Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  And anyway, I could have slipped on the ice. I could have been struck by a car. Would it have been worth the risk? Oh, it would have, it would have, if it meant otherwise losing my dear, sweet dog. But I couldn’t budge, stuck there behind the guardrail watching Charlie’s tail flouncing away. He disappeared down the embankment on the other side of the freeway, where there was a frozen marsh. I was much too frightened to even scream or shut my eyes or breathe. When I tried to whistle, my mouth wouldn’t work. It was like a nightmare, when the hatchet man is coming for you and you want to scream, but you can’t. All I could do was wave to the few cars driving by with my little red gloves, like a fool, tears beading at the corners of my eyes from both the cold wind and my terror.

  But then Charlie returned. He came scuttling back at full speed across the ice, catching a stretch of complete stillness on the freeway, thank heavens. He carried the dead bird—a meadowlark—softly between his fangs and laid it at my feet and sat next to it. “Good boy,” I said, embarrassed by my unruly emotions even in front of my own dog. I dried my tears and embraced him and held his neck in my arms and kissed his head. His breath in the cold was like a steam engine, his heart thumping. Oh, how I loved him. How much life there was rumbling in that furry thing just astounded me.

  Since then, I’d taught Charlie to fetch sticks and neon yellow tennis balls that turned brown and soggy with saliva, then gray and cracked, rolling under the front seat of the car, where I’d forget them. “This is a retriever, some bastard combination of Labrador and Weimaraner,” the vet in Monlith had told me. That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths.

  I whistled, and Charlie came, a crumbling red shard of rotten wood poking out from his soft lips. I put the leash on him. “Just in case,” I told him. He eyed me querulously, but didn’t pull. I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself.

  It wasn’t me.

  Who was this me? I wondered. It seemed unlikely that a woman would abandon a dead body in the woods, so I felt I could safely presume that the writer of the note, this me, this character, the I of the story, must be male. He seemed very sure of himself, indeed. Nobody will ever know who killed her. And how could he know that? And why would he bother to say it? Was it some kind of macho taunt? I know something you don’t know. Men could be like that. But was murder an appropriate occasion to be so boastful? Magda was dead. That was no laughing matter. Nobody will ever know who killed her. What a silly way to ward off suspicion. How arrogant to think people are all so gullible. I wasn’t. We were not all idiots. We weren’t all lemmings, sheep, fools, like Walter always said all people were. If anybody knew who killed Magda, it was the “I.” Where was Magda now? Clearly I had been with her dead body while the note was being written. And so, what had become of her? Who had run off with her body? Had it been the killer? Had the killer come back for Magda after he, I, whatever, had written and laid down that note?

  My note, I felt it was. And it was mine. I possessed it now, tried not to crinkle it in the warmth of my heavy down coat.

  I’d need a name for this me, the writer of the note. At first I thought I’d need a name as just a placeholder, something lacking in personality so as not to describe the me too particularly, a name like the anonymous printed penmanship. It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody. But there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank. My husband’s name, Walter, was one of my favorite names. Charlie was a good name for a dog, I thought. When we were feeling regal, I’d call him Charles. He did look regal sometimes, his ears perked up and eyes cast downward, like a king on his throne. But he was too good natured to be truly kingly. He wasn’t a snobbish dog. He was no poodle or setter or spaniel. I’d wanted a manly breed, and when I’d gone into the kennel in Monlith, there he’d been. “Abandoned,” they told me. “Discovered two months ago in a black duffel bag on the banks of the river. Barely three weeks old. The only one of the litter to survive.” I spent a minute piecing that together. What horror! And then, what a miracle! From then on, I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-colored pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine. Charlie. Can you imagine abandoning such dear little creatures?

  “Who would do something like that?”

  “Times are tough,” the woman told me.

  I filled out the requisite forms, paid one hundred dollars for medical testing and vaccines, and signed a promise to get Charlie neutered, which I never did. I also didn’t tell them that I’d be moving east, across seven states, all the way to Levant mere months later. These dog pounds, they need assurances. They want it in writing that a person will care for the animal and raise it in the right way. I promised not to abuse it or breed it, or let it run wild in the streets, as though a signature, a mere scribble on paper, could seal fate in place. I didn’t want to neuter my dog. That seemed inhumane. But I signed my name on the contract, heart racing at this, one of very few deceptions I’ve ever enacted knowingly, blushing, trembling even at the thought that I’d be found out. “What kind of sick person doesn’t neuter their mutt? What kind of perverse . . .” Naive, actually, to think that a mere signature was so binding. It’s just a little ink on paper, just a scribble, my name. They couldn’t come after me, drag me back to Monlith, simply because I’d moved a pen around.

  So I got away all right. After Walter’s funeral, I packed up the house in Monlith, bade farewell to the place and all it had put upon me. What a relief it was to get out of there, the house sold, and a new home in Levant ready and waiting. In the pictures it was my dream home: a rustic cabin on a lake. The land needed work. There were some rotting trees, overgrowth, et cetera. I’d bought it sight unseen for a song. The place had been under foreclosure for six years. Times are tough, yes. And there I went. I tried not to think too much of the house back in Monlith, what the new owners were doing inside of it, how the porch had withstood the winter. And what my neighbors were saying. “She just took off, like a thief in the night.” That wasn’t true, though. I knew that. I was a good woman. I deserved some peace at last.

  I thought some more about a name for this me. In the end, I settled on Blake. It was the kind of name parents were naming their boys those days. It had a twinge of pretension to it in that sense. Blake, as in the shaggy blond boy on the skateboard, the boy eating ice cream from the container, the boy with a squirt gun. Blake, clean your room. Blake, don’t be late for dinner. Given these associations, the name was sneaky and a bit dumb, the kind of boy who would write, It wasn’t me.

  Strange, strange what the mind will do. My mind, Charlie’s mind, sometimes I wondered just what the mind was, actually. It hardly made sense that it was something contained in my brain. How could I, simply by thinking that my feet were cold, be asking Charlie to shift his chin to cover them, which he did? Were we not of the same mind at such moments? And if there was a mind I shared with Charlie’s, was there a separate mind I kept for myself? Whose mind was now at work, thinking of the note, imagining, debating, and remembering things as I walked down the path through the birch trees? Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether. Walter had always said I was sort of magical that way, a dreamer, his little dove. Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with shari
ng a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams. When I dreamt of Walter now, he was young again. He was young still in my mind. I still expected him, at times, to come through the door with a bouquet of roses, carrying in the sweet smell of his cigars, his hands on the rustling cellophane so tender and strong. “For you, my dove,” he’d say. And if not roses, then a book he thought I’d like. Or a new record, or a perfect peach or pear. I missed his thoughtful gifts, little surprises pulled from the pocket of his overcoat.

  I suppose my cabin in Levant was Walter’s final gift to me. I’d used the insurance money to buy it, and to move. Profit from the sale of the house in Monlith would keep me fed until I died. And there was also money in savings. Walter had planned well for retirement. He was always scrimping and saving, which made the little gifts he gave me all the more lovely. Roses were expensive, after all. “These cost an arm and a leg,” he said. “I hopped home like a cripple.” He’d have found my cabin cheap and small. He liked big, wide-open spaces. He loved it in Monlith, the plains, the metallic hills of rock, the cold river. I missed Walter. The big house became preposterous without him. When the cabin in Levant presented itself, it was a relief. I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.

  I thought of that dead meadowlark in Monlith again. It was yellow bellied, beautiful, like a jewel against the pale, frozen gravel. A gift. Strange, strange. Had Charlie thought it would cheer me up? I’d left it there where Charlie had dropped it, and took him by the collar and steered us back home, straining my shoulder, but there was no other way, the leash was ruined. After that, I read books on how to train him. Between packing up the house and signing more papers and so on, Charlie and I bonded and I taught him to obey me. He attuned himself to me and I to him. This was how our minds melded. The books confirmed that a dog should never sleep with its master. At first, we abided by this rule, but when we drove out east, staying in those roadside motels along the way, he crawled in and I couldn’t stop him. I worried that the move would traumatize him. A little comfort did us both a lot of good. The open road is such a lonely place. In Levant, we did tend to sleep together, Charlie even nestling down under the covers with me when it was cold. But in the summer, he’d be at the foot of the bed, or off the bed entirely, splayed out in the cool shadows of the dining table downstairs. He was better on the leash now, though I rarely used it. I carried it with me when we went for walks, in case we came upon some wild animal, and Charlie was moved to attack it. I knew that he could be vicious if he wanted to, if someone was threatening me, if something bad happened. That was a comfort, too. Charlie, my bodyguard. If there was a madman on the prowl, Magda’s killer, whoever, Charlie would attack. His head hit only about midthigh, but he was stately enough, broad shouldered, seventy-eight pounds of muscle and fine pale-brown fur. I’d seen him gnash his teeth and growl only once, at a rattlesnake back in Monlith. It took a lot to rile him up. I heard there were bears around Levant, but I didn’t believe it. I’d seen dead foxes on the road. Also rabbits, raccoons, opossums. At dawn, apart from birds and small rodents, the only other souls out were the gentle whitetail deer. They hid behind trees, stock still as Charlie and I passed by. Out of respect, I tried not to look at them in the eye, and I’d trained Charlie to leave them alone, too. It must be nice to think you can become invisible just by standing still. They were beautiful deer, some as big as horses. What a nice life they must have, I thought. It was so quiet in the woods, sometimes I could hear them breathing.

  Blake must have come through in the last twenty-four hours, I figured, since Charlie and I had been there the morning before, and there’d been nothing, no note. As we headed home, I saw no strange footprints, no white fringe or confetti from the ripped-off edge of Blake’s spiral notebook. It had been a whole year now that I’d been in Levant, and those woods felt like they belonged to me and Charlie. Perhaps more than Magda’s murder, it began to bother me that there had been someone else out there, in my woods, touching my rocks, walking down the path I’d been wearing and widening through the birch woods. An invasion. It was like coming home late, going to bed, and waking up to find that at some point in the night, someone had been in your kitchen, had been eating your food, reading your books, wiping his mouth with your cloth napkins, staring at his strange face in your bathroom mirror. I could imagine what fury and fear I’d feel discovering that he’d left the butter out on the counter, a crust of bread, to say nothing of a bloody knife in the sink, or a knife that had been used and washed and set in the rack to dry. Nobody will ever know. . . . It could drive a person crazy if something like that happened. You might never sleep again, might never again feel safe in your own home. Imagine all the questions you’d have, and only yourself to ask. The intruder could be in the house still. My God, he could be crouched behind the kitchen door, and there you’d be, standing in your socked feet and bathrobe, agog at the knife glinting in the rack. Had you used it to chop onions? Had you forgotten that you’d wandered down for a midnight snack, left the knife out, et cetera? Were you still dreaming? Was I?

  No, no. This was real. Here was Charlie, here was the ground, the air, the trees, the sky above, the sweet green buds of leaves quaking from the branches, pushing forward into life, come what may. I knew these woods. I knew my cabin, the lake, the pines, the road. I was the only person to walk through the birch woods on a regular basis. The neighbors were far enough to have their own birch woods, their own paths. And why would anybody come all the way up here, just to walk on my path? Why would Blake have come, other than for me? It was no mistake. The note was a letter. Who else but me would have found it? I had been chosen. It may just as well have been addressed to me. Dear Vesta. I’ve been watching you. . . .

  Was Blake watching me even now as I hurried out of the woods? I could imagine a teenage boy, just growing out of the doughy adolescent mask that hid his deviance. Did it give him some strange pleasure to see me so alarmed? Was his mind mingling with my mind somehow, planting these thoughts, these imaginings and reasonings? Dear Vesta. I know where you live. Suppose the woods had never been mine at all. Suppose I’d been the invader, and Blake, pushed to act finally, had sent me this message to scare me off, to ruin my world so that he could have it all to himself. My mind wrangled the possibilities. As we walked, I took the note out again to read it. Her name was Magda. That much still was true.

  The sun was up now as we crossed the edge of the woods. The day ahead was bright and clear. There was no dark, brooding cloud, no sharp tang of storm in the fresh spring air. There was nothing to get tense about, nothing at my back, no need to run. So I found a note. So what? It couldn’t hurt me. Magda, if she had been a threat, was dead and gone. And Blake claimed, at least, that he was no killer. There it was in black and white: It wasn’t me. I could choose to believe it. There was nothing to fear. It was just a piece of paper, words on a page. Silly to get so invested. Stupid even. Stupid.

  Down the hill we went, and across the road and up the gravel path to the cabin. At the door, I dropped the leash and wiped Charlie’s feet with a rag, as I always did, holding the note between my lips, folding my lips inward so as not to wet the paper. Charlie looked up at me, annoyed but unperturbed. Certainly, if there was anything to fear, the hair on the back of Charlie’s neck would be standing on edge, a sharp ridge to indicate danger, the threat of death. I rubbed his velvet ears. We went inside.

  It was still cool and dark in the kitchen, which faced westward onto the gravel path and the little garden. I’d recently started tilling the soil in the clearing just outside the kitchen windows. I hoped to plant flowers, maybe tomatoes, squash, carrots. I’d never had a garden before. The earth in Monlith had been too dry. Nothing would have grown out there in that stale, red dirt. But in Levant, where it was green and pretty, I felt inspired to bring something new to life. I stood at the sink and looked out through the window, picturing how my gar
den would grow. Across from the raked-up dirt, there were spindly and rotted horsehair ropes hanging from a thick branch of the one large sycamore on the property. These were remnants of a swing, I supposed, installed back when the place had been a summer camp for Girl Scouts. The boathouse had been torn down, but my cabin, the main structure where the girls learned crafts and ate their meals, had endured. I had found rusted bobby pins, thimbles, jacks, broken knitting needles, small scissors fit for children’s hands in the soil, wedged in between the grubs and earthworms. Those little artifacts must have been twenty or thirty years old by then, maybe older. Besides the sycamore and a few splintery stumps of rotted oaks, the trees on my property were all tall pines, mostly eastern whites. I had borrowed a book from the library and meant to study up on the local flora but it had been too scientific, too technical, not enough pictures to hold my attention. I had no sensitivity to science. Walter and his rational mind had exhausted my patience for that kind of mental busywork. Since his death, I’d grown to be more poetic in my thinking. Too much magic was dashed by cold logic.

  If those birch woods across the road were good for dawn walks, my old pines were more for midnight. Shut in under their dark canopy of thick branches, sound was dampened by the nesty carpet of dried pine needles underfoot. The space the pines made was like an interior, like my den, a place where you’d sit and read or listen to records. A glass of bourbon, a warm wool sweater, a green glass desk lamp, a dark mantel, these things would have done nicely there. I didn’t go very deep into the pines, however. Twice I’d wandered more than a quarter of a mile deep, and both times I became short of breath. There was something I was allergic to out there, some mold or spore, I guessed. Those thick groves of pines would keep me safe, I’d thought; the poisonous air would force any ne’er-do-well to retreat. But now that Magda had been murdered, I was not so sure.