The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (53 page)

T
HIS IS HOW IT
began. A series of seemingly random events: a road trip, someone’s alarm didn’t go off, a lost set of car keys, some killer Thai weed pulled from a pack of Drum tobacco. But now, reading the journal here in Henry’s studio, Tess wonders how random any of it really was.

It all started with a trip to Boston to see a modern-sculpture exhibit. Berussi’s entire class was going. Henry offered to drive a group down in his orange Dodge van, which Suz called “the Love Machine.”

“Bet you get a lot of action in the Love Machine, Henry! Try to tell me you haven’t got some nasty old mattress back there!”

Suz said she’d ride with him. Then, under her name on the sign-up sheet, she added the names of Tess and Val. Spencer, Val’s boyfriend, wrote down his own name.

But when they all met in the parking lot at six
A.M
., there was no Spencer. “I’ll go get him,” Val said.

“Nah, you stay here,” Suz said, volunteering to run to the community center to call him.

“Dude who answered said he was sick and we should go on
without him,” Suz reported when she got back to the van. Only later would they learn that Spencer wasn’t sick. He simply overslept because someone had pulled all the insides out of his alarm clock.

But it didn’t matter then. What mattered was that Spencer hadn’t been there in the beginning. He wasn’t one of the chosen.

It was a quiet ride at first. Suz sat in front, next to Henry, and kept flipping through the radio stations, looking for songs she could stand.

Tess closed her eyes in the backseat, trying to sleep. She kept squinting at the back of Henry’s head, wondering what it would be like to touch him there, to run her fingers through his hair. Val sat beside her, hunched over her notebook, scribbling away, hiding behind her hair.

“What are you writing, babycakes?” Suz asked.

Val shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much.”

Suz laughed. “I really doubt that,” she said.

Then, just before they were out of Vermont, Suz announced, “I have to pee,” and asked Henry to get off at the next exit and look for a gas station. They found a tiny Texaco out in the middle of nowhere. The bathroom was out back and Suz had to get the key from the pimply-faced teenager behind the counter.

Henry and Tess went in for coffee and snacks: two stale crullers and a package of Gummi worms. Val stood outside smoking, insisting she didn’t want anything to eat or drink.

“She seems a little lost without Spencer, huh?” Henry said to Tess when they were by the register. Tess shrugged. She thought Val seemed a little lost all the time, no matter who she was with.

When they all met back at the van, Henry couldn’t find the keys.

“I coulda sworn I left them in the ignition,” he said. He searched his pockets. The others looked all over the parking lot, in the store. No keys.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Tess complained. “They couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air.”

“We could hot-wire it,” Val suggested.

Henry laughed. “Right. And who knows how to do that?”

Val looked at Suz. “I figured Suz might.”

Suz shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint, babycakes, but I guess my limitless talents have a limit after all.”

“Do you have a spare set?” Tess asked.

“Back at the dorm,” Henry answered.

It took them ten minutes to search for enough change to call Henry’s roommate, Isaac, on the pay phone. Isaac wasn’t there. He was off campus at his girlfriend’s, whose phone had been turned off because she didn’t pay the bill.

“Jesus!” Tess moaned as she stood next to Henry, listening to his end of the conversation.

Henry left a lengthy message at the dorm, giving the name of the gas station, the town they were in, the exit number, and the location of the spare keys. “Tell him I’ll give him a hundred bucks. My firstborn. Whatever it takes for him to get those keys down here,” Henry said to the kid who answered the phone.

“We could hitchhike,” Val suggested after Henry hung up.

“No one’s gonna pick four of us up,” Tess said, already imagining the horror of being separated from the others, alone in some serial killer’s car.

“Tess is right,” Suz said. “I say we stay put and wait for Isaac to rescue us. Besides,” she said, crossing the parking lot to the grassy slope behind the gas station, “It’s kind of pretty here. We’ve got provisions. A bathroom. And this…” She pulled an enormous joint out of her pouch of Drum.

Henry, Gummi worms, and marijuana—Tess couldn’t possibly ask for more. “I vote for staying,” Tess said, plunking herself down on the hillside.

They formed a rough circle in the dead brown grass and Suz
lit the joint. It was early December, but freakishly warm. Tess’s knee was pressed against Henry’s, and from time to time, she reached over to take a Gummi worm from the open package on his lap. When they were good and high, weaving fallen brown oak leaves into their hair, whistling through grass blades, and all secretly hoping Isaac would never show up, Suz said, “Do you want to hear something that will change your lives forever?”

Tess held her breath expectantly, looked over at Henry, whose eyes were glistening, all lit up and locked on Suz.

“It’s something I realized that night, when I burned my sculpture.”

They each nodded, drawing in closer, as if Suz herself were the fire this time and they all wanted to get warm.

“Art, true art, isn’t about putting marks on paper or canvas. It’s not about building sculptures. It’s about tearing it all the fuck down.”

Suz had mastered this way of talking, this beautiful ebb and flow of words that drew Tess in, trapped her somehow, made her never want to leave.

“Think about it,” she went on. “Destruction is the beginning of all creativity. Without it, there can be no transformation. No rebirth. It’s the most powerful force there is.”

Tess nodded vigorously. The whole thing made perfect sense. Tess felt as if her whole concept of not only art, but the world itself, was being cracked wide open right then and there by this girl in black leggings and combat boots.

Suz was beautiful, but not in a magazine-model kind of way. Her teeth were a little crooked, her nose a bit too small for her face, but these things made her more stunning somehow. The thing that drew them to her was the thing that had made all of them come to Sexton in the first place: they were all outsiders, people on the fringe. And no one, it seemed, understood this better than Suz. She turned her difference into a source of power,
power that radiated from her, humming, a live thing that sent sparks out to anyone who listened.

When Suz had finished describing her epiphany, her vision for a group of renegade artists, Compassionate Dismantlers, she had them all—hook, line, and sinker.

“So who would be in this group?” Henry asked.

Suz smiled, licked her lips, looked at each of them in turn. “You. All of you.”

“Just us?” Tess asked, her heart beating a little fast at the thought that she was one of the chosen.

Suz nodded. “It needs to start small. Be people who are committed. People we can all trust. We’re going to be doing some seriously crazy shit—breaking and entering, fucking stuff up. The group needs to be made up of people who can keep secrets.”

Henry nodded. “I can keep a secret.”

“So you’re in, then?” Suz asked.

“I’m in.”

“Me too,” said Tess, looking at Henry when she said it.

They all looked at Val.

“Val here,” Suz said, leaning over to brush the hair back away from Val’s bloodshot eyes, which were focused on the brown grass, “she’s a walking secret. A born Dismantler if I ever saw one.”

Val looked up at Suz, smiled shyly.

“So what about it, babycakes? Are you ready to meet your destiny head-on? To set the whole motherfucking world on fire?”

Val nodded.

“Say it,” Suz said. “Say you’re going to set the motherfucking world on fire.”

Val stood up, cupped her hands over her mouth, and shouted down the hill, to the valley below, “I, Valerie Delmarco, am going to set the motherfucking world on fire!”

Suz laughed. “Beautiful,” she said. “Now we’ve got our first mission to plan.”

S
HE LOWERED THE RAZOR
blade, traced the surface of her skin gently, a soft, wanting caress, then, not being able to hold back another second, pushed the blade into her left forearm. Relief so sweet she let out a little moan.

The cut she made was short, not too deep. Just right. Perfect. She raised the blade, let herself do it again, another cut perpendicular to the first. No need to hurry. She could savor each luscious second. The others had gone swimming. She told them she was tired and needed a nap.

“What the fuck is this? What the fuck are you doing?” Suz swept back the makeshift curtain surrounding their bed. “Give me the razor!”

“Suz, I…What are you doing back?”

“Just hand me the fucking razor blade. Now!”

Mutely, Winnie passed the blade to her and watched as Suz left to throw it away. When Suz came back through the curtain, she was in tears.

“I thought we were done with all this shit,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Winnie told her, thinking how like Suz it was
to say
we
instead of
you
. Was she really all that different from Spencer?

“Why?” Suz asked, but Winnie could not answer. Suz took hold of Winnie’s arm, studying the cuts the way a doctor or scientist might. She kissed them lightly, then poked the tip of her tongue out and licked away the blood. “I love you,” Suz said, and Winnie pulled Suz’s face up to kiss her. Winnie tasted her own blood on Suz’s lips, salty and metallic, like a lucky penny.

“T
HE WAY
I
SEE
it, the cutting is all Spencer’s fault,” Suz said to Winnie later, as they sat naked in the little tent room they’d created with tapestry walls. Suz touched her lighter to the metal bowl of the bong she’d made from the plastic honey bear, took a hit from the pointed spout of his cap. “And the others. The whole string of fucked-up boys who treated you like a little-girl sex toy.” She passed the bong to Winnie, then ran her fingers gently over Winnie’s scars, which tingled with Suz’s touch.

“Spencer put you in a box. Took away your very personhood. Invalidated your feelings. So of course you cut. You cut to feel something real.”

Suz had part of it right. The part about cutting to feel. But she was wrong to blame Spencer or any of the other boys Winnie had been with. It wasn’t about them.

After Suz was gone, Winnie started cutting again. Not often. Just when she needed to feel something. After Suz died, Winnie lived inside a void, a quiet vacuum in which no sound, no touch could penetrate. She felt nothing. Only when she took out the blade and drew it over her skin, forming neat little lines in rows along her arms and thighs, crisscrossing the old scars, only then did she remember what love was like.

Last Friday, her stepmother forwarded the postcard to her.
To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Isn’t it just, babycakes?

Winnie packed a bag and headed for the cabin in Vermont the day she got the card, thrilled and terrified to discover that it was in much the same shape as it had been when they’d left it.

What’d you expect, babycakes? Did you think the maid would have come? Some happy housekeeper doing her duty out in the woods?

Winnie immediately went to work cleaning up. She took two pickup loads of trash to the dump: old clothes chewed through by mice, shelf after shelf of ruined food, hardened tubes of acrylic paint. Some discoveries, like the unsent ransom note, she burned.

In the back corner of the kitchen, she found the aquarium they’d put the jar of frogs’ eggs in. She covered her nose and mouth with a bandanna, held her breath, and carried the tank out of the cabin and into the woods behind it, eyes watering, throat closing instinctively as she gagged and retched from the smell. She dumped the thick, green scum and discovered that there, settled on the bottom of the tank, were frog bones—paper-thin skulls, a front foot so like a miniature human hand that Winnie had to count the digits to be sure.

She filled a big black Hefty bag with things that had belonged to Suz and drove it down to the beach. Winnie stripped off all her clothes, added some rocks to the bag, and swam it out to the middle of the lake.

Back at the cabin, Winnie swept and scrubbed until her back ached and her hands were rubbed raw. She washed all of the cups, bowls, plates, and silverware in hot water mixed with bleach. She put out tempting little piles of poison for the mice.

As she cleaned and brought things to some semblance of order, she collected artifacts from their long-ago summer: sketches on curled yellow-edged paper, Polaroids shoved in a drawer, a box of drawing charcoal. She tacked some of the old drawings to the wall, set a box of matches and some ancient, dried-up scraps of Drum tobacco next to an ashtray on the table. Sometimes,
looking around, she could trick herself into believing that time had stood still here and Suz was just about to walk through the door.

Once the cabin was clean and in order, she began, like a paleontologist assembling old bones, to reconstruct Suz’s moose, which lay in a collapsed heap out back.

Winnie branched out, leaving the cabin to watch Tess and Henry’s house. She followed Tess to the farmers’ market and art galleries. She tailed Henry to his office.
DEFORGE PAINTING
said the sign. Winnie remembered Henry going to meet his father there years before. Once, she came along and the old man took the two of them to lunch. Henry respected his father, but had, Winnie felt, a healthy sort of contempt for the life he’d chosen—the painting company, the old rambling farmhouse, the Chamber of Commerce dinners, meetings at the Elks Club. Now Henry had chosen the same thing. Or perhaps, thought Winnie, the life had chosen him, pulling him along like a strong current Henry had been unable to swim against.

She knew all about those currents. Wasn’t that what had led her back home to Boston, to work in a series of crummy low-wage jobs: aide in a nursing home, night clerk at a 7-Eleven? Jobs her mother might have taken. Jobs her family expected her to fall into, in spite of the fancy BA from Sexton. Her life, after Sexton, after the Dismantlers, for the most part, had been shit. Shit jobs, shit relationships. She tried to write and couldn’t. Poetry had left her. Or maybe she’d left it. Turned her back on that part of herself the night Suz died.

Winnie felt so alone after Suz died that she had tried to kill herself twice and had somehow been a failure at that too. The first time she just passed out and woke up sticky with blood that seeped pitifully from the all-too-shallow cuts on her wrists and groggy from the over-the-counter sleeping pills she’d swiped from the 7-Eleven. The second time was just pure idiocy. She
was at home for Thanksgiving dinner and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom where she took everything she could find in the medicine cabinet. When she didn’t come down for pie, her father broke down the door. Her stepmother, having watched one too many episodes of
ER,
began searching for a pulse. She pulled back Winnie’s sleeve and caught sight of the scars. While they waited for the ambulance, her stepmother undressed her the rest of the way—Winnie could just see the scene in her mind’s eye, her stupid, sturdy stepmother yanking the clothes off Winnie’s seemingly lifeless body, getting angrier and angrier—and saw the extent of the damage. Winnie woke up in the psych ward, where she stayed for six weeks. Then she was deemed well enough to leave and given two prescriptions and a referral to a community mental health center, all of which went in the trash can at the T station.

Y
ESTERDAY MORNING, HER STEPMOTHER
called her on her cell to say a private investigator had phoned, looking for her—a man named Spencer Styles was dead, found holding in his own hand a postcard identical to the one that had come for Winnie.

Fueled by this bit of news, she’d finally gotten up the nerve to go pay an actual visit to Henry and Tess. She’d driven up the driveway to their house, sure she’d announce herself, have a cup of coffee, and reminisce while showing them the strange postcard she’d received, but no one was home. Winnie walked around the old brick farmhouse, peering in windows. She sat in a wooden chair beside the pool, even took off her tennis shoe and dragged her toes through the blue water. She made her way across the yard and discovered the sculpture garden. She stopped to watch the goldfish in the cement pond, then to study the statue of Tess and Henry as terrified half lions. It was clearly Tess’s work.

Winnie continued on to the far corner of the garden and
found the grotto, the photo of Suz right at the center. Winnie knelt down so she was at eye level with her old lover, and it was as if she had caught Suz off guard, surprised. Winnie had looked through some window to the past, pried away all the years and found Suz startled to see her, as if Winnie herself were the ghost.

After seeing the grotto, she hurried back to her car and drove straight back to the old cabin, to the very place the photo had been taken, feeling like the line between past and present was too blurry to face Henry and Tess just then.

Then, this afternoon, she decided to try again, using a new approach. She left her number in the mailbox for Henry. It would be easier if he came to her. If she saw them one at a time.

B
ACK IN THE CABIN
, Winnie peels off Suz’s soaking-wet clothes and crawls into her sleeping bag, glad to be done with this beast of a day where nothing went as planned. She may have just blown any chance of reconnecting with Henry and Tess. She never did know how to reach out to people.

“Idiot,” she mumbles to herself.

The moon plays with the shadows in the loft, stretching them out, making the building seem as if it has its own set of scars. And it does. Winnie knows. She can feel them. The cabin aches the way Winnie herself aches. She reaches under her pillow and takes out the stack of letters, flips on a flashlight, and reads the first:

Carefully, so as not to tear the worn pages, Winnie puts the letter aside, finds the page below, and stares down at the words scrawled in blue ink.

THE COMPASSIONATE DISMANTLER MANIFESTO

We, the Compassionate Dismantlers, hold five truths to be self-evident.

Winnie tucks the letter back into its tattered envelope, back under her pillow.

“We’re going to stay here forever,” Suz had promised one night, just weeks before her death. “Can’t you feel it?”

Yes. Winnie could feel it. She’d felt it for years, a terrible aching tug at her chest, pulling her back to the old cabin. She felt it stronger than ever now that she’d returned, as she patched holes in the roof with a bucket of tar from the hardware store, or lay in her sleeping bag in the loft listening to the mice munching on poison.

Suz was here still. Waiting for Winnie to carry out one last act of Dismantling.

“I’m here, Suz,” Winnie whispers to the shadows as she reaches down to run her fingers over the ridges of her scars. “I haven’t forgotten.”