Hemlock Grove

by Brian McGreevy

  “Let. Go,” said Mother.

  “Leave her alone,” said Roman.

  She struck him with the back of her free hand. He closed his other fist around that arm. She tried to wrench free, but he held. My head fell and I began rhythmically to lift it an inch, two, and let it drop on the table. Dishware rattled.

  “So help me,” said Mother, “you will end up in the gutter, you [EXPLETIVE DELETED] little rodent.”

  A spherule of blood beaded at the corner of his mouth from where he had been struck.

  “I’ve seen the will,” said Roman.

  Mother was quiet. My percussions sent a glass over the end of the table and it shattered.

  Roman released her but she did not move. I held my head suspended, confused by the significance of this admission.

  “Last year,” said Roman, “when you didn’t like the settlement Annette got you for the Black Derby incident.” (Referring, in case you have forgotten—or, for that matter, were not in her company—to legal complications arising from Mother, dissatisfied with the service at a cocktail bar, entering into a dispute with the bartender requiring stitches for the latter.) “Do you remember what you called her? Not everyone likes being talked to that way. She called me into her office and showed me the will just to spite you, you psychopathic [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. I know.”

  Mother sank into his empty chair and he said the words that unglued what mutual understanding had ever existed among us.

  “It’s all mine,” he said. “I’m sole beneficiary. And on my eighteenth birthday I gain control of the entire trust. Everything is mine. It’s my house and my money and it always was.”

  He picked up a napkin—his napkin—and dabbed the blood from his lip. She looked past him. A fragment, a small diamond rainbow, flickered on the table—his table—refracted from the chandelier. This is what held her attention.

  He backed away from her and lit a cigarette. Cigarette smoking was never tolerated in the dining room. Mother looked at that diamond and Roman smoked his cigarette. I wanted instinctively to reach for her, but in that moment it was understood by each that Roman alone had freedom of movement. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out. He was as afraid as the rest of us of where we went from here.

  Outside, a cloud must have passed over the sun and the diamond vanished. Mother’s head snapped as though she’d been nodding off. We remained there in a silence that had begun some time before the beginning of the world, and though Mother adjourned wordlessly to her (or, Roman’s) room where she remains, and I am in my (Roman’s) attic, and Roman off to devices of his own in his fiefdom, in that binding silence we remain, just as I remain

  Yours,

  S.G.

  * * *

  Roman stood in the doorway. She sat on the top mattress hunched and facing the window. Her back was as broad as a child with fully outstretched arms, and a glow under her shirt evanesced with her breathing. She did not turn to him. The mattress curled around her in a smile.

  “That’s not what I wanted,” said Roman. “I didn’t want to do that.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I would never do anything that would hurt us,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She turned now and looked at him. It was the first time she had called him a liar.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  She grunted no. He went to the bed. She lay back and he lay behind her, working his arm under her head. She knew his arm would be crushed numb in moments but he could live with it. He saw she had removed the earrings. He shut off the bedside lamp and the star and moon stickers glowed.

  Later, when her breathing had become a regular saw, Roman extricated his arm and rose. He went to the door, shaking the needles from his arm. The easel caught his eye. She’d been working on this one awhile, it seemed nearly finished. A single vertical white bar against a dark muddle of night, and directly beneath it some subterranean chamber within which was a ring with a sort of node at the top.

  A snake—a snake eating its own tail.

  Roman took his hand from the door and went back to the bed and climbed on with his arms outstretched and laying his cheek flat against the echo chamber of her heart.

  A Measure of Disorder

  The phone rang, ending a brief and halting sleep. Dr. Godfrey picked up.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, calm down. I’ll be right there.”

  In the dark he found a pair of jeans and a sweater.

  “Was that Olivia?” said Marie.

  “No,” he said absently. At some distance he was aware how treacherous and truthful it was that in a semilucid state this was the first thing to occur to his wife. But he could worry about that later; it would have to take its place in the queue. He looked out the window. There was a misting of dew that made the night outside look like wine through a glass and he had the strange and pleasing thought: No time like the present for a swim. It occurred to him he may actually have said this out loud, but he wasn’t sure and Marie gave no indication. He laced his shoes.

  Down the hall, Letha was in the bathroom. She heard her father’s descending footsteps and quiet exit, and waited another few moments for any sign her mother was going to stir. Then she crept down to the study and knelt at his file cabinet.

  * * *

  The police were already at the Neuropathology Lab, waiting for Godfrey’s arrival. Nurse Kotar came to him. Her eyes were red and her hair looked like she had just been given a serious going-over in the bedroom, an appearance so unlikely it could only spell disaster. He put his hands on her elbows and told her to go home and take a few days off.

  She nodded docilely, then abruptly clung to him tightly and shook like a child.

  “Go home,” said Godfrey again, his gentleness of tone hiding his resentment that to some this remained a solace.

  Sheriff Sworn waited for her to leave, then approached Godfrey with a smile meant as a frown.

  “Some funny math here,” he said. “You have a highly disturbed individual and a straightforward—or at least these days close enough—suicide, whole thing caught on camera. But. The security situation here, it’s no joke, right?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Godfrey nevertheless confirmed no joke.

  “Thing is,” said Sworn, “you watch the tape, this wasn’t a break-in, but there was no assisted entry either.” He paused in considered disapproval of a world that had once held up its end of what he’d considered an understanding. “The door, it just opens up for him. As if … well … as if to say, Come on in, pilgrim.”

  Dr. Godfrey looked to the floor of the far end of the Brain Barn. Francis Pullman lay on the floor. There was the plunger of a syringe in his hand. There was the splintered needle of the syringe in his temple. What was that Dorothy Parker line? I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Godfrey stifled the only sane response to this tableau, the latest somewhat dramatic addition lying at the wall of three thousand orderly Tupperware-housed specimens. The only response a certifiably sane person could have in this asylum. But it would not be appropriate for a man of your position to laugh.

  * * *

  At first light the master bedroom door opened and Olivia emerged. She wore a white satin robe and passed down the hall and stopped at the door with the Dragon on it and entered. The room was dark; morning light visible around the edges of the curtains. He was still sleeping. She came forward and stood over him. His bare chest and neck were long and lean and white. She placed the backs of her fingers to his neck and felt the living miracle of the young heart in his chest, the conduit between it and her own. His eyes opened. She caressed his face and his scalp.

  “We’ll need to bleach you soon,” she said. “Your roots are showing.”

  * * *

  On his way to homeroom Peter stopped at his locker and found sticking through the slats a folded page of notebook paper. He looked at it and he knew in his Swadisthana that it had been delivered by the same hand th
at had sent Lisa Willoughby the invitation. He took the page and unfolded it. There was no writing on it, only a picture. A crude drawing of the severed head of a brown wolf. The head lay in a pool of dried blood that in color and texture was clearly real blood, and the head itself seemed at first appearance to be brown shoe polish but no. He realized, after a moment, that’s not what it was. Peter grimly folded the picture and placed it in his backpack. He looked at a poster on the wall of a hand with an extended index finger with the caption WHEN YOU POINT ONE FINGER, YOU POINT THREE BACK AT YOURSELF.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He turned to head down the hall but saw Roman approaching.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  But this had all the trimmings of one those days. They stepped out an eastern exit next to the loading zone and overlooking a steep embankment over a housing development. They kept the door open a wedge with a half brick to keep it from locking behind them and Roman lit two cigarettes and handed one to Peter and said he had a lead.

  Peter looked out. It was the sort of day that had the birds all in a dither. They gathered by the dozens on high wires like dark clothespins against slate sky only for some mysterious birdbrain impetus to send all of them into drunken wild flight, God shaking pepper into a whirlwind, and then just as suddenly to alight once more on the same wire, but facing now in the opposite direction. Whatever it is that gets into birds on days like today.

  “I think something is going on at the White Tower,” said Roman.

  Peter smoked and watched the birds.

  “I don’t know if it’s connected or not, but I can get us in,” said Roman.

  Crosshatching the sky were gauzy tendrils of black. Rain later.

  Roman saw it in his face. “What?” said Roman.

  “No,” said Peter.

  “What do you mean, no?” said Roman.

  “It’s over,” said Peter.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is over. We’re done.”

  Roman looked at him and saw he was serious. Suddenly he wanted to rip that faggot fucking ponytail out of his head. He wanted to find whatever words it would take to make him change his mind.

  “Why?” said Roman.

  Peter did not answer. He hated that he was having this conversation; this sort of thing was no less suffocating to him than when he was younger and an older cousin would trap him in a blanket and sit on him and it felt like the worst of all possible deaths. Getting mixed up in other people’s feelings, only himself to blame. Also he blamed Roman.

  “What, you mean the cops?” said Roman. His tone reflected the boringness and triviality of the incident. “You said get rid of them and I did. Oh, and that was very considerate, dropping my car off with an empty tank, incidentally.”

  He waited to see if interjecting levity made the situation any different but it didn’t.

  “Okay,” said Roman. “Okay, it was stupid. It was really stupid and I’m an asshole and what is there to say other than that I was being an asshole, but come on. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away from … this.”

  He pronounced this in the phonetically correct fashion, but somehow it still rhymed with us.

  Peter thought about how he might explain things to Roman in a way that wouldn’t upset him further. Explain that they were not alike, that however different from the rest of the world Roman felt, he was still rich and so tolerably different. He did not know what things were like for Peter, he did not fear the cage. The cage was the worst of all possible deaths. But there was no way to make that real for someone like Roman in the same way you could hardly say to a tiger in the jungle, Do you know how free you really are? Because how can he know any other way to be? There was no way to make this a picture in Roman’s brain, so he bounced his heel off the railing for a while and wondered if he could get away with not saying any more than he’d already said.

  “Will you fucking say something,” said Roman.

  “You should go,” said Peter. “There’s no good for you here. You should get away from this death and this town and your name. Make it all clean. And I don’t know. Figure it out from there.”

  Roman regarded his hand. His hand was shaking and wasn’t much use for holding a cigarette, so he flicked it. “I bet you’d like that,” he said. “I bet you’d find that very convenient, you Gypsy piece of shit. You know if you fuck my cousin, I’ll kill you.”

  Peter looked at him.

  “You’re not better than me,” said Roman, bitter.

  Peter kept looking at him.

  Roman turned his head. “That’s a faggot fucking ponytail,” he said.

  Peter got up and went inside. Roman looked up at the glowering sky. “Fuck,” he said. There was a constriction in his throat.

  Then there was a movement in the corner of his vision. Peter coming back out, not leaving it like this. Like before, Peter getting the hard-on thing out of his system but coming back to him. Roman looked pridefully ahead but knew he would let him. That was just his way, Peter was all right for a hard-on. Roman would let him come back again. But the door did not open and Peter did not come, and the movement he had seen was suddenly in the opposite side of his mind’s eye, and it was like dark fingers of black shadow performing sleight of hand to get his attention. Roman’s eyes fluttered. He bent and picked up the brick and the door closed after it and he hurled it over the hill. There was a metallic crunch and a car alarm went off and Roman sat against the locked door and after a moment held up his still-trembling hand palms outward and scurried his fingers in the air, watching the dance of spidery veins.

  * * *

  When school let out Letha appeared by Peter’s side as he approached his bus and he did not question as she boarded alongside him. He walked to his customary seat in the back and gestured for her to sit and she did. She reached into her purse and pulled out an old, wrinkled envelope, which she handed to Peter. It was to her father, no return address. He raised his eyebrows and she nodded, pleased with herself.

  “Did you read it?” said Peter.

  She was offended. “I would never read someone else’s mail,” she said. “Unless it was about me.”

  He put the letter in the front pocket of his backpack, joining the fragment of Goblin Market and the shitty picture. He did not know if this would all ultimately come together as something meaningful or if it was like the opposite of those paintings made of dots, the illusion of order a consequence of proximity; if you stood at the other end of the universe seeking resolution you would just end up feeling like an idiot for trying.

  When they passed Kilderry Park Letha looked out the window and said, “He’s dead.”

  “Who?” said Peter.

  “Francis Pullman. The one who saw. He stabbed himself in the brain last night.”

  “Oh,” said Peter.

  Letha moved her hand as if to take Peter’s but changed the motion into picking at the duct tape patching a rip in the faux leather of their seat. The bus came to a stop at the mouth of Kimmel Lane and she got off with him and started down the hill. Still, neither commented that this was outside the normal run of events.

  “Roman seemed weird today,” she said.

  “He’s pissed at me,” said Peter.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a big Roman-shaped blind spot in the way Roman sees things.”

  “What happened Saturday night?” said Letha. “Were you there when he was arrested?”

  “Your mom using the sheriff’s department to give you a time-out isn’t the same thing as being arrested,” he said.

  “What are the things you’re leaving out?” she said.

  Peter said nothing.

  “You don’t need to leave stuff out just because I’m a girl,” she said.

  Peter looked at her to see if she really believed that. He said nothing.

  “I should sock you,” said Letha.

  As they approached
the trailer, the rain that had been threatening all day began lightly to fall. They jogged inside. The car was gone and they had the place to themselves. They sat on the couch and listened to the rain.

  “Do you believe in angels?” she said.

  Peter saw no way out of this conversation and regretted for the second time today that it was only one night of the month that he got to drop his human mouth on the ground.

  She clasped her hands on her stomach. “It scares my parents, because they don’t believe me. But I guess I wouldn’t either in their shoes. I know it sounds a little crazy.”

  “It actually sounds a lot crazy,” said Peter.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you just saying you don’t know because you think I’m crazy?”

  “Well, I think you probably are crazy, but I still don’t know.”

  She looked at him but he looked away. He felt her still looking at him and wished she would stop, but still tried to make his profile handsomely contemplative. The cat leaped onto the coffee table and sat on the jigsaw puzzle Lynda was still working on and began to groom, not actually disrupting any pieces but proving that it could.

  Every cat is a woman, thought Peter.

  “Well!” said Letha.

  “Well what?” said Peter. He knew but had learned that if there was one advantage to the male sex it was that your obtuseness would never be underestimated; if you pretend you don’t know what the problem is, half the time it just goes away.

  “Are you going to try to fuck me?” she said.

  Peter sucked in breath. “Well, here we are,” he said.

  “What kind of thing is that to say!” she said.

  Peter grimaced.

  “What is it?” she said.

  His grimace tightened and he licked the back of his teeth.

  “Roman,” he said.

  “What does Roman have to do with the price of rice in China!”

  “You know,” he said.