Esme did not go back to sleep. She stayed up all night and drank a lot of coffee and fed Nicky and got the kids ready for school. Before heading out the door, Mike hugged her hard and told her he loved her, which made her wonder if maybe she’d turned psychotic, and none of this life she was living was reality.
Then she dropped Lucy off. Lucy kissed her hand like they were in love, then waved this sweet, adorable wave before disappearing into mammoth PS11. “I’d love you even if you were a stranger,” Esme called out, to her own surprise.
Meredith and Natalie were waiting at the preschool. They ushered Esme and Spencer into the office for another talk, Spencer sitting on the training-toilet.
“Could you get my kid a real chair, please?” Esme asked. Meredith immediately complied, unhooking it from the stack in a closet just behind her desk. Then Natalie suggested a psychological interview, as she was worried Spencer might have oppositional defiant disorder, a rare condition that demanded immediate attention. It came from poor infant attachment and physical abuse. To this, Esme replied, “How much am I paying you? Just… Fucking keep him alive for two hours. Can you do that?”
Nicky strapped to her chest in a bright orange Moby Wrap, she left without Spencer (she forgot him!), then returned and took his hand. “I trust you’ll give me my money back. A false accusation of child abuse is a big deal. I can’t imagine you’ll keep your accreditation if I sue.”
Back at home, they watched television. Not even Sesame Street. Ozark, followed by Bojack Horseman. It was unclear to her whether she was repudiating or following in her shitty mother’s footsteps.
Five hours later, they picked up Lucy. Ritah’s mom asked Esme to babysit. “You realize I’m drowning and you’ve never once offered to watch Lucy, right?” she asked, and then she kept walking, her face red with shocked blush.
Once home, she got an e-mail from the Huffington Post that her story had been accepted and would run front page. This was her first real publication since Lucy, and she was delighted. To celebrate, she brought out her mom’s Baccarat and everybody drank orange juice out of $200 crystal. The bedtime routine lasted two hours. Mike caught the tail end. He held Nicky, who shared his small ears with joined earlobes. Soon, even Mike was snoring but Esme wasn’t, because what had Wendy meant about a fee? About thinking a name before sleep, and when she woke, the person with that name would be gone?
She Googled Wendy Broadchurch again, but the website about the night nurse was gone. What she found instead, not even buried, but on the first page, was a newspaper article from the Washington Post, about a woman in Whitesburg, Kentucky, who’d stabbed her husband and three children to death. A self-declared witch, she’d then engaged in ritual sacrifice, peeling the skin from their bodies and hanging it on the backyard trees.
Wrong woman, had to be. Except, there was the photo of a young Wendy, her crazy eyes just the same. Esme used her account at LexisNexis that the New York Times had never revoked when they’d fired her for getting pregnant, but had pretended it wasn’t because she was pregnant. A downsize upon a downsize upon a downsize of a collapsing industry.
After murdering her family, Wendy served twenty years in a psychiatric hospital in Lexington. She didn’t seem to have a handle in chat sites, but her name showed up a lot. Mothers talked about her like she was a ghost. They called her a savior. They called her a monster. They said she’d been their night nurse. They’d met her in dime stores and coffee shops and libraries. She’d earned their trust. And then she’d stolen their children. But no one believed. No one remembered the children, at all.
Esme was shaking when she finished. She still hadn’t slept. She didn’t sleep. Two nights in a row. That morning, Mike hugged her hard, and kissed her goodbye, because husbands always know when they’ve pushed you too far. They always come back, because the last thing they want is for you to break.
She got Lucy, Spencer, and Nicky dressed and cleaned for the day, but at the last minute turned back from the front door and had everyone take off their coats. Because it was Saturday. No school day, after all.
While the kids watched television, she went on another Wendy Broadchurch deep dive. There were three mentions of Wendy Broadchurch in the Park Slope Parents Listserve, dating back to 2004, when Wendy first moved to New York. All named her as the nanny they’d employed when their families fell apart.
Esme called one of these women, having located her name in an online directory, and paying the five dollars to get her cell-phone number. The woman answered on the first ring. “Hi, my name’s Esme Hunter, and I’m writing an article about the Park Slope Parents. I was wondering if I could speak with you?”
Esme explained that her article was about the usefulness of web groups for women over the last twenty years. “Did you find your nanny on a website?”
The woman’s voice got soft. “Yeah.”
“Right. And she was named Wendy Broadchurch?”
A long pause. Can you feel rage through a phone?
“Is it you?” the woman asked.
“I… what do you mean? My name’s Esme Hunter?”
“Give me back my fucking baby!” the woman screamed. “Give her back. Give her back. Give her back, you sick fucking cunt. When I find you I—”
Esme hung up. The phone starting ringing from that same number. She silenced it, her heart beating so fast it felt like all the vessels had burst, and blood was everywhere inside, drowning her.
She went to the children and held them one by one, and then altogether. They smelled like patchouli and bergamot and frankincense. The whole apartment reeked of it. She found the dandelion tea, which stank of blood and milk. She found the hair oil and the skin salve. She put them in a Ziplock bag and threw them in the garbage outside the house.
* * *
Late afternoon, Esme called Wendy on the phone. “I’d like to pay you your fee. I can sell my family’s Baccarat crystal or I can give it to you. It’s worth about five thousand dollars.”
Wendy’s voice was cold. The deep-down voice. The bone voice. “Sleep, honey. Stop avoiding it.”
“This is crazy. You’re crazy. I know about you. I changed the locks,” Esme answered.
Esme heard faraway laughter on the other line. She had to strain her ears. Then Wendy hung up.
After that, she really did have the locks changed, and then she texted Mike and asked him to come home. Something was wrong. She needed to explain. He called back right away and she told him everything. “I’m afraid to fall asleep. What if everything changes? Do you believe me?” she asked.
“I believe that you believe,” he answered. He said he’d be home as soon as his new department finished its meeting.
At last, she joined the kids on the couch. Her eyes kept closing. Mister Rogers played. The soft light of the setting winter sun pushed through the parlor window. Her mind skipped stones.
Wendy. How had they met?
The Children’s Museum, where no one remembered her.
She put Nicky down for his afternoon nap, and then went to her bedroom to get some rest while Lucy and Spencer continued their Teen Titans marathon. As she dozed, she wondered which child she might have picked. Nicky, of course. Because she loved him, but he’d been a setback. She could do without Nicky, and all the better, if no one had to know.
But she’d never do that.
Lucy and Spencer? No. They were a part of her, sewn in tighter than her stomach.
Mike? In magical fairy land, she could do without Mike, but not in the real world, where cash was exchanged for goods and services. Then again, he did have a life insurance policy.
No, not Mike. He was the father of her children. Not Mike.
In her dream, her skin tingled. Her bones broke and reknit with the architecture of briar-patch vines. These vines filled the room and the apartment. They covered the children and then broke the children apart. Everything stank of blood and sour milk.
Not anyone. Of course, not anyone. She chose no one.
A
nd then she thought: Esme. Esme would love to disappear.
* * *
“Dad!” Esme heard as she awoke in her bed. “There’s a lady!”
She stood, and it was Lucy, dressed in a fancy frock adorned with purple hydrangeas, her hair a ragged mess like it had been combed by white people. Then Spencer was toddling beside her, wearing a polo pullover instead of a t-shirt, shorts belted. When he saw Esme, he screamed.
Esme came to them, but they started running. She followed them into the kitchen. Which was different. Her office was gone. It was refinished like she’d always wanted, in sparkling marble. Mike’s mom was cooking supper. She wore this frown on her face even before she saw Esme. The frown was the same one the kids wore. A light had gone out inside of them.
Mike’s mom lifted the cast-iron frying pan as a weapon, but it was hot and burned her hand. She yelped as she dropped it. Esme turned out to the living room. There was Mike, holding baby Nicky. He was about forty pounds heavier, his light gone, too.
“It’s a lady!” Lucy screamed again.
“Get out of this house,” Mike’s mom said, because underneath all that bullying, she’d always been a nervous wreck.
Esme was at the door. Somehow her shoes were on her feet, and her coat on her back. The furniture, she now saw, was different. Crate and Barrel instead of the stuff she’d inherited from her mom. No Baccarat for Lucy to inherit, either.
She was in the doorway, and she wanted to explain, but they were all so upset. And then Mike came closer, baby Nicky in his arms. Nicky wailed at her like he couldn’t stand her stench, and something in Mike showed recognition. Something deep remembered. Because he looked at her with the most perfect expression of hatred.
Then he shut the door.
THE MEMORIES OF TREES
Mary SanGiovanni
The Faithful intended to hang the child at dusk.
She was a ward of the old woman of the glen, the reclusive widow who put her faith in the ancient religions instead of the new. The old woman, one Martha Weede, had been arrested the week prior, and after extensive questioning, had been found guilty of witchcraft. It was the mind of the village elders that both Weede and her young ward, Ellena, be hanged together.
Ellena was a sweet young girl of about thirteen, round and pink of face with soft blue eyes and pretty red lips. The old woman would not promise her as a wife to any young man in the village of New Ipswich despite the Third Law, which was to propagate the human race with strong, eligible specimens as soon as they were of the age to conceive. Ellena certainly seemed to be able to bear children; she had already developed breasts and Cora Rawlins had once reported seeing the girl rinsing blood from her undergarments in a nearby stream.
It was not the Weede woman’s violation of the Third Law, though, which made her and her adopted daughter the targets of the townspeople’s disdain. Few of the proud families, particularly those whose elders had survived the wars and plagues of the early Twenty-First Century, would have sought the lovely Ellena as a wife for their sons. They wanted no part of a young godless harlot who wore only a shift when prancing about the woods alone and unchaperoned. Instead of binding up her long blond hair, she let it stream freely behind her as she danced and ran. She and old Mother Martha never attended the New Church in town, either. Their monuments of worship were made of wood and stone, out in the forest. They did not believe in the New Church teachings or the God of technology. Their gods did not care about the electronic debris scattered across the land, nor did they demand it be gathered and repurposed. Their gods were ancient, older than the gods of the extinct religions of the Christians and Muslims and Jews. Their gods were old when the world was new, or at least when those fumbling first steps of human technology were fire and spears and the wheel.
It was said Martha and the girl gathered herbs and plants from the woods to make potions to poison cattle and cause babies to abort themselves from their mothers’ wombs, and that they talked to forest devils and spirits and cavorted naked with them at night by moon-and firelight. It was said they could conjure the forest spirits to protect them and to exact revenge on those who had wronged them.
Of course, those were just stories, so much swirling smoke from fires stoked by fear and jealousy. Science and technology had seen to erasing any silly, childish notions of the existence of magick long ago. If the women were conducting any kind of sorcery, it was of a manipulative, imaginative, and psychological kind.
Nevertheless, those stories made the people of the village uneasy. To them, the feral world before the Final War of 2021 was the stuff of terrifying and sinful myth, and Ellena and Martha were haunting phantoms of that myth.
The village schools did not teach about the world before the Final War, beyond a few pivotal turning points in its history. They were instructed—or perhaps, catechized—regarding the Digital Deadzone Plague, when the New God was angry at the wanton ways of the world and sent balls of fire and electromagnetic pulses from the sun to render dead and useless the technology that He had bestowed upon them. Every aspect of society had been connected like a great spiderweb—banks, businesses, defense systems, electricity, plumbing, even the production of food. All was leveled by God’s pulses of wrath, and it was only a matter of time before the Faithful understood that their Lord wanted to wipe the slate clean, just like an old god of myth had once wiped out the earth with a flood. Thus, the creation of the First Law of the Faithful: all technology developed or recovered should be put into the service of worshipping God.
The children were also taught about the Culture Battles, the dissention between the Faithful and the Heathens, which led to a Final War to claim the world that was left and its scant resources. The history books—they’d had to go back to books once the iPad textbooks lost their charge—said the Plague of Invisible Mouths was actually a flesh-eating virus, a weaponized biological agent that halved the population and then halved it eight times more.
It is not only history that is written by the winners of war but also the future. The Plague of Invisible Mouths was the hand of the New God, devouring the flesh and brain tissue of the enemies of the Faithful and scattering the surviving Heathens and their ancient beliefs to the wind they honored so much. So the wind blew the Heathens to the forest, where the trees have long memories. The trees are patient.
Mother Martha remembered the time before the Final War and knew all the stories not told in schools. She had been a girl then, a child much smaller than Ellena, but she had a memory like the trees. Martha would recount those stories to her daughter and the other children, forbidden fairy tales that they passed on to each other behind small, cupped hands, the myth and history of the Heathens. The village children liked the old woman’s tales about the ancient gods and the world before the Final War. They liked that she had a memory like the trees.
To the village elders, Martha and her stories were a poison, sinister and downright evil. Since evil had once dismantled the world, it had to be rooted out and destroyed before it could take hold again.
* * *
In the dank cage of cold metal and hard edges, Ellena did as Mother Martha suggested. She closed her eyes, relaxed her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and imagined a great altar in her mind’s eye. Then she swept all the fear off that altar, all extraneous thoughts, all distractions, like so much collected dust and cobwebs. She tuned out the heavy, labored breathing of Mother Martha and of the abused women and men all around her. In the silent darkness that engulfed her inside and out, she smelled the stone of the prison and felt the soft breath of the wind as it tried to reach her through the tiny barred transom above her. She heard the rustling of leaves from the nearby trees and in it, heard their words of comfort, of promise.
She and Mother were not alone. It would be all right.
I’m scared, the girl thought.
Fear is natural… but unnecessary, the trees’ rustling told her.
They mean to kill us. The girl felt a heavy panic try to set
tle in her chest and she swept it away.
The trees replied, We will protect you…
The girl wiped at the unspilled tears in her eyes and added, Their weapons are of iron.
Our weapons are older, stronger, the trees responded. We will not let you fall, little one.
* * *
Not all were unsympathetic to the suffering of Martha and Ellena. Jonah Harwood, whose family once lobbied against developing rainforests before repenting and turning to the New Church, went to visit the women in their jail cell. He brought biscuits and a jug of water in a small basket. He felt it was his religious duty to tend to the sick, imprisoned, and suffering, though many whispered that was a holdover from his family’s old Christian roots.
The jail was a large holding cell once called “the Tank” in the crumbling remains of an old municipal building in the center of New Ipswich. It stank like stale sweat and urine, rotting food and rotting sores, and other less pleasant things. It had grown jagged from rust and age, its metal flaking and splintering, but it was nevertheless a formidable barrier to the outside world. As it was in the basement of the old building, it was exceedingly dark and damp. The tank held a grave and weighty sense of timeless suffering unlike anywhere else in New Ipswich. It was as if decades of people’s miseries had bled from their bodies into the ground, cooled, and grown hard, layer after layer, forming the very prison that continued to leech others dry.
Harwood picked his way over bodies either unconscious or dead and found the women in a far, cobwebbed corner of the cell. Both had been stripped down to their shifts and had their hair crudely and unevenly lopped off close to the scalp. The girl looked scared and pale, but otherwise unmarked. Harwood was glad for that; some of the jailers had a tendency to avail themselves of the bodies of pretty young things, particularly those accused of witchcraft, since none of those women was ever set free. To the jailers, the pity of a conviction was often a waste of good flesh.
The old woman was in a far worse condition. Having been further accused of the corruption of an innocent soul through teachings of witchcraft and nature magick, she had been beaten, and possibly worse. The village of New Ipswich had managed to repair an old generator, and put its ability to power brief electrical sparks through metal prongs into the service of cleansing souls. Mother Martha bore the burn marks of such a cleansing. Further, her left eye was nearly swollen shut and three of her fingers looked broken. Her dry lips were split in two places and her bare arms and legs wore patches of bruises. A remaining strand of her long, silvery hair fell against a bruised cheek.
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