The Heaven of Animals: Stories (16 page)

Then, there’s how it
would
be, and she’s not so naive she doesn’t know the difference.

Arnie would lose the house, that’s a given. He’d lose half of everything, and so would she. The spouses would be bitter. The family friends would side with Frank and with Anne.

At best, they’d share custody. And what if Arnie only got Maddy two weekends a month? Already, she can picture Anne, vindictive. She’d show up late with Maddy Friday nights, arrive early on Sundays with someplace to be, Arnie fighting Anne for every hour.

It’s her he’d blame, not Anne. “Your fault, Linda,” he’d say. “Your fault my girl’s good as gone.”

In bed, Arnie’s body would grow familiar as Frank’s, and what then? What becomes of clandestine sex translated to the everyday?

In the end, resentment. And would Arnie take his father’s lead? Would he drink or disappear days at a time? Would he raise a tire iron to her face?

The bison hide their faces in the grass. They eat and eat.

Arnie shrugs her from his shoulders the way one does a coat.

Her feet touch the ground, and now she’s shaking because, oh God, all this time, and what has she been waiting for?

She sits. Her breath catches with the pain of pulling on the boots. And Arnie above, watching her with wonder, saying, “What is it? What on earth?”

If she could put it into words, she’d tell him that their two-decade experiment has reached an end. He’d ask:
Why now?
And she’d have to shake her head, unsure, understanding only that what’s come before is gone and what she wants can’t be. The future, the past—both are impossible.

Arnie seems to sense it, the approach of something that will arrive irrevocable. He seems to want to keep her from saying it.

“I’ll take you anywhere,” he says. “That place you like, the place with the robes.”

For a moment, it’s almost enough. She pictures herself in bed, Arnie beside her. She’s in her robe, and he’s in his. It’s enough to make her take his hand, to let him lift her to her feet. But, with his touch, the moment is gone.

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t collapse into his arms.

He’d called the bison
gentle,
and she wonders whether he believes this or whether it’s the kind of thing he knows she likes to hear.

But they aren’t gentle. All the signs say so.

She climbs the fence, and before he can follow she’s across the field. The bison quit their grazing. Their heads lift. The calf tucks itself between two members of the herd.

She picks a bison and moves to it. She doesn’t know whether age determines size in bison, but, if it does, she guesses this one’s a scraggly teenager. Its head rears back. A blue tag marked “11”
hugs one horn.

She’s close, now, and Arnie’s calling her name, yelling in a way that lets her know he knows just what kind of violence these animals are capable of.

She lays a hand on the bison’s coat, and a shiver ripples its side. One eye, wet and wide, bobs in its socket. The nose, snot-slick, expels air with a tremendous snort.

Arnie rattles the fence, begging her back, and the other bison break away, bodies curving, tails twitching. They move across the field with a sound like a dozen bowling balls launched down a dozen lanes, the balls rolling and rolling, picking up speed and no pins in sight.

But her bison doesn’t budge. It snorts and snorts. The eye rolls, hypnotized.

Arnie is climbing the fence, so she climbs too, and it’s just like childhood, like summer camp, when she and a friend left their cabin in the night and rode the camp horses bareback. The bison’s pelt twists in her hands, and she’s up and over and aloft, the animal warm and trembling beneath her.

And now Arnie is over the fence, and now he is waving, sprinting, screaming her name, his face otherworldly, his voice a siren, and she’s never seen him move so fast, and she is not afraid.

She kicks. She kicks again. She kicks once more, and, at last, the great beast charges. It ignores Arnie, moves right past him. It moves away from the fence, away from the other bison, in the direction of the open, uncomprehending field.

And, for a few glorious moments, just like that, she rides.

What the Wolf Wants

S
o, it’s the middle of the night and there’s this wolf at my window. He stands like a man on his back legs. His hindquarters bulge, all muscly and stuff. He’s so silver he’d almost be blue in the moonlight, were there moonlight. But this is the suburbs, so, instead, he’s almost blue in the lamplight, the streetlights, back porch security lights, light from the flicker of across-the-street TVs, the radiant glow spilling out of downtown. A lot of artificial illumination round these parts, is what I’m getting at.

Delusions aren’t new to me. This last year, I haven’t been getting much sleep. But, the longer I stare at the wolf, the more I realize he’s no delusion—this one’s
real
.

He’s not a werewolf, not exactly. There’s nothing mannish about him. No human hands or face. No pants. His balls hang immodestly between his knees. They swing in the breeze like something, like balls.

I shouldn’t open the window, but I do, and he climbs in. I’m in just boxers, but his balls are out, plus, he’s a wolf, so what does he care? I slide my feet into moccasins. They’re my favorite, a gift from Tyler, leather with fur lining.

The wolf follows me to the kitchen, seats himself in my Rooms-to-Go Dynasty Collection dining room chair at my Rooms-to-Go Dynasty Collection dining room table. I want to put down a towel, something to get those balls off the chair’s imitation maple laminate surface, but the look on the wolf’s face tells me I’d best keep my hands away from his testicles.

“Coffee?” I say.

The wolf nods and does that thing dogs do, that bob of head, curl of lip, that almost-smile. His teeth
gleam
.

Wolves like instant. I learned this somewhere, Wikipedia, I think. I’d been out of instant since the eighties, but just last week stocked up on Starbucks, their new line, VIA. They won’t call it instant, but instant’s what it is.

I pour the coffee into a shallow bowl for him to lap from. I set the bowl on the table before the wolf. He blows on it to cool it down. He does this, and I think of my mother, how she taught us, me and my brother, to cool soup by blowing on it. It never worked, just like kissed cuts never hurt less. The first sip still scalded, but we pretended—me, Tyler, Mom. We drank our soup, pretending we could taste it, pretending our mouths weren’t on fire.

The wolf does not pretend. The first sip burns. He lifts his head and howls. It’s so loud, I cover my ears. He growls, and for the first time I wonder about the welfare of a man with a wolf in his house. My body parts, I like all of them.

The wolf watches me.

A toe’s not the end of the world,
I think.
I could lose a toe
. I bend to unslipper one foot.

“Yes,” the wolf says. Here, I should be surprised, should be, like, “Oh, oh my God, it’s a talking wolf, ahhhhh!”

But I’m not surprised, not really. Because why else
would
he be here, if not to talk, if not to ask a question or offer me wolfly counsel?

Except that it’s not advice he’s here to give, there’s something he wants. And it’s not a question he wants answered, or a piece of me to eat, it’s my
slippers
.

“Moccasins,” I say.

“Whatever,” the wolf says. “Those are what I want.”

“Anything else,” I say. I’m hoping he’ll take the chair.
Take the chair and your ball sweat with you,
I want to say but don’t.

Let’s be adult about this,
I think.
Here you were, ready to give up a toe, and all he asks is one worldly possession, a souvenir from his big trip out of the woods.

I consider furniture, clothing, maybe a nice household appliance. Something he can show off to all of his wolf friends and be, like, “See, I went
inside
, man. I went into the box with the roof!”

“Consider the Whirlpool,” I say. Only two years old, the dishwasher’s good, the kind you can load without washing things first. “Seriously,” I say. “I tried it. Just like in the commercial. A whole cake went in there, and, when it was done? The dishes:
spotless
.”

The wolf shakes his head.

I proffer an Emerson brand microwave, a Lands’ End thermal fleece, a 2009 Storybook Mountain Vineyards Zinfandel, my favorite. “Fifty dollars, retail,” I say. “Excellent vintage.”

But the wolf, he needs none of these. Food he eats raw. Fur keeps him warm. And wine, well. Wolves, he informs me, drink white.

“The moccasins,” he says. “Really, they’re all I want.”

I ask why. The wolf shrugs.

“It’s rough out there,” he says. “You ever had a pine needle jammed in your pads? Ever cross a snow-covered field in bare feet?”

I admit that, no, I have not.

“Try it,” he says. “Try it, and, trust me, you’ll be begging for moccasins.”

I sigh. “Okay,” I say.

I slip off the first moccasin, then the second. The stitching is yellow. It rises like Morse code through the leather. The fur lining is soft, white.

“Real rabbit,” I say, and the wolf gives me a look like,
There’s nothing that
you
can teach
me
about rabbit.

I hand the moccasins over, and the wolf stands and steps into them. They’re too big, but he tugs on the laces until they bunch up around his paws like tennis balls, the kind that Tyler fastened to the feet of his walker after he lost the first leg.

“They’re all I have left of him,” I say.

The wolf closes his eyes and lowers his muzzle, somber-like, an expression that says,
I’m real sorry
and
I’m still taking them
at the same time.

His tail wags.

“Gotta go,” he says, and, before I can say goodbye, he’s out the front door and down the driveway, running fast in moccasined feet.

I shouldn’t have said what I said to my brother that Christmas: “Slippers? What the hell am I supposed to do with
slippers
?”

He’d just returned from Alaska, where I guess buying local was the thing to do.

“I like them,” my mother said. She held out her matching pair. A tongue of tissue paper hung from one of the holes where the feet go in.

“I buy you a thousand-dollar Cuisinart espresso machine, the Tastemaker’s Model, with dual espresso dispensers and an advanced steaming action wand, and all I get is a couple of lousy
slippers
?”

“They’re moccasins,” Tyler said. “Hand-stitched.”

“They smell like dead animal,” I said.

Tyler shook his head. His hair had just grown in. He’d lose it again before summer. From the casket, he’d look back at us without eyebrows.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I stuffed the moccasins back into the box.

I was a bad person then. Maybe I still am. It’s been a year, but it takes longer than that. I think maybe it takes a while to redeem yourself in the eyes of the dead.

I go back to my room. The window’s still open from where the wolf came in, and I close it. Outside, more light’s coming on, real light, the sun’s pink peeking through the black.

I move to the phone by my bed. I call my mother.

Her voice, when she picks up, is soft, cottony. I picture her in her bed, alone in her big house on the other side of the country. The red Renaissance quilt I got her two birthdays back comes up to her chin, and there’s fright in her eyes.

“Mom,” I say. “There’s a wolf at my window.”

“Yes,” she says. “There’s one at mine too. I’m just now looking at him.”

The Geometry of Despair

I. Venn Diagram

E
very Wednesday, after dinner, we drive to the nondenominational church across town. Here, for an hour, a dozen of us sit in a circle of aluminum chairs in a small, well-lit room telling our same sad stories. Sometimes there’s coffee. Sometimes there’s chocolate cake. Usually, there’s a tissue box that orbits the empty center of our circle like a misshapen moon.

Each week, Pam, our counselor, reminds us that it isn’t a competition, that the goal of group therapy is not to outdo each other or to rank our circumstances. Misery, she assures us, cannot be measured. But our greatest comfort is in the comparing. Validation awaits those who tell the best stories. And, since talk won’t bring back the dead, we make do with our little game of grief. What it comes down to is the following equation: If a train leaves Chicago at sixty miles an hour and another train leaves Atlanta at eighty miles an hour, when they both collide in Kentucky and everybody’s babies die, who is the saddest?

There’s Lydia, who had an abortion in order to finish college, then wanted the baby back after graduation. Then there are Lucy and Beth, with their multiple miscarriages. We pretend to feel sorry for them, but, really, they never had children they loved and lost. Then there’s Dot and Drew, whose son was decapitated when he tried to drive home after too many tallboys. Granted, a tragedy, but at least they had him for eighteen years. And, hey, if they’d been better parents, who knows?

One week, a weepy, red-faced woman stops by. She introduces herself as Jenna, then tells us her story, and, for a moment, we have a winner. Her three-month-old died without explanation, and it wasn’t until a year later, after interrogation by two cops and a coroner, that the husband admitted to shaking the baby. In this way, three became two, then one. Still, my wife says, it’s not the same. Jenna has someone she can be mad at. Jenna has somebody to blame.

What happened to us, Lisa says, in poker terms, is like being dealt three of a kind. You go all-in and show your hand only to see that, really, all you have is a pair, and the whole time you’re wondering how you ever mistook that three for an eight.

With SIDS, despair isn’t tied to regret or what-ifs or whose fault. With sudden infant death syndrome, the only thing you want to know—after you wake with the shock that you slept through the night, after you sit up and stare and consider the silence, the stillness of the cradle, after you swallow your paranoia and go to the baby, only to feel the warm rush of panic again flooding your chest, after the touching, the holding, the shouting, the running, the phoning, the signing, right here, on the dotted line—after all of it, the only thing you want to know is
why?