The Mere Wife_A Novel

  Car wheels skid on slip, workers inhale mineral deposits, and a few struggle as the tunnel fills with water. We kill none of them.

  The mountain is hollowed by progress: the old tunnel mouth is reopened and stabilized with cement, the ceiling tiles replaced so they look like the tail of a sea creature. Dust is moved and marble is polished, and bloodstains are bleached.

  We were a mountain, but we were also a tunnel. We were a cave, but we were also a stopping point on a journey to elsewhere.

  And the woman from the mountain? Her son? They are hidden deeper than this. There are still secrets in this old place, and the caverns run all the way down, beneath the lake and beneath the station, into the bedrock of the Earth and out again, through a passage, a hidden door from here to there, a tunnel slender and meant for one person at a time.

  The antique train is rolled out onto the tracks, polished to a shine, the mud removed from the engine, the blood removed from the floor, the upholstery replaced. We let the rust flutter from it. We let the wooden seats creak. The places where white tablecloths were laid cough red particles.

  The train is retrofitted. It’s designed to speed to and from the city, while still looking like something from the past.

  The station is plastered with posters showing old things becoming new ones: the Trans-Siberian, snow and black tracks ahead, the transcontinental lines obliterated by wars, the Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Medina, the steam locomotives turned to Shinkansen in Japan.

  The events involving the boy from below and the boy from inside the mountain are forgotten but for a bench placed near the drinking fountains to honor a son of the suburbs.

  The train will contain a bar full of cocktails that cost more than they should, and tables that will fold down from the walls over the laps of important men who’ve always traveled the back-and-forth route.

  It’ll be an all-day and all-night swarm of bees, whipping its way from the suburbs to the city, from the mountain to the masses.

  We open ourselves up to the air and look out at the sun. We ready ourselves to be ticketed. We are the passage for passengers. We’ve seen canoes and rafts, we’ve seen waders and walkers, all coming up from the mere and into the shadows. We are the bones of the Earth, and we are still here, busy.

  Years ago now, the boy from the mountain ran into the cave holding a boy who wasn’t breathing. He ran down, into the wet and dark, into here, the mere, where we waited. There is no place on this mountain we do not watch over.

  We watched our boy try to save his friend, on his back on the marble floor, breathless, blue, lips open, eyes shut. Fossil trees dripped ice on the dead boy’s eyelids. The boy from the mountain brought his friend to be saved. We intervened, and the boy from below choked and spat out a king’s head.

  No one sees us unless we decide to be seen. We are the things that were, the things that are, the things that will be, and we have nothing to do with electricity, nothing to do with commuters. We love what we love and we kill what we kill.

  The boy from the mountain is here still, safe in the dark, hidden, and we know what he imagines.

  We know who haunts his dreams.

  31

  Ah! I gasp every time I open my eyes. Disbelief, belief. Days pass. Months pass. No one comes for us.

  If people think you’re dead, can you go out into the world like a ghost?

  Gren and I have gone deeper into the mountain and the whole thing shakes with excavations, but they’re not looking for us. Tunnels and caves, warm places in the dark, heated by the mountain’s waters. There are passages below everything, older than the train, older than tourists. People went beneath this mountain before I was any kind of imagined person, before my mother was born, and her mother, and her mother. There were no sons in my family, not until Gren.

  “I’m a monster,” Gren tells me.

  “No,” I tell him. “You’re a soldier’s son.”

  He doesn’t want to be a soldier’s son. He wants to be someone else. I spend months healing, my missing arm haunting me with motion. When I can move again without screaming, I strip off my clothing, fold it neatly, and ease myself into the part of the mere that’s under here. The mountain’s all around me, a singing swell. In the pond, there’s water from the center of the Earth coming up through the iciness, a hot current, and I immerse myself in it, my aching body, my arms and legs scarred, my face scarred. Who’s ever managed to skin themselves without scars?

  “They say you’re dead,” Gren tells me one day. “I climbed up. I listened.”

  He tells me I was killed by someone named Ben Woolf. I’m buried. There’s a grave. If I have any family left, they think I’m gone. I’m the age my mother was when she died, and so I consider myself dead.

  Some nights I wake up hearing the sounds of my boys around me, talking shit and playing cards. Other nights, my dreams are the same as they’ve ever been: falling, dying, flying, full of things that happened long before I hit the planet. It’s war and ships and kitchens, running through forests trying to stay ahead of dogs, running down mountains with a torch in my hand, running at the house.

  But now I know more than I knew. I drink the water down here, and maybe it heals me, maybe it does something else. I feel like my muscles have been wired for electricity, glass nodes, strong circuits.

  I live on fish and rabbits, and the things Gren brings me, walnuts, windfall apples, pine needles, bark. Tins of vegetables, a peach with soft down, a loaf of bread. Sometimes I don’t ask.

  He’s been out and wandering while I was sick, away from me and into garbage or grocery stores.

  He sits on the other side of a coal fire, turning a fish, and offers me a can of apricots in syrup, which he’s opened already, with a quick stab of the knife.

  He’s not grown, but he’s no longer someone who sits down when I tell him to sit down. He’s been in the world and lost it too.

  He makes his way through the mountain, fearless, swims in the mere, fearless, while I sit deep underground. Who’s the monster now?

  * * *

  It’s a cold morning when I finally come outside again, Gren insisting there’s nothing to be afraid of. My hair’s gone white and my face is older than it was. He’s brought me a pair of plastic sunglasses. I tie up my jacket sleeve. I’m dead. A dead woman can’t be seen. A dead woman who looks like I do? Invisible.

  I look down into the water of the mere, and it reflects me back to myself, my mother and my grandmother, faces I know. I feel less lonely looking at them.

  There’s snow covering the ground. I take a breath of icy air, and feel my lungs freeze a little, smoke and crushed stone.

  Years underground, years of training in the dark. This isn’t what makes a monster. This is what makes a soldier. Battle drills, sword swinging, one-armed and merciless. I can fight better now than I could before. My reflexes are sharp. I can see in the dark.

  Look at how transformation happens. I think of my mother, and I know she went the other way, thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker.

  Gren brings me clothes and I walk to town, not Herot, but ten miles upriver, away from anyone who might have seen me here. I have my sword down my waistband, and so I walk like I have a fake leg. Young-old woman, hobbling.

  No one even looks at me.

  You don’t really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.

  There are people on the ground once I get into the town proper, sidewalk sitters, and I’m not one of them. Maybe everyone who’s ever disappeared has felt this way. Maybe the lights make them squint and the sounds of horns make them hurt. Some of them are veterans of the same war I was in. They have that look of permanent surprise.

  I walk past them. No one grabs my ankle. No one makes me listen. A couple of people nod at me, and I nod back, like I haven’t been gone what feels like a thousand years.

  The first time I go looking for my own history, I panic all the way in, but no one notices. I stand in the center of the tow
n library, which is small and understocked, but it’s like a miracle.

  There are stacks of books teaching a person how to live in the world with nothing, cabins built of fallen trees, traps made of thread, but I’ve done without them. Gren knows how to read. I taught him. Gren knows how to write. I taught him. Gren knows everything I know, and more.

  “Miss?” says the librarian, and I flinch.

  “Yes?” I ask, looking anywhere but at him, ready to have it all taken away. The smell of mint tea. Carpet lint, old books, flowers on the call desk, wool jackets, shampoo, bricks on the walls, a stuffed animal in the children’s section, a dragon six feet long, balanced on top of the shelves. A castle made of sugar cubes. A pumpkin carved with a smiling face. It must be Halloween. There’s a cat and I look at him, orange fur, fat belly, and I don’t have to think anything else about cats, nothing about hunger.

  I bend my knees. I put out my hand. I touch the cat’s face, and it butts my fingers, trusting me.

  “There are computers here,” he says. “And newspapers. Or if you’re looking for something in particular, you can ask me.”

  He doesn’t pull at the strap of his bag, or look at a camera in a corner.

  “Thank you,” I manage to say. “I don’t need help.”

  “If you do,” he says, “I’m here to help you.”

  I don’t lose myself. I don’t sob. I don’t scream.

  I walk to the computer, sit in a chair, and learn that everything has changed since I went underground.

  The war is officially over, no declaration of mission accomplished this time. I pore over the articles, learning what passes for history. Somebody’s going to teach this in schools, and it will be full of lies. Slowly, slowly, de-escalation, slowly, slowly, the war ended, like a quiet divorce. Soldiers shipped home, strangers to their country. Their wives and husbands had installed cardboard replicas of them so that their children would feel raised by someone. One day the war itself was declared dead. No ticker-tape, no funeral flowers.

  But like me, the war kept living after it was supposed to have been buried. There are monsters still out there, monsters I can name. The famous ones kept going, video, photos, headlines, and here they still are, running countries, pressing buttons, standing in offices insisting that all the money in the world belongs to them, pushing secrets through votes, starving the bottom so the top can feast.

  Everything kept exploding, now unofficially, cities bombed to dust, and ancient pathways crumbling, so that there was no way to heaven from the desert anymore, and no way to any other place either. War’s contagious. It spreads like a plague, reducing countries to catastrophes. I could’ve told them that.

  Archaeologists and historians dusted the war away from the ancient world. Mostly, the discussion in print revolves around grief for extinctions, cities found and lost again, libraries burned, museums torched, animals poached.

  I look at all the articles, all the possibilities, all the places on the map where I might have been when I disappeared.

  Finally, I find something I recognize. I hover over the link for a moment before I can bear to click it, and then I do.

  A buried city full of gold, jars, cloth, and books. This city was lost—they say—for two thousand years, and now it’s found. Bones and books and treasure, and all around it, trip wires and bombs.

  I’m sitting in the library, staring at the computer screen, and I know every street, every building, every fountain. Every staircase. Every square.

  Every place I ran my fingers over a sculpture, every market stall, every dead corner full of every dead ghost, every scrap of silk, every scroll.

  Every bedroom.

  I sit in silence for a while, and then I close the window and let the computer sleep.

  I look at the dark screen until it’s dark outside too, and then I walk back to my cave beneath a mountain and an old mere, under stars that punch holes in the sky, blazing rays of frozen light.

  * * *

  By the time Gren’s thirteen, he’s a foot and a half taller than I am. By fifteen, he looks like a man, but he’s not. He’s still a child, and only I know it, because only I’ve known him since the beginning.

  Gren looks at me across the fire and asks me a question.

  “Do you think he remembers us?”

  I feel the world stop around me. It’s the sound of the piano all over again, the sounds of the suburbs, people in them waiting to kill us, people waiting to turn us in to the police. Dylan would only remember us as nightmares. The woman who killed his father and the boy who left him in the station and ran away from him.

  “No,” I say. I’m lying. If he doesn’t remember us, there’s been a miracle. We’ve had some miracles, but not that one.

  “I remember him,” Gren says, very quietly, almost so quietly I don’t hear him.

  “Remember?” I ask. “You remember, or you went hunting?”

  “I wasn’t hunting,” Gren says, but he won’t make eye contact with me. I picture him running at night down the side of the highway, sprinting along, or climbing a mountain in order to look down on that boy he’s never been able to forget.

  In two years, if Gren were me, he’d be taking a bus across the country and signing up to be a Marine. I did it because my mother died. Will I be dead in two years? If he were me, he’d be getting sent over the ocean and put into whatever war was going. And there are wars going. There always are.

  He’s searching, and I know why.

  Here’s the truth of the world, here it is. You’re never everything anyone else wants. In the end, it’s going to be you, all alone, on a mountain, or you, all alone, in a hospital room. Love isn’t enough, and you do it anyway. Love isn’t enough, and it’s still this thing that everyone wants. I see what he wants. I know him better than I know myself. I know his whole history, and I don’t know my own.

  “I’m going to find Dylan,” Gren tells me at last, and his voice is both rebellious and apologetic. He isn’t asking. He’s telling me he’s grown. He’s done being my baby, and now he wants to be in the world. “You can’t stop me.”

  “I won’t,” I say, for the first time in his life. I know well enough to know I have no choice in this.

  A baby’s born. He might have twelve years of safety, maybe less. You hope he’ll stay small. Small is safer. Your son wants to go to a playground. He wants to run and climb and sing, he wants to leap fences and play. He falls asleep with his face in your neck, humming to himself.

  How many other mothers’ sons have died as a result of me? I have a count of those souls, but I also have a count of things I saw when I was looking up, missiles falling like stars, food packages containing explosives, poisons in the water.

  “I just want to see if he’s okay,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “I’ll look in a window.”

  He thinks I don’t know what a liar looks like. I love him so much I don’t care. Lie to me, I’m thinking now, tell me lies. Tell me you’ll be safe. Tell me you won’t risk your life hunting for love.

  I don’t know what he looks like to other people. He looks like me in the reflections I see in the mere. When I see him pass me in the dark, down a passage, or in the woods, he looks like a boy. He’s not a man yet. That won’t stop anything from happening to him.

  I know we can’t hide forever, but we’ve been hiding so long I don’t know how to stop. He’s hardly hiding, though. He’s out in the very early mornings, before doors are open, before the world’s awake. He brings home books, and more clothes, strange ones, from dumpsters maybe, or donation sacks. Once, a bottle of vodka, and I don’t know where it came from, but I can guess.

  I know that if I were him, I wouldn’t choose to live my life this way, a boy inside a cave, in hiding with his mother. How much life do you get?

  I know that if I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t choose this life either.

  Gren doesn’t know that a handful of years is a thousand years, is a hundred thousand years, that he?
??ll be a memory of pain to Dylan.

  Some nights I think about that city they found in the desert. Some nights I think about what it would be like not to be alone. I used to know. Now I’ve been alone too long to be anything else. But I don’t know how to forget safety. I don’t know how to forget arms around me.

  Why should Gren?

  I sharpen my sword. Sharper, sharper, bronze and steel. There are stones deep under the surface here, white quartz, yellow opal. Down in the dirt there are flints and spikes, old tentacles turned solid. There are fossilized fangs.

  I sharpen my blades on all of it, everything I can find, until my knife and sword could kill someone without them even noticing they were dying.

  The whole time I’m doing it, I’m wondering who I’m planning to protect. Myself? Him? Someone else entirely?

  Keep them sharp, I think, because at least I can do that thing. The world is the world and my child wants it. The world is the world and my child will go into it, whether I like it or not. He doesn’t have any magic. I don’t have any either. I have metal. I have to think it’s something, even if it’s not enough.

  LO

  32

  Lo, out of nowhere, Willa’s thirty-five, then forty. She disbelieves the narrative that ended her up here, but every morning it’s still true, recited like a ballad by gossip columnists, blind items, chroniclers of power. She has her fans and her enemies.

  She’s as lovely as she’s ever been, maybe lovelier. Now she has a team of beautifiers, and when she gets dressed, it is with input. She lets her hair hang free, blood-red lipstick and a little reminder to everyone, stabbed in over her heart, a brooch in the shape of the American flag.

  Mayor? Governor? Senator? President?

  A designer inserts a pin into her waist, and she has him arrested. That’s a joke. She has him go down on his knees and pin each pleat by hand, carefully, his fingers spread on the silk, the top of his head visible to her, in case she wants to bring her wineglass down on his skull and stab him with the pieces. People in her position poison, they don’t stab. Another joke.