The Mere Wife_A Novel

  The kitchen windows look out onto a mountain with a tunnel through the center, widening daily, and the tracks, extending daily.

  Willa and Ben throw dinner parties where they tell the story of Dana Mills, Roger Herot, and the kidnapping of Dylan Herot, the story of how the abandoned station was discovered, how the train was unearthed, their personal mission for rehabilitating the mountain.

  They talk until late in the evening, and donors nod along. Willa finishes the parts Ben finds difficult to discuss—the death of Dana Mills—and Ben finishes the parts Willa can’t speak—the death of her perfect first (face it, second) husband, so innocent, so good.

  It could kill a conversation, this discussion of a home invasion, a kidnapping, a murder, a criminal hidden in a cave, unexpected love found in the most terrible circumstances, but there is always someone curious enough to keep asking.

  Willa brings out a tray of cordial glasses bordered with casual gold, and Ben clears the plates. Willa goes into the music room and puts on something to lighten the mood, walking slowly, her heels clicking.

  “The moral is that you can survive anything, even the loss of the ones you love most,” she’ll add softly, returning, her earrings catching the light, tears in her eyes. “Sometimes there’s a happy ending you couldn’t have imagined, for more than just you. This is our happy ending. The Herot Heritage train line and station will offer jobs, employment for hundreds of people. It’ll change the culture of the suburbs for the better. A return to the good old days, before the world became so cruel.”

  They tell the story often enough to get the Herot Heritage Station made legal, to get a hole properly cut in the side of the mountain, to get Ben promoted to chief.

  Willa remodels the police station along with the train station. Ben sits at his new mahogany desk and oversees a growing center of commerce, culture, glamour.

  Who wants to live in the city, anyway? The guns! The knives! The lack of human compassion! Come to this charming hamlet, safe and secure, just two hours from the whir.

  “You’re commuting to your community,” says Willa, in the advertisement for Herot Hall and for the Herot Heritage train line.

  There’s a wine bar with wine made from biodynamic grapes. There’s a bookstore. There are cobbled streets and wide sidewalks and Willa changes some of the perfectly plotted hedges to wild roses, to suggest romance. The white picket fences are replaced with sustainable wood, brass fittings, and the front doors are painted red.

  Look at the people drinking cappuccino and eating sushi. Avocado toast, vegan cupcakes, and gluten-free pasta, and all that in addition to the Herot Heritage Station, a glorious relic full of cultural significance.

  River views. Mountain views. A train designed to be silent when it travels, every hour on the hour gliding along sleek silver tracks. There are, it turns out, unused lines running all over, forgotten resort tracks and tourist destinations, and Willa’s plan is to use them all, to fill them with trains to replace the ones that have stopped coming. This is just the beginning. There are platforms beneath the city where a person could stand forever without meeting anyone, parts of the underground where trees grow up through slanting funnels of light, where there are flowers in the damp and windows to old shoe shops with satin pumps on display, all these places where homeless people slept in the grime and dark.

  At last, Willa is reclaiming them for the people they were meant to serve. The few people who’ve slept in the tunnels surrounding Herot for years are bought bus tickets to elsewhere. No one’s been in the Heritage tunnel. That one, thank god, was closed off, safe from interlopers. Well, no one but Dana Mills, and Willa doesn’t count her. She’s long gone.

  Willa Woolf’s acquired rights to places beneath the earth.

  Now houses at Herot sell moments after they hit the market, and the community ripples down from the mountain like a Christmas tree skirt.

  And that’s all anticipation! The station isn’t even open yet! The train hasn’t had her maiden voyage, though it’s been tested, of course, in the middle of the night, whipping through the tunnel, fed by electric joy. The new Victorian-style bridge over the lake is ready, and the Edison bulbs are installed on either side. The bridge suits the train. It’s shaped like a castle, tall and perfectly formed with crenellations. If there were no more humans, and everything went black, if the power went out and Earth lost its passengers, the train’s bridge would remain for another thousand years, longer than a holy body kept in the basement of a church.

  The lake bottom beneath it is a whirl of crushed boats and broken masts. There’s a hidden metropolis of rust here, a lost and forgotten colony. This bridge arcs up like a bow. The train will cross it, rattling at speed, spitting sparks as it travels.

  Willa spends her days talking about her train, and the heritage she’s celebrating with it. Herot Heritage, yes, but more than that. She invokes both pilgrims and artisans, the beginnings of the wonderful world of America.

  When someone questions her, she looks tearily down, and they remember why she’d feel strongly about this land, her pain, her loss of safety. They remember how she’s personally honored the history of Herot, the old graves found in the land near the station entrance, the museum put in at the expense of both Willa and Ben. There was some criticism, from certain corners, inquiry into the nature of those graves, gentrification, eminent domain, but Willa and Ben handled it perfectly. Of course they did. Willa’s own mother attended a fund-raiser for a state senator, shook his hand, patted his shoulder, brought him an envelope full of nothing at all.

  At night, all night, every night Willa imagines riding her own train into the city, moving so quickly the world blurs around her, so quickly it feels like flying. She’ll drink champagne in the dining car, sit against the window and look down on everything that’s tried to keep her from getting what she deserves.

  * * *

  On the day before the inaugural run, Willa’s dressed in a suit of silver silk slub to match her train, drinking her coffee in a shining room, in a shining house.

  She’s looking across at the station entrance, planning the ride. There’ll be music, champagne, a dinner in the dining car, and then, in the city, cake for the first commuters. Years of work coming to fruition.

  The lake glitters like a sapphire, and the rail bridge is ruby red. The mountain has a snowy peak and the trees are decorated with fairy lights for the ceremony.

  She’s pouring another cup when a mouse runs across her kitchen floor.

  She stands very still, her heels very high, and listens to the sound of the mouse’s claws on the tile. The mouse, its teeth, its tail, this tiny thing in the center of perfection, gnawing.

  She feels everything falter. She traps the mouse beneath a wineglass.

  Ben walks into the room, and she’s on the kitchen floor. She gives him a ridiculous can-you-believe-I’m-on-my-knees smile, while assessing him from below. Perhaps a tiny pad of fat at his belly, seen from this angle, and possibly in his chest hair she’s found some white. She’d never mention it. He still carries her up two flights of stairs when the boys are at sleepaway camp. He still throws her onto the bed, and she still finds herself startled by desire when she runs a hand down his spine.

  Her heroic husband is the envy of everyone, and sometimes she has him carry her purse through a crowded room, just so other women know she claims him.

  “There’s a mouse,” she says.

  He looks amused. “Are you going to eat it?”

  She leaves the glass on the floor, unfolds herself from her crouch, and into Ben’s arms.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “I’m going to eat it.”

  She lets him crumple her up in his hands like a cocktail napkin. Men will be men.

  A pang of hunger again, as she’s on her back on the countertop. She’s denied herself food since last night, when she opened the refrigerator and found a raw steak. Ben’s, of course. A fork into it, a failure, and then a knife, and then three bites in quick succession before she wr
apped it up again imagining a tsunami of flesh. She wants to buy hamburgers from drive-through windows, creamy milkshakes, boxes of Girl Scout cookies to shake down her throat.

  Her phone buzzes. Dylan’s school. She doesn’t pick up. They’ll leave a message. The phone inches its way across the counter and falls off. Ben leaves for work, and Willa straightens herself.

  Dylan’s not coming to the ceremony. She doesn’t need the stress, and Ben agrees. The little boys will be there, one on either side, but Dylan will be at school.

  Last term he starred in a play, and she went to see it, hidden in the back of the auditorium. There he was, onstage, standing in the spotlight with an agonized face, a monologue. Tight black leather pants, tooled all over with peacock feathers—clearly purposeful. Eyeliner. Platform shoes. Mercutio as Freddie Mercury.

  She stood in the dark, her heart full of something.

  She hasn’t seen him in months. There was plastic surgery to repair his face. There was a psychiatrist to repair his mind, but apparently he left parts of it shut. There are tens of thousands of dollars of therapy in his history, discussions about trauma, people coming up from underground, bunkers, basements, broken. It seems to be the reverse, though, the basement in Dylan’s head. The cave beneath the mountain was Paradise, as far as he’s concerned, and everything else, no matter how expensive, is inferno.

  Eight years, three months: kicked out of private school for biting. Nine years, six weeks: screaming curses in the grocery store. Eleven years, eight months: roaring down the road having stolen Ben’s car. Money to keep that quiet? Yes. Pulled over and brought home by police who are, thank god, loyal to Ben. Twelve years, birthday: Dylan wandering Herot Hall, somehow scarring all the neighbors’ doors with fake claw marks. Twelve years, two months: boarding school, a relief. He’s been there ever since.

  Two years ago, he said to her, “I remember, you know.”

  “What do you remember?” she asked him.

  “Everything,” he said, and that was all, but she knew what he was talking about. She knew, and he wanted her to know.

  “Murderer,” he calls Ben, despite all evidence to the contrary. Ben’s been a model stepfather, and Dylan’s the one who’s been a trial. Most recently he attended a protest in the city against police brutality, holding a sign that read I AM THE PROBLEM. He gave an interview, spouting a long string of something about witnessing illegal activity and injustice as a child. His stepfather, of course, treats him as though he’s all in a day’s work.

  “Boys will be boys,” said Ben, as he arm-wrestled Dylan at dinner and faked a loss.

  Now Dil’s fifteen and not speaking to anyone.

  She dials his phone. She should make sure he knows he’s not coming, though she can’t imagine he’ll care. He’s waiting to graduate, and then to go forth in any embarrassing fashion he can find. No answer. She tries the school line.

  “This is Dylan Herot’s mother, returning your call,” she says to the secretary.

  “I’ll transfer you to the headmaster.”

  This is unexpected. There’s an ominous pause. Willa imagines:

  1.  Suicide

  a. Pills?

  b. Noose?

  c. Gun?

  2.  Call to Ben

  a. Grief, seven stages.

  b. What to tell the little boys?

  c. Their brother is gone to a better place?

  3.  Press conference

  a. “The worst that could happen to a parent.”

  b. Ben or Willa. Probably Ben.

  4.  Funeral

  a. “A time for the family to reflect.”

  b. Good photography, like JFK’s funeral. The little boys in matching suits. She and Ben, in black, her face in her hands.

  Willa’s learned over the years that preparation saves suffering. She paws through her handbag, finds a granola bar. It’s dry and crumbly as dirt.

  “Mrs. Woolf,” says the headmaster.

  “Yes,” she says, in a careful tone.

  “Your son seems to have run away,” the headmaster informs her. “He’s been missing since last night.”

  She exhales. “Is there any reason to think he won’t be found? Any sign of anything actually wrong?”

  The headmaster seems nonplussed.

  “He always runs away,” Willa says. “He’ll show up.”

  “He’s not on the grounds,” the headmaster insists. “Should we report this to the police?”

  “No need,” she says, realizing. “I know where he’s headed.”

  Her son is still her son. One last chance to steal focus. It’s Willa’s big day, and he’s coming to humiliate her.

  Fine. She goes upstairs, and pulls an old suit of Roger’s out of mothballs. At least if he shows up at the ceremony he’ll be dressed like a son of hers, and not like the horribly tattooed attempt at a punk rock tragedian he is.

  She goes to the pantry and looks in. She’d never fling her entire body at any of this, her hands open for fistfuls of sugar cereal. Bottles of olive oil, wine by the liter, sitting on the floor in a heap of potato chips, her cheeks puffed around unchewed bites, her body plumbed at last with something other than desire.

  She’d like to dissolve her maternal bond to Dylan like gelatin in hot water. Instead, she imagines her son stepping off the new platform in front of the train, a blazing spotlight, an ovation. Roses falling in every direction, and then motion, fast and brilliant, no brakes, nothing but an end to this story.

  She bends over and picks the mouse up, tail between her nails. It dangles from her fingertips, moving like a toy, and she breaks its neck, places it on her tongue, chews, and swallows.

  No.

  She dangles it over the garbage disposal, flips the switch, and runs the water.

  Back to the mere it goes, with the rest of the bones, and she’s off, out to the last set of meetings before the gala opening tomorrow afternoon.

  She runs her tongue over her teeth as she walks out the door, and feels an edge, something needing to be filed down before she bites her tongue. Dentist. Manicure. Makeup. Hair salon. She tastes blood, swallows it, pops a mint into her mouth. Small repairs. There’s no woman alive who hasn’t found the occasional hole in heaven, and carefully, meticulously, covered it back up.

  33

  Low ceilings and low tunnels, but none of that stops Gren from moving fast. I let my son think he’s really alone, but he hasn’t ever been. I let him think I’m not with him, but I’ve always been.

  Listen to me, I want to say, but he’s done listening. He’s me at this age, and I am my mother, broken, injured, walking behind him.

  I can see him from where I’m standing at the back of the trains he takes, ten miles from the mountain, the old commuter line. I’m between cars, and he’s on the top, riding it like he’s riding something living. He’s not noticeable, because no one is expecting anyone to travel the way he travels. He moves at night, out of the mountain and into electricity. Risking everything, but maybe that’s normal. Maybe that’s what I did too.

  I put my hand on the side of the train and feel it humming. The tunnel is tagged, gilded with spray paint by people willing to walk through the bones of the city into a territory of tin cans. The metal of the train beats a fast, cool heartbeat. The train’s old. It’s been signed by who knows how many names, people writing themselves into the future as the train sleeps in the station. I signed it myself back when I was his age.

  Gren doesn’t lead me to anywhere Dylan might be. He lets me think he doesn’t know I’m with him. I remember seeing my own mother waiting for me at night, in the window, looking out through the curtains. I remember seeing her car behind me, a block or two, as I made my way into town.

  We go to a museum. I walk in the dark behind him as he touches sculptures. We go to a library. He sits in corners, reading. We go to an ice rink, and he spins in silence in the center. We aren’t alone in the city, but it’s late and cold and we make our way quietly, heads down. At first I’m ready
every second for someone to stop, to stare, to see him as something he’s not, to scream.

  We pass an old man who moves aside for us.

  We pass a woman who nods at me. A police cruiser slows, and I clench myself, but it moves on around the corner.

  No one looks at him for more than a moment, and when they look, they look away. A very tall boy walking. A very tall boy with a beautiful face. A very tall boy with a beautiful face and hopeful hands. I try to compare him to other people, to other men and boys, and he looks like them. He looks like he belongs here, not hidden, not in the mountain fearing for his life. But I know things about the world, I—

  I think about long ago, the woman in the Army surplus store, me bringing my baby to see her, and her reaction was—

  Maybe her reaction wasn’t. Maybe I read between the lines of her silence. Maybe she was scared that I had a child and that I looked so broken. Maybe she was pitying me.

  Maybe I’ve been hiding for myself, not him. The buzz in the corners of my brain. The feeling of a bomb blowing up nearby, the ground shaking. My soul raked over my sins. My boys, dead. My mother, dead. Myself, dead.

  Gren, alive. He walks like he knows every block.

  We go to the main station, and he stands beneath a ceiling painted with stars. He stops, looks up, considers the points of light, the chandeliers, the golden ram and fish flying across someone’s version of heaven.

  The stars glow, and we stare up at them together, two people gazing at a sky made of electricity. How many ghosts are here? This land, this city, this station. How many people have died here, in the dirt below us?

  I haven’t been here in twenty years, not since the war. The new century on its side, glass, metal, and paper drifting down, and then the videos of people leaping. The phone messages left by the leaving, both the ones in the airplanes and the ones in the buildings.

  Listen to me now, people said. Listen, I love you. Listen, this isn’t the end of the story. Listen, I’m sorry. Listen, I wish I wasn’t going this way. Listen, this is goodbye.

  Now I let myself think about places I could go. Out into the world. Away from here. Alone, and invisible, not taking care of him. I let myself imagine a life without this constant fear. Everything changes. He’s almost old enough that he can take care of himself. Maybe he’s almost old enough that gone won’t be forever. Not every son dies before his mother. That isn’t what has to happen.