Michael came in and said, “Ah, the conscientious neighbor.” He swept an arm toward the window, “Look. We have fixed the problem.”
I went to the glass. In the yard the dog circled and pawed at leaves. It opened its mouth and I got ready for the incessant cacophony. Instead it flinched and went mute, and I realized that its collar was shocking it. The muscles in my throat constricted. It had only wanted to express its primal loneliness and they had taken away its voice. Surely there was some more humane solution?
As if reading my thoughts, Michael said, “It was the only way. He was stubborn, and he refused to be trained.” I felt a flush of shame. Was it my fault that they had silenced the creature? Meanwhile, a blessed quietness fell around us. Michael said, “Enough of that, come. Galina has prepared a feast.”
We sat. Galina brought in the turkey. It was delicious and opulent, and everything was overwhelming. Later, when the turkey had been reduced to a cave of bones and the children had been dismissed, Galina sipped wine as dark as a gorgon’s blood. She looked at me and said, “Have you seen the wild turkeys that roost in the woods?”
I nodded.
“Beautiful, aren’t they? Big and ungainly but also beautiful. Prehistoric. You watch them and you know what the dinosaurs looked like. It seems such a strange thing to appreciate their beauty and then eat them.”
I said nothing.
“Living here, it’s like living in the midst of paradise. In the summertime we had the doors open and two fawns wandered in.” I must have given her a look of disbelief because she said, “No, really! The children were thrilled and we stayed quiet as they trotted all around the house. They must have been searching for water because it’s been such a dry year. But they came into the house so easily, as if they were curious. As if they wanted to know how the humans lived. They were like creatures out of the fairy tales I grew up with. They walked all around this room.” She spread her hands wide. “And then their mother was at the door and made this noise and they ran out. Their hoofs left marks but I had them erased.”
I asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” Michael replied.
Galina tapped her bloodred nails against the crystal of her wineglass. “Back then this was a safe neighborhood. Now there are all sorts of criminal elements coming up the hill — poor people, black people. They can’t find work so they resort to crime. The house at the end of the road got broken into last month. That’s why I was so upset when I thought you were one of them.”
She didn’t apologize. She was not a woman used to apologizing.
I brushed it away. I was as curious as a cat about them so I asked how they had met.
He said, “That’s a funny story,” and pulled her to him, kissing the side of her luminous face. She made the tiniest movement then, so subtle that he missed it. But I recognized it. It was how my husband used to move, ever so slightly, away from my kiss. I hadn’t thought about it for months but now a hairline crack reopened on the surface of my mending heart.
“I wanted to marry. I was ready. So I went to Romania looking for a wife.”
She said, “He wanted a mail-order bride.”
“Really?”
“Why not? I was sick of meeting women here and having it go nowhere. I knew what I wanted, and I knew where to get it. Dating in America is a terrible thing.”
I turned to her. “And you... were the mail-order bride?”
“No! I was the interpreter.”
“I took one look at her and here we are,” Michael finished the story.
I stayed late as they got drunker and drunker. She sat on his lap and they kissed as if I was not there. Then I too, like the children, was dismissed. I walked the short distance to my own door, went into my red room, and shivered all night on my mattress. I was alone, abandoned, unloved. It was the worst night since my husband had told me we were finished.
I got close to them after that. They needed someone to watch the kids and I was right next door. What could be easier? They had this idea that the girls were attached to me. I bought them toys, courted them in the way you are supposed to do with children, and they — used to a succession of brown-skinned nannies, Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, Mexicans — did not complain. I had lost my job some time before and was glad of the money they tossed my way.
I watched the girls while they played in the garden and at the park. We went for walks in the woods with the dog. There were trails everywhere. Huckleberry Trail, Redwood Regional, and Tilden Park were close. One could walk for miles and not run into a soul. Once the dog led us, panting, straight to the carcass of a stag. It lay at the edge of a cliff on its side, its antlers tangled in the undergrowth, its hoofs pointed at us. Its stomach had been slit and there were organs strewn in a jumble next to it, a bloated mint-green sack, dark viscous puddles of blood.
The children squatted, their eyes large. “What did this?” they asked me. Something big, I thought, something voracious. We looked at it for a while. Then they got bored and wanted to leave, and I walked after them.
In all that time, the kids kept getting thinner, paler. No one could understand it. They ate at mealtimes, their mother hovering over them, cooking their favorite foods, begging them to take just one more bite. But however hard she tried, the girls did not thrive. She watched them like a hawk, she said. They did not throw up, they did not purge, and yet the shadows loomed large under their eyes, their limbs got more sticklike. It was uncanny.
It was months later that I came upon Michael in his study. The girls were in their bedrooms putting away toys. I had heard his car arrive and went looking for him. His hair was bedraggled, and when he saw me he waved me into a seat and said, “I need to talk to you.” I sat. He paced up and down the room behind his desk, running his fingers through his hair. I kept silent until finally he spoke: “I don’t know how to say this... Have you ever... seen Galina do anything to the kids?”
I was shocked. “What?”
“They get sick all the time. I think it’s Galina. I think she’s sick in the head, I think she’s hurting them.”
“Why would you think that? And no, I’ve never seen her be anything but good to them.”
“I don’t know what to think. We’ve taken them to every doctor, done every test. But you see how they are? The doctor asked me if it might be her. He said sometimes mothers...” He paced some more. “But why else would they look like that, like little ghosts?”
Then he sat at his desk, leaned his head back on the leather, and I watched as tears ran out of the corners of his eyes and along the planes of his face. When he spoke again his voice was broken: “She’s fucking someone else. I know it.”
He put his head on his arms and sobbed in great, painful gulps. It was startling to see a man express pain in this way, but I knew exactly how he felt. There is no dagger more cold than betrayal. There is no wound more terrible than the thought of your lover with their lover. The idea of their two bodies together takes over, becomes the entire pulsing world.
It got worse after that. They had screaming matches; they threw things. They sobbed and hurled accusations. Some of it happened in my presence because by then I had become indispensible. I’ll spare you the details — everyone has gone through heartache, everyone knows what the end looks and sounds like.