by Ted Sanders
I’d carried the box in by the handle, and now I bent and set it on the table. I stepped back and pulled my arms from my coatsleeves, trying to think if I should have said yes, or something else. Sara asked me again where the lizard was. She watched me from the couch, all frozen and waiting. Suddenly she wilted, reaching for the box and pulling away, confusion running through her face.
“Oh my god. Is he alive?”
I stopped and considered her, surprised. My head felt like a bird’s. I tried to imagine her thinking such a thing. “That’s what I said.” I touched my chest.
“Oh my god.”
“No, he’s not alive. He’s not alive anymore. He died like they said. They put him to sleep. It went fine.”
She nodded, chin working. “So where is he?”
“There was a mix-up. I couldn’t get him.”
“What do you mean? Did they just throw him away?”
“Ah. They…burned him.”
“They burned him?”
“Well, it’s one of the options—for that. The wrong one, but he was definitely dead. I mean, technically they cremated him. That’s what I should have said.”
“They cremated him.”
“Yeah, if you don’t want the remains, then they can cremate them. I told you that.”
“Oh god,” Sara said, nearly crooning, touching her lips. “He’s remains.”
“I think it was bad timing. Last night was incinerator night.”
“But you called,” she said through fingers. “I thought you said you called.”
“I did.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“Yes, but, you know, they couldn’t…you know. What would they do?”
“Did you get your money back?”
“They didn’t charge us. For any of it.”
“Well, yeah.”
“They didn’t charge us for the shot, even. The stuff, you know.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, real sad. She leaned down the length of the couch and tore herself a handful of tissues, one at a time. They fled into her hand like tiny blue ghosts. She piled them on her stomach and pressed one to the corners of her eyes, her nose. “Oh shit,” she said. “Fucking little lizard.” I stayed standing. She had all the couch anyhow.
“But anyway,” I said. “I got the box.”
“The box.” She pointed. “This box.”
“It’s the box they would give you. Normally. To bring him home in.”
“It’s empty?”
“Yeah. Well—actually, it’s full of paper towels.”
“Why?” she said. She sniffed. “Why is it full of paper towels?”
I opened my mouth. Air came in. I thought about the vet girl, the glitter in her eyeshadow.
Sara didn’t wait for me. “They said, ‘Sorry, we incinerated your dead lizard, but take this nice box full of paper towels anyway,’” she said.
“I asked for the box.”
“Why.”
“Because of Evan.” I looked at the back of my hand. Sara’s tissue went still.
“You’re going to bury an empty box,” she said at length.
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to tell him.”
“That’s my thinking.”
She gazed at me. She shrugged and dropped the ragged tissue on the floor. “Well,” she said, “here, then.” I hesitated, then leaned forward and grasped the box with both hands, tossing it to her. She hefted it, shook it beside her ear. “Feels empty. Sounds empty.”
“Does it? It’s not.”
“It feels pretty empty. It’s big.”
“Yeah.” I watched her turn the box over in her hands. She didn’t say anything about the sticker. “I guess we’d better buy a shovel.”
“I guess you better, babe.” She eased the box down onto the table. I squinted at her and she blurred a little.
“Okay,” I said, and just as I was saying it the box gave off a sudden soft whick, and a flit of movement. I jumped, and Sara did too, but it was only the tabs on the box top popping free. The box cracked open. Sara spread her thumb and forefinger along the line of her collarbone.
“Oh shit,” she said, breathing, and we watched the mouth of the box yawn slowly open, the raw ends of cardboard scraping and stuttering apart. Eventually Sara sat forward and closed the flaps, fingering and pinching the tabs quickly back into place. Like she had done it before.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What a thing to say.” She poked the box. “Evan will know there isn’t anything in there.”
“No, he won’t.”
“You can tell when you touch it.” She poked at it some more, scooting it.
I shrugged. “So he won’t touch it.”
“He’ll want to. He will anyway. He might.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Maybe you should put something in there.”
“What, like an effigy?”
“It doesn’t have to look like a lizard, but for god’s sake it should at least feel like there might be a lizard in there.” She sat back and plucked another tissue off herself. I looked around the room.
Sara pointed to a heavy retractable pen on the table. “Here. A pen.”
“Not heavy enough. Too clackety, too.”
She shrugged, worked the tissue into her nose. I wandered around, looking over our busy shelves and opening our few cluttered living room drawers, surprised by all our stuff, and by how little was like a lizard.
“How about a candle?” I peered into the candle drawer. “Part of one.”
“Maybe.”
I broke off a lizard’s worth of cranberry candle, pulling it free from the wick like a shrimp from its vein and feeling the weight of it in my hand. It smelled like Christmas. I brought it to the table, rocking it back and forth in the cradled cup of my palm. Back and forth. I was pretty sure it was wrong, a machined thing. I tipped the box over onto its side and laid the candle down atop it. The candle began to slowly roll, picking up momentum. It rolled off the box and dropped into a magazine, open on the table. It lay there.
“We need something else,” I said.
“Something meaty seeming.”
“Yes.”
“Lizard sized.”
“Yes, the weight of him.”
“Sausage link,” said Sarah. She blew her nose, dropped the tissue on the floor.
“Sausage link,” I said. Right off, I knew it was the right thing. A picture of one popped into my head, one with little lizard legs, scurrying—steam coming off it. Then I tried not to picture it, which was much harder. “Do we have sausage links?”
“We have had them,” Sara said. She picked up the pen from the table and started writing something on the palm of her left hand.
“What are you writing?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m drawing.”
I went into the kitchen. I went to the refrigerator. I opened the freezer and dug around in the cold, under the pizzas and behind the ice cubes. Most of the stuff in there was old and foreign—a box of pink Popsicles, a bag of peas with onions, a tiny Tupperware with a brown and orange chunkiness inside. And way in the back I found a box of sausage links, frozen in place by a blurb of furry ice. Some of the skin of the box stayed behind as I tore it free. Inside, only a few sausage links remained, glommed together like a little stack of logs. I broke one loose and dropped the rest in the garbage. The box, too. I ran my thumb across the sausage link, smoothing the icy ridges where I’d broken it away from the others. The feel of the thing relieved me somehow—its cold stoniness, its pasty and impotent complexion. I wrapped my hand around it and gave it a squeeze.
“Do we have any Ziploc bags?” I called to Sara.
Her voice came back. “We’re out.”
“How about Baggies?”
“We don’t use Baggies anymore. We use Ziplocs.”
I went to the drawer where we keep that kind of stuff, but all that was in there was a loose roll of wax paper and a bu
nch of those little cake-decorating tips.
From the other room, Sara said, “I’m only going along with this because I think he did it.”
I tore off a ragged rectangle of the wax paper. It looked like Vermont, or New Hampshire. “Will tape stick to wax paper, do you think?”
“Do you hear me, John?” She called me John.
“I hear you.”
“I think he did it.”
“I hear you saying that.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, Sara, I know what you mean.” I examined the wax paper, trying to determine if one side was different from the other. The box didn’t specify.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Sara said. She emphasized I’ve. Or I thought she did, just slightly, and right then I thought I might tell her about how I’d gone through the garbage a day or two after Rafael got hurt—how I stood on the front step, angling the big black kitchen bag into the yellow porch light, pawing through all the kitchen refuse, removing and inspecting the little white trash bags from the other rooms, the bedrooms, one by one. I unwadded balls of tissue, paper towels, toilet paper. I didn’t even know what I was looking for—or, rather, I knew precisely what I was looking for but did not know for certain what it would look like. I looked through everything; I found nothing like what I thought I might.
Sara got up from the couch. I imagined I could hear the tissues from her belly falling to the floor. I put the wax paper and the sausage link on the counter and started to roll it up.
“So it’s wax paper,” Sara said from the doorway.
“That’s all there was.”
“Here, then.” She set the box from the vet down in front of me. “And here.” She held up her left hand. A piece of transparent tape drooped from the tip of her middle finger. I reached to pull it loose, and as I did I saw a dark patch on the skin of her palm—a fat stripe of ink. Also what looked like a mustache, or giant lips, straddling the stripe. But then the shape crumpled as Sara bent all the rest of her fingers into a fist, leaving just the finger with the tape pointing at me.
“It’s double-stick,” Sara said.
“I see that.”
“That’s what there was.”
“So it’s double-stick.” I took the tape and wrapped it around the wax-paper tube, sticking it to itself. I opened the box and parted the sea of paper towels. I felt a little confusion there; the paper towels weren’t blank after all. They had herb plants printed on them, stenciled in green. Their names in blue, someone’s handwriting, I’ll never know whose. I saw basil twice. I pressed the wrapped link against the bottom of the box, thinking it might stick because of the tape. I covered it again and closed up the box. It was easy, overall. I hefted the box gently, testing it, but I already knew. I started to say it was kind of creepy and then didn’t. It was, though. I handed it to Sara and she must’ve felt the same, because she grimaced as she shifted it; she gave it right back to me. She wiped her hands on her pant legs. I went back to the refrigerator and opened the door, looking for a place to make room.
“I don’t want that in the refrigerator,” Sara said.
“Oh, right.” I opened the freezer.
“No,” Sara said. “I don’t think I want that.”
I looked down at the box. “What are you talking about? It’s sausage. It was in there already.”
“No, I don’t think it belongs there.”
“Why not?”
She grimaced again and made a fluttery gesture with her fingertips and thumbs, like she’d been into something. “Just…no.”
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with it? I can’t just leave it on the counter.”
“I don’t want it on the counter anyway. Put it outside.”
“Evan won’t be here again until Tuesday,” I said. “That’s like four days.”
“Three. Three days.” She held up her hand and mouthed silently, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, making three imaginary dots in the air as she went. She didn’t count today.
I looked out through the sliding doors over the patio. I stepped up to them and put my hand against the glass, gauging October’s cool out there.
“How cold is it in a refrigerator?” I said, squinting.
“I don’t know. Fifty degrees.”
“That seems high.”
“Thirty degrees.”
“Well, that’s not right.”
“I don’t know why you’re asking, then. It doesn’t matter.”
I took the box outside, closing the screen door behind me. I set the box down on the concrete under the eaves, beside the patio wall. Sara watched me through the screen. She looked gray. She chewed her nails. She had her head tilted and she bobbed it slowly, almost in a circle; I couldn’t tell if she was nodding her head or shaking it.
“What if something gets into it?” I said.
Sara took her hand out of her mouth. “I was thinking that.”
“It’s food, I mean.”
“Oh my god.” Sara turned and faded back into the house. I cast around for something to put on top of the box but found nothing that wouldn’t crush it.
“Sara?” I called, and almost immediately she resolidified at the door. She opened the screen and handed me one of the red plastic milk crates from Evan’s room.
I took it from her. “What was in this?”
“What wasn’t?” She slid the screen door closed again. I caught another glimpse of the dark drawing on her palm.
I put the milk crate upside down over the top of the vet box. I pushed it with my toe, and it skittered across the concrete.
“Put a rock on it,” Sara said, but there were no rocks. I saw only one heavy thing, the rose of Sharon tree. The leaves, already feeble, and yellow now, had begun falling in earnest for winter.
I went over to the tree. I imagined I could still detect the stale-rotten smell of the crickets, rising from the dirt where we’d kept them. They’d been gone for days, though; after dropping Rafael off with Dr. Kipp I’d come home and taken the cricket cage to the dumpster, letting everything inside tumble rudely around as I walked—leaves and twigs and toilet paper tubes, the two cutoff bottoms of Dixie cups, dead crickets and live ones, tiny cricket turds like thistle seeds. I pitched the entire thing. The whole container, everything in it. I cracked the lid open first, just a little bit, I’m not sure how much.
“John?” Sara said through the screen.
“Yes, okay.” I stooped and began to drag the rose of Sharon tree across the patio, the heavy stone pot scraping. Leaves shaken loose began to fall, palmfuls of them. I dragged the tree right across in front of the doorway where Sara stood. She tsked at me twice as I went by—twice—but she didn’t say anything. I hefted the tree up onto the crate. I used my legs. The plastic lattice sagged beneath the weight, but it held.
“Might as well be good for something, right?” I said. When I looked up, Sara was gone. One of the cats ghosted by, further back in the house; I couldn’t tell which one.
TUESDAY NIGHT, I WAITED FOR EVAN IN HIS MOTHER’S DRIVEWAY. I hoped to avoid talking to her. The week before—the day we’d taken Rafael to the vet for the last time, the day Geneva had taken him stolidly from us—Evan’s mother called us, long after bedtime. Sara and I were forked on the couch, reading.
“Evan said Rafael was sick or something? Or dead—I’m so sorry, is that true?” Her voice made the phone hum.
“When did he say that?”
“Today at school.”
“Why were you at school?”
“The Harvest Party, John. The party? I took cupcakes.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t heard of the Harvest Party. I felt pretty sure I hadn’t.
“You should go to something sometime. It’s fun, the kids are fun.”
“I can never keep track. I don’t get the schedules.” I took a pen and wrote E—harvest party? in the margin of the article I was reading. I held it up to Sara.
“Just ask for one. Or ask me,” Evan’s mother was sa
ying.
“Yeah, I’m bad at that,” I said. Sara shrugged at me and shook her head. She waved dismissively at the magazine, her brow furrowing. She mouthed something at me. I squinted to see—it looked like Fuck that.
“So what happened to Rafael?”
“Right, Rafael,” I said.
“Did he die?”
“Well,” I said, and I laughed. Sara frowned at me. “Maybe.” I laughed some more.
“What does that mean?”
I explained the whole situation to her, badly. I began at the end, for some reason, and only seemed to recall for myself—as I spoke—how things had begun. “He lost his tail, I guess is how it happened. It started because he lost his tail.”
“How did he lose his tail?”
“I don’t know.” Sara watched me talk. She’d put her open magazine in her lap. It arched over her thighs like a bird drawn by a child.
“Did Evan have something to do with it?”
I took a breath. “I don’t know that.”
“Hmm. So Rafael is at the vet now?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Yes. Or the next day, I’m not sure.”
“Did Evan go with you? When you took Rafael in?”
“What? No. He was in school. This was this morning.”
“Why didn’t you take him?”
“Why would I?”
“So he could be there, so he could know what was happening,” she said, and over her Sara was saying to me, “She wanted you to take Evan? Tell her there was nothing to see.”
“There was nothing to see,” I said into the phone. “There wasn’t even a doctor. It was…it would have just been a different place to end things.”
“But still, some context would have been demonstrative. I don’t want him to think Rafael just went out the front door and isn’t coming back. That’s basically what’s going on, right?”
I rolled my eyes at Sara. “Demonstrative? Of what?” Sara stuck out her arm and began to snap at me, wiggling her fingers at the pen in my hand. I gave it to her and she bent into her magazine, scratching.
“Of the process, John. Of what’s really happening.”
“There was nothing even to see there. Just a waiting room.”
“That’s better than nothing.”
“What do you want him to think is going on? You want him to blame the veterinarian? Or the girl that works there? That would’ve been more like it, the way it happened.”