The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  She hadn’t expected the heartbreak, the thoughts of him, the simple, unrelenting desire for an absent person. She called twice and left messages. In the first, she asked him to please call. In the second, she was blunt. “Call me, Charles. Call me today.” She was shocked by her aggression, her outright command. But she was even more surprised by the fact that he didn’t call, not on that day and not on the next. The third time she called, Ryan answered with a flat, face-slapping, “Yeah, who is it?”

  “Kate,” she said softly. “I’d like to speak to your father.”

  “What did you do to him?” She’d expected the rudeness, but not the defensiveness, the obvious anger in his voice.

  “I’d like to speak to him.”

  “He’s not here.” He paused. “What did you do to him?”

  “I don’t think that’s really your concern.”

  “He was crying the other day. He was just sitting at the table crying. I guess you found out just how much you could push him around. I’d say you’re an expert at that.”

  The rage in Ryan’s voice left her both overwhelmed by guilt and glad that there was love for Charles mixed in with his son’s bitterness. “Please tell him I called.”

  “Maybe I will,” he said, and then hung up.

  By mid-November, the beautiful portion of fall had ended. The winds came and blasted the leaves from the trees, and the rains turned them to brown gutter slush. The dark fell early, and more often than not Kate woke to gray mornings and the wet sounds of cars driving through water-drenched streets. Melissa continued to stay away, arriving home late in the evenings and slipping out of the house with her book bag early in the mornings. Kate worked half days now at the bank. She’d told her bad news to her district manager, who was happy to let her work until she no longer could. She spent her solitary afternoons at home rereading old mysteries and watching stacks of rented movies. She slept. She hoped that Charles would call. And she prepared herself for what would be a quieter, lonelier death than she’d expected.

  Just when it seemed things would go on in this way, Kate came home from work one afternoon to find Melissa on the couch hugging her knees. She was in her favorite pajamas—thin yellow cotton with blue polka dots—and her eyes were raw from crying. In the crook of one arm, she held her worn-out teddy bear. Kate sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “Where’s Mark?” she asked.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Home?” Kate asked.

  “Gone,” Melissa said. “He dropped me.”

  Kate felt a rush of guilt. She wanted to go to her daughter, but Melissa made no gesture or sign of wanting her. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  “I scared him off,” Melissa said. “I was too intense for him, or something.”

  “I don’t think it was you,” Kate said. “I think it was the circumstances. Sixteen-year-old boys don’t particularly want to be around a house where the mother keeps taking to her sickbed.”

  Melissa shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “OK,” Kate said. “There are other boys.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Melissa said, beginning to cry again. “I was just using him. That’s what he said, and maybe he was right. He was my protector.” She looked up at Kate. “From you.” She stopped crying then and sat up straight and made an effort, Kate could tell, to be brave. “I’m going to try to be around more.”

  This news caught Kate off guard. She didn’t know what to say, and was just as surprised when she felt the tears come. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I can’t be here all the time,” Melissa said cautiously. “But I’ll be here after school, and I’ll be here for dinners.”

  “I know what to expect this time,” Kate said. “I’m going to be better. I’m not going to …”

  “You went hunting the other weekend,” Melissa interrupted.

  Kate nodded. “I actually shot a bird.”

  Melissa laughed. “I can’t picture it.”

  “I did. I shot it and Charles roasted it and I ate it.” Kate and Melissa both laughed at the thought of it.

  It took Charles three weeks to call. He left a message on the machine asking Kate to coffee at the café where they’d first met. That afternoon, the temperature fell below freezing, though the sun was out, and people hurried over the sidewalks, bundled in heavy coats. Wanting to look her best, Kate went without a hat and suffered for it, her ears numb by the time she entered the warm, mostly empty café. She found him seated in the same sunny corner where they had met, though he looked different now. After three weeks of not seeing him, he looked paler, thinner, slighter than she’d remembered him. He sat clinging to his coffee cup as if for warmth. His mustache was back, for which she was glad. In truth, she preferred him with his mustache. “Thank you for coming,” he said after she’d sat down.

  She could hear the fear in his voice and was at first reassured by it. “I’ve missed you,” Kate said. It was a great relief to have said this, to have let it out.

  He smiled, but his smile didn’t last. “I’m not good at this.”

  “Good at what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I want to say.”

  Kate already knew from his tone what he wanted to say. “Sure you do. I don’t know why you had to make me come out in the cold to hear it.”

  He shook his head as if he were trying to rid himself of a thought. “I’m very sorry about your … about your being sick. I wanted you to know that.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “I’m sorry, too. About not telling you.” But she couldn’t make herself sound sorry. And once again, she was surprised by her anger. She wanted to strike out at him now. Instead, she sat back in her chair and waited for him to speak.

  “It’s nice to see you. I’ve missed you. That’s true for me, too. But I don’t think I know you well enough to …”

  He was going to make her finish his thought. He didn’t know her well enough to watch her die. “I suppose not,” she said. And then she added, with more anger in her voice than she’d wanted, “Your electric razor is still in my bathroom.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  For a moment, she remained silent and fought off an urge to weep. It stung to see this man who had giggled and tumbled in her bed now hold himself at a distance. And when she was sure she would not cry, she laughed. “It was just a fling, right?” Her voice sounded fake, and though she knew this pretense made her ridiculous, she couldn’t help herself.

  “Sure,” Charles said. “I just wanted to see you again.” He put his head down, and for a moment Kate thought he might cry. But when he looked up again, he managed to smile briefly. “It was nice,” he said.

  He wanted her to agree. He wanted her to say something equally fake and cheerful, but she didn’t.

  Melissa came back to her, as she’d said she would. In the late afternoons, she opened her books on the kitchen table and worked while Kate prepared dinner. One afternoon, Melissa brought dozens of college brochures home from school, and Kate and Melissa paged through them, talking about whether a large or a small college experience would suit Melissa best. Did she want a school with a Greek system? “That’s not for me,” Melissa said. And Kate, who didn’t want to be too influential, was inwardly glad that her daughter would not be a sorority girl. It was far too early to be so absorbed by these questions, but Kate was grateful for any opportunity to talk about her daughter’s future, and Melissa seemed to know this and indulged her.

  In December, Kate’s double vision worsened and she finally left the bank for good. Her doctor recommended that she tape her left eye shut and wear a patch. And so this small part of Kate was already dead. Once or twice a week, she would suffer headaches that were bad enough for morphine. But for the most part, dying was surprisingly painless. More than anything else, it was exhausting, so exhausting that merely standing up was a struggle. At times, death seemed more mundane than frightening. The drawn-out brightness of the mornings, the length of mi
dday and of the late afternoons when she lay on the couch alone waiting for Melissa to come home from school left her fatigued and drowsy.

  Kate still had her bursts of energy, though they’d last now for hours rather than days. When a blizzard descended on Ann Arbor, Kate and Melissa put on their fattest winter coats, gloves, and hats, and walked for more than an hour in the new snow.

  Melissa and Kate almost never spoke of what was happening—and what would soon happen—until one afternoon when Kate was especially sick. She lay over the couch, groggy from painkillers and covered in blankets. Kate had been discussing as lucidly as she could the virtues of Carleton College, while trying to hide the fact that this was the school she would choose for her daughter, when Melissa stopped her with a blunt question. “Does it hurt?”

  Kate looked at Melissa for a moment. “You’re sure you want to know?”

  Melissa nodded.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But not as much as I thought it would.”

  “But it hurts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it hurt when it happens?” Melissa wasn’t looking at her. She was paging through a glossy college brochure.

  “No,” Kate said. “I won’t be awake.”

  Melissa shook her head. “I don’t think I want to be there then. If that’s OK.”

  For an instant, Kate wanted to beg her daughter to be there, to stay with her, above all, at that moment. Instead, she nodded. “I’ll be asleep. I won’t know who’s there.”

  “Is it OK?” Melissa asked.

  “It’s OK,” Kate said.

  It was raining out when someone knocked. The day nurse had just gone home, and Kate had to summon all her energy to rise from the couch and answer the door. A cold in-suck of air filled the entryway, and despite the grayness outside, the light had a raw brightness that Kate had to turn away from. Charles was wet, and the stringy flatness of his hair made him appear desperate. He held a small bunch of drenched tulips out to her, and she managed to carry them back to the couch. Looking at the flowers—their dramatic mess of color—exhausted her. “I got caught in this,” he said. Water dripped off his coat and onto her wood floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he explained himself: “I just wanted to visit. As a friend.”

  “I’m tired, Charles,” she said. “I won’t be able to say much.” As usual he was nervous, and for the first time Kate was irritated by his fear rather than touched by it. She knew that he was merely afraid to be in the presence of a dying person. He seemed so reduced: every inch the furniture salesman. She should have offered him tea or coffee, but she could not imagine how she would get up from the couch again. She was in her robe, for God’s sake. “Your eye,” he said. “Is it OK?” She’d forgotten about her patch until then, and now felt humiliated. She didn’t want him there. She didn’t want him to see her dying. He had been right: They didn’t know each other well enough.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not OK.”

  “You look good.”

  She almost laughed, but stopped herself when she realized how horrific laughter would sound coming from her. For a time they were silent until Kate finally said, “I’m tired.”

  He nodded. “I hope … I hope I wasn’t unkind. I hope I didn’t mistreat you. I hope …”

  Kate understood now why he had come. She shook her head, and because he looked so achingly vulnerable, so convinced of his guilt, and because he was so extremely kind that he believed he was in the wrong when he wasn’t, she said, “Of course not.” And though she was too exhausted to summon the requisite tone of penitence and regret, though she wasn’t sure it was entirely true, she remembered her daughter’s recent courage and summoned her own. “I suppose I used you … a little. I didn’t want to end up alone. I didn’t want to end up”—she paused and let her head sink into her pillow—“like this.” She smiled. “It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I have my daughter.” And now that she had said it, she thought it was true.

  His shoulders lifted as if a chain had just come off him. How easily people might push him around. How easily she might have delivered a blow to him right now, had she wanted to. “It was just using me?” he asked.

  “Not just. It was more than that, too.” The truth of these words was in the sudden enthusiasm and fullness of her voice, and his smile and the lift in his face told her that he had heard it. For a moment, she wondered if he deserved to be this happy given what would soon happen to her. But the moment passed.

  “I’d rather you not come back,” she said. “I’m going to get worse, and I’d rather you remember me as the woman you took to bed and not the woman with an eye patch.”

  “Sure,” he said. She wished he’d struggled more before saying that.

  “I’m tired,” she said again. But she wasn’t prepared for how quickly he kissed her forehead and then turned around and left.

  Her heartbreak continued. When she was especially lonely, in the long hours of daylight, she thought again of his lanky nakedness, his surprising competence at killing, his melancholic voice on her answering machine asking to speak to her. How odd to be heartbroken at this time in her life. How odd to be left with desire. It was a relief and a luxury to know that she did not want the actual man. Not now. She liked him best in her thoughts. He was more vivid, more alive that way. She could spend hours thinking of the soft, contemplative way he’d touched his mustache from time to time, and the way he’d told her, “Always stand behind the shooter,” making it clear with his paternal tone of voice that her safety was his foremost concern. She would see them making love and be surprised again by his athleticism, his volume, his surprising confidence in bed. She would see years into an imaginary future with him; how annoying his passivity and meekness would become, annoying and also endearing. She would exhaust herself protecting him from those who’d take advantage of him: his son, his business partners, even herself. She would think of him as a hunter, too, a gentle hunter with great respect for his prey. How quickly he got to his wounded bird and snapped its neck. She would think of how he had lifted his wine above their small feast of grouse and toasted to her success, to their many hunts to come; and how he had lain beside her that night, his hand—the same one he had killed with—touching her scar in a darkness that was, for the time, easier to bear.

  REAL GRIEF

  Holly Morris was thirteen and not behaving herself at her grandmother’s funeral. She made the few children in attendance—only there because the counselor from the school district had advised it—play patty-cake with her on the couch while the adults lined up in front of the large, glossy black coffin. Everybody knew that coffin had cost a lot more than the Morris family could afford. And because a funeral home was too expensive and Bethel Mount Chapel, the church where the Morrises and my family and every other family at the funeral went, was no more than a room with gray metal chairs, the Morrises had moved their TV out of the way and put the casket, with its upper lid open to the dead woman, in their living room. Everybody on the front porch and back patio was whispering about the cost of the coffin, not to mention the reconstructive work done on the old woman. The coffin was polished metal and wood with what Larry Truman, a carpenter in Wilford, knew was cherry trim. “Precious,” one woman said about the interior fabric and cushions. People seemed to agree that the expense must have nearly destroyed the Morrises and would not have been necessary had Holly’s grandmother died in a more peaceful way. But they also had to agree that they might have done just the same had it been their tragedy.

  Jack Rogers and I tried to understand the cost in our terms—the number of trick boards and soft-wheels with Speedo bearings and Tracker trucks that kind of money might buy. We both had Kmart specials, plastic held together with rusty bolts. You could have bought twelve or thirteen flexwood-fiber fat boards for what the Morrises had spent on that funeral. “At least that many,” Jack whispered, and I didn’t argue. From the back of the living room, we had both glimpsed, through the throng of
adults, the long, narrow box. The three Morris men were kneeling over their mother, weeping, and doing something desperate and inward—praying, talking to the dead woman—while Holly and Belinda Green, who even at eight must have known better, clapped hands and sang out from the back of the room, “Say, say, oh playmate! Come out and play with me!” Finally, Mrs. Morris seized Holly’s wrist and led her away. But as soon as Mrs. Morris returned to her sobbing husband, her daughter was back, recruiting every kid she saw for a game of carpet tag, in which you take your shoes off and drag your socked feet over the shag carpet and shock the hell out of another kid. Holly also rounded up Jack, the Watkins brothers, and me, though in our early teens we were all too old for nonsense. So we stood back while the little kids tore their shoes off and began motoring around that part of the living room to fill themselves with electricity. By that time the adults were no doubt questioning the wisdom of bringing the few children who had come—the ones who’d witnessed what happened to old Mrs. Morris. Never mind that the woman counselor from the school district had advised it, had asked our parents to talk to us, listen to us, let us decide whether we’d like to come to the ceremony. “It might help give you closure,” Jack’s father had told him earlier that day, though “closure” was not a word we’d heard our parents use before. And now the Hedge and Bibs and Scott parents grabbed their kids and hauled them down the street and into their homes.

  Standing alone at the back of her living room, Holly Morris swung her arms in circles, as if about to start jumping an invisible rope. “That is entirely enough now,” Mrs. Wills, a close friend of Holly’s mother, said fiercely. But Holly just smiled and wore this I-can’t-hear-you face. Feeling stiff in our hand-me-down suits and ties, Jack Rogers, the Watkins brothers, and I stood there, waiting, knowing something had to happen. “That child needs to be hit,” we heard Mrs. Wills whisper. Under normal circumstances, with all the families present going to the same church, living in the same neighborhood, working similar jobs, someone might have done it and let Mrs. Morris grieve. But there was something manic and unapproachable about Holly Morris—her openmouthed smile, her loud, hard giggling, her shouts, moments ago, of “You’re it! You’re it!”—that made her glee unstoppable and challenged any authority so completely that the adults seemed to back away from her and doubt themselves.