Dismantled (8 page)

Sometimes I think we’re just conduits.

Shit.

If Tess doesn’t get rid of the photo, he’ll have to. He’s sure she’ll see it as an act of hostility rather than an attempt to protect their family. How is it that whenever Henry tries to do the right thing, he ends up as a villain?

Henry turns from watching Tess at the grotto, looks at his own senseless project, all lit up with halogen spotlights. He doesn’t let himself think about what he’ll do with it once it’s finished. He doesn’t admit to the probability that Tess is right: the landlocked canoe will stay in his workshop, there to forever remind him of his own futility, of how he failed his wife and daughter. The boat will taunt and tease, call out to him, whispering its deepest desire, which happens to be his greatest fear—
Water,
it will whisper in its low, woody voice; garbled, thick with pitch:
Water.

I
T’S A FORTY-MINUTE DRIVE
from Henry’s office to Alden. Route 2 all the way, traveling east, toward Maine, following the twists and hairpin turns that take you past Sexton College and then to the turnoff onto Curtis Road ten miles beyond. The blacktop ends shortly, and the woods get thicker, and the houses get fewer, and then the road signs end too. If you know the way—if you can follow the maze of forks and four-corners that look increasingly the same—eventually between the red pines there’s a narrow dirt turnoff that leads up the hill to the cabin. He hasn’t made the trip since Emma was born, but the way feels familiar, as if he just drove it yesterday. He blinks. Looks around at the inside of his Blazer just to remind himself that it’s not the rattling old orange Dodge van he drove in college. The Love Machine, Suz called it.

Sometimes he thinks about how odd it is that the cabin has been so close—only an hour’s drive from their house—all these years. So close and yet universes away. They never come out this way. When Henry, Tess, and Emma used to go to Maine in the summer, they’d loop around, take the interstate, claiming it got them to the beaches and lobster pounds faster. Alden was a big, black hole in the map, a danger zone to be avoided at all costs.

“T
HINK OF WHAT WE
could accomplish—no classes, no jobs, not even a fucking telephone,” Suz said, eyes wide as she surveyed the cabin. “We could devote ourselves to the cause full time. Eat, sleep, and breathe dismantlement.”

It was the week before graduation and Winnie was showing them the hunting camp her grandfather had built back in the late sixties. They’d parked Henry’s van at the foot of the driveway and hiked up the hill, arriving sweaty and winded but exhilarated.

“My grandfather owns it outright,” Winnie explained. “Forty acres. Hasn’t used it since his arthritis got bad. No one’s been here in years.”

The cabin was only a twenty-minute drive from Sexton and was in magnificent shape. Henry, who had worked for his father since his early teens, was used to assessing the condition of buildings—the level of rot, the structural integrity—and was pleased to see the old frame carrying the weight of the cabin perfectly. He got on his belly and slithered under the crawl space: the cement posts the building sat on were straight and true, despite years of frost heaves. Winnie’s grandfather had understood the importance of a good foundation and had dug deep.

“It’s in great shape!” he called to the others. He wiggled out from underneath the building, dusted cobwebs out of his hair, and walked around the outside. “The plywood’s a little buckled here and there, and it could use a new coat of paint, but overall it’s pretty excellent.”

Suz opened the front door and danced through the cabin.

“Right here, in front of this window, this will be our studio space! And Winnie and I can sleep down here, near the kitchen. We’ll hang up some tapestries or something for walls—do the hippie thing. Henry and Tess can have the loft.” Suz was talking a mile a minute, the sleeves of her tunic flapping like frantic wings. The dust in the cabin swirled around her, lit up by the light from the window, making it look as if she had her own excited force field. “We’ve gotta get a camp stove. One of those little propane things. We can bring sleeping bags, clothes, art supplies, a few flashlights and oil lamps. We don’t need much really.”

“We’ll have to haul water from town,” Henry said.

“It’s no biggie,” Suz said. “We can get a bunch of containers and make weekly runs to Sexton if we don’t find a closer source. Shit, we can just take it from people’s hoses at night! Water liberation!”

“What about a bathroom?” Tess asked.

“There’s a lovely outhouse in back,” Winnie said. “Just gotta watch out for the porcupines.”

“Ouch!” said Henry.

Tess gave a little shiver.

“And we can take baths in the lake!” Suz exclaimed. “Oh, Winnie, it’s perfect!” She threw her arms around Winnie and kissed her cheek.

“What do you think?” Henry asked Tess. She was the only one of them who’d applied to grad school, and had been accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was planning to move to Providence after graduation. Tess bit her lip, looked around the cabin, then back at Henry. “Fuck grad school,” she said.

Suz cheered. “Dismantlement equals freedom!”

N
OW, AS
H
ENRY ROUNDS
the last bend, passing the stand of red pine, straight and tall as telephone poles, he reaches the old logging road that leads a mile or so up the hill to the cabin. He slows, puts on his turn signal.

Does he really want to see it again?

The cabin, where, last time he visited, Tess’s water broke.

Where they found the frogs.

He chews his cheek harder. A dread as thick and green as the ooze from that tank of frogs seeps through him.

Henry thinks of the mayhem. The photos. The ransom note and chair looped with rope. Suz’s things. So many of her things lying around the cabin. Evidence. What if it’s still there? And what happens when that private investigator shows up, starts snooping around and finds the cabin?

Someone’s got to go check it out, clean it up. He promised Tess that someone would be him.

Henry the brave. Henry who makes the bad things go away.

“Tomorrow,” he mumbles, his hands shaking a little as he shuts off the turn signal, does a U-turn in the road because he can’t bring himself to even go take a look. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he whispers, then he turns the radio up all the way so he won’t have to hear himself think.

D
ON’T GO OUT OF
sight. Stay where I can see you. See you. See you.

See who?

She has gone out of sight now but her ears are good as a rabbit’s—she listens carefully for the sound of her mother calling her name. Her mother in gardening gloves with purple flowers printed on them, tending bunches of plants that Emma can never remember the names of. She’ll run back when her mother calls her, her legs are fast, it won’t take long.

And it’s stupid, really. Emma is old enough to be on her own in the woods. Something’s gotten into both her parents these past few days. They’re jumpy. Overprotective.

Today, her mom said she couldn’t ride her bike to D.J.’s to meet Mel for a creemee.

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

“But I always ride my bike! It’s ten minutes away.”

“Not today,” her mom said, as if there was some escaped convict on the loose or something.

And her dad, who’s always been a little nutty about the pool, made up some story about how she couldn’t go in it because the chemicals were all out of balance.

“I have to shock it,” he told her.

“But I can go in tomorrow, right?”

He shook his head. “It might take a few days. We’ll see.”

And now she’s supposed to stay in the garden, not go out of her mother’s sight. But her mom is busy with a new flat of flowers she just picked up at Agway. She’s planting the area around the new grotto.

“Who’s that?” Emma asked when she saw the photo of the blond girl with the knife that her mom had put in a plastic frame on a little shelf in the grotto. It was the same girl who was giving the camera the finger in the photo she and Mel had found in her dad’s toolbox.

“Suz,” her mother told her. “The lady who painted Francis.”

“Where is she now?” Emma asked.

Her mother got that glassy, far-off look in her eyes. “Out west, I think. California, maybe. That’s where she was headed last I knew. But that was a long time ago.”

E
MMA HEADS DEEPER INTO
the woods, toward the road. The closer you get to Route 2, the thicker the woods become. The part along the side of the road, the very edge of the forest, is almost impenetrable in places. Prickly cucumber vines cover the trees in a thick blanket. Emma loves them and calls them porcupine eggs. They have spiny, oval, two-inch fruit that’s hollow inside, and kind of fibrous and webby looking, like a loofah. Emma’s mom says they’re members of the gourd family. Her dad calls them cactus balls. Mel calls them
alien testicles,
which Emma thinks is really gross. Whatever you call them, they’re bizarre and are most definitely Emma’s favorite plant, except for maybe the Venus flytrap.

Emma’s not near the road now, though she can hear the cars and trucks going by, tires bumping over potholes and frost heaves that the road crews haven’t gotten around to fixing yet.

In the leaf litter on the ground in front of her is a ring of toadstools, which Mel says is a magic place where fairies gather. She says if you stand in the middle of one on Midsummer Eve, they’ll take you over into the fairy world. Emma doesn’t believe in stuff like fairies, but then again she probably wouldn’t believe in Danner if she couldn’t see her with her own eyes. If she could just see a fairy once, then it would be a different story.

Seeing is believing.

Emma counts the toadstools (seven, which uninformed people think is lucky, but really isn’t at all—in fact, it’s most decidedly unlucky) and pokes at the largest one with a thin stick. Poison black ink seeps from the gills underneath. Fish have gills and so do mushrooms. She thinks it’s nice that mushrooms have to breathe just like everybody else.

Just then, just as she’s wishing she had someone with her to tell this to, she hears her name called, but it’s not her mother calling. No, this is a voice from the other direction, from deeper in the woods.

Danner.

Danner’s magic too. Emma just has to think of her, and she’s there.

Emma runs toward the sound of Danner’s voice, into where the trees grow thick together, shading out all light.

“Where
are
you?” she whisper-yells, afraid her mother might hear.

Out on the road, a car blows its horn.

“This way,” Danner says. She’s close by. Hiding. Playing a game, maybe. Hide-and-seek. Sometimes Danner never shows herself at all—just keeps moving farther away, calling Emma from what sounds like every direction at once.

Emma tiptoes around the trees, trying not to make too much noise. She wants to catch Danner by surprise. Emma holds still and listens. She hears only the cars going by on the road beyond the trees. Faraway crickets. Birds. She steps forward, slowly, carefully, then turns around.

There they are: the words she and Mel painted on the tree trunks last week. Words in red letters on the smooth gray bark of the beech trees.

The words are painted one per trunk, lengthwise down the trees in blocky capital letters, spelling out a message that was supposed to be the next step in reuniting her parents.

It had been Mel’s idea, naturally. The day after she and Emma sent the postcards, they’d been sneaking around in the woods beside Emma’s mother’s studio, spying in windows, trying to catch her doing something interesting. But all she did was paint flowers, which was, in Mel’s words, B-O-R-I-N-G and L-A-M-E. This was not the outlaw artist they’d read about in Suz’s notebook.

“No wonder your dad moved out,” Mel whispered as they crept away from the studio. Emma gave Mel a pissed-off shove and Mel tripped on a root and went noisily crashing into a small stand of striped maples.

“Who’s there?” Emma’s mother called from the studio.

Mel got back on her feet and hissed, “Run!”

Emma raced all the way through the woods to the road, her mother shouting threats about guns and prosecuting trespassers behind her. What Emma didn’t know was that Mel had doubled back and gone into the studio. When they met up later, back by the pool, Mel took a tube of paint from her pocket and said, “I have a plan. We’ll use the paint to—”

“He didn’t move out on his own,” Emma said.

“What?” Mel hated to be interrupted.

“My dad. My mom asked him to leave.”

Mel tucked the tube of paint back in her pocket and shrugged. “Whatever. Do you want to hear about phase two of Operation Reunite, or what?”

“I’
VE GOT A RIDDLE
for you,” Danner says. She’s leaning against the tree with the last word painted down it in big, bold letters. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but over it is the red robe Emma got at Christmas.

“Okay,” Emma says.

“What is dark but made out of light?”

Emma thinks. Danner drums her fingers on the trunk of the tree, going faster and faster, showing time is running out. She never gives Emma long to answer.

“A shadow,” Danner says, grinning. Danner loves riddles.

“I should go back,” Emma says. “Closer to the house. So I can hear my mom if she calls.”

Danner makes a little tsk-tsk sound. “This was a complete waste of time,” Danner says, stepping forward so she can look at the tree she was leaning against.

“But I liked the riddle,” Emma asks.

“Not the riddle. I’m talking about painting the trees. Do you think your parents are ever going to come out here? Have they yet?”

“No,” Emma admits.

“And even if they do, a few words in the trees aren’t going to change anything. You think that just because you found them in that journal, they mean something, but you don’t even get what they really mean.” Danner spreads her arms and the robe looks like wings. Emma half-expects to see her take off flying.

“My parents will tell me. I’ll figure out a way to get them out here and they’ll explain it.”

Danner snorts. “When are you going to get it, Emma? Henry and Tess don’t tell you anything. If there’s something you want to know, you’ve got to figure it out yourself.”

“But how am I supposed to do that?” Emma asks.

“Relax,” Danner tells her with a smile. “That’s what you’ve got me for.”