We lock him in his bedroom for a time-out.
One of us goes to the kitchen to plate appetizers and another fills ice buckets. Diane wedges Willa into silver heels like she’s shoeing a horse. Tina looks into a garbage bag she finds on the floor, wrinkles her nose, and shoves it in the freezer.
The residents of Herot Hall are tromping toward the house for their feast, and as the doorbell rings, Tina raises a glass.
“To us,” she says.
“And people like us,” says Diane.
We clink and drink, answer the door, take the bottles, drape the coats over our arms. The party guests are not what we would’ve imagined ten years ago. Everyone’s fleeing the city. This community used to be WASPs, is the joke, and now it’s worker bees.
Here’s that couple, the lawyer and his wife, the dancer-now-mother, and she’s from India and he’s from somewhere else. Another couple, both men! One from Japan, the particularly handsome one, and the other Moroccan! This is a diverse place now. The kids memorize all the countries in Africa on a big map, painted in pastels. The countries have changed their names since we were children, as though they all got married.
We make the rounds, passing appetizers, filling glasses. The TV is tuned to Times Square, where everyone’s smashed together, looking frozen. Thank you, no.
Look at that fool who had triplets after his marriage to one of us. They were born when he was fifty-eight. No one wants a toddler of one’s own at this age, let alone a trio. Look at his gaunt cheeks. Look at his wife. She’s thirty-four.
Ha!
We swan past her, free as falcons, our muscles flexed. A baby has spit up on her shoulder, right into her hair. We offer her a wet wipe so she knows how much we care.
Where is Dylan? Forgotten in his room. Diane trots up the stairs with the key. We continue to walk the perimeter, seeking to confirm suspicions.
Yes, there.
Roger Herot is standing on the front steps with Louisa Bellow. The threads of heat spun cheater-to-cheater glow like dying elements in the winter cold. Louisa’s a cup size up, a tightness to the zip at the back of her dress. We hand her a glass of champagne and an oyster. She pretends to drink one, and tries to hide the other in a luminaria. Roger Herot. A little boy with a dripping nose, the kind of boy who, sleepwalking, shits in the corner of the guest bedroom. It is against the law to cheat on one of the wives with another of the wives. If you cheat, you cheat in the city. Oh, Roger. We know your business now.
Did you know you could kill someone with a stiletto heel? Our daggers travel with us, underfoot, capable of being removed and jammed into an eye socket.
Do you think sixty-five-year-old women don’t go to war? We are always at war. Our husbands spent their lives in comfortable chairs. Have we ever sat in comfortable chairs? No. Yoga balls, haunches tensed.
Our sympathies shift. All but Tina turn our heads slowly and look around the room. Is there a better man here for Willa? Is there a solution?
Diane beckons urgently from the landing, and we reverse-march upstairs, holding our champagne flutes, laughing as though there’s nothing at all going on. Down to a science.
There’s no Dylan in the bedroom, but GREN is written in red crayon on the wall, letters three feet tall, and he must have had to stretch to do it. There’s a portrait too, a drawing of two figures. We get the Magic Eraser stick, but the more we scrub, the more they’re there, crooked pink ghosts.
Window, open. We crane out, into the dark. Nothing visible. Third floor.
There are no crannies in Herot Hall, no crawl spaces. Where is he? Things are strewn all over the floor of the bedroom, bundles of twigs, a strange lace christening gown.
If you’re the mother of a little boy, you never stop finding stolen objects in his pockets, or in the bottom of the washing machine. If you go to the grocery store with a little boy, you’ll notice them dragging their hands along the bulk bins, stealing beans, thinking to grow a beanstalk. Go to the zoo and they’re ready to leap in among the animals. Little boys are quick.
They get older and become criminals of suburbia. A contact lens stuck to the bed frame long after you’ve switched to bifocals, a tampon wrapper long after you’ve stopped bleeding. There are worse things to find than used condoms, and in truth, we’re prepared to find them, looking at the loot on this boy’s floor. A hatchet? Fishhooks?
Who’s he been stealing from? What’s he been doing?
And in the center of the bed, displayed on a black garbage bag, what is this?
A dead rabbit with a bow around its neck. Frozen solid. Last seen downstairs in the freezer.
Diane glances out the window and catches a glimpse of her delinquent grandson, running wild through the snow like a dog loose of his pen, and as one we make a sound of revulsion, not stopping to wonder how he got out. We see him duck into the downstairs through a door that should not be open.
Someone starts playing the piano, badly, weirdly, loudly, and we tilt our heads to listen. Is the party drunk already?
Tina steps on something. A set of dog tags?
We pick them up and read them.
Dana Mills.
13
What do we pack? Everything, which is almost nothing. We’ll leave this mountain when Herot is sleeping, in the early hours of the first day of the year.
Two knives and my guns, a pack of food. Dried meat and berries from the summer. A pair of wool socks, a shirt made of blanket fabric, a thin windbreaker. Gren wears part of my old uniform, and part of his own. I came down the mountain three years ago, went across the highway to the surplus store, and tied a piece of cloth across most of my face. They gave me some blankets, some winter clothes, wool and synthetics, a sleeping bag, nothing Gren was born to wear, but I had to do something. He’d gotten too big, and everything we had was woven of broken thread.
Now I have all our possessions on my back, tested to make sure they’re not too heavy.
We’ll come off the mountain, through the tunnel, and up. A night journey. It’s been a week of imagining north.
There’s an island I heard of once, off Nova Scotia. It’s a shipwreck island and nothing comes near it anymore. People’ve lost it on maps for centuries. It might not even exist. But maybe we could get to a place like that and stay. We can live on gulls and eggs, me and Gren, and when he’s grown, we’ll build a ship and sail off again.
Lots of parts of the world have nothing in them. There are places you could be a mother alone, trying to raise a boy into a man. There’s no piano on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and there’s no little boy to be his friend. There’s no one who’ll kill him instead of loving him. That’s enough.
Four more hours in the dark, and then we move. I’m counting it down while walking the tunnel, thinking of my mother, my grandmother, my family. Thinking of climbing up this mountain when I was small. Did my family think this place was holy? I don’t know. We thought it held our history. It’s hard to leave that behind.
I kneel on the edge of the platform and try to say goodbye, then walk for a while, over the tracks where the train used to come, looking at the things in the walls and under the stream in the bottom of the passage. Something shines in the mud, a glint and point like an arrowhead, and that’s what I think it is for a second, until I put my hand in the water and pull it up.
It’s a sword, an old one, the hilt rough and crude, the blade as long as my arm. Civil War, maybe, that old? It feels that old.
I gasp, and then look at my finger, the cut I didn’t feel happening. Sharp enough to slice.
Useful. I put it over my shoulder, into the pack I use for my guns, and climb back up toward our cave. Food, and then keeping Gren awake until it’s time to go.
When I hear the sound of the piano drifting up the mountain, I don’t think about it for a moment, but then I know the tune, played badly, played barely, but played. It’s a lullaby. My lullaby, the one I sing at night. The song’s quiet at first, and then louder. Someone’s playing like they just learne
d what music is, not like they know how to play a piano, but like they know how to make song.
I open the door from the tunnel to the cave.
Gren’s sleeping bag is empty. His things are gone, and mine are dumped out of my pack. A knife, my dog tags, his toys, missing.
He thinks he’s running away from home, but he’s running into an enemy camp.
I’m out of the cave and scrambling, rolling part of the way down the mountain. I crash into trees, bash against rocks, and I know I’m about to hear shots and arrive at blood. All I’ll have left is vengeance and five seconds to take it before I’m dead.
I’m ten feet from the house, still in the trees, when I stop.
I can see his tracks in the snow. Up to the side of the house, and onto the roof outside the little boy’s bedroom.
My heart’s so loud I feel like anyone could hear it, but there’s no sign of Gren.
Instead, there’s a pack of women leaning out that bedroom window, looking into the dark. They’re not screaming or pointing. They look curious, but not scared. No one else is either. The house is a party, not a panic.
Gren’s inside it somewhere, or out here, with the boy.
I know where the security lights are. I don’t trip them. I move through the trees toward the glass back wall, where I can see into the kitchen and music room.
The boy’s mother is alone at the sink, dressed in silver, yellow hair, bright pink mouth, surrounded by bottles of champagne. She picks one up and drinks from it.
I scan the rooms looking for Gren, all the rooms I can see, but—
There. My son’s creeping along the white-tiled wall of the kitchen, behind her. I make a sound that starts in my gut.
Nonononononono.
Trailing behind him is the boy he’s come to see. The boy beckons my son over to a tray of food, and both of them take things from it.
Gren edges along the wall, toward the door. The woman doesn’t see him. She’s looking out the window over the sink. He’s moving, secretly, quickly, like I taught him.
She looks up again, starts to turn like she’s heard something, and so I throw a pebble at the window.
She looks out here instead. I scramble around the house. I’m not even thinking before I’m ringing the bell with my fist. Look at me instead.
The woman gasps when she opens the door, and then quickly corrects herself. Now she’s just staring.
“Can I help you? Are you with the cleani…”
She trails off, and looks me up and down, my clothes, my hair.
“Sorry, but no,” she says, and she starts to close the door. “We’re all donated out this year.”
But my foot’s wedged in the jamb, and I’m into the party. No choice. No choice.
“Gren!” I’m shouting. “Gren!”
The older women are coming down the stairs from the little boy’s bedroom, and I see things in their hands, things I recognize, a christening gown, a hatchet. What else? Things Gren took as gifts? Things he took so that he and his friend could run away together?
I’m shoving people in party clothes, food, wineglasses. Something spills. I trip over a cord and the music stops. Something crashes. I see the face of one of the people, and I see that person see my face too.
A lamp, light bouncing at us, flashing, and I’m starting to shake and fade, starting to feel like shooting into everything, or going flat to the floor, but I don’t.
I hop a couch.
“Gren! Go home, Gren!”
A man runs toward me, and then a couple more, all big in the shoulders. They think they can take me? They think I’m some crazy woman, but I’m a soldier. I dodge and duck.
“Get out of here, Gren! Now!”
I don’t see him, but I hear him wail with rage and sadness, and a door slams.
I run after the sound, into the whiteness of the kitchen, which throws me back in time. Bang, me waking up, blood on the tile, bang, stitches like ants crawling up my face, dizzy, blind in one eye, wait, no, eye gone—
No. I’m in a kitchen, not a hospital, not a prison. I stop. I breathe. No one has us captive. No one’s taken us back to the police, or to the military prison. I’m surrounded by people in party clothes. They stare. I stop. I stand still, giving Gren time to get up the slope in the dark.
“Roger,” says the blonde, her eyes wide. “Roger, do something.”
“We have to ask you to leave,” someone says, the man who lives here, tall and tuxedoed, the host. The word comes to me, now I can think again.
No one saw Gren. He’s gone. He’s safe. Where’s his friend? I don’t see him.
“Security’s on the way, but you can go peacefully if you go now.”
The host opens his jacket and takes out his wallet.
“This community supports the homeless. We donate every year. We collect food and supplies. There was a drive. We hate to see you in such a bad way.”
“I’m sorry for the trouble. It was a mistake. I’m leaving,” I say, with dignity, hunting the words from the back of my brain. I haven’t spoken to anyone who isn’t Gren in a long time.
I can see my reflection in the windows, my hair matted and filthy, my torn sweater over torn shirt, my jeans, my boots. Old uniform jacket, with the insignia ripped off. Tattoos still on me, but they’re covered. Identifying marks. I’m already identifiable enough.
“I’m not homeless,” I say. “I’m okay.”
I feel them staring. The video of my execution was everywhere, but it’s been a long time. I was on my way to being a dead woman in it, not a live one, and I have to think that’s enough for them to forget me.
Someone pushes a plate into my hands, gently, gently, like I’m going to break. It’s full of little fried things. They look like fingers. I walk out the front door, escorted by men, not screaming, though my legs want to bend out from under me.
I walk down the front steps and to the end of the street, out to where the bus stops. I don’t run. Finally, I’m out of range of the cameras. I double, reverse, twist, turn, and make my way up the back of the mountain.
When Gren was tiny, I tried to find a way to keep him safe from this, all of it. I taught him his ABCs and numbers. I taught him how to add and subtract, how to make two from one. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I shouldn’t have taught him any of the things of this world. I don’t trust anyone here. I don’t trust anyone anywhere.
“Here is a church,” I told him. I moved my fingers, doing the lacings, the old game to keep children from fussing.
“Here is a steeple. Open the door and here’s all the people,” I told him, and he looked up at me, not sure if he had permission to laugh.
I did all the singsongs, all the games.
Here’s an itsy bitsy spider, here’s an alphabet, here’s the sound a dog makes—
Here’s the sound a hound makes
Here’s the sound a round makes
I tried to teach him about danger. I tried to teach him about the things that might kill him, without scaring him so much he wouldn’t be able to live.
I didn’t do a good enough job.
“Mama,” he said, and smiled at me, shining eyes. “You’re silly.”
He ran off into the trees, playing with a feather, and I stood watching him, trying not to think of the world as paper and him as ink, trying not to think of the way blood could redline the story of his life.
He’ll be in our cave, angry and crying when I get there, but he never disobeys, not like this. He wouldn’t. He knows we’re leaving tonight. He won’t run away from me. I’m all he has.
I hike up the side of the ice and snow, and I am so certain he’ll be there, so sure I’m the only person he loves enough to listen to, that I don’t notice there’re no tracks ahead of me.
14
What happened? A crazy woman runs through a party, and afterward everything feels wrong. The television ticks down the seconds in the year and the ball wobbles and the announcers grin and there’s confetti. No one’s watching. No one’s ki
ssing. No one’s singing.
Willa glances back toward the kitchen and the uneaten hors d’oeuvres. There’s caviar, smoked salmon, and blini, all going to waste.
That woman, and her frightening face, her scars, her filth. Unclean. Beneath her shirt, hardly hidden, was something Willa only saw as she left.
A holster? And on her hip there was, Willa reconstructs it in her memory, a knife.
“Dylan!” she calls, suddenly realizing she hasn’t seen him in hours. She spins into the living room. “Has anyone seen Dylan?”
She runs up the stairs and into Dylan’s room, and there he is, toys all around him, his party suit looking worse for the wear. His hair is wet and his face is dirty. The room is a mess. It looks as though several people have been rummaging. All the drawers are open, and Dil’s backpack is out on the bed, half packed. Willa sees a loaf of bread, apples, cookies, cans of soup. Every book is off the shelves.
Out of the corner of her eye she catches a flicker of movement in the hall. She spins. Nothing there. Paranoid. Adrenaline and champagne combined. She breathes twice, a mini-meditation usually done with an app.
“What?” Dylan asks. “What, Mommy?”
Willa doesn’t know what. She has no answer at all.
“Did you see that woman?” she asks. “Was she in here with you?”
“Gren wanted to sleep over. He forgot to ask his mommy,” Dylan says. “She got worried. It wasn’t his fault.”
Willa is at the end of her patience for imaginary friends. She sees some crayon on the wall, red stripes, and she reads them sidelong.
“Did you draw on the wall?” she asks her son.
“No,” he says, clearly lying. “Gren did.”
Willa bends over the bed and looks out at the room. Her son is flushed. She puts a hand on his forehead.
“No more of this, Dylan,” says Willa. “No more Gren. Did you see anyone you don’t know? Was she up here? She ran through the house—”