The Mere Wife Read online

  “Stop it, Dilly!” she says, her voice sharper than she intends it to be. He’s an hour past being sent to bed, and he’s supposed to be sleeping. She wants to be sleeping too.

  The piano stops, with the sound of complaint. She hears Dilly scuffling around, and she sighs. She’ll go in, in a moment, and coax him back to where he belongs.

  There’s a small yelp she assumes to be Dilly slamming down the piano lid on his own fingers. Not the first time.

  Roger’s sitting at the table reading a medical journal. Willa eyes him from where she sits. He’s rolled up his sleeves and his collar’s undone.

  It’s Christmas Eve, the packages are already wrapped, and she takes her temperature every morning. There was a bad moment two years ago, but she managed to keep it secret. Willa wonders if she’s like a rabbit who eats its young. What if her womb is a cave full of teeth? She turns off the television and walks toward Roger.

  Her son’s standing suddenly in the door of the living room, staring at her.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed,” she tells him.

  “I’m not sleepy,” he says.

  His pajamas look damp. His hair looks damp too. A nightmare? His lips are bluish.

  “Why not?” she asks, weary of it, wanting to hold him, but he’s getting too big for that, and she doesn’t really want to, anyway. She wants to want to. What she really feels like doing is drinking in the kitchen with Roger. There he is, just out of reach, his foot in his slipper, tapping on the tile.

  “I want my friend!” says Dylan, still standing there. She’s forgotten him. “I want Gren!”

  “What’s that?” Willa says, looking down at him, hearing grain. Why would anyone want gluten?

  “My friend,” Dylan repeats. “He came to play. But he had to go home to his mommy.”

  Roger comes into the room. He bends to look at Dil. “He? Who’s he?”

  “I showed him my room,” Dil says, and shrugs. Willa looks at Roger. Roger lifts his eyebrows.

  “Is this person imaginary?” Roger says, and Willa shakes her head, knowing the answer. No child thinks his best friends are imaginary.

  “Who?” Dil says. “Gren’s real.”

  “And who’s Gren?” Willa asks, kneeling to meet Dil’s eyes. “You don’t know anyone named Gren. That’s not even anyone’s name. You know a Benjy?”

  Dylan writhes with irritation. “I’ll show you.”

  He runs down the hall and, reluctant, Willa follows him. Roger gooses her from behind, but she’s in control. She doesn’t laugh. The pill she took in the kitchen is working.

  Dil’s gone into the music room, and when she arrives there, he’s sitting at the open piano. Roger’s behind her.

  “Imaginary,” Roger whispers, and almost laughs.

  “What, Dilly?” she says. Roger has no idea what it takes to do this job every day. He’s in the city, nipping and tucking, a gardener tidying the edges of labial hedges, while Willa’s busy making Dylan into a miniature man.

  She glances into the gold-framed mirror over the piano and sees a flaw on its surface. She steps forward to brush it away, but it’s a scratch, like the ones on the kitchen door, and then she looks down at the piano keys and gasps.

  “What happened here?” Roger says.

  “I showed Gren our piano,” Dil says, and sighs. “He didn’t know how to play it. And then he saw himself in the mirror.”

  Willa puts her hand onto the keys and runs her fingers over the scratches, deep and wide. They make a sound as she touches them, a sound wrong for the moment, sudden chords, and she flinches.

  “Who’s Gren?” she asks again, in what she hopes is a casual tone.

  “My friend,” says Dil, and closes the piano lid again abruptly, nearly catching her fingers in it. “My friend who comes to play with me. Can he come again? Can you call his mommy? Can I have hot chocolate?”

  “What friend?” she presses.

  “My friend,” says Dil again. He’s gone from the room now, leaving Roger and Willa standing in front of the piano looking at each other.

  “I don’t know,” Willa says. “Maybe he got a knife?”

  “How could our son possibly get a knife?” Roger’s looking at her with more blame than she could ever deserve.

  “From the kitchen?” she says cautiously.

  Roger gives her the look he gives her when she’s failed in any small way.

  The pill overtakes her now, filling her with gloom. He is ruining its proper effect, which should be cloudless calm.

  “You’ll have to lock them up from now on. Our son? Access to knives? No, Willa. That is a no.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  She looks up, and into the mirror again. There’s no one reflecting there, no one but herself and Roger.

  Something tumbles in the kitchen, and they both run in, but it’s only Dylan scaling the cupboard, hunting marshmallows.

  She sways. My friend. My friend came to play. In the morning she’ll call her mother.

  “Time for bed,” Willa says. “No exceptions. Let me see your teeth.”

  Dilly bares them.

  “Brush them again.”

  Yes, the mothers. All of them, Roger’s too. What if the housekeeper’s bringing a dog? Maybe it’s a pit bull.

  The pill is working. She’s falling, but she’s upright. The window, the dark outside and the light inside. There should be curtains. For a moment she sees something flashing, out beyond the house.

  Roger has his hand on Willa’s thigh, pushing up her white gown. Dylan’s back in his bedroom, having drunk the hot chocolate she doesn’t remember making, but there’s the dirty pot on the stove.

  Sometimes, she tucks her son into bed and she feels like she’s tucking a wild animal beneath the covers. It’s always been that way.

  Willa shuts the kitchen door and locks it, twisting the little metal clasp that brings the bar across. There are locks on all the interior doors here.

  She turns and looks at her husband.

  “Well, I don’t know what all that was, Roger!” she says, her voice puppeted by the pill, using his name so he knows she knows it.

  “Just Dylan inventing something,” Roger says. “He has a big imagination. The knives, though? We’ll get locks for a cabinet and shut them inside it. That can’t happen.”

  Willa looks at the clock and changes the subject.

  “Merry Christmas,” she says.

  She pushes her hips up over the lip of the countertop. She’s tall enough to hop up without being awkward. She crosses and then uncrosses her legs.

  Long and pink, like fronds, she thinks. Under the nightgown, which isn’t for sleeping in, everything is cream-colored lace, trimmed in red for the holidays. The lingerie saleswoman advised her on what men want.

  It was nice to be naked in that room, watched by the saleslady, appreciated. “That suits you,” the lady said, clapping her hands. “That’s perfect.”

  Roger’s mouth is on her hip bone, and she’s arching and pushing herself up. The counters are clean. She sterilized them with a spray bottle.

  She looks out the windows as Roger pulls her nightgown off her shoulders, and she thinks, There, look at that if you’re looking. But she doesn’t see them, whoever they might be. All she sees are her breasts in their lacy half cups, falling out of the dress, hard and pale, and as Roger unties the tiny bows at the sides of her hips, the triangle of red-gold hair between her legs.

  The windows are like a mirror, light reflecting her own face, and Roger’s, the two of them in their white kitchen glowing like they’re a lighthouse, calling whatever ship, any ship. Lighthouses don’t speak only to the ships of their own country, Willa thinks, and then no.

  It’s Christmas.

  Everything is bright.

  If anyone’s watching from out there, let them watch.

  6

  Listen! It’s time for church! Bells are ringing from below, this fat homesick sound that makes me think about everything I’ve ever seen at t
his time of year, good and bad: a skinny little plastic tree in a parking lot when I was thirteen, a red nose in the desert when I was twenty-three, a rose on a motel sign when I was twenty-four, and I’m confused for a moment before I remember that it must be Christmas.

  It snowed during the night, and everything is blanketed. The world feels safer, against logic, and I feel summoned, like I might get up and run down the mountain, now, after all I’ve been and done. I haven’t been to church since I was seventeen, and the church I went to then is gone, underneath Herot Hall like everything else.

  Instead, I check traps, the ones in the darkest part of the trees, where no one can see me from below. Nothing in them. I need a bird or a rabbit.

  Gren’s still fast asleep, and so I watch Herot through the scope on my weapon. I’m not aiming at them. I’m just looking. I haven’t killed a human since Gren was born. Before that, I killed ten. That was my count. Maybe someone else’s is different.

  Seven years ago, I woke up in a hospital that wasn’t really a hospital. My guns were gone, but when I got out of there, running, I climbed into my friend Bobby’s parents’ barn in Nebraska. Hollow hoarding under a plank. Couple hundred bucks, some naked pictures of women I didn’t know, some MREs, Bobby’s M4 carbine and Beretta M9. Man was ready for any just in case. Bless you, Bobby, rest in peace. They’re up high on a ledge, originally out of reach of Gren, except now he’s tall enough to touch anything he wants. I’ve tried to teach him about danger, but he also knows how to load and fire. I needed him to know. There are emergency weapons in a situation like this. I don’t use either of them to shoot, but I keep them clean.

  I’m trying to figure out what Gren sees in the people below us, and it’s obvious. They have so many things. Everything down there is brightly colored and bountiful. Up here? Rocks, sticks, rabbits.

  The wall-sized TV is on. There are balloon animals parading down the middle of an avenue somewhere. Is there a Christmas parade now? I don’t see a child and I don’t see a husband. Just the wife, dressed, making coffee.

  The parade she’s watching is a parade of grinning giants. I saw a parade once that was all puppets with bloody mouths. That seemed more right to me, the way sticks moved them, the way they cast long shadows on the sand, and beneath the shadows little creatures scrambled, trying to get out of the sun.

  She brings a bird out of the refrigerator. A goose, plucked by someone else. I watch her at the counter with a knife, opening it up, putting her hands into it, blood in the sink. She’s stuffing this bird, and I’m up here, with my son, feeding him what tonight? The cat is turning on the spit, and no fat is dripping. There’s a squirrel too, not safe in its den, but roasting in ours.

  There’s the boy, in snow gear. He looks very small, but that’s because I’m used to Gren.

  I think about how a mother made him. I’ve been a house like that, for more than just my son. I’ve been a warm room for voices that shout and scream and tell me they’re trying to surrender. I saw a baby blow up in its mother’s arms when I was over there. A soldier touched its face and the baby cooed and the soldier gave it a kiss. Everybody died, mother, child, soldier. All the soldier’s guys died but one, and I watched that guy running crazy, out from a black and white place in the dirt.

  I saw a lot of movies played in a tent. That thing, the bomb, the baby, the last guy running? It might have been in a movie. One time I threw a beer bottle at a sheet, stretched between two buildings, and cried during a preview for something stupid I figured I’d never live to see. That’s the last time I remember watching anything on a screen.

  I think about what Gren would know if his world weren’t the size of our cave. He could see what the world really looks like. What the world really is like.

  The fossil trees, the ones around this mountain? Those trees were never hung with ropes, but that’s only because humans didn’t exist when those trees were alive.

  Down in the tunnels off the main station, there are things from a century back, people using it before us. People hid here. There’s a trunk with a jacket with a high collar, something made of dark fabric, bloodstained. A dress made of calico covered in mud at the hem. A paisley shawl. A christening gown, embroidered with flowers for some baby gone now a hundred years. If you leave things long enough, they stop belonging to anyone but the place they’re in. When I was little, I had a doll my mother found in the caves on this mountain, small bones, carved and strung together.

  My son has a rock with a fossil inside it, and that came from someone else to me, and from me to him. Discarded things can get used again, sometimes for love.

  When I get back to our cave, I find Gren’s toys on the floor. Stick dolls, each one tied together with string, each one broken into twig bits. Men he’s made. He’s killed them and I don’t know why. I don’t know what game he was playing, who he was angry at.

  “Mommy,” he says. He’s never said that before.

  He has a doll in his hand. I watch him crush it, and then throw it off the edge of the cave lip, into the water we can’t see. Something makes a sound down there.

  I’m looking at his spine, the sleek bones beneath his skin. Made by my body, those bones, and sometimes I’m broken by that too, the idea that this person came from me. I feel toxic, mostly, but I brought him into this world, and here he is. We look down into the dark together and something large splashes, a heaving up out of water, a slopping onto stone.

  “Gren,” I say. “All is well and will be well.”

  “No.” He looks up at me, and his eyes flash in the dark. “I’m not right,” Gren says. “I don’t look right.”

  “What do you look like?” I ask him. “You look like yourself.”

  He shakes his head. He crushes another stick man in his fist, and it cuts his palm. Drops of blood fall from Gren’s hand and down into the dark water. The creatures keen.

  “Stop that,” I say.

  “They’re hungry,” Gren says, and flings another drop of blood down. He had thirty men here made out of sticks. Now there are only twenty-eight. “I played with the boy from down there,” my son says, not looking at me. “You said they were monsters.”

  My heart starts pounding and I calm it as quickly as I can. I can’t scare him. I have to get him to tell me.

  “Only one person?” I say, my voice even. Calm. “Just him? Did you go down the mountain?”

  “I played in the snow with him,” he says. “He’s not a monster.”

  “Did anyone else see you?”

  There’s something else in his hand. I’ve been seeing it glittering, not thinking about it, and finally I know what it is. A Christmas bow, the kind that sticks onto a package. I’d forgotten something like that even existed. Gren brings out a box wrapped in colorful paper.

  To: Dylan

  From: Santa

  “He gave me a present,” Gren says, and his mood has changed. Now he’s happy. He looks up at me. “Can I keep it?”

  He thinks his loneliness is gone forever, but this is the thing that happens right before you learn that even though you love someone, they might not love you back.

  Is this how it is in the world, for every parent? You follow your son. You wait outside your house when he doesn’t come home, hoping there’s a god out there paying attention to you. Or you wait for your daughter. You look in the windows of cars and houses, knowing you could lose your children in a second if you let down your guard at all. This is nothing new. The world is the world.

  My world is worse than that one, but not by much.

  I think of the little boy in his bear pajamas, the way he’s running around his Christmas tree, his parents, the things he’s going to tell them about my son.

  I think about that little boy, and I feel my heart fill with grief, with end of the world, because now I know who I have to kill.

  SO

  7

  “So?” says Willa’s mother, Diane, marching in with her matriarchal unit on Christmas morning. There are five women here, all wives
and widows of Herot Hall, dressed in holiday casual, pale cashmere and pearls. The mothers travel as a pack. They station themselves on the kitchen stools. “We got up early for this.”

  “Coffee?” Willa asks, the silver tray already in her hands. This is a council of war, even though it’s Christmas Day. War is always one cup, black, no sugar, and, sure enough, the mothers take their portion.

  No one eats breakfast. If Willa offered, it would be a national scandal. The mothers count calories like kills. Beneath their sweater sleeves are arms made muscular by boxing. Three have become karate black belts out of boredom, and the rest train on the Pilates reformer daily.

  Willa ties her own wrap sweater tighter around her middle. Beneath her eyes there is a light treatment of concealer, which her mother wipes off with a disdainful fingertip, reapplying something Dead Sea from her own purse.

  “There are marks on the window,” Willa tells them. “And the piano. On the mirror above it too.”

  The mothers march through the house to examine the marks. They seem unimpressed. She’d expected more. A crew of fixers running from a van like something on television.

  “I always thought it might be a mistake to leave the back of the houses unfenced,” Willa says. “Who knows what’s on the mountain? There was that bear attack last year, and—”

  “Absolutely not,” Tina interrupts. “My husband designed Herot for safety. It’s a mountain, Willa, not a safari park.”

  “What are the marks from, then?” Willa asks, feeling slightly desperate.

  “Claudia doesn’t have a dog,” says Diane, considering.

  “Who’s Claudia?” Willa asks.

  “The woman who cleans,” says Roger’s mother, Tina, a faint edge of disapproval in her voice, which has taken on an accent. “Claudia. She’s been cleaning your house for four years. She’s from Mexico.”

  Implications. Willa feels like a candy thermometer, blood rising.

  “I know her name,” Willa says.

  Roger’s taken Dylan to build a snowman, specifically arranged by Willa so that the visit of the mothers could be a secret from him. Thank god. She doesn’t need Roger seeing this. Dylan’s vision of Christmas Day, gleaned from television, includes dawn. Willa plied him with treats, and now Roger will have reaped the rewards of sugar, Dil sobbing in the snow, irrational and bitey with his demands.