Henry handed over four of his Benadryl and he and Tess watched Suz grind them into powder and dump it into a shot of tequila.
Winnie and Spencer came in laughing, said the fire was good to go. Spencer said something about porcupines that Henry didn’t catch, but it made Winnie start laughing again.
“Celebration time!” Suz announced, a sickly sweet grin pasted on her face. “Let’s drink a toast to the newest member of the Compassionate Dismantlers.” Suz handed Spencer the first shot she’d poured and gave him a hearty thump on the back.
“To Spencer,” she said, and they all clicked their glasses together. When Spencer finished his shot, Suz poured him another. Then another. She filled her own glass too.
Henry and Tess threw cautious, worried glances at each other. Where was Suz going with this?
“Not gonna let a girl outdrink you, are you, Spencer?” Suz asked. He shook his head, held his glass out for another shot. In half an hour, he was slouched in the chair, slurring his words, barely able to move.
“Give me a hand,” Suz said to Henry as she looped Spencer’s left arm around her shoulder and started to stand him up. Henry got the other side, figuring maybe they were just going to carry him off to bed. He should have known better. With Suz, things were never that simple.
“Wherewegoin?” Spencer moaned.
“For a ride,” Suz said. “Grab the keys to the van, Henry.”
“Keys?” Henry repeated, more worried than ever.
Winnie touched Spencer’s face, pried open one of his eyes. “What the fuck did you do to him?” she hissed at Suz.
“Relax, babe,” Suz said. “It’s all part of the plan. Now let’s get him to the Love Machine.”
“Where are we taking him?” Tess asked, once they’d all settled into the van. Henry was behind the wheel, a lit cigarette between his lips. He liked to smoke when he was nervous. It gave him something to do with his hands.
“East,” Suz said. Then she turned to Henry and said, “Get on Route 2 and drive, babycakes. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
On and on they drove, past farms, lakes, and campgrounds. Through St. Johnsbury and across the bridge into New Hampshire where they stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through for coffee and milk shakes. The road twisted and turned. Suz rolled cigarettes, played with the radio dial, never letting a song finish before searching impatiently for something better.
Three hours after leaving the cabin, Suz told him to pull over.
“Where?” Henry asked. They had just crossed into Maine and were on a two-lane highway without a house or streetlight in sight. The last town they went through had a paper mill, and the air was still heavy with the thick, sulfuric stink of it.
“Right there,” Suz said, pointing to a dirt pull-off about ten yards ahead. Spencer was out cold.
“Now what?” Tess asked.
Suz smiled. “We dump him. Come on, help me get his clothes off. And grab his wallet too.”
“Jesus!” Tess said. “This is going too far, Suz. You can’t leave him out here in the middle of nowhere, naked, with no money or ID.”
Suz thought a moment. “You’re right. Let’s leave his underwear on. What do you think, is he a boxer or briefs guy?” Suz un-buttoned his black jeans and started pulling them down. “Tighty-whities! I knew it. But then again, it’s no surprise to you, Winnie, is it?” Winnie looked away as Suz pulled the jeans the rest of the way off, then rifled through the pockets. She pulled out his wallet, a book of poetry, and a jackknife.
“I am so keeping this,” Suz said, turning the knife over in her hand.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” Tess asked. “I mean, it’s evidence, right?”
“Evidence of what, exactly?” Suz asked.
“That we were here. That we did this to him,” Tess said. “What if he doesn’t make it back?”
Suz laughed. Shook her head.
“It’s fine, Tess,” Henry told her.
Spencer was on his back on the floor of Henry’s van, wearing only white briefs.
“Are you sure he’s okay?” Tess asked. “He hasn’t moved at all.”
Henry leaned down, found Spencer’s pulse, which seemed strong enough, nodded. “Nothing to worry about,” he whispered to Tess.
They got Spencer out of the van and laid him down in the dirt. Suz took a Sharpie and wrote, I TRASHED STYLES INDUSTRIES across his forehead. “How’s that for a finishing touch? Fucking brilliant, isn’t it?”
Later that night, back at the cabin, everyone was quiet. Suz sat carving her initials into the table with Spencer’s knife. At last, she looked up and addressed the group.
“I know you’re all thinking we crossed a line tonight. But that’s the nature of compassion,” she explained. “Think about it: sometimes, the most compassionate thing to do is the hardest. Like when you have to put an animal down, or cut off someone’s leg to save them.”
Tess shook her head. “Spencer’s not an animal. And he didn’t have gangrene or whatever the fuck in his leg.”
“You’re missing the point,” Suz said. “People who think they know everything need to be shown that they don’t have a fucking clue,” she told them. “That’s the true path to enlightenment. Sometimes, the most compassionate thing is to be the wrecking ball that changes someone’s life forever.”
BE THE WRECKING BALL.
Jesus.
Henry rises out of the canoe, goes over to the phone and picks it up. He’s got to get out of his own head for a while. Talk to someone who might understand.
He’s surprised to hear Tess in the middle of a call. Henry covers the mouthpiece of the phone with his palm and listens. “I’ll do it,” he hears her tell someone.
“I knew you would,” a woman’s voice says. The woman has a thick accent. This is clearly not anyone Henry knows.
Who would Tess be making deals with in the middle of the night?
Henry hangs up quietly, waits a few minutes, then calls Winnie at the cabin.
“I can’t sleep,” he tells her. “I think something’s going on with Tess.”
“Henry,” Winnie says, her voice lulling, almost seductive. “Can you come out here? To the cabin.”
“What? Now?” Henry looks at his watch—nearly one in the morning.
“Yes. There’s something I want to talk to you about, but not over the phone.”
Val. That was her name before.
Before they were the Dismantlers, what were they? And after?
Isn’t the reality that everything else, for better or worse, pales in comparison to the lives they lived that summer?
“I’ll be there in an hour,” he says.
Chapter 37
SHE’S COLD. SCARED. EMMA’S been watching her father’s barn all night from her bedroom window. As soon as she saw him turn out the lights, she raced down to the Blazer and climbed into the backseat.
When Emma called Mel earlier to promise to get Suz’s journal tomorrow, Mel said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe your dad’s got a girlfriend.”
Emma let out a snorting laugh.
“Think about it,” Mel said. “It would explain why your mom kicked him out of the house. And where he goes so late at night. Maybe he’s playing hide-the-salami with some other lady!”
“Eew!” Emma shrieked. “No way.”
But she needs to make sure. To prove it to herself.
And if it’s not a girlfriend (which she knows it isn’t, thank you very much, bigmouthed, smarty-pants Mel), what is it that he’s doing so late at night? Where does he go?
If she has any hope of getting her parents back together again, she has to do more than what she’s been doing. She needs to understand what they’re really up to.
The truth is, Emma’s worried that her plans are backfiring. Her mom and dad seemed oddly frightened by the message she and Mel painted on the trees. And the riddle! She’d read it in Suz’s journal when Danner convinced her to go back in and take another quick look. Hearing the riddle again would su
rely take her parents back, give them a little thrill; they’d share a look, a gesture, and be on their way to reconciliation. What really happened was that they both looked horrified. As if Emma had opened her mouth and spit out shards of glass.
Emma’s in her favorite pajamas, the ones with little red moose all over them. She’s crouched down behind the driver’s seat, the blanket from the backseat covering her. She’s a worm underground. Wriggling. Writhing. But worms are dirty things. Full of germs. Bacteria. Microbes. Some worms are parasites and there’s nothing more repulsive than a parasite. Emma knows that if she starts to really let herself think about parasites, she’ll get itchy all over and need to take a scalding bath, scrub her skin until it’s raw. It’s starting already—that creepy, wiggly feeling just under her skin.
“Hold still,” Danner says.
Emma hadn’t even realized Danner was with her. But at the same time, she knows that in some way, Danner is always with her. She wants to push away the blanket, look around and see where Danner is hiding, but instead, she holds still. Listens to her own breath.
Now she’s a worm asleep. A worm who has rolled over and is playing dead.
Stop the worm thoughts, already! she tells herself.
She starts counting by nines. Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven.
She listens. Hears nothing.
“Danner?”
“Yeah?”
“Was that you earlier. At the bottom of the pool?”
The blanket is scratchy against Emma’s face and she wonders if it’s possible to suffocate under it. She hears a gurgling sound—a wet, rasping choke. She goes to lift the blanket, to peek and see if Danner is okay, but she’s afraid. What if it’s not Danner? Or what if it is and she looks like she did at the bottom of the pool, skin sloughing off?
Stop it, she tells herself, then she goes back to counting. Thirty-six. Forty-five. Fifty-four.
She feels as if she’s playing hide-and-seek, but what is it she’s hiding from?
Ready or not, here I come.
Through the blanket, she smells something wet and rottenan animal that’s fallen into a well; a fish left in a plastic bag in the sun.
“Danner?” she says, the word little more than a gasp caught in the back of her throat.
She covers her nose and mouth with her hand to protect herself from the smell that’s growing stronger each second. She hears the gurgling sound again, someone sucking air through a wet straw. But there are words behind it; voices piled on top of each other, straining, screaming, panicked. She thinks she hears her father’s voice among them, saying something about stones.
No stone unturned.
Sticks and stones can break your bones.
Emma reaches out from under the blanket and gropes for the door handle. At last, she’s got it and she’s about to pull it open, to throw herself out of the car, blanket still covering her, when she hears her father open the driver’s-side door, climb in, and start the engine.
All at once, the wet sucking noise stops. The smell disappears. She lets go of the door handle.
They ride a long time. Swerving, bumping along like maybe they’re in a boat, not a car. She smells cigarette smoke. She didn’t know her father even smoked. Weird. Maybe it’s not him. Maybe someone has stolen his car. Maybe she’s been kidnapped.
She thinks of the face at the bottom of the pool.
I’ve got a secret.
Her feet are full of pins and needles. Gone to sleep. Or maybe it’s the parasites under her skin. She starts to scratch.
“Don’t move,” Danner whispers. “Stay where you are and don’t make a sound.” She sounds so serious. A lump forms in Emma’s throat.
Everything you have is mine.
In movies sometimes people jump out of moving cars. The trick is to roll. She thinks maybe she should do this. But where would she be? And how would she find her way home with a broken arm or leg? And what if she landed in something gross like a pile of dog poop or a swamp full of skunk cabbage?
The Blazer is going up a steep hill now. Rough and bumpy. They’ve slowed to a crawl. Emma feels as if she’s on a carnival ride. It’s that the-ground-is-not-the-way-it-should-be, sick-to-her-stomach feeling she gets. Then, all at once, it’s over. The Blazer stops. Her father (or whoever the driver is) gets out.
Then he shouts something. He’s calling a name that sounds like Give me. Give me.
A woman calls back.
Give you what? Emma imagines her saying back.
Emma pulls the blanket off and sits up, looking out the windshield. The Blazer’s headlights are on and focused on the building in front of them: an old cabin. On the steps is Winnie and she’s still wearing Emma’s mother’s clothes. Her father is standing in the yard, talking to Winnie. Emma can’t make out the words, but her father looks sheepish, worried. His hands are dug deep into his pockets and he’s scuffing at the pine-needle-covered ground with the toe of his boot.
And there, just to the left of her father, stands a figure Emma recognizes at once. There he is, real and life size, just like she always imagined. Like she’s always wished for. And if this wish has come true, doesn’t that mean others might as well?
“Francis!” Emma cries, slamming open the car door and rushing to him. “Francis! Nine! Nine! Nine!”
Chapter 38
TESS HEARS HENRY DRIVE off, and slips out of the house and across the yard in her pajamas and robe.
She can’t picture Henry having an affair at all. He’s just not the type for clandestine meetings in the middle of the night.
She slides open the door to Henry’s workshop and flicks on the tiny Maglite she brought. She doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone. (Maybe he just ran out to an all-night supermarket for something; maybe he’s off for another moonlight swim. Ha! Right.) Wherever he’s gone, she may not have much time.
Tess makes her way across the concrete floor, past the enormous dugout canoe, which sits in the dark like some giant, pale monster lurking. Trotting now, she goes straight for the toolbox.
After drawing the flower with Suz’s face this afternoon, Tess filled page after page with images she recalled from the summer of the Dismantlers. She drew the wooden moose, Winnie and her gun, Henry with a beard and wistful expression, and sketch after sketch of Suz. Suz writing in her journal. Suz holding a bottle of tequila. And the final drawing: Suz in the lake.
But no matter how hard she worked on Suz’s face, she felt she wasn’t getting it quite right. The rigid jaw. The crooked teeth. Little, sharp nose. Stormy, amber eyes.
Then she remembered the photos stashed in Henry’s studio and thought maybe they’d help. She’ll just borrow them for a few days. He’ll never notice they’re missing.
Tess opens the toolbox, the rusty hinges letting out a little squeal of alarm. Removing the top tray full of tools, she reaches in and grabs the photos: Suz, Winnie, Henry, and a younger, smoother, surer version of herself smile up at her. There’s the moose. Henry and Suz clowning around on the beach. The photos are just what Tess needs to give her sketches new life, accurate detail. She looks down at an image of Winnie with the gun pulled up against her shoulder, her finger on the trigger, left eye closed, right eye sighting her target down the barrel.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU did to the condoms,” Tess said. They were alone, outside the cabin. Suz and Henry had gone on a beer and cigarette run. Winnie was polishing her gun.
“What’d I do?”
“You can’t play with people’s lives like that,” Tess said. This got no reaction from Winnie, who just kept polishing the metal barrel of her gun with an old bandanna. “You think it’ll help you hold on to Suz, but it won’t. Just like it won’t help me hold on to Henry. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, Winnie. Baby or no baby.”
Winnie continued polishing the gun, a little harder and faster now.
“Maybe I should tell Suz about it,” Tess said.
Winnie looked up. “Tell her what, Tess? That you were so desperate to hol
d on to Henry you poked holes in the condoms, then tried to blame someone else for it?” She smiled with amusement and went back to polishing her gun.
Tess clenched her hand into a fist, then opened it again. She stood up and climbed the steps up to the front door of the cabin.
“So it worked then?” Winnie called after her.
“What?”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Fuck you!” Tess said, slamming the door behind her.
TESS TUCKS THE PICTURES into the pocket of her robe, then lifts out the journal, flipping through it until she comes to a place near the middle.
June 21—Cabin by the lake
Winnie is actually a pretty good shot—who knew the gun would be such a perfect gift? When I gave it to her I was just thinking that here was this thing I could hand over that would make her feel strong and powerful. I bought it from some old-timer at a flea market. At first I thought we’d just use it as a prop in our missions…you know, something to carry around and flaunt. Then I thought that it would be good for Val to learn how to shoot. She was scared at first. But now, she’s hardly ever without it. It’s so naturally a part of her that I started calling her Winnie. It was just a joke, but it stuck. Now none of us ever call her Val. We hear someone call her by that and we’re like, “Who?”
Winnie rides in the passenger seat of the Love Machine, hanging her gun out the window on our midnight runs. Hence the term “riding shotgun.” She’s taken out mailboxes, satellite dishes, transformers on telephone poles. She puts holes in aboveground swimming pools and water towers. Tonight, we drove out past Sexton and down a little dirt road to the Green Mountain Power substation. It was all fenced in, razor wire on top. Henry pointed the headlights of the van at it and Winnie just started shooting—she turned the big boxy transformer into Swiss cheese, blew the tops right off the two towers. It was beautiful!
After, we drove around screaming, passing the tequila, all of us shouting, “Yee-haw!” like a posse of cowboys. Every house we passed was dark, not a single streetlight was working in town. Even the college was lost in the black night.
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