The Heroines (21 page)

“We have no time for tea!” Catherine cried. “We must go find him!”

“Yes, but you need to drink some tea first, to get your strength up.”

Gretta placed the tray on the nightstand without saying a word, though Mother knew she was holding back. She silently left the room, pulling the door gently behind her. Mother poured the tea into a cup and handed it to Catherine.

Catherine took a sip, then drew back, a sour look on her face.

“It’s a special brew.” Mother didn’t mention that it was Gretta’s remedy for manic English girls. “It will give you strength to climb out the window.”

Catherine swallowed it down, then she began to rave. The usual complaints: Edgar’s unfairness, Nelly’s insensitivity. Mother was exhausted by it, but she listened, brushed Catherine’s hair with long strokes, said soothing words, until finally Catherine fell back on the bed. Mother didn’t bother to coax her beneath the sheets. She wanted only to get the hell away from her.

After eleven, Mother headed down the sheet rope, her heart as heavy as the humidity. The woods seemed miles from the house. Tonight she felt like a different girl: a girl whose future looked bleak, a girl who no longer wished to put others’ needs before her own. She was tired of being treated like a servant by her mother and Catherine. What was she getting out of any of it? Her mother had planted an evil seed: was her father abandoning her? She had to push away her doubts. She looked up at the sliver of a moon, a golden crescent. Would Catherine be here forever? She couldn’t bear the responsibility for anyone else’s plot after all. She wanted her own story to begin, one utterly different from what Edith had scripted. As she entered the woods, she looked back to see a faint golden light in her bedroom window. She could have sworn she’d turned it off.

Once her eyes adjusted to the woods, the sky seemed to brighten, the leaves and branches becoming a stark contrast. She headed down the usual paths, calling Heathcliff’s name. Her voice sounded pathetic and desperate to her. She entertained the idea of running off with him. She’d been groomed all her life to be quarry, but this time she was the pursuer, seeking something that would make her feel like somebody else. The frogs in the pond croaked unceasingly. Far off she heard the rumble of a truck. There was life out there, roads traveled by cars with people who had direction and purpose. What was she doing out here, chasing down a fictitious hero?

“Are you alone?”

His voice shook her. She held out her arms, looking over each shoulder, stunned to have found what she’d been looking for. Suddenly she realized that all her anxiety stemmed from one fear: not finding him. “Where are you?”

“Here.” He stepped out from behind a tree. “Where is Catherine?”

“Ill. Again.”

“I don’t want to see her again. I hid from you last night. It’s useless. Let her marry that half a man! That’s what she deserves.”

Anne-Marie didn’t say anything. Her joy at being near him overwhelmed her. She couldn’t believe the electricity she felt in her blood, her body. He wanted nothing to do with Catherine? She was thrilled and terrified. Her weariness evaporated. “What will you do now?”

“I’ll find my way.”

“I wish you would stay,” she heard herself say. The frogs chirped in the silence that fell between them. His boots creaked as he stepped closer to her.

“Why?”

“I’d like to get to know you better.”

Laughing, he reached out and took a lock of her hair in his hand. “Certain of that, are you?”

“Not at all.” She raised her hand to brush back the hair and saw her fingers tremble. He took hold of them. A train whistle blew. He kissed her fingers. She fell against him. He was so tall. He kissed her lips. His face was thick with stubble. She felt the earth shift. Then she felt wood chips beneath her back. The kiss turned into a touch into a disrobing into a penetration. Before she knew what had hit her.

When it was over, when he’d shuddered, then collapsed on top of her, Mother opened her eyes. There on the path, glowing in a white nightgown, stood Catherine, her mouth wide open. For a moment their eyes met, then Catherine screamed and ran off. Heathcliff leapt to his feet and chased after her. Mother never saw either one again.

T
hirteen years later, in the same woods where I was conceived, I hid with another Hero, a Celtic king. It was late afternoon, and we were waiting for Albie (perhaps the true Hero) to return with word from the Homestead. We had sent him off with a note to my mother, telling her I’d run away. Since then, Conor had gone back to our first camp and brought back the deer, while I hung out in the tent, in a drug-withdrawal fog mollified by periodic tokes on Albie’s weed. My paranoia was intensifying. Albie had told me that Nixon was scheduled to resign from office any day now; it seemed like everything was off. Only one day had passed since my escape from the Unit, yet it felt like a week. Thinking about Dr. Keller stimulated a fresh wave of anger toward my mother. How could she have signed me into the Unit? Part of me hoped she was worried sick; another part felt sorry about what Albie had said: that Mother, as much as any other Heroine, needed a break from her story line.

I smelled smoke and crawled out to see Conor by the fire with the deer. My head felt better, and the pot had stimulated my appetite such that I was long past squeamishness about Conor’s venison. I was actually craving it. Surviving the Unit and living in the woods had toughened me; fresh air and grass-induced munchies made me ravenous. We sat on a log outside the tent, chunks of greasy meat between our fingers. I’d gotten used to eating without a knife in the Unit. I took a big bite of the meat and licked my fingers. Slobbering over smoked meat felt terrific, and my lack of fussiness made me feel strong.

Conor ate with little enjoyment, chewing slowly as he gazed into the woods without seeing them. He had the blues. It was odd to see this capable and strong king looking vulnerable, and it didn’t fit my ideas about ancient heroes, who always had a plan, and groveling underlings to do their bidding. I knew it wounded his pride not to have caught Deirdre yet. The weeks in the woods were wearing on him; his beard was long and scraggly, his hair full of tangled knots.

He picked up some twigs and fed the fire. “It’s been too long since I saw the walls of the Twinkling Hoard!” Conor began his rant about axes, skulls, gold-rimmed vessels, etc., which always recharged his self-esteem. Sharp rays of orange light pierced the scrub, the last daggers of sunset, and I picked up long thin branches and cracked them over my knee to add to the fire. Albie had been gone for hours. Something rustled in the leaves, and I imagined billy clubs beating back the brush. I stood frozen, one foot in the air, and looked over my shoulder. The sun seemed to set all at once, and the fire roared, night fell, making the trees suddenly blacker than the sky.

I sat next to the fire and watched the flames. Whether it was the withdrawal or a pot flashback, I couldn’t tell, but I started to see evil faces outlined in the flames—wide eye sockets, mouths stretched in terror. We both grew quiet, and I began wondering what was taking Albie so long. My doubts that he would return grew, as did my fear of Conor. When he dragged his hands down his face and I saw the shimmering hair on his knuckles, he looked animal. I didn’t want him handed over to law enforcement, but I wracked my brain trying to remember if any Heroine ever could have benefited from the arrival of a Hero. Not Madame Bovary and Rodolphe, not Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Everything about Conor spelled Villain, especially his certainty that he had a
right
to Deirdre. It wasn’t a subtle enough conflict for a genuine Hero. But his bold rescue of me at the Unit was kingly—he was a liberator! And that was huge to me. Huge.

It dawned on me, as I studied the blue light at the base of the golden flames, that maybe I was a character in a book. The same way Albie had wondered whether a memory was a dream or real, so it struck me suddenly that my very existence might be nothing more than a string of words along a page, sentences building into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, and all of it an invention. If this were the case, did anything I do matter?

I stood up, and my knees buckled. What if I were a Heroine destined for tragedy? Conor ran to my side and helped me back into the tent.

“Rest is what you need.”

I nodded, dropped carefully to my knees, and crawled into the tent. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I couldn’t get it straight in my head. If this wasn’t real, then there was another version of me back home, somebody who could be talking with Albie on the phone, chatting with Gretta, helping Mother with the garden. I wanted this to be the story, the nightmare—and not the reality—so that sleep would lead me back home.

I
awoke to the sound of footsteps plodding through the dead leaves. I sat bolt upright; my heart pounded and my thoughts began to race the way they had the day before, as if my brain were on fast-forward, a scrambled, high-speed re-creation of all the events of the past month: Conor, the lawns of the Unit, white hospital gowns, the scent of Jean Naté. The aftertaste of venison soured my mouth. And I wondered, again, was any of this real? Somebody was out there.

I got to my feet. Albie must be back with word from the Homestead. Conor wasn’t in the tent. Maybe he didn’t really exist. This was it! I was going to find out what was real, real, real. I had no idea what time it was; it felt as if I’d been asleep for hours, and my body was electrified, and words flew through my head—
real, real, real
—but everything felt foggy, groggy, foggy, groggy, foggy. What was real? I would find out what was real. If Albie had seen the real me back at the Homestead, then I would know that this time in the woods was fantasy. The Penny right here wasn’t real. The Penny over there was.

“Where’s the girl?” a man’s voice shouted. “Out of there, now.”

I heard the hiss of a walkie-talkie. I couldn’t believe it. Albie had brought the cops! That meant that the real me was here, that no other Penny existed at the Homestead. I held my breath. No. This couldn’t be real. They couldn’t be looking to bring me home; they wanted to take me back to the Unit. I listened for Conor’s voice and heard nothing. He was probably gone, he probably had never existed. I’d been holed up with a madman in the woods. I crawled back to the mattress, pressed against the plastic sheeting. I couldn’t go back to the Unit! Something clicked inside my head, and my thoughts felt like they were rolling in reverse, and the reversal retriggered my headache. Just before my eyes adjusted to the dark, a spider web swept across my face. I shrank back and crouched on the floor. They were coming with the restraints!

Somebody was swatting at the shelter door. I knew it was Eleanor, summoning me back to the Unit.
It’s Eleanor!
my head shouted.
Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor!
I crawled on shaky hands toward the door.

“She’s in there,” somebody said.

“Come on out now, Penny,” Eleanor said.

“I’m not going back there!” I shouted. “You can’t make me!” I crawled between the mattresses, my legs shaking. I thought of Kristina and Keller and Peggy and, most of all, the hated Eleanor, who’d trooped all the way across the woods in the middle of the night just to get me, to get me! I had to be as strong as Scarlett, staring down the Yankee soldier who held her mother’s sewing box. But the shelter was so dark, and the rustle of sounds outside could be anything. I couldn’t trust my senses. I didn’t really know what was out there, and without a visible enemy as real as a desperate Yankee, my will began to falter.

The flap rustled, and suddenly I found myself looking into the wide eyes and flaring nostrils of Officer Marone, the tall cop who’d come to the house the night I’d first met Conor.

“It’s all over now.” He reached a hand to me.

“I won’t go back there!”

“We’re taking you home,” he said. “C’mon. It’s all right now. Your mother’s here.”

Ears ringing, my mind deranged, I crawled out of the tent to find Mother standing before me. With the fire backlit behind her, I saw only her silhouette, the long wavy hair, the short-sleeved T-shirt and ankle-length skirt. She grabbed me hard and hugged me, and as I looked over her shoulder, my eyes adjusting to the dark, what I saw next flipped everything around again. Beneath a tree, Albie stood behind one of the wheelbarrows from the Homestead. Inside of it sat Deirdre, bound at the wrists and ankles, duct tape over her mouth. She stared at me with hard, cold eyes, her long curls covering her chest and shoulders. I was frozen in place. Conor stood beside her; the look of triumph on his face struck me as smug.

“Deirdre! At last!”

Marone turned to Conor. “We want to trade, Conor. Penny for Deirdre.”

Mother was offering up a Heroine. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. The thing I’d wished for all along. Mother was putting me before a Heroine, but I was horrified. Seeing Deirdre tied up deepened my paralyzing shock. My brain felt squeezed in a vise, and then it released, and the blood drained from my head and I thought I would pass out. There was no way any of this could be real. It couldn’t! I dropped to my knees, unable to believe how Deirdre stood up to Conor, even when bound and gagged. It had taken this brutal abduction to secure her surrender.

Deirdre wiggled and tried to talk from behind the tape. Her long blond curls fell over the metal edge of the wheelbarrow.

Conor drew his sword and pointed it at Marone. “What unmanly way is this to bring her in?”

Marone held up his hands. “Easy there, big fella.”

“You dare to threaten the King of Ulster?”

“Conor!” I yelled. “You’ve got Deirdre. Take her now, just go!” I dropped to my knees and held my mother’s arm.

“I’m okay, Penny,” Mother said. We held each other tight, both speechless, witnessing a spectacle Mother had always tried to avoid.

Deirdre squirmed against the ropes and mumbled into the tape. Conor ripped the tape from her mouth, and Deirdre spat out a curse. “I’ll never spare you much love!”

“You’ll spare what I take!” he said. “Unbind her feet!”

Marone obeyed, stooping to loosen the clothesline knotted around her ankles. Deirdre stiffened, pressed her arms to her sides, unyielding as a piece of plywood. I thought she might lash out and kick Marone, but she was stiff with dignity. I couldn’t stop watching her. Once she was on her feet, her hands still bound behind her back, she raised her chin and started to chant. “If all of Ulster’s warriors were gathered on this plain, Conchobor, I would gladly give them all for Noisiu, son of Uisliu.”

Conor said nothing in response, but simply leaned on his sword and drew his horse closer to him. I hardly recognized his manner; Deirdre’s presence had transformed him into the regal man I’d met that first night in the woods.

Albie shook his head, muttering, “Holy shit.”

I looked up into the trees, into the heavens. The sky was turning a lighter blue between the branches, and I saw through the shrubs a ribbon of pink on the horizon. A male cardinal began to whistle, and a crow cawed right afterward. Another cardinal answered the male’s call, and then a catbird did a squeaky imitation. How could they carry on with their morning songs in the middle of all this? I looked at Mother, her face frozen, her mouth ajar; she was witnessing the first return of a Heroine to her story. This was our life, not some distant political tragedy, and much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t change the channel. Mother couldn’t comment from a cool distance. For a weird moment, I wanted to cover her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to see this cold surrender. Betraying a Heroine would kill her, I thought, and vomit rose in my throat. I hunched over and puked venison in the dirt.

I heard the horse, and I rose up to see it lift its knees and clomp in place beside Conor, who tightened the reins. The horse relaxed and allowed him to mount. Conor waved his hand for Marone to lift Deirdre up. Marone grabbed her by the waist and lifted her high. She sat sideways in front of Conor, her chin tilted up, and I remembered how he had pulled me up by my hair and carried me like a bundle of wheat weeks before. Deirdre’s dignity and courage surpassed her great beauty, and any envy I had of her melted away. She tucked her long curls beneath the collar of her nightgown and crossed her feet. Conor grasped her around the waist, kicked the horse, and they rode off, in the opposite direction from the prairie.

I closed my eyes as Mother wiped my mouth with her sleeve and caressed my head. It was the most comforting touch I’d felt in weeks. I was unbelievably relieved to be near her again, to feel her cool hands on my hot forehead. I listened to the retreating hoof-beats, not wanting to feel the absence of this king who’d neither said good-bye nor thank you.