Hall of Small Mammals (28 page)

“Not really,” he said. “It's not about that. Making them is what's fun. It's fun, isn't it?”

She was in a white towel, examining the shower. There was blond hair swirled around the drain. His wife's, no doubt. One of the drawers was halfway open, and she could see hair products and cotton swabs and a box of tampons. She opened the medicine cabinet and found three different kinds of antidepressants.

“Not mine,” he said. “Let's start with you in the shower. You ready?”

She was not ready. She slipped back into her underwear and told him it was over.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“I want the tape,” she said. “From the beach.”

“I erased it. I always tape over them.”

She left him half naked in the bathroom. Later she wondered if she might have gotten the tape from him then if she'd only been a little bit more persistent. She thought about it constantly. At work, ringing people up, she lost track of the numbers. She spilled a box of rainbow sprinkles, and what should have been a ten-minute cleanup took her almost thirty.

“You've got to get the tape back,” her friends said. “What if he puts it online?”

Online! She started visiting pornography sites, just in case. There were so many sites, so many categories of sex. She couldn't believe all the categories: Mature, POV, MILF, Amateur, Ex-Girlfriend. How might Wynn have categorized her?

She called him and demanded the tape.

“I already told you,” he said. “It doesn't exist anymore.”

“I'll call the cops.”

“Listen, if I had it, I'd give it to you, but I don't. You can't just call me like this. I'm at work.”

She imagined a locked desk drawer in his home study, a hundred tapes, each with a label, her name on one of them, the date, the location, the positions, the noises made, all of it charted out and diagrammed.

This was her situation to fix. Wynn kept a key hidden under a rock on the back porch. She remembered that. All she had to do was wait for the right day, the right moment . . .

•   •   •

“And so you think he has the tape here,” Brooks says. “Somewhere in this house? And that's why we broke in?”

She nods.

“You could have just told me earlier,” he says.

“You would have judged me.”

“Sure, but only a little.”

“Would you have gone along with it? If you'd known we were breaking into someone's house?”

“No, of course not,” he says. “I would have waited in the car.”

She smiles at him, and he is relieved to see that it's a real smile, without a trace of pity. “So where is Wynn now?” he asks. “How much time do we have?”

“A few hours, maybe. They drove up to Chapel Hill for the day. His son's looking at colleges.” She knows this because Wynn shares so much of his life online. When she was with him, he was always typing something into his phone.

“If I had a sex tape, I don't think I'd keep it in the house for my wife to find.”

“You don't know Wynn.”

The dogs have stopped barking. They sit patiently at the foot of the fridge. Brooks's ankle throbs. He doesn't know what to do next. If only he could curl up on top of the fridge and take a nap. But the dogs will never give up. They are trained to attack intruders, and that's exactly what he and his sister are: intruders. Brooks
has broken into someone's home. He needs a brick. Where's his brick? Give him a brick.

Brooks jumps—not over the dogs and toward the door but to their left. He lands on both feet and sprints back down the hall. The dogs follow. He's the distraction, the bait. “Find it!” he yells back to Mary. He passes the pantry. Ahead of him is the grandfather clock. A blue Oriental rug shifts sideways as he turns left at the end of the hall. He runs up a wide staircase, hand on the rail, and at the top he sees that there are doors, three of them. They look the same. It's like a terrible game show. He grabs the knob of the middle door, but his fingers won't grip right. “Some things will get better and others won't,” Dr. Groom says, and Brooks will have to accept that.

But it's not his fingers, he realizes. The door is locked. He slings his shoulder into it with all his weight. Thankfully the lock is cheap and the door pops open.

Closing it behind him, he finds himself in a room with hot pink walls decorated with gruesome movie posters. A stereo and a television barely fit on a small white desk beneath the window. In the dead gray television screen Brooks can see his own warped reflection staring back: his terrible haircut, his skeletal face. Overhead the ceiling fan spins. The bedspread moves.

Moves? A tiny wiggle at the corner of his vision. An almost imperceptible change in the arrangement of wrinkles in the blanket. Like a scene from a horror movie.

In the months after the accident Brooks experienced what he now knows were mild hallucinations. At the hospital he became temporarily convinced that a family of goats had taken up residence under his bed. They had gray coats and wet black eyes, and
at night they came out to lap water from the toilet. If Brooks called for help, the goats would scatter in all directions. They would duck for cover and hide. Dr. Groom explained that Brooks could no longer implicitly trust everything he saw and heard. What Brooks needed, he said, was a healthy dose of skepticism. If goats were ransacking his room, he was supposed to remember that it would be very tricky for a goat to somehow get past the hospital front desk and take the elevator to the third floor. If the coat rack asked him for a grilled cheese, Brooks needed to remind himself that coat racks did not typically require human food, especially not grilled cheeses. If the bedspread sprang to life . . .

He steps toward the bed. There are pillows piled at the head and foot. In the middle, under the bedspread, is a person-sized lump. He watches it closely. It might be rising and falling, but then again—

“Who's under there?” he asks.

The lump is very still.

“I'm trying to leave,” he says. “So don't be afraid. All of this was a big mistake. Us being here, I mean. We know your dad. We got trapped. By your dogs.”

The lump doesn't move.

“I'm Brooks. I'm not sure if you're actually under there. Maybe I'm talking to nothing. I can get a little confused. I haven't always been this way.” He steps toward the desk. “I'm moving your desk so I can go out the window. Your dogs want to eat me. So I'm going out the window. Sorry.” An apology to a ghost.

He slides the desk toward the closet, everything on it rattling. A water glass topples over and the liquid rolls. He grabs a soccer sock off the floor and sops it up before it touches a closed laptop
covered in pink monkey stickers. “I spilled some water,” he says, “and I had to use one of your socks. Sorry. Your laptop is fine, I think.” He gets the window open and pops out the screen, which lands below in some holly bushes. He sticks one leg out and straddles the sill. It's a long way down but not so far that he will necessarily break a bone. Still, this is probably going to hurt.

“Ba baboon,” the lump says.

“I'm sorry?”

“Say that to the dogs and they won't attack you.”

“So you're really under there?”

The lump doesn't answer.

“Thank you. That's very kind. I'm Brooks.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Aren't you supposed to be off with your family or something?”

“I got out of it. Please go now.”

“I hope you're not just in my head,” he says, and goes to the door. “Because that would mean
ba baboon
is total nonsense, and I'm about to get bitten again.” The lump doesn't answer. He's about to turn the knob but stops. He walks back over to the bed. “By the way, just in case this ever happens again—”

“God. Why haven't you left yet?”

“I will. I'm about to. But next time this happens, you should really consider calling the police—or at least your parents.”

The lump is quiet.

“Just an idea,” Brooks adds.

The lump sits up fast, the bedspread transformed into a mountain. “Look, my mom, like, stole my cell, all right? I told you what to say, now go. Just get out of here.”

Brooks isn't sure what to say. He considers apologizing again.

“Actually, I lied,” the lump says. “I did call the police. They'll be here, like, any minute. You're going to jail.”

“Okay,” Brooks says, hand on the door. “Okay, I'm going.”

•   •   •

When Mary climbs down from the fridge, part of her just wants to leave and forget the tape. But she can't do that. Brooks could be hurt upstairs. He could lose his way. He could trap himself in the linen closet and, in the dark, lose himself entirely.

Until her brother's accident, Mary never gave much thought to the idea that personalities may be not only malleable but also divisible from the self. There has to be more to us than memories and quirks that can get smashed away so easily. This raises questions of accountability. What part of her is accountable for her decisions if all that stands between Mary being Mary and not someone else is a simple bump on the head?

Wandering down the hall in search of her brother, she finds a room with a computer on a mahogany desk and a leather chair on a clear plastic mat over the carpet. Wynn's camera is in the chair, and in a metal tray beside the computer she finds a stack of small gray tapes. She can't sort through them here. She'll just have to take them all with her. She dumps out a bag of tangled cables, connectors, and start-up discs and loads the tapes into the bag. Then she adds the camera, just in case.

The hallway is quiet. Brooks is upstairs, somewhere—and the dogs? At the bottom of the stairwell she hears their nails. “Get out, Brooks,” she yells, and runs back the way she came, down the hall, past the grandfather clock and the pantry, into the kitchen,
all of it so familiar now. She goes out the back door and runs out into the yard, the sunlight on her face, a stultifying whiteness. One day she will forget everything, and there will be nothing left of her except . . . This. Whatever
This
is. Total erasure, maybe.

She wanders around the perimeter of the house, searching for any sign of Brooks up in the windows. She sees a popped-out screen in the bushes—but no Brooks. On the front porch she leans into a narrow window beside the door with her hands cupped around her eyes. Through the thin white curtain she can barely make out a table in the foyer, a painting on the wall above that, and the base of the wide staircase. She rings the doorbell three times, hears it echo in the house. She is about to abandon the porch when, through the window, she sees feet on the stairs, then knees, then a torso. Brooks is striding down the stairwell like he owns the place.

The dogs follow him, no longer vicious at all, their heavy dumb tongues lolling over sharp, crooked teeth. Her brother has tamed the beasts. The dead bolt clicks open, and there he is, framed in the doorway: her big brother.

•   •   •

The dog bite isn't deep enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. “No more stitches,” he says. “Please.” Back at Mary's, he takes a hot shower and lets the water trickle over his wound. Blood swirls around the drain. He towels off and wraps his ankle with gauze and then falls into a long nap on top of the covers. When he wakes up again, it's dark out. He does his exercises at the foot of the bed and checks his email.

His mother has sent more pictures of the frogs. He scrolls through them: big-eyed blobs in the white snow, their neon-blue
eggs like a thousand eyes under the freezing water. The final photo is of his mother and Cora crouching. Seeing his mother this happy in such a bleak landscape makes him smile.

He prints the picture to show his sister and heads downstairs. In the den, the blinds are drawn and the television screen casts a blue light across all the furniture, the plush couch and ottoman, the wall of framed photographs from Mary's semester abroad in Rome—her black-and-whites of the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, so many gardens, basilicas, crumbling stone baths. On the den floor stacks of gray tapes surround a video camera tethered to the television by a long cord.

Brooks sits down cross-legged and brings the camera into his lap. He can hear Mary in the kitchen, pots rattling, a dinner being prepared. The tapes all look the same. He picks one and pops it into the camera. When he pushes play, he keeps his finger on the button, just in case he's presented with something no brother wants to see.

Two lines squiggle across the screen, and then a patio appears, a concrete space bright with sunlight. The camera is bouncy in someone's hand. Two kids are on the ground, dyeing Easter eggs in red Dixie cups. The boy, maybe twelve years old, gives an egg to his younger sister. Holding it between two fingers, she dips it in the cup.

“Hey, didn't know you were awake,” Mary says, striding into the room. When she sees what he's watching she sighs and sits down beside him on the floor. They stare up at the television together. It's been years, Brooks thinks, since he last saw this tape, but it's all coming back to him now: their dye-stained fingertips,
Easter eggs buried in the pine straw, the smell of the azalea bushes, his mother lounging in the yard with her Bible and
People
magazines.

“Seems like yesterday that was us,” Mary says.

The little girl on the screen knocks over the cup, and colored water spills all over her dress, the blue dye splashed up across her chest. She faces the camera bewildered, looking for help or reassurance maybe, and begins to cry.

“We shouldn't be watching this,” Mary says, and grabs the camera from Brooks's lap. “It's wrong. Do you think I should try and return all this stuff? I feel awful about it. I guess I could leave it all on the doorstep.”

As she's saying this, a woman Brooks doesn't recognize rushes onto the screen with a handful of paper towels for the little girl's dress, and only then does he fully understand that this isn't their patio or their Easter or their mother. This isn't their childhood at all, and it never was. “Stop clinging to the Old Brooks,” Dr. Groom likes to say. “And guess what? You'll still be you.”