The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  “What?”

  “Come on, Jane,” he said. “Stop it.”

  “Fine,” I said, and I lay the phone book in front of him on the table. I opened it and pointed to Kaus’s name. “I’m surprised they still print our addresses right there for the entire world to see, though.”

  “Who is this?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

  It’s strange how my brain took in that question, how it processed it with remarkable speed yet at the same time saw it all in slow motion. It was like a wave washed through our kitchen, over our bodies. I felt as Henrietta had in her nightmares, like beneath the weight of that water we still spoke yet could not be heard. When the wave passed and we came out on the other side, I suddenly saw the entire story through my husband’s eyes. I saw the story I believed, too—a lecherous doctor, and Henrietta’s silence bought by that briefcase; or, maybe, that briefcase the ransom she held against his trespass on her body. But now I also saw what I had taught Clarence to see: an innocent Henrietta, a virtuous one. A fire that came before it all, that stood alone, unconnected.

  We stayed up half the night. I told him everything I knew. Finally I said the worst of it as plainly as I could. I said, “He was sent away for the fire I started.”

  “Does he know about their son?” my husband asked me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Charley. Does Kaus know?”

  “Why would Charley be his? Why wouldn’t he be the doctor’s? Or anyone’s?”

  My husband shrugged. He wanted to know where Kaus’s name had come from. I remembered that day when my sister and I had lain on the braided rug together and I’d watched her trace the shape of her lover’s homeland. “Laos,” I said. “I think he was from Laos.”

  “I’m just saying,” my husband said. “That boy I met.”

  “What about him?”

  “He maybe looked Asian,” my husband said. “You could find him. You could find her and her son.”

  “Stop it,” I said. “This conversation isn’t about that. I’m trying to talk about Kaus. I’m trying to ask you what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Go apologize.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “You have legs,” he said. “You can walk there.”

  “Fuck you,” I told my husband, but he was right. I am trying to work up my courage. I do intend to atone.

  * * *

  —

  For days my husband asked me the same awful question: “Have you made your plans yet?” For Kaus’s, for Montana. I had never seen him so disappointed in me before. I felt like a prisoner, like he was watching me, waiting. Finally one night I woke up to the freedom of his heavy sleep. I tiptoed down the stairs. The night had brought a soft darkness, the kind just light enough to make out the shapes of trees out the window. So many times I had looked out our windows at night and willed some wanderer from the past to appear. Now I looked out and felt just what I’d understood my sister to: nothing. I pulled the lamp on and found that old book on the shelf. I wanted to burn it. I wanted to kill that coyote story, if such a thing were possible. I wanted to kill that story and all others that had ever encouraged my mind toward fantasy. Yet still I found my hands holding the book’s familiar skin, sifting through its pages, opening to just the spot I had always opened to. All alive in this town will remember, I read. I knew those words so well, but now as I looked at them they seemed to float above their yellowed page, released from the place they had always occupied in my mind. I had to concentrate on each word, each sound, to make sense of it. In this way, I read the story anew. I read it as my cold sister would and when I read that final sentence—No trace of the Ross family remains, nor any trace of this vicious new predator from the West—I stood and threw the book to the floor and yelled my husband’s name. A flash of his deep sleep crossed my mind. I yelled again for him. “Jane?” he finally called. “Jane, where are you?” He kept calling my name as he emerged from bed and ran down the stairs, but I didn’t answer him. I just stood there, removed. When he found me he picked up the book, returned it to its shelf, and sat me down on the couch. I remember thinking that he had put the book away, out of my reach, before doing anything else.

  “How could I be so stupid?”

  “Jane,” he said.

  “How could you let me?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Those people didn’t fucking turn into coyotes.”

  “Well, no. Maybe. It’s just a story, Jane.”

  Just a story. What a shock to see that Henrietta, who scarcely ever read a book, should have understood the story better than all of us.

  “They escaped,” I said. “Every single one of them.”

  Clarence was not happy with me for saying this. He was waiting for me to say that with this information I would move on, would do something real. Apologize to Kaus, find Henrietta. When instead I told him that I would now be able to find out the truth of what had become of them, he left me there on the couch alone.

  In the morning, I went back to the State Library. I had written my question across the top of my notebook: Did they return home? I put my pen down and reread the question I had written, and suddenly I realized something. Colin, Evan, and Jeremiah—those children, according to the story, would have been born in New Hampshire, and if in fact they made it back home, they most likely would have died in Scotland. That was something uncommon, and searchable.

  I had wasted the better part of a year with records that led to nothing, but now that I had the right question it didn’t take long. I was alone in the genealogy room when I found the first record. The room is dark, windowless, and when I opened the document the computer screen glowed in a new way, like a beacon before me. Nobody else was in the room and I was acutely aware of the smell of all the old records that filled the shelves around me. Even though the record I looked at was on the computer I felt like I could smell it, too. An 1861 Scotland census report for one Evan Ross, born in New Hampshire in roughly 1840, father’s name Thomas and mother’s name Elspeth, living in civil parish Monifieth, County Angus, Scotland. And at the bottom of the document, a list. Household members—Thomas Ross, forty-one; Elspeth Ross, forty-one; Ann T. Ross, twenty-three; Jeremiah Ross, nineteen. I touched the screen. They might as well have come to life right before my eyes.

  I was giddy, could barely sit still. I took out my phone to call my husband. My hands were so unsteady that it took some time, but finally I got through to his voicemail. “I found them!” I said. “They returned to their country, Clarence, I found them.” After that I hung up the phone and looked awkwardly around the empty room. I gathered up my things into a mess that I shoved into my bag, and I went outside and practically ran up and down the city block a few times. I stepped into the bakery and bought a ham-and-cheese croissant, which I devoured, and then I rushed back to the library, back to my seat. By the end of the day I had located the marriage record for Evan, which accounted for Ann, and the census report that Colin, the oldest, had filled out. He was in that town, too, living with a wife and two children and two others who must have been their grandparents. I printed all the records, and then I searched the town itself. There’s a historical society there that seems to be active. They research and collect documents and stories connected to the town, so I’ve decided I will call them up, ask them if they have any records about the mysterious family of my woods.

  When I left that evening, I intended to go straight home. As I drove I daydreamed that maybe, just maybe, Elspeth kept some sort of diary of her life, and that now that diary, bound safely in leather, waited for me in Scotland. When I came up from my daydream, I found myself on the road to the coast, to my parents’ house.

  * * *

  —

  My parents were asleep by the time I arrived. I knocked frantically and when my father answered
the door he said, “My god, Jane, where’s the fire?”

  I could see my mother behind him, in the doorway to their small bedroom. I pushed past him to the table and laid the papers out. “I’ve been researching,” I said. I wanted to say what I’d been wondering my entire drive: What if this piece of history had been planted into my childhood self? What future would that have created? But I didn’t know how to say it.

  “These people,” I said. “From the story. Look. They returned home.” They came to the table, picked up the papers, began to read. As they did, I said the rest as quickly as I could. Clarence’s phone call from Montana. Henrietta, Charley.

  “What are you talking about?” my mother asked.

  I looked pleadingly at my father but he just looked right back at me, his expression totally devoid.

  “Jane,” my mother said, her voice as hateful as I had ever heard it. “What are you doing showing us these people from some other century when for weeks you could have told me that my daughter was alive, that your husband had seen my daughter?”

  “Sylvia,” my father said.

  My mother gathered up all the papers from the table. “Get out,” she said to me.

  “Sylvia,” he said again.

  “Out,” she said, and she shoved the papers against my chest then returned to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  “It’s not nothing,” I said pathetically to my father, indicating the records I had found. But how to explain to him what it meant? It wasn’t only that I had spent my life believing in shape shifting when all along the story had been an escape. It wasn’t only that Henrietta, too, had escaped. It was that despite all of it, despite the fact that my sister had abandoned us and I had wasted my life, something still meant something. History still had repeated itself. Or history was just a story, but the story still mattered.

  Henrietta

  HER SON was at the wheel. They had already crossed the Rocky Mountain Front and had now been released into the plains. Tumbleweed blew across the golden fields. Memories darted into Henrietta’s mind as they drove, and she had the sense that it was because there were no mountains or trees on the horizon to stop them from flooding in. She remembered her Charley as a baby in the back of the car, making this same drive west. She remembered her first days in Montana, in a motel room so stuffy she could scarcely breathe. She remembered the first friend she had made, Jackie, another single mother who had lived nearby her. They wouldn’t have even become friends had Jackie not been so insistent on it.

  Henrietta had first met Jackie on a park bench while their children played. Both of their boys had been two. She and Jackie had talked about naps, bedtime, meals—the sort of tedious conversation that Henrietta loathed. But Jackie had said she’d be back the same time the next day, and so Henrietta agreed to meet her. After that, their get-togethers quickly became regular. Jackie had been born in Montana, as had her parents and grandparents, and she took pride in introducing Henrietta to the state. She told Henrietta to get herself a cowboy hat and boots, to start listening to country music, to learn to dance the two-step. Finally, after weeks of begging, she convinced Henrietta to leave Charley and her own son with her babysitter, and to go dancing. It was the first time Henrietta had gone out since beginning this new life, and she had been apprehensive about it, but in spite of herself she’d enjoyed choosing what to wear, looking in the mirror, putting lipstick on, leaving Charley. They were underage but in that town it hadn’t mattered; they went to bar after bar. Still, Henrietta didn’t drink at all and Jackie had only one beer. They just danced while bands played, and at the places where there were no bands they fed quarters into the jukeboxes. Mostly they danced together, but then Jackie began dancing with a man, so Henrietta did the same. He was tall, with a burst of blond, curly hair, and he had a large, angular nose that gave him a goofy look and made her feel comfortable with him. At one point as they danced he said, “What are we doing?” Surely he had been referring to whatever sort of dance they’d been attempting, but she looked right at him and said, “Falling in love, of course.”

  It was the last bar they went to. There was a long hallway at the back of the bar that led to the alley, and Henrietta went into it with him. As they kissed she imagined that he could lift her up around him, that without too much effort she could undo her pants right there against the wall. Jackie found her quickly, though, said it was midnight and time to go. He asked for her phone number and she instinctively gave him a fake one. It was because they had touched each other with such hunger. She knew where it could lead.

  As the years passed, though, there had been a few other men. People at work would set her up or she would get to know a customer. She would go on dates with them, would usually sleep with them, but she would never let them into her life. Eventually she’d taken a few adult classes, one on Chinese cooking, one on flower gardens, and, when she’d saved up enough money, one on horseback riding. There she met a man who worked at the stables. She’d instantly felt at ease with him, and he became the first man she ever told about Charley. He had no children but did not flinch when she told him about her son, as she’d expected him to. She went to the riding class twice a week for three months, and each time, she lingered for an hour or more, just speaking with the man, helping him with his chores, daydreaming. She told him about the horses of her youth. She told him about her father, who wouldn’t let her ride them. One afternoon, she told him about leaving her home, of never going back.

  “Never?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “But you’ve called them. You’ve written to them.”

  “No.”

  “They know where you are,” he said.

  She didn’t answer, and watched the weight of her silence cross over his face.

  “Is Henrietta even your real name?” he asked accusatorily. After, she would realize that his tone might have been from shock, or perhaps just an attempt to lighten up the conversation with a little mockery. But just then it felt like too much. Anything but the softest of words did. She told herself he should have realized that.

  “No,” she said to him. “It’s not my real name.” She left the stables, picked Charley up from his friend’s house, and never returned there again.

  Jackie’s friendship had ended quickly, too. Each summer, their small city hosted the county fair, and Jackie insisted that they take their boys. They would see the rodeo, see bull riding and barrel racing, the sort of thing Henrietta had wanted to see her entire childhood. They arrived early, ate hamburgers and popcorn and fry bread. Jackie’s son was desperate to go on the Ferris wheel, so they bought tickets and got in line, but as they waited Henrietta decided that she had to go to the bathroom. She ran across the fairgrounds, and was almost to the toilets when she heard her name being called. She turned to find a woman right in front of her, so close Henrietta could see a tiny splotch of mascara beneath the woman’s eye. The woman was so out of place that it took Henrietta a moment to recognize her. But when she did, something took over Henrietta’s body. She wasn’t stunned, not frozen. Charley, she thought, and she ran. She could hear the woman yelling behind her. “Henrietta, I know it’s you!” Her Charley. They had a good life.

  “Charley!” Henrietta said. He was the first in line now. He was three years old. She scooped him up. She thought she would pee her pants. She could still hear her former French teacher calling her name. The woman’s son lived in this town—it’s how Henrietta had first heard about it—but she had never actually expected to see her here. When the fairgrounds worker opened the line up for them, Henrietta ran to the passenger car and snapped at Jackie to hurry up. As soon as they were all in, she shut and locked the door, then crouched down as low as she could until the ride began.

  “Who is that?” Jackie asked as they rose up into the sky.

  “Some freak,” Henrietta said.

  “She keeps calling your name,” Jacki
e said. “Do you even know her?”

  Henrietta leaned over the cart then. She held her boy’s hand tightly as she yelled back down to the woman. “La, de, da!” she yelled.

  Why had she yelled that? Now, as she drives across the eastern prairie with her son, she remembers the power that statement had filled her with. She would not be afraid. She would not hide. Of course, it had been false—she had to hide. When the ride had stopped she’d run off with Charley in her arms, leaving Jackie calling out for her. She’d crossed the fairgrounds and ducked under the bleachers and kept running, deeper and deeper. Now and then a paper soda cup or a hotdog wrapper would drift down from above. But she had stayed under there with her son, had watched the rodeo they’d come for from beneath. Charley had wanted to know why and she’d pretended that it was more fun that way, less crowded and with a better view. When Jackie had called her the next day to find out what had happened, Henrietta declined her invitations to get together. There was a line, Henrietta felt. If she was to keep this life the way she had built it, there was a certain distance she would have to keep, too. Just like that, the friendship ended.

  Before their trip, Henrietta had envisioned taking a long route, camping at Yellowstone to see the geysers, driving across the Upper Peninsula to explore Lake Superior. Charley had said no. He’d highlighted the map—the most direct route across the country. They would take the highways, make it to Chicago first, stop to sleep, then drive the rest of the way. Finally the two of them compromised. They would follow his plan, but more slowly, with longer rests. Five days instead of the three he had wanted.