The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (58 page)

T
ESS CAN STILL TASTE
the sweet floral smoke of Claire Novak’s cigarette on her tongue. Violets, but not violets. Someone else’s wedding cake. She longs for another cigarette as she locks the door to her studio.

She finds herself unsettled by the idea of Winnie being back in town. Winnie, at least the Winnie of ten years ago, was not to be trusted.

“H
AS SHE FUCKED HIM
yet?” Winnie asked.

The two of them were on the beach at the lake, moon bathing. Henry and Suz were having one of their races out to the rocks at the other side.

“What?”

It wasn’t just the words that caught Tess off guard, but Winnie’s tone. It seemed, to Tess, like these past few weeks since school ended, Winnie had been trying out different voices—varying her tone and rhythm, even experimenting with slight accents, struggling to find something that would fit with her new name and the haircut Suz had given her. The voice that seemed to have the
most staying power, the one she’d just used, was dark and gravelly, bubbling with quiet rage.

“Suz and Henry. Do you think they’ve fucked yet?”

Tess flushed and immediately felt stupid. “Henry’s with me. And Suz is with you.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Tess,” Winnie said. “If they haven’t done it yet, it’s just a matter of time, right? He thinks he’s in love with her. You’ve seen the way he looks at her. The way she teases him.”

“And what about Suz?” Tess asked. “Is she in love with him?”

Winnie laughed, rolled over onto her side to look at Tess. Her short hair made her eyes seem huge. Henry said the new haircut gave her a sexy androgynous look. Tess thought it made her look sick in some way, like someone with cancer, or a mental patient.

“Suz is in love with being loved,” Winnie said. She scooped up a handful of sand, watched it run through her fingers.

Tess sat up, tried to spot Henry and Suz out on the water. They were just two pale dots in black water at the other side of the lake.

Winnie lit a cigarette, held it out to Tess who took a drag. The filter was squished from Winnie clamping it tightly between her teeth.

“You love Henry, right?” Winnie asked.

Tess exhaled smoke, nodded.

“Like I love Suz,” Winnie said, laying her head back down in the sand.

They were silent a minute. Tess watched Winnie smoking on her back, her eyes fixed on the stars.

“I don’t think it’s too late,” Winnie said. “You could hold on to him. You could find a way.”

“I don’t know…” Tess’s voice trailed off. The two white specks out on the lake were gone. Underwater? Or had they made it to the rocks already?

“Henry’s a good guy. One of the few. If you got into trouble,
like say you got, you know, knocked-up or something, he’d do the right thing. He’d stand by you.”

Tess turned back to Winnie. “Are you suggesting I get pregnant on purpose to get him to stay with me? To choose me over her?”

Winnie sat up, shrugged her shoulders.

“That’s a little fucking archaic, isn’t it? Not to mention pathetic. If Henry wants to be with me, I want it to be his choice. I’m not using a baby to tip the scales.”

Winnie nodded, stubbed out her cigarette, stood up and headed for the path back to the cabin. “It was just a suggestion,” she called back. “A way to fix both our problems. To make sure everyone ends up where they’re meant to be.”

L
ATER THAT SUMMER, WHEN
Tess first began to think she might be pregnant, she studied the condoms Henry kept in the milk crate next to their futon in the loft. Did condoms have an expiration date? She picked a foil package up by the corner and held it to the window to check. Light shone through a dozen tiny holes. Pinpricks.

One by one, she checked the rest of the box. They were all the same.

She gathered them up, threw them into the trash. Later, she borrowed Henry’s van and drove to the drugstore for an identical box, which she replaced without him ever knowing, and a home pregnancy test, which she used in the ladies’ room at the Green Mountain Diner, confirming what she already knew.

T
ESS SHAKES THE MEMORY
from her head, looks over the work scattered around her studio. She sighs, realizes Claire is right. All these paintings are empty. Meaningless. Technically accomplished, but so what? A flower is a flower is a flower.

“Knows how to stretch her limits, my ass,” she mumbles, sitting
herself at the drafting table and reaching for a new sketchbook. She picks up a pencil, places the tip of it on the paper, and waits.

White space. Blank canvas. Intimidating, but thrilling beyond belief.
Anything can happen.

When was the last time her art mattered?

When was a flower not just a flower?

“Y
OU NEVER MENTIONED SETTING
anything on fire,” Tess said as she watched Suz lug a gas can from the back of the van. They were at the construction site for the new Green Hills Savings Bank. Earlier that afternoon, Tess had discovered the holes in the condoms and learned she was pregnant. She hadn’t said a word about it to Henry or confronted Winnie. When she returned from town with the van, she was swept up in a flurry of activity getting ready for the evening’s Dismantling mission. Suz’s plan had been to tear down whatever they could at the construction site and maybe take some lumber to use for art projects. But now, it seemed plans had changed.

Tearing things down and taking a few pieces of plywood was one thing, arson was another. If they were caught, they’d be arrested. Tess wondered if you could have a baby in jail.

Suz began dumping gas on the neatly bundled piles of framing lumber and plywood.

“Won’t people from the highway be able to see the flames?” Henry asked. He shifted from one foot to the other, nervously watching the headlights going by on the hill off to their left.

“That’s the point,” Suz said, emptying the last of the gas. “Fire is cathartic. Cleansing. It burns away anything transient and imperfect. I think that people get that—fire speaks to them on this kind of primitive level. Fire is life. And death. And rebirth.”

Tess touched her belly, trying to imagine the baby inside. Winnie watched, grinning, the rifle cradled in her arms. If Tess had any doubts about how the holes got put in the condoms,
they disappeared when Winnie smiled at her knowingly, conspiratorially.

Suz took out a book of matches, lit one, and held it to her face, smiling. “Fire is a wake-up call,” she said, dropping the match. The gas caught with a whooshing sound and the flames raced over the wood. Tess felt as if all the air around them was being sucked into it and replaced with thick smoke. Suz lit the second pile, then the third. She grabbed the empty gas can and danced around the flames, screaming, “Dismantlement equals freedom!” She pulled Winnie to her, kissed her so ferociously that Tess was sure when they pulled apart, Winnie would be bleeding.

“Banks are all just part of the trap,” Suz said as they made their getaway in Henry’s van. “Part of the machine. They keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Think what a different place the world would be if we could just go back to using barter. If I could walk into the market with one of my paintings and trade it for a week’s worth of groceries.”

Tess believed that barter might be better, but knew it would never happen. Not on the large scale Suz dreamed of. And the truth was, Tess thought as she watched all that lumber go up in flames in the rearview mirror, she kind of hated the waste. She would rather steal than destroy—take the wood from the bank construction and use it for a sculpture, or give it to some homeless guy to build a shack under a bridge. But that’s not what it was about for Suz. For her, it was about tearing it down, burning it up. That’s what got her off—made her eyes light up, all wild and surprised, like she’d just won the fucking lottery.

W
ITHOUT EVEN REALIZING IT
, Tess has begun to draw, her hand moving freely across the paper, seeming to have a memory and will of its own. And it’s a flower she sketches; not a common sweet pea, but some hothouse beauty growing from a vine with tendrils like arms and legs reaching, grasping, trying
to pop through the two-dimensional trap of paper and actually touch her. Wrap its sticky limbs around her, threatening to never let her go.

Tess draws in a trance, remembers that this is what it’s supposed to be like: the goal is to lose yourself in the work, to give yourself over entirely.

As she draws, she feels everything else slipping away: Henry’s drinking, Emma’s near drowning, Winnie’s arrival in town, even Claire Novak vanishes from her mind.

It’s not until she’s finished, ready to flip the page and start another, that she sees that there, in the dark folds of petals curled like flames at the flower’s center, is a face. Hard eyes, a mischievous grin showing crooked teeth.

Suz.

The only true creative force is chaos, babycakes. Don’t you forget it.

I
T’S NEARLY MIDNIGHT
. T
HE
main house is dark and Henry’s sure Tess is asleep. He makes his way through the garden, around the fish pond and to the grotto, navigating by moonlight. Once there, he pockets the little photo of Suz in its plastic case, then hurries back to his barn.

Henry tucks the photo from the grotto into a bag of rags on a shelf in his workshop, then settles himself into the canoe with a fresh bottle of wine. He flips through Suz’s journal, knowing full well that this is evidence too, but at least he has the good sense to keep it hidden.

“I
NEED FOUR OF
your Benadryl,” Suz whispered, leaning in so close that her hair tickled his face.

Tess, who was on the other side of the room with her sketchbook, gave them a warning glance.

“What for?” Henry asked.

“You’ll see,” she promised.

They could hear Winnie and Spencer outside, gathering wood for a bonfire.

Henry handed over four of his Benadryl and he and Tess watched Suz grind them into powder and dump it into a shot of tequila.

Winnie and Spencer came in laughing, said the fire was good to go. Spencer said something about porcupines that Henry didn’t catch, but it made Winnie start laughing again.

“Celebration time!” Suz announced, a sickly sweet grin pasted on her face. “Let’s drink a toast to the newest member of the Compassionate Dismantlers.” Suz handed Spencer the first shot she’d poured and gave him a hearty thump on the back.

“To Spencer,” she said, and they all clicked their glasses together. When Spencer finished his shot, Suz poured him another. Then another. She filled her own glass too.

Henry and Tess threw cautious, worried glances at each other. Where was Suz going with this?

“Not gonna let a girl outdrink you, are you, Spencer?” Suz asked. He shook his head, held his glass out for another shot. In half an hour, he was slouched in the chair, slurring his words, barely able to move.

“Give me a hand,” Suz said to Henry as she looped Spencer’s left arm around her shoulder and started to stand him up. Henry got the other side, figuring maybe they were just going to carry him off to bed. He should have known better. With Suz, things were never that simple.

“Wherewegoin?” Spencer moaned.

“For a ride,” Suz said. “Grab the keys to the van, Henry.”

“Keys?” Henry repeated, more worried than ever.

Winnie touched Spencer’s face, pried open one of his eyes. “What the fuck did you do to him?” she hissed at Suz.

“Relax, babe,” Suz said. “It’s all part of the plan. Now let’s get him to the Love Machine.”

“Where are we taking him?” Tess asked, once they’d all settled into the van. Henry was behind the wheel, a lit cigarette between his lips. He liked to smoke when he was nervous. It gave him something to do with his hands.

“East,” Suz said. Then she turned to Henry and said, “Get on Route 2 and drive, babycakes. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

On and on they drove, past farms, lakes, and campgrounds. Through St. Johnsbury and across the bridge into New Hampshire where they stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through for coffee and milk shakes. The road twisted and turned. Suz rolled cigarettes, played with the radio dial, never letting a song finish before searching impatiently for something better.

Three hours after leaving the cabin, Suz told him to pull over.

“Where?” Henry asked. They had just crossed into Maine and
were on a two-lane highway without a house or streetlight in sight. The last town they went through had a paper mill, and the air was still heavy with the thick, sulfuric stink of it.

“Right there,” Suz said, pointing to a dirt pull-off about ten yards ahead. Spencer was out cold.

“Now what?” Tess asked.

Suz smiled. “We dump him. Come on, help me get his clothes off. And grab his wallet too.”

“Jesus!” Tess said. “This is going too far, Suz. You can’t leave him out here in the middle of nowhere, naked, with no money or ID.”

Suz thought a moment. “You’re right. Let’s leave his underwear on. What do you think, is he a boxer or briefs guy?” Suz un-buttoned his black jeans and started pulling them down. “Tighty-whities! I knew it. But then again, it’s no surprise to you, Winnie, is it?” Winnie looked away as Suz pulled the jeans the rest of the way off, then rifled through the pockets. She pulled out his wallet, a book of poetry, and a jackknife.

“I am
so
keeping this,” Suz said, turning the knife over in her hand.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” Tess asked. “I mean, it’s evidence, right?”

“Evidence of what, exactly?” Suz asked.

“That we were here. That we did this to him,” Tess said. “What if he doesn’t make it back?”

Suz laughed. Shook her head.

“It’s fine, Tess,” Henry told her.

Spencer was on his back on the floor of Henry’s van, wearing only white briefs.

“Are you sure he’s okay?” Tess asked. “He hasn’t moved at all.”

Henry leaned down, found Spencer’s pulse, which seemed strong enough, nodded. “Nothing to worry about,” he whispered to Tess.

They got Spencer out of the van and laid him down in the
dirt. Suz took a Sharpie and wrote,
I TRASHED STYLES INDUSTRIES
across his forehead. “How’s that for a finishing touch? Fucking brilliant, isn’t it?”

Later that night, back at the cabin, everyone was quiet. Suz sat carving her initials into the table with Spencer’s knife. At last, she looked up and addressed the group.

“I know you’re all thinking we crossed a line tonight. But that’s the nature of compassion,” she explained. “Think about it: sometimes, the most compassionate thing to do is the hardest. Like when you have to put an animal down, or cut off someone’s leg to save them.”

Tess shook her head. “Spencer’s not an animal. And he didn’t have gangrene or whatever the fuck in his leg.”

“You’re missing the point,” Suz said. “People who think they know everything need to be shown that they don’t have a fucking clue,” she told them. “That’s the true path to enlightenment. Sometimes, the most compassionate thing is to be the wrecking ball that changes someone’s life forever.”

B
E THE WRECKING BALL
.

Jesus.

Henry rises out of the canoe, goes over to the phone and picks it up. He’s got to get out of his own head for a while. Talk to someone who might understand.

He’s surprised to hear Tess in the middle of a call. Henry covers the mouthpiece of the phone with his palm and listens. “I’ll do it,” he hears her tell someone.

“I knew you would,” a woman’s voice says. The woman has a thick accent. This is clearly not anyone Henry knows.

Who would Tess be making deals with in the middle of the night?

Henry hangs up quietly, waits a few minutes, then calls Winnie at the cabin.

“I can’t sleep,” he tells her. “I think something’s going on with Tess.”

“Henry,” Winnie says, her voice lulling, almost seductive. “Can you come out here? To the cabin.”

“What? Now?” Henry looks at his watch—nearly one in the morning.

“Yes. There’s something I want to talk to you about, but not over the phone.”

Val. That was her name before.

Before they were the Dismantlers, what were they? And after?

Isn’t the reality that everything else, for better or worse, pales in comparison to the lives they lived that summer?

“I’ll be there in an hour,” he says.