Willa has not been allowed on television.
Like he flew, people keep saying. Like he just flew away. But boys don’t fly. Monsters fly. No one’s saying what Willa knows, which is as follows: a monster took Dilly, and he’s never coming back.
Willa imagines her son as a polished skull, stripped of everything that made him himself, his hair, his face, his brain, “Chopsticks.”
Her son will soon be bones, and her husband too. She looks up at the mountain and wonders which god answered her prayers, wonders if she prayed them.
She looks down at the other mountain, this one made of flowers out of season. Where do they grow funeral flowers? Are they kept separate from wedding flowers? Are there greenhouses full of bouquets grown for the dead?
Louisa’s weeping loudly and distractingly, her face covered in zebra stripes of mascara. Willa wants to hunt her, a safari for disallowed grief, and then it gets worse, because Louisa takes a ring off her engagement finger. The diamond glitters in the sun, larger than Willa’s, as Louisa drops it into the grave. She puts both her hands on her stomach, which, Willa sees now, is rounder than it ought to be.
Louisa weeps louder, and louder, and someone takes her arms and removes her, people on either side, carrying on.
Roger has left Willa in charge of his entire fucked-up, secret-keeping world. This is what Willa should be doing. She should be taking off her own ring and then she should be climbing into the grave, the dirt around her.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says, to no one in particular, and her mother’s the no one who answers.
“Keep yourself together,” her mother says. “Don’t fall apart. Don’t let go. Stand up straight. This isn’t your shame. It’s Roger’s.”
Willa feels the mothers behind her, all of them clicking their heels in military posture. She doesn’t climb down into the grave. No.
She does what he deserves. She throws a handful of dirt onto the place where Roger was. She throws another. She picks up a shovel, and starts heaving dirt onto the coffin, because all she wants to do is cover it all up.
Roger’s in there on his little white pillow, sleeping through everything, just the way he always has, but this time he’s sleeping underground. Willa will have to make certain the cemetery unburies him and brings that engagement ring back to her. She’ll sell it, take the money and use it to buy a pair of shoes, and then she’ll walk all over these years she spent with him.
Her mother takes the shovel from her. Then Roger’s mother. Then the other mothers. They cover him together, a small army of women sinking into the snow in their stilettos. This is a classic version.
The men marry. The women bury.
The earth is wet and water is welling up inside the grave, water from the mere, Willa thinks, water from beneath the mountain. She sees it seeping into the place Roger is sleeping, like blood from a wound.
Willa thinks about Greek plays she performed in during college, the wailing chorus she was once a part of, but she has no wails left, no rending of garments. She has nothing but mud.
Under the ground, her husband, the favored son of Herot Hall, is enjoying every moment of this attention.
* * *
Later, Willa stands in the kitchen, looking through windows replaced with bulletproof glass while she wasn’t home. She’s drinking vodka from the bottle, and wearing a kimono robe that belonged to her in the time before she was this Willa. It’s ancient, tattered, faded, and comforting. It belongs in the garbage, and that’s where she found it, in the housekeeper’s—Claudia’s—rag bag.
The bathtubs are full of flowers, and the refrigerator is full of macaroni, and Willa is full of something. She has never been alone here before, not for this long. Did she ever even want to be this person? Her phone rings and she nearly tips over.
“I’m sorry to be calling so late,” says the man on the other end.
She comes out of the house to meet him, a hood to cover her hair, as though she’s ever been invisible. She gets into his car, not the cruiser, a truck.
Willa looks at the man beside her. He has a beard he didn’t have when she met him. He looks as though he hasn’t slept in days.
She is the one in pain. Her son is a soccer-snack orange slice lost on the floor of a minivan, down in the wheelwell.
“I’ll find him, Mrs. Herot,” he says.
“Dylan’s dead. I know that much. You don’t have to pretend. And call me Willa. My husband’s dead too. I’m not Mrs. Herot anymore.”
He reaches out slowly, and runs his thumb over her mouth, leaving a print for later identification.
“Willa,” he says, using her name like he’s a man and she’s not.
“Ben,” she says, and lowers her face.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was inappropriate.”
She unfastens her seat belt and kisses Ben Woolf full on the mouth, taking the back of his skull in her hand and remembering how Dylan’s skull felt in her hand when he was a newborn, that tempting triangle of detachment under her nail.
The whole world is a mess of blood and teeth. She can only angle for the things left. She looks at the man before her. She wonders who’s watching, peering from behind curtains. Everyone. Monsters. Mothers.
When she leaves the car, she throws her empty bottle into the bushes, perfectly plotted, so perfectly that there’s not even room for a bottle to break into them.
You can’t fight nature, she thinks. You can’t make it human. You can’t even make yourself human. Everyone is an animal.
When she goes to bed, she doesn’t dream anything at all. It’s only silence, a black screen before a reboot.
HARK
19
Hark! We listen to the hunt. The same sort of hunt that’s been conducted for centuries, though the people on this mountain are calling it something else, a search rather than an armed attack.
It’s the same hunt no matter the monster, spears and swords and bullets in the side, blood on the rocks. Take the horn for a precious thing. Take the skin for fireproof armor. Take the blood. Poison enemies or heal beloveds. Harpoon the beast, capture the kraken, swimmers with spears, boats of the brave.
The mountain and the mere, like all old things, like all old places, protect those who live inside them.
There are boats with metal claws, motoring over our lake. They drop, dredge, and drag, but the woman from the cave never surfaces.
Maybe she’s caught beneath the mere on a hook, or maybe she’s gone backward into the flood. The water returns to being used for drinking.
There are crows and owls and rabbits. Everything burrows into the ground, and flies above the heads of Herot Hall, where the people look over their shoulders as they go from house to house. There are deer in the driveways, and ravens on the roofs. The houses are still lit up. Dogs, leashed to keep them safe. Groceries, put away quickly to avoid attracting more of the wild into the domestic. Countertops, clean; closets, closed. New locks and new windows installed.
The water from our mere rushes through pipes and into mouths, and ice cubes clank in glasses.
“There’s a bear on the mountain!”
“A grizzly bear!”
“I bet someone had a cub as a pet in the city and didn’t know what to do with it, I’ve actually heard of that before, I read an article—”
“But seriously, have you seen that movie about the, yeah, the Herzog movie, that one? He thought bears were his friends? Oh, my god.”
“Did you see the video about the baby hedgehogs adopted by the orange stripy cat? Hang on, I’ll send you the link.”
“And poor Roger!” says a woman in one of the dining rooms. “Poor, poor Roger. And his wife, just—”
“I never liked her.”
“But her son too.”
“He’s dead. There’s no way he’s not. A bear took him.”
“Maybe it put him in a cave.”
“This isn’t The Jungle Book.”
“Humans probably fed that bear and made i
t think it should eat humans—”
“Humans didn’t feed it people! If anything, it’d have a taste for potato chips!”
“That Herot boy bit my Davis, did I tell you?”
“And scratched my Lisa too, but there’s nothing to say about that to any of the Herots. What can you say? No, that’s inappropriate. Tina Herot. She looks like the walking dead. She’s just been going to the cemetery to sit at Roger’s grave, like that’s not morbid.”
“I’m not drunk. I’m just a tiny bit tipsy—”
“I’m going to go out there, right out there and—”
“Stay inside, I’m making pot roast.”
* * *
News clips play from every television, every radio, every phone, and we listen.
“Reports say veteran soldier Dana Mills, missing for seven years, broke into a house on New Year’s Eve, allegedly murdering a resident of a gated community, and kidnapping a child. Police officer Ben Woolf investigates.”
An incongruous photo of a man swimming, naked chest, pectorals, biceps. And then a switch to a couple on-screen, cell phone video from the night of the catastrophe.
“The late Roger Herot,” says the anchor, “and his wife, Willa Herot.”
The residents of Herot Hall make a sound of recognition, a cross between sorrow and triumph. The man they knew has died, and some of them saw his body. Others saw the woman who must’ve killed him. Some of them hated him. Others loved him. Now he’s a ghost on their screens.
The couple drifts through a party, beautiful, successful, certain, and there’s laughter in the background. Glasses are raised. The camera freezes on the woman’s face.
“I really could never stand her,” says someone. “That fake accent.”
“She thought she was the queen of this place,” says another. “Look at her now.”
“Did you hear what she said? About monsters?”
“Last year, she had a … well, we’ll call it a miscarriage. I saw her standing in the kitchen, bleeding down her legs. I almost called the police. The police? I mean 911, of course. Only good thoughts to Willa.”
One should know better than to live in a glass house at this point in human history. A neighbor goes anonymous on the news and talks curtly about uncurtained windows, an open invitation.
No one’s saying monster. No one but Willa Herot.
And now she stands in her kitchen, scrolling through the photos on her dead husband’s cell phone. A man playing guitar. A woman’s freckled breasts, a video of two people naked in a bed, all of it radiant with 1970s light, a decade he didn’t live, but only bought as a camera filter.
She drinks wine. She bathes in the mountain’s water, boiling herself. In her heart, Herot Hall burns to the ground, melted windows and puddled tiles. Even a glittering green world can be reduced to a crumpled black cup in the campfire.
She walks down the street, and invites the woman from the cell phone photos over for a cup of tea.
Mere water, mountain herbs in it, and later, in an upstairs bathroom in her own house, the other woman bleeds until the heir she carried is gone.
A few days later the blonde stands outside her house with her mother and her mother’s friends beside her, waving at the moving van as the other woman is packed into it, all her delicate wineglasses, all her low-cut sweaters. The other woman’s husband stands at the window, watching her go.
Lamplight flickers on Willa Herot’s wedding ring teetering on the edge of a bedside table. It rolls into the corner, where tomorrow the maid’s vacuum will suck it into a whirling void of lint, dander, and dirt.
Time passes for lost objects, and it is not time at all. Centuries after a burial, bogs turn up the murdered, and foundations turn up the sacrificed, and beneath this very house, there are a thousand nights ending in tears, the salt of those tears part of the soil now. Not enough to ruin the possibility of crops, but enough to change things. We know it. We’ve been watching the world.
We look at what the vacuum does, taking that salt, that skin, that hair, those silk threads, and twisting them into a hoard, the ring at the center, swaddled like an infant.
We remember other hoards like this one, a place in the desert with another golden wedding ring, polished by sand, khaki threads knotted around it to keep it the right size for a slender finger. That ring. How old it is, how bright, how polished by recent wear.
Time passes slowly in this glass house. The alarm clock shakes itself, second to second, the kind of clock that can be thrown against the wall and not be broken. It has a glow face, better than a glow dial, no history of radium. Six hundred seconds, the clock shuddering.
The wedding ring becomes something other than a wedding ring. All its history of love is gone, and its history of hate too.
It has been worn for seven years (220,838,400 seconds), but now it belongs to us again, and to the gods of garbage.
20
Hark, Willa thinks, a few days after the funeral, Dylan still missing. No heralds, no angels, no newborn king.
There’s no peace on Earth, either, but when has there ever been?
“Meet me,” she says, gets into the car and drives to a roadhouse upriver from Herot.
Now, she’s sitting on a cracked red vinyl bar stool, which she can feel pinching into her bottom, old germs, old disinfectant, old yellow foam bent to old yellow forms. No doubt most of the people who sat here before her are dead. They ate hamburgers and thought their lives were getting better. The wall behind the bar is postcarded with fifty years of peeling waterfalls, curled corners.
Willa’s in a parka and beneath it a skirt cut to hug, kick pleat, and a sweater, V-neck, soft black cashmere.
She orders a gin and tonic with lime, gets lemon. The bartender’s a woman with two red-and-gray braids, a face like a leather purse. No one else here has a playgroup or a Montessori cubby. No one else here has ever seen a monster.
She has a vision of Gren rampaging through Herot Hall, eating everyone there. She wants them shredded like seven-year-old taxes.
It’s Clam Chowder day today. If she were home, she’d have Cornbread (Homemade) already in the oven. It’s a mix from a box. It only takes twenty-five minutes: three active, twenty-two vodka + orange juice.
Willa orders another, hold the tonic and the lemon. It’s still legal to find oneself, at the end of a perfect marriage, perfectly miserable. Roger is the one who lost his life like a set of car keys. She’s doing nothing wrong.
2:00 when he sits down on the stool beside her and orders a beer.
2:05 when his hand is on her knee.
2:07 when his fingers pluck the elastic of her panties away from her skin.
2:09 when he puts those fingers into his mouth, and she’s looking around the dark bar, wondering if they’ll get arrested for public indecency, but he’s the only officer here.
2:15 when they walk across the road to the motel with its sign on during the dark of the day. Snow falls down over the boy in a barrel and the girl in another barrel, both of them at the top of a blue neon waterfall that flickers because some of the strands of neon are from the fifties and some are from the eighties.
2:25 when she’s underneath him. She winds her fingers into his hair, bright gold in the lamplight, and for a moment she’s a queen with a hoard, before she’s here again in a motel room fucking a man she barely knows.
2:31 when she’s facedown on the mattress, the bed shaking like a ship, and he’s inside her, his hands on her hips, steering.
2:36 when there’s a shipwreck. There are so many clear explanations for icebergs and captains. It’s never an accident. She envisions the Titanic.
Pillow between her teeth while he roars, no care for who might hear. So Willa, bruised biceps, scraped lips, spits out the pillow and screams, her body wracked, unexpectedly seized with something that isn’t pleasure and isn’t pain and isn’t even human. She’s fucking this man because her son is dead. She’s fucking this man because her husband was fucking the neighbor. She’s fucki
ng this man because she’s never gotten anything close to what she wants.
She holds on to that.
2:39 on their backs on the bed. Willa smokes a cigarette because one does. Badge on the bedside. Gun in its holster on the desk made of wood that’s not even wood. It’s walnut laminate. She looks out the gap in the curtains and there’s the parking lot covered in new snow, no footprints at all.
Her watch is still on backward from the funeral. She flips it over and looks at the little golden dragon flying around the edge. It cost as much as a car.
3:15 when she runs a finger down his chest, over a scar like a rope. “Where did this come from?”
“I ran into a burning building to save a kid,” he says. “There was an explosion as I brought him out.”
She wonders. Something too humble in the tone. His breathing has changed. It’s quicker, and when she puts her head down on his chest, she can feel his heart. She polygraphs his breath and beats, and finds him to be veering away from truth and into myth. She needs him to be a hero right now, but not historically. She’ll change him into the man she wants. The past doesn’t matter.
3:30 when she’s on top of him, contracting herself into a Kegel vise. See what she can do if he looks at her the way he’s looking at her now, as though she’s the queen of the world, and not a widowed woman in a motel room near a pretty boring wonder of the continent?
“Let go,” she whispers, because it is she who’s in charge of everything, never mind what men think—
Let go. Feel your life disintegrate. Make a new one.
3:50 when they’re in the shower, someone else’s long hair in the drain, Officer Ben Woolf soaping the back of the woman with the missing son.
4:00 when she picks up his gun. Flirtatious, not flirtatious. She points it at him. He’s not even scared. Would Officer Ben Woolf really go to bed in a motel room with a near-stranger and leave the bullets in his gun? She’s impressed, as impressed as she can be at this juncture. He’s planned ahead. He’s not the kind of man who gets killed by a woman.
The Mere Wife Page 11