Dismantled (15 page)

“W
HERE THE HELL HAVE
you been?”

It’s a trap. Tess has been pacing in Henry’s dark little apartment on the south side of the barn, lying in wait like a spider, and as soon as he comes in the door, she flips the kitchen light on, hoping that if she catches him off guard he’ll be honest with her. She thinks she deserves that much at least.

“Out driving.”

“You’re soaking wet, Henry. You’re dripping all over the goddamn floor.”

“I went for a swim.”

She laughs. “A swim. That’s perfect. Fucking perfect.”

He looks down at the puddle he’s making on the linoleum floor. He looks so boyish, so guilty, that she almost feels sorry for him. Then she looks at the clock on the microwave: 3:30 in the morning. Where the hell does a man go at that hour?

“Are you seeing someone, Henry?”

“Jesus!”

“Are you?”

“No.”

Is she jealous? Jesus. This is too much.
Get the fuck over it,
she tells herself.

She remembers the feel of his hand on her back this evening. The thrilling jolt it had given her. How close she’d been to turning around. Such an idiot!

“Well, maybe you should be,” she tells him. She notices she’s positioned herself in a boxing stance: her body turned so that her left shoulder is to him, chin down, fists clenched at her sides. “Maybe we both should. It’s time we moved on. It isn’t healthy to go on living like this. Not for us or for Emma. I think it’s time you found someplace else to live.”

“Someplace else?” Henry says, standing in his own little puddle, a leaking, melting man.

She thinks of the first time she laid eyes on him: both of them nineteen, standing awkwardly by the snack table at a new-student mixer their first week at Sexton. She was spooning hummus onto crackers and he was fiddling with the spout of the coffee urn.

His hair was buzzed like a marine and his face and arms were the kind of bronze you got working outside all summer. He was wearing brown canvas carpenter’s pants and a black T-shirt that said
ASK ME
in big white letters on the front. He was exactly the type of boy Tess always found herself attracted to: well kempt, normal looking. But the trouble was, these normal-looking, handsome guys with their short hair and smooth golden skin were always a disappointment in the end. Duller than dull and sometimes just plain dim-witted. She wished she could be attracted to the artsy boys with piercings and purple-tinted hair who dressed in black from head to toe, guys she could actually have a conversation with, but for whatever reason, try as she might, there was just no spark.

Tess walked over to Henry, decided to take a chance.

“Ask you what?” Tess said.

His brown eyes met hers. “Huh?”

Dim-witted, for sure,
she thought, sorry that she’d even approached him.

“Your T-shirt.”

“Oh,” he said, and turned so that she could read the back:
ABOUT WILSON PAINTS AND STAINS
.

Tess sighed. “And here I thought you were going to tell me the meaning of life, the origin of the universe.”

He shrugged his shoulders. Smiled apologetically. “I could make something up,” he told her. “Or how about I tell you the dream I had last night?”

“Okay.” She took a step closer to him, listening intently.

“I was this cow in a field, you know, just hanging out, eating grass and clover. Happy and peaceful.”

Tess nodded, waited for him to go on.

“Then I woke up,” he said, scuffing at the linoleum floor with the toe of his work boot.

“That’s it?” she asked. She’d outdone herself in the dim-witted department this time. She did a quick scan of the room, looking desperately for a reason to excuse herself.

Henry continued. “I woke up and thought, what if it’s the other way around? You know, what if I really
am
a cow in some field and I’m having a dream that I’m a human, living this whole human life during one long bovine REM cycle? Wouldn’t that be a trip?”

Tess focused her eyes back on Henry. “Descartes,” she said.

“What’s that?” Henry asked.

“It reminds me of Descartes. The French philosopher. We read him in high school. He had this whole theory about the separation of mind and body. Let me guess, you’re not a philosophy major?”

Henry shook his head, smiled. “No. I’m an artist. A sculptor.”

Tess laughed out loud. She couldn’t believe her luck.

T
ESS WATCHES THE PUDDLE
around Henry widen.

“You know what I want to know most, Henry? What I’m absolutely dying to know?” She thinks of the words in Suz’s journal:
She knows how to stretch her limits.
Remembers Henry saying,
No. I’m an artist. A sculptor.
“When did we become the people we least wanted to be?”

Tess starts to cry and hates herself for it.

Enough. Get hold of yourself.

Henry comes to her, his shoes squishing. She steps away.

“Don’t,” she tells him. And it’s that easy. He turns, head down, and makes his way through the little door that leads from the kitchen of his little apartment into his studio, leaving a wet trail, like a slug, to show where he’s been, shoes making nasty wet sounds as he scuffles out, obscene sounds, like someone fucking an octopus.

“D
ADDY
!” E
MMA CRIES WHEN
he enters the kitchen the next morning, as if he’s been away for weeks, as if it’s a miracle he’s here at all.

He takes her in his arms, leans down, and breathes her in. Strawberry shampoo. Chlorine.

He could live on that smell. Be stranded forever on some small desert island, as long as he had a bottle of that smell to take out each day.

Someday soon, he thinks, Emma will be too big for this. She won’t squeal
Daddy!
excitedly when he enters a room, won’t jump into his arms or let him bury his face in her hair.

“Your shoes are leaking,” Emma tells him.

“Indeed they are,” he says, letting her go, then reaching for a cup, pouring himself some coffee. He woke up and put on the work boots beside his bed, just like he did each morning, forgetting somehow that he’d worn them into the lake last night. He’d just as soon forget the whole wretched thing.

Swim with me, Henry.

Maybe if he told himself it didn’t happen, if he pretended and ignored the wet boots, then it would all just fade away, like a bad dream. Even the part where Tess told him it was time to find someplace else to live.

Where is he supposed to go? He belongs here, with his family. It’s his house, for Christ’s sake!

Tess puts toasted waffles on Emma’s plate, lays down some sliced strawberries, tops it all with whipped cream from a can.

“Here you go, love,” she says, kissing the top of Emma’s head. “Just the way you like it.”

Then Tess goes back to the counter and grabs a section of the newspaper, thrusting it at Henry. He glances down. The classified ads. She’s circled apartment listings.

“Mom made me and Danner cocoa last night,” Emma says, looking up from her waffles, traces of whipped cream around her mouth.

“Isn’t that nice.” He folds up the paper, tucks it under his arm.

“And Danner told her a riddle.”

“Did she?” He stirs half-and-half into his coffee.

“Yup.” She wipes her mouth with a napkin, sets down her fork. “Danner loves riddles. She’s real good at them. Do you want to hear it, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“You’re in a cement room with no windows or doors. Just four walls. There’s a mirror and a table. How do you get out?”

Henry feels himself grow pale. Of course he knows the answer, but he acts as if he’s never heard it. He throws a desperate glance, like a lifeline, to Tess, but she won’t hold his gaze.

So this is how it’s going to be.

“How?” he asks. Some of the coffee sloshes over the edge of his cup and onto the floor. Maybe it’s a different riddle. Something she heard at school.

But no.

“You look in the mirror to see what you saw. You use the saw to cut the table in half. You put the two halves together to make a whole. You crawl through the hole and escape.” Emma’s smiling, pleased with the riddle all over again.

Henry sets his coffee down on the counter and holds on with one hand, steadying himself. “Danner told you that, huh?”

“She told it to Mom. She said it was special, just for her.”

“Lucky Mom,” Henry says, chomping down hard on the inside of his left cheek.

“I have an appointment this morning,” Tess says, seemingly oblivious to Emma’s unexplainable connection to Suz.

Henry only nods, stunned. He wants to grab his wife by the throat and demand a rational explanation for the riddle Danner told them. He wants to say,
I told you so
. Then he remembers the private investigator.

“What about Bill Lunde?” Henry asks.

“There’s a woman, here for the summer, she bought three paintings and wants to talk with me about doing a piece for her. She’s renting a place out on County Road. She really wants me to come out this morning.”

Henry only stares, still gripping the counter.

“So can you handle Bill on your own? And hang out with Em until I get home?” Tess asks, sounding slightly exasperated.

“Of course,” he tells her in a voice barely above a whisper. “I thought I’d take the day off anyway.”

“I shouldn’t be long,” she says.

He nods, but what he wants to do is get down on his knees and beg her not to go. Not to leave him alone with
them
.

Because for the first time, when he looks across the kitchen at his daughter diving into her too sweet waffles, he thinks he sees a shadow figure in the chair beside her. A dark girl with no eyes or nose, just a mouth, perfectly round, from which comes a damp, rotten laughter that only he seems to hear.

“I’
M GOING OUT TO
the garden,” she tells her dad. Emma’s come downstairs from getting changed and caught him pouring vodka into his orange juice. He gives her a puzzled, nervous look.

“Fine, Em. I’ve got some things to do in here.” He sits down at the breakfast bar with the newspaper open to the sports section. He’s not really reading, she can tell. Just pretending.

Emma saw a Lifetime movie once about a girl who had an alcoholic mother who did awful stuff like make scenes in a department store and show up trashed for her daughter’s graduation. Emma wonders if her dad is an alcoholic. Is it just a matter of time until he shows up drunk for a PTA meeting, giving everyone at school yet another reason to think Emma’s a total freak?

Emma crosses the kitchen, heads out the sliding doors to the patio. She makes her way through the garden, stopping at the pond to say hello to the goldfish. They come up to the surface, mouths open, begging for food in their own fishy way. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Emma blows kisses down to them, imagines she’s the Fish Queen, her skin covered in gold, shimmering scales.

She glances back at the house, sees the shadowy figure of her father through the kitchen window. He’s still hunched over the paper. She waves to him, but he doesn’t notice.

It’s now or never.

She puts down her head, and speed-walks to the barn.

If she doesn’t get the journal now, she might not get another chance. Mel’s coming over after lunch, and fully expects that Emma will have the journal in hand. One way or another, she feels like she always disappoints Mel. It would be nice to do something right for a change.

Last night on the phone, Emma told Mel about her parents finally seeing the words in the trees.

“So what’d your mom and dad say?” Mel asked.

Emma bit her lip. “They kind of wigged out. It was weird. They acted like, like someone wrote
Satan, Satan, Satan
on the trees or something. Like it scared them.”

There was silence. Emma could hear Mel puffing away on one of her stinky gum-wrapper cigarettes. Mel’s room is in the basement and her parents never check on her. Plus, she burns incense all the time to cover the smell.

“Interesting,” Mel said.

“What do you think it means?” Emma asked.

“I think it means we have to spend more time with that journal.”

“But—”

“But what?” Mel interrupted.

It’s not respectful.

“Just get the damn journal,” Mel said.

“O
KAY
,” E
MMA TELLS HERSELF
, her hand resting on the metal handle of the sliding barn door. “You can do this.”

She takes a deep breath, pulls the door open.

The barn is dark and smells like damp cement, wood shavings, and old grease. She looks around and sees that the windows have been covered—her dad’s stapled black plastic to them. Why? To keep the light out? To keep people from looking in?

She thinks about turning on the lights, then decides against it. If she hears her dad coming, she can hide. Jump into the canoe maybe. Or under one of the painting tarps.

She waits a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, pupils expanding after being out in the bright morning light. When she’s able to make out the rough shapes of the canoe, shelves, and drill press, she moves forward, sliding along in her flip-flops as if she’s ice-skating in slow motion, feeling her way. The toolbox is right ahead of her, she can just make out its shape.

Behind her, she hears the cat-sneeze noise, followed by a little chuckle.

“Danner?” Emma calls, turning. She doesn’t see Danner anywhere. She hears a scuffling sound but can’t tell where it’s coming from.

“Why?” Danner asks.

“Why what?”

“That’s the question you’re not asking yourself, Emma. Why did your mom and dad freak when they saw the message in the trees? Why has your dad kept the photos and journal hidden all these years? And why is this guy here?”

“What guy?” Emma asks.

“Shhh,” Danner says, a disembodied voice in the dark. “Turn around.”

Emma turns back toward the toolbox and hears something in front of her, just to the left. The door that leads to her dad’s kitchen is open and there’s her dad, just a dark silhouette, watching her.

The lights come on and here she is, caught, caught, caught! She is such an idiot. Mel’s going to kill her when she hears about this.

But when she looks up from the toolbox, with the lights blazing she sees that the figure who caught her isn’t her father at all. It’s a stranger—a man in tan pants and a button-down shirt, with a crew cut and a funny little sideways grin. She closes her eyes tight, thinking that maybe when she opens them, he’ll be gone. Hoping that her parents are right and this is just her overactive imagination.

But no.

She opens her eyes and sees he’s coming toward her, and Emma spins, takes off so fast that she loses one of her flip-flops. She jerks the barn door open, and runs into the garden, screaming “Daddy!” the whole way.