Dismantled (4 page)

“You look over there,” Mel orders, pointing to the metal shelves and cabinets that line the east wall of the workshop. Mel goes to the old wooden workbench, starts picking up tools.

“My dad doesn’t like people to touch his stuff,” Emma complains. It’s not
RESPECTFUL
.

“He’ll never know,” Mel promises, dropping a large metal rasp back down on the bench with a clang.

Emma scans the shelves: chain saw, pruning shears, a burned-out headlight. Mostly what she finds is row after row of half-empty paint cans. She picks one up, reads the top: Bone White. She counts the letters in the name: nine. Emma hears from up above what sounds like a cat sneeze.

There, sitting on the edge of the top shelf, with her long legs dangling over, is Danner, smiling down.

Danner is a girl with dirty blond hair, just like Emma’s. She’s around Emma’s age. In fact, she could almost be Emma’s twin. Her nose is a little different, her chin a little more pointy, but every now and then, Emma catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror or shop window, and thinks it’s Danner she’s seeing.

Sometimes Danner shows up in Emma’s clothes, which Emma can’t stand, but Danner always puts them back, clean and folded. Sometimes Danner arrives in some outfit of her mom’s or dad’s. For some reason, she never puts back the clothes she borrows from Emma’s mom. If Danner shows up in Emma’s mom’s new running shorts, you can bet that they’ll either disappear forever or turn up ruined. One time, she borrowed Emma’s mom’s cashmere coat and the next day, it showed up at the bottom of the pool.

Today, Danner’s wearing Emma’s dad’s old fishing vest.

Danner gives a little snicker, which is what makes the cat-sneeze noise.

Emma puts her finger to her lips:
hush
. Danner puts her own finger to her lips, smile growing wider. Then she takes the finger from her mouth, and rests it on one of the paint cans on the top shelf. Emma shakes her head
no!
but it’s too late. The paint can crashes down on the floor, the lid pops off, and a thick, dark green paint splatters everywhere.

Emma’s whole body vibrates with panic. How is she ever going to clean up this mess? If there’s paint on the floor, her dad will know she’s been in his workshop. She should never have come. What was she thinking? She grabs some rags from the shelf. Danner snickers. Emma’s too mad to even look up at her.

“I’ve got something!” Mel yells. She’s hunched over an old red metal toolbox.

Emma’s skin gets prickly. She drops the rags into the center of the forest green puddle, leaves Danner and the spilled paint, and moves in for a closer look. There, stuffed into the rusty bottom of the toolbox, is a stack of Polaroids and a heavy black book with the words
DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM
painted across the front.

“No way!” Mel squeals, picking up the photos and looking at the one on top. “It’s your parents. Look!”

Emma snatches the photo. Her mom and dad are in the picture, but even though Emma knows it’s her mom and dad, everything about them is different, wrong somehow. Mom’s hair is long and tangly, and Daddy looks like he’s growing a beard. And they’re smiling! They actually look genuinely happy. He has his arm around her. Emma can barely remember the last time her parents touched, with the exception of bumping into each other accidentally, which is always followed by a very awkward
Excuse me
.

Beside her parents are two ladies Emma doesn’t recognize. The lady at the far right has short dark hair and is holding a gun. A rifle, like for hunting. The other lady, a blonde, has her head on the shoulder of the gun lady. And the blond lady is showing her middle finger to whoever is taking the photo, which is a dirty thing to do. Like swearing.

“Check it out!” Mel says, snickering. “She’s giving someone the bird.”

Emma looks for a bird, but just sees the gun, the girl holding up her middle finger, her mother leaning in to her father, her head on his shoulder.

Emma stares at the picture so long and hard that she starts to feel dizzy. She knows she’s seeing her parents
A Long Time Ago
. She hardly hears Mel speaking, and when she does, it takes her a minute to remember where she is, how she got here, who it is who’s speaking to her.

“It’s a journal by someone named Suz,” Mel says, holding the heavy black book. “You’re not gonna believe this, Em! Your parents were part of some group called ‘the Compassionate Dismantlers.’ They had a manifesto and everything!”

“Manifesto,” Emma repeats, not 100 percent sure what the word means, but thinking it sure doesn’t sound like anything her parents would ever be involved with.

Emma looks back across the workshop to Danner, still perched on the top of the shelves, to see if she’s catching all this. Danner gives her a wink.

“Listen to this,” Mel reads, “‘
To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.
’”

Emma just nods. She thinks of Francis the moose. “Nine,” she whispers without thinking, looking back down at the photo in her hand. Suz is the lady who painted Francis. Is she the one with the gun or the one giving the camera the finger? And who had taken the picture?

“What’d you say, super freak?” Mel asks.

“Nothing.”

Emma tucks the photo into the back pocket of her shorts, then looks up again, searching for Danner, but she’s gone. Danner’s like that. Here one minute. Gone the next.

“Holy crap!” Mel says, holding the journal out to Emma. “Check it out: there are addresses in the front for all the group members. We’ve gotta write to them!”

“And say what?” Emma asks.

Mel studies the names and addresses, thinking. Then, she smiles so big that all her teeth are showing. “Oh my god!” she howls. “This is it!”

“What?” Emma asks.

Mel holds the book out in front of her in both hands, shaking it like a tambourine. “Don’t you get it? We’ve gotta write to these people and find a way to make them come back. Maybe if we can remind your parents of their old college days, they’ll like go back in time and be all gaga for each other again. This is our answer.” She shakes the book again. “Right here. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for!”

“But these addresses are like ten years old,” Emma says.

Mel nods. “They were in college. Which means these are probably their parents’ addresses. And parents can stay in the same house forever. Trust me.” Mel pulls a small spiral notebook and pen from the back pocket of her grungy army fatigues and copies the addresses from the journal. When she’s done, she puts the journal and photos back into the toolbox. “I’ll get the bikes and meet you out front. Go tell your mom we’re going to D.J.’s for Cokes. And get some money.”

Emma shakes her head. “I’ve got to clean up the spilled paint first.”

Mel looks over at the huge green mess on the floor. “Great going, super freak,” she says, shaking her head. Then Mel goes over, grabs a bunch of rags, and starts wiping it up.

A
T
D.J.’
S
G
ENERAL
S
TORE
, they choose three cheesy Vermont postcards from the spinning rack (each with a moose, in honor of Francis) and stamps. Bernice sells them to the girls, and says, “Doing a little correspondence this morning, huh?”

Bernice has run the store forever. Even Emma’s grandpa couldn’t remember there ever having been a D.J.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mel says with a proud smile. “We’re writing to our friends at summer camp.”

Mel says that Bernice is a textbook case of split-personality disorder. Sometimes, you walk in and she’s all smiles, and gives you a free piece of licorice. Other days, she snarls, “This ain’t the place to window-shop. If you don’t have money, go on home.”

“Maybe it’s menopause,” Mel guesses, and Emma nods, but has no idea what she means.

The best part is, you can always tell which Bernice you’re up against by her face: on the days when she’s evil Bernice, she’s got on makeup—little circles of pink rouge, orange frosted lipstick put on all wrong.

This morning, she’s just plain old friendly Bernice with her gray hair in a ponytail, her pale liver-spotted skin scrubbed clean.

“Good girls,” she says. “Kids can get homesick at camp. A postcard from a friend will put a smile on their faces. You each take a root beer barrel. On the house.”

“Thanks, Bernice,” they both chime, reaching into the plastic bin on the counter.

Mel rolls her eyes, unwraps her candy, mouths the words
mental case,
and Emma steps hard on Mel’s foot to shut her up. They both start laughing.

Emma is sure she can still see a trace of green just under her fingernails even though she scrubbed her hands with hot water and a brush. It took them almost forty-five minutes to clean up the paint. Mel kept saying it was good enough, but Emma was sure her dad would be able to tell.

“This floor is a mess,” Mel said. “It’s already covered with paint splatters and grease and Christ knows what all. Trust me, Em, the only one who’s going to notice whatever little smudge of green we left is you.”

O
N THE POSTCARDS, THEY
write down words carefully copied from Suz’s journal:
DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM
. To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.
They address the postcards to Spencer Styles, Valerie (Winnie) Delmarco, and Suz Pierce with
PLEASE FORWARD
in big letters beneath each address.

“If you write that, whoever lives there will send it to the right address,” Mel explains. “My dad showed me. His sister, my aunt Linda, she moves around a lot, and whenever we write her, we put that on the envelope.”

Emma nods, watches Mel drop the cards in the out-of-town mailbox outside.

“Now what?” Emma asks.

“Now we wait for something wonderful to happen,” Mel says.

“N
INE
,” E
MMA WHISPERS ONCE
they’re back at home, Mel already halfway to the kitchen where Emma’s mom is making the girls their favorite: grilled cheese and bologna sandwiches. Mel says bologna is made from the lips and buttholes of pigs, which is totally gross, but makes eating it kind of like a double-dog-dare, which is why it’s their favorite.

Emma lingers in the front hall, stares into the great unblinking eye of the moose, and realizes for the first time (how could she never have noticed it before?) that Francis’s eye, the iris a rich brown flecked with sparkling gold, is exactly like Danner’s. Then, she’s sure she sees it: the lid closing for a mere fraction of a second, the moose giving her the tiniest of winks.

“L
OOK
, D
ADDY
, I’
M A
frog!"

Dog paddle. Frog kick. Splash. Legs bent. Extended. Pretzel-thin limbs. Her face goes under. Henry holds his breath too. His heart beats double time in his chest. His breath goes whistley. He knows she’ll drown. He’s seen it in his nightmares a thousand times.

Since summer vacation started ten days ago, Emma’s been in the pool every day, sometimes with Mel, which he can’t bear. Too much horseplay. They pull each other under. Pretend to drown. He yells at them and they yell back, laugh, call him the
Fuddy Duddy Daddy
. Mel says he needs to
Take a chill pill,
and Emma only laughs harder at that, which makes his chest ache.

Emma swims to the side of the pool, touches the white cement wall, bobs up, smiling, blond hair slicked back. She has Tess’s small, elfish nose and Henry’s deep brown eyes.

“Dad! Did you see me? I’m a frog!”

He lets himself breathe. Bites his tongue to keep from saying the words:
Are not. Now get the hell out of the water.

His jaw hurts from keeping it clenched tight. He opens it wide, like he’s yawning, trying to get the muscles to relax.

He watches Emma go under, holding her breath, her lime green bathing suit shimmering through the water. She has a special waterproof watch she uses to time herself. Tess gave it to her on her birthday. He gave her a camera. A nice one. Digital. For taking pictures on land. Safe old solid ground.

Emma pops up, gasping, her eyes bright red from chlorine. “One minute, nine seconds, Dad!”

He gives her a smile, nods wearily. “You’re the champ,” he says. “Where are your goggles?”

But she’s already underwater again and doesn’t hear him.

She starts doing laps. Nine times back and forth across the pool, touching the edge, counting out loud.

He should have filled in the pool when his father died. Put in a tennis court or a greenhouse for Tess. Anything but this. He knows one day his daughter will drown. Feels it in his bones. In his shaking muscles each time she jumps in. Swan dive. Belly flop. Sinking down, down, nearly to the bottom while he gnaws the insides of his cheeks like a desperate animal, until he tastes blood.

In his dreams she’s there in the water, reaching for him, calling,
Daddy!
as she goes under, sinking down, down, down.

H
ENRY LOOKS MUCH THE
same as he did when he graduated from college. Same close-to-the-skull haircut, same way of walking with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Only he wears chinos these days more than ripped jeans. The scruffy beard is gone. And there are faint wrinkles around his eyes. He’s still very boyish. Fidgety. A stranger would look at him and call him handsome. Would say he was a lucky man with a beautiful wife and daughter, a successful business, a swimming pool. A stranger would look at him and think Henry would be a fool not to be in love with his life.

But a stranger wouldn’t know that Henry actually lives in a converted barn out back beyond the pool and hasn’t slept in bed with his wife for nearly a year. And as far as sleeping with his wife in the conjugal sense, it had been a year and a half. Sex had become increasingly unsatisfying and more of a trial than anything else. Tess put more of an effort into reviving it than he did. She bought books, sensual massage oils (including one that was supposed to be arousingly warming but caused an allergic reaction, burning his penis), but in the end, he just didn’t feel all that interested. Passion, Henry told himself, was for young lovers, poets and artists. None of which he was or would be ever again.

But a stranger would not know any of this. They would have no idea that Henry sees every part of his life as a miserable failure. True, he loves Emma profoundly, painfully—yet surely he is failing her too.

Fuddy Duddy Daddy. Take a chill pill.

Fuck.

Henry chews the inside of his cheeks. Feels a headache coming on. It always starts with a little tickle just behind his eye. Then the tickle turns to a pinprick and Henry imagines his skull, like the body of a pinhole camera: that little pinprick lets in the pain and magnifies it; projects it onto the wall of his skull where it vibrates until even his jaw and teeth are sore. He carries aspirin around in his pocket the way some people carry breath mints. He shakes the bottle with his fingers, hears it rattle. There’s comfort in that. He pulls it out, pries off the lid, lets three tablets fall into his open palm, tosses them into his mouth and chews. The aspirin burns the cuts on the inside of his cheeks. Eats away at the exposed flesh there—wounds that never heal.

A
T FIRST, HE’D MADE
Emma wear a bright orange life jacket. Then water wings. Eventually, Tess argued that Emma was too old, too strong a swimmer, that the flotation devices did more harm than good. Into the garage they went, any hope of saving his daughter piled up with the mildewed camping gear and bald tires.

Henry doesn’t even own swimming trunks. Doesn’t take baths, just three-minute showers. Lather, rinse, out. Tess calls it a phobia.

“Survival instinct,” Henry says. “We were not born with fins.”

Sometimes, though neither of them says it, when they look out at the pool, they remember the dark water of the lake.

Tess remembers out loud what a good swimmer Henry used to be. How he and Suz would race out to the rocks from their beach at the lake. They’d have contests to see who could go farthest underwater, who could hold their breath longest. Suz usually won but Tess suspected that Henry let her.

“You used to love the water,” Tess says, shaking her head mournfully.

Secretly, Henry now wonders if he’ll have the courage to save his daughter when the time comes. In his nightmares, his feet are concrete blocks and he has no hands. When he dives in to save her, he goes straight to the bottom, trying to picture Tess’s face when she finds them both there—waterlogged on the cement floor of the pool—and he’s sorry he won’t be able to come back to life for an instant to deliver his final words, sound traveling up in bubbles escaping his blue lips:
I told you so
.

E
MMA’S TOWELING OFF WHEN
the phone rings. The sliding glass doors leading from the patio to the kitchen are open, and he hears it through the screen. Tess will never hear the phone in the basement, iPod buds in her ears as she works out.

“Stay out of the pool,” he tells Emma. She just rolls her eyes. He stops, rolls his own back at her, which gets a laugh. He jogs into the house, through the sliding screen door, picks up the phone just before the answering machine kicks in. Technically, this phone is now Tess and Emma’s, although there is still an extension in the barn. When the office can’t reach him on his line in the apartment side of the barn, they call the other house line. People at work have no idea he lives apart from his wife and daughter—he tells them the first line is for his workshop and to always try there before calling the home number. Somehow, his entire life has come to be about deceit.

“Hello,” he stammers, out of breath.

“Is this Henry? Henry DeForge?” A woman’s voice. Young. The words carefully enunciated and crisp as pressed linen.

“Yes.” None other. The Fuddy Duddy Daddy himself.

“My name is Samantha Styles.”

Henry draws a blank. A client? He doesn’t think so. But there’s something familiar about the name. Something that tells him he
should
recognize it. He searches his brain, but the headache is coming on strong now and not leaving room for much else.

“Yes?” he says, not willing to give away that he has no idea who she is. He just wants to get rid of her and take some more aspirin. Or maybe he’ll head for the medicine cabinet and steal one of Tess’s codeine tablets. She’s got some old Percocet in there too. That might take the edge off.

“I believe you were a friend of my brother, Spencer?”

Henry feels the pain in his eye go off like a firework, blossoming into the rest of his face.

“How did you get this number?” he asks.

“I found it in an old address book of Spencer’s. My brother…” Her voice falters. “Spencer killed himself two days ago.” The words come fast, a nearly inaudible blur, no longer careful and crisp.

Henry falls back against the wall, covers with the sweaty palm of his hand the eye that feels as if it has an ice pick going into it. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs into the plastic phone. Really, he’s more terrified than sorry. He hasn’t thought of Spencer Styles in ages. He just put a wall around that part of his brain. Caged the Spencer memories in. Or, more appropriately, tied them up.

He remembers the feel of the rope in his hands—rough, un-yielding hemp—and Suz’s voice,
Tighter, Henry. Tie it tighter.

He blinks the memory away. Mustn’t start down that path. No sir-ee.

“He didn’t leave a note,” Samantha Styles tells him. “But he was found with a postcard from Vermont. All it says is, ‘
Dismantlement Equals Freedom
’ and…” She pauses, and he imagines her peering at the postcard to read it carefully. “And ‘
In order to understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart
.’ Does that mean anything to you, Henry?”

Oh Jesus. Does it ever.

“Not a thing.” His voice is just above a whisper. He’s pressing his hand into his eye, trying to quell the pain as he wonders why Spencer would have kept an old postcard and why, in God’s name, he was holding it when he offed himself. It’s been ten years.

“The postmark says that it was sent from Vermont last week,” she tells him.

“Last week?” Impossible. The only remaining members of the Dismantlers in Vermont are he and Tess. It must be a mistake. A card lost in the mail all these years. That kind of thing happened now and then, didn’t it?

Shit, Henry thinks. Suz would have loved this. He actually smiles at the thought of it. Can’t help himself.

“My father’s hired a man, a private investigator, to look into Spencer’s death. Whatever the words on the postcard mean, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He’s planning a trip out to Vermont. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.”

The smile turns back into a grimace of pain. Suz would
not
love this part.

Fuck. If some private investigator shows up and starts sniffing around…

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be.” Henry hears the words leave his mouth, but he’s hardly aware of having formed them. He’s down on his knees now. The lines of grout in the tiled floor are wavering, making the floor seem to ripple. The light is impossibly bright. His mouth has the salty iron taste of blood.

“The memorial service is next week,” she says. “Here in Chicago. It would be great if you could make it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t get away. I run a painting business. This is our busy season.”

There’s a long pause. He resists the urge to just hang up. Get rid of this woman the quickest way he can.

“You know,” she says, “I don’t think Spencer had many friends after college. Not like the friends he had then. It would mean a lot if you could come.”

Tighter,
Suz said.
Tie it tighter.
By then Spencer had given up fighting.

Henry’s palming his eyeball, trying to keep it from popping out from the pain, the pressure of the explosion happening inside his head. He listens as Samantha Styles rattles off the address, date, and time of the memorial service, pretends to write it down, just in case he’s able to get away. He hangs up just in time to get to the sink and throw up. There’s blood in his vomit from his bleeding cheek. He runs water, turns on the garbage disposal.
The Electric Pig,
Emma calls it. He peeks out the window. She’s lying down in a chair beside the pool, her skin streaked ghostly white from the sunblock she’s applied. Good girl.

He takes the stairs to the basement slowly, gripping the rail, his legs rubbery. He hears the sound of Tess’s gloves on the bag, the rattle of the chains. Her grunts, gasps, heavy breathing. It’s incredibly sexy, the boxing. Sometimes when he’s alone in his bed at night he plays little movies in his head of Tess boxing. In his fantasies, he’s holding the bag, feeling the force of each punch until he can’t take any more, then she guides him to the floor, he slides her shorts down and she climbs on top of him, her padded gloves pushing down on his shoulders as she rises and falls with him inside her. His fantasy sex life is much more exciting, more vivid than the real thing had ever been.

It was her idea that he move out of the house last April.

“It’s not working,” she said. “I’m tired of just settling.”

Her decision wasn’t based on any one thing, rather the accumulated years of struggling, just getting by. One day she woke up and decided she’d had enough.

“Don’t you ever want more, Henry?”

“No,” he’d told her.

She shook her head mournfully. “You used to.”

“But I love you,” Henry said. He’d been saying those three words for so long. They were the three magic words that were always supposed to make everything better.

And it wasn’t a lie. He
did
love her. Maybe it hadn’t ever been this bright, passionate thing that she imagined it should be, but it was solid. It had a strong foundation. He firmly believed that he and Tess were bound in some deep way by the things they’d shared. They were meant for each other. No one else would have them. No one else would ever understand who they each truly were, where they’d been. When he looked at Tess, he saw all of her: the college student, the Compassionate Dismantler, the mother, the artist, and now, the boxer. How could he help but love someone he saw so completely?

And they’d been happy together, hadn’t they? It was true that their marriage hadn’t been picture perfect every moment, but it was good, it was fine. It was enough. Or it should have been. But Tess always seemed to want more; that ever elusive more that Henry could never manage to get his head around.