Dismantled (12 page)
Authors: Jennifer McMahon
Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Adult, #Young Adult, #Thriller
H
ENRY FINDS A ROLL
of black plastic, cuts off a few squares, and staples them over the windows in the barn. He latches the sliding door knowing it’s unnecessary—Emma and Tess never come in without knocking and calling out.
Henry takes four more aspirin, pours himself a mug of wine, and runs trembling fingers over the red nail polish on the cover of Suz’s hardcover black journal.
D
ISMANTLEMENT
= F
REEDOM
All these years in his toolbox and he’s never been able to open it, fearing, somehow, that cracking open the book would be like letting the genie out of the bottle. But now, he has this sense that it’s too late: the genie is out. God help them.
He carries the mug and journal over to the canoe and climbs in, letting the rough-hewn sides cradle him.
Henry takes another sip of wine, thinking he should have brought the bottle, and flips through the journal on his lap, to a spot near the end.
Even now, after all this time, he can hear Suz’s voice scolding him for daring to read her words, can almost hear her say,
What is it you hope to find?
July 27—Cabin by the lake
As I write this in the flickering light of the oil lamp, the prisoner is asleep. Winnie is watching him. Sometimes, when I see her with the gun, I get this rush that starts as a tingle at the top of my head, like a tickle, and moves down through me, growing warmer, then hot when it reaches my cunt. Who’d have guessed a string bean, sullen girl like Winnie could make me feel like that?
Then again, who’d have guessed any of this?
Now they want to know what to do next. I’d like to just slip away, let them figure things out for once. Maybe I’m not the fearless leader they believe me to be—the fucking cruise director who keeps everything going, big shiny grin, no crisis she can’t handle.
Yes, I brought us all together. I had the idea, wrote the manifesto. I identified the cause. We will change the world by taking it apart, dismantling it piece by piece. Break it down. Tear it up. Only then can we be truly free.
Dismantlement = Freedom. Right? Right.
But sometimes I’m scared that this thing we’re doing is so much bigger and stronger than who we are that we may disappear inside it somehow, evaporate. Maybe it’s happening already. Am I the Suz the others see or—steel yourself, it’s cliché time—the girl behind the mask? The girl who’s shaking in her fucking boots because somehow or other, everything’s spiraled out of control?
We have
a prisoner
! We kidnapped a guy at gunpoint. Yep, we did. And we did it because I said it was the right thing to do. Shit. Who the fuck am I? I don’t know who’s to blame—me for starting it or them for blithely following.
Am I saving Winnie? Letting her point her gun (the gun I gave her) at the guy who put her in a box for months, made her totally hate herself. If ever an asshole deserved to be terrorized, this is that asshole.
And yet, is this really an act of dismantlement, or some fucked-up personal vendetta? Earlier today, Tess asked, “Where’s the compassion here, Suz?” Tess can be a whiny little bitch sometimes—but she had a point.
Gotta admit, I’m afraid of where all this may take us. How it might end.
They’re beginning to doubt me. Like maybe we went too far bringing Spencer here. Dissension in the ranks—ha! I don’t know…
Do you hear that, Winnie, Tess, and Henry: I DON’T KNOW! News flash: I’m mortal. Not some James Bond mastermind who can always see twenty steps ahead.
Right, so what DO I know?
This: It’s more important than ever that we all stick together now, whatever it takes. We can’t afford to fall apart. Though I wonder if maybe we’re supposed to be taken apart (we are the Dismantlers, after all!), reduced to our bare parts, our individual selves?
Whatever happens—however this mess turns out—we’ve done good work. I believe that. We committed ourselves to something and we did it. We stripped things down to their bare fucking bones. We have gotten down to the marrow and sucked like hell. How many people can actually say that? How many people have ever been that brave?
Henry closes the book, rises and gets the bottle of wine. Then he settles himself back in the canoe and opens the journal to an earlier entry.
June 26—Cabin by the lake
We have these cats that come around. It started with one huge orange tomcat, then he brought a friend. Next thing we knew, there were five cats hanging out. Then Winnie, she brings home a kitten from town. She keeps bringing them. They don’t look stray, but she says they are. Lost, she tells me. They need a home. Now we leave bowls of milk, tuna, and Friskies all over the place. The cats come and go. And Winnie keeps bringing more home. Giving them names none of the rest of us can keep track of. Jasper, Yum-yum, Iris, Wanton, Grover. Carrot, she calls that first cat, the one that started it all. What kind of a cat name is Carrot? is what I wonder, but I love Winnie, we all love Winnie, so that’s the cat’s name.
Poor Henry’s allergic, so he’s stocked up on Benadryl and walks around weeping and sniffling like someone died. It’s like me with the fucking pollen in the spring. But I can’t take the shit he does—I’d be out like a fucking light.
Tess found an old aquarium at a yard sale, and she and Winnie filled it with water from the lake then threw in all these frogs’ eggs they’d collected in a peanut butter jar. We’re watching the eggs every day, waiting for them to hatch. Waiting for their little lives to unfold right there, before our very eyes.
Metamorphosis. Is there any greater word in the English language? And I can’t help but ask, isn’t that what’s happening to us? Don’t the lives of the four of us mirror those in the aquarium? Aren’t we changing a little every day, leaving our old selves so far behind that soon, we won’t even remember what we were like? And after the metamorphosis is complete, it will be impossible to go back. Though who would even want to?
H
ENRY CLOSES THE BOOK
. Closes his eyes.
Suz was right. There would be no going back.
Then he thinks about what finally became of those frogs: how they died trapped in stagnant, brackish water.
The door to the barn flies open and Henry sits up drunkenly in the canoe, turns, and sees Tess. He quickly slides the journal off his lap and under his thighs.
“This was left at the grotto,” she tells him. He squints at the object in her hand, bringing it into focus.
“Left?” Henry asks. Questions answered with questions.
“I saw something…
someone
. In the trees.”
Henry just nods.
“Someone with blond hair.”
“Oh,” says Henry. He tries to come up with something else, and fails.
Henry and Tess both know Suz had the knife in her pocket the night she died. The night he swam her out to the middle of the lake, her clothes weighted with rocks, her head bleeding, her face placid, calm.
“So what the
fuck
is going on?” Tess demands. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
Don’t we all?
Henry thinks.
Questions with questions. But what’s the answer?
“Metamorphosis,” he mumbles under his breath, because it’s the first word that pops into his head.
S
HE PICKS UP THE
phone after the first ring.
“Yes?”
“This is Henry. Henry DeForge. Someone left this number in my mailbox.”
It’s nearly midnight. She was starting to think he wouldn’t call. She lets out a soft, breathy chuckle.
“Who is this?” he asks.
“Haven’t you guessed?”
“No—I mean, it’s impossible,” he mutters.
“Come for a swim, Henry. Right now. Our beach at the lake.”
She hangs up before he can answer. But he’ll come. She knows he’ll come.
E
MMA OPENS HER EYES
. Danner is standing above her, holding out her hand.
“What do you destroy when you speak its name?” Danner asks. She’s wearing Emma’s Disney World T-shirt.
“What?” Emma asks. She sits up, rubs the sleep out of her eyes, takes Danner’s hand, which is always cold and fishy. Sometimes she expects to look down and see scales sparkling like tiny jewels on Danner’s long fingers. She can’t believe Danner woke her up in the middle of the night for one of her riddles.
“Silence,” Danner says, then leads her to the window where she looks down onto the circular driveway and sees a man lurking near the cars. He’s wearing a hooded jacket. Burglar. Prowler man. He fumbles with the door to Daddy’s Blazer.
Emma understands. Danner woke her up because there’s an intruder. Emma’s about to say, “I’ll go wake up Mom,” when she sees the man drop something. Then he bends down and nearly falls over. When he regains his balance, he looks up at the house. Emma ducks out of sight. But she saw his face. This is no burglar. It’s her dad.
She hears a car door shut, then the Blazer starts.
“Where’s he going?” she asks.
Danner only smiles. “Why don’t you ask him?” she says.
O
NE TIME
, D
ANNER SHOWED
up at school, which was really weird because she’d never done that before. Emma went into the bathroom at the end of the hall near the gym, and there was Danner waiting for her in the stall.
“Don’t go to Laura Pelsinger’s house after school today,” Danner told her.
“I wasn’t going to,” Emma whispered. “She’s not even my friend. She’s kind of weird.”
“Laura’s going to ask you to go with her and you have to say no. Promise?”
“Okay. But why? And how do you know Laura’s even gonna ask?”
Outside the stall, Emma heard giggles.
“You talking to yourself again, DeForge?” a girl called. “Do you have to count when you take a piss too?”
There was more giggling, then another girl did an imitation of Emma’s whispered counting, “
One
I’m-a-mental-case,
two
I’m-a-mental-case,
three
I’m-a-mental-case, all the way to
infinity
I’m-a-mental-case.”
More laughter.
Frozen in the stall, Emma thought that was a stupid thing to say. No one can count to infinity. You’d never get there.
“Maybe she’s not talking to herself,” someone said. “Maybe she’s got someone in there with her.”
“Is that right, DeForge?” the first girl said, pressing up against the door, putting her eyeball right up to the crack. “Who’ve you got in there with you?”
“No one,” Emma said, jumping back, bashing her calf on the toilet. She’d been so wrapped up in what Danner was telling her that she hadn’t even heard the girls come in. How could she have been so careless?
Danner laughed. “I am too someone!” she yelled.
“Shut up,” Emma hissed. Danner pinched her arm.
“I bet it’s Chucky Hayden,” the first girl said. “Are you in there with Chucky?”
Chucky was the fat boy who wore a blaze orange winter hat all year round. Emma’s cheeks burned.
“I’ve got a riddle,” Danner said. “What is coming, but will never arrive?”
Emma ignored the question; she couldn’t even believe Danner had asked it—this was so not the time for riddles. Emma took a deep breath, pushed the door to the stall open, and found Erin LaBlanc and Vanessa Sanchez in front of the row of white porcelain sinks. They peered into the empty stall behind her.
“Tomorrow!” Danner called from behind the door of a stall farther down. “Got it?” Emma got it all right. And right then and there, as the snickering girls stared her down, she found herself wishing that tomorrow would never arrive.
By recess, everyone was talking about her invisible friend and saying she was a mental case for sure. Everyone but Laura Pelsinger, who got on the swing beside her.
“I don’t think you’re mental,” Laura said.
“Thanks,” Emma said.
“I know some people who really are. Like my aunt Lynn. She’s a real nutcase.”
“Oh,” Emma said.
“My mom’s picking me up after school. We’re going to the Tastee-Freez. She said I could bring a friend. Wanna come? We can go to my house after. My dog just had puppies. You can pet them. They’re real soft.”
“No thanks,” Emma said. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to go. She was so rarely invited anyplace and she loved dogs, had always wanted one. But she remembered what Danner had said.
The next day, there was a special assembly first thing in the morning. The whole school was there. The principal said there had been a terrible car accident out on Ridge Road, just past the Tastee-Freez, and Laura Pelsinger had been airlifted to the children’s hospital in Boston. The principal said she wouldn’t be in school for the rest of the year, and asked that each homeroom make their own card to send her.
H
ANDS BUNCHED INTO TIGHT
, nervous fists at her sides, Emma puts her face back in the window, calls through the screen, “Daddy!”
But he’s already pulling away. He’s got the radio turned up loud to his rock-and-roll station. Emma hears the scream of a lone guitar, the boom of bass and drums behind it.
Emma’s nose is pressed against the window screen; she imagines the marks it’s leaving there, a tiny grid, as if her nose is a map with longitude and latitude lines. She opens her mouth to yell again, touches the screen with the tip of her tongue—the metallic taste is so sharp she jerks her tongue away, but then makes herself lick it again. Once, twice. Three more times. She watches the taillights of her dad’s truck disappear down the driveway.
“Daddy!” she yells, louder this time, worried that maybe Danner somehow knows something terrible is going to happen. He’s going to get into a wreck just like Laura and her mom. “Stop!”
The lights above her come on and she turns, blinking from the sudden brightness, to see her mother in the doorway.
“What’s the matter, Em?” her mom asks.
“Where’s Daddy going?”
“Going?”
Her mother comes to the window, looks out, and frowns at the empty parking space where the Blazer used to be.
“Where’s he going, Mom?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“I think something bad is going to happen. That’s why Danner got me up. I think I was supposed to stop him,” Emma says.
Her mom wraps her arms around Emma and rocks her as if she’s little again. Her mom has just come from the shower. Her hair is still damp, her skin warm and moist.
“Would you like some hot cocoa, sweetie?”
“With whipped cream?” Emma asks, smiling into her mother’s flowered nightgown. She smells like soap and sunshine, if sunshine had a smell.
“With whipped cream.”
“Can Danner have some?”
“Absolutely. I was hoping she’d come. I think it’s time Danner and I had a talk.”