The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  Lily shook her head, but not in response to Martin’s question. She couldn’t accept what she had heard. Has he said what I think he’s said? Martin’s words had come and gone so quickly, and nobody else seemed to have heard them. Denise was giggling into Jim’s face, and Lily saw Martin turn and walk down the stairs with the costumes as Mrs. Wright announced dress rehearsal for Thursday. “We’re close, people, very close. You have two days of rest, so rest well and get ready for a big weekend. There’ll be no stopping Thursday. If you make mistakes, it’s like a real performance, just make the best of it.”

  Mrs. Wright’s voice sounded remote. Lily didn’t move. She heard chatter and footsteps and then someone hitting the triangle that was used when the fairies came onstage.

  It was Mabel who decided to follow Martin. Lily reported the conversation in a voice she barely recognized as her own. She didn’t know how she managed to repeat those words at all, but she did, and then she wondered if she fully believed them. The two women sat together in Mabel’s old Saab and waited for Martin to walk through the doors, which he did in a matter of minutes. They watched him say good-bye to Mrs. Baker and saw the woman pat his shoulder affectionately. He walked slowly to his truck with his head down, his wrapped hand looking very pale in the darkness. He climbed into the cab of his truck and drove away. Mabel allowed the truck to move ahead of them for a block and then pulled the Saab onto the avenue and began to follow Martin out of town.

  “He never touched Bottom or anyone else onstage,” Mabel said.

  Lily couldn’t understand how Mabel could talk about the play now, but she didn’t stop her.

  “Have you noticed that?” Mabel’s voice was a little hoarse. “He clearly made a conscious decision to play it that way, and it’s very clever, because his gestures look like magic. He would get close, but there was never any real contact. His movements made me think of a mime.” Mabel paused. “It was as if he were tracing the lines of things in his own invisible world, as if he had forgotten the boundaries of real people and real things. I suppose the actor who plays Bottom doesn’t even know, because he’s wearing that head.”

  Lily folded her hands and pressed them into her lap. She was thinking of the kiss she gave Martin when he left the stage the first day he rehearsed and the way his face had looked. The moon was almost full, and it seemed to sail along with them as they drove two cars behind Martin’s truck. Lily remembered the latch on the box that Martin had drawn on his map. It was a handle, wasn’t it? Too large for a chest. It wasn’t a chest. Martin’s left-turn signal blinked red ahead of them, and the truck veered onto Old Dutch Road. Mabel slowed the car and waited for the pickup to disappear behind the hill about a hundred yards ahead and turned. When the Saab arrived at the crest of the hill, Lily looked down and saw no lights and no truck.

  “Where did he go?” Lily could smell the creek through her open window and manure and hay from the farm across the road. “There it is.” The truck was parked on a slant—two wheels in the grass, two on the narrow shoulder. “We’ll park on the other side,” Lily said. “The old Dundas Road is straight ahead. It’s all grown over now, or mostly, but you can park there. My house, my old house is right up the road, see, around that bend and past the fire-call sign.” Lily took a breath. “I know every rock, bush and stump around here.”

  Mabel followed Lily’s instructions and parked the car on the old Dundas Road. When the motor stilled and Mabel had turned off the headlights, Lily said, “What are we doing?”

  Resting her hands on the wheel, Mabel said, “I don’t know. Are we near the caves?”

  Lily nodded. “It must be where he’s gone. But it’s dark, Mabel. We don’t have a flashlight, and even if we did, the caves aren’t easy to get into.”

  “You’re right. Let’s go home. Let the police take care of it. If there’s something to find in that cave, they’ll find it.”

  “I want to look in the truck, anyway.”

  Mabel was muttering to herself or to Lily, “It’s not uncommon for people who stutter to lose it when, well, when they’re not themselves.” She opened the car door and stepped into the grass. Lily followed, and standing in the night air, she looked across the field lit by the moon.

  In Martin’s truck, they found a coil of nylon rope, a wrench, a hammer and a large tarp. Lily knew these discoveries meant nothing. A handyman was bound to haul tools around with him, and yet when she reached for the tarp, her fingers touched something cold and wet, and she withdrew her hand as if it had been bitten.

  Mabel was standing with her back to Lily, staring down the embankment that led to the creek. Under the road was a culvert, and Lily listened to the water resounding inside its metal walls. A train whistled in the distance, and cars hummed on the highway, but there was no sound of a person moving in the brush. Had Martin been close, Lily felt sure they would have heard him. Every cough, every stick that broke underfoot would sound in the relative stillness. Lily stood beside Mabel and looked down at the creek, where moonlight shone in hundreds of broken pieces on the moving water. It was light enough to see the fallen tree that crossed the creek like a bridge. That was where the water curved, and the bank was steep enough to make climbing difficult. The entrance to the caves lay a hundred feet beyond the fallen tree, and if you walked along the bank another quarter of a mile, you would wind your way to the Bodlers’, to where Lily had buried the shoes. It all seems so remote now, like I dreamed the whole thing, Lily said to herself, and looked down at Mabel whose sober face was lifted to the sky. “Orion,” she said and pointed.

  Lily nodded and turned her head in the direction of her old house. She hadn’t been to look at it since the new people moved in. The man worked at 3M and the wife was a secretary at Grundhoffer and Lundqvist. They had three kids.

  “Lily.” Mabel’s voice had an awed inflection. “What’s that?” She was pointing toward the creek bank, and when Lily looked, she saw that about a hundred yards away, not far from the fallen tree, a white form was floating slowly toward them. Exactly where it began and ended was hard to tell, because it trailed gauzy appendages that made no human sense. “What is it?” Mabel whispered.

  Lily stared and shook her head. “It’s too far away.” But the impossible thing continued to come toward them, and in the seconds that followed, Lily shuttled between belief and disbelief. She saw an angel, and she saw a ghost, and she saw some mad version of the Holy Spirit floating in the woods, but as soon as she had named each one, she dismissed it and told herself it must be something else. She wanted to look at it, and she wanted to run from it, but when the thing emerged from the black shadows of the trees and stopped beside the creek in a place where the moon shone down on it, and Lily saw wings, huge transparent wings like an insect’s, she grabbed Mabel’s hand and pulled her across the road and down the bank to the other side of the culvert. She felt she would be safe inside the big metal tube and still be able to look at the creature. Lily dropped Mabel’s hand, grabbed the metal ribs of the culvert and sought a toehold with her boots on the large metal screws just above the waterline.

  “I’m going in. You stay here,” Lily said to Mabel. Inside the culvert, the noise of the moving water echoed terribly. Her cowboy boots slipped twice and Lily could feel water seeping through the leather soles.

  Mabel spoke behind her, and her voice bounced off the walls. “It’s Martin, Lily. He’s carrying something.” The echo came as a series of three repetitions, each fainter than the one before—but Lily knew even without seeing it clearly for herself that Mabel had to be right. Leaning forward to peer through the round opening of the culvert, Lily identified Martin’s pale hair and oval face in a cloud of white netting. Because he was much closer now, Lily could see that the four wings must have been part of Cobweb’s costume. They were so thin that they shook slightly in the wind. Then Lily understood that what had looked like an interruption in his body was a long, dark bundle he was carrying in his arms. She heard Mabel breathing behind her and turned her head. The
woman had slid into the culvert herself and was half standing, half sitting against its curved wall. She held herself there with shaking arms and legs, and because she didn’t dare to let go, she motioned violently with her head toward the outside bank where they had come in. But Lily ignored the signal and turned back to Martin. He stepped into the water, and as he crossed the creek with his burden, his features took on an eerie definition in the light—his eyes stood out and his lips seemed unnaturally red. And then through the tarp or blanket Lily recognized the limp form of a person, the shape of knees over Martin’s arm, sagging buttocks and a covered head falling backward over his other arm. She choked back a cry and heard herself grunt instead, and that gagging sound echoed. Martin stopped. He looked straight into the culvert. He sees us, Lily thought. He must see us. Her hands slipped then, but she caught herself and saw Martin wiggle his shoulders to adjust the body in his arms, and the blanket slipped. In that second, no more than a second, Lily saw the girl’s head uncovered, her small, beautiful face and her long, dark hair falling over Martin’s arm. The stillness of that body was absolute, and Lily screamed. The echo was terrible, and while it was still reverberating off the walls, Mabel fell. When she heard the splash, Lily lost her footing and slid down the ribbed wall of the culvert into the cold creek water. She stood up, slipped again on the wet metal bottom and screamed again. The sound bouncing inside the walls was like a third person in there with her, a shrieking lunatic, and then Mabel was shrieking, too. Lily lunged toward her. She could see Mabel’s head above water moving downstream. Lily planted her feet on the culvert floor and braced herself. The water was only thigh deep, but the current pushed her forward, and she struggled to keep her balance. There was no question of swimming. Mabel had been dragged outside the culvert now, and Lily was forced to walk toward her at a maddenly slow pace, but once she found herself out of that tunnel, she threw herself toward Mabel. Her knee hit a stone on the creek bed and she cried out as she grabbed what must have been Mabel’s elbow, reached for the woman under her arms and pulled her up. “Lily,” Mabel said. Lily pulled the woman onto the bank, and with Mabel’s small, heavy head against her chest, Lily listened to the sound of Martin driving away in his truck.

  Lily gasped for air. The wind felt cold on her wet clothes and the tall grass made her arms itch. She heard the high noise of mosquitoes in the grass.

  “My ankle,” Mabel said. She bent over and pulled up her pant’s leg. Lily noticed that Mabel was wearing little ballet flats with no socks. The sky had darkened, and even when she bent close to Mabel’s leg, she couldn’t see enough to figure out what had happened to it.

  Every movement Lily made after that seemed to occur in another kind of time. Seconds, minutes, hours went haywire. She couldn’t begin to guess how long it took to get from one place to another. But she helped Mabel to the car, settled her into the passenger seat and examined the ankle with the door open for light. A bloody gash ran from the ankle bone up the shin, and the joint had already begun to swell and discolor. Mabel’s face had turned gray-white, and her lips were tinged with blue. Lily had never seen Mabel with wet hair plastered against her head, and the absence of the familiar light wisps of hair that softened the old face gave her the appearance of another person. Shivering uncontrollably, Mabel said, “There’s a blanket in the trunk.” Her teeth chattered audibly. Then she said, “This is ridiculous,” and laughed. “Absolutely ridiculous.” When Lily looked at the woman’s glassy green eyes, she wondered if Mabel was about to go into shock.

  Lily helped Mabel take off her wet clothes. They stuck to her skin, and after Lily had pulled off the shirt and brassiere, she removed a couple of dead leaves from her friend’s white abdomen, which had a long ragged scar across it. It was strange to see Mabel naked—to look at her thinning wet pubic hair and her shrunken breasts on either side of a bony rib cage—but the little old body touched her, and when she wrapped the blanket securely around her, Mabel said nothing. Then Lily moved the palm of her hand along the woman’s cheek, and while she was doing it, she recognized the gesture as her mother’s.

  Lily stared at the road ahead of her and drove slowly.

  “Something isn’t right,” Mabel said. She was leaning her head against the window, and Lily heard that her teeth were now quiet.

  “What are you saying?” Lily let a car pass her.

  “Did you notice the way he carried her?”

  Lily remembered the form in Martin’s arms, the face and hair.

  “She was so light, Lily. Not even a child…” Mabel croaked with hoarseness. “And why did he cross the creek? He was on the opposite bank. He could have gone up that way to get to his truck. Why get wet? Why wade through that water, unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “He knew we were there, and he wanted us to see him from the beginning.”

  Lily found it hard to speak, to say what she had seen without sobbing. “I saw her face.”

  “Yes,” Mabel said. She cleared her throat as if she were going to speak again, but stopped. Then she said, “Lily, there was a resemblance.” She paused. “A strong resemblance, didn’t you think?”

  Lily watched the white line on the road, appearing and disappearing under the right car wheel. “A resemblance?”

  “To you.”

  Lily didn’t speak. No, she thought. No.

  “You didn’t see it?” Mabel said.

  Lily shook her head, but her stomach seemed to rise inside her, and the chill she felt under her wet sleeves had gone into her bones.

  * * *

  Lily held the phone with her shoulder as she tied Mabel’s terry cloth robe around her body. She dialed the police station and glanced at Mabel, who sat with her leg up in a pair of navy blue pajamas holding a little makeup mirror in one hand and a towel in the other. She fluffed her hair and Lily marveled at the woman’s vanity. It’s one o’clock in the morning, she just saw a dead body, and now she’s fixing herself up. The next thing I know she’ll get out her lipstick. No lipstick appeared, but when Hank answered the phone at the police station, Mabel was pinching her cheeks to restore some color to her ashen complexion. He recognized her voice and said, “Lily!” The happiness in his tone bruised her.

  “It’s not about us, Hank. I wouldn’t call you at work to talk about us. I have to report something.”

  Hank didn’t answer this. He listened to Lily tell her story about Martin at the creek. She mentioned Dick and Dolores and the photo of the dead girl. He was so silent, she asked him once if he was still on the line. He said, “Yes,” but that was all.

  When she had finished, Hank said, “Is that it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Hank took a breath. “Martin Petersen’s running around town in his fairy costume or his cowboy suit, depending on who’s doing the looking, with a dead girl—well, for at least a week now, maybe more. Must be a smelly corpse. And nobody’s missing, Lily, no men, women, girls or boys. A couple of dogs and a load of cats, but no person in the whole county.”

  “Well, Dakota County isn’t the world, Hank.”

  “That’s right, it’s not the world, is it? Maybe Martin’s knocked off one of your boyfriend’s whores come all the way from New York City. Nobody keeps track of who’s missing there.”

  “Mabel saw it, too, Hank.”

  “Well, she’s off her rocker, too.”

  “That’s not fair, Hank, and you know it. You’re mad at me, so whatever I say now is bullshit.”

  Hank didn’t reply to this.

  “Tell me one thing,” Lily said. “Who called about a man carrying a woman near the city limits? I read it in the log.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Lily.” Hank sounded terribly angry.

  “I’m not.”

  “You called. You made that call.”

  “What?” Lily looked out the window. In a small voice she said. “No, Hank, I didn’t. I swear to you I didn’t. Did you take the call?”

  “No. Pete did.”

 
“But where were you? It was your shift, wasn’t it?”

  “I was taking a piss. That all right with you?”

  “Hank,” Lily said. “I didn’t call. Why would someone call and pretend to me? And with you as dispatcher?”

  “Maybe you forgot.”

  “Oh, Hank,” Lily said. “Please…”

  “Good-bye, Lily.”

  Hank hung up before she could say good-bye. Lily stared into the room. It was lit by a single lamp on a small table next to Mabel’s chair, and the bulb glowed yellow through the old shade. Mabel clasped the mirror in her limp right hand, her eyelids partly closed.

  “Are you asleep, Mabel?” Lily said in a whisper as she stood over the chair.

  “No, Lily, just tired.

  “It was Hank. He doesn’t believe me.”

  Mabel nodded. “I can’t get to the bottom of it myself, but they’ll check it out, believe me, they will.”

  Lily washed Mabel’s ankle, wrapped it and made an ice pack. She helped Mabel hobble to her bed and pulled the sheet over her. Mabel’s face was pale as eggshell, and her hair had dried to its familiar whiteness. Lily pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. Had the girl’s face looked like her own? Wouldn’t she have seen it? Dolores had been seeing herself all over the place.… Had Martin killed her? Maybe he had found her already dead after somebody else killed her—the cowboy, maybe Tex? Could Dolores, drunk on her ass, have seen the murder? No, it’s all wrong, Lily thought. The timing is wrong. Dick’s story. Professor Vegan’s story. But for some reason the muddled theory of Martin’s innocence gave Lily hope. She hoped Tex had done it, or some nameless stranger. Maybe Martin had tried to save that girl. Maybe he couldn’t, and now, distraught and crazy, he had taken to carrying the body around in a tarp dressed as Cobweb.

  She sat down beside Mabel on the bed and looked at her. Her placid, exhausted face was suddenly a burden, an annoyance. She didn’t look upset. She looked at ease. She wasn’t taking this seriously. Lily grit her teeth.