“Why, you little shit.” She got to her feet quicker than I thought she could, like all big animals that move faster than you can imagine. But Dean was faster. He’d nocked an arrow and leveled it at her before she could rush him. His face ran with sweat, his eyes red and tortured.
“Now you listen to me, Dean. These women here—-including that coward in the river . . .” She gestured in our direction. Blood dripped from her arms and stained her skirt. “They don’t care about you. They don’t love you. They haven’t taken care of you your whole life, fed you, kept you safe from your own father, from all the animals out there, and I don’t mean just the ones in the forest. You know the animals I’m talking about, don’t you? You remember. You were young, but I know you do.”
Dean shook his head, kept the arrow trained on her heart.
Her voice lowered to an intimacy that bordered on obscene. “You know there’s nothing out there for you. There is no family for you beyond these woods. Only savages who would tear you up. Oh, yes, my son, they would have you for breakfast. But here”—she opened her arms to the sky, did a girlish twirl toward the forest and back—“this is ours, Dean. And I’ve told you, it’s not good to meet the people who get lost here. It’s not good to trust them with our story. Because not everyone understands. We’ve seen that, haven’t we? This is our world, Dean. Yours and mine, not theirs.”
His arm trembled at the bow; the arrow shook in its notch.
She moved closer to him; one more step and she could have reached out and touched the bow. “We have all God’s creation to ourselves. We have paradise, and you want to throw that away? Have you lost your mind?”
The forest hushed in anticipation of blood.
“Come on now, Dean,” Simone said, a catch in her voice. “Where is the boy I knew? Where is my beloved son? Put the bow down. Do as I say.”
I didn’t see his hands move. Only saw the big black bird—a cormorant—as it thumped onto the rocks next to Simone, an arrow piercing it through, oily blue-black wings splayed as if it were still trying to fly, long neck twisted backward. We stared as if we’d never seen a bird before. Dean nocked another arrow into his bow and aimed it at the center of his mother’s broad chest.
“So, this is it,” Simone said, her voice softer, chastened. “I understand. You’ve made up your mind to leave me.” She tossed up her arms and shrugged her shoulders, a parody of defeat. “Fine. There’s nothing else to talk about. You’re free to go. God knows, you’ve always been free.” She gestured a beefy hand at him. “Look at you. You’re a grown man. I’ve never put you in chains, have I? I’ve never locked you up.”
As she spoke Dean lowered his weapon bit by bit; tension draining from his shoulders and arms that held the arrow straight in its notch and the bow forward in perfect readiness.
He blinked.
She dropped her head like a bull and charged him, ramming her bulk into his midsection, felling him onto the rocks closest to the surging river. He disappeared under her mess of rotten clothes and hair. With a wild cry, Rachel leapt on her back. Simone flung her away as if she were nothing, but she jumped right back on as if possessed.
The three bodies rolled and churned a foot from the water’s edge. The river roared all around us, orchestral, magnificent. I breathed in its white energy as I snatched up the biggest rock I could lift with one hand, picturing myself smashing Simone’s skull through her ski hat and viperous hair, but nothing stayed still long enough for me to take good aim—would I kill Rachel instead? Or Dean? Gasping, crying, I raised the rock.
Pia, drenched, almost inhuman looking, burst out of the water near the bank, sprinted past me and threw herself on the mass of writhing bodies. She locked her arms around Simone—who lost precious seconds in her surprise—and grappled her away from Rachel, who still clung to her. Dean found his chance and rolled away, instantly on his feet. Pia spun Simone facedown in the dirt, smacking her head down into it as Dean seized her wrists and lashed them together. Rachel rolled away, moaning, “Pia, Pia, you’re alive.”
With some roughness Dean spun Simone onto her back. She snarled, kicking and jerking. We all stood back and out of range.
She wriggled herself to a seated position, hat half-cocked on her head, hair more chaotic than ever. “Fuck you all. It doesn’t matter,” she hissed. “Do you really think you’re going to find your way out of here? You’re all going to die, one way or the other.”
46