The Mere Wife_A Novel
Maybe this has always been a job that mothers do. Raising them and protecting them, trying to get them out into the future still living, still loving, trying to defend them from all the things the fucked-up, broken world wants.
Maybe this has always been a job made for failure. This is the child I don’t know how to hold. This is pain walking. There’s no saint here now. There’s only Gren and me, in the dark, and we are each other’s hurt, and we are each other’s only family.
“I want to kill Ben Woolf,” Gren says. “And then the rest of them. Dylan’s mother. Everyone down there. All of Herot Hall.”
“I know,” I say.
“He was my friend,” he says, his voice breaking. “They killed him.”
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
And he doesn’t tell me, but I can see all the things he’s not saying, an imaginary path into the future. A bridge made of red steel, a train taking them forward and away from here. I can’t imagine Gren killing anyone for any reason but love. No one wants to live alone in the dark, not me, not him, no matter what we know about the world.
“I can’t let them live if Dylan’s dead,” he says. “I can’t be the one who gets away, not without doing something. Teach me what to do, Mama?”
He hasn’t called me Mama in years. He hasn’t used any name for me.
“Can you make me a soldier like you?”
I hesitate. I want to do it for him. I want to save him and keep the world away, but I’ve always wanted that, and that’s never happened. The world is filled with pianos and people. Ben Woolf is out there, wandering the mountain, and Dylan’s mother is in that kitchen, on the floor, and there is a dead child in the snow.
Gren and his mother. Dana Mills and her son. A man with a gun. All of us circling one another. I feel the walls of our cave move. I feel the trees and the bats and the dirt and the stars outside. I feel the mountain, the mere, the creatures that cry out from deep in the water.
He is here.
She is here.
“Yes,” I tell my son. “I can teach you.”
If this is the last lesson, it’s the last one. The last line of every life story is the same. There’s nothing precious about it.
I begin.
“Listen,” I say to my son. “Listen.”
NOW
40
Now it is five days later, and Willa stands in the center of her station, beneath a chandelier and a hundred mirrors, all reflecting funeral candles. She blinks.
For a moment, the room is covered in handprints of blood and claws and the convex mirrors are skewed and broken. They reflect a battle. She looks up into one of the mirrors and she sees her own face, distorted. She’s a queen wearing a crown of gilt and broken glass.
Then, no. Banners. A stack of funeral programs. A coffin wrapped in roses.
She goes to the catering table, where she eats and drinks everything she can find, bite after bite, sip after sip, feeling as though food is nothing relevant, as though she is made of infinite air. Her mouth tastes like chewing gum covering alcohol.
Every corner of the world could hold a mouse or a monster. She wants to slice Dana Mills into bites, make certain she’s dead, and then consume her strength. Willa hears the back of her own mind insisting that if Willa is what she eats, given the right meal, she might become a revenant with a winged sword.
Down below, there are dogs being walked, a parrot on someone’s shoulder, faces of people who know nothing about sacrifice, nothing about liars. There are people coming out of houses and going into cars, and Willa is no longer any of those sorts of people. She’s painted her face into something saintly, gold leafing and pigmenting, sealing it all in, making herself holy.
She wipes her mouth and emerges, flanked by the mothers.
They stand behind her, welcoming witnesses to the funeral. Look at what they’ve survived. Look at how they’ve managed to live through everything. Willa brings out wine and serves it to the press gathered for grieving and for tribute.
This train is the memorial. Her son was the sacrifice. Her husband, the betrayer, the monster, is being hunted, FBI alerts, his own officers searching for him. Years of safety, now revoked. The fences and the windows and the gates, all irrelevant. Her enemy has been sleeping beside her, fathering her children, sharing her wealth, rising on her efforts. This is a performance of courage in the face of catastrophe.
If Ben is smart, he’s fled. Gone to a cave to live there, where no one expects him to do anything. He could hunt deer, seals, whale, anything, as long as he never comes back to Herot Hall. Across the ocean, maybe, across the world. There are places men like him could hide, and it’s not Willa’s business.
He was always a mercenary, though he pretended to be a good man. He came to Willa, she knows now, because he saw money he might marry. All the secrets of her husband are Willa’s secrets too. She’s seen him melt like a crayon in the sun, and now she has to clean it up. It’s disgusting, but typical. Her own mother did the same, and Roger’s mother. Ben’s mother would have done it too, but she abandoned him instead. Willa understands that now.
She imagines what will happen next, when Dylan’s funeral is done, when she goes back into the mountain, this time with something stronger. She trusts only herself. How many years has she known there was something she didn’t know? She has a gun, and she’s a good shot. If Dana Mills is still in there, she’ll find her. And Gren?
She imagines it as she’s imagined it for years. Willa is going to be the one who kills him. She’s going to murder him and his mother too.
She thinks for a moment about her own son. Dylan made his choices and left the world of humans behind. She was his mother, but he always took after the dead. His school sent his laptop and condolences after they got the news, and his files were full of poetry, all of it old-fashioned. She’d pictured him playing rock and roll and instead he was writing an opera. Who knew he’d learned to play piano? Not Willa. He never told her. The singer today will sing one of his compositions, picked by the mothers. Willa didn’t have time to listen to them all. The singer, though, is nationally known. She was meant to sing at the ribbon-cutting, and she’s singing at the funeral instead.
There’s a crowd gathered now, all in black. They seat themselves in chairs that don’t fold. Willa’s spared no expense. There are reporters and donors, friends of the mothers, politicians, photographers.
“Ten years ago,” Willa says—she has to talk about it; there’s no way to keep it quiet, it’s national news—“my husband encountered a woman who’d turned against the United States. She murdered my first husband, Roger Herot, and kidnapped my son, Dilly. In the process of saving us, Ben Woolf, then the officer in charge, was forced to end that woman’s life. It scarred him. It broke him. And this, the horrible thing that happened to my son? It can be blamed on her as much as on him.”
She doesn’t say Dana Mills. There is no reason to make Dana Mills a name for anyone but someone who is long dead.
“Is it any wonder that my husband went back to those years of trauma and committed a crime motivated by it? I can only think that it was a horrific accident and I urge you to think the same. Today I grieve my son, and my husband both.”
She pours wine with a heavy hand, into the glasses of journalists, Ben’s whole staff, and half the lawmakers from around the state. PTSD specialists and grief counselors. She gives them a special look, an agonized one that nonetheless contains grit. No use looking entirely like a victim. It’s a balance, her future.
She takes a slice of pâté delicately with the edge of her knife, lets it dissolve on her tongue. The cameras catch her, a tear in the corner of her eye, her dress for mourning. She’ll run for office, eventually. She writes speeches in her head. Willa rises, her face in the expression that will telegraph compassion, grief, and strength in the newspapers.
“To us,” Willa says softly. She doesn’t say the silent part, but she thinks it. To us, and people like us.
“To us,” e
choes the table.
“Against the darkness,” says Willa.
“Against the darkness,” they reply.
“And to my brave son Dylan,” she says. “Rest in peace.”
She can hear them crying.
The train is ready to take Dylan into the city, and there’s a band waiting to play the funeral march, and the cars are stocked with champagne, coffee, tea, and a funeral banquet, done delicately. There are donation cards in each seat where the tickets would normally be. Already checks are flying through the air and into the accounts. Already Willa is famous for her pain. Already the train is sold out for two months.
“You’re brave to come tonight, and strong. You’re all good people, doing hard jobs. Even in a time like this, perhaps especially in a time like this, beauty triumphs over horror.”
The mothers sit down on either side of her and take her hands, and everyone bows their heads, and the train is there, perfect and shining and waiting for passengers. The singer begins to sing.
The first notes are enough to make Willa rise in her seat, but not fast enough to stop it. It’s the song she heard years ago in her house, the song her son would not stop humming. It’s the song that brought all this trouble into her life.
“Listen,” sings the soprano, a trilling lullaby, a sweet and delicate soprano.
“Down from the mountain,” she sings.
Down from the mountain and out of the dark.
Up from the ocean they march through the park.
They are coming, they are coming,
All the ghosts and all the men,
They are coming, they are coming,
When the moon comes up again.
Is Willa Woolf hallucinating now? Is she back in time, deep in her own memory of catastrophe? Is she clawing her way down the slope of a mountain, is she beside her husband, a monster?
Or is she a monster herself, flying out of her house and over the land?
Willa breathes in and out, listening to the song, and she feels a flutter in her heart, a rising that becomes a pounding. Nerves. Caffeine. Grief. Fear. Thole.
She opens her eyes and lifts her chin, almost imperceptibly, trying to look as though she is deep in prayer. She sees someone pass through the door of the station, and he is hulking, muscular, matted, and hairy.
He’s something wild when nothing wild lives on this mountain. Everything’s been exterminated. There are no bears, no wolves, no panthers. There are no predators left here. Willa’s gotten rid of them.
But this song is a song of wolves, of lakes where sea monsters swim and ancient forests bloom.
“Listen, in them sleep heroes,” the soprano sings.
Heroes in the mere
Heroes in the drear
Heroes who march down the hill to the hall.
Willa’s husband takes a step into the station, and she’s the only one who sees him. She looks into his eyes and knows that he knows everything she is, everything she’s ever done, and that he has forgiven her sins and taken them for his own.
She is flooded with love for him, and even as she is, she knows that the sharpshooters must already be waiting, that bullets are whispering his name.
There is a sound from above, and the chandelier shudders, and the singer stops singing, and everyone but Willa looks up. Then everyone in the station is falling and shouting, screaming over one another, and guns are drawn and people duck, roll, and drop to the marble tiles.
Willa is the only still soldier in the center of the battle, and she looks calmly at what is coming into the station.
Look, she thinks, in some wonder, because what she is looking at is nothing terrifying. It’s only a woman and her son. Willa looks into the eyes of her enemies for a moment, long enough to realize that she’s alone, a frozen woman in the center of a battle film, the camera coming closer to her, her face too lit and her makeup too perfect. There’s only one end to that kind of movie. She ducks her head and runs.
41
Now it begins. I’m already in the station when the funeral procession comes in. I’m in the ceiling looking down on them. Gren’s beside me. We’re the invaders instead of the invaded, for the first time.
I’m looking down at Ben Woolf’s wife, a sliver of ice at the table, and she’s the one who killed Dylan, and I’m the one who’ll kill her. I’ve known her for years now, her yellow hair and painted face. The way she stood in the kitchen looking out at me. The way I stood on the mountain looking in at her.
I’m looking down at the coffin as they load it into the train, listening to an opera singer, singing something I don’t know, and do know at once, something familiar. I can’t listen to familiar. I’m here, in my own skull, paying attention to my own future, not my past. Gren is beside me, watching, his face wet.
Our plan is to wait. I’ve been teaching him, but there’s only so much teaching to be done in five days. He can shoot, but he already could. He can use a knife, but he knew that too. Some part of me still thinks there’s another option. The funeral will be over, and Gren will say goodbye. We don’t have to die here.
Wait for the funeral to end. Wait for her to be alone. Wait for something to change, and then—
And then Ben Woolf walks into the station from outside, and he’s filthy and wounded, his face covered in cuts from when I found him in the tunnel.
I feel Gren move beside me, launching himself through the panel of the ceiling, and then he’s down in the midst of the crowd, and running.
I tumble down into the table, among the chairs and banners, and throw myself at Woolf from behind, using my leverage to shove him down. He falls, crushing wineglasses and steak plates, smashing pitchers of water. He’s fighting not me but my son, a boy screaming in a circle of anguish and fury. They’re evenly matched. I shout directions at Gren, and Gren follows them.
His neck, his arm, his fist coming for your face, his chest, his size, punch, kick.
The crowd is panicking and people are stepping on one another and black balloons are everywhere and bags of black confetti. Tiny glittering trains shower from the sky.
I see Dylan’s mother standing in the middle of the room, and she stares at me, and for a moment I think she’s drawing a gun, but then she’s running.
Gren is still so young, still so scared, but he’s fighting for his life, and for someone else. There are police in this station, and I feel them aiming, but they can’t shoot at us without shooting at him.
I scream my enemy’s name. “Woolf!”
He looks up at me. His teeth are covered in blood. His chest is covered in blood. His neck is wounded. He has my son in his arms, clenched too tight, my son pressed against his bulk. Not a man, not grown. Did I give birth to him so that he could die in public, torn and shredded, innocent of anything but defending me, defending his friend?
No.
I throw myself at Woolf with all my strength, shoving him out of the station, over the edge of the new tracks, and into the mere.
We drop down, through ice, seeking fire.
No kingdom will clasp Gren from below. There’s no hole in the snow, no place in the sand where nothing becomes something.
It doesn’t matter what form a child takes. He might be smoke and he might be a screaming monster flying across a mountaintop. He might be a boy with a tender heart picking up skeletons and trying to put them back together. He might be all that. You will know he’s yours. He’s nothing but your son, whatever he appears to anyone else.
I dive. I follow the man I see swimming before me, his hair bright in the dark. Into the fire, into the cave I can see with a vision that isn’t mine. Who does it belong to? I don’t know what I am. I’m Dana Mills, and I was a child and then I was a Marine. I was beheaded and I lived. I gave birth to a wonder of the world. Maybe every mother thinks those things. Wonders. Glories. Beloveds. I gave birth to a son.
Everything exists.
I have all of my memories in my mouth. I hold them in my teeth and I wait for Woolf to show himself. I’ll dr
own, but I’ll drown taking Ben Woolf down.
He’s in front of me, and my son is in his arms.
We are in my territory.
I let all of my rage pour out of me. I let all the pain come through me, all the anger. I let all the blood of centuries of murders pour out of my hands, all the agony of childbirth and all the panic of waiting for someone to find us on that mountain, all the fury of keeping someone safe in the dark when you should be bringing him out into the sun and giving him all the things he deserves.
When my son should have had school and friends and diplomas and love, when my son should have driven a car and gone to college and been at the top of every class. When my son should have been able to fall in love. When my son should have grown old with his chosen one.
When my son should never have met this man.
We surface on the ledge, and Woolf has him, strangling him, and Gren is fighting, but he’s losing. I’m on Woolf, battling him like I’d fight anyone on the other side, any enemy, but I’m gunless, swordless, all my weapons lost in the water. He’s stronger than I am. More than that, he has my child by the throat, and fury isn’t enough.
I watch myself, a woman projected on a shredded sheet, stretched between trees, trying to fight a man twice my size, even as he tries to murder my child. I watch it as a trailer for a film I won’t see, fireworks falling overhead, missiles making their way across the sky, babies exploding like bombs, soldiers with their lips pursed to kiss, a river that’s not a river, a bright star that isn’t a star, a silver goblet from somewhere else, my hands cutting the cord that ties me to my child, and reaching out to Woolf, to knit him to me instead of to my son. I’m full of the history of my own heart, and the history of my family, and what does he have?
He should have nothing, but nothing is enough.