Willa’s mother pulls the sheets off, and Willa snatches at the blankets.
“That tattoo,” Diane says, looking with wrinkled nose at the white scar on Willa’s thigh. Willa feels spatchcocked, like a chicken on a slab, pink and raw, heart exposed. Diane looks at her with the gaze of a coat-hanger abortionist.
“Are you pregnant again?” Diane says.
“No!” Willa says, but then wonders. Her body feels buoyant as a seal’s.
“Get dressed,” Diane says. “He’s back, and he’s got Dylan.”
“What?” Willa says.
“Don’t you dare make that face,” says Diane. “This is your moment. Take it. Get dressed and take it. You only get so many moments in a life, and you’ve had more than your fair share.”
* * *
On the ninth day, every news van in the world is already on the mountain, and the mothers are holding Willa’s undead son in their arms when Willa, reeling, dressed in winter white, arrives.
Dylan looks like an innocent child rather than like someone who’d purposefully ruin the life of his mother by living through the impossible. He’s wrapped in blankets. There are bruises on his throat, yellow and blue mottlings, beginning to fade. There is a mark on his cheek, a healing wound, a scar in the shape of a star. Willa looks at it. A star? No. It must be a claw mark.
“They dug their way out,” Diane whispers. “It took days. There’s an old tunnel from when the train used to come here. I thought it was gone, but they were inside it.”
Willa reaches out her arms. Her son looks at her like he doesn’t know her.
“You’re not my mommy anymore,” says her son. “I want to go home! To Gren! To Gren’s mommy! He killed her! He killed her!”
He’s pointing, and Willa turns.
Ben Woolf, frost on his hair like he’s been crowned by some god, flash, flash. He nods at Willa, and she feels a rush of heat, melting the mountainside, melting the universe.
He’s standing in what she now sees is a hole in the mountain. There’s a black crack in the snow, and stones pushed out onto the slope. A photographer kneels to get the shot for the front pages tomorrow. News crews move their microphones closer.
“Dana Mills is dead!” Ben shouts, a proclamation, and Willa jolts. “I tracked her to the old train station beneath this mountain. I found little Dilly inside it, terrified. Dana Mills was a highly qualified soldier, but trust me when I say that something in her had snapped. She had a sword. In the end, I got lucky. We learned that in the war, Dana Mills and me both. Living is luck.”
He bows his head. “I managed to turn that luck back on her at the last moment.”
He shows his arm, the small mark of teeth on it, inflamed, and then looks around to make certain the cameras are pointing at him.
“Her body slipped into the water and sank before I could reach it. This is all I could recover,” he says.
He lifts a black bag, full of something heavy. Willa steps forward, expecting a head, hoping not.
“Gren?” Willa whispers, and Ben raises a hand, silencing her. He opens the bag.
Inside it is a woman’s arm, but there is no woman attached to it. He lifts it out, as though anyone wants to look at the fingers, as though anyone wants to look at the clean cut at the shoulder, her arm a piece of poisonous meat, and her blood no longer her possession.
Everyone wants to look.
Everyone wants to photograph it.
Everyone wants to cringe in horror and make proclamations. Willa averts her eyes, and fixes them on her mother, who takes Dylan and bundles him away, the boy protesting, but he is nothing compared to his grandmother, whatever feral demon he is.
* * *
When all of it is finally done, when the story is written and the videos are taken, Willa takes Ben Woolf home.
She unlocks the front door of her house, yes, she does it in front of all of Herot Hall, and she holds Ben’s hand.
She walks into the house with him, he still carrying a bag in which there is a piece of flesh—how much, she wonders for a moment, a pound? No, more.
Willa puts the bag into the freezer—it smells like death. The maid hasn’t been in this week for obvious reasons, and Willa’s not sure where the foil is. She settles on recycling sacks, blue and scented with lavender.
She pours two glasses of red wine.
“She’s dead?” she asks him at last. “Are you sure?”
“She’s dead,” he confirms. He says it with grief in his voice, and with ownership, and she appreciates that.
“And Gren?” she asks. “Tell me how.”
“Dead too,” Ben Woolf says, and exhales slowly, showing Willa that it’s been hard, his life, his dive, his journey down. Willa wants to know everything, but he has no more story to give her.
“I killed both of them. That’s all you need to know. You’re safe,” he says to Willa, and only then does he hesitate, looking at her. “We’re safe.”
And the floor beneath her melts, the stairs melt, the entirety of the glass house melts, because Willa will not have to wander any desperate desert alone. She will not have to take herself back to the city and stand in the center of the sidewalk, signing herself up once again for hunger, guitars, tattooed signatures, matchmakers, aging eggs, hair salons, Kegels, Pilates, falling off a stepladder and getting eaten by rats.
* * *
The investigation confirms Dana Mills’s DNA and the lawyers confirm Willa’s inheritance. Herot Hall, marital property, a controlling interest, and she can’t be ousted. Tina Herot holds the rest. For the first time, Willa is the queen and the king. She’s the woman in charge of the gates, the windows, the roads, and no one can say differently.
Do the neighbors talk? They do.
She stands opposite Ben, and it’s a public wedding in a church. Dylan is there, as the ring bearer, though the ring he carries is the second one, because the first one he’s swallowed, literally.
Who can get angry at such a little boy, a boy who has been through so much?
Willa breathes through her nose, hard, and then tells Ben what has happened, and they get a replacement. It’s Dylan who’ll have to shit a wedding ring. This is how all this trouble started, a child swallowing the head of a king, and now?
Now that Roger’s gone, Willa can see exactly where Dylan got all his tendencies. He’ll grow up to be someone’s cheating husband.
“Do you take this man?”
She takes him.
Her new husband, who comes from no one, born to some mother entirely unknown, his adoptive parents bringing him out into the shine of the world. Ben’s swimming medals are hung under glass in the room where the piano is, and Willa leaves the scratches in the piano keys as reminders of the horror that brought them together.
There are always horrors in the world. There are always upsides.
The wedding photos of Willa and Roger remain in the house, in the back hallway, for Dylan’s sake, and for the sake of reminding Ben Woolf that he hasn’t always had Willa’s heart. This is something men need reminding about. She makes sure he knows it, even if she doesn’t say it directly. Their wedding vows have had the sickness/health portion excised. Also the till death do us bit.
Then it’s summer. Then fall, and twins are born, Willa in the hospital, Ben beside her, counting her down, counting her up, wiping sweat from her brow like they’re two soldiers bunkered together waiting for an enemy, but this time, when she gives birth, she feels she’s repopulating the world with heroes.
Ben’s beside her, a newborn son in each arm, handsome, proud, happy at last, and don’t they deserve it? Willa’s wearing makeup that looks like it isn’t. She smiles for the camera. She posts the photos, tags them. Blessed.
Goodbye to that old life, Willa thinks, clenches every muscle, one by one, stretches every nerve, one by one, and looks down at her breasts, which are pale as marble, veined with silver. The babies at her breasts are perfect too, wrapped in their little blankets. She feels she could found Rome, but wa
it. That was a wolf.
She stands up, walks down the hospital hall, and makes a sound that bewilders even her own ears. It’s a sound of some kind of triumph, a warbling rattle of vindication over gold records, and plastic surgery, and mothers.
She looks into her husband’s eyes, and sees something in them she doesn’t recognize. He’s looking down at the babies, and touching their little faces, and she notices, on each of their spines, a thin strip of hair.
“What’s that?” she asks. “Did the doctor say?”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “It’ll fall out. It’s only because they were born a little early.”
There was a time this would have horrified her. Now Ben kisses Willa, and she kisses him back.
She has a nightmare, in which all her dead are around a dinner table, the baby she didn’t have with Richie, the baby she didn’t have with Roger, along with Dylan and Gren, all of them seated together.
Willa stands there, hostess to all these sons, but her goblet is full of blood. There’s Ben, standing opposite her, drawing a sword as she offers him the loving cup.
She gets out of bed and finds Ben between the two cribs, sitting up, a hand on each son, the babies perfectly still, their eyes open.
Upstairs is Dylan, who will not speak to her. He sleeps beneath the window, curled like an animal under the sill, though he’s been reprimanded. Willa’s given up. If he wants to sleep on the floor, let him. If he insists on looking out at that mountain, let him. Maybe rabies is the explanation, some kind of emotional rabies no one knows about. If he insists on letting himself go, let him. Everyone has a child they wish they hadn’t had. Willa knows that from her own mother.
She moves forward with her life, a wife, living at last in the sun.
PART III
the dragon
They saw there a wrathful wonder.
The dragon become ground-ghost, close enough to bruise
a devil, dead. This flame-spitter had been
scathed and sooted by her own song.
She was fifty feet long, and she’d
ruled in riving-rapture over the dreaming hours,
diving through dawns to nest with her treasure.
Now death had won her heart.
The worm would no longer writhe with coins, but with dirt.
AH
29
Ah, yes, we were there! We spend the next years telling the story to newspapers, to television, to neighbors, at the grocery store, to anyone who asks, and some who don’t.
All around the world, conspiracies are discussed in back rooms, and officers fume at their failure to find Dana Mills, when this lowly police officer somehow managed it, out of nowhere, in the dark. The president himself declares Dana Mills dead, and our mere her grave.
There is a funeral. We attend.
Not at Arlington, with those white aisles of stones, but at the cemetery two towns away from Herot. There is a small headstone. There are no speeches. There’s a certificate of gone for good. There’s a burial of what’s left of her.
Where’s the rest of her? we wonder.
We stand next to Ben Woolf. We won’t forget him coming out of the water. He was holding hands with a murdered woman. We know what kind of man does that. Shortly thereafter, he held hands with Willa Herot.
There is a wedding. We attend.
White crepe. How pregnant? Showing. You don’t wear a long dress when that happens. Not when your own much-grieved husband is only a few months dead. No, no, cocktail-length, with a nice lace bolero. Hide the lines with shadows. Who’s the father? She’s the mother.
Ben Woolf may be our officer, but we’re watching him. There he is, putting a ring on her finger, and there she is putting one on his.
We wonder.
Tina Herot dies for the next few years, piece by piece. A lump the size of a plum, an orange, a grapefruit. The slow deaths are reserved for women.
We ask if she wants our assistance. No one here has ever swallowed a bottle of barbiturates chased with Château Lafite. No one has ever closed her garage door with her engine running and sat in the driver’s seat, considering. No one’s ever stood in the train station waiting for the weekend train her husband was on, wondering if time would stop if she leapt.
Please. Everyone knows none of us would attempt suicide after sixty, no matter the circumstances. At sixty-five, husbands begin to die like flies. Flies, we all know, do not die quickly enough. They hover around the room, crashing into things for years before they drop, little shriveled bodies with missing bits of wing.
They do die, though. We remain.
Tina doesn’t. Look at her: hospital room, tubing. Look at her: a building falling. She shuts her eyes one day after a visit from Diane. Then she’s dead all the way. She’s excavated, demolished, and carted away.
Tina Herot was ours. Diane Nowell is ours as well. Who is to say what happened to Tina Herot, Diane holding the cup to her lips, Diane alone with her own daughter’s future in her hands? Diane, looking down at her helpfulness. Oopsy. Daisy.
Tina was never our favorite. Sometimes one of our husbands converts a secretary into wife, and she comes knocking, carrying a basket of muffins like she’s Red Riding Hood, when really she’s a wild animal. What are we supposed to do? Throw a cup of blood from the lamb we’ve been roasting into her face and warn her away from Herot Hall? No. We invite her to lunch.
Did we expect Tina Herot to be promoted to be our commander? We did not. Did we appreciate it? We did not.
Willa inherits Herot Hall. We watch from our balconies. Ben and Willa Woolf, in their living room, looking out over the mountain.
We’ve never had a daughter bring in a wolf and call him her husband. We have no procedure in place. He plants himself on the living room sectional, and Willa refers to him as her hero. We hold tissues to our lips.
They make a plan for a new station inside the mountain where Ben Woolf killed Dana Mills, a new railway on the old bones, classic and charming, commuting in the style of our forefathers.
We shake our heads in disapproval.
We invest our savings, obviously.
No one here is going to live forever. But some of us are going to enjoy this version, traveling in a pack to fund-raisers, our photos in the society pages, Diane in the center with her daughter on the rise. We rise with her.
We’ve been waiting years for a train to stretch all the way to Herot Hall, and until now we never knew that there was an old station still hidden inside the mountain, and a train waiting inside that station, capable of being upgraded.
The train’s been inside a tomb since the 1920s, like Snow White sleeping in her glass coffin, or perhaps like something bigger, something worse than a princess. We’re in charge of the grandchildren. We sit on couches watching movies. Dragons, castles, and women made of trouble. Dead does, girls with stepmothers, and witches with long white hair.
We keep ours short.
There is a groundbreaking ceremony. We attend.
We stand on the side of the mountain wearing hard hats, and watch a bulldozer bite into the rocks. Men at work. We’ve spent our lives watching men at work. We retire for a cocktail, but from our balconies we keep track of every cup of dirt, every bucket of water, every tree and every rock, every piece of bone.
We know some things about the mountain, about Herot Hall, about the way the first Dylan Herot built over the people who wouldn’t go. Some of it was eminent domain. Some of it wasn’t. Tina Herot’s secrets were our secrets. We’ve picked the locks on the drawers of the desks of the dead. We know things our husbands never knew we knew.
We are standing on the mountainside when the bulldozer’s claw rips up a section of earth that’s been hiding graves, the bodies of a hundred people, thrown into a hole, coffins broken, gravestones crumbling, covered over and planted upon, familiar vegetation in this section of the hillside, the kind of plantings Dylan Herot Sr. commissioned, deciduous trees, hedges. Recent graves and old ones alike. Some of the stones lis
t decades we remember.
We lead the charge to make certain the mountain isn’t categorized a graveyard. Recent stones go directly back to gravel.
Enough time has passed that a hidden graveyard full of bodies on ground destined to be developed is something we’ve figured out how to spin.
We make a museum out of the problem. Plaques, glass cases and respect. We protect our investment.
We watch the construction, the permits, put money in the hands of the senators, make sure everyone knows who made this train happen. We attend land use and zoning meetings, dig up old diagrams, consult geologists, take meetings with conservators.
It’s not Ben Woolf, nor is it Willa Woolf. It’s us.
We’re the ones who make the world, the warriors who stand watch, the women on whose wrong side you would not want to walk.
What do you get the women who have everything? You get them more.
30
Ah! The mountain is opened and everything that was hidden is revealed. We watch from the water, from the walls of the cave, from the roots and the burrows.
Trucks come and cart our dirt away. Saws chew at our trees. We’re breached, and the water from the mere wells up to be made into coffee. It percolates, scenting the air of the old station, which is now to be the new station.
The station is built of the mountain’s materials. The china beneath the counters is made of bones from a secret grave, and the glasses are made of sand from the bottom of the lake, and the silver was wrested from out of the earth by sweating miners. Or so their version of the story goes.
Ties are hammered into the earth and curving tracks swoop through the mountain and out again, so sun comes in from both sides, not just from the skylight. There are stained-glass windows beneath layers of soil, and they’re scraped. A deer picks her way up the slope and over the colored glass, glowing red as she wanders. A robin plucks a worm, and flies, a writhing body in her beak.
A shower of fine dust falls onto Herot Hall, and rain falls after it, washing the mud of the mountain into every garden, every fence post, every place we haven’t been.