22

Another glamorous monstrosity, beyond Lake Sumner

The closing party was hosted at a different house, just as modern and decked out as the last.

The sense of a season’s completion put a charge in the air. The mix of the company plus the stage crew and Jesse’s impressive strangers had turned into a real riot. I took the rest of Jesse’s powder in the bathroom after twenty minutes.

At a sweating lope, the party carried into the small hours of the night—and caught in the soaring fever pitch of refusing to let go of a good time, I found my vision spinning as I became startlingly aware of myself. I was crushed hard in the middle of a nattering circle of conversation. Someone had just delivered a punch line I forgot to listen for.

My head felt like it was full of cotton balls. I’d lost sight of Wesley after slipping away to touch up the makeup around my bruised cheek a few minutes after midnight, and now here I was. I excused myself for the sprawling back patio; it was drizzling outside and I could take a cigarette in peace.

I would wait for things to die down a little before going back in to find Wesley—I was well and truly done. I wanted to go home.

The dark mountain shoulders shrugged up against the night seemed to watch me in return from their abstract relief. I found with a soft panging behind my breastbone that I would miss them, the stretch of a horizon unfettered by buildings. I looked up at the small patches of stars showing through the smudged, swollen clouds, more numerous than I ever could have imagined. They were illuminated from behind by a moon three-quarters heavy with silvery light.

Something closed hard around my elbow. My cigarette fell to the ground with a hiss.

I wrenched against it, but the hold gripped down more tightly. It hauled me into the dark, and all I could do was stumble down the muddied path.

“What—?”

“Quiet.”

The hand around my arm was fierce and tense with certain fury. A hand, it was—a hand, Haas leading me at a clipped stride. Haas.

I dug my heels in, the ground scuttling uselessly under my party shoes, and tried to stop. It didn’t work. I pried at his iron grip.

“Felix, you—”

He squeezed me harder, and my flesh protested as he shook me tightly. “I said quiet.”

My fingernails scored his hand as I struggled against him, but he didn’t relent. His unsettled gaze roved with a paranoid intensity. I scrabbled at his sleeve as he hurried me into the emptiness—I looked wildly over my shoulder at the lights of the house retreating in the distance, slipping away, but nobody was there. I had stepped alone beyond the safety of my flock, like a stupid lamb.

“Stop!” I shouted and wrestled harder against him as my voice disappeared into the night-heavy sprawl of the desert.

Haas took me by the other elbow to steer me violently, the hard bite of it making me cry out. “Get in the fucking car,” he snapped.

He shoved me into the same Ford that had taken us back to the motel from the first party. My vision swam. My breath came short, and as I fought to calm it, I realized a low litany of no, no, no, no was dribbling from my mouth.

Haas’s expression was restless, his jaw grinding, his stare bright and horrific in the throw of the headlights leaping to life—I jostled messily in my seat as he tore into third gear and gunned it onto the main road, speeding in the opposite direction of town. When I yanked at the door handle, it was already locked.

“Who do you think planted the seed in Kline’s empty fucking head?” Haas shouted, as though resuming an argument he’d already been having with himself. His knuckles clenched white around the steering wheel. “ ‘Talk to Margaret Shoard, I saw her in Ezra Pierce’s last farce, she and her lily of a husband were the only good part!’ I gave this to you! I gave this to you with both hands!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I cried around my heavy tongue. “Let me out.”

“He wasn’t going to bother when he heard Ezra had dropped you, but I told him to take Wesley anyways, he was still passable on his own,” Haas spat, barreling onward. “I gave you back exactly what you wanted and now you have the audacity to think you’ll—what, go home again to your kitchen, and a nursery, give all of it up? I brought you back to life, Margaret! You were unspoiled! Where did you misplace your fucking gratitude!”

I kept at the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Haas accelerated. It was useless. I would be dashed on the asphalt if I tried to leave the car at this speed.

“You want to throw everything away, FINE!” The persistent growl of the engine ticked upward. The odometer crawled past eighty. I plastered myself to the seat and tried not to panic. “You’re chaining yourself to a fairy who knows nothing of how to handle you! If you want any future at all, the best thing you can do for yourself is drink a capful of bleach and leave him!”

“This is about Wesley?” I shouted, nearly laughing. “You knew we were married from the start!”

“I thought it was a fucking act, but look at you!” Haas pitched something hard at me, and I cried out as I tried to duck it—my pocket calendar thwacked with a sting against my shoulder, falling open in my lap. “Fucking PREGNANT! You think I never let myself off in your cunt for the fun of it?!”

What?

He’d been through my things, he’d found my calendar, he’d—read it, deciphered it, and stolen the most basic knowledge of my own body from me.

This violation sparked a new and more bone-deep terror, as though Haas had crawled inside me to squeeze his hands in between my very organs. “How the hell did you get this?” I breathed, afraid to touch it lest the pages burn me after being in his hands.

“You’re a stupid, selfish, shortsighted bitch,” Haas seethed.

I shook my head as terrified tears began to pour from my eyes. “I’m a good wife.”

“You’ve gotten by on batting your eyelashes and spreading your legs! I should have known you weren’t any different!”

“I am a good. Wife,” I insisted, unable to find any other words.

“You’re a common fucking whore!” The car purred at near ninety miles an hour, the engine whining. “The second your husband gets a taste for having this kind of money again, he’s going to leave you for some uptown fop and you will have nowhere to turn but me! Be grateful I’m still willing to bear the sight of you!”

I flinched, full-bodied, and could do nothing but bawl. Be grateful to me, Margaret. It was Hollis all over again.

How had I let this happen? Mama said it all the time, only stupid girls invited bad shit to roost.

That was all I ever had been, then, from the very beginning: a stupid girl.

Haas flexed his hands on the wheel. “We’ll solve this nasty fix of yours and forget this ever happened, or I will make you forget it. Now shut up. Quit crying.”

Rolling my head to the side, I clawed my stare out, out, out along the basin of the desert as though any of it might reach in and pull me to safety. Heavy clouds churned in the distance over the jut of a mesa illuminated in a hard shaft of moonlight. The rain came down in heavier sheets.

“I want to go home,” I sobbed.

“I said shut up, Margaret.”

“Fuck you!”

“SHUT UP!”

His voice boomed like a cascade of thunder rattling the claustrophobic interior of the front seat. I shut my eyes and tried to hold in the cry that still slipped out.

“I’ve seen better women than you piss away every opportunity in the name of the mewling whelps they claimed to want,” Haas roared. “I will not let it happen again!”

“I don’t want to,” I babbled, shaking my head wildly, clinging to the door handle and begging silently for this to be a nightmare. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to find myself in a cold sweat in scratchy, starch-stiff sheets and pile into a van that smelled of ancient tobacco leaves and leave this place. “Felix, please, I want to go home, I—”

“I don’t believe you! This is all your fault! You threw yourself at me, you begged for this! And for what, so you could have an excuse not to put yourself back onstage!”

He slammed his hands on the wheel, which made us fishtail shallowly down the empty road—I vised my grip to the door and screamed through my tears.

“NOBODY can be more than one thing at once!” Haas bellowed over me.

“STOP THE FUCKING CAR!”

Haas slammed the brakes and peeled violently off the road, only narrowly avoiding the pit of a ditch opening up ahead. I caught both of my hands on the glove box and barely kept from smacking my forehead on the dashboard.

The windshield wipers danced in the sudden, sickening silence—thup-thup, thup-thup, thup-thup.

“You want so badly to find a villain on whom you can blame everything wrong with you.” Haas’s voice dropped to a horrific murmur as he glared at me in the dark, the headlights illuminating him in their watery reflection glancing from the hood of the car. I had never seen a man so angry in my entire life, not even with the worst of Hollis’s benders. “You want me to be a villain?”

Incredulous and terrified, I could hardly make out what he was saying. Reality whined around me like the filament in a lightbulb about to burst. I fought to take control of my breathing again.

“What the fuck is going on?” I wept.

“If you want me to be a villain,” Haas said through his teeth, his mouth trembling and his eyes wet, “I’ll show you a villain.”

I tried to plead.

Truly. I did.

Sometimes I turn this moment over in my mind to wonder at it. Did I really kick my feet at him as hard as I meant to? Did I shout at him and bite at his fingers and wrists with as much feral abandon as I could have?

I think I did.

I think I did everything a desperate creature can do, but when a monster is intent on peeling back his skin to show you the truth of his bones, there isn’t any amount of fight that can remove the decision he’s made to do harm.

The dirt bit into my knees. The air was cold on the backs of my legs, the ground wet and unforgiving against the side of my face as Haas pinned me and did what he willed.

It was horrific.

I had thought I knew how terror lived in a body, but not like this.

Never like this.

I went very far away.

All of me became a muddy throb, like congealing blood pushing up through a wound. I couldn’t say for how long it lasted—it might have been seconds, minutes, hours, or years. It was an aberration of existence, a cystic tear so violent that it separated itself from the plane where real things happened.

Haas left me for a while in the rain when he was done.

Still face down, staring sideways across the ground as I labored around oblong scrapes of breath, I watched as he staggered into the shafts of the headlights and leaned on the hood of the Ford to catch his breath. He put his head in his hands not with shame or regret, but with the sense of stilling himself after a very difficult and artistically rewarding performance.

My stomach turned. His shoulders rose and fell. The pelting breeze tugged at his clothes and the ends of his hair.

I had never before hated anything so much as I hated Felix Haas in that moment. The ferocity of it burned through me, barreling along my veins in one great cauterization.

I hated. I would never again be ignorant of hate so intimate. I was, all of me, hate.

A shallow puddle sat beside me, catching the upside-down reflection of the sky. I wished I could dive into it and never return. I wished I never had to feel anything ever again.

The Lady was there with her hand held up to the surface. Her palm was clean and unwavering, and I lifted one trembling and filthy hand to meet her there. The water broke cold around my skin.

“Devour,” I croaked, and flexed my fingers into the wet earth to try to cling to her—but nothing held me in return.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

I was empty.

All that filled me was a searing absence, which hurt far more than anything of the act that had stolen my peace for good.

I was nothing.

I still had a fistful of mud clenched at my side. Haas and I had ridden back into town in a stiff, unspoken silence. There was nothing to speak of. We had seen each other down to our very natures, and in seeing I had unearthed from his depths the monster. This was him, Felix Haas at his very core: his blood, and his bones, and his choice.

It was done.

“You behave as though nothing is the matter. The morning the rest of the caravan goes back,” Haas finally said, parked at the far end of the motel lot, “I am taking you to Juárez and we are fixing this. Is that clear?” His voice crackled with fatigue, raw from all his shouting.

I heard him, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t make sense of anything. “What about Wesley?” I said distantly, my own voice just as ruined.

I flinched when the back of Haas’s knuckles skimmed my cheek. I shut my eyes and prayed he was through with me.

I didn’t dare look at him. If I looked at him, I would be sick. In my periphery, Haas peered with distant curiosity at the mud on his fingers. I must have looked like I’d crawled from my own grave.

“Not a word to him,” Haas murmured, and then paused. I could still feel him looking at me. “I told you, I’ll take care of you.”

This was a lie I’d been told for years. Wesley was the only one who had ever meant it.

My eyes were leaking. I couldn’t have stopped them if I tried.

“Let me out of the car, please,” I said lightly.

Haas leaned close, and I cringed away from him on instinct—he reached across my lap and pushed the door open.

Haas lingered over me. Every ounce of bravery left in me activated at once as I flicked my eyes to his and found him peering at me with concern; as if realizing for the first time he was, perhaps, pushing me away from him by having done his. “I swear it, Margaret. If you tell your husband what you made me do,” he whispered with the lightest tinge of desperation, “I will teach you what it means to cross me again. Is that clear?”

The cool damp of the night met me as I hurried into the washed-out light of the breezeway.

It’s as if I am nineteen years old again, and I am afraid of everything.

The world was not made to love me, and I know this—and still, I am afraid of everything.

I recall, somehow, the way to unlock the door. I shut it behind me. It takes a moment for me to register that this place is the motel. Lake Sumner. Not Richmond. Wesley is here, standing up from the foot of the bed. We are in Lake Sumner, together.

Margaret? Margaret.

Someone is saying a name, the name my mother gave me. Margaret!

I stare at Wesley. Wesley Shoard, my Wesley—he looks frightened. I look past his shoulder. He is my husband. I, there, me in the mirror, I am his wife. Margaret—is that name still mine? I look monstrous.

I shudder. Mud in my hair, my clothes a mess, am I truly—

“Jack!”

I blinked; came to. My eyes filled with tears in a great heaving rush.

“What happened?” I breathed.

Wesley watched me with alarm hastily covered at the back of his stare. He made no move to reach out to me or touch me at all. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. He looked me over with a quick pass of his eyes, and I felt his gaze like a flaying scrape. “Are—are you hurt? Was there an accident?”

I…had been. I was. Many and various times, but did any of it matter? Was this an accident?

I sat down on the edge of the bed. In my lap, I clutched my purse so close I could feel my pulse in my stomach, the pocket calendar stuffed inside, thumping with each heartbeat.

“Did I ever tell you about Hollis?” I asked him distantly, staring at the wall across the room. I couldn’t bear to look at the mirror again. “Michael Hollis?”

Wesley was silent as he knelt in front of me. He still didn’t touch me, but he seemed so shaken I figured perhaps he was confused.

“He was a—a director,” I offered, clarifying, hoping he might quit looking concerned if he knew what I was talking about, what I was trying to talk about. “He took over after—after Jensen was arrested; Jensen was my favorite, he took such wonderful care of me, but Hollis. Hollis was a monster.”

Wesley nodded slowly. “Okay,” he whispered. “Jack, can I…?” He held out a hand, hovering it over my knee. I watched the edges of his hand shake. I nodded. When he rested it there, over the dirt and the raw skin with small pieces of gravel stuck to the stinging scrapes through the hole in my stocking, I shivered. But it was a tender touch, and it didn’t make me want to snap his wrist in half. So I let him leave it there; I stared at his fingers, the fine shape of his hand so gentle by its making, and kept on.

“I did nothing without his approval. I was his pet project, he—he made me, but only in his own image. He took what he said I owed him in return whenever he saw fit.” I drew a deep tremor of a breath and let it out again in a quavering rush. Wesley did not move his hand or attempt to soothe me with any petting or patting. He simply was.

“I was so good for him,” I said, and it sounded as though I was begging—bargaining. “I was such a good girl, and I—all I wanted was to be loved, what could be so wrong with that? How could he have hurt me? I’m not a girl, but I still—I still want to be good, Wesley, I want to be…I want to be so good for everyone, why did he hurt me?”

I looked my husband directly in the eye and abandoned my purse to cling to his hand with both of mine so fiercely my tendons stood up like roots. “Why did he hurt me, Wes?”

His eyes, so dark in the low light they were almost violet, flickered with a reluctant, aching recognition. I begged him silently to know me, to love me as himself in this moment.

“Was it Felix?” he asked, gentle as a moth’s wing.

I stared at him until my eyes filled again. Wesley blurred into a wash of color.

“He was so—angry,” I gasped as a sob worked thick and sticky up through my chest. I pulled Wesley’s hand forward to hold it against my chest as I fought for breath.

Words left me. I began to bawl like an animal, reduced to my lowest self.

Wesley pressed his cheek to my knees and let me keep his hand clutched desperately to my heart as though holding back my vile insides from spilling out. Beneath my sobs, I could hear the sound of him lulling me with patient repetition—It’s alright, Jack. You’re safe. I’m here. I’m so sorry.

I cried until there was nothing left, all the way down to my fumes.

I am nineteen years old again and I am staring at the fuel gauge of a Hudson Hornet that does not belong to me, ticked nearly all the way down to Empty.

I am alone in the middle of a night that was muggy in Richmond, but here at the bus terminal farther north there’s a certain briskness. It is almost autumn. I have always liked autumn best.

I am nineteen years old, and I buy a bus ticket to New York City with Michael Hollis’s money. Name? The attendant asks, not looking up at me.

It is a privilege to name myself. There is perverse victory in seizing one’s identity back from the hands that have molded it in one’s stead.

Margot, I say with my best enunciation, claiming Jensen’s nickname for good. Margot Wolf.

I am nineteen and I am afraid, but fear makes me a hunter; a better, more dogged chaser of the things I must take for my own from this unkind world.

I am nineteen and I am afraid of my woman’s body. Mama never talked about how any of it worked because mortal bodies were temporary, the spirit was all that mattered, and I thought my blood coming in when I was twelve meant I was dying.

I am nineteen and Hollis has taught me that desire is also something to fear, because to desire means to be touched, and being touched is horrific. Being touched makes me go very far away.

I am nineteen and I am twenty-nine and I am Margaret, I am Margot, I am Jack, I am a beast with blunted teeth that has become tired of being denied my nature.

I will open my jaws.

I will devour.

I will become.