The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Then it was dark, it was nighttime, and Evelyn saw white butterflies flitting above the thick, molten river, swirling with eddies and undertows. Russell was casting and casting, and the shadowy form of a fish rose to his fly, then folded into the dark river again. She slipped under the water with the fish and couldn’t seem to struggle back to the surface again. And because it was easier, she allowed the cold current to take her. “They don’t want you to sleep for more than a few hours at a time,” Russell said now. She realized that she was awake and he was sitting beside her, a blue curtain at his back. “It’s important that we make sure you’re OK. You have a concussion.” He asked her a series of remedial questions. “What’s your name? Can you say your name for me?”

  “Evelyn,” she said, smiling. “You’re here,” she said. “You’re here.”

  “And my name? Who am I?”

  “You’re Russell.” And then: “Am I hurt badly?”

  “No,” he said, and despite the trembling in his voice, she believed him. “They just want to watch you for a day or so. They had to give you stitches. You cut your head.”

  She sat up. “I feel good. I feel …” But she felt a heavy ache behind her eyes, and when she put her hand to her chin it felt at once too close and too far away. She lay back down.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll be as good as new in a day or two.” His hand was shaking in hers, and she understood then that he was the frightened one. She understood how hard it must have been for him to return to this place, the beds and stretchers and wheelchairs terribly familiar from the hours and weeks and months he’d passed in waiting rooms, wanting everything to be all right when nothing was.

  “I did it on purpose,” she said. “I rode out into the intersection. I wanted you to see that there was nothing to be afraid of.” She shook her head. “More than anything, I did it to piss you off. But I didn’t see that car. I didn’t see anything. I know you’re always thinking about what happened to her. And I just wanted to make you forget it. I’m sorry. You must be furious with me.”

  He closed his eyes and squeezed her hand more tightly. “Later,” he said. “I’ll be furious later. You can sleep again if you like.”

  When she woke next, it was daylight, and Russell, eyes puffy and ringed with purple, sat beside her with a cup of coffee in hand and a copy of Newsweek in his lap. He was still wearing the clothes he had fished in—his Levi’s torn out in the knees and his Michigan Wilderness T-shirt. He hadn’t showered, hadn’t even gone home, Evelyn guessed. On her bedside table sat a vase of red and yellow tulips. “Those are from the garden,” Russell said. “Margaret brought them over earlier this morning.”

  Evelyn felt surprisingly well. She sat up and stretched her arms above her head. “That was nice of her,” Evelyn said. Then she laughed. “Margaret doesn’t think much of me.”

  “She brought you flowers, didn’t she?”

  She passed her hand over her head, discovering the wiry lattice of stitches in her scalp. “Fifteen,” Russell said.

  “She’s right, you know. She’s absolutely right not to like me.” She gestured at the tulips. “They’re beautiful, but I bet she brought them for you. I bet she feels terrible that I’m putting you through something like this all over again.” Russell shook his head and tried to smile, but there was a blankness, a helpless exhaustion in his face that told her the truth. “You didn’t go home last night. You probably didn’t even sleep. And I did that to you.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “I put you through hell.”

  He looked away, toward the TV on the wall opposite her, and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you did.”

  Later that morning, she was taken in a wheelchair to radiology and learned that she had sustained a minor fracture in her left fibula. They put her in a bulky plastic boot, which she’d have to wear only a few weeks and in which she could walk without the aid of crutches. Otherwise she was fine, and her doctors told her she’d be released that evening. Though she insisted that Russell go to work, he stayed through the day and they played game after game of checkers, between which she rose from bed and practiced hobbling around the room in her plastic cast. After picking over a terrible lunch, they switched from checkers to chess, and just when Evelyn had been about to seize his queen with her knight, she looked up to find that Russell’s head was down and that he was sleeping.

  When he woke a few hours later, she greeted him with a kiss and then had a question. “She’s here, isn’t she? In another room somewhere?”

  “Yes,” he said, “she’s here.”

  “Can I ask you something … something you can say no to?”

  He nodded.

  “Could we visit her before we leave?”

  He pulled away from her then, sitting back in his chair. “I don’t understand. Why would you want to do that?”

  “It’s all so unreal,” she said. “Your past and everything that’s happened to you … Maybe I’d just like to know more, to understand more. You can say no. I won’t mind at all.”

  He looked away, out the window, and after a moment shook his head in a gesture that seemed to mean no. But he stood up now and rolled the wheelchair over to her bed. “You have to realize,” Russell said, “that she’s not herself anymore. She doesn’t even look like herself.”

  “I understand,” Evelyn said.

  After asking a nurse for permission to take Evelyn off the ward, Russell rolled her down the hall, into the deep vault of an elevator meant to hold several hospital beds, down another hall, and over a sky bridge alit with an orange evening sunlight so effusive and luminous that Evelyn had to squint. Finally they came to a reception desk, in front of which a corkboard, set on an easel, announced, “Arboretum Summer Outing This Saturday” and “Mrs. Harriet Becker celebrates her birthday tonight in the Events Room. She invites one and all to join her for cake and ice cream.” A skinny male nurse sitting at the desk greeted Russell by his first name, and an awkward moment, in which the nurse noticed Evelyn and seemed to stop himself from asking Russell about her, hovered in the air. “She’s a friend,” Russell said quickly, and the nurse nodded.

  Russell wheeled her down the hall and stopped in front of what must have been the door to his wife’s room. “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “I’ve never brought anyone to see her. I want to check on her first. I want to make sure she looks … she looks presentable.”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said. He opened the door quietly and closed it behind him just as quietly, as if not to wake a sleeper. During his absence, a very old woman dressed in what seemed to be several layers of pajamas and robes took impossibly tiny steps behind her aluminum walker as she passed Evelyn and made her way down the hall. When Russell opened the door again, she saw, just behind him, a wedge of evening light coloring the air a soft burgundy. “OK,” he said, and he wheeled her inside.

  The room held a bed, a normal bed with a headboard that might have been in any bedroom or hotel, and a side table on which sat a small digital clock, one hour fast, and a vase of freshly cut flowers, red and yellow tulips, so that Evelyn knew immediately that Margaret had also visited her daughter that day. A plastic chair sat at the bedside, and from a west-facing window light fell into the room. The woman, Russell’s wife, her arms at her sides, wore a yellow terrycloth house robe that any healthy woman might wear. Evelyn noticed purple bruising just above the ankles. “Bedsores,” Russell told her, and he arranged the robe to cover them.

  He pulled Evelyn’s chair up to the bed and sat down next to her; she took his hand, felt him stiffen, and so let go again. “We might have to leave soon.”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said.

  “It doesn’t feel right—letting you see her like this. She cared a great deal about how she looked, and she used to be so much more … more beautiful.”

  “She still is beautiful,” Evelyn said. In fact, she wasn’t. She was hard in some ways to see at all. Her hair was cut short, like a boy’s, and her head
seemed too large for the small body beneath the sheets. The adultness of her face, the sharpness and distinctness of her features, had faded, been erased, perhaps from so much sleep and stillness, so that she looked like a child of indeterminate gender that was somehow not young.

  “They cut her hair short because it’s easier to clean that way.” He took in a deep breath, and without looking at Evelyn he said, quietly but with an edge of anger that she hadn’t expected, “This is what you wanted to see, isn’t it?” He turned and glared at her. “Damn it,” he said, and Evelyn understood then that this was the fury he’d held back until now, the anger he’d been saving for her since last night. “You can see it, can’t you? You can see that she’s not going to wake up. You can see that. It’s pretty damn clear, I’d say.”

  Evelyn sat quietly, waiting, hoping this would pass, and Russell reached out, snatched the small digital clock from the bedside table, and reset it to the correct time. She could see from the way he hit the plastic tabs that he was still angry, but when he set the clock back down, he did so gently and with great care. He let out a long sigh that became a moan, then bent over and began crying so softly that Evelyn could hear only the jagged little breaths he took in. She wanted to touch him, but stopped herself. After some time, he sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m worn out.”

  “It’s all right.” And then, after a moment, Evelyn asked, “How did it happen? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. But I’d like to know.”

  He nodded and let out a humorless laugh. “It wasn’t even a bad accident,” he said. “Tessa was making a fuss in her carseat in the back, and Jenny took her seatbelt off. Just for a moment. You know, to fix whatever was wrong back there. Someone turning left ran a stop sign. Drove right through it. Jenny had been leaning into the backseat. Her body flew half the distance of the car. She hit the windshield. Nothing happened to Tessa and me. We didn’t get a scratch. We had an old car with no air bag. An old Volvo. A tank, you know. We’d decided on that car. All those stories about kids dying from air bags scared us. Scared me, I should say. Of course, if we’d had a car with air bags, a normal car, Jenny wouldn’t be here now.” He looked at Evelyn and smiled a little. “I’ve always been overly cautious, even before all this. Even as a kid. I’ve always been a worrier. Jenny never thought twice about taking small risks, reasonable risks. I used to hate it when we’d go to the coast, to Lake Michigan for a weekend. She liked to swim out a little ways—out where it was deep. She was a strong swimmer, but that worried me.” He shook his head. “She’d even do it because she knew it bothered me. I’d guess you know what I’m talking about.”

  Evelyn felt a hot rush of guilt.

  “I know I’m difficult that way,” he said. “I know I’m paranoid. It used to drive Jenny crazy, and I can see that I’m doing the same to you. And I’m sorry, but I can’t help it.” He shook his head. “I tell Tessa not to climb on the maple tree in our backyard, and as soon as I turn my head she does it. It’s a good tree for climbing, with low limbs. She never climbs too high. Sometimes when I look out the kitchen window and see her doing it, I make myself look the other way. I make myself go do something to take my mind off it. But I can’t just tell her to go ahead and climb it … because if something did happen … if she fell and I had told her she could do it …”

  He made a fist. “I didn’t like it when anyone in my car took a seat-belt off. Even for a moment. But I didn’t stop Jenny from doing it that day. I didn’t say anything. I try to convince myself that it wasn’t her fault for doing something that any mother would have done. I try to convince myself that it had nothing to do with Tessa, with making a fuss, just being a kid. She was three then and doesn’t remember any of this, thank God. I didn’t see that bastard who ran the stop sign. I didn’t see him until he’d hit us.” He put his hands on his knees and took in a deep breath. “Anyway,” he said, “this is her. This is Jenny.”

  The wedge of light in the room had retreated, but it was sunset and still bright in the distance. Evelyn took Russell’s hand again, squeezing it firmly. “I’m sorry,” she said, only now realizing she had never before offered her condolences. “I’m sorry that this ever happened to you.”

  He nodded, and Evelyn felt his hand tighten around hers.

  A few days after returning home from the hospital, Evelyn answered the front door and greeted a fireman, his red SUV parked in her driveway, who held at his side what was left of her mountain bike, the front wheel bent, a handlebar splayed back, and the crank shaft smashed and dangling in its casing. “This would be yours,” he said, smiling. “I’d say you were very lucky. We’re glad to see that you’re OK.”

  “My God,” Evelyn said.

  A week later her stitches were removed, and a week after that her plastic brace came off, and she was, as Russell had said she would be, as good as new.

  In late June the heat came and the air was still and the afternoons were long and unrelentingly bright. On the banks of the Huron, mosquitoes, born in the sticky humidity, thrived and tormented Evelyn, who coated herself in bug dope to no avail and spent most of her energy fighting off these pests and scratching the welts they left on her arms. After an hour or two on the river, she and Russell would return to her place and, in the cooling half-dark of evening, make love. Fishing and sex had somehow been paired in their relationship, and when Russell was inside her she could still smell the scents of the river on him—the damp earth, the weeds and grasses. “I feel guilty,” Russell confessed one evening after they had finished. “I feel guilty for wanting you so much.”

  Evelyn lay still beside him, naked in the warm air, and felt a familiar frustration at the fact that Russell had once again brought up his tragedy in the wake of their lovemaking. Yet when had Ed, her grumpy, taciturn ex-husband, who would nod, say yes, say everything was just fine when nothing was, who’d sit on a grudge for weeks or months at a time, ever come out and simply told her how he felt? And so she remained silent. She listened. “We didn’t have much sex. Not in our last years. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other. It was the opposite, really. We’d loved each other so much and for so long that we didn’t have as much desire somehow. Of course, there was Tessa, too. She changed things. And earlier, when we had sex often, in high school and afterwards, it was …” He laughed, then started giggling in an infectious way that compelled Evelyn to laugh with him. “You know … awkward. Not very skilled. We’d never had sex before. Neither of us. It got better, but never this good, never this …” He paused. He searched for the word and discovered it suddenly. “Wonderful. So I feel guilty.”

  Evelyn didn’t say it, but she felt it and wanted to say it. She was glad their sex was better. She was happy to have bested his sleeping wife in this way. She turned, kissed him, and offered her own confession. “I hate fishing. I wanted to like it. I wanted to fish with you because Jenny didn’t.”

  He laughed. “That’s fine. I’m happy fishing by myself.”

  For some weeks, Evelyn and Russell gave up biking and took long walks instead. They walked through the Old West Side, the houses quiet in the heat, or strolled through the university campus, mostly deserted save for a few summer students, who studied in the shade of trees, and gangs of bare-chested adolescent boys on skateboards and roller blades, who sped over the wide sidewalks.

  “Do you think we’re serious yet?” Russell asked one afternoon. They’d just sat down on a stone bench in front of the engineering building, where one such gang, shirtless and wearing helmets, performed increasingly dangerous stunts on the entryway stairs, at the top of which each boy would break into a sprint, leap to the hand railing, and ride—skates sideways—the metal bar, as a surfer might ride a wave, to the bottom. “Jesus,” Russell said.

  “Serious?” Evelyn said.

  “I mean,” he said, “should we be hopeful? Are we more than just dating?” They looked on as a boy lost his balance, landed butt-down on the rail, bounced off a
nd fell to the concrete steps, from where he sprang to his feet and, rubbing his backside, climbed the stairs to try again.

  “Nice butt plant, dude!” one of the boys shouted in mock admiration.

  “They’re made of rubber,” Evelyn said. “You don’t have to worry about them.” And then she added, “I’m hopeful. I’m more than just dating, if you are. If you want me to be.”

  He looked away from the boys and at Evelyn. “I do.”

  In the weeks that followed, they ate plenty of meals together, dinners and lunches, breakfasts on Saturdays and brunches on Sundays. Occasionally, they met at Evelyn’s house in the evenings, where she would prepare a meal for Russell and make love to him afterwards. More often, they ate with Tessa and Margaret, who remained distant and watchful, if not openly hostile. Evelyn could—and did—come over unannounced. She began gardening with Russell and Tessa while Margaret, whose knees were bad, sat on the porch and read. Evelyn attended Tessa’s soccer games at ten on Saturday mornings in West Park and cheered with more enthusiasm than she’d thought herself capable of where sports were concerned. On the Fourth of July, she threw a party, inviting Heidi, Michael, and their boys, Dennis and Chad, to meet Russell and his family. They ate bratwurst that Russell barbecued in the backyard and Evelyn’s favorite summer dish, a grilled vegetable and potato salad slathered in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Heidi and Evelyn lifted glasses, toasting their latest and biggest success, the contract they had just signed with Detroit Edison. “To tracking your kilowatt use online and paying your electric bill in cyberspace,” Heidi said. Later, they watched a distant fireworks display from Evelyn’s porch and, despite Russell’s hesitation and worry, set off a small number of fireworks in the street for Tessa and the boys.