Dangerous Women. Part II

That was the first day. The next morning Sandy and the friend arose and began stripping the unused bedrooms that had been Alex’s and Sandy’s when they were teens. Sarah felt a mixture of relief and regret as she watched them finally emptying the closets and drawers of the “precious mementoes” that Sarah and Russ had longed to discard for years. “Lightening the load,” Sandy called it, as they discarded old clothing and high school sports gear and required-reading paperbacks and ancient magazines and binders. One by one they carried the bulging black garbage sacks down the stairs and mounded them by the back porch. “Time to simplify!” Sandy’s friend chortled cheerily each time she toted out another sack.

They ate sandwiches at lunch and then brought back pizza and beer for dinner. After dinner, they went right back to work. Sandy’s friend had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. Sarah escaped her cigarette smoke by going out into the dusky backyard. The evening was rainy, but when she stood under the copper beech, little of the water reached her. She stared out at the street. Empty. Empty and fog free. A calm neighborhood of mowed lawns and well-tended houses and shiny cars. Sandy came out with another bulging garbage bag. Sarah gave her daughter a rueful smile. “Better tie them shut, dear. The rain will ruin the clothing.”

“The dump won’t care, Mom.”

“The dump? You’re not taking them to Goodwill?”

Sandy gave a martyred sigh. “Secondhand stores have gotten really picky. They won’t take a lot of this stuff and I don’t have time to sort it. If I take all these bags there, they’ll refuse half of them and I’ll just have to go to the dump anyway. So I’ll save myself a trip by going straight to the dump.”

Sarah was drawing breath to protest, but Sandy had already turned and gone back for more. She shook her head. Tomorrow she would sort them herself and then call one of the charities for a pickup. She simply couldn’t allow all that useful clothing and all those paperbacks to go to a dump. As the friend plopped down another sack, a seam split and a shirt Sarah recognized popped from it. Sandy came behind her friend with another bag.

“Wait a minute! That’s your father’s shirt, one of his good Pendletons. Was that in your room?” Sarah was almost amused at the idea that a shirt Sandy must have “borrowed” so many years ago would still have been in her room. But as she came smiling to the bag, she saw another familiar plaid behind it. “What’s this?” she demanded as she drew out the sleeve of Russ’s shirt.

“Oh, Mom.” Sandy had been caught but she wasn’t repentant. “We’ve started on Dad’s closet. But relax. It’s all men’s clothing, nothing you can use. And it has to go.”

“Has to go? What are you talking about?”

Sandy sighed again. She dropped the bag she carried and explained carefully, “The house has to be emptied so it can be staged by a realtor. I promise, there’s nothing in these bags that you can take with you.” She shook her head at the shock on her mother’s face and added in a gentler voice, “Let it go, Mom. There’s no reason to hang on to his clothing anymore. It’s not Dad. It’s just his old shit.”

If she had used any other word, perhaps Sarah would have felt sorrow rather than anger. Any other word, and perhaps she could have responded rationally. But “shit”?

“Shit? His ‘shit’? No, Sandy, it’s not his ‘shit.’ Those are his clothes, the clothes and possessions of a man I loved. Do what you want with your old things. But those are mine, and I am not throwing them away. When the time comes for me to part with them, I’ll know it. And then they will go somewhere where they can do someone some good. Not to the dump.”

Sandy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Can’t put this off any longer, Mom. You know it’s why I came. I’ve only got this weekend to get all this stuff cleared out. I know it’s hard, but you have to let us do it. We don’t have time for you to be picky about it.”

Sarah couldn’t breathe. Had she agreed to this? When Alex had been there, talking and nagging, she had said, “Yes, yes,” but that didn’t mean she’d agreed to this, this destruction of her life. No. Not this fast, not like this! “No. No, Sandy.” She spoke as firmly as if Sandy were still a teenager. “You are going to take all my things back upstairs. Do you hear me? This stops now!”

The friend spoke in a low voice. “Your brother warned you about this. Now you’ve upset her.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out on the porch step. She left the butt there. “Maybe you should call your bro. She looks really confused.”

Sarah spun to confront the friend. “I’m standing here!” she shouted. “And you and your stinking cigarettes can get out of my house right now. I am not ‘confused’; I am furious! Sandy, you should be ashamed of yourself, going through other people’s things. You were taught better. What is the matter with you?”

Sandy’s face went white, then scarlet. Anger flashed across it, to be caged by dignity. “Mom. I hate to see you like this. I have to be honest. Your mind is slipping. Alex has been updating me. He told me he’d talked to you about this, and that you’d looked at the brochures together and chosen a couple of places you’d like. Don’t you remember at all?”

“We talked. That was all. Nothing was decided! Nothing.”

Sandy shook her head sadly. “That’s not what Alex said. He said you’d agreed, but he was taking it slow. But since that last incident, we have to act right away. Do you remember how he found you? Crouching under your table with the door open in a snowstorm?”

The friend was shaking her head, pityingly. Sarah was horrified. Alex had told Sandy, and Sandy had spread it to her friends. “That is none of your business,” she said stiffly.

Sandy threw up her hands and rolled her eyes. “Really, Mom? Really? Do you think we can just walk off and say, ‘Not my problem’? Because we can’t. We love you. We want to do what is right. Alex has been talking to several very nice senior communities with lovely amenities. He’s got it all figured out. If we use your social security and Dad’s pension, Alex and I can probably scrape together enough extra to get you into a nice place until the house sells. After that—”

“No.” Sarah said it flatly. She stared at Sandy, appalled. Who was this woman? How could she think she could just walk in and begin making decisions about Sarah’s life? “Get out,” she said.

Sandy glanced at her friend, who hadn’t budged. She was watching both of them, her mouth slightly ajar, like a Jerry Springer spectator. Sandy spoke to her apologetically. “You’d better go for now, Heidi. I need to calm my mom down. Why don’t you take the car and—”

“You, Sandy. I’m talking to you. Get. Out.”

Sandy’s face went slack with shock. Her eyes came back to life first, and for a moment she looked eleven and Sarah would have done anything to take back her words. Then her friend spoke knowingly. “I told you that you should have called your bro.”

Sandy huffed a breath. “You were right. We should have gotten the guardianship done and moved her out first. You were right.”

Cold rushed through Sarah’s body. “You just try it, missy. You just try it!”

Tears were leaking from Sandy’s eyes now. The friend rushed to put a protective arm around her. “Come on, Sandy, let’s go. We’ll get some coffee and call your bro.”

Even after the door had slammed behind them, and she had rushed over to lock it, Sarah couldn’t calm down. She paced. Her hands trembled as she put on the kettle for tea. She climbed the stairs and looked at the chaos they had created.

In the kids’ bedrooms, there were boxes neatly taped shut and labeled with their names. And across the hall, in the bedroom she and Russ had once shared, there were more boxes and half-filled garbage sacks. With a lurch of her heart, she recognized her old hiking jacket poking out of one. She pulled it out slowly and looked at it. It was still fine; there was nothing wrong with it. She put it on and zipped it. Tighter around her middle than it had been, but it still fit. It was still hers, not theirs. Her gaze traveled slowly from the sprawled bags to neatly stacked FedEx cardboard boxes. Each was labeled either “Sandy” or “Alex,” but one was labeled “Heidi.” Sarah tore the tape from it and dumped it out on the bed. Russ’s ski parka. Two of his heavy leather belts. His Meerschaum pipe. His silver Zippo lighter. His tobacco humidor. She picked up the little wooden barrel and opened it. The aroma of Old Hickory tobacco drifted out to her and tears stung her eyes.

Anger suddenly fired her. She dumped out all the boxes and bags on the floor. Alex’s box held Russ’s sheath knife from his hunting days. Some wool winter socks, still with the labels on. The little .22 and its ammunition were in one of Sandy’s boxes, along with Russ’s 35mm camera, in its case. The extra lenses and the little tripod was in there, too. His Texas Instruments calculator, the first one he’d ever owned and so expensive when she got it for his Christmas gift. A couple of his ties, and his old Timex watch. She sank down to the floor, holding the watch in her hand. She lifted it to her ear, shook it, and listened again. Silence. As still as his heart. She got to her feet slowly, looked around the ransacked room, and then left it, closing the door softly behind her. She’d clean it up later. Put it all back where it belonged.

Halfway down the stairs, she knew that she wouldn’t. There was no sense to it. Sandy had been right about that, at least. What did all the trappings mean if there was no man to go with them?

The kettle was whistling, and when she picked it up, it was almost dry. The phone began to ring. She wanted to ignore it. Caller ID said it was Alex. She spoke before he could. “They were ransacking the house. Putting all your father’s things into sacks to take to the dump. If that’s how you’re going to help me, how you’re going to ‘keep me safe,’ then I’d rather be …” Abruptly she could think of nothing to say. She hung up the phone.

It rang again, and she let it, counting the rings until her answering machine picked up. She listened to Russ’s voice answering the phone and waited for Alex’s angry shout. Instead, an apologetic voice said that they hated to leave this sort of message on the phone but they had been trying to reach her all day without success. Richard had died that morning. They’d notified the funeral home listed on his Purple Cross card and his body had been picked up. His personal possessions had been boxed for her and could be claimed at the front desk. The voice offered his deepest condolences.

She stood frozen, unable to move toward the phone. Silence flowed in after that call. When the phone rang again, she took the receiver off the hook, opened the back, and jerked out the batteries. The box on the wall kept ringing. She tugged it off the wall mount and unplugged it. Silence came back, filling her ears with a different sort of ringing. What to do, what to do? One or both of her children would be on the way back by now. Richard was dead. His body was gone, all his possessions taped up in a box. Russ was gone. She had no allies left, no one who remembered who she had been. The people who loved her most were the ones who presented the gravest danger to her. They were coming. She was nearly out of time. Out of time.

She made a mug of black tea and carried it outside with her. The rain had stopped and the night was chill. Abruptly she was glad of the coat she wore. She watched the mist form; it wove itself among the wet tree branches and then detached to drop and mingle with the grayness rising from the trickling street gutters. They met in the middle, swirled together, and the streetlight at the end of the street suddenly went out. The traffic sounds died with it. Sarah sipped bitter black tea and waited for that other world to form beyond the mist.

It took shape slowly. Illuminated windows faded to black as the gray rolled down the street toward her. The silhouettes of the houses across the street shifted slightly, roofs sagging, chimneys crumpling as saplings hulked up into cracked and aging trees. The fog thickened into a fat mounded bank and rolled toward her. She waited, one decision suddenly clear. When it reached the fence, she picked up a garbage sack full of discarded possessions, whirled it twice, and tossed it. It flew into the mist and reappeared in that other place, landing in the littered street. Another bag. Another. By the fourth bag she was dizzy from whirling, but they were too heavy to toss any other way. She forced herself to go on, bag after bag, until her lawn was emptied of them. Better than the dump, she told herself. Better than a landfill.

Dizzy and breathless, she staggered up the porch steps and went to her bedroom. She opened the blind on the upstairs bedroom window and looked out. The fog had rolled into her yard. It billowed around her house like waves against a dock. Good. She opened the window. Bag after bag, box after box she shoved out. Sandy and Alex would find nothing left of her here. Nothing for them to throw out or tidy away. Until only the gun and the plastic box of ammunition remained on the floor.

She picked it up. Black metal, cold to the touch. She pushed the catch and the empty clip fell into her hand. She sat down on the bed and opened the plastic box of ammo. One little bullet after another she fed into the clip until it was full. The magazine snapped into place with a sound like a door shutting.

No. That was the front door shutting.

She jammed the ammunition box into her jacket pocket. She held the gun as Russ had taught her, pointing it down as she went down the stairs. They were in the living room. She heard Alex ask something in an impatient voice. Sandy whined an excuse. The friend interrupted, “Well, you weren’t here! Sandy was doing the best she could.”

Sarah hurried down the hall and into the kitchen. Her heart was pounding so that she could barely hear them now, but she knew they were coming. She opened the kitchen door and stepped out.

The fog lapped at the bottom steps. Out in the street, the voices of Backpack Man and his scavengers were clearer than she had ever heard them. They had found the things she had thrown out there. “Boots!” one man shouted in excitement. Two of the others were quarreling over Russ’s old coat. Backpack Man was striding purposefully toward them, perhaps to claim it for himself. One of them took off running. He shouted something about “the others.”

“Mom?” Alex’s voice, calling her from inside the house.

“Mom?” Sandy’s light footsteps in the kitchen. “Mom, where are you? Please. We’re not angry. We just need to talk to you.”

The fog had lapped over another step. Her porch light was dimming.

Backpack Man would likely kill her. Her children would put her away.

The little .22 handgun was cold and heavy in her hand.

She stepped off the porch. The concrete step she had swept a few days ago was squishy with moss under her foot.

“Mom? Mom?”

“Alex, we should call the police.” Sandy’s voice was rising to hysteria. “The phone’s been torn off the wall!”

“Let’s not be” something, something, something—his voice went fuzzy, like a bad radio signal. Their worried conversation became distant buzzing static.

She tottered into the dark garden. The ground was uneven. She waded through tall wet weeds. The copper beech was still there and she hid in its deep shade. In the street, the silhouettes of the men intently rooted through the bags and boxes. They spoke in low excited voices as they investigated their find. Others were coming to join them. In the distance there was an odd creaking, like a strange bird cry. Sarah braced her hands on the tree and blended her shadow with the trunk, watching them. Some of the newcomers were probably females in bulky clothes. The girl was there, and another, smaller child. They were rummaging in a box, peering at paperback titles in the moonlight.

Two of the men closed in on the same garbage bag. One seized hold of a shirt sticking out of a tear and jerked on it, but the other man already had hold of its sleeve. An angry exclamation, a fierce tug, and then as one man possessed it, the other leaped on him. Fists flew, a man went down with a hoarse cry, and Backpack Man cursed them, brandishing his aluminum bat as he ran at them.

Sarah cringed behind the tree and measured her distance to the kitchen door. The house windows still gleamed but the light was grayish-blue, like the fading light from a dying Coleman lantern. Inside the room, her children passed as indistinct shadows. It wasn’t too late. She could still go back. The friend lit a cigarette; she saw the flare of the match, the glow as she drew on it. The friend waved a hand, commiserating with Sandy and Alex.

Sarah turned away from the window. She took a breath; the air was cool and damp, rich with the smells of humus and rot. Out in the street, Backpack Man stood between the quarreling men. He held the shirt high in one hand and the bat in the other. “Daddy!” the little girl cried, and ran toward them. One of the men was sprawled in the street. The other man stood, still gripping a sleeve, hunched and defiant. The girl ran to him, wrapped herself around him.

“Let go!” Backpack Man warned them both. A hush had fallen over the tribe as they stared, awaiting Backpack Man’s judgment. The distant creaking grew louder. Backpack Man raised his bat threateningly.

Sarah gripped the gun in both hands, stepped from the tree’s shadow and thumbed off the safety. She had not known that she remembered how to do that. She’d never been a great shot; his chest was the largest target, and she couldn’t afford a warning shot. “You!” she shouted as she waded through the low fogbank and out into that world. “Drop the bat or I’ll shoot! What did you do to Linda? Did you kill her? Where is she?”

Backpack Man spun toward her, bat held high. Don’t think. She pointed and fired, terror and resolve indistinguishable from one another. The bullet spanged the bat and whined away, hitting the Murphys’ house with a solid thwack. Backpack Man dropped the bat and clutched his hand to his chest. “Where’s Linda?” she screamed at him. She advanced on him, both hands on the gun, trying to hold it steady on his chest. The others had dropped their loot and faded back.

“I’m here! Dammit, Sarah, you took your sweet time. But looks like you thought to bring a lot more than I did!” Linda cackled wildly. “Bring any good socks in there?”

The creaking was a garden cart festooned with a string of LEDs. A halo of light illuminated it as Linda pushed it before her. The cart held two jerry cans, a loop of transparent tubing, and the tool roll from the truck. Three more battered carts, similarly lit, followed her in a solemn procession. As Sarah’s mind scrambled to put it all in context, she heard the rattle of toenails on pavement and a much skinnier Sarge raced up to her, wriggling and wagging in excitement. They weren’t dead. She wasn’t alone. Sarah stooped and hugged the excited dog, letting him lap the tears off her cheeks.

Linda gave her time to recover as she barked her orders at the tribe. “Benny, you come here and take this. Crank this fifty times and then it will light up. Hector, you know how to siphon gas. Check that old truck. We need every drop we can get to keep the Generac running. Carol, you pop the hood and salvage the battery.”

The scavengers came to her, accepting the jerry cans and the siphon tube. Backpack Man bobbed a bow to her before accepting the crank light. As he turned away, Linda smiled at her. “They’re good kids. A bit rough around the edges, but they’re learning fast. You should have seen their faces the first time I fired up the generator. I know where to look for stuff like that. It was in the basement of that clinic on Thirtieth.”

Sarah was speechless. Her eyes roved over Linda. Like the dog, she had lost weight and gained vitality. She hobbled toward Linda on the ragged remnants of her bedroom slippers. She gave a caw of laughter when she saw Sarah staring at her feet.

“Yes, I know. Dotty old woman. Thought of so many things—solar lights and a crank flashlight, aspirin, and sugar cubes and so on … and then walked out the door in my slippers. Robbie was right, my trolley was definitely off the tracks. But it doesn’t matter so much over here. Not when the tracks are torn up for everyone.”

“Russ’s hiking boots are in one of those bags,” Sarah heard herself say.

“Damn, you thought of everything. Cold-weather gear, books … and a pistol! I’d never have thought it of you. You pack any food?”

Sarah shook her head wordlessly. Linda looked at the gun she still held, muzzle down at her side, and nodded knowingly. “Didn’t plan to stay long, did you?”

“I could go back and get some,” Sarah said, but as she looked back at her house, the last lights of the past faded. Her home was a wreck, broken windows and tumbledown chimney. Her grapevines cloaked the ruins of the collapsed porch.

“Can’t go back,” Linda confirmed for her. She shook her head and then clarified: “For one, I don’t want to.” She looked around at her tribe. “Petey, pick up that bat. Remind everyone, we carry everything back and divvy up at the clinic. Not here in the street in the dark. Don’t tear the bags and boxes; put the stuff back in them and let’s hump it on home.”

“Yes, Linda.” Backpack Man bobbed another bow to her. Around her in the darkness, the others were moving to obey her. The girl stood, staring at both of them, her mittened hands clasped together. Linda shook a bony finger at her. “You get busy, missy.” Then she motioned to Sarah to come closer. “What do you think?” she asked her. “Do you think Maureen will be ready soon?”

Lev Grossman

A novelist and journalist, Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time and coauthor of the TIME.com blog TechLand. His quirky 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians was a phenomenal international sensation, and landed on the New York Times Best Seller list as well as being named a New Yorker Best Book of 2009, and its sequel, The Magician King, published in 2011, has enjoyed similar acclaim. Grossman’s other books include the novels Warp and Codex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a website at levgrossman.com.

Here he takes us to an ancient, venerable school for wizards, one haunted by a thousand age-old traditions as well as spirits of a different kind, to show us that even the most innocent of pranks can end up having dangerous and even deadly consequences.

THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR

You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.

You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?

Plum was president of the League—unelected but undisputed—and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since the college had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been, at some point in the past, another League or at any rate something along the same lines, which you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.

They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was lying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but rather exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.

Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius—and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.