And in this room, in this series of rooms: Why we moved to the dirt between the lake and the woods, the reason different than what always I had believed before. And how this was something she never told me, even though we were husband and wife. And in each room of that floor one action of a sequence was made distinct from the last, so that the crush of her father’s body atop her mother’s was separated from how his knees punched into her thighs, pinning them to their mattress. Then the blows she struck across the meat of his forearms as they moved his hands to her throat. Then how her father choked her mother. Then how he lifted her head by the throat, then how he struck the headboard with her skull until he had broken both.
And in this room: another reason my wife had not at first wanted children of her own, even as I wanted them more than anything else. The genes of a killer, the genes of someone killed; half of what her parents had, but which half?
And in this room, another space, filled by the fingerling saying, THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. THAT IS HOW YOU SHOULD MAKE IT TO BE.
And in this room: How my wife had known what her father was, how he had hurt her too, and how she had lived with the hurt because it meant that her mother received less.
How after my wife left his house for mine, then her mother had no one left to protect her.
How my wife blamed herself for this, and how she also blamed me, for taking her away.
And in this room: The sound of my wife singing herself to sleep. The sound of her voice keeping her company. The sound of a song that made temporary ghosts to appear and then to sing her songs along. How she punished herself for her loss. How she promised that her own children would be born into a world without sadness, without tragedy, without death, or at least without the death of parents. How she determined to make that world and only then to give me the children I claimed to want, and how she planned to keep those children safe.
How if she could not keep this promise, she would rather not have any children at all, no matter how I begged.
And what bruises accompanied these words.
What burns and shallow cuts.
What years those wounds lasted, scabbed over, healed, replaced, scarred white.
Those pale textures, all previously hidden in places I would never look, or where I had stopped looking, or else in plain sight where again I failed to see or understand.
And in this room: how I told my wife that by taking her away I would keep her safe.
On some new dirt, I told her, she would no longer hurt herself, no longer visit upon her body what frustrations she gathered from the busy world around her, its tall buildings, its crammed streets.
Our new world, it would be quieter, simpler.
Our new world, it would be just her, would be just me, just us and the babies I then hoped—that I hoped we both hoped—would become our family.
As if to prove my love I should remove her from all that she knew. As if to keep her mine, I had to share her with no one.
And in this room: my wife saying she does not want children, that she has never wanted children.
And in this room: my wife saying that she is tired, that her body aches, that her breasts are sore from years of unpurposed lactation, and that she does not want to live this way.
And in this room: my wife saying Please, saying Please stop.
And in this room: My wife pleading that a husband and a wife are still a family. That two are enough.
And then, in another room down the hall, my voice replying, my voice saying, No.
And in this room: all the arguments by which I hoped to leverage her first to try and then to keep trying, even as in the aftermath she hurt her body, then the house and the dirt and the sky.
And in this room: How inside a mother bear a cub might float for months before starting its arc toward birth. How it might remain a tiny bundle of cells, dividing slowly, until the bear’s body decided conditions were right, that there was enough food stored inside the sleeping mother, enough of whatever else it took to make a cub. How my wife thought of this often, this bear-knowledge she knew, as pregnancy after pregnancy we failed to fill her with what stuff she needed to bring forth our child, our children.
And in this room: the moment of the fingerling’s conception, when the half-body of my making entered the half-body of my wife’s, and how from that moment part of me grew inside part of her. And even in that moment her seeing how jealous I was, despite how I tried to hide it, from that first moment until the one months later, when the fingerling passed from her body and into my hand, where while she howled I claimed the two halves of us for myself, so that they might grow inside my flesh instead.
And in this room: the shape of that heartbreak, a slim black tear, the length of a finger.
And in this room: the fingerling’s crib, its small wooden frame, its thin pad and song-spun blanket filthied with the garden dirt.
And in this room: the times my wife touched me while I was asleep, happening here in sequence but cut away from their context, their chronology recognizable only by the changes in my body, in hers. How long she persisted. How I thought throughout that we were already estranged, that in our silences we were to come undone, unravel from our bonds. And yet in this room she ran her hands beneath the sheets, across the width of my widening back, traced her fingers through the salts of the day’s working, then wrapped her arm around the slumbering bulk of my belly, that round shape girthed heavier than that she had first married, that she then still loved.
And in this room: How I touched her too. How every time it left a mark.
AND IN THESE ROOMS, MORE component parts, more wife-shaped pieces of our past, and as we walked I decided that despite the fingerling’s insistence and my undiminished fear of the bear I would find some way to escape the bonds of my promise. I told the fingerling I would continue to pursue my wife and the foundling but not to hurt them worse, only to beggar myself before them, to bloody my knees with my apology, and the fingerling said, NO, said, WE GO NOT TO FIX THAT FAMILY BUT TO END IT.
YOU PROMISED THE BEAR, he said. YOU PROMISED ME.
You spoke with my voice, I said. You promised, and only you.
I said this, but I knew it was not true, and afterward the fingerling said nothing else, but for a time he knocked about my stomach and then the cavity of my chest and then both at once and other places besides, voice box and the clicking joint at the back of my jaw, then back down, through organs I could not feel until he hurt them, gall bladder and spleen and liver and others whose names I knew only in abstract or only when pulled from the bodies I had trapped.
The fingerling hurt me until all that remained lay prostrate on the ground, where I pleaded for him to stop, to show his father mercy, but he only twisted me worse, claimed I was no father of his—and of course if he wanted to be right, then he was right, because even if I called him my child I knew he was not, not anymore.
And in this room: The voice of the foundling as I had rarely heard it, as he talked to my wife when they were alone. A voice high and eloquent, curious and questioning, so different from the silence that blanked his wild face whenever I appeared.
And in this room: the number of times my wife hurt the foundling, even accidentally. A number so close to zero.