Dismantled (18 page)

T
HERE WAS A FACE
down there at the bottom of the pool. A face smiling up at her as she floated, trapped, upside down in the inner tube. It was Danner. Only different. A frightening sort of Danner with pale, wrinkled skin.

This is how dolphins die,
thought Emma. Caught in fishing nets and pieces of plastic. That’s why they cut apart the plastic circles six packs of soda came in. So animals wouldn’t get trapped. She struggled to right herself, but her hips were wedged and she couldn’t get leverage. She looked down at the face.

I have a secret,
Danner whispered. Her blond hair was spread out around her face and glowed like a halo. Maybe she was an angel. Or a mermaid. Yes. A mermaid. There were green weeds in her hair. Pond scum. Duckweed. She’d been down there a long time. But this was a pool. Not a pond.

Come closer,
she whispered, beckoning with her hands, the skin white, wrinkled and loose, coming off like gloves.

Emma couldn’t move. She opened her mouth to scream, but only bubbles came out.

Everything you have is mine,
the terrifying mermaid Danner said.

And just then, someone dove into the deep end of the pool and swam underwater to Emma, righting her at last.

“E
ARTH TO SUPER FREAK
, come in!”

Emma opens her eyes, sees that Mel is standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

“Oh, hi,” Emma says.

“God! You are such a space cadet! I’m gonna ask you one more time—who’s the chick down there with your father?” Mel asks as she steps into Emma’s room, closing the door behind her.

“Winnie.”

“No shit? Compassionate Dismantler Winnie? The one we sent the postcard to?”

“She saved my life,” Emma says.

“What? Were you guys in a car wreck or something? Your dad’s face looks all messed up.”

“I was stuck in the inner tube in the pool. Upside down. My dad fell down and cracked his head open trying to get to me. Then Winnie showed up.”

“Showed up?”

“It was weird. Just when I couldn’t hold my breath another second, there she was. She saved my life. It was kind of a miracle. There’s something cool about her.”

Mel furrows her brow. “Miracle, schmiracle. It was me who saved your life,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m the one who had the idea to send the postcards, right? And if I hadn’t, she wouldn’t have just shown up out of the blue. So it’s me you should be thanking.”

Mel is over at Emma’s bookcase, running her dirty fingers over the spines. She pulls out a book, flips through it, then shoves it back in totally the wrong place.

“You looking for something to read?” Emma asks. She immediately hates that she’s even suggested this. Mel’s only borrowed one book from Emma—
The Complete Guide to Pet Hamsters.
She brought it back with the cover torn and writing in the margins, not even in pencil but in green ink.

The kids at school call Mel Captain Smellville. They laugh at her baggy army fatigue pants and give her a special salute while holding their noses. Mel always acts as if she doesn’t even see them. She just pulls out the little notebook she carries around in her back pocket and starts scribbling fast in one of her secret codes, as if she’s writing them a ticket or something. She writes faster and faster, stopping now and then to lick her finger and rub at one of the words to try and erase it. She ends up with inky fingers and paper covered in illegible smudges, worn through in places. When she fills a page, she tears it off and folds it into a tiny triangle, then stuffs it into her front pocket. She says they all go into her files, but Emma’s never seen any files.

“Where is it?” Mel asks.

“What?” Emma asks.

“Suz’s journal. You got it, right?”

Emma bites her lip, looks at the book Mel shelved in the wrong place.
The Borrowers
by Mary Norton. It’s now jammed in the
C
s—next to
Alice in Wonderland
. Also, she’s put it in upside down. It’s all wrong and it’s messed the whole shelf up. Maybe even the whole room. Emma feels a funny weight in her chest and it’s almost like it’s tied with an invisible wire to that out-of-place book. Like the book is tugging her toward it, pulling in this painful way that will only be relieved if she can just put
The Borrowers
back where it belongs.

Fastidious.

“Don’t tell me you wimped out,” Mel says.

“What? No, I was interrupted,” Emma explains. “There was a man there. In the barn.” She’s leaning forward now. If she stretches out her left hand, she could reach the book. Put things back together the way they belong. She drums her fingers on her knee, counts to nine in her head.

Mel rolls her eyes. “Right. Sure there was. A friend of Danner’s, right? Give me a break, Em.” Mel stands up, heads to the door.

“Where are you going?” Emma asks, making herself take her eye off the bookcase to look at Mel.

“Home. Call me when you’ve got the journal.”

“But—”

“But nothing, Em. Either you’re going to take this seriously or not. Just get the freaking book. No more excuses.”

Emma watches Mel head down the hall. She thinks of going after her, begging her to stay, saying she’ll sneak over and get the journal right now. But instead, she goes right for the bookshelves, pulls out
The Borrowers,
gives it a quick wipe down with the bottom of her T-shirt, then puts it back in its place with the other
N
s. The weight in her chest lifts a little, she lets herself breathe. The world, at least this little piece of it, has been restored to order. She locks the door to her room, counts the number of books on each shelf (twenty-seven), and decides that she’ll call Mel later to apologize and swear up and down that she’ll get the journal tomorrow. She’ll prove her commitment to Operation Reunite, and to Mel.

“Nine,” she says, closing her eyes. “Eighteen. Twenty-seven.” The numbers are swimming behind her eyelids. But they’re not the only thing. There’s a face there too.

She feels the pressure in her chest, all around it. She’s back in the tire again, upside down, with her hips wedged, lungs screaming for air.

Everything you have is mine.

“I
T LOOKS WORSE THAN
it is,” Henry promises.

Tess has come into the kitchen and found Henry and Emma playing rummy at the table. Emma, as usual, is keeping score very methodically, in neat rows of carefully printed numbers.

Tess has missed Winnie by only about fifteen minutes.

“What on earth happened?” Tess asks, touching Henry’s bandaged head gently, tenderly. She looks as though she’s about to lean down and kiss it better. He shuts his eyes, waiting. Wishing.

“I almost drowned,” Emma tells Tess. Henry opens his eyes and sees his daughter grinning from ear to ear.

“What?” Tess asks. She jerks her hand away from his head, draws back, the compassion in her eyes now clouded by fury. Henry looks away, reaches into his pocket for the bottle of aspirin.

“I was a frog and I tried to jump through a hole but I got stuck. Stuck like dolphins get stuck.”

Put the two halves together to make a whole,
Henry thinks. He smiles. Can’t help himself. He dumps three aspirin into his palm, tosses them into his mouth.

“Do you mind telling me what is so goddamned funny?” Tess asks him. “Come here, baby,” she says to Emma, pulling Emma to her. “You okay?”

“Fine, Mom. The lady saved me.”

“What lady?”

“The lady from the picture,” Emma says.

Henry watches Tess hold her breath. It’s almost painful. Poor Tess. Maybe she believes in ghosts after all.

“Winnie,” Henry whispers.

“Where the fuck were
you
?” Tess asks.

Emma flinches at Tess’s curse. She looks down at the rummy scores and starts adding and subtracting, then just penciling in a new column of numbers. Her lips move as she writes them.
Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven.

“I fell down,” Henry explains. “Emma flipped over in the inner tube. I was running to the pool and tripped over a chair.” As if he can put some of the blame on the chair. The blame that rests, he knows, entirely on himself for getting too drunk to walk. Too drunk to watch their child. “I cracked my skull and I guess I blacked out for a second. Then Winnie appeared. She jumped in and pulled Em out.”

He leaves out the part about how Winnie was dressed as Suz. Just like she was last night when he met her at the lake. There are details Tess is better off not knowing.

“It was a miracle,” Emma says, looking up from her rows of numbers.

“But where did she come from?” Tess asks. Her voice sounds high and desperate. As if Winnie were the ghost.

“I don’t know. The road. She said she parked by the road and walked through the woods. She wanted to surprise us,” Henry says.

“Did she stay?”

“Only for a little while.”

“What did she want?”

What was wrong with Tess? Her every question was an accusation. Winnie appears from nowhere, saves their daughter’s life, and all Tess can think of to say is
What did she want?

Henry bites the inside of his cheek.

“To visit, Tess. To see how we were.”

Tess nods. Turns to Emma. “Sweetie, can you go up to your room for a few minutes? I want to talk to your dad alone.”

“Are you going to yell?” Emma asks, looking up from her neat rows of numbers, gripping the pencil so hard her fingers turn white.

“No,” Tess says, leaning down to tuck a strand of Emma’s hair behind her ear. “Of course not.”

Emma nods and leaves the kitchen, mumbling something to herself. Counting, Henry realizes. She’s counting her steps. Maybe she’s making a treasure map: ten paces to your right, five straight ahead, X marks the spot.

“You were drunk, weren’t you?” Tess hisses once they’re alone.

Henry starts to answer, but she cuts him off.

“I can smell it on you, Henry. Stale liquor oozing from your pores. It’s inexcusable.”

Henry stares down at his feet like a reprimanded little boy. He knows she’s right.

“No more drinking. Not a drop. I catch you so much as having a glass of wine with dinner and you’re out of here that minute. Do you understand? Next time, there won’t be anyone lurking in the woods like a fucking stalker.”

Henry nods, his eyes still on the floor.

“And I’m serious about you finding another place to live,” she tells him. “I want you to start calling about some of those apartments tomorrow.”

He nods again, knowing he’s in no position to argue right now. But he’ll be damned if he’s moving out. This is his home. This has always been his home. Emma sleeps in the room that was once his, hung with model planes and Red Sox pennants. There is a handprint on the wall of the basement stairway, right next to the emergency switch for the furnace, that he made when he was ten, when his dad was painting shelves and Henry touched them when they were still wet.

“What I still don’t understand is what Winnie was even doing here. Why would she come back now, after all this time?” Tess asks.

Henry looks up, relieved that the spotlight of accusation is off of him for the time being.

“She got a postcard. Just like Spencer. She’s staying at the cabin. Cleaning it up. Getting rid of anything incriminating, which is a good thing. Bill Lunde isn’t a stupid man, Tess. He knows a lot already. It’s only a matter of time until he finds his way to the cabin.”

Tess walks over to the coffeepot and pours herself a cup. It’s the coffee Winnie made. Black as tar and strong. Tess takes a sip and scowls.

“I thought you’d taken care of things at the cabin,” she says.

“I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“So you haven’t been out there at all?” she asks.

Henry shakes his head. Watches Tess swirl the thick, brackish coffee around in her mug.

“Why,” Henry asks Tess, “do you think Winnie and Spencer got postcards when we didn’t? I’d think of all the Dismantlers, we’d be the easiest to find. We’re the ones who never really went away.”

Tess shrugs her shoulders, turns so that her back is to him and dumps the coffee from her mug into the sink.

“I’m going to my studio,” she says, her back still to him.

And for the first time, Henry starts to wonder if maybe there’s something to Winnie’s crazy theory about Tess, the postcards, and the grotto. If maybe there are things about his wife he does not know.

W
INNIE’S NEARLY TO THE
cabin when she realizes she left the Suz outfit and wig behind, drying in Henry’s bathroom. Shit. Here she is, stuck in Tess’s too-small clothes, imagining what it might be like to be Tess, trapped inside a too-small life.

Hadn’t she been trapped once, too?

And then Suz showed her the way out.

“I’
M SICK TO FUCKING
death of you hiding behind your hair,” Suz said, and in just two snips of the scissors, the long bangs Val had since she was ten were gone. She felt her body stiffen reflexively. It was as if someone had severed a limb.

“Relax, already,” Suz said, placing her hands firmly on Val’s shoulders, like she was afraid Val might stand up and run off. “Trust me.”

They were in Suz’s dorm room. The walls were covered with sketches, paintings, and photographs. Clothes, books, and art supplies lay in scattered piles on the floor. The desk was covered in clumps of melted candle wax. It was two months before graduation and she and Suz had just started sleeping together. Val had broken up with Spencer, and he hadn’t taken it well. She’d spent an entire night held captive in his dorm room. He stood blocking the door, promising to let her go if she could give him just one valid reason why she’d chose Suz over him.

“I love her,” Val had told him and he’d laughed, said only, “You’ve gotta be kidding.” He didn’t move from the door. Over the next eight hours, he tried reasoning with her, begging her, and even threatened to end his own life if she left him.

“I’m sorry,” she told him over and over. She wept, but would not change her mind.

At five in the morning, Spencer stepped aside and let her pass through the door.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered one final time.

He said nothing, and stared at the floor.

V
AL HAD DECIDED TO
let Suz cut her hair not just at Suz’s insistence, but because she knew how much it would piss Spencer off—he always said her hair was her best feature and made up for her skinny ass and flat chest.

Suz went to work around her ears, then moved to the back of the head. Val held her breath and closed her eyes.
It will grow back,
she told herself. Her chest clenched and her breathing was fast and shallow. The scissors were moving quickly, singing almost. Val opened her eyes to see her hair fall in great clumps to the floor.

“Who’s behind all this raggedy-ass hair?” Suz asked, her voice lilting, teasing.

Who indeed? If Suz saw, would she stay? She’d already seen the scars. She knew about the cutting and hadn’t been scared away. She’d listened to Val’s poems, even the ones Val had never shown another living soul. Maybe, just maybe, Val had finally found another human being who might understand her, who might love her for who she truly was, not what she pretended so hard to be.

Val bit her tongue, not sure if Suz was waiting for an answer. Sometimes, with Suz, you couldn’t tell what was an actual question and what was just a springboard for one of her monologues. And you didn’t want to make the mistake of jumping in and interrupting her before she was ready.

“And while we’re at it, babycakes—what’s up with the hippie clothes?” Suz stopped cutting, plucked at Val’s baggy peasant blouse. The bells on the neckstrings jingled. “You wear them because that’s what half the people at Sexton wear, right? You want to fit in, to blend, so no one will notice you. Just another long-haired girl in Birkenstocks, right?” Val didn’t respond.

“Am I right?” Suz repeated.

Val shrugged.

“Is that who you are, Val? Are you just a mousy little hippie girl? Thinking her limp organic broccoli thoughts?”

Val held her breath.

“Or are you something more?”

Val looked down at the clumps of hair scattered across the gray linoleum floor.

Suz went back to work with the scissors, said, “It’s time to show the world who you really are.”

“So who am I?” Val asked, her voice a papery whisper. Wind through cornstalks.

Suz stopped cutting, leaned down and put her mouth right against Val’s ear, and asked, “Who do you want to be?” Val shivered as Suz ran her tongue lightly over the folds of her ear, gave the lobe a startling nibble. “You can be whoever, whatever you want, babycakes. Be the lion or the mouse. You choose. But I’ve gotta say, the lion is a lot more sexy.”

When she was finished, Suz guided Val over to the mirror, her hands covering her eyes.

“Behold the new you,” she said, taking her hands away.

Val gasped. She hardly recognized herself. “I look like a boy,” she said.

“You look hot,” Suz said, kissing her on the back of her newly exposed neck.

“I’ve got something for you,” Suz said and went over to the bed. She got down on her knees, reaching for something underneath. Val stood in front of the mirror studying the shape of her closely cropped head, the squareness of her jaw, her thick eyebrows. She was wearing an old black T-shirt Suz had told her to put on for the haircut and baggy jeans. She looked…tougher. She stood up straight and scowled at herself, practiced her evil eye.

“Surprise!” Suz was holding a gun. A deer rifle.

“What’s that for?” Val asked, taking a step back.

“It’s a gift. I picked it up at that flea market last weekend. I thought it would come in handy for our missions. I even got bullets. After dinner we’ll go down to the lower field, and you can try it out.”

“I don’t think I can,” Val said.

“Don’t give me this pacifist bullshit,” Suz snarled, shoving the rifle at Val, who reached out and took it with trembling hands. It felt solid—the wood smooth and dark, the metal barrel somewhat sticky and covered in greasy fingerprints. Val imagined the men who might have held the rifle: men in red wool hunting jackets, hats with earflaps; men whose breath reeked of stale beer and cigarettes; men with huge leather boots who took up space just because they could. Men who knew what it was like to kill, who had a taste for it, a burning need.

Suz ran her fingers though Val’s freshly shorn hair and said, “I’m not asking you to go on any killing sprees or anything. The rifle’s just a prop, Val. The gun, the haircut, they’re about letting go. Deconstructing yourself. Becoming someone else. Someone with more power who no one would ever dream of putting in a box. I say enjoy the fucking ride. See what it’s like on the other side for once.”

Val took in a breath, raised the rifle up with the butt end against her shoulder and used the sight to look down the barrel.
Just a prop.
Her own small fingers mingled with the greasy fingerprints, covering them, as she aimed right at her reflection in the mirror, and didn’t recognize the figure she saw there. Someone stronger, braver, scowled back at her. Someone who refused to back down or take any shit. Suddenly, this whole thing felt like one of their missions, only this time, it was Val herself who had been dismantled. And peeking over her shoulder with an I-told-you-so grin, was Suz. She wrapped her arms around Val from behind, her hands working their way under Val’s T-shirt, up to her breasts.

“Who do you want to be?” Suz asked, the words hot against Val’s neck.

Val felt her body turn to liquid beneath Suz’s hands, and the unspoken answer echoed through her head, driving everything else away:

Whoever you want me to be.