Be Mine

by Laura Kasischke

When we stepped out of the car he said, "I had to do it," looking from me to Chad, and back to me. "I had to get the whole nest of them," he apologized. "They were moving in. They were going to be living in the attic, chewing up the wiring, living in our house before we knew it if I didn't do something."

  They were there, on the ground between the driveway and the house, the fur and blood of them.

  I looked at the roof.

  Somewhere up there the nest was empty now.

  I looked at Jon.

  His face was haggard, pale.

  "Why aren't you at work?" I asked.

  "I called in sick," he said. "I couldn't sleep a wink last night."

  SATURDAY.

  Chad took Jon's car to visit Ophelia in Kalamazoo again. I spent a few hours in the garden, despite a light and steady rain. My garden gloves, gone from the hook on the back porch where I'd always kept them, could not be found, so I dug in the dirt with my hands. I packed the earth around a geranium I'd bought last week but hadn't gotten around to planting yet, and when I was done, my knuckles were bleeding. My fingernails had dirt under them.

  They were the hands of an old woman, I thought, looking at them.

  Unfamiliar, but undeniably mine.

  It began to rain harder. In the distance, a very low rumble of thunder. Jon was in the backyard, putting golf balls across the grass. He had no hat on, and the rain had turned his dark hair silver. When he saw me standing in the driveway, watching, he turned and called out, but I pretended I didn't hear him. I went back into the house—not ready to talk to Jon.

  Since we'd come home on Wednesday, I'd said nothing to him except that one sentence, Why aren't you at work? And I'd answered the few questions he'd asked ("Are you going to bed now?") by shaking my head, nodding it, or shrugging, and slept so close to the edge of the bed that I kept waking up startled from dreams that I was falling.

  Once, Jon must have felt me spasm in my sleep. He reached over and touched my shoulder.

  Still mostly asleep, I rolled away from him, and he took his hand back.

  In the morning, despite the silence between us, we'd had breakfast with Chad, who seemed so jovial and well-rested that I thought, crazily, for a moment, He's forgotten—all of it, forgotten. Jon complimented the pancakes so extravagantly and repeatedly that Chad finally laughed and said, "Dad, are you trying to get Mom to sleep with you or something?"

  Jon didn't laugh. He gave Chad a disapproving look. He said, "I just appreciate your mother's cooking, and it wouldn't hurt for you to do the same."

  "Point taken," Chad said. "The pancakes are fantastic, Mom."

  The subject between them changed to the weather. Rain. All day. Thunderstorms by evening. And, yes, Chad could take the car, but be careful driving home, especially if it was dark, and if there was a storm. Chad said not to worry. He'd be home early. Ophelia had to work.

  "Where does she work?" I asked.

  "She's a stripper," Chad said. And then he laughed. "No, really, Mom," he said, "she's a waitress at a nice place." He stood up from the table, carried his plate to the sink, kissed me on the cheek, and said good-bye.

  I went upstairs, and made the bed.

  I heard the Explorer drive away, Chad at the wheel.

  Also, outside, a mourning dove, close by, was singing its hollow, throaty song—sounding dry and breathy and underwater all at the same time.

  Jon had gone to the garage. He'd tried to talk to me in the kitchen as I rinsed the dishes at the sink to put them in the dishwasher, but when he put his hands on my shoulders, I felt a cold weight settle there with them, and I shivered, and he stepped away, his hands still hovering in the air. He said something under his breath, turning out of the kitchen, but I couldn't hear it, and didn't ask him what it was.

  I looked out the bedroom window.

  The morning was perfect.

  I would never have guessed that in only a few hours it would rain. The air was warm, but light. The lilacs had sagged on their branches, but they had not yet browned. The blossoming trees had begun to drop their petals, but it was beautiful. It left the road and the grass shredded with pearl and pink, as if bridesmaids had wrestled with angels in the night, as if spring itself had been passed through the blades of a fan.

  In the scrubbrush, Kujo was back. Or had never left. He'd been there constantly for the last few days, and he'd whimpered out there all evening and late into the night. Now, he'd quit whimpering, but was still pawing around and making circles in the scrubbrush, his nose to the ground, relentless in his longing for—what? What terrible appetite was it that could not be satisfied? Back at the Henslins', a bowl of water and leftovers were surely waiting. There would be a corner with an old blanket for him to sleep on. Mrs. Henslin would put down her dishrag, scratch his ears, when he came in the door. There was, I felt sure, some old rubber ball there for him. A discarded boot that was all his, which he could chew to his heart's content.

  But here he was, instead, in the scrubbrush behind our house, still on the trail of whatever it was (deer, rabbit, another raccoon?) and would not give it up to go home, to rest.

  Long after the light rain had turned to a deluge, he was still out there.

  CHAD came home later than he'd said he would. I could hear him downstairs in the kitchen. The clatter of silverware. He was humming, opening the refrigerator door, closing it again. I'd left him a pork chop there, some fried potatoes, three spears of asparagus on a plate covered with waxed paper in the refrigerator. I'd made an identical dinner for Jon, and also left it there, but when I went downstairs for a glass of water and an aspirin at nine o'clock and looked in the refrigerator, Jon's dinner was still there, untouched.

  It didn't thunderstorm, as they'd said it would. Just that distant threat of thunder, and then torrents of rain. I listened to it from my study, where, for many hours after I was done gardening I lay on my back, listening to that rhythmless pummeling, and then I took them out—the photo albums.

  The wedding album first—all those miniaturized smiles, the tiny people, pressed onto paper, kissing one another, arms flung over one another's shoulders. In the background of every photograph, the long shimmering black serpent of the Thornapple River. In the foreground, always a dropped napkin or a flower that had fallen from someone's hair or bouquet. In one, a swan was drifting down the river. In another, Jon's sister (was she ever so young?) was leaning toward the swan, offering it a piece of bread. In another, my father in his tuxedo was toasting what appeared to be the air. He looked stifled in his tuxedo, but also ruddy with good health.

  And Sue, in another, with those flowers in her hair, in her low-cut bridesmaid dress, the blond gloss of her. She was talking in this photograph to a man I couldn't recall, a guest I didn't recognize, someone I couldn't remember having invited to my wedding—a man I'd never noticed while he was there, and had never seen since.

  And, in another, the cake.

  The brilliant frosted tiers of it. Its layers and layers of sweetness. The bride and groom were knee-deep in that sweetness. Behind the cake, there was the blinding white blur of me passing by it, on my way somewhere, or just returned.

  Then, I took out the other albums.

  Chad's birth. Chad, in the hospital, wrapped in a blanket. Chad at my breast. Chad in Jon's arms—that terrible, beautiful, new-father smile on Jon's face.

  And all the years that followed. The red ball, so large in Chad's small arms he could barely hold it. The sandbox. The enormous, stuffed horse. Chad on its back, wearing a cowboy hat. The first day of kindergarten. The zoo. The beach. The park. The swings. The kiddie pool. The county fair.

  Chad on the carousel, holding the reins of a lacquered blue stallion with a flowing white mane, looking worried.

  A few of the photographs had yellowed or faded despite the protective plastic sheaths they were in.

  Some of the pages were stuck together.

  The weight of the albums on my knees grew painful. I piled them on the floor at my feet.

 
Later, I heard Chad in the bathroom. The shower doors opening and closing.

  I heard Jon come up the stairs. He came to the closed door of my study. From the other side, he asked, "Do you still love me?"

  "Yes," I said, but did not go to the door.

  CHAD was rested, happy, talkative in the car on the drive to Fred's Landscaping Monday morning. I'd forgotten to wash his landscaping crew T-shirt, and he had to fish it out of the laundry basket and wear it anyway. "Do I stink?" he asked, coming down the stairs in it as I was putting the eggs on his plate.

  I stepped close to him, inhaled—sweat, grass, summer. "No," I said. "You smell good."

  "You're just being nice," he said. "I stink."

  When we pulled up to the garage, Fred was standing outside it, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing shorts, and I could see that his knees were enormous, deformed. Knees the size of soccer balls. Was it something that had happened to make the bones grow, I wondered, or had fluid accumulated there?

  Arthritis? Kidney failure?

  Were they painful? How did he manage to walk?

  He waved to me as Chad stepped out of the car. I waved back and pulled out into the road. I drove to the freeway ramp, and headed into the city, to the efficiency.

  I'd called to cancel my lease, and the woman in the office asked that I have my belongings out of it within the week. Jon said he would do it for me, but I'd said no. I didn't want him to go there. I wanted to be the one to go.

  But I felt afraid as I opened the door to it. I hesitated at the threshold. I could feel, I thought, something still in there. I could smell it—his body. The scent of his flesh on his shirts, on my sheets—machinery, tools, the warm suggestion of combustible fuel. I stayed where I was, listening, ‹in the doorway. I said, "Bram?"

  There was no answer.

  I stepped in and looked around.

  Nothing.

  A towel on the floor in the bathroom.

  A cup in the kitchen sink.

  The sheets and blanket had been pulled off the futon and were bunched at the foot of it. I went to it. I lay down.

  For a long time, I lay there, smelling him—in the futon, on the pillows. I pulled the sheet and the blanket up over me, and the smell of him, of us, was on those, too. I rolled onto my side, and closed my eyes, and a terrible emptiness entered me—it was over, the affair, this was my life now, altered forever, but also unchanged— and I fell into a dreamless sleep, swiftly, like stepping through a door, oblivion on the other side. But a familiar oblivion. A place I'd been before. I must have slept for at least an hour because when I woke, it was gone—the scent of him in that nest we'd made. Now, all I could smell was the garbage can under the sink, which hadn't been emptied for over a week—the sweet rotten remnants of our last meal together.

  I stood up, folded the sheets, and began the first of several trips to the car.

  WE ATE dinner late because Jon got stuck in traffic on the way home. It was already dark, but we hadn't pulled the curtains yet, and, watching my son and husband eat the chicken and rice I'd cooked for them, I imagined the scene from outside the house, what someone would see if he were at the window, looking in:

  The small, content family at the dinner table.

  The son, almost grown.

  The parents, long married and comfortable in their shared life.

  The home, tastefully decorated. The food on the table. The easy conversation. The ordinary life being quietly lived. I was imagining that person, at the window, and myself from that perspective. If I imagined it vividly enough, it seemed to me, it could really be the life I was living. Who was to say, I thought, that the life glimpsed from a distance was any more of an illusion than the life being lived? Shouldn't I, of all people, understand that by now?

  Then, as I looked out that window, imagining, I thought I actually saw someone out there, looking in—a quick glimpse of a face emerging from the dark glass, then disappearing.

  I must have gasped, or flinched. Both Jon and Chad looked up at me quickly. "What's wrong?" Chad said, and looked behind him, at the window.

  He didn't wait for me to answer.

  He said, "Let's pull the curtains, okay?"

  He got up and pulled them himself.

  After dinner, Chad went up to his room to check his e-mail. I stood up and began to gather the plates from the dining room table. Jon caught my wrist as I reached for his plate, looked up at me, and said, "Let me clean up, Sherry. Please." But I pulled my wrist out of his hand, twisting it to get away, and said, "No."

  "When, Sherry?" he asked. "When can I talk to you again? When can I hold you?"

  I said, "I don't know."

  JON WAS gone already in the morning when I got up. I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time. I could hear, again, what must have been squirrels on the roof. Perhaps some new family had found the abandoned nest already? Easier than starting their own, making a new one, had they simply moved into the one left behind?

  No, I thought.

  Animals had a better sense of this than people. They would have been able to smell it—that something violent, and permanent, had happened there. They would not have chosen to live in that nest. If there were new squirrels up there on the roof, they were starting over, building a nest of their own.

  I needed, I realized, to get Chad up, to drive him to work. The night before, I'd washed his T-shirt, taken it from the dryer, still a little damp, and put it on his bed while he was writing an e-mail. I asked, "Who are you writing to?"

  "Ophelia," he said without looking away from the screen.

  He was still in his room when I went to bed, and although his door was closed, I could hear the soft rattle of his fingers on the keyboard.

  8:00 A.M, I checked the clock, got out of bed, slipped on my robe, went to Chad's room, but he was not, as I'd thought, still asleep in his bed.

  I looked in the bathroom, went down to the kitchen, heard something outside, looked out the kitchen window.

  He was out there, in the backyard, crouched at the edge of the scrubbrush, making hand motions to Kujo to come to him—but Kujo would not come.

  GARRETT.

  After I dropped Chad off at Fred's Landscaping (today Fred was wearing overalls, no shirt under them, and I could see that, once, he'd been a muscular man, but now the flesh hung off his arms and chest like old, damp rags), I remembered that it was this week that Garrett was to go to boot camp, to North Carolina.

  I have to tell him, I thought, before he goes, how sorry I am, how I never thought, for one second, that my mistake with Bram Smith would have anything to do with him.

  I wanted him to know that I didn't blame him for telling Chad about my affair with Bram. It wasn't his fault. I wanted him to know that I knew it. I wanted Garrett to know that I would remain his friend, and if there was ever anything at all I could do for him, I would do it.

  But when I called his number from home, there was no answer.

  I tried again.

  And then a third time.

  And then I got in the car, and drove to the house I remembered picking him up at, dropping him off at, so long ago, when he was a little boy.

  IT WAS exactly as it had been then.

  Ramshackle, but pleasant. A small blue modular home with a chain-link fence around it.

  Back then, they'd had a dog, I recalled. Some kind of mutt that would bark ferociously when we'd pull in the driveway, and then begin to wag its tail so wildly when we stepped out that it could barely keep its balance.

  Had the dog been named Creek ? Could that be right? Or had I ever even known the name of Garrett's boyhood dog?

  Now, there was no dog in the yard, but the grass was green. The garden was without flowers, but udy. The curtains were drawn, and the garage door was open. In it, I could see what must have been the red Mustang, covered carefully with a tarp. I opened the door to the chain-link fence, and walked up the steps, and rang the doorbell. I heard nothing inside, so I knocked, thinking that the doorbell might be brok
en, and then I heard something behind me ("Hello?") and turned around.

  It was Garrett's friend, the one from the cafeteria, the one with the red nylon jacket, except that today he was wearing a T-shirt (HARD ROCK CAFE, LAS VEGAS). Again, his resemblance to Chad surprised me. The hair. The structure of his face. The shape of his eyes. He was standing in the driveway with a shovel in his hand.

  "Oh," I said, taking a step toward him, recovering my composure. "Hello. Does Garrett still live here?"

  "He did" the friend said. "Do you know where he is?"

  "No," I said. "I came here to look for him."

  "So did I," the boy said.

  "He's not here?" I asked.

  "He hasn't been here for a week," the boy said. "I guess. That's the last time he got his mail, anyway. That's the last I heard from him."

  I came down the steps, met this boy at the gate. "A week?" I asked.

  "Yeah. I guess," he said. "I saw him about ten days ago, up at the school. And then he called me on Monday morning, and we were supposed to put the transmission back in the Mustang on Wednesday, and I came up here, and he wasn't here. And he hasn't been here since. I've come up every day, and there's no sign of him at all."

  Monday.

  The night he came to dinner.

  The night he and Chad went to Stiver's, and Garrett told Chad about Bram.

  "Oh, no," I said. "Has anyone heard from him?"

  "Who would hear from him?" the boy said. "He doesn't have a girlfriend. His parents are dead. He's got one aunt, but he never talks to her at all. Who would hear from Garrett?"

  "Have you—done anything?"

  "Yeah," the boy said.

  He looked younger than Garrett, I thought, younger than Chad. His arms were thin. His teeth were crooked. His eyes were a gray so light they looked colorless. He looked, I thought, like a shadow of Chad.