The Mere Wife_A Novel

  37

  Yes: the night before the ribbon-cutting, sleeping pills to ensure Willa’s whole mind arriving at morning.

  She’s diving toward cold fire, the bottom of an ocean or a well, and all around her a chorus of other voices, voices Willa thinks maybe only she hears, because the water is suddenly filled with women in white, swimming around her, white deer, no, women, no, wolves, and she is bending into sleep, the bed chilling around her as a song twists into her lungs. She moves her own body in the dark and feels her tail lashing, and all around her are the rest of the wolves in her pack, their teeth sharpened on bone. No, not wolves, but women again, and all those things part of them, teeth and claws and tails, swimming toward some pale light.

  Willa wakes to a loud noise, a—

  A shot?

  She’s still foggy when she hears someone slam through the back door and into the house, screaming. The sound is animal, agonized, and she waits a moment, listening, the gun she keeps bedside, automatically in her hand.

  “Ben?” she calls. She remembers Roger, his early mornings, and wonders, but no. She knows everything about Ben. She reads his email and his texts. She sets his passwords. He has no secrets left.

  She pulls on jeans and boots in the kind of frenzy she doesn’t usually allow herself. Her train. Her station. Her money. Her mountain. Her treasure. Out the window the sun is hardly rising, and there’s snow, whiting out the view, spinning in circles, plastering itself to the glass.

  Silence downstairs, but sounds, creaks, the floor that needs replacing, the stair where the tread is wrong. She runs to the landing, and suddenly Ben’s in front of her on the spiral, protecting her from whatever’s down there.

  She takes a step toward him, her hand out to touch his shoulder, but he turns and she sees that his face is torn open. His neck is bleeding. She looks for bullet wounds, but no, nothing, only the slashes across the face, and a missing—

  His ring finger is missing? What? Is he holding a sword?

  He raises the mauled hand to his mouth to silence her. His pupils aren’t the same size. The side of his head is bleeding.

  She sees something at the bottom of the stairs, flashing past them, a shadow, a—

  “I thought she was dead,” he rasps. “She wasn’t dead. He isn’t dead.”

  Willa is still drugged. The world’s half real and half dream. She feels the wrath of a woman about to strangle a man with her braided hair. There’s a story about a woman coming to a conqueror’s bed. The bed’s draped in mosquito netting and wedding gold. The woman is a prize. The prize takes the man’s head off with her sword. She puts his head in the sack she used to bring bread to the bedchamber. She leaves the bread in the bed, in place of his head, a feast she doesn’t feel like eating.

  Willa’s eyes twitch over another shadow, light shifting in the room below.

  A hundred bright red Herot Heritage balloons are loose in the house. They float from the living room and up the staircase, all around her and Ben, blocking her view.

  She aims into the balloons with her gun, but Ben snatches it out of her hand.

  In the hall, one of the twins starts crying.

  Downstairs there are more sounds, and the back door slides on its track and Willa runs through the balloons, in front of the muzzle of the gun, down and into danger, protecting the children upstairs.

  She darts into the kitchen, pulls a carving knife from the block and holds it. No one. Silence. A balloon pops. The kitchen door is open. The white mountain is covered in bloody prints.

  Someone’s here.

  A sound. A breath. Willa spins. She’s surrounded by balloons and they look like soldiers, each one the size of a head, milling around her, filling the room, red glow, mist. She can’t see. Light is coming from everything, the floor, the countertops, the windows, and snow is blowing in from outside.

  Gren. She knows it. He’s in the room with her.

  There are gift bags on the counter, upended, contents strewn across the floor, tiny plastic trains and skeletons to commemorate the museum, an aluminum goblet to replicate the antique silver piece in the case, older than you’d think, all over the floor, bare feet, and he’s here, right beside her—

  * * *

  Willa Woolf is sleeping when she stabs him in the back with a carving knife. It’s harder to do it than she would’ve thought.

  Here are shoulders. Here are ribs, stripes up the back, and the back of the neck, the knobs of vertebrae. Here is the place where the knife belongs, on the left, protected by shoulder blade—

  Is this what shoulder blades are for? So that no one can stab you through the heart from behind?

  Here is a hand spread in front of her face, and she can see claws protruding from the fingertips, long pearlescent claws, like sheathings found in the hallway carpet, so long ago now that she hardly remembers what they looked like. She knew what she was dealing with then, though everyone denied her. Not a bear. Not a tiger.

  The claws are trying to catch her face, but she’s faster, she’s faster. Self-defense. She’s saving her own life, and defending her husband and children, defending all of Herot.

  Willa Woolf is a hero.

  She grips the monster’s elbow and pins it behind his back, and then she presses the point of her knife in along his spine, a butcher. Here is the reason for years of yoga and Pilates. She’s fighting the reaper.

  She hears herself, as though from far away, making a strangled sound as she pushes the knife in, grating on bones.

  She’s sleeping when her attacker’s heart stops. Is she? She’s sleeping when she cuts out the heart. Is she? Is this a mouse, is this her mouth? She licks her fingers.

  Does she?

  And is this her husband, who is not dead, only wounded, coming down the stairs, running at her?

  Willa sees herself from above, floating in a sea of gore, her hair spread out, her skin stained, and all around are enemies, slain. She’s defended the house. She’s kept everyone safe.

  Ben tears the knife from her fingers. He’s screaming at her, but she doesn’t hear him. She’s dreaming.

  Her hands are wet and warm. Her mouth is full. She clenches her fists and feels the points of her own fingernails piercing her palms. Stigmata, she thinks. Holy, holy, thole.

  What if one night her husband finds himself on his back, reclining on soft cushions under a canopy of mosquito netting? What if he looks up into his wife’s beautiful face, and sees the sword swing back, a silver slash across the remaining three seconds of his existence? Onto the bed will go a loaf of bread, and over this combination of loaf and corpse Willa will pull the coverlet. She’ll walk out into the desert, her cloak around her shoulders, her hood up. She’ll never be a wife again. She’ll walk until the edge of the world, and she’ll set villages on fire as she passes them.

  Monster slayer, people will whisper.

  She feels her body turning to metal, away from the marble and onyx she was. Maybe she’s lost wax, a soft sculpture melted away in the forge, replaced by bronze.

  Once upon a time, Willa thinks. She was rescued from this. On her finger is a diamond ring. On her skin is a name written in shining scar. It’s not even her own name. Someone signed her as a piece of art. Everything that was Willa Woolf, that was Willa Herot, that was Willa Cotton, that was, first, back in the days before she was anyone’s wife, Willa Nowell, all of that is gone.

  She stretches her fingers and examines her nails. Her manicure is messy. It’ll have to be redone. She squints at it, holding her hand closer to her face, but she can’t focus.

  Ben is over her, screaming at her, shaking her.

  Willa looks at Ben through slitted eyes and a crack opens beneath him, erasing him from the face of the Earth. Maybe that’s next. Cocaine. Errors in judgment. Drug habit. Who knew? Oopsy-daisy.

  She’ll have to call her mother to take him to the emergency room for stitches. He looks terrible. Little winged Band-Aids, antiseptic. That’ll do it. Handsome men look better with scars. It’s
almost her responsibility to wound him.

  Later, she’ll do the train ceremony alone. She may end up on her own anyway. What woman doesn’t? She thinks of her mother. She thinks of Roger’s mother. She thinks of all the widows, and she thinks about herself.

  It’s 7:03 in the morning. Willa hears the sound of church bells, and a cell phone is ringing, but she’s asleep again, curled on the floor, her pale hair a nest, and her husband running past her, his boots, his blood dripping on the white tile, all of it cooling as she stays there.

  She’s a dream dreamed by someone else, a network of scars and hidden wounds, a body made of hunger.

  In her dreams she walks the aisles of the Herot supermarket, white linoleum, white walls, and she and her tiny son put their hands into the ice cream.

  Look, she thinks, in wonder, the prints of beasts revealed, clear enough to be cast and displayed next to the bronzed baby shoes.

  Her victory is so complete that she can sleep fully. Her body is hardly a body. She’s bones falling through an ocean, a treasure in a shipwreck.

  She dreams of audiences, theaters, ovations, her hands opening and spreading in bathtubs full of cream, bathing in milk, her body paler and paler as blood begins to pour out.

  The milk is white.

  The milk is pink.

  The milk is red.

  The house is quiet now, but for the sound of the radiators, and after a while there are sirens that aren’t coming for anyone, because no one here has called for help.

  SING

  38

  We sing the song we always knew we’d end up singing, ever since Willa married this man, ever since she trusted him with anything: her heart, her hand, her land.

  We never trusted him. Our daughter dials us, her voice blurry, confused, murmuring frantically into the phone. We were waiting. We’ve been waiting for this day ever since we saw Ben Woolf.

  Now we march into the house and stand in a row, seventy years old, tight and taut and taught.

  “Where is he?” we roar.

  We have learned every lesson, every horrible disappointment. Babies have died within us. Husbands have died beside us. We’re the last ones standing.

  Everything is covered in blood. Where are the little boys? Upstairs. Locked in their room, tearful, but uninjured. Heirs of Herot, unharmed. Check.

  We put our palms flat on the kitchen counter. We control ourselves, but we are made of barbed wire.

  “Goddamn it!” we shout. We knew what he was. The kitchen is smashed. He’s written in absences: a blue fingerprint impressed on our daughter’s throat, her hair torn out and scattered like the shed fur of a Persian cat.

  Willa’s on the floor, shaking, bloodied head to toe, arms covered in marks. We knew better than to trust him.

  Monsters. Some people believe they’re unusual. Others know that monsters are everywhere. We know one another’s secrets, all of them. Confessions in bathrooms, collapses, emergencies. None of us have ever felt a shove from behind as we descended our front staircases. None of us have ever had a splintered jawbone reassembled. None of us have ever had the rest of us hold the straw to our lips as we healed.

  Diane sets up business, sutures, antiseptic. We were doctors’ wives. We keep hospitals in our purses.

  We question Willa. She tells us that Dana Mills is back and Ben Woolf is deranged, and we believe her. Murderer not dead? Check. Monster not slain? Check. Hero not heroic? Check.

  We take over.

  Everyone thinks all we’ve been doing, for thirty years, is planting award-winning begonias. It’s always the mothers who are hated. The fathers are too far away, home at 5:30, off the train, perfume on their jackets. The mothers are the clay pigeons children want to shoot out of the sky. Imagine being a target for fifty years, from your moments of first nubility to moments of humility, when your skin feels like paper and you stop sleeping forever, unacknowledged as being the armed guard of civilization.

  There were times when we fought for perfection, for long carpeted halls full of family portraits, for scrapbooks.

  Scrapbooks.

  We’ve given all that up. Now we have PhDs in pain. We’ve watched the video of Dana Mills’s original death, and imagined ourselves on both sides of it. We’ve seen the sword, the one taking Dana’s head, flash through nothing. She managed to live through the first round of dying. It’s no wonder she’s done it again.

  We who are survivors recognize her.

  We’ve wanted to be like her, even, warriors with our swords, killing everyone who gets in our way, even as we know we wouldn’t really be her. We’d hunt her, a pack of well-preserved women in boots, with our dogs and guns chasing her through the mountain. Well-preserved. Oh, we hate that phrase. Are we pickles or are we jam? Are we sour or are we sweet?

  “Gren?” Willa asked Ben Woolf on the mountain that day, and we were listening. We filed that question away for later.

  “What about Gren?” we ask Willa. Her face is agonized.

  “There was someone in the house,” she says. “He was in the house. Ben ran out the door after him. I don’t know what happened then.”

  We take her into the bathroom. We turn the tap to scalding. She submits as we use the washcloth on her, looking for wounds.

  “Stop flinching,” we say, and tongue the cloth over her skin. We wash her clean.

  She stares out the bathroom window, up at the Herot Heritage banner and the station.

  Whose blood is this if it isn’t Willa’s? We hope it belongs to Ben Woolf. We hope he’s discovered in the trees, flayed. Whatever he’s done, it’s criminal.

  We go outside to take out the trash, step over the threshold and into the blowing snow, the back porch, the mountain. There’s something—we take a step toward it, then leap back.

  Look at how the porch rails are shining with a thin layer of ice and each tread of the stairs too, and look at how, just off the stoop, at the end of the trail of blood and footprints, right in the middle of the snow, there is—

  A Dead Boy in the Snow

  1.  A pale shirtless boy with a knife wound in his back, facedown.

  2.  No, we won’t look, we can’t look, we—

  3.  The boy’s arm is tattooed, and we know the tattoo. We know the back of this boy’s neck and we know his hair.

  4.  We stand there for a moment. We breathe. We breathe.

  5.  We try to see the story. We piece it together from scratch. The past and the future. There is no such thing as a family tree without broken branches. The back pages of every Bible are corrected in white paint.

  Willa comes out of the house behind us. She drops to her knees. We know the posture. She is Caesar’s wife, Lady Macbeth, the chorus in a classical play. She’s veiled by her platinum hair, and she’s screaming and screaming, beating her breast.

  She’s letting go, letting everything go, letting her bladder go, letting her tear ducts go, letting her face, frozen without wrinkles, go, letting her voice go, out it comes.

  We look at her. We know her. She’s one of us.

  The neighbors are summoned out of their houses. They’re dialing the police. Nine-one-one bounces from satellite to satellite. She doesn’t stop screaming.

  There are sirens, and then more sirens, and then more, until the hamlet is ringing with them, like God has come down from heaven and called out for every church to pay tribute.

  This is what the story of Herot Hall is now, revised from fairy tale into horror. The flip side of hero is monster.

  No one ever knows what mothers do. We defend our children from themselves, tooth and claw, bending the admission boards and battling landlords, taking the extra set of keys and cleaning up evidence of wrongdoing. We save our daughters from disaster, over and over again.

  We kneel beside our grandson. We calmly, slowly, remove our monogrammed scarf from the pocket of our coat, and use it to wipe the fingerprints from the handle of the knife protruding from his back.

  We take care of the details, because
the details are always the devil, and this is our story now. We write it. We scream it. We belt it out into the winter air.

  “Ben Woolf!” we shout. “Find the monster!”

  39

  Sing on, normal world, even when everything in it is broken. Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners are humming from below. An announcer calls out over a radio, and Gren is with me. Sirens surround the mountain, and here we are deep inside it, my son, sobbing, sobbing.

  No one has ever let me go. There’s been no honorable discharge, nothing but dying, over and over, declarations that the war would never end, that my service would never finish. I curl around Gren and hold him. What is love but this dark, this cold, this child?

  Hush, little baby, I sing to him. Don’t say a word.

  “He’s dead,” he whispers.

  “He’s dead,” I say, and hold him tighter.

  I saw Dylan in the snow, just outside the kitchen door, the boy who saved my life. His back and chest were torn open. I didn’t look at his mother when I ran, but I remember what I saw of her now, sitting on the floor in that room, her eyes dilated, her hair stained red, her hands full of something wet, and I—

  My knees gave and returned. We ran through weather, sliding, ice and blood and blackness, and Ben Woolf ran after us. We lost him in the trees, but we heard him shouting, running, stumbling, roaring with panic and frustration.

  I burn for my child. For our mountain, stolen. For ropes on trees and for autopsies conducted in theaters with admission sold, for rebels charred at the stake. I burn for the women in the war whose sons and daughters were blown into the sky and left unburied.

  Here I am, and my son with me, a product of a war that people thought was over. We manage, somehow, to be living. I think about how I felt, running through America, fifteen years ago, hoodie up, my face with my new scar, starting at the jaw and stretching to my hairline, walking dead with a swelling belly, guilty of no crime.

  I didn’t know what kind of baby Gren would be, but I could feel him while I was pregnant, a hand pressing hard to my insides. I tore my shirt off in truck stops as I made my way back here, sweating, my nipples darker daily, my belly button shifting, and Gren’s little hand against me, showing through the ribbing of my undershirt, telling me that he was alive and growing, telling me that he was mine, and that when he was born, he would need me to keep him safe.