Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

by Kristin Bair

  “Aware that something was shifting.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Stop it. We’re talking about anthrax.”

  “We’re talking about Dax.”

  Agatha purses her lips. This is a classic Shrinky-Dink switcheroo. “You’re talking about Dax.”

  “Who is the woman?”

  “A dog walker who’s been walking past our house for years. Dax and I used to joke about her. Together. He says they met in the spring at the park.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “No.”

  “Dax hates dogs.”

  “So he said.”

  “He refused to get a dog when you and the boys begged.”

  “Indeed he did.”

  Shrinky-Dink pauses, and Agatha imagines it is one of those moments when a therapist has to stop herself from veering off the path of neutrality, like Switzerland when faced with a fondue crisis. A moment when she wants to say “What the fuck?” Maybe the greatest challenge of the job. Definitely the reason Agatha could never do it.

  “So,” Shrinky-Dink finally says. “A dog walker?”

  “Yes.”

  “I assume she has dogs of her own.”

  “A Chihuahua.”

  “It’s a fling?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “They’re in love.”

  “Really?”

  “So he says.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Dax has moved in with her and her Chihuahua.”

  “Already?”

  “Already. He told me in a text.”

  “And the boys?”

  “He said they’re moving in, too.”

  “Into the dog walker’s house?”

  “Yes, he says they’ll be living there with him and her, part-time, when they’re not with me.”

  Shrinky-Dink shakes her head. “It’s been barely forty-eight hours.”

  Agatha nods.

  “Are you going to fight?”

  “Fight?” Agatha can’t imagine fighting any harder than she had with the hatchet.

  “For full custody.”

  Shrinky-Dink’s words echo in her brain. Full custody. “I don’t know,” she says, trying to imagine the boys never spending another night with their father. “How could I?”

  “I’m sorry, Agatha.”

  Agatha wonders if Shrinky-Dink’s measured response would be any different if they were out for drinks, if they were pals, not therapist and client, if Shrinky-Dink was an honored member of Agatha’s imagined zephyr of friends. Maybe she’d sling back a whiskey sour and spit, “What a bloody jerk!” Or wrap her arms around Agatha and hold on tight. Perhaps she’d even answer the questions pummeling Agatha’s heart: How does a man who hates dogs fall in love with a dog walker? How does a man fall in love with anyone but his wife? Does Dax now love dogs, too? Does he love the chirpy, snippy Chihuahua the dog walker sometimes carries in a pouch? What about their boys? Have Dustin and Jason fallen for the dog walker? Will they? How long will it take for Agatha to untangle the knot in her middle? When will she breathe again?

  Not brave enough to ask her real questions, Agatha says, “Do I still smell like skunk?”

  Shrinky-Dink nods. “And tomato juice. Have you gotten all of the splinters out of your hands?”

  “Most. There are still two deep ones in my right. I can’t dig them out with my left.”

  “May I help?” Shrinky-Dink opens the drawer of the coffee table between them and pulls out a sewing kit. She seems prepared for anything.

  Agatha sticks out her right hand. When Shrinky-Dink takes it and holds it in her own, tears start to seep out of her eyes. She isn’t sure she’s crying because the needle digs so deep or because this is the first skin-to-skin contact she’s had since discovering Dax and the dog walker in the shed. She makes little gulpy noises as tears soak the collar of her shirt.

  “You could have called me on Saturday,” Shrinky-Dink says. “I’m here in a crisis.”

  “I couldn’t. I should have.”

  Shrinky-Dink makes the clucky sound she makes whenever Agatha admits to something she could have done differently. She doesn’t cluck often. Her eyes go to the clock. “Time’s up.”

  “Thank goodness.” Agatha pulls her hand back into her lap.

  “When is Dax dropping the boys?”

  “Tomorrow evening after soccer practice.”

  “You could have demanded he bring them home immediately. You know that, right?”

  “I know, but I didn’t want them to see me like this.”

  Shrinky-Dink nods. “Take it easy between now and then. Remember, you’re working on living in the moment.”

  Agatha nods, notes that her current moment is a crock of shit, goes home, researches symptoms of anthrax, and decides that yes, yes, she may, in fact, already be suffering from this horrid disease. Twenty-five years before, in the pre-internet era, she would have had to work way too hard to come by such information. Go to the library. Search in the card catalog. Jot the Dewey Decimal numbers on a piece of paper. Find the right section of the library. Find the right stack. Find the right book. Find the right page. But with Google at her fingertips, she is able to learn all too quickly that sore throat, fatigue, muscle aches, headache, and shortness of breath—all maladies she’s been suffering since the shed incident—can quite logically be attributed to anthrax. She saves the information in the Hard Truths file on her phone. Despite Shrinky-Dink’s doubt, the winds from that place near the very tip-top of the world must have blown directly to Wallingford. This is it, she thinks.

  * * *

  Agatha draws a bath, pours the remaining cans of tomato juice into the tub, and steps in. Why die stinking like a skunk? Sloshing around in what feels like slimy, day-old soup—sinking low enough to soak her hair and submerge her ears—she dares to shift her brain from the child who died of anthrax to her own children. Her healthy, hilarious, wear-you-out boys who are right at this moment exploring the new bedroom their father is putting together at the dog walker’s house. That’s what Dax’s text said. “My love’s name is Willow. The boys and I are at her house. I’ll be living here. They’ll have a room. I’m fixing it up now. I’ll drop them to you at 6:30 on Tuesday after soccer practice. I’ll pick up a few things, and we can figure out a child-sharing schedule.”

  My love’s name is Willow.

  What kind of corny crap is that?

  In her best Lauren Bacall voice, Agatha repeats Dax’s pronouncement. My love’s name is Willow.

  And the boys will be living part-time at this Willow’s house?

  Her boys? Their boys?

  Though it’s obvious Dax had put a good amount of thought into this plan over the past few weeks or months, Agatha doubts the plan had included getting caught screwing in the shed and having to escape the hatchet. That wasn’t his style. Still, brand new to this unexpected twist, she is understandably bewildered, understandably heartbroken, and understandably pissed. She sits up in the tub and checks her body for blisters and dark scabs, further telltale signs of anthrax. She has a good many but isn’t sure if they are left over from the shed incident or are symptomatic of her newly self-diagnosed disease.

  A child-sharing plan. What does that even mean? How do you share children? Between houses? Parents? Lives? Hearts?

  She could lawyer up and battle for full custody, as Shrinky-Dink suggested. It probably wouldn’t be hard to win given the circumstances. But even in her current state, submerged in a pool of tomato juice, Agatha can’t imagine doing that to the boys.

  She turns on the shower, stands and rinses. In her head, she pens a farewell letter to the life she’d known and loved. What would it all look like now?

  * * *

  Agatha zips Dax a text. “Hope you and GDOG are happy.”

  He’s fast. “GDOG?”

  She’s equally fast. “Your hussy. Your muumuu-maxi mama. You know, the Grande Dame of Grapefruits. GDOG.”

  Dax knows
the reference. Of that, Agatha is sure. They’d read Their Eyes Were Watching God out loud to one another for a college English class, back-and-forthing about Tea Cake and Janie and hurricanes and love, under trees and blooming bushes, in dorm stairwells and coffee houses, dog-earing pages, breaking spines, jotting notes in margins. Their first kiss was a post-TEWWG kiss in the college gazebo at midnight. Agatha has been standing on chairs and reciting best-loved passages to him ever since.

  Dax:

  Her name is Willow.

  Agatha:

  Grande Dame of Grapefruits

  Chapter Four

  Agatha stands at the bottom of the back stairs and looks up at the door to her office. Lift your foot, you big crybaby. Lift your foot.

  She drops and curls on the floor. Don’t call yourself names, she hears Shrinky-Dink whisper from somewhere far away. Be kind to you. Try again.

  She stands.

  Good god, if only she could will herself into action. One step at a time. Go on. She needs to climb these stairs, sit down at her desk, and get to work. Isn’t writing the thing that always saves her? The thing that always keeps her from falling apart? When her father keeled over at the train station and died before she could get to the hospital, she wrote. When her mother suffered heartbreak-disguised-as-pneumonia a year later and died, she wrote. When Dax’s sister married that feckless nincompoop from Texas, she wrote. When she miscarried, she wrote. When her fourth book flopped, she wrote. But this. This. This is something else. This is different. This is the hyena clamping her throat to weaken her. This is quicksand swallowing her limb by limb. This is the roller-coaster flying off its track. “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” she whispers. All hail Joan Didion.

  But upstairs, through that door, that beautiful crimson door, is the desk that Dax built. The solid, sturdy desk as big as a farmer’s table with dozens of drawers and cubbies stuffed full of notes and letters and cards from the boys, along with balls of string and not-so-sticky- anymore fire truck stickers and pens and hair ties and all kinds of marvelous, mysterious whatnots. There’s even an inch-high chamber carved into the wood on the right-hand side. A wee door, invisible to most eyes, that opens and closes on the tiniest of hinges. “It’s for magical things,” Dax had told her. For all these years, since her first big book deal, she’d stored a miniature photo of him and the boys in the secret cubby. Magical things.

  She grips her right thigh with both hands and tries to drag her leg up onto the next step. She pulls; the leg pushes. She pushes; the leg pulls. It’s like trying to wrestle a cranky toddler into a grocery cart. Giving in, surrendering to this impossibility, Agatha turns and trudges through the kitchen into the living room and up the front staircase to their bedroom. In the beginning of this house with Dax, she’d found it strange and unnerving to have two staircases, a front and a back. Who needs such convenience? Such luxury? Such a reminder of times past with maids and butlers? But after ten years, she loves the two equally. The boys love them for hide and seek, but she finds comfort in the fact that if a murderer ever comes for her up the front steps in the night, she can escape down the back.

  Upstairs, she wraps herself in Dax’s pit-stinky robe and curls in their king-size bed. For the next few hours, she binge-watches the most marvelous Bear Grylls leaping and crawling through brush and streams, clawing his way up a mountain and slip-sliding down a steep, shale-covered slope. He shimmies over a rocky crevasse, twenty feet in the air, one leg flung over a cord stretched taut from one side to the other. “It’s all about the knots,” he tells the camera.

  “Bloody hell,” Agatha says. She can barely tie her shoes.

  Her nights with Bear always start this way, with Agatha unpacking her cornucopia of fears.

  The first big one? Beans.

  Years before, when she was just a teenager, she’d watched that horror movie about the serial killer guy who eats people with fava beans. Fava beans. It was hard enough to make sense of a movie about a man who eats people—actually eats them, with a fork and knife, and maybe some béchamel sauce—but to pair the main course with a particular type of bean? That was too much. As a writer, even at the tender age of seventeen, Agatha appreciated the specificity, but as a human … well. Never mind that she’d never eaten a fava bean, didn’t know what one looked like, and had to look up the spelling of fava when she wrote about it in her journal. The experience had sent her into spasms of fear, and the only thing that helped her cope was complete abstinence. Not since that devastating cinematic experience has she eaten a single bean. Not any kind of bean. Not a green bean or a baked bean. Not a lima, wax, or snap bean. Not a kidney bean, despite her passion for chili. Not a black, garbanzo, or pinto bean. And, hell no, not a fava bean.

  “Beans were my gateway fear,” she’d told Shrinky-Dink at their first appointment. The fear that had opened the floodgates for all others: strangers, sand, mice, ghosts, alien invasion, fireworks, the dark, bridges, tunnels, not fitting in, the fact that raisins are dried grapes and prunes are dried plums, drowning. The list goes on.

  “Fear is like that,” Shrinky-Dink had said. “A slippery slope.”

  “Slippery slopes scare the shit out of me,” Agatha had replied.

  Dax once asked Agatha why she’d generalized, why she’d stopped eating all beans rather than just fava beans. She didn’t have a good answer. It had felt like the right thing to do. The only thing to do. It sounds ridiculous described this way, but in Agatha’s head, it makes complete sense. A person’s head is a funny place. The heart is even funnier.

  * * *

  But an hour in, when Bear manages to spark a lifesaving fire as torrential rain pummels his hand-hewn leaf tent, Agatha stands on the bed and cheers. “I can do it, Bear!” she yells. “I can make it through this storm. I can climb this mountain.”

  And for this moment, she believes. Bear—the king of “I can do anything”—makes her believe. He makes everyone believe. It’s his superpower. He is so focused and determined, so “no shit is taking me down out here,” that for a few brief hours, Agatha Arch believes that she too can find her way out of a maze of vines and sinewy trees, keep her footing while crossing a river on a fallen log, and suck the innards from a poisonous creature whose sting can rot you from the inside out in less time than it takes you to say, “Holy shit, what is this thing?”

  Courage is contagious after all.

  She even believes she can write the psychological thriller about a murder in a Facebook moms group that she’s promised to her agent. It had seemed like a great idea months before when she’d pitched it. Brilliant, really. Any woman shackled to such a group knows a murder within its confines is an absolute eventuality. Some of these moms are batshit crazy; take away their pumpkin spice latte on a day when their little one throws an epic tantrum in Whole Foods and snap. It’s coming, no doubt about it.

  After that, for a few all-too-brief weeks, dollar signs had cha-chinged back and forth in emails between Agatha and her agent, best-seller lists were alluded to, and images of Agatha in a sexy persimmony gown accepting an Oscar for best film adaptation of a book gave her palpitations. Thrillers are hot right now. Big sellers in the publishing world. Facebook moms groups drip with zeitgeist. So a murder in a Facebook moms group? Well, that is one hell of a plot.

  When Agatha shared the news about her pitch at therapy, Shrinky-Dink had said, “Why in the world would you, of all people, offer to write a scary book? You are afraid of, well, according to you, everything.”

  “I know. The list of things I’m not afraid of is shorter than the list of things I am afraid of.”

  Shrinky-Dink nodded.

  “The truth is,” Agatha said, “all things of which good thrillers are made scare the living shit out of me. I remember the first time I read Dracula. I was in fifth grade, and to this day, I’m haunted by black flies.”

  “Black flies?”

  Agatha rolled her eyes. She has no idea what to do with people who haven’t read Dracula. “Y
es, they’re a sure sign a vampire is nearby. If I spot a fly in the house, within seconds I’m drowning in sweat just thinking about the vampire who is about to swoop down from the ceiling and sink his fangs into my jugular. Jason and Dustin think this is hilarious. They love to catch a fly outside and let it loose inside just to watch me leap and scream ‘Vampire! Vampire!’”

  “So why did you tell your agent you’re going to write a thriller?” Shrinky-Dink said.

  “I don’t know. One minute Dustin was reading the Transitive Property of Equality to me from his math book and the next I was equating the whole thing to humans.”

  Shrinky-Dink cocked her head and waited.

  “You remember, if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C.”

  Shrinky-Dink nodded again. “Yes, that part I know. But how does this relate to humans and your next book?”

  Agatha sighed. “People love thrillers, right?”

  “Some.”

  “Many. Believe me, they’re hot right now. Hot, hot, hot.”

  “And?”

  “People don’t really love me all that much.”

  “Not true. Your family loves you dearly.”

  “People besides Dax and the boys.”

  “Many other people love you.”

  “Still not true. I’m not easy to love.”

  “That aside, how does all this relate to the Transitive Property of Equality?”

  “People love thrillers,” Agatha said. “If I write a thriller, people will love me, too.”

  “That’s quite a jump,” Shrinky-Dink said.

  “I call it the Transitive Property of Love.”

  Shrinky-Dink sat quietly with that for five very expensive minutes, then said, “I’m happy to hear that you’re interested in forming stronger relationships with people, but there are better ways than committing to write a book that may send you over the edge.”

  “No, this is it,” Agatha had said. “I can do it.”

  * * *

  When she finally quits Bear at 3 AM, Agatha limps outside. Still wrapped in Dax’s stinky robe, she turns her back on the remains of the shed and stares up at Orion, the mighty hunter, gleaming in the night sky. How can she, the biggest chickenshit in the world, write a thriller? Good god, she shivers just thinking about that horrid serial killer guy and his favorite fava bean meal.