Someone will tunnel into the cave beneath it and find our grave goods: trucks made of plastic, a knife with a red case. A sword. Some guns.
The bones of two boys, their skeletons entwined, dressed in wedding attire.
In the pair’s joined hands, the searchers will find a smooth stone and the tiny head of a plastic king.
* * *
“Listen,” someone said to me once. This was a long time ago, another life, the same woman, the beginning instead of this, which is not the end but something else. Dana Mills. You’re the one who gets away. You’re the one who keeps living.
“Listen, let me tell you a story.”
“A story?” I said. I was on a bus going cross-country, and I was seventeen years old. I had all the time in the world.
“I was lost,” said the old woman beside me. “I was lost and I didn’t know how to get home. No one would take me in, and I didn’t think I’d make it. Then I found something.”
I turned my head, expecting a Bible. She handed me a rock instead. It was embossed with a fossil, a tiny sea monster the size of my thumb, a lizard face and swimming limbs. When I tilted it into the sun, it glowed, opalescent.
“You never know what will make everything change,” she said. “They keep finding ancestors of humans in caves, and every time they do, it’s a surprise! They keep finding miracles. This one is millions of years old, this miracle. Touch its spine and feel how it must’ve swum. It must have found its way through a sea that was here before anything else we see now. Maybe every monster is a miracle meant to change the world and maybe every monster is just an accident of biology.”
I looked out the window. Corn and light. Me here, about to go running into it, alive.
“Somebody told me,” my seatmate said. “Somebody told me that he didn’t love me anymore, that he’d never take me back or let me come home, but there are billions of years out there, and who knows what’s happened in them. If something’s happened once, we could all find love again. If something’s happened once, none of us are done for. None of us are the last of us. The story is all of the voices, not just the voice of the one who tells it at the end.”
I was holding a rock with a tiny sea monster embedded in it, a child of some tremendous mother. How many millions of years had it traveled to come to me?
I was holding this rock when the old woman in the seat beside me fell asleep, and didn’t wake up. I was holding it as I stood at the side of the highway, watching them drive her away to be buried. I’m the only one who knows her story.
When I was in labor with my son, I clenched the rock in my fist, feeling the bones.
When he was tiny, I told him its story, naming those bones, one by one.
When he was eight, I gave it to him as a brother, and joined its bones to ours, a single family, one line of miracles, one line of warriors, one line of swimmers through unknown waters.
“Listen,” I told him. I whispered it into his ears. “In some places, no one’s alone.”
And they’re all around me now, a market full of people, a city full of people, a world full of people, bright eyes, bright skin, bright voices—and nothing is what I thought it was.
I’m in a crowd, and hanging on to my hand is my son, tiny, learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to be alive.
I’m in a crowd and we are all walking together, my mother and my grandmother, my husband and my heart, my son and his beloved, my ghosts, the soldiers I fought beside, the people we killed, and the people who killed us. My saint with her breasts on fire, and my strangers with their hands out, telling me to listen.
The sun is setting, and the town is a skyline, black as the back of a whale coming up out of the ocean. My skin is cold, but the last rays heat me, making this soul into steam.
We walk past the fire and past the graves, under the stars, up the mountain, and up, and up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original inspiration for The Mere Wife came during a 2006 residency at the MacDowell Colony, where I ran across a library copy of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. I typed the first few chapters of my own novel about monsters in suburbia eight years later, overnight on my sister Molly’s couch in Paris, next to her newborn son Jasper, who was intermittently growling (it runs in the family). In 2015, I was a resident at Arte Studio Ginestrelle, on Mt. Subasio, Italy, where I wrote the rest of the first draft listening to the snuffling of wild boars and the howling of boar-hunting dogs. Thanks to Marina Merli, and residents Opal Palmer Adisa, Jude Harzer, Signe Lykke, Harriet Wheeler, Gosia Lipka, Aleksandra Syrenka, Nel ten Wolde, Susan Cornelis, Deb Berzsenyi, Nancy Ulliman, Reinot Quispel, and Neroni the cat. When I returned, my magnificent agent, Stephanie Cabot, took the newborn novel out on submission, and I owe thanks to her and the rest of my Gernert Company team, Ellen Goodson Coughtrey, Rebecca Gardner, Anna Worrall, and Will Roberts. I salute the generosity of Carole DeSanti and John Joseph Adams, both of whose thoughts on the first manuscript led to this version. At Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MCD, thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, who acquired this wild beast and wolfherded it through several increasingly fangy versions, and to claw-tenders Nora Barlow, Maya Binyam, and Daniel Vazquez. Also at FSG/MCD, thanks to Katie Hurley, Jonathan Lippincott, Nina Frieman, Brian Gittis, Norma Barksdale, Debra Helfand, Naomi Huffman, Jeff Seroy, Alex Merto, and Keith Hayes, and to Miranda Meeks, who is responsible for the beautiful cover image. Thank you to the immensely skilled and ridiculously appropriately named Beowulf Sheehan (assisted by Sami Sneider) for the author portrait, and to the divine Mandy Bisesti and Greg Purnell for, respectively, warpaint and skull dragons. Thanks to Marika Webb-Pullman at Scribe, multiyear believer. Deep owing and love, as ever, to China Miéville, who read, annotated, and battled every bit of this book, ghosts to epigraphs. There are no margin dragons like his margin dragons. More love to Jamie Pietras, who fed my fires and feted me throughout the last year and a half of this project, all while listening to my revision roars, and to the rest of the large tribe who offered specifics during this dream: Chris Abani, Zay Amsbury, Nathan Austin, Jim Batt, Jess Benko, Kim Boekbinder, Brooke Bolander, Libba Bray, Myke Cole, Molly Crabapple, Kate Czajkowski, Junot Díaz, Matt Cheney, Chip Delany, Kira Brunner Don, Rebecca Donner, Kelley Eskridge, Patrick Farrell, Jeffrey Ford, Craig Franson, Larisa Fuchs, Neil Gaiman, Barry Goldblatt, Nicola Griffith, Adriane Headley, Mark Headley, Molly Headley, Dani Holtz, Kat Howard, Doug Kearney, Meghan Koch, Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, Téa Obreht, Erin Orr, JoAnna Pollonais, Victor LaValle, Ben Loory, Sarah McCarry, Sofia Samatar, Joshua Schenkkan, Sarah Schenkkan, Elizabeth Senja Spackman, Jesse Sheidlower, Sxip Shirey. You’re all listed in my book of wonders. Thank you, finally, to translators, to tales told, to scholars of crumbling manuscripts, to disputed definitions, to passionate readers. You bring me the brass balls and the talons to write my own versions.
ALSO BY MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
FICTION
Aerie
Magonia
The End of the Sentence (with Kat Howard)
Queen of Kings
Unnatural Creatures (with Neil Gaiman)
NONFICTION
The Year of Yes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Sel
ected Translations
Prologue
Part I: The Mountain
Listen
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
So
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
What
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II: The Mere
Attend
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Hark
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Tell
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Behold
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part III: The Dragon
Ah
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Lo
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Yes
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Sing
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Now
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Acknowledgments
Also by Maria Dahvana Headley
About the Author
Copyright
MCD
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Maria Dahvana Headley
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Headley, Maria Dahvana, 1977– author.
Title: The mere wife / Maria Dahvana Headley.
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058628|ISBN 9780374208431 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and sons—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.E233 M47 2018|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058628
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e-ISBN 9780374715540