How It Ends

by Laura Wiess

  “No,” I said, turning away from my reflection in the mirror. “It’s better that I know, although I bet I know why he did it.”

  “Why?” Sammi said warily.

  “Because he knew it would get back to me,” I said and was completely unprepared for her response.

  “How about just because he’s an asshole and he doesn’t care how much he hurts you?” she snapped.

  Yeah, that could be it, too.

  I saw Seth today, not right up close but passing him in the hall. I don’t know how that happened, because I’ve been so careful to avoid all his routes, but I was walking and trying to find something in my notebook, and I just got this feeling and glanced up. He was coming toward me in the flow of traffic, and he quickly averted his gaze before our eyes met. I knew people were watching so I just looked back into my notebook, and we passed and I smelled his beautiful scent and my knees actually got weak.

  How long is this stalemate going to last?

  I haven’t worn my ankle bracelet since the night I walked away and he didn’t come after me. I wonder if he’s mad about that.

  I laid on my bed, stared at the ceiling and listened to “Sweet Jane” over and over, trying to figure out whether or not I should make the first move toward getting back with him.

  All it would take was wearing that bracelet.

  Gran doesn’t look good at all today. She’s flailing all over the place and I’m afraid she’s going to fall right out of her wheelchair, even though she’s belted in.

  Even worse, I think she might have peed herself, because I can smell it, but there is no way I can change her.

  I just can’t.

  It would be a major violation and I wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  How It Ends

  Peter, heartbroken that there would be no natural child, retreated into himself, and when I told him I was hurting, too, he held me briefly and said, “I know, Louise. Just…give me some time.” It was his way, to retreat into a place I couldn’t go, and, although it frustrated me sometimes because I never really knew what he was thinking or processing or had decided, trying to make him talk about it was like banging my head against a brick wall and only made things worse.

  So we put our all into working and saving, but the times they were a-changing and our neighborhood fell to a never-ending wave of broke, stoned, braless, sometimes dirty and desperate, sometimes charming and cheerful, often earnest and always hungry, free love, let it all hang out, don’t trust anyone over thirty, do your own thing hippies.

  The kids weren’t bad except for the occasional vomit on the lawn or porch, the casual appropriation of anything left outside that could be sold or bartered for pot, acid, or food and the nerve-wracking habit they had of just opening the door, flashing a peace sign, and wandering in whenever they felt like it.

  Some of them were my age and a lot of the guys thought I should quit being a tool of the man, fuck the establishment, and tune in, turn on, and drop out with them, but I always told them that if I did that, then there wouldn’t be any food here, either, and then where would they eat for free?

  “Bummer,” they’d mutter good-naturedly and, swiping a slice of cheese or an orange, wander back out to find the guy with the psychedelics.

  Someone, I never found out who, decided the dogs, our beloved Sonny and Cher would be happier free, man, not locked up in the backyard like prisoners, so they opened the gate while Peter and I were at work, removed the dogs’ collars, and let them go.

  We ran looking for them for hours, handing out hastily scrawled fliers, and posting LOST DOGS signs on the phone poles, asking everyone hanging out on the block if they’d seen the dogs and getting only slow, wide-eyed shaking of heads or vague memories of thinking they might have gone that way.

  Or that way.

  Or the other way.

  It was awful.

  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop crying thinking of them out there in traffic, hungry, stolen, lost, maybe hurt and unable to find their way home. And what if they’d gotten split up? They did everything together—eat, slept, played, peed, dug holes, stole snacks—so how could they survive without each other? Oh, why hadn’t I locked them in the house instead of leaving them in the yard? Why?

  Exhausted, Peter hit me with that same question, and it salted the wound so keenly that I raged back, saying that it was him who hadn’t wanted the dogs sleeping on the couch while we were at work and it was his rule, not mine, and so if they were starving or dead out there somewhere, then he had no one to blame for it but himself…

  “You know what?” he said. “You’re right. It’s my fault. Everything that goes wrong around here is my fault.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, already regretting lashing out at him. “I didn’t mean it. I’m just…I can’t stand the thought of them lost out there all alone….” And I started crying all over again, and this time, instead of pushing him away, I leaned against him, and his arms came around me, not tightly this time but there all the same.

  Sixteen days after replacing the LOST DOGS signs with REWARD signs, a pickup pulled up and a dark-haired, moon-faced girl in tie-dye got out and knocked at the door.

  “Hey, man, I think I found your dogs,” she said, scratching the inside of her arm and avoiding my gaze. “They’re in the back of the truck, but—”

  I pushed past her, running down the steps and to the back of the pickup. “Sonny? Cher? Son—” I went still, gazing at the dogs, my dogs, lying on their sides on the hot metal, fur stretched over bones, too weak even to lift their heads, filthy, sunken, and I gasped, “Oh, no,” and Sonny managed to twitch the tip of his stubby tail in a feeble wag.

  I shouted for Peter and scaled the truck’s tailgate, crying, crouching in there with them, running my hands gently over their heads, babbling, “You’re home, you’re home, you’re going to be fine,” and gagging at their filthy, sun-baked smell.

  Peter took one look at them and, swearing, jerked down the tailgate and lifted Cher in his arms. “Open the car,” he said, and I scrambled past him, past the girl who said, “There’s a reward, right?” and I flung open the back doors of our car, and while Peter was laying Cher across the seat, I ran for water and wet a paper towel and squeezed some into her mouth while the girl said, “You said there was a reward, right?” and Cher licked my hand once and exhaled and never inhaled again.

  I stared at the dog in disbelief a moment and then backed out of the car. Turned on the girl and in cold rage said, “Where did you find these dogs?”

  “There’s a rew—”

  “Where?” I shouted, making her cringe back against the car. “Did you steal them?”

  “No, man, I swear, they were chained up behind a pad down on Saxson,” she babbled, scratching and scratching her arm. “Some bony dude brought ’em down there a couple of weeks ago, and then just, like, never came back—”

  “Whose house?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, trying to inch away. “A lot of people crash at that place—”

  “But no one remembered to feed the dogs?” I said, breathing hard. “No one heard them barking or crying or begging for food and water, no one—”

  “Hey, you know, you’re flipping out and I didn’t have to come here,” she said, flinging back her frizzy hair. “I could’ve just left them there—”

  “But there was a reward,” I said as I caught sight of Peter, standing slumped and head bowed over a limp Sonny in his arms. “Can’t collect the reward if the dogs are dead, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said, shrugging a shoulder and looking away. “I mean bread’s bread, and there’s never enough, you know? You gotta eat.”

  I stared at her, incredulous. “Get out of here. Go, or I swear to Christ I’ll—”

  “Peace,” she said and, scuttling past me, scrambled into the truck. It pulled a screeching U-turn, and as it blasted past, she stuck her arm out the window and gave me the finger.

  We buried the dogs together n
ext to the garden and I didn’t cry until I looked up and saw some of the kids on the block, girls mostly but a sprinkling of guys, too, standing there in line, each with a flower and waiting to pay their respects.

  The neighborhood wasn’t good for us anymore, so we put our house on the market and sold it to a man of about forty wearing a terrible toupé, striped bells, and a crushed-velvet Nehru jacket. He came arm in arm with a skinny, gray-toothed woman who giggled and said, “Far out,” when she walked into each of my neat, freshly painted rooms.

  I hated them both.

  By the time the house changed hands, I was more than ready to go.

  Instead of buying in a neighborhood where our future children would have plenty of playmates, we bought a wooded piece of land with a big old farmhouse and outbuildings, where we could shut out the world and live the way we wanted.

  The new place—our new place—changed almost everything.

  The house and the land embraced us.

  The first moment I saw it, something inside my heart opened and whispered, Yes, oh yes, and kept on delighting as we explored the rooms, admired the giant hearth in the kitchen and the fireplaces scattered throughout, as we smiled at her white plaster walls, deep windowsills, and Dutch doors, as we stood under the towering catalpa tree in the back and gazed out across the gently rolling green lawn, the wild woods, and the little pond down the hill.

  “It’ll be a bear to heat in the winter,” Peter said, eyeing the size of the place. “There’s a woodstove and fireplaces, but the rest is electric baseboard. We might have to close off the rooms we’re not using so we don’t go straight to the poorhouse.”

  “Okay,” I said, dazzled by the sight of a towering sugar maple beginning to turn red and a giant tangled knot of wild roses and blackberry bushes spreading alongside it.

  He shot me an amused look. “I’m going to need to get a snowplow for the pickup, too. There’s no way I’m going to shovel this driveway. I’ll have a heart attack before I even get past the pines.”

  “Okay,” I said, spellbound at the sight of a doe poised at the tree line down near the pond. She lifted her head and sniffed the air, then sauntered across the grass and started grazing. Another joined it, and a moment later, two more. Oh yes, oh yes. “Okay to all of it. To anything.”

  “Including the French maid?” he said, laughing when I smacked him in the arm.

  “Do you see that?” I said, nodding in the does’ direction. “It’s an omen. It is. This is our home. It’s true. I can feel it.”

  He watched the deer for a moment, tawny and graceful in the late afternoon sunlight and said quietly, “Me, too.” His hand closed around mine. “I think we could be really happy here.”

  “Oh, yes,” I whispered.

  Peter started singing again, not only when he left for work now, day shifts because he had some seniority under his belt, but when he came home. The door would open and he would great me with “Lovely Rita” and lift me in a hug and kiss me while I laughed and dangled and hugged him back, near tears because it felt so good to be happy again.

  He tilled me two gardens, one for flowers and one for vegetables, as I’d learned something listening to the hippie chicks and that was about eating organic, and I wanted to try it. Peter didn’t—he said he wasn’t giving up chili dogs for anybody—and that was fine because it meant I could plant what I wanted and reap whatever I sowed.

  Peter wanted to live off the land, too, but thankfully, while he did buy a shotgun and ammunition, that vision shifted to a less lethal one the first time a young buck at the salt lick, antlers fuzzy with velvet, lifted his head and stared back as we watched from the porch, breathless with admiration.

  “Dr. Boehm thought killing and gutting them, then stuffing and posing them was bringing the natural world to life,” I murmured, not wanting to frighten the buck away.

  “Boehm was an asshole,” Peter said, and went and bought a roll of PRIVATE PROPERTY NO HUNTING ALLOWED signs, which he stapled to trees throughout the woods, just in case the ones at the property line were disregarded.

  From then on, although it was never defined to outsiders as such, our home became a sanctuary to any and all wildlife that chose to live there, and the shotgun, stored in its case in the closet, has yet to be used to kill anything.

  The place came with barn cats, three wily young males who took months to get close, and only then because I’d been feeding them through that first hard winter. I convinced Peter to take them in to be neutered, having read that fixed cats live longer, happier lives and were less likely to roam or get into fights.

  And besides, by the time he did, we had two more cats, pregnant females who delivered a total of five sweet little kittens, and who also had to be caught and spayed once the kittens were weaned.

  I’d never had a cat before, but we brought the females and their brood into the house to stay, as I couldn’t bear the thought of those playful little fluff balls falling prey to the owls or hawks or even the occasional car speeding along the winding country road.

  One kitten, a cranky-looking little tiger named Wren, with a tail that stuck straight up in the air and a perpetual scowl as if we existed only to thwart him, climbed up the couch and wobbled onto my lap one afternoon. He looked in my face and began kneading my leg, tiny needle claws making a pincushion out of my thigh, but the expression on his unhappy little face grew so sloe-eyed and dreamy that I sat, enchanted, as his kitten purr rumbled out and his kneading intensified until, finally, overcome by his own contentment, he collapsed, asleep.

  Thanks to Wren, I fell head over heels in love with cats.

  Money was tight that winter, and after being late twice on the electric bill, I decided to stop waitressing and apply for an office job instead. The benefits and pay were better, and it would be a relief to sit all day, so I went to a mortgage company in town and for the first time ever was asked to fill out an application. I read through the questions, heart pounding, and with a casual confidence I didn’t feel, checked Yes next to Did you graduate high school? and when asked where and what year, wrote in the name of the high school back in the town I’d lived in before my mother had died, and the year I would have graduated had I been allowed to keep going.

  I hoped, because it was out of state and so far away, no one would bother to check.

  That night, when telling Peter about it, I discovered he’d always said Yes to that question, too, adjusting the date he’d arrived here to accommodate a high school graduation in Holland so as not to automatically be disqualified from his career.

  “But we’re lying,” I said.

  “Louise, do you think you’re a stupid woman?” he countered, leaning back in his chair and running a hand over his hair.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you think you’re stupid?” he said.

  “No,” I said, frowning.

  “No,” he said as if in agreement. “You read everything you can get your hands on. You have an extensive history in customer service. You’re used to making decisions on your own. You’re a whiz at managing our finances, what little there is of them.” He grinned at my look. “You’re an independent worker who doesn’t need a supervisor hanging over her shoulder all day just to make you perform. You speak well, you reason even better, and you’d be an asset to any company smart enough to hire you.” His smile faded. “Now, you can go in there, offer them all of that and make them gladder than hell that they hired you, or you can check No and tell them you didn’t graduate high school and watch how fast the door closes and you’re out of there.”

  “Do you really think that’s what would happen?” I said.

  “You have an interview tomorrow, right? Well, if you want to test the theory, go in and change your Yes to a No and see what happens.” He snorted. “Standards are set by people who have decided that you can’t possibly be considered smart unless some fat cat sitting behind a desk at some institution somewhere decides you are, and rubberstamps you to make it official.” His voice
grew bitter. “You know, Hitler’s Youth was considered the best and the brightest once, too, and look at where all that lockstep conformity got them.”

  “All right,” I said with a sigh. “I get the point.”

  So I left it as a Yes and got the position. The money was good but I was better, as I was determined never to make them sorry they’d hired me. I did so well processing mortgage applications that I was promoted to assistant supervisor of the department, and then supervisor. I attended training sessions and seminars and soon had framed certificates marching in rows across my walls.

  I was proud of them but in a distant, impersonal way. They meant a lot to the fictional Louise who had chosen not to have children, whose parents had absolutely been married, and who had definitely graduated high school, not to the real me whose journey had started the morning she found her mother dead.

  With no children growing up and reminding us that we were getting older, time seemed inexhaustible, gliding by in whole seasons rather than days or weeks.

  Fall into winter was the hardest for me, as the brutal snow, ice, and wind scoured the acres, driving some animals into hibernation and others into a desperate, daily search for food. I did research at the library, made lists of the types of plants the land would support and what the animals on it needed to help them survive, and in spring planted white oak and crab apple trees, easter red cedars, dogwoods, sumacs, hemlocks, and honey locusts.

  More cats came, sad, scrawny, cringing souls dumped by people who told themselves that cats could survive in the wild without a problem because Look, they have claws! or lied to their children with They’ll find a good home on the farm when instead, lost and terrified, they were often hit by cars, attacked by animals, or died of starvation because they were domesticated cats, not cougars, and simply didn’t know what to do.

  Peter called me a bleeding heart for feeding them, but what was the alternative, turning my back on their hunger and desperation just because I didn’t want to see it? Ignoring it because their life-or-death struggle inconvenienced me?