They were on the beach when they heard the rumbling. A growing thunder from beyond the saw grass. Rose’s eyes tripped over the waves of green, searching for the source.
“That can’t be good.”
She turned to Hugo and he flashed her a grin. Tall gorgeous tan toothy Hugo. Rose’s Hugo.
The rumbling grew louder. Closer.
“We should get moving.”
He shrugged, smile still on his lips.
The tops of the most distant grass began to bend and shift, cutting a wide swath toward them. The thunder broke into its distinct components, the sound of a thousand hooves beating the ground.
“Oh God.” Rose began to run just as the antlers of the first Bucks burst from the grass.
A stampede.
Hugo was closer to the edge of the shore. His feet bit into the sand, seeking traction as he sprinted farther up the beach, the shifting grit slowing his pace.
But despite this, he was in less danger than Rose, who had been on firmer ground but yards closer to the point where the Bucks had emerged from the grass.
The animals were panicking. Their eyes wide, revealing the recessed whites. They were gnashing their teeth at one another, lips curled, exposing ruminant incisors.
But more dangerous were the antlers. There were no females in the island’s herds, no gentle does, only thousands of horned males. Their antlers grew to enormous proportions, points sharpened against the trees in the forest or in combat against one another.
Rose’s bare feet carried her closer to the loose soil that banked the saw grass; she could move faster here than she could closer to Hugo on the open reaches of the shore. Behind her she could hear the clattering of antlers striking one another. The Bucks were running close, preferring the safety of the stampeding herd to the less treacherous exposure of solitude.
The Spider leaped out of the saw grass, landing on the beach, its diamond-shaped metatarsals sending a spray of pink sand into the air. It was a large one, even by the standards of the island, its thorax hovering ten feet above the ground.
“Rose!” Hugo was still moving, making the best of his head start, but his neck was turned toward the monster behind the oncoming horde. He needed her to know of the real danger.
She knew.
The Bucks were gaining on her, their panic rising now the hunter was in the open.
Rose angled closer to the blades of grass, reaching out toward them. Every step that didn’t push her farther away from the Bucks and their clamoring hooves and their clattering racks was a risk. But she needed a weapon.
The first two plants slid from her grasp. She was moving too fast to catch hold. But she was able to wrap her palm around the third, using the momentum from her body to pull it from the ground.
In her hand the blade transformed, growing a handle to fit her grip, pulling into itself, its sides sharpening. A sword. As strong as steel, but still as green as the plant it had come from.
She had what she needed, but they were running out of space. Up ahead the saw grass gave way to a rocky outcropping … the herd was going to get pushed onto the beach.
It was then that they overtook her.
She was lucky she wasn’t speared in those first moments. The lead Bucks were less close together than their brothers farther back. Rose pulled as close as she could to the body of the nearest animal, her free hand trying to catch hold of the lowest prong of its antlers. Maybe if she could swing onto its back …
Behind her and yet somehow above came an inhuman scream. The Spider had plucked one of the animals from the rear of the herd, seizing it with its enormous palpae. Rose turned her head in time to see the Buck’s spine crunch between the monster’s dark mandibles. The Buck screamed again before folding in half and slipping farther into the Spider’s maw.
The herd turned onto the beach. Rose tried to keep apace, but she had two legs to their four. Ahead of her the end of a Buck’s antler caught the eye of a second, blinding it. The creature tumbled, its front legs folding.
Rose leaped over its body just in time to miss the second animal that collided with it.
Where was Hugo?
The sword felt sweaty, slippery in her hand. Her thighs burned. She could barely breathe.
Where was he?
Movement to her right. A dark shape. Brown hair studded with sand. Striking from above.
Rose veered left and the Spider’s palpae seized the Buck next to her, yanking it from the ground. She looked up; its hooves tread air, still running, going nowhere but into the beast’s mouth. A spray of blood hit the back of her neck as the Spider consumed its latest morsel.
Where the hell was Hugo?
A stream of sunlight bored a hole through the clouds. It threaded through the air, making its way to the surface of the island. The thread grew, prying the clouds from the sun, until the whole of the far end of the beach was alight with a magic shimmer.
There he was. Standing in the shadow, watching the edge of the newly glowing sand. His face was calm. Waiting.
Behind him the line of sunlight raced forward, moving toward Hugo and the galloping herd.
He turned as beams struck the sand just inches from his feet and began running toward Rose. The vanguard of a pure line of light.
The Spider was now among them, keeping pace above the charging Bucks. Rose looked up. Its abdomen loomed above her, its pelt sticky with gore and sand. A metatarsus pierced through the air, punching the ground next to Rose. Large hairs jutted from the shell of its mottled leg.
Rose hacked at it with the blade, piercing its carapace. There was a wet snap as the sword cracked into its exoskeleton, a brittle break into the meat of its leg.
The Spider reared up with a shriek, its lower abdomen dropping, knocking the bodies of the Bucks in its path forward. The deer, wild-eyed, broke through its legs, scattering onto the beach.
Rose pulled on the blade. It was wedged in the ugly shell of its leg. She wrapped both hands around it—
Something whisker soft brushed the underside of her arms.
And then suddenly she was in the air, sword in her hand, pulled out like a splinter—and she the tweezers. The hairs of the Spider’s pedipalps jutted through the soft cotton of her blouse, a secure hold about her waist.
The beast was still shrieking, a river of blue-green blood gushing from the rent in its leg. It shook Rose, whipping her about—
* * *
—giving her a view of Hugo, running toward them. A blinding edge of light in his wake.
And then the beams hit the area beneath his feet … and he was flying. Forward motion launching him from the glowing sand directly into the Spider’s thorax, driving it backward. Rose was thrown from its grip, the sword flying from her sweat-drenched palm.
Hugo clung to the beast’s carapace, his hands catching hold of its piebald layer of hair. The creature shrieked as he braced himself on the edges of its joints. Out of reach and climbing.
Rose hit the sand solid on her back, all the air in her lungs rushing out at once. She gasped, stunned by the impact.
“Rose! The sword!”
Hugo had crested the Spider’s back and was clinging as it whipped around wildly, trying to throw him off.
Rose rolled to her knees. She felt like she could barely see. Still, she had been holding the sword only a minute ago. Where had it gone?
The Spider’s shrieking rocketed up an octave as Hugo saddled himself on the bony ridge above its eye.
A glint under the sand. A few feet away. Rose crawled to it, frantic, her hands sweeping …
A pair of bright cartoon eyes winked up at her beneath the pink silt.
Rose felt her brows crease.
It was the Orange Tastee. The sun-faded fiberglass speaker from the drive-through. She brushed at the sand, pink particles escaping into the battered grille of its mouth. What is this doing here?
“Rose! There.”
She looked up. The Spider was thrashing, its legs unable to reach the pest on its back. Its motion had carried them farther down the shoreline. Hugo was pointing away from Rose. Her eyes followed the line of his hand.
The sword gleamed bare in a mound of coral sand. Like Excalibur, only waiting to be pulled.
Rose raced toward it, the mystery of the Orange forgotten. She wrapped her hand around its handle and winged it, throwing it end over end toward Hugo.
He caught it in the air and drove it two-handed into the beast’s flat black eye. The Spider collapsed to the ground, a pulsing hemorrhage of oily blood spilling down its body.
Atop its corpse, Hugo laughed and brushed his hair out of his eyes. He smiled down at Rose on the sand.
* * *
His car had not been at the Orange Tastee when she arrived, an hour and fifteen minutes after kissing the boys good-bye and watching them find their seats on the school bus.
Maybe it was his day off.
She searched for his house by instinct, lefts and rights by feel, not remembering the dark path she had followed him on that night. Though the town was small, daylight revealed a sad sameness to the dwellings of its citizens. Each street was identical in its shabbiness. She drove through its tired little neighborhoods, turning onto streets labeled “Oak” and “Sycamore” that showed no growth of either of those noble species. Her heart raced, convinced she would never find the place where the Man Who Was Not Hugo lived.
It was the coil of garden hose that finally let her know she had found it. Its neatness, a tidy stack, unique in this ugly, fallow place. And then she saw his car in the driveway, two cement strips separated by a patch of dying grass.
Rose noticed that the Man Who Was Not Hugo’s license plate read 349SXY. She presumed it wasn’t intentional and was instead one of those accidental DMV abbreviations people were sometimes saddled with: 47GYN0, L3BTW7, 57ROTF.
She parked opposite. A few houses down. Close enough to see … not close enough to draw notice.
He exited about fifteen minutes later, wearing the same blue jacket she had seen on him before. On his head was a battered Broncos cap, its cloth-over-plastic bill frayed on the edge. Rose could almost see him as good-looking. The kind of attraction that increased as you got to know someone. He was older, paler, and at least ten to twenty pounds overweight, but certainly not repulsive in any way.
At least no more repulsive than she was in comparison with the woman she was in her dreams.
I guess we have that in common, Rose thought … and then she shook off the ridiculousness of her supposing this actually was Hugo.
He bounded down the stairs and into the car without looking up, without looking over, without noticing the minivan parked across the street or the watching woman behind its wheel.
The Walmart she followed him to was three towns away.
The Man Who Was Not Hugo found a parking space and locked his car just as Nemo was reunited with Marlin. Synchronicity.
From the back of the car, Penny’s voice said, “Mama? We go in now?”
Rose turned to her daughter. Penny grinned at her from the car seat. She kicked her legs, little feet ending in the scalloped white sandals she had insisted on wearing that morning.
Through the windshield, Rose could see the Man Who Was Not Hugo pull a cart from the row and head toward the automatic doors.
“Yes. We go in now, honey.”
* * *
Rose knew this wasn’t healthy. She knew people had a name for this behavior. She knew that following anyone, much less a complete stranger, was generally the first part of those real-crime television shows that ran constantly on the higher reaches of her cable box … and that after the commercial break the story always took a turn for the worse.
But she assured herself that she wasn’t doing anything that wrong.
She was just looking.
And Penny had been perfectly happy to watch videos in the car. As far as she was concerned, today was no different from any other day she ran around town doing chores with Mama.
Rose figured it wasn’t even a complete ruse, as long as she got a few things here. If they happened to pass something the family needed, she would just drop it in her cart.
Besides, they would look less suspicious that way.
Rose shook her head. People who are just shopping at Walmart don’t worry that their empty carts look suspicious.
But it did not stop her from circling the store until she caught sight of the faded orange of his hat. Perusing the shelves in the automotive aisle.
Rose paused by a display of paper goods. Rolls of Bounty paper towels. Walmart was rolling back the price to $8.99 for thirteen. Rose took note that this was a good deal even as she cheated her body behind the display so she could see him.
The Man Who Was Not Hugo was crouching by the motor oils. He had pulled two from the shelves and was comparing them, reading their backs. Judging the various weights. The advantages one brought over the other for a few dollars more.
Rose studied him.
The subtle arc of the beds of his fingernails. The way his dark hair curled under the plastic joining of the cap. The way the bone of his wrist met and twisted beneath the meat of his hand.
Rose could almost see those hands as she had last night. Plucking a shining green blade out of the sky, driving it down into the brain of a monster. Strong hands.
It was impossible. Everything about this man was impossible. How could this stranger look so like the man who lived in her mind?
“Mama!”
He looked up, his attention drawn by Penny’s shout.
Rose quick-stepped behind the display, her heart racing.
“Mama. We look at toys now?”
Rose shook her head and fled. Trying to catch her breath as she pushed Penny and the empty cart toward the front of the store and escape.
* * *
Rose’s surveillance of the Man Who Was Not Hugo went on for weeks.
It became routine. Put boys on bus, pack snacks for Penny, drive to Hemsford, follow him.
She became an expert in the pattern of his life. That he did his errands during the week told her that his days off were Tuesdays and Thursdays—from which Rose extrapolated that he must work on weekends. His visits to the Laundromat told her that he didn’t own a washer or a dryer. Rose would watch him as he sat outside reading, waiting for his clothes to finish; he favored cheap science fiction, the kind with aliens and large-breasted women on the covers. He ate lunch out a few times at a local pizza joint, ordering the salad. Through the windows Rose had noticed the way he stabbed at the iceberg shreds, dousing them in ranch dressing.
That’s exactly how Hugo would eat salad, she thought. I mean, if I ever saw him eat salad.
The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away, a trip he dutifully took once a week. He always stopped at one of the larger towns’ chain restaurants before heading to the store. Olive Garden. Chili’s. Applebee’s. Rose’s heart sank whenever he pulled into one of these places … she knew she had no chance of watching him from the windows, their darkened interiors protecting him from her scrutiny.
After the close call in the Walmart, Rose never again followed him inside the places where he ran his errands. She knew she could very easily slip inside one of these restaurants, just another customer. Order the kid’s meal for Penny. Watch him from the darkness of an upholstered booth.
But if she did, he might see her.
The thought of this terrified Rose.
Rose didn’t know what she thought would happen if the Man Who Was Not Hugo saw her.… Something … something not bad, but also not good.
The idea of it made her stomach feel hard. He couldn’t see her. Shouldn’t see her.
So she stayed outside the restaurants and the Laundromat. Hidden in the safety of her minivan.
In all this time she saw him take only one phone call. He had stepped outside the Orange Tastee, cell to his ear. Paced back and forth in the shadow of the restaurant’s eaves. As he talked, he squinted at the bright cars passing on the street. And for a brief moment, his eyes had passed over her car, parked on the opposite side.
For an instant Rose felt as though he had seen her. Caught.
Adrenaline flooded her body, causing her muscles to tense, her breath to quicken, pupils to dilate, the delicate hair on her skin to lift at the root.
But he looked away quickly, seeing only the reflection of the street on her windshield. Rose knew she was safe.
But her body still roiled with the aftereffects of the flight impulse. It took minutes for her heart to steady. The hairs on the back of her neck and beneath her panties shifted, settling back to their unalerted positions.
His phone call was short. Eight minutes, Rose noted, before he headed back inside.
The Man Who Was Not Hugo led a life of quiet routine. He seemed happy enough, though Rose had seen an existence that looked lonely. Probably single, she thought. There was little evidence of anyone in his life.
But Rose supposed she could be missing things: things that happened on the weekend, when she could not get away to watch; things that happened in the evenings, when she was required at home.
It was during these times that she thought of him most, extracting meaning from the details she had observed. She made dinner and tended to the kids and Josh with the same parts of her mind that had driven her to Hemsford in the first place. She ran on automatic, all the while allowing her higher functions to fill with the life of the Man Who Was Not Hugo.
* * *
Penny, compliant baby, happy girl, was witness to all of this—though “witness” is a hard word to use for the way a two-year-old observes the world.
The little girl settled easily into Rose’s new routine, soothed with the electronic crack of Disney’s oeuvre playing on repeat over the minivan’s entertainment system. She napped in her car seat. Ate lunch in her car seat. Lived in her car seat.
After a spectacularly messy accident, Rose had started to bring Penny’s potty seat on these trips. This she would set up in the aisle of the car, where Pen would sit, straining her neck to keep her eyes on the still running movie.
Rose would empty the leavings in a gas station on the way back home. All the driving was certainly having an effect on how many times she needed to fill up during the week. Thankfully, Josh never looked too closely at the credit card bill.
So Rose limited Penny’s fluids. Less in meant less out.
When the car was finally too much and her little girl started whining and pulling at her seat belt straps, and even Elsa and Anna couldn’t convince her to settle, Rose would drive to the flat, grassy park on the edge of town. There she would watch Penny romp through the playground for an hour, hanging from the swings, digging in the sand. And when time was up, Penny would easily climb back into her seat, ready for another “wideo,” as she would say it. Rose would then drive back to the Orange Tastee, hoping to get one last look before heading back in time to meet the boys as they disembarked from the bus.
Penny’s mother knew none of this was good for her. Penny had a full life back home, filled with music class and pre-preschool, swimming lessons and enrichment. Penny had playdates, scheduled weeks in advance.
She deserved better than this, Rose knew.
But Penny’s willingness to go along with whatever Mommy said made it easy for Rose to think that this “thing” she was doing wasn’t all that bad. Pen wasn’t unhappy. For her, all these videos were like a vacation.
And there was the added benefit that she couldn’t yet tell anyone what Mommy was doing all day.
* * *
Rose canceled three appointments before Naomi called to ask if she was terminating therapy.
“Oh no,” Rose had said. “No. I think that would … I think that would be a bad idea.” At the moment she said this she had been on the highway, driving back from Hemsford.
When Naomi finally had her, guilted into the gloom of her office, Rose confessed only to following the Man Who Was Not Hugo once.
She told her the tale of Walmart.
Naomi’s reaction made her glad she had not let on to the deeper truth. Her therapist’s body shifted as she spoke, alerting to the danger in Rose’s words.
“This was just one time?”
“Uh-hm.” Rose was afraid a full “yes” might reveal the lie.
But leaking this smaller truth allowed Rose to finally give voice to the thoughts that had occupied her for the past weeks.
“I feel like … like, he’s hijacked my brain. It’s becoming a problem. I’m always thinking about him. Obsessing.”
Naomi was quiet.
“I know he’s not Hugo.” Said Rose firmly, “I do.”
Naomi relaxed a little in her chair. The danger had passed, her patient had a grip on reality. “Okay. Let’s try another tack. Let’s indulge this fantasy that this is the man of your dreams.”
“In,” Rose responded.
“Pardon?”
“He is the man in my dreams. Not of.”
Naomi pursed her lips at the distinction. Moved on. “What would happen if you introduced yourself?”
A granite hardness landed in Rose’s stomach.
“Rose, you’re asking me for the quickest way to detach yourself from this fixation. This man isn’t Hugo. Hugo doesn’t exist. But some part of you—the part that is obsessing over him—isn’t quite convinced. The quickest way for you to convince that part of yourself that this man isn’t who you think he is is to introduce yourself to him.”
Introduce yourself? Rose couldn’t really wrap her brain around the idea. One introduces oneself to people at weddings, to insurance salesmen, to neighbors. One doesn’t just walk up to strangers and hold out one’s hand. “Hi, my name is Rose and I’ve been stalking you for weeks.”
And this man was a stranger. Though she knew details about him, the schedule of his life, he was no more to her than any other person in the world. She didn’t even know his name. He was just some guy, who through some trick of the genetic lottery looked an awful lot like someone she had made up in her mind.
“If I do this … then what? What happens?”
“You will confirm that he is just a man. That he is not Hugo. You will be able to detach from these obsessive thoughts and go back to your normal life.”
And my normal thoughts, thought Rose.
She had been so occupied with this man, the project of following him, that it had been weeks since she had thought about what a disappointment she was. What a failure she was. What a waste of sad flesh she was.
It had been nice, obsessing about someone else instead of her own failings.
A holiday from herself.
But still, it had to stop.
Rose just wasn’t sure that letting him see her was the way. It felt perilous—though what the danger was, she had no idea.
Her stomach was still hard as stone when she drove away from Naomi’s office.
* * *
Isaac was giving the hard sales pitch as Rose got them ready for school. Talking a mile a minute: “Ben Winters said if I had a bike, then this summer we could ride on the trails by the river. And Teddy Kosar said he got a bike when he was five. And Ben said he got his when he was three, but I don’t believe him.”
“I don’t believe him either.” Adam was trying to be helpful.
Oh, Lord, thought Rose. Again with the bikes.
Isaac was refusing to act as he had in the past. Until now he had never settled for long on what toy he most desired; the constantly shifting landscape of greed made Christmas shopping difficult and birthday shopping a nightmare. At Christmastime Rose combated this proclivity by making the boys write letters to Santa in the first week of December. That way when they (inevitably) changed their minds about what they wanted, she could remind them they had written to Santa about their old heart’s desire and that he wasn’t likely to be able to read their minds.
That said, this did not keep Rose from going shopping on Christmas Eve, attempting to put whatever newer better cooler thing they craved into Santa’s sack. But at least if she failed, she had managed to curb their expectations and avoid a little bit of Christmas-morning disappointment.
Usually this far out from “B-day” Isaac would have changed his mind five or six times already, leaping from the latest gaming system to whatever new piece of masculine crap Nerf was selling and back again.
But, to Rose’s chagrin, the bike was sticking.
Rose had left toy catalogs on the kitchen table in hopes of something new catching Zackie’s eye. Instead of fast-forwarding through the ads flanking the boys’ favorite shows on the DVR as she usually did, she had let them play, steeping the boys in their bright commercial flogging.
But still the bike stuck … though Zackie had a few fresh ideas for what he’d like from his grandparents.
Finally Rose just told him to pick something else.
“But why?” he’d asked.
She had shown him the scar buried in her hair. She had told him the story of that day when Papa had shown her how to ride a bicycle.
“Bicycles are dangerous, sweetie. And I don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to you. I just want you to wait a couple more years.”
“How much longer?”
“Maybe when you’re ten.”
Isaac had closed his mouth at this. Looked away. But he was quiet.
Rose knew better than to think it was over.
Instead of accepting his mother’s proscription, Zackie began collecting evidence in his favor, hence the polling of his friends for the age at which they had gotten their bikes.
And he had, naturally, recruited Adam in this endeavor, which was even worse, as Adam discovered that most of his friends, too, already had bikes and knew how to ride them.
“Dad said the reason you got hurt is because when you were kids people didn’t wear helmets … and I would always always always wear my helmet.”
Rose wanted to murder her husband. When had he said this? He knew how she felt about it. So much for a united front.
“Did Daddy also tell you that I didn’t wake up for five days and that Baba and Papa thought I might never wake up?”
Adam’s little mouth opened. “Like Sleeping Beauty?”
Rose shook her head. “Not fun like Sleeping Beauty.”
Isaac furrowed his brow. Rose could tell he was already thinking of his next plan of attack.
Josh was repentant.
* * *
“Sorry, honey. I didn’t think it would be a thing. He just asked after you showed him your scar.”
Rose had had Josh paged. He had called immediately, thinking that something had happened to one of the children, and was relieved to find that it was just this quirk of Rose’s. He relaxed. Even though he could hear the edge of frustration in her voice, it was nice to hear it during the day. She sounded clearer than she had in recent weeks, closer.
Rose sighed. “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”
This had happened because she hadn’t been paying attention. She had been too busy thinking about that man to attend to her kids.
“Oh, before I forget, the preschool called me. They must have our numbers mixed up.”
Rose felt her heart stop. Penny hadn’t been to school in weeks.
“They left a message asking if Pen was okay. They said she hasn’t been in in a while?”
“That’s weird.” Rose felt the lie come easily. “Must be another Penny in one of the other classes. I’ll call and let them know they have the wrong one.”
“You’re such a good mom, Rose.”
Rose was quiet. She was a horrible mother. She was the worst mother. She was a negligent liar of a mother.
“I love you so much.”
“You too.”
Rose hung up. She had to fix this. She had to get rid of these thoughts that had pulled her away from her family.
Her stomach seized again.