The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  “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 mentioned 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.

  Only, here’s the thing. As it turns out, they don’t all go home. Every so often, a particularly astute zebra or savvy antelope will say to itself, “Hey, why not stay here?” These few remain in the basin, where they live rich, long lives free of hardship.

  “So, what I want to know,” I say, my arm around Lisa, as the lights come up and the credits scroll, “is why don’t more stay? Why would any of them leave the basin?”

  “Simple,” my biologist wife says. “The habitat could never sustain that degree of life. The basin only thrives as long as the resources aren’t used up.”

  I nod. I watch the muscles in her neck move as she speaks.

  “From an evolutionary perspective,” Lisa continues, “the animals are drawn away so that they don’t destroy what they have.”

  “And what about the ones that do stay?”

  “Well,” Lisa says, “I guess they just managed to outsmart evolution.”

  . . .

  After the funeral, Lisa and I worked at being miserable, as though happiness might disrespect the dead.

  One night, coming home late from school, I found Lisa on the sofa watching a sitcom. I sat down, and she moved close, rested her head on my shoulder, an intimacy I hadn’t known in weeks. Something funny happened on the show, and, without warning, Lisa let out a laugh. The sound emerged sharp and loud and strangled at the end. She put a hand over her mouth. We watched the rest of the show refusing to laugh, Lisa keeping a hand near her face just in case.

  It was six months before we made love. It wasn’t planned, couldn’t have been. To speak of sex would have made it impossible. Instead, having gone to bed early, unable to sleep, we held each other. I kissed Lisa on the forehead. Her body tensed, and I apologized. “No,” she said, taking my face in her hands. She kissed me hard on the lips, grabbed me, tore at my T-shirt. It was over in minutes.

  “That was nice,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. I was bewildered, but Lisa seemed happy. Th
at was what mattered.

  A minute later, from the bathroom, over the hum of the fan, the gush of the faucet, through the closed door, I could hear Lisa sobbing.

  . . .

  “Did you enjoy the movie?” I ask once we’re in bed. When it’s quiet, we think about June. Most nights, we fight to fill up the silence. Tonight, though, we have something to talk about.

  “It was good, but hardly groundbreaking,” Lisa says.

  “Oh,” I say. “I beg your pardon.”

  “No. It was fine. I only mean that the filmmakers made no new discoveries.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well,” she says, “take, for example, a documentary I saw last week. It had to do with the Nile and the animals that live there. Mostly, it was about hippopotamuses and crocodiles, how they share the river.”

  “They live together?”

  “Sure,” Lisa says. “It’s the Nile. For the most part, it’s no problem. Typically, the crocodiles leave the hippos alone. Nothing can take down a full-grown hippo. But, sometimes, if a group of crocs is hungry enough, they’ll attack one of the younger hippos.”

  I try to picture it, a crocodile wrestling a hippopotamus, the splashing, the waves, the water’s red surface.

  “But, here’s the good part,” Lisa says. She smiles. “What really got me was this footage they shot of a hippopotamus funeral.”

  “A funeral?”

  “Well, sort of. Something that had never been caught on tape. See, this baby hippo had been mauled by crocodiles. It managed to pull itself onto a sandbar in the middle of the river. Then the other hippos surrounded the calf until the crocodiles swam away. Once it died, the hippos licked the baby.”

  “What do you mean ‘licked the baby’?”

  “I don’t know how else to explain it,” Lisa says. “The hippos made a circle around the dead baby and licked it. And they actually have these very long tongues. They must have licked every square inch of it, then they all lay down and rested their heads on the body. After a while, they stood up, walked back into the water, and swam away.”