The Mere Wife

  Gren swims for fish, and through the dark for bats. He can press his body through narrow spaces, climb the walls, slip along rocks that have no handholds. He slides through places I couldn’t come close to fitting into. He reaches his fingers into tunnels and finds the things inside them. Drops dead creatures at my feet and smiles. Gren’s teaching Dylan to catch a fish with his fingers, but at night Dylan still sucks his thumb.

  Gren makes a fire to cook a rabbit. I don’t know where he found it. I don’t ask. The other boy has been to camp. He speaks authoritatively about pyramids of twigs. Gren imitates him. The other boy knows nothing. Gren shows him how to crack rocks together to spark a flame.

  I watch them play like the world doesn’t exist. Imagined games, the games of every little boy everywhere.

  I take a bite of meat. The taste of that is an old gamy taste, a good one, but I’m getting sicker.

  I was a child born outside this mountain, a hospital, a house, a home, a mother, a father, grandmothers. I have vaccination records somewhere out there. I have a birth certificate. I was a citizen of this country, part of the world until I wasn’t.

  I hallucinate the house of my baby days back into existence, my bed, the kitchen cupboards, the peg rack for coats. The childhood phone number, a number I want to call. Maybe all of the dead will answer, come to the phone together, It’s Dana!

  I called it once from overseas, collect, and while it was ringing, I thought I was about to hear my mother speaking to me, telling me what to do.

  I thought maybe she’d answer the phone, and I’d say the usual things, but then the disconnect came on, and the operator and I listened to it together before I hung up.

  They’ll find us. There’s no way they won’t, and I’m not strong enough to fight them.

  It’s five days, then ten. Then more. My arm is swollen, and hot to the touch. I wrap it in a sling, but I know what’s coming. We ran without anything when we ran. No antibiotic, no alcohol, nothing to keep my life from turning into death.

  “You’re the one who gets away!” shouts the woman on the sidewalk inside my skull. I shake my head.

  I look down at my hands, at my arms, at my body, and I’m just the woman who was Dana Mills, who was a soldier, who was killed, who died, who came back to bring Gren into the world.

  Who am I now? I don’t even know my own story.

  Add it up. I hold my breath to keep from screaming out the losses, tallying up the dead, all the people I’ve killed, all the family I can’t find, all the rest of the lives no one got to live. Is this the guilt of being a soldier? Is this what you’re left with after a war, when you follow orders, when you’re not the one in charge? I see the dead all around me. The cave is full of them, and I’m full of them, and they’re not just the ghosts I’m responsible for making. They’re the ghosts of this place too, my ancestors and the people here before them.

  There are two little boys running up and down the tracks, laughing, holding hands, leaving a trail of footprints in the muddy sides, Gren fast, Dylan slower, and then Gren carries his friend on his back. I hear them singing to each other, Gren singing our lullaby, the boy teaching him new ones. They’re working on a project in the tunnel, bringing out the dirt.

  I open my eyes to the light of my saint, examining my arm, holding the hand I’m about to lose. I’m grateful to see her this time, though usually I’m not. She’s a reminder I’m still alive.

  “Everyone, holy and not, good and not, ends up a series of relics in the end,” she says, like it’s nothing, like there are no big deals left on Earth. “People stick them in glass cases and look at them in churches, or they make a pile over them and call the spot a place touched by heaven. Shit,” the saint says. “You didn’t ask to be this, but I didn’t either. Guess it’s just the way things go.”

  “I guess so,” I croak out.

  “You could be a saint like me,” she says.

  “I don’t want to be a saint like you,” I tell her. “I don’t want to be a saint at all.”

  “Somebody chose you,” she says.

  “I didn’t want to be a martyr.”

  She smiles. “You’re not. You’re alive.”

  The saint smokes her cigarette, and inside her chest the candle is flickering.

  “If anyone up there saw him, you’d be on the side of one of these already,” she says, pointing. “People’d be praying to you to settle their accounts. Maybe you’re the miracle one, not your boy.”

  “No,” I say. “I was a normal person.”

  “Sometimes you get noticed,” says the saint, “and then there’s no accounting for it. What’d you do in the desert? Did you run into God out there?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I ran into someone.”

  She walks out onto the water in the passage and it steams around her invisible feet, sizzling as she steps on it.

  I think about riding a bus across the country, the way each hour on a bus feels like a hundred years, each mile, each marker, each state passed through like you’re marching. Those buses are full of the dead. Everyone on them is on their way out. Once, I sat in the seat beside an old woman who didn’t get off at the end of the line. She just died right there on the Greyhound, silently. We all tried to wake her up, but she was stiff and cold already. It doesn’t take long for life to disappear.

  “What saint are you, anyway?” I finally ask.

  “Oh, I don’t have a name anymore,” she says. “I just died in a bad way and came back to Earth like this.”

  “But you had a name before?”

  “So did you,” she says. “But the name you’ll get remembered by is his.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ll call you Gren’s mother.”

  * * *

  I’m surrounded by spinning dark. Gren and Dylan are bent over me.

  “You were talking,” Gren tells me.

  “Sometimes I talk in my sleep too,” says Dylan, and pats my forehead. “Sometimes I have nightmares.”

  Gren holds my arm like I’m the child, and I gasp with pain. It looks like something other than an arm, something more like a tree trunk cracking open in lightning. I feel it rotting, things boring through it, movement underneath.

  I make a tourniquet of my shirt.

  Everyone might be a monster underneath their skin, me included. Bring out the bones and see what’s there. I look at my left hand, this hand that’s been mine all these years, in charge of firing guns and of gutting animals, this hand that’s been the one that held Gren’s skull when he was sleeping.

  I think about the girl in the hospital bed next to me, her legs gone, this girl I made into my saint, and I wonder if the ghosts of all lost limbs travel the world, pulling themselves along.

  Gren’s crying, but listening to me, and I tell him how hard he has to swing to make this work.

  “Cut it clean,” I tell him.

  He’s wavering, not sure if he trusts me to know what’s good for me. The other boy is standing there too. There’s nowhere for him to go, no way for me to protect anyone from this.

  I shut my eyes and breathe, and all around us, in the dark, I feel the place, the things of this mere, skeletons reassembled. There’s my mother, watching, and her mother, and ten generations of mothers before them. Here are all the years of my family on this mountain. Here are all the years I’ve been running from something I didn’t do wrong, trying to get away from pain, trying to start over.

  “Do it,” I say to Gren. “Do it now. It’s okay. Just do it quick.”

  He’s a soldier too, just like his mother, and this is what a soldier does. You sacrifice the weak to keep the strong marching. You bury the dead by the side of the road if you have to, and you keep walking until you get to where you’re going.

  Then you fight.

  He raises the sword higher, higher, and it whistles through the air, making a sound I’ve heard once before.

  Listen. In some countries, you kill a monster when it’s born—


  My baby brings the blade down.

  25

  Tell the story. There is only one star in it, if you ask Willa. That star is the sun. If anything else glows, it’s secondary.

  Willa’s never been the sun before. Years in the shadow of everyone else, child, husband, mother, Herot Hall itself, and this goddamned mountain.

  Now, now, she is rising, flying through the space of her future. The years spent on eradicating uncertainties, pouring cocktails, cooking dinner—those years are over. She’s free.

  Her mother comes to visit her late, the night before Ben Woolf plans to go into the water.

  “Willa,” she says, in a tone.

  “What?” Willa asks.

  For a moment, the two of them stare at each other across the table.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Diane says. “Don’t pretend. Well, it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever done. He could run for office. He looks like a politician. You were pretty enough for a doctor, I always said that, but that’s spilt milk now. Let’s make him a chief of police, and from there, something better. Herot Hall’s yours now, except for Tina’s share, which it wouldn’t have been in a divorce, there’s that.”

  As though Willa meant for Roger to be murdered.

  Willa wonders if her mother has plans for everyone she’s ever met, graphing their futures on some invisible chart. Her mother and women like her are the reason men can live at all, running corporations, announcing wars. Every man has a woman at home, and every woman plots the course of the universe, putting it into his breast pocket, like a note attached to a kindergartner, sending him out into his day.

  Diane’s already called reporters, planned the arc of events, and nothing about Ben Woolf’s dive in pursuit of Dana Mills and the missing child will be invisible. There’ll be cameras, lights, words. He’ll be a hero, and Willa will be alongside him, the bereaved.

  Willa wonders if anyone is actually grieving Dylan. Everyone else seems to think he’s somehow lived through this, but he barely lived through being born. He’s always been delicate. Willa feels the grief in public. In private, she remembers the feeling of the crown against her fingertip.

  It’s time to keep pushing.

  Willa, she thinks, this is what happens when you let yourself go. You don’t die. You float, relieved of the chains around your ankles. You float, higher, and you leave the rest of the world behind. You are not a monster, but an angel. You’re not a nightmare, but a dream.

  She runs a thin line of pink lip pencil just beneath her eyes. She brushes a powdery blue shadow into the hollows of her cheeks, a little, enough.

  With her shorn hair, she looks like a figure on the wall of a tomb, her face without vanity. She’s paint-by-number, but the cameras will erase what she said about the monster, and see her as Willa the Widowed, Willa the Wounded, Willa Whose Poor Son Is Missing.

  Black boots, black jeans, black sweater. Black coat, long and lean, made of the fur of a sheep dead on a slope ten thousand miles away.

  She is her own creation, a pearl in mourning, and she walks out the door just before sunup for the first appearance of her new existence. She tightens her gloved hands around the steering wheel as she drives, moving in her mind from the Willa she once was, her stinging, freshly tattooed thigh, her wedding dress wadded up in the bottom of her purse, her newly minted husband picking her up and carrying her to bed, to the Willa after that, the second husband, the meals and potty training, Tahiti and waiting for the train, to the Willa she will be. She digs a pit for her marriages and kicks sand over the faces of her former men; she waits for their skeletons to reveal themselves.

  She glances at herself in the rearview mirror, checking her makeup, and catches a glimpse of something else.

  A girl in a white dress, running down the highway behind Willa’s car, barefoot, and then suddenly she’s in the road, right there.

  Willa swerves, but the girl’s against the dash, her claw-tipped fingers spread as starfish, and her mouth a sealing wax rose, her long blond hair, her white dress, the red trim on her lace underwear, and a wedding veil over her face—

  Her mouth behind that lace, opening too wide, revealing sharp teeth, as blood spatters all over the glass.

  And then it’s over and gone and Willa’s still driving in the darkish dawn, panting.

  Nothing.

  The dash isn’t cracked, and out there is only snow. Willa squints because a white deer is bounding, just on the edge of the light, but no, it’s the lake, and even as she approaches, she can see news vans.

  She pulls herself together. She’s good at that. It’s like suturing a wound, stitching together all the Willas.

  Her neighbors are there, and at the center of them is Ben Woolf, dressed in winter diving gear. His voice booms out.

  “I’m doing this for Roger Herot and for his family, for his wife, Willa, who has more cause than anyone to call for justice. If no one else can find Dana Mills, I will. She’s my responsibility. I’m the one who let her escape.”

  Willa allows a single tear to slide down her cheek.

  “If you haven’t been to war, you don’t understand. Dana Mills does. I do. She came into Herot with slaughter on her mind.”

  The sun is rising behind him.

  “I was with Roger Herot when he died. I heard his last words. ‘Take care of my family,’ he said. ‘Keep them safe. My son. My wife. Tell them I love them.’”

  Willa feels her mother behind her, nodding with Ben, and this reminds Willa to nod with him too.

  “Roger Herot is dead, his son is missing, and Dana Mills is on the loose. She wants to destroy everything Herot Hall stands for. I won’t let her. I can’t.”

  Ben Woolf bows his head. He struggles to get the words out. A handsome man with tears in his eyes, and everyone is crying with him. He looks to Willa.

  “With your blessing,” he says, and she feels the crowd exhale.

  “You have it,” she says, perfect pitch.

  Ben Woolf eases himself into the mere and plunges below the surface, lower, lower, tethered with a thin line of air to his diving tanks.

  As he dives into the hole in the ice, the place where the hot springs merge with the cold, Willa looks down into the water, and for an instant she sees him swimming into fire, a burning city, the world blazing and coming apart at the seams.

  Then he’s gone and it’s only darkness, a hero dropping through a mountain lake toward a sunken villain, a soldier, a dead-body-to-be.

  26

  Tell the depth of the mere in inches, in feet, in fathoms. How deep he dives!

  How long will it take us to drown him? Water wraps around his limbs and tangles in his fingers. He falters, struggles, continues to swim.

  We’re used to being infiltrated by things, tin cans, rabbits, birds, lost cats. Our water’s nothing pure, though it pretends to be, and neither is the man. He’s hot blood pumping through a cold heart.

  He swims, a headlamp lighting his way down. He swims until he reaches a space between rocks, and when he finds it, he presses himself through it and swims deeper, deeper, until there is nothing left to swim in.

  He’s inside the mountain. He takes off his mask, and passes through a tunnel. The bats can smell him, and so can the worms under the soil. There are blind things and they stay still as he passes.

  “Dana Mills! Tell me where you are!” he calls into the dark of the tunnel, and then, experimentally, “Gren?”

  There is no response from any of us. We have nothing to say to him.

  He keeps walking.

  At last, there are rail tracks beneath his feet, and the walls of the tunnel are paved. He’s come through a slender entrance, a service passage, and into the main tunnel. There are footprints here from the ones who came before him.

  One of our birds flies past his face, a clutter of black wings, and he looks back in the direction it came from.

  We’ve seen this kind of man before. We’ve felt atomic explosions, undersea tests, fireworks, and bridg
e buildings. Meteors have fallen and hit hard, delving out cracks in the surface of the Earth. This man is only a body, not a bomb.

  Boulders shove him and gravel presses upon him. There is sand beneath his feet that shudders. We give him the feeling of a songbird in a mine, making him gasp, running a trickle of water over his feet.

  He doesn’t stop. He climbs from the track into a chamber, and only then does he pause, panting.

  A station, abandoned. He looks around in surprise. This station isn’t on his maps. It’s a closed place, forgotten on purpose.

  There are reasons for that. There were accidents on the rail line, conductors confused, passengers wandering into the tunnel and struck by the train. Tourists from the city loathing the smell of the water in the lake. Other tourists loving it too much. Swimmers disappearing, bodies floating up, lace dresses and eyes shut in pleasure. Deer leaping over crevices, mist from the darkness.

  We are nothing new.

  Evidence of a fire, and of inhabitants, empty cans of food. There are toys on the floor, plastic trucks and dolls made of sticks. The walls of the station are painted with children’s work, a boy and a house, trees, a mother, another child. There are words written all over the marble surfaces, crayoned and charcoaled.

  Light from the beam of the man’s headlamp, and from the filthy skylight a fractured sun, dust motes.

  There’s a sound, and the man peers into the shadows, but there’s nothing there. Campfire ashes, and ankle-deep swamp around the rock floor, a dark underground river feeding the lake.

  There’s a pile of bloody cloth and a little mound of dirt in the center of the room.

  The man kneels over it and plunges his hands in, scrabbling, moving aside wet clumps of mud. There is something beneath the mound, and it begins to be revealed, curled fingertips, rising out of no body. There is no grave here, but we feel the man’s memories of violence, places he’s been in the past, bodies he’s buried, sand he’s scraped over secrets.

  He moves the dirt aside, choking as he does, his face contorting. An arm, from bicep to fingertips, given hasty burial. It’s swollen, scabrous, and pus is dried on the stump. The fibers of the muscles are sad flesh now, red, white, and unraveled.