You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  For Alec’s fourth birthday Scott brings home a Big Wheel. Outside for the inaugural ride, Cory catches Scott standing at the top of the driveway instead of the bottom, where he could block the street.

  “What are you doing!” She runs out, startling Alec, who thinks it’s him who’s made a mistake. He turns the bike, riding across the grass and into the neighbor’s driveway. The neighbor, Mr. Prout, is backing out of his garage. He stops, smiling amiably. No big deal, your son’s life, his grin implies.

  By dinnertime Scott is red with anger.

  “Stop it!” he yells at Cory, throwing down his fork. “He was only smiling! Of course he thinks it’s a big deal if he runs over our kid. You’re the one who scared Alec into going off the driveway.”

  Cory can barely keep from slapping her husband. “You almost hit Alec with that fork, you fuckhead!”

  Alec begins to cry and Cory immediately repents. “I’m sorry, oh honey, I’m sorry. Mama’s not mad. Mama’s just pretending. Smile for Mama.” She kisses his hair, his cheeks, each soft eyebrow, glancing sheepishly at Scott.

  “Sorry,” he says, kissing her on the head, then his son. She’s right. The fork did bounce close to Alec’s face.

  Midsummer the Prouts retire to Arizona, replaced by a middle-aged couple prone to parties, usually cookouts. The guests who arrive look just like them—thick black hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Some of them look young enough to be the couple’s children. Maybe they’re all family, but Cory can’t tell because they speak a foreign language. On Saturdays she sits in the screened porch or takes Alec outside to play, finds reasons to linger at the fence line listening to their musical chatter. Googling their last name, she discovers it’s Persian, another word for Iranian, almost certainly Shiite Muslims. Muslims usually blow themselves up in busy places. They don’t kill single little boys, right? And Alec’s not going to be taking the bus to school. But what about in school? The neighbors have no small children. She’d feel better if they did. They wouldn’t blow themselves up in their own kids’ school, would they? Of course, they seem very nice. They always smile and wave. Cory knows she’s being ridiculous.

  One day, she pulls in the driveway and catches sight of somebody in the backyard, crouching behind the fence. Startled, she runs the car into the side of the garage. Then she sees—it’s a squirrel. He jumps on top of a fence post and stares at her, oddly unperturbed by the crunch of metal against the garage wall. Cory leans over the seat to examine Alec for injuries. He is buckled in tight—new car seat of course, this one researched through Consumer Reports. Whiplash? Concussion? He seems fine, but you can never be sure.

  When Scott gets home, he’s angry. “You made me leave work for this? How fast could you have been going? He’s fine. The car’s what I’m worried about.”

  •

  Late July a coyote digs his way under the fence. “You don’t know that,” Scott says. “It could have been anything. A raccoon.”

  “Which carry rabies,” Cory says.

  Scott ignores her. It doesn’t matter. She knows a coyote made that hole. It’s too big for a raccoon. And a raccoon would have climbed the fence anyway. The roll bar wasn’t designed to stop them.

  She examines the spot he chose, at the end where only pachysandra thrives under a sycamore’s dense shade. Within a week she has the tree cut down, replaced by a row of hawthorn that will reach thirty feet. In front of that she plants two rows of rugosa roses, a barbarously thorned shrub the man at the nursery claimed is “almost impenetrable.” That is the word that makes her buy it—impenetrable. It sounds military.

  She tells Scott the village took the tree down and paid for the new bushes. “Some contagious disease I guess.” They’d had the ash borer, so he buys it.

  A week later she finds another hole. Thorny twigs broken off the nearby bushes lie about, thin and brittle as uncooked spaghetti.

  That night Cory pretends to go to sleep with Scott, then gets up when he begins to snore and takes up watch at the kitchen window. It’s dark, though, and the yard is deep and large. At its furthest point shadows move without divulging their identity. Cory turns on the patio lights, then gets a baseball bat from the garage and stations herself next to the willow, where she’ll be hidden by the weeping branches. They make her think of lynchings and hangings. She imagines waking up to find her son dangling midway up, just another limb vulnerable to the wind.

  Cory leans against the trunk, ready, then eventually sits, kept awake on the bony roots. Around her, dozens of broken boughs lie on the ground like snakes in the grass. We’re insulated, she thinks, but falsely. A little drywall, a metal cylinder in a doorframe stands between us and it. We can’t hear it. But it’s always there, the rustling in the woods, the crunch of twigs and old leaves underfoot, the new neighbors whispering below their densely-planted pergola.

  Cory creeps over and peers between the branches of an old lilac. The moon illuminates two people, men she’s fairly sure, leaning forward with elbows on their knees, glowing embers in their hands. Cory inhales, trying to identify the scent. Cigarettes? Pipes? Cigars? Pot? Some Iranian thing she’s never heard of? They talk, their heads bent close together, and she strains to catch something comprehensible. Why don’t they speak English? What do they have to hide?

  She thinks about the door she has left unlocked, retrieves the extra key from the false sprinkler head and secures the house, then returns the key to its hiding place. If someone kills her out here, she doesn’t want the key on her person.

  Summer is her best chance. Knowing that neither Alec nor Scott are prone to wake in the small hours of the night, she spends this time outside, waiting. The sounds, shapes and movements of darkness grow familiar. In a stiff wind, the pine’s branches wave like enormous fans cooling the undergrowth. In the moonlight the neighbors’ forbidden trailer—hidden behind their garage and stacked with boards and lengths of gutter covered by a tarp—looks like a skiff, the tarp its sail, the hitch an emergency oar neglected and soon to slip overboard.

  The first time Cory hears rustling in the woods, she readies the bat. The fiftieth time she can tell the difference between the crackles of a methodical, light-footed raccoon and the more infrequent rustles of an owl in flight. When they settle, they hoot, long and low, reassuring her. Every night the murmuring in the Persians’ yard reaches her, humming speech that mingles with the owl’s hoot and the raccoon’s scurrying. It is definitely two men—she’s gotten a moonlit look to confirm. If one is the homeowner, who is the other? No one would visit so late every night, which means he must live with the couple. A boarder? An out-of-work brother? An older son?

  Of course Cory gets tired. Five nights outside, seven, eight. Once she falls asleep and wakes near dawn with a pattern like a healed burn impressed on her cheek by the willow’s bark. Sneaking into the house, she stations herself on the couch with a book across her chest, where Scott finds her only half an hour later.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Cory lies. “So I came down to read.”

  Alec seems to be crying more often. Is he sick? Another ear infection? The doctor says no. Cory tries to comfort her son, playing his favorite shows and taking him to the park, where he falls and hurts his arm. At the ER they look at her like she might be to blame.

  “How did you say he fell?”

  She doesn’t plan to tell Scott, but as soon as he walks in the door, Alec tugs his sleeve and says, “Mommy didn’t catch me so I fall and the doctor say I lucky!”

  “How much is that stunt going to cost us?” Scott asks, and Cory shrugs, not sure if the stunt is Alec’s fall, her letting him on the park’s climbing wall, or her taking him to the ER. If Scott knew about her backyard vigils he’d blame her outright. If she weren’t so tired she’d have caught Alec like she promised.

  At playgroup one of the women mentions that two neighborhood cats have gone missing and Cory brings up the coyotes. Everyone shrugs—“Well, that’s what happens when you let your pets roam.” No one seems concerned, even when
Cory points out that the coyotes have been seen in the middle of the day.

  “That means they’ve lost their fear of us.”

  The women all look at her as if to ask, “What is there to fear?”

  In the second week of her vigil, a new scrabbling sound and there he is, coming snout-first under the fence. Cory doesn’t move, letting him come fully under the fence and muscle his way through the rugosas. Pieces of the shrub are caught in his fur. He shakes the thorns free, then raises his head and sniffs. His erect ears quiver. What can he detect? Can he smell her boy’s peanut-butter breath? Hear the murmur of his toddler dreams? Cory’s hand is on the rough tape above the bat’s knob. She closes her fingers around it, feeling the gritty texture.

  The coyote moves toward the house slowly, with a self-consciousness that makes her sure he knows something is different about the yard tonight. How often has he been here? Does he know the lay of the land as well as she does? Better? Cory eases to a stand and the coyote turns to her. Even in such dark, between the hundreds of switches dense with leaves, he seems to catch her eye. Evidence of nocturnal talents denied her and more proof, she thinks, that we aren’t God’s favorite.

  Cory comes from beneath the willow’s protection, the bat held ready to strike, her feet swift on the familiar lumps of grass. The animal runs, and Cory’s nerve, about to falter, strengthens. Her shoulders are stiff and her hips click at full extension as they haven’t since she was ten, playing tag. “Stay away from my boy,” she huffs, out of shape, her breath held low in her stomach. “Stay the fuck away from him,” she snarls, as the coyote reaches the rugosas. She’s behind him and then he’s gone and she’s tangled, tripping, falling on the useless roses.

  The next morning Scott notices scratches on her face: long, narrow red welts, the dermatographia of pursuit. Or escape.

  “I was in the woods yesterday, dumping out those old flowerpots. I think I’m having a reaction.”

  He looks at her quizzically. “I didn’t notice that last night.”

  She shrugs. “Delayed, I guess.”

  •

  For their wedding anniversary Scott asks his mother to babysit and makes reservations at Cory’s favorite restaurant. During dinner she resists the urge to call home, but she does keep the phone on the table, where she’ll be sure to hear it ring. Over dessert, Scott brings up having another baby. “It’d be good for Alec to share you.” In the last year he’s become concerned that Alec is too attached to Cory, unaccustomed to being without her for even an hour.

  Cory reminds him—falsely—that she’s been off the pill for months.

  “We haven’t really been trying, though.” He wiggles his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  She laughs. “Let’s get to it then,” she says, knowing her son is safe. Her attention cannot be divided.

  Alec’s moods don’t improve. One night he wakes crying and Scott discovers she’s not in the house. Cory doesn’t hear the crying—windows closed, air-conditioning on—but she sees the light go on in Alec’s room. Before she can get to the house, the slider opens and Scott’s there. “What are you doing?”

  She’s holding the bat. “I thought I heard someone out here.”

  “So you came out by yourself with a kid’s baseball bat?”

  Cory hadn’t realized until then the bat was small and remarkably light. She swings at him in mock menace. “I could do you some damage.”

  Alec begins to complain of stomach pains and when Cory takes him to the doctor and insists they scan him, they find a tumor. More tests are ordered. For a week she cannot eat. She exists on the brink of tears, her throat tight and chest weighted, as if someone is sitting on it. She sleeps next to Alec’s bed on the floor, attuned to sounds of choking or a change in his breathing. She imagines the tumor expanding like a balloon. Can it creep into his throat overnight, like the coyote into their yard? How foolish of her to think cancer would let her off the hook.

  When Alec plays outside, she sits in the patio chairs with the baseball bat by her side, rehearsing what she’ll do, how she’ll spot the coyote coming up behind the pine, in the cover of the forsythias. How she’ll rush him, yelling for Alec to run inside. Run, run as fast as you can!

  Then on Thursday at ten a.m. the doctor calls: the new tests confirm it’s not a tumor, but a harmless malformation.

  She gets a second opinion, then a third and fourth. At that point she’s run out of doctors in her insurance network and Scott insists she stop. “You’re driving everyone crazy, especially poor Alec.”

  Cory buys a gun, locks the bullets in one box and the gun in another, carries the keys in her pocket. At target practice, the recoil hurts her arm, but the ache reassures. She’s taking action.

  Scott thinks she’s at yoga. He’s happy to be trusted again. “I won’t let him out of my sight.”

  At night she takes the baby monitor outside with her. Alone, waiting for that scrabbling noise or a change in her son’s breathing, she would find the predictable company of the neighbors, the faint, faint odor of their smoke, a comfort—if only she knew what the hell they were saying.

  On the first chilly night in September he emerges from between the thorny roses. Cory’s attention has been on the neighbors, certain words they use over and over that she is trying to memorize so she can look them up later. When the coyote finally catches in her peripheral vision, she freezes, then, regaining her focus, slides the magazine in as quietly as possible. She’s placed some dog food and meat scraps in a bowl behind the pine. He finds them and begins to eat. Cory parts the willow’s whip-like branches and creeps across the grass, moving closer than necessary for a foolproof shot. She cannot miss, cannot inflict merely leg wounds.

  His shoulders are low, his tail down, his face intent on its find. Under the pine the ground changes to a million brittle needles. Crunch and his head turns. She raises the gun, thinks aim, steady, squeeze. It’s only a few seconds before she realizes she’s waiting for him to lunge. Come get me you motherfucker. She can’t shoot him otherwise. This shocks her. Wasn’t that the plan? Preemptive strike.

  She moves closer. The animal takes a step back, easily clearing the lowest branch, and that’s when Cory realizes it’s a pup. The males strike out on their own in fall.

  “Come on,” she begs. “Come get me.”

  The pup sniffs the air, his tail still low, then takes off at a speed she didn’t think they had and in a second is gone to the darkness, the trees, the future.

  In the house Scott sits slumped forward on the couch. Out the window, the pine where Cory failed to protect their son is in full view.

  She tries to hide the gun in the folds of her wide-legged pajama pants. “Sorry. Did I wake you up? I thought I heard something.”

  Scott doesn’t even look up. He’s staring at his hands, folded tight between his knees. “I thought you were having an affair.”

  “What?”

  “I heard you creeping around. At first I figured bathroom, a drink. Then I caught you outside, with the bat, and I thought, oh, she’s being paranoid, but one night I cracked the window and heard a man’s voice.”

  It takes a moment before Cory realizes what he must have heard. “The new neighbor. Two men. They’re out there all hours.”

  Scott nods. “Yeah, I know. I figured that out.” He looks up at her. “Did you unload it?”

  Cory hesitates, then drops the bullets in her hand and hands Scott the gun.

  “So why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “It was a pup.”

  “He’ll grow up.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you shoot him then?”

  Cory shakes her head and begins to cry. “I can’t.”

  Scott walks over to the window and stares at the backyard, streaked in light from the neighbor’s porch fixtures and the moon, half hidden behind a bank of thunder clouds.

  “What do you think they’re talking about over there?”

  AKA JUAN

  Lawan would have been on t
ime to pick up Gloria if he hadn’t circled back for Tricia, thinking it will make breaking the news easier, though he knows the second he drives off—that’s stupid. Tricia will make it worse. Because it’s weird to introduce a new girlfriend in a situation like this, and she knows it too, but can’t resist. She’s wanted to meet his family ever since she found out they are white.

  On the way to the hospital Lawan lets Tricia choose the music while he watches the clock. Time seems to be moving faster than usual. Yesterday, Karen told him to be at the hospital by ten thirty. “They should have Mom discharged by then. You can bring her home in the van and I’ll meet you at the house.”

  Lawan drives disabled kids for the county. They’re all in wheelchairs, skulls cradled by headrests and chins fixed by straps, like victims of mad scientists in the old black-and-white movies. The van he uses has a power ramp and bars to secure the chairs, and Lawan knows his boss won’t care if he drives Gloria home in it, but the way Karen assigned the task, as if he were some Negro houseboy in the prewar South, pissed him off, so he let an uncomfortable few seconds go by before saying, “I’m not supposed to use the van for personal stuff.”

  Karen gave him that look. She cannot believe he works such a menial job. “This is for our mother, and it will take twenty minutes.”

  Lawan relented because he’d have to go regardless. Gloria might be able to get from her chair into a car, but just barely, and only with someone strong to lean on. Six months pregnant, Karen could hardly be used as muscle, Kevin has a bad back from the bike accident a few years ago, and Dennis is built like you’d expect of someone who sits in a chair all day. If Gloria started to go down, he’d only serve as something soft to fall on.

  By the time Lawan pulls into the hospital’s drive, it’s eleven fifteen. He tells Tricia to stay put. “I’ll go see what’s what.”