Kay takes a step inside the cabin. She is an actor following a set of stage directions. Or, it is as if she’s planned this herself months ago. She’s been completely true to herself, and she’s brought herself here. She wonders if Ben, too, has wheeled himself along the tracks he has laid with his own hands. It’s as if they were supposed to be here, the Universe kept bumping them up against each other.
And here, right here, they collide.
“Why didn’t you go? Why didn’t you go, Kay?” Ben takes off his cap, smooths his dark hair, his voice is familiar but not quite his own. “I told ya to go, I gave ya the chance.”
But she has nowhere to go, not the woods, not the lake. She sits down across from him. Her hands splay out on the table, she feels the rough grain. She wonders how Ben will kill her. She thinks he will either strangle her or drown her. There is a dog leash on the table between them. She thinks of the nape of Freya’s neck, the way the fine pale hair curls in the deep dent of her atlas bone. She thinks of Tom’s breath against her cheek, his kisses like butterflies. She remembers the rain on the tin roof, and the war coming closer to Gol, but Tom was sleeping, little naked rabbit, little pip, against her breast, and the wind and the rain, and the girl in the bed next to her bathing her own baby, a boy. He had hydrocephalus, his head like a melon wobbling on the vine of his neck. He would die within days, but his mother was smiling and cooing, pouring warm water over his smooth black body. Such tenderness in the broken world.
Ben can do anything he wants to her. He has become her death; he has become her life. She will simply disappear, she is already disappearing. Women disappear all the time—read the papers—no bodies are ever found in these woods, these lonely roads. “Nosey, hey,” he says, he hears himself say in this other voice, this voice echoing back at him. “What ya wanta ask s’many questions for?”
I was on my way back. She hears Michael, only he is not angry, but anguished—she hears the difference in tone; and she lets him finish what he’d begun to say. I was on my way back to you. To you, Kay, to you. Those are the words, all of them. I was on my way back to you, he is saying to her, and she is listening. What if Michael isn’t having an affair with Barbara? What if he has forgiven her for Gol because he knows her, the person who sees garbage bags on the side of the road and wants to look inside—she is still the vain, brave, curious woman he fell in love with. The kitchen is behind him, around him, where they live, the row of cereals—Cheerios, Rice Krispies waiting for her. What if she has forgiven him for the bucket, such careless cruelty, and the uncomprehending face of the child who owned it. But it’s not enough to apologize, sorry-sorry; she and Michael need to sit at the kitchen table. They need to accommodate each other in some new way not just the old lie of marriage. They must raise two fine children. It’s not as simple as it looks. It’s a life’s work.
She begins to cry. She’s no longer pretty, her face contorting into itself. She doesn’t want to die. But what choice does Ben have? The vicious narrowing and winnowing to this point, this time and place, this table between them. He and Frank planned to steal the dogs of rich people. They were going to run away to Australia. And his mother’s mouth agape, she’s trying to explain or apologize—I’m sorry, Benben—but he didn’t know what for. Hunger was normal, fear was normal, what Richie-Dinko-Honeybaby-Bob did with their hands, boots, fingers, words was normal. There’s a boy in the back seat of a Pajero who has never eaten a summer peach or been swimming in water sun-sparkling like champagne under a blue sky. He will not grow straight and tall but stooped and grey, a fungus child in the cellar. Every moment of Ben’s life is happening concurrently, an unrelenting, crowded, shouting present, shouting so he can’t hear himself, he hears Ammon, Come on down, boy, come and join the fun.
Her own death seems obscure, a date on a calendar that is suddenly at hand. There were many times she could have died. Life is not owed her. She has wasted, she has squandered. She doesn’t want to die, of course not, but what she is realizing is that the not wanting to die is only part of it—not wanting; while there is this other pull, far stronger, this deep pulling riptide, this wanting. Her body fills with wanting—a howling deaf and blind wanting—longing for her children. Wanting, longing. She can see the street where they live, the steps to the front door. She goes up the steps, she peers through the window on the door, she presses her face against the glass. She would crawl through fire, she would cut off her own arms just for that last glimpse.
Here we are, right here. The past rushing toward us along steel cables, binding us to what has been done to us and what we have done, forcing us to this intersection, this particular nexus. Here, the future blooms outward, it frays or radiates.
Kay puts out her hand, her hand a fist that she opens, finger by finger, exposing the soft, vulnerable palm, the skin still raw and burned. Why is it so difficult to stop being selfish? Disappointed? How completely and wilfully we misunderstand each other.
*
“Ben,” she says. “Let me.”
Margot’s clavicle. He had watched the bone move beneath her skin and she had turned and smiled and he fell into her, shining and clean.
He finds killing easy; this has surprised him, and he could keep on killing. Shevaunne, Dinko, this woman, they just disappear, he’s tidying them away. He remembers Dinko’s struggle, as if he really cherished his life after all. Why do you want the boy? Dinko asked. Why do you want the boy? The answer stirs in the corner of the room. Ben turns to see it, there, in the dark corner, the seam, the joist of the house. He keeps his eyes sharp, and after a moment, the shape emerges, trembling. He hadn’t known that pigs tremble with fear. He’d come looking for Frank and heard noises he didn’t understand. He opened the front door and heard noise in the basement, voices, and so he stepped down, and Come on down and join the party, Ammon said, and he slipped on the blood. He couldn’t see, his eyes could not understand what he was seeing, the pigs, humpbacked, squealing, two or three other men and Frank on the far side holding up the electric knife, the kind used to carve the turkey.
Pig fights, Ammon said, Ammon grinned, teeth flashing. The blood gets them all riled up.
Frank turned on the blade. He looked at Ben and Ben said Please in his mind, he tried to send the message to Frank, he was thinking so hard. Just come with me, we’re faster than these men, let’s just run away, up the stairs into the woods, we’ll hotwire a car and drive up to the cabin, we’ll cross the border, Canada then Australia, but Frank plunged the whirring blade into the back of a pig.
Why do you want the boy? Dinko is looking up from his bed of slurry. Why do you want the boy, Benny?
Jake is standing with Lacey. She has brought him a suitcase. She hates how the kids have to use garbage bags to move their things, their second-hand clothes, their donated toys, greasy with the film of other children. She smiles at Ben, she walks toward him with Jake, “Are you ready?” There is kindness, there is grace. He wants to breathe it in and breathe it out; he wants to be this kindness. Ben kneels down, as if at an altar, to embrace this boy, this lost son, lost self.
This is what he wants.
Let me. Let me live. Let me love, Kay says, the words tumbling out from the mouth that kissed him. Let me love, Ben, let us, let us love.
Why didn’t she go, he told her, warned her, who is she, a liar, a liar, yer nosey askin’ after Frank and why why why what’s it to do with ya? He moves his hands to the dog leash. She will not be found, nor will she be alone, down there.
“Do octopuses pee?”
He has misheard her; he tilts his head. Her nose is red, her face wet, misshapen, ugly.
“Do you know if they do?” she asks desperately.
The dog leash is smooth in his rough hands; he feels its texture, the manufactured strength of it. He lifts his hands up, up, as if offering a sacrament. Does she sense the shifting air or see his shadow? Can she hear the whispering spell of Ammon? Ammon is inside him. He is inside Ammon. He feels the hissing pleasure of spite: to hurt for hurting’s sake.
But the lake glitters, he can see it through the cabin’s door, the smooth absolving surface. Frank’s grave, where he had been happiest, the water a blanket he pulled over himself to sleep soundly at last.
A dozen small birds flock across the water—he can’t be sure from here, perhaps they are cedar waxwings. They move the air with their wings, and he feels the current all the way here. He feels who he wants to be, not hewn by the past, the lumbering damaged past but the unweighted possibility of the future. What may be, what may be despite, despite the past. He took this from Shevaunne—this possibility; perhaps she wanted him to take it, why she came with him, surrendering the boy. With her junkie’s intuition she saw in him Jake’s only chance. And why he turned around, turned around and went back to Littleton. And why he wants the boy. Jake is his only chance.
There is a great turning inside his chest. The turning is difficult. The machinery is deeply grooved by habit; to ask it to rotate in the other direction, against the heavy gravity of the past, against the crushing weight of Ammon, the weight of his mother and her lovers, their careless, terrible cruelty. It takes all his strength. But he turns, he turns around, turns his heart, and the rusty hinges of his heart slowly open, the red, plush chambers, and his blood begins to flow the other way.
And he lowers his hands back down to the table. He looks at Kay, she looks at him.
“About the octopuses,” he says. “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”