The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (13 page)

When I made it back to the house, I walked inside, afraid Wendy would have skipped out, that there’d be nothing left, no trace of her, and some small part of me worried I’d made her up entirely, but there she was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and when she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me and then stepped back and looked at me and said, “I’ve missed you so much, I could just eat you up, like scrambled eggs.” Then she mimed cracking eggs into a skillet and stirring them around with a spatula and then eating them up with a knife and fork, and I said, “Who eats scrambled eggs with a knife and fork?” and then she punched me in the shoulder and then she kissed me, and I knew I was home.

We thought, Wendy and I, to make a home of the emptied house, mainly by rooting through the other houses on the same block, which I hadn’t considered might be as stripped bare as our own. When, after hours and days of house-looting, we returned empty-handed, I figured we would give up on the idea of furnishings and homemaking of that sort and that we would settle into a less permanent lifestyle, our possessions carried with us on our backs. Wendy wouldn’t have any of that, not since I first convinced her that I had serious plans to renovate and build in one of these houses. “We need something to sit on, at least,” she said. And when I came home with seats I’d stripped out of one of the abandoned cars in a body repair shop nearby, she smiled and kissed me and said, “Now we just need something to sleep on.”

What struck me now, though, about that first conversation, about our earliest confidences, and what worried me about this house full of animals she had claimed to have only just found, was that small detail of her life that I had at first thought pleasantly bland and unimportant. What girl, at one point in her life, doesn’t want to become a veterinarian? It had seemed a safe assumption that she had long since given up on the idea of becoming a veterinarian. It had seemed a safe assumption that this feckless and transient lifestyle had precluded any faint desire to make something of herself. But then she showed me this house she had found, and I wondered if she had found it or if she had made it herself.

The fact of the matter was: I didn’t have any actual experience judging homes or estimating what it would take to fix one up, but it was something that came naturally to my father, who owned a now defunct and practically empty hardware store, and I had always assumed that if you were to toss me into a hardware-and-repair sort of situation, push come to shove, a store of knowledge, buried but innate, would bubble up, and I would be just as good at it as he was. And it occurred to me that Wendy had at some point in her life hit upon the same flawed philosophy, that a skill or talent would necessarily pass from father to child, except that she expected to know how to fix these animals because her father had known how to take care of horses and mules.

I can’t say, then, that it surprised me too much when one night I woke up and turned to look at her and found that she had a bird. I asked her where she got that bird, and she said she couldn’t sleep with all the racket the bird had been making outside and that she’d gone to investigate and that this is what she’d found. It had broken its wing somehow, and she had gathered it to her and tended to it. There was a gentle way to how she was holding that bird that made me certain she had done this before. “Are you going to maybe put that one with the rest of them?” I asked. She shook her head and said, “Not tonight,” and then she put her lips to the bird’s beak, though I couldn’t tell if they touched, and then she said, “Tomorrow, you go into the house with the others, but tonight you sleep with us.”

The whole night it didn’t make a sound and she didn’t let go of it, and when I woke up, she was asleep but still with that bird in her hand. I sat up and pulled my pants on and then poured some water into a cup for the bird, but the bird didn’t stir, and I thought to myself,
I don’t know you, bird, or how to fix what’s wrong with you, but I don’t doubt that you will soon be dead.
And for a minute or two, I considered lifting it gently from Wendy’s hand and breaking its neck or smothering or suffocating it, though I didn’t know the first thing about going about suffocating a bird. I thought I should do this for her, anyway, for her peace of mind, and for me, I’ll be honest, for my own peace of mind. It would be harder on her when this frail creature died in a week or two weeks than if she woke up now to find it had died while she slept, but then Wendy began to shift and wake, and the bird lifted its beak and poked lightly at her finger, and my opportunity window had closed.

For the next few weeks, I tried to ignore the toll that house full of animals took on us. But it wasn’t easy. She was never home, it seemed. She was always at the other house, or she was out searching for other injured or sick or stray animals to ensnare. Our house, the house we were living in, had begun to take on the other house’s smell. I don’t know how this happened. Maybe that smell grabbed hold of her clothes and her hair and her skin and snuck in that way, or maybe it followed her home, some physical thing trailing behind her like a cartoonish wisp of smoke. Anyhow, I could smell it and I mentioned this to Wendy and she shook her head at me (scattering wisps of stink everywhere) and told me it was my imagination. And more than once, I woke up to find her asleep with another animal tucked under her arm like it was a stuffed animal she’d been sleeping with since she was a child. How she managed to coax these creatures into these docile positions, I never understood. Nor did I know where she found them in the first place, and when she wouldn’t tell me—or told me only vaguely “Here and there” or “At the park” or “On the side of the road”—and when it appeared to me that some of them were less sick and more just stray, I began to suspect her of sneaking into people’s homes, or into pet stores, or into the neglected city zoo, and stealing these creatures to bring back to our house. And if I hadn’t become more and more engrossed in how angry this was all making me, I might have stopped to admire her way with animals, but in truth, I wanted desperately for them to die off or break free, but they didn’t seem to want to do either. And after a month of this, and of living in a house that became increasingly dirtier and dingier, I decided I should leave Wendy and this house, that I should let her have her animals and this other house she had found herself and return to my parents’ place before setting out in search of another abandoned shack where I could set up camp. Or maybe I would leave town altogether, start fresh again somewhere new.

Then, before I decided I would leave for good, she got sick. She was nauseated and throwing up, light-headed and weak and sweaty. I gave her some water. I stole into my parents’ house and found her some variety of pills—for headache, for sinus, for cough—but none of them helped much. In the end, she asked me if I could go on my own to the house with the animals in it and change their cages and administer their medicines. I wanted to ask her, Is that really a thing we need to concern ourselves with? Is this an exercise we need to be devoting our time to? Instead, I asked her what she wanted me to do and then how to do it, and she explained, retching and looking green and unwell, and then I said, “Do you need anything while I’m out?” and she shook her head and lay down, and I left.

It would be easy enough, I thought to myself, to show up at my parents’ house. To show up and let myself in and climb upstairs to my old room and go to sleep, and then to wake up the next morning and act as if nothing had happened, as if nothing more than a long walk, one really long walk that I’d only just now returned from, had happened. My mother would act diffident toward me, would refuse to smile at me, and would tilt her head my way and say, “You think you’re so funny, don’t you?” but she would be happy to have me home. That much I knew.

And there would be no consequences, either, nothing that might damage me, anyway, in leaving Wendy and those sickly creatures, and there would be potentially bad consequences in returning to them. I thought of all of this as I walked, and I knew I should have turned around and gone somewhere else, anywhere else, but I didn’t.

The house smelled, of course, as it was full of sick or dying animals, smelled of their fur, their hair, their feathers, of the mucous that dribbled from their noses or the pus-filled sores on their footpads or on their bellies, and it smelled of their piss and shit and of the disinfectant Wendy sprayed throughout the house to hide that smell, and of their breath, and of the animals themselves, whatever their smell was, a smell I associated with zoos and circuses, and, I supposed, this collection of monsters, ordinary monsters, was as close to a zoo as our small town was likely to see. But there was another smell, too. It was an overpowering and metallic smell that a part of me recognized at once as the smell of blood, but since there was no reason for there to be this smell in the house, I dismissed the idea.

Moving quickly through the house, hoping to root out the cause of the smell and get rid of it so that maybe the smell would have faded by the time I finished administering to the animals, I slid on something and fell forward, only barely throwing my hands out in front of me in time to break my fall. Turning to see what had tripped me up, I felt a wetness on my knees and saw a blooming red stain on my pants, and for a moment I was scared that I’d seriously hurt myself, hurt myself so badly that I couldn’t even feel the pain of whatever wound resulted in so much blood, but then I realized I’d fallen into a pool or a smear of blood, and that what had tripped me in the first place had been the metal gate to one of the cages, pulled apart, twisted and mangled and tossed into the open doorway.

Eventually I found five more cages with their doors also torn from their hinges. Studying these cages, I couldn’t remember what had once lived inside them, but they were empty now, the only sign that the cage was once home to some living thing being the trail of blood leading away from the bent or broken frame. The sight and the smell of all this carnage was upsetting enough that I quickly left that place without opening a single cage or refilling a single bottle of water, and when I finally walked back through our door, I found Wendy asleep on the floor, and, taking my pants and my shirt off, I went to lie on the floor next to her, but didn’t fall asleep until just before morning.