by Devin Murphy
Everything around Terrance felt lighter as a doctor told him about the half-dollar-size hole between the inside of his left thigh and testicles, where the current of electricity that entered his body had ripped out. Surgeons had sutured and skin-grafted the wound during the thirty-one hours he had been unconscious.
That feeling of lightness stayed with him the whole week he was in the hospital. The doctors kept him because they wanted to make sure nothing was wrong with the circulation of his femoral artery. He slept most of the week, waking each time with his mind fixated initially on the bones of his right foot and then working its way over his body, making sure everything was still there. When he wasn’t sleeping he sketched his awakening skeletal system in his notebook and drew things he would carve once he was released.
“Did your life flash before your eyes?” Helen asked him while they were alone in the room together.
“No,” he said. “There’s too much of it to happen all in one little moment.” She looked disappointed by his answer. He probably should have said something about thinking of her. He was worried about why she had been fired and how soon they could both get back to work. Maybe he should have mentioned something about Los Caporales, the Mexican restaurant off Highway 93 where they had met five years ago. She was thirty-seven at the time and had never been married. Terrance was fifty, and had been divorced for years. His ex-wife, Catrin, lived near Olean, New York, and they rarely talked. He wrote letters once a week to his three kids ever since he left New York. Since he left them. Jamie sometimes wrote back. Connor less frequently. Lewis never did. Not once. He didn’t know where Lewis was. That was the price of a messy early life. Helen was the only one who visited him in the hospital; the rest were out there in a place he could not get back to. That alone seemed like it would be hard to condense into one brief flash before a person could die. So much to make peace with in one lifetime.
His cabin was on 160 acres of land in the Bitterroot mountain range. It sat against the foothills side of an expansive oval field that his grandfather had cut back into the surrounding woods when he first bought the land in 1938 for next to nothing. Terrance had made the cabin his year-round home after he moved back to Montana.
The first three days out of the hospital, Helen lifted his leg from the couch and rested it on her shoulder as she rubbed the salve he’d been given at the hospital on the burn scar on his crotch to keep the skin moist. On the fourth day, he had full range of motion back in his leg, and Helen helped him limp around the cabin the rest of the weekend. On that Monday, he drove himself to the office at Alberta-Montana, where his bosses and their lawyers were waiting to offer a settlement package to keep them out of court. They were willing to offer him a 2.3-million-dollar pension plan that would kick in next month. One million dollars spread out over eighteen years and 1.3 million paid in full at the end of that time. He felt a subtle wave of shock roll over his body like he was hanging upside down again. He imagined it was a similar feeling, from her descriptions, to Helen’s orgasms.
Terrance signed the papers.
When he got home, Helen was under the covers on the couch with the salve cream cupped in her hands like a tiny bowling ball.
“I thought you had been killed,” she said. “It would have been me—all alone.” She lifted her body off the couch and hugged him. “I thought you had been killed.”
Terrance sat next to the couch, and Helen’s hand started clutching the hair on the back of his head. There was a buffalo skull that he’d cleaned and mounted above the fireplace. Two-track light bulbs illuminated it against the brick. The eye sockets of the bison skull were empty. He turned to Helen, and her eyes seemed just as exposed and vault-like. Something in her had come unlatched and was swinging around inside. He felt the shrill screech of an alarm sounding up his spine, as if his skin was still so very thin and offered no barrier between him and the world. All of this had happened before. Her moods had always swung between outrageously happy and a bone-tired funk that ushered her into the flatness of depression. The struggle with each had been exhausting, but now he wanted to once and for all mend it.
He pulled the blanket over her shoulders and rubbed his fingertips against her temple until she fell asleep. He didn’t have to tell her about the money. She knew he’d receive workers’ compensation checks until he wanted to go back to work, so he wouldn’t have to tell her. Another one of those ghost currents shook through his body.
When Terrance woke up, his sketchbook was resting on his stomach—he’d been sketching another sculpture he now wanted to build—and he was on top of the covers. The room was dark. The alarm clock on the side of his bed read 1:13 A.M. The bright LCD screen shone on the floor. He closed his eyes and opened them to get the sleep out, then turned on his reading lamp.
There were chrome-oxide-green footprint outlines on the carpet leading into his room. His heart knotted like a fist when he saw where Helen’s thin feet had lightly touched the ground as she came in. Next to his bed there was a mass of footprints, where she must have stood for a while. She had been watching him sleep again. He walked into the living room and found her rolling dollops of paint into the carpet with a roller brush. She had the five-gallon paint bucket from his work truck that he used for neighborhood circuit boxes. She’d either rolled the brush over her chest or lain in the wet paint, as there was an outline of the large cups of her bra highlighted in chrome-oxide-green on her shirt.
“Helen—”
The ends of her hair had sealed together in clumps, with paint. She had finger-painted the corners of her eyes as if she were accentuating the crow’s-feet and now looked like a tired forty-something-year-old child.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m devastated,” she said to him and bent forward over her lap so her forehead was resting on the carpet.
Terrance phoned the hospital after she fell back asleep. “Is she off her meds?” the doctor on call at the clinic asked.
“She swore she wasn’t,” he told the doctor, who said to keep an eye on her and bring her in that afternoon.
Terrance was wide awake from falling asleep so early. Helen’s presence in their bed seemed to fill up the entire space of the cabin. He didn’t know how he’d make it until morning, wondering how to help her. For the rest of that night, he pulled out the ruined carpet, cutting away at the corners and rolling it up at the center of the room. Enough paint had soaked through to dye the carpet glue green. He thumbed the green glue marks and hoped she had gone off her meds and it would be an easy fix.
She had gone to what they ended up calling a “therapy retreat” once since they’d moved in together. He had hoped she’d be able to address some central event of her life that she could then move on from. She came back with a small painting she had done from a flyer for a horse show. It was something completely out of the norm for her, but she kept it on the wall of the cabin. Terrance looked over at it as he took a break from pulling up the rug. It was a watercolor copy of a sequined woman standing on a galloping white horse. She wore a blank white mask with feathers that hid any part of her except her eyes, which were shadowed and dark. Priscilla the Performer was written in white paint across the bottom.
He had snuck one of her unmarked meds after she’d gotten back, to see what they did to a person. The next morning he’d had to call in to work for the first time. When he finally did get out of bed, it was with equal parts fear of how intense the drug was and how out of touch with his body it made him feel. He was also curious as to what chemical it was that kept Helen up and running. As he continued to pull up the rug now, all that fear returned, knotting between his shoulders.
A few days later, Terrance filled his nostrils with cotton swabs so he wouldn’t smell the putrid meat scraps hanging off the buffalo skulls he’d gotten from the bison ranch. He coated the horns with a thick layer of Vaseline so the ants wouldn’t eat away the enamel, and left the heads on anthills. The ants would clean away the tendons and tunnel to the marrow, if a bear or
coyote didn’t decide to come gnaw on it first. His grandfather had taught him how to clean bones like this when he was a boy. Then he piled the bones and antlers into a cargo net. He set the net in the deep part of the Kootenai River tributary on a rope he tied across the water so the current would bleach them smooth.
He’d been carving bones and antlers his whole life—making eagles, bears, wolves, and other “high Alpine art images.” Danny, a friend, would sell them in his tourist store outside of Glacier National Park. The bones had added a lot of extra income over the years.
Now Terrance walked back through the snow to the cabin with a full elk rack over his shoulders. The hilt from the crown of the elk’s head rested against the back of his neck, and the horns draped over his shoulders in front of him like a giant thorn scarf. He was thinking of the sculpture he wanted to build: how with the large bag of bones in the cargo net, he’d have everything he’d need.
He weaved out of the woods with the antlers and came into the open valley south of the cabin. The cabin had been a sanctuary for him since his divorce, giving him all the time he wanted to set out into the woods and mountains and collect his bones.
After Helen woke up he drove her north to Whitefish, where he dropped off a truck full of bone carvings to Danny’s gift shop. Danny was in the store, wiping a dirty rag over a glass display case of turquoise jewelry. Helen helped Terrance unload the carvings. They took one at a time through the back door of the building to the storage area; there Danny would decide where he wanted to display Terrance’s work.
“This one is lovely,” Helen said as she pulled a length of elk horn out of the truck cab. Terrance had carved a series of figures running from the base toward the points. They showed an evolutionary progression, from a hunched-over Neanderthal to better and more upright hunters. The final figure was standing straight, with a bow drawn taut across his chest. Terrance had carved them using small bend gouges and skew knives. He’d often work on them late at night so Helen wouldn’t be awake by herself. In the morning, he’d wake to her sweeping up the pittings off the floor.
When they finished unloading the truck, they drove south toward the clinic in Kalispell. The hospital was the first major development on a gigantic plot of land. For Sale signs advertised the other lots in the surrounding fields. At the clinic, Helen went into the doctor’s examination room while Terrance walked around the building.
In the summer all that was in those fields were bleaching bones and weeds. Now the light off the snow made everything seem refrigerated. A yellow finch landed in front of him on a tall, dead blade of olive grass. The grass curved slightly under the bird, which dropped a little white splatter of shit and flew off. There was a frozen burlap seed sack stuck to the ground along the fence bordering the parking lot. Terrance pulled it up from the snow, and it tore grass out of the ground like a Band-Aid on arm hair. Camel crickets, potato bugs, and centipedes squirmed in the exposed earth.
His grandfather used to read the Bible to him. Terrance had been fascinated by the story where Jesus walked on water. Maybe it was having lived entrenched in this kind of earth and so far from any sea that made the whole matter an utter mystery. Terrance used to think about Jesus walking on the water and how fine a thing it must have been. Now he thought how Jesus must have walked from the water back onto land—back into this—and felt a bit of a letdown. He wondered if Jesus felt water underneath his feet for the rest of his life, the way Terrance suspected he’d feel a blue current running through him.
When he went back inside he read Oprah’s magazine instead of a pamphlet called On Living with People Who Suffer from Various Mental Disorders and Imbalances. He had spent the last several years learning the clinical language of disorders and imbalances. He had been there with Helen through the course of trying to find the right balance of medications. He’d held his concerns in check as the medicines seemed to be getting stronger with each doctor’s visit, cycling through anticonvulsants, before moving on to lithium and carbamazepine.
From the waiting room, he saw a doctor with his head down, writing and talking to Helen at the back counter. He tore a pharmaceutical script from the pad and handed it to her. She put it in her pocket. Terrance thought of setting her up somewhere other than the cabin when he got his settlement money.
“How’d it go?” he asked when she came out.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Wait. Do we need to get your prescription filled?”
“Please, let’s get out of here, Terrance.” Her voice was limp. Something in her face looked crushed, and he couldn’t bear keeping her there. They went to the truck, and he started driving her north to the cabin.
“Are you okay?” he asked Helen when they were driving.
“I need to be sad for a while,” she told him as they drove.
“Why are you so sad?” he asked. She was looking out the window at the rolling fields.
“Terrance,” she said, letting his name hang in the space between them. “I used to feel it.”
He knew she was about to drop some hammer on him, something that had been festering. “Feel what?” he asked.
“I could feel my body wanting a baby. If I was around one, I could feel it in my bones.” She turned away from him and looked out the window. “I stopped feeling it. It was this sort of pang. Something inside of me I couldn’t explain, that got louder and louder when I got older. Now I can’t hear it anymore. It stopped.”
Terrance reached over and put his hand on her knee, but she pulled her leg away.
“We were never going to have a family. I was always too scared of having kids take after me to try.” She was pressing herself into the doorjamb. “And—you—never pushed us to do it!” Her voice was full of anger, and she shot out and punched his arm as hard as she could.
His elbow buckled, and the truck veered to the side of the road for a moment, vibrating over the rumble strip and gravel before he pulled it back. Her eyes looked like the hollow buffalo’s again.
“We’re not going to have a family!” she screamed at him. Her sudden rage was unfurling in front of him, and something reckless was pushing out of her, making her glow.
“You’d probably be a shitty husband and a shitty father again anyway,” she yelled, hitting him where she knew he was most vulnerable. “You’re not even worried about me either, you just don’t want to be stuck taking care of me forever.”
Terrance was silent.
“Say something!” Helen yelled.
“Right now that’s true. Right now I’m sick of you,” Terrance blurted out.
“So what? Right now I hate you!” Helen screamed. She sounded vicious, and Terrance felt the dread that there would be no washing clean after something like this. There would just be plodding ahead, both of them worn to emotional shreds.
Helen hadn’t taken her eyes off him. Everything dark and confusing in her was working its way through her stare into the side of his neck as he drove. There was too much to flash in front of a person’s eyes before they died, all right, he was sure of it.
They drove farther north.
Helen had never mentioned having children before, but he felt the weight of it now. “When you got hurt, I thought you were going to die and I’d be left with nothing,” she finally said, and he knew she was mourning the family they would never have. Now all they had for sure was each other. Her body must have told her that, and when he’d been shocked and almost killed, she was as close to left alone as she’d ever been. All they really had was a trust that they’d be there for each other, and she had draped that trust over herself like a plaster cast until it was the only thing holding her up.
When they got back to the cabin it was past dark. There was cloud cover pocked with clusters of dense, bright stars.
Helen stepped inside the cabin, took off her boots, and made a show of tossing them far across the room. She undid her belt and slipped her pants to her knees before even taking off her coat. He watched as she kicked her legs free of her
jeans, then started undoing the jacket as she walked toward the bedroom, looking over her shoulder at him before the jacket hit the wood floor.
They had not had sex since his accident, and everything she did now made him anxious, but he followed her into the room. Inside the doorframe she moved behind Terrance and jumped on him. He felt her bare breast push into his back. He turned her over in front of him and pinned her back against the wall. He bent down and took her breast into his mouth and bit down on her nipple with his lips folded over his teeth. She pushed him away and threw herself on the bed. When he came near her, she reached up and scratched his chest. He jumped back and felt the pain of each long nail gouge she’d given him. Her eyes were locked on him. She was gyrating her hips at him, grinding the space between them away, as if, since this part of their lives together was going to be fruitless, she’d make it into something else entirely.
He charged her. When she tried to scratch him again, he blocked her hands and pinned her to the bed and started fucking her immediately. It felt like the first time there was real hate between them, as they crashed their bodies into each other until they’d shook the painting of Priscilla the Performer on the wall sideways.
“Where did that come from?” Terrance asked after they had finished, breaking the silent shock they were both panting into.
“Sometimes I want to be able to yell it out of me,” she said.
“This is a good place to do that,” he whispered to her as she burrowed her head into the nook of his shoulder and arm.
Helen slept like their sex had erased time and she’d forgotten everything they’d said. Their fight kept Terrance on edge, so he slept poorly and woke before dawn. He got dressed and went out to walk the woods.
