by Abi Maxwell
“We couldn’t have anyway,” he says. “Henrietta. Look at me.”
Very slowly she turns her head again. The leaves crunch beneath her hair and she can feel a stick snap. She knows there must be ants on her, but she has trained herself to be still, to not reach for any itch she feels.
There, she allows herself to look at him. It has been one week since her mother took her to the doctor in Boston. One week since she lay on that cold table and told them simply that she didn’t want to do this. That she wanted to raise her child. One week since her mother held her hand so tightly that it bent the cheap clatter ring she wore on her ring finger, the one that Kaus had bought for her at one of those little stands in the middle of the mall a few towns over.
“Did you steal it?” she had asked him caustically when he gave it to her, then she noticed his red cheeks, the embarrassment he felt as he dropped it into her hand. She noticed the sincerity of his gesture.
“I won’t let you ruin your life,” her mother had said, and squeezed Henrietta’s fingers so hard that months later, when she tried to remove the ring, she would have to pry it off.
“Did I ruin your life?” Henrietta had snapped back at her mother as she lay there on the table, legs splayed open. But then she had closed her eyes, ridding off the possibility that her mother would answer. That her mother would say, Yes. Yes, you did.
Just then the door opened and a nurse came in and placed her hand on Henrietta’s hair. Henrietta opened her eyes wide and said clearly, “I don’t want to do this.”
“Shhhhh,” the nurse said. “There, now.”
And so she did what Kaus had told her to do when something hurt. To focus herself right out of existence. To find one spot, one feeling, and pour all of her consciousness into it. The spot of cold metal beneath her pinkie finger on her left hand, the spot that the sheet had somehow failed to cover. She let that spot exist and nothing else. She released herself into it until she slipped right through, into the other side. No time passed and it was over.
“What would we have done?” Kaus asks, there on the floor of The Den. “Henrietta, where would we have lived?”
She still doesn’t speak. She knows that he knows that this is punishment. She hadn’t told him about it, not any of it. That she had been pregnant, that she had wanted to keep it, that she had told her parents, that they had made her terminate it. He had called and called and she had avoided his calls until she could no longer. Until she felt that only he would know her, only he would understand what she felt now. Now, such shame, such regret at not telling him before. But then when she had said it, had opened her mouth and let it all come out as quickly as it could, he had yelled at her. Had said, “Fuck, Henrietta! Fuck!” as though it had been her fault. Which, perhaps, it had. She had not been tied down. She could have sat up. She could have run.
An hour or so later, though, he is calm. She has made him this way, maybe, with her absolute silence. Only just now, this very second, does she finally look him in the eyes.
“Anyway,” she says. “You cheated. You’re a rotten piece of shit.”
He doesn’t look away, doesn’t get angry. He simply moves his hand from her empty belly to her face and says, “Have you lost your mind?”
She explains. After their first night, her first time, the night in the barn. The next morning. She had gone to his house and he hadn’t been there, no one had been. She had gone to the trestle. The other girls had laughed right at her, then, seeing her face, had offered her a cigarette. At least he liked you for a little while, they had said. Anyway, we saw him with Kristi this morning, so you might as well get over it.
“They said that?” he asks her, there in The Den. “Why would they say that? Why didn’t you tell me?”
* * *
—
Henrietta comes to this moment often in her new life, nearly twenty years later. All these years she has come to it over and over again as she sits with her son in the woods on the edge of a trail, or as she lies on the banks of a river. Even though the forest floor in Montana is so dry, even though its scent is so piney, so unlike that sweet, fecund smell of The Den, still it sends her right back there, lying next to Kaus. It is like a dream, but of course she is awake when she enters it. Of the thirty-three years of her life she had known him for four months, maybe five. She had not known him at all. But then she had, completely. Jane, her own sister, Henrietta had never been able to tell if she was lying or not. About the fire, for instance. Had Jane really seen him in the glow of the flames? How could she have seen him so clearly, so surely that she felt she could just announce it like that, without reservation? She had surely known what it would mean for him, to say that.
Before the fire, Henrietta had searched for him. That afternoon they had said goodbye in The Den, she had eaten dinner with her family and then retreated to her room, and then, after they had all gone to sleep, she had snuck back out and walked to his house and just stood there, looking up at his window, willing him to come see her. It was late at night but early for him. Usually he had a light on, but just then his entire house had been dark and still. So had he even been home? Or had he been at her house, waiting for her just as she was waiting for him? Or—she had to ask herself—was it possible that he had gone home that evening and realized his anger and then returned to the barn to punish her parents for his lost child in the worst way he could imagine?
But he wouldn’t have done that. He could not have. Anyway, why had Jane said another word first? Why coyote and not Kaus?
Kaus, she knew he was telling the truth. Knew as they lay there together in The Den that he had not cheated, that he would not, that he loved Henrietta, that he would not leave her.
“I’m sorry,” she says in the dream. Had she said it in reality? Sometimes she imagines there is a way to slip back into that time. To float above it and observe every word, every moment, every turn. Which turns led to her future? All of them? And which might she have changed, if she could? “I should have just run away,” she says on the floor of The Den, just hours before the barn burns to the ground.
“No,” Kaus says. “I would have missed you too much.”
Jane
“WE’LL BE an hour away, maybe two,” my father said to me, as though I was still a child. But I was in my twenties by then. I had graduated college; I had taken care of myself, somewhat. We were in the kitchen when he said this. They had called me down from my bedroom. My father had made a dinner of waffles and eggs, which had been a favorite of mine since childhood. When I saw that, right away I suspected something.
The house had been paid off for years, my parents said. I would only have to worry about the taxes and upkeep. They told me I had nothing to be afraid of.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Will you rent a place? Where will dad work?”
“Your father already found a job,” my mother told me. And then to my father: “Show her.”
“We’ll take you this weekend,” he said, and lay before me photographs of the small cottage they had bought on the coast.
“We didn’t want to worry you before we were sure,” my mother said, and it struck me then just how fragile they must have believed I was. I would not let on that they were right.
“Great,” I said. “It looks great.” And just like that, my parents packed for a life I never would have expected them to live. The air in their new town is always wet and salty. One row of cottages separates them from the coastline, but you can see a square of ocean from the living room window. It’s a ghost town in winter and full of fancy out-of-staters in summer, and it’s the kind of place I would have thought they’d loathe, but they have their own life there, and they seem to enjoy it. The cottage is a tiny place, less than eight hundred square feet, but since it’s right near the ocean the only reason they could afford it was because it was liable to fall over. They are fixing it up. Main Street is close by, and my f
ather works there, at a French restaurant, while my mother paints in the kitchen. She hangs her artwork up now, too, enough to cover all the walls. She hangs it heedlessly, with no attention to height or alignment, but it looks artful in the way that everything she does looks. The paintings themselves are an odd mix—not together, but each individual painting. They are pictures of our home—our field, our woods, now and then an unnamed yet decidedly New England building. In that sense they are comforting. But there is a trick of light to them. When my sister and I were children, our mother used to say she liked the Romantics best. Henrietta and I imagined that meant she was up in her studio painting some great love affair that had escaped her own life. It wasn’t until college that I saw how wrong we had been. The paintings are dark, but somehow, within them, there’s some untraceable source of light that makes the whole of them glow. Walking in and seeing them for the first time, I felt cheated. Why hadn’t she shown me these before? Why hadn’t she told me that she saw our land as I do?
It wasn’t long after they moved that I began swimming. In the late nineties a little development was built up the road from my house, a maze of roads peppered with A-frame-style houses for people who like to come to this area and ski, and they also put a little hotel up there, where I swim laps. The pool is long and wide, and I am almost always alone in it. The eastern wall of the pool room is floor-to-ceiling glass that faces a downward slope of woods, and the first floor of the pool room’s interior wall is typical enough—white concrete, doors to the locker rooms—but above that, the wall becomes a row of windows that looks right into the hotel’s restaurant, so diners can watch swimmers below. It is an odd arrangement. Back then I would swim at four o’clock every day, and frequently as I swam a man sat up there, watching. Not eating, from what I could tell. I assumed he was a worker, perhaps the owner, sitting in his empty restaurant, looking at his nearly empty pool, contemplating his failed venture.
Before my parents left, it was they who always grocery shopped. Twenty-five years, and for the most part I had never had to perform the simple task of planning my food, of restocking my toilet paper and dish soap. Once they were gone I found that I was not so good at it. Frequently I would be left with eggs or a bowl of cereal for dinner. So it was that one night, after swimming, I decided to go up to that empty restaurant and see what they were serving. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would typically do, but I liked the idea of it, of feeling unknown and capable. In the wake of my parents leaving, I had resolved to be brave.
I ordered a hamburger and french fries and even a soda. The waitress delivered it to me, and just as she began to ask if there was anything else I might like, a short, dark-haired, middle-aged woman walked in, and my waitress said, “Excuse me,” and then in a little whisper, “New hotel manager.”
I must have been eating as I stared. I looked down and suddenly all but a bite of my burger was gone. I knew exactly who it was before she approached my table. She had sold the house years ago, after a divorce, and I knew from my father that, strangely, she had bought a smaller house in town rather than returning to the city, but I had never seen her around.
“How is everything?” she asked, indicating the food.
“Les,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” she said, and then she lowered the glasses that sat atop her head. “Oh, my,” she said.
“Jane,” I said.
“Of course I remember. Jane. How are you?” She seemed nervous, from my view. Was it because of what her husband had done to, or with, my sister? Which was, exactly, what? For years I had imagined their tryst. Had Les imagined it, too? Or was she nervous about the money? They had never said a word about it, and that fact had sealed for me the impression that they had it by some illegal means. “How are your parents?” she asked, her voice unnaturally loud.
“They’ve moved,” I said absently.
“And you?”
“I stayed,” I said, and then realized that had not been her meaning. She had again meant to ask how I was. But how to answer that question? I had always seen my sister’s disappearance as a series of dominos falling, with Les’s husband—her ex-husband—standing there to ensure that final, definitive fall.
“And Henrietta?” Les asked. She looked the same, older but somehow better than I had remembered. Maybe not so tired. I should have asked about her girls, but I did not. I pictured them off to some fancy college, one that meant their mother could no longer live off checks from her ex-husband alone, that she had to take this job. Though maybe she worked because she liked it.
I said, “Excuse me?”
“Your sister,” she said. “How is she? Did she ever come back to this area?”
Had she not asked that question, I might have just gone on in my timid way. But that question—its casual air, its suggestion that my sister had done nothing but simply gone away—made me fierce. I looked right at her, the way my mother—or Henrietta—would have, and with all the hatred I could muster I said, “No.” And then, adjusting my voice to just the right false pitch, “And what about your husband?”
“Ex-husband,” she said quickly, with no reaction whatsoever to my tone. “The crook.”
I went red with guilt, imagining that briefcase. “Crook?” I asked innocently.
“And I thought we moved to the country for the fresh air,” she said. “Idiot.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look it up. It was all over the Boston papers. Dr. Jack Hennessey, the great embezzler,” she announced like a newscaster. She leaned over me as she said it, took my empty cup, and asked simply, “Would you like a refill?” and when I shook my head no she turned away, but then turned back. “I’m sorry about Henrietta,” she said lightly.
“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t look at her when I said it, couldn’t move my head or even my eyes. I just focused on breathing, on pulling air in and letting it back out. My father had told me to do this in those after-college years when I had returned to The Den and then week after week hallucinated my sister beneath every maple, at the edge of every stone wall, hallucinated her strolling down every single sidewalk. It had gone on and on until I no longer dared leave my room, scarcely dared open my eyes. I had called for my father. “Breathe,” he’d said. “The entire day. Just one breath after another,” he had said. He reminded me daily, until the visions that I had spent so many years warding off finally retreated back to their hiding place. I listened, I breathed, but never did I tell him the whole picture. That it was not only Henrietta who I’d seen. That inside every car that passed me on the highway, painted on the inside of my lids every time I closed my eyes, had also been Kaus, real and whole and innocent. Kaus and the treachery of what I had done.
When I had taken enough breaths I leaned over and pulled my wallet out from my gym bag. I found a twenty-dollar bill and placed it on the table. Les had disappeared into the kitchen. I steadied myself and walked out.
* * *
—
I didn’t have much in the way of expenses, as my parents had said. I found a seasonal job with a plant nursery and I learned to take care of the gardens around the house that had become my own. I learned to stake up the peonies and to separate the lilies when they got too cramped. I learned to cut back the raspberries. I built a little coop myself and got chickens for eggs. I had a good, lonely life. I kept swimming, determined to do as my father had told me and not let the past stop me. But I never ventured out of the pool room, and Les never came down. That man who I believed to be the owner continued to sit up in the restaurant, yet I began to envision it was Dr. Hennessey up there watching me. Still, every single day I swam my one long, slow mile. I promised myself I would keep a firm grip on my mind.
* * *
—
One evening not long after encountering Les I went out to the mailbox to mail some bills, and just when I put the flag up I looked across the driveway and saw that I was
staring at a fox. It was small, silent, reddish, with a face framed in gray. The animal startled me, and when I took a step toward it I knew—a chicken had been killed. The fox and I stared at each other while my mind raced through the details of the other chickens—where they were, whether or not they were safe. I moved toward the backyard, where they like to roam, and off the fox ran, across the field and into the woods.
The previous week, I had come home to find the chickens in their coop, fighting over a dead bat. I had kept these particular layers for two years and this had been my very first problem with them. I suppose that logically it might not have even been a problem—they are animals, there is no reason they should not peck at another dead animal—yet the incident disturbed me. And then the very next week that smart and beautiful fox crept in to kill my least favorite of the brood. There are—or were—five of them, and I had named them all. Circus, Helen, Egg, Betty, and Dinosaur, who died. Even though that chicken was always bullying the others and pecking at me, her loss made me feel overcome with my responsibility to keep these beings safe. Short of locking them all in the coop all day, which I didn’t want to do, I wasn’t quite sure how to protect the others, and since I had no books on chicken husbandry, I went to the library to try to learn a little.
“You might like this,” the librarian said, seeing the books I was checking out. “Next Thursday night at six o’clock.” I took the flyer home, wrote the date on my calendar. Living with the Eastern Coyote. When the night arrived I walked to town. I sat at the back of the room, riveted. The room was full—maybe forty people—which was more than I had expected. The speaker was a man in his late twenties who had begun his career studying wolves in the Midwest.