Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “No, I don’t, I want you to—”

  “It’s not the actual fucking—oh, I won’t lie, that can be fun too, if the guy knows what he’s doing. But the absolute best part is right at the beginning, hooking them, getting them to want you. The moment when you know you have them, when you know they’d do anything to be with you…mmm, there’s no other satisfaction like it.” Loins closes her eyes, as if savoring a memory. “Oh, my…” She leans back over the boulder. “Just thinking about it gets me…right…here.” Her feet come off the ground, tucking up under her behind, and her knees splay apart, and Mouse stands there, gaping, the miner’s lamp shining like a spotlight on—

  Too much. Mouse retreats, stumbles from the grotto into the big cavern. The miner’s lamp switches off, she wills it off, and she blunders on, in darkness, out into the middle of the cavern, and throws herself down among the sleepers, letting the shame roll over her.

  Time passes. Mouse lies in the dark, fading in and out of consciousness, until she feels a tug on the twine that is still wrapped around her fist—

  —and then it is afternoon, and Mouse and Andrew are sitting in a restaurant booth. Judging by the empty plates on the table between them—and the bloated feeling in Mouse’s stomach—Maledicta and Sam have just finished gorging on pastry and cheesecake. “Sam!” Andrew exclaims, as he examines the bill.

  “H-how did your meeting go?” Mouse asks. About as well as her encounter with Loins, if his demeanor is any indication.

  “I have a new place I need to stop, before we go to Seven Lakes,” Andrew tells her. “If I’m lucky, Seven Lakes may not matter so much.”

  “OK,” says Mouse. She looks out the window at the restaurant parking lot, and sees little to distinguish it from the other roadside parking lots of the past three days. “Where are we now?”

  “Gary, Indiana,” Andrew says. “Almost there.”

  He pays the bill, and they go outside and find the car; Mouse drives. Half an hour later they are in Michigan. They follow the coast of the great Lake; by late afternoon they are in Muskegon. Andy Gage’s hometown is inland from here, but Andrew has Mouse keep driving north.

  Eventually they leave the highway for a narrow two-lane road that runs right along Lake Michigan’s shore. After a few miles the road forks, with one branch going down to a sandy beach, and the other curving up to a wooded bluff. They take the high branch.

  The cemetery is called Lake View: a half-acre wedge of grassy plots set right at the edge of the bluff, bounded by a low stone wall and flanked by stands of maples. The ground slopes up from the drop-off, giving the rows of headstones the appearance of seats in an amphitheater. “‘Lake View,’” Maledicta observes derisively from the cave mouth. “Boy, it must have taken some fucking inspiration to come up with that name.”

  “Be quiet,” says Mouse, still nauseous from one too many slices of pie, not to mention one too many cigarettes.

  “What? What did you fucking say?”

  “You heard me.” Loins may be more than Mouse can handle, but Maledicta doesn’t scare her anymore.

  Andrew has already gotten out of the car. He walks as far as the cemetery gate and then stops; Mouse can’t tell if he’s afraid or just thinking. She carefully sets the Centurion’s parking brake—the cemetery visitors’ lot is on a slope, too—and goes to join him.

  “Andrew?” says Mouse.

  “It reminds me of the pumpkin field,” he says. “It’s not exactly the same—we don’t have so many graves—but still…” He turns to her. “Hold my hand?”

  She nods, and slips her hand in his. Andrew lifts the latch on the gate. They go in.

  “They won’t be buried out here,” Andrew says, as they walk among the rows of the amphitheater. “This is only part of the cemetery—the oldest part—and my father says it filled up a long time ago.” Mouse examines some of the headstones in passing and sure enough, the most recent dates are from the late 1950s.

  Andrew heads for an opening in the stone wall; beyond it, a path winds uphill through the trees to another graveyard. This one is much larger than the amphitheater, but lacks the view of the lake, unless you want to climb one of the taller monuments.

  “OK,” Andrew says, pausing to confer with a member of his household. “OK.” He points. “That way.”

  They cross the graveyard on a diagonal. Andrew counts rows under his breath; around row twenty-five, he slows down and starts checking individual headstones.

  “What name are we looking for?” Mouse asks.

  “The stepfather’s,” Andrew says. “There.”

  It’s a huge standing slab of polished granite, the kind normally used to memorialize entire families. The chiseled inscription reads:

  HORACE GARFIELD ROLLINS

  FEBRUARY 3, 1932—MAY 24, 1991

  Here I sleep but for a while

  Until I am called up again

  Into my Father’s house

  Andrew’s face betrays a welter of emotional states. Whatever else he is feeling, though, he is angry; his hands clench into fists, and Mouse’s own hand gets squeezed so hard that she cries out. “Sorry,” Andrew says absently, releasing her.

  He shakes his head at Horace Rollins’s gravestone. “May 24th. That’s the wrong date.”

  “The wrong date?”

  “Not the date I was hoping for,” Andrew clarifies—though for Mouse, this doesn’t actually clear up anything.

  Andrew stares at the headstone a while longer. Then he says “OK,” steps back, and turns to the grave to the immediate right, which, according to its marker, belongs to Joshua Green, who died on June 5th, 1996.

  Andrew’s brow creases. He checks the space to Horace Rollins’s left, but that’s an empty plot.

  “Where is she?” Andrew asks; the question is not addressed to Mouse. “Is it possible that she isn’t really—…Well, she’s not where she’s supposed to be, father.”

  Andrew begins a systematic search of the surrounding graves. Three rows up and half a dozen plots over, he finds what he’s looking for.

  This marker is much more delicate, a slender tablet of rose-veined white marble. It reads:

  Althea Gage

  December 8, 1944—December 16, 1994

  Beloved

  “1994,” Andrew says, and this time his face reveals no conflict of feeling, just pure sadness. “It’s true, then.”

  Mouse doesn’t have to ask what he means. Obviously, Andy Gage’s mother didn’t die when he was young; and the fact that she is buried here, so close to Andy Gage’s stepfather, suggests that she didn’t run away, either…although it’s interesting that she’s not buried right next to the stepfather, as she was apparently meant to be.

  Andrew’s eyes well up with tears, slowly at first; then all at once his whole body sags and is consumed by weeping. “Momma,” he says, the voice not Andrew’s now but Aaron’s.

  Mouse steps up beside him, wanting to comfort him but not sure how. He looks at her sidelong, and smiles bitterly through his tears. “You see?” he says. “You thought you were worthless. But at least your mother felt something for you, even if it was wicked. Our mother, though…” He turns back to the stone, his bitterness beginning to ferment into anger. “Why couldn’t you love us?” he demands. “How could you love him, and not us? How?”

  Without warning he whirls around and charges across the rows at Horace Rollins’s marker, as though meaning to tackle it. The sheer mass of the stone defeats him; his fists glance harmlessly off its polished surface, and when he hurls his whole body against it, it barely shudders, while he is thrown back off his feet.

  “Aaron!” Mouse calls, running over to see if he is all right. When she reaches him he is weeping again. He raises an arm and grasps her hand as she bends over him; his knuckles are skinned and bloody.

  “Why didn’t she love us?” he asks, through sobs; Mouse isn’t sure who is speaking now. “What could we have done that was so wrong, that she would reject us so totally…”

 
; “I don’t know,” is all Mouse can think to say. “I’m sorry, Aaron…Andrew…I don’t have an answer.”

  Letting go of her hand again, he rolls over on his side and curls into a ball.

  “Why didn’t she love us?” Andy Gage wails. “Why?”

  NINTH BOOK: HOMECOMING

  25

  “You thought our mother died when Andy Gage was very young, didn’t you?” my father said.

  “I never really thought about it at all,” I told him. “I mean yes, I guess I assumed she’d died a long time ago—that’s how it always sounded when you talked about her—but I never dwelled on the question. Why would I? It’s not my job to look back.”

  We were sitting on the front steps of the house. Sitting in daylight: the mist had receded overnight, though it still shrouded the entire lake. Early this morning my father had managed to rebuild the pulpit (a definite patch-job, but functional), and Seferis was up there now, keeping an eye on the body—or rather, keeping an eye on Aunt Sam, who was in the body, riding across Wisconsin with Maledicta.

  “This is the program from our mother’s funeral,” my father said. He held up the pamphlet that he’d pulled from under the mystery door yesterday. “I threw the original away, but I guess somebody brought a copy inside when I wasn’t paying attention…either that, or the memory persisted on its own somehow.”

  He handed it to me. The cover bore Althea Gage’s name, and a date.

  “December 1994,” I said, surprised. “Is that right? Only three years ago?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “That recently?” Then it hit me: “This would have been just two months before I was born.”

  He nodded. “I got the news about our mother the same week Dr. Grey had her stroke.”

  “And did that have anything to do with your decision—”

  He started crying.

  I’d seen my father angry before, many times, but I’d never seen him cry. I hadn’t known he was capable of it. But now his eyes flooded with tears, and his soul was wracked by horrible sobs. It hurt me to see, but it scared me, too; I found myself checking the sky repeatedly, to see if the sun would darken in sympathy. It didn’t; but I could swear that the mist on the lake got thicker again.

  “I loved her, you know,” my father said, when he was able to speak again. “I loved her, and for years I waited for a sign, any sign, that she loved me too. Of all the hopes I ever had, that was the one I held the longest, and the strongest. I wanted her love more than anything, even more than, than to get away from him.”

  “The stepfather,” I said, as another realization fell into place. “She was there, living in the same house, the whole time he…”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she know?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Andrew. Of course she knew. She never abused us herself,” he added forcefully. “Not once. And when it was just the two of us, when he wasn’t home, it was fine. It was wonderful, in fact. But when he was home…she knew.”

  “Then she was as evil as he was,” I said.

  He exploded at me: “Don’t you say that! You weren’t there! Don’t you ever say that about her!”

  “I’m sorry, father, but you know it’s true. If she knew what was going on, and did nothing to stop it—”

  He disappeared. His face got very red, until I thought he was going to lash out at me, and then he vanished. A few seconds later, in the forest behind the house, a series of loud crashes began—whole stands of trees being uprooted and hurled in anger. This went on for some time, and once again I checked the sky, this time for incoming meteors.

  The crashes subsided. My father, calmer now, reappeared beside me.

  I didn’t try to pick up where we’d left off. “Why did she do it?” I asked instead. “Could she really have loved the stepfather that much, to let him—”

  “I don’t know what motivated her,” my father said. “What moved her. I never knew that. All I can say…it must have suited her to be married to him, suited her enough that she was willing to overlook…to allow…” His composure faltered. “I guess she must have loved him, if she loved anyone. More than she loved me.

  “But still,” he continued, “I held out hope, and watched for a sign. And I thought I had it, once. It was near the end of high school, when the time came to start applying to colleges. The stepfather didn’t want me leaving home, but she argued in favor of it. It was the only time I’d ever seen her argue with him about anything. And I thought, this is it, this is the proof. Maybe she can’t stop him from, from doing that to me, not while we’re under the same roof, but she is trying to help me escape. She does care. She does love me…”

  He shook his head. “I should have let it go at that; I should have just believed what I wanted to believe, and been content. But it wasn’t enough; I had to try to confirm it. And so after it was settled that I was going away to college, I got her alone, and tried to thank her. I told her how grateful I was, and I told her that I understood what it really meant, her sticking up for me like that.

  “She cut me off before I could finish. She told me I shouldn’t make assumptions. She said that it wasn’t anything she’d done for me, it was just…she was tired of competing with me for his attention.” He paused, and I thought he might cry again, but instead he smiled, a ghastly smile. “So that…that was not the response I’d been hoping for.”

  “And after that you gave up hoping…”

  He actually laughed. “Come on now, Andrew,” my father said. “Vain hopes don’t die that easily. You should know that.”

  “But how could you still think, after she said such a horrible thing to you, that she might—”

  “You never met the stepfather. He had…power. He was a monster, but he could be charming, too, and where he couldn’t charm he could persuade. He could get you to say things, or not say them. It was a long time after we got away from him before I could tell anyone about what he’d done; and if he could have that kind of control over me when he wasn’t even there, it wasn’t hard to believe that he had control over our mother, too, and that when she said what she said, that wasn’t really her talking, just…his power.

  “But he was older than she was. And he drank; he drank more as time went on. It seemed very likely that she’d outlive him, and that there would come a day—maybe in ten or twenty years, but still—when she wouldn’t be under his influence anymore, and then, then finally, her true feelings could come out…”

  “That’s…”

  “Ridiculous?” my father said. “I suppose. But not too ridiculous to hang a hope on.”

  “And you were willing to wait for that?” I asked. “For him to die of natural causes?”

  “It wasn’t a question of being willing. I couldn’t have killed him. I couldn’t even stop him from fucking me; to actually stop him from living…” He shook his head. “There would be no way. My only chance of beating him was to get beyond his reach; my revenge was to survive him, and maybe one day shit on his grave—after he’d gone there on his own.”

  “About that,” I said. “Is the stepfather—”

  “Oh yes,” said my father. “He’s dead. But for a long time I didn’t know it.

  “Going away to school was only the first step in my escape,” he told me. “MSU, where I started college, wasn’t really far enough. It was only a two-hour drive from Seven Lakes. During the first semester, he tried to, to visit me, on campus. He tried twice. The first time, I knew he was coming, so I hid for three days. The second time, there was no advance warning, and I ended up jumping out a window to get away from him.

  “There wasn’t any third time. After that surprise visit I dropped out of school, and left no forwarding address…” He paused, then corrected himself: “I say ‘I,’ but really it was Gideon who did that. Gideon and probably Adam. All I did, I closed my eyes in East Lansing one afternoon, and when I opened them again it was nine months later and I was living in Ann Arbor.

  “I never went back to Seven Lakes.
Never called either, not even from a pay phone—I would have liked to hear our mother’s voice again, but I was always afraid he’d trace the call somehow, or maybe just come crawling through the line. So I didn’t call, or write, but I did come up with what I thought was a clever way of keeping tabs: every so often I would dial directory assistance and give them the stepfather’s name. I figured as long as he was listed he was still alive; it didn’t occur to me that our mother might keep the phone in his name even after he died.

  “So anyway there I was, in Ann Arbor. And this part of the story you mostly know: I, we, slowly started putting things together, understanding our multiplicity. Eventually we met Dr. Kroft, and worked with him until our falling out. And then we moved to Seattle, and found Dr. Grey.

  “That part you know. But what I never told you, because I didn’t think it mattered, is that I finally did try to contact our mother again. This was after we’d been in therapy with Dr. Grey for a while. The therapy was going really well, and I had what was either a fresh burst of optimism or a perverse impulse to screw things up. I decided to try and get in touch with our mother and let her know that we were alive, and see if she missed us. If she was ready to love us yet.”

  “Oh boy,” I said.

  “Yes,” said my father. “Dr. Grey didn’t think it was such a hot idea, either. But Mrs. Winslow was more supportive. I decided to write rather than call—I was still afraid of the stepfather tracking us down—and Mrs. Winslow had a suggestion for how I could make the letter harder to trace. I rented a post office box in Seattle, one that I could stop and check on my trips to Poulsbo, and wrote to our mother care of that PO box. Mrs. Winslow also promised me that if the stepfather did find out where we were living somehow, she would deal with him.” He smiled. “I think I would have paid to see that. He had power, but Mrs. Winslow could have taken him.”