But then morning passed into day into evening into night.
I listened, but the song did not come, the calling-down sung after each of her other pregnancies, and when at last I opened the door, there was no wife out upon the dirt, or near the lake, or in the woods, no matter how or where I searched: Again she had disappeared from the surface of all things, just as she had the day the bear destroyed our wedding gifts at the mouth of its cave.
When at last she returned, her pregnancy seemed not ended, despite the grief bloodshot through her eyes, the stagger pained into her step. I asked her where she had gone and what she had done, but she said only that she was tired, that she did not wish to speak. Her body betrayed none of the quick deflation it had before, and so I did not know what to say or do, and afterward I kept some distance during the day and also in the night, and I gave her more than her share of what I trapped and fished, so that she might feed this baby better, so that if it were somehow still within her it might find the strength to live.
From that night on, my wife avoided our bed, sleeping instead alone upon the dirt, beneath the moon and also her moon, bidding me not to follow but to promise to remain inside the house—and even though I promised, my promise was not enough.
Each evening I again agreed to retire to the bedchamber, agreed as if I had never been asked, my wife’s voice betraying no recognition of our patterns, of my nightly exile to our lonely bed, where only the fingerling’s terrors would keep me company.
Then my wife saying good night, muffled through the closing and closed door.
Then the key moving in the lock.
Then the latch making it easy not to break my promise.
Then the waiting until dark, until the darker dark inside, and then moving to the window, where I believed I would not be seen.
From that vantage, I could not spy where she lay, but I could hear her voice, and as I listened she filled the nights with a song she had not sung before, the purpose of which I could not divine. Each morning, she returned at dawn in her draped and dirtied nightgown to unlock the bedchamber door, and no matter what she said I did not question her, only chose to believe the best of the many possibilities, that her acned skin and ruddied cheeks and heavied body were some good sign, some assurance that this pregnancy continued, that there was still some child coming. This was the story I wanted most, and so it was easiest to believe, no matter what the fingerling claimed—and also there was the matter of her moon, neither ascending nor descending. If her pregnancy had ended, then I thought there would be no need for these locked doors, these separate nights, not against the language of her eyes, the promised danger of her sung moon.
In my hopeful naïveté I made believe that the moon’s place in the sky assumed or assured a child’s place in her, but while I slept the fingerling begged my eyes open, watching and waiting and never allowing me to forget what we had seen, that night my wife had returned bloodied to the bed.
YOU KNOW THERE IS NO CHILD, the fingerling said, his shape curled in upon my ear, circling its ugly organ with each word, each soft-slung syllable. THERE IS ONLY A LIE, WHICH IN YOUR WEAKNESS YOU ALLOW HER TO KEEP, TO HOLD AGAINST YOU.
EXPOSE HER, he said, and then he slipped his shape across my face, around the curve of my jawline, down into the spiral canals of my other ear, crowding that too-small space so that he might command my attention, so that he might speak longer than he had spoken before: EXPOSE HER AND MAKE HER PAY. FOR HER DECEPTION, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO YOU, FOR WHAT SHE DID TO ME, TO MY OTHER BROTHERS AND SISTERS.
He said, I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF HER SHAPE, AS I HAVE SEEN THE INSIDE OF YOURS, AND I TELL YOU IT IS NOT OUR LACK BUT HERS.
Despite the tickle of the fingerling in and around my face, still I dissented. Long had I saddened at the failure of my children, at the ghost I had set to seed, but never had I blamed my wife, not in full, not as we expanded the distance between our bodies, not after we had ceased to smile at each other in doorways or through windows. Some part of that distancing had been reversed by this pregnancy, and in this last-found closeness I wanted to believe all the fingerling claimed I should not; and even if her pregnancy was over, then perhaps I was willing to blame her actions on the twisting unreasonableness of heartbreak, and so I did not agree that my wife had done me wrong.
Against these arguments the fingerling insisted, and in my refusal of that insistence the fingerling showed me some others of his tricks, demonstrated how he too was a tracker. He had learned his mother’s movements, and also her motives, knew both better than I ever had, and so one hot afternoon he urged me back to the house, hurried me until I abandoned my shouldered burden to walk faster: For weeks, my wife had sung upon the dirt throughout the darkest hours while in the locked bedchamber I slept or tried to sleep. Now she was too exhausted to resist napping some portion of the day, and so the fingerling commanded me to tread lightly, to open the front door without creaks, to cross the floorboards without boots, to enter the bedroom, to see there what might be seen.
LIFT HER SHIRT, bid the fingerling, hysterical, foamed and frothed, a nausea of need, and I did as he begged, and beneath my wife’s blouse I found what he wanted me to find: a fur, balled into the shape and size of a baby’s bulge; this hide with which my wife had hoped to deceive me, as if our son was to be a wolf, as if she had last rucked with an animal.
WAKE HER, the fingerling commanded, but I did not wake her.
WAKE HER, the fingerling said again, but it was only the fingerling who was angry then, only he who wanted her so quickly exposed and punished. For my part, there was almost only more sadness, that she could not admit what had happened, this expulsion from her body of our most recent child, which unlike all the others she had delivered dead alone.
NOW CAME THE MONTHS OF crossed deceptions, where we each hid beneath our clothes some child or not-child, grown inside our bodies or else never grown: For me there was the fingerling, five years swallowed, willful, angered at what world he knew only through me, his father-shaped host; and for my wife there was her own false child, her lie made artifact, a fakery of fur clutched always under her blouses and dresses.
Despite this gathering evidence, I did not call my wife’s bluff, only counted the days and weeks and months as they passed. Each night, after I was locked into our bedchamber, there I scratched a new mark into the floor beneath the bed, some reminder of the length of her deception, a predictor of its likely end, a calendar made more necessary as the season stalled, so that often it was the cloudless distress of winter, the harsh light of sun and moons cold despite the sometimes-bright blue of the sky.
Whenever we snuck into the house during her nap to lift her shirt, to spy again her deception, always her body appeared pregnant everywhere but her belly, where there were always only the bundled furs between her shirt and her flat skin, and no baby besides, and no matter the strength of her songs I did not then believe those furs would ever become a baby, even as she otherwise remained seemingly with child, heavy-breasted, thick-thighed. And so in the ninth month I emerged unsuspecting from the woods, still merely a husband, made no proper father despite the insistent promises of my wife, the hungry claims of the fingerling upon my flesh.