I could hardly bring myself to say the word. Murder. Murderess.
She slowly sipped her coffee. She poured more from the pot. She looked too thin, too pale. Haggard, but of course she would be. She seemed lost in thought for a while, and then looked at me again. She poured a mug of coffee and held it out for me to take. As I did, I stepped in the water pooled at her feet from her wet hair, felt the cold seep into my socks.
There was a witness, she said. A man came forward. He saw what happened.
Witness, I said. Where? What did he say? What did he see?
I felt more wetness dripping onto my toes. The coffee. I had spilled it.
Merry observed me. Careful, she said.
My hands were burning. I moved to set down the mug.
You must be exhausted, I said. I bent to wipe the tiles, bowed at her feet. She didn’t move. I could feel her eyes on me.
Where’s Sam? she asked over my head.
Probably the barn, I replied. He’s been sleeping out there. It’s freezing, but I guess that’s what he wants. Cold. Hard floors.
I looked up at her and she regarded me carefully.
You’re still here, Frank, she said.
Merry
Sam in the barn was curled up into a tight ball, pillow wedged between two boxes, blankets over his head to fight against the cold. There was a bottle next to him, a pack of cigarettes. So much for our wholesome Swedish ways. So much for any of it.
I crouched down. He smelled awful. There was spit dried white in the corner of his mouth, a slick of oil on his face. He opened one eye.
What the fuck are you doing here?
Sam, it wasn’t me. They let me go.
He turned from me. He reeked of last night’s booze, of days of unwashed man.
Liar, he said. Fucking liar.
No, I said. There’s a witness. There’s proof I didn’t do it.
Liar, he said again.
I left the barn and closed the door behind me. I went back inside the house.
In the baby’s room, I put my face against his blankets and breathed in, sniffed at the stuffed toys still coated with his drool and kisses. Bear and Biscuit, forlorn from overuse, ears chewed and fur matted. I inhaled the smell of him; I sucked at the corner of the wool to taste him and imagined him in my arms, cradled against me.
I opened the fridge and looked inside. The rows of baby food still sat unopened on the top shelf. Broccoli and carrots. Zucchini and red peppers. Potato and peas, his favorite. I felt the familiar stab of pain to the gut. Dead. Gone. You did this. You deserve this. Someday, Merry, it’s all going to catch up with you. All your lies.
Who said that? I can’t even place the face.
I took a garbage bag and held it open as I threw in the pots of food, one by one, dinners and lunches that would never be eaten. I thought of the days I’d left him hungry. The days I gave up trying to feed him after one or two mouthfuls. I saw his face, that open, trusting face, the way he watched the world through those dark-lashed eyes, searching out information, seeking smiles, wanting nothing from me but that most instinctive thing: a mother’s love.
Mother’s love. Mother’s unconditional love. Where was it? Where had it been? I’m sorry; I’m sorry, Conor. Forgive me, son. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream.
I bundled up the trash and took it outside to the recycling bins at the end of the road.
Elsa was closing the lid of the brown waste bin, her winter coat pulled tightly against her tiny frame.
Hello, I said.
She shook her head at me, a nervous, quivering bird. Merry, she said. I just can’t speak to you.
I nodded. I moved aside and let her pass.
I walked slowly back toward the house. It was an effort to move, to lift one foot in front of the other. I was bone-tired, cell-tired; everything wanted only to surrender. To the exhaustion, to the grief, to the great black void waiting to swallow me into the depths.
It is all gone. All you had is gone. Emptiness like before, but worse. Deeper, darker.
I deserve no sympathy. No mercy, either.
From outside, I glanced into the house, to see if Sam was inside. I saw Frank instead, in the kitchen, washing dishes, stirring something on top of the stove. This is what I would have looked like a few weeks ago, I thought. This would have been the picture of me. I liked the scene, the gentle domesticity, the pleasure of simple pursuits. Homemaking. Making a house a home.
Who might have wanted your son dead, Merry? Who might have benefited?
I had gone through the list of people we know in Sweden—a handful, if that. Detective Bergstrom had written them all down.
But they loved him. Everyone loved him.
A pang, a punch.
Everyone loved him but me.
Frank, so maternal and instinctive and tender. That photo of her and Sam and the baby lodged in my memory: a merry little trio. I wonder if this is the picture she sent to Christopher.
I watched now, from the outside looking in. You see it all differently like this. The perspective switched around, like a pair of binoculars used backwards.
Frank in my house, framed in glass. Frank in my house, looking terribly at home. Why did it feel like she was always finding ways to intrude in my life?
Frank. Frank and her ways. The way her hurt has always turned so quickly to rage. Boyfriends who scorned her, men who turned her down, husbands who failed to leave their wives for her after all they promised. Colleagues who got promoted ahead of her. I’d watched the bloody aftermath. She could be ruthless. Phone calls to the wives at dinner, underwear left behind for girlfriends to uncover, brown envelopes of incriminating photos sent to the Board of Directors. She always got her way.
I have to be like this, she told me once. It’s the only way to get ahead.
Perhaps this is what a childhood of scarcity will do to a person.
But a child.
My child.
I kept watching her through the glass. Beautiful. She has always been too beautiful. But only on the surface. Really, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
I love you, Mer-Bear.
I love you, Frankincense.
We are so good at pretending, aren’t we?
A lifetime you spend entwined in someone’s world, the cord that connects you thick and ropy and impermeable to the storms. Me, you, us, we. Two lives and two people, knotted together in a tight fist like the gnarled roots of ancient trees, so deep and twisted that you cannot distinguish one from the other, that you cannot uproot the one without killing both. Part you, part me. Best friends.
Things stolen from one another over the years, not to possess but only to hurt. Boyfriends I managed to turn against her. I was not very kind. Mario, the Italian, her great college romance. It didn’t take much to orchestrate that little drama. He just stopped answering her calls. With Simon, too, the almost-husband. I had seen to it that the engagement ended quickly. I don’t know why. I suppose she was just too happy. Too pleased with herself to need me. And that never feels right.
Be careful, I told Simon. She’s prone to being overly possessive with the people she loves.
It was a sore point for him, Frank had mentioned to me once before. All I needed to do was stoke the flames. Invented tales of Frank’s post-breakup overdose attempts—only for the attention, I explained—a restraining order, a slow cutting-off of all friends and family so that she could be the sole focus.
Just so you’re aware, I said, as though I were being a good friend.
But these cruelties were unknown to her. Others, perhaps not.
Payback.
Revenge.
Or the same old games.
Mine.
No, mine.
Leave, I’d said, and watched with glee as her face fell. The singular pleasure, the never-disappointing thrill of poking her wounds. Betrayed, cast aside. All the things Frank cannot bear.
But this. A child.
She looked up suddenly from inside the house and held a
hand to her heart.
She had seen me. And I had startled her.
Sam
I looked at Merry in front of me. Not speaking. Not moving. Waiting for me to do whatever I chose. I deserve it. That’s what she was saying. That’s what she would be saying if she could speak. I want it. I want the punishment, Sam. I want it to hurt.
I want you to do it. Do it all. Make me suffer.
The feeling inside is rage, burning, fiery, so hot it’s like someone’s stoking coal in my gut, the heat working up through the belly, into the chest, up up up and holding in the throat, strangling the breath out of me, holding it all inside.
I was shaking, my fists, those fists, tight and red and hot, throbbing, itching to do it, to send the hate out through the knuckles, to deliver it all to my wife, a strike, a blow, a shock of blood and bone.
Yes, said the voice, do it.
Do it.
The fists. The fists.
Now, Sam. Do it. For all the pain. All the hurt. For all the women who have done you wrong.
So many women. Manipulative. Cruel.
Liars.
All of them such good liars.
I heaved my full force into my hand and threw the first punch. It sank into her; she crumpled.
Another, said the voice. Really do it this time. Really feel it.
I leaned back, I lunged forward, I hit her. Again and again; my knuckles ached from the impact. There was screaming, terrified and brutal and urgent, but I ignored it and carried on.
Take it, take it, fucking whore, fucking bitch.
More, Sam, more.
Liar! Cunt! Miserable fucking bitch of a mother. Hideous woman. Cruel, terrible woman, you don’t deserve to live.
The screams had intensified. There was blood on my hands and I paused to wipe tears and spit from my face. I was out of breath, sweating with the exertion. Shaking. The screams had been from me.
I looked at Merry, wife no more. Just a forlorn heap in the corner, bloodstained and collapsed.
Good, said the voice. You did great, Sam. Really great.
I wiped my eyes. I took a deep breath. Tried to find my focus. Still my heart.
Thank you, I said at last. I think I’m done with this now.
In the car on the way home, I thought about the conversation with Karl. The secrets we keep. But this is all on her. All of it.
You are so angry, Malin had said, and that was before all this had happened.
What use was it trying to understand? To unpack the story, as they say.
You go back, all the way. You go deep. Feel the pain. This is good, the shrink says.
Live in your truth. Own your pain.
Bullshit.
I’d tried it, after it all fell apart in New York. Tess on her high horse insisting that I pay for what I’d done—I thought, something has to change. Let me change. Let me try. Nothing changes.
Nothing ever changes.
How can it, when the women are all the same. It’s in their DNA.
Frank
Things are awful around here. Sam and Merry thundering about the house, him in a half-drunk stupor, her in another kind of daze.
He was out most of yesterday afternoon, took the car and drove off, leaving Merry and me alone at home. She barely said a word, spent almost eighteen hours fast asleep. I popped my head in the bedroom door at one point to check up on her. She was under the covers, dead to the world.
She’s not yet told me a thing. Witness. Witness. I cannot imagine who it might be.
I made some lunch and checked my options for flights. There’s no doubt it’s time to leave. Now that Merry has been cleared. Now that she is free. Honestly, I can’t wait to go. To shrug off all this sadness, the great perversity of their lives. How different it all looks now, the curtain lifted, the masks off.
I suppose I’ll stick with the plan and go to Italy. Though I could go anywhere, really.
There are other friends in other parts of the world, many of them. They always say, Come and visit. You really must, Frank. And so I will.
Alain in Paris, Oren in Brussels, newly divorced Nicolai in his high-rise in Hong Kong.
Yes, it will be a new chapter, a whole new world of possibility ahead. I am really quite excited.
Pick up a shovel and dig yourself out. That was one of my mother’s maxims. You could never forget she was a farm girl. But she was right. I have always been skilled with the shovel. Making my own luck, setting my life on the right course.
You could be my daughter, Frances, Gerald said, but I put my finger to his lips and shook my head. I was sixteen.
I want this too, I whispered softly, an attempt at seduction. I was wearing new underwear, red and cheap. Merry’s father liked them young; everyone knew that. I kissed him and put my hand down his trousers like I’d seen the women do in the movies. I rubbed until he was hard against my palm. He bit at my breasts and pushed me down with one hand until I was spread out flat on the kitchen counter.
Afterward, his face was stricken. He looked at me, pale and naked and painfully childlike; he trembled. What have I done?
I don’t need to tell Maureen or Merry, I said. I wouldn’t dream of it.
I wanted to go to college, that was all. The next morning, the first of several generous payments was deposited into my account.
Resilient old Frank. Yes, that’s always been me.
My phone rang. Elias in Shanghai, an old friend from business school. He read a book on radical honesty two years ago and he’s practiced it ever since.
I don’t love you anymore, he told his wife. I find you repulsive. She divorced him and he moved to China.
What are you doing in the arse end of nowhere? he said.
Visiting an old friend, I replied.
And how’s that working out for you?
It’s a little dull, to be honest. I grimaced. And it was, wasn’t it. How amusing now, to think I coveted it all.
I filled the rest of the day with napping and reading. I did some yoga. I finished a box of rye crackers and soft cheese. I looked around the guest room, which seemed sparse and cold and unwelcoming now.
How did you like Sweden? they’ll ask, the London set and the New Yorkers, catching up on our lives over dinners and champagne brunches. I can see myself already, replying with a dismissive wave of the hand and a playful roll of the eyes.
Oh, you know how it is, I’ll say, quaint but terrifically dull. We’ll laugh and relief will wash over us, that we have been spared such parochial little lives and boredoms.
Around seven o’clock, I heard the front door open. Sam was home. I stayed in the room, listening for the sounds of his shoes. I thought he’d be straight back out to the barn, but I heard another door opening. The bedroom.
I got up and stood in the doorway. I heard voices. I crept closer.
I’ve apologized, Sam. I’m on my knees. I can’t say it anymore. I can’t be any sorrier for what happened.
Merry, trying another angle.
He was quiet.
I didn’t do it, Sam. The police wouldn’t have let me go if I had. So you go ahead and hate me. You throw me out, you punish me; you do whatever you need to do. But all I want is to find out who did this. I think you want to do the same.
He mumbled something in reply, but I couldn’t hear what it was.
There was silence. And then Merry spoke once more.
I think it was Frank, she said. I think she might have followed me into the woods. I know it’s crazy, but I think it was her.
In the dark, I stood, stunned. I felt sick, my heart in my throat. Unbelievable. After everything I’ve done. After the friend I have tried to be.
I moved very carefully away from the door and slipped out of the house, still in my socks. I pulled the door quietly behind me and sat myself outside. I scratched around for the pack of cigarettes Sam keeps under one of the flowerpots, and blew wisps of white smoke into the cool night air. My hands were shaking, fury and shock. The injustice of it all. But
why am I surprised?
She’s never hesitated to throw me under the bus. If only she could see. If only she could know.
We are the same. We are all we have to depend on.
I shivered, spying Karl’s front door across the field, illuminated by the red-tinged lamp hanging overhead. A Christmas wreath had been hung on the door, probably handmade by Elsa and Freja; a cheery afternoon’s craft project. Karl doesn’t deserve them.
Elsa, he’d said. Another miscarriage.
Implying many before.
Poor woman. These really are the things that can destroy you. The feeling that no matter what you do, life will always find a way to deny you the things you covet most.
I looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful night. Biting but clear. The stars were luminous, the moon a pure circle of light. The end of a cycle. A good time for a big change, isn’t that what they say?
I sat awhile longer, a lone shadow in a dark night. A girl a very long way from home. A girl without a home.
Poor Elsa, I thought once more, before creeping back inside.
Merry
The house chills you to the bone. Still, the windows stay open. No one has turned on the heating. There is no wood chopped for the fire. The cold is bracing, a slap, a punishment. Soon it will hurt more, it will be painful to breathe, painful to shift about. Every day is colder and darker than the last, less and less light; in a month or so there will be none at all, just a handful of daylight hours to break the blackened sky.
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