The next night, I did the same, and the night after that, and the night after that, and so on for a week, and then two weeks, and then a month, each night expecting to find them all dead in their cages, or half of them dead, and some number of them stolen away, but over the next month, they only seemed to grow stronger, and I wondered if maybe they were getting well and if one day they would be well enough that I could set them loose.
You could say, too, that over time I became attached to these animals. Not to all of them, but to enough of them that on occasion I had to stop myself from giving a certain squirrel or a certain pigeon a name, and that on other occasions, unable to stop myself from naming a raccoon, say, I had to stop from speaking that name aloud, from trying to scratch it behind its ears, had to stop myself from thinking of them as pets or friends.
You could also say that being in that house, spending time there, more time than was even necessary, was a release to me. That the house, despite the smell and despite the noise, or because of these things, became a place I often wanted to return to, became the place I thought of when I was at our home, when I was home with Wendy.
Wendy hadn’t gotten better, or, rather, she would begin to feel better, gaining her strength and her color, and then fall back into whatever sickness had taken hold of her. For a time, I worried that she had contracted something chronic and incurable, potentially contagious, but then the idea that she wasn’t sick, that she was pregnant, began to sprout between us, though this possibility was a thing we never directly spoke to. Instead we ruled out, over and over again, the things it couldn’t be.
“Not syphilis,” she said.
“Oh, no, certainly not that. I think the symptoms are all wrong.”
“Heart palpitations, perhaps?”
“Let me check my Physician’s Desk Reference,” I said, and she smiled weakly.
“I don’t suppose you’ve fallen prey to something so silly as the flu. Or mono?”
“If I have mono, it’s certainly all your fault.”
“Well, then, no, I suppose it must be malaria. Or diphtheria.”
And after a while, this conversation, like the others before it, came to an uncomfortable, winded end, the two of us having painted ourselves into a corner, the fact that she must be pregnant soon the only idea left to us and still the only idea neither of us wanted to verbalize.
Unsettled by this and what to do about it, I often left our house and Wendy in it, after she had fallen into a restless sleep or shuffled herself quietly into a corner to let herself wallow in nausea. I walked up and down the streets of our neighborhood, wondering who if anyone lived in these houses around us, surprised sometimes to see a light on in a living room or a kitchen or on the porch, having forgotten that there were people around us who had their own lives, who lived in these run-down houses, but with furniture and appliances and families. Then, eventually, I would find myself back at the animal house, and there sit for hours with one or two of the animals set free from their cages and allowed to hesitantly sniff out a safe perimeter around the other cages. On occasion, I would lure one into my lap with a piece of food, some special treat, but mostly I just sat there alone and quiet and watched the animals sleep or turn about in their cages, or I would close my eyes and go to sleep myself, and soon I began to consider possible outcomes for us, the consequences of a pregnant Wendy, a new life brought into our routine, and I began to make plans, vague and potentially unworkable plans, but regardless, through this I came to feel certain about a burgeoning and sustainable new life for us, for our small piece of this world. Look, I would think to myself, if you can take care of these animals — and not just you, but Wendy, too — if you and Wendy can take care of these animals, how much harder is a child? And I would start to imagine this life, Wendy and myself and some faceless, sexless person bundled to one of our backs as we tended these animals and as we moved through our days together, but I never got very far with these images, and soon, no matter where I was, with Wendy at home, or wandering aimlessly through the streets, or at the animal house, I felt agitated and jittery and unhappy, so that when the thing came back, I at first welcomed the distraction.
Once it returned, though, the thing, which I only once saw the barest glimpse of, made short work of all I had done.
Feeling emboldened or strong or simply desperate, it went first for the dogs in the backyard. I like to think that I heard them howl that night they were killed. At some point in the night, I woke with a start, unsure of where I was or why I was there, and then turned to see Wendy next to me, and then slowly settled myself back into a tense and restless sleep, but it was just as likely a foul dream or thoughts of pregnancy that woke me. After I found the dogs, or, rather, their cages, mangled and empty, I knew it was back and I set to work on the house.
I boarded the windows. I boarded all but the front door. I stood on the roof and patched whatever holes I could find. I found steel wool under one of the bathroom sinks and began to stuff it into every open space. I searched the basement. I searched the attic. Closed every entry I could find. Still it found its way inside and stole next the nutrias and then the raccoon. Soon, I noticed a pattern — attack, rest two nights, attack, rest three nights, then attack again, and with each successive raid on our house, it would steal more. No amount of preparedness, it seemed, protected the house. The thing bored holes into the walls and dug underneath the house and found weak spots and exploited them. So I changed tactics and waited for it. There were days and nights I spent crouched outside the house, hiding, hoping to catch the monster in the act. I had found a knife, a kitchen knife, the blade dulled but its point still sharp, sharp enough. I waited and I consoled the animals it left behind and I cleaned up after it had done whatever damage it could attend to while I was gone or even as I sat outside waiting for it to arrive.
During that time, I dreamt about the animals in their cages, and sometimes I dreamt about the baby, and these were disturbing dreams, but not so disturbing as those nights my dreams bled one into the other and I dreamt that either the baby was the monster terrorizing Wendy’s animals or that the baby was one of the animals, a weak and wasted thing living in one of those cages waiting for death — natural or violent — to come for it. And then there were times when I was inside the dreams, too, and these were the worst of them, though not when in the dream I was the monster or when I was my own child trapped inside that cage, or even when I was one of the other animals bearing witness to the massacre of my child, fearful of my own death, which was surely forthcoming, but when I was myself, when I wasn’t anything or anyone more frightening or disturbing than myself, and it was me who unlocked the door to the house and ushered the beast inside.