The Mere Wife_A Novel by Maria Dahvana Headley
“Dana Mills ruined everything,” Willa says. “And now she’s just free, out there somewhere. She can do whatever she wants, and no one else can.”
He doesn’t say anything, but she can feel his thoughts now. They’re the thoughts men always have. She’s spent her life anticipating those thoughts, working around them, pouring their drinks and patting their shoulders, sewing their buttons on tightly so that they can feel secure while they undo everything. No more of that.
“I need you to find her,” Willa says. “I need you to keep us safe.”
She feels a tremor in him, the agreement they’re making, the handshake, the deal. She’s no devil. She won’t feel guilt.
“And him,” she says.
“Who?” Ben asks.
“Gren. I need you to kill them both. I need them gone from here.”
“I didn’t see him,” Ben says. “If anything, I saw a bear.”
“It wasn’t a bear,” Willa tells him. “It was wearing clothes.”
He looks at her, and finally, finally he nods. Does he believe her? Does she believe herself? She’s no longer entirely sure. It was chaos. If she got it wrong, it’s not her fault.
4:15 when Willa closes the motel room door behind them, when they both go to their cars. Yes, something hisses, and it’s a yes to an abyss, Willa walking forward to put her hand in Roger’s hand.
Do you take this man, yes, do you take his hand, yes, for rich, for poor, for sick, for health. Yes. She should have said, I don’t know.
Willa Herot is up a flight of stairs from her history, and her last name is hardly Herot now. She imagines her third wedding.
21
Hark! We slap the bell on the front desk of the police station. Though it dings like a tiny church, no congregation comes. We stand alone, unheralded, and angry. There’s been a murder, and we will have justice, even if we have to fight for it ourselves. We should be the police, that’s the truth of the matter. We do everything else.
First thing, we’d sterilize this whole place. The station smells of dirty laundry, stale coffee, and dog. We consider spritzing with the sanitizer we carry in our handbags. Instead, we barge through the station until we find Officer Ben Woolf at his desk, staring into the middle distance. Alas, there is no distance, only us, all five of us, in front of him.
Our officer is a mask of masculine tragedy, days of stubble, bags beneath his eyes. He projects grief and guilt for failing. His uniform is no longer pressed.
But he’s smiling absently, and what does he smell like? He smells like Willa Herot’s perfume. We’ve mistaken his greed for grief and his gluttony for guilt. He doesn’t even notice us. He seems to be screening a dirty movie in midair.
There’s a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets.
We know everything there is to know, and we keep it rolled into the newel posts, stuffed into the mattresses, smuggled inside our vaginas if it comes to that. Women’s clothing is made without pockets, but we come into the world equipped.
We lean on his file folders, furies dressed in midday luncheon attire.
“Are you sleeping, Officer Woolf?”
He jolts and looks up at us.
“Ladies,” he says, and blinks. “How can I help you?”
We have no illusions about men. They’re all strong until they’re skeletons. Tina brings out a string of photos. It seems we’ve hired an investigator to look through windows. It could be any blond woman and any blond man, but it isn’t.
Don’t climb our walls if you’re afraid of boiling oil.
We pass one of the photos across the desk. Officer Woolf looks at it for a moment, and swallows hard. “That’s clearly fake.”
“We’d like you to focus on recovering our grandchild,” says Diane. “And apprehending the killer of my son-in-law.”
“Instead of focusing on the recovery of his mother,” says Tina.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. “But whatever you’re implying, it’s disrespectful to both of us.”
Does Officer Ben Woolf remind us of anyone we know? Of course he does. He reminds us of some of our husbands, the way they took us, unwilling, on trophy safaris, once-in-a-lifetime trips during which we rode in Jeeps, while they got too close to lions.
No one here has ever reached the limit of her patience. No one here’s ever had an accident with her husband’s prescriptions. The thing about erection pills is that they make the blood flow away from the brain. No one here has ever, ever stood at the top of a staircase, cocktail in one hand, looking down at an oopsy-daisy.
We know what kind of man he is. A lazy one. It is our task to get him back on track. We’ve been marching the perimeter of Herot Hall since the kidnapping and murder. We’ve studied the photographs of Dana Mills before and after. Apparently we’re the only ones who care. Herot Hall has been breached. We will have a body and a perpetrator, or we will have this officer’s job.
“Ladies,” he says. “Believe me, all of our resources have been dedicated to this, and only this—”
Tina Herot slams her fist down and spills Woolf’s coffee.
“Don’t you dare lie to me,” she says. “You’ll find my grandson, and you’ll find Dana Mills. That’s an order.”
We spin as one and depart the police station. We walk to our cars, and lean on our horns. We will not surrender. We will not back down.
Soon, soon, the mountain will be covered with men in uniform, hounds, cars moving fast, people telling and yelling.
Soon, soon, we will have what is ours.
22
Hark! Yes! Dogs on duty! Criminals, teeth! Robberies, noses! Drugs! Bombs! Riding in cars with heads out the window, official vests! We’re off with our agitated officer, ten dogs without leashes, the whole company met and released, inclined by right of nose.
Our officer blows a horn, and we sniff his secrets. He’s taken a few things to keep himself awake, bulk illegal from India. Pure protein and adrenaline, chewable fear. He’s been scanning a map of the mountain, an old one, and we smell that too, railroad, crumbling paper, oily fingerprints.
Hounds in a swarming pack, moving as one sleek body, leaping a wall made of stone, an interesting smell there. Four hundred years ago someone died on this rock, a hundred years ago someone hung from that tree, thirteen seconds ago there was a squirrel, run, run, yes!
Big mountain cat spray! Drop flat to the ground, creep, no, not above, look up, careful, branches? Oh, no, oh, no, silent slinking murdering cat, ah—
Never mind. Long gone. Housecat, tiny, fluff and flea powder. Scratch over that, dig a moment in disgust, show them your work, boys, show them.
Dogs can tell how many times a person’s heart beats, how many breaths they’ve taken, whether they’re sick, whether they’re dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don’t know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them.
Dogs can feel this officer and his cowardice, making him miserable. He doesn’t want to find the things we’re looking to find. The world is full of secrets no one cares about, no one but dogs. Sniff it. He’s scared of the woman in this mountain, but he has a long yellow hair stuck to his jacket. Fur of a different beast. We sniff it. Officer has been roaming.
We huff the target sweater again. Boy, chocolate, poison divine, lick, yanked back! Dirt, bloodied knee, soap?
Sometimes we’re in a cage for days. Sometimes we’re at a café for days, waiting, biding time, eating clandestine crumbs with tongue out, casually tasting toddlers. We are rarely used to our full sniffing capacity.
“Rub his nose in it, there you go, get him the scent good.”
We already got the scent. We had the scent before you knew there was a scent, from three towns away we had the scent!
We??
“Rub his nose in it again, yeah, he’s lost the scent, there’s a good boy.”
We never lose the scent. Scents don’t disappear the way you think they do. We tug them like ropes.
Hounds running uphill, a wall of the correct smell. That sweater again. We know it by now, don’t we, and every day it smells more interesting. Now it’s coffee, doughnut, plastic sack, car keys, sexual lubricant, vodka, yellow-haired woman who smells like—
She smells like the boy we’re tracking. Where is that boy? All over the mountain.
Oh, yes! It’s the smell of the sweater, it’s the smell of the lost boy, making his way up the slope!
Highest leap, over fallen trees, over icy creek, snow to the chest! Cold paws, trip trap trop, snow ruins the smells.
Who needs to shit? Stop, paw the snow, look busy.
Oh, the horn again, RRRRWWWWAAAAAAAAAA, and it breaks the snow off branches. One of us is military, retired, brought back on a flight, misery forever. Mostly he only points for tobacco.
But. He stands over a crack in the snow, pawing, a gap in the story of Earth, a wriggle. It’s a scent he knows! Sand. Desert. Someone made of war. Bomb and bright and night and birds screeching overhead.
What’s in here, shall we? Yes, we shall.
A skinny spiral of smoke coming from a fire, a chimney under the mountain. We think about the underground, because our officer thinks about the underground. Caves, railways, trains, tracks. Where are they? A rail tie there, a barricade there. An old crack in the old earth.
Point, boys. All at once, every hound here. Paw down, nose down, show him where the scent went.
Our officer kneels.
A tiny crack, and through it, we smell the scent, of the missing, of the mother, of the other. All three, down there, out of reach, but that is not our business.
We thrust our noses into the dangling palms of police and bark our victory.
For our quest is complete!
Treats.
23
It hearkens back to the war, all of it, the mountain, the caves, and no visible villains in front of him. People hiding where they shouldn’t be able to hide. The dogs insist they’ve found Dana Mills and Dylan Herot too, but all they’ve found is smoke.
Ben Woolf stands on top of the peak, and the whole thing might be a hive teeming with his enemies, but he can’t see the evil for the trees. He’s been given intel like this before, and he has no desire to die on this damn hill. In the war, he dodged bullets, hid in alleys, pressed himself back and away from the line of fire. He went to war to be a hero, and he failed at it, never mind the body count. None of that was glory. Glory should feel good.
Now’s the time to change the course of his existence, find a murderer and bring her to justice, come back to applause from Herot Hall.
The smoke, though, is only a tendril, coming up out of the snow. There’s no passage down into the center of the Earth from here, but the dogs orbit him, certain. No one with any sense dives into fire.
He doesn’t want to go in, even if there was a way he could see to do it.
Dana Mills waits behind his eyelids, her face gaunt, her eyes shining with tears. He knows what kind of soldier she must have been. She was behind him on the slope, her knife at his jugular. She almost had him. She was tougher than he was, and the proof is in that video. Whatever happened to her, it’s still happening.
He’s watched her beheading a hundred times, and he knows that she is something unnatural. She needs to be burned, staked, any of those options. How else could she have taken him on? He outweighs her by at least a hundred pounds, and he’s a foot and a half taller than she is. No normal person is willing to die, but she was willing.
His mind is full of blood spatter, white walls, cement, words written in red. He takes a piss in the snow and feels his future, the way his kidneys will fail and his cock will go limp, the way his stomach will increase in size as his legs become pins. He tosses his head, feeling his wound stretch, seeing Dana Mills’s face. He’s still shot full of antibiotics and painkillers, but if he lets himself pause, even for a moment, he feels his jaw locking, infection spreading through his body.
He needs to do chin-ups on a construction fence, go into a dive bar and punch someone in the face, push someone in front of a speeding train.
He needs to banish this coward crouching inside him. The coward has always been there, if he’s honest. There’s a reason he’s a small town police officer. He looks down at his stomach and feels shame. One day without working out, and even his flesh turns against him.
Ben takes the dogs back to the station and takes himself to the gym. When he’s done there, he shaves his face, the bristles dulling his razor. He draws the clippers down his body, shearing away half an inch of hair. He used to get his back waxed when he was a swimmer, but waxing an entire body is no pleasure, and lately he’s taken to maintenance and laser hair removal. If his skin always feels prickly, mammals are not by nature smooth. He’s done the Internet research. Even whales are sometimes born with fur.
Good man, he whispers to himself as he shaves, over and over, the cadence soothing. He stews in the shower, steaming, and then looks at himself in the mirror. He was wrong. There’s no weight gain, no muscle loss. He’s stronger than ever. He’s strong enough to take her.
He flexes. He flexes again. He pours himself an ounce of caffeinated vitamins, throws it back like a shot. He touches the wound absently, feels it knitting, tugs the edges apart. It can wait to heal a little longer.
He returns to his house, eats a plate of beef and three egg yolks. He listens to inspirational voices, calling him from the speakers, pushing him onward, upward, Ben Woolf who’s always been destined for greatness and never yet achieved it, Ben Woolf, who is a police officer in a place where nothing ever happens.
This is the answer to his ask, he knows. She’s what he’s been waiting for. Police have no business praying for peace.
Dana Mills will be the enemy he brings out of the mountain, slung over his shoulder. He goes over the body he’ll dismantle, the way he’ll take her apart, tendon by tendon, bone by bone, cell by cell, dividing her from her soul and tearing out her heart.
He looks at the geological survey maps, all of them disagreeing, but none of them disagree about the mountain. There’s room inside it for anything the world might wish to hide. It’s been blasted and shut down, covered over, mined, flooded. Haunted too, or so goes the bullshit. Plenty of dead in that ground, but there are plenty of dead everywhere.
The only way he can think to get under that ground quietly enough to surprise her is the same way she went in, and that is by swimming. A leap, a dive, a drop through water into stone.
Into the lake, he thinks, and down to the bottom. There must be a passage. If there’s smoke, she’s the fire.
Things that don’t make sense are not things he thinks about. Dana Mills was presumed dead all these years, but that’s not his business. It will be his job to return her to the proper category.
Later, when he’s found her, and when he’s found Dylan—the kid is likely dead, but maybe he isn’t—all the men of the station, the chief, the rest of the officers, and Willa, her too, all of them will sing a song about someone being a very jolly good fellow.
He’ll be the hero who saves Herot Hall.
TELL
24
Tell me I’m going to make it, I’m thinking, but no one knows to tell me. I’m in the dark. It’s like I’m in a palace. Golden bathtubs and beheadings. There are too many things that happened in the dark, and too many things I can’t remember. I open my eyes.
I don’t know how many days we’ve been down here. I’m made of pain and heat, clammy skin, jaw
Gren is on his knees beside the stream that pours over the tracks. He looks like a kid at Disneyland, not that my kid will ever go to Disneyland. Not that I’ve been there either. But that’s what he looks like, the advertisement version, a kid on a dark ride.
Dylan’s beside him, unafraid, because he’s never had to be afraid, and because Gren is protecting him.
I’m afraid, though, of this boy’s ability to break my baby’s heart. Hasn’t everyone had a best friend?
“Your parents need you at home,” I tell Dylan. He shakes his head, but I’ve seen him in his footed pajamas, a child with everything he could ever want, spoiled and coddled.
Tenderness is dangerous.
And then I realize that I’ve said parents, and that the man I killed was his father. His face comes back to me, the man in the glass house, the same man who tucked this child into bed at night. The same man who told me to leave the party.
I killed Dylan’s father because Dylan’s father killed Gren, but Gren’s not dead, and I—
Gren’s made him a comfortable spot with leaves and a mattress of sticks. I don’t know where he’s gotten them, but I know he learned to make this mattress from me.
The two of them sleep curled up together, like halves of a whole.
“Yes. I got lost. Anything helps.” I’m hearing myself whispering it now, endless repeat, my skin against the warm sand of memory, the knobs of my spine naked and water pouring over me. Someone returning me to the living. I’m remembering the desert, without anything to keep me from it. I don’t want to remember it, but at night I feel the grit of sand in my fists.