Winnie packed a bag and headed for the cabin in Vermont the day she got the card, thrilled and terrified to discover that it was in much the same shape as it had been when they’d left it.
What’d you expect, babycakes? Did you think the maid would have come? Some happy housekeeper doing her duty out in the woods?
Winnie immediately went to work cleaning up. She took two pickup loads of trash to the dump: old clothes chewed through by mice, shelf after shelf of ruined food, hardened tubes of acrylic paint. Some discoveries, like the unsent ransom note, she burned.
In the back corner of the kitchen, she found the aquarium they’d put the jar of frogs’ eggs in. She covered her nose and mouth with a bandanna, held her breath, and carried the tank out of the cabin and into the woods behind it, eyes watering, throat closing instinctively as she gagged and retched from the smell. She dumped the thick, green scum and discovered that there, settled on the bottom of the tank, were frog bones—paper-thin skulls, a front foot so like a miniature human hand that Winnie had to count the digits to be sure.
She filled a big black Hefty bag with things that had belonged to Suz and drove it down to the beach. Winnie stripped off all her clothes, added some rocks to the bag, and swam it out to the middle of the lake.
Back at the cabin, Winnie swept and scrubbed until her back ached and her hands were rubbed raw. She washed all of the cups, bowls, plates, and silverware in hot water mixed with bleach. She put out tempting little piles of poison for the mice.
As she cleaned and brought things to some semblance of order, she collected artifacts from their long-ago summer: sketches on curled yellow-edged paper, Polaroids shoved in a drawer, a box of drawing charcoal. She tacked some of the old drawings to the wall, set a box of matches and some ancient, dried-up scraps of Drum tobacco next to an ashtray on the table. Sometimes, looking around, she could trick herself into believing that time had stood still here and Suz was just about to walk through the door.
Once the cabin was clean and in order, she began, like a paleontologist assembling old bones, to reconstruct Suz’s moose, which lay in a collapsed heap out back.
Winnie branched out, leaving the cabin to watch Tess and Henry’s house. She followed Tess to the farmers’ market and art galleries. She tailed Henry to his office. DEFORGE PAINTING said the sign. Winnie remembered Henry going to meet his father there years before. Once, she came along and the old man took the two of them to lunch. Henry respected his father, but had, Winnie felt, a healthy sort of contempt for the life he’d chosen—the painting company, the old rambling farmhouse, the Chamber of Commerce dinners, meetings at the Elks Club. Now Henry had chosen the same thing. Or perhaps, thought Winnie, the life had chosen him, pulling him along like a strong current Henry had been unable to swim against.
She knew all about those currents. Wasn’t that what had led her back home to Boston, to work in a series of crummy low-wage jobs: aide in a nursing home, night clerk at a 7-Eleven? Jobs her mother might have taken. Jobs her family expected her to fall into, in spite of the fancy BA from Sexton. Her life, after Sexton, after the Dismantlers, for the most part, had been shit. Shit jobs, shit relationships. She tried to write and couldn’t. Poetry had left her. Or maybe she’d left it. Turned her back on that part of herself the night Suz died.
Winnie felt so alone after Suz died that she had tried to kill herself twice and had somehow been a failure at that too. The first time she just passed out and woke up sticky with blood that seeped pitifully from the all-too-shallow cuts on her wrists and groggy from the over-the-counter sleeping pills she’d swiped from the 7-Eleven. The second time was just pure idiocy. She was at home for Thanksgiving dinner and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom where she took everything she could find in the medicine cabinet. When she didn’t come down for pie, her father broke down the door. Her stepmother, having watched one too many episodes of ER, began searching for a pulse. She pulled back Winnie’s sleeve and caught sight of the scars. While they waited for the ambulance, her stepmother undressed her the rest of the way—Winnie could just see the scene in her mind’s eye, her stupid, sturdy stepmother yanking the clothes off Winnie’s seemingly lifeless body, getting angrier and angrier—and saw the extent of the damage. Winnie woke up in the psych ward, where she stayed for six weeks. Then she was deemed well enough to leave and given two prescriptions and a referral to a community mental health center, all of which went in the trash can at the T station.
YESTERDAY MORNING, HER STEPMOTHER called her on her cell to say a private investigator had phoned, looking for her—a man named Spencer Styles was dead, found holding in his own hand a postcard identical to the one that had come for Winnie.
Fueled by this bit of news, she’d finally gotten up the nerve to go pay an actual visit to Henry and Tess. She’d driven up the driveway to their house, sure she’d announce herself, have a cup of coffee, and reminisce while showing them the strange postcard she’d received, but no one was home. Winnie walked around the old brick farmhouse, peering in windows. She sat in a wooden chair beside the pool, even took off her tennis shoe and dragged her toes through the blue water. She made her way across the yard and discovered the sculpture garden. She stopped to watch the goldfish in the cement pond, then to study the statue of Tess and Henry as terrified half lions. It was clearly Tess’s work.
Winnie continued on to the far corner of the garden and found the grotto, the photo of Suz right at the center. Winnie knelt down so she was at eye level with her old lover, and it was as if she had caught Suz off guard, surprised. Winnie had looked through some window to the past, pried away all the years and found Suz startled to see her, as if Winnie herself were the ghost.
After seeing the grotto, she hurried back to her car and drove straight back to the old cabin, to the very place the photo had been taken, feeling like the line between past and present was too blurry to face Henry and Tess just then.
Then, this afternoon, she decided to try again, using a new approach. She left her number in the mailbox for Henry. It would be easier if he came to her. If she saw them one at a time.
BACK IN THE CABIN, Winnie peels off Suz’s soaking-wet clothes and crawls into her sleeping bag, glad to be done with this beast of a day where nothing went as planned. She may have just blown any chance of reconnecting with Henry and Tess. She never did know how to reach out to people.
“Idiot,” she mumbles to herself.
The moon plays with the shadows in the loft, stretching them out, making the building seem as if it has its own set of scars. And it does. Winnie knows. She can feel them. The cabin aches the way Winnie herself aches. She reaches under her pillow and takes out the stack of letters, flips on a flashlight, and reads the first:
January 1, 12:40 A.M.
Dear Val,
Happy Fucking New Year. I’ve just downed half a bottle of peppermint schnapps. No champagne in the house. Tsk-tsk. God, I miss you. Things here in cheery old New Jersey are just swell. I divide my time between my days at the FRANKFOOTER—yes, you read that right—slathering chili on foot-long dogs, and my nights at my aunt’s where I am making a collage to cover all the walls in the dungeon that is my room. No word from my mother. My aunt, who makes it clear that she’s put out by my being here, thinks maybe she’s in jail again. Or rehab. But neither of us has taken the incentive to call around.
I’m sorry you had such a lousy visit with Spencer. No, fuck that, I’m not sorry. He’s a pretentious piece of shit who treats you like a little girl. You deserve better. You deserve true love, with all its beautiful complications.
Thanks for the poems. I’ve pasted them to my wall, right above my bed, and read them each night before falling drunkenly into sleep. They’re perfect, Val. You’re perfect. If you were here, I’d kiss you.
Here’s hoping the New Year brings us all our truest desires.
Love and consequences,
Suz
PS—Here’s a copy of the Manifesto I’ve been working on. I think it’s a fi
nal draft but I wanted to show it to you before calling it done. I ain’t the writer in the group.
Carefully, so as not to tear the worn pages, Winnie puts the letter aside, finds the page below, and stares down at the words scrawled in blue ink.
THE COMPASSIONATE DISMANTLER MANIFESTO
We, the Compassionate Dismantlers, hold five truths to be self-evident.
1. To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.
2. We oppose technology, hierarchy, rules and laws, and all forms of government.
3. The universe was created in chaos, and the only true creative force is chaos.
4. Dismantlement is an act of compassion as well as an act of revolution.
5. Dismantlement = Freedom
Winnie tucks the letter back into its tattered envelope, back under her pillow.
“We’re going to stay here forever,” Suz had promised one night, just weeks before her death. “Can’t you feel it?”
Yes. Winnie could feel it. She’d felt it for years, a terrible aching tug at her chest, pulling her back to the old cabin. She felt it stronger than ever now that she’d returned, as she patched holes in the roof with a bucket of tar from the hardware store, or lay in her sleeping bag in the loft listening to the mice munching on poison.
Suz was here still. Waiting for Winnie to carry out one last act of Dismantling.
“I’m here, Suz,” Winnie whispers to the shadows as she reaches down to run her fingers over the ridges of her scars. “I haven’t forgotten.”
Chapter 24
“WHERE THE HELL HAVE you been?”
It’s a trap. Tess has been pacing in Henry’s dark little apartment on the south side of the barn, lying in wait like a spider, and as soon as he comes in the door, she flips the kitchen light on, hoping that if she catches him off guard he’ll be honest with her. She thinks she deserves that much at least.
“Out driving.”
“You’re soaking wet, Henry. You’re dripping all over the goddamn floor.”
“I went for a swim.”
She laughs. “A swim. That’s perfect. Fucking perfect.”
He looks down at the puddle he’s making on the linoleum floor. He looks so boyish, so guilty, that she almost feels sorry for him. Then she looks at the clock on the microwave: 3:30 in the morning. Where the hell does a man go at that hour?
“Are you seeing someone, Henry?”
“Jesus!”
“Are you?”
“No.”
Is she jealous? Jesus. This is too much. Get the fuck over it, she tells herself.
She remembers the feel of his hand on her back this evening. The thrilling jolt it had given her. How close she’d been to turning around. Such an idiot!
“Well, maybe you should be,” she tells him. She notices she’s positioned herself in a boxing stance: her body turned so that her left shoulder is to him, chin down, fists clenched at her sides. “Maybe we both should. It’s time we moved on. It isn’t healthy to go on living like this. Not for us or for Emma. I think it’s time you found someplace else to live.”
“Someplace else?” Henry says, standing in his own little puddle, a leaking, melting man.
She thinks of the first time she laid eyes on him: both of them nineteen, standing awkwardly by the snack table at a new-student mixer their first week at Sexton. She was spooning hummus onto crackers and he was fiddling with the spout of the coffee urn.
His hair was buzzed like a marine and his face and arms were the kind of bronze you got working outside all summer. He was wearing brown canvas carpenter’s pants and a black T-shirt that said ASK ME in big white letters on the front. He was exactly the type of boy Tess always found herself attracted to: well kempt, normal looking. But the trouble was, these normal-looking, handsome guys with their short hair and smooth golden skin were always a disappointment in the end. Duller than dull and sometimes just plain dim-witted. She wished she could be attracted to the artsy boys with piercings and purple-tinted hair who dressed in black from head to toe, guys she could actually have a conversation with, but for whatever reason, try as she might, there was just no spark.
Tess walked over to Henry, decided to take a chance.
“Ask you what?” Tess said.
His brown eyes met hers. “Huh?”
Dim-witted, for sure, she thought, sorry that she’d even approached him.
“Your T-shirt.”
“Oh,” he said, and turned so that she could read the back: ABOUT WILSON PAINTS AND STAINS.
Tess sighed. “And here I thought you were going to tell me the meaning of life, the origin of the universe.”
He shrugged his shoulders. Smiled apologetically. “I could make something up,” he told her. “Or how about I tell you the dream I had last night?”
“Okay.” She took a step closer to him, listening intently.
“I was this cow in a field, you know, just hanging out, eating grass and clover. Happy and peaceful.”
Tess nodded, waited for him to go on.
“Then I woke up,” he said, scuffing at the linoleum floor with the toe of his work boot.
“That’s it?” she asked. She’d outdone herself in the dim-witted department this time. She did a quick scan of the room, looking desperately for a reason to excuse herself.
Henry continued. “I woke up and thought, what if it’s the other way around? You know, what if I really am a cow in some field and I’m having a dream that I’m a human, living this whole human life during one long bovine REM cycle? Wouldn’t that be a trip?”
Tess focused her eyes back on Henry. “Descartes,” she said.
“What’s that?” Henry asked.
“It reminds me of Descartes. The French philosopher. We read him in high school. He had this whole theory about the separation of mind and body. Let me guess, you’re not a philosophy major?”
Henry shook his head, smiled. “No. I’m an artist. A sculptor.”
Tess laughed out loud. She couldn’t believe her luck.
TESS WATCHES THE PUDDLE around Henry widen.
“You know what I want to know most, Henry? What I’m absolutely dying to know?” She thinks of the words in Suz’s journal: She knows how to stretch her limits. Remembers Henry saying, No. I’m an artist. A sculptor. “When did we become the people we least wanted to be?”
Tess starts to cry and hates herself for it.
Enough. Get hold of yourself.
Henry comes to her, his shoes squishing. She steps away.
“Don’t,” she tells him. And it’s that easy. He turns, head down, and makes his way through the little door that leads from the kitchen of his little apartment into his studio, leaving a wet trail, like a slug, to show where he’s been, shoes making nasty wet sounds as he scuffles out, obscene sounds, like someone fucking an octopus.
[ PART THREE ]
THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED INCHAOS, AND THE ONLY TRUE CREATIVE FORCE IS CHAOS
Chapter 25
“DADDY!” EMMA CRIES WHEN he enters the kitchen the next morning, as if he’s been away for weeks, as if it’s a miracle he’s here at all.
He takes her in his arms, leans down, and breathes her in. Strawberry shampoo. Chlorine.
He could live on that smell. Be stranded forever on some small desert island, as long as he had a bottle of that smell to take out each day.
Someday soon, he thinks, Emma will be too big for this. She won’t squeal Daddy! excitedly when he enters a room, won’t jump into his arms or let him bury his face in her hair.
“Your shoes are leaking,” Emma tells him.
“Indeed they are,” he says, letting her go, then reaching for a cup, pouring himself some coffee. He woke up and put on the work boots beside his bed, just like he did each morning, forgetting somehow that he’d worn them into the lake last night. He’d just as soon forget the whole wretched thing.
Swim with me, Henry.
Maybe if he told himself it didn’t happen, if he pretended and ignored the
wet boots, then it would all just fade away, like a bad dream. Even the part where Tess told him it was time to find someplace else to live.
Where is he supposed to go? He belongs here, with his family. It’s his house, for Christ’s sake!
Tess puts toasted waffles on Emma’s plate, lays down some sliced strawberries, tops it all with whipped cream from a can.
“Here you go, love,” she says, kissing the top of Emma’s head. “Just the way you like it.”
Then Tess goes back to the counter and grabs a section of the newspaper, thrusting it at Henry. He glances down. The classified ads. She’s circled apartment listings.
“Mom made me and Danner cocoa last night,” Emma says, looking up from her waffles, traces of whipped cream around her mouth.
“Isn’t that nice.” He folds up the paper, tucks it under his arm.
“And Danner told her a riddle.”
“Did she?” He stirs half-and-half into his coffee.
“Yup.” She wipes her mouth with a napkin, sets down her fork. “Danner loves riddles. She’s real good at them. Do you want to hear it, Dad?”
“Sure.”
“You’re in a cement room with no windows or doors. Just four walls. There’s a mirror and a table. How do you get out?”
Henry feels himself grow pale. Of course he knows the answer, but he acts as if he’s never heard it. He throws a desperate glance, like a lifeline, to Tess, but she won’t hold his gaze.
So this is how it’s going to be.
“How?” he asks. Some of the coffee sloshes over the edge of his cup and onto the floor. Maybe it’s a different riddle. Something she heard at school.
But no.
“You look in the mirror to see what you saw. You use the saw to cut the table in half. You put the two halves together to make a whole. You crawl through the hole and escape.” Emma’s smiling, pleased with the riddle all over again.
Henry sets his coffee down on the counter and holds on with one hand, steadying himself. “Danner told you that, huh?”
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