I glance into the car. Bert is curled up in the seat. He’s wearing an old T-shirt of mine that tells you about different kinds of whales.
We get back on the road before it’s fully light out. Bert stops at a gas station to buy hot chocolates and Mom goes in with him. She comes back out alone. “I told him,” she says, weeping, buckling into the driver’s seat and starting the car. “I had to.” She pulls out, tires squealing.
“We can’t just go,” I say.
“It’s done. He doesn’t want to go on with us.”
I look back. Bert’s standing outside the store, our two hot chocolates in his hands. His gray-blond hair is blowing like seeds from a kicked dandelion.
“Turn around,” I say, but she won’t.
I crank the window down and rest my cheek on the edge of the glass. I let the wind batter me. Each new moment as we speed away from Bert comes as a surprise: the trees blurring by, the white line steady on the road’s shoulder.
I have felt this way before, when I was nine and my dog died. I went on a bicycle ride and suddenly couldn’t believe I had the power to move my machine forward into each new, unfolding second. I kept waiting for the next second to be swallowed up in black. I guess I kept waiting to die.
Mom needs rest. She’s so tired that the buildings going by are wavering a little, like heat shimmer above pavement.
“Say I’m drowning,” she says. “I’ve been holding around Bert’s neck for a long time. He’s tired, too.”
The motel smells the same as two nights ago, and the soaps are the same, the very same brand, and I feel like I’m in a dream. Mom crawls into bed and I don’t know what to do for her. I run a bath. And here I am in the bath, swishing my hair back and forth, watching the water drain. And here are my hands, pulling a blanket up over her. She is asleep. She flutters her eyes open once when I get into bed beside her but I don’t think she’s seeing me. When I lean in, I can feel the heat radiating off her, tiny suns tucked around her body. And here I am kissing her forehead. She tastes like salt.
Driving isn’t so hard. There’s a rock caught in the front tire, and as I accelerate the tick tick tick grows faster and that’s all I’m listening to. I park crooked at the gas station and run in, a bell sounding. Past the flurry machine, the red hotdogs steaming in their case, the motor oil, and the sunglasses stand. Bert’s not there. I knock on the door to the men’s room, open it. It’s empty. I was positive this was the same gas station, but now I’m not so sure.
I run back to the parking lot and grab the air horn. Start honking it. It’s louder than I imagined it would be. No one’s at the pump, but the cashier comes to the window. I keep blaring the horn. A line of crows scatters from the telephone wire. After fifteen honks it runs out of air, hissing. The cashier shouts at me from the doorway, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. When my ears stop ringing, she’s still waiting there, looking at me, her hands on her hips as though I’m supposed to say something. I climb into the front seat of the car. She watches me. I dig Bert’s orange cap out from under the front seat and pull it on. I wait for him to come back, but he doesn’t.
By the time I’m driving ninety toward the horizon, sunroof open and windows down, the car doesn’t smell like Bert anymore.
Werewolf
Already, what a day. Claire can’t open her eyes because of what she might see — their clothes scattered on the floor, the glass of orange juice and water on the bedside table with the pulp settled to a cloud at the bottom, and her lipstick blotting its rim, accusatory somehow, as the glasses she unloads from the dishwasher, clean save for her stubborn lipstick, are also accusatory. She has to put them through the dishwasher twice. In the kitchen now is a stack of dirty dishes. When she and Hal returned from last night’s party she plunged her arm into the greasy gray dishwater to scoop the drain free of food. She had walked the oatmeal slop to the bathroom to blame him. “This is truly disgusting,” she said. “This is what happens when you don’t scrape them.” But it was her fault, too, for making oatmeal every morning and leaving the dirty pot on the stove.
Then they fought in the shower because she had wanted to leave the party earlier than he did. They were both drunk, and Hal stood under the stream of hot water with his eyes closed and his hair plastered to his forehead while she talked at him. When she started to sob, Hal hugged her, and the water streamed between their stomachs. She knew that by crying she had won Hal’s tenderness.
There was a cold entity inside her that rose out and watched. Werewolf, she thought, and this disturbed her. She rarely acknowledged this second self. In the past, when she became aware of it, her private thought was that this witness self was something that brought her closer to God. She had never thought of it as malicious. Werewolf. The water ran too hot, and her stomach turned. She thought, what if I am bad?
Before bed she climbed on top of Hal and had sex the way she did when she was drunk. To fall asleep she said a mantra to herself so she would stop thinking about badness or goodness.
The next morning Hal’s arm is slung over her body. Some drama peaks in his dream and his hand spasms, squeezing the little pouch her stomach makes when she lies on her side. It startles her. The sudden awareness of her stomach makes her queasy. Though she shouldn’t feel that way. It is a good body.
It’s hangovers that make her body feel most uninhabitable — physically with nausea, but also, perhaps primarily, because she is wracked with guilt. She is married, she has her own family unit now, and soon, maybe in a year or so, she hopes to have a baby. Still, the morning after she drinks, her mind goes right to her parents, as though she’s let them down. It makes no sense.
She wants to sleep all day, but today is her Sunday with Paul. By now he has probably showered, dressed, and put on his cologne, and is waiting outside for her, as he does even on the coldest days, even when she calls to tell his aide she’s running late. Or once, when she had to cancel, the aide couldn’t get him to come back inside. Not for a couple hours.
She gets out of bed, knowing she can bear it. Even Paul’s cologne (her own doing, a present from the discount bin) that he douses himself with is something she will bear.
Today needs a lot of makeup, and she takes her time bringing her face back to life. Her eyes are rimmed red from the crying. Hal comes into the bathroom and runs his nails across her bare back. “That was some hot lovemaking,” he says. Their lovemaking, like her crying, is slightly hazy. But she knows she was somehow better. As in, wilder. He wraps his arms around her and puts his mouth to her ear, “My werewolf.”
The sudden clarity of that word, breathed against her ear, jolts her. It was like gunpoint, which is crazy, but that was her thought—a gun.
It’s like he’s found her out.
“Don’t call me that,” she says.
“You’re pretty proud of yourself aren’t you? Fooling everyone.”
“Am not,” says Claire. “I really don’t understand the rules. I hate that game. I hate being werewolf. It makes me so nervous.” She does, she hates the game.
He runs his hands over her hip bones.
“Hello, it’s me,” he says. “I’m your husband, remember? You can’t fool me. I see you. You’re playing the game right now.”