Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

“Billy, stop that!” she says, trying to be firm and gentle, trying not to cry.

“Nobody ... tells ... me ... what to do:” He steps back from her, then brings his leg up, knee into her stomach. He’s too drunk to aim well, but it hurts her.

“You’ll kill it!” She’s screaming now. “You’ll kill our baby!” Billy puts his head down on her shoulder and begins to cry, hoarse choking sobs that sound torn out of him. “I told you,” he said. “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Told me what?” she says, stroking his yellow hair.

‘‘There’s no scars,” he says. “Nothing. There’s no scars at all.” Charis doesn’t put it together, what he’s talking about. “Come on now,” she says. “We’re going up to bed:” They do, and she rocks him in her arms. Then they are both asleep.

In the morning Charis gets up to feed the chickens, as she always does. Billy is awake: he stays warm underneath the sleeping bag, watching her dress. Before she goes downstairs she comes over to give him a kiss on the forehead. She wants him to say something, but he doesn’t.

First she lights the stove, then she fills the pail at the sink. She can hear Billy moving around upstairs; also Zenia, which is unusual. Maybe she’s packing, maybe she’ll leave. Charis certainly hopes so. Zenia can’t stay here any more, she’s causing too much disturbance in the air.

Charis goes outside and unlatches the gate to the chickens’ compound. She can’t hear them rustling around this morning, she can’t hear their sleepy cooing. Sleepyheads! She opens the chickens’ door, but none of them come out. Puzzled, she goes around to the door for humans and steps inside.

The chickens are all dead. Every single one of them, dead in their boxes, two of them on the floor. There is blood all over the place, on the straw, dripping down from the boxes. She picks up one of the dead hens from the floor: there’s a slit in its throat.

She stands there, shocked and dismayed, trying to hold herself together. Her head is cloudy, red fragments are swirling behind her eyes. Her beautiful chickens! It must have been a weasel. What else? But wouldn’t a weasel drink all the blood? Maybe it was a neighbour, not anyone right next to her but somebody else. Who hates them that much? The chickens; or her and Billy. She feels violated.

“Billy,” she calls. But he can’t hear her, he’s inside. She walks unsteadily towards the house; she thinks she’s going to faint.

She reaches the kitchen, then calls again. He must have fallen asleep. Heavily she goes up the stairs:

Billy isn’t there. He isn’t anywhere in the room, and when she looks into Zenia’s room he isn’t there either. Why would she expect him to be?

Zenia is gone also. They are both gone. They aren’t in the house. Charis runs, she runs gasping, down towards the ferry dock. She knows now. It’s finally happened: Billy has been kidnapped. When she reaches the dock the ferry is hooting, it’s pulling away, and there is Billy standing on it, with two strange men close to him. Two men in overcoats, just the way they would look. Beside him is Zenia. She must have told, she must have turned him in.

Billy doesn’t wave. He doesn’t want the two men to know Charis has anything to do with him. He’s trying to protect her.

She walks slowly back to the house, goes slowly into it. She searches it from top to bottom, looking for a note, but there is nothing. In the sink she finds the bread knife, with blood on the blade.

It was Zenia. Zenia murdered her chickens.

Maybe Billy wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe he’s run—away. He’s run away with Zenia. That’s what he meant by no scars: there are no scars on Zenia. He knows because he’s looked. He has looked at Zenia’s body, all over it, with the light on. He knows everything there is to know about that body. He has been inside it.

Charis sits at the kitchen table, banging her head softly against it, trying to drive out thought. But she thinks anyway. If there are no scars there must be no cancer. Zenia doesn’t have cancer, just as Billy said. But if that’s true, what has Charis been doing for the past six months? Being a fool, that’s what. Being stupid. Being so deeply stupid it’s a wonder she has a brain at all.

Being betrayed. For how long, how many times? He tried to tell her. He tried to make Zenia go away, but then it was too late.

As for the dead chickens and the bread knife, it’s a message. Slit your wrists. She hears a voice, a voice from a long time ago, more than one voice. You are so stupid. You can’t win this fight. Not in this life. She’s had almost enough of this life anyway; maybe it’s time for the next one. Zenia has taken away the part of herself she needs in order to live. She is dumb, she is a failure, she is an idiot. The bad things that have happened to her are a punishment, they are to teach her a lesson. The lesson is that she might as well give up.

That is Karen speaking. Karen is back, Karen has control of their body. Karen is angry with her, Karen is desolate, Karen is sick with disgust, Karen wants them to die. She wants to kill their body. Already she has the bread knife in her hand, moving it towards their shared arm. But if she does that, their baby will die too, and Charis refuses to let that happen. She calls all of her strength, all of her inner healing light, her grandmother’s fierce blue light, into her hands; she wrestles Karen silently for possession of the knife. When she gets it, she pushes Karen away from her as hard as she can, back down into the shadows. Then she throws the knife out the door.

She waits for Billy to come back: She knows he won’t, but she waits anyway. She sits at the kitchen table, willing her body not to move, not moving. She waits all afternoon. Then she goes to bed.

By the next day she’s no longer so spaced out. Instead she’s frantic. The worst thing is not knowing. Maybe she’s misjudged Billy, maybe he hasn’t run away with Zenia. Maybe he’s in prison, having his throat cut in the showers. Maybe he’s dead.

She calls all the numbers scribbled on the wall beside their phone. She asks, she leaves messages. None off his friends has heard anything, or will admit to it. Who else could know where he is, where he might have gone? Him, or Zenia, or both of them together. Who else knows Zenia?

She can think of only one person: West. West was living with Zenia before she turned up on Charis’s doorstep with a black eye. Charis views that black eye from a different angle, now. It could have had a valid reason for existing.

West teaches at the university, Zenia told her that. He teaches music or something. She wonders if he calls himself West, or Stewart. She will ask for both. It doesn’t take her long to track down his home number.

She dials, and a woman answers. Charis explains that she’s looking for Zenia.

“Looking for Zenia?” says the woman. “Now why in hell would anyone want to do that?”

“Who is this?” says Charis. “Antonia Fremont,” says Tony.

“Tony,” says Charis. Someone she knows, more or less. She doesn’t stop to wonder what Tony is doing answering West’s phone. She takes a breath. “Remember when you tried to help me, on the front lawn of McClung Hall? And I didn’t need it?”

“Yes,” says Tony guardedly.

“Well, this time I do.”

“Help with Zenia?” says Tony. “Sort of,” says Charis.

Tony says she’ll come.

Tony takes the ferry to the Island. She sits at Charis’s kitchen table and drinks a cup of mint tea and listens to the whole story, nodding from time to time, with her mouth slightly open. She asks a few questions, but she doubts nothing. When Charis tells her how stupid she has been, Tony says that Charis has not been particularly stupid; no more stupid than Tony was herself. “Zenia is very good at what she does,” is how she puts it.