30
My car had no trouble finding the town house development and the woods behind it, driving there as if of its own volition. When I arrived, two rotting wooden posts flanked a newer metal gate, secured by a chain, which blocked my entry. So I put the Volvo in Reverse, rammed down one of the posts, and drove right up to the edge of the trees.
As I made my way into the woods I saw nothing of the lush landscape that had welcomed us barely months before. The trees jutted from the ground like dead sticks, not expansive and multicolored as they had been the day Zach brought me here. Where the crackling leaves had lain there was only a dry, dusty mulch, and the glint of sun through the trees was obscured by the mottled gray sky. Here was the tree he had leaned against, his hands weary as they rubbed his face, worn down by the immensity of his desire. Here was the patch of ground where I knelt above him, offering him a last chance to deny me before the jagged teeth of his zipper bit into the flesh of my inner thigh, before his indulgent grin tricked me into believing he could offer consent as competently as he offered pleasure.
I leaned back against that same tree and squinted up at the tangle of branches. The bark felt rough through my thin cotton shirt, but the panorama of the forest, in all its rotting loveliness, was still enchanting in its way. I dug into my purse for a small bottle I kept there, opened it, and swallowed a few of Russ’s Nembutal pills. The police had seized all the large bottles I had pointed out to them, but I still carried quite a lot in my purse, for reasons that were now irrelevant. I shook a few more into my hand and looked into the middle distance. Not far away there lay a swamp I had never noticed before. The sight of it made my heart lift a little. A body of water would be a good place to be when I fell asleep. I could vanish utterly, pulled back into the earth without a sound or a sign, and with no chance at all of waking.
I walked ahead a little ways and stepped into the swamp. The cold water squelched into my shoes. I bit my lip, but pressed on. Ankles, shins. The mud sucked my shoes from my feet, so I let them go. My toes, already adjusted to the temperature, shocked to the smooth, enveloping grasp of the mud. At the center of the mire I fell to my knees, steeling myself against the shock of the cold. I swallowed the pills that remained in my palm, then lowered my hand into the water to steady my balance against the shifting ground. My fingers came up covered in green and gray, like a swamp creature.
A flash of colored light in the distance caught my eye. It was a police car—no, two—investigating my car at the edge of the forest. I sighed deeply and sat back on my heels. Very soon, they would come into the woods and find me. I had no time to die. They would take me home, or more likely to a psychiatric ward, where I would play sane and soon be sent home with a bottle of Prozac. It would buy me just enough time for the gloom to pass and anger to set in, and I would decide it was better to stay alive. And alive, I was a menace. I had done bad things, and they weren’t nearly as bad as the things I had left to do.
The officers shone their flashlights into the woods: two discs of pale yellow light, like the centers of daffodils bobbing under a child’s hand. From the very bottom of my spirit I wished for only one thing—to speak to Bobbie now, to hear her speak the sorry truths about my dirty heart, to coax me into doing the right thing. But I knew Bobbie was not here to speak with, and if she had been she would have told me to use my liar’s talents for the good of alclass="underline" to tell the story without embellishment and animation, so the listener’s mind can hear through the make-believe the sound of resonating truth.
Man is both a fallen god, and a god in the becoming.
With difficulty I rose from the dark water and trekked across the forest, my bare feet gathering leaf litter in their coat of mud. At the tree line the two officers looked up at me, their hands instinctively rising to their holsters.
I said, “I would like to confess to the murder of my husband.”
In the dark bedroom Zach’s mother appeared a bent black shape on the sheet, her body curved in a Z around the quilt. Rhianne’s inclined head was a shadow, hair sticking from her ponytail like raveled black threads, her whispers ghostlike.
Zach sat on a chair in the far corner, his usual place when Rhianne was present, a silent watcher. His father, on his knees beside the bed, clutched his mother’s hand and whispered earnestly in a reassuring baritone. If Zach slipped out, no one would have blamed him. The normally cool room was downright hot, the thermostat kicked up to eighty-six degrees, and his mother wore a black athletic bra and nothing else, although at the moment her body lay entwined in the straining sheet. Rhianne’s usually warm and easygoing manner toward Zach was gone, replaced with an edgy impatience that made Zach suspect she was angry at him, or secretly expecting something to go wrong.
But he was determined to be present. This was his sister, yes, but for some other, less explainable reason he felt obligated. It seemed a reckoning, to sit and observe helplessly this other side of passion, to watch how nature accounted for the pleasure. After all his indulgences, he owed himself that much.
Despite the whispering, nothing in that room was quiet; specifically, nothing about his mother. Fighting through what Rhianne called transition, she groaned and sobbed, took great gulps of air, then clutched the corner of the pillow to her face and sobbed even more. Her ankles strained, pulling the sheet tight between them. The white of her face and dark of her hair flashed strobelike as she twisted against the pillow.
Zach observed, not for the first time, that it looked disconcertingly like orgasm, this business of labor. The momentum of moans, the forgetting of breath, the pinpoints of sweat—at the crux he could not help calling forth images of Judy and of Fairen, their open mouths, the tendons in their necks, the wild hair. It was as though pleasure and pain were not a spectrum but a wheel, and when a woman pushed past one end or fell back through the other side, she would find herself in the state of his mother. Into his mind flashed a quote from her studio chalkboard: The end of birth is death; the end of death is birth. Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable.
She screamed—a long, impossibly deep, animal sound—and swelled in a curl around the balled quilt. Rhianne waved a hand urgently, and Zach’s father climbed onto the bed and wound himself behind his wife. As he turned himself into a sort of seatback for her, Rhianne moved to the front of things, and Zach knew it was almost over. He unfolded himself from the chair and came forward, touching the tall bedpost, peering over Rhianne’s shoulder.
“Can you see from there?” Rhianne asked him, and as he nodded, his mother grimaced and groaned and arched back against his father. Rhianne laid a hand intimately on the inside of her thigh and said, “Shhh, there, you’re close now, so close.” His mother gritted her teeth, the muscles in her legs tensing and jumping, and Zach recalled Judy telling him Scott had been born at home, doubtless in a scene much like this one. Spontaneously he wondered how he could ever have presumed to know her, this woman who had traveled through time and pain in ways that seemed impossibly distant to him. She had borne Scott in her own bed, her darkly polished sleigh bed, and with him the chain of time that would bring Zach to that same place eighteen years later, his knees planted where her hips had been.
With that, his sister’s fuzzy head burst forth into the world in a gush of water, mouth agape, fat limbs flailing, streaked in blood and greeted with their mother’s sudden turnabout laughter. And this, Zach thought, was the natural order, indeed: love everywhere, and also, a terrible mess.