The Mere Wife Read online

  The look on her face was a look I’d seen in the war, soldiers bending to admire babies, knowing that in a week, a day, an hour, those babies might be dead. I saw bombs falling and obliterating my son, and I saw guns aimed at him.

  I saw his body categorized as an enemy body, and I couldn’t breathe. I wrapped him up again. I held him tighter.

  I went up the mountain, trying to seem like I wasn’t running, doubling back, hiding my tracks. She was the last person I spoke to. That was six years ago. I hope she’s forgotten everything about it.

  There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s perfect.

  His eyes are gold. He’s all bones and angles. He has long lashes, like black feathers. He’s almost as tall as I am and he’s only seven. To me, he looks like my son. To everyone else? I don’t know. A wonder? A danger? A boy? A boy with brown skin?

  Any of those things will make him a target. I know the world. I’ve been in it.

  “Mama?”

  “Gren,” I say. “All is well and will be well.” I simplified the line, and made it a lullaby.

  He says the next line back to me reluctantly. He’s distracted by the piano. “And the squirrels will be fed, and the trees will grow taller.”

  “The snows will come and pile up, but we’ll be warm.” I say the next line, and Gren says the next.

  “Like the animals,” he says. “All in their dens.”

  This mountain used to be a place where predators could survive, but the last mountain lion I saw out here was spread across the asphalt one morning, belly vibrating with flies. We’re not predators.

  “Like the fish sleeping beneath the frozen water.”

  “Like the children, safe in their beds,” he says, and this isn’t a line I taught him. This is something he’s made for himself. Has he been watching the people down the mountain? Thinking about what he doesn’t have?

  I put it aside. He’s still little. He doesn’t know how to lie to me yet. I haven’t always been here, but it’s all Gren knows.

  I can’t panic. I can’t think things could be as bad as the rabbit part of my heart suddenly insists they’re about to be.

  “We don’t need to listen to the people down there,” I tell my son. “They have their place, and we have ours.”

  “Listen, though! Listen!” my son insists. There’s a little whine in his breath, the air catching itself in his vocal cords and singing through them. I worry about asthma. I worry about everything.

  Everything in me says, Get away from here, but I know what I am. I’m a stack of broken dishes in the shape of a woman, and this is a flight response.

  Nobody comes to this cave, and certainly not to the station below it. That’s closed off, and no one even knows it’s still there. I know that for sure, but I have to convince myself all the time.

  When I was a kid, people didn’t want to walk up this mountain at all. They thought it was haunted. It’s full of steam springs, water rushing out of nowhere, cold breezes, strange sounds. The mere is half glacial freeze, half hot spots, mist coming up from the center. Everything about this place still exists because people are too nervous to break it open and see what’s underneath. It’s not a national park. Nothing protects it from progress, nothing but people being scared of ghosts. It’s private land. It used to be owned by the train company, and now, I don’t know. The people below us, maybe, the ones who surround it.

  I stand up and brush the leaves from my jeans, feeling the wind coming in through them, too thin for the winter. I’m as thin as my jeans, my hip bones prodding my skin from the inside. Gren is no better. We strip the bark from the trees. We store nuts, and in the winter we roast them. I hunt with snares.

  I tell him I’m checking our traps, but instead I go to the overlook and stare down at Herot Hall. The perimeter’s lit up every night with streetlights so God can see them from heaven. I can see them too.

  I stare down at the neatly plotted roads, the green grass, watered even on days when it rains. I can hear the people of Herot Hall, the way their appliances beep, the way their car motors move as they come home to wooden tables and identical chairs.

  The gated community goes all the way around the mountain, except for the place where the lake is. There are pickets for each of the houses—not the kind of fences that keep anything out—but at the top of the exterior wall they’ve got barbed wire and cameras, lights detecting our motions when we come too close.

  It isn’t entirely walled off, though. The side facing us is unguarded. Whoever designed this put their backs to the hillside, like mountains weren’t a threat.

  Below us, a woman opens the front door of a house made mostly of glass. A child comes running out, young as my son, but fed on better things.

  The cats from Herot Hall climb up here to eat our birds. I have a Siamese skinned and ready for the fire, but cat’s nothing good to eat, and it isn’t enough. The Herot child is dressed in furred pajamas with feet, and the feet have soft claws. The pajamas have ears. A bear. I can see how that’d be sweet, if you weren’t me, and they weren’t them.

  From my vantage, I watch the child bouncing on the asphalt, warm enough, fed enough, safe enough.

  Safe from people like me, people living on nothing. If he saw me, he’d be scared. That’s how it goes.

  The damage that shows: One eye. There’s a part of my hair coming in white instead of black. The damage that doesn’t show? PTSD, amnesia. Brain, shaken by explosions. Sight, full of shadows. Some people had it worse than me. Some people are dead. I’m alive and I think I’m thirty-four.

  I felt like there was a miracle when Gren was born, when I survived it. Look at my son, I thought, wanting to show him to my mother, my grandmother, anyone, but there was no one left to show.

  * * *

  My ancestors built the first houses in this valley, hauling materials up the river to the mountain. The mountain was famous for its springs, and the mere was famous for being the place people came to be healed. In the 1800s, people drank the waters and soaked in them, and thought they were being cured of every kind of disease. There was a train from the city, and they’d come out, stay in the hotels for months. My family staffed the resort grounds, cleaned, cooked. Went about their business.

  Soon after the turn of the century, people lost their taste for the water and started wondering if it was poison rather than medicine. The tourist trade dropped to almost nothing, and so my family started working for the train line.

  In the 1920s, the train stopped coming, and they closed up the station. My family stayed, living in the old hotels, working the scrap jobs in a place left over from the glory days. They knew about the station because they worked the line. They were the ones who closed it off from the world. There were stories about the mountain, people dying in these caves, but my family wasn’t afraid.

  I was seventeen when my mother brought me up here and rolled a rock off something I later figured out was a vent down into the station. She pretended she was leading me, but I had most of her weight on my shoulder.

  This cave was part of the upper entrance, the one for maintenance, and out of it was a hidden staircase, metal, skinny steps, steep, spiraling down a long tunnel with a hidden door. She wouldn’t let me take a flashlight. The first cave, this one, had a view of the outside world, but she took me farther in.

  We crept along a clammy wall, ankle-deep in water for a while, and below us, on one side, there was a drop-off.

  Finally, she lifted a panel from the floor and showed me what was underneath it. The real cave, the old station, was like climbing into the mouth of a whale.

  We looked down into the water off the platform, a gurgling river covering the old tracks.

  She cupped her hand and lifted the water to her lips and for a moment I saw her as maybe she’d always been, my mother. A skinny woman with blazing eyes. When Gren was born, I saw those eyes again. Wherever he came from, he came from my family too. I sipped from her hand, tasting rock, dirt, and tree.

  She tossed a penny
down from the ledge at the end of the platform, and I heard something cry out. The sound echoed against the walls.

  “If they ever come for you,” she said, “this is where you hide. There’re things down here they don’t know about. Old things.”

  We were ten years into her illness by then. I figured everything she’d been through, chemo, surgeries, radiation, had messed with her mind. She was always saying things like this, trying to convince me I was special.

  That night I climbed out the window in my bare feet and went to meet a boy. I was desperate to see anything that wasn’t my mother’s shoulder blades under her nightgown. We drove to a party. Someone had music and dancing and lights, parents gone, couches, closets, but all I remember was that when I came home in the morning, ready to get in trouble, my mother’s bed was empty, and by the time I got to the hospital, she was already in the basement, covered in a sheet.

  Her grave is down there, underneath Herot Hall. I prepared her body for burial myself. I dressed her, and put her favorite things around her, like she’d have any use for them after she was dead. Her family’s things, all of them kept generation to generation. I figured they belonged with her, not me. There was a goblet made out of silver, which I spent my childhood polishing. It had the family initials on it, and every night before bed I was the one who filled it with water from the spring. She loved it in a way that pissed me off, like she loved it more than she loved me, and most of the time I wanted to drop it in the mere, but when I found her empty bed, the goblet was sitting on her bedside table. That was what I ended up holding, like I was holding her hand. I put it in with her to go down. In my head, I was taking off forever.

  There’s no sign of her gravestone now. I don’t know how they got permission to build mini-mansions on top of a graveyard, but I guess they did. The cemetery was almost two hundred years old. People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations.

  I walked away from all of it, from the place I came from, and from anything that tried to be more than the usual world. I knew about the station, I knew why it was there, and that was all I wanted to know. I wasn’t special.

  Then my life happened.

  If they come for you, this is where you hide.

  The labor took a long time and it was as painful as any labor is. The birth was worse. Anyone who says it doesn’t hurt, they’re lying. He was born, and we both lived through it, and that’s more than nothing.

  Let him grow up, I was thinking the whole time. That’s an old prayer. It comes in every language.

  * * *

  I go back to the cave and hold the back of Gren’s skull for a moment. I stroke his forehead. I give him a walnut and he chews it slowly. I can feel the cold of the cave floor through my jeans and his sleeping bag. There’s wet on the wall, wicking upward.

  There’s a sound out there, clucking. Someone on the other side of the mountain has chickens. We got one last year, but I had to be quick, because they have dogs too. There’s a family in Herot Hall that has a parrot, and sometimes I hear it telling itself stories. Once, Gren and I saw it fly over, its wings bright red and green, talking to itself.

  “Once upon a time!” it screeched.

  My son was terrified, but dazzled. So, it turned out, was I. I’d never seen a bird like that out here before, and I was worried it’d tell the world about us, but it just flew over, looked at us with a black and glittering eye, and in a very soft voice said, “Once upon a time,” again, before it took off into the morning.

  “Hello,” I said to the bird, and then closed my mouth. Apparently parrots grieve for the dead as much as humans do, and they’re often a sad, speaking creature, capable of flying up into the trees to cry for you and all your neighbors for twenty years or more. I wish—

  I can smell Herot Hall’s dinner cooking. I wish Gren didn’t hear or smell as well as he does.

  He cocks his head and looks out into the dark. Laughter carrying up from Herot. The sound of music, louder than it was, and singing. Recorded. Ella Fitzgerald. I know this song.

  “It hurts my ears,” he says.

  Gren doesn’t know the words yet for how music makes you feel.

  “It makes me want to sing,” he says. He looks at me, his eyes darting around, looking first at one side of my face, then the other.

  “You can sing quietly,” I say. “In a whisper.”

  He whispers, “I’m singing.”

  He’s shaking with excitement. I try to distract him with a story.

  “You can never go down the mountain,” this story begins. A lot of my stories begin this way.

  “Why not?” he asks, every time I tell it.

  “Down the mountain there’s a town where everyone’s a hungry monster. The monsters tear people limb from limb—”

  “Like tree limbs?” he asks.

  “Like I might tear bark.”

  He nods. “To chew,” he says.

  “They’d tear the skin from your arm,” I say, “and eat it.”

  “What if I want to go down the mountain?” he says.

  “Want and need aren’t the same thing,” I say.

  “What if you’re sick?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’ve been sick before,” he says reproachfully, his fingertips on the scar on my face.

  “That was hurt,” I say. “Sick is something different.”

  “I don’t think they’re monsters. I watch them when you’re hunting,” Gren whispers. He hesitates a moment, then: “There’s a little boy. He plays outside.”

  “A little boy?” I ask him. I know the one he means. There’s a cold feeling in my stomach. “You can’t go down there, Gren. You know that. Tell me you hear me.”

  He looks at me defiantly and howls in harmony.

  “Shhhh!” I tell him, holding his shoulders hard.

  He keeps howling, glaring at me, high-pitched, louder and louder.

  “Do you want the monsters to kill your mama?” I don’t want to say it, but I say it.

  He hesitates, and then the howling turns to whimpering.

  I stay still, checking, hoping. There are no sounds that say anyone’s heard him. No sirens. No new lights flicking on where they face the slopes.

  I point out into the sky. A shooting star streaking across the dark. Gren’s sniffling, but he looks. I reach out my arms to my son, and he huddles into them, making himself smaller, his hard skull, his eyelashes on my face.

  Over there, when you saw a star fall, you weren’t sure if it was a star at all, or something sent from your country to blow up their country. There were, I was told, monitors showing all the people in every place, with names put to the dots. There were, I was told, when I was one of the dots, systems for making sure you killed only the monsters, not the good people.

  Who are the monsters? Who deserves killing?

  I wait for Gren to sleep. He’s not a sleeper, and neither am I. But who can sleep in a time like this?

  4

  We’re listening to a little boy at a piano, the keys halting under his fingertips.

  Beneath the mountain, in the cave, the song carries, and someone’s listening there too.

  The people of Herot Hall eat dinner, drink wine and more wine and more wine until the entire place is sleepy. Snow falls, heavy and soft, insulating the roads and rooftops, and a boy emerges from a crack in the mountainside, moving quickly. He runs down, snow kicking up around him, clouds of cold. He glances back at the place he’s come from, dodges out of sight of the cave entrance, and down the slope.

  The lights blink over him, and then he’s at the back of a house full of windows, tapping on the glass.

  Another boy appears inside the house, smaller than the first, eyes sleepy, then wide.

  They look at each other, one inside, the other outside. They put their hands on the doors and stare. The glass fogs up, and at last the boy on the inside slide
s his door open.

  He puts a finger to his lips. The other boy nods, and comes into the house, easing the door closed behind him. They are known to each other, not strangers.

  Silence here. The brightness of the snow, the shine of it under the moon. Nothing moves but tree branches weighted with ice.

  The boys are out again, the smaller one dressed for the cold. Both of them run up the hillside, out of sight of the house. The moon silhouettes two shadows as they play in the drifts, the boy from inside teaching the boy from outside how to make a snowball, the boy from outside teaching the boy from inside how to throw the snowball, hard and fast enough to hit the treetops.

  Their laughter carries up and away, and the birds consider the sound. We dampen the noise so the laughter is only murmurs, whispers, two boys at play.

  They fall on their backs and roll. They angel, arms and legs flailing, and the snow melts around impressions of wings.

  After a while, the boys make their way down again, back through the sliding doors, and into the house. The piano plays again, haltingly, four hands instead of two.

  5

  Listening halfway to the late-night news, Willa’s sitting in front of the TV in her robe and slippers, thinking about the scratches she’s just found on the kitchen door. Long and thin, and in the glass the marks of something that scratched it. She tried to do it with her own fingernails and couldn’t. The marks were on the inside. The housekeeper must have brought her dog. There’ll be a discussion.

  She looks up at the holly on the mantel. Holy, holly, thole. Thole = suffering. That drifts up from somewhere, some college intro to lit, Canterbury, something.

  Scrooge is on the screen suddenly. She’s always hated Tiny Tim. She changes the channel. Now it’s a Christmas special with folk singers in Austin, where it’s not snowing.

  It seems disrespectful to Willa, to sing winter songs in a place where the sun is shining. It was probably taped in daylight. The singer has an earnest face. She’s playing the piano. Is she even alive? This Christmas special looks 1975.

  “Chopsticks” from the music room. Da da da. DADADADADADDDAAAAAA. Then a tumult of notes, hammering on the keys.