Hemlock Grove (11 page)

“Bad things,” said Peter.

There was the dull voiceless drone of a helicopter behind the hills. They dug.

In time, despite the coolness of the air, their faces began to shine with the sweat of their labor, and Roman wiped his brow and looked into the night where a ring of cloud was passing in the breeze. He put his foot on the pile of dirt and crossed his arms on the shovel, resting.

“I’ve been to two funerals,” said Roman. “One was my dad, in ’99. It’s all pieces. I remember hearing the shot and going downstairs. The way Mom was sitting on the couch, the look on her face like she forgot why she’d walked into the room, you know. He was on the floor. It smelled like her favorite perfume, he’d soaked himself in it. I remember thinking how much trouble he’d be in for wasting it.”

He drifted off, other fragments coming to him. His uncle coming by later that night. He was the one she called, and that was when Roman knew about them. He was too young to know what he knew, but nevertheless. His mother sitting with him every morning and reading out loud what the newspapers were saying. If he was going to hear it he was going to hear it from her mouth. Dr. Pryce dandling Shelley at the service—looking at her like their father never had. Like something of his.

“People like to say it was Mom, but no way,” said Roman. “She would never have done it on that rug.”

“Who was the other funeral?” said Peter.

“Shelley’s,” he said.

*   *   *

It was near dawn with threads of mist playing cat’s cradle between the graves when they hit it. Roman climbed up to the ground and pulled on his palms to stretch his cramping forearms and the night air felt good on the callused pads of his hands. Peter braced his legs against the side of the hole, wedged his shovel under the lid, and pried. Lisa Willoughby was in a satin blouse safety-pinned at the bottom and completely surrounded with stuffed toys; each had the painstaking imperfection of having been made by hand. The bottom half of the casket was weighed down by sandbags where it was not weighed down by Lisa Willoughby. Peter lowered into a hunker unfastening the safety pin at the hem of the blouse and asked Roman to hand down the bag but got no response.

Roman was fixated on something staring up from near the head: a plush cardinal, the bead of the moon on the curve of its black eye. Roman stared into its black eye lost suddenly to another childhood memory, one of his earliest. A third funeral that had previously escaped him. He had been in bed and jarred awake one morning after a late winter’s snow by a sharp bang against the window. He got up and opened it and poked his head outside. There was a cardinal down on the ground. It was late February and it lay there in the snow, wings spread. He went downstairs and hunched over it, mesmerized by the brazen redness but unspeakable delicacy of the thing. Its black eye quivered and he expected it to roll down like a teardrop. He watched, not noticing the cold, for he didn’t know how long. Until the quiver stopped. He felt a hand at the back of his neck and looked up at his mother.

“Where did it go?” he said.

She pointed into the sky, and he tried to follow her finger but had to look away in the bright.

“Earth to fucknuts,” said Peter.

“Sorry,” said Roman and handed him the bag.

*   *   *

When the sheriff picked up Alexa and Alyssa three hours later, both said “Shotgun,” but as their father called it Alyssa had been a hair quicker and he cocked a finger at her. Alexa climbed grudgingly into the back and their father said to just hold on now while we get ourselves combobulated and handed Alyssa a brimming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He backed out of the driveway and asked how Chrissy was holding up.

“We told you not to call her Chrissy anymore, it’s infantilizing,” said Alexa.

“She still says the demon dog is Peter Rumancek,” said Alyssa. They went over a pothole and a spurt of coffee came through the slit of the lid and onto the webbing of her hand. “Ugh, coffee burp,” she said.

“She says it’s going to happen again the next full moon,” said Alexa.

He reached for the cup and gingerly took a sip. His saliva spanned a membrane over the slit and then popped.

“Does she,” he said.

Inch by Inch

That afternoon Peter had company for lunch. This was unusual. For a while he’d sat at the table with the kids who wore dog collars and misquoted the Existentialists, but then they started sitting somewhere else, even the girl called Scabies Peter was pretty sure had left him anonymous voice messages of just moaning a couple of times. He didn’t follow; more to say for eating alone than running around after a girl called Scabies. But today a brown bag was set down across from him and he looked up from his motorcycles and tits magazine to find Letha Godfrey joining him. She opened a container of fruit salad with exaggerated casualness and said, “There’s a rumor going around you’re a werewolf?”

Peter sipped his orange soda. He’d caught that one.

“Well, are you?” she said.

He looked at her.
What do you think?

“You know, you really scare people,” she said.

He shrugged. He was darker and poorer and had conspicuous style. People didn’t need their little girls to be found in pieces to fucking hate that.

“What are you doing with my cousin?” she said.

“What needs to be done,” he said.

“You know we’re in the cafeteria and not a Clint Eastwood movie?” she said.

“When you go to the bank do you ask for twenties or wheelbarrows?” he said.

“Lazy!” she said. “Money doesn’t make you dumb.”

Peter did not disagree—it just made you used to people caring what you think.

“Do you want my help or not?” she said.

“If things keep going down this road, someone very important to me is probably going to get hurt,” he said.

“Who?” she said.

“Me,” he said.

She was annoyed to find she couldn’t dispute the logic; she had already decided she was in, as if exclusion was even an option, but had been looking forward to making him work harder for it.

“Well, I’m glad you’re friends, anyway,” she said. “Roman doesn’t have enough friends. I mean, there’s those people.” She nodded her head toward Roman’s lunch table. “But all they care about is the name. Nobody really knows him. Least of all, Roman.”

She leaned in with a confidential aspect and looked at him intently, and Peter saw now with clarity. Her soul’s light, the wide-eyed mysticism that set her apart from the rest of these dipshits. Right. The thing Roman didn’t know it but he was really in this for, Order of the Dragon my ass. Good to know, unless it wasn’t.

“Promise me something,” she said. “Promise you won’t let things go too far. Promise you’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.”

Peter made a solemn face and smiled inside: he enjoyed the ceremony and impressiveness of making promises completely irrespective of his intention of keeping them.

“I promise I won’t let that happen,” he said.

They were quiet within the cafeteria babble. She shifted one leg over the other under the table intentionally grazing his shin, for which she falsely apologized but he paid no heed at all, filling her with the surpassing desire to give it a sharp kick. Then she realized it was the table leg she had artlessly footsied and projected on her face the exact opposite of how much dignity she felt.

“Can I ask you something?” said Peter.

She consented.

“What can you tell me about Roman’s mom?”

“Aunt Olivia? Why?”

“Curious.”

She bet he was. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you know about her?”

She thought, and shrugged. The truth was, nothing. No one did. In the ’80s JR had seen there was no way to compete realistically with the Chinese and decided to move from industry into biotech. He went abroad to inspect some facilities and came back engaged to the most beautiful and despised woman in the town’s history.

“Where did they meet?” said Peter.

“England, I think.”

“Is that where she’s from?”

She was not sure.

“What about her people?”

She shrugged.

“Do you think there’s any chance your dad knows more of the story?”

“Maybe. He was her shrink.”

Peter’s expression did not change but there was no hiding the crafty crackle this inspired.

“I don’t suppose you might be able to fish around and see if you can fill in some of the holes,” he said.

“Mixed metaphor!” she said.

He gave her a look that somehow made her feel dumb even though he was the one who went around mixing metaphors. This boy!

“Well, I don’t suppose life was getting interesting enough already,” she said.

“Life is always interesting,” he said.

“Did you steal that from a movie poster?” she said.

He opened a box of Cracker Jacks.

“Ooh, let me find the prize,” she said.

He held the box out, widening the opening between his grip, and she rooted with closed eyes, producing a plastic packet.

Peter looked at the prize and was quiet.

She opened her eyes. “Huh, weird,” she said.

She was holding a translucent pink plastic ring, a little nub in the middle like the drawing of a planet in orbit. A snake—a snake eating its own tail.

Peter held out his hand, and she gave him the ring. He opened it. “Wear it. It’s good luck,” he said.

Across the room, Roman watched Letha hold out her hand and Peter slip something around her finger.

*   *   *

That afternoon Dr. Chasseur waited in the atrium of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies for an interview with its director. At the reception desk was a small man in a pink country-western-style shirt with rhinestone pistols at the shoulders skimming through an entertainment gossip magazine. Engraved in the marble flooring of the entrance was a horizontal line followed by an omega followed by another horizontal line:

*   *   *

She asked if this motif had any meaning. The receptionist shrugged. He licked a finger and turned a page.

Then there came from behind her the sound of footsteps approaching from the bank of elevators and she turned to see a man who appeared no older than forty, though he was over a decade past. His hair was black but tinted gray to suggest his real age and his face was a firm polyethnic blend. An uncommonly dense musculature was visible under his suit. He held out his hand. His hands were small in comparison with his build, and of almost feminine delicacy, curiously smooth even of the calluses along the pad of the palm common to bodybuilders.

“Dr. Johann Pryce,” he said, and there was a certain spurious slickness to his carriage and his smile that brought to mind the rainbow patina of oil on a puddle.

“Dr. Clementine Chasseur,” she said.

The receptionist, sipping a Diet Coke, abruptly coughed it back into the bottle. They looked over. He gesticulated at his tabloid.

“He’s marrying that whore!”

Pryce asked Chasseur if she objected to holding this interview over lunch.

Chasseur said that would be fine and Pryce escorted her outside and around the building. In the front lawn there was a cloistered quadrangle surrounding a carefully tended rock garden in the spiral pattern of a nautilus shell. She followed him to a white van in the parking lot, with the same omega motif repeated on the door.

“A hieroglyph, of a fashion,” Pryce answered, preempting by a fraction of a second her actually asking the question. “Adapted from the code of the samurai: no matter the length of the journey, it must be taken inch by inch, like the measuring worm.”

She looked again and saw it was in fact a literal visualization of that process:

*   *   *

He took out a set of keys and punched the button to unlock the van. “Truth be told, a lunch break will be the closest thing I get to a vacation this week,” he said.

She looked up at the White Tower. “Doesn’t it make you a little crazy?”

“Does the name Noah Dresner mean anything to you?”

It did not.

“He was the architect of the institute, which was to be the summation of his life’s work. Dresner was something of the Ahab of sacred geometry: the Fibonacci sequence, geomagnetic alignments, all that hokum-pokum. His intention was to culminate his legacy with the proverbial axis mundi: the connecting point between earth and sky. Upon the completion of this opus he took the elevator to the summit but collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage by the fifth floor.”

Chasseur suggested this did not exactly answer her question.

Pryce tapped the side of the van with his knuckle. Inch by inch.

They relocated to an upscale Asian fusion restaurant near the mall.

“People inform me the sushi chef here is quite good,” said Pryce upon seating. “I wouldn’t know. If you told me tartar sauce on Styrofoam was a delicacy, I’d probably believe you. It’s all glucose to me. I’m not Asian, incidentally.”

“You’re German and Brazilian,” said Chasseur. “You came to term at twenty-six weeks of age but after fairly spectacularly staging something of a prison break from your own incubator were diagnosed with the condition of myotonic hypertrophy. Superstrength, to us mortals. And you’re allergic to peanuts.”

“You read the Sunday
Times
,” said Pryce, in reference to a
New York Times Magazine
profile titled “Man and Superman” of which he had been the subject the previous winter, the sort of puff piece focusing on the more sensational aspects of his biography that he submitted to from time to time in order to hide in plain sight, diverting attention from the nascent stages of a project of unusual sensitivity.

“I have a hideously abusive relationship with the crossword,” she said. “But I keep on going back.”

His mouth smiled before his eyes did.

“Are you going to be recording this conversation?” he said.

“I hadn’t intended to, Dr. Pryce.”

“Johann. But I am, just so you know. Which is to say, I have been this whole time. Just so you know. You understand.”

She did not object. “So what exactly is it you do, Johann?” she said.

“Pretending you don’t know.”