Dismantled (13 page)

D
RIVING OUT TO THE
lake, Henry remembers helping Suz stretch the canvases for the nine moose paintings. She was edgy, keyed up. She always got like this before a project. Once Suz started a new piece, she was transfixed. She could go days without sleep, living on cigarettes, black coffee, and peanut M&M’s, which she claimed were the perfect food.

“You got your protein, you got your sugary carbohydrates, you got your red dye number forty, what else do you need?”

She was also on edge because of their most recent mission: the night before, they’d broken into the records office at Sexton to destroy any evidence of any of them ever having attended the college. Suz said it was important because their new lives had begun and it was time to destroy all proof of who they used to be.

“Shit. They’ve got Berussi’s letters to the dean in my transcripts,” Suz said, looking up from a thick folder. Winnie and Tess were struggling to delete any computer records, Suz and Henry were pulling the hard copies from the enormous bank of file cabinets.

“Listen to this,” Suz said, clearing her throat. When she spoke again it was in a low, raspy voice, a tinge of Bronx accent: Professor Berussi’s. “‘Suz Pierce is obviously a girl in emotional distress, but more important, a person seemingly without a moral compass. She seems to have no remorse for the destructive acts she and her group have perpetrated upon the campus. Her delusions of grandeur and narcissism are clearly symptoms of some sort of personality disorder. I believe she is a danger to our community and recommend a full psychological evaluation, and ask that she be expelled if she does not comply.’”

“‘Delusions of grandeur’?” Suz said in her own voice. “Can you believe that pompous motherfucker?” She threw the whole stack of papers down on the floor.

Winnie placed a hand on Suz’s arm. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Damn right it doesn’t,” Suz said.

“We fixed him,” Winnie said.

“Rat bastard,” Suz mumbled, kicking at the papers on the floor.

H
ENRY HELPED HER HANG
the nine canvases up on the wall behind the bed she and Winnie slept in. Every now and then, Suz would stop, mumble, “Delusions of grandeur” or “Personality disorder,” shake her head angrily, then go back to what she was doing. She pushed back the mattress, threw down a drop cloth, and went to work, mixing paints on dinner plates, filling the cabin with the dizzying scent of turpentine. Only once she actually started work on the painting did she seem to forget her fury over Berussi’s letters.

Suz stood on a chair to do the top row of paintings: the moose’s head, neck, and broad back. She roughed it out with brown lines, circles,
X
s and
O
s as if she was playing a giant game of tic-tactoe.

Over the next three days and nights, the others watched as Suz created a moose on canvas, mixing hair, sand, and ash into the paints that she applied with brush, fingers, and a knife and fork. She wrote down words on a paper bag, then tore pieces off, chewed until they were pulp, and mixed this into the paint too.

“Alchemy,” Winnie said.

What struck Henry most, what he could never truly reproduce in his memory years later, no matter how hard he tried, was the sound she made. When Suz was lost in it, completely caught up in the act of creation, she made this low, soft, droning buzz.

“The static noise,” Winnie called it.

But there was more than static there. Sometimes, Henry would sit and listen and swear he heard words hidden inside the buzz, not just one voice, but many, all different pitches and tones; different accents and languages, all talking so fast over one another that it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

T
WO A.M
. E
MMA’S ASLEEP
, her belly full of cocoa. Henry’s god knows where. What a long, crazy day it’s been: the meeting at the gallery with Julia, the words on the trees, the knife at the grotto, and now, to top it off, the strange conversation she’s just had with Emma.

“Is Danner here?” Tess had asked.

“Yes.” Emma was sitting with her elbows on the table, blowing into her hot chocolate. She was wearing her Minnie Mouse pajamas.

“Good.” Tess smiled. “I’m glad she decided to join us.”

Emma chewed her lip, stared down into her cocoa.

“Is something wrong, Em?” Tess asked.

Emma looked up, her face worried. “Danner says she doesn’t really like you.”

Tess bristled. She knew Danner had never really liked her, but had never heard Emma admit it. Over the years, Tess had been the victim of countless pranks blamed on Danner. Little things of hers went missing—lipstick, car keys, sunglasses—they all usually turned up later in Emma’s bedroom. And there were more mischievous things too—Tess would get into her car and turn it on to find the radio blaring on some Christian station, the wipers and heater turned up to high; a load of dark laundry somehow ended up being washed with a cup of bleach. The answer, when Tess confronted Emma, was always the same:
Danner did it.

Tess took a sip of her own cocoa. “Does she say why she doesn’t like me?”

Emma was quiet a second, concentrating on her cocoa, and, apparently, on listening to Danner, who sat across from her with her own empty cup of imaginary hot chocolate with whipped cream.

“No.”

“Does she know where your father went tonight?” God, she couldn’t believe she was asking these questions.
Great,
she’d said to herself.
First you’re talking to ghosts, now you’re giving your daughter’s imaginary friend the third degree. What’s next? Channeling Elvis?

Emma shook her head, ran her fingers through her sleep-tousled hair. “She knows, but can’t tell.”

“Why not?”

Emma shrugged. “She says she has a riddle for you.”

Tess smiled. “Okay then. Go ahead and tell me. I love riddles.”

A
CRAZY DAY FOR
sure. But it’s not over yet.

Tess grabs a small metal-barreled flashlight, turns on the old baby monitor in Em’s room, puts the other one in the pocket of her sweatshirt and heads for Henry’s studio. The floodlights come on as she walks the path outside the house. Prison-break time.

She gets to his workshop and enters like a criminal. Tiptoeing carefully even though she knows it’s foolish—Henry’s gone, not sleeping in the room next door—she makes her way to the large metal toolbox. The latch is rusty, but opens easily. Holding the small flashlight between her teeth, the metal cold and sharp in her mouth, she lifts the lid, then the tray on top with its array of screwdrivers and wrenches. The photos are right where she saw them earlier tonight, and under them, just like she thought, is Suz’s journal.

DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM

She flips through the photos: Suz and Winnie on the front steps of the cabin. Tess and Henry on their beach at the lake. All of them gathered around Henry’s orange van.

Tess takes the journal and sits on the floor, holding the flashlight in her mouth, using both hands to flip through. Then, she decides to start at the beginning.

Tess closes the journal, turns off the flashlight, and sits in the dark. Holding the book on her lap, she draws her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around them, and begins to rock, Suz’s book at her very center.

She can’t help but feel a twinge of pride to think that Suz had watched her, handpicked her for the group. She had once been good enough, intense enough, to catch the eye of someone like Suz.

How did she stray so far from who she once was? What happened to the girl who made those paintings? The girl with guts. The girl who knew what was sexy, how to push all the boundaries.

She wants so badly to be that girl again. To feel alive. She reaches down and touches the journal.
DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM
in raised nail polish letters. Then, she pushes the journal aside and touches herself. There. Fingers slipping under the waist-band of her pants, under the boring old-lady panties she buys in four-packs at Wal-Mart. Closing her eyes, she pictures the flowers she used to paint. But it’s no good. She tries something else. A dark, mysterious man. Still nothing. She switches fantasies like clicking through a child’s plastic viewfinder. Then, she goes back to the flower paintings. She becomes the painting hung above Suz’s bed, suspended from the watermarked ceiling of her Sexton dorm room, and she watches Suz watching her. She watches as Suz brings a girl into bed. A long-limbed, faceless girl. Winnie, maybe, before she was Winnie.

I’d like to hang one above my bed and fuck someone all night…

Suz and the girl move as if their bodies are liquid.
Symbiosis
, Tess thinks, though it doesn’t make sense. But neither does being a painting. Symbiosis. Bodies entwined. It’s all open mouths and sticky skin. Pistil and stamen. Pollen in the air. Moist nectar.

Suz is moaning, screaming, digging her nails into the other girl’s back, but all the while, she keeps her eyes locked on the painting, on Tess, who moans right back, satisfied at last.

H
ENRY STAGGERS DOWN THE
path. Trips on tree roots. He brought a flashlight, but the batteries are dead. He’s feeling his way. He used to know it by heart.

The path opens up on the beach, which is really just a tiny patch of sand and mud with a wide, flat rock in the center.
The sacrificial stone,
Suz used to call it. She’d lie across it naked sometimes, sunning herself like a stranded mermaid.

He sees her and his breath catches in his throat, filling it. When he opens his mouth, he lets out a croak like a bullfrog.

She’s floating out in the water. Facedown. Dead-man’s float.

“Suz!” he croak-shouts. His heart jackhammers in his chest, making his whole body vibrate.

What if time is not a linear thing? he wonders. What if it loops and circles; what if we can go back?

Is this what he has done—gone back to the night Suz died?

And now, will he be given the chance to save her?

He’s standing at the water’s edge, trying to will the courage to dive. She hasn’t moved. She’s just floating there, her pale blouse billowing in the water around her like a phosphorescent jellyfish.

Then, just as he’s about to dive, she lifts her face, folds her body so that she’s upright, treading water.

“Swim with me, Henry.”

“You’re dead.”

“Am I?”

I checked you for a pulse. I filled your clothing with stones.

“They never found a body,” she says.

Impossible, he thinks. He was there. He saw what happened.

“Come swim with me,” she calls, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter to him if she’s dead or not. It doesn’t matter that he’s terrified of the water. He leaves his clothes on and walks out into the lake, toward her.

The lake envelops him. The water is warm, but still he shivers. Shivers like a man sure he is walking toward his own death. He should, he thinks, put up a fight. But what’s the use?

Suz is laughing, teasing, calling his name.
Henry, Henry, Henry.
Siren song.

He’s up to his chest now, ankle deep in muck, and she’s swimming wide circles around him.

“You’re dead,” he repeats.

“Am I?” she asks. She swims in behind him, wraps her arms around his waist. Breaths on his neck. Hot dragon breath. He’s trembling harder now.

“Do you still love me?” she whispers.

Love me. Love me not. Love me.

Should he answer her question with a question?

He remembers the night she burned her wooden man, how as he watched her face all lit up with flames, love hit him like a punch in the solar plexus. He stayed up all night writing her a letter to try to explain his feelings, but the next day, when he sneaked into her studio, he had the courage only to leave a simple, unsigned message:
I love you, Suz.

“Yes,” he gasps. He could never play games with Suz. She was the one person he’d always been honest with. Too honest, maybe.

“Best of all?” she asks.

“Best of all.” Yes, it’s true. What a relief to say it out loud.

He starts to spin around, desperate to get his hands on her, and she stops him. “Close your eyes, Henry.”

He does. He’ll do anything she asks.

“Close them tight and make a wish, babycakes,” she says.

A wish. But isn’t this the one and only thing he would ever wish for? To have her back again?

He doesn’t care that he watched her die ten years ago. He’s swimming with a ghost and he doesn’t care. If this means he’s dead too, then he welcomes it. Dear God, yes. He opens his eyes, reaches for her, gets only her hair, which he tugs on gently, trying to turn her around. If he can just kiss her, put his lips against hers and taste her one more time…

“Suz,” he breathes.

Her hair comes off in his hands. She turns to face him, her face no longer gentle and seductive, but mocking.

This is not Suz.

It’s Winnie.