Still, some nights when they feel secure in their presence, and are overjoyed and thrilled, or just need to talk, they pour looping yodels for hours from the cliffs in the game park and from that end of the road where Kit Tatro lives. Elsie hears them first, wavering above the Bach, and punches the pause button on the CD player’s remote control. If the howl persists we go outside to sit on the back porch and listen. In mid-September, as the nights and mornings are growing crisp and cool and the deer are retreating from the roads and orchards into the densest brush they can find, it seems to us that the music of the coydogs, as they are mistakenly called, is the music of all the broken and hunted creatures who survive and persist and will not be eliminated. For there they are, along with the ravens, destroyed and returned.
One night, almost a year and a half after changing the back door locks, we are sitting in wicker armchairs on the back screen porch, listening. Between coyote intervals, Elsie and I hear steps crunch down the cinders of the driveway and slap softly along the flagstone walk that rounds the corner of the house. Neither of us speaks a word, though I am astounded and disbelieving. We both know who it is, and also where he is headed. In addition, it is then that I know for certain that mother knew all about those visits to me in the night. Surely she would utter some startled challenge otherwise. There is a half moon out but the porch is in complete shadow, and Elsie and I are invisible. Kurt walks up the steps, the screen door whines softly open. He enters the porch and steps toward the door with the changed lock. The instant I realize that he is going to try the door I feel a pang of sympathy for him and scrape my foot on the painted floorboards. He freezes.
“Sit down, please sit down,” I say. “Elsie and I are listening to the coyotes before we turn in.”
He gropes for a chair, lowers himself into it right next to me. Krahe has quick social reflexes. Without revealing a trace of embarrassment and without acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation, he begins a polite conversation. Elsie answers his questions about her health in more detail than he probably wishes, but she is being game about the whole thing.
I have seen Kurt from time to time at a distance and even said hello to him once at the general store, beneath the snarling glass-eyed head. After I changed the lock, I stopped answering Kurt’s calls. To find that he has, perhaps, been intermittently trying the back door is disturbing to me, and also touching. He sits so close in the dark, perhaps without knowing exactly my position, that the warmth his body sheds drifts along my skin.
“What have you been doing?” It is a light conversational question asked in a tone of voice that makes it into a deep and unanswerable query. What have I been doing?
“Lately?” I suppose my voice is wary.
“In general.”
“We have a lot to do,” I say, although things have actually been slow.
“People die.”
“It’s not only death,” says Elsie. “Sometimes people want to downsize, dramatically. Or they move into assisted living.”
“Assisted living. Beistehendsleben. That sounds better.”
“I’m turning in,” Elsie says, and then she gets up and walks into the house. I try to rise, too, but Kurt puts his hand on my arm (he knows exactly where I am) and says, “Don’t go.”
I am a nondescript-looking person, dark hair, dark eyes, fair skin. A face that is neither flashy nor plain. Medium build, medium height. My size is always medium, my pants length regular. I favor neutral colors. Medium heels. There is really nothing memorable or interesting or odd or certainly beautiful about me. So when Krahe touches me and I feel very suddenly that I am all of these things—odd, beautiful, interesting, drawn in color—it is very difficult. I sit back, his hard-palmed hand still on my arm. I am not capable of moving away. He speaks to me.
“I don’t understand it,” he says.
Outside in the dense black thicket of weeds and scrub that surrounds the mowed portion of the yard, a few hold-out fireflies pulse. Sometimes the wind takes them, scattering their lights. Beyond the tall grass the orchard weeps fruit. The branches of the old trees are loaded with tough little apples that the bears like. I’ve seen one on a dark afternoon, browsing there. Maybe there’s one now.
“Do bears come out at night?” I ask him. I can’t think of what to say, and he doesn’t answer. “Because I think there might be one in the orchard.”
“We never talked. You never answered your phone. You walked away from me.”
“I still don’t want to talk. There isn’t anything to say.”
“Of course there is, there is a lot to say. Why did you do it?”
“I had to do it.”
“Listen, I have not gone to a woman since you locked your door on me. I have been waiting; I work with stone. I know how to wait, but tonight I couldn’t help myself.”
His voice is so raw I put my hands over my eyes. I am silent, paging through my thoughts like a diary, knowing that anything I say will be wrong. Or worse than wrong. I am so afraid that my hand shakes and I know my voice would quiver if I spoke out loud. The last crickets in the grass are seething and sighing, and I listen to them, clinging to my silence with desperation now, waiting for him to leave. He stirs and stretches his arm out and touches mine. I close my eyes and a kind of brilliance is wheeling there, a green, blazing circle. We sit together for a long time, not talking, not saying anything. At last, Kurt tells me things I’ve heard before. Other men have said these things to me. It is almost a relief to hear them. His voice floats up in the dark, disembodied, talking and talking: I am cold. I am strange. I have abandoned him. I have hurt him. I begin answering by rote, apologizing, but not explaining. We fill a crack with words that freezes and becomes a rift that keeps widening until a gulf filled with words plunges down between us. After that we just kept throwing our words into the pit. I know there must be better ways, forms of communication that work, ways that women manage to stay with men and men with women. But what are they, what can they be, other than words? The words collect between us until the coyotes start up. Then we fall quiet, sit there together, and he holds my hand. It seems to me that we are closer, listening to that unknown language pouring out of unknown heart, than we were when we tried to exchange our words. And maybe even closer still after the coyotes are finished, when he does not try to sleep with me, but leaves. And closest of all when I go inside, close the door behind me, bolt it, and walk up the stairs alone.
I sleep so heavily that I forget where I am in the morning and for a few seconds I am oddly suspended. I could be anywhere, dead or still dreaming. But when I open my eyes I have the feeling that I’ve just returned from an unknown journey. My vision’s sharper and there is a newness to my familiar windows, the green pine tips outside, the thin light of autumn. My room is painted a pale cream color and for a few minutes I watch the light move through the tree branches outside and pool across the wall with its formal bookshelves stacked with year after year of journals, notebooks, diaries. Something about last night, despite the waste of words and my fear, has caused this surprised and secret calm.
Sipping thick coffee downstairs, I watch my mother carefully as she slices and chews the same dry toast she makes for herself every morning. This will be our routine every day until she dies, but she won’t take me with her, as in my childish wish. No, I’ll be left on this earth to make what I can of my own days.
“Let’s sell the business,” I say to her.