Hall of Small Mammals (27 page)

“The safe command will make them docile,” she says.

“Remind me again who Wynn is to you,” he says.

“A friend,” she says quickly. “He's out of town for a few days, and I agreed to feed his dogs and bring in the mail. He gave me the safe command before he left. I should have written it down.”

“Could have just told me. I would have remembered.”

She smiles.

“Let's just call someone for help,” Brooks says.

“I would if I could. My cell is out in the car.”

Brooks fishes around in his pockets.

“Yours is in the car too,” she says.

“Well, that's bad luck. What should we do now?”

“When they settle back down again, we'll go together. There's a door in the kitchen. That's, what? Like, thirty feet from here?”

Brooks isn't sure but nods. The dogs are no longer scrabbling at the doors but whining. They walk in circles, with clicking nails, outside. Mary reaches over Brooks's shoulder for a bag of pistachios. She rips open the plastic at the top and offers him some. “We missed breakfast,” she says.

He doesn't want any nuts. He sits down on the dog food again, his head back against a shelf. His medication can make him groggy. He needs to rest his eyes.

•   •   •

If only she had poison. Mary imagines Wynn coming home and finding both dogs dead. She imagines him cradling their bodies
and weeping. No, Wynn wouldn't weep. He'd probably just buy two more dogs, recycle the names, and move on with his life. Mary has never killed an animal as big as a dog. She veered her car in order to hit a squirrel once and regretted it for two days.

She eats another pistachio. She forgot to put out breakfast this morning because her mother called early from Bread Island for an update.

“How's my boy doing?” she asked.

“He's still asleep. He made dinner last night for both of us. He dropped an egg, and he freaked a little. But mostly he was fine. Good report from the doctor yesterday.” Mary did her best to repeat the doctor verbatim.

“Did you ask him about the morning headaches?”

“I forgot, I'm sorry. But Brooks hasn't mentioned them since you left.”

Her mother sighed. “I'm going to cut my trip short,” she said. “I don't like not being there.”

“Mom, you don't have to do that, really. We can manage. Are you staying warm?” Mary pictured her mother layered up in animal furs like one of the Arctic explorers of old, posing at a pole, her cheeks red, the fuzzy dark hair on her upper lip frozen, seal blubber on the bottom of her shoes.

“It's three in the afternoon. We keep the woodstove burning all day, and we've got electric heaters too, but Lord, my butt's been numb ever since I got here. You can take a southerner out of the South but you can't—well, you understand. The point is, don't take her out. Just leave her be. But Cora has been great with me here, she really has. This morning she convinced me to visit one of the mining camps with her. She was doing her interviews. I didn't
understand a word of it, of course. All I can do is hold the microphone steady.”

Cora was her mother's “roommate,” a term they'd used around town for years, with a wink, of course, since they owned separate houses. Cora was a sociologist at the university and had recently won a Fulbright to study the few people who lived on Bread Island, a mostly wild and rocky dot in the ice-cold Baltic Sea. Besides the miners, the only other inhabitants were a small indigenous population that kept to themselves. Mary's mother, who had never even been outside America before she met Cora five years ago, was on the adventure unofficially as an assistant. Internet access was limited and, because of the time difference, so were phone calls.

“Did you get the pictures I sent?” her mother asked. “Of the frogs?”

Yes, Mary had seen her mother's photos of the snow frogs, slimy and shimmering on the edge of a half-frozen pond. The frogs, while strange, had been a nice change. Mostly her mother just wrote to complain—about the temperature, about the long days, about all that white, white, white, as far as the eye could see. She said it was like the inside of a crazy person's head. They found white skeletons in the snow. The wolves ate the musk oxen. The polar bears ate the seals. Everything ate something else. Probably she would be eaten too.

But the frogs, she wrote, were a real inspiration.

“Their eggs are neon-blue in the lake behind our cabin,” her mother said. “The eggs actually glow. It's amazing. When I'm feeling sad I go down there. Then I remember that everything will probably be all right.”

“Be all right?”

“Didn't you see my picture of the frogs hugging? Okay, not
hugging
exactly. The gentleman-frog hitches a ride on the lady-frog's back, and he fertilizes each egg as it comes out. Cora says they stay that way for months if they go into hibernation together. Romantic, isn't it?”

Two nasty, clammy frogs squeezing each other for weeks on end in the middle of some frozen field?
Romantic
was not the first word that hopped into Mary's mind, not at all, but then again she understood what her mother was getting at, she really did, two otherwise lonely creatures conjoined, clinging to each other, not giving up on each other, swimming into the dark and watery deep, down to the cold, cold bottom of things where nothing else lives. There was, if you disregarded certain details, such as the sex itself, something beautiful about it . . .

“What's the matter?” her mother asked. “I can't tell if you're crying or if the connection's gone bad. Are you crying? Did I say something wrong?”

Mary apologized. It was nothing, she said, just something silly. “Stupid boy stuff.”

“Tell me.”

She had kept her mother out of the loop these last few months because of everything that had happened with Brooks. She hadn't wanted to bother her mother with any of her own troubles. But now that her mother was far away and free, she didn't mind unloading, at least a little bit. She told her mother about Wynn—about Wynn's chin, his blue eyes, the perfect gray streak in his long windswept hair, their weekend at the house in Myrtle Beach, and then about his crazy wife, the pediatrician, who was hardly ever around.

Her mother was silent.

“Come on, you can't judge me. You used to be
married
,” Mary said. “To a
man
.”

“I'm not judging you. And for the record, I wasn't married when I met Cora. In case you've forgotten, I was alone for almost eight years after your—”

“None of this matters anyway,” Mary said. “I broke up with him. I didn't love him. I barely even liked him.”

“So what's the problem?”

Mary sighed. “I did some things I'm not proud of.”

“What sort of
things
?”

“He liked to—this is embarrassing—make movies.”

“Oh, Mary.”

“I know. It only happened once. He says he taped over it—but still.”

“Don't provoke this man,” her mother said, meaning what? Provoke him how?

“Just don't do anything you'll regret,” her mother said. She thought the best and wisest course was for Mary to let it go. To move forward with her life. To just forget the tape.

•   •   •

He is halfway in a dream when his sister announces that it's time for another escape attempt. The dream is about fishhooks. Well, not
about
fishhooks, but it involves them. He is looking for one in the bottom of a tackle box. Brooks hasn't gone fishing in more than a year, probably not since his last trip to Nicaragua. His company, which he started with a friend a decade ago, manufactures
medical devices and has a factory outside Managua. The last time he was down there, Brooks took a few extra days and chartered a deep-sea fishing boat out of San Juan del Sur. He caught a striped marlin, though it was the captain who did the hard work, setting up the rod, finding the right spot. All Brooks did was wait and take orders, reel when the captain yelled to reel. Going deep-sea fishing is, actually, kind of like how he lives now. Sure, he can fry a few eggs, but only if there is someone there to help him, to keep him on task, to clean up the mess when his hands fail him, to calm him down when he loses his temper, to reel him in.

“You have gunk on your face,” Mary says, and wipes it away with a wet thumb. “I think it's old soy sauce.”

“Are you sure we should go for it again?” he asks. “How long will the owners be away? We could survive in here for days.”

“No,” she says. “I got us into this mess. I'll get us out.”

Brooks knows this is the truth, that his sister is to blame, but he can't let go of the feeling that he should be masterminding the escape. After all, he's the big brother. He's always taken care of her. That's just how it is. His former self, the Old Brooks, up there somewhere, would know exactly what to do in this situation. Old Brooks sees a solution, surely, but he's keeping quiet about it. He's enjoying all this confusion. “Try not to think about who you were
before
the accident,” Dr. Groom has said, “and concentrate on who you want to be now. Accept the new you.” Sometimes Brooks wants to toss Dr. Groom out the window.

Mary opens the pantry doors and peeks out into the hall. “I don't see anything,” she says. “Maybe they've gone upstairs.”

He follows her to the kitchen entrance. She turns, a finger to her lips, but he has not made any sound. He watches her inch into the kitchen. To his right is a refrigerator. Photographs and appointment cards
attached to its white side with magnets. In one of the photographs are two children, an older boy and a tiny girl, on a seesaw. Across the bottom someone has written,
What goes up . . .

“Stop moving,” Mary whispers, at least forty feet of tiled floor left between her and the exit.

But Brooks sees something on the wall, something that might help them: a cordless phone. Mary can just call her friend and get the safe command, and all this will be over. He reaches out for the black phone with the glowing blue screen, unhooks it from its cradle. When he turns to show it off to Mary, he realizes that she has come to a full stop at the entrance to the living room. “Easy,” she says.

Through the door he sees them, the dogs, heads low, tails stiff, coarse black fur Mohawked up along their backs. Is it possible that the dogs have set an elaborate trap for them?

Mary inches backward. The dogs growl. “Baa, baa, black sheep,” she whispers. “Bibi Netanyahu.”

Brooks could probably make it safely back to the pantry. But not Mary. She's too close to the dogs, too far from the pantry. Behind him, on the stove, is a grimy cast-iron skillet. He grabs that. “Top of the fridge,” he says.

“What?” Mary sneaks a look over her right shoulder. The dogs come at her with their clicking nails and soggy growls. She lunges at the fridge. She tries to use the ice dispenser as a foothold, but the freezer door swings open. She slams it and scrambles up onto the soapstone counter, knocking aside cookbooks and an old Mr. Coffee
pot that shatters across the tiled floor. From there she pulls herself up onto the fridge. Brooks is two steps behind his sister. Phone in hand, he flings himself onto the counter, belly first. He feels like a spider with all its legs ripped out. He reaches for a cabinet knob. One of the dogs locks on to his ankle, and he screams. He writhes, swinging the phone back and forth. When the phone connects with the dog's head, he loses his grip on it and it goes clattering to the floor. But he's free now. He's able to clamber up beside his sister.

They have to crouch on the dusty fridge-top or else their heads will touch the ceiling.

“You're bleeding,” Mary says, bending down to his ankle.

“Don't bother with it now.” He looks down at the dogs, at their giant stinking faces. One dog is on the floor whimpering, and the other is pogo-ing up and down the front of the fridge, knocking loose all the photos and appointment cards. Its back paws come down on the phone and launch it sideways.

“I dropped it,” Brooks says. “The phone. Sorry. We could have called your friend.”

Mary is prodding at his ankle unscientifically. “Don't worry about it. That wouldn't have worked anyways.”

“Why, he's out of the country or something?”

“Well—”

“He doesn't know we're here,” Brooks says, surprising even himself.

His sister looks at him as if she were the one with the dog bite.

•   •   •

The night Wynn first brought out his video camera they were in Myrtle Beach at his family's beach house. Mary listened to the
waves through the open window as Wynn fiddled with a tape. Then he told her to start playing with herself. Already she could anticipate the regret. Maybe that was part of the fun. Her friends had warned her about Wynn. They'd heard strange things about him. Perverted things. According to a guy who used to work with him, he cheated on his wife constantly. He'd been with a hundred women. Probably his dick was contaminated, her friends joked. At least make him wear a condom, they said.

Did she enjoy making the video? A little bit, sure. For the newness of it. But not for the sex itself. It didn't even feel much like sex to her. It was like something else. She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation. The pillowcase smelled like potato chips and sweat. She wondered if he'd even washed them, if maybe this was one of the kids' bedrooms. He smacked her bottom, and she almost laughed. It wasn't risqué, it was silly.

She broke off the affair a few weeks later when he proposed a new video, this one in his bathroom at home. His wife was at work and the kids were at school. He already had the camera out.

“Do you ever watch these later?” she asked.