He smiles and nods with deep satisfaction, as if this had been his plan all along. He kisses her on the nose, on the short, soft fur of her muzzle. She looks away in shame. He holds her at arm’s length for a moment, studying her, then carefully sets her down on the very edge of the circle of light, her front half illuminated, her rear end in darkness. From that angle, you can’t see the direction of her eyes, so she seems to be looking over her shoulder, at the woods beyond the fence. “There,” he says. “Now you can’t even tell.”
He starts across the yard. I pull his elbow, try to slow him down. “We’ll get grass all over our shoes,” I say, but he grabs my hand and squeezes it tight, as if against somebody trying to pull us apart, and keeps on walking, and I go with him, picking my way over the mounds of clippings they’ve left strewn all over while he shuffles right through them toward the trees, their trunks nothing but accretions of darkness, their fissured bark the darkness’s weathered, wrinkled skin. We walk to the very furthest ledge of grass along the bare patch, stand side by side for a long time without saying a word. He squints at the ground, then bends down, one hand on his knee, and runs the other over the edge of the lawn, feeling for evenness. The blades of grass, bending, brush across his palm. He shuffles along the fence like that, while I heave back on his elbow the entire time to make sure he doesn’t lose his balance, until finally he manages to find one little tussock that sticks up a little higher than the rest.
“I knew they wouldn’t do it right,” he grunts. “Didn’t I say they wouldn’t do it right?” He grabs a handful of grass and rips it free. “That’s better.” He pushes down on my hand to slowly raise himself up again.
“I believe I’m going to head on to bed,” he says.
“Already?” I say. “It’s early.”
“Maybe for you. I’m wore out. Feels like I’ve been working all day long, even though I ain’t done a thing.”
“It’s so nice out. I could put us some chairs on the patio.”
He leans his head back to look up at the stars in the clear, cold sky, so many of them the sheer number’s enough to make you dizzy, enough to knock you down. Still, there used to be more. Before we strung up all our lamps to keep them at bay, to drive them like wild things back into the night.
“Naw,” he says. “That’s all right.”
He kisses me on the corner of the mouth, whiskers tickling my lips, and turns to go. His stubble’s soft now. Used to scrape me till I was sore.
We walk back across the yard. In the patio bulb’s bright light, enormous moths flutter in circles, their outdriven shadows fracturing its glow as their wings, so fragile just the light itself ought to blast them into dust, catch it and hold it close to the curve of glass. They knock endlessly against the bulb, trying again and again to break through into the light’s blinding heart, to wrap their wings around its glowing filament and absorb every last bit of heat until it burns them to ash. Somewhere out in the woods, deer are rushing, wild blood pounding in their antlers, each pulse laying down the next layer of sediment before it recedes, slowly hardening them into bone that echoes the shape of the veins that carry it there, which look themselves like the bare branches of trees. In the winter, they’ll fall beneath the weight of the snow, two more dead limbs on the forest floor.
I open the door and try to lead him in, but he pulls away and turns around and looks out over the yard one more time, with his hands on his hips, scowling: at the grass washing clean and smooth all the way out past the fence, where it dissolves into the shade of the trees, and at all those places we tried our hardest to make it grow but never could, and at Daisy, weary and tired, turning her head away so we won’t know she’s watching.
“Not bad,” he says, nodding. “Not bad at all.”
He heaves a deep, slow breath and shuffles toward the open door. I hold on to his hand, squeeze it as tight as I can, and walk with him into the dark house.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, first and foremost, to my family for their unending love and support.
Thanks to Emily Forland for her belief in the book and her great skill in shepherding it; to Rachel Mannheimer for her masterful guidance, sharp edits, and generally being an absolute joy to work with; to Alexa von Hirschberg for her expertise, enthusiasm, and care; to George Gibson, Laura Keefe, Laura Phillips, Marie Coolman, Megan Ernst, Nancy Miller, Patti Ratchford, Steven Henry Boldt, Theresa Collier, and the entire Bloomsbury team in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Thank you to everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; to the great people of Highlander Center; and to John McNally, whose artistic and professional guidance for the past decade has made a profound difference in my life.
Thanks to my friends for being the best people in the world, and especially to first readers Chris Plating and Sarah Karon for the advice and encouragement I needed at just the right time.
Finally, thanks to Raymie, without whom I would not know nearly enough about love to have written this book; and to Liam, for watching over me nearly every day as I worked on it.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Matthew Griffin is a graduate of Wake Forest University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was born and raised in North Carolina and currently lives with his husband in Louisiana, where he is a visiting professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. This is his first novel.
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First published 2016
© Matthew Griffin 2016
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-338-6
ePub: 978-1-63286-339-3
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Griffin, Matthew, 1984−
Hide : a novel / Matthew Griffin.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-63286-338-6 (alk. paper) 978-1-63286-339-3 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3607.R54842H54 2015
813’.6—dc23
2015022845
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