“Run!” he screams at me. “Mommy! Run!”
To hear that word is to know that your child knows he’s not going to make it out.
I’m not strong enough. I’m not fast enough. I’m throwing myself into Woolf, but he’s in a frenzy. He has a hunting knife in his hand and he yanks and screams as he drives it into Gren’s throat, and—
My son—
I watch him die.
42
Now! something shouts inside Ben Woolf’s skull. He’s weighed down with decorations, old gold medals and imaginary purple hearts. His skin feels heavy too: tattoos of monsters and broken boys, flags of many countries, missiles and swords, the names of his gods and his animals.
He has something in his hand and he’s leapt back into the lake.
He feels the breath he’s held all these years begin to gasp out of his lungs, but he lived through all the things that have tried to kill him.
Good man, he thinks. This is his training. This is his history, protecting the innocent, saving the community. This is what he was meant to do, and who he has always meant to be. The man who saves civilization from horrors.
He surfaces from icy blue darkness full of drifting memories of people he killed, all of them swimming at him, their eyes open, their hands stretching to reach him.
There’s a great deal of blood in the snow, enough to paint a masterpiece on a fresco, a brave resolution, a set of demons wandering hell.
He struggles out of the lake, sinking through snowdrifts, thinking about places he went once, the way he swam in a swimming pool tiled with gold tiles, pure gold, pried them up in a rage, and found out they were only ceramic. There are photos of a long-ago Ben Woolf, looking like a hero, swimming fast, diving deep. He posed for portraits, the president patting him on the shoulder, a somber smile, a handshake, and Ben Woolf alone carried the story of what he did in the war. And what did he do? What everyone does in war, for thousands of years. Kill the enemy and try to survive long enough to go home. There is no such thing as a war hero, he knows, and has known forever. There are heroes of daily life, and he is one of those. He has strong hands and a sharp knife. He is not a winner, but he has won. No one knows it yet. He has to show them.
Peace is written in blood, and has been and will be. Dana Mills knows it as well as Ben does. She served in a war and so did he. If someone wants to kill you, you kill them first. There must be walls to keep attackers out. Locks on the doors. Guns in the hands of the defenders. Society wants to collapse, and it is his task to keep it from crumbling. He was born this way, and there is a history of violence on Earth, more violence than calm, more blood than water.
Everything has changed in an instant, and he’s too far gone to go back home.
His wife is standing at the edge of the lake. She’s all in white. No, the snow around her is white. She’s in red. No, she’s in black. She’s a crow.
“Willa?” he says.
“What did you do?” she screams.
He’s followed the orders he’s been following since the beginning of his career, the ones that’ve told him that all heroes lose things as they go. There is nothing simple in the end of a story. The battlefield is always piled with corpses in need of burial, and even the riches belonging to an enemy are not enough.
He has no army. He’s alone with the rest of his life, and his wife looks at him in horror, and he knows he will never see his sons again, knows he will never sleep in his bed again. Somewhere, he hears women screaming his name.
Ben Woolf steps onto the train tracks and starts to climb the bridge, feeling his muscles move. All he’s done is save everyone. No one is thankful. No one respects him. He has blood on his hands and it’s still spilling out.
So it fucking goes.
43
Now Willa Woolf stands at the edge of the lake. The mere is greenish black, and the only things she can think of are shipwrecks, frost and chill, oil spills, dead dolphins and lost whales, all tangled together into this failure, this catastrophe, this swirling drain of all the water in the world.
Her mother isn’t saving her. Her mother has fled with her friends, for safety. They’re inside the train with Dylan’s coffin. Willa watched them hide themselves there.
Let go, Willa thinks.
She feels the heart inside her, thumping. She sees a dripping woman coming out of the mere, and boarding the train at the back, walking onto it behind all the people who’re inside it.
The woman is silent, but she turns her head and looks at Willa, and there’s nothing about it that isn’t familiar. Years of forgetting. Years of countertops and windows. Years of earthquakes and grief, babies born and now dead.
Willa yells and spins, back to where the police are. She points.
There she is, Dana Mills, there she is, the murderer, but they’re not coming for Dana Mills.
Willa looks at the lake again, from which her husband is emerging, a form dripping with darkness, his hair tangled, his muscles too large, his hands too big, his face a strange mask of hunger and joy.
And now Ben is at the end of the rail bridge, holding a monster’s head in his hand, his face blank and strange—
And the monster is not a monster—
Everything is a sea of shouting and barking, sirens and chirps, and the world is white, and Willa is in the middle of it, her arms around her chest. She holds herself.
The boy is just a boy—
“What did you do?” she screams.
Ben is there, and she is here, outside the station, surrounded by black balloons, emergency order, Herot Heritage, Dylan’s face on them along with the train that was supposed to carry him to the city and bury him. All of this was supposed to be lovely. All of it was supposed to make hearts ache, not beat inside of Willa.
She thinks about Winter’s Tale, trying to remember the plot. She was in that play once. A child named Mamillius is eaten by a bear. It seems like a joke, like a puppet interlude. The child exits the stage, the bear runs through a bit later, and later still you learn that the bear ate the boy, but you never see it happen. The boy is grieving his mother, who isn’t really dead. She’s hiding in a convent, accused by her husband of being unfaithful.
The bear was a shadow puppet piloted by two actors with sticks, paper, and a big piece of fake fur.
Wait. She’s remembering it wrong. The bear doesn’t eat the boy. The bear eats someone else entirely. The father recovers. The mother resurrects. There’s a happy ending with a wedding and a veil, and the gods show up.
The son is dead, though, the little son, his little death, and for the entire play you think he’ll return, but he never does.
Dana Mills is a woman in black, who should never have come back from any dead land, who deserves nothing.
Willa watches her, boarding the train, with longing, with something she finally diagnoses as lust. It’s none of her business, in the end, what Dana Mills is doing on that train full of the residents of Herot Hall. The mothers. The cowards. Abandoners. Kill them, then. Kill them all.
The last twenty years. This whole life. How can they leave Willa here? They should take her. She should die with her army if they’re dying, if that woman is coming to put them out of their misery.
Willa is in misery. The dragon on her wrist is shining in the sun and it spins too quickly, through the hours, through the days, reddening into rust.
She turns her head slowly, and looks at all the people, the ones in the station, and the ones out here, the people running out of Herot Hall, and the people running up to see what there is to see. The police piling out of cars and sprinting out of the trees, her neighbors, the women of this mountain, the mothers on the train.
She can see them all through the windows, but they’re distorted by the old glass. They’re shifted, stretched, their faces mottled, their teeth longer than they should be, their manicured fingernails curving into—
Someone tells her she has the right to remain.
“Remain where?” she asks.
&n
bsp; “Silent.”
“Mother!” she cries, but no one answers. There’s a camera, and Willa is immortalized, her eyes wide, with running mascara.
Inside her stomach she feels it still, beating, beating. It ticks like a bomb, her son’s heart. She feels it now.
She remembers it all now, everything.
Willa looks down at her own hands and watches them change into something other than the hands she’s used to seeing. Speckled and withered, the talons long and curved, pearlescent. She’s not the only one. It’s everyone, all the people of Herot Hall, the police and the babies, the men with their names all the same, the women with their perfect faces, all cracking and showing what’s underneath, what’s always been there, coarse fur and gaping maws, whipping tails, scales, claws and hunger, and teeth, and teeth, and teeth.
44
Now it ends. The currents of electricity, the calls of metal. This train will depart the station with all of us on it.
We are done with being mothers. He was our son, in law alone, and now he is our son-in-nothing, because we’re finished with our daughter.
We have no children.
We run across the platform and onto our train, past the coffin, quickly, erasing with every footstep the nightmare that is already on the screens of everyone at the station. There is chaos, and there is a train, and there are doors that lock. Take shelter.
Here is your purse, and here is yours. Here is your coat. Here are your keys. Here is your phone. We have nothing to say at all. We are leaving the scene of a crime. There were shots fired. Some of us need our medication. Some of us are having palpitations.
Look at Ben Woolf. Look at the blood in his hair, the bones in his beard, the way his teeth are full of gristle, the way his whole face is red. Look at him, not at us.
What about the daughter? She’s not our daughter. Never mind the years of cleaning up after her, fixing her life, mending her marriages, taking care of children she failed to raise.
So many years of marching. So many years of waking at dawn to trumpets, cooking in the mess hall, mopping up the blood. We are entitled to exhaustion. We are entitled to this train we built with our own money, our bank accounts drained to buy crystal and chrome.
Are we ready? Ready? Yes, yes, we are on our way, yes, the stations of the cross. We pass a man crouched in the last car before the conductor’s, who asks us if we saw her.
Which her?
We put our hands into our purses. Coins of many countries, credit cards, lipsticks, expensive watches, and ink pens. Our dead husbands’ wedding rings. Tiny bottles containing both perfume and pepper spray. Phones full of bad news, videos about to be viewed a hundred thousand, a million times.
We drop everything. Look, it’s your lucky day. Why don’t you take our credit cards and sleep somewhere fancy?
We’re past pills and cocaine. Now it’s just Kleenexes, tissues wadded up.
This train is bound for glory. This train is bound away from Herot Hall. At least we’ll ride it once. The conductor is already in place. We see the door shut behind whomever it is.
We’re through the car with the coffin. We’re clutching programs detailing our grandson’s small life, and the history of this train, named, they claim, after him rather than after Tina Herot’s dead husband.
Ben Woolf is being arrested, no doubt, and Willa is too, reported anonymously by one of us, and we have nothing to do with any of this.
We look at Diane, and nod.
We are dressed in black. We’re heavy with ceremony. We seat ourselves in the dining car, along with the rest of the survivors of Herot Hall, and there is an unexpected whistle, and we begin to roll.
The train rumbles out of the station. Just as we leave the tunnel, some of us look across at the white, at the graffiti of blood, signatures on the snow. Others put on their sunglasses. This isn’t over. There will be more to deal with, statements to make. In the city, they’ll take the train aside and bring us all into the precinct, but for now, a last ride in luxury. It will be police escort, federal, and we will walk one by one into rooms, be questioned by men in suits. Bright lights and false-sounding condolences, and we will tell them we know nothing.
We’ll say it like we’re giving a press conference.
“I need to speak with my lawyer,” we will say, in voices that offer no other option. We know our rights.
The train is moving at strangely high speed now, emerging from the darkness of the station and into the light. We blink at the vista, a view over the mountain and Herot Hall, a world beneath us, the lake frozen at the edges and steaming at the center.
We have a moment of uncertainty. Do we report the train’s speed, or do we resign ourselves to it? Look at us, our eyes bright, our makeup perfect, our spines straight as dressmaker’s pins. Look at how we sit, not screaming, as the train we’re on begins to hiss and rock.
The train shudders silver, new paint flaking off names and dates and faces and places, dents from moments its metal has touched edges, windows cracking. We slide from seat to seat. We were the women at one side of the tracks, and now we speed headlong at the other.
And there he is. We see him now. We see what’s happening.
On the bridge before us, Ben Woolf is standing, one hand in the hair of the child he’s killed. He raises his gun and tries to shoot at the train.
Sometimes grace is speeding at the obstacle instead of avoiding it. We see our enemy on the tracks. We look into the conductor’s car, and we see our other enemy, driving.
We surrender to the end.
Everyone sees this train, windows blazing, and its dining car full of passengers as it pushes its way toward Ben Woolf, standing, screaming, shooting at something larger and stronger than himself.
Everyone sees the train as it takes him from the tracks, as we derail, and fly out from the bridge and into the air, Ben Woolf pressed to the engine like he’s marrying metal.
We watch him obliterated.
No one ever really knows who’s holding them at night, that’s one thing you learn when you’re dead. We turn in our last moments and hold tight to one another, dropping through the mere.
The train maintains its trajectory, deeper, deeper down, and reclaims all of it, the graves of centuries, the blood that watered the land. Our husbands’ secrets, and our own secrets. Our history and our regrets. We reach out, one by one, and take one another’s hands, wedding rings pressing into wedding rings, fingernails stabbing like needles into wrists, as we sink into darkness.
We open our eyes and we let it all go.
45
Now we’re all together, for the first time and the last. I’m driving the train, and Ben Woolf shoots at me, but he misses. He’s screaming, but I can’t hear him. He thinks he can take on a train, but he’s a man. I drive it into his body, and like that, he’s no longer anything to fear. His hands are open and his heart is revealed. The end of his story is simple.
We fly off the bridge, and into the mere. We fall away from the surface, and time is slower than it was. Time is listening to me.
Through the ice, I see Dylan’s mother, her hands pressed flat against the frozen edge. She’s kneeling, bloody, shouting, but I can’t hear her.
We’re going deeper, and as we go she’s taken away, her wrists in silver bracelets, her head crowned with a hand, escorted into the rest of her life.
My son is with me, my son with his beloved, and everyone else, the bones and blood dispersed into this water, the history of my family, the sand and bullets, the old hotels, the train tracks, and the train. The mountain and the mere, the trees we touched, the rabbits we snared, the wolves we heard but never saw. The cats and the dogs bounding down the driveways, the children on the swings and the women on the bridge and the echo of the sirens, singing their way into notes for birds to mimic.
The mere is freezing over above us.
There’s a silver goblet dropping through the water beside a silver train, both of them sinking slowly to the bottom. There are bodie
s, skin blue, clothing drifting. Champagne mixes with salt. Rain mixes with sea.
Am I dead myself? How long have I been here and gone at once? I feel something inside my heart, something that reminds me of someone I used to know, long ago, in a city no one remembers but me.
I feel old things running around this place, like we’re in the center of the smoke of a burning book of wonders. As though all the pages have gotten stuck together and now it’s a world of everything at once.
A pitcher of water in my hands. A stand of trees somewhere in the middle of a desert. A bed with white linen sheets. Above me the moon crescented, stars I don’t know. Wine in a cup. Smooth wet sand around me, packed down, a cave, a tomb, a room. A rock rolling across the entrance. A stick made of old wood.
And here, a country of claws. A mob of monsters. Look at them as we fly, and look at us, all of us, the desperate, desiring humans of this place. No longer. The story is shifting. Things are changing.
All is well and will be well. I look down and see the candle lit in my chest, glowing, blazing.
And now: we are the wilderness, the hidden river, and the stone caves. We are the snakes and songbirds, the storm water, the brightness beneath the darkest pools. We are an old thing made of everything else, and we’ve been waiting here a long time. I’m part of the fossils and the tunnels, the swords buried in mud, and all of it sings to us, and all of it is us. We are the mere and the mountain. We are the dead and the bones they left behind. We are the birds and the rainfall, the storms and the stars, and all of us are named, and all of us are numbered.
Later, maybe, two thousand years after the end of this century, the world will have parched and flooded, dried and become succulent again. There will have been deaths of continents, and new islands born where there were deserts. The world will be different from this one. Maybe all the cities will have crumbled away, and all the bridges fallen. Maybe there will still be a mountain here.
Someone will tunnel into the cave beneath it and find our grave goods: trucks made of plastic, a knife with a red case. A sword. Some guns.