Idaho

Set in northern Idaho, the novel spans multiple perspectives and timelines from 1973 to 2025, centering on the aftermath of a single act of violence that shatters a family and reverberates through every life connected to it.

The novel opens in 2004 with Ann, a former choir teacher originally from England, sitting alone in an old truck on Mount Iris. She is trying to reconstruct the August day nine years earlier when her husband Wade Mitchell's first wife, Jenny, killed their younger daughter, May, with a hatchet during a family trip to cut firewood. Their older daughter, June, witnessed the aftermath, fled into the woods, and was never found. Wade, now 50, has early-onset dementia, a hereditary disease that also killed his father. His memory is eroding, though certain sensory details remain vivid. His disease triggers violent episodes connected to buried memories: He pushes Ann's face into a box of old shirts, into pinecones, against the refrigerator, always in the voice he uses to train dogs. Ann catalogs and avoids the triggers, interpreting them as confused attempts to communicate grief he can no longer articulate. When he asks if she has ever loved anyone else, she tells him no, and they become each other's "first love."

Ann's present life revolves around her attempts to inhabit the past. She sits in the truck to reconstruct the killing and calls the library at the Sage Hill Women's Correctional Center, where Jenny is imprisoned, to check on a drawing book she mailed years earlier containing Jenny's unfinished sketch. When Ann confronts Wade about the truck and presses him to remember, he grows agitated. She accidentally knocks a tray of knife blades off his workbench, and he forces her face onto them, cutting her lip. She flees into the woods; he finds her hours later, having called the police on himself. In the truck, he tells her he ripped down the rearview mirror that day so Jenny would not have to see May's body.

Ann's connection to the Mitchell family begins before the tragedy. After returning to Idaho at 28, she takes a teaching job near Hayden Lake. When a student named Eliot, a 16-year-old who lost his right leg after falling through a dock, withdraws from school, Ann finds a young girl standing at his empty locker. The girl holds a wrapped gift: a bone-handled knife made by her father, with a card signed by June Mitchell. Ann calls June's father, Wade, who retrieves the knife and begins weekly piano lessons with Ann. She teaches him a folk song called "Take Your Picture Off the Wall," which becomes central to their bond. After the tragedy, Wade disappears for six months, then resumes lessons as though nothing has changed. When his memory visibly falters that spring, Ann tells him she could take care of him, and they marry that summer.

The narrative shifts to 2008 inside Sage Hill prison, where Elizabeth, a prisoner serving two life sentences for murder, has lost her place in the prison school after stabbing her former cellmate. Her new cellmate is Jenny, who has spent years in near-total silence. When Jenny is given Elizabeth's seat in the poetry class, Elizabeth lashes out, but Jenny begins attending and taking meticulous notes for Elizabeth, transcribing teachers' comments and submitting poems Elizabeth writes under Jenny's name. Their relationship exists entirely in these margins for months. When Elizabeth tapes a collage of personal scraps onto their cell wall and tells Jenny she wants to be her friend, Jenny whispers, "Yes" (107). Their bond deepens through shared silence, a day delivering piglets at the prison pig farm, and the steady accumulation of exchanged notes.

Interspersed chapters reveal the family's earlier history. In 1985, Wade and Jenny are trapped on Mount Iris through winter with Jenny pregnant. They discover that Wade's father, in the grip of dementia, had sent nearly $10,000 to a woman named June Bailey Roe, believing she was his secret daughter. When their daughter is born in spring, Wade asks Jenny to rename her June, after June Bailey Roe, wanting to give his child a name connected to something that survives in memory. In 1995 chapters, the sisters' world is rendered from inside: June's sudden withdrawal from playing with dolls devastates May, who carries a secret she never speaks. June has a distinctive smell their mother has assured May will pass, and May's restraint in never mentioning it becomes her deepest expression of love.

In 2006, Ann visits Tom Clark, an artist who paints age-progressed portraits of missing children, to review 20 paintings imagining June at age 20. She gives Tom a Polaroid of May found under the refrigerator. Wade's dementia worsens. In 2007, he asks Ann if they should have a baby, not remembering he was already a father. Ann brings a seven-year-old piano student to the house, hoping the child will trigger his memory, but Wade greets the girl with polite indifference. Ann realizes his daughters now live only in her.

In 2010, Jenny receives Ann's letter informing her of Wade's death at 55. Nearly a year later, rereading it with eyes trained by poetry, Jenny decodes Ann's phrasing and understands that May is buried beside Wade in Grangeville, Idaho, in a graveyard Jenny once walked through as a young woman. In 2012, a letter arrives from June Bailey Roe, now elderly, returning the money with interest. Ann is furious at first, but the letter breaks something open: She sits at the piano and composes original music for the first time, transforming "Take Your Picture Off the Wall" into something wholly her own.

By 2024, Elizabeth secretly plans to forge Jenny's signature on a parole application, writing a statement of rehabilitation in Jenny's voice after years of studying her handwriting in the margins of photocopied poems. She knows Jenny would never apply, believing she deserves to die in prison. Elizabeth understands that Jenny's release will mean her own slow death inside, but considers it her one good act.

In May 2025, Ann sits in the truck one last time, preparing to leave Idaho forever. She revisits her theory about the August day: Wade hummed the song Ann taught him while loading wood, and May heard it and sang the words inside the truck. Jenny, hearing in her child's voice a melody her husband carried from another woman, sensed a presence she could not name. Ann cannot know if this is true. A brief chapter shows the moment from Jenny's perspective: silence, the dust on the windshield, and behind her where she does not look, "forever Jenny's hand" (279). Ann prepares an apartment in Moscow, Idaho, for Jenny's release and deposits June Bailey Roe's returned money into a joint account in both their names.

In August 2025, Jenny walks out of prison in the clothes she stored 30 years ago and does not recognize the elderly woman in the mirror. Ann waits in the parking lot. They drive north in near silence. At a turnout by the Snake River, Jenny mentions a mountain lion she once saw leap from the water. Ann says she knows the story: Wade told her. Jenny smiles and asks what else he told her, a question that opens the possibility of connection between the two women.

The novel closes not with this meeting but in 1995, returning to May and June chasing their missing cat, Rocket, down a wooded slope. They discover an abandoned armchair among discarded furniture and huddle together as evening light filters through the trees. May fights sleep, wanting the moment to last. She deliberately forgets everything, and the instant Rocket is forgotten, he calls out from a tree above them. May looks up: "Oh, Rocket. Come here" (295).