The Last Animal, page 20
“Oh,” Art said. “They were the sickest of all. I think the fire blight must have started there. They were goners. I sawed and sawed, but the tissue was pink all the way through. No healthy bark left.”
“I see,” Cosmo said.
“I carried all the branches out to the alley,” Art said. “I’m dead on my feet. I’m a mess, really, my hands are all torn up. But I think it will look okay. I mean, right now it’s just stumps, and a lot of sawdust, but—” He took a heavy breath, and then he began to cry in earnest. Cosmo listened, aghast, as the man broke down. The cat, disliking the noise, sprinted from the room.
“Art,” Cosmo said softly. But there was no stopping him. Art let out a sniffle and then almost screamed in anguish. Not knowing what else to do, Cosmo got to his feet, the phone crooked under his ear.
“Can I—” he began. “Is there someone I could—?”
Art moaned, and Cosmo heard him blowing his nose.
“I’m so sorry,” Art said. “This is ridiculous. Honestly.”
Another sob escaped him, and for a moment he was overcome. Cosmo stood in the living room, his mouth open. The rain picked up, and a burst of spray misted through the screens.
“You see, he left,” Art said at last. “I was living with—Well, I’m sure you know I’m gay. We’d been together for nine years. And then one day I walked in, and there was a note on the table.”
“A note,” Cosmo echoed.
“Yes, a little Dear John letter. Nine years ended by a slip of paper. I felt like I’d been fired.” He laughed wildly. “And Steven was gone.”
Cosmo grunted.
“For a while,” Art continued, “I thought I’d live in the house anyway, you know, just buy out his half. But God, Cosmo, here I am, the only faggot on the block. I’ve got the dog—Steven left his dog—and it’s not even a pretty dog. It looks like a hyena. So I walk his damn mutt, and I work on my garden. The neighborhood kids are scared of me. I’m the creepy guy who lives alone in the big house. I’m Boo Radley!”
He burst into tears again, and for a time his words were lost. Cosmo tugged open the door to the garden. The rain had dwindled. The air was hung with damp curtains of chill. He kicked on his boots and stepped into the soaked grass. Art wept, and Cosmo moved quietly among the plants. Heavy leaves, bowed under the weight of moisture, brushed against his legs.
He was aware that he ought to confide in return. That would be the normal thing to do—the polite, friendly response. Cosmo ought to share some part of what he himself was suffering. But he could not manage it. The words were stuck in his throat. He could scarcely breathe.
“My wife—” he began. “Elaine—”
“Hm?”
Cosmo faltered. A cool wind blew up around him, and there was a moment’s pause, during which Art blew his nose. From the distance came the chuff of a train. At last, somewhat feebly, Art said, “Anyway, I did want to ask—would you recommend that I put some stones over the poor little stumps? You know, some big boulders? Just so it doesn’t look like there was a natural disaster back there.”
“That would be nice,” Cosmo said. “But make sure you wash them before you put them in the garden. Sometimes rocks will bring in lichen or pests you don’t need.”
Art sighed. “It’s perfect in a way. Those were Steven’s trees. His one contribution. And when he left, they just withered away to nothing.”
Cosmo moved deeper into the yard, sniffing the air.
“Well,” Art said, now sounding mortified. “I suppose I ought to go.”
“Mm.” Cosmo was steeling himself. If he did not speak up now, he never would. If he did not speak up now, Art would not call the hotline again, and God only knew what the net loss of income would be.
“My wife,” Cosmo said loudly. “She lost the baby.”
“What’s that?” Art gasped.
And then it was easy. Once the dam had broken, a veritable tide of words came tumbling across Cosmo’s tongue. He told Art about Elaine’s surgery. He told Art that he had not really talked about it, not to anyone; if he did not verbalize it, the knowledge tended to stay somewhere else, on a back burner of his mind, like a bad dream. He told Art that he could not imagine his wife out in the wilderness; she was a city girl, unaccustomed to sleeping under the stars. Elaine had been gone nearly a week, and in an odd way he was having trouble calling up an accurate picture of what she looked like. During the pregnancy, she had been swollen and blossoming, almost fey in her giddiness. She had not moved with the usual languid weight of a gravid woman, but seemed buoyed up, drifting as though through water.
The miscarriage had come on so suddenly. The two of them were walking back from the ice cream store when Elaine had doubled over. Ten minutes later Cosmo was screaming for an ambulance. He told Art that he barely remembered the hours in the hospital, doctors bustling, doors slamming, Elaine groaning. There had been a terrible moment, after they had carried off the remains of the baby, in which Elaine had wailed that she wished she were dead too. She had shouted it for everyone to hear. He tried to hold her, but she slapped him away.
As he spoke, Cosmo’s senses were abuzz. He could smell the wet coals of someone’s outdoor barbecue, releasing, after the downpour, the scent of yesterday’s meal. He could hear the flutter of a moth, the lonely, faraway whistle of a train. Art was soothing and kind. Cosmo murmured that he was afraid Elaine might never return. He paced the wet grass, listening as Art poured himself a glass of lemonade and fussed with his icemaker. The sky was filled with the eerie calls of bats, the swish of swallow’s wings. The moon rose between the leaves.
Gradually the talk turned to boulders, and real estate agents, and the best neighborhoods in which to invest. But Cosmo’s thoughts were elsewhere. It seemed as though some doorway in his mind, hitherto shut tight, even to himself, had suddenly opened. Inside that private room was a mess of conflicting emotions. He was angry with Elaine. She had treated this tragedy as her private sorrow, as though Cosmo, too, had not lost a child—as though he had not lost his chance of ever having children. He had been so busy caring for Elaine that his own heartbreak had been steamrolled over.
Cosmo had wanted to be a father, a good father, unlike his own. He had wanted to see his gray eyes and Elaine’s snub nose duplicated in a small, soft face. He had been ready for parenthood, and it felt now as though some part of him had died. Some part of him had been sliced down, toppled, and excised from him—a stone rolled over the place where it had stood. Those last moments in the hospital would haunt him forever. The baby had just looked so lifelike as it had been carried away, its tiny hands reaching for the air.
When Elaine returned home, two days later, she was struck first by the stillness. Standing in the front hall, she set her suitcase down uneasily. She had learned over the years how to discern where her husband—naturally more silent than other men—might be hiding; she could tell, like a spider seated in its web, one leg poised on each strand, how to go to him unerringly. Today, however, the house felt abandoned. An odd smell hung in the air, earthy and damp.
There was dirt on the living room floor. Cosmo had evidently left a mess for her to clean up. With her nose wrinkled, Elaine followed the muddy trail to the staircase. There were footprints on the steps. There were twigs and leaves caught in the banister. Cosmo had apparently gone to pieces in her absence. The hallway was strewn with pebbles and clay, leading into the baby’s room. Elaine sucked in a brave breath, turned the corner—and stopped in her tracks.
A tree stood in the center of the room. Cosmo had piled a waist-high mountain of crumbling black soil upon the clean wooden floor. Buried in the heap, listing slightly toward the window, was a five-foot sapling. The thing looked brand-spanking-new, as though Cosmo had picked it up at a nursery and transported it directly here. Its fronds were pale green, the bark a glossy copper. A few roots poked out of the dirt. The cats had made merry with their new plaything; there were inky footprints on the floorboards. Not quite trusting her senses, Elaine stepped forward, her hand outstretched, and let her fingers close around the wood.
The rest of the room was absolutely bare. Cosmo had repainted the walls and spirited away the crib and baby clothes. The framed pictures of lambs had been taken down. There were no more packages of diapers. The mobile had been tugged out of the ceiling, and even the holes left by a nail or two had been carefully spackled over, all evidence of their hope removed. The pile of earth was the only thing left, with silt and loam scattered right into the corners. A breeze wafted through the window, and the sapling trembled. Its limbs were delicately sculpted. A few fragile flowers gleamed among the twigs. Elaine gazed for a while with her mouth open. Then she buried her hands in the branches, the bright, cold leaves against her skin. She ought to have been upset, she knew. She ought to have been furious, or at least concerned, but the first emotion that came to her was a kind of wrenching elation, as she took in the wild, blooming layout of her husband’s creation, this strange, new living thing.
THE LAST ANIMAL
The two women burst through the doors of the Mexican hotel lobby together. At first glance they were indistinguishable, two gray-haired sixty-somethings in bright print dresses, trailing the scent of perfume and mothballs. Their bodies showed the marks of arthritis and fatigue. They might have been sisters, twins, with their airport-disheveled hair and anxious eyes. They wheeled their luggage inexpertly into doorjambs and coffee tables on the way to the front desk; their bags were stuffed almost to bursting, since they had brought a change of clothes for every conceivable weather condition, even snow. It was Marge, the bolder of the two, who approached the concierge, and in her usual way with non-Americans, she pitched her voice a little higher than normal and spoke with exaggerated slowness.
“We have a room reserved,” she boomed. “Look it up under Markby. That’s her.” She hooked a thumb at her companion.
Here, for the first time, if you had been watching—which no one was—you would have seen the two women separate for a moment into distinct beings with widely different personalities. Marge negotiated the payment of the room, mistrustfully and at top volume, but Delilah stood back, and in her dark squirrel’s eyes there flickered a hint of naughty amusement. This was her vacation. She had been planning it forever, saving up, researching hotels, making lists of local attractions, and trying in vain to learn Spanish from books on tape. From the first, she had been certain she wanted to bring a traveling companion, and in the absence of a suitable man—the upright, competent sort who would carry bags and cope with panhandlers—she had asked Marge, of all her wide acquaintanceship, to travel with her for five full weeks.
Her children had been appalled. Though Jenny and Chris were both grown now, well into their thirties, they remembered strident, inappropriate Marge from their childhood. Marge gave offense to nearly everyone she met, but she was too narcissistic to notice it. (In all their years of friendship, Delilah had never once seen the woman embarrassed, and had finally learned not to burn with vicarious shame or attempt a hissed apology, but rather to just sit back and enjoy the ride.) Marge loved to travel, despite the fact that she was suspicious of anything unfamiliar. Her stomach could not tolerate spices, and she coped with her diarrhea by updating Delilah on the state of her bowel movements through the hotel bathroom door. She lived in fear of one of her cats sickening and dying in her absence and insisted on calling the poor cat-sitter at least three times a day. At the beach she shielded every inch of her skin with a covering of some sort—hats, glasses, towels, and shawls—and then groused that she never got tan. But Delilah had her own reasons for wanting Marge with her, not least of which that Marge was a source of constant, if unintentional, hilarity.
The payment of the room at last concluded, Marge gathered up the keys with a threatening glare at the concierge and took Delilah’s arm.
“Come along, my dear,” she said. “You look about half done in. He claims the beds are firm, but we’ll see.”
Not until that evening did Delilah have the room to herself. After testing the mattresses, faucets, and ceiling fan, and failing to reach her cat-sitter by phone, Marge marched off to examine the hotel pool. Delilah watched through a crack in the blinds until her friend’s broad, swimsuited back had disappeared. Then she hauled her suitcase up on the bed, fumbled beneath a layer of shirts, and brought out a battered envelope, yellowed at the corners. For a moment she sat on the bed, biting her lip and eyeing the envelope warily. Then, her face resigned, she drew out a single sheet of paper, which she traced dreamily with her hands, as though reading Braille.
My love,
Have landed in a town called Playa del Carmen in the Yucatan Peninsula. Hired for a week’s work at the local hotel, translating the signs into English for the American guests, of all things. High school Spanish lessons continue to pay off.
Know I won’t be home to see you again. Know you won’t understand why. I do love you, little one. Am missing your funny ways every day. Missing the kid, too, though you won’t believe that. Think of her constantly. Wonder what the new boy will look like. (Here Delilah, reading, laid a hand on her belly.) Maybe when he’s born you will send me a photograph. If you ever forgive me, that is, which you won’t. Have slept with a local prostitute every night this week. (Delilah’s eyes bounced, by habit, to the next paragraph, where a new subject was introduced. But that would not do. It was her last moment with this letter; she must read it all. She dragged her gaze back to the treacherous lines.) Skinny and hungry girl, not pretty like you. I take her out on the beaches to do it, for the humiliation. Anybody could walk by. Looks at the sky while I’m on top of her. Face empty. Yesterday watched her walk away, so little and tired, counting the bills. She tripped over a bucket some kid left in the sand.
Need your love still, always, but I’ve got it, you’re so true and loyal, I’ve got your love in my pocket with the cigarettes. Right here. But I need this too, hurting that dumb, skinny kid. Like a broken bird. That’s what I know you’ll never understand. Could say it’s because of that old Korean war, and it’s true, but I know it’s no excuse. It is true. I wasn’t like this before. Tried not to be like this for so long after I came back. Worried about what I would do. Kept thinking about hurting you. Kept thinking the worst things. It’s no excuse, of course. Lots of guys came back just as messed up as me, and they’re still good husbands and dads somehow. But I’m gone. Won’t be here more than a week. I’ll keep moving, until I fall off the world, which will happen one of these days. Hope these letters aren’t messing you up too much. Think of you always. Always.
Lew
Delilah sat for a minute with her head bowed. The letter fell over her, its weight rendering the air porridge-thick and hard to breathe. After a moment she sighed, kicked her feet into flip-flops, and slipped out the front door, clutching the letter in both hands. The Mexican night was as warm as bathwater. The sky was the rich purple she recognized from Lew’s descriptions, scattered with stars and wet clouds. She made her careful way down the path to the beach (and spared a moment’s fond irritation for Marge. Here they were, paying a small fortune for a hotel bungalow in walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico, and Marge would spend the week doing laps in a ten-by-twenty chlorine pool). The beach was empty of people. Delilah stood irresolute for a moment on the cold, pale sand. Crickets (or cicadas, or geckos—she could not be sure) chimed in the palm trees around her. Waves crested as they came in and laid their long black tongues upon the sand. To Delilah’s uncertain eyes, it seemed that ivory pillars rolled across the water, rather than curls of foam. She took the letter from her pocket. She took a pack of matches from her bag.
The flame lapped over Lew’s handwriting, his curly w’s and sharp erect t’s, the spelling mistakes he had made and blacked out, the tiny drawing of a tree he had done unconsciously in the margin. Delilah sat down in the sand. When she had burned Lew’s first letter, back at the beginning of her trip, her heart had thumped so wildly that she’d actually been afraid she might have a coronary. Each time, however, had grown progressively easier. She had watched four letters go up in smoke now; she was familiar with the way it progressed, the ache in her chest, the ensuing emptiness. Now, as she watched her husband’s final note crumbling into windblown ash, she felt something more—light and airy, as though wings were beating somewhere about her person.
Lew had disappeared thirty years before in a manner that was both spectacular and mundane. On a Tuesday morning, he had driven Delilah to the doctor. She had been well into her second trimester then, eager to see her obstetrician. It was a rainy afternoon in Seattle, the clouds low and dark, the streets bright with damp. Lew had dropped her outside the clinic, at the lobby entrance, rolling down the window to shout that he would park down the block and be right back. Delilah had watched him turn the corner, watched the car until it was out of sight.
He never returned. That final image, the back of his head framed in the rear window, was the last glimpse of him she ever got. Delilah had waited for him in the uncomfortable plastic chairs at the doctor’s office. She waited for him afterward, standing on the sidewalk for over an hour, squinting against the drizzle and trying not to cry. Lew did not come back to collect her. He did not pick their daughter up from a playdate that evening, as planned. He did not turn up at his office the following morning. It seemed that he had driven around that corner and vanished outright, popping like a soap bubble.
For three days, Delilah had no news at all. She called his friends—his co-workers—the police. She filed a Missing Persons Report. She did not sleep, guzzling coffee and holding her bewildered daughter in her lap. For three days, she imagined the worst things. Mugging. Car bomb. Dead in a ditch.
Then, on the fourth day, she was startled by a persistent ringing at her doorbell. Two uniformed officers stood there. Delilah came onto the porch to meet them, her bare feet cold against the boards. Her hands were trembling as she smoothed her hair out of her face. In the background, from inside the house, floated the sound of Jenny’s morning cartoons. The officers had been brisk as they reported their news.
