The Mere Wife_A Novel
The boy from the mountain sits down and the other boy sits down beside him. The boy from the mountain opens the lid and puts his fingers on the keys. He plays.
We listen to it reverberating out from the building, and we move it through the dreams of Herot Hall.
This is the song he’s playing from the dark, but nothing about it is hidden, nothing about it is secret.
Some of those who hear it dream of old stories, hunts and hungers, prey and riders, the unknown coming from under the hill, and others think of ice-cream trucks playing songs they shouldn’t play, minstrel show songs selling cold to children.
The music fades and one boy takes the other’s hand in his.
They look at each other. The boy from the mountain is too frightened to speak. He’s talked to the train for years. There is only one train here, just as there is only one of him. He has talked to the birds, to the electric lights and to the fish. The two boys look at each other, silent, shaking.
I could leave again.
Don’t leave me here.
I’ve been looking for you all this time.
There are two boys in this room now, for the first time in years, and the mountain watches. One boy puts his arms around the other, and feels his bones, his shoulders, his spine.
The boy from Herot Hall presses his palm to the palm of the boy from the mountain, comparing size.
“Do you remember?” says the boy from the mountain. “You taught me to play. We sat on the floor of your bedroom. We built a castle out of wooden blocks. You flew a little airplane over my head.”
“Do you remember?” says the boy from Herot. “You brought me here. You saved my life. You taught me to build a fire. You taught me to hunt. I slept beside you.”
The boy from Herot lifts the other boy’s chin, and looks into his eyes. “I thought you were dead. I thought I’d have to spend the rest of my life without you.”
The boy from the mountain mumbles, stammering. Blood is rushing to his face, and his heart is pounding.
“I thought you wouldn’t want me,” says the boy from the mountain.
“I want you,” says the boy from Herot. “You’re the only one I want. Do you want me?”
“I want you,” says the boy from the mountain, his eyes shining with tears.
“All is well,” says the boy from Herot. “And will be well.”
The boy from the mountain smiles.
“And the squirrels will be fed, and the trees will grow taller,” he whispers.
“The snows will come and pile up, but we’ll be warm,” says the boy from Herot. “Like the animals. All in their dens.”
“Like the fish sleeping beneath the frozen water,” says the boy from the mountain.
“Like us, safe in bed together,” says the boy from Herot.
What more do they say to each other as they make their way into the train, as they walk the cars? Nothing we are interested in listening to. Love is usual and rapturous, and nothing about it is new.
A cabin.
A wood, a river.
Another city.
A ship with a glass bottom, an ocean full of fish.
Let’s run away together. Let’s go somewhere else and stay.
Inside the mountain, inside the train, one boy kisses the other, and the other kisses him back, and there is nothing but history between them, and history is enough to make a future.
35
Yes: every soldier knows the dead return to walk your dreams. Ben Woolf wakes up with a start, the sound of piano music ringing in his ears, but it isn’t real. His dreams are taking things over, and it’s not because of the dead. It’s because of the living. It’s the ones he didn’t kill.
He patrols early on purpose, his dogs beside him. He’s been lying awake telling himself stories: the moment he put his hands around Gren’s throat, the moment he felt Gren’s fur and thorny claws, the way he tore Gren’s head from his body, the sinews ripping, the skin shredding, the smell of blood.
He remembers it like it actually happened, but lately he’s felt inclined to confess to everyone that it didn’t. He wants to walk the streets shouting for Dana Mills again, and for her son. There’s something in the air. The opening of the station, the public nature of it, the way old places will be lit and filled.
An arm in a heap of dirt does not guarantee a death. He knows that. He’s always known. Soldiers lose limbs and live, just as they have done for centuries. And Gren? For all the screaming, all the years of Dylan’s therapy paid for by Ben Woolf himself, there has never been a sign of any son of Dana Mills walking that mountain. The only place Gren exists these days is in Ben’s head.
Maybe all good men feel this way sometimes, a yearning to give over all the wrongs they’ve done. Men, at least, have a code. Thousands of years of soldier’s honor. Women and children have no rules. They’ve been allowed to do as they please, protected and full of secrets. If Woolf knows anything, he knows they’re all stealth. At any moment a woman or child might come out of a doorway, holding something that looks like a flower, and isn’t.
Gren walks Ben’s dreams, and in them he’s a blur, running, huge and strong, angry. Ben has never seen his face, and doesn’t know what his enemy looks like. Big, he thinks, and that’s all he can say.
The world isn’t large enough for monsters and heroes at once. There’s too much danger of confusion between the two categories. Ben Woolf’s job is to defend this place against those from elsewhere. Every all-you-can-eat buffet eventually runs out of food, and it’s his duty to serve his own. A man must have his chance to fight change. Borders are shifting and people are rushing across them. Herot Hall is safe for now, but Ben imagines what could happen, any moment, the place full of criminals from the world outside. The world is made of enemies. His own station house had bedbugs last year, and he fought them like he was fighting a ring of serial killers. He was forced to cook the whole goddamn precinct. Ben knew what to do. No mercy. No pause. Straight forward, and into the fire.
Never mind the dullness of that, the lack. Never mind the dearth of true heroics involved in extermination. His life has been quiet before. Surely he wants it quiet.
Ben opens the glove box, checks the weapons, locked there to keep them away from the twins, who are born warriors.
He’s taught his sons to eat their meat bloody. He’s taught them to pretend their eyesight is duller than it is, their strength less. He’s taught them to respect their mother, and never to dive too deep. But once, a few months ago, both boys dove to the bottom of the swimming pool and stayed there, sitting on the bottom, their faces bright with rebellion. And once, a thing Willa doesn’t know, he got a call from their school and picked them up midday, their faces flushed, and another boy beaten badly. An accident, they swore, and eventually the other boy swore it too.
There are no photos of Ben as a baby. There was no note in the basket. He was just left on the front steps of the orphanage.
When he thinks about it, he imagines his mother young, beautiful, a heroine, though he can’t get beyond the point where she leaves him, the part where she looks around furtively, and then runs to a waiting car that contains his father. Ben Woolf doesn’t judge them for running from him. Some days, he wants to run from his sons too. There’s something about them that makes him uneasy. They might be criminals. They might be cowards. They might be both.
Beside him in the car, his hounds wait, a braided mass of fur, and that’s comforting, though they’re old. Who else would know the scent of Dana Mills if she came through a window?
Dana Mills is dead, he reminds himself. He can still feel her shoulder joint separating, the sword in his hand as he cleaved her arm away. He can almost see her slipping into the water, a pool of blood, the final bubbles of her last breath as she sank into the dark.
He’s recounted the story so many times that it feels truer than any other part of his history. He dives after her, groping for her hair, but she’s gone, disappeared like the nightmare she was.
&nbs
p; Ben Woolf cracks his neck, thinking about how it feels to kill someone he didn’t kill.
He thinks about the people he did kill too, of course, his own years making himself into this man. When he was fifteen, he started a fight with a kid who had a string of names inherited from his grandfathers. Something about that pissed Ben off, made him feel as though his own name was a broken thing, no lineage, no history. He isn’t even Benjamin. He’s just Ben, an orphan’s name. It ended in the center of a river, two boys challenging each other to a contest. Together, they tried to swim against the current, and they ended up exhausted, in rapids. The other boy eventually went under. Luck was what Ben called it when he got to shore. Luck was what he said, when he knew that part of what had taken the other boy down was Ben’s elbow.
Horrors are everywhere. They are none of Ben Woolf’s business, those glitches in the narrative. He drives past the new train station, orbits it, parks, and takes a pass around the perimeter with the dogs, strolling proprietarily.
Sometimes Ben imagines a cave for himself, here in this mountain, a place he might hibernate through a winter, not on duty, but then he removes that thought. Who would he be if he wasn’t defending? Desk, doughnuts, disaster. He’s forty-eight (face it, fifty-two) and it takes more work than ever to keep himself in condition.
Suddenly the dogs are barking, pointing, and Ben looks around and sees no reason. The dogs hop and twist, and Ben still sees nothing.
“Heel,” he tells the dogs. “Sit.”
But they run into the station and bark, bounding from end to end of the platform, insisting. It’s still night. There are decorations everywhere, and the Heritage train, polished and perfect, is parked in the tunnel, and wrapped in a giant bow, out of sight for the big reveal. It’s already loaded with champagne.
Ben stands on the platform, looking once again into the darkness, but it’s not darkness any longer. There’s a sunrise beginning, purplish light.
He takes a step into the passage, and the dogs go wild, running up and down the tunnel. He has a bad feeling, but he’s had bad feelings before. More officers for security today.
His toe touches something. A rock on the marble tile, some fossilized creature inside it. A step on the tracks, someone creaking away. No. He spins. The dogs are barking. Too loudly.
It’s her.
It can only be her, even as he knows it’s not. It’s someone homeless, or an animal. Still. Better to draw the gun and walk.
He locks the dogs into the cruiser to keep them from barking too loudly. He doesn’t need all of Herot up here.
He walks toward the entrance to the museum. He dodges out of direct view. Is there someone in the dark there? Is there a person in the passageway?
There’s broken glass on the floor, in front of an empty case. It catches the light of the sunrise.
Step by step, he goes down the skinny set of stairs at the end of the platform. His knees crackle, but he doesn’t have bad knees, because bad knees mean desk and desk means death. He steps into the undercarriage of the station, pursuing a phantom.
Because of an earlier incident, his head insists, preemptively cleaning up this mess. Trains will be suspended, pending further notice.
And what will the incident be? Who will he find? Who will find him?
Down, and into the tunnel Ben Woolf goes, pausing at every mark he sees, looking at every drag mark on the ground, everything that could be normal, and could also be an assassin lurking.
Footstep by footstep into a darkness that’d damn well better lead him to trouble with a solution, trouble he can cuff and question and take back to the station, trouble that lets him go to bed tonight in the arms of his perfect wife, back to his perfect life. There is no other version possible. Heroes don’t die in the dark.
36
Yes, I’m whispering to her. I’m the daughter you raised. I’ve grown into someone as tough as you were. I’m telling her the last twenty-five years, telling her I’m sorry I wasn’t with her when she went.
I’m telling her about my son when I hear dogs in the station. One moment I’m on my knees in front of my mother’s bones, and then I’m out of the passage, away from the gravestones, into the dark.
I’m panting, sweating at the end of the tunnel, crushed into an alcove. I press my spine to the wall and shake, muscles screaming, body taken over by adrenaline.
A man walks in front of me, outside the cases full of my family. I see him in silhouette and I know who he is. I should have been gone by now, if I wanted to go.
He’s the reason my mother’s bones are here. He’s the reason I’m still here, and have been here all these years. Uniform. Holster. A policeman walking slowly through the station.
Light bounces on the ceiling. Water trickles out of the walls, and it’s not supposed to. I’m sure they thought they’d filled it all in. Behind me, there’s a chorus of muffled howls. I’ve been invisible for a long time, and he’s been walking the world with all the privilege of being a man.
He can’t see me. He’s looking the other way, toward the sun rising, and then he turns and comes into the tunnel. He walks. I let him walk. He has a gun.
I have my mother’s goblet in my hand.
I’m silent, but I can hear my own heart beating, and I can feel my own losses, shaking the walls of my body. When he turns, slowly, and looks at me, I see his eyes are as bright as something exploding and I know we’re the same kind of thing, he and I. We carry the memory of death with us, deaths we avoided and deaths we caused.
He raises his gun and presses it to my chest, the muzzle against my heart. I can see my future, the bullet leaving the chamber and going through my body, the way my flesh will try to hold it, the way I’ll sag, the way he’ll drag me into the mere, weigh me down, drop me to the bottom of my own history. I hear him take the safety off. There have been so many clicks in my history, so many last seconds in my life.
I look into this man’s eyes and he looks into mine, and I smile at him. I feel him waver.
“From the halls of Montezuma!” I shout, raise the goblet, and swing it hard, hitting him in the side of the skull, and he grunts and staggers against the wall, and goes down on his knees, holding his head. There’s blood on silver.
After a moment, he looks up at me and blinks.
“Dana Mills,” he slurs.
I drop the goblet, draw my sword. I know how to kill someone. I know how to be killed. I do it the way it’s done. You say each other’s names.
“Ben Woolf,” I say.
There’s a sound behind me, from the direction of the train. Enough distraction for Woolf to get on his feet and lunge at me.
Then we’re face-to-face, stabbing and tearing. He’s trying to turn me back into the dust of the desert we both fought in. We’re both gasping, both choking. He’s soft from the desk, and I’m hard from twenty years of war, but this is pain. This is two people no longer young, fighting to kill.
“You’re dead!” he shouts. “I killed you! Goddamn it! I buried you!”
I twist and jab my elbow into his solar plexus.
We came from the same war. If I’m broken, he’s broken too. If I killed, he killed too. He stood looking out at sunrises, just like I did, wondering how he’d die. He knows what it’s like to say goodbye every time you say hello.
Listen, I’m saying to him. I’m the one who lives.
He gets a hand around my throat, another around my face, trying to break my nose. I find his hand with my teeth and wrench.
I tear a finger from him, and spit it out.
He swings at me with his other hand and hits me in the jaw. I slash him with the tip of my sword, straight across the face, a stripe like a clawing, and another, crossing the first. He’s bleeding, his lip opened.
He jabs, tugging my knife loose and lurching across slippery rail ties. I can feel his fear, and I know, all at once, that he’s not the man he pretends to be. Maybe he fought over there, but maybe he hid himself in alleys, up staircases, waiting for other soldi
ers to throw themselves out into the war and die for him.
I knew men like him. They’re all dead now. Cowardice didn’t save them.
I charge at Ben Woolf, sword out, and he levels his gun at me, finger on the trigger. I’m going to run him through at the same moment he shoots me.
There’s another sound from out of the dark, a shout. He grabs me by the hair, twisting me around, holding the gun to my head, and then there are two boys in the tunnel with us, half naked, leaping out of the train. One is tall and one is small. One is tattooed with the other’s image and is holding a Swiss Army knife.
One is my son and the other is the son of the suburbs.
I try to speak, try to get Gren to run, run, but it’s not Gren who saves me.
Dylan Herot, T-shirt off, mouth bruised, motivated to murder by love, lifts his knife and plunges it into his stepfather’s neck.
Then he takes Gren by the hand and runs with him. The gun falls out of Woolf’s hand. I have it in my hand now.
Time slows down and speeds up and jerks into something other than time as I pull the trigger.
I shoot three times, but Woolf’s gone into the brightness, the light I can’t adjust to. Out of the tunnel and onto the slope, out of the mountain, into the blazing sunrise.
I follow the blood, follow the cries of birds and wolves, the songs of things from my mountain. All of us run the same way.
Snow’s coming down hard, whiting them out. Blizzard weather, and I’m made of heat. My saint is here, with me. We burn.
There’s a shout. Ben Woolf appears out of the white, bloodied and screaming. His eyes are the eyes from the photo I saw in newspapers from years ago, berserk, this man carrying my stolen arm, claiming he’d killed me.
He’s chasing them into the house, my son and Dylan, sprinting into the white room, black room, red room, flashback, stitches crawling up the corners of the universe, sewing it all together, tearing me apart, and I’m running after them, to die or to kill.