by Amy Lloyd
Dennis kissed her and, deftly, manoeuvred her out of the bathroom, closing the door between them. She told herself she was being paranoid, that she was upset. But something about the silence behind the closed door gave her chills and she pictured the kitten as she thought she’d seen him so briefly, eyes glassy and fur slick against his tiny body, water pooling around his head.
Twenty-nine
The next morning, when Dennis left for his run, she felt herself let go, as though she’d been sucking in her stomach all night. She’d had bad dreams that flashed through her brain like fireworks, each one quickly replaced by the next. She saw Dennis holding the kitten underwater. Next she could see him holding a dog by the scruff of its neck while it yelped, the flick of a knife through its windpipe. Finally, she saw Dennis on top of Lindsay, holding her hands above her head, looking deep into her eyes.
She needed to see the kitten, his body. She needed to know that she’d been wrong, that his fur was dry and his eyes were closed. It was absurd, she told herself, to believe that Dennis could have drowned him. Even if he was doing it to end his suffering, as she believed he had. But searching the house she found no sign of the kitten. In the bathroom she checked every corner, to see where Dennis could have hidden him while she had been lying awake, listening and running the scene again and again in her head.
As she wandered from room to room that morning she saw the crumpled brown paper bag that Lindsay had brought to him. It was placed carefully amongst his old belongings in his childhood bedroom, as if he was putting it back where it belonged. Sam knew she shouldn’t look but she was drawn to it. If Lindsay had been looking after it all these years then surely it wouldn’t hurt if she had a look at it, too. She carefully opened the paper bag. Inside was a metal box, rusted green. It looked, to Sam, like a kind of army-issue lunchbox. It rattled when she lifted it. Even though it was obviously locked, she slid her nails into the seam and tried to lever it up. When it didn’t work she banged it against the wall and groaned in frustration. She shoved it back into the paper bag, ripping it as she did so, and shoved it back amongst the other things. Fuck him, she thought, fuck his secrets. Fuck Lindsay. Fuck them both.
When Sam calmed down she felt sick with a binger’s remorse. This wasn’t how she’d wanted to be: the crazy wife snooping through her husband’s possessions. Paranoid fantasies about drowned kittens and affairs with old girlfriends. It stopped, now. Why was she so hell bent on destroying everything that made her happy?
The bag was torn and she couldn’t hide it. So she wrapped the box back up as carefully as she could and placed it back where it belonged. This was a fresh start. When Dennis asked her about it she would be honest and they would put it behind them and move on.
But when she heard Dennis return her stomach lurched and she began to panic. Excuses raced through her mind but none seemed believable. She couldn’t wait for him to find out; she would have to confront him first. When he’d finished stretching, Sam heard him go to the kitchen and open the fridge. She steeled herself, ashamed and embarrassed. As they met in the hallway, Dennis taking a long drink from a bottle of Smartwater, his head thrown back, Sam started to confess.
‘I—’
Dennis’s phone rang from the living room. He unplugged it from the charger and answered. ‘Carrie, I’m sorry, I was going to call …’
Sam let out a long breath and went into the kitchen where she could eavesdrop in privacy. She heard Dennis try to defend himself but eventually he fell quiet and Sam envied Carrie for being able to get through to him in a way she could not. Finally, he started to speak again.
‘You’re right. I fucked up. I’m sorry,’ Dennis said. ‘I guess I should accept they don’t see things the way I do.’ His voice came closer. ‘OK. Speak soon. Yeah, you too. Sam,’ he said, holding the phone out to her. ‘Carrie wants to speak to you.’
‘Are you as pissed with him as I am?’ Carrie asked.
‘It was a … weird night,’ Sam said, making sure Dennis was out of earshot. ‘I tried to stop him but he wouldn’t let it go.’ Sam wondered how much she should tell Carrie about last night.
‘He’s stubborn when he wants to be,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s not great for the series, to be honest, but …’
‘How was the premiere?’ Sam said.
‘There were protestors. It was kind of a shit show. Probably better Dennis wasn’t there. Or at least I thought that until I saw Twitter.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Sam said. Everything felt as if it was going wrong.
‘It doesn’t matter. Dennis is out; you’re happy. Right?’
‘Yep,’ Sam said half-heartedly. ‘Yeah, we’re mostly good. I mean … I hate it here, to be honest. I’m lonely. That Lindsay girl is here all the time.’
‘Ugh …’ Carrie groaned.
‘They have this weird brother-sister thing going on but they’re also kind of flirty?’ Sam realised how she sounded but she had to talk to somebody. ‘Or I might be imagining that. But she’s here. All. The. Time. She was here last night, getting him all riled up over that stupid tweet.’ Sam explained what had happened. She stopped at the part where Lindsay drove home drunk.
‘If it’s any consolation Dennis told me how he can’t wait to get away from Red River. He says he can’t wait to start fresh somewhere with you. He just wants you to be happy.’
‘He said that?’
‘Sure. Whenever I speak to him, you’re all he talks about. Listen, I have to go. But I’ll be at the funeral. We can talk more then.’
‘Thanks. I just want to speak to someone normal. People out here are …’ Sam couldn’t put it succinctly enough. ‘Anyway, we’ll talk at the funeral.’
After hanging up, Sam went to Dennis. He was in the living room, the crumpled and torn paper bag resting on his knees. Sam started to explain but he stopped her.
‘Twenty years and Lindsay never even asked me what was in here. Do you know why?’ Dennis asked.
‘Because she trusts you?’ Sam remembered the night before and felt queasy.
‘No. Because she wants me to trust her. Do you not want that?’
‘Of course I do,’ Sam said.
‘Do you think there’s something in here I need to hide from you?’ He rattled the box, pulled a small key from his pocket and tried to turn it in the lock. The key no longer fitted, the lock rusted shut, so he fetched a screwdriver, which he wedged into the seam of the box, and levered up the lid. It popped open.
‘Here,’ Dennis said. Inside were photographs, of himself as a baby, of his mother and grandparents. There were the deeds to the land, a movie ticket stub, a small silver-plated crucifix with a broken chain, an address book. Slowly he took each item out and laid it on the empty sofa cushion next to him. Things of no real value, Sam realised, just things he’d miss if they were gone.
She couldn’t even tell him she was sorry. Instead, she knelt on the floor next to him and picked up the photographs: there was a picture of his mother holding him in the hospital, another of him as a boy, not more than five, standing barefoot on the steps of the house. Lastly there was a snapshot of him as a teenager, his arm around a young Lindsay, who wore a crop top and wide flares, her hair plaited into white-girl cornrows. Sam smiled. And there was someone else, a boy who rested his head on Dennis’s shoulder, with long thin hair and a wispy teenage moustache.
‘Who’s that?’ Sam asked.
‘Howard,’ Dennis said, taking the photo out of her hand. He looked at it for a moment before putting it back into the tin.
‘That was a nice picture,’ Sam said. ‘You looked happy.’
‘I think we were,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember.’
Thirty
Dennis wanted to bury the kitten in a place away from the house, in the woods beyond the fence. Just after lunch, he came into the living room holding a shoebox that Sam knew must contain the kitten’s body. He put the box into a carrier bag and passed it to Sam while he got ready to leave. It was almost weightless, she noted
sadly, remembering how small and fragile he’d been. Her stomach sank; she was glad when Dennis took the bag back. They set off into the trees, Dennis telling her that he wanted to bury him next to his old cat, Ted, in a place that would be meaningful.
The ground sank under her feet, and she felt the soles of her shoes disappearing into the layer of moss and weeds that covered everything. Dennis told her to stick right behind him, as he tested the earth with a long branch, poking for areas where there were holes who knew how deep, or the roots of trees on which to trip. Everything was covered by a blanket of green.
They’d been walking more than half an hour and, looking over her shoulder, Sam could no longer see the house, or any signs of civilisation. Dennis swore he could remember the way, and was leading her confidently, stopping every now and then to get his bearings. But, Sam realised, if he left her there she didn’t know how she would find her way back.
They’d started on a diagonal trajectory, bearing right, then turning a sharp left before sidestepping down a steep decline, before heading straight on once again. There had been no distinguishing features since the decline, and soon paranoia started to grip her. He would leave her there, Sam knew, and as it got darker she would fall and be trapped in a hole, left to die in some bottomless pit.
The air was thick, as moist and claustrophobic as a swimming-pool changing room. Still, she walked silently behind him, her clothes sticking to her body, sipping from a bottle of piss-warm water, watching a Rorschach of sweat spread on the back of Dennis’s T-shirt as they weaved between fallen trees and heavy foliage.
‘Almost there,’ he said eventually. ‘I remember all of this.’
Sam didn’t think anyone could possibly remember something as chaotic as this but Dennis was more at home here than she had ever seen him. She looked around her, disoriented, and stumbled, her ankle twisting underneath her, stuck in a tangle of roots. The pain was immediate and she cried out.
Dennis turned back to her. ‘What is it?’
‘My foot. I think I’ve broken my foot.’
‘Shit. Why didn’t you stay behind me?’ He dropped his branch and slid off her shoe. ‘It’s OK, I’m just seeing if you really broke it, or if it’s a sprain.’ He cupped her heel in his hand and moved her foot to the right. Instinctively, she pulled away from him and he supported her foot so it didn’t fall to the ground. He repeated the motion to the left and she cried out again.
They sat on the ground for some time. Dennis asked Sam for updates on the pain, a scale of one to ten, and eventually she felt it subside a little. He found another branch for her to use as a walking stick and persuaded her to continue the ten minutes to Ted’s grave. ‘It’s just a sprain,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be up right now and walking if it was broken.’
Each step sent a shock of pain up Sam’s leg and into her core. The branch splintered in her hand and she nearly sobbed in relief when he finally said, ‘It’s here!’
At the next clearing Sam could see a blue plastic sheet wrapped around one tree; underneath was a flat stone with a blue-painted inscription: ‘Ted 1990’. Around it hung decorative objects such as a crow might collect: chunks of bottle-green glass swinging from string; a ceramic cat, faded from the weather; shapes made out of bent twigs and tied with bent wire, stars, hearts, diamonds. Dennis crouched next to the stone and pulled up the weeds that had grown around it.
Sam’s ankle ached and she looked around for something on which to sit. As she took a step backwards she felt the edge of something beneath her heel, and looked down to see the corner of another slab, overgrown with a tangle of what looked like veins – bits of undergrowth, dark red and green. She ran her toe over the stone and pulled the vegetation back to see a date, also in paint, ‘1987’. She began to notice more of the glass shapes, winking as they twisted and caught in the light. Sam moved around, trying to find a place to sit down, and she tripped on other flat rocks, each with a date, some with ‘Dog’ or ‘Rat’ written on them in paint that seemed to fuse with the stone’s surface and some where details had been carved into the rocks, the lettering filled with more paint. More caught her eye in the disarray of nature, little pockets of human interference. To her it looked almost like a shrine. She shivered.
‘Dennis?’ She leaned against a tree to take the weight off her right ankle. ‘What are all these?’
He looked around as if he were seeing it for the first time.
‘Were these all … pets?’
‘No. Just animals I saw around.’
‘Dead animals?’
He was kicking a cut of wood the size of a desktop. As it fell back insects skittered in all directions, some of which he crushed under his boot.
He shrugged. ‘Everything deserves its own grave. Even my father, right?’ He smiled at her and she stared back, unsure. There must have been, at a glance, thirty or so little graves.
Beneath the wood was a rudimentary toolbox, also crawling with insects. He pulled out a rusted old trowel, found a spot on the ground near Ted’s tomb and started to dig. The earth was soft, as spongy as cake, and Sam watched him meticulously scooping the dirt and piling it at the side of the hole. Eventually he clapped his hands against his jeans to clean them and picked up the shoebox. He took the lid off and just looked at the kitten for a while. Sam turned away; she’d seen the kitten’s body curled stiff, face screwed up tight as if bracing himself for a punch, and she didn’t want to see it again. She heard the dirt hitting the lid of the shoebox and looked back. Dennis sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. She wondered if he was crying.
Dennis asked her to help him look for a stone but after limping over the treacherous terrain for a while she decided to rest up for the long walk home. She found a fallen log, sat down and looked at her phone: no signal. She listened for Dennis, but he was out of earshot, and was away long enough for her to worry he’d left her there.
He returned carrying a rock with both hands. It wasn’t flat like the others but had a smooth surface, and he buried it until only the smooth side emerged from the earth. From his pocket he took a bottle of Sam’s nail polish. Sam watched him paint a lurid red ‘2015’ and then ‘S+D’. She wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or creeped out.
Dennis spent some time bending and tying twigs together, twisting wire around the joints, while Sam watched the sky starting to grey through the trees. If it rained it would only make the journey home even harder and she willed him to finish quickly so she could get back to the house and take some painkillers. Soon there was a low rumble of thunder and heavy drops of rain hit her cheeks and rolled down like tears.
‘Shit,’ Dennis said. He stepped back to look at the grave and then patted the earth by the kitten’s headstone. Before leaving he covered the toolbox with the plank of wood and beckoned for Sam to follow.
Sam walked slowly, trying not to put too much pressure on her right ankle. ‘How much further is it?’ she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of the rain hitting the large leaves of palms around them.
‘Over an hour,’ he shouted back.
‘Which way is the road? Is there somewhere else we could go?’
He shook his head and pointed at the forest ahead of them. ‘That way’s just woods for miles. That way is back where we came. And that way’s the mangroves and the lake, and too close to bear territory.’
‘Bears?’ Sam said, voice shaking.
‘Don’t see too many here but yeah, bears. Best we stick to this route.’
The closest Sam had ever been to nature were the Center Parcs holidays her family took when she was younger. There she rode a rented bike along a heavily signposted trail and had a picnic under a redwood tree. It was hard to imagine a forest in Britain large enough to get lost in, to be somewhere so vast you could walk for two hours to a place undisturbed for over twenty years.
He turned back to her. ‘Can you do this?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’
With
a sigh, he turned and crouched, patting his back, and she was suddenly shy, reluctant to climb on to him and no longer feeling vulnerable but vast, stocky, immovable. Ignoring her hesitance, he hooked his arms behind her legs and started to lift her, forcing her to cling to him to stop herself falling backwards. And eventually she was up, legs around him, trying not to choke him with her arms.
It slowed them down so that the sun was setting by the time they arrived back at the house, pulling back the broken chain fence and navigating the debris scattered around the back yard. Dennis placed her down once the ground was flat and as he stretched his back she limped into the house and went straight to take off her shoe.
Her ankle was swollen and what looked like a faint bruise was spreading like ink on water. Unable to get into the shower by herself, she asked Dennis to help her, which he did without looking at her body. As she stepped out, he held out a towel and looked down to the side, which only made her feel worse.
The pain did not ease with a Tylenol, nor could she lie next to Dennis in bed as each movement sent shock waves up her leg.
In the night, she woke him up. ‘It must be broken. I need to go to hospital …’ but he urged her to wait until morning, to give the swelling a chance to subside. But by morning it was worse.
‘Should I call an ambulance?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I can drive.’
‘I don’t have a licence and you know the cops around here are looking for any excuse to harass me. But you can’t call an ambulance just for a sprained ankle. Can’t you just use your left foot?’ Dennis said, walking down the hall and returning with the car keys. He wouldn’t be able to go with her, he explained, as he needed to meet the funeral directors today. ‘Don’t worry, Lindsay will give me a ride.’
Before she left he asked her not to tell the doctor where she hurt her leg. ‘That spot in the forest is kind of my place, you know what I mean? You’re the only person I’ve shared it with. I don’t need people trampling it up trying to sell a story about me. Can you say you hurt it while we were working on the house?’ Drowsy from her lack of sleep and eager to get going, she agreed.