Be Mine (33 page)

"That dog," Jon said, shaking his head. "You better call the Henslins, or he's going to starve to death out there."

"I will. I love you," I said to Jon's back as he stepped out the door.

He turned around.

He came back.

We kissed again. Harder, longer. And then he left.

O
N THE
way into Fred's Landscaping, Chad didn't speak. He looked out the passenger-side window. I spoke, although I had the sense that Chad wasn't listening. I said, "About Garrett, Chad—he's probably just taken off, maybe left for boot camp early, or maybe he changed his mind about boot camp. Maybe he ran off to avoid it, or went to visit his aunt, but I can't help being worried, Chad. I don't blame you for any of this. This is all my fault, of course, but I need to know, Chad—you didn't
threaten
Garrett, did you? I know he told you about—" I couldn't continue. I swallowed. "But, of course, you know that none of it was his fault. I understand if you were angry at him, Chad, but Garrett didn't leave, did he, because—?"

Chad snapped around and looked at me. "No, Mom, I didn't
threaten
Garrett."

I looked away. I said, quietly, "I know you didn't, Chad. I'm sorry I asked."

We drove for a few minutes in silence, then I cleared my throat and asked how he was feeling, how he'd slept.

He said, "Fine."

W
HEN
I pulled back into the driveway, Kujo was still there.

I walked halfway down the backyard and called to him, but he was pawing busily around in the dirt and didn't even look in my direction. His ears did not even perk up. I went inside and dialed the number of the Henslins. Mrs. Henslin answered. Her voice sounded fragile, faraway, as if she were answering the phone from much farther down the road than she was, or as if she'd aged greatly since I'd last spoken to her—and I realized that I hadn't actually seen her, except as she and her husband passed in their blue pickup (a glimpse, mostly, of my own reflection in their windshield, and a wave) since last October.

In that voice, she said, "I'll send Ty down when he gets home for lunch, to fetch him. I can't do it, not with this arthritis. And Ernie hardly leaves the house since he broke his hip."

"He broke his hip?" I asked.

"Last October."

"Oh, Mrs. Henslin, I'm so sorry. I had no idea."

I felt more alarmed by how little I knew about the suffering of the elderly couple who lived less than half a mile down the road than I did about Ernie's broken hip. What had I been doing all those months that I hadn't thought to check in on them, had never once stopped by, or called, or wondered more than in passing why it was I never saw them outside any longer?

"Why would you know?" Mrs. Henslin asked. Always, she was practical. "But, anyway, he can't come down there. I'll send Ty"—her grandson—"and he'll bring a leash and get the dog back here. And I'm sorry about the trouble."

I told her that it was no
trouble,
that I'd only called because I was worried, because—

"Of course it's trouble," she said. "We'll take care of it."

She said good-bye and hung up, and I held on to the receiver for a few moments, feeling somehow dismissed too summarily—reprimanded, or rejected. I wanted to call her back, to explain myself again. Why I'd called. Why I hadn't known about Mr. Henslin's hip, how busy I'd been, teaching, and Chad having gone off to college. How I'd thought of them often. How I'd—

But then Kujo began to wail—a famished, cavernous noise. A cry of such frustration and despair that I put down the phone and hurried to the door to look out at him.

Had something else happened?

No.

The Henslins' spaniel was just where he'd been for days, his head thrown back, directing that long wail to the sky.

I went to the refrigerator and got the last of the pork chops I'd made for Jon and Chad on Saturday, and put it on a paper plate, and I headed for the backyard with them.

B
UT, AS
soon as I reached the edge of the scrubbrush with the paper plate, the pork chop—

As soon as I saw what he'd done—

That the dog had dug a hole at least three feet deep.

And the way, even when I approached him with the meat held out in front of me on a plate, murmuring his name, calling his name, finally shouting his name
(Kujo!)
he would not turn toward me, he would not stop howling—

And the scent of it, rising—

And a swarm of sweat bees hovering over the hole that Kujo had dug—

And the flies—

The music of those flies—

I knew.

I understood.

Just tell him you'll call the cops if he comes around, or that your husband will shoot him, or something, if he comes to the house again.

I put the plate with the pork chop on the ground at Kujo's feet, and turned back to the house, running.

A
T TWO
o'clock in the afternoon, after hours of standing at the back porch door, looking out to the end of our yard, listening to Kujo there, howling, then pacing, then rising up again to howl, I saw Mr. Henslin—his shadow first, hobbling in the dust—coming down the dirt road with a leash.

I opened the back door, and stepped out.

I watched as he approached his dog.

The dog crouched, wagging its tail across the ground—whining, pacing. Mr. Henslin caught him by the collar, and Kujo struggled to get away.

Mr. Henslin clipped the leash to the collar, and Kujo began to cry, and bark, and pull backward on the leash.

But Mr. Henslin was surprisingly strong. He managed to pull Kujo behind him, the dog finally giving up the struggle to pull Mr. Henslin back, but still unwilling to leave, letting his legs scuttle across the ground, refusing to stand, to walk, but having no choice but to let the stronger of the two of them drag him away, out to the road. When Mr. Henslin noticed me standing on the steps of the back porch, he called out to me. "You've got something dead out there," he shouted, then turned his back, pulling his dog behind him, home.

I
SAT
on the love seat with Garrett's cat. I stroked her shadowy coat. There was so much sunlight pouring in through the window on us that I could see nothing beyond this cat, in my lap, and my limbs. It was if we were floating there in a sectioned bit of glare, a bit of roped-off brilliance. The dust around us revolved slowly, galaxies of it. We were space travelers. Time travelers. We had arrived here, in this new world, with nothing. We'd brought nothing with us. We hadn't expected, I supposed, to stay so long, and then hundreds of years had passed, and we were still here, floating, homeless, alone on the love seat—

But when the phone rang, the cat leaped from my lap, straight out the back door, which I'd left open.

I couldn't move, watching her leave.

I tried to follow her with my eyes, but she was gone.

T
HE PHONE
rang so long, the answering machine never picking it up, that I finally found myself rising, despite myself, from the love seat, and going to it. "Sherry? Is that you?"

"Yes," I said. "Jon."

"Sherry. I was worried. I let the phone ring about a hundred times, sweetheart. Were you outside?"

I said, "Yes."

"Sherry. Do you still love me? Is everything, now—is everything okay?"

"Everything is fine," I said.

There was a pause.

He said, "It doesn't sound okay, Sherry. What's happening? Has something happened there?"

"Yes," I said.

"What."

But it didn't sound like a question. It sounded as if he knew.

"Jon," I said. "Did Bram come here again?"

Another pause. Phone lines stretching through cornfields, forests, apple orchards. Soberly, Jon said, "How did you know?"

I said, "I know."

Jon cleared his throat. He said, "You were in Silver Springs with Chad. Do you want me to tell you what happened?"

"No," I said. I felt the blood move from my fingers, my hands, up my arms, into my chest, and then pooling coldly around my heart. I was sweating—my back, my chest, my brow—and had to wipe it from my eyes.

Jon sighed. He said, wearily, "Sherry, I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm not."

My hands were shaking. I dropped the phone. I could hear Jon's voice inside it, still—tiny and a million miles away, calling my name. When I was finally able to pick it back up again, all I could say was that I was sorry. I was sorry, but I'd dropped the phone.

"Jesus, Sherry," Jon said, "I thought you'd passed out. I was getting ready to call 9-1-1. Look, you go lie down, sweetheart. You lie down, and forget all about this, and we can talk about it when I get home."

I heard, then, what sounded like fingers snapping just under my chin, or some delicate bone breaking in my throat. I managed to choke out, "Jon. My god. What now?"

"Nothing
now,
Sherry," Jon said. "That's the beauty of it, sweetheart.
Now
it's over."

***

O
VER
dinner, he was no different than he ever was at dinner. I'd brought a rodsserie chicken home. Potato salad from the deli counter. I'd walked through the grocery store with a red plastic basket on my arm—a ghost woman, gathering food for the dead. I paid for the food. I carried the brown bag out to the car. I'd driven, without thinking about driving, to Fred's Landscaping, where Chad was waiting for me, sitting under a tree with Fred, both of them with their shirts off—Chad, chiseled and tan beside Fred, whose flesh was the pure white of papier-mâché except for a jagged red scar straight down his chest.

I asked Chad, when he got in the car beside me, what Fred's scar was from.

"Open-heart," Chad said.

He was talkative on the way home.

He'd seen a coyote in the backyard of a house where he was planting saplings. "Right there, in this pretty little suburban area—kind of scouting out their pool, the biggest coyote I've ever seen. It could easily have eaten their poodle, or their kid. It just froze when it saw me looking at it. We stood there staring back and forth for a long time, and then, just like it had made itself invisible somehow, it was gone."

His tone—natural, healthy, familiar, like the smell of grass and leaves and sun on him—brought me back to myself, gradually, until I was an ordinary woman driving a white car, having picked up her son at his summer job, on her way home to her remodeled farmhouse in the country, where everything was the way it had always been, and would continue to be
(that's the beauty of it, now it's over..
.) forever.

At dinner—the rôtisserie chicken, the deli potato salad, some bread from a plastic package full of reassurances about our health
(no saturated fat, heart healthy, high in fiber, calcium)
—Jon and Chad talked about golf, about hunting, about hedgerows and saplings. Now and then, Jon looked across the table at me, and his eyes would linger for a moment. When I looked back, he looked down at his plate, or back at Chad—sheepishly, I thought, like a child who'd recently been reprimanded, who was not sure if he was still in disfavor, who was hoping desperately that he was not.

Is this all it is?
I thought.

Jon's sheepish look made it seem that it was, as if almost nothing had happened, as if it were all a regrettable mistake, perhaps, but nothing that a shrug of the shoulders and a mumbled apology couldn't fix.

Is
this the beauty of it? I thought.

Was that possible?

For twenty years, Jon had been the one who'd known where to find the fusebox in the basement, how to jump-start a car with a dead battery, when to refinance the house, who to call when the furnace died, how to remove a splinter from a finger, where to go during a tornado warning (interior closet, crouching in the dark among our own coats—the suffocating wool of them, the comforting intimacy of them), what to do to keep the food from spoiling in the refrigerator during an electrical failure.

For twenty years, it had been Jon who'd kept track of our finances, the maintenance of the house. It had been Jon who'd set the timer on the water softener, who'd warned us away from the wasps' nests in the yard, who'd sprayed them with poisons, who'd kept the squirrels from getting into the attic, from chewing the wiring, from burning the house down to fine white ash that would have sifted through our fingers.

Had he known, again, simply, what needed to be done?

Had he known it? Had he
done
it? Was it possible? Had I been married to a man capable of this, and not known it, for twenty years?

Again, he caught my eye when he saw that I was looking at him. He seemed, I thought, surprised by the intensity of it, my gaze. He smiled at me, and it rippled through me like the first smile—the pleasure, the anticipation, this
stranger,
could he be
mine?

Was it possible, this thrill in the blood despite myself—part horror, part confusion—but also, yes, a kind of baffled amazement that I'd misread him for so long, his passion, so furious and wild, I had never seen it, never.

Jon?

I hadn't, I realized, known him at all.

Yes, he was a stranger.
My
stranger. And he'd killed my lover to keep me.

I
N THE
morning, I was still asleep when Jon left for work. Down the road, I could hear a dog howling. It was coming from the direction of the Henslins'.

Kujo? Was he trying to come back?

A
FTER
dropping Chad off at Fred's, I went into the city.

How could I go home? Kujo, down the road, by the time we'd finished breakfast, had begun a yowling and barking so fierce that it sounded as if the Henslins had tied him to a post, then set a fire around him. Desperate, unrelenting. I could not stay home and listen to that. It had to end, eventually, I knew, but I knew it wouldn't end today. Too warm. Ninety degrees at 10:00
A.M
. Kujo would be wild with the heat, and the scent. No, I would go into my office, I thought. I would shelve the books I'd left on the floor, on the chairs. I would check my mailbox. I would sit alone, in my office. I would try to think. It surprised me to think that I
could.
How was it, I marveled, that I could drive? That I could think? That I could look into the future at all and imagine that it would continue to exist? How was it that I had the sure sense that things could go on, and that nothing that had happened could have changed everything?