Nowhere like home, p.1
Nowhere Like Home, page 1
ALSO BY SARA SHEPARD
YA
Pretty Little Liars Series
The Lying Game Series
The Perfectionists Series
The Amateurs Series
Wait for Me
ADULT
The Visibles
Everything We Ever Wanted
The Heiresses
The Elizas
Reputation
Safe in My Arms
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2024 by Sara Shepard
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Shepard, Sara, 1977– author.
Title: Nowhere like home: a novel / Sara Shepard.
Description: New York: Dutton, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023035477 (print) | LCCN 2023035478 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593186961 (paperback) | 9780593186978 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3619.H4543 N69 2024 (print) | LCC PS3619.H4543 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230825
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035477
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035478
Cover design by Sarah Brody
Cover image of room by Magdalena Russocka / Trevillion Images; landscape by Heidi Besen / Arcangel
book design by Daniel Brount, adpated for ebook by Molly Jeszke
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ep_prh_6.3_146171365_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Sara Shepard
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Three
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_146171365_
To Maya
PROLOGUE
It’s hard to sum up this place. Hard to craft a sales pitch. It took me a while to get it right, but I needed the perfect thing that would persuade someone to take the plunge. I’m nothing if not persistent.
This is what I came up with.
Maybe you’re stuck. Maybe you’re sick of yourself. Maybe you want answers about who you really are. Maybe you want to make lasting relationships, true friends, not like the acquaintances you think you’re close to now. Maybe you think, If only I could get away. If only I had time to really think, really breathe. Everything would be better. I’d know what I want. I could change.
So come, then. Here, things are different. We have stunning sunrises every morning. Fresh food every day. Good company, always. Your children will grow up appreciating nature and community instead of burying their faces in screens. You’ll grow your own food, really feel the soil between your fingers. You’ll understand what life is supposed to be. You’ll get the answers you’re looking for. You’ll find peace. You’ll heal. I promise. Because here, you can start over. Here, you can be who you want to be. Here, we’re all friends. At different points of the day, we pause after screwing the lid on a mason jar, or conjugating a French verb with our children, or while we’re holding up the beam of the new shed, or while we’re trying to find the center of ourselves at meditation. And we think, We’ve really cracked the code.
You want that. Of course you do. So come. We’re living the dream. We’re becoming better selves. Out in the desert, with the stars as our witnesses. Out in the desert, with its natural beauty as our model and guide. Out in the desert, you can escape.
Pretty good, right? Admit it—I’ve got you curious. Not that it’s the real reason I want you here. It’s only the means to the end. But once I’ve hooked you? Once you arrive? You’re out in the desert…alone. And I’m waiting for you.
Because out in the desert, friend, no one can hear you scream.
PART
ONE
1
Lenna
October
Present day
The first troubling thing that happens when Lenna Schmidt arrives in Tucson is she nearly falls flat on her face on the Jetway. She catches herself and the baby using one of the ground transport guys’ shoulders.
“Whoa,” the man says, staggering backward. “You okay there, ma’am?”
“Fine, fine,” Lenna mutters, her cheeks blazing. “Sorry.”
“Think you frightened your little guy!” He gestures to Jacob, her five-month-old son, who has broken into a fresh round of sobs.
Lenna gives the guy a grimace-slash-smile. If only her baby were merely startled. There have been ten minutes of blissful silence since they began traveling. As Lenna walks down the ramp, her son’s screams rise in volume. She can hear passengers deplaning behind her groaning. There goes that baby again.
The Tucson airport is small, with only one terminal and a few shops that are open. Lenna walks hurriedly, bouncing Jacob ineffectively and trying to convince herself that the fall and Jacob’s renewed cries aren’t some sort of omen that she’s made the wrong choice. Just in case, she squeezes her fist five times, counting the squeezes in her head, making sure she’s got it right. Then she searches the airport for something yellow. There. A bright yellow soccer jersey on that little kid. Better.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeats to the baby as he moans. Blearily, she pokes her head into various women’s bathrooms until she finds a changing table that seems somewhat sanitized. The diaper change helps his mood a little, and his screams trickle to whimpers. “All dry now,” she says cheerfully as they exit the bathroom.
But he starts crying again as they get to baggage claim. She needs to get the baby’s car seat, too, waiting next to at least twenty hard-case golf bags. Rhiannon told her to leave most of her possessions behind—That’s not what this place is about—but Lenna would feel naked without them. As she hefts a suitcase off the carousel, she hears little jars of Stage 1 baby food clinking. A few travelers give her funny looks. She wonders if they think she stashed a bunch of beer bottles in there.
An airport attendant helps her load her things on a luggage cart and push through the Ground Transport doors—Rhiannon said she can’t pick Lenna up personally, and that no buses come out to the community, and Lenna tries not to see this as an omen, either. The desert heat smacks her in the face as soon as she steps outside. It’s so stiflingly hot that it’s difficult to suck in a breath. Lenna’s lungs feel like they’re inside a pizza oven. There’s a shiny sedan waiting at the cabstand; a man with leathery skin, wearing a barn jacket, leans against a wide-open passenger door. The A/C wafts from within. Lenna gravitates toward it, zombielike.
The man perks up when he sees her. “Need a ride?”
After he’s helped her shove all of her things into the trunk and get the baby semisecure in the car seat, Lenna swings into the back seat next to Jacob. “Shh, shh,” she says, trying to fit a pacifier into his mouth. He swats it away angrily.
The cabbie catches her eye in the rearview. “Set a’ lungs on that one, huh?”
“Sorry.” Lenna wants to burst into tears herself. “He isn’t usually like this.” A lie. Jacob is always like this.
She fishes a prepared bottle from the pocket of her backpack. She doesn’t want to get him too atta ched to bottles or formula, but it’s an emergency. Jacob accepts the nipple and falls silent. Lenna shuts her eyes. Peace.
The driver peers at her expectantly in the rearview mirror. “Oh. Sorry. The Texaco station just past Three Points on Ajo Way, please. There’s a mile marker, too….” It’s the address Rhiannon gave her. She repeated it over and over to herself on the plane ride like a chant.
He looks puzzled. “That’s almost an hour’s drive. And not much out there. You sure?”
“Positive.”
They start out the airport drive, heading due west—Lenna can tell because the sun is behind them. Her phone buzzes in her pocket. Daniel, reads the text ID. He has texted an image of the hastily scrawled note Lenna left for him this morning. And a question mark.
The time on the vehicle’s dashboard clock is 8:30 a.m. Daniel is nothing if not predictable: Upon waking, he goes immediately to their home gym, which is next to the bedroom. He finishes, showers, gets dressed for work, and makes his way into the kitchen at 8:30, often on the dot. Her note, on the kitchen counter, was likely the first thing he saw when he came out to make coffee. She banked on this, being a whole state away before he even opened his eyes. Less chance that he’d convince her to change her mind.
She waits for another text. A reaction beyond just a question mark. Bon voyage, she expects he might say. Or an indifferent See you later. Maybe Thank fucking God. But nothing comes.
The A/C smells musty, so she breathes through her mouth. She looks at her baby, worried about the chemicals he might be inhaling. Five more fist clenches. And there: yellow words on a billboard for an injury lawyer. It will be all right, she tells herself. It has to be. Otherwise, what is she doing? Why is she subjecting her child to this upheaval if not for all the things Rhiannon promised? Serenity. Community. Help. Answers.
Well. That last one is a goal, not a promise. She just hopes that Rhiannon will comply.
The first part of the drive, there are cars whizzing east, turnoffs for housing developments with names like Sonoran Sun and Grande Iguana Casitas, and a casino on Tohono O’odham tribal land, jam-packed with cars. There are stoplights, then blinking stoplights, then stop signs, and then nothing, nothing, nothing but human-shaped cacti and dirt. They drive on a road called Valencia, then Ajo, small mountains rising before them.
With the hand that’s not feeding the baby, Lenna opens the text chain from Rhiannon. Let me know if you find a flight, her old friend texted very late last night, when Lenna had bolted up in bed gripped with the notion that maybe she should come. (Friend? Can she call Rhiannon that again?) Now, Lenna replies. Landed, coming your way. Hope that’s still okay!
“There’s an observatory out there,” the cabbie says, and Lenna jumps. He juts a thumb out the windshield at a purplish mountain rising in the distance. “Kitt’s Peak. They use it to watch for UFOs.”
“Pardon?”
“Kidding. But sky’s real clear out here. On a good night, you can even see the International Space Station every ninety minutes.” He chuckles. “You shoulda seen your face! UFOs!”
Lenna closes her eyes. She’s too keyed up for jokes.
Rhiannon hasn’t texted back. Neither has Daniel. To calm her nerves, Lenna focuses on her baby’s relaxed features—miraculously, he has fallen asleep. His eyelashes look like little stars against his cheeks. His plump, pink lips are parted just so, blowing out soft breaths. When she eases her pinkie into his fat, open palm, his fingers gently close around it.
Her heart melts, twists, explodes. And with it comes that fierce, stomach-clenching love—a love that almost hurts.
Twenty minutes later, the driver’s GPS announces that they are arriving at their destination. He pulls into a vacant lot. “This is where you want me to drop you?”
The lot might have been a gas station—in another decade. There is a bleached-white empty building that might have been a garage, and disruptions in the concrete from long-ago gas pumps. An empty plastic water bottle rolls across the lot, but it certainly didn’t come from a mini-mart anywhere close. Not a single car passes going either direction. If a bug were to crawl past, Lenna might hear its scuttling legs.
She looks at her phone for what seems like the millionth time this hour. She’s lost service.
“Um.” Her voice cracks. She thinks of what Rhiannon said in the café last week: The land where the community is? Marjorie always says it’s special. It has a way of revealing the truth. She thinks, too, of Rhiannon’s kind eyes, the way she said, I think you should come. You’ll find what you’re looking for. And I’d love to have you. She even sang Lenna and Jacob a lullaby of sorts.
Hush, little baby,
No sound will you make
Mama, come to Tucson
’Cause you need a break.
But Lenna also thinks of how they left things off—before. The fight. The absence. The silence. And then what Lenna did.
A dusty cloud suddenly appears from inside the desert like a twister. Tires scrabble on the dirt. The cloud gives way to the shape of a dusty Chevy Suburban. A relieved laugh escapes from Lenna’s lips.
“There she is,” she tells the driver.
The cabbie shifts. “An off-the-gridder, huh? Watch out.”
“Why?”
“They don’t rely on the system. Most of them are criminals—or they have something to hide. My uncle was like that, slippery as hell. Excuse my language.” He eyes her in the mirror. “You trust this person?”
Something to hide. Lenna shivers. Little does he know, the cabbie is describing her.
The Suburban comes to a stop, and Rhiannon Cook looks out. The light through the window hits Lenna’s old friend in all the right ways. She looks the same as when she and Lenna were close, her auburn hair wild around her face, her chin sharp, her green eyes bright. But now, her frame carries a few extra healthy pounds. It suits her. And her skin, which used to be prone to breakouts, is clear and shining. When they’d reunited in LA a week ago, Lenna had prepared herself for Rhiannon to look either really wrecked or so transformed she was unrecognizable. But this version—it’s inspiring.
“You came!” she bellows.
Lenna glances at the cabbie’s ball cap, pulled low, and then back at her friend again. She lets her palms splay free. Please, please, please, she thinks, trying to push down a shudder of dread. Make this worth it. But also this: Please let her have forgiven me if she already knows…or have mercy on me once I tell her the truth.
She looks at Rhiannon. “I came.”
2
Lenna
May
Two years before
The lights in the dressing room line in the H&M store at the Beverly Center were an eerie shade of orange, even though it was nowhere near Halloween. Lenna stared down at her hands, which held a few questionable items she was pretty sure wouldn’t look good on her tall, gangly, straight-up-and-down body—in this strange light, her skin looked positively ghoulish. Every indication was saying she should leave this store; she wasn’t even sure she liked the clothes she was trying on. And yet, something was compelling her to stay. Just for a moment.
Lenna was a believer in signs. Her mother had been the same; the two of them even had a game where they opened up the newspaper in the morning, and whatever story they felt pulled to would set the tone for their day. These days, whenever Lenna felt that something might be an omen, good or bad, she saw it as maybe a message from her mother, from the other side. Lenna didn’t always give in to the vibes, but today, the anniversary of her mother’s death, she felt she should.
