Dismantled (22 page)

S
UZ IS KISSING HER
.

Kissing. Sucking. Biting. Chewing her lips. Scratching her skin with ragged fingernails.

Winnie, Winnie, Winnie.

We’re going to stay here forever. Can’t you feel it?

Then Suz clamps down, her teeth ripping through the flesh of Winnie’s lips, biting them off, like the bright red wax-candy lips kids chew on Halloween. Winnie screams, her mouth a fleshy, bleeding hole, while Suz goes back in for the tongue.

Winnie opens her eyes, touches her lips, dry and chapped, but whole, and the dream is gone.

“Fuck!” she yelps, rolling over.

We’re going to stay here forever. Can’t you feel it?

“Suz?” Winnie calls. She sits up, listening. Holding her breath. “Are you there?”

But there’s nothing. Just a few early morning birds. Mice rustling in the walls. The drum of a far-off woodpecker hunting for breakfast.

Winnie licks her lips, so dry and cracked they’ve begun to bleed.

She gets up, throws a sweater on to ward off the early morning chill, and heads down the ladder to make herself coffee. The cabin is neat and tidy. The faded old Indian tapestries with their concentric, mandalalike designs that once formed the walls around the bed she shared with Suz are gone. Taken to the dump with a dozen other trash bags full of relics: old sneakers, rusted cans of pork and beans, the honey-bear bong, the aquarium.

She thinks of the tiny frog skeletons, the stench of rot and ruin.

Metamorphosis, babycakes. It’s a beautiful thing.

Yeah. Fucking lovely.

Winnie shivers. Walks past the table with four chairs spaced carefully around it, set up as if they’re just waiting to be filled, for another meeting of the Compassionate Dismantlers to take place.
Break out the tequila! We’ve got a new mission to plan!

On the table are some wildflowers she picked and put in a canning jar. A candle in an old wine bottle. Four gallon jugs of water. And the notebook she uses as her journal, pen left on top. To the left of the notebook, a paper grocery bag, the top folded closed. She walks toward it, then changes her mind, steps back.

“Not yet,” she tells herself. Later. She’ll open it up later. After coffee. After she’s cleared the cobwebs and nightmares from her brain.

She stumbles into the kitchen, puts water to boil in a little aluminum pan on the propane camp stove. Measures grounds into the single-serving coffee filter.

Open the bag, Winnie. Take a look.

Winnie gives in, sets down the coffee filter, goes over to the bag, opens it with trembling hands.

Good girl
.

H
E’S SWIMMING OUT TO
the center of the lake, his arm around Suz’s limp body. He’s on his back, looking up at the stars, wondering about heaven, about time and space, if he’s really a cow in a field having a dream that he’s human.

He kisses her hair, lets her go. He’s stuffed her clothing full of rocks so she won’t float back up.

Down she goes, the lake taking her into its deepest, darkest place.

Her hands are the last to go under, floating like white starfish. Under the surface, he can still make out her face.

She opens her eyes, smiles, says something to him underwater.

His body goes rigid.

He’s made a terrible mistake.

This is not Suz at all.

It’s Emma.

The one word, “Daddy,” floats to the surface, a bubble of sound.

He dives, trying to reach her, but she’s gone.

H
E WAKES SOAKED IN
sweat (lake water), lungs screaming for air. The phone is ringing. Rolling over, he grabs it, makes a choking sound.

“Henry, you okay?” Winnie asks.

“Mmm,” he mumbles. “Just getting up.”

“Can you come out here today? There’s something I need to show you. Something I just found this morning.”

“What is it?” he asks, closing his eyes, imagining his daughter’s body floating to shore.

Stop, he tells himself. Enough.

“It’s better if I show you in person,” Winnie says.

“Tess has stuff going on, so I’ve got Emma all day.”

“Bring her. We’ll have a picnic. She can help with the moose sculpture. Maybe we can go swimming.”

Henry stiffens, chomps down hard on the inside of his cheek. “No. No swimming. I don’t want her to go anywhere near the lake. But we’ll come out. Around lunchtime. I’ll pack a picnic.”

“Perfect,” she says. “See you then.”

Henry hangs up, and slides out of bed. The dream is still fresh in his mind.

Daddy.

“D
O YOU THINK YOU’LL
ever have kids?” Henry asked Suz. They were swimming to the rocks on the other side of the lake. Henry thought the tops of the rocks poking out of the water looked like the backbones of a dragon, curled and waiting.

Suz laughed. “I’m not exactly mommy material,” she said. “And I didn’t have the greatest role model. Not like you—born and raised in a quaint little Vermont town with Mr. and Mrs. Apple Pie.”

Henry splashed her. He hated her vision of his life. That she saw him as being so very ordinary. So predictable. He hated the condescending tone she took; the implied judgment that she was somehow better than he was, that he could never really understand her because her family was fucked up and his wasn’t. “It wasn’t like that,” he said.

“Oh, sure it was,” Suz said, rolling over to float on her back, staring up at the sky as she spoke. “And you’ll appreciate it one day, when you settle down with your own little bundles of joy.” She studied the clouds as if his future was laid out up there, unfolding as the breeze blew in from the north.

“What makes you so sure I’m going to have kids?” Henry asked her, getting pissed off now. One of these days, he’d find a way to show her that he wasn’t nearly as simple and predictable as she thought. “Maybe I don’t even want them.”

Suz smiled. “I think…I think there are a lot of things you want that you don’t even know you want. And there are things you think you want that you wouldn’t really be all that happy with.” She was treading water now, looking straight at him.

“That’s not true,” Henry said, shaking his head, frustrated.

I’d be happy with you.
He thought the words, opened his mouth to say them, but they didn’t come.

Suz laughed. “You’ll have kids, Henry. Trust me. And just think, babycakes—think how fucking lucky they’ll be. I wish I had a time machine and could jump into the future right now. I’d pat those buggers right on the head. I’d say, ‘God dealt you a good hand making this guy your daddy. You watch him, listen to him, and everything’ll turn out just fine.’”

Henry watched as Suz held her breath and went under. She surfaced almost two minutes later, nearly at the rocks. Suz could hold her breath forever and swam faster underwater than she did on top.

“Face it, Henry,” she said when he’d finally caught up with her and they were resting on the rocks. “I swim like a fucking submarine.”

“What about me?”

“You? You’re something slow and steady. Dependable. An aircraft carrier maybe.”

Henry shook his head. “You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?”

“Pretty much, babycakes,” she said, leaning in so that her lips were resting on his neck, the words buzzing against his skin, her breath this hot liquid thing that made him forget he’d ever been mad at her. “Pretty much,” she said.

“I
T MAY BE TIME
to call off Operation Reunite,” Mel says, pushing the thick Velma glasses back up to the bridge of her nose.

“What?” Emma protests. “Why?”

Emma collapses against the wooden moose. She can’t believe she brought Mel here. Not when Mel is so obviously clueless.

All Mel’s done since they got here is complain:
I thought it was gonna be a log cabin; the moose looks more like a deformed horse; we’re going to get malaria or West Nile virus if we stay out here much longer.

It’s only midafternoon and already the mosquitoes are starting to come out in force. She and Emma have covered themselves in some herbal bug repellent Winnie gave them. It doesn’t really work to keep the mosquitoes away; it just makes them smell like cough drops.

“If we stopped breathing, they’d leave us alone,” Mel says. “That’s how they find us, you know. Each time we breathe out, it’s like we’re ringing a big old dinner bell.”

Winnie called Emma’s dad this morning to invite them out for a picnic. Emma asked if she could bring Mel and her dad said it was fine.

“Why don’t you come with us today, Mom?” Emma asked once she got off the phone with Mel. “You can meet the new cats! We’re taking a picnic. We can get that cheese you like—the one that’s all moldy outside.”

Emma’s mom shook her head.

“Not today, love. I have to meet with a client I’m doing a painting for.”

“But it’s Saturday,” Emma whined. “You never work on Saturday. We usually go to the farmers’ market together.”

Her mom just shook her head. “Sorry. You go have a special day with your dad and Mel. You and I can do something together tomorrow.”

Even when tempted with moldy cheese, she had an excuse.

Emma doesn’t get it: if Winnie and her mom used to be friends, why isn’t her mom jumping at the chance to go see her? You’d think she’d be eager to go out to the cabin again, to visit Winnie and see all the old cats for herself.

They’ve named the cat Emma brought home last night Thor because he has a white mark, shaped like a hammer, on his chest. It was Emma’s mom’s suggestion. When Emma got up this morning, she found her mom in the kitchen with bags from an early Price Chopper run—cat food, litter box, flea collar, and brightly colored felt mice stuffed full of catnip.

T
HE EIGHT REMAINING PAINTINGS
of Francis are hanging inside the cabin. Emma stood before the wall earlier counting under her breath; counting to nine over and over again as she studied the details of his chest, legs, back, hooves, and tail. He has texture, the moose. Fur that actually looks like fur, coarse and matted.

But even better is the sculpture, which Emma and Mel are helping to finish. Winnie showed them how to spread glue from the little pot across strips of canvas, then wrap the frame of nailed-together branches that make up his body. It’s like bandaging. Making a mummy.

Emma loves it. She’s figured out how to apply the canvas strips carefully, neatly, with just the right amount of glue. If she uses too much, if some drips out the edges, she tears off the canvas, cleans up the glue, and has to start over. Francis deserves perfection.

“You’re a natural artist,” Winnie told Emma.

Mel snorted, said, “Nah, she’s just fastidious.”

“B
UT WE CAN’T GIVE
up!” Emma tells Mel. “Winnie being back, my dad coming out here to help with the moose, with the cabin, it’s progress. Any day now, I’m going to get my mom out here and this place—it’s magic, I think. They’ll totally get back together if I can just get them both to the cabin.”

Winnie and Emma’s dad have gone inside and left the girls alone with the strips of canvas and pot of glue.

“This glue stinks,” Mel complains. “And I think I just found a horse hair in it. It’s totally the product of some rendering factory.” She smears more of it onto the moose, says, “From one ungulate to another.”

Show-off,
Emma thinks.

“Why do you think we should give up?” Emma asks.

“Sorry to be the one to tell you this, Em, but your dad totally has a thing for Winnie,” Mel says, dropping her glue-covered brush into the pot and standing up to stretch.

“What? No way! They’re old friends. She’s gonna help get him and my mom back together!”

Mel shakes her head, makes a buzzing sound like when someone gets the wrong answer on a game show. “In your dreams, Em. The truth is, Winnie’s going to be the thing that finally drives your parents apart once and for all. Believe me.”

“You’re wrong.” Emma’s voice is shaking now. “You don’t know her at all.”

“Yeah, well, neither do you,” Mel says.

Mel’s just jealous because Winnie hadn’t told Mel she was a natural artist or offered to teach her to do a perfect butterfly stroke. Emma knows all she needs to about Winnie: Winnie understands about Danner, which is way more than she can say for Mel.

But Emma’s trying not to think about Danner today. Danner’s been freaking her out—first, the weird thing she said at the bottom of the pool:
Everything you have is mine.
Was it some kind of riddle? Then there was the trick she played in the car last night, making that horrible sound and smell. Later, when they got home, her dad said the new kitten had peed all over the backseat. “Did not,” Emma told him. She’d been snuggling the kitten on her lap the whole time. But Emma’s dad was right, the seat beside her was all wet.

“Come on,” Mel says, taking Emma’s hand, dragging her toward the cabin. “I bet they’re making out right now.”

“You are so
sick
. They’re just friends.” Emma jerks away from Mel, goes back to the safety of the moose. She wants to open the little door in his chest and crawl inside. Count the sticks that make up his rib cage. Breathe in his sweet, gluey smell. Emma knows, just knows, that if she were to count every stick that made up his body, it would be a multiple of nine.

“If I’m wrong, then what are you so scared of?” Mel asks. “Come look.”

Mel’s at the window now, standing just to the side and peering in.

“Come away from there!” Emma hisses. “They’ll see you!”
It’s not respectful.

Mel doesn’t turn. Her eyes are focused on whatever’s going on behind the darkened glass, like a girl looking into a tank of sharks at an aquarium.

And it’s just to spite Mel that Emma finally gives in and joins her. Just to prove how wrong she is. Because if Emma doesn’t come and see for herself, Mel could make up anything about what’s going on in there. Mel could say all kinds of gross and terrible things about her dad and Winnie.

“I should never have brought you here,” Emma whispers when she gets to the window.

Mel just grunts in response.

Emma turns away from her and makes herself look in the window, where at first, all she sees is the reflection of Francis behind her, so large he takes up half the window and she has to look into him to see the figures inside.