The Mere Wife Read online

  “The marks are too deep to be from a cat or raccoon,” Willa says. “They’re too deep to be from anything I can think of.”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” says Tina.

  “A delivery?” says Diane.

  “A guest with a dog?” says Tina, and gives Willa a look that feels like an ice pick to the soul.

  What guest? What implication is this? Tina might as well call her an infidel. Is that what it’s called? Tina’s never liked Willa.

  Tina puts a questioning hand on one of the two fragile balloon wineglasses on the counter, left over from last night. Both have a bloody rime of red in the bottom.

  Tina smiles at Willa, whose pulse visits her eyeballs, though she has no reason to be guilty. She’s done nothing wrong. Tina’s own son drank that wine.

  Willa knows, though. This is her own fault. She’s not supposed to rely on the mothers. She spent the night considering the way dying attacked by a mystery animal would absolve her of every carpool, every cocktail hour, every day as a daughter and mother and wife. Would dying be worth it? No.

  The mothers look around judgmentally, and at least two of them have fingers out, dragging for dust. Willa has a sudden fear that her lacy panties are on the kitchen floor.

  She glances down, but there’s only a broken gingerbread man. She tries to scoop it up before they notice, but now Willa’s on her knees and all the mothers are craning down at her like ostriches.

  “I think it was a bear,” Willa hears herself say. “I really think it was a bear.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” says Diane, and gives Willa her own ice pick look, except that this one resurrects a dead marriage and reminds Willa who the hero here really is.

  “Never mind,” says Willa. “It was probably something that happened at Dilly’s last playdate. Maybe I just didn’t notice.”

  The mothers nod. That narrative is their preferred, Willa failing slightly, regularly. Roger is perfect. Willa is not. This is usual.

  Christmas morning isn’t for package-opening, because the mothers prefer Christmas evening. The light is better then; photos live forever. They leave a stack of presents. Too many, if you ask Willa.

  “I’ll wear my armor and bring my sword tonight,” says Tina, and laughs. “It seems someone’s imagined a monster.”

  “My daughter’s not prone to imagining,” says Diane.

  “Of course she’s not,” Tina says. “She only needs to be her own lovely self, isn’t that right? Why would she need to imagine anything?”

  Willa tries to get between Tina and the fridge, but she’s not quick enough. Tina opens the door, dodging and bobbing as though the crisper contains a criminal.

  “I’d never do a goose,” Tina says, and shudders.

  “The fat,” Diane says, and nods, realigned in sisterhood.

  “I love how she doesn’t care about calories,” Tina says, and then both of them look at Willa’s waist.

  When Willa was seven months pregnant with Dylan, she and her mother went shopping, and a woman smiled at Willa. The woman was large in a way that enticed, gloriously enormous, and unapologetic. Willa smiled back, and turned to see her mother shaking a finger.

  “That’s what happens when you let yourself go,” Willa’s mother said, and glanced at the flesh on Willa’s upper arm, the creamy way it poured from her sleeve.

  “There’s a warning in this for us all,” said Diane, all but crossing herself.

  Now she lives on protein bars. They all do.

  When the mothers are finally gone, Willa puts her head inside the freezer. Of course it wasn’t a bear. It was Dylan and a paring knife. She regrets calling in the troops.

  She ordered the goose from a retailer that gave the goose’s entire family tree. It’s a heritage bird. She ordered heirloom onions and grains for stuffing. There was a ten-page photo spread in her mind, her Christmas dinner as photographed for the masses. Tagged, envied. Now the goose looks yellowish and nervous.

  She has it all under control. She’ll drain the fat. She won’t drink it. She won’t boil it and pour it over anyone. She’d never.

  She looks down at the cookie kicked beneath the counter. Dylan running through the kitchen sneaking sugar, or Roger last night, pushing her against the counter. She walks into the pantry in search of the rest of the three dozen gingerbread men, baked yesterday afternoon. She’ll decorate them. Usually she loves Christmas.

  But each gingerbread man is missing its head, neatly bitten off.

  Gren, she thinks, in spite of herself, and shivers.

  All around her the windows open onto snow, and the sky is falling. The bells are ringing out for Christmas Day, and in the foyer she hears Dil and Roger stamping their feet, the gusting smell of weather.

  She walks out into the foyer but no one’s there.

  Snow pants sprawl like a bisected corpse in the hallway. A red scarf dangles from the banister. A balaclava like a sucked dry head, skull and eyes missing, only skin left.

  A snowball hits her in the back.

  She turns and another snowball hits her hard in the face. She blinks, and tries to keep smiling.

  “Coffee?” she says, clenching in turn her teeth, her vagina, her fists.

  The men are laughing. Not men, no, she corrects. Boys. Dylan is doubled over in hilarity, and Roger’s laughing too, HAHAHAHA, DADADADA Da DA da Da Dada DADADA!

  Willa thinks about the chef’s knives in the kitchen, her brain glancing over them, the way they stand in the block like soldiers.

  “Did you eat the heads off the cookies?” she asks them. “Do you think that’s funny?”

  The white lights on the Christmas tree twinkle in staccato seizures.

  “Someone had too much wine last night,” Roger says, and then laughs. “It’s just snow, Wills. Don’t be so grumpy. It’s Christmas!”

  She flexes her muscles again, and then blows air out her nostrils like she’s a horse. She’s never had a horse. Some girls are horse girls. Willa’s a walker. Suddenly she wants a stallion, and she wants to ride into battle on it, swinging her own sword.

  Dil’s standing beside her, his hands out for the mittens to be removed. For a moment, she sees claws poking through the fingertips, and a tail whipping up behind her son, but then that’s gone.

  “I showed Daddy where I played with Gren!”

  She looks over Dil’s head at Roger, who shrugs. “Snow angels,” he says. “He went out to run around. There were some tracks, but it wasn’t anything. I’ll get Mark to come out with me and have a look.”

  “There are bears here,” she reminds him. One got into the trash and made a mess of turkey legs and gullets last Thanksgiving.

  “Bear tracks don’t look like that,” he says. “Also, it’s winter. This is just kids. Don’t worry. Enjoy Christmas. And your mother. We saw her car leaving, and my mother’s car too, and who else, Margaret, and Alice? Patricia? The entire club, actually, which seems a little much, if you ask me. But you didn’t.”

  Willa studies Roger, who is losing his hair as he stands before her. She drifts back to the kitchen and stares up the misty mountain. The slope is smooth as vanilla ice cream. The bells ring again.

  From the living room there’s the sound of the piano, not “Chopsticks” but something else, a tune she’s never heard before. It makes her stomach tilt, her ears prickle, and bile rise in the back of her throat. It’s not beautiful. It’s strange.

  Willa listens for a moment, then yanks a chef’s knife from the block, but when she gets to the room, only Dylan’s there, sitting on the bench. She puts the knife behind her back.

  “What was that?”

  “Gren taught me a song,” Dil says, and smiles giddily, his tiny pale self, milk teeth.

  Willa is reminded of an X-ray photo she saw once, of a little boy’s skull, the way the adult teeth were lodged high up near the nasal cavity and deep in the chin, hidden above and below the pointed, pliable baby teeth, double rows, like those in a shark’s mouth.

  She
goes back toward the kitchen, boiling. Why did she say she’d cook this goose? There’s supposed to be some sort of archaic feast and packages, and everyone singing around the tree, in seven hours and thirty-seven minutes.

  She’s walking barefoot across the soft pile of the rugs, when her heel catches on something. She drops to her knees and crawls, her face an inch from the floor.

  There are snags all along the passageway. She blinks, feeling dizzy.

  She unlatches something sharp from the carpet fibers.

  It’s the sheathing of a claw, hooked as a tiger’s, pearlescent white.

  8

  “So it fucking goes, man,” one of the other officers laments as Ben Woolf picks up a phone that’s not supposed to be ringing. It’s Christmas Day. Then again, why are there officers in the police station at all, if possibility’s on pause?

  Ben Woolf’s been up since five in any case, doing what a man of a certain age needs to do to stay combat-ready. Bodies want to crumble.

  Fifteen miles on the stationary bike. Four hundred sit-ups, bench press, elliptical, pecs, speed bag, stairs, high school bleachers, up them, down them, chin-ups, yoga plank cooldown. Shower in ice water (circulation), jerk off while showering, why not, though the cold water makes that a challenge, dress in uniform, comb hair neatly, and out of there by 6:45. Steak tartare. Raw egg.

  Ben Woolf may be forty (face it, forty-four), but he’s in the best shape of his life. He’s never off-duty, despite the drowsy nature of this situation. Trees fall on houses and he has to be there, nature committing crimes against property. People collapse in the middle of the grocery store, or end up driving while dead. Crime doesn’t sleep and Ben doesn’t either.

  Now it’s nine, and Ben’s been sitting in the station, alert for hours, waiting for anything at all to happen. Chief is midway through his third piece of fruitcake. Ben watches as he brings a bite to his mouth. He’s an old man with years of service. His hand shakes as he lifts his coffee mug. Ben sets his face in the expression he’d show his dad, good men united in a fight for justice, and lifts the phone to his ear.

  “Ben Woolf here,” he says. He doesn’t know how to answer the phone. The receptionist is off.

  “Hello?” It’s a woman on the other end. “Is this the police?”

  “This is Officer Woolf,” Ben says, and she laughs, which catches him off guard entirely.

  “That’s funny,” she says, and then, “No, it’s not funny. I’m sorry, it’s not funny.”

  “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?” he asks.

  “It’s just that there’s been an animal,” she says. “A wild animal. In my house. That’s why I laughed. Wolf. I mean, it’s probably not a wolf.”

  She’s on speaker, and the other officers look at him. Chief twirls a finger beside his ear and Ross makes a gesture that causes Ben to avert his eyes.

  “What kind of animal is it?”

  She pauses, clearly thinking.

  “No, not a wolf. It might be a tiger. I know how that sounds.”

  “Miss,” Ben says.

  “Mrs.,” says the woman. “Willa Herot.”

  Ben sees Chief mouthing obscenities. He finds the mute button.

  “Even if she’s calling about an imaginary tiger stuck in a powder room, you’re still going out to Herot Hall, Woolf, Merry Christmas to you. They donate.”

  “They should have their own police,” another officer mutters. “They have all the money in the world.”

  Ben gets the particulars and hangs up.

  “Got enough calories in you?” asks Chief. “My wife made cookies.”

  He pushes a dish of Christmas at Ben, who shudders in revulsion and longing. There are no carbohydrates worth it.

  “Suit yourself,” Chief says. “Wear your snow gear. Like as not they’ll send you hiking up that damn mountain, treat you like some kind of neighborhood watch. Any trouble with them, tell them it’s Fish & Game’s job, and you’re there on a mercy mission because of the holiday. Don’t do anything that might get you rabies.”

  “And don’t get eaten by a tiger, buddy,” one of the officers says as Ben heads out. Ben almost turns to see what’s got him going, but it’s not worth it. People sometimes hate Ben. They take one look and think, Fuck that guy. Nobody’s fault but their own.

  It’s a commuter town, but the commute isn’t complete to Herot. The train stops near the police station, and then it’s a forty-minute drive through forest to the mountain. Up and down the river there’s nothing but trees. There’s not a lot in the way of local employment either, couple cafés, couple gas stations, a general store. They’ve gated themselves in up there. The place is like a fortress.

  Woolf doesn’t understand it. Why isolate yourself? He likes to hear his neighbors. His childhood was orphanage to foster home, and when at last he was adopted he went quickly from being a beautiful boy into an awkward adolescent with acne-spackled skin, thin as a chopstick. He grew twelve inches in a summer, swam instead of talking, and almost made the Olympic team. His life was a series of almosts, until he joined the Marines and went to war, where the almosts became certainties.

  It’s been a long time since he’s killed anyone. He drives fast, and, as usual, his brain’s full of the dead. He counts them like sheep. Some were killed by bombs, some by drones, some by Ben’s gun. He did okay. Better there than here.

  This job in the shadow of the mountain, at the edge of the lake, isn’t much of a killing job. This is a slip-and-fall, shoplifter-busting job. There are better jobs, though, and Herot, maybe, is the ladder to them. The money and the backers. Some jobs are elected. It’s Ben’s job to make nice until he gets himself to the chief position, or higher yet, maybe, running all the stations on this side of the river. State politics, even national. Not today. Animal roaming a suburb. It’ll be a stray dog, maybe a raccoon, at best a possum.

  He pulls through the gate in his cruiser, rings the bell, and waits for them to let him in. The house is mostly glass. There’s nothing wrong here. He can see all the way through, from the front door to the mountain behind it. It’s tight as a bedsheet.

  Nobody’s dead in this house. Nobody needs to be killed either. He misses the war. What kind of heroics are possible? Cats in trees and old ladies on floors. It’s enough to make a man fall into ruin, and plenty of men do. Ben sucks in his gut preemptively.

  The wife opens the door and stares at him, as though he’s a surprise. Tall, blond, he doesn’t notice the rest.

  “You called the police?” he says to her. “I’m Officer Woolf.”

  It’s his height she’s reacting to, probably, greater than her own. She puts out her hand and waves it at the world, holding a full cup of coffee, then brings it back in just as he reaches out his own hand to take the handle. He sees her lipstick on the rim and realizes his mistake. Embarrassing.

  “There’s a tiger,” she says. “Or a lion. Or a bear!”

  He looks at her. Drugs?

  “Welcome to Herot Hall,” she says, correcting her tone. “There’s no hall, though. Only walls and fences.”

  “Fish & Game’s off today, or you’d be getting a man with a truck,” Ben says. “Instead, you get me. I’ll take a look around.”

  “There were claw marks in the window,” she says. “And in the door. There were claw marks in the carpet. I wasn’t going to call, but—”

  Ben makes sure his eyes are kind. He is thinking about the likelihood this woman is entirely crazy. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’s had women wriggle their fingers and walk in the direction of the bedroom.

  “—but then, we started to think about how whatever it was, it was in the house with our son. What could have happened. What almost did happen, and—”

  “We had to call,” says the husband, arriving behind her. “There are children here, for God’s sake.”

  Ben reassesses. She’s not inviting him in for that purpose, then. Or at least not obviously.

  He tries not to look at the lace he sees under her sweat
er. Wrap sweaters always make him want to untie things and then double knot them. It’s a failing.

  “This is my husband, Roger Herot,” she says. “Roger, this is Officer Woolf. Come in.”

  Into the house, then, all waxed wood floor and stainless appliances. The dining room contains a table for more people than could possibly ever eat dinner here, and there are tremendously high ceilings, cathedral, that’s the word for them. They’re almost high enough to make Ben feel he doesn’t need to stoop to walk politely.

  “Can I offer you anything?” the wife asks.

  “Water, thank you,” says Ben, and she brings him something not from the tap, but a bottle with a European label.

  “It tastes like sulfur,” she says, noticing his hesitation. “The tap water. Roger likes it, but I think it’s disgusting. People used to come here to soak in it, can you imagine? People used to think this mountain was haunted, but now it’s just a mountain.”

  Woolf sits down on the couch. At any moment they’ll offer him carbs.

  The child runs through, making his way from end to end of the room chanting a singsong.

  “Gren, Gren, Gren,” the child sings. “Gren, Gren, Gren!”

  Imaginary friend, the husband mouths.

  “Well,” says the wife.

  Woolf feels a button on his uniform beginning to detach, and makes a mental note to stitch it back on, tighter this time.

  “It was Gren,” says the child, planting himself on the couch, looking like an ancient and weary king. “And me. We played.”

  The wife holds out her hand. In it, there’s a claw sheathing.

  So, he revises. It’s something large, an illegal seller, someone with a stash locked behind a barbed-wire fence. Some people like to pretend they’re still fighting a great battle against the creatures of Earth, that the world remains wild around them. Other people like to think they’re building Noah’s trailer park.