The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (45 page)

He packed his clothes and moved into the barn that night. All his father’s old widower furniture was still there: the dusty daybed, the small table and desk.

Only later, tossing and turning under his father’s duck-decoy-print sheets, did he realize he should have said something more to her (something along the lines of
But you’re real, you’re alive
); he should have put up a fight. But by then, it seemed too late.

H
E GETS TO THE
bottom of the stairs and turns to the left, there she is, her back to him, pounding the shit out of the hanging bag under a flickering fluorescent light. She’s a small-framed woman. Barely five feet tall and ninety-five pounds, nearly all of it muscle. She’s wearing a sports bra and running shorts. Her body is soaked with sweat. It flies from her closely cropped brown hair as she lunges at the bag, going in for the full assault, grunting with the effort of it.

Henry circles around his dancing, punching wife so that he’s in her line of sight. She gives a surprised little shriek.

“Jesus, Henry! I had no idea you were there!”

He smiles apologetically. He sees her tremble a little and imagines being able to lay a reassuring hand on her arm, say, “Sorry, love,” maybe even take her in his arms. He’d like that. To take her in his arms again. Feel her damp body against him, the heat radiating, warming him in the deepest way.

In the early years of their marriage, when they slept together, she fit so neatly, so perfectly against him, filling all his empty spaces. And she was always warm, even on the coldest winter nights when she’d shriek at the feel of his frozen hands and feet on her bare skin.

She’d take his hands, tuck them under her body, then, once they were no longer painfully cold, she’d guide them to her warmest places, and soon, he’d be hot, sweating, throwing the covers off.

He clears his throat. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I just got a phone call.”

She uses her teeth to un-Velcro the thick boxing glove, pulls it off, then removes the other. Underneath, her hands are wrapped in what looks to Henry like black bandages for extra support and protection. Once the gloves are off, she removes the earbuds. He can hear the music thumping out of them. One of the snarling women Tess listens to when she exercises.

“From whom?” she asks, reaching for a towel to mop the sweat off her face. Tess looks worried, her damp brow creased. She knows he wouldn’t have interrupted her if it wasn’t important.

Henry closes his left eye to keep the pain at bay.

“Another headache?” she asks, her voice soft.

She used to take her thumb and rub this spot just under his eyebrow. She’d start out soft, then press hard against the ridge of bone, the pain almost excruciating, and just when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, she’d stop and the headache would be gone.

He nods, then, one eyed, he tells her about the phone call from Spencer’s sister: Spencer’s suicide, the postcard, the private investigator coming to Vermont.

“If the truth comes out…,” he starts to say, looking at her through one eye, Cyclops eye.

Tess nods. Her shoulders slouch, her knees bend, her head drops down, and she closes her eyes tight, as if she’s making a wish.

“But maybe,” Henry says, desperate to make things okay again, to stick to his role as protector, “maybe it doesn’t have to. It’s been this long, right? We’ll practice our stories before the investigator gets here. I’ll go up to the cabin and make sure there’s nothing incriminating there.”

Tess looks up at him, her eyes glassy. “Henry,” she says. “What would happen to Emma? If we went to jail?”

“We’ll get through this,” he tells her, letting himself take her wrapped-up hand in his. She gives his fingers a gentle squeeze.

“Henry, do you ever think about what would have happened if…” Her voice trails off.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he promises, remembering that they were the same words he told her the night Suz died. Empty, hollow words.

H
ER RHYTHM IS OFF
. Her concentration, gone. Spencer is dead. Their past is surfacing, like she somehow always knew it would.

Dismantlement = Freedom.

“Christ,” she mumbles, stepping away from the bag to get her water bottle. Holding it clumsily between her two boxing gloves, she takes a long swallow.

Henry got right up to her without her having any idea he was in the room. She hates being sneaked up on, knowing someone has been watching her without her awareness. Even harmless Henry.

She’s been feeling like that a lot lately: as if someone’s watching her. Spying. She feels eyes on her when she’s working in her studio, buying flowers at the farmers’ market. Last Saturday morning the feeling was so strong she had to stop herself from running across the town green back to her car, weaving between card tables and vendors set up with white umbrellas; everything felt sinister, right down to the bluegrass trio, whose music, as she race-walked past, made her almost scream—the notes brushing her skin like feelers from some hideous, invisible insect.

“Paranoia, the destroyer,” she says, remembering the old Kinks song.

But what if it’s not her imagination? What if someone—something, even—is watching her?

It’s crazy to even think of.

And what about the vermilion paint?
she asks herself.
Explain that one, will ya?

She gets a chill, puts down the water bottle, goes back to the bag, but it’s no good. Today’s workout is ruined.

The whole reason she started boxing was because it was the one thing she’d tried that made everything else go away: the summer of the Dismantlers, the complicated mess her marriage had become. When she practices boxing, she’s that focused. There’s her, the gloves, and the bag. There’s no room for anything else.

She’s done it all: yoga (God, she hated lying there on the mat, concentrating on her breath, trying to be calm and centered and one with the universe.
Please.
), aerobics, even Jazzercise where a pert blond instructor kept everyone in step in a room that smelled distinctly like bad clams. Henry had chuckled when she told him this detail.

“I swear,” she’d said. “Rotten seafood. But no one else seemed to notice.”

“How could they not?” he’d asked. “Maybe they were just being polite.”

“Polite?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “Maybe they all knew the smell was coming from the instructor.”

They laughed harder.

They used to be a couple like that: they’d tell each other little stories from their days and laugh. Fill the space and silence with these small details, but rarely would they delve into anything deeper, more meaningful.

Tess thinks of those water bugs, striders, who skate across the
surface, but never dive. That’s what their conversations used to be like.

T
WO YEARS AGO, WHEN
Tess was feeling particularly unsatisfied, she tried therapy, where she’d gone over and over her childhood and her dead-end marriage. She knew better than to expect any sense of resolution, of ever feeling whole again. She knew there were too many things she’d never tell any stranger—a therapist, a priest, anyone.

Tess sidestepped carefully around the real issues, her secret Dismantler history. She got close sometimes, but never told. Instead, she talked about her dreams. Dreams where she discovered some forgotten pet tucked away in a closet or basement: a starving puppy who’s chewed off his own tail, a box of mice who have eaten each other’s eyes out.

“And I pick the box up and the mice are all banging against the sides of it, their feet are bloody stumps from trying to dig their way out.”

Her poor therapist gave an involuntary shiver and this left Tess feeling strangely satisfied. But that small satisfaction aside, therapy was going nowhere.

“What do you think the mice represent?” the sweet New Age woman with hennaed hair had asked.

Tess shrugged.

Therapy was just another mistake in a long series of mistakes, lined up like tumbling dominos, leading her right there to that place: blubbering to a near stranger about her unsatisfying life with a husband who didn’t love her the way she longed to be loved. Pathetic.

“But then there’s Emma,” Tess was careful to mention at the end of each therapy session, a reminder to herself and her therapist that not every part of her life was empty and unfulfilling. Emma was her greatest accomplishment—the one good thing she had to show for the last ten years.

When things between Tess and Henry were going badly, on days when they couldn’t even muster the energy for small talk, they had Emma. Their bright jewel of a girl who gave their relationship focus and meaning. She’d waltz into the room and they’d be a happy family again—laughing at knock-knock jokes, tripping over words, talking over each other, because suddenly, they all had so much to say.

I
T WAS ONE OF
the trainers at the health club, Joe, a tiny man with Brylcreem hair, who turned her on to boxing. He showed her the heavy bag and some basic moves. He taught her the proper way to wrap her hands, the importance of the right gloves. At first, they just worked on her stance and he had her circle the bag, chin tucked in, face protected by her hands, silly and cartoonish in bright red gloves.

“You have to learn the footwork first,” he told her. “It’s the foundation you’re going to base everything else on. If you don’t have a solid stance, you’re through.”

Then came the punches. The straight left, the jab and the hook. The cross. The uppercut.

She’d master one and he’d teach her another.

“Beautiful!” he’d shout. “Watch your feet. Eye on the bag. Chin down. Gloves up. That’s right. Circle to the left. Hit it again. Picture your hand going through the bag, out the other side. Nothing can stop you!”

And as her fists connected with all eighty pounds of the hanging leather bag, she felt something she hadn’t in a long, long time. Not from her art, her life, her marriage. She felt
satisfied
.

H
ER GLOVES AND WRAPS
off, she moves to the weight bench, lies back, and does ten presses.

If the truth comes out…

Ten years. Ten years spent avoiding it, circling around it, not daring to look it in the eye. Talk about fancy footwork.

“You’ve gotta look, Tess,” Suz told her, blowing sweet, resiny smoke in her face. They were getting stoned on the roof of a parking garage in Burlington. They had just finished going carefully down the rows, dumping sugar in the gas tank of every SUV. They left little typewritten, photocopied notes tucked under the windshield wiper of each one:
Gas-guzzling motherfuckers get dismantled!

Winnie and Henry were off scoping out the construction site of a new bank around the corner to see if it was a good target for a late-night dismantling mission.

Suz passed the joint to Tess and continued. “Really look at things without all the bullshit filters you’ve been taught to look through your whole life.” Suz’s amber eyes were bloodshot, but glittering. She tucked her hair back behind her ear. “That’s what this is all about. Waking people up from the consumer-culture coma. That’s the compassionate part, you know? We’re showing people the truth, and even if it hurts, even if the shit they think they love gets destroyed, they’re
awake
. Truly living, maybe for the first time in their lives.”

At the time, it seemed true, felt true. Suz believed it so passionately, and her passion was contagious. But Tess always wondered—maybe people were better off with the watered-down version of life, life with blinders, filters, cars that ran and buildings that went up on time, simple, stupid, mindless jobs. Maybe they were happy.

It was something Tess still struggled with—it was why she’d insisted that she and Henry separate, wasn’t it? Because the watered-down version of life had left her profoundly unsatisfied. But she wasn’t an idealistic kid anymore. Maybe she was wrong to expect more.

Tess looks up at the bar resting above her, the rings of round
silver weights clamped on. She reaches up to do another repetition, but finds she can’t. She’s somehow exhausted. Her arms are shaking.

Nothing can stop you.

Bullshit.

Every superhero has his weakness, his own kryptonite. The summer of the Compassionate Dismantlers is hers. Apparently, it was Spencer’s too. Powerful enough to make him take his own life, even after ten years.

“Fuck,” she mumbles.

She sits up, grabs her towel.

She’s strong. Fast. Has developed a hell of a right hook, the power of her whole body behind it. She can run five miles and feel great, barely winded. But none of that matters. It’s been a year since she started boxing and only now does she understand that in the end, it won’t protect her.

She turns to look in the large mirror she installed along the paneled wall, for shadowboxing, and is startled by what she sees: fear.
I know what you did,
the face in the mirror tells her.
And soon, the rest of the world will know too.

You can sink a thing deep, weight it down with stones, but eventually, it will surface.

T
HEY’RE ON THEIR WAY
home from the supermarket, Henry at the wheel, the back of the Blazer full of grocery bags, Emma strapped in the backseat.

“Mel gets to ride in the front seat,” she complains, thumping her foot against the back of his headrest because she knows it drives him crazy.

“The backseat is safest,” he tells her, for what must be the thousandth time. “Now quit kicking my seat.”

Tess wanted to work on the latest installment in her sculpture garden and Henry offered to do the shopping. He thought it would calm his mind after the phone call with Spencer’s sister earlier that afternoon. He finds comfort in the mundane tasks of everyday life—pushing the shopping cart with the wobbly wheel through the all too bright Price Chopper; scratching the items off Tess’s carefully penned list: lemons, dish soap, bran cereal; giving in easily when Emma asks for a Butterfinger in the checkout line. It makes him feel almost normal. Just a man out shopping with his daughter, guided by his loving wife’s thoughtful list.

It’s all about deception.

Seven miles from home now, they’ve just passed the blind corner beyond Halloway’s Used Furniture, the place where every few years some kid gets killed. The trees beside the road are lined with wooden crosses, sometimes decorated with plastic flowers and Mylar balloons. On the left ahead is the old Seven Bridges Egg Farm with the giant wooden chicken cutout in front. Someone painted it purple with pink spots a few years back, on April Fools’ Day, and no one ever fixed it. The egg farm is now owned by a guy who calls himself Muskrat and sells handmade drums, rattles, and didgeridoos. The chickens are long gone, but sometimes after a summer thunderstorm the acrid scent of chicken shit still haunts the road.

Henry is listening to the Red Sox on the radio when he glances in the rearview mirror to see that Emma’s talking to Danner again. Nonstop talking in a low, deliberate voice. Her hands are flapping, head bobbing as if her talk is a dance, a secret dance done for her secret friend no one else can see.

He catches only a few words and phrases: “If you could see…only…and then I wonder…”

He thought Emma would grow out of it, but it seems the older she gets, the more important Danner becomes. Tess says it’s not cause for concern. “Emma’s imagination is so vivid,” she tells him. “We should be grateful, not worried.”

The Red Sox are behind, five to two. Henry’s chewing the insides of his cheeks again, sucking on the scars he’s made there. What must his dentist think?

It’s stuffy in the Blazer. He turns up the AC. They pass Burt’s Texaco. He spots one of his DeForge Painting pickups gassing up, gives a beep and a wave to the kid filling the tank. A new kid. College boy. David. David gives him a salute.

Henry’s mind circles back around to the phone call from Spencer’s sister. It isn’t Spencer’s death that bothers him. Or even so much the sad fact that his sister is under the illusion that Spencer
had his closest friendships in college. No, what worries Henry is the fucking postcard.
Dismantlement = Freedom
.

Hearing the words again had torn something open inside him, a tear too jagged and unexpected to close neatly.

He tries to tell himself that it’s possible the postcard had been lost, stuffed at the bottom of some forgotten mailbag for ten years.

But what if it wasn’t?

He feels the tear inside him widen. Where had the card come from? There were only five people who had ever used that phrase: himself, Tess, Winnie, Spencer, and Suz. Surely Spencer didn’t send the card to himself. And neither he nor Tess would do such a thing. Winnie? After that summer, she returned home to Boston and they hadn’t heard from her since. In some ways, she’d lost the most that summer and would be the last person to go poking around in the past. If it was her, why would she have sent the card to Spencer? It just didn’t make sense. That left Suz. And Suz—well, she was down at the bottom of Number 10 Lake.

To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.

Was there another possibility? Someone else who knew the secrets of that summer?

Henry looks up into the rearview mirror, sees Emma talking with Danner. She’s nodding her head. Saying, “I know. I don’t think so either.”

He drums his fingers on the wheel.

Damn it. She’s too old for this. She needs more real friends. She spends too much time alone. There’s Mel, but Mel’s a little off herself with her fake glasses and hacked-up hair. He and Tess should have found a good summer camp for Emma. Something with crafts and horses and cute little campfire songs. But no lake. God, no lake.

Maybe they should have planned a camping trip themselves, like they did when she was little. They had a big old cabin tent
that they’d throw in the back of the pickup with sleeping bags, and a cooler full of hot dogs, soda pop, and beer. Tess had a rainbow-striped woven hammock she’d bring, and tie it between two trees at the campground. They’d all three get into it, the sides curling up around them.
Cocooning,
Tess called it. Sometimes they’d fall asleep there. Mostly they wouldn’t. They’d just swing gently, wrapped in each other’s arms, sticky with sunscreen and bug spray, playing the game where you looked up at the clouds and said what you saw there:
hammer, walrus, banana
.

“A troll, Daddy! I see a troll. He’s watching us.”

“Want me to make him disappear?” Henry asked, and Emma, sweaty, fearful, nodded. Henry puffed out his cheeks and blew a loud, hissing breath into the sky just as the wind picked up, distorting the clouds, carrying the troll away.

Emma cheered.

“Daddy’s magic,” Tess said, smiling wistfully. “He makes all the bad things go away.”

H
ENRY CAN’T BE SURE
when Danner first showed up. It’s almost as if she’s been around since Emma was born. Since she learned to talk, at least. In the beginning, the invisible girl wasn’t called anything, then, when she was first learning to read, Emma named her.

Henry had an old pair of hiking boots, something he’d bought just before graduating from college, visions of trekking around the world in his head: Ireland, Wales, Australia, the Alps. They’d all four go—“The Compassionate Dismantlers take on the world!” Suz had shouted, delighted by the idea. But then Suz died and Tess got pregnant, and that put an end not just to the Dismantlers, but to his wanderlust. The boots were relegated to yard work and the occasional hike through the woods behind his house. And these days, the only dismantling he did was taking apart the trap under the bathroom sink to retrieve whatever small artifact
Emma dropped down the drain. Earrings. A little Eeyore pin she got when Tess’s parents took her to Disney World.

“Daddy, what do your boots say?” Emma asked one afternoon as she lay on the kitchen floor staring at the boots abandoned by the door. The company name was pressed into the leather across the heel of each boot.

“Danner.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s who makes them.”

“Like the elf?”

“What elf, honey?”

“The elf who makes the shoes.”

“Something like that, I guess.”

Emma gave a nod and went back to staring dreamily at the boots. The next day, the invisible girl had a name. Named for a shoe-making elf, and a pair of heavy boots that spoke to Henry not of regret exactly, but simply of what might have been.

Henry grips the Blazer’s wheel tightly, worrying over the baseball game, the origin of the postcard that drove Spencer to suicide, and now, over whether or not Danner is going to be a permanent fixture in their lives. Emma gets quiet. He glances in the rearview mirror, sees she’s still talking, but in a low, quiet voice. Subdued. He turns down the radio.

“How did you die?” Emma asks. Then, in the mirror, he watches her nod, her face as serious as it gets, all pinched up.
I’ve got a splinter
kind of serious.
I think my hamster’s sick
kind of serious.

On the low murmur of the radio, Henry hears the crack of a bat. The announcers go wild. Home run. Bases loaded. The Sox have taken the lead. It’s a new ball game.