That night, the wife gets up and goes to sleep in her daughter’s room. If he asks, she can lie and say she called for her.
Fight or flight, she thinks. Fight or flight.
She has noticed though that he seems to love her again. A little at least. He is always touching her now, brushing the hair back from her face. “Thank you,” he says one night as they are sitting in the yard. He says it was as if they were all trapped under a car and in a burst of inexplicable strength, she moved it. He kisses her and there is something there, a flicker maybe, but then she hears the bug zapper going. Zzzft. Zzzft. Zzzft. “You shouldn’t have driven us off of the cliff,” she says.
42
The wife braids the daughter’s hair every morning before school. At bedtime, the husband reads to her from Anne of Green Gables.
They are both worried about the daughter. At night, she writes long letters to her favorite doll, then mails them in a Kleenex box she keeps hidden under her bed.
If they ask the daughter why she is crying, she says, “Don’t talk about it.”
The husband decides to teach the daughter how to whistle and the wife listens to them in the backyard whistling away.
The wife still has a plan b just in case. I could join the Amish, she thinks whenever they pass them.
For the daughter’s birthday, they decide to get her a puppy. She is ecstatic, but it does the final work of unhinging the wife. “Can you take it back?” the shrink says more urgently than expected. “Take it back!” “No,” the wife says. It is the only thing that makes the girl happy. “You’ll have to crate it,” she says. “Often.”
Sometimes the husband says he is going to look for kindling. But later the wife sees him chain-smoking at the edge of the far field.
Sometimes she still thinks about the ex-boyfriend, but she does not hunt for him in the ether.
One morning the wife takes the puppy out for a walk. He blazes ahead then returns covered with burrs. She picks them off and lets him go again. Sky here. She had forgotten how much sky there could be. When she catches up with the puppy, he is eating something dead. “Leave it!” she says. “Leave it! Leave it!” He drops it on the ground, wags his tail at her. But later, the puppy runs back to the same place and rolls around in it.
Don’t drink. Don’t think.
The wife and the husband take the puppy to the vet to get his shots. They pass the Holiday Inn Express again. This time she manages not to say anything. She feels him notice this. After a while, he turns on the radio. The puppy licks the steering wheel. To their surprise, he is well behaved at the vet. He doesn’t pee on the floor or nip at the hand that holds him. But later when they get home, he stands on his hind legs and drinks from the toilet.
That night the wife can’t stop her hands from flapping. She goes out into the dark field to get away. But the daughter sees her and follows. “Mommy!” she says. “Mommy! Where are you going?”
So she takes the pills the doctor gives her. Her hands stop flapping. She is less inclined to lie down in the street. But her brain is still buckling. In the parking lot of a store two towns over she cries like a clown with her face on the steering wheel.
43
The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.
One day the husband sees a woodchuck looking through the window at them. It is with great joy that they discover that another name for this creature is “the whistle pig.”
The daughter has stopped talking so much about going home. She is building something in the far corner of the yard now. They watch as she carries heavy rocks across the grass and dumps them in a pile. Days pass, but the construction remains mysterious. Sometimes she changes her mind and moves everything a few feet to the right or left. It seems to be some kind of game. “Backyard Gulag,” they call it.
The husband and wife whisper-fight now in the gloves-off approved way. She calls him a coward. He calls her a bitch. But still they aren’t that good at it yet. Sometimes one or the other stops in the middle and offers the other a cookie or a drink.
And then one day the wife realizes she’s driven past the Holiday Inn Express without noticing. Maybe it’s becoming just a hotel again. Not the place where she stood, then sat, then knelt, palms turned down on the bedspread. Dear God, Dear Monster, Dear God, Dear Monster, she prayed that night, shaking like a junkie until the slow sun rose again.
What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
44
I’m hungry. I want to eat something delicious, have a beer and a cigarette. I’ve come back to Earth full of desires. The air tastes good.
This is what the Japanese reporter said when he came back from the space station.
In the morning, the wife lets the dog out: Hey a squirrel! Hey a tree! Hey a piece of shit! Hey! Hey! Hey!
They bathe him together, toweling him off gently. Afterwards, the wife gives him peanut butter and watches him lick it from the spoon.
What Emily Dickinson said: Existence has overpowered Books. Today I slew a Mushroom.
The husband buys a grand piano. No one out in the country cares how long or loud he plays. He teaches the daughter a few finger exercises. But she would rather pack a bag of candy and climb a tree.
He composes something beautiful for the wife. Songs About Space, he calls it. Sometimes she plays it late at night when he is asleep. She thinks of that radio show, wonders if the girl still listens to it.
For a long time, the wife had an idea that the girl might write her a letter. But, no, no, of course, there is nothing.
The wife sits in the backyard with binoculars. She is trying to learn about the birds. She has seen robins and sparrows and wrens. A green-throated hummingbird. She wants to know the name of the black bird with the red wings. She looks it up. It is a red-winged blackbird.
Dear Girl,
She writes the philosopher a letter instead. He has gone to live in the Sonoran Desert. He met a poet there who tends sixty kinds of cacti and speaks three languages. Yes, the wife says. Stay. She tells him about the red-winged blackbird because it is important to know the names of things.
My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right.
The leaves are nearly gone now. The daughter is pressing them into a book. The husband is outside chopping wood.