Corky picked up a few more things, looked in the cupboard to make sure the sheets for the fold-out bed hadn’t started to smell musty since they were last in use. Wayne would never think to check something like that, but it was important because children hated funny smells, and Will would have enough problems adjusting, coming from the cold winter weather into the humidity and sun. But of course, she thought, as she opened the closet door, that would be a nice thing for a child, coming from gray days into a sunny world; it was like being born. Why couldn’t she be Will’s mother? Why was Jody blessed with motherhood, with Wayne’s child, when her home and Wayne’s was childless? Why did she try to convince herself that everything was for the best?
Tears welled up in her eyes. The sheets smelled of mildew. The mattress she and her mother had tried to move years ago smelled the same way. Corky could remember feeling infinitesimal next to the mattress, and smaller still as one of the cops hoisted it and helped her mother carry it back into the house, saying, “Lady, I’m just real glad it’s not a body.”
She knew very little about Wayne’s childhood, and he knew very little about hers. She liked it that Wayne didn’t want to pry into her past — an unusual attitude for a man, in her experience. What men always wanted to do was banish the other people — cap the lid on their existence, like placing one checker on top of another. Men wanted to make other men — of course men didn’t care about your childhood friends, only about other men — into understandable clichés and then dismiss them, pick them up and take them off the board. You could help them by mentioning only the nasty one-liners, remembering only rainy days, producing a picture of the person in which the former beloved foolishly held up a fish not big enough to brag about, or one in which he was flanked by his friends, who had previously been described as villains. Wayne had surprised her, though, by not being curious. It made her wonder what he might have done that he didn’t want her to inquire about. How bad had things been, that he would rather not mention those people, or those years? Sometimes she felt that he was too handsome to be interested in her, that she had gotten lucky too fast. They had met at a garage sale when he stopped to look at hubcaps and she was flipping through a twenty-five-cent National Geographic. Instead of buying the magazine, she bought a book of Sherlock Holmes stories — she still had the book and hadn’t read it, but meant to one day — and he bought a hubcap and a frying pan. She figured that he was a single man because of that purchase: No married man picks up a frying pan at a garage sale. They had glanced at each other as they paid for their purchases. Walking toward their cars, she had sneaked another look, and later he confessed that he had walked slower than usual so that he could more or less keep pace with her. His car was parked in front of hers. As she was opening her car door, he had hollered something that she didn’t quite understand. She looked at him quizzically and heard him the second time: He had National Geographics in the trunk of the car, and they were hers, if she wanted them. She walked toward him, feeling the hot-faced shyness she had experienced as a little girl. He smiled and opened his trunk. There were six National Geographics he said had been in the trunk when he bought the car. There had also been newspapers tied with string, he told her, and a couple of cinder blocks — none of which were there when she looked in — and he smiled when he told her it was only some time after buying the car that he had figured out the previous owner must have put them there to stop the car from fishtailing. Then suddenly he was telling her how much faster the car guzzled gas if a bag of sand was in the trunk, and she was complaining about the battery she had bought that went dead one month after the warranty expired. While other people had a book of matches or a drink stirrer or some other little souvenir of the night they met, Corky had a pile of National Geographics. She would have to put them in the closet so Will didn’t think they were something he could play with. As silly as it might be, she did feel a great sentimental attachment to them. When she looked at them that first time, flipping through nervously as she and Wayne had coffee, she had felt elated, as if the African tribesmen and egrets on the wing foretold their exciting future together. If Will’s round-tipped scissors had begun to cut anything out of the magazines, it would have been like cutting out her heart.
Children meant no disrespect; they just thought that whatever they discovered, they could have. Girls usually grew out of that notion, but boys did not. Boys continued to think that the world was accessible, whether they went after what they wanted with scissors or with guns. Corky hoped that if she had a child, it would be a girl.
It is a mistake to leave a child alone in the dark, under the weight of the blanket and the heavier weight of your reassurances, when the child knows perfectly well that the monster is still in the room. As long as the shutters stay open — and they must, so the moonlight can stream in — the tree branch will be endlessly transformed into the shadow of a bat, whose wings will stir in the breeze the moment the door is pulled shut. The robe draped over the chair, straightened so that the hood no longer casts the shape of a huge arrowhead on the wall, will become a mummy intent on sucking the child’s breath away if the child should be foolish enough to close his eyes.
Telling the child that you will see him in the morning, and smiling down at him, is as unconvincing, and as little to the point, as standing on the deck of a sinking ship and applauding as the lifeboats are lowered. As if the sea didn’t churn. As if something benign presided over our destinies. As if words could palliate so real a darkness as night. The feathers shift inside the pillow and sink. The leaves of the plant curl until morning light. Sleep is like life in the city: Everyone is in danger who moves while others are still. How can we continue to tell the child, or any other skeptic, that night settles like lush, soft velvet, when it’s as insidious as the swirl of the bullfighter’s cape? The cape swishes and the bull escapes for a while, but soon enough the dagger plunges in and there is blood on the velvet, blood on the sand.
At night, the furry fox cub in the storybook sprouts fangs and gnaws the wire coiled in the boxspring. The jack-in-the-box, having popped up, continues to grow, towering until it touches the ceiling, and then ducks its head, the eyes two globes dangling from the lighting fixture, the mouth smiling or smirking, obliterated by darkness.
Things are hungry at night. This is when animals stalk their prey. When fish sleep with open eyes. When fevers rise. When a sheer drop may be just ahead, and there is black ice on the highway.
For children, the metaphor exists, not the simile, and at night they see what we see, without dreaming. How interesting to always see potentiaclass="underline" the thing transformed, before it is even understood.