The Mere Wife_A Novel

  For a moment the reindeer looks at Willa, and she sees its evil black and gleaming eyes. Then it’s made of neon again.

  Now she’s in the back of an ambulance, but where are Dylan and Roger? They’re carting her to a cemetery. She’s about to be buried alive.

  Willa sits up, but someone pushes her flat again, a mask on her face.

  Where is he? she tries to say, but can’t. The doors of the ambulance are open. It’s not moving.

  Tina’s screaming into her phone. “It took him, some kind of animal, my grandson, and ran off, some kind of animal my grandson I said a bear I said a bear a bear rabies I said goddamn you to hell I said a wild fucking animal.”

  “It wasn’t a bear,” Willa says, very quietly, and looks at the top of her hand where a tube has made its way into her vein like a little red snake. “It was a monster.”

  “A bear or some kind of wolverine how should I know? Do you know who I am, do you know who you’re talking to, do you know anything at all? Because I want Fish & Game and I want every cop and I want my goddamn senator if this isn’t happening right this fucking second, get here, get your asses here, something took my grandson.”

  Willa pulls the mask off. Everything is a watery haze and Christmas lights are blinking on all the houses. On a neighbor’s roof, a man in a crimson suit with eight tiny reindeer is taking flight.

  Women are running around her, and the mothers are coming too, marching in, coming for Willa and for Roger. She looks for Officer Woolf.

  Willa’s mother slaps her face.

  “Stop making that sound! Stop it this second!”

  Willa discovers that a moaning howl is coming from her mouth. The lights of Herot Hall flicker. There’s snow on her tongue.

  The hand wings across Willa’s face again, thwack, and Willa looks up, startled, hurting. On one of those fingers there’s a rock big enough that it could substitute for one of Willa’s eyes.

  Willa pushes herself off the stretcher and stands, wobbly, tethered to the IV bag. She’s the one in charge of this household, not her mother.

  “Officer Woolf!” Willa calls.

  She hears dogs in the distance barking frantically. Gunshots from the mountain.

  Diane’s hands are on Willa’s shoulders, marrowing her bones. “Pull yourself together!” She pinches Willa through her dress, in the tender bit of flesh above her hip.

  Willa can only point up the mountain, to the spot where the sky is turning purple—is it morning? The trees are saw blades stuck in the snow. The snake in her vein wriggles and turns to an earthworm, a pale pink shudder making its way in and out of her body.

  She stares at it, remembering Dil’s umbilical cord, which she never really saw. It was cut and bandaged, a tiny scroll of skin when the bandage came off. Now she’s connected to a bag of fluid, or it’s connected to her, and she can’t tell who’s feeding whom.

  Everyone must be hungry. There are appetizers in the kitchen, fish eggs, flat champagne.

  “Roger,” Willa says, but her voice doesn’t carry. Where is he? Where can he be?

  Diane is talking to the police, pointing and shouting, and Tina is too, and there are more people coming.

  At last, the man she needs is leaning over her. Willa presses both hands to his chest.

  “Officer Woolf,” she whispers.

  “Mrs. Herot,” he says, his voice breaking.

  There’s blood. Willa raises her hand to touch her own face, to see if she’s wounded. Maybe something scratched her. There’s a shining star pinned to him like he’s the sky over Bethlehem.

  “I let you down,” he says. “I failed. I should’ve listened. I’ll find Dylan. I’ll find Dana Mills. I swear to you.”

  Willa’s fingertips remember the feeling of the crown and her son’s throat, the little head of the plastic king. Dylan’s dead. He must be.

  Tina is wailing suddenly, keening, running up the mountain, and everyone’s looking at Willa.

  There are medics carrying a stretcher down through the trees and over the snow, and there’s a thin trail of blood coming from it, lit up under the lights of Herot, like the red sash on a dress bought for an opening night, or like blood on the floor of Willa’s kitchen, the way it pooled after it ribboned down her thighs.

  There are medics with a stretcher, yes, Willa recognizes that, and someone’s on it, yes, not moving, covered in a sheet. It’s Dylan, but why would there be blood?

  Willa takes a step toward the medics as they pull the sheet off the body.

  It’s Roger.

  Willa stands at the bottom of the mountain, watching medics tend to her husband in a way that tells her he’s already dead. She tears out the IV and reaches his side in long steps, feeling like she’s flown. No plastic surgeon can fix this. No one can draw new lines and reconnect the dots.

  Her skin is hot and her entire history is illuminated. She’s gotten what she deserves, after all this time on Earth, all these years of failure, all these tiny things dropped into boiling oil, the fried and forgotten pieces of her heart.

  She’s a marble statue, Mary in a cathedral, her dear one draped across her lap, her face a mask of tragedy.

  “It wasn’t Dana Mills who took my son,” she says. “It was a monster. The monster killed Roger too.”

  Willa’s mother is making frantic beheading gestures. Slicing her hand across her throat over and over again.

  “It was a monster with a long tail, claws, and teeth, a huge monster with fur, but also not—like a bear, like a person, but also not like a person. The monster’s name is Gren. He’s Dana Mills’s son.”

  Her hands touch her husband’s body. A sob tangles in her teeth like thread. She’s biting through a known tapestry to make a new story, a hunt unraveling and being re-woven in midair.

  “Find Gren!” she shouts. It rings out in the frozen world. “Kill the monster!”

  PART II

  the mere

  You could walk to their mere,

  shaded by frostbitten trees, the surface a mangle of roots.

  The waters are black, and every night,

  a horrible wonder is visible in them, drowned flames

  lolling beneath the surface like corpses.

  They live in dark-unmarked, a place no one wants to go.

  ATTEND

  17

  Attend to this, my brain tells me, you’re late, you’re missing everything.

  I’m dropping through the mere, and it’s deeper than I thought it could be, bottomless. I choke on lake water, and it fills me, a tide coming in.

  I should’ve killed that officer, his neck under my knife. Everything’s underneath the thinnest covering. All it takes is a puncture, a rusty nail, a bullet, and your history leaks out.

  I should have killed him, because now he’s killed me.

  I feel like I’m still running down that mountain with a stranger’s sword in my hand, but my arm isn’t my own. It’s an arm with poison in it. I didn’t know I could breathe water. I didn’t know I could live underneath the rest of everything, but it burns, it chills, it fills me—

  Someone grabs me by the shoulders, pulls me out of the water and shakes me. Gren scrabbles at my jacket, pushing on my chest.

  I’m looking at him from far away, but then I’m choking the dark up, and it’s pooling around me.

  “I thought you were dead,” Gren says. He burrows in my arms and stays a minute, but I can’t get any words out of my mouth. “I saw someone kill you, down there, on the screen. I was hiding and I saw you die.”

  I thought you were dead, I want to say.

  The pain in my arm is real. Bullet wound. I feel it, a hard bore of light.

  Gren crouches beside me, his worry vibrating him. Somewhere there are hospital beds and antibiotics, and somewhere soldiers are losing their limbs under anesthesia. We’re here, again, in the old station, arrived from underneath instead of above. We’re on the marble floor, in a pool of green water, and blood is draining from me into it, pink on the silvery ti
les, a world gone Technicolor and then backward in time, into a silent film.

  I have to try to keep myself alive.

  “Is there a fire?” I ask Gren. “Can you make a fire?”

  There are kindling and branches down here already, from the times we’ve been into the station during the coldest winters. I didn’t know you could get in here from the mere, but Gren knew. How did he know? I can’t think about him wandering off alone, but that’s the only explanation.

  Gren makes a spark, and soon there’s a small blaze.

  I put my knife into the flame, burn it until it’s sterile and then cut into my wound.

  I’m a blast of light, an explosion killing a whole city, and my body flies apart. Then, silently, it comes back together, everything centered around the bullet.

  I push it out with my other hand.

  I’m in the dark, walking through a black hallway, all around me doors, no knobs, and I don’t know what’s behind them. Ghosts.

  I sear my arm with the hot blade, attempting to cauterize the wound, and I scream, and he screams too, and all I can say when I’m done screaming is, “You’re keeping me alive, baby,” and hope he believes me.

  We smell my flesh cooking against the metal like I’m a witch. He’s dragged me off into this cave to die, I think and then I think I’ll heal, but the bone is shattered, and all I’ve got are basic medic skills, nothing like what I need.

  “People were burned at the stake later than you think,” says my saint, appearing out of a corner, sitting on the case that used to house cakes. She walks in circles, periodically touching me with one of her frozen fingers, and Gren never sees her.

  “Gren,” I say.

  My son turns his head.

  “Mama,” he says.

  “Are they coming for us?”

  “Who?” he asks.

  “You know who,” I say.

  “They won’t find us,” he says.

  I look up at the roof of the station, and it’s like a whale’s ribs. I wonder if we’re sailing over the ocean, hiding inside the belly of this mountain, if we’ve taken off from where we were moored. Maybe we’ll come out into the light, and there’ll be the sound of birds, and all around us there’ll be wolves and cougars and maybe there’ll be my mother, alive again, her arms open for her grandson.

  I look down at the water and see a rib cage in the wet. A spine as long as a bus. Starry worms hang from the ceiling, and bats chirr and rustle.

  * * *

  “Mommy,” Gren says some time later, hours, days. I move, gritting my teeth.

  “Wake up!” he says, and tries to open my eyelids with his fingers.

  “I’m fine. Let me tell you a story,” I manage to say, but my voice is cracking, my throat dry and red.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I tell him again. “You were wanted,” I say. “I wanted you.”

  I don’t know how to explain love to this boy. He knows about love from falling for the music of a faraway piano, but maybe that’s how I know about love too. Maybe that’s how it is.

  I’m hot and then frozen, delirious, seeing things I don’t want to see, streaks slithering like red and black snakes up my arm.

  Then I see something worse.

  The little boy from Herot Hall is sitting on the floor across from me. He’s pale in the firelight, his yellow hair sticking up, still in his suit. The boy’s mouth is hanging open. He has a plastic truck in his hand, and bruises on his throat.

  “Want to play?” he says.

  He picks up the truck, and runs it up a ramp. Gren is beside him, with a truck of his own. Nothing I gave him. It’s shiny and new.

  “What’s your name?” the boy asks me.

  “Dana,” I manage.

  “My mommy calls me Dilly,” he says, and smiles at me, gaps in his teeth. “But my whole name is Dylan Martin Herot the Second. I’m named after my grandpa, but he’s dead.”

  Gren’s holding the little boy’s hand. He looks at me pleadingly. I open my mouth to say no, but nothing comes out.

  Gren can’t have a friend, but I lose my will to fight against it. All I can do is curl up in the corner of the cave and watch two little boys playing with toys I didn’t buy for them. Only one of them is the son I gave birth to, but now I have them both.

  18

  Attend the social event of the season! Willa thinks, her brain filling in the tone of the announcer, TV, 1950s-style, and then stops that thought in its tracks, along with the luminarias and the hors d’oeuvres that want to come into her mind with it. Sour cream and lemons, caviar, or maybe stuffed mushrooms, the poisonous kind.

  It’s five days later. Police, Fish & Game, Animal Control, dogs, up and down the mountain, boats in the lake with dragging devices, but there is no sign of Dana Mills, no sign of Gren. No sign of Dylan.

  Willa’s dressed in black silk. She’s wearing a hat with a veil. She can see herself as though from afar, her pale hair, her pale skin, like someone in a Hitchcock film, thinner and more beautiful than she was a week ago, more perfect, her body some sort of saintly relic, becoming lighter than air, because she hasn’t eaten, no, because she hasn’t slept, no, not since they brought her husband bloody and broken down the mountain.

  Her dress holds her like Roger never did. Beneath it a black slip, and beneath that a garment made of strong elastic, something that squeezes every inch of her. She is made of obsidian, after all this time being made of marble. Marble isn’t what she wanted. Marble shows every flaw. Obsidian is made of heat, stone melted into black glass. Willa is a pyre, except that her nipples are frozen, like buds on a tree that’s about to be bitten down to the roots. Everything aches, but these are the clearest ones, the two lumps of ice in her chest, and she doesn’t laugh, doesn’t cry, she’s colder than a witch’s—

  A camera flashes.

  On the front steps of Willa Herot’s house three dozen white roses appeared this morning, with a note. She’s gotten emails of support from all over the country, people telling her they’re sorry she’s being blamed for something that’s clearly not her fault. She was only speaking the truth. Monsters, yes. Thugs, yes. Shoot on sight, yes.

  She wobbles. No? She’s not a—

  She runs through a screaming street in her head, because now she’s under attack. How many times has she watched the video of Dana Mills? Too many times. No one got a video of Gren. Late at night she wonders what she saw. She has too many versions in her head. One of them is just a little boy—

  No. It wasn’t wrong for her to say monster. Monster is the right word. Some of the headlines say Willa was heavily medicated when she said what she said. Others say that she is someone other than the someone she knows herself to be.

  Her hair is braided into a crown on top of her head. Later, she’ll get the safety scissors and shear off all the inches she grew over the years of this marriage. She’ll take handfuls of it and drop it outside the house and then they’ll see.

  The ground’s been hacked into with some machine, carving into the mud-ice. There are hydraulics on the coffin, and it heaves up, then down, lowering like a storm over an unsuspecting world.

  Roger Herot, she thinks, in strange wonder still. This was not the plan. Willa Herot is a widow and Roger Herot is dead.

  There will never be any more kisses in public, never any more cocktails at 5:30, never any more of her dress bunching up against his belt as he lifts her onto the counter, never anyone ever again thinking they’re the perfect couple.

  You can’t be the perfect couple when one of you is dead, killed by a woman with a sword—a sword!

  Killed for no reason at all.

  Willa turns her gold watch face in toward her skin, like time doesn’t exist. It’s a watch not to her taste, a strange watch for Cartier, a slender gold Chinesey dragon ticking the seconds, making its way in endless circles around the diamond-numbered face. A present from Roger in a moment when he couldn’t remember which anniversary it was and bought her time instead of paper.

  The
photos are all over the Internet, happy marriage, wedding day, Christmas mornings, Tahiti, photos taken by the mothers. Looking at them, Willa even feels jealous of herself. There are cell phone photos too, taken by the neighbors and leaked, Roger, flayed, open at the throat, red and white as Santa Claus, but not.

  The headlines are everywhere, translated into a thousand languages, the murderous missing woman who came to Herot Hall, killed a father, and stole a child. That’s the news. The news is confusing, because it seems there was also a bear, or, at least, a bear died on the mountain. Dana Mills is nowhere, and neither is Dylan Herot, and neither is Gren, who doesn’t exist as far as the story is concerned. There’s only been this stupid bear, a big, dumb, dead body of a bear, fur and blood and glazed eyes.

  Willa imagines Gren and his mother making their way through underground passages, a sword in one hand, a gun in another, and claws, claws.

  Who knows what happened? Only Willa, as far as she can tell. Gren, she repeats to herself, because she’s in danger of forgetting. Hysterical. She’s not.

  The mountain’s been invaded, officers like ants over a hill, but no one’s been brought down. No more bodies displayed. No hanging, no gun battle, no guillotine. No reckoning. No revenge. All five of the mothers surround Willa now, flanking her like crows. Tina Herot looks like a statue, but her hands are shaking. Willa has a mean and sudden thought about vodka.

  As the coffin descends, Roger’s mother makes a sound like nothing Willa’s ever heard. Willa’s own mother is behind her, elbows sharp as knives.

  There are AMBER alerts and thumbprint alerts and every kind of alerts. Dylan’s all over the news. His kindergarten picture, not the most attractive. Suspicious face, missing tooth. Why don’t they clean the kids up before they photograph them? Smudge right down the middle of Dil’s face in that photo, but it’s the one they’re running.

  The mothers have done the requisite TV appearances. They formed a pastel pack and stood together, tearfully saying, “Bring him home,” and announcing the cash reward, not with numbers, just with, “Substantial.”