The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (42 page)

Present Day

“D
ISMANTLEMENT EQUALS FREEDOM
.”

Suz is there, whispering the words in his ear, each syllable hot and twisted. She’s glowing, radiant, still twenty-one and burning with the fierce need to fuck up the world.

The dead don’t age.

He finishes the knot, his hands steady, without the slightest tremble, then climbs onto the chair and throws the rope up over one of the beams in the kitchen. Old, hand-hewn beams his builder rescued from a salvage yard. They’d reminded him of Vermont. Of the cabin near the lake.

In his mind, he goes back ten years, sees Suz coming up the path, stepping into the clearing, pole in one hand, string of fish in the other: bass, sunfish, trout. They glisten like jewels, strung on the braided nylon rope she’s carefully looped through their mouths and gills.

Suz’s walk is a dance, her movements fluid, the silk tunic she wears flutters around her, making it seem as if the wind itself is carrying her, buoying her along like a kite.

She winks at him.

He loves her.

He hates her.

He doesn’t want to be here, but there’s no way he could ever leave. Once you’re in her orbit, it’s impossible to pull yourself away.

The others gather around as she lays the fish out on the table to clean them. She pulls the trout off the braided rope, lays it flat on newspaper, and slides the knife in, slitting it open along its belly from gills to vent. The fish opens its mouth, sucking at air. Suz smiles, showing crooked teeth, pushes her fingers gently inside the fish, widening the opening with her hand. The skin stretches; the movement of her fingers produces a wet, tearing sound.

“To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart,” Suz says, tugging out a string of entrails, sticky and shimmering with rainbows, like oil on a puddle.

“Y
OU NEVER REALLY GOT
it, did you, babycakes?” he hears her whisper in his ear.

“No,” he tells her, slipping the rope around his neck, pulling the postcard from his pocket to look at one last time. “But I do now.”

He steps off the chair.

The postcard falls from his hand, drifts to the floor in slow motion, turning: moose, words, moose, words—until it lands, the carefully printed words facing up, the last thing he sees before losing consciousness:

DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM

THE COMPASSIONATE DISMANTLERS WERE HERE

W
HEN
T
ESS’S WATER BROKE
, she was staring into the long-forgotten aquarium, her eyes fixed on the bodies of the frogs floating like lost astronauts in oversize spacesuits, something clearly not of this world. They were pale and spongy, having frozen and thawed with the cruel cycles of winter and spring. It was, somehow, to Tess, as if they were stuck in limbo, waiting to be rescued, to rise singing from their own tiny galaxy of stagnant water; calling out in deep, vengeful bullfrog voices,
How could you leave us here? How could you forget?

And they stank. God, how they stank. They reeked of cruel abandonment. Of things gone terribly wrong.

It was the first of May and Tess and Henry had hiked up to the cabin to
take a look around
. What they were looking for exactly, neither of them could say. And even if they could have named it, this thing that they hoped to find, they wouldn’t have dared utter it out loud.

They were a week away from Tess’s due date and the trip had been her idea. She thought they should visit the place one last time—the cabin where they had conceived their child, where so
much of their lives had both begun and ended. The building, and everything in it, had been abandoned nearly eight months before—the night Suz died—just left as it was, nothing taken with them but the clothes on their backs, the summer of the Compassionate Dismantlers left entombed within the cabin walls.

The building was a hunting camp built sometime in the late sixties and the only access was up an old logging road, impassable by car most of the year. Henry and Tess opted to walk up, as the road was still soft and muddy from snowmelt and spring rains. The cabin itself sat in a clearing at the top of a steep hill—a simple single-story box twenty-four by thirty feet, with a gable roof that made room for a sleeping loft. The outside was sheathed in plywood once painted red, now warped and faded by years of snow and rain, chewed through in places by porcupines with a taste for wood, glue, and the sweat of human effort. The roof was rust-splotched tin, layered with years of pine needles and maple leaves that had formed a rich compost where baby maples sprouted and grew, stunted, with no hope of ever fully developing.

They arrived in the clearing out of breath, their shoes caked with mud, blackflies buzzing around their heads like angry halos. Several times on the way up, Henry had suggested they turn back. He was worried about the strain on Tess, who had a difficult enough time traversing flat surfaces with her large belly, much less mountain climbing. Surely it couldn’t be good for her or the baby. But Tess was determined to stick to the plan, to make it to the top.

To the right of the clearing was the path that led down to the water. The lake and the land around it was a protected watershed area and threatening
TRESSPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
signs were nailed to trees every twenty-five feet or so. The lake, referred to on maps only as Number 10 Lake, was not accessible by the main road and theirs was the only cabin even close. About fifty feet up the driveway to the cabin, there was a turnoff leading to the
little beach they used, but the brush and weeds made it almost impossible to recognize it as a road. In any case, you’d never make it to the water without four-wheel drive and a lot of clearance. They’d never attempted it in Henry’s van, sure they’d lose the exhaust system or put a hole in the gas tank. The entire summer they spent there, they never saw a single person anywhere near the lake.

T
WO TRASH CANS LAY
tipped over outside the cabin, their contents scattered in a wide swath: rusted cans, wine bottles, plastic containers torn to shreds. Henry picked up a ripped-open Hershey’s syrup can.

“Bears,” he said.

Tess nodded, gave a little shiver as she scanned the treeline at the edge of the clearing. Henry dropped the ruined can and touched his wife’s shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring way. She wasn’t expecting it, and jumped, startled. As if his hand was a thick brown paw with razor-sharp claws.

“Sorry,” he muttered, knowing already that he’d been right all along: they shouldn’t have come.

Above the rough-hewn door (which Henry found to be unlocked, just as they’d left it at the end of August) were the words
THE COMPASSIONATE DISMANTLERS WERE HERE
. It had been painted in dripping black letters the week they’d moved in, mid-June of last year, when they were all sure they were going to have the most exciting, important summer of their lives. The words were a way of marking the building as theirs, the way gangs tagged their home turf with graffiti. Henry couldn’t remember who had painted them—him, Tess, Winnie, or Suz—and this surprised him; he had already forgotten a piece of their puzzle.

Circling the cabin, like alligators in a moat, were the cats. Yes, he’d forgotten the cats too; they both had. Not forgotten them exactly, but just assumed they’d gone elsewhere, found some other
home. They now seemed more wild than tame—mangy, skin and bones, their fur dingy, their eyes weeping, ears torn. At first, just a few, then more gathered, until Henry and Tess were surrounded by ten or twelve feral cats, half starved, who seemed to remember that these were the people who’d once fed them. The cats mewed and screeched, their voices ragged and pleading as they circled Henry and Tess, followed them inside, hopeful, insistent. Henry kicked at them, while Tess hurried to the kitchen.

“Maybe we left some cat food. Friskies. If there’s water, I could mix up some powdered milk,” she said.

Henry bit the inside of his cheek, knowing it was hopeless to try and stop her.

The air in the cabin was stale and smelled like mice: a sour stink came from the ceiling and walls, where Henry imagined the insulation torn into nests, pockets, cities of hidden condos, dampened by the urine of generations of its residents. Behind the mouse smell was something more sinister: the damp smell of rot and decay.

“There might be a dead animal in here,” Henry called from his spot near the front door. “Maybe one of the cats got stuck.”

Tess only grunted, focused on her search through the kitchen cabinets.

The cabin’s downstairs was one large room divided into living room, kitchen, and dining area. In the far corner of the living room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to separate off the space where Suz and Winnie had slept. Henry did not pull back the curtain and look in, unable to violate their privacy even then. Instead, he focused on the chair by the window, just to the left of their curtain, and felt slightly queasy when he saw the pieces of rope still looped around the arms and legs. He remembered the feel of the rope in his hands, stiff and bristly, like an unwieldy animal, as he made the knots.

Tighter, Henry,
Suz had told him.
Tie it tighter.

“Tuna!” Tess exclaimed, holding two cans in her hand and
turning back to lean into the cabinet, her enormous belly bumping against the counter, to pull out a can of condensed milk. She gave a little cry of triumph. The cats screamed. Henry drew in a breath and surveyed the inside of the cabin while Tess got down bowls and began pulling open swollen, reluctant drawers, rattling silverware, in search of a can opener.

Nothing had been touched. No vandals had come. No kids looking for a place to get stoned and screw around. Everything was just as they’d left it, frozen in time like some museum diorama. Henry half-expected Suz to come flitting in, gesturing madly as she went off on some new tangent, the sleeves of her silk tunic like butterfly wings.

On the table was half a bottle of tequila, and five empty glasses. Inside the bottle was a dead mouse.
Lucky fucker,
thought Henry, staring down at the drowned rodent, a wave of nausea washing over him.

There were five plates out, dirty silverware, used napkins. The mice had taken whatever crumbs remained from their last supper, licked the plates clean.

In the corner of the table was the ransom note, never sent, a jigsaw of letters and words cut carefully from newspapers and magazines. Henry read the last line:
If you do not follow our instructions, we will kill your son
.

On the coffee table in front of the couch, Henry found Winnie’s old Polaroid camera and a handful of snapshots, scattered like tarot cards spread out to tell not what will come, but what had been. Henry glanced over at Tess, who was too busy with the cats to notice what he was doing. Without looking through the photos, he scooped them into his knapsack. Underneath the photos was Suz’s journal: a heavy hardcover black notebook with the words
DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM
painted on the cover in red nail polish. He traced the glossy words with a trembling finger, then the journal went into the bag too, unopened. He shouldered
the knapsack, impossibly heavy already, and looked longingly at the open door. He fought the urge to run from the cabin, lungs gasping for fresh air. Cold sweat prickled between his shoulder blades.
Wing bones,
Tess called them.

Wings.

Suz always wore those tunics, long and flowing, in muted earthy colors. Black leggings beneath. And beat-up combat boots. Standard Suz uniform.

“We shouldn’t stay long,” he mumbled, more to himself than to his wife.
Shouldn’t have come at all
. This wasn’t part of the deal. They promised, that last night, to never speak of what had happened. To never return. And if anyone should ever contact them about Suz, they were supposed to say that at the end of the summer, last anyone saw her, she was headed west, for California. She was always talking about California. And wasn’t it Suz herself who told them that the secret to telling a really good lie is to make sure there’s a shiny pearl of truth hidden deep inside?

Henry glanced over at Tess, who was setting down bowls of tuna and canned milk. She bent at the knees to get down to the floor, and hoisted herself back up with both hands on the counter. The cats fought for places at the bowls.

“Careful,” Henry warned. “They don’t know you anymore.” He had always hated the cats, could never keep track of their names and little histories. Now he had reason to believe they could be dangerous, and Henry saw his biggest job as husband and soon-to-be father as making things safe. He couldn’t control what happened, but he did his best to be prepared. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. A good Vermonter’s motto.

They had been married four months, out of college not even a year, and Henry still found himself staring dumbly at the gold wedding band on his finger. Tess. The girl he never meant to end up with who now stood in a wrecked kitchen feeding starving cats, a matching gold band around her own swollen finger, some
physical, tangible thing that linked her to him. Proof. As if the baby wasn’t proof enough.

His father paid for the small wedding, persuaded them to move in with him afterward. Henry’s mother had died the year before and the large, rambling farmhouse left his father lonely. There was plenty of room for all of them, plenty of room for privacy. And there was the inground pool Henry’s mother, Ruth, had insisted on years before. Tess loved the idea of having a pool.

“Babies come out of the womb knowing how to swim,” she told Henry. “It’s instinct. We’ll get her right in the water and our baby will be swimming before she can crawl.”

Henry cringed, silently thinking,
We’ll see about that
. Henry hated the pool. An inground pool was an extravagance in and of itself, but to have one in Vermont where it could only be used three months out of the year seemed like pure foolishness. Not to mention the fact that it was just plain dangerous.

Henry worked full-time with his father at DeForge Painting, saving money for the baby. He kept busy. He went out on crews all day, wearing a crisp DeForge Painting T-shirt tucked into white painter’s pants, and came home in the evening to work on the house. He got a nursery ready for the baby and cleaned up one of the small sheds out back for Tess to use as a painting studio. He baby-proofed every room, putting safety covers on all the outlets, installing plastic locks on the cabinets that contained medications and household cleansers, placing foam padding over the sharp corners of furniture. He drained the pool. He even cooked dinner most nights for his father and wife. When he finally got to bed, he slept a hard, dreamless sleep and woke up rested and ready for whatever the day before him held. There was no time in Henry’s life for looking back, for thinking about what had happened at the cabin. He lived in a world ruled by the present and immediate future. So when Tess had insisted they go back to the cabin once the snow melted, he put up a fight.

“Why would you want to do that? We swore we’d never go back,” he told her.

“I want to take one last look around, before the baby comes. It’s something I need to do, Henry.”

“But we made a pact,” he reminded her.

“I’m going with or without you.”

Henry knew better than to argue with Tess, especially now that she was pregnant. If she said she wanted fettuccine carbonara at three in the morning, she would damn well find a way to get it, even when it meant sending Henry to the all-night grocery store and cooking the meal herself.

Henry had no choice but to join the pilgrimage. To do his best to make things safe. But here, in the cabin, that felt like an impossible task.

He climbed up to the loft where he and Tess had slept, where they’d made a baby together. Their bed was an old futon laid out on the floor, piled high with sleeping bags, now chewed through by mice. Like a thief in a hurry, he quickly sorted through their things: clothes stacked in milk crates, mildewed books, Tess’s paints and brushes, his wood-carving tools. He grabbed the canvas roll of chisels, gouges, and knives and stuffed it into his pack along with some of Tess’s better brushes. The paints he left.

The loft felt small and airless. Henry made his way back to the ladder and down, going straight for the hanging tapestries this time, pushing his way through quickly as if he half-expected to catch Winnie and Suz there if he moved fast enough. Privacy be damned. But their bed was empty. Clothes lay scattered on the floor. Combat boots and white canvas sneakers with intricate designs hand-drawn on them. A spilled box of crayons. A bong made from a plastic bear that once held honey. An empty wine bottle with a candle shoved in its neck, red wax drips covering the glass like coagulated blood. And there, taking up the entire wall behind their makeshift bed, was the moose. Not the wooden
sculpture that Henry knew lay in pieces behind the cabin, but the paintings: nine canvases put together to make one large moose, a study Suz did before tackling the real project: the sculpture, which would be the ruin of them.