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You’d think Abigail’s father would start her on something small, like rabbits. Something easier to kill.
You’d be wrong. The most vivid memory she has is holding the gun for the first time, pointed straight at a deer. Just like that, her father whispered, and all she could smell in her nose was picea and juniper and her pulse jumped like something too small to kill and she pulled the trigger and fired—
--
Hannibal tells her that she can only leave the house when he tells her to. It’s to keep her safe, apparently; Hannibal tucks her hair behind her one remaining ear, over and over, like a threat and a reminder. To keep you safe but they both know that’s a lie. It’s just to keep her. And Abigail’s never liked being kept; Abigail belonged to the woods before she ever belonged to her father. When Abigail was seven years old she leapt out of her window onto the ground and ran out into the woods behind their house, just because she wanted to know them. Her father brought her back, and whispered in her ear:
You can guess. You can guess what everyone tells Abigail, over and over and over again. Everything I do, I do to keep you safe. Everything I do, I do to keep you—
The point is: Hannibal leaves for his therapy or his murder or his suit-shopping, whatever interests Hannibal Lecter today, and Abigail pockets the spare key and slips out the back door.
The city isn’t anything like the woods. Also: it’s just like the woods, cool dark shadows from towering sky-scrapers and the bustle of prey all around you. Abigail breathes in through her nose, long and sharp, and only smells gasoline. That’s all that’s in the air, here in this great metal forest.
Oh, girl, she thinks to herself, as she stalks through the city streets with her hands in her pockets and her head tucked down towards the ground. Oh, girl, there’s a fire coming. Run.
All the animals are smart enough to flee the woods when a fire comes. You can see them, the wolf and the deer running next to each other, animosity forgotten for more important things.
But not Abigail. She just unlocks the door to Hannibal’s cage, and steps back inside.
--
Sometimes she dreams. Sometimes she dreams that she’s standing in a river with Will, and Will is teaching her how to fish. He says: I named the bait after you. She says: But why am I only ever your bait?
--
Hannibal teaches her how to play the harpsichord, the way he promised he would when he put his hands around her neck and sprayed her blood all over her house. He sits next to her on the bench and Abigail breathes in through her nose, waits for juniper. Doesn’t get it. Hannibal’s house doesn’t smell like anything much, and Hannibal just smells faintly of aftershave. Underneath it all: gasoline. They’re building towards a fire. They’ve been building towards a fire ever since she killed Nick Boyle – no, since her father died – no, since her father killed – no, since she was born with big blue eyes and dark hair and something in her that made her father want to kill – no—
She doesn’t know, but she knows it’s coming. The scar on her neck doesn’t hurt when it rains, but it hurts when Hannibal smiles at her in that way that makes his mouth look like the wide-open gape of a throat. Right now it hurts and hurts and hurts. Abigail gulps in small breaths through her nose, smiles in a way that hurts. She places one finger on the key and it screams a note, loud and shrill in the air. Under the pad of her finger she can tell that the key is made of bone.
The part of her that is still her father’s daughter whispers: whose bone?
The part of her that has always belonged to the woods whispers: don’t ask that sort of question. Hannibal is watching her with such bright interest, now, but soon she’s going to stop being a curiosity to him. She has to save her tears for that: for when they’re necessary. So she plays another note, pulls the memory of bone through her fingers (artist’s fingers, her dad had always said) (killer’s fingers, her dad had always thought) (wanted) (the memory through her fingers is like long dark hair, just like that, exactly like that, exactly like her) and shoves it to the back of her mind. Breathes in. Breathes out. Swallows the tears down.
She starts playing “Heart and Soul,” the only song she knows. Back and forth, the same handful of notes on the keys. Da dada dada dada dadum dada dada dada da—
(Is this all her life will ever amount to? Back and forth forever, the same hands on the same keys, only the man sitting next to her switching in and out?)
Hannibal joins in, playing the lead with smug amusement rolling off of him in waves. Abigail can’t smell juniper, can’t smell pine. These are the sorts of hands, she thinks, that could break her neck. There’s something in the knuckles.
“Did your father teach you how to play,” Hannibal murmurs.
Abigail’s hands slip, hit a wrong note. The harpsichord wails.
--
When Abigail was younger she had sleepovers with the girls in her grade. Sammy taught her how to braid hair, and Lynette told ghost stories that made everyone shriek.
(Abigail didn’t shriek. Or. She didn’t see any need to shriek, but everyone around her was so afraid that she played at it. She made her eyes so wide. Bit the inside of her lip until: tears. It was easy. Maybe it was a little too easy.)
Abigail’s mother is an absent ghost in her life, a woman she only remembers in flashes. Someone to be avoided when coming back from the cabin. Someone to talk to about tampons. Abigail and her father both knew that her mother didn’t get it; they had a secret between the two of them that she would never know. So when Abigail thinks about the smell of perfume, the soft cross of leg over leg, the way hair falls lightly over the shoulder – she thinks of sleepovers with girls whose hair and eyes looked nothing, nothing like hers. Girls who would never play a part in her sort of story.
Who taught Abigail to play “Heart and Soul”? Did her father? Did her mother? Did Marisa? Did she learn it in the woods? Did she learn it in a dream? Why is everyone so eager to know who taught her? Why is it that Abigail had to be made?
--
Sometimes she dreams. Sometimes she dreams that she is standing over a corpse, and Jack Crawford is trying to talk her into saying she put it there. Behind her, her father is standing with his hands on her shoulders. These are the sorts of hands, she thinks, that could break her neck. There’s something in the knuckles.
We did it together, he whispers in her ear, and his breath smells like juniper and meat. Glasses press up against the space where her ear used to be. The words are accented. Who was Abigail’s father, again? Who put the body there? Who is the body? Why can she never, ever wake up?
--
She doesn’t have sleepovers anymore. Or: her life is one great sleepover, your choice. She stalks through the halls of Hannibal’s house, like a ghost, like something that wandered in from the woods and got lost. The whole house is dark. It doesn’t smell like anything. One of the few memories of her mother Abigail has held onto is her mother reading her fairy tales, when she was younger. Now Abigail can’t stop thinking about Bluebeard. Where is the locked door, in this house? What is it that she’s not supposed to see?
She can’t help seeing stags everywhere, statuettes and paintings and the shapes of stags’ heads out of the corner of her eye. It’s cruel, cruel, that she keeps finding herself under the looming shadows of someone else’s antlers. She can feel the stripe of them across her neck, bleeding like tar. All the curtains are drawn; the house is dark, and Abigail has nowhere to go but in circles. She keeps walking anyways. Around, and around, and around, her fingers stroking the metal fur of a stag as she walks by. Her feet on the wooden floorboards only sound like hooves.
--
Hannibal tells her about his memory palace. He thinks that she should make one too, but the idea is laughable. In Abigail’s mind there is no safe place. In Abigail’s mind there is only the wood, dark and deep and unknowable. She couldn’t build a palace there. She couldn’t put her mother up a tree, say stay safe there, don’t move, my fathers are coming to hunt you down and eat you alive. She couldn’t make a place for all those girls she—
—all those girls her father killed. The woods are only ever the woods. You can build houses there, but leave and come back and the trees will eat them alive. Every time Abigail and her father came back to the cabin there was a little more ivy on it, a little more dust. Hannibal, she thinks, wants her to make that cabin into the entirety of her mind. He wants her to stretch it out, fill rooms with antlers and the way Will held her hands and the way her blood smelled when it sprayed in great gushes from her throat. To put these things on the wall, separate herself from herself and stand back and look and say: well, that’s a lovely painting, isn’t it? To honor – every – part.
By now, the wood of the cabin has already begun to rot. Termites gnawing away. One hunger changes to a different kind of hunger and soon enough the entire cabin will be gone and some mornings Abigail wakes up and it takes her a minute to remember the way her father’s voice sounded when it said her name. Maybe you can’t hold onto things. Maybe it’s best to let them go.
--
(I’m so sorry, she says to Alana.)
(I didn’t know what else to do, so I just did what he told me, she says to Will.)
(She is so good at being what other people need her to be. The big eyes, the trembling voice, the delicate gasping sobs. Alana and Will need the victim from her so desperately. Hannibal needs the girl who jokes about her death, who wants to hold the pump and play a part in her own unmaking. Her father needs—
needed—
Her father needed—)
--
Go upstairs and stay very quiet, says Hannibal. Jack Crawford is coming over for supper, and Abigail is pacing back and forth in one small tight circle around the room they’ve both called “hers.” Downstairs she can hear yells of pain, crashes, thuds. She keeps pacing. She has “Heart and Soul” stuck in her head, an insistent tinny collection of notes. Da dada dada dada dadum dada dada dada da—
(Hannibal might die down there.)
Heart and soul,
(Hannibal might kill down there.)
I begged to be adored—
(She can’t decide)
—lost control—
(which is worse.)
—and tumbled overboard—
Footsteps climb up the stairs. Abigail moves back into the dark. The sound of the piano – harpsichord – the sound of the music in her head is so loud she can’t think. The moonlight is falling through the window, the shadows long dark antler-shapes; the forest is growing in, and aren’t antlers and branches the same if you take enough steps back? Abigail keeps backing up, further and further, and all she wants in that moment – more than anything – is to shatter the glass.
--
Sometimes she dreams. Sometimes she’s awake. Sometimes she’s so very, very awake.
--
Maybe you can’t hold onto things. Maybe it’s best to let them go. But here she is, in Hannibal Lecter’s house, just another memory trapped behind glass in the palace he’s made of his mind. He can’t bear to let her go. He doesn’t want her to die, so she doesn’t. She doesn’t have any illusions: someday that is going to change. Her father told her not to shoot the fawns, so that they’d grow large enough to eat. Eventually Hannibal will run out of things to teach her, or he will realize that no matter what soaps and shampoos sit in his shower she will never stop smelling like pine trees.
She should run, she thinks. There are places out there in the world for girls like her. She could get a cabin somewhere, between the shadows of the trees. She could get an apartment in a city close to the sea. She could hunt. Oh, god, she could hunt.
Instead she sits upstairs by the window and tries to draw. She can’t sketch – her father said she had an artist’s fingers, but that’s not true. They’ve only ever been a killer’s fingers. Her faces are flat and lopsided, and everyone she draws stares at her with accusing eyes. Leave, she thinks, and writes the word in the margin: leave. But she can’t. She thinks about it – running – and she can’t. Maybe it’s because this is what she deserves, to wait for Hannibal Lecter to slit her throat. Maybe she doesn’t know how to be herself without a father to contrast herself against. Maybe she just wants to survive. Maybe she just wants to live out the rest of her life without looking over her shoulder for whatever’s hunting her.
So she lives here, in the mouth of her death. Caught between all those teeth, like just another piece of meat.
She turns the pencil over, erases her spidery handwriting in the margins of the page. Hannibal likes looking at her drawings. She can’t let him see that part of her. That isn’t the part that he needs.
--
(Here is an answer: Abigail is not Bluebeard’s wife. Abigail is the bloody room, behind the locked door. Abigail is the kept secret. Abigail is the revelation, what the hero needs to kill the beast.
Abigail isn’t the hero of her own story. Just handwriting in the margins, waiting to be erased.)
--
They’ll go to Florence, Hannibal says. He talks about it lovingly, the way he talks about Will, the way his voice sounds when he’s talking to Alana. (Abigail can hear them talking, sometimes, and she could go down the stairs – Abigail can hear Will talking to Hannibal and she could go down the stairs—) She’ll like it there, he says. There will be a place for her there. For the three of them.
There’s no place for Alana Bloom, of course. This has never been a story about mothers.
Abigail smiles, sweet and pink as the spill of guts from a deer’s belly. Tell me about Florence, she says. Here is what Hannibal needs: an audience. Here is what Hannibal needs: a student. Abigail holds innocence in both hands, palms held open towards the ceiling, and listens to every word. Florence. Will holding one hand, Hannibal holding the other, the three of them walking next to each other through the cobbled streets. She thinks she would like to see Will smile.
It’s a beautiful dream. Hannibal is very good at conjuring up beautiful things for her; little cakes and plates scattered with pomegranate seeds. But at the end of the day you eat it all, and everything is gone. You keep all the beautiful things in your belly, but you can’t hold onto them for long. Eventually you have to let them go.
--
Sometimes she dreams. Here is a dream: she is walking through Florence. Her mother is holding one hand, Alana Bloom is holding the other. Every step they take on the cobblestones sounds like hooves clicking. Around them Florence is crumbling, trees cracking the stone with their urge to grow.
That’s Venice, sweetheart, says Abigail’s mother. Venice crumbles. Florence stays where it is.
Alana just looks at her and smiles. Between her teeth flowers are sprouting, ferns unfolding themselves like little hairs from her skin. Alana understands, Abigail thinks. Everything crumbles eventually. She and the forest, they are both so very hungry. She and the forest, they can’t be kept. Not for long. Eventually, everything burns down.
--
She wakes up from that dream, though. This isn’t a story about mothers. This isn’t even a story about Abigail. It’s a story about her dying, over and over again, the same girl brought to life so she can be erased from the margins. The forest grows back just the same as it was. Between the trees there is always another deer for her father to shoot.
--
—and she missed the deer. Her shot fired off into the woods somewhere, and the deer went jumping off into the forest.
That’s alright, her father said, you’ll get it next time. His breath smelled like juniper and meat. He tucked her hair behind her ear, looked at her like she was the most lovely thing in the world. Abigail held the gun between her perfect killer’s fingers, and she smiled back.
When she thinks about this moment, later, she wishes that she hadn’t smiled at all.
--
I’m so sorry, Abigail says, but she’s not sure who she’s apologizing to and she’s not sure what she’s apologizing for. Maybe it is this: every apology she’s ever wanted to make, pushing out of her throat like branches. Stinking on her breath like juniper.
In the dark of the room upstairs, all Abigail can think about is Alana’s long dark hair. All Abigail can see is Alana’s bright blue eyes.
I’m so sorry, Abigail says.
Glass shatters.