Beware the Woman - Softcover

Abbott, Megan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593084950 ISBN 13: 9780593084953

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An NPR Best Book of the Year

"Beware the Woman is Rebecca wedded to The Handmaid’s Tale . . . along with the feverish psychological twists and turns that Abbott’s novels are celebrated for.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

Honey, I just want you to have everything you ever wanted. That’s what Jacy’s mom always told her. And finally, Jacy did. Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her husband, Jed, embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Dr. Ash, in Michigan’s far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive at the cottage snug within the woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the hospitable Dr. Ash, if less so by his house manager, the enigmatic Mrs. Brandt.

But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly, activities are scrapped, and all eyes are on Jacy’s condition. Suddenly, whispers about Jed’s long-dead mother and complicated family history seem to eerily impinge upon the present, and Jacy begins to feel trapped in the cottage, her every move surveilled, her body under the looking glass. But are her fears founded or is it simply paranoia, or cabin fever, or—as is suggested to her—a stubborn refusal to make necessary precautions? The dense woods surrounding the cottage are full of dangers, but what if the greater ones are creeping inside?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including New York Times bestseller The Turnout, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, and The End of Everything. She received her PhD in literature from New York University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Guardian, and The Believer. She's the cocreator and executive producer of USA's adaptation of Dare Me, now on Netlfix, and was a staff writer on HBO's David Simon show The Deuce. Abbott lives in New York City.

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"We should go back," he said suddenly, shaking me out of sleep.

"What?" I whispered, huddled under the thin bedspread at the motor inn, the air conditioner stuck on hi. "What did you say?"

"We could turn around and go back."

"Go back?" I was trying to see his face in the narrow band of light through the stiff crackling curtains, the gap between every motel curtain ever. "We're only a few hours away."

"We could go back and just explain it wasn't a good time. Not with the baby coming."

His voice was funny, strained from the AC, the detergent haze of the room.

I propped myself up on my elbows, shaking off the bleary weirdness.

We had driven all day. In my head, in my chest, we were still driving, the road buzzing beneath us, my feet shaking, cramped, over the gas.

"But you wanted this," I said, reaching for him. "You said we should go before the baby comes."

He didn't say anything, his back to me, the great expanse of his back, my hand on his shoulder blade.

"Jed," I said. "What is it?"

"You're dreaming," he said, his voice lighter, changed. It was like a switch went off.

"What?" I said again, looking at the back of his head, lost in shadow.

"You were dreaming," he said. "Go back to sleep."

A strange feeling came over me. It hadn't been Jed at all. It had been some boogeyman shaking me awake, warning me to go back, go back.

Some boogeyman.

Like Captain Murderer, the smeary white man I used to dream about when I was little.

Captain Murderer.

Who? my mother used to ask me. Someone from one of your comic books, or a grown-up movie you snuck over to the Carnahans to see?

The Carnahans, with six kids from ages four to twenty-four, lived next door in a rambling house, and two of the Carnahan boys fed me warm beer in the basement once when I was ten, and another time I split my lip when one of the girls slammed a screen door on my face, and they loved to set off firecrackers in the driveway all summer long, once burning down the old sycamore everyone loved and it changed the light in our house forever.

But no, Captain Murderer didn't come from the Carnahans' big console TV, videogame cords dangling like spider legs. He didn't come from my comic books or the slumber party stories swapped in our sleeping bags.

He didn't come from anywhere at all. He was always already there.

But who is he? my mother kept asking, unease creeping into her voice.

Captain Murderer, I kept repeating because I assumed she knew him, too, deep down. Like the tooth fairy, the devil with his pitchfork and his flaming tail, like on the can label in the cupboard. Captain Murderer!

My mother, face drawn together in worry, would stop what she was doing, folding laundry or wiping glasses in the drying rack, and make me start at the beginning.

And I'd tell her how he was all white, white as milk, head to toe, with white nails and white lashes, teeth like little bones, and one red spot in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades.

How he moved like bedsheets snapping. How he bit you and his teeth popped out, leaving you with little bones under your skin that everyone would say was a mosquito bite, a fire ant, chiggers.

But where did he come from? my mother would plead. Was it a story someone told you at camp? Where did he come from?

Later those nights, after she thought I'd fallen back to sleep, I would hear her moving from room to room, checking all the locks on every window and door.

Click-click, click-click, bolt.

I would hear her breathing all through our little house.

Captain Murderer came from nowhere. But you couldn't tell your mother that.

He came at night, for me.

Captain Murderer came for me!

***

Later, the hint of blue dawn, I felt for Jed’s wrist. Half lost in sleep, I clambered for him, the crazy, dream-thick thought: What if Captain Murderer got him?

But he was in the bathroom, the light under the door, the drone of the automatic fan.

When he came out, a blue shadow in that blue dawn, he stood at the foot of the bed looking at me, his face too dark to see. Only the flicker of the whites of his eyes, wide and wary. Somewhere, a snarl of mosquitoes buzzed, a light sizzling.

Jed, I said, my voice gluey with sleep.

His hands clenching at his sides, looking at me as if I were this strange thing, landed in his bed, come to do him harm or wonder, an alien, a ghost, a succubus.

Jed, sweet Jed, so nervous. My fingertips tingling.

Lifting the sheet, I told him to come inside and he put the heels of his hands on my legs and dragged me to the bottom of the bed, and it was like never before.

All our times, romantic and sticky whispers, but this time something else. Something blue and strange and piercing and I shuddered all through, my breaths catching against his ear.


Day One

We'd been driving forever, the Midwest finally sneaking up on us, the hard smack of road-salt as I-75 widened and widened again.

I'd never seen Jed so nervous. Excited. Both. It was hard to tell.

It was our first road trip together and everything felt impossibly fun: the oversized rental car-a toothpaste-white Chevy-lurching across the lanes, the burr of the air conditioner, the rest stops with the beef jerky and neon flip-flops, the toaster muffins in plastic wrap and the hot dogs slinking on an endless roller grill.

On the crinkly map we traced our route up the great paw of Michigan, I-75 snaking up the state like a wriggly vein.

Sometimes we sang along to indifferent radio. Lite FM and classic rock, the occasional Christian devotional show.

Sometimes we clasped hands clammy from shivering Big Gulps in the cupholders.

Sometimes we made long lists of baby names. We'd already decided we didn't want to know the sex. We didn't care, and just naming names made it feel glorious and impossible all over again, my hand on my belly.

I never even thought I'd have a baby, he was saying, and now here I am and it's the rightest thing I've ever done, and we're rattling off names, Jed rejecting my favorite, "Molly," swiftly and without mercy, confessing finally that he was once sick with love over a girl named Molly Kee at summer camp when he was fifteen.

That can't be true, I teased. You told me you'd never been in love before.

He had said it-I never forgot it-one muggy Sunday morning, both of us too tired to make coffee, our arms and legs entwined.

Well, you know, he said now, shrugging, smiling a little, caught.

Sick with love, the phrase so unlikely from his solid, square-jawed Midwestern mouth, the words made me inexplicably sad. Before I knew it, I was crying. My sunglasses sticky from it. It makes me feel silly and sad to think of it now. To feel so close, so encircled and encircling with love and yet...

Is it the hormones? That's what he kept saying, hearing the hitch in my voice, sneaking anxious looks at me, wondering if he should pull over.

I'm fine, I sputtered, and then laughed even as the tears slathered me, and somehow he thought that meant keep going, because he kept going, talking about this Molly girl, how she had a chipped tooth that drove him crazy, and how she could land bullseye after bullseye at archery with a longbow she made herself, and how she sang "Coat of Many Colors" at the talent show, and what he would have done, back then, for one glancing touch of the back of her left knee.

Behind my sunglasses, I was crying and couldn't stop and he kept going because he couldn't see. Crying behind one's sunglasses-is there anything...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593084950
• ISBN 13: 9780593084953
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland