Shit. Bill fucking Lunde.
Henry grabs a painting tarp from the floor, hurriedly tosses it over the doll just as Bill slides the barn door open.
“Hey, Bill,” Henry says. He’s leaning casually against the frame that once held the canoe, smiling so hard his cheeks ache.
“The babysitter said you’d gone, but I saw your truck and the light on in here.”
“I’m just about to take off. I’m helping a crew finish a late job,” Henry says, lying without meaning to. But it’s too late to back out now.
Bill’s eying the black plastic stapled to the windows. “Not a fan of daylight, huh?” he says.
“Guess not,” Henry says.
“I was hoping to see Tess actually,” Bill says.
“Tess?”
“Yeah, I spoke with Julia at the Golden Apple gallery. I wanted to ask Tess about the woman who bought her paintings. Any idea where I can find your wife?”
Henry stiffens. “No,” he says. “Actually, I have no idea at all.”
“And you’re not worried?” Bill asks.
“Should I be?” Henry snaps. “She’s a grown woman.”
He takes in a breath, tries again. “Look, my wife and I…we’re sort of separated. I’m sure you figured that part out when you saw our living arrangement.”
Bill nods.
“I assume she’s dating someone. She’s probably off with him.”
“Well, when you hear from her, can you ask her to give me a call?”
“Sure,” says Henry. “Will do.” He looks at his watch—a not-so-gentle hint that he’s running late.
“So you got her out on the water, then?” Bill says.
“Huh?” Henry chomps down on the inside of his cheek.
Have to weight her down. So she won’t float.
“The canoe. How’d she handle?”
Henry lets out a breath, smiles. “Like a dream,” he says.
HENRY STANDS IN THE driveway, watches the taillights of Bill’s rented SUV disappear as he takes a left onto the main road, back toward town.
Henry checks his watch. Shit. He grabs the cell phone from his pants pocket, punches in Winnie’s number.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“I’m running a little late,” he tells her. “Lunde was here. Tess never showed up, so I had to get a sitter.”
“That’s fucked up,” Winnie says. “For her to leave you and Emma like that.”
“Yeah,” Henry says. “Look, I’m leaving in about five minutes.”
“Great. Don’t forget the gas can.”
“I won’t. And I’ve got the doll.” Tied up. I tied the fucking bitch right up.
“Perfect,” Winnie tells him. “I’ll see you at the lake in an hour. And wait till you see the latest present someone left for me.”
“What is it?” he asks.
“Suz’s old journal. It was here on the table when I came back from meeting you at the lake earlier. I’ll bring it with me and we’ll toss it in the moose.”
“One hour then,” Henry says, hanging up.
How the hell did the journal get from his workshop to the cabin? An absurd thought hits him: it was the doll. She took it there.
Jesus.
“Get a grip, Henry,” he tells himself.
He hustles back into the barn, grabs a corner of the tarp, and hesitates before pulling it back. What if she’s not there?
He chomps down on his cheeks, counts to three, and yanks up the tarp, feeling like a magician: now you see it, now you don’t.
But there she is, still wrapped in yellow rope.
And for my next trick…
When he finally lifts her, carries her fireman style over his shoulder to the truck, he’s once again amazed by the weight and heft. And he thinks, for an instant, that maybe he feels her move; her body going rigid, then limp again as he tosses her into the bed of the truck. His heart is hammering in his chest, his breath is wet and whistley. And that’s when he hears it, coming from the doll, a low, throaty hum: the static noise.
Chapter 73
WINNIE’S SITTING AT THE table in the cabin, wearing the Suz outfit one last time. She’s exhausted, but the whole thing is nearly over. Earlier, she and Henry wrestled the canoe out of the truck and into the water, driving a huge eye hook into the front and running a rope from the hook to a nearby tree so the boat wouldn’t drift away from shore. Then, with great effort, they maneuvered the moose into the back of Henry’s truck, carrying it up a board ramp, then tying it down for the rough trip to the lake. At the beach, they performed the whole procedure backward to get him out of the truck and onto the canoe where they used boards to brace him upright. He was too tall, and made the canoe tip, so they cut off his legs from the knees down to give him a lower center of gravity. Even then it was a trick, balancing him just so; they had to put rocks in his belly, over on his left side, to keep the canoe from tipping.
Now, Winnie’s sitting at the table with Suz’s journal, which is laid out right next to hers on the table in the cabin.
She checks her watch: nearly 11 P.M., minutes before she’s due to meet Henry. Fingers trembling slightly, she opens the journal to the last entry—Suz’s final written words.
July 29—Cabin by the lake
Everything’s going to hell. It seems that, at last, the Dismantlers are coming apart. And if you want to know the truth—I’m actually a little relieved.
Spencer’s tied and gagged, sweaty and pathetic. Winnie’s pacing around with the gun. She whispered to me earlier that we’ve gone far enough. We should just let him go.
How far is far enough?
This is the end and I think we all know it. Everyone’s looking to me to make sure we go out with a bang, not a whimper. They’re all expecting something great. A show worthy of Suz the Magnificent. Christ.
Tess and Henry are up in the loft arguing. They think we can’t hear them, but I’ve heard every word. Tess is pregnant. And noble, sweet Henry is swearing he’ll marry her, get a job and settle down. Poor Henry. Everyone knows it’s not Tess he’s in love with.
What they don’t know is how one night back in June, Henry and I swam way out to the other side of the lake. We floated on our backs and saw shooting stars, one after the other, like the whole sky was coming apart. Magical. Truly, it was. When we got to the little beach at the other end of the lake, we did it there in the sand. It was stupid, but it happened. Sometimes I think I get so caught up in being the Suz everyone believes I am that I lose track of what’s right. The romance of the idea of Suz the outlaw artist, Suz the revolutionary, Suz the red-hot lover. Or maybe that’s just bullshit. I’ve always known this wasn’t going to last forever. The summer will end. We’ll all drift apart, forget the Dismantlers. The others are living this shared delusion that we can go on and on, but I know the truth. And maybe, just maybe, that night on the beach with Henry, I wanted to milk it for all it was worth. Cause I was sure that I was gonna go back to fucking Trenton and get some shit job and date some idiot and maybe get married and join the whole fucking rat race and no one, no one will ever look at me the way the other Dismantlers have looked at me this summer. The way Henry looked at me that night on the beach.
After, Henry got all maudlin on me, told me how he’s been in love with me since the second our eyes met and all that. “I know,” I told him. “I’ve known all along.” And then, I did the thing I’ve been meaning to do since we got to the cabin.
“I have something for you. A present.” I pulled the Magic 8 Ball key ring out of my pocket and handed it over, pressing it into his palm.
“My van key! But I lost it that day at the gas station…” Henry trailed off and I watched as the truth hit him.
“You had it all along,” he said, grinning.
I nodded.
He asked what I wanted him to do now, and I told him to stick with Tess, how she would never let him down. “She loves you more than you know,” I told him and he just cried.
“But what about
us?” he asked.
“Part of you will always be with me,” I told him. “When you’re eighty years old, drooling into your oatmeal, part of you will still be back here at the lake, watching the sky fall with me.”
That’s really how I feel about this whole summer. No matter what happens now, part of us will always remain here. And I think it’s the best part. The purest part of our souls. We’ll haunt this place like ghosts while we live our “real” lives in cities far away, get married, have 2.5 kids, work our meaningless jobs.]
Part of me feels gone already, a living ghost.
Winnie closes the journal, sure she’s a living ghost herself. The veil between the past and the present is so thin in this place, so tenuous.
Outside, headlights come up the driveway. It could be Henry in his old orange van, coming back from town with Tess and Suz and a cardboard box full of supplies: tequila, drawing charcoal, oatmeal, coffee, and sugar.
She hears footsteps, stands and looks out the window, but before she can get a look, whoever it is is at the door, opening it. Coming inside.
Maybe, Winnie thinks, time is a layered thing and the past is always there, hidden right beneath the present, but somehow, they both exist in each moment. Maybe that’s what ghosts really are.
“You,” Winnie says.
The visitor smiles, says, “Who were you expecting? The goddamn queen of England?”
Chapter 74
PARKED ON THE BEACH, Henry stares out at the water and gnaws the insides of his cheeks. Feels his heart jumping around in his chest like some caged wild thing that thinks it’s about to be set free.
He understands now. There never was a Danner. It was Suz all along, coming to their daughter before she was even old enough to speak, befriending her, watching her, winning her over. What better way to haunt them? To make them pay for what they’d done.
Stomach acid churns, rises up, burning his esophagus, pushing its way to his throat. He swallows it back down, opens the door, and climbs out of the truck.
And now Suz has been given life, a body, by Emma, fed by the power of their fears, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster. And like that monster, she must be destroyed. Henry knows it’s up to him to do it, because he’s the only one who understands. He’s got to send her back where she belongs, to a grave at the bottom of the lake so her spirit can join her bones.
First thing this morning, he called Winnie to tell her he’d decided to follow her suggestion and put the doll in the moose.
“You really think it’s alive in some way? That Suz is inside it?” Winnie asked.
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, then went on to tell her about his adventures with the doll in the night.
“Jesus!” Winnie yelped into the phone. “I say let’s burn it. Soak it in gas and torch the fucker.”
But then he’d gone out to the Blazer and discovered the doll had made another miraculous escape.
“But I got you now,” he mumbles, thinking he should walk around to the back of the truck to check, but he can’t bring himself to. Not yet. In his mind, he hears the static noise.
Henry leans against the front of the pickup and lights a cigarette. Just killing time.
Killing. Time.
He shivers, takes a deep drag of his cigarette. It tastes horrible, dank and rotten.
It’s dark. Too dark. The moon hasn’t risen yet. Or maybe it’s a new moon. He should have paid attention to the goddamn Weather Channel last night. Maybe then he’d know.
He pushes the button on his watch, lighting up the face: 11:10. Where the hell is Winnie? Tossing his cigarette down without finishing it, he moves to the back of the truck and opens the tailgate, half expecting to find the doll gone, having jumped from the truck bed when he slowed at a stop sign.
But even in the dim light he can see that it’s there. Jesus, yes, it’s there.
And thankfully, it’s quiet. No buzz. No hundred voices coming from its sand-filled throat.
Henry dances from one foot to the other, scared to touch it, but finally, he tells himself, Fuck it, and lifts the Danner doll from the bed, throws her over his shoulder and staggers toward the canoe. The trick is to keep moving. To not stop to think about what he’s carrying.
His feet sink in the sand, his ankles twist on rocks. He remembers carrying Suz into the lake once before, her clothes full of rocks, Tess and Winnie sobbing behind him.
We have to weight her down. So she won’t float.
He remembers how he swam out on his back with Suz resting against his chest, one final embrace. How he saw Tess on the shore and thought of the baby inside her. He made a decision then, as he neared the middle of the lake—he would protect and defend Tess and the baby, no matter what. It was too late for Suz.
“She loves you more than you know,” Suz had told him, and now, he would do his best to honor that. To cherish it. To love Tess back.
He reached the middle of the lake and let Suz go, the rocks carrying her down into the darkest part of the water.
NOW, AS THEN, HE’S a man on autopilot, doing just what needs to be done. He’s protecting his family the only way he knows how.
He doesn’t stop to kick off his shoes or roll up his khaki work pants, just wades out so that he’s knee deep in water, opens the door in the moose’s chest and dumps her in, with a triumphant “Arghh!” like some comic book action hero.
But he hasn’t won yet.
He reaches for the can of gas, raises it up high, and soaks the whole moose, from his antlers to the tip of his tail, fuel raining down, some new kind of baptism.
Chapter 75
EMMA CRAWLS OUT FROM under the tarp, lowers herself over the opened back gate of the pickup and down to the ground. Behind her are woods, thick and shadowy. Off to the left, the rough old logging road they must have taken in, her father creeping along in low gear, Emma bouncing in the back, needing to pee so bad that each bump was agony. In front of them, a lake, probably the lake from A Long Time Ago. The water’s black and smells of whatever it is that lakes smell of: fish, algae, bugs, and bacteria. Do bacteria have a smell? she wonders. Mel would know. She suddenly finds herself wishing like crazy that Mel was here, which is dumb because Mel would just be ignoring her, no help at all. She wouldn’t be alone if Danner was here, but Danner hasn’t made an appearance since their argument the day before—in fact, the Danner doll itself seems to have taken off too. What Emma really wishes is that she was back home now, in her warm bed with a bathroom just down the hall. Laura would be downstairs, sneaking cigarettes, chewing on her toes, and watching one of those reality TV shows.
Crouching behind the left-rear bumper of the truck, looking desperately around for the best place to pee, Emma sees her father at the edge of the water.
He’s carrying something. Whatever it was he put in the back of the truck. Emma had been too scared to look and had ridden the whole way with the tarp covering her head, making her dizzy with the smell of turpentine. She’d probably killed some brain cells. It was supposed to make you high, sniffing turpentine, but it just gave her a headache and made her nostrils burn. Why would anyone do that for fun?
Now, as her eyes adjust in the darkness, she sees that this something her father had transported is actually a someone. A woman. Unconscious.
Oh. My. God. This was way worse than her dad having an affair! What if he turned out to be a serial killer or something? Would she still love him? Would she go to the police and tell?
Emma holds her breath, watching.
Soon, she sees that this is not really an unconscious woman.
“No,” Emma mouths the word, her mouth making a little O shape in the dark.
He’s got her sculpture! It’s Danner, she can see from the boots, the tuft of her blond wig. He’s got Danner all wrapped up in shiny yellow rope.
But that’s not even the worst part.
There, at the water’s edge, is the huge canoe Daddy made, and strapped to it, like a prisoner, is Francis, down on his knees. A
moose begging for mercy.
“No,” Emma mouths again, a cry without a sound.
Her dad wades out into shallow water, heaves Danner inside Francis through the door on his chest.
What is he doing?
A magic trick, Emma thinks. Like putting the lady in the box before sawing her in half.
Then, she sees her father pull something square and red from the front of the canoe.
Emma can smell the gasoline even from her hiding place behind the truck. He’s pouring it on Francis and the canoe. She hears the liquid rush out of the spout, spatter on whatever it hits.
She has got to pee. Now.
She gets down on her hands and knees, crawls into the woods behind the truck, her bladder a hard, painful clenched fist inside her. She finds a tree to hide behind where she still has a view of the beach, pulls her shorts and underwear down. Emma hates peeing outside. You never know what bugs are hiding there in the leaves. Or snakes. She heard a story once about a girl who went to pee when she was camping and a snake crawled up inside her. Then, she had all these snake babies. Mel said it wasn’t a true story, because snakes lay eggs. “Maybe the eggs hatched inside the girl,” Emma said. Whether or not it really happened, it just went to show that when you pee outside, you’re vulnerable to all sorts of terrible things.
Just as Emma starts to go, squatting in leaf litter, holding on to a skinny white birch tree to keep from tipping over, and praying for no snakes or poison ivy, she hears someone coming through the woods. But it’s too late now, she can’t stop midstream to hide, so she hunkers down as low as she can, keeps right on peeing as a figure moves down a path just to her left. Emma watches, holding her breath, shorts down around her ankles as Winnie passes not ten feet to the side of her.
Winnie’s wearing the same outfit she had on the day she jumped into the pool; the day she saved Emma’s life. The wig an exact copy of the one Danner wears, like she and Danner are sisters or something.
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