Dismantled (35 page)

W
HEN
S
UZ DIVES OFF
the front, it makes the canoe rock, nearly tipping. Henry drops the paddle, grips both sides of the canoe in a desperate attempt to stay upright.

What are his options? Swim or be burned alive.

He feels the heat as the moose’s head is engulfed in flames. The smoke blows back, hitting him like a wall, choking him, making his eyes burn. Slowly, carefully, he lifts himself out the canoe and slips into the inky water.

The panic he feels is incredible. He’s fighting with the water, flailing uselessly, exhausting himself. Then, he sees her.

There, just in front of him, is his daughter, exactly as she appears in his dreams. Emma, his Emma, is sinking down, her hair and clothing full of pondweed—a little girl playing dress up, with a necklace, boa, and tiara of slimy green stems, brown algae-covered leaves.

“Emma,” he calls, the word a desperate sigh.

He holds his breath and goes after her.

He swims blindly down, reaching out with his hands, not seeing anything.

Down, down, down he swims, sure he’ll touch bottom at any minute. He’s holding his breath, but his eyes are open. He sees his own arms, glowing and pale, moving in front of him; disembodied, creatures all their own.

Hands are grabbing the back of his shirt. He’s being pulled up.

No!
he wants to scream.
My little girl is down here!

He struggles against the hands, but he needs a breath, just one sucking gulp of precious air, then he can go under again.

He fights his way to the top, his rescuer still holding tight to his shirt. He surfaces, gasping for air, and hears Emma’s voice.

“Daddy!”

He turns, sees that it’s Emma clutching his shirt.

“But you went under,” he says, coughing and sputtering, reaching out to take her in his shaking arms.

“I thought you were drowning,” she says, gasping herself.

No. It was you. You were drowning.

He holds her against him, both of them treading water and shivering. Emma’s in shorts and a T-shirt. No flowing clothing. No long fronds of pondweed draped around her neck and woven through her hair.

Is it possible, Henry wonders, that your fears can take on a life of their own? Is this what ghosts are—things worried into existence, frantic energy manifesting itself in an almost physical way?

Suz, like a buoyant otter, is swimming playful circles around Henry and Emma.

“Thought we lost you there,” Suz says. “What happened, Henry? You used to be a great swimmer. Pretty sad. Having to be rescued by a little girl.”

Behind them the moose crackles and snaps as the flames spread.

But beyond the noise of the fire, there is another sound, a low howl, as if the moose is crying out in pain.

It’s almost human—buzzing and frantic: the static noise.

Treading water, Henry remembers the weight and heft of the Danner doll. The way she was laid out in his studio, waiting for him like some kind of sacrifice.

“Daddy!” Emma cries, nearly to him now. “You’ve got to put out Francis! Hurry! You’ve got to save Danner.”

Another humming groan from inside the moose.

Tess was the one who threw the rock that night. The one who’d drugged Suz’s drink. It was Henry who stuffed her clothing full of rocks and dragged her out into the middle of the lake, but it had been Tess who killed her.

He begins paddling madly toward the blazing moose carcass. Henry’s battling with the water, struggling to stay afloat and move forward. His face keeps bobbing under. He swallows great gulps of lake water, coughs and sputters.

“Danner!” Emma screams, swimming toward the burning moose at a steady clip.

Henry’s swimming muscles are stiff and out of practice, but soon he hits his stride, stops taking gulps of water. His body remembers and takes over, overpowering the crushing fear in his mind. He was always a strong swimmer. The strongest and fastest of the bunch.

“You’re too late, Henry,” Suz calls. She’s treading water behind him. “You’re fucking pathetic!”

The moose is throwing off too much heat. Its antlers have collapsed; its head is teetering forward, hanging by a thread. Flames have covered its back. The tail is nothing but crisp carbon and ash.

“A crime of passion,” Suz says. “You discovered your wife was having an affair with another woman and you snapped. So tragic! So sick and titillating and tragic! Gonna be on Court TV for sure!”

Henry swims closer to the moose, the truth moving through him like its own sort of fire. He turns back to Suz. “What have you done?”

Suz laughs. “Oh, Henry. The question is, what have
you
done?”

Emma is beside him now. “Danner, Daddy!” she squeals.

“Stay back!” he yells at Emma. And then, he holds his breath and goes under.

Eyes open. Black water. He dives down and forward, reaches ahead and up, grasping blindly until he feels the wooden hull. He’s under the boat now, and brings his hands up, grabs the edge of the canoe, fingers screaming from the heat, and yanks down with all his might. The canoe teeters, then flips. He slides through the water and comes up for air on the other side.

His lungs clog with the thick smoke. Pieces of burning moose have floated away from the smoldering carcass and sail like a tiny flaming regatta. The body of the moose, what’s left of it, is quickly sinking.

“Hurry, Daddy!” Emma yelps. She’s treading water near the sinking moose. He scans the wreckage, sees the moose is door side down. He grabs hold of it, the charred wood is hot but the flames are out. He’s trying to flip it over, to keep it from going down. With his left hand, he finds the door underwater. He takes a scorching breath and dives under, pulling at it. Then Emma is beside him, reaching for the door in the moose’s chest. The door that has jammed, won’t open. They’re both feeling along the edges, scrabbling and pounding. Henry has to rise to the surface for a breath, but Emma, Emma can stay underwater forever, she’s got gills, their daughter, and by the time Henry takes a stabbing breath and dives back under, he finds that Em’s got the door open. Now it’s her turn to go up for air.

The figure wrapped in rope is thrashing, fighting against him as he pulls it out of the skeletal wreckage of the moose. He loses his grip, the body slips away, sinking down. He dives deeper, groping in the dark water and grabs it again, yellow rope looped around his hands as they struggle to the surface where his lungs scream for air.

With Emma helping him, treading water, they awkwardly unravel the waterlogged rope mummy to reveal Emma’s doll. Henry rips at the cloth face, the terrible eyes stitched on, ink running like tears down the pillowcase face.

“Dad! No!” Emma shouts, but then she sees what’s underneath.

Tess is inside, her own eyes wide with panic, mouth duct-taped closed.

“Mom?” Emma says. “You’re Danner?”

Henry and Emma free her from the remaining rope and Danner doll suit, pull the tape from her mouth. She gulps at the air, coughing and retching.

“Henry,” she whispers at last. She’s naked against him. Shivering, but okay. She’s going to be okay.

She gives a little shriek.

“Shhh,” he says. “You’re okay. It’s okay now.”

“Suz,” Tess gasps as she looks out across the water. “She went under. She’s gone.”

And they all look to the place where Suz just was, scan the surface of the water for bubbles, ripples, anything, but she’s slipped away. All that’s left is the blond wig, floating.

“I
WAS SO CLOSE
to piecing everything together,” Bill Lunde tells them. They’re huddled around Henry’s pickup, on the beach, waiting for the police to arrive. Tess has wrapped herself in a paint-splattered canvas tarp from the back of the truck. She’s shivering. Can’t seem to get warm. Henry is standing beside her, their bodies not quite touching. Every now and then, when she lets out a hacking cough, he reaches over and gives her shoulder a tentative little pat, something an old-maid aunt might do. Emma is sitting cross-legged on the big rock in the center of the beach. She’s holding a soaking-wet canvas gardening glove—all that remains of the Danner doll.

“I’d followed Tess out to Claire Novak’s and seen Claire sneaking around at the cabin,” Bill tells them. “I suspected she might be Suz, but didn’t have any hard evidence. And of course I had no idea that you all thought she was dead.”

Henry’s already explained that ten years ago, there’d been…an accident. “I swam her body out into the middle of the lake,” he told Bill. “I watched her go under.”

Tess still can’t believe it.

Suz. Alive.

Claire was Suz. It doesn’t seem possible.

Passion. That’s what’s missing.

She pictures Claire’s hands. Tries hard to go back in her mind and see Suz’s. Could they really be the same? Yes, she may have changed the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes—but shouldn’t Tess have known? Isn’t it possible to recognize someone by their hands, the small gestures it’s impossible to hide?

Was Tess that desperate for love, for someone to come along and actually understand her, that she was blind to the warning signs?

Pathetic.

“She’s the one who left the wig and clothes for me. Who’d been writing in my journal,” Winnie says. “It
was
Suz. Only not the ghost version.”

Bill nods.

“I can’t believe she’s been alive all this time,” Winnie says.

“Alive and harboring one hell of a grudge,” Bill adds.

Tess touches her bruised shoulder—the faint bite marks Suz left there.

Do you want to be saved, Tess?

“Did she say anything to you?” Henry asks Winnie. “When she came out to the cabin and tied you up like that?”

Winnie’s chin quivers. Her eyes fill. “She said we’d disappointed her. She couldn’t believe how easy it had all been. To set us up like this. To fool us.”

Henry turns to look at Tess, who has said nothing so far. What is there to say? What can she possibly add to all of this? She had been the one most fooled. The joke was on her.

Tell me your biggest secret. The one thing you’ve never told anyone.

“I think she was the one who sent the postcards,” Bill tells them. “Though I can’t figure out why she waited ten years.”

It’ll be like confession…I’ll absolve you of your sins.

Henry shakes his head. “When we were out on the canoe, she said it wasn’t her. But that whoever did send them had done her a favor.”

“It was me.” A weak voice from the edge of the group. “I sent the postcards,” Emma says. She looks so small, hunched there in her soaking-wet shorts and T-shirt. The little girl brought into existence by holes Winnie poked in a condom. The one good thing that had come out of that long-ago summer.

“Mel and I found the pictures and old journal in Dad’s studio.” She looks at her parents. “I thought that if I could get your college friends back…” Her chin starts to quiver and she looks down at the ground.

Tess steps forward, takes Emma in her arms, enfolding her inside the paint-splattered tarp, like a mother moth.

Flashing lights come bouncing down the old logging road. Bill insisted on calling the police, but Tess knows it won’t make a difference. They can search the woods around the lake all night—they’ll never find her. As always, she’s about ten steps ahead of everyone else.

Suz is gone.

H
ENRY’S ON THE FLOOR
of his workshop, amid the sawdust and shavings: all that’s left of the canoe.

He’s got Suz’s journal on his lap. Winnie handed it to him yesterday just before she got in her pickup to head back to Boston.

“Suz left it for me that last day,” Winnie told him. “She must have taken it from your studio when she grabbed Emma’s doll out of the Blazer.”

Henry nodded. Over the past week, they’d put everything together. It had been Suz dressed up in the wig and old clothes, sneaking around. She’d burned Tess’s studio. She’d learned about the doll from Tess, knew how Henry hated it. Winnie told them that Suz seemed to know all about their plan to float the moose out on the lake with all her things inside and set it on fire.

“She must have been spying on us all the time. Listening to our phone conversations. She knew everything,” Winnie said. “I think she snuck into your house that night and moved the doll around, knowing it would freak you out to the point of wanting to burn it up in the moose. Then she stole the doll and returned it with Tess stuck inside.”

Tess, they’d learned from blood tests at the hospital, had been injected with walloping doses of tranquilizers to keep her knocked out, hidden inside the Danner doll.

“Veterinary drugs,” the emergency room doctor told Henry. “It’s a lucky thing your wife is in such excellent shape—her heart could take it. Another person might not have been so lucky.”

Henry still didn’t understand how Suz had pulled it all off—it wasn’t possible that she’d planned for things to go the way they had. She had no way of knowing about the canoe or the doll when she’d first gotten to town.

“You know what Suz used to say,” Winnie told him. “Great art is all about improvisation.”

Henry had one hand on the door of Winnie’s pickup, in the other was the journal. He remembered Suz taunting them from the lake just before Tess hit her with the rock.

We’ll always have this summer to remember. To come back to. Part of us will always be here.

“Do you think we’ll ever see her again?” Henry asked Winnie just before she pulled away.

Winnie shrugged. “It depends,” Winnie said. “On whether or not she thinks she’s through with us.”

H
ENRY FLIPS THROUGH THE
journal. Reads about the formation of the Dismantlers—how Suz pocketed the keys to the van so they’d be stranded at the gas station that long-ago December. As he turns the pages, he watches Suz falling in love with Winnie, determined to save Winnie from the boys and the cutting, even from herself. He reads about Suz’s plot to get him and Tess together, how she talked him into going out to the Habitrail tube to meet Tess that night by saying, “If you want to prove your allegiance to me, Henry, then go out there and hook up with Tess. It’s not forever. It’s just what works best for now.”

Last night, after checking on Emma, Henry stuck his head in to say good night to Tess. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at a sketch she’d done of Suz, crying.

Without a word, he sat down beside her, put his hand gently on her shoulder. She leaned into him, let him hold her. They stayed like that for a long time, not speaking, but together. Finally, too exhausted to sit any longer, they lay down together on top of the quilt covering the bed. He held her all night, listened to her fall asleep, breathed in the smell of her hair, felt her chest rise and fall.

And in the morning, when he woke, she was down in the kitchen, the smell of coffee drifting up the stairs. He lay there a long time, savoring the moment, tricking himself into believing that it had never been any other way—he had always been there, waking on his side of the bed, her pillow still warm.

Part of him was twenty again, waking up in her dorm room at Sexton, waiting for her to bring in a cup of thick, sweet Turkish coffee, in love with his life because it was so full of possibility.

Sometimes I think we’re just conduits.

Then he sat up looked down at the floor and saw Tess’s sketch looking back at him.

Suz.

Suz the creator. Suz the destroyer. Suz the shaman, who put hair and blood and dirt and little pieces of other people’s souls into every work of art she ever created, making the static noise, speaking in tongues.

Suz. His Suz. Their Suz.

Part of you will always be with me.

He bent and turned the drawing over, facedown, then joined his wife and daughter downstairs for breakfast.

H
ENRY’S DECIDED TO BURN
the journal today. He’ll look at it one last time, then have his own little bonfire out behind the barn. Time to put the past to rest once and for all so he can concentrate on rebuilding his life in the here and now.

Henry flips to an entry he hasn’t read before. Dated one week before Suz’s supposed death, before the end of everything.

Henry closes the journal, his head beginning to throb.

Part of you will always be here with me.

Did Suz have a child? His child? Does he have a son or daughter out there somewhere, walking around in the world?

The child would be about Emma’s age.

He tosses the journal aside, pulls the cell phone from his pocket, and punches in Winnie’s number. He gets her voice mail.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he says into the phone. “Suz really was pregnant. That baby was mine! What happened to it? If you know, if she said anything to you about it when she found you at the cabin, you’ve got to tell me. Please call me back.”

As he’s hanging up, his landline rings. He pulls himself up off the floor and hurries to grab the phone mounted on the wall beside his tool bench. Maybe it’s Winnie! Or even Suz—he lets himself imagine it for half a second—Suz calling to say,
Would you like to meet your child? The one you never knew about?

“Hello,” Henry says, nearly breathless with expectation.

“Henry? Bill Lunde here.”

“Hey, Bill.” Henry sighs, dusting wood chips from his pants.

“Henry…I wanted to give you a heads-up. The police, when they couldn’t find any trace of Suz in the immediate area, they dragged Number Ten Lake. The divers found something.”

Henry presses the phone harder against his ear. “Something?”

“First, they pulled up a trash bag full of clothes and personal effects.” Bill pauses, Henry nods into the phone, remembers Winnie telling the story of swimming the clothes out when she first got back to the cabin. Bill clears his throat, continuing, “Then they discovered human remains. Out in the middle of the lake.”

“Oh my god! Did Suz not make it back to shore? Did she get caught up on the moose somehow?”

“No. The bones they pulled from the bottom of the lake had been there awhile. A decade or so. Female, trauma to her skull.”

Henry feels the little pinprick of pain in his left eye that says a headache is coming. His breath is fast and shallow. His skin cool and clammy.

“I don’t understand,” Henry tells him.

“Suz’s old dental records were faxed over this morning. They’re a positive match, Henry. I think you’re going to want to get a lawyer.”

Henry remembers the feel of Suz against him, on top of him, as he swam on his back out into the middle of the lake. How cold her body felt. How still.

“But that’s not possible. Suz is alive. She came back,” Henry says. “You saw her. She told me things in the canoe—things only Suz would know.”

“We were wrong, Henry. I don’t know who Claire Novak is—I can’t find a trace of her anywhere—but she’s definitely not Suz Pierce.”

Henry feels all the air leave him.

He’s underwater again, trying to save his drowning daughter. Only this time, at last, he understands it’s not Emma. It’s the unborn child Suz was carrying when he swam her out to the middle of Number 10 Lake, her clothing full of rocks.