The Mere Wife_A Novel

  The wife breathes in, a shuddering little breath.

  “See?” she says. “I didn’t make it up. You thought I was exaggerating.”

  “No one was here but the three of us, Dylan’s grandmothers, and a couple of their friends,” the husband says.

  “Someone was here,” she says sharply.

  “Only if you left the door open,” her husband says. “Those doors are secure.”

  “Glass is the opposite of secure,” says the wife, and looks at Ben.

  Ben looks away. Marital discord isn’t his business.

  “You said there were marks?” he asks, and they show him, leading him around the house.

  He glimpses the wife’s reflection in the mirror over the piano, her sweater still falling slightly open, the curve of her breast.

  Other men are seized with lust in the middle of Walmart, following women down the aisles, imagining best-case scenarios. Woolf is made of self-control. His job comes first. Her mouth, though, is like a spatter of blood on a plaster wall, that’s what Ben Woolf thinks. Then he carefully removes his thoughts from that part of his memory. Nothing is there, nothing but a stippled white surface and a man marching past it, nothing but an enemy captured and a door locked on a history of violence.

  All he knows is that he’s one of the few good men. He is the front line against the nightmare.

  He gets himself outside. He’ll walk the mountain himself. Someone up north filled a swimming pool with alligators, and someone else got busted with an elephant in the garage, bought fuck knows where.

  His job at present is a performance, standing at the bottom of the slope and looking up toward the mist at the top, keeping the suburbs safe.

  He can feel the wife watching him from the kitchen windows. He squares his shoulders. There are tracks in the snow, yes, but nothing more than those of kids playing. Half a snowman, footprints and snow angels, and then the tracks are lost in undergrowth, brushed over with weather and wind like all things eventually are. No paws. No bears. No monsters. Just kids. The only oddity is that some of the tracks are from bare feet, but Ben would have done that himself at that age. Might do it now, for that matter.

  Ben marches up the mountain, fading himself purposefully to white.

  He feels her the whole time, standing in that window, watching him rise.

  9

  So, this is what I have to do. I don’t know how to do it. I load the M4, but there’s nothing good in this. No silencer. More gun than this task, but I’m not close. I fumble as I load it. The saint sits beside me, raises her finger to her temple, and suicides with her own invisible weapon.

  “Somebody painted a picture of my face on the cave wall over there once. That man lived here for a while, when they built the station. He found a bunch of bones. When I was alive, we thought those bones were dragons, but nobody ever saw a dragon in the real world.”

  “Nobody ever saw a girl with a candle lit in her tits either,” I say.

  “Sure they did,” she says. “I’m just keeping it bright in here for you. Who likes the dark? Do you?”

  I edge myself out of the cave entrance and blink in the light of the world.

  Gren’s behind me suddenly, and she’s gone.

  “No,” I tell him. “Back into the cave, and down the stairs. Stay there. Don’t come out until I say you can.”

  Gren backs away, and I wait for him to disappear before I resume surveillance. Windows look impermeable, but they’re made of glass. Houses are made of straw. There’s always someone waiting to blow the whole thing down.

  The boy in the house looks like he’s been worried since he was born, but maybe that’s just the look of a little boy watching a parade. There’s a pile of wrapped presents, and lights on the tree.

  He’s maybe half Gren’s size, wearing a Christmas Day suit, with a tie, and shined shoes. He’s as pale as his mother, blond hair, pink and white skin. His hair’s a sticking-up mess of yellow curls.

  He hasn’t done anything wrong. All he has is a secret, and the secret is us.

  I think about how some mothers over there watched their tiny sons talking to soldiers. I offered candy to the little boys, telling their mothers they’d be safe with me. By then I’d memorized a few phrases.

  “What are you doing?” Gren asks me. He’s back, moving so quietly I had no warning. When did he learn to move that way?

  “Watching,” I say. “Go in.”

  “Are you hunting?”

  This startles me. I turn away from the scope.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not hunting. This isn’t hunting.”

  You have to be vigilant and keep track of your mind, if you’ve been out awhile, in any war on Earth, at any time on Earth. I put the M4 away, back in the cave, back on the shelf. This isn’t the weapon for this. I don’t know what I was thinking.

  Once, in the desert, on the edge of the ring of campfire light, I saw a black gleam. Ants carrying a body across the sand, sharing the weight, millions upon millions of them, the corpse levitated a fraction of an inch above the earth. I blinked and that vision was a shadow, no ants, no body. A hallucination.

  Anything could be like that. Shooting at them from up here won’t save us. It will bring them hunting us. This is no solution. What has to be done is quieter. I have to get closer.

  Gren grabs my hand and tugs it, like he’s much younger than he is. “Don’t hunt, Mama. I’m not hungry.”

  He’s using the voice he’d use to ask for a story. He’s scared of what I might be about to do.

  I have a flash of Gren’s body being carried down a long slope on the backs of those ants, and then brought to a river. I see him being ferried away from me.

  “I’m keeping you safe,” I say.

  He looks at me, and his eyes are huge.

  “I am safe, Mama,” he says. “We’re safe in our cave.”

  But who’s ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?

  Some people must be safe on this planet, but I’ve seen houses with thick walls blown up, kids walking down the street, crossfire. Crossfire. Flaming in front yards, hoods in white, hoods on sweatshirts, and who’s safe?

  No one’s ever found me. I think I got lost in a file of forgotten soldiers. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t guilty of anything. Maybe they decided I was innocent. That’s what I’ve been telling myself, but I look out over the slope, and my heart stops.

  There’s a cruiser speeding down the one road that comes here, circling around the mountain and through the front gate of Herot Hall.

  The cruiser pulls into the driveway of the house I’ve been watching. Out of it comes a Viking-looking man in uniform, very tall and very blond, exactly the kind of man I know to watch out for. He was a soldier. I can see his march from here.

  “If you hear anyone coming up the mountain,” I tell Gren, trying to control my voice, trying not to scare him, “you have to hide.”

  “Why?” he asks.

  “If you hear the sounds of dogs, or if you hear clicks or shots, or voices, run into the cave and go all the way down,” I tell him. “Go into the station, and, if you have to, into the tunnel that comes out of it.”

  This is a last resort. If I die, he’s still too young to make it on his own. Where would he go?

  I see the places in the dark beneath the mountain, the bones of my family buried beneath Herot, and no one to bury us, so we’ll be burned, maybe, and put in a box in some police file room, ashes to ashes, dust to done.

  When Gren was tiny, I tried to teach him about death. We buried a soldier made of twigs and a plastic woman he’d found on the mountain.

  “This is what you do when someone you love dies,” I told him.

  “Okay, Mama,” he said, and his eyes welled up. “Don’t die.?
??

  “I won’t,” I said, and I knew even then I was a liar. “I’ll never leave you.”

  Now I wonder why I taught him to do any of the things people do: burial, grief, any of it. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell him to run as fast as he could, as far as he could, into the woods or ocean, away from people, away from guns and soldiers. I’m not ready for this.

  “I promise I’ll find you,” I tell him. “All is well and will be well.”

  He hesitates. “Mama?”

  The officer’s out of the house, sniffing the air like he’s a tracker.

  “Go now!”

  He’s talking to himself, talking to nothing, and men who talk to nothing are men you can’t trust. They yell into the dark, causing the rest of their company to spin in a weapon-drawn panic and catch some poor bastard taking a piss, one of your own, not whoever the enemy is, just one of your buddies, hidden by midnight. It happens all the time. Half of the dead are killed by their friends. Maybe that’s the history of everything.

  I take myself back inside the entrance of the cave, where I can still see the officer, and bring the Beretta down, aim at him, stare at his face and his hands and the way his face moves. I center on his skull, but what I see is a man who’s been to war just like I’ve been to war. He’s a boy with a badge and I’m a fugitive in the line of bullet fire if I don’t get him first. We were on the same side. Not anymore.

  The officer makes his way up the slope like a fire spreading from a cigarette. He’s coming toward me, up the whiteness, straight up the center of the mountain.

  The saint is back. She looks at me, approving of all of this. This man is my enemy, and I’m his. Maybe this is destiny. Maybe he’s who I’m supposed to kill, out of all the people I’ve killed in war. Maybe I’m supposed to turn on a soldier who could’ve been beside me.

  Finger on the trigger. Heart pounding.

  The officer’s in the trees, twenty feet from the hidden entrance of the cave, running hands over the rock, but I’m invisible to him. I keep the crack in the mountain covered with brush and wood, things I’ve made to look like nature made them. There are pine needles outside the entrance, and pebbles, things that keep our tracks from showing. I’m looking at him through a narrow opening, controlling my panic.

  He’s within a few feet of me, but now he’s talking on his phone.

  “There’s nothing up here,” he says. “I’m walking the mountain, but it’s just snow, no animals, no people.”

  He looks around, sniffs the air.

  “There’s part of a claw, yeah, in the house,” he tells the person on the other end. “Maybe the kid picked it up in the woods. The wife thinks it’s an invader, and the husband’s humoring her. It’s nothing. I’ll close it up and head back in.”

  A bullet rolls off the ledge I keep the guns on, and across the rocks. I’m paralyzed.

  He’s alert, listening, but a bird sings out, and he looks up to the sky instead.

  He’s not looking for Gren. He’s not looking for me. If he was, there’d be guns all over the mountain. They’d take Gren, tie him down, tear him open, look at his organs, map the way his heart beats. They’d count his breaths and call him a killer. I could tell them he’s only a little boy, but it wouldn’t matter.

  They don’t know.

  They don’t know about him, and that means they don’t know about me. I watch the officer leave the mountain, walking down, still talking on the phone. I track his every move.

  He turns once, feeling me looking.

  “Hello?” he says.

  I don’t answer, and after a moment he keeps walking.

  Death is one step in the wrong direction, a heartbeat losing its place. I know this much is true. Death returned me, and here I am. I watch until he’s gone.

  “Gren,” I whisper into the dark of the cave, and he appears from out of the secret door, standing on the stairs, tears on his face.

  * * *

  We have to leave this mountain. I was a fool to think we could stay here, not anymore, not now that Gren’s older, but we can’t leave today. The mountain’s too busy. There’ll be sleds on the slopes, carolers, Christmas lights. We’ll go after New Year’s, after everyone’s stopped celebrating and the lights go off at night again.

  We’ll find somewhere else to hide then. Six days to think of where, six days to figure out how to get out without anyone seeing us. Six days to stay hidden here.

  The saint sits down beside me. My companion, my hallucination, my dream.

  “He’s gonna die here, girl,” she tells me. “He’s gonna die on this ground.”

  She’s been saying it awhile, but she isn’t real and so I pretend it’s possible to ignore her.

  “Gren,” I say. “Come here. Let me tell you a story.”

  He curls into my arms, and I tell him I can keep him safe forever.

  WHAT

  10

  What will he do? We wait, watching, and the boy waits too, for his mother to leave him. He counts down, pretending to sleep, until she takes her nightly walk of the tunnels, the entrances and exits.

  Then he slips out of the cave, as he always does, to watch the village below him, looking through the window of a house where a roasted goose is being pulled from the oven. The bird is steaming, and there’s a dish of warm fat outside the kitchen door. The boy watches it solidify in the cold.

  The houses are lit for the holidays. Cars drive a quarter mile across the subdivision, parking, the people in them walking up. Guests are dressed in red, green, and gold, and when they come into the houses, drinks are put into their hands, and bits of food too. Cocktail napkins. Olives.

  The boy stands in the trees, banned from descending, looking down the mountain and longing for everything he sees below him.

  A roomful of people, with piles of packages, the smell of meat and bread, and every house is the same, while he is up here, alone and different. Everything that happens rings in his ears, and calls to him. He pulls a cookie from out of a tree hollow, a spiced man, and eats it as he listens.

  “Ho, ho, ho, Louisa!” someone whispers from the back door of one of the houses.

  “Oh, Roger,” she whispers back. “You’re feisty tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Every night,” Roger replies, and she laughs.

  “Later?” she says.

  “In the morning,” he replies. “Meet me at four.”

  People call from around the neighborhood, heralding spouses and children and pets, shouting for grandparents and carolers:

  “Punch bowl!”

  “Little sausages!”

  “Fred, did you let the dog out? Where’s the dog?”

  “Zip this, will you? That’s why I’m turning my back, I can’t get it, no, I need longer arms. It’s not too tight.”

  “Oh, god, the poor thing! And her husband! What a catch. I know, but I just want to know if he’s single?”

  “Swizzle stick!”

  “No, they’re pretty, right? Colored sprinkles, don’t eat the silver ball ones, they’re poison.”

  In the house the boy is watching, there is a Christmas tree cut from the mountain’s slope. The boy knows the tree. It sheltered an owl. Now it’s covered in white lights and red orbs. The boy wonders if they’re eggs, about to hatch some bird he doesn’t know, but he knows all the creatures and things that live here. Every piece of this mountain. He talks to everything, and everything has a name. At night, he looks up at the sky and names the stars.

  The boy watches his friend, sitting down at the table, eating dinner, people all around him, a cake, wine, laughter, and everyone raises their glass to the man at the head, the father, who then leaves the room.

  Father is a new word for the boy, but he’s learned it. Before this, he only knew mother. The boy’s friend looks out toward the window, but the boy is invisible. The boy waves from out of the night at him, unseen.

  The father returns, dressed in a red suit, a white beard gummed to his face. The boy flinches, startled, but
then it is clear, a costume, for some reason, a new coat, a new fur to keep the father’s face warm. The boy’s friend sits in his father’s lap.

  Packages are brought, and the boy from Herot opens them. They contain things that bewilder the boy from the mountain, bright plastic items, shining ribbons, little animals made of soft cloth.

  He watches.

  When it’s dark, when the boy from Herot is in bed, the boy from the mountain hunts for a present for his friend.

  The rabbit’s sleek and brown, fur speckled, long silken ears. Nostril with a little blood dribbling out. Eyes dull. Neck broken. Strong thigh muscles, soft fur. Meat for a night, enough to share.

  The boy leaves it on the step outside the kitchen, then turns back and runs up the slope, quick over the snow and through the trees, avoiding the lights, the cameras, fast enough that he hardly touches the ground.

  He slips through the crack in the stone and into the cave, then through the hidden door and down silently, into the old station.

  The walls are already covered in his drawings, done in charcoal, a toy truck, a glass house, a piano. There are cats and birds in them, and spotted dogs with flapping ears, a sun, trees, cars.

  Now he draws the boy from below, pale hair rendered in campfire ash, blue eyes set down in a stolen piece of wax from down the mountain. He has a whole box of colors.

  He’s already made a drawing of a woman with one eye, and beside her a blur. The blur holds his mother’s hand.

  Slowly, carefully, the boy from the mountain makes a line between the drawing of the boy from Herot Hall and his own portrait. An arm outstretched, pointed nails like little moons on the fingers of one of the boys.

  Now two little boys hold hands in the dark beneath the mountain, on a wall of an abandoned station. Between them there’s a package, a red bow, a tree, a rock. There’s a rabbit.

  The boy from Herot Hall is smiling, and so is the boy who has portraited himself in scribble, an obliteration.

  He sits back on his heels and looks at the drawing he’s made.

  Carefully, carefully, he draws a star shining over the whole thing. He draws light as it falls from the sky, and another symbol he’s learned from watching through windows, a heart of red wax, pressed onto the marble.