The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, standing on the porch in a warmish rainy morning. One of his shoes was still untied, and his shirt was partially untucked. He waited in the drizzle until Kate gave him a peck on the cheek. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’ll call you,” she said, and then closed the door.

  Kate stayed home from work for the next few days. With the house empty, she thought of Charles more than she wanted to: his ease with a shotgun, his pale, gangly nakedness, his postcoital belch, his laughter and patience in her bed. He left four messages on the machine, but she didn’t call him until two days later. It was three in the morning, and she’d woken with a dull, throbbing pressure in her head that verged on pain. She was hot, drenched in sweat—a side effect, her doctor had explained, of rapidly growing tumors—and opened her windows, but the breeze moving in the curtain sent shadows rushing through the dark of her room—walls of blackness falling on top of her. “Kate,” he said sleepily.

  “Would you consider coming over here … now?”

  He was in her bed in fewer than twenty minutes. She could only cuddle that night, and he seemed more than happy to oblige her. “This isn’t going to be serious, right?” she asked.

  He kissed her ear. “OK.”

  “It will be pleasant. It will go until one of us says enough,” she said.

  He moved in closer, sealing their bodies together. “Sure. I mean, unless we decide otherwise.”

  “I’m pretty sure that I won’t decide otherwise.”

  “That’s fine,” Charles said.

  On subsequent nights, they returned to their lovemaking, vigorous, athletic, more skilled and certain. They did everything they could think of with the eagerness of discovery and the fumbling skill of those who’d done it before. Charles took her from behind with an enthusiastic brutishness—his arm hooked around her neck and his pelvis pounding into her—that left her feeling pleasantly ravished. Kate remembered how to come, straddling Charles and using her thigh muscles to focus on the pleasure. Charles became, at times, almost too fearless, letting out loud howls so that Kate put a hand over his mouth and whispered, “My daughter will hear.” In moments of physical exuberance, Charles tried to lift her shirt, but she grabbed his arm forcefully and pushed it back down.

  After a week or so of adventurous nights together, Kate was exhausted. Her body felt leaden, fatigued, not exactly sick, but not well either. She wanted closeness, not pleasure, which Charles sensed easily. He spooned her, the weight of his arm folded over her—a good, blanketing weight—and fell asleep more often than not hours before Kate, who lay awake watching the lunar sweep of headlights pass through the room. Charles spoke out of his dreams, which were sometimes comforting, as when he asked repeatedly for more gravy, please. “Delicious,” he would say. And sometimes terrifying. “Stay away!” he shouted one night. “Away! Away!” When she woke him, he looked at her, and she saw the terror pass from his face as soon as he recognized her. “Love,” he said sleepily, and then held on to her for a desperate and needy moment before he fell back asleep.

  Toward the end of October, Kate arrived home from work one afternoon to find her daughter in tears at the kitchen table. Sitting across from her, Mark looked pale and unwell, and Kate assumed that he had finally broken her daughter’s heart. Kate had had a good day and was hardly prepared to deal with this sadness. She’d felt strong, invigorated right through this sunny, slightly chilly afternoon. At lunch she had seen a group of schoolchildren dressed as witches and vampires grasping a rope as their teachers herded them safely across Huron Street. Walking home, she took note of the fat pumpkins, gapped-toothed and grinning on porch steps, and thought of this holiday that contemplated darkness and fear and death. She’d felt both aware of and pleasantly removed from what was about to happen to her. And now, facing her weeping daughter, she was about to rush upstairs and leave the kids to themselves when Melissa lifted an open letter from the table. “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t say anything.”

  “Is that my mail?” Kate asked, setting her briefcase down. From the torn envelope on the table, Kate knew it must be a letter from the hospice where she had decided she would die, in part to give Melissa her own safe space at home.

  “You lied.”

  “I think Mark should go home,” Kate said calmly. “I think you and I need to talk.”

  “He’s not going.” Kate’s daughter reached over and grasped Mark’s hand.

  Mark looked shaken, uncertain. He wore a Mountain Dew T-shirt, a new pair of bright blue Nike running shoes, and the same sort of blue sweatpants that Melissa was wearing. They had just returned from swim-team practice and had that sallow, washed-out look of kids who’ve been in water for hours. A box of Raisin Bran was out on the table, and they’d no doubt eaten two or three bowls each before Melissa had opened the letter. This time of the afternoon, with the kids gorging on toast and cereal, then sitting in front of the TV or working on homework, could be Kate’s favorite part of the day. She enjoyed the house most when they were there, when she felt their presence, which was another reason she never should have put her foot down weeks before. “Should I go, Mrs. Harrison?” Mark asked.

  “He’s staying,” Melissa said again.

  “He might want to go,” Kate said.

  Mark looked timidly over at Melissa. “Maybe I should go.” Melissa shook her head and pulled him so forcefully toward her that Mark had to scoot his chair over. “I think I should go.”

  “Please just …,” Melissa growled, unable to finish her sentence.

  Kate sat down at the table. “I didn’t tell you because I needed some privacy for a while. I needed to get used to it again.”

  “How long?” Melissa asked.

  “Maybe three months. Maybe six. The doctors can’t be certain.”

  “You don’t look sick,” Melissa said suspiciously.

  “I don’t feel very sick. Yet.”

  “Maybe it won’t happen. It didn’t happen last time.”

  “Maybe.”

  Sitting beside Melissa, Mark seemed to squirm in his chair. He had no freedom to move with Melissa clinging to him, and Kate saw how intensely he wanted to escape. She sensed that this second occasion of her dying might be too much for him. She hardly knew if it was a selfish and calculating impulse or true desperation, the better motive by far, that made her say, “You can spend as much time with Mark as you like, Melissa. He can even sleep over now and then. I just ask that you not disappear this time.”

  Melissa’s gaze was cruel. “You lied to me.”

  And because Kate couldn’t fight, especially over this, she got up and left the room.

  Kate was not surprised when her daughter disappeared after that. She came home from school late and left first thing in the morning, hopping into Mark’s car. She stopped talking to Kate, or only talked to her to say the most prosaic things. “Got to go. Be home later.” Kate could do nothing but watch as her daughter grew distant, watch and hope that Melissa’s fury would subside.

  It was around this time that Kate began testing Charles, though she was only vaguely aware of doing so. One morning when they woke up together, Kate kissed him and then asked him to shave his mustache. “I’d like to see you without it. It tickles a little.”

  He touched it contemplatively before retreating to her bathroom. After a moment, she heard his electric razor, which he’d brought over hesitantly the week before and only after asking her permission. “It’s an extra,” he had said. “I have another at home.” As if that somehow made a difference. Kate had smiled and said teasingly, “As long as you don’t think it’s too dangerous.” When he came back out of the bathroom now, his face was leaner than she’d expected, though she knew she’d get used to it. What surprised her even more was how willingly, how quickly he’d done as she asked.

  She made other requests, too. She asked him to part his hair on the left side rather than in the middle, and he did it. She asked him to wear
red, the color that suited him best, and discouraged him from ever wearing gray, which washed him out. She woke him at two, three, four in the morning and made him leave without explaining herself. She called him at the same hours and pressured him to come over and get into bed with her. He came and he left when she asked. And though she wasn’t always sure why she made her requests, she was sure that Ryan had been right about her. She was taking advantage. She was pushing him around.

  The first weekend in November, Charles took Kate hunting. He’d proposed that she hike with him through the woods while he hunted, and had been surprised when she insisted on participating. She left a note for Melissa, to whom she hadn’t talked in days. “Gone hunting. Will return on Sunday.” Kate felt startled by the note even as she wrote it: how odd, how unlike herself it sounded. Would Melissa laugh when she read it? Would she worry?

  Charles picked her up at five on Saturday morning in what he called his “rig:” a huge pickup with a camper on the back. It was dark out, freezing, and Kate felt frail and groggy as she locked the front door and pushed herself through the cold air. The truck was warm and smelled of boot leather, wet wool, and another odor that Kate could identify now as guns—oil and cordite. A mist clung to the roads and made the dark houses on Washington Street appear caught in spools of web. Kate struggled to stay awake and talk to Charles, but she felt unwell, and the pull of sleep and the pleasure of succumbing to it were too much.

  She woke in a little town called Mio, where Charles bought her a hunting license from a large man who wore an orange hat with earflaps and smiled at Kate. “Wish I could get my wife to hunt. But she won’t have it.”

  “I thought I’d try it this once,” Kate said. She felt a little strange and improper, going out into the woods to kill things.

  Outside Mio, they entered a tract of forest that Charles knew well enough to navigate without a map. By ten that morning, Kate had donned a hunting vest, its pockets weighted down by twenty-gauge shells, and was cradling a shotgun and trampling over a forest floor carpeted with bark and dead leaves. Charles was twenty yards to her right. Their quarry was grouse, and Kate was tense, conscious of wanting to shoot something, though she didn’t necessarily want to kill it. The day was sunless and cold enough that Kate could see her breath. When the first bird rose in front of her, the muscular beating of its wings startled her. She shot and missed, after which Charles took the bird down in a cloud of feathers. The grouse, dark gray and nearly the size of a chicken, was still alive, driving itself into the ground as it flapped one wing. Charles ran to it, took its head in hand, and snapped its neck with a flick of his wrist, then stuffed it in his game pouch. “You want to do that right away,” he said. “There’s no reason to let it suffer.” How simple, how quick it was. It sickened Kate even as it excited her, even as it made her want to shoot more surely the next time.

  The second bird that got up, she missed, as did Charles, who shot after her, and she was relieved to see the bird soar above the tree line and escape. But early that afternoon a grouse burst out of a tree no more than five feet in front of her. She was quick to train the barrel on it. The bird went down and immediately began its broken dance, hopping on a leg, leaping into the air and falling again. She ran to it, then stood back when she saw the ripped-open wing, the bleeding flesh to which bits of feather stuck. Charles reached her and offered to finish the panicky creature off. “I can do it,” Kate said. She grabbed it by the neck, struck by its weight, its absolute terror as its one good wing insisted on struggle. She tried to flick her wrist, as she had seen Charles do, but the bird was stubbornly heavy, one grayish, unreadable eye trained on her as she flopped its too-solid body about. Feathers fell to her feet. Blood flecked her forearm and left dark spots on her jeans. The bird’s stupid determination enraged her, and she tightened her grasp around its neck and flung it down like a heavy bag of laundry. She felt its neck snap, as distinct as a pencil breaking. Finally, it was dead, and Kate felt guilty for the sense of accomplishment killing it had given her. She had overcome the bird. She was the stronger. And this feeling was overshadowed only by her desire to clean herself up, to get rid of the mess, the blood and feathers, of her stupid bird.

  That night, Charles opened a nice bottle of Cabernet and prepared a modest feast of wild rice, zucchini squash, and grouse breasts, which were thankfully small. Kate’s appetite was poor. Though the bright interior of the camper was warm and cozy, she battled a nearly irresistible fatigue that seemed to arrive earlier every evening now. Charles offered a toast to her hunting skills. “To your successful first day out,” he said. “We’ll do this again.”

  He was glowing, overjoyed by the success of the day, by the belief that there would be other such days, and Kate felt the urgent need to dim his happiness. But it was too late to tell him with any justice what he should have already known. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Hunting is a little dirty for me.”

  It stormed that night, wind and rain pounding the thin camper walls. In bed, the darkness was all-encompassing, pitch-black as it could only be away from city lights. Kate could see nothing in it. No sign of Charles beside her. No sign of her own hand in front of her. And as the wind continued to rage, Kate thought of the grouse out there clenched like fists in the shelter of trees and covered over in the same darkness that seemed to be smothering her. She felt his touch then, his soft fingers settling over the place where her breast was gone. It was not a sexual touch. It was tender. It wanted only closeness. And when Kate tried to remove his hand, he held her more firmly, and soon she let her hand rest over his, let herself be held in a darkness that felt safer now.

  In November, Kate found it almost impossible to work through a full day at the bank. She was having pressure headaches that made even light physical activity unthinkable. Her double vision and dizziness worsened. At times, her left hand stopped functioning. She couldn’t make the fingers close, and so for hours at a time she would keep this hand in her lap and hope no one noticed. To a degree, these signs of her illness relieved Kate. Certainty was good. It precluded hope. It precluded delusion and disappointment. And then, for a day, even two or three, the pain and fatigue would lift and she’d feel remarkably well again. She’d eat large dinners with Charles and make love to him. She’d take long walks with him and stay up late watching rented movies. She’d laugh loudly at his jokes, which were admittedly not so funny. But the pain would always come back, and she had to prepare herself for its return. She had to remind herself that she would die, which she did by handling numerous practicalities with the same dispatch and efficiency she brought to everything else in her life. She prepared her taxes in advance, contacted a lawyer, revised her will, set up a checking account for Melissa, who would turn seventeen in six months and would live alone in the year before college. Kate arranged a very brief and affordable funeral, at which, she had decided, no physical remains of her—in a jar or coffin—would be present. Kate found comfort in these tasks. They made death accomplishable, something she could do rather than something that would be done to her.

  One morning, after four days of what felt like perfect health, Kate got up from bed and collapsed before she’d gotten halfway to the bathroom. Charles was helping her up when she realized what had happened. She was unhurt, and as soon as she could stand on her own, she pushed Charles away. “Please don’t cling to me,” she said.

  “You just fell.”

  “I stumbled. I’m fine now.” She went into the bathroom, and when she came back out, Charles was sitting on the edge of the bed looking up at her with too much concern in his eyes.

  “Is something wrong?” He paused, seeming to realize the danger in his question. “Are you unwell?”

  She slammed her underwear drawer, panties and a bra clenched in her fist, and began rifling through dresses in her closet with a physical vigor that was meant to be definite proof of her wellness. Charles flinched when she threw a dress down on the bed. “I am not unwell.”

  “You just collapsed.” />
  “I tripped.”

  “Your knees gave out from under you. I saw it. You’ve been tired lately. I’ve seen that, too.”

  She turned her back to him and kicked a stray house slipper into the wall. “I’m dying.” She was furious at him for making her say it. But in the long silence after her admission, her anger faded. “I lied to you earlier. I’m not recovered. I’m sick.”

  “Dying,” he said flatly. “Dying when?”

  “I’m dying now.”

  “When?” he asked again. “How long?”

  “Not long.” She turned around. Charles was naked save for his boxer shorts. His pale shoulders were drooped in a sad way that made her want to go to him, and through the slightly open slit of his shorts, she glimpsed a small part of his limp penis, the sight of which left her feeling tender and proprietary toward him. He was hers—her lover, her friend, her companion.

  “From what?” he asked.

  “Cancer.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s gone to the brain,” she said. “That’s why I get dizzy.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “It’ll get worse,” she continued, unable to stop herself. “Before it’s over, I might not be able to make facial expressions. I might not be able to pronounce words correctly.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me any of this.”

  “We were having a fling,” she said. “That was our agreement.”

  She sat down next to him, but he moved away and then stood up and began hurriedly dressing. “No,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say that.

  He struggled to tie his necktie, finally just letting its ends fall. “I’ve got to go for a while,” he said. He picked his shoes up from the floor, walked into the hallway in his socks, and closed the door behind him.