The Mere Wife

  After an hour under the sky, we go back where we came from. It’s a snowy night and the windows fog over as the train shines its light into the gloom.

  Two passengers. A boy and his mother. I ride between cars. He smiles at me as he climbs the ladder that leads him to the roof.

  I know what this is. He’s telling me he’s leaving.

  We leave the train where it stops, and walk back to the mountain, ten miles, first aboveground, and then through the old part of the tunnel.

  It’s been changed. I can smell the newness of it, cleaner than any tunnel has a right to be. It should smell like damp, like river, like old bones, but it smells like paint.

  Everything changes.

  We’re back in our own station. I get a bad feeling in my stomach, because the station has changed too, no lights on, but the old broken chandelier unbroken, the windows replaced, the floor polished. The smashed crystal glasses have been replaced by glasses made in molds, and the soda fountain has a bar full of bottles behind it.

  HEROT HERITAGE reads the banner across the entrance, waterproof fabric, bright colors.

  I knew there was construction, but I thought they’d torn it out, made it modern. Instead, it looks like it looked the first time I saw it, before dirt got into it. I feel my thirteen-year-old self here, and my mother, looking out over the track and whispering. I hear her telling me this place belongs to me. It doesn’t. It never did.

  I feel that, and other times too, climbing down through the ceiling into safety, curling against the counter waiting to lose my arm. My history, here.

  I stand for a moment inside the cavernous room, and then I see that there’s a door leading off to the side. A sign that reads HEROT HERITAGE MUSEUM.

  “What’s that?” I ask Gren. He lifts his shoulders.

  It’s down a dark passage, not part of the station itself, hidden from everyone except those who choose to go in. I walk through the archway, and there’s a glass wall, with skeletons behind it.

  Gravestones. Artifacts. Dimly lit by filament lightbulbs, little plaques telling lies. Unearthed, they read, unexpected, old.

  But I know this cemetery. I grew up going to the church that held this graveyard.

  I look in for as long as I can stand it. It isn’t an accident that these graves ended up here, two hundred years of graves, the people who lived and died in this place before Herot Hall came and took it.

  They’re here for decoration.

  I look at names of the people who built this place, stones I know by heart. I look at the things found in their graves, rings and charms, funeral gowns, treasures they had buried with them.

  They prayed here, on land that hissed and spit sulfur, on ground that shook, on a mountain known for ghosts. They prayed for safety here, just like I did. They prayed for their children to grow up, just like I did.

  I put both my hands on the glass. I want to smash it. I want to break it all apart, and then I see—

  There’s a panel far along one wall of the display, and in it, there are bones marked as being from the 1880s. There’s something else in there too, and I stare at it for a long time, trying to reconcile it.

  It’s the goblet I poured my mother’s water into every night, the one she kept beside her bed, the one I polished over and over. It came down in our family, and it has our initials on it, embossed in the silver.

  It was the last thing I put in her coffin before they closed it, and now it’s out, with a light on it, making people feel like they aren’t looking at a crime scene.

  The sound I’m making isn’t a sound I’ve ever made before. Those are her bones behind glass. This is what I’m left with, here, standing with my son. A museum. Heritage. Whose heritage?

  “Who are they?” Gren asks me. “Do you know them?”

  I told him stories about monsters below us, stories about how they eat people like us, stories about how you can’t go down the mountain. I never told him any part of why. I told him lies.

  “This is the cemetery from where I grew up.”

  “Where did you grow up?” he says, looking at me like I’m crazy. He’s never asked. I’ve never said.

  “Down there,” I say. “Where the houses are. They took our land and built Herot Hall on top of it. I was overseas.”

  His eyes are wide, and I can see confusion rising inside him, betrayal.

  “You told me you were a soldier,” he says. “You said I was a soldier’s son. You said you came from the cave.”

  “I came from down the mountain, where Herot is now. That was my family’s land.”

  “Where did I come from, then?” he asks me. He used to ask all the time, and I used to tell him stories. I don’t know what I’m telling him now, a story or the truth. I’ve never known what the truth about this is. I don’t know his father’s name.

  “You came from the war,” I tell him. “Your father came from a town in the desert, and all of it got destroyed by people like the people in Herot Hall. People like Dylan. He’s one of them.”

  He’s silent, but I can feel him. He’s crying. I can’t stop. I can’t comfort him.

  A wall of bones they stole from my family’s graves, turned up to build those houses, those picket fences, those years we hid here, afraid of being found, afraid of being killed by them. There’s something whipping up inside of me, something with teeth.

  During the Civil War, there were accounts of a monster that came coursing over the battlefields on the Confederate side. A tsunami of transparent brown bodies, salt-drenched and cotton-worn, roaring up out of the fields, ghosts brought by blood, and suddenly the soldiers would see a line of them, and behind that line another line.

  Except it’s the reverse in my head right now, not the victims rising as ghosts, but their murderers. I’m seeing everyone from Herot Hall and everyone they came from. Thousands of them, stealing and stealing. Thousands of them breaking open graves and taking our bodies out of them. Thousands of them marching over land that should belong to us. I’m seeing my son, and all the years I’ve been afraid to let him walk in the world, not because I’m crazy, but because they are.

  For the first time in my life, I’m praying. Not for salvation but for destruction.

  Take it down.

  Take it down and blow it apart.

  Here they are, the people who stole my family’s land, the people who’ve taken my arm, the world, my son’s safety from me. I want them to know what it feels like to lose.

  My saint is back, standing beside me.

  “Sharpen your knives,” the saint says. “Kill them all.”

  “I thought saints didn’t kill people,” I say, and she laughs, the candle in her chest flickering.

  “Some of us killed hundreds, and others got killed.”

  “Why are you with me?”

  “I’m not with you,” she tells me. “I’m just your hurt walking.”

  Her fingernails are long and dirty, but her teeth are perfect. She has clear eyes and twisted hair, and that candle in her chest has been burning for years. There’s a skull in her hand.

  I graze my fingertip over that skull and then I’m pulling my knife out and turning myself toward the entrance to the station, toward the path, down the mountain to their houses. In through the back doors. Up the stairs and into their bedrooms—

  “Stop it! Stop talking to yourself!” Gren yells. He’s shaking me by the shoulders. “You’re not a saint! You’re not anyone!”

  “I never said I was,” I tell him.

  “It’s your fault we’re in here,” he says. “You’re the one who killed Dylan’s dad. No one down there has ever done anything to you. I played with him. That’s all. The only person who’s ever hurt me is you.”

  My son and I look into each other’s eyes, and for the first time in our life together, we both see monsters.

  “Nothing ever even happened to you,” Gren spits. “Except that you’re a coward.”

  I’m flashing into that goddamn white room, stitches crawling up my face
, Gren in my womb, my body torn up, my brain torn up. Where was I? A good city? A bad city?

  “Nothing happened to you,” said the men when I woke up in the hospital. “Nothing happened to you that didn’t happen to a hundred men. They were kidnapped, but they kept their mouths shut. You were a soldier. You were approached.”

  “I was taken.”

  “You sympathized with the enemy.”

  “Who are you, if you don’t?”

  They poured water into my face. They drowned me, baptized me in ice, resurrected me, drowned me again.

  There are rules about torturing mothers, though not about torturing women. Always have been. You couldn’t burn a pregnant witch, and you can’t bend a pregnant soldier over backward and make her confess sins she doesn’t remember. They went as far as they could, and then maybe someone stopped them. I was six months in, and I was carrying a light. I was a lit cigarette. Someone ground one out on my arm, but I don’t know who, because my head was covered with a sack. I don’t know if the things I remember are real or things I made up. I don’t know if Gren’s father was a kidnapper, or if he was a god, or just a normal man I met, someone I fell for in the middle of a war. I don’t know anything.

  “You should’ve killed me when I was born!” says Gren. “You should’ve just killed me, if you were going to make my life into this!”

  My heart is a meteor hitting the ground.

  “You made me think I was a monster,” he says, and his voice shakes. “But I’m not a monster.”

  My son stands before me looking like a boy. Out there, I know it, I know it, my son running down a street would be my son confessing to a crime. My son shouting would be my son attacking. My son sleeping would be my son addicted. My son in love with the boy from down there would be my son hanging from a tree.

  People say the world is changing, but it isn’t changed enough.

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there,” I say.

  “I don’t know what it’s like because you never let me outside! I hate you,” yells Gren. He’s my only reason for being here, my only reason for losing everything I could have had. “You ruined my life!”

  I see white light, a blast radius. I see a city burning down. I see my own body burning and then I see myself walking out of the burn.

  I’m wrapping my jacket around my fist. Gren’s crying and raging and I’m done being careful.

  “This is what they did to your family,” I tell him.

  I punch my fist through the glass, and it hurts, it hurts, but I don’t care. I don’t care about the sound it makes and I don’t care about the consequences.

  I take the goblet in my hand and hold it, feel my family initials, feel the warmth of my mother’s hand on it, feel the way I’m back here again, with her again.

  When I look up, Gren’s gone, and I’m alone in the dark with the ghosts of the love I’ve lost.

  YES

  34

  Yes: times are changing and we change with them. The mere is brimming over, deeper than it was, bitter water and heat, fury and fire. Excavations into our mountain spilling salt into sweet.

  We are angry. We are breached and boiling. The center is darker now, and warmer than it was. It’s not all heat. Some of the mere is ice, but a hot spring steams from the middle of the lake, wisps of white rising over the surface. The mountain shakes.

  We are a white deer and we are a black raven and we are blood in the snow. We are a sword made of old metal and we are a gun filled with old bullets and we are a woman standing before her mother’s bones, holding her family treasure, broken.

  We wind around the mountain, looking into windows, gusting over the stars, covering the moon. The center of the mountain is open and inside it, the woman and her son look at each other and for the first time in their history, there is a war between them.

  Then he’s running through the snow, furious, wanting to flee her and save her at once. The boy from the mountain doesn’t notice the cold.

  He was raised to trust no one but her, to love no one but her, but he is made of longing. He dives into the mere and swims, sinking to the fish, rising to the ice.

  Out of his sight, just, another boy is walking across the new rail bridge, a bag slung on his back. He’s drunk on somebody’s daddy’s private stash of whiskey. He’s been walking since he left the train station ten miles away.

  We know this boy too, his mind, his heart, his hopes. We’ve known him since he was a child, and we know him still, though he has changed. In the gym, he bench-presses things that outweigh his imagination. In his pockets: a stone, a fossilized sea monster.

  For years, he haunted us, collecting the nests in our corners, stealing a china cup, a crystal from the chandelier. He hiked alone and sat in the middle of the floor, arms wrapped around his knees. He left letters pressed into crevices, addresses, stories, and all of them were taken by his stepfather into black plastic sacks and to a dump, where they’ll survive eternity.

  He wrote on our walls with red paint. GREN. FIND ME.

  We know his memory. We read his heart.

  Earlier tonight, the boy was in the city, drunk on tequila. He was on his sixteenth bed, with his sixteenth girl, and he isn’t even straight. Seventeen was on the bench at the back of a bar, vinyl opened with stuffing coming out, a mouse running by his foot, a girl with her legs wrapped around his waist, the wall behind her.

  The boy from Herot’s found plenty of things while looking for love: sweaters rucked up, zippers tugged nearly from stitching. How can love come from something as nothing as fucking? he wonders, even as he keeps doing it.

  He still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

  “You seem high,” said the girl. “Are you high? Can I have some?”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “You aren’t.” She poked him in the chest. “You’re pretty, though.”

  He wasn’t planning to come to Herot. He was planning to spend the night in the city and then go back to school. Then, just before he packed up his bag and got on the train, she reminded him of everything he’d lost.

  “You’re the kid whose dad got killed by Dana Mills, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t even figure it out until now, but then I had this weird memory of seeing you on TV, like when we were super little.”

  His plan changed.

  The boy from Herot has a tattoo on his arm, procured with a fake ID. It’s a picture of the mountain, and inside the mountain are three figures. Once upon a time, he was the child of some other mother, and his beloved was a wonder of the world.

  He got on the last train out of the city, and headed for the suburbs. Back to the house he used to stand in, looking through a glass wall at a mountain.

  The last time he was dead, someone picked him up, took him home, and loved him. Maybe, he thinks, he should die again.

  A ribbon-cutting ceremony, and an inaugural ride through a station he shouldn’t have ever been inside, a place he helped destroy.

  He’s the murderer, not his stepfather. He’s the reason anyone from out here went into the mountain, the reason anyone found the cave, and he’s the one who tunneled out with his bare hands. He tried to go backward the whole time, until his stepfather held him to his chest, pinning him so tightly he was left with a star-shaped scar.

  Now it’s a series of white lines, almost invisible, a breached cheekbone.

  The boy makes his way slowly across the bridge, considering a jump from the highest point. Get more rocks for the pockets. Or wait until morning, do it during the ceremony, the train and his mother, ruin his already ruined life, and hers too, and his stepfather’s along with them.

  He pauses. The water looks up at him. We are everywhere. We look out of the trees and the sky, out of the lake and the shore.

  After a silent moment, we hear his heart pounding, his breath coming fast. He takes off his shoes, coat, backpack. He stands on our trestles barefoot, looking down.

  * * *

  The boy from the mountain is be
low him. We’ve been watching him swim, his head up above the water.

  He’s talking to himself, telling himself how to live, how to run, how to leave his mother. He’s telling himself he doesn’t have to protect her, doesn’t have to believe her about the world. The world, he is whispering, will take him.

  I’m leaving, he’s saying aloud, when the boy from Herot dives off the bridge and into the water beside him. He jolts, stunned at the splash.

  The boy from the mountain dives, following the way the water trails from the other boy’s fingertips.

  They surface together, come apart, and stare.

  We listen. Voices in the dark, carrying over water, whispers, uncertainty, hope. The mere counts the beats of their hearts through their skin. The mountain shakes, full of change.

  A train, a tunnel, a woman in the cave looking at her own mother’s bones, weeping over the things she’s lost. We feel it all at once, the birth and death of the fossil trees, the gone dinosaurs, the bathers who used to come here, the passengers who used to walk through the station under blazing lights.

  The boy from Herot presses something into the hand of the boy from the mountain. It’s the fossilized monster, brought from his pocket.

  The boy from the mountain pulls something up out of the water. There’s a string around his neck, and on it is the head of a tiny plastic king.

  And they hesitate, and the mere springs from the center of the Earth, and some of the lake is ice and the rest is boil.

  They swim to the shore. They make their way into the old station. The world is sleeping. There’s a grand piano in the middle of marble tiles and mosaics. One boy holds out a hand. The other boy takes it and leads him to the piano.

  Maybe there’s been a haunted sound in the past months, maybe someone’s been playing these keys in the middle of the night, teaching himself how to make music. Maybe we’ve dampened the sound of song.