The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  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

  Every 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?

  It’s the question we ask each Wednesday, a question for which there is no answer. So, why do any of us return, week after week? Because, at the conclusion of every session, there remains a single, blessed assurance. In the end, all satisfaction lies in the certainty of this, our shared secret: that each of us knows we have it the worst.

  . . .

  The divorce rate for couples who lose infant children is almost ninety percent. Most couples split up inside of a year. Our own one-year mark a week away, I’ve decided that Lisa and I are no exception. It’s not that we’ve stopped loving each other exactly, only that every time I look into my wife’s eyes, all I see is my little girl. Lisa is holding out for a miracle, the thing that will bring us together, unite us in our sorrow. But the only miracle here is that we’ve lasted as long as we have.

  Lying in bed, one tired Wednesday night after group
, we consider what would happen if I left. This isn’t the first time the subject’s come up. It’s not meant as a threat. I just want Lisa to be ready when I go.

  Lisa hasn’t bothered to wash her face, and her eyes are still bloodshot, her eye sockets mascara-stained. In the lamplight she looks like a sleepy raccoon.

  “Where would you go?” she asks. She takes my hand, wants me to see she’s taking this seriously, but she’s exhausted, drained by the meeting. This, of course, is why I waited until now. Because I can’t face Lisa when she cries. Because on any given Wednesday night, with no emotion left, we can talk about separation like two strangers discussing the weather.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I say.

  “You don’t have to leave,” she says.

  “Actually, I kind of think I do.” I rub the back of Lisa’s hand with my thumb. “I mean, we tried. We gave it our best shot. It’s just too much. All of it.”

  And this is how we’ve come to speak of our dead child, as though saying her name will summon what happened back into being. Say June and someone might say Jinx.

  “We can make this work,” Lisa says.

  I don’t say, We’re doomed.

  I don’t say, What happened, it’s going to haunt us as long as we’re together.

  “Maybe,” I say, “but not like this.”

  “If we just keep going to group,” Lisa says, and I wonder if she believes this. She lets go of my hand, pulls the covers up to her neck. Beside me, she seems small, a frightened animal.

  “I’m not talking divorce here,” I say. “What do they call it? A trial separation.”

  “Right. Because those always have such happy endings.”

  “I just think we need some time apart.”

  “You. You need time apart. Not me. You don’t know what I need.”

  That shuts us both up. When I speak again, I choose my words with care. “Lisa,” I say, “I need this. I need space, some time to figure things out. Solve for x, you know? I want you to be okay with this.” But I think we both know the truth. When I leave, it will be the end.

  Lisa sits up. She puts one hand on her pillow, as though any second she might bring it down over my face. “Listen to you. Do you even hear yourself speak? I’m not a variable, Richard. You can’t just take me out of your little equation and expect it to balance on both sides.”

  I don’t want to cry, but suddenly I do.

  “Lose me, and you wind up with less than you had.”

  “Lisa,” I say, “please.”

  “No. Enough. You want to leave? Leave.” There are tears in her voice, but she doesn’t cry. She fluffs her pillow a few times, dramatically, violently, then pushes it against the headboard and lies down.

  “You can’t escape what’s happened by leaving this house,” she says, rolling onto her side. “The only thing you escape if you leave is me.”

  . . .

  The first thing they do when you lose a newborn is pump you full of drugs so you don’t kill yourself. Lisa took the antidepressants, but I refused. I had my reasons. I wanted it to hurt, was certain I deserved the pain.

  Have you ever been to a baby’s funeral? There’s an absurdity to the pageantry: the miniature casket, the floral arrangements done up in pastels. I don’t remember anything the minister said. I only remember I couldn’t breathe. Lisa sat on my right, my mother on my left. Each of them leaned in. By the end of the service, my shoulders were wet and my hands ached.

  After, friends and relatives followed us home. “You shouldn’t be alone right now,” they said. Lisa nodded. She wore a smile I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. She was determined to do whatever everyone thought was best.

  Something about death makes people bring food. In North Georgia, people still operate under the pretext of “southern hospitality.” Neighbors whose names I’d never learned came bearing balls of aluminum foil.

  “You’ll never finish all this by yourselves,” everyone said. Our guests set up card tables and folding chairs around the house. Our kitchen counter was transformed into a buffet. Soon, everyone was helping themselves to turkey and ham, noodle salad, little sandwiches cut into triangles.

  The air was full of the aroma of rolls being warmed under the broiler when Lisa and I began to fight. I wanted to be left alone. Lisa said she liked the company. The argument escalated quickly, our voices competing with the din of the crowded living room. I yelled something. Lisa screamed something back. Then ours were the only voices left. People drew near, surrounded us. Sentiments were whispered. Hands patted my shoulders, rubbed my back. I felt like a bird with a broken wing, the neighborhood cats closing in.

  “Please,” I said. “She just died. Please leave us alone.”

  “Oh, and now you care,” Lisa said. “Now, when you didn’t even want her.”

  At that, everyone took a collective step back.

  “It’s your fault!” Lisa said. Her body shook. “You didn’t want her, and she died!”

  Lisa collapsed into me, pressed her face to my chest, heaving. A second later, I heard the words, processed the meaning of what she had said. And, in that moment, I hated my wife. Her very touch repulsed me.

  I pushed her. I meant only to separate our bodies, to get away, but there was a miscalculation of force. Lisa fell backward onto a table. A tray of carrot sticks hit the floor.

  That could have been the end right there, except that it wasn’t.

  The next day we went on as though nothing had happened. I started taking the pills I’d been given, ignoring the recommended dosage.

  . . .

  It’s true, though, what Lisa said. The pregnancy was not what people call planned, and I hadn’t wanted the baby, not at first. It’s not as if I told her, spoke the words aloud: I don’t want this baby. But Lisa knew. She knew the moment she told me she was pregnant.

  I was teaching when the news came. Lisa had thrown up that morning, called a sub, and gone back to bed.

  The high school is where we met, where I’d been teaching math to teenagers for ten years. Lisa was right out of college, the hot, new biology teacher all the boys, and some of the girls, had a crush on. The decade’s difference in our age went unnoticed by both of us. We kept the relationship a secret as long as we could. Public school gossip, after all, is seldom kind. The smaller the town, the worse it is, and this is a small town. Of course, when Miss Adams returned one fall and told everyone to start calling her Mrs. Starling, it wasn’t long before people put two and two together.

  The voice coming through the intercom ordered me to the front office. I had a call waiting on line one.

  When Lisa told me, I dropped the phone. We’d only been married a year, and we’d been careful. I put a hand on the office copy machine to keep from falling over. My thumb caught the keypad, and then the copier was humming and whirring. White paper streamed into a tray on the floor. I watched the paper coming out, sheet after sheet. I fully expected a baby to tumble from the mouth of the machine, down the chute, and into the gray basket.

  I bent over, grabbed the phone, brought the receiver to my ear.

  “Well,” Lisa said, “aren’t you excited?”

  They were there, all the words I knew I should say, the words one uses for such an occasion, but none found their way to my tongue.

  “Fine,” Lisa said. “I’ll see you when you get home.”

  So, I feigned joy, went through the motions as I thought a better man might. I painted the spare bedroom blue, then, after the second ultrasound, repainted it pink. I helped Lisa’s friends at school throw a shower. But, in time, real pleasure crept in. Action blossomed into belief, and belief turned to love, a love for what grew inside Lisa, love even before the baby came. I bought the baby book, the one Lisa still looks at every day, the first month the only section filled in.

  Our daughter was born in June, and we named her just that: June.

  It was only after June died in July that the subject of my initial reluctance resurfaced. Lisa has not me
ntioned it since the day of the funeral, but it’s stayed with us, a green cloud hanging low in the house. When we fight, I feel her holding back, and with each argument I have waited—am waiting still—for her to throw the accusation back in my face, as though death is a thing I wished upon our daughter.

  . . .

  I decide to postpone the separation, again, this time with the stipulation that I no longer have to attend group. Lisa can go, but I’ve had enough.

  After all, I’m hardly a model candidate for group therapy, especially group therapy with a spiritual component. Me, I’m a believer in the concrete. Give me statistics. Give me data. Give me a line, fat and sturdy, working its way across a grid.

  I believe in a calculable world, even when the math doesn’t quite make sense. Take Lisa and me, for example. We, x, may be expressed as follows: x = [3 - 1] but [1 + 1 ≠ 2].

  Lisa and I used to be a lot alike. My world was made up of numbers, hers of biological processes. She saw everything through a scientific lens. Her outlook changed, though, after June died. When Lisa couldn’t pin the blame on me, she turned to God. Suddenly, meaning attached itself, leechlike, to every facet of her life. Everything that happened happened for a reason.

  Soon, she was reading the Bible every day and memorizing scripture. God’s will became a favorite catchphrase. Sunday mornings now find me home alone.

  . . .

  Lisa agrees to my terms. I can stop going to group. She also says I owe her an apology, so the Friday following our fight in bed we drive an hour south to Atlanta to the opening of a new film at the Fernbank Science Center. We sit in the theater’s front row. Lisa’s just nuts for nature documentaries. This one’s called The Amazing Journey and chronicles an annual herd migration across the Serengeti Plain. The film pretty much follows the standard African migration documentary format: Gazelle and zebra and water buffalo travel hundreds of miles, terrorized by lions and cheetahs, fording crocodile-infested waters, all so they can make it to a lush basin somewhere in Kenya. In the basin, the grass is long and green. Plant life of all kinds abounds, and there is fresh water enough for every animal. It is like a kind of heaven. Then all the animals fuck and go home.