by Abi Maxwell
“Don’t make any noise,” Henrietta whispered to him, and he did not. He just stood there and let his pants slide off like water. And the rest of it, it was all so silent, so fluid. In the morning he was gone without a trace, but after that he snuck back into her bed over and over again.
* * *
—
The man with the chickens lived a few peninsulas over. Alicia stayed at home with the babies while Brian and Henrietta went to pick them up. On the way, they passed a line of trucks parked bumper to bumper, blocking the entrance to a road. Brian slowed down, peered over, then said, “Hope they catch the fuckers.”
“Who?” Henrietta asked. “Catch what?”
“Coyotes,” he said. He said that the road was the only entrance to a peninsula that had been overtaken by the animals, and that just now residents were chasing them down, herding them toward the land’s narrow end. On their way, they would invariably cross the logging roads, and there they’d find men waiting to shoot them.
“Why would they?” Henrietta asked.
“You’ll be shooting them yourself once you have chickens.”
“I’ve had chickens before,” Henrietta said. “And coyotes. They lived in our woods. They never killed our animals.” It was the first time she had ever spoken of home, and she found herself wanting to continue. To tell Brian the story her father had always told her, about the family in the woods. To tell him about her romantic sister, who had always imagined that family had transformed, when clearly—because it had always been so clear to Henrietta—they had just gone off to some other life.
She didn’t say a thing, though. Nothing more than that she had once had chickens and coyotes. Even that felt somehow like too much. Like to speak of it would be to call it back—and if she did that, how would she ever stay away?
At the farmer’s house, Brian introduced Henrietta, and the farmer said, “Now, how’d you find yourself a woman like this?” They lifted the crates into the bed of the truck and drove home, and Henrietta had the distinct feeling that together they were building a life. She almost said as much.
When they pulled in, though, Alicia came to the door of the barn. She had a pitchfork in her hand. She wasn’t doing anything with it at that moment, just standing there, but when Henrietta looked, Alicia struck her as the husband of American Gothic. She had grown up with that painting, too—it had hung in the upstairs bathroom her entire life, and it, like Christina’s World, had been a comfort. Now, though, when Henrietta looked at her, she was filled with a very certain terror. Just there, with the pitchfork in her hand, Alicia had claimed this land. She would not leave, not ever, not for anything.
* * *
—
Henrietta told the cook about being with Brian. She felt that comfortable with him. She could tell him anything. She told him that at night, in her room, it was like magic. Like something so perfect she could scarcely remember it, like it hadn’t even existed.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” the cook said. “Maybe you’re just insane.”
“Stop,” she said. “That’s not the problem.” The problem, she explained, was that in the daytime—and particularly when Alicia was around—Brian acted like they’d practically never met. She said, “What the hell is wrong with me? It’s like he’s hiding it.” She took another drink of wine, which was their habit. She’d work the front of the restaurant, and in the back, he’d keep her glass full.
Finally he said, “It’s not you. It’s Alicia, he and Alicia.” He winked at her and made a crass motion with his hands and she knew exactly what he meant.
“No,” she said. “No, it can’t be.”
Timothy Vallilee just smirked.
* * *
—
At home, Henrietta thought of that story of the sailor and the mistress that Brian had told them. Had it even been true? And did that make her the new mistress of the house? Or had Brian made the story up in order to prepare the two of them to share one man?
It was her house. Not hers exactly, but close enough. Brian and Alicia had moved into her space. And she would not be made a fool.
* * *
—
“I just want them to admit it,” she told the cook.
The cook shrugged.
“I have to know,” she said.
“Who cares?” he said. He told her to kick them out or let them stay. He told her to get on with her life.
“You have to help me,” she pleaded.
“Just don’t sleep with him again. Who cares if they lie to you?”
She said, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” It had just come out of her mouth, no thought involved. But now that it was out it occurred to her that she had hit on an important question. She studied the back of his head. If he doesn’t turn around and look at me, she decided, he is hiding something.
He didn’t turn. If he had, would it have meant that her son’s entire childhood would have been spent in that beautiful, desolate place? And if so, would he have ever gone to meet his family, just six hours away?
Alicia and the cook had known each other forever, after all. Suddenly Henrietta remembered that. Obviously the cook would be on Alicia’s side.
* * *
—
My father used to beat my mother, Henrietta lied to the cook one night. She hadn’t planned to. It just came out before the idea took full shape. But then it did—the idea became a clear, solid plan. Because of course there was a certain way to gain the cook’s respect. All it would take was a limited amount of harmless lies. She said, I used to try to stop him, but then I’d just hide in the closet. She said, My high school teacher gave me a failing grade when I refused to make out with him. No one believed me. Eventually I dropped out. She said, I had a dog, but when he bit my father, my father made me shoot him myself.
It worked. In two short weeks, Timothy Vallilee not only believed that Henrietta was the strongest girl he’d ever met, but also that she deserved to be treated better. He began to say “You got brains, kid” and “You might not had it easy but you done a good job,” and a hundred other meaningless phrases she had molded him to say. And then, at last: “Those two, sneaking around, using you. Isn’t fucking right.”
“It’s not,” Henrietta said.
“We’ve got to get them,” the cook said.
“Teach them a lesson.”
“Show them who’s in charge.”
Henrietta said, “They won’t tell me. Not ever.”
“Oh, those fuckers.”
“I know.”
“Alicia,” he said.
“I know.”
“We should get them,” Timothy said. He went on to tell some story about when he was in the army. He talked about the ways they used to get people—shaving cream, honey; Henrietta wasn’t really listening. It was something benign, really. Nothing at all compared to what they were about to do.
She said, “I just want them to admit it.”
“They won’t.”
“No.”
“There has to be a way,” he said.
* * *
—
Unlike the list of destruction that Henrietta had kept for Kaus, she and the cook kept this list in their minds. They tossed ideas out as they heated buns and made salads and stirred pasta sauce and filled pitchers with ice. Henrietta could pretend to be at work but really hide in the closet to catch them at it. She could set up tape recorders in their rooms. Nothing much. Nothing harmful. Any one of the plans would have worked fine, and all of them, they knew, would never come to pass.
But then one night she said, “If I took her kid.” Why, why ever, did she say it?
“No.”
“I don’t mean forever. Just made her go missing.”
Timothy gave a malicious and eager little smile. Go on.
“Just to see how he reacts,�
� she said. “Just to see if in the heat of the moment it slips from him. That he loves her. Alicia. That he loves Alicia.”
He said, “Maybe he thinks the baby’s in the car, and the car gets stolen.”
“Or Alicia disappears too, and then he freaks, says he has to find his woman.”
They went on and on like this. Hatched a thousand different plans to separate Alicia from her baby in a way that might make Brian mistakenly come clean. The little game echoed her terrible childhood one, and yet she barreled forward just the same. On some level, it was fun. Terrible but delicious. Besides, she would never go through with it.
* * *
—
“I got it,” the cook said one night. A Friday, early November, dark and slow. He tipped a giant box of bowtie pasta above a pot of boiling water, but his aim was off, and most of the dry pasta fell on the floor.
“Are you drunk?” Henrietta asked, kidding.
“Yes,” he said.
He proceeded to tell her his plan while she swept up the pasta and put it in the pot, lint and dirt and all. There was nothing complicated about it. She would creep into the room at night and take the baby. Call the cook when she had her. He would meet her at the end of the driveway, and from there he would take the baby to his house. It wasn’t such a big deal, Henrietta always remembers telling herself. They were going to be safe. She would bring the car seat.
“We have to do it tonight,” he said.
“No.”
“Now or never,” he taunted.
“This is stupid.”
“Your life is stupid,” he said, and handed her a glass of cheap, sweet merlot.
* * *
—
At the restaurant, Henrietta kept drinking wine and kept getting happier and happier. Charley was safe—even if she didn’t trust her with Brian, she always trusted Alicia with her baby, always—and Henrietta was filled up with the thrill of it.
“Won’t you make your baby drunk if you go home and feed him?” the cook asked.
She told him she had extra milk in the freezer. She told him she was prepared for this sort of occasion.
“Wait,” he said. “What if Alicia’s baby wakes up? What if she gets hungry?”
“That baby sleeps right through the night,” she said. “I think there’s something wrong with her.” She poured herself more wine, and then she slid so smoothly into this terrible and familiar role of hers. When the restaurant finally closed and she made her way home, she decided that they must have had a fight, Alicia and Brian. Or they must have suspected something, been afraid to be caught, because typically when she arrived home they would be awake, laughing, watching TV, sitting side by side on the stiff couch. But tonight they were both already asleep, Alicia in her bedroom and Brian in his. No matter. It made the plan that much easier. Henrietta went upstairs, checked on her Charley. Sound asleep. She turned the monitor off and tiptoed back down, into Alicia’s room. She was a little drunk. More than a little. The door creaked as she opened it and Alicia rustled. She, too, was a new mother, after all.
“Henrietta,” she said.
“Shh,” Henrietta said.
“Henrietta, I’m so sorry.” Her head was still on the pillow. Her eyes, from what Henrietta could tell, were closed. And because of this, she could tell herself that Alicia hadn’t really known what she was saying at all.
“You’re sleeping,” she whispered as she approached the crib on the far side of the room. Her words slurred a bit. “Go to sleep,” she said.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Alicia said again. This time she sat up. She said, “You were my only friend in the world.”
What was Henrietta supposed to do? She went to her, patted her head until she lay back down. Told her not to worry about a thing.
“It’s a dream,” she said. “You’re having a dream.”
When Alicia nodded back off completely, Henrietta took her sleeping baby, slipped out, and tiptoed upstairs, peeked in at her Charley again, and then went to the phone in the hall. It’s a wonder they all stayed sleeping. Even that little baby girl in her arms.
At first the cook didn’t answer. And then, instead of waiting for Henrietta to call back, he called the house. She answered before the first ring was complete.
“What are you doing?” she hissed into the phone.
“Operation SBB,” he said. Henrietta had no idea what that stood for. She told him to come over but to not drive up the driveway. Charley would be fine; everyone would be fine. It would take only a minute to walk to the end of the driveway and back. She bundled that baby up and went out.
* * *
—
Henrietta has never been able to remember that moment when she handed the baby over to Timothy. She can’t remember watching him drive away with that poor sleeping baby in the back of his car. But the night itself, that is clear: she stayed up all night, drinking water and tea and just watching her baby breathe. He woke up twice. Each time, she fed him warmed milk in a bottle, just in case she’d had too much to drink. While he slept she became overwhelmed with the fact that he was a person, his own whole person. That he would one day love someone. Charley, she whispered. She promised him a better life. It wasn’t until two chickadees started calling back and forth to each other that it occurred to her not only how horrible of a person she was and what a scar she could leave on that baby, but also that she could go to jail for what she had done. That she had to undo it immediately, before anyone woke up, if she meant to make any kind of life.
Just then the door swung open.
“Henrietta?”
Alicia looked so childlike, there in her plaid pajamas and her loose ponytail.
“Henrietta, where’s Robin?”
“What?”
“You have her, right?”
Did she answer? What, right then, became of her face? Her being? What had already become of it? What does it mean, really, for a person to lose her mind? Is it any less real than the full loss of her that her own family had experienced?
“Oh my god,” Alicia said.
Henrietta hadn’t planned on this. Hadn’t even thought of it. She’d only imagined the shame she could subject the two of them to, and somehow she’d ignored the fact that it would be Alicia, Alicia alone, who would suffer the worst kind of pain imaginable. When she said that, Oh my god, her skin paled and her eyes dropped and Henrietta felt certain, right then, that Alicia would never again be the same. Up until this moment, despite her lack of a foot up in the world, her personality had shielded her from any sense of real trouble. Now she had been forced to wake up. Henrietta had forced her.
“I don’t know,” Henrietta said, in response to nothing, but Alicia probably didn’t hear her. She was already turned around, had already begun to run through the house, open all the doors, and scream for her child. The baby was almost five months old now. She could roll over sometimes, but that’s about it. She could not have gone anywhere unless someone had taken her. Still, Brian and Henrietta trailed Alicia, pretending it was possible that the baby had crawled out of her crib to a new place to sleep. Anyway, they couldn’t have stopped her from looking in this way if they’d tried. She was fierce, directed, monstrous. Finally, Brian went to the phone.
“What are you doing?” Henrietta snapped, and when he said he was calling the police, Henrietta grabbed the phone from him.
“No,” she said.
“What is wrong with you?”
They looked at each other, and there it was, somehow. At least, Henrietta always thought so, thought that at that moment Brian had understood. Had seen right through her. He handed the phone to her without a word, then left her standing there, alone, while he helped Alicia to the kitchen, sat her down, got her a glass of water, and put the kettle on for tea.
Finally Timothy picked up. “For the love of God,” he said. “Come save
this baby.”
On her way out, Henrietta went through the kitchen. She lied, of course, told Alicia she had called the police, that she would now go to the station to file a report. She said she was sure the baby was okay.
“How can you be sure?” Alicia demanded.
“I just can,” Henrietta said wholeheartedly, and it was the last thing she ever said to her. Charley was in his playpen, and before Henrietta left the house she swooped him up and gave him a spin, and then put him back down with a kiss. In that playpen he had a little crinkly book made of fabric that he liked to chew, and also a baby mirror to look into. Henrietta held that mirror up for him for one moment before it struck her that Brian had provided her with one last, final chance to be good.
She pulled back in a half-hour later. Alicia looked out the window and when she saw that Henrietta had a car seat in her arms, she came running out. She grabbed her baby and didn’t so much as look at Henrietta. In that way, no explanation was ever needed. Henrietta packed her things quickly. She considered stealing one cookbook but decided to leave it, vowing that her days of dishonesty were through. She left the house while the three of them were playing in the living room. Didn’t even say goodbye. The drive took five whole days. She stopped at motels to get what sleep she could, but she was always back up and on the road before the sun. She stayed off the highways because the car still wasn’t registered and because she still had no license. She kept calling out to Charley as she drove. “Hello!” she’d coo a little manically. “We’re okay!” Every now and then she reached back and dropped a handful of Cheerios onto his lap, and in fear of him entering into an inconsolable fit she sang a constant string of every childhood song she could remember.
It wasn’t until they crossed into North Dakota that she finally felt like she could let out her breath, like she had gotten far enough away to know that she would make it. This was the last state to cross before she reached her destination. She relaxed a little as she drove, stopped with the singing and instead began to talk. She told Charley the story of the first time she’d ever sneaked one of her father’s horses out of the barn and into the woods to ride. She knew he couldn’t understand a story at this age, but still it felt so good to tell. She told him about playing house in The Den with her sister. His car seat faced the back, so when she stole glances of him in the rearview mirror she could only see his little feet inside his little pajamas, but he seemed happy. Maybe he was sleeping, but at least he wasn’t crying. She kept talking. “Once upon a time,” she said when her memories ran out. “A family of five lived in a house in the woods. One night, the temperature dropped and the world turned to ice, even their windows turned to ice.” It was the first time she had ever told the story. She found herself trying to imitate her father—not what he told but the way he told it. That strong, full voice. But as for the details, she gave Charley an almost entirely different version. “The parents had come from Scotland,” she said to her son. “That’s a country on the other side of the ocean. They came here for a new life, for freedom, but they didn’t find it. They had to escape,” she said. She tried to think of a reason why this would be true, and finally she just decided to keep on. She said, “I can’t explain why. When you are older I can. But they had to escape,” she repeated, “so what they did, they waited for a storm. There were coyotes who lived in their woods. When the storm came the family went to the coyote den and held out raw meat to tempt the animals. With the meat they led them back to their own home. Make this your den, they told the animals. They threw the meat on the floor and ran, and the townspeople, they thought the family had been—” But she stopped herself, not wanting to say something so gruesome to her boy, despite the fact that he would not understand.