Mother's Revenge

by Abuttu, Querus

  The front door opens, and the girl is gone again.

  “Matthew,” Lena calls, walking into the living room. “You home?”

  He steps into the backyard, without answering, but still holds onto the door handle, fearful of leaving his portal back to a world of sense and reason, a world where there are no red-haired women carrying the scent of foreign oceans with them everywhere they go. The air feels like a thick fog, and smells like kelp decaying on the sand, though his backyard looks just as it did before she left. His lips taste salty.

  When he was in San Francisco the coastline smelled the same. The air was heavy and moist, and there was always that dead smell of decay underlying everything. The Pacific rose and fell as the water pulled back into itself with every break and recess. The tides, he heard, came from the moon’s gravity, but this never made sense. He didn’t see how something so far away, so otherworldly, could have such a powerful influence on the earth, which always seemed to be spinning with such benign predictability.

  A hand touches his shoulder.

  “Are you okay?” Lena says. “I wanted to remind you we have guests coming over tonight. A couple from the hospital.”

  He nods a weak acknowledgement, not knowing what he could possibly say. He tries to ignore the smell of the sea, but now that he has caught it, the scent lingers, unshakable, as though he carries the red-haired girl with him.

  Lena stands in the kitchen, her hand extended to him. It hangs in the air uselessly, as though failing to reach across an inexplicably long distance. “Matthew?” she says.

  He says nothing, staring back at her.

  “Never mind,” she says, finally turning away. “Just, please don’t be late tonight.”

  “Of course,” he says, but he’ll be forty minutes late. He’ll start home as soon as he gets Lena’s text saying only: 8:13. where are you? He won’t say much all night.

  The moon will have just begun to wane as they eat, and the spring tide will start to lose its strength. Along the coast, the sand will have at last pushed back the encroaching water, but it cannot last.

  Matthew wakes one night, and Lena is there, sitting at the edge of their bed. He knows that she has been thinking of waking him.

  “How long have you been sitting there?” he says.

  She shrugs. “Long enough,” she says, and then after a pause: “I worry. These were supposed to be our best years. Before kids. This is the time we are supposed to be together, alone, but we’re in our thirties now. It doesn’t feel real, I guess. I thought I’d—we’d be different, but everything seems the same, except for being surprised how long ago things were. Like we should be more than . . .”

  “More than what?” he says, but immediately regrets it. He shouldn’t play into her constant discontentment.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s stupid. I keep having these dreams that you’ve died. I always see your body afterwards. It’s stupid. But you make these horrible faces, and I can’t stop . . . I just—the idea of everything ending like this, us like we are, is so frustrating.”

  He knows what he should say: He should sit up, pull her to him, and offer the kindness of an empty promise to be there for her no matter what, and he almost does. But he thinks of sea salt on his lips, and a red-haired stranger caressing him, the palm of her hand softly crashing against his chest with the inevitability of the tide. He is certain that, should he move to kiss her, Lena would taste the stranger on his lips, so he lies there, rigid, and prays he were a different man, a stronger man, who could stop the dreams from coming to them because he, too, has been dreaming.

  “Matthew,” she says. “Are you still awake?”

  He curls into the thick warmth of the comforter, feigning sleep. For a moment, he almost believes that everything will be all right, as though cotton and this little deception are enough to protect him.

  Matthew dreams of the Old Country, a time and world that he has never known. In these dreams, his name is Nikolai Petrovich, an officer in the Great Northern War, serving under Tsar Pyotr Alexeyevich, Peter the Great. As reward for his service, he is offered an administrative position in the new capital, Petersburg. He accepts. He has a wife and a child, and very little means of supporting them. As a military man, he is often far from them, and has no guarantee that he will be able to continue to provide for them should he die. A desk in Petersburg, though dull and tedious, is a far better option. He offers his sincere thanks to the Tsar, but the Great War refuses to leave him. Matthew knows that Nikolai is plagued by dreams of his own, waking each morning to the memory of the war that he wishes he could forget, but is able to see Nikolai’s dreaming only once.

  A Swedish man, dirty blond hair spattered with blood that bubbles up from his mouth, stares up blankly. His eyes glaze over as they struggle to move, to dart back and forth, but they can do so only sluggishly. The Swede’s left eye is bloodshot. He mouths words that seem, even if only in Nikolai’s mind, to accuse the very streets of Petersburg of shedding his blood.

  Then Nikolai wakes, carrying Matthew’s consciousness with him, with a sudden thrash. His fist, clenched still from the nightmare war, breaks his wife’s nose. Matthew feels the collapse of bone and cartilage under Nikolai’s knuckles, and the sudden warmth of her blood, staining the rough, woolen blanket. They have no money. The only treatment she receives is the hastily thrust-out scrap of Nikolai’s shirt to staunch the bleeding. Her nose will heal crooked.

  She rises, naked, from the bed. The cloth, already dripping and bloody, is clutched tightly to her nose. Her long red hair covers her breasts. She isn’t as pale as Matthew remembers her being when she first appeared to him on the streets of downtown Portland. Though he can’t see them clearly, Matthew knows there are only two or three of the whip marks, marring her back and shoulders from past beatings. In the coming years, something in Nikolai will snap, some psychosis, and the whip marks will checker her entire back, though Matthew can’t say how he knows this. Nikolai will sometimes tell himself that it was the war, but Matthew knows that Nikolai will never be fully convinced of this. There was always something in Nikolai, something dead, that was desperately searching for some kind of feeling, and it only got worse as he spent those endless hours behind that Petersburg desk. He strikes her to relieve his own hollowness.

  Their child wails in the background, and it is this that most disturbs Matthew when he wakes.

  The air feels claustrophobic. He steps out to the balcony, hoping for a breeze, just a little fresh air to offer some reprieve.

  She waits for him. They are both naked, but, like it was in the dream, this seems to Matthew normal, inevitable. He goes down to her. The moon is out, only half of its glowing fullness, but the sky is clear. She appears in its light, a luminous gray.

  “Kolya,” she says. “You came to me.”

  “Why?” His voice is weak. “Why me? I shouldn’t be dreaming these things. I don’t know any Niko . . . My name is Matthew.” He looks at the grass tickling the edges of his bare feet.

  “Of course, my dear Nikolai. Call yourself whatever you’d like.” She looks up at the moon. “Isn’t she beautiful? I wanted to visit you much sooner, but she wouldn’t let me.” A laugh. “She gets so jealous. You must know. She wants to keep an eye on us.” With every word, she steps closer, deftly sidestepping the cement circles that form a path to the little planters along the thick brush that wall the two of them in. She looks so young.

  She touches him on the arm. Her hand feels clammy and dead.

  “This is—I’m still dreaming, aren’t I?” Matthew says.

  “If that’s what you’d like to tell Lena,” the girl says, looking up at him. She kisses him on the collarbone and then on the neck. Her eyes are a light green, soft. She whispers in his ear, her breath warm against his ear: “I know a nice spot on the river we could go. I could show you where, and we could meet there tomorrow night. It’s a beautiful little piece of shore. Far from the lights. Just us and the river and the roots of trees.” He can�
��t help but see the spot. The two of them, bodies tangled together, and surrounded by only earth and trees and some small river that feeds into the Willamette. He hears the water hit the rocks with the sound of a slap. The girl traces the contour of his spine gently with the blade of a finger. “The dirt would be soft against our backs.”

  The drip of the water where her finger ran itches slightly as though suddenly infected, and he draws away from her. She glares, the green of her eyes suddenly gone, leaving only a hard gray.

  “What is it now, Nikolai? It’s so soon, and already you draw back from me. Does your eye wander so easily?” She laughs, but it sounds hollow. Her eyes have the same disinterested glaze one would see in the eyes of a child deciding whether or not she wants to crush an insect into the ground. “Silly me, but of course it does. How could it not? I’ve known so many men like you. Stoic men. Day after day, stuck in the same little circle. Whose eye wouldn’t wander? Who wouldn’t kill for something new?”

  Not like that, he wants to say. Not like Nikolai, whose routine served only to hide from the blue eyes of that Swede, accusing him from the grave. Matthew had known no wars, had spilled no blood.

  “Are you so sure, solnitsa?” she replies, though he said nothing. She presses against him. He tries to ignore the feeling of her closeness brushing against his ribs. It seems so much easier to go away with this stranger than to remain with Lena, who, he must admit, never did anything to rescue the two of them from the deadness of their life together. The fantasy of life with this girl seems to hover, palpably, before him. One of her hands rests on his chest, a trickle of water dripping from underneath her palm.

  But she looks so young, so impossibly young in the moonlight, as though that weak, gray light somehow keeps her perpetually frozen in a single moment.

  He wishes he had never seen her on the street that day—that he had continued on in the endless repetitions that compose his life. Nothing upended.

  But it is almost dawn, and the sun’s light threatens to spill out onto the sky, drowning out the moon as she hangs low over the trees and high-rise buildings. The girl rises to the tips of her toes, and kisses him once. “You should come with me for a swim, Kolya. Soon. Monotony has never been good for you,” she says. “It brings out the worst.” And then she is gone. He gasps for air, realizing he was holding his breath. His pulse pounds against the edge of his throat so fast he thinks he might vomit. The ground is flooded where she stood, and his naked soles sink into the muck.

  After that night, Matthew sees her everywhere he goes. She hides in a tree, carefully balanced on the thin, gray-brown branches, but the arms seem not to move under her weight. He walks past homes, and she moves delicately at his side, each mincing step precisely placed in the grass, until she comes to a stop at the sidewalk. She calls to him. Her voice pleads like a child’s, as though she were at the edge of a cement sea in which she could not swim. At the sound of a call, Matthew’s vision blurs: the cement sidewalks and asphalt melt and shift, until he is convinced that he walks, instead, on the cobbled street and dirt paths of Old Petersburg.

  He runs from her, deeper into the ocean of gray steel and cement, but still it becomes harder to know where he is with every passing moment. Burnside becomes Nevsky Prospect, with its bustling crowds, the Columbia and Willamette sing the same as the Neva, and the gray steel of downtown Portland blends with the stone and wood and brick of ancient streets and houses. He runs, but she returns moments later in a different tree, on a path of beaten earth, or standing in a flowerbed, the dirt between her bare toes. He imagines how it must feel to touch only grass and dirt and water. How soft it all must be. He shakes his head, but the thought remains.

  Matthew can’t say anymore how long this is has been going on. Three days? Four? A week?

  “Kolya,” she will say. “Come with me. We can swim until night, and then . . . ”

  He will see it in lurid detail. The cries she will make, how it will feel to hold her too tightly to himself as she presses her nakedness against him, the wash of silver light against the slowly rustling river next to them, and he will never want to leave that magic hollow, as though it were the paradise of God himself.

  Matthew, in these moments, forgets his own place in the decisions that brought him into this caged life, and Lena takes on a more sinister light. She seems to Matthew nothing more than a seductress, luring him into the godless repetition that his life has become. It was never his idea to watch the shattering of marriage after marriage, destroying his faith in the institution, and the red-haired girl, whose green eyes bore into his, seems the perfect salve to help forget everything that Lena has done to him.

  But the moment ends, and Matthew looks away, remembering the sound of Lena’s breathy laugh, barely louder than a sigh. The quiet sound shakes her whole body, as though to compensate for the lack of volume. On one of their first dates, he had said something, forgotten almost immediately after, followed by a long silence. He quickly drank his beer to hide his embarrassment, when she laughed with a glass of red wine in hand. Her hand shook, even though her laughter could barely be heard, until she spilled the wine on herself. That night was the first that they had gone home together, and that laugh had, in retrospect, seemed especially significant, as though every previous interaction had possessed a certain coldness, an awkwardness, and it was this wine-stained night, more than anything else, that had set the continued tone of their time together, though that playful quality had grown quite neglected.

  When Matthew looks up again, the girl is gone, and he can’t remember why he had been so angry with Lena.

  The dreams of Nikolai grow worse, more violent every night, and Matthew resists the urge to sleep for as long as he can, until his body, pushed beyond the point of reason, collapses, and Matthew is forced to become Nikolai.

  Matthew sees the tedium of Nikolai’s birchwood desk, not so very distant from his own hundreds of years later. An endless tide of bureaucratic shuffling as papers stacked at the desk’s edge rise and ebb predictably. In some of the dreams, their lives blend together. Nikolai, in Matthew’s Portland office, puts his hand on a weeping husband’s shoulder, and mumbles his condolences in Russian. He feels the starched shirt under the blue cloth of Nikolai’s imperial dress uniform tight against his chest and neck, and a pin pricking lightly against his breast where he wears three medals for his services in the Great Northern War.

  But the dreams always end the same: the dry heaviness of a leather horsewhip in his hand, and the red-haired girl staring at him with the same accusation that was in the dying eyes of the Swede. Matthew wants to scream, to drown out the relentless cracking of the whip, but Nikolai’s mouth never opens from its determined grimace. He wants to scream because he knows that she isn’t looking at Nikolai, who has lain in a distant grave for centuries.

  “There have been others, solnitsa,” she says. “I have known more men than you can imagine. You all come to me, call me to yourselves, and I obey.” She smiles slowly.

  Nikolai screams at her to stop telling lies. He accuses her of unfaithfulness. Matthew wishes Nikolai would stop. It is so strange a feeling to be at the precipice of another man’s rage, trapped in a body not your own.

  “Eventually, they all swim with me,” she says. “And that’s the end of it.”

  Matthew wakes, shaking and covered in sweat. He resists the urge to vomit, but still drags himself to the toilet. He clings to it weakly.

  “It’s not me,” he whispers, though he no longer quite believes it. “It’s not me.”

  When the shaking finally stops, he goes back to his bedroom.

  “Lena?” he says. It sounds thunderous in the stillness of their room. “Lena, are you awake?”

  Her body stirs under the covers, but she offers no other response, and he collapses at the foot of their bed. It seems impossible that his life should come to this. That he would be guilt-wracked and brought to the brink of confession in the middle of the night, though he had done nothing. He never asked
for any of this, but he knows, somehow, it will all go away if he wakes Lena and tells her everything.

  Since they had settled in Portland, neither Lena nor Matthew drank often, but tucked into the back of a cupboard they have a nice bottle of vodka that someone has given them. It is almost untouched.

  Matthew goes downstairs. He pours himself a glass, and then another, and listens to the unmoving night. He could still wake her, tell her about the girl. Get help or, maybe, a padded cell smelling of spilled bleach and sedatives. A younger version of himself wouldn’t have hesitated. He was naive enough to still believe that life gave back when people put in enough effort.

  He drinks until his whole world spins, and stumbles up to the suicide-fence at the edge of the bridge. His eyes drag shut only to snap open again, and his fingers are locked into the chain link. What if he climbed it? The metal beneath his hand is warm and inviting. There is no one around on the street, no one who would try and stop him. How many cars would he end up bouncing between before actually touching cement? His ragdoll body surrounded by cars flying past at sixty-plus.

  He remembers reading of underworlds. Sheol. Hades. After the river of the dead and meeting Charon, they really don’t have much going for them. The dead just disappear, growing ghostlier, until someone makes a sacrifice to them. The blood, the ancients said, gives the soul a taste of the life that it used to have, and the soul becomes, if only for a moment, more substantial in that gray, hollow world.

  It all seems too familiar to Matthew. What if he did go with the girl? Let someone else make the decision for him as to which gray world he would live in. The air tastes salty again like drinking seawater with every breath. Maybe she wants to punish him for some unremembered sin, an adulterous thought or a moment of cruelty to Lena.