“Yes,” Dylan says patiently. “She’s Gren’s mommy, like you’re my mommy.”
Roger’s in the room. There’s lipstick on the corner of his mouth, Willa notices, the same shade of red as the crayon that’s ruined the wallpaper.
“Everything okay up here, bud?” Roger says, in his trademark jolly anesthetic tone. “Your grandma said you were outside in the snow. You know that’s not allowed.”
Willa wonders how Roger can call a rabbit slayer “bud.” Has he forgotten? She’s only just remembered about the rabbit, about the miserable next few months of therapists and family counselors making sure that their son is not on a path to becoming a serial killer. But what if there’s nothing to be done?
And even as she thinks it, she sees, kicked under the bed, the black garbage bag, two limp ears, no eyes. She inhales raggedly and stands in front of it. She pokes it significantly with her toe, to let Roger know what’s here.
“What do you think she wanted?” she asks Roger.
“Food, I imagine,” says Roger, entirely too calmly, on the other side of several cocktails. “She looked hungry.”
His bow tie is crooked.
“She was yelling for someone,” Willa says. “Yelling a name, over and over again. She didn’t seem like she wanted food.”
“Gren,” Dylan says.
“Gren,” Willa repeats. It’s true. That’s exactly what she was yelling. Willa thinks about the woman some more, diagramming her face, remembering the look the woman gave her, the way she stared into her eyes. She envied everything. The house, Roger, Dylan, the party.
Where would someone like her come from? Not Herot Hall. No one like her lives here.
“It’s fine, Wills,” says Roger, and turns to leave. “Most of them are just mentally ill. Maybe the city put her on a bus and shipped her out for the holidays, keep the tourists from seeing her on the street. That happens.”
“She had a knife and a gun,” Willa blurts, her mouth getting the better of her.
This brings Roger to attention. “A gun? What kind?”
“I don’t know what kind, but a gun. She showed me,” Willa says, and instantly regrets it. Roger turns red and white. His ears look frostbitten.
“A gun,” Roger says. “Are you sure?”
Willa isn’t.
“Yes,” she says. Better to be safe than—
Is there someone in the hall? She’s seen it again, a movement, at the edge of the light, but no. She walks out and flips on the chandelier. Nothing. The windows reflect her own self, her dress a void filled with sequin stars.
“I’m calling the police,” Roger says, already dialing.
“It was probably a toy gun?” offers Willa.
Once, years ago, in the city, a kid pointed a gun at Willa. She was dialing 911 when he shot her in the center of the chest. For days after, she felt that icy water, hitting her in the heart. She still feels it.
“She came into our home,” Roger says. He was the rational one, but now he’s switched. “With a gun. No. That is a no.”
Willa’s mother appears on the stairs, holding something. It dangles from her fingers, a necklace. Dog tags.
“These were in Dylan’s room,” Diane says.
* * *
For the second time in a week, Willa opens the door to Officer Woolf. There are three more officers with him. Willa feels better already.
“This isn’t supposed to happen here,” Willa says. She might as well be back in the city, subway platforms and catcalls, dark hallways and elevator cages. Mysteries hidden in every stairwell. At least there she’d have been prepared for the intruder.
“It happens everywhere, ma’am,” Officer Woolf replies. “There are people lost in every city in America. It’s our job to make sure they don’t hurt anyone else.”
He looks into her eyes, and she feels herself quiver, an arrow notched into a bow. He must be seven feet tall, muscles visible through his sleeves. Roger’s only five-foot-eleven, and that’s enough, it is, but she can’t wear heels.
“Everyone here saw her?”
She nods.
“Get statements,” he says to the other officers.
The officers circle the room, viewing cell phone videos, taking notes. The party is improved. Willa makes the rounds, refilling champagne.
“Really,” a neighbor says, “don’t you think we’re overreacting?”
It’s Louisa from three doors down. Willa discovers herself about to pour champagne into Louisa’s plumped-up cleavage.
“I know you’d be perfectly fine with guns and knives at your party,” Willa says. “I guess Roger and I are just sensitive.”
“Of course not,” says Louisa. “I just wonder … I didn’t see a gun. Do you think maybe you might have misinterpreted because of—”
Willa nearly crushes shrimp paste into her hair.
“She had a gun,” says Willa, and walks away.
It’s not racist to think that someone with a missing eye and a long vine of scar down her cheek might be a dangerous person.
“Drugs, I imagine,” says Tina to one of the other mothers. “All I know is, I’m glad she didn’t do more damage than she did.”
“Thank god nothing worse happened,” says Willa. “Have you tried the crab dip?”
“Hell of a New Year’s party,” says one of the Marks. There are too many Marks at Herot, and too many Sarahs and Matts and Michaels as well. Willa confuses them all with one another. Is this the Mark who’s married to Louisa? He looks like he’d marry a woman with that nose, turned up at the tip.
“Where’s that rum?”
“To Herot Hall! To adventures! Happy New Year!”
Willa glances at the officers, now talking among themselves.
“What is it?” she asks.
“We’ve got a match. There’s video,” Officer Woolf says. “But it’s graphic. You might want to—” He looks apologetically at Willa.
“I’ll watch it,” says Willa.
None of the people in the living room bat an eyelash. They’re watching the screen like they’re watching a wedding. Normally the TV is used for football, the players skittering across it like living dolls, but now it’s New Year’s Eve, and they’re watching a woman on her knees.
It’s not her, Willa thinks at first, looking at the woman, the way she tilts into frame, her long, elegant throat, her muscles visible. She stares into the camera, her eyes so dark there’s no light in them, her cheekbones high.
“Can you identify her?” Officer Woolf asks. “This is Dana Mills. She grew up here, in the old town. Is she the woman who was at Herot tonight?”
The woman looks straight out from the screen. She has two eyes, not one.
“America, this is your doing,” the woman says, and then holds up a piece of paper on which is written the same thing, in looping handwriting.
Her voice is the familiar part, the part that makes Willa take a second look.
“You might want to send your little fellow out of the room,” Officer Woolf says, pausing the video.
Dylan’s sitting in the middle of the floor. He’s supposed to be in bed.
“Dilly?” Willa says. “Upstairs now.”
He’s fussing with something small and sharp, little plastic items, and a rock, from where, Willa doesn’t know. Willa’s already stepped on one of the blocks, a set meant to build a castle. Now she has to lug him up from the floor. She passes him to his grandmother, despite Roger’s look. Diane lifts Dylan above her head with no effort at all. She’s recently taken up boxing.
“I want to stay awake,” Dylan cries, but up the stairs he goes. You can’t always get what you want, Willa thinks, even you.
The video moves again, and the woman who ran through Willa’s house turns her head slightly, looking up at someone. Then a blade slices through the edge of the screen, faster than Willa can see. There’s a camera lurch, a blast, and black.
Willa retreats to the hall, nauseated, and hears some of the guests running out of the r
oom, but her husband stays.
“I remember seeing that on Fox. I’m not convinced,” Roger says. “The woman we saw didn’t look like her.”
Willa remembers this video. She never saw it when it was on the news, however many years ago that was. It feels like forever. There are some things a person never needs to see. It was released during those dark days during a long war she’d forgotten was even still happening. Sometimes there’d be a major boss killed or caught, and there’d be handheld cameras tilting into tunnels. It recharged the war, the beheading of a female soldier. Willa almost completely ceased watching television, and skipped like a flat stone into another decade.
She ventures back into the living room, where Roger is sitting, Louisa standing behind him. He leans slightly back, into breasts that give no territory to the hardness of his skull. On top of his head there’s a circle like Stonehenge, the white center a place for sacrifices. Oh, Willa thinks, looking at Louisa’s lipstick. Oh.
She returns to the circle. Officer Woolf smiles sympathetically at her.
“Everything all right, ma’am?”
“Call me Willa, of course,” she says crisply. Roger doesn’t even notice her speaking. His pulse is pounding in his neck. A second video is up, a woman walking down the steps of an airplane and onto the tarmac, soldiers all around her. She raises her head and there she is. Now with only one eye and scars down her face.
“That’s her,” Willa says.
Everyone agrees. The whole room is murmuring.
“Are you certain?” Officer Woolf asks. He’s taking notes and looking only at Willa. “Corporal Dana Mills was in your kitchen?”
“That’s her,” Roger says, talking over Willa. “I should know. I gave her twenty bucks for food.”
Somehow Dylan’s at Willa’s feet again, not in his room at all, and she wonders how long he’s been there, what he’s seen. He looks delicate, but maybe a beheading wouldn’t be too much for a child with no other experiences in his life thus far. He has no context for horror.
There’s a sound behind Willa in the hallway, something she can’t translate, a creak on the floorboard, rattling, a strange muffled sob of a noise. The hair stands up on the back of her neck, and in the window she sees something reflected behind her, something from outside, something that—
She starts to turn, and so do Ben Woolf and his officers. Dylan’s looking over her shoulder, his eyes wide.
“Look!” Dylan cries.
He raises his hand and puts the head of one of the little Lego kings between his teeth. What is he doing?
Even as Willa’s rising out of her chair, he swallows. The king’s head lodges in Dylan’s throat, his face turning red.
A striped sweater. A glass of wine. Holy palmer’s kiss. Thole. Palm to throat. Other palm to Dil’s diaphragm. Willa lurches forward on her knees, and pries open his mouth. He fights her for control, but she made this mouth. She made these teeth. Had he refused birth he might have been found inside her years later, a tumor full of hair and fangs. A teratoma, her mind says, even as she bends him backward and feels his fingernails scratching her hands. She persists.
The urgency with which Willa shoves her hand into Dil’s mouth, past all the rows of secret teeth, over his tongue, and into his throat, impresses her from afar.
She’s a princess. She’s a queen. She’s a heroine.
She locates the point of the crown with her fingertip, and pushes it deeper into his throat, like she’s pushing a toy train into a toy tunnel.
Deeper, deeper into the dark.
* * *
Someone leaps onto Willa and shoves her aside. Woolf, she thinks, then, no, Roger, Diane, Tina? Confusion, screaming, someone dressed in camouflage, the smell of woodsmoke, the smell of pitch, and she’s facedown, and her son has been torn from her arms.
She catches a glimpse of Dylan’s head, over a shoulder and then fast movement, a candle tipped, fire on the carpet, champagne spilled and pooling, shouts—
The officers’ guns are drawn, and there’s a pop of gunfire, another, and then the sound of shatter, as the entire back wall of the house goes from glass to sand, and something, someone, rushes out and onto the mountain, into the trees.
Willa’s alone on the floor and everyone’s outside, screaming, and for a moment she stays there, flat on her stomach on the carpet, looking at the print beside her face, a bare human foot, not an animal track at all, impressed into the fibers.
She reviews the reflection in her memory, and then her mind covers it over with the worst case, the warring world climbing over the fences, home invasion, walls falling, no such thing as safety.
She runs her hand over the footprint and blurs it with her palm until it’s obliterated, gone as her son, gone as her party, gone as any version of Willa that has ever lived a life she understood. Her hand is wounded. A drop of blood wells up and spills over onto the carpet.
Claws, she remembers. Fur. Monster, she remembers.
Monster.
15
What have I done? I’ve left him behind in the worst place he could ever be. I run out of the cave and look into the night, trees blocking me, half forest, half blowing snow, and there’s shouting and then sirens bark out of silence like wolves. Oh, god—
“Gren!” I’m screaming, “Gren!” and something with no words, something that’s coming up out of my arteries, like I’m bleeding screams.
I sprint through the trees, making all my existence into something that’ll tear them from their wives and children, something that’ll drag them into misery forever. My knife in my belt, my sword on my back, my pistol in my hand.
I call death onto those who don’t know a child when they see a child. Men who think they made the world out of clay and turned it into their safe place, men who think a woman wouldn’t flip the universe over and flatten them beneath it. I have enough bullets for all of them.
A window shatters and falls. Gunshots. The whole of Herot Hall is an alarm. The electric fence is flashing. The mountain’s swarming with men in tuxedos and men in uniform.
I’m not here. I’m elsewhere, hearing bombs, tanks moving over a desert I never really left.
“Get the dogs!” yells a man, but I’m back in time, fighting, my team beside me. We were the ones with the dogs back then; we were the ones with the guns.
Someone thunders past me, and I scream Gren’s name, but no one answers.
“There it is!” a man shouts, and I spin, looking into the dark, but I can’t see Gren. There’s a shot, up and out of the underbrush.
“I see it!” Another shot, another.
“Here! Fuck! Get here! It’s here! I just saw it!”
The dogs are in one spot at a tree, moving out at all angles, screaming spokes of a Catherine wheel. The man in front of me raises a hunting rifle, blinking, and pulls the trigger into the air.
There’s a crash as something heavy falls.
The police officer in charge shouts, “We got it, goddammit!”
A roar of triumph, from all the men at once.
I hear something different.
I hear the sound of my son crying for the first time after he was born, his voice telling me, wordless, that I’d brought him into the world, that he’d made it out of my body alive. I’ve only loved someone like that once. This love is the love that obliterates you. This is the love you die for.
I can’t see Gren, but I can see his murderer lowering his rifle.
I draw the sword I found in the mountain in one clean motion, like I’ve been drawing swords my whole life. I swing it.
It whips through the air and hits him, the shock of his body. He falls, and an arc of blood spurts out, red letters in a white world, splattering into the ice and snow. We’re alone for a moment, with only dark around us, and I’m gasping, choking on rage and tears, before I throw myself backward, out of sight and into the trees. The police officer with the blond hair runs in front of me.
I twist sideways, grab his hair in one hand, press my knife
to his throat, the soft place below his ear. He’s much taller than me, much stronger than me, but he still wants to be alive. I’m ready to die.
He’s coming with me.
“Don’t!” he cries, and I smell his piss.
The man I cut is down, and a bunch of others are kneeling over him, shouting, but none of them are in front of us. I’m the only one here, my enemy tight against me, and my ears are buzzing and I can hear my heart shouting. I force myself to turn my head now, to look at the other body on the ground. There’s blood in the snow, and it belongs to Gren. There’s blood in the snow, and it is the last of us, and—
It’s not.
It’s not my child, not anything like my child. Not human. It’s a bear. Dead and covered in fur, dead and dark and part of the woods. Why was it even out? Bone skinny. I see ribs.
I still have this officer, his hot blood trickling down my fingers, and I hear branches breaking and dogs coming and then someone grabs me from behind, hard, and pulls me nearly off my feet.
There are shouts and dogs barking in a frenzy, and there’s a shot and a bullet blasts into my arm.
Flashes of light go off in my skull, explosions happening inside me, and I’m no longer holding on to the police officer.
I’m rushing over a landscape that feels like I’ve dreamed it, and my son is dragging me across the high mountain rocks that boundary the lake.
There’s a wall of water, the part of the mere that’s outside the mountain, and I’m looking down at it, into the ice blocks and beyond them the hotspring, as we leap into the dark.
16
“What are you doing?” Willa’s mother shouts.
The stretcher’s too narrow and Willa’s spilling over the sides. Her hips drape off the edge like a picnic cloth, and her arms fall. There’s nowhere to put them. Willa looks down at her legs, bare, exposed, her dress rucked up. She wonders if she’s wet herself. No, it’s snow melting as it lands on her. How did she get outside?
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, sings something, a decoration, everywhere you go, and up on a roof a reindeer gallops back and forth in place. She should’ve taken it down. It’s past the time for decorations.