Animals We Are

by Valerie Brandy

  Ken leaned his crutches against the wall, motioning to the white cast around his foot. “Broke it on the fall. Water was too shallow. Knew as soon as my heel hit the bottom that something was wrong.”

  “We wanted to warn you, Zoe,” Sue said, playing with a tassel on the edge of her purse. “We talked it over for hours, trying to decide what the best thing to do was. We didn’t know where you were, how to find you—”

  “You did great,” I told her. “Really. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you.”

  “As soon as we got to the lodge, we shouted for them to call search and rescue. We came off like a couple of crazies, saying your names over and over, describing what you both look like, muttering about Logan. Wish we’d gotten to the lodge sooner, but the trip took longer than we thought it would, what with Ken’s broken foot…”

  The Hardingers stayed until the nurses kicked them out, but came again the next day, and the next day, and the next. Between the Hardingers, my Mom, and the medical staff, there was always someone in our small, curtained room, and Mike and I never felt truly alone during our stay at the hospital.

  Now— inside a car that feels too small, headed toward Silverlike— we’re on our own again, wearing too-big clothes that aren’t ours, trying to step back into lives that aren’t familiar. We drive in silence for the first thirty miles, watching the wild streak by, unbridled asphalt stark against the green backdrop, hinting at a destination yet reached and a talk to be had. Words don’t come to me, so I don’t say anything. Instead, I let the white lines click past, wishing I could see Mike’s feelings again, imagining red and purple thoughts dripping onto the steering wheel.

  Suddenly, the trees turn to buildings and the world is inhabited once more. Mike lets out a sigh, as if he’s been thinking this entire time, and the sudden density of our surroundings has made him remember there’s someone else in the car.

  “What a mess,” he says, eyes creased, hands tight on the wheel, mind still sorting through everything we left behind.

  “I have to ask you something,” I answer, making him look at me, taking his eyes off the road for just a second.

  I used to think a relationship was a question; one to be asked again and again, one that requires the asker to measure fangs and guess at the sharpness of teeth. But now—sitting in this car with Mike— feeling like I’ve met him in a thousand different lifetimes and am about to introduce myself again, I’m starting to think that a relationship is really just a series of introductions made over the course of a lifetime. Hello, how are you, I’m the new me. Are you the old you?

  “You can always ask me anything,” Mike says, eyes back on the sprawling asphalt.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s one thing I can’t ask you about.” My tone is smooth and two-sided, the vocal equivalent of a pair of scissors held wide open, ready for action. “It’s an unspoken rule.”

  “Who made the rule?” Mike asks.

  “Both of us. You set it up early on, and I agreed to it every day after that,” I pause, trying to find a way to explain the new me. “But I’m not that person anymore. I can’t keep seeing you without knowing everything.”

  Mike chews on the inside of his cheek, but he doesn’t get mad. Instead, he turns the heater down and closes the vents, as if preparing to be interrogated by a police officer with a spotlight. “Well then,” he says, careful. “Let’s break the rule. Ask me the thing you think you can’t ask.”

  “What really happened between you and Cassandra?”

  There’s a long silence before Mike answers, and when he does speak, all he says is, “I’m going to need a piece of pie first.”

  We pull over at the next twenty-four-hour diner we stumble on. It’s the kind of place where the mugs don’t match, and the waitresses still wear heels, and there’s a tired sort of fatigue clinging to the air, like the diner itself would like to be euthanized, if only the owners would just-let-go-already. We pick a booth in the corner, sliding over tomato-red seats upholstered in a plastic-like fabric, fraying at the corners, patches revealing the foam interior in the most unfortunate spots. We settle in, and, after ordering a slice of pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee— black— Mike shows me the worst of him.

  ***

  Relationships are made of space, big empty caverns waiting for two people to fill the gaps, empty rooms in a large tract home, begging for clutter, yearning for kitsch. A partnership is an invisible vacuum, an empty stomach longing for the feeling of fullness. Mike stirs his coffee, peering into it as he tries to explain the phenomenon, searching liquid oil for the right words.

  “Our entire relationship was about me, not her,” he says, scratching the scruff on his chin. “We knew she had a problem. It was always there— but they were treating it. She had her family in San Francisco. Friends. Her entire life. She was stable. But I had always wanted to start my furniture business in LA, to get a warehouse in downtown, source materials cheaper. I would make pieces for the rich and famous, Cass and I would get a beautiful place on the West Side. I had this idea— this vision— to build a home there.”

  He picks the mug off the table, swirling its contents around like someone reading tea leaves, divining the future.

  “What I didn’t understand is that when you love someone, they become home, and whatever you make, you make together.”

  He glances up at me, looking for some reaction, but I don’t give him one. Instead, I swirl my fork in the whipped cream on the apple-pie I’m not eating, spreading it around the plate to make it look like I’ve had some.

  “If life was a house, I’d already built it, without asking Cass what she wanted. I picked out the shutters and the doors. I chose the floors and the windows. And then I expected her to move into it. I was young, and stupid, and when it came time to head for L.A., I packed her up like just another thing I was taking with me.”

  “Did she tell you she didn’t want to move?” I try to ask it in a way that doesn’t sound judgmental, but not because I’m not judging him— only because I want the truth, and making him feel safe is the best way to get it.

  Mike folds his napkin into squares, an origami shape shifter, part bird, part triangle.

  “She did. I think she knew she wasn’t going to fare well away from everything that kept her in the right head space. If I’m being honest, I probably knew that too, on some level. But I—” he clears his throat, ashamed, a sign he’s about to tell me the worst part. “I didn’t care. I didn’t make room for her. Our relationship was ninety percent me, and what I wanted, and Cass let me do it because…” a waitress with permed, red hair walks by, and Mike waits for her to be out of earshot before finishing, “… because I told her we’d have to break up, if she wouldn’t move with me.”

  “Did you love her?”

  Mike pushes his plate to the side, sending crumbs over the smooth surface of our table.

  “I loved her, but I wasn’t very good at love. I don’t have a family, Zoe,” he makes eye contact with me for the first time since we’ve sat down, and the pain there makes me want to leap across the table and tell him we don’t have to talk about this, not now, not ever. But I don’t, because I deserve the truth.

  “You know how it is, with my aunt and uncle, and I act like it’s not a problem but it bothers me— it bothers me more than I let on. When I met Cass, I was nineteen. We got through college together, and when school was over I felt like an adult orphan with no idea what to do. I set my mind on a plan for my life, and was too scared to deviate from it because it was the only thing that made me feel like I knew what I was doing. All I cared about was making the fear going away. Do you know what I mean? The fear— the vague kind that keeps you up at night even when there’s no good reason for it? It’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s the idea that I’ll die alone, an old man, with no one in this world who cares whether I’m here or not.”

  Yes, I think. I’m familiar with that one.


  “It was that fear,” Mike continues, “that caused me to pressure Cass into the life I imagined. I wanted my vision, exactly as I saw it, but I wanted it with her because I was just out of school, and scared shitless to try to take on the world by myself. A less selfish person— a man, not a kid— would have moved on his own, but that wasn’t me, back then,” he looks up again, searching my face for some reaction, but I don’t give him one.

  “We moved to L.A., and I started my business. Cass was fine, for the first couple of months, but then the distance got to her. She didn’t know anyone in the city, and I wasn’t—” he stirs his coffee again, seeking more answers, “— I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been. I didn’t help her make friends. I didn’t help her find a new Doctor. I expected her to give up her entire life, move into mine, and be completely fine. We were so young, we weren’t equipped. As the months went on, her behavior got more erratic. She’d have these episodes. Once, I came home and she’d taken all the kitchen cabinets off their hinges. Just unscrewed them for no reason at all. Every other week a window would be broken, and she’d claim someone threw a rock at it, that people were after us. I begged her to let me call her parents, but they didn’t support her moving with me in the first place, and when she didn’t listen it caused so much tension that we were basically on our own. We were alone, and she was combusting from the inside out.”

  “What did you do?” I ask, stacking my plate on top of his— a signal for the waitress to take it. I’ve done a fair job smearing the pie around, and it looks like I at least made an effort.

  “We went on that way for a few years,” Mike answers, sipping his coffee even though it has to be cold by now.

  “I got older, and wiser. I tried to get her help, and sometimes we’d go months without an episode. It wasn’t all bad. There was a lot of love between us. At one point— when I realized she might never get better— I told her we should move back to San Fransisco and try to start again there, together. But she wouldn’t budge. She never told me why, but I think it had something to with fear of change. She’d already made a move once, and it completely untethered her. Facing a second was too much.”

  “What made you break-up?”

  “It was a car accident,” Mike downs the last of his cold coffee. “Cass was driving, and she had an episode. She took us from a side-street, heading the wrong way down a freeway exit, going sixty miles an hour against four lanes of traffic. We slammed into a barrier. It’s a miracle we didn’t kill someone.”

  “That’s why you’re such a careful driver.”

  Mike nods. “After that, I realized I wasn’t doing her any good, that I’d only stayed with her so long to appease my own guilt. I was still being selfish, only in a different way. We broke up. Her parents came back into the picture— even got her to move back up North a couple times— but without fail, it happens again. She goes off her meds, comes straight back to L.A. and tries to pick up where we left off. It’s ironic, that I pushed her into a life she didn’t want, and now she won’t let it go.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the move. Maybe she would have been the same,” I say, thinking aloud, “If you’d stayed in San Fransisco and never left.”

  Mike gives me a sad smile before pushing his mug to the side of the table, the final addition to our collection of dirty dishes, yet to be picked up any one of the five bored waitresses milling around the diner.

  “I used to lie to myself and say the same thing, but there’s a truth here, Zoe, and it’s one I took ownership of the day Cass and I broke up. I made someone I loved uproot her entire life, even though I knew she wasn’t completely stable. I knew she wasn’t well, and instead of doing what was best for her, I pressured her into what I wanted, because I was afraid to be alone.”

  Finally, a waitress stops at our table, her silver hair pinned back in a bun. “Get you guys anything else?” she asks before taking our plates, barely giving us time to shake our heads.

  “And that’s it,” Mike says once she’s gone. The table looks empty without plates, the distance between us wide when not interrupted by mugs and napkins, forks and knives. “Now you know everything. I could tell you I’m not that person anymore, but I’m not sure you’d believe me. Maybe, if I’m lucky, you’ll let me show you who I am, every day, in small pieces, until one day you don’t have to ask anymore.”

  Mike waits, letting the silence sit heavy on my shoulders as I think about empty rooms, and the space we take up, and the line where needs end and love begins.

  We’ve introduced ourselves again, meeting each other all over, and now I have to decide if I like this stranger, this new version of Mike, fractured and damaged, not a princess in a field but an ogre just like me.

  A few seconds pass, and then I’m on my feet, and I’m stepping out of the booth, walking over to Mike’s side and holding out my hand.

  He shakes it, and we’re officially starting over, the two of us brand-new and broken all at the same time.

  ***

  There’s a kind of love story— you’ve heard it before— where the princess is trapped in a castle, and the prince comes to save her. She knows at once he’s the one, and they live happily ever after.

  Ours is not that kind of love story.

  In our story, two ogres meet at separate ends of a bridge, each carrying ratty old suitcases, heavy with fears. They wait on either end, wondering if it’s safe to cross, inching forward a little bit each day, until one day they meet in the middle, and build a home there.

  When we get back to Silverlake, Mike and I take inventory, looking not just at where we’ve been, but where we’re going. We re-decorate the house. Mike builds us a new bookshelf, and two coffee tables for either side of the couch. He’s careful to make sure they’re the same size, and he asks me what color stain I want. I paint the accent wall in the living room orange. We plant new flowers.

  In each moment, we pay attention to the space in the relationship; who chooses where we go for dinner, what show to watch that night, how much of the vacuum we fill with ourselves. Logan was wrong about love. It does exist, and not because of chemicals, or biology, but because we were made to find each other, to seek the only permanent thing in a world of impermanence.

  Love isn’t perfect— it’s marred and a little unsteady, just like the people who feel it— but it’s there. It’s only perfect when we get it from the Great Everything, and in the meantime we all just stumble along, doing our best to love others while meeting ourselves all over again, in diners and in forests, in mirrors and in enemies.

  Little by little, I stop looking for fangs in Mike’s mouth, because something has changed inside me. My time in the wild reminded me that I have my own claws, my own teeth.

  I’ve spent so many years looking for the animal in others— a glimpse of a tail, a growl in the night— that I forgot about my own power, the piece of me that defends, the part that bites back.

  There will always be space for me in this home, because I require it. I’ve found my fangs again. And if, one day, I find myself shoved into a corner— by Mike or anyone else— I’ll flex my claws and leave. Not because I don’t love him— I will always love him— but because I love me, too. The animal I was taught to hide has emerged in full, and her favorite refrain is, “I want, I need, I must have.”

  In the darkness of night, my laptop glowing in time with Mike’s snores, I search for wolves in a Google deep dive. The EMT we met was right: there are no wolves in Yosemite. I keep reading about them anyway, and learn that at least one part of my encounter with the wolves was real: the idea of an alpha male is a myth, nothing more. Wolves live in pairs, in equal partnerships, in families. They lean on each other to make sense of the wild.

  One day, when we’re putting new curtains up, it suddenly occurs to me that if I am a wolf, Mike must be something too. “You’re a golden-retriever,” I tell him, without explaining it at all.

  “Yes,” he says. “That sounds about right.”

  When Mike asks me to ma
rry him— pulling the ring from his worn-out pack, one of three he took to Yosemite— it’s easy to say yes.

  Mike is a golden-retriever; one who sees the best in others, but the worst in himself. I am a wolf; aloof, but willing to go to the ends of the Earth for the people I love. Together, we make a rag-tag pack, different, but committed, ready to meet each other again and again, always making sure we know one another, strangers and partners all at the same time.

  The gap between us changes each day— varying in size from moment to moment— but whether it’s big or small, we’ve learned how to cross it, what bridges to build.

  I’m not afraid to marry Mike, because now I know where the teeth are hiding, where the tails are twitching.

  Now, I know what kind of animals we are.

  23

  Cassandra

  My hands are holding pig-meat when the story comes on the news: Mike’s face projected on the little TV screen in my kitchen.

  My apartment is a one-bed, one bath, carpeted, cock-roach-ridden mess in Van Nuys. The only nice thing about it is that I’ve put a small television set in every room. It makes me feel like there’s another person around the apartment, even when there isn’t. “Cassandra,” I’ll say out loud, liking the way my own name tastes in my mouth, “it’s important for a home to have a busy feeling.” It’s my go-to excuse for watching too much TV.

  The toaster jumps right when the morning show pops on. It’s one of those exhibitionist talk shows that combines the most horrific events of the week with a panel discussion by people who are totally unqualified to comment. My hands stop pulling bacon from the pan when his face appears; Mike has that affect on me.