Excerpt from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

How lonely it had to be, to realize that the only resource he had left—besides his trailer and a few truly world-class stuffed rainbows—was me. Maybe getting sick had made Carl softer. Maybe this was why he had shown up. Maybe this was why he had not left, despite my need for him, as fresh and pathetic as ever. The idea broke my heart, and into that jagged, bleak crevasse, all my fears rushed to fill the gap. "I'm out of money," I said. "Just so you know. In terms of helping you with your deductibles."

He looked at me—puzzled, or maybe stunned.

"Out-of-network is expensive," I said. "That's how it is, I hear, down in Houston."

"Dutch," he said. "And you wonder why we always go to shit." He stood up. He started walking down the backyard toward the dock, where Donald was standing with the rib tied to a length of frayed plastic rope he had found in the snow-machine shed.

"Wait," I said and stood up. "I'll keep your stupid dog."

"I don't want your money," he said. "And you don't even like her."

"Sure I do," I said. "She's kind of spirited, that's all."

"What's her name?" he said, not stopping, not slowing down in the least.

"Rita," I said. All his dogs were named Rita, one after another.

He stopped to scrape some dog puke off the bottom of his boot. But he waved. "I call her Pinkie," he said. "After your secret balloon of dreams."

That was how I knew it was the last time we would see each other. Carl always liked to leave me a little more in love with him than ever.


EVEN BEFORE THE OPEN HOUSE had officially begun, people were pulling into the driveway. Silver had sprinkled baking soda all over the grass, then hosed down the entire yard. There was nothing else to do, she said, but hope for the best. One of her ways of hoping was to stick Donald down on the dock with his rib and his rope, where he would look like an imaginative, playful boy. Calling to his dog. With all the innocence of a kid in a lemonade commercial.

Candace was subject to a similar redecoration. Silver laid her in a deck lounger under a blanket, so it would look like she was just dozing, enjoying the sun. I sat beside her for a while, wishing she could get herself upright enough to come up to the wolf room with me, the way she had always wanted and the way I was finally ready to let her—high or sober or even just a little brain-dead from the chemicals. Carl was gone. I had no one. All over again.

I did consider pouring water on her face. But she was curled up on her side, her hands tucked under her cheek—not because her high had brought out the child in her, I saw only at that moment, but because the child kept surfacing despite the pills she took to keep it asleep.

There was nothing to do but tuck her in under the blanket and take the back stairs, which are the only stairs to the wolf room. The air in there is climate-controlled and smells just faintly of cedar from the paneling. I sat down in the middle of the skins and tried to look dignified, as if ready to answer any questions that a buyer might have. Questions that only I knew the answers to.

A young couple with matching glasses stopped in the doorway, looked in—politely, alarmed—and wandered off without a word. Over and over, this happened for the next few hours. A couple with fake tans. A couple with a baby. A couple with matching man buns. Single people and old people, apparently, didn't buy houses at my price point. Every time another couple turned up, I told myself to smile. Or invite them inside. Or leave so they could marvel at it openly. Or disparage it. Or discuss their plans to replace it with a master bath.

Silver had told me that it was better for the closing price if the owner went out for lunch with a close friend during the open house. Now I knew why. Nobody was being unkind, but you couldn't tell, just by looking at it, that the wolf room used to be a nursery.

Excerpted from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman. Copyright © 2022 by Leigh Newman. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.