When We Were Animals (28 page)

J
ack drives. It is deep night. No moon at all. There are no streetlights out here. We are in the middle of a great black, the aperture of our headlights opening on the two-lane blacktop scrolling out before us, the margins of the trees flashing past. The only sound is the stable hum of the engine and the groan of the upholstery under us as we shift in our seats.

I glance into the backseat at our son, Marcus. Jack could not find someone to watch him when he came to fetch me from jail.

“He’s asleep,” I say.

“It’s late,” Jack says.

“It’s late,” I repeat, nodding.

I am very much alone, the light in the car strange, the flashes from the oncoming headlights casting shadows that make my husband look like someone I don’t know.

He looks at me, earnest.

“It’ll be okay,” he says. “Helena and her fiancé won’t press charges. They won’t. I’ll talk to them. You’ll apologize.” He makes his hand into a flat sword and cuts it through the air with each point. “She’ll forgive you. It’s what people do.”

This is true. It requires unrelenting effort to hate. It takes strength, commitment. Most of us are not that ambitious.

“We’ll…” he goes on, “we’ll schedule an appointment for you. To see a psychologist. It’ll be good for you to talk to someone. We’ll find someone you can talk to, someone you feel comfortable—”

He stops, looking to see how I will respond.

“I will,” I say simply. “I trust you.”

He gives me a tentative smile. A solitary car comes from the other direction, and we squint our eyes against its headlights. Then there is a shift in his voice toward gentleness.

“How are you feeling?” he says.

“Sleepy,” I say. “But okay. I feel fine.”

Then we are quiet for a while. In my mind, I say a little prayer for my father, but it’s a prayer I sometimes say over my son in his crib, and sometimes over my husband when he is asleep beside me in our bed. It was one of the traditional lullabies in Pale Miranda—first taught to me by Polly when we were both very little girls. It made everything seem blameless, and it went like this:

None of us is a saint, but the world is still magic.

“Just a few weeks till summer,” Jack says beside me.

“It’ll be nice.”

“We’ll have time. Maybe we should go somewhere.”

“Yes,” I say. “Let’s go somewhere. Where do people go?”

My mother, she got lost during the Lacuna, the June moon. My father, he died just before it. Do you know what a lacuna is? It’s a space. A hole. A lumen. In music, it’s a pause that makes you hear silence as though it were being played by an instrument. In moons, it is the middle of the year—a hiatus. In literature, it’s something left out of a manuscript. Here is a lacuna:

Do you see me there? In that empty space—that’s where I got lost. It’s where I went from that night to this one. It’s where my father and Blackhat Roy went. I hope it’s bright where they are. Bright as my aching girl-chest, where their hearts, black and white, still do dances.

Next to me in the car, Jack takes a deep breath. Then he speaks, haltingly, as though any word might cause the whole night sky to collapse.

“You know,” he says, “you can…talk to me.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. About things. Anything. Whatever’s important.”

After a pause, I say:

“I miss my father.”

I turn and look at my husband, the way the dim light from the dash makes his face glow with a strange tint. His skin seems almost unreal, his eyes glassy. Then I look at my son, asleep in the backseat. I can see his little chest rise and fall under his striped cotton shirt, his hot breath coming slow between parted lips, his head, hair messy, cocked to one side and leaning against the cushion of his car seat. His hands rest loose on his lap, but I see his tiny fingers twitch slightly around his stuffed pet bunny.

I think of an Easter Sunday, when I was ten.

Every year my father made a special Easter egg hunt for me. He hid them in difficult places, both inside and outside the house, then he gave me clues to those hidden treasures in the form of rhyming couplets written in script on index cards.

That year I was stuck on the last one. The clue said this:

I looked in all the places in the house where we kept valuables. I scoured the sideboard in the kitchen, where we kept the china and the silverware. I looked through my father’s office drawers, where he kept important documents. I sifted through the dresser where we kept all the things that once belonged to my mother.

While I looked, he watched me, smiling. He refused to help me with any additional hints.

I scowled at him. He gazed back at me with a look I’ll never forget.

I finally found the last Easter egg. It was in my bedroom, under my pillow.

“Your father,” Jack says now. “You never tell me about him. You never tell me anything about where you grew up, or about your school days, or about what you were like as a girl. You know I’d listen. I love you. I want to hear these things.”

I look away from him toward the trees, their briefly illuminated trunks flashing by in the night. I wonder who might be out there.

“Maybe.”

Everyone in the
neighborhood will know about my breaking into Helena’s house and about my being arrested and about the psychological rehabilitation I will undergo. At dinner parties, they will be nice. They are always very nice. They will offer their support. They will tell me they care about me and love me and want what’s best for me. Jack will remind me, as he always does, that he loves me.

It’s funny, all these people talking about love. They think love is something like a fluffy pillow where you rest your head. They think love is sweet and gentle, all hands and lips and nestling. But they’re wrong. I know what love is. Love is angrier than this. It’s harsher. It’s tasting the world on your tongue and digging your claws deep into the underbelly of life. I know exactly what love is. It’s sometimes leaning over your husband while he sleeps, while he conjures in his dreams all the fears and ecstasies he would relish if he were ever able to let himself be truly and wholly alive, breathing in the fermented air exhaled from his pink, undamaged lungs—and it’s sometimes wanting to rip out his throat with your teeth.

Special thanks to Josh Kendall and Eleanor Jackson. I owe them considerable gratitude. If you could read the first version of this book, you would see just how much.

Joshua Gaylord grew up in Anaheim, California, and currently resides in New York City. Using his own name or the pen name Alden Bell, he has authored three previous novels, including
The Reapers Are the Angels.
He received his PhD from New York University and has taught high school English as well as literature courses at NYU and the New School.

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