Hemlock Grove (14 page)

“Oh, Shelley Belly,” said Olivia.

A car parked outside then and Olivia felt a frisson pass through the hair on her arm as though from a soft breath; a concurrent increase in the girl’s unease with her mother’s ire. The front door opened and Roman passed through the foyer. Olivia muted the television.

“Roman Godfrey,”
she said.

He appeared and stood with his hands in his blazer pockets and waited with an affected and overcooked boredness and Shelley tensed, spine rigid and arms unnaturally straight with hands braced on her thighs, and Olivia was suddenly almost too fatigued by it all to get on with it. Like a night when the energy is bloody unsalvageable but the show must et cetera. Domesticity. Times when one wonders if
Medea
is a tragedy or goddamn wish fulfillment.

“Is there anything you’re of a mind to share?” said Olivia.

“Not especially,” said Roman.

“The news tonight said that Lisa Willoughby’s grave was terribly violated,” said Olivia. “They’re offering ten thousand dollars for information on the culprits. Would you care to be more
specific
about your social agenda?”

He said nothing.

“You’re lucky I don’t phone the police right now,” she said.

“Go nuts,” he said. “Just gimme a minute to powder my nose if I’m gonna be on the front page tomorrow.”

Shelley’s breath became hoarse and shallow.

“Sarcasm, the enemy of wit,” Olivia said witheringly.

“Pithy,” said Roman.

Her face clouded darkly and she spoke with dread calm. “You think you can hide behind your name like every other time, but I have made my position clear on your association with that Gypsy trash. And whatever
preposterous
goddamn game you think you’re playing to get a rise out of me, you have a rather great deal more to lose than that thick, spoiled head is allowing for.”

Roman did not immediately respond, and wanting least in the world to bring attention to herself Shelley held her breath and there was only the high-frequency pitch of the muted television.

“Jesus, you need to get laid,” said Roman.

Shelley gasped and raced from the room. Olivia looked at Roman. He was too pleased with himself to be finished, so she waited.

“Is Norm busy?” he said.

Now there was the rush! She rose and stood before him, regarding the child with a thrill of gall. And then she slapped his face with such force it knocked him back over the end table, and he made no attempt to protect himself as she knelt over him and slapped both sides of his face until his cheeks were an angry rose red. Then, suddenly short of breath, she backed off and turned away, leaving him on his back. There was a flicker in the window, the reflected screen of the television. The film’s spurned heroine on a chaise smoking with languid animus. Olivia stared captive as the image diffused into a liquid flux of the light and dark and she felt herself sinking, sinking somehow away and into it at the same time …

She felt a pair of strong hands steady her shoulders and Roman caught her just before she fell.

These Lowly Creatures

Dr. Godfrey sat in the OB-GYN waiting room, where a sitcom he vaguely remembered loathing played as an otherwise emaciated young woman in her third trimester shrilled over it into her cell phone the excruciating details of her proud triumph in one of those squalid sexual potboilers that so frequently end up arbitrated in front of the cameras of daytime television judges. Next to her was a morbidly obese friend or relative who nodded and
mm-hmm
’d through the story as if on a pew. On her other side was a lean man years her senior in a sheriff’s deputy uniform with a nose that led not just his walk but his slouch. His arm was around the pregnant girl. Godfrey thumbed through the lone
Sports Illustrated
he assumed was here to reduce the chances of expectant fathers taking flight.

“And I says Mom, I says Mom, you just tell him that demon pig bitch and anything that smells like her is gone by this weekend or he’s never touching
this
again.”

“Mm-hmm … Mm-hmm…”

Despite his evident sexual proprietorship over the prize in question, Nose had little enough stake in the drama; rather, his focus was on Godfrey, to whom he had now sent enough dagger glances that it could not be coincidence, though whether it was because of some inadvertent offense or the alpha-male hostilities that Neiman Marcus cuff links and a well-shined shoe instinctively arouse in a certain species of blue-collar man could not be said.

Godfrey employed a mental exercise. He had read at a young age a guiding principle that had changed the course of his life: The first step to liberty is respecting the rights of others. This had made him something of an aberration in the Godfrey line, the idea that each and every soul with whom you share this planet, no matter how unlike, much less appalling to yourself, was worthy of empathy and respect in all circumstances. So the exercise was simply continuing to sit here with this magazine whose words were a blur of irritation and trying to find a modicum of generosity toward this particular segment of humanity instead of escaping to the car and having a slug from the flask that he rationalized he wasn’t hiding because the glove compartment wasn’t a hiding place, it was a perfectly innocent compartment. What distinguished this exercise from punishment was a question of degree rather than intent.

Suddenly there was a report like the firing of a gun and Godfrey’s head snapped in alarm. But there was no threat, no threat to his daughter, and the sound’s provenance became clear as the obese girl slid to the floor: an existing hairline fracture in the leg of her chair had snapped under her weight.

She lay dazed on her back like a tortoise carved out of butter as her friend cackled into the phone.

“Oh my holy shit!” said her friend. “Guess whose fat ass broke the chair!”

Godfrey put down the magazine and rose. He went to the fallen fat girl and held out his hand.

“Are you okay?” he said. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

Afterward, passing over the Hot Metal Bridge, he asked Letha if she’d like to go to lunch at the club.

“Are you sure you have time?” she said.

He didn’t. He nodded.

“She has irises,” she said.

He didn’t know what she meant. And then he did and found himself at a momentary loss as though any second now words would be invented.

“I wonder what color her eyes are,” she said. “I need some fresh air, okay?”

He did not object to fresh air and she cracked her window and her bangs danced in the wind.

*   *   *

Just upriver Olivia leaned against the hood of her pickup, smoking a cigarette in the shadow of the Dragon. This local luminary was a sculpture of rebar and oxygen hosing of a serpent’s head. It stood roughly thirty feet in height between the mill building and the hot stoves of Castle Godfrey. What castle complete? The sculpture’s author was a mystery; the figure made its first appearance on the property in 1991 following the aborted attempt at removing the Bessemer converter for scrap that resulted in the death of one worker and a half dozen injuries. Fearing the hand of some millenarian cult, the sheriff’s department destroyed the statue, only for another of identical placement and proportion to take its place soon after. This process was to repeat itself several times before it graduated into a received part of the landscape, like the pornographic graffiti or scrap pile of exploded electric appliances or pieces of furniture dropped by the more enterprising of bored local youths from the ore bridge.

Sun glinted off the water, causing Olivia to wince and the cigarette to fall from her lips. She crushed it with the toe of her shoe and walked to the entrance of the mill unevenly in heels and went inside. Several minutes passed. There was a breeze and the hawk glided into it, coming to a standstill, wings tilting to and fro like a child on a balance beam. Then the old doors slammed open with a rusty whine and Olivia came stumbling out and, bracing herself on a wall, heaved a dark and glutinous puddle on the ground. She retched herself into dry heaves and then eased herself to the ground and lay on her back. She fished her phone from her purse and dialed. It took a minute to connect with the person she was looking for.

“Sheriff Sworn, Olivia Godfrey … Yes, yes, and yours … Well, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too much trouble if you would request your men to keep an eye out for any unusual activity around the mill … Precisely … Quite, cheers.”

She stretched her arm and dipped a finger to the puddle and brought the fingertip between her lips.

*   *   *

Peter was doing a card trick with the Major Arcana for Shelley in the school parking lot when Roman approached and said it would be better if he didn’t come along for the follow-up. Peter gave him an inquisitive glance as he produced the Hanged Man for Shelley. She shook her head and he flicked it aside.

“
Der Führer
’s panties are in a bunch,” said Roman. “I’ll come by your place in the morning.”

Peter flashed the Hierophant. She shook her head again and the card was discarded.

“What is she so afraid of?” said Peter.

“Her talons slipping out,” said Roman.

Peter nodded. Then his nose wrinkled and he doubled over in an explosive sneeze and a card fluttered to Shelley’s feet faceup. The Wheel of Fortune. Shelley grinned.

“Gee, I wish I was cool enough to know magic tricks,” said Roman.

He drove Shelley home. An institute van was parked in the drive. When Shelley saw it she clapped her hands and leaped from the cart, which lurched and rocked from side to side. She landed with a
whoom
that sent a rippled wave through the grass and she bounded to the door, stopping herself short of inadvertently battering it from its hinges. Steadying herself, she attempted to properly turn the knob in a ladylike manner. She was spared the effort as her mother opened the door and stepped out.

“Darling,” she said, “you have a visitor.”

Dr. Pryce stepped into view. “Hello, Glowworm.”

Shelley seized him by the chest and held him aloft, mustering her fullest restraint to prevent herself from spinning.

“Do settle down, dear,” said Olivia.

Shelley set Dr. Pryce back to his feet. He smiled indulgently.

“I was wondering if my best girl would care to join me for a walk?”

She tipped up and down like a child on the edges of her cubes.

“Hello, Roman,” said Dr. Pryce.

“Hey,” said Roman, passing by. He and Pryce had never had anything but a superficially civil relationship. The doctor fell into the rare category of person that gave even Roman the creeps.

“Any designs on the evening?” said Olivia.

“
Nein
,” said Roman with a crisp Nazi salute. He went inside.

Dr. Pryce threaded his hand through the crook of Shelley’s arm and they strolled around the house to a trail through the tree line in the rear. She left quadrangular imprints in the ground and bare leaves clumped to her feet. There was gloaming light through the naked trees and he noticed the tip of an earthworm protruding from loose earth. He knelt and pinched it and stood once more, holding its dangling, dirt-speckled pink to the light.

“‘It may be doubted,’” he said, “‘whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly creatures.’”

They admired it a moment and then he delicately replaced it. They went on.

“Would you like to know a secret, Glowworm?” said Pryce.

She looked down at him. Did he even need to ask?

“Through some quirk of design, I was born with a sense of self,” he said. “Can you imagine anything so horrific? It’s like the terror of waking up and not knowing where you are and the terror of the most lucid nightmare all at once. And if that wasn’t enough, I was born twelve weeks premature. It was no bracing swat on the behind and delivery into loving arms that welcomed me to this world, no—it was the loveless mercy of an artificial womb. My first weeks as a sentient being were spent in solitary confinement. But I’ve always taken issue with that phrase. If anything, it’s lucky I have no tendency toward agoraphobia; the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, from particles of atom to the far reaches of the universe encompassing thirty powers of ten in space, all
within the apparatus of the mind
: the firmament without and the firmament within merely opposing sides of the glass. And in that pacific solitude, in full awe and dread: I saw it. Destiny is no more than the fulfillment of purposive potentialities within us. The human cerebral cortex is a single sheet composed of more neurons than there are stars in the known universe folded like a paper crane to fit in a quart-sized cubbyhole; there is enough potential energy in a single person that if released would equal thirty hydrogen bombs. Destiny is nothing to sneeze at! And there I saw my own. So I willed the power to hatch myself from that incubator because my Work in life illumined before me as perfect and outstanding as a single star at night, and I had no time to lose.”

There was a slim tree felled in their path about four feet from the ground. Shelley grasped it and lifted it over her head as they passed under it, letting it crash back behind her.

“I understand,” he said, “you have a certain confidence with your uncle.”

She tensed in expectation of chastisement. He put a pacifying hand on her arm.

“I’m not cross with you. I’m not Olivia. But there is something I have to do, something very important, and by necessity very secret. Have you ever shown your poetry to your mother?”

She looked at him in alarm.

“Exactly. There is nothing wrong with secrets. You know, the alchemists believed that a creative work has a sort of life all its own independent of the creator, straddling the worlds of psyche and matter, of both and neither. A subtle body, they called it. Can you imagine anything so beautiful and precious? All creative expression a reverse eucharist: providing a spirit body! Can you think of what you wouldn’t do to protect such a spectacle of fragility? There is no shame in hiding some things. Now, you’ve done nothing wrong, but, Glowworm, I do have to ask you, as a personal favor, to repeat nothing I tell you. To anyone. Ouroboros is that important and that vulnerable. Just … trust me that it’s for the best.”