Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  I go charging through the open gate—stupid—and that, of course, is when he grabs me, stepping out from behind the toolshed and scooping me up as neat as you please. I let out a shriek that is as much frustration as fear—stupid, stupid—and flail my arms and legs uselessly. He laughs, holding onto me effortlessly—one hand on my breastbone, splayed across my chest, the other up underneath my skirt, fingering between my legs—and lets me struggle as long as I want.

  Resignation comes soon enough. My strength is no match for his, and we both know it. I stop kicking, and my arms fall limp at my sides. He pulls me in closer, an intimate embrace; the movements of his hands become more insistent, and I feel his lips pressing on the side of my neck, on the hollow of my throat. I try to make myself go dead inside. I’d leave my body if I could, but I can’t, I am charged to endure this, so I try to go dead, let it happen without feeling it. In one of the garden plots that dot the yard, pumpkins are growing in profusion; I imagine myself buried among them, covered in soft earth.

  The sun goes under a cloud. The light in the yard changes.

  And suddenly I come alive again. With the sun’s glare dimmed, I can see a face in the kitchen window. It’s my mother. She’s not looking out—it looks like she’s washing dishes, her eyes are on the sink—but if she lifts her head for even a second, she’ll see me. She’ll see us.

  Hope fills me up again before I can stop it. It’s a vain hope—some part of me knows this perfectly well—but it electrifies me anyway, animates me. Have to get her to look up, have to: she’ll see, she’ll save me, she’ll put a stop to this!

  I open my mouth. I scream.

  And maybe the scream is very loud, loud enough to rattle the kitchen window in its frame.

  And maybe the scream is soundless, stifled by my own terror, by the rude hand on my chest.

  Deafening or silent, my mother hears it. She looks up. She sees us. Her eyes go wide.

  The joy I feel in that moment is indescribable. She’s going to save me. She’s going to save me. In another second she’s going to come bursting out the back door, dishwater streaming from her hands, and she will yell, she will yell at him to stop it, she will scream at him and hit him to make him let me go. I stretch out my arms in anticipation of rescue.

  And then her brow creases. Her expression turns cross, not outraged but annoyed. She takes a breath, lets out a sigh of…exasperation? Her hands come into view; she’s drying them with a dishtowel, making brisk, impatient movements. Finished, she tosses the dishtowel aside.

  She turns her back.

  She turns her back, and I can see the back of her head receding, moving away from the window, deeper into the house. I don’t understand, and then I do: she’s going to her bedroom, their bedroom. She’s going to close her eyes and take a nap. She does this often. I know this.

  She’s gone.

  She’s gone, and then it is just him and me, I and the stepfather. He shifts his grip, holding me with one arm while the other reaches back behind him. I hear the creak of the toolshed door opening. He whirls me around, carries me inside—

  —“Andrew!”—

  —and the door bangs shut behind us—

  —my foot slammed down, smashing through the plank.

  “Stop it, Andrew! Andrew, please, stop it, you’re going to”—

  —and he sets me down, on the floor, facing the back wall of the toolshed. His hands are all over me now, but I no longer care. No need to deaden my feelings anymore; I am dead, I—

  —“want to get yourself fucking killed, you stupid fucking cocksucker? Knock it off!”—

  —and as his weight pushes against me from behind, my face is shoved up against the toolshed wall, but what I see is not the wall but the kitchen window, and my mother, frozen in the act of turning away, always turning away. And then there is a sound of wood cracking, and the wall gives way beneath my hands, curves back in on itself—

  —and my arms were wrapped around the telephone pole, muscles straining as I pulled at it. Maledicta yelled “Knock it off!” one more time and then Malefica grappled me from behind. She punched me in the back of the head, broke my grip on the pole and flung me to the ground. She kicked me in the ribs, once to make me stay down, twice to make sure I’d stay down, and a third time just because she was angry. The kicks were painful, but I didn’t cry out or try to defend myself, just lay there where she’d dropped me.

  My fusion with the Witness had only been temporary. But I guess the Witness had been hoping for permanence: inside somewhere, on the lakebank or in the forest, I could hear her wailing, lamenting her own continued existence. I would have felt sorry for her, except I was too busy being glad, so glad to have the vision fade, its vitality leaching away, and the memory that had briefly been mine becoming someone else’s again, becoming to me just a memory of a memory, a story I’d been told but hadn’t lived through.

  My head hurt. My heart hurt worse. But you were wrong, father, I thought. I did learn something.

  “I did learn something,” I said. I said it again, inside, but there was no answer from the pulpit.

  I sat up—slowly, so Malefica wouldn’t kick me again. We were outside the cottage, and I could see that all of the bracing planks had been pulled down or broken. It looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to them, but a fresh set of aches in Andy Gage’s feet, legs, hands, and arms told a different story: my knuckles were bloody, and full of splinters.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “What happened?” Maledicta was livid. “What the fuck do you think happened, asshole?”

  “I tried to pull the house down?”

  “Yes, you fucking tried to pull the fucking house down! With us still inside it!”

  “With you…no. No, Maledicta, I would never—” I stopped, noticing a bruise on her cheek and a bubble of blood in her nostril. “What happened to your face?”

  In answer, she aimed another kick at my side, but caught herself, spun on one heel, and stomped off into the backyard. A moment later I heard a rhythmic banging start—Malefica pretending the toolshed was my rib cage. As the banging went on, I found myself staring at the telephone pole that was the cottage’s sole remaining prop, and realized a part of me was still itching to bring it down. I crossed my arms over my chest and shoved my hands up under my armpits, ignoring the scratch of the splinters. I was very cold.

  TENTH BOOK: CHIEF BRADLEY’S TEARS

  28

  “My father was wrong,” Andrew tells her. “He said I wouldn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know, that it would just hurt more. But feeling that pain firsthand did teach me something, after all.”

  They are sitting in a booth in Winchell’s Diner, untouched cups of coffee growing cold on the table between them. Mouse holds a piece of ice wrapped in a napkin against the bruise on her cheek.

  “She hurt us more than he did,” Andrew says. “Not in terms of the actual amount of damage done—the stepfather is still the one responsible, I think he’s the one responsible, for breaking Andy Gage’s soul into pieces. In terms of, of quantity, he’s still the worst by far. But the way she hurt us…there was a quality to it, a depth, that nothing the stepfather did came close to, not even when he…”

  She hurt us more than he did. Andrew has been trying to articulate this point for a while now, and though on an intellectual level Mouse grasps what he is saying readily enough, emotionally it’s just not clicking. Andrew’s story of the cat-and-mouse game the stepfather played with him around the shore of Quarry Lake—that she can relate to. It’s the same sort of entertainment her own mother specialized in. But when Andrew starts describing how his mother’s failure to protect him was somehow more hurtful than the stepfather’s assault…well, Mouse gets it, but not really. She can’t help thinking that she would have traded everything she had, and then some, for a mother whose worst sin was that she did nothing.

  “It just felt like such a violation,” Andrew says.

  “Violation? But it was
the stepfather who—”

  “I don’t mean physical violation. I mean violation of, of order, of the way things are naturally supposed to be…The stepfather, he was always a monster, and that’s all he ever was. He was never a real father to us; he was just this awful person who lived in our house. And it’s like, if a wild animal bites you, it hurts, it’s traumatic, but it’s not as if it’s any kind of big surprise. Wild animals bite; it’s what they do; you may not like it but you know to expect it.

  “But what we felt, when our mother turned her back and walked away—it was like, like watching water flow uphill. And I know, you know, that she must have done that all the time, turned her back on us, and so I don’t really understand how it is we came to expect anything different from her, but I know—I felt it—that we did. There was this incredible sense of disappointment, of betrayal, and it must have been like that every time, whenever she just stood by and let him do that to us…

  “And so what I really don’t understand,” he says, taking a deep breath, “is how I could go for so long without having even a clue about this. I mean you remember: two nights ago you asked me about my mother and I couldn’t even tell you whether she’d survived giving birth to us. And even after my father told me the truth, even after I saw him cry, break down over her, still…I never, ever would have guessed. All my life, whenever my father, Adam, or any of the others talked about the abuse they’d suffered, it was always the stepfather they talked about—his wickedness, what he did to them. Never a single word about her.”

  Andrew looks at Mouse as if expecting her to have an answer to this riddle, but the best response she can manage is a shrug—a gesture that makes her face hurt.

  “How’s your cheek?” Andrew asks, seeing her wince.

  “It hurts.”

  “Oh.”

  This is of course another reason she’s having a hard time commiserating: she’s still in shock over what happened at the cottage.

  Andrew had lain unmoving on the dusty cot while Mouse, standing guard, got more and more spooked by a furtive scuttling noise in the shadows at the far end of the attic. Maledicta, up in the cave mouth, kept telling Mouse to stop being such a jumpy cunt, it was just the fucking squirrel again—but Maledicta sounded as if she were spooked too, and her vulgar admonitions only served to make Mouse even more jumpy. She sidled closer and closer to the cot, until finally she was standing right over Andrew, nudging the edge of the filthy mattress with her leg. The nudges got stronger and more insistent until the whole cot was shaking, but still Andrew just lay there; and then something galloped across the far end of the attic, and Mouse began to shake Andrew’s body directly, saying, “Wake up! Wake up!”

  At which point Andrew had opened his eyes and leapt up screaming. Mouse was knocked aside, tossed face-first onto the attic floor. The impact left her dazed, and by the time she recovered Andrew was gone: down the stairs, out the back door, and around to the side of the house. As Mouse got back to her feet, she heard boards breaking somewhere below her. Her first thought was that Andrew was trying to tear the cottage apart; then she remembered the bracing planks and realized that was exactly what he was doing.

  Which is the part that’s still got her weak-kneed. Andrew knocking her down in a moment of panic is no big deal—that’s something Mouse could see doing herself, something she’s already done to herself. But Andrew nearly bringing a house down on her is something else again. Not that he was trying to hurt her—he, whoever he was at that moment, wasn’t thinking of her at all probably, but still…if she’d landed a little differently, hit her head a little harder, she could have been lying in the attic unconscious until the cottage fell over. She could be dead now. For that matter so could Andrew: when Mouse came running downstairs to stop him demolishing the place, he hadn’t seemed too concerned about his own safety.

  “I think,” Mouse says, “that I’m ready to go back to Seattle now. I know you have things to figure out, and I still want to be helpful, but…I don’t want to go to the cottage again, or anywhere else that’s going to make you react that way.” She looks at him. “Can we be done here? Please?”

  Before Andrew can answer, the bell above the diner’s front door jingles, and a voice calls out breathlessly: “Sam!”

  Oh God. Mouse, who has been sitting with her back to the door, turns to see Officer Cahill striding towards them. The officer is red-faced from exertion, and Mouse guesses it’s no coincidence that he’s come in here; he must have seen the Centurion parked a block and a half away and come running down the street, looking in every window until he found them.

  Mouse braces herself for another round of Mistaken Identities, but when she turns back to Andrew his posture has changed, gone poised and feminine. Either Aunt Sam has successfully petitioned for some time out, or—more likely, Mouse thinks—she’s taken advantage of Andrew’s disrupted mental state and seized the moment.

  “Sam…” As Officer Cahill arrives at the booth he visibly gathers himself, preparing to launch into a speech. But Sam heads him off, smiling sweetly and saying: “Hello, Jimmy. How are you?”

  Officer Cahill blinks, stunned by the welcome. Then he smiles, too. “Sam,” he says warmly. “Can I…is it all right if I join you?” Not waiting for an answer, he starts to slide into the booth on Mouse’s side; Mouse realizes she’s about to get sat on, scoots over hastily, and loses control to Malefica, who snatches up a teaspoon and prepares to jam it into Officer Cahill’s buttocks.

  “Wait, Jimmy,” Sam says, and Officer Cahill halts obediently, half-in and half-out of the booth. “Before you sit down, could you get me a slice of pie?”

  “Pie?” For a moment he’s at a loss, like he’s never heard the word before. Then he smiles again. “Sure. What kind?”

  “Cherry, please.” Sam returns his smile, her eyes shining. “With whipped cream. Extra whipped cream.”

  “Cherry with extra whipped cream. You got it.” He hurries off to the counter.

  “Sam?” Maledicta says.

  “Dear.” Still smiling, but sadly now. “Do you have a cigarette?” Her hands are trembling.

  “No. Sorry.” Maledicta drops the spoon back on the table. “What the fuck was that, Sam? You’re not going to give this cocksucker the time of day, are you?”

  Sam doesn’t answer, just stares at her hands. By the time Officer Cahill returns with the cherry pie, she’s got them to stop shaking.

  “Here you go, Sam…” He lays a fork and a fresh napkin on the table in front of her and starts to set the pie plate down too, but she catches his wrist. “Sam?”

  “Jimmy…” She tilts her head like she wants to whisper something to him, so he leans forward, and Sam slips her other hand up underneath the pie plate and shoves it, extra whipped cream and all, into his face. Officer Cahill lets out a muffled squawk—“Urk!”—and steps back sputtering. Sam gets up and runs out of the diner, in her rush very nearly making the day’s knockdown score two for two.

  “Yeah, Sam!” hoots Maledicta, pounding the table hard enough to upset both coffee cups. She slides out of the booth and makes her own exit, pausing at the door to holler to a startled waitress: “Don’t worry about the fucking check—lover boy there’s got it!”

  She catches up to Sam on the block where they parked the Centurion. Sam’s standing in front of a Laundromat, staring blankly in the window. Maledicta comes up and gives her a good hearty clap on the back.

  “That was fucking excellent, Sam.” She gestures to a nearby cross street, where she remembers seeing a bar. “Come on, let’s go get a drink. I’m fucking buying.”

  “No thanks. A drink is the last thing I need right now.”

  Andrew. Maledicta’s expression of glee turns to a scowl. “Fuck!”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Andrew says.

  “Disappoint my fucking ass, you fucker. Get Sam back out here.”

  “Sam’s gone to her room. She won’t be coming out again today.” He glances down the street towards the diner. “That
was really…unfortunate, what just happened back there.”

  “‘Unfortunate,’” Maledicta mocks him. “It was fucking great!”

  “Well I’m glad you enjoyed it, Maledicta. But I think we’d better leave town now. Could you get Penny for me, please?”

  “No, I could not get fucking Mouse for you. And I’m not leaving town until I get a fucking drink.”

  “Maledicta…in case you didn’t notice, I just attacked a policeman.”

  “Oh, bullshit! That was no fucking policeman, that was an asshole ex-boyfriend who got what he fucking had coming.”

  “Well even so, I think we should go. I’m done here, at least for—”

  “Well I’m not fucking done here. I want a fucking drink.” Glaring: “I need to calm my fucking nerves after someone nearly collapsed a house on me.”

  “Maledicta, I’m really, really sorry about that, but—”

  Enough of this bullshit. “You fucking coming?” she says, and starts walking.

  “Maledicta…”

  She doesn’t even look back, just gives him the finger over her shoulder and keeps going.

  “Maledicta!”

  “Maledicta!” I called, but she just made a rude gesture and kept walking away. I stood there indecisively for a moment and then, hoping it might startle her into switching, yelled out: “Penny!”

  No good. Maledicta continued on to the corner, then started to cross the street, cursing out a driver who had assumed that a green light gave him the right of way. Frustrated, not knowing what else to do but follow her, I stepped sideways into the street myself, my back to the flow of traffic.

  The blare of a horn sent me leaping back to the curb. I turned as a patrol car pulled up alongside me. I thought it was Officer Cahill again, but the face that leaned over from the driver’s seat was Gordon Bradley’s.