“Maybe we left some cat food. Friskies. If there’s water, I could mix up some powdered milk,” she said.
Henry bit the inside of his cheek, knowing it was hopeless to try and stop her.
The air in the cabin was stale and smelled like mice: a sour stink came from the ceiling and walls, where Henry imagined the insulation torn into nests, pockets, cities of hidden condos, dampened by the urine of generations of its residents. Behind the mouse smell was something more sinister: the damp smell of rot and decay.
“There might be a dead animal in here,” Henry called from his spot near the front door. “Maybe one of the cats got stuck.”
Tess only grunted, focused on her search through the kitchen cabinets.
The cabin’s downstairs was one large room divided into living room, kitchen, and dining area. In the far corner of the living room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to separate off the space where Suz and Winnie had slept. Henry did not pull back the curtain and look in, unable to violate their privacy even then. Instead, he focused on the chair by the window, just to the left of their curtain, and felt slightly queasy when he saw the pieces of rope still looped around the arms and legs. He remembered the feel of the rope in his hands, stiff and bristly, like an unwieldy animal, as he made the knots.
Tighter, Henry, Suz had told him. Tie it tighter.
“Tuna!” Tess exclaimed, holding two cans in her hand and turning back to lean into the cabinet, her enormous belly bumping against the counter, to pull out a can of condensed milk. She gave a little cry of triumph. The cats screamed. Henry drew in a breath and surveyed the inside of the cabin while Tess got down bowls and began pulling open swollen, reluctant drawers, rattling silverware, in search of a can opener.
Nothing had been touched. No vandals had come. No kids looking for a place to get stoned and screw around. Everything was just as they’d left it, frozen in time like some museum diorama. Henry half-expected Suz to come flitting in, gesturing madly as she went off on some new tangent, the sleeves of her silk tunic like butterfly wings.
On the table was half a bottle of tequila, and five empty glasses. Inside the bottle was a dead mouse. Lucky fucker, thought Henry, staring down at the drowned rodent, a wave of nausea washing over him.
There were five plates out, dirty silverware, used napkins. The mice had taken whatever crumbs remained from their last supper, licked the plates clean.
In the corner of the table was the ransom note, never sent, a jigsaw of letters and words cut carefully from newspapers and magazines. Henry read the last line: If you do not follow our instructions, we will kill your son.
On the coffee table in front of the couch, Henry found Winnie’s old Polaroid camera and a handful of snapshots, scattered like tarot cards spread out to tell not what will come, but what had been. Henry glanced over at Tess, who was too busy with the cats to notice what he was doing. Without looking through the photos, he scooped them into his knapsack. Underneath the photos was Suz’s journal: a heavy hardcover black notebook with the words DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM painted on the cover in red nail polish. He traced the glossy words with a trembling finger, then the journal went into the bag too, unopened. He shouldered the knapsack, impossibly heavy already, and looked longingly at the open door. He fought the urge to run from the cabin, lungs gasping for fresh air. Cold sweat prickled between his shoulder blades. Wing bones, Tess called them.
Wings.
Suz always wore those tunics, long and flowing, in muted earthy colors. Black leggings beneath. And beat-up combat boots. Standard Suz uniform.
“We shouldn’t stay long,” he mumbled, more to himself than to his wife. Shouldn’t have come at all. This wasn’t part of the deal. They promised, that last night, to never speak of what had happened. To never return. And if anyone should ever contact them about Suz, they were supposed to say that at the end of the summer, last anyone saw her, she was headed west, for California. She was always talking about California. And wasn’t it Suz herself who told them that the secret to telling a really good lie is to make sure there’s a shiny pearl of truth hidden deep inside?
Henry glanced over at Tess, who was setting down bowls of tuna and canned milk. She bent at the knees to get down to the floor, and hoisted herself back up with both hands on the counter. The cats fought for places at the bowls.
“Careful,” Henry warned. “They don’t know you anymore.” He had always hated the cats, could never keep track of their names and little histories. Now he had reason to believe they could be dangerous, and Henry saw his biggest job as husband and soon-to-be father as making things safe. He couldn’t control what happened, but he did his best to be prepared. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. A good Vermonter’s motto.
They had been married four months, out of college not even a year, and Henry still found himself staring dumbly at the gold wedding band on his finger. Tess. The girl he never meant to end up with who now stood in a wrecked kitchen feeding starving cats, a matching gold band around her own swollen finger, some physical, tangible thing that linked her to him. Proof. As if the baby wasn’t proof enough.
His father paid for the small wedding, persuaded them to move in with him afterward. Henry’s mother had died the year before and the large, rambling farmhouse left his father lonely. There was plenty of room for all of them, plenty of room for privacy. And there was the inground pool Henry’s mother, Ruth, had insisted on years before. Tess loved the idea of having a pool.
“Babies come out of the womb knowing how to swim,” she told Henry. “It’s instinct. We’ll get her right in the water and our baby will be swimming before she can crawl.”
Henry cringed, silently thinking, We’ll see about that. Henry hated the pool. An inground pool was an extravagance in and of itself, but to have one in Vermont where it could only be used three months out of the year seemed like pure foolishness. Not to mention the fact that it was just plain dangerous.
Henry worked full-time with his father at DeForge Painting, saving money for the baby. He kept busy. He went out on crews all day, wearing a crisp DeForge Painting T-shirt tucked into white painter’s pants, and came home in the evening to work on the house. He got a nursery ready for the baby and cleaned up one of the small sheds out back for Tess to use as a painting studio. He baby-proofed every room, putting safety covers on all the outlets, installing plastic locks on the cabinets that contained medications and household cleansers, placing foam padding over the sharp corners of furniture. He drained the pool. He even cooked dinner most nights for his father and wife. When he finally got to bed, he slept a hard, dreamless sleep and woke up rested and ready for whatever the day before him held. There was no time in Henry’s life for looking back, for thinking about what had happened at the cabin. He lived in a world ruled by the present and immediate future. So when Tess had insisted they go back to the cabin once the snow melted, he put up a fight.
“Why would you want to do that? We swore we’d never go back,” he told her.
“I want to take one last look around, before the baby comes. It’s something I need to do, Henry.”
“But we made a pact,” he reminded her.
“I’m going with or without you.”
Henry knew better than to argue with Tess, especially now that she was pregnant. If she said she wanted fettuccine carbonara at three in the morning, she would damn well find a way to get it, even when it meant sending Henry to the all-night grocery store and cooking the meal herself.
Henry had no choice but to join the pilgrimage. To do his best to make things safe. But here, in the cabin, that felt like an impossible task.
He climbed up to the loft where he and Tess had slept, where they’d made a baby together. Their bed was an old futon laid out on the floor, piled high with sleeping bags, now chewed through by mice. Like a thief in a hurry, he quickly sorted through their things: clothes stacked in milk crates, mildewed books, Tess’s paints and brushes, his wood-carving tools. He grabbed the canvas roll of ch
isels, gouges, and knives and stuffed it into his pack along with some of Tess’s better brushes. The paints he left.
The loft felt small and airless. Henry made his way back to the ladder and down, going straight for the hanging tapestries this time, pushing his way through quickly as if he half-expected to catch Winnie and Suz there if he moved fast enough. Privacy be damned. But their bed was empty. Clothes lay scattered on the floor. Combat boots and white canvas sneakers with intricate designs hand-drawn on them. A spilled box of crayons. A bong made from a plastic bear that once held honey. An empty wine bottle with a candle shoved in its neck, red wax drips covering the glass like coagulated blood. And there, taking up the entire wall behind their makeshift bed, was the moose. Not the wooden sculpture that Henry knew lay in pieces behind the cabin, but the paintings: nine canvases put together to make one large moose, a study Suz did before tackling the real project: the sculpture, which would be the ruin of them.
TESS STOOD OVER THE cats, watching them choke the food down, listening to the low drone of their purring. She contemplated ways to convince Henry to take the cats home with them. Maybe not all of them. She’d just start with a couple. Surely Henry’s father wouldn’t object. And though Henry was allergic, there were medications available, right? It wasn’t too much to ask—just one or two of the cats. Carrot definitely, because he had been the first. And maybe little Tasha with no tail. The rest they could at least take back to town. But how would they get the cats down the hill? She didn’t believe the animals would follow them, even if they led with open cans of tuna, fishy Pied Pipers. She began searching around for something to put them in—a large box or crate. That’s when she noticed the aquarium, set up just where they’d left it, on the counter to the left of the sink. She immediately understood that was where the dead animal smell was coming from.
She remembered the day she and Winnie brought home from the lake an old peanut butter jar full of dark eggs in a gelatinous mass. It was the beginning of summer. Anything seemed possible.
“Oh,” was all she could say as she stood before the glass tank now, the stench overtaking her.
How many were there? Fifteen? Twenty? It was hard to make a guess. The aquarium was thick with partially decayed frogs, trapped in the sickening green gel that had once been water and now more closely resembled primordial ooze.
It was there, standing before the tank, that Tess remembered the way Suz had said the word met-a-morph-o-sis, emphasizing each syllable, promising the same fate lay in store for the four of them, the Compassionate Dismantlers, that they too would each be irrevocably changed and there would be no going back.
It was at that moment that Tess’s water broke, the stink of the frogs filling her nostrils, Suz’s voice filling her head. Met-a-morph-o-sis.
“Oh!” Tess cried again, louder this time, more of a moan really. Like a heartsick child crying for home.
AS HIS WIFE’S WATER broke, the liquid pouring down through her cotton panties, down through the tented opening of her skirt and onto the worn kitchen floorboards, Henry regarded the moose.
He had locked eyes with the animal in the painting and believed the moose pinned him there. He dared not move for fear of startling the creature to life. He noticed for the first time how the shape and color of its iris was not unlike Suz’s own eyes—light amber flecked with gold—and only then did he imagine that it was Suz looking down, judging him, asking why he had come back, what it was that he had hoped to find.
“You,” he told her in a whisper, speaking to the moose directly, saying the word at the same moment his wife began to moan.
Henry stepped forward and removed the upper-left-most painting—the close-up of the moose’s left eye and raggedy brown ear. Then he pushed through the curtain and went to find Tess, clutching the painting under his arm. He moved through the sea of cats in the kitchen and found his wife standing in a puddle before the aquarium. At first, he thought that she’d been trying to rescue the frogs (though it was clear to him at once they were long past the point of rescuing). He imagined that she’d been bailing out the green stinking water with her hands and the very idea terrified him to the point of paralysis.
“I think the baby’s coming,” Tess said, hands over her belly.
It took long moments, even after Tess’s explanation, for him to understand what had happened, and plan his next move. He carefully orchestrated their escape from the cabin, the slow walk down the hill to the car, painting jammed under his arm at an awkward angle, that big brown eye glancing up in his direction, seeming to ask, What were you hoping to find?
[ PART ONE ]
TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF A THING, IT MUST BE TAKEN APART
Chapter 1
Present Day
THE MOOSE, OR RATHER, the left eye, ear, antlers, and snout of the moose, hangs from a nail gone rusty in the front hall of their home—the brick farmhouse Henry himself grew up in—watching their comings and goings, greeting each visitor over the years, sizing them up. Sentry moose. Give him the password and enter. But who knows the password? Not Tess. Not Henry, who moved out of the house and into the barn nearly a year ago. Not Franklin DeForge, Henry’s old father who has been dead now four years—brain aneurysm. The moose takes pity on all of them and lets them pass, day in and day out. Watches with curiosity as uncountable bags of groceries, boxes of pizza, handfuls of mail, and loads of firewood come in. As snow is shaken off coats, mud scraped off boots, umbrellas left to dry.
Finally, it is their daughter, Emma, who thinks up the password. It is Emma who names the moose Francis, and knows you have to look straight into its one turbulent eye and whisper, Nine, just as you come in. Nine is the magic number. Francis, Emma knows from her parents, was nine paintings big. Eight are missing. Nine would make him whole.
Francis was painted A Long Time Ago by a friend they knew in college. Suz, her name was. Whenever Emma asks questions about Suz or the moose—like, “How long did it take Suz to make Francis?” or “What happened to the other eight paintings?”—her parents shake their heads. Their eyes go blank as dolls’ and they say only, That was A Long Time Ago.
A Long Time Ago is its own country, a place Emma doesn’t have a passport for and can only imagine. It’s the time before time; the world without her in it.
Emma sometimes stands in the hall and tries to imagine the other paintings, the full effect of Francis in his entirety. He’d take over the wall, the room, be large as life, and yes, maybe if he were whole, maybe then his entire body would move—not just his eye, as Emma swears she’s seen. Maybe he’d step off the wall and onto the floor, leaving great muddy hoofprints next to their own predictable shoes.
Nine. A lucky number. And just last month, Emma herself turned nine. They had a little party, just Emma, her parents, and her best friend Mel. Her parents had been eager for her to invite more friends, but the truth of it was that Emma didn’t really have any other friends. Most of the other kids in school made fun of her, called her a mental case. And even if she’d had another friend, she probably wouldn’t invite her to her house. Especially not now that her dad was living in the barn. That was not something she wanted going around school.
Mel’s the only one she trusts. The only one who doesn’t make a big deal about her counting under her breath or having to go through the trays at lunch until she finds a blue one without scratches.
On her birthday, Emma, Mel, and her parents went candle-pin bowling, then came home and ate red velvet cake, which was Emma’s absolute favorite because it’s both chocolatey and a strange Mars red color. The other thing she loved about it was that when her mom was growing up, this was the exact same cake Grandma Bev baked for her each year. Emma loved the words Family Recipe, and each birthday, when she took her first bite of the cake, so sweet it made her teeth ache, she’d imagine her mother at the same age—seven, eight, nine—taking her first bite, and for those few brief seconds each year, she felt linked to her mother in this fleeting, sugary way.
Emma c
losed her eyes as she blew out the nine candles on her cake, sure that when she opened them, something miraculous would have happened. She would discover she’d sprouted wings, or find herself living underwater with the starfish. Francis the moose would have come to life—not just a little twitch of the eye, a little wink, but a full-fledged, living, breathing, smelly moose.
But this is not what she wished for. What she wants most, what she concentrated on with all her might as she blew out the candles, was that her parents would get back together again. They would realize they love each other and her father would move out of the barn and back into the farmhouse with them.
Maybe, she decided, as she watched them grinning at her over the cake with its smoking candles, they just needed a little help. A little push in the right direction.
IT’S MEL, WHO IS ten, one whole year older, who suggests they start snooping.
“We can’t do that!” Emma complains. It’s Monday, the ninth of June, the first full day of summer vacation, and they’re bored already.
“You’re the one who wants to get them back together so bad,” Mel says, then she starts picking at her cuticles, a sure sign that she’s on the verge of losing interest in the problem altogether. Mel is smart, but she hates to be shot down and it doesn’t take much for her to get bored and move on to something else. If Emma’s not careful, Mel might even hop on her bike and ride home, leaving Emma alone and bored, nothing to do but watch bad reruns. It’s the first day of summer vacation. The first day of freedom. This one day could set the tone for the whole summer and Emma doesn’t want to blow it.
“But how’s that going to help? What would we even be looking for?” Emma asks, hesitant, knowing that what Mel suggested is wrong, bad, it is not RESPECTFUL, and respecting one another is the biggest, maybe the only, rule of their house.
The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Page 44