was spiraling to nowhere, bodies littered all over. I went as long as I could, counting the minutes to myself before I stopped the car right there in the middle of the road and tried to breathe. I worried I would faint and the truck would go off the side, that I would plummet through the whiteness and die suffocating.

When you move a shovel against asphalt it makes a sound that, when she was a baby, would make Wren cry. She was a red-faced baby. We called her little watermelon at first, red and sweet. She had sweaty hands and a throaty laugh, like she had been smoking and playing dominoes in a trailer. One time for Halloween we put those little baby sunglasses and a worn cowboy hat on her and called her trailer trash. She wanted to waddle around by herself all night, tipping over and losing her accessories, and when she fell she would rub her hands in the dirt. She was safe in the dirt, something we taught her. We kept the lesson going into her childhood. I would take her to work with me and I would sing to her up the mountain, would show her the draped upholstery of the mountains on the other side of the valley, and she would squeal a prayer of thanks.

With the white all around me, I tried to laugh like my daughter the baby smoker. It wasn’t so hard; the air was rotten enough that when I inhaled I was already raw and rug-burned, and the laugh came out shattered.

It hurt to keep my eyes open and I started to get scared, actually scared. Through the fog I could not see the woods, could not hear where I was––the world was dropping off around me. It was fleshy and chewed up and coated in mucus, it was oozing and blackened and solid as concrete; the smell was a spike through the head. I started the truck again and drove over a graveyard of mice, of foxes, of toads, shrews, chipmunks, bunnies. My hands were white on the steering wheel, and I tried to drive the motionless world behind me.

And then in a moment the fog parted just slightly and it looked like the highway had sprouted a tumor. I came to a stop—the body was as big as my truck, almost. I put my shirt over my nose and mouth and got out of the car, the air stinging the skin under my eyes. Male moose, full grown, laying on his side with dew pooled on his antlers. His eyes were open, depthless orbs painted white by the suffocating sky around us. I wanted to touch him, feel if he was warm. His last heavy sigh seemed long emptied out. I felt I could see his flesh starting to decay in real time. Short black hairs curled up against his skin, which was beginning to slacken, blubbery lips that would soon peel back. The vulnerability of his body to the foul air made me sick. I ran behind my truck and knelt there and started to cry, and the tears and gasps came hot like acid across my face. His body blocked the road up the mountain, he was bloodless and splayed out, and behind me the road was silent and unmoving, dipped in dry ice.

***

When Wren turned eight, Oscar got his first tattoo. It said “Wren.” Then the next week he got another of a deer. The guy who did them used cheap ink, so the tattoos turned to splotches fast. As they aged they looked like smoke marks on a wall, edgeless wisps of heat. He was grabbing at the wheel. It was spring, and the wind picked up every animal’s smell and spread it all over town. The world was full of hunger, shit, and sex. I was nauseous. When I was pregnant with Wren, Oscar would put his hand on my belly and say, “Mine.” Now, instead of work he went to the valley, drove up and down the roads with his friends, and he came home with his beard grown out and beads of sleep still in his eyes. The sink was covered in dust, dead skin cells. He began to get more and more panicked, kept talking about securing the future, plastics in other cities. Every day I would drive up Route 90 to work, and Wren would go to school, and he would have nowhere to drive himself other than the valley; at night he reached over to touch me and I rolled away from his too-large hands. He wanted another baby, and I couldn’t bring myself to touch his naked body. He would turn over and tell me I was cold.

Wren’s nose was always stuffy and her hair was too long. By ten, she was tall, almost Oscar’s height, and liked to build houses of sticks in the flat woods behind our house. Oscar disciplined her for nothing; he told her to show some respect. In those moments she would look at me, then at him, tuck her hair behind her ear, and tell him to get a grip. He didn’t like that, wanted me to tell her the same, to show some respect. And after a while, he began to see things that weren’t there: an affair with one of the sheriff’s deputies, an affair with Wren’s teacher, an affair with someone I hadn’t met yet.

So when I began to get sick, my patience for his demands and his nervousness thinned out. A cough, the kind that makes your heart squeeze and thump with panic, and then, for weeks, my skin was on fire. My hair got brittle and started falling out—I didn’t have much to begin with. I could feel the cold wind on my scalp. I let him do his talking and I cashed my own checks, and he stayed out late most nights. Then he called me from the valley one night, his voice high and stammering, and told me he was going, said he was looking for something to push him further, something bright. I told him I hoped that meant a real job and he hung up, and I knew he wouldn’t come back. It was still in the bed, his animal smell, and I washed the sheets.

The thing about being sick is the world feels inaccessible. Days are full of reminders of your limits, of distance. You notice what everyone is in on and what you’re not, and you feel the machinery of your body going haywire. You either stop paying attention or you pay even more attention. And the way people see you changes, so even if you’re looking at them as normally as you can, they won’t do the same to you. The Parks director, a skinny woman with a crackly voice, noticed my hair and skin and told me I only had to come into the office for Public Works meetings, which we almost never had. You think of yourself as the piece of the puzzle that’s missing ’til you realize no one else thinks so, and that actually the puzzle is just one piece smaller.

I watched Wren’s hair get longer and she saw mine fall out entirely from what the doctors gave me. When Oscar didn’t come home that night I told her that he had gone up to Williamsburg to find some work and once he did he would come back on weekends. She nodded, and then when he called a week later, she looked up at me like a question. I couldn’t tell what she wanted to know, or how to say it. So I petted her head and lay down on the couch. She wriggled up next to me and had a preening instinct, playing with my hands, which were swollen, the skin on them always cracking. I felt the freedom of his absence and the weight of her near me. I was stranded on the side of the road.

***

She would put lotion on my bare scalp and shining skin, or heat me up tea on the stove, and she got taller and taller. I lost weight, almost all of it, and soon the shovel was too heavy for me and the truck too high. The Parks director told me to take some time off of work until I felt better. The treatments the doctors gave me were working enough that the lesions on my arms—so rotten and exuberant with pus that I thought my bones were infected—started to heal, but I couldn’t stand up much. Wren was in high school and when she got home every day she would ask me if I wanted something to eat, and I saw in her the same uncurling fern of her infancy and I felt that the fern had begun to sprout too quickly. I would heat up soup on the stove and she would offer to stir it for me, like I had no sense. She would talk to me as I slurped, would ask me why I never asked the doctors how I got my diagnosis, told me I could sue. I asked her who in the world she thought I could sue, what power did I have, and she would scoff, go to her room.

I asked Wren to help me bring a chair out to the backyard, on the edge of the flat little path behind our house, the undergrowth almost gone because of the deer. I saw the pitying look on her face when I told her I couldn’t lift the chair myself. That patch always reminded me of her childhood, before I was sick or she got tall, when we would take her into the woods. I would carry her in a backpack and Oscar would hold the branches aside. I tried to remember how that felt, the mountains, the stream ribboning to the valley, the appeal of the Park Ranger uniform, the hung clouds, the boulders on the path. I sat in the flat woods and smelled the sodden earth stink.

The oncologist told me to rest but when Wren was at school I would call one of the guys in the town departments and they would pick me up. We would go down to the municipal building to pass the time. I was there and one of the guys was telling me about how he proposed to his girlfriend at Disney World. He had also gotten a diagnosis, the same one, and lost his hair, too, but he didn’t have any lesions. He said that getting sick made him want to go to Disney World with his girlfriend even more. He was halfway through his story when the sheriff came in. The sheriff was everyone’s boss and he licked his lips when there was trouble. Disney World Guy was starting to hand out cards for another round of Texas hold ‘em, talking about the gift of life. The sheriff came in with his hands on his belt buckle. He told us that there was a lawyer in town who might try to ask us some questions about work. Anyone who talked would have to deal with him later, and he pointed to his own chest. He said the lawyer was meeting with all the town departments, but that she was particularly interested in those of us who had been there more than ten years. He looked at me and Disney World Guy, nodded, licked his lips, and left.

The lawyer found out about the spill from a group of sick patients at the old folks’ home right at the base of the mountain. They went on daily walks together. Years later, they all got the same diagnosis. Most of them died pretty quick. The couple that remained had children my age and those children called the lawyer, who was known for this kind of thing. She came to town and began asking around. She said she wanted to meet people who worked on the mountain. She was blind, and had these wandering, cloudy eyes that would roll around in her head and never find a place to land. She asked me all about my job as the Slam Collector. Her notes were perfectly neat, like her hand was a typewriter, and the more we talked the more disturbed I became.

She told me that when the plastics plant shut down, they didn’t properly close up shop, so to speak. They sent their workers out, Oscar among them, and just turned the lights off. But with those boiling vats of liquid sitting there to cool, something was bound to go wrong. It wasn’t an explosion, there wasn’t a huge boom; instead the air just went sallow. Something about the temperature and the volume, a corroded container and then the slow seep of would-be-plastic on the floor. Molecules changed shape midair, the chemical world reconfigured itself momentarily. Or, longer than momentarily. She told me it was anywhere from a day to a week long, the chemical exhale. That’s how she described it.

She kept coming around for a while, gathering people for a class action. It was months of her talking to me and Disney World Guy, who was excited by her attention and imagined she might call him to the witness stand so he could talk about his life—foster care, savior work, fiancée. It didn’t matter that she said there probably wouldn’t be a trial. He kept talking about how he had been in the valley that day clearing brush, how he saw the fog, and he smelled it, and he knew something wasn’t right. How he knelt for a second before driving off. The three of us would sometimes get lunch at the diner in the next town and the lawyer would crinkle her napkins and use them to gesticulate her points. She told us we could enroll in the lawsuit, she could defend us, could insist the plastics plant pay for our bare scalps. Her clothes were too starched and her hair too shiny, and I thought if she could see me she must have seen me like a slam in need of a good shovel. I didn’t enroll.

***

Wren turned fifteen and made herself a cake. She brought a small table into the living room so I could eat it with her on the couch. And she poured me some vodka when I asked her to, and then another one, until she was sitting up in front of the TV with a slice of cake and I was lying on my back with the spins. I threw up the cake and she brought a towel over and wiped my face. I looked up at her and could not remember the redness of her cheeks when she nursed against me or the trailer park laugh with her little hands in the dirt. In her face I saw pity, the simmering outrage of someone who thinks they’re always in control. She was as separate from my flesh as a stranger, her face a combination of facts that did not compute anymore, the equation all wrong. She told me to sit up and get a grip.

I told her that she had no idea about anything. Her hair was too long and her nails were too long and she better learn to keep herself trim. I was lying there on the couch and looking up at her, with her clean shirt and watery eyes, and I told her that I would always be her mother, nothing she could do about it. She began to cry then, I could see the anger bleeding her vision, and she tried to get me to drink water, told me I was just sick all around. I spat it out at her. I told her I’m not so far away as you think I am, though as I said it, I looked at her and felt we would never know each other again. She said I don’t ever want to be like you, I don’t understand a thing about what you’ve done. The pulse of rage took control of me then and I wanted to shake her, bring her down onto the couch, and make her sit there and eat the cake like I had. She walked out of the room, and I know that I screamed at her, and told her she would never get to forget us, this.

***

The lawsuit was set to file. Disney World Guy, who kept testifying to anyone who would listen, got the attention of some nearby reporters at the bar one night. He told them about me and my lesions, not thinking much of it, and how I got it worst. Then he called me the next day to tell me I should reconsider my stance, and I lowered my blinds after we hung up. I told Wren from my spot on the couch that some people might be coming around trying to talk to me. She drove herself to school those days. We weren’t speaking much, she made breakfast before going and left me half; she would sometimes bring home a pizza, though I had no appetite most of the time. When she was at school I had the world to myself, all indoors, all mine. I told her to bring home some cases of beer and cans of beans, and she did, and I didn’t wonder how. I acted like the lawsuit was a storm coming to cut the electricity.

The lawyer filed and the story made the front page, along with a picture of Disney World Guy and some quotes from him. Soon there were TV cameras outside my house. I saw the helicopters over the ridge and I ate my beans and drank my beer without turning on the television. I didn’t want water or sleep. I sat there and looked at them through the peephole of the door and laughed out loud. I threw peanut shells out the window so they knew someone was home. I found a stash of cigarettes and I smoked two at a time sitting on the toilet. I drew birds in the ashes that fell on the floor. I tried on dresses in the back of my closet, I put lipstick on my eyes. My lesions were coming back and my skin was taut, and I got drunk in the bathtub. I was riding out the storm.

They tested the soil and found that all the mushrooms had died. The water, when placed under certain tests, turned into goo. They found entire wolf families dead in their dens, beavers had crushed themselves under their dams; their flesh, years old, had stayed on in chunks, discolored and gaping. Biologists started coming to the town in hazmat suits and looking at the sky, hoping to see birds. Investigators from the city felt their way through the woods behind my house, sniffing like hounds, their lips pressed together.

Wren kept going to school, walking through the field of cameras to get to the car. After a week of that, she didn’t come home. She left a note on top of that day’s paper. It had a phone number and I didn’t call. Instead I drank more beer. Then the next day Disney World Guy called me. He was pretty pleased with himself. He said the sheriff wasn’t speaking to him, but that wasn’t so bad, since the lawsuit was going to pay him out. He said he thought his hair was coming back, too. I still didn’t get off the couch. I imagined Wren driving up and down the mountain ridge, up and down Route 90, looking for evidence of something, her long hands wrapped around the steering wheel, tapping along.

When I finally called her, I told her she wasn’t safe out there, and she told me she wasn’t coming home. She found some charitable school in another town, Catholic, that would take her in. She started talking about being a new person in her new school. She told them she was an orphan. I never heard her sound so familiar to me, her voice deep and settled. She said she was going to study the land and be around people. She hung up the phone.

I drank long enough that I took a taxi to a casino in Williamsburg. I had Wren’s note in my pocket. When I was eighteen I went to this same casino and won eighty bucks. I got them to put me in a wheelchair and they wheeled me up to the same old slot machine. Nothing had changed except the lights, which were brighter. They gave me vodka and a cup of coins. I pulled the lever, kept pulling the lever, and the slot machine kept taking the money. There’s no clock in the casino but you can tell how much time passes by the faces of the people around you. They go from drunk to drunk and moody to drunk and faceless. The slot machine kept taking my money.

The vodka shook in my hand because my arm was too tired. Wren was all wrapped up in what she was going to do. She took for granted that she could do anything at all. She would talk about the future as if there were choices to be made. She was going to go on with her life and remember me as sickly, too weak to lift a chair. That’s just what happened—the plastics, the exhale, the sickness—and there was never a choice to stop it. They were big blocks of concrete. All I did was be in the way. No lawyer could’ve broken through that.

Around me in the casino the slot machines were flashing. The faceless people were clapping at their machines, the carpet was worn down, the vodka was watery. I was thinking about God. God was having as much fun as the rest of us at the casino—not because He loves gambling, but because He loves torture. I sat there and laughed with my head rolling back, the weight of my skull like an anchor. I felt like I was in on the joke with God, sitting up there at the casino next to Him.