Take What You Need

ALSO BY IDRA NOVEYNOVELSThose Who KnewWays to DisappearPOETRYClarice: The VisitorExit, CivilianThe Next Country VIKINGAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by Idra NoveyPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATANames: Novey, Idra, author.Title: Take what you need: a novel / Idra Novey.Description: [New York]: Viking, [2023]Identifiers: LCCN 2022017969 (print) | LCCN 2022017970 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593652855 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593652862 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.Classification: LCC PS3614.O928 T35 2023 (print) |LCC PS3614.O928 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017969LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017970Cover design: Colin WebberCover images: Getty ImagesDesigned by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora WigenThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_142813756_c0_r0 CONTENTSCoverAlso by Idra NoveyTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJeanLeahJean (Three Years Before)LeahAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_142813756_ for Gerry and Barbara Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.—LOUISE BOURGEOIS LEAH This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for a complicated person. My stepmother Jean was a complicated person. I’ve been reading all kinds of advice since hearing of her death. I didn’t know that she’d begun to weld metal towers in her living room, towers so tall she needed a ladder to complete them. Apparently, that’s how she died, slipping from one of her ladder’s highest rungs.Jean never left the town where she was born, and where I was also born, and where she became the closest version of a mother I’ve known. It’s a town in the southern Allegheny Mountains, which have been sinking for millions of years and resemble rolling hills now more than mountains. I know uttering Jean’s name won’t quiet my mind any more than saying the word mountain will stop these hills from sinking farther.My use of the word stepmother, while soothing, is wishful thinking, too. Jean left my father when I was ten and hasn’t technically been my stepmother for decades. I’ve gone through phases of calling her up, seeking her contrarian take on things. Just as often, it’s felt saner to stop all contact, and the past four years we’ve had none.Despite this prolonged recent silence, she left her towers to me. I received the news from a man named Elliott, who claims he’d been living with Jean for some time. He was reluctant to elaborate on the phone, beyond explaining that he was at the hardware store when Jean fell from the ladder. He drove her to the hospital, he said, as soon as he found her unconscious on the floor.I’m driving toward Jean’s house now, trying to give this man the benefit of the doubt, to imagine him grieving for her as well. Early this morning, I rented a car near my building in Long Island City.It takes hours to cross the tilled middle of Pennsylvania and I’m not alone in this compact rental car. I have a young son in the back seat and a husband sitting next to me who isn’t from this country and has never driven into the Allegheny Mountains before. I’d planned on bringing my family here at some point, once the country was less polarized, or after Jean wrote first, or after I caved and sent a few words to her. I work all day with words, revising them in multiple languages before they move on to websites, and yet these past four years I haven’t been able to move even a single sentence in Jean’s direction.Beside me in the car, my husband, Gerardo, is sighing. The road before us has narrowed to two lanes, and for several miles, we’ve been trapped behind a blue pickup truck with several long plastic tubes rattling around in the back.According to the GPS, it’ll now be an additional twelve minutes until we reach Jean’s driveway, and conjuring her name has yet to resolve the disquiet in my mind. Each time I say Jean’s name to myself, I hear her louder still, the rising pleasure in her voice when she read me fairy tales, stopping to insist that she wasn’t like the stepmother in “Snow White,” that she had no craving for my liver or my lungs.All I want is to nibble at your heart, Leah, she’d tell me. You don’t mind if I eat your heart sometimes, right? Just one of your ventricles?I’d play along, tell Jean to eat my whole heart if she was hungry enough. We had such fun slipping bits of ourselves into the savage parts. I’ve yet to read any of those Grimm tales to my son. I’ve stuck to newer books for him, to stories that stir up nothing from my childhood and present no risk of Jean creeping into my voice. It’s felt like a neat and necessary excision, leaving out Jean and the confusing appetites of those old tales. I’m fumbling enough already, ambling motherless into motherhood.Except now there is no Jean. She’s fallen to this odd fairy tale death while living with a man I know nothing about. I hope what Elliott said on the phone about her slipping from the ladder is true, and that Jean died in the rapture of making these towers. Maybe my grief will be easier to bear over these last few hills if I keep this fairy tale going in my mind. I know even fairy tales that bend toward mercy have their brutal twists, and there’s no returning to these hills without allowing