How It Ends

by Laura Wiess

  Impossible.

  If I hadn’t learned anything else from Margaret Boehm, I’d learned that.

  So even though Peter sighed and muttered about going to the poorhouse, I noticed he always scraped his plate into the scrap bowl or stopped to pet whoever was brave enough to wind around his ankles on his way out to the barn.

  I loved him even more for his good heart.

  We got three chicks for an ongoing supply of fresh eggs, and they grew into two hens and a rooster, who became Cindy, Lucy, and the rooster Brunhilda.

  Peter laughed when I named the rooster, and for a while, every time he would pass the proud, muscular Rhode Island Red scratching in the yard, he would sing in a warbling, Elmer Fuddian–type opera voice, “Oh, Bwunhiwda, you so wuvwy…”

  The rooster would pause, giving him a beady look, and I would call, “You’re asking for it,” but he would just laugh and keep going.

  All that ended one fall afternoon when Peter was kneeling at the edge of the garden, sitting back on his heels and hunched over, deeply involved in planting a second crop of lettuce seedlings. His jeans, always hanging low on his hips, hung even lower in the back. His T-shirt had ridden up, too, exposing—at least from one bird’s-eye view—a dark, alluring crevice that might have contained any number of fat, tasty grubs or scurrying beetles and must have seemed maddeningly irresistible in the ongoing quest for dinner.

  I was washing the dishes, thinking that Peter really did need a new belt for Christmas and absently watching Brunhilda stalking around behind him. When I finally realized what was happening, it was too late; the big bird zeroed in, cocked his head and, eyeballing that intriguing new crack in the landscape, rammed his beak into the promising darkness.

  It was electrifying.

  By the time I’d wiped the streaming tears from my eyes and staggered out onto the porch, Brunhilda had found safety behind his girlfriends and was muttering at being so cruelly misled, and Peter was muttering back, twisting around, groping himself, and trying to make out the damage.

  “Did you see what that crazy bird did?” he said, looking both bewildered and outraged. “What the hell kind of rooster pecks a guy in the ass?”

  “He was provoked,” I said, and then buried my face in my hands and howled.

  One summer, the last truly pure and happy one, on Peter’s birthday I was upstairs getting dressed to go to work, standing at the back window in my slip, wishing for a cool breeze and debating whether to put on the dreaded panty hose when I spotted Peter standing out at the edge of the lawn looking at the pond.

  He wasn’t doing anything in particular, just standing there gazing at the water, a man whose thick, black hair was now gray at the temples, whose beautiful, summer-tawny skin was looser, and whose muscular arms were growing slack, a man whose accent still stumped me at times and who still sang occasionally but no longer the newest songs, preferring to stick with old favorites like “Let It Be.” A man who once said, I’ve crossed the state line, Louise. I can either leave you somewhere or you can marry me. Whatever you choose, and who had then gone on to make me happier than I ever thought possible.

  I don’t know where it came from, the rush of love that rose and enveloped me, the sudden desire to be that girl again and him that young man who had kissed and danced by the river, those two who had taken such pleasure in learning each other inch by inch….

  I looked at the clock, then at Peter, who had turned away from the water and was walking slowly back across the lawn toward the house. Dropped the panty hose, ran down the stairs and out onto the back porch, scattering stray cats and causing him to look up in alarm.

  “What?” he called, walking faster.

  “Nothing, stay there,” I said, half laughing, near tears as I padded down the steps and ran across the grass to meet him. “I just love you, that’s all, and I wanted to say thank you for loving me back.”

  He tilted his head and gazed at me, eyes twinkling and his mouth curving into a wonderful, bemused smile. “You know you’re out here in your underwear.”

  “Am I?” I said, leaning forward and kissing the spot beneath his ear.

  “People will talk,” he said, shivering.

  “If they can see us, they’re trespassing,” I murmured, kissing it again and sliding my arms around his waist. “Let them tell it to the judge.”

  “What’re you doing?” he said huskily, as I backed him toward a particularly thick patch of clover and sank to my knees.

  “Everything I can think of,” I said, tugging him down beside me.

  “Watch out for bees,” he said, and then with a small, wicked smile, “Maybe you’d better not sit in the grass, Louise. Maybe…”

  “Maybe I’d better stay right up here,” I whispered, hiking up my slip, and then his eyes got smoky and his hands slid up beneath the lacy silk, and mine fumbled with his button and zipper, and I knelt over him, kissing and taking him, and the sun burned my back and the clover stained my knees and he did get stung once on the thigh, and several of the cats crept closer and watched worriedly from the underbrush, and I laughed and touched the gray at his temples and the lines of his dear, sweet face and whispered, Oh, yes, because what I’d hoped to discover was true:

  In our hearts we were still who we’d started as.

  “I can’t take this story,” I said, turning off the CD player. “First it’s a tragedy, then a horror story, then a romance, and now it’s what, a back-to-the-land thing? It’s a roller coaster, Gran, and no matter where I think it’s going, it never goes there.” I rose and, shaking my head, walked into the kitchen singing, “Oh, Bwunhiwda, you so wuvwy….”

  I wish I had chickens.

  It was cold walking home across the back, and at the gap in the little woods I stopped and opened my cell, not because anything had come in but because this was where I’d been when Seth had texted me about the New Year’s Eve party.

  We haven’t talked in more than two weeks. If we don’t hurry, there might be no going back.

  Sammi told me she saw Lacey and Seth talking in the upstairs hallway at his locker. She said she was too far away to hear anything and couldn’t really see their expressions but that Lacey looked more intense than Seth did.

  I said, Of course she did, she’s the one who wants, he’s the one who gets, and that sounded really mean but at that minute it was exactly how I felt and it didn’t matter that Lacey was the one who’d gone up to him like I had so many times in the past, tracking him down and making it easy for him, making myself available so he wouldn’t even have to reach too far and maybe strain himself while I got shin splints from racing around the school every day just to be in the right place at the right time.

  The whole thing put me in a bad mood; the stalemate, the worsening weather, knowing deer season was coming again and now having the whole Boehm taxidermy weirdness in my mind and not being able to talk with Gran about it because she couldn’t answer back. I’d had no idea how much I’d counted on her opinions until every one of them was taken away from me, and it was like someone had said, Too bad, Hanna, you lose and there’s nothing you can do about it, and that same rotten, miserable helplessness and frustration and, yeah, fear, came back into my mood, not big and obvious but gray and seeping. Not even Mr. Sung stopping me in the hall and congratulating me on bringing my grades up and tearing through those mandatory hours, warning me to be careful or I would become a model student and then he’d be left without a challenge could make me really laugh.

  I ran into bow-hunter guy from the property next door on my way home from the bus stop. He didn’t have his black knit face mask on but I still knew it was him from the camo wear and the way he walked, and it left me feeling even weirder because he had a nice face, a regular, open face just like anybody else, and he smiled and said hi when he walked by. I said hi and so much wanted to ask why he didn’t care that he was stealing their one chance at life just like I had one chance and he did, too, but I didn’t because I was afraid he would just call me a Bambi l
over (like that was a bad thing), and then get mad and go kill something extra like a squirrel or some doves just to pay me back.

  So I said nothing just to keep the peace, and I hated it.

  Gran is not well. Even for her, she’s not well.

  Grandpa doesn’t look so hot, either.

  And then some shithead went and hit one of the stray cats and just left the poor thing lying dead in the road in front of the house, and I had to go out there with a snow shovel and a box and push its poor mangled, floppy body inside, carry it into the back, say a prayer and bury it.

  It was almost a relief to go in, sit down, and hit play.

  How It Ends

  At first we called it a run of bad luck, shrugged, and kept going.

  Later, we just dug in and took the hits as they came.

  The town reassessed our place and the taxes almost tripled. We appealed and were turned down. We paid them for a while, but they became too much on top of everything else, so we were forced to subdivide the land and sell off the acreage in the back to a nice, hardworking family with a child and later the side acreage as a recreation spot.

  Money was still an issue. I was laid off, the roof needed replacing, the furnace went.

  And then, out of the blue, Peter had his first heart attack.

  He was in the hospital for two weeks, and in those two weeks I paced holes in every carpet in the house. I hated thinking of him under the care of doctors and nurses, and I was terrified that they wouldn’t be good enough to pull him through.

  I forced myself into the place, throwing up in the bathroom as the sweet, rotten disinfectant scent of the Boehms’ clogged my throat. I held his hand and hated how suddenly frail he looked, how his menu was a sick person’s menu and his food delivered on a tray, and my God, there were moments when I wanted to grab him and scream, Get up! Let’s get out of here! You know what’ll happen if we stay! And I’m sure he knew it because he would murmur, Don’t, Louise. I’ll be fine. I told you I’d never leave you, never want to live without you…I meant it…just give me a little more time and I’ll be fine.

  I would have stayed all night if they’d let me, if he hadn’t said, Go, you’ve got animals to take care of, and gently tugged loose of my grip.

  So I would leave, jaw like iron, teeth clenched as I strode down the endless hallway to the door, and I would burst through, and then start running through the parking deck to my car and fumble with the keys, climb in, slam and lock the door, and then lose it.

  Nobody ever stops and asks you if you’re okay when you’re crying in your car in a hospital parking deck. They already know you’re not because they’re there, too, and chances are they’re not okay, either.

  I’ve written our lives as though we had no friends and that isn’t true. We had good friends from work and neighbors who shared their families, joys, and woes with us, and we loved them but there was no denying that the lives of those with children was very different from that of those without. Not better, not worse, just different, with different priorities and schedules and time allowances.

  So yes, we had friends and loved ones.

  Never think otherwise.

  Peter came home a different person. A sad person, quieter than he’d been before, more tentative about how far out of sight of the house he would go or what kinds of things he’d find to do in his time off. He was anxious about going back to work and was considering putting in for early retirement until I convinced him to stay out on sick leave for now, as we needed the health insurance. He didn’t eat as much, but the good part was that I had already laid down the law and told him his diet was changing and nothing he could say or do was ever going to alter that.

  He just gave me a listless nod, leaned back in the chair, and closed his eyes.

  “What’re you doing?” I said nervously, after a moment.

  “Resting,” he said.

  “Are you okay? Do you have pain?” I went right over and would have put my hand over his heart if he hadn’t stopped me. “What?”

  “I’m fine, Louise,” he said. “Why don’t you go find something to do?”

  “All right,” I said, hurt. “I’ll bake some low-fat blueberry muffins. You’re allowed to have those.”

  He sighed and swiping a hand across his watery eyes, got up, and walked slowly into the living room.

  Little by little I got him to talk and discovered he was terrified of becoming a burden I couldn’t take care of, that he would rather die than be taken away from me and our home and all he loved, that his deepest fear was to be put in an institution somewhere out of sight of the world, because out of sight is where atrocities occur and he didn’t want to be left to die in a long, slow, agonizing decline.

  Hearing him say those things out loud was like reliving an old nightmare that had been dormant for years but now rose again, stretching and showing its teeth, and he began to cry and that scared me even more because Peter had never been afraid of anything and now he was, and that alone was reason to fear.

  I promised him I would never put him in an institution and became frightened now, too, because although I knew we were older, I had never wanted to think we were old, and yes, we moved slower and drove slower and had to step out of the way when youth rushed past as if they didn’t even see us. Our clunky old computer was still almost as foreign to me as the first day I’d bought it and there was more we couldn’t eat than we could. We had taken to listening to old music, our music, and sitting out on the porch delighting in the rhythm of the land, because its constant regeneration brought hope and sweet peace.

  But now his trembling words sparked a dark terror in me, too, so I made him promise me the same, no nursing homes, hospitals, or institutions, because I had been held captive once and would never go back, had seen those nursing home exposés on TV, seen the ruin and the wreckage, the unwanted and forgotten sitting dull and lifeless on the edges of their beds, food cold and uneaten, limbs mottled blue or red and shiny with burgeoning sores, and the footage had brought back the nauseating scent of decay beneath disinfectant, and I’d turned it off, but the scent had lingered in my nostrils for days.

  I drove him to post-heart-attack counseling as often as the insurance would allow, and when it was done, he was diagnosed with depression and put on more medication. His medications were expensive and the insurance didn’t cover it all, so I began taking things down to a consignment shop to sell.

  I went back to the diner and started waitressing again. Coral was gone but the owner was still there and glad to take me back even if most of the other waitresses were a third my age and cuter than puppies. I felt old and slow and lumbering, with my creaky knees and the anxiety at being away from Peter making me distracted.

  Still, the tips were a lot better than they had been in the old days, even if some of the patrons were more condescending and the kids smirking brats who left holy hell messes on the tables for me to clean up.

  That second stint at waitressing cured me of any lingering regret I’d had at never having children.

  In the earlier days we’d talked about fostering, of course, and even adoption, but Peter had been strangely reluctant, mumbling about thorough background checks and tracking family histories and what were we going to say about those and what if the state home or the police still wanted one or both of us for questioning about what had happened at the Boehms’.

  He said by making an adoption application we put ourselves right back up there on the radar, and did I really want to revisit all of that and maybe have it get out that my parents hadn’t been married and I didn’t have a high school diploma, and what if we were charged with fraud or asked to pay back years’ of salaries earned for falsifying job applications, and on and on until I’d said, No, you’re right, let’s just keep it the two of us. I’m happy this way, and he’d breathed a huge sigh of relief and we’d lived on from there.

  Thinking about it now made me wonder all over again, and so when I got home one night and collapsed in a chair, watchin
g as he made me a tuna sandwich on whole wheat with low-fat mayonnaise and a low-sodium pickle, I said, “Is there any other reason you didn’t want to get all involved with background checks, Peter? Is there anything you never told me?”

  And of course, there was.

  During the almost two years it had taken Peter to make his way out of Holland after his parents were murdered, throughout all the dark horrors a penniless young man on his own must endure to survive hostile territory, it seems he had done some brutal things while trying to stay alive that were best left unclaimed and undisturbed.

  I’m going to leave them that way, too, as other than making him stronger, they have no real bearing on this story. I’ll only add that he’s the best person to have at your back, as when he said he wasn’t afraid of anything, because the worst had already happened, he meant it.

  We lived small, finding homes for some of the strays because we just couldn’t afford to feed them all anymore, even with the cheapest food. We closed off half the house to avoid having to heat it, clipped coupons, accepted a new hand-me-down computer from a neighbor when they upgraded and spent many a frustrating hour learning how to use it. When we’d had enough of typing, we walked the property together, put out the deer food in winter, and sat by the pond in spring.

  And it was during the course of him being frugal and still trying to find me what he called a decent birthday present that he found me the absolute best present of them all.

  “Louise,” he said, after I’d blown out way too many candles and cut slices of the low-fat apple cake for each of us, “do you know what ephemera is?”

  “No, but, good God, Peter, don’t tell me you have that, too,” I said, stopping with my fork halfway to my lips and staring at him uneasily. He looked different; his eyes were shining and there was a strange sort of excitement coming off him in waves.