Car Troubles

By Jody Mace

I was run over by a school bus once, but it was the best-case scenario for getting run over by a school bus.

I was sitting in my Honda Civic in a school parking lot, waiting for my son’s bus to show up, and a different school bus was right in front of me. Then it started backing up. When a school bus starts backing up into you, it’s a little surreal because your mind doesn’t understand it all at once. It can’t. School busses don’t just back up and run over your car.

So everything felt like it was in slow motion. I laid on the horn, released the parking brake and started backing up to get away from it, but there was no escape. That school bus was dead set on running me over. When I finally was able to pull away I heard a noise that sounded like the ripping of metal. It turned out to be the ripping of metal. Something was hanging off the back of the bus and I thought, “That must be part of my car.”

But when I got out of my car and noticed that it didn’t have a hood anymore, I was still a little bit surprised. The entire hood was attached to the back of the bus. It was such a clean break, like peeling the lid off a sardine tin. Nobody was hurt. That’s what made it the best-case scenario for getting run over by a school bus.

When I retell this story, friends always ask if it was scary. It was not. As soon as I heard the bus come into contact with my car, I knew that my day had just gotten a lot more complicated. I knew that my evening plans were in jeopardy. I knew that I’d have to deal with a repair shop, with the police, with the insurance company. I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass. But it wasn’t scary. Not then.

In general, I like when things happen. I like things to be interesting. Zoos, for example, are boring to me unless something goes wrong. I don’t want things to go too wrong, but maybe a zebra could escape. Or two chimpanzees could copulate in front of a group of children on a church preschool field trip. Or a gorilla could throw his excrement at the Plexiglas wall and glare at the onlookers. Otherwise, what’s the story? It’s just a zoo.

So during the school bus incident, a part of me realized right away that something unusual had happened, that it was a story, and I began collecting details:

The fact that, since I didn’t expect to get out of the car, I was dressed in clothes that could be mistaken for pajamas. (But which were not pajamas.)
The way the middle school children on the bus thought the accident was the greatest thing ever and also mocked me as I walked past them in my clothes that could be mistaken for pajamas.
The fact that they pissed me off and I said something to the effect of “You think this is fucking funny?”
Which made it funnier to them.
The way the school safety officer assured me that the school district has good insurance because the buses get into accidents all the time. It’s true, too. All the time. Ever since this happened, I’ve noticed that.
The way the police officer was surprised that, when he arrived, the hood was still hanging off the back of the school bus. “You didn’t get it down yet?” he asked. “No, I left it there,” I said. “For your investigation.”
There was no investigation.
This fact that I learned: It’s legal to drive a car in North Carolina without a hood, as long as it has two working headlights and one taillight. My car had a taillight to spare.
The way that after a minute of driving without a hood, you kind of forget that your car doesn’t have a hood. It’s a little loud but you can’t see the engine from your vantage point behind the steering wheel. So you stop thinking about it. It’s surprising, really, how quickly you can get used to something like that.

The silver lining of things going wrong is that there’s something to talk about. I don’t like being bored, so I’m always grateful when there’s something to talk about. It’s a break from the ordinary.

And getting run over by a school bus actually wasn’t that big of a deal anyway. The car got repaired and insurance paid for the work. I drove a Hyundai SUV while the car was in the shop, which I thought was fun because I’d never driven an SUV before.

But as part of a bigger picture it was a little unsettling. It was the second of three car accidents members of my family were in with very large vehicles within an eighteen-month span, and the only one that didn’t result in our car being declared a total loss by the insurance company. In the first accident an eighteen-wheeler swerved into my daughter’s lane and pushed her VW Beetle down the interstate for some distance before she was able to steer to the side of the road. She was fine. Later, she said that she absorbed the power of the truck, superhero-style, and it made her stronger. But the Beetle was history. In the third accident, a young woman turned in front of my husband, lost control of her SUV and spun out and hit him twice. He was driving my Honda Civic (with a brand new hood) and that was the end of that car.

The problem is that when enough things go wrong, like members of your family being run over by large vehicles, you start wondering what the ordinary actually is. Is the ordinary state of the universe such that at any moment someone can make a thoughtless decision and put your life in jeopardy?

Actually, it is. We’re trusted to navigate massive pieces of metal at high speeds in close proximity to hundreds of other people doing the same thing, sometimes within just inches of each other. Think about how little you have to move the steering wheel to effect a significant change in the direction of the wheels of your car. That’s mechanical advantage happening right there, aided by a bunch of magic engineering stuff that I don’t understand. The margin of error is too small and we are too powerful. In the best of situations it seems insane to drive a car on a road.

Add to that the distracted, intoxicated, and impatient drivers. And the assholes. And the kids who haven’t quite learned to judge time and distance yet and don’t have the life experience to know to be afraid. And the elderly driver whose middle-aged offspring are debating if he should still be driving, and how to stop him if he shouldn’t, while right at this very moment he turns the key to his Buick to drive to Publix and buy a loaf of rye bread and ice cream sandwiches. And the school bus drivers who are so annoyed and beat down by snotty, defiant middle-schoolers that all they can think about is getting through the day and working enough years so they can retire. It’s not being dramatic to say that we’re putting our lives in these people’s hands every day. Maybe we are some of these people.

Our trust in each other’s judgment, attention, and adherence to the law is an amazing social construct. Our safety is a flimsy fiction. Yet we put ourselves in the path of this potential disaster every day, because if we don’t, then what? This is the world we live in. Driving to work without fear requires the suspension of disbelief.

The danger is real.

It becomes even more real when my own kids drive. I may be able to inflate my confidence in my own driving, my ability to out-maneuver the cars gunning for me, but I don’t have that same confidence in my kids. Not enough anyway, not when measured against the potential loss. They’re seventeen and twenty but I’m not sure it would matter if they were thirty-seven and forty. No matter how competent they are, I remember the times they got their heads stuck in the bannister or busted their lips by trying to fly off a stool. It’s not fair, I know.

So every time they leave with car keys in their hands, I tell them to be careful. They’ve stopped replying, “I’m always careful” or “Do you think if you don’t say that I won’t be careful?” because they’ve learned that I won’t stop. The words are a talisman I hand them as they step out the door. Like a coin I slip into their shirt pockets as they prepare for battle. As small as it is, it might absorb a bullet. I say it every time.

I don’t leave it as just “be careful.” Every time, I try to impress on them the specific dangers of that point in time.

“Be careful. With the change to Daylight Savings Time, people are tired.”

“Be careful. It’s the last day before a holiday weekend. People won’t have their minds on driving.”

“Be careful. The roads are wet.”

“Be careful. People were up late watching the Panthers game. ”

“It’s Saturday night. Every single driver out there is drunk. Be careful.”

Sometimes I can’t think of anything specific dangerous, so I say, “Statistically, today is the most dangerous day of the year for driving.” I say that several times a year.

The fear of your kids getting hurt is a cliché, but that’s only because it’s true. It’s the one truest, deepest thing that all parents share. It’s a fear so real that letting the thought percolate in my head for even a minute causes a stabbing pain in my gut.

Things are going to happen. They will have stories to tell, which is good, because I like to be entertained. But parts of their life narratives will be awful, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can hope for is that when they’re run over by metaphoric or real school buses they’re okay enough to tell the stories and that the stories are eventually funny, or at least bearable. I hope that their hoods always come off clean.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Read more FGP essays by Jody Mace.

Dinner Menu With Fear, Bears, and Endless Trees

IMG_1769 (960x1280) — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Matthew Olzmann

I didn’t actually think I was going to be eaten by the wild, but you never know. For the past fifteen years, I’d been living in Hamtramck, Michigan, where the “natural” landscape consisted mostly of pigeons and broken streetlights. An abandoned axle factory. Railroad tracks. But I’d recently moved to western North Carolina to take a teaching position at a small college in the mountains, and, here, in Swannanoa, Mother Nature touches everything. The fairytale-like shadows of infinite forests. Kudzu crawling up the sides of farmhouses.

Out here, there are seasons possessed by swarms of one strange insect, followed by seasons possessed by swarms of another strange insect. And then there are the black bears, which in this part of the state are seemingly everywhere. They’ll rip through your trash at night. They’ll climb trees to take down bird feeders. (They love birdseed). They’ll block traffic when they lumber down the road. I have a friend who even saw one walking through the Target parking lot. If you don’t see them, you still know they’re there. The darkness of the western North Carolina night is immense, and when you peer into that darkness, you can only imagine what thunders through it. I tend to imagine things with teeth and claws. They prowl behind the shadows, just beyond the small perimeter of light that circles my house. Or maybe they watch me from afar charting my movements and recording my actions on a clipboard. Or they clean a grill in their backyard, look over recipes, and invite guests to an exclusive dinner party.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment I had to make was not to the actual presence of the natural world, but to people’s attitudes toward that world. I think bears are terrifying, but this is not a widely-held belief in these parts. Anthropomorphization is the act of assigning human-like qualities to nonhuman entities, and it’s fairly common for people to do this with animals. Regarding the bears of North Carolina, I’ve heard people say, “The bears, here, are so friendly” and “they have such gentle spirits” and “they are beautiful and peaceful souls” and “it’s possible to be their friend—they really like people.” I appreciate these ideas. But I don’t really believe them.

II.

In his stand-up special, Oh My God, comedian Louis C.K. says, “I don’t know if we fully appreciate the fact that we got out of the food chain. That is a massive upgrade. Because for every other living thing, life ends by being eaten.”

III.

I don’t know why I imagine bears hunting me with poison-tipped spears, while other people imagine them burning incense and dancing through a massive drum circle of love, but one of my favorite things about working at a college is that I’m surrounded by people who are smarter than me. People with knowledge about the world. People who know how things really work. Perhaps someone here can explain the true nature of animals and—you know—tell me I’m right.

I bring my query to the science department, where Dr. Jessa Madosky, a conservation biologist, says, “Strict animal behaviorists might say we should never anthropomorphize animals and claim they have feelings. I tend to be more generous in my thoughts about that, but there are a lot of images in the media that can give people the wrong impression about animals. There’s one commercial that has polar bears drinking bottles of Coke, wearing scarves, and acting like human families.”

And I say, “So you’re saying they don’t do that?”

And she says, “Yes, as far as I can tell,” then laughs, but cautiously, and I secretly wonder if she’s trying figure out how it’s possible that we could both be employed at the same institution of higher learning.

IV.

Speaking of polar bears, whether they’re drinking cola or not, they’re not exactly affable and kind. They’re carnivorous, known to be aggressive, and not only kill people, but occasionally eat them as well. In other words: they’re dangerous. But in 2009, a woman had to be rescued from a polar bear attack at the Berlin Zoo after jumping into their enclosure and swimming toward them. Occasionally, when bears aren’t acting like people, they act like bears.

Even the panda (undisputedly, the most adorable of all bears) is still a bear. In 2006, in Beijing, a panda named Gu Gu ripped apart a man’s legs when the man jumped into the bear’s enclosure. Reportedly, the man wanted to hug the bear. In 2008, a panda named Yang Yang attacked a student at another zoo. The victim was quoted as saying, “Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him.”

We got out of the food chain, but it’s possible to apply for readmission. No cover letter, CV, or letters of recommendation are necessary. Your materials will be processed quickly. Look: they’ve already completed the paperwork. Congratulations, your application has been accepted.

VI.

There’s a black bear in the poem “Twilight” by Henri Cole. The speaker of the poem sees a bear in an apple tree and says, “Come down, black bear,/ I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.”

“Indifferent” might be the best description I’ve come across. Despite my tendency to imagine bears as vicious hunters and my neighbors’ tendency to picture them as joyful hippies, there’s the possibility that bears actually don’t give a damn. They’re animals who just want to eat berries and roots and occasionally fish. And then be left alone. Still—

VII.

I too want to learn the faith of the indifferent. To eat what I want and not care. To be left alone because I’m the swiftest, most powerful animal among these trees. At night, I go to the grocery store. It’s open twenty-four hours and everything shines in neat little rows. I’m the strongest thing in the wild. I buy onions, potatoes, and jalapenos. I take it all home. There’s a skillet. There’s a flame. There’s always salt. Everything is fine, I tell myself. I eat what I can, because I still can.

•••

MATTHEW OLZMANN is the author of two collections of poems: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), and Contradictions in the Design, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November, 2016. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Writ in Water

water monster — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Antonia Malchik

This is one of my earliest memories: I am three or four years old, scrabbling for a hold on a fallen tree while a river repeatedly pulls me under. I paw at the bark. The water is cold, moving fast and strong. It churns along with my other memories: the overturned Coleman canoe beating against the tip of the log, my father’s orange cap as he reaches out to pull my mother’s arm. When he has her, she lets herself drift to the sucking water that tries to drag us under the tree. She encircles me with her free arm, holding me above the current. My older sister has been balancing on the log, trying to reach me.

“How old?” I ask my sister Sasha. She is in California, sunny Santa Cruz. I am in dreary, garbage-scented Boston.

“Well, maybe you were two,” she says. Running water and the clink of plates tell me she’s washing dishes. “It was the guy they asked for directions from. They wanted to take us canoeing on the Madison, but he gave them directions to the Jefferson. It was a lot wilder.”

“So the canoe turned over in the rapids and we all caught onto a half-submerged tree, and…”

“Papa got pushed to the bottom several times before he got up. I climbed up the end, but Mama lost her hold of you and both of you were going under.” If I was two at the time, she would have been seven or eight. It surprises me, that this half-figment of half-memory—was my father wearing an orange cap?—is real to someone, that my sister remembers me half-drowning with clarity.

“How awful,” I say, as if the accident had recently happened to someone else.

A few years after that conversation my husband and I are in France for a wedding, in a small town between Nice and Monaco. The small, scruffy beach is next to placid Mediterranean water of such clear, bright blue it feels unreal. No matter where you swim, the water is never murky, and the bottom looks immediate, like a hologram.

My husband wants to dive from the floating dock a little ways off, so we swim towards it, he, the stronger swimmer, in front.

Halfway there I stop swimming. The water is clear. I can see the bottom. The dock isn’t far away. I try to convince myself to keep going, but my heart pounds, terrified of the water, of the depths, of the powerful, gentle-looking mass of a sea that is just longing to pull me under.

I turn around and head back to the beach, crawling onto the sand like I’ve been saved from a wreck, not caring what I look like in my very American one-piece suit and ridiculously pale, freckled skin that’s slathered in sunscreen. I long to be in that beautiful water, but I’m terrified of it. I know it wants to take me back.

•••

It’s not just deep water. I’m afraid of the dark, too, and ghosts, and the monsters under the bed. Frisson-filled, gut-freezing fear that tells me these things are real. It’s their reality that terrifies me—ghosts drifting through my house, creatures beneath my box springs, the dark night as a monolith of unknowable worlds seen through acid trips. Other things that keep me lying in bed, staring into the dark and unable to move: the weeping angels in Doctor Who, ruthless alien races that might someday invade from another star system, a future like that in I, Legend, where most of the surviving human population has mutated into zombie-like beings due to pharmaceuticals gone wrong (I consume a lot of science fiction). And, ever since I read Stephen King’s book Lisey’s Story, mirrors.

Fears of pain, nonexistence, and the unknown. Water holds all of them. To die in water can mean one’s body slips out of sight, taken below on bright, sunny days of children’s laughter bouncing into jet skis’ obnoxious roars. Arms overhead, legs kicking, and then fear itself winding around the ankles to pull gently down. Hair floating upward to greenish light as the body is forced to lie among the muck that ancient glaciers left behind. My phobia makes this end feel like fate. A lingering death, a cold one, leaving not even footprints, just the water and sunshine, laughter and jet skis.

In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the goddess of the ocean. Her mate, Abzû, is the god of fresh water. Tiamat is the embodiment of primordial chaos. Or she is the embodiment of harmony, uniting salt and fresh water for all of creation. She is a serpent, an early form of dragon, or a goddess who made dragons filled with poison. She was killed by other deities, who created the world and heavens from her body. Her tears formed the mightiest rivers.

I’d love to connect my water phobia to ancient creation stories, to turn my human life into sensical narrative. But I do not believe in mythologies. I do not, in fact, believe in anything I can’t see or feel or sense or prove. I believe in mathematics. I do not believe in ghosts or the monsters that lurk in dark lake bottoms.

Why, then, am I terrified of them?

The word frisson describes a thrill of fear or excitement, a sense of foreboding that defies precision. The word’s very existence is proof of our fears. It acknowledges that we are terrified of things we cannot see or sense or know. Our minds are frightened of what our bodies can’t feel—or is it the other way around? Is it the mind’s fear and the body’s reaction, or the body’s fear and the mind’s reactions? Where does the experience of that wild river, the log, my family’s terror, reside in my body? Why does my mind insist there is something down there, in the non-empty spaces of dark matter between rocks and silt and sightless water?

I can see it now, in this barely-lit room where my children are sleeping. It’s sifting around the pine trees and the rustling aspens outside, a nameless something that awakens very real fear. Can you feel it?

•••

An unfinished book sits in my drawer—or, not in a drawer but in a file on my laptop, our new drawers. It’s only partly written, set aside after a cross-country move and a year of living in someone else’s home while adhering to an exhausting work and parenting schedule. I touch the thought of returning to the book and feel wary. I say I don’t have time, and it’s true, I don’t. Not the kind of long, luxurious hours that extended writing demands to achieve any kind of depth. The lack of time I have is crushing. It’s its own being, monstrous and impenetrable like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A weighty horror.

I fear drowning under the lack of time. It holds books that I will never write. In that space is where I will cease to exist, fade away. And yet, why should I feel that way? Why must our names be etched in more than our immediate lives if we are to feel real and whole? Are we so terrified of being forgotten?

(Yes. We are.)

But caution also keeps me from diving into it again. A book is a long, sustained effort. It requires stamina, willpower, a certain quality of fearlessness to keep going when it feels your words have landed you in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been there before; this is the fifth time I’ve headed into those wide-open, unpredictable waters.

I fear venturing out there this time, kicking off again, not sure when I’ll get to the other side, and the petrifying thought of what’s lurking beneath the surface. Writing a book can lead to dark, unexpected places, once you let the words start to flow. What if I get to the middle and run out of energy, and the monsters snake around me as I try to tread water? What if I disappear?

It’s so much easier to stay in the shallows near the shore, penning smaller things, where I can see others’ faces, hear their laughter and splashes, even jump in deep sometimes and come straight back to shore.

•••

My husband and I went scuba diving once on the Great Barrier Reef, back when we were living in Australia. A tour boat scooted us and a dozen or so others out from Port Douglas and the guide gave a perfunctory ten-minute lesson in dive symbols: up, okay, help, shark. I was the only person who had never even snorkeled.

“You a water baby?” he asked me in that brisk Aussie twang. “You love the water?”

“Yes.” I do, I really do. I grew up in Montana, where my family hiked all the time, preferably up into the mountains, where ice-cold lakes sat in tiny dips of valleys. Any hike where I can’t jump into a lake or at least soak my feet in a river at the end of it felt pointless. I would swim in a lake every day if I could.

When he toppled me in, wet-suited and oxygen-tanked, I took a few moments to get used to the mask, and ended up hyperventilating, heading towards panic, until I figured out how to breathe all the way out as well as all the way in. A thirty-second lesson with more impact than years of yoga.

Then I followed the group down, arms at my sides to keep down oxygen use, and I wasn’t scared. Nearly forty feet below the surface, where the monsters supposedly lived, I had no fear. The colors were just as bright as in photos—blue, orange, yellow corals and fish; big feathery growths of red; strange, enormous clams that closed as our shadows passed over. “Don’t put your hand in one of those,” he’d warned us before we left the boat. “You won’t get it out again.”

The water was cold, even through the wetsuit. I emerged hungry for lunch and eager for the afternoon dive. There was so much beauty there, none of the dark mystery that haunted the lakes of my home state.

•••

I’d like my fear of deep water to be about something else, to turn it into a metaphor—for writing a book, for example, or for life and the risks we do or don’t take. But the near-drowning of my two-year-old self and her family, the sucking, surging power of that swift-moving river, were very real. When I long to swim across a lake, and flinch back because the water has become too dark and the monsters are waiting to get me, it’s not about taking risks in life and venturing into the unknown. It’s because I’m afraid of being pulled under and drowning.

We humans, we’re always seeking meaning. We want our suffering to have purpose, our fears to shape into Jungian explanations, our gods to exist. We are storytellers, symbol-makers. We find it hard to accept that not everything can be about something more.

You almost drowned because of our stupidity, says my father.

I almost lost you, my mother says to my sister and me.

•••

The town I live in is built on a lake, and in the summer we take advantage of that fact several times a week. I swim out to the lake’s floating dock with my kids safely lumpy in life jackets. We climb up the dock and my son jumps off and climbs out again, over and over until he can barely keep his head above water. He’d do this until the stars pricked out overhead and the water became frigid, if I let him.

My daughter doesn’t want to go under. After years of swimming lessons, she’s still afraid of submersion and doesn’t like getting her face wet. It’s okay, I tell her, you don’t have to. I sit on the dock and stretch my legs out. She slides down them, gripping my hands, the life jacket keeping her cork-bobbing in the water.

I never learned to dive, so I stand at the edge and jump straight in. Underwater, the tiny bubbles I’ve made fizz around my ears, and I bob to the surface and swim to my kids, listening to the ripple-rill of water over my shoulders. I love this feeling so much, more than almost anything, the splashes of the lake, the mountains chaining the valley. My son wants to swim out farther together and we take off. He can’t see the constriction in my chest, the fear gnawing my toes. I don’t tell him there are monsters out there.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK has written for Aeon, GOOD magazine, 1966, and many other publications. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People and the managing editor of STIR Journal. You can read more of her work through www.antoniamalchik.com.

Grounded

headw:greenery — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Amy E. Robillard

“This, honey, is crabgrass. It’s the stuff that’s been driving me nuts all summer,” I say to Steve as I point with my foot to a particularly large weed. “It’s all over our front yard and I pull it up and it leaves a huge hole and I could do it for hours, but at some point I just stand up and walk away ’cause I know it’s a hopeless fight.”

We’re walking to the hospital’s parking lot. I’ve just had a CT scan of my brain. Steve has taken a couple hours off work on this Thursday morning to drive me to the hospital because I’m so shaky from the migraine that I’m not sure I can do it myself. I drove myself to my doctor’s office this morning, but the drive to the hospital and the waiting in the waiting room and the potential need for food and drink all seemed too much at once, so I called Steve and asked him to meet me at home. I got home first and, while I waited, I Googled “brain aneurysm” and learned that what we normally think of as a brain aneurysm—the kind that kill people—is actually a burst brain aneurysm. So I could have a brain aneurysm right now without knowing it and it could be the cause of this excruciating migraine.

•••

There’s something so satisfying about pulling up crabgrass because it all comes up at once. Find the center, gather the tendrils, and yank. At first I’d used the super duper fancy stand-up weeder I bought earlier this summer, with its eject button, but it turned out to be too slow. I wanted to be on my hands and knees pulling more than one weed up at once, digging into the earth, ridding it of the intruder that, for so many years, had passed for grass for me.

Until we moved into this house, the first house I’ve ever chosen, I paid little attention to the grass except to mow it. I always made sure that we kept the lawn mowed. There was a deep satisfaction that came from seeing the immediate transformation from unkempt to kempt. And surely at the old house we had crabgrass. But it had been Steve’s house before I moved in and I didn’t feel the same sense of ownership that I do here. The crabgrass here is maddening.

I sometimes worry that my neighbors, walking their dogs, judge us the way that I, walking our dogs, judge neighbors whose lawn has been taken over by weeds. Last year, our first summer in the new house, I quickly identified the house in the neighborhood with the tallest weeds. They were like a huge “fuck you” to the rest of us who pulled the ugliest and most obvious weeds. It doesn’t help that we live next door to a woman whose yard and garden are damn near perfect. I imagine conversations with her in which I defend the state of our yard by pointing to the work I do as a professor and a writer. While you’re out here perfecting your yard, I imagine saying, I’m inside prepping my classes or writing an important piece of scholarship. All she does in this scenario is look down at my feet, where the freshly mown crabgrass taunts. And on the afternoons when I find myself outside on my hands and knees pulling crabgrass, I imagine her shaking her head and telling me that I’ll never win. I know I’ll never win, but still, it’s so satisfying. When the entire weed comes up like a mop of hair, there’s nothing else like it. No other weed offers such a huge reward.

•••

I’ve always been the kind of person who immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusion. Recently when our dog Wrigley began limping, I assumed it was bone cancer. When the anti-inflammatories helped, I relaxed. When the limp came back a month later much worse, I spent the night imagining our lives with a three-legged dog. Dogs recover from these things much better than people do, I told myself. We see it all the time. It’s the people who are taken aback by a dog with a missing leg. The dog herself is usually fine, running and playing like any other dog. Steve, on the other hand, always thinks the best, minimizing what I take to be life-threatening situations. For Steve, Wrigley’s diagnosis of severe arthritis on both hips was a shock. He thought for sure she’d just pulled something.

When I was a kid, I didn’t expect to live much past my late twenties. It’s not that I thought something terrible might happen to me; rather, I knew something terrible would happen to me. It’s a mindset born from years of abuse. The trauma theorist Kai Erikson wrote that traumatized people calculate life’s chances differently.

So when the doctor told me she wanted a CT scan of my brain because of the frequency and severity of the migraines, I immediately jumped to the worst possible scenario. “I’m convinced I have a brain tumor,” I said as she examined my ears.

“It’s not a brain tumor I’m worried about,” she said. “Usually with a brain tumor, a patient will come in very confused, unsure how they got here. What I’m more worried about—and I don’t want to give you more to worry about—but I worry about an aneurysm.”

Despite the migraine, I chuckled a bit. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know enough about the brain to imagine the worst-case scenario. I was an amateur at this thinking-the-worst business, it seemed.

•••

One afternoon when I was outside with the weeder pulling up crabgrass, the UPS guy stopped by to deliver a package. “Are you pulling crabgrass?” he asked.

“Yep. It’s hopeless, I know.”

“Can I hire you?”

“I think I’ve got more than my share here, thanks.”

He shook his head and smiled as he got back into his truck.

What am I doing? I thought. I should be inside writing important scholarship.

•••

I woke that morning with the headache. It seemed manageable for the first hour or so I was awake. But then my head really started pounding. I took a couple tramadol. Nothing. I tried to imagine going in to school, teaching my class, talking with any coherence about anything. I started crying, holding my head with both hands, massaging my temples with my fingers. It had never been this bad before. My first migraine lasted a month, my second one three days, and the last couple just a day because I’d finally gotten medicine that helped. But with this one it was too late to take an Imitrex and the tramadol wasn’t helping and I understood what it was like to want to die. I couldn’t escape myself. I couldn’t think. I canceled class for the day and called my doctor.

In the radiology waiting room, Steve and I sit quietly until my name is called. The radiology technician asks me for all of my vital info, checks the name on my paper bracelet, and asks me whether I’m pregnant. “No,” I say.

“How can I be sure of that?”

“My husband had a vasectomy.”

“I’m still gonna need you to sign a form before we do the scan.”

I shrug my shoulders. Fine with me. As he walks across the room to find the form, I say, “I’m too old to be pregnant anyway.”

He tells me that they’re now required to ask women up to age fifty-five about pregnancy.

“Ha! I can just imagine some of the answers you must get.”

“Oh, I’ve gotten some good ones. At first it was hard for me to ask, but now I just laugh about it.”

“You should write an essay about those responses.”

On the ride home, I realize that being the passenger is making me nauseous, so I ask Steve to pull over and I take over at the wheel. Somehow I feel a little better after the scan. Maybe it’s the promise of certainty. We’ll finally know how I’m going to die. Steve, of course, is convinced it’s just migraines. “If it’s just migraines, it’s gonna take years to figure out the right medication and I’m just not up for that,” I tell him.

My doctor and the radiology tech both told me that they’ll have an answer for me within an hour and a half. By the time we get home, I figure it’s more like an hour. Steve goes back to work and I sit on the couch with the dogs, imagining how this will play itself out. As the minutes and then the hours pass, the scenarios become bleaker.

I have a brain aneurysm and I need immediate brain surgery to clip it. They’ll have to shave my head. My department chair will have to find someone to take over my classes for the rest of the semester. I might die. If I die, I’ll get to see my beloved dog Annabelle again.
I have a brain aneurysm but surgery is too risky, so I must walk around for the rest of my days knowing it could burst any time.
What they’ve found is so bad that they call Steve first, tell him to come home and get me, and we go to the doctor’s office to learn that I have weeks to live.
They don’t find an aneurysm or a tumor, but they do find plaque and I’m diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

•••

At night sometimes, I close my eyes and I see crabgrass, its white webbed center with its blades growing in all directions. I open my eyes and try to concentrate on something else, but it’s no use. I close my eyes and the crabgrass taunts me. It knows I’ll never get it all. It will always win.

It occurs to me now that crabgrass is like cancer in that they’re both named for the crab. Cancer comes from the Greek karkinos because the tumor with its surrounding vessels resembled the shape of a crab. And the most common genus of crabgrass is digitaria, a name that likens the tendrils to fingers reaching out in all directions.

•••

It’s not that I want to die or that I want a brain tumor or an aneurysm. It’s not that I want attention, that most obvious of explanations. I think when I imagine these scenarios what I also imagine is the freedom that comes with knowing.

After my beloved dog Annabelle died, none of the day-to-day stuff mattered anymore. What mattered was that I no longer had my Annabelle and I no longer knew who I was. But I knew who I wasn’t. I wasn’t a person who cared about who in the department was dating whom or which professor had a crush on which graduate student. I wasn’t a person who cared about the way that the people I had thought were my friends couldn’t find it in themselves to support me. I wasn’t a person who cared about who liked me or who loathed me or who didn’t know I existed. I’d lost my girl. Nothing else mattered. I wanted that clarity again, the clarity of tremendous, soul-crushing grief.

•••

My doctor’s office called after about two and a half hours. My CT was normal. I’m normal. When she told me this, she pulled it all up at once, all of my imaginings about the end, all of the repercussions of the scenarios that allowed me the freedom that comes only with certainty. Like I do with a particularly gnarly crabgrass weed, she yanked it all and left a gaping hole.

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD is becoming increasingly torn between her identities as Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she specializes in rhetoric and composition and the personal essay, and as essayist whose work resists academic categorization. Her nonfiction can also be found on The Rumpus.

Sepia

flower — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Cora Schenberg

August 8, 2012. When I get scared, I lose my senses. I know that the walls of the clinic are acid green, but my eyes take in sepia.

“I’m glad you came in,” the doctor says. “Post-menopausal bleeding is never normal.”

Two weeks ago, my husband, son, and I were at the beach. I went into the bathroom to put on my bathing suit and found a spot of blood. I tried to ignore it. I figured the bleeding would stop by itself. When we got home and it hadn’t stopped, I called the clinic. The receptionist said my doctor was on vacation. Would I see Dr. A instead?

So here I am, bare-bottomed on crinkly paper.

“What do you think is wrong?” I ask the doctor.

“Unfortunately, I can’t tell anything from your exam. You’ll need to see a gynecologist. But I wouldn’t worry. It’s usually polyps or fibroids, which are benign.”

I had fibroids twenty years ago. Getting rid of them took major surgery and a six-week recovery. I don’t have time for this. I teach in the German Department at University of Virginia, and the semester starts in a few weeks.

Driving home from the clinic, I fall into a fantasy, where instead of undergoing a messy medical procedure, I can make time unspool, so the bleeding simply un-happens. I wouldn’t mind going back to April of this year, when our youngest nephew became bar mitzvah. The whole family was present and well. My husband Wade and I led the congregation in a favorite hymn. In a picture Wade’s sister sent, Wade, our son Gabriel, and I stand grouped around the bar mitzvah boy. Why can’t we step back into that picture?

But is that picture really where I want to end up? Gabriel, at seventeen, looks great, dwarfing all of us by at least a head and a half, his thick brown hair tousled, grin full of snark and confidence. But what about Gabriel’s parents? Mom’s got crow’s feet. Dad’s soft blue eyes show exhaustion; his once ginger hair has gone brown-grey. If we’re travelling in time, why not go back to when Wade and I met, in 1979? Or would it be better to return to October 16, 1983, when we said our vows before a rabbi? I remember how my hand turned radiant after Wade placed the ring on it. But then we didn’t have Gabriel. I wouldn’t want to live without him.

During my musing, I’ve been driving, and have now arrived at our house. I’m telling myself fantasizing won’t solve anything—besides, un-happen isn’t a word—when my teenager runs out, barefoot, to say that our friends the Smiths just called. “They’re coming for Shabbat dinner. Can you make lemon-ginger chicken?”

•••

Following Dr. A’s recommendation, I set up an appointment with my gynecologist. After examining me, Dr. B says, “I didn’t see any red flags in the exam, but let’s get you an ultrasound, to make sure you’re okay.”

A week later, she calls to say that the ultrasound tech “didn’t do a very good job,” so the picture is fuzzy. “However, it did show some fluid in the cul-de-sac between your uterus and rectum.”

“I’ve got a cul-de-sac? Like a dead-end street?”

The doctor laughs with me. But when I ask what caused the fluid, I hit a true dead end.

“I don’t know. But I’ve made you an appointment with a specialist, Dr. C. He’ll do the ultrasound himself, so there won’t be any problems.”

She gives me the date for Dr. C’s ultrasound: A month from now.

•••

The semester starts in a week. I feel exhausted all the time, and the bleeding is getting worse. I call Dr. D, my family doctor, to see if I’m anemic.

“Oh, I doubt dribbling for a month would make you lose much blood,” Dr. D says. “But sure, I’ll test your hemoglobin.” And a few minutes later, she reports, “Just as I thought—everything’s fine. And I see you’ve got an appointment with Dr. C. He’s the best.”

“But I have to wait another three weeks to see him.”

She smiles. “If he’s making you wait, it’s because he thinks your problem’s not serious.”

I’m fifty-five years old, but at this moment, I might as well be three. At the thought of contradicting the doctor, I picture myself as a pathetic, whining kid: but it hurts!

•••

The specialist, Dr. C, tells me I’m fine. “You’ve got a few fibroids, maybe a slight hormonal imbalance. But that’s not what’s making you bleed.”

“What is making me bleed, then?”

“We have to find out. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

Those words again. The doctor recommends a dilation and curettage, or D&C. “Very simple, a routine procedure.”

What planet have I landed on, where it’s “simple and routine” to be placed under total anesthesia while a doctor opens up and scrapes my uterus?

“My colleague, Dr. E, can do it,” Dr. C says.

•••

Sept. 16, 2012, a.k.a. Rosh Hashana, beginning of Jewish New Year 5773. At services, I stand between Wade and Gabriel. “Avinu Malkhenu, shema kolenu,” we chant. Our Father, our King, hear our prayer. A Hasidic legend tells us that on this day, the earth rises to the level of heaven. I imagine standing on tiptoes, whispering in God’s ear: “My doctors say I’m fine, but I don’t feel fine.” My belly aches and pulses. The holiday forces me to remember there’s no playing with time. We all petition God to inscribe us in the Book of Life for the coming year. But looking around, I see empty places where friends once sat. I wrap my prayer shawl around my shoulders and sink into the baritone voices of my husband and son.

•••

Dr. E’s office calls to say they’ve scheduled my dilation and curettage for September 26. I look at the calendar, see that day is Yom Kippur, and start to ask for a different date. But then I realize that since the surgery’s not until afternoon, I can attend most of the morning’s services. I write to the rabbi, explaining my situation. He writes back, promising prayers. And the Ritual Committee offers me an Aliyah—the chance to bless the Torah before the cantor reads from the scroll.

On Yom Kippur, I wake refreshed and energized, ready to pray the old melodies with lightness and joy that I’ve not felt in a long time. After the Torah reading, my family and I wave good-bye to the rabbi as we leave the sanctuary.

•••

Dr. E reports that my dilation and curettage was unusually difficult: “Your cervix was so tight, I hardly got any tissue at all. The good news is I’m pretty sure you don’t have cancer. But I’d like to do an endometrial biopsy to be certain.”

I agree to the biopsy; Dr. E. calls a week later.

“The tissue I got looks fine. You don’t have cancer.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Malignant cells are very prominent. When I biopsy someone with cancer, all this brown stuff comes tumbling out.”

I shudder at the complacency with which she paints this horrid picture.

“What about the bleeding?” I ask.

“That’s a mystery. Honestly, Cora, we might never find out why you’re bleeding. Let me think about your case and get back to you.”

•••

As much as I like to play with time, I make an effort not to wish my life away. In college, we tended to live from one break to the next. We’d just gotten back from winter vacation when my freshman roommate Diana said, “It’s only two months till spring break!”

I did not tell her my thoughts: following spring break, it was only six weeks till summer, and from there, just four years till graduation, forty till retirement, and just a little while before we get to die.

Now, with the pain and bleeding, I can’t help wishing away work days. Teaching exhausts me. The only part of the day I enjoy is my bedtime ritual. It starts with a bath. The warm water uncramps my gut, washes away the blood. After the bath, I plug in my heating pad and lie down beside Wade. We hold each other and watch something innocuous on TV. Often, Gabriel joins us. I’ve gotten to love the Home and Garden Channel. People choose and buy houses. Sometimes they fix the houses up. No one is sick or in pain. Often, the houses are located in lovely places, like Hawaii.

•••

A week after my biopsy, Dr. E phones. “I’ve thought about your case. You have two options.”

Option 1 is a second D&C, this time using a camera called a hysteroscope, so the doctor can pinpoint the exact location of my problem and remove the cause.

“Option 2 is an ablation,” Dr. E tells me. “It means removing the lining of the uterus. Take a few days to decide which you prefer.”

I research the web and talk to Wade. In the end, I tell the doctor I choose the D&C, the less aggressive procedure. Why rip apart my uterus when I don’t know what’s causing the problem?

“But a D&C isn’t one of your choices,” the doctor says. “It didn’t work last time!”

“But you said you’d use a camera—”

“I don’t think so,” says Dr. E. “Your options are an ablation or a hysterectomy.”

My breath stops. Could I have gotten this wrong? Yet surely I’d remember if she’d said hysterectomy. The word sends a chill through my body. How can this doctor suggest removing my uterus or its lining without knowing what my problem is? And how can I trust her with my body if I can’t trust her to remember her own words?

I have no idea what to do next. But the bleeding and cramping keep getting worse. I’ve got to do something.

•••

I hear about a therapist offering a workshop for people with chronic and/or terminal diseases. I figure three months qualifies my problem as chronic and sign up.

“You are in charge of your healing,” James, the therapist, tells us. He does not say to distrust doctors or medicine, but rather that each of us should stand vigil over our health professionals, since we are the experts on our bodies.

“Get a second, third, and fourth opinion,” James advises. “Use different types of healing. When my wife had cancer, she worked with Western doctors but also consulted an acupuncturist.”

I tell James I don’t have the strength to do what he suggests. He says that’s the hard part—no one with a chronic disease has energy. “But have your current doctors helped you?”

“Not really.”

“Then you need to fight.”

•••

I go back to Dr. D and ask her to recommend another gynecologist, and she refers me to Dr. F. I send Dr. F my chart, now two inches thick, along with a note detailing the past four months.

“How terrible!” Dr. F tells me during our consultation. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

I heave a sigh of relief, hold back tears of gratitude. She’s the first of my doctors to express empathy.

After looking at my record, Dr. F asks two questions: “When Dr. C performed your ultrasound, why didn’t he use a contrast dye? And when Dr. E did the endometrial biopsy and D&C, she got no tissue, or as good as none. How can she say you don’t have cancer?”

“Do you think I have it?”

I remember the day I learned about this disease, in seventh-grade science.

“When a person gets cancer, some of their cells go bad and start to kill the good cells,” Mr. Ringel, the science teacher, told us. “More and more cells turn cancerous. The process doesn’t stop until the host is dead.”

Host? A host welcomes guests. How can we use the same word for a body invaded by rogue cells? And am I now harboring this illness that killed my grandparents and later struck my mother and her siblings?

“You’re probably okay,” the doctor says. “But if you were my patient and I had such little data, I would not feel safe assuming you didn’t have it.”

The doctor recommends another D&C. Since she no longer performs surgery, she refers me to her colleague, Dr. G.

Dr. G can’t see me until December 19—a month away. When he finally examines me, he concurs that my uterus is enlarged and a second D&C is warranted.

“Good. Can we do it this week?”

“Unfortunately, my schedule is packed, and with the holidays, we’re short-staffed through New Year’s. I can schedule you for January 9.”

I bristle at his banalities: schedule packed, holidays.

•••

Dec. 22. A bunch of us are grouped around the breakfast bar at friend’s Christmas party. A skinny, bespectacled guy, a friend of the hosts, says, “Did I ever tell you how I killed my first patient?”

We all prick up our ears.

“So, anyway,” Dr. Skinny-Bespectacled says, “I’m twenty-five, I’m a resident, and I’m a real idiot, you know? They’ve got me paired up with this other newbie, Fred. They send us in to—I dunno, do something to the oxygen tube on this guy—the guy was thirty years old and dying of cancer, right? A real tragedy. So anyway, no one tells us how to do this thing, we’re both falling over ourselves, then all of a sudden, Fred says, ‘I think he stopped breathing.’ It was awful. Now you’ve gotta bear in mind that this guy probably wouldn’t have lived much longer, anyway—”

In my head, something kills the volume on the conversation. All I hear are doctors’ voices: Cora Schenberg’s death was a terrible tragedy. But of course, she’d have died anyway.

•••

If offered a wish now, I’d ask for time to speed up. I want the surgery done. But time has slowed to a standstill. It creeps toward Christmas, fa-la-bleeping-la. My family and I hide away from the stores, the hysteria. Wade and I are too tired to throw our usual Hanukah party. On Dec. 31, we’re all asleep before midnight.

•••

January 8, 2013. The night before surgery, the cramping increases. It feels as if something is fighting to get out of my belly. In the morning, I’m filled with relief as we drive to the hospital.

Wade is waiting when they bring me back from the OR.

“The doctor just left. He wasn’t able to complete the surgery.”

“What?”

“He said he got in there and nothing looked like in the ultrasound. He was afraid he’d punctured your uterus and gone into a false channel.”

I don’t know whether to cry or curse. False channel. Cul-de-sac. My body is not a road!

“So what’s next?” I ask Wade.

“The doctor’s going to consult with some colleagues and call you on Monday morning.”

Dr. G does not call on Monday morning. That afternoon, I ring his office. The receptionist tells me he’s out of town. Which words to choose so that this woman will hear me and make sure the doctor gets my message?

“I was in menopause for four years,” I say. “Six months ago, I started bleeding. It keeps getting heavier, and I’m in constant pain.”

“That’s awful!”

“It would really help me to know the doctor’s plans.”

Tuesday morning, Dr. G is still out of town. I leave another message.

By Wednesday morning, I’m desperate. I’ve had to buy yet another family-size box of feminine hygiene product. I know it will just make things worse if I call and yell at the receptionist.

The phone rings; it’s Dr. G. After apologizing for his long silence, he says, “I just got your report back from the pathology lab, and I’m afraid the news isn’t the best.”

Wade steps into the room just as I repeat the doctor’s next word: malignancy.

“You’re saying it’s cancer. What kind? What stage?”

“We don’t know. It’s in your uterus or your cervix, maybe your ovaries. I was surprised there was enough tissue for them to find anything. We’re sending you to the cancer center at the University Hospital. They’ll take care of you from now on.”

I hang up the phone, run into Wade’s arms. I try to feel the warmth of his body, but I’m frozen in panic. I think of all the months wasted, going from doctor to doctor. I remember my friend Mary, who developed symptoms like mine years ago. Mary’s doctor diagnosed her with fibroids, prescribed a painkiller, and said to come back every six months for monitoring. One day, a mutual friend called to say Mary had cancer. Rather than presenting, Mary’s cancer had slunk in silently and set up camp. Free from a doctor’s intervention, the twisted cells multiplied until they pushed past the walls of her uterus and laid claim to Mary’s lungs, heart, and back. She was dead six months later.

“I hope those doctors haven’t killed me,” I say, into Wade’s shoulder. I suddenly remember a cartoon the New Yorker ran just after Mary died. It showed a doctor in a lab coat, doing a silly dance. The caption showed what the patient on the exam table was saying: “Sounds like dance? No, dancer! Cancer! I’ve got cancer!” At the time, I wondered if Mary would find this cartoon funny or think it the most tasteless thing in the world. Since I wasn’t that patient, I thought it wasn’t up to me to say. But now I am that patient, and I hope Mary laughed, because I think that cartoon’s funny as hell. I hold Wade, laughing and crying, until it’s time to leave for work.

•••

February 5, 2013. The instant I meet my oncologist, Dr. Cantrell, time speeds up. Dr. Cantrell looks no older than twenty-five. A slender woman with a brown ponytail and a big, toothy grin, she shakes my hand with a strong grip. After hearing my story, she says, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Sometimes even very good docs miss these things. Now, the first thing we need for you is an MRI.”

“When?” I ask, expecting the usual wait.

“When do you get done teaching this afternoon?”

“At two.”

Dr. Cantrell turns to her nurse, Peggy. “Schedule Ms. Schenberg for an MRI after 2:30 today.”

Noticing my expression of disbelief, she grins. “You’ll find things move pretty fast around here.”

A week later, Dr. Cantrell calls with my results.

“Your ovaries and cervix are fine; the cancer’s in your uterus. I recommend a hysterectomy. Can you clear your schedule for surgery on Tuesday?”

“I’ll call my boss now. How much bed rest will I need?”

“Most people go back to work in a few days.”

“How–”

“In most cases, I make a couple of tiny incisions, about a quarter-inch long, then I can remove the uterus vaginally. It comes out like a baby.”

No! I want to protest. Not like a baby. My baby filled me with awe. My baby did not try to kill me.

“Now, sometimes,” Dr. Cantrell continues, “the uterus gets enlarged from inflammation. If it’s too large to remove vaginally, I’ll have to make an incision. That recovery can take four-to-six weeks.”

I say nothing to this, my head still swimming

Before hanging up, Dr. Cantrell teaches me three new words: Endometrioid. FIGO. Clear cell.

After surgery, she’ll order a pathology report. If I have endomitrioid, FIGO grade 1 or 2, my tumor will be classified as slow-growing and non-aggressive, and require no treatment beyond the hysterectomy. However, if clear cell cancer—grade 3—is present, I’ll need chemo and radiation, too.

“Clear cell,” I repeat. These words sound so innocuous. But on second thought, clear cells would be the undetectable kind that sneaks up on an unsuspecting host.

•••

Gabriel joins Wade and me in our bedroom as we watch television.

“Mom,” he says, “I know you don’t want to make this cancer thing public. But is it okay if I talk to my really good friends?”

“Of course,” I tell him. “I’m taken care of. You and Dad need all the support you can get.”

•••

February 12, 2013. The orderly wheels my stretcher into the operating room, where Dr. Cantrell, already wearing her mask, greets me with a hug. Waiting for the anesthesia to work, I place my hands on my lower belly, murmur a silent good-bye to my womb.

I wake to whispers. Someone repeats one word several times before I realize it’s my name and look toward the speaker.

“Your surgery went well,” Dr. Cantrell says. “It looks like stage 1—no sign that the cancer spread. I’ll get your pathology report back in a week or so.”

“It hurts.”

“Unfortunately, I had to make an incision. It’ll take a bit longer to heal, but you’re in great shape. You’ll be fine.”

Flowers, care packages, and cards are waiting when Wade brings me home from the hospital. Gabriel hands me a stuffed penguin he and Wade got me at the hospital gift shop. Friends from the synagogue tell me I’m on the prayer list and ask when they can come by. My sister Kathy arrives to visit and shop and cook for us.

A week later, Dr. Cantrell phones.

“Cora, I’ve got your report.”

“Good news, Doctor?”

“Remember I told you about those three kinds of tumors? I’m afraid you’ve got clear cell–a grade-three.”

The room turns sepia. I struggle to find my voice. “What happens next?”

“We’ll give you time to heal, then, if you agree to it, we’ll start chemo and radiation.”

“How come I need both?”

“This is all based on studies. The latest ones show that when the cancer returns, it usually comes back to the same site. So we radiate that area, to kill any cancer cells the surgery might have missed.”

“And the chemo?”

“The chemo will get any cancer that might have spread into your system. I know I’ve given you a lot to think about. Take a few days to decide what you want to do. Call if you’ve got questions. I’ll support any decision you make.”

Wade, Gabriel, and I sit around the table, not speaking. I try and fail to feel the warmth of their presence or register the soft light from the lamp above the table.

•••

Dr. Cantrell teaches me more new words. The radiation she prescribes is called brachytherapy–placing the radiating source near the former site of my tumor. She explains that with the radiation confined to a small area, I shouldn’t expect side-effects. Yet what I hear in the sound of “brachy” is “break” and “broken.”

I have to train my mouth to get around the words Carboplatin and Paclitaxel, the chemo drugs Dr. Cantrell would use. Their syllables feel arbitrarily thrown together, like bad architecture. Dr. Cantrell does not hide the fact that chemo is poison. While it kills cancer, it also attacks other fast-growing cells, like those in the stomach lining and hair follicles. It wipes out both red and white blood cells, disabling the immune system. I’m reminded of generals who hire mercenaries—thuggish louts who wreak havoc, but get the job done. I sign off on both the chemo and radiation.

•••

February 25, 2013. I’m off from work for at least another month. The chemo and radiation won’t start till April. Meanwhile, healing takes place in the silence that fills our house when Wade and Gabriel leave for work and school. I depend on my body to tell me when to eat, sleep, poke my nose outside for air, and sleep again. From my rocking chair in the living room, I take in butter-yellow walls, a glass-fronted bookshelf holding our favorites, and three cats asleep on the sofa.

I don’t yet know that in September, when my family and I join the congregation for Rosh Hashanah, I will be pain-free, my scar a faint line. That Dr. Cantrell will call me her star patient and say to come back in four months instead of three, since everything looks so good. For the moment, I’m content not to know this. To let time to do what it does, without expanding or contracting, speeding up or slowing down. I’m grateful to rock in my chair, as the winter sun strengthens.

Note: Some names and physical characteristics have been changed to protect privacy.

•••

CORA SCHENBERG’s work has appeared in Brain,Child, Utne Reader, the Delmarva Review, C-ville Weekly, and The Hook; she has also read essays on WVTF radio (NPR Roanoke) and had three plays produced in Charlottesville’s Live Arts Theater (Summer Shorts Festival). She holds a Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Virginia, where she currently teaches.

Croc Walks Into a Bar

By Jennifer D. Munro

The crocodile slipped out of the underbrush that strangled the opposite shore and eased into the water. He shoved off with webbed paws incongruously small for steering a barge loaded with muscle and teeth, like tricycle tires on a hearse. He moved slowly, as if he had all the time in the world to wreak havoc upon humanity. No hurry, must scrutinize the menu before making his selection.

The freshwater lagoon teemed with local families diving headfirst into crystalline water. They hurtled themselves into the boulder-encrusted pond from a frayed rope swinging from a rickety tree. Standing on a small dock downstream, I’d hesitated to join the splashing crowd. With the croc’s grand entrance through the curtain of mangroves, the terrified mob scrambled from the water. We didn’t speak their language, and the Mexicans didn’t speak ours, but we got the message: get the hell out of the water, pronto! In a country where the national motto seemed to be, I’m reconciled to death, the translation rang loud and clear: Not like this.

“Felipe,” scolded the poolside café’s bartender, shaking his head at the cold-blooded critter who had crashed the party.

Although Felipe apparently pub-crawled here often enough to earn himself a pet name, the bartender had kept mum while the croc remained out of sight. The café had the market for refreshment cornered, perched at the edge of a shady headwater deep in the Mexican jungle. Bad for business, this errant croc who bellied up to his bar with growing frequency, so the bartender wasn’t going to give away the marauder in the back booth as long as the Uzi stayed under the table.

If ever God needed to knock back a stiff one, Tovara Spring is where He’d rap his knuckles for a double shot of Cuervo. Here we could chug an ice cold bottle of Tecate with a lime wedge, then leap into aquamarine water to cool off in the muggy heat. Which my husband, friends, and I were about to do when Felipe took his cue and cruised into the spotlight. Despite his lack of Shakespeare monologues or juggling tricks, he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. There was nothing to stop him if he decided to eat our hands. If Felipe chomped one of us in mid-swig, he’d get the lime, beer, and salty sweat all in one gulp.

We had nowhere to run if Felipe left the water, since the only way in or out of this place was by boat. He idled in neutral about ten feet from where we jammed together on the dock at the lagoon’s base. At the pond’s head, about a hundred feet upstream, a cliff towered. The dock jutted from a narrow strip of paved shoreline along one side, mostly hogged by the café. A handy set of stairs descended into the water so that Felipe could easily emerge from his bath to sip his piña colada with cartilage garnish. On the opposite shore: a solid mass of impenetrable brambles, probably littered with the remains of other tourists.

Too close for comfort, we backed up on the dock. Our friend Mark and our guide Nicho argued about Felipe’s vital statistics. Eight feet long, snout to tail, Mark estimated. Twelve feet, Nicho countered. We agreed on ten, but of a massive girth, solid as skyscraper girders—well-fed. Nicho’s quick calculation: 450 pounds. We settled on 500. Fifty years old, everyone agreed, judging by Felipe’s size—a crafty survivor who knew a thing or two about the food chain.

The bartender wrung his apron, likely hoping Felipe would realize that he’d forgotten his SPF 30 and return to the shade. But Felipe didn’t move an inch of his cement-hard muscle (not bad for a middle-aged bald guy, he’d obviously been disciplined about his Pilates). His scales looked as dense as the concrete pier we stood on. Unimpressed with his admirers, he sunbathed like an aloof Hollywood starlet. An imperceptible current rotated him gently in the limpid water. Squat legs, thick and short as old-growth tree stumps, were motionless. Those feet were made for bitch-slapping as sure as any evolutionary tool, but Felipe didn’t look like he’d bother breaking a fingernail.

Sizable fish tra la la’d under him, and turtles cruised past his snout. If the mood struck, the jaws that made up a remarkable portion of his overall length would widen and then snap shut, with the strongest bite of any animal on earth, and he’d ingest a crunchy tortuga like a taco. Just a snack, more out of boredom than hunger—a television commercial break to interrupt a documentary yawner in which the seasoned killer does absolutely nada. I suspect he hummed an Alice Cooper tune under his breath.

The lagoon beckoned, now peaceful and empty. Truly paradise—except for the crocodile—this idyllic spot that we’d toiled to get to.

I turned around to the downstream side of the dock, my back to Felipe. I stuck my big toe into the water. Here in this pond, disaster wasn’t lurking around a corner, ready to catch me unawares, but stretched out in the water, big as a pontoon bridge.

We had journeyed half a day from Puerto Vallarta to get to this mouth of water, appearing by magic at the base of a verdant cliff. The still and cool freshwater turned to murky saltwater farther downriver—if you could call the maze of channels hacked through the swamp a river—before meandering to the Pacific Ocean. We had hoped to sight crocs as we journeyed up the swamp from where it emptied into the sea, but we never intended to swim with one. Our guide had assured us that crocodiles never crossed from salt to fresh water. So when we putt-putted from brine into the sudden miracle of clear water at the head of San Cristobal Estuary, we stripped down to our bathing suits, eager to take a refreshing dunk in the carnivore-free pond.

A hundred miles from any cash machine or English-speaking waiter, we were the only white folks there—three middle-aged, married couples, all pushing the upper limits of height-weight proportionate and more interested in testing tequila brands than in testing our mettle. We had traveled all morning on rough roads pockmarked every blink by a white roadside cross commemorating a gory death. Buses passed compact cars on blind mountain curves, and the left hand blinker on the car ahead could signify a polite “okay to pass, the road’s clear,” or, “I’m turning left, so don’t pass.” Take your pick, brake or gun it, ’sup to you. You’d find out in a minute what the driver ahead was trying to tell you.

We navigated the tricky Mexican highway system of turning left from the right hand lane. We followed instructions like, “Park at the El Conchal landing. Get out of the car and wait. Eventually someone will come get you.” Fortunately this turned out to mean boat guides, not drug runners or kidnappers.

We spent two more hours puttering up the estuary in a flat panga with no life preservers. Our rented skiff squeezed through the tunnels of trees; in places we ducked to avoid low-hanging limbs that would knock us into brackish tributaries. Covered in bugspray and sunscreen in high humidity, we hunted crocodiles with our digicams and binocs, but they remained elusive. We spotted tortugas, owls, and herons, and the disintegrating remains of a Hollywood movie set, all well and good, but not what we came to see. An hour after we forked over 200 pesos (twenty dollars) apiece and journeyed up the dank estuary without seeing any reptiles, our guide Nicho admitted that it was the wrong season. At this time of year, late in the spring, the parent crocs hid with their newborns deep in the tangled mass of shrubbery and roots. We glimpsed one or two juvenile crocs, a foot or so long, errant adolescents out on the prowl, revving their engines. At sight of us, they startled like teens caught smoking and thrashed away through the undergrowth with an unexpected swiftness from clumsy-looking bodies. So by the time Felipe took the watery stage, I understood his capacity for speed. Looks were deceiving. He was a Sherman tank with a Maserati motor. His fire hydrant legs could move like redlining pistons.

Calm as driftwood, Felipe was an impressive beast, especially given the lack of barbed wire fences, nets, guns, and Peligrosa! signs. A depressing ecological reason must account for Felipe’s emigrating to a new ’hood, where he was as welcome as an oil tanker in the Galapagos, but at the moment, who cared about global environmental crises?

I’d risen before dawn while on vacation and traveled all morning for a dip in this swimming hole. I was an inch shorter than when we’d set off that morning, my spine compacted by our tin van’s thunking through never-ending potholes. I’d worn my swimming suit under my clothes to save myself the hassle of changing. No teeny-bikini, this total coverage bathing costume. I suffered the swamp in a girdle of cling wrap. Felipé would need some serious dental floss to pick this hellacious spandex stuff out of his incisors. The turquoise water glinted. I moved to the empty head of the pond. Felipe did the dead man’s float, the distance between us about the length of a few stretch limos in a funeral procession. I sat on a boulder and dangled my legs into the water. Nirvana, if I ignored the fact that I was flashing my knees at a butcher with a fondness for knuckle sandwiches.

The crocodile has remained unchanged for 200 million years. I’d remained unchanged for forty. Time to shake things up.

I’d spent four decades in my well-defined female role: shopper, navigator, time watcher, reservation- and list-maker. I was a clucking hen, not a wildlife tamer. I blundered into rare exploits by mistake, ignorance, or indifference. I tagged along on other people’s adventures so that I could carry the First Aid kit. Like today. I’d almost stayed back at the hotel with my book, in close reach of the fridge and bottle opener, but I went along to ensure that everyone wore their seatbelts and sunblock. I wasn’t out to wrestle a tooth-crammed predator that would outlive a nuclear holocaust (I hadn’t read any such crocodile prognoses anywhere, but, looking at him, I was certain that cockroach genetics had nothing on his). This sucker’s DNA was all about survival. Obviously unlike mine, since I, sporting cellulite instead of armor, was flaunting my gams at a pilgrim with a penchant for drumsticks.

My idea of daring was eating just-expired yogurt. I’d faced my brand of peril earlier in the shallow end of the hotel swimming pool; I slipped off a child’s inner tube, a too-small frame for my large culo, and cracked my head on the underwater stairs. Did I want to meet my maker in such an inglorious manner, floating ass up in one foot of heated water? Or did I want to go down as the woman who swam with crocodiles, the inspiration for Waltzes with Felipe, an overbudget Costner epic? Just me and Baryshnicroc starring in a memorable pas de deux.

Always too fearful and uncoordinated, I’d never done a cartwheel, never climbed a tree, never did the splits, except once when I slipped on my brother’s Hot Wheels. The primary definition of my life so far was what I had not done: bear children despite repeated attempts. Always an over planner, stocking up on maps and emergency supplies, things had not gone as planned. After seven miscarriages in ten years, I was aimless, drifting like Felipe in the trickling current, uncertain about my next step. My husband and I could not agree about embracing childlessness, further medical intervention, or adoption, so we often ended up discussing divorce. Adopting a child felt as scary as swimming with a crocodile, a leap of faith if ever there was one. My husband was ready to take the plunge, but my reluctance persisted. I wanted to feel whole and complete first, without a child, before I moved forward on adoption—not as if I was missing a puzzle piece, a woman without substance or value until she replicated herself. What I had become was paralyzed. Faced with twelve brands of pickles in the grocery store, I left empty-handed. My future was not nearly as clear as Felipe’s shadow, stretching dark and ominous below him on the pond bottom.

But this decision was miraculously easy. I was sweaty. I was grumpy. I was sore and tired. I was an idiot American with a charge card. I endured hardship for a dunk in this water and damn it—after being denied time and time again the thing that I most wanted—a dunk is what I’d get. I didn’t want to leave this pond adding one more thing I had not done to the already lengthy list. If it was my time, then I couldn’t imagine a better place to go. My demise would be quick. I’d be beheaded like a Cabbage Patch doll snatched by the school bully. (A friend assured me later that in reality the croc would drag me to the rocky depths and toy with me until I drowned in slow agony.) Regardless, we were so far from any hospital that I couldn’t be saved to live out my days with no arms and legs, just a head and torso sipping meals through a straw. No fuss or muss for my family, no choosing cremation or burial, no debating my final resting place, just a wake with margaritas and alligator boots all ’round.

Here, I wasn’t afraid of the unknown, an ambush against my body by my own body that surprised me every time. This was my one and only chance to swim with a crocodile. In the States, a SWAT team headed by Bruce Willis would close the place down before you could say New York Sewer. If I lived through doggie-paddling with a homicidal lizard, I would have this knowledge to carry me through the rest of my life: for once, I didn’t overthink. I finally did something really, really stupid. At long last, I took a risk.

Mostly, though, it was hot, and the water was fine.

So, with a smidgen of a second thought, I eased my body into the water a decapitated head’s throw away from a ferocious reptile. I tooled around my end of the killer-infested pond (I assure you that one large crocodile equates to infested), about as far from Felipe as a baseball catcher from a dirty player on third. I enjoyed myself but tried not to splash and attract Felipe’s attention. This wasn’t about committing suicide. I was simply tired of being afraid. Of course, I was also hyper-aware that I frolicked with a wide-jawed trespasser who could make toothpicks of pelvic bones.

I floated, as near to a prehistoric killing machine as I’d once gotten to Roger Daltrey backstage before my nerves failed me. The water so clear, I saw the tips of my toes five feet below me, and farther. So clear, I would see an underwater torpedo, dark shadow of death, streak through the depths a millisecond before I become dinner. Me, a frothing bubble bath of crimson, red tendrils snaking to the surface as the predator worried me into extinction. The huddled mass of frightened bathers onshore would witness Chef Croc shredding my sinews and tendons like fajita fixin’s. My eyeball might float to the surface before the croc snagged it for dessert, a tasty macaroon. Or my ear a vanilla wafer, my diamond stud twinkling in his teeth like a rap star’s.

Felipe did… absolutely nothing. We each remained at our end of the pond, avoiding eye contact like brooding tennis opponents mid-match. The locals on shore looked from Felipe to me and back again.

Felipe appeared oblivious, off in a daydream, yet I sensed his awareness of every dragonfly that flitted past his snout. When he chose to strike, it would be with the speed of a Daytona finish line. He was the size and shape of a drag racer, poised at the start, wheels spinning, ready to peel out and burn rubber. But he didn’t. He hung out, considering the shapes of clouds.

My husband, the daredevil who’d never left his teens and kept emergency rooms in business, watched me from shore, arms crossed over his shirt. Damp stains spread under his arms and sweat dripped down his forehead. Without children, we often had nothing in common, other than his tendency to set things aflame and my ability to douse them with one of my several fire extinguishers. I had followed him on countless of his spontaneous escapades, more to pick up the pieces in case of catastrophe than to enjoy the moment, nagging him the whole time about safety equipment, safety courses, safety belts, safety goggles. But this tale would be mine alone, my gamble, my glory, if not my funeral.

The crowd grew bored with tossing Felipe tortillas that he left for the fish. One by one, the families returned to the water. A father tossed his two kids in; the toddler couldn’t swim and wore inflatable arm bands above his spindly elbows. A pregnant madre slipped in, cradling her infant. For the first time in my life, I’d been the fearless leader, venturing into the face of menace and proving it safe for the rest of grateful humanity. Me, Bruce Willis, with breasts and hair. Job done and credits rolling, I heaved myself out of the water, cool and slick as an arctic seal and just about as graceful.

Truthfully, I’m sure the locals would have returned to the water without my bumbling example. I couldn’t pretend to sum up their culture after a week there, but I witnessed a willingness for risk that’s absent in the States (except by teenaged boys). The bull-riders at the local rodeo had no ambulance or nearby hospital, the beaches no lifeguards or warnings about riptides, and the taxis no seatbelts, with grannies in rockers riding in the back of open-bed pickups. They exhibited an acceptance of fate that I rarely glimpsed in the U.S. I’m sure they would embrace a pension plan and a teaching hospital in a First World minute but had no choice other than to shrug at whatever nature and providence handed them. Nobody said boo to the bartender for keeping his trap shut when he should have divulged the fact that Felipe had U-Hauled it into a family neighborhood.

In the States, we insist on insurance, assurance, or recompense for what nature or mankind dishes out. We want doctors to fix our ills and demand that lawyers avenge what’s broken. We weigh statistics before we make decisions. I knew the precise odds for each of my pregnancies and thought each of my doctors would eventually cure my problem. I tried to shrug and “let nature take its course” but could not, carrying on an argument about where nature’s path led me. Adoption carried a different sort of risk, with a good chance that alcohol and drugs had been abused during the pregnancy and that the child had been abused since birth. But if I didn’t take that plunge, I would surely lose out on one of the richest experiences of my life.

We climbed back into our panga and began the long journey home. My husband put his arm around me. Felipe still hadn’t moved a pinkie.

But we did. We signed up for foster care and adoption certification training shortly after we returned home. Someday I’ll be able to tell my son, “Mommy once swam with a crocodile.”

Then, “Don’t ever let me catch you doing something so stupid.”

•••

JENNIFER D. MUNRO is a freelance editor whose blog, StraightNoChaserMom.com, is a Top Three Finalist in the 2015 National Society of Newspaper Columnists blog competition. She was also a Top Ten Finalist in the Erma Bombeck Global Humor competition. Her numerous publishing credits include Salon; Brain, Child; Listen to Your Mother; Literary Mama; Best American Erotica; and The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image. Her humorous stories about sex and the sexes are collected in The Erotica Writer’s Husband. Website: JenniferDMunro.com.

The Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

heart pillow — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Lynne Nugent

“Syncope and sudden death are the same thing, except in one you wake up.”

—Dr. B. J. Carey, Irish Medical Journal, June 2003

No dainty wilting violet, he. His whole body thunks to the floor. He can’t see. He can’t hear. He can’t speak. He can’t think. And here I am, new to the scene, with my notions gleaned from Victorian novels: fainting couches and smelling salts and fluttery ladies caught by dashing gentleman at the most romantically opportune moment. Not he. He throws everything into it, or rather is thrown, flung. From wherever I am in the house, I’m jerked into the room by the sound of the crash. I kneel down, take his hand. He stares through me, unblinking, as I hover above him, trying to catch his eye like a schoolgirl with a crush. I repeat his name into the void, love unrequited. I pat a stiff, clammy hand that is no longer his hand. For five seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, he is motionless. His heart stops. He is dead.

Then, as I am preparing to dial 911 and trying to remember my CPR class from high school, the face suffuses with berry-red. The unmoored eyes dart, saccading across the ceiling until they rest on my face with a look of great alarm. Kembrew has said that when he first comes to, he has no idea where he is or how he got there. So I’ve learned to tell him. He listens with intense attention—“You passed out; you’re on the bedroom floor; you’ll be okay”—and the eyes start to reflect light again; he speaks, remembers, a skipped record needle sinking back into the groove of life.

More than once I’ve I dragged Kembrew to the emergency room after one of these incidents. It’s maybe the worst thing I can do: the anxiety of being in a medical situation tends to cause more episodes of vasovagal syncope, a condition in which the chutes of the blood vessels open in response to some physical or emotional trigger, and not enough blood can reach the brain, which in turn causes loss of consciousness. In other words, fainting. Blacking out. A common condition, often benign.

I simply don’t learn, though. I can’t be alone with him, with it—especially in the middle of the night, when it always seems to happen. The word “syncope” comes from the Latin and Greek “syn” (together) and “kope” (to cut off). Each time, this cutting off of everything that holds him together, that holds us together, unnerves me. To see him in an unresponsive state, even for a few seconds, is intolerable.

All the more so because my husband is not the kind of person who is normally known for being at a loss for words. Kembrew teaches for a living, leading discussion in small classes or lecturing to large ones. In his spare time, he organizes protests. He writes multitudes of letters to the editor of the town newspaper. He delights in the fact that upper officials at the university where we both work consider him a troublemaker and give him dirty looks at receptions.

I remember one of the first times I heard his voice, back when we barely knew each other. I was driving somewhere with the radio on; he was a guest on a local NPR show. A listener called in to vehemently disagree with his position and hold forth upon his own. Rather than being taken aback, as I would have been, my future husband jumped into the fray—“Let me ask you this,” he interrupted when the caller took a breath—and gleefully debated his opponent, matching the man’s intensity, never backing down. And yet, when it’s three a.m. and he’s sick, or he’s struck by sudden medical fears for himself or others that remind him of his childhood when his family couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, he succumbs. And I’m the one who has to step up, fill the silence with my words, and I can’t. “Syncope” also has a grammatical definition: the excision of part of a word. In his proposed absence, words whose significance we built together—marriage, family, love—become distorted and lose their meaning. My vocabulary fails.

So I end up driving Kembrew through our sleeping town toward the permanently-lit red EMERGENCY sign. I tell myself that since the fainting spells are usually brought on by dehydration caused by ailments like the flu, it’s worthwhile to make the trip since they can give him fluids through an IV. Really, I just want company. I want someone else to be there.

During our most recent trip to the ER, a nurse hooks Kembrew up to an EKG machine, and it catches the next syncope on its ticker tape. I watch as the heartbeat, that clichéd beeping line with its regular jerk upwards followed by a slow slope downwards, just keeps sloping down and sloping down and sloping down. “Um, hello!” I call out to a group milling at the nurses’ station. In a flash, our small room is crowded with people. “Get the cart,” someone says. They place defibrillator pads on his chest. They inject his IV with atropine. Then we all stand around and watch.

Again, notions. Notions of heroic rescue. Not the Victorian novels, but TV hospital shows this time. Everyone leaping onto the body, massaging it back to life, deploying machinery. Instead, we hover ineffectually, exactly the way I do when it’s just me and him and the bedroom floor. The nurses and residents and a rumpled cardiologist-on-call who has been paged and still seems halfway in whatever dream he was having—we all stand there in the presence of the body’s lonely struggle to survive. It’s not like the TV shows: at some level, he must do this for himself. The heroics are all internal. My voice sounds from somewhere in the back of the room, repeating my usual mantra: “You’re okay, sweetie.” Someone glances at me as if I’m insane. “He’s breathing,” one of them says, looking on the bright side in lieu of a heartbeat.

I think back to the early morning of June 12, 1999, to the paramedics’ unfamiliar voices in the background as my mother’s familiar one, catching on her fear, tells me over the telephone, “They say he’s still breathing.” By the time I hang up and put my clothes on to go to the airport to get on the next plane to St. Louis, my father’s dead from a heart attack. Breathing often continues for a few moments after the heart has stopped.

But that was then and this is now, and now the usual invisible hands—not mine, not the doctors’, which are all just hanging there useless—throttle him back to life; Kembrew’s face goes scarlet, and he is again among us. Only now do I notice that taped to the side of the crash cart is a laminated sheet of paper that says, “When there is no pupil response for X seconds”—I can’t now remember how many—“page the social worker/grief counselor on call.”

When we were first in love, I would watch him as he slept. One morning, as I was watching him, he opened his eyes and looked right at me, and that simple action seemed like such a miracle that I started to weep. I remembered how I was taken to see my dad in the ER exam room where they put him after he died, in the same hospital where I was born, and how I studied my father’s face then, touched his cheek. For a long time afterward, whenever anything good happened to me, I would think, “I’d trade it all for another five minutes with my dad.” All of the accumulated good in my life since he died, over two years, over five—I’d have traded it all without a second thought. Then I fell in love and wondered if that was indeed true anymore. You have turned my mourning into dancing, I thought, looking into the eyes that were looking back at mine, having performed the miracle of opening on a summer morning. It was a verse from Psalms I had somehow picked up during my atheistic life. You have taken my sackcloth and clothed me in joy.

After the drama is over and our room empties of hospital personnel, I corner one of the doctors in the hall and explain that there’s been a small misunderstanding, ha ha, that this has happened before, that perhaps we could try not to alarm him with more talk of how serious it is. “But it is serious,” she tells me. “Your husband scared the bejeezus out of us just now. His heart stopped.”

“Okay,” I say, thinking, Yes, course. This is how it is. I knew it. It’s not benign; how could it be? The body doesn’t lie. Into the Cardio-Vascular Intensive Care Unit we go, where his new neighbors are gray lumps on their hospital beds. Having fainted three times in quick succession this morning, Kembrew looks almost as gray as they do. They say he must remain for a couple days of observation. There is talk of implanting a pacemaker. There is talk of implanting an emergency pacemaker to cover the time before a permanent pacemaker can be implanted. But after a few hours, during which I watch the green line of his heartbeat and the blue line of his respiration on the monitor like it’s the most fascinating show on TV, it’s broad daylight out, no longer the fluorescent-hued night of the ER. A new mood arrives with the day shift.

He doesn’t look like his neighbors any more; anyone can see that, so they set him free. It’s benign, the day-doctors tell us. It mimics sudden death so naturally it causes alarm. And his heart didn’t stop, they clarify: it just paused briefly. It maybe pauses longer than some others’, but it’s still an acceptable pause. This makes us feel better, but for me, every day still has a tinge of three a.m. around the edges, and it always will. Each time it happens, the floor will fall away from my life, and I can’t help that any more than Kembrew can help fainting. How many seconds is X?

Back when few of our friends had children, and long before we contemplated it ourselves, babies seemed like alien beings to us. In one of our first up-close encounters with one, we marveled at how small and delicate our friend Chris’s newborn son was. The baby plunked into our arms, we each displayed the stiff, awkward don’t-break-it arm-crook of the childless. “Don’t worry,” Chris told us, already a seasoned father with one older child. “They’re not as fragile as they look. They cling to life!” His hearty “they cling to life” has stuck with me over the years. I believe it and I don’t believe it about anyone I love, because it’s true and it’s not true, and I’m sure Chris or any parent, or any wife, or any daughter, must feel the same way. The body’s drive to live is invincible. Until it isn’t.

Dismissed from the cardiac unit and the hospital, which in the daytime is once again our friendly, local, familiar hospital where we get check-ups, we walk to the parking ramp on our own two feet with no follow-up appointment scheduled. It’s what I’ve come to think of as the get-out-of-jail-free card, yet another to add to the several we’ve accumulated as we approach middle age: that breast lump that turned out to be nothing, the stomach pain that required a peek with the stomach-camera. Outside in the bright sun, back in the community we know so well, everyone looks outrageously healthy: so ruddy, so active, so obliviously jogging and pink. It’s easy to believe that there are plenty more of those cards in the deck.

When it happens again, though, it’s always night. Since Kembrew knows I’m not strong or fast enough to catch him, he aims for the floor. Sometimes he makes it all the way there before he passes out. Sometimes he falls the rest of the way. I run in, always too late, in no way the dashing Victorian gentleman, appalled to find that the person who most pleases and irks and understands me in the world has cut himself out of our shared experience. And there isn’t a thing that I can do about it. I can’t catch him. I can’t resurrect him. I can just be there.

•••

LYNNE NUGENT is managing editor of The Iowa Review. Her essays have appeared in the North American Review, Brevity, the Modern Love column of the New York Times, and the anthology Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia.

Sips of Air

walk — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Antonia Malchik

Some premature babies, the Neonatal Intensive Care nurses tell me, can’t afford the calories it takes to swallow. The first time they take my skinny, three-point-three-pound son off his IV drip to give him real food, they ask me not to watch. They have to run a tube through his mouth down to his stomach—babies this young also have no gag reflex—so that the calories go directly where they are needed, rather than being wasted in tongue and throat action, a method called gavage feeding, the same way foie gras geese are fattened. The instinct to rescue him from this specific invasion comes as a relief: my days are otherwise filled with fear, helpless and enormous and without direction.

•••

The entrance to our nearest hospital butts against a curved driveway where people pick up and drop off patients or take advantage of the free valet parking. Behind it, before shifting into pure concrete and asphalt, is a landscaped grassy area with benches clustered around a fountain and picnic tables set at angles near the walkway to the parking lot.

It looks innocent enough, inviting, but it’s not. The first time I stepped on that walkway, I was looking down and jumped to the side as if it burned through the soles of my shoes. It was paved with bricks, most of them carved with the dedications of donors, bricks given in honor of someone whose name was usually followed by a date of birth and a date of death. What made them unusual was how close the two dates were—sometimes days or weeks, sometimes the same day. I wondered how long those babies had lived. Hours? A whole day? Minutes? Where were their parents now? Did they wake up on that date every year to face the grayness of loss?

My husband Ian and I called it the Dead Baby Walk and kept to the grass after that. We spent a lot of time at the hospital, sitting in Neonatal Intensive Care next to an incubator holding our premature son. He was so scrawny that he weighed less than our smallest cat; he’d been born seven weeks too early, and his lungs weren’t functioning properly. There was no way that I was going to start the day’s visit to him by being reminded of the fragility captured at the beginning of life and how frequently it can end in the opposite of hope.

•••

“I don’t think I can go in,” I told Ian. We could see the birthing center, on the fifth floor of the hospital, from the parking lot. It was seven days after John’s unexpected, extremely early arrival, and I was leaving emotional shreds of myself all over the county as we made our daily drive up and down the New York State Thruway from our home to the NICU. There, locked away from rooms where real people, with normal babies, bore and laughed and kissed and nursed, my son took sips of air from oxygen tubes while another tube tried to clear an air pocket from around his lungs. He had air in all the wrong places and a hole in his heart and had never yet eaten anything not given by IV. The NICU—short for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the place for undercooked or sick babies (ours was both)—dragged on me like a small planet with its own gravitational pull, a force nonexistent for people whose babies had been born full-term and healthy.

Every day after being buzzed in the locked door and scrubbing my arms and forearms at the NICU sink (premature babies are also extremely susceptible to infection), I paused just outside the bright room, trying to arm myself against tears that were of no use to anyone. The incubators were shrouded with small homemade quilts made by a charity organization. John slept and blinked and cried under a pattern of cats sitting against a green background while Ian and I read to him from a book of traditional English fairy tales that I’d picked up in London. We sang the “Mockingbird” song over and over, and described the room that was waiting for him: the special mobile his grandparents had sent from England, the fairy tale–themed mural a friend had painted on his wall. I choked when telling him about the blue rug and striped curtains we’d bought. The care that we had put into those everyday details sometimes overwhelmed me.

Today I couldn’t get to the blue rug and striped curtains. Today I couldn’t even get as far as the NICU door. I couldn’t even get out of the car. Today the neonatologist had called early in the morning to warn us that John needed another chest tube to clear a second pneumothorax—an air bubble that prevented his lungs from expanding—and I’d curled up between my bed and the loathsome breast pump and sobbed as if tears could dissolve the pain and me at the same time.

In the parking lot, Ian brushed tears back into my hair. Neither of us had any platitudes. “Can you?” Another nod. A deep breath. A final wiping of nose and face. I swung my legs carefully out of the car and hauled myself up using the handle above the door, heading for the longer path around the curved driveway that avoided the Dead Baby Walk. My skirt brushed over the massive numbness in my abdomen, hiding a healing scar I’d never intended to have.

Two weeks before, I’d been grimacing every time I folded myself into a car and thinking that I couldn’t possibly stand the discomfort of pregnancy for the two months I had left. Three weeks before, we’d been hiking on a remote Scottish island, where the hospital was over an hour’s flight away from the island’s cockleshell beach—an hour if the weather was clear, a day’s wait or more when it was overcast. If my body had turned against me earlier, neither John nor I would have made it. The nearness of the timing still makes my breath short and my hands cold.

•••

I had HELLP Syndrome. A vicious, rare illness that’s caused by pregnancy, with no cure except delivery. It hit me fast, progressing from slightly elevated blood pressure to nearly unbearable abdominal pain within twenty-four hours. By the time my obstetrician performed an emergency C-section, my liver was failing. When my son and I came out of the operating room, Ian was on the phone with my older sister. He froze, not knowing whom to follow as they whisked us each into our own intensive care units.

That first day, I sat in shock in the ICU, smiling automatically at the nurses because being nice is such a deeply ingrained habit that it’s almost pathological. I’d jerk awake when the oxygen monitor screamed to tell me I’d stopped breathing again. My fingers shook as they stroked the streaky Polaroid photo taped to the bed rail. John Henry, a thoughtful nurse in the NICU had written, 4 lb 3 oz, 17 in. I didn’t see my son until thirty hours later, when I was transferred from the ICU to the birthing center’s Mother & Baby section, surrounded by women with full-term newborns and visitors armed with balloons and flowers. Ian and I, three thousand miles from our families, navigated phone calls and inedible hospital food alone, no baby by the bedside.

That first time I met John, at some dark hour of the night, a NICU nurse lifted him, tubes and all, out of his incubator and into my arms. Our IVs tangled; Ian held an oxygen sniffer to John’s nose; I murmured happy nonsense, a normal new mother for a few minutes, ignorant of the month to come.

•••

A week later I sat once again on the high stool next to John’s incubator. I hadn’t been allowed to hold him since that first day, due to the chest tubes, oxygen sniffer, and IV lines, so Ian and I took turns resting our index fingers in his little hand, living for the moments when he squeezed. We couldn’t do more than that. Premature babies are also extremely sensitive to touch. Stroking a preemie’s head or skin can drive him crazy.

The nurses—our friends by now—looked at us anxiously when we walked in that day, the day I gave up on hope and struggled to come in the door. They’d seen parents go through this before, and worse. The neonatologist wrapped us in her professional sympathy as she showed us the second pneumothorax on an X-ray and said John might have to be transferred to a tertiary care unit closer to New York City. I envisioned weeks of three-hour commutes to spend scarce minutes with him, and it seemed unbearable.

After seven days, two pneumothorax, a hole in the heart, and an extra bit of heart valve where it wasn’t needed, there was only one thing that hadn’t been tried: John had not yet had food. He’d lost slightly under a pound—a quarter of his body weight—while my pumped milk had been piling up in the freezer, the only offerings I had to give the gods.

The next day they decided to start feeding him. One milliliter of milk went down the tube to his stomach. The next time it was three, no calories lost to pesky swallowing. His breathing became less erratic, and they turned down the whispering oxygen. Within three days, John had recovered so well that it startled even the neonatologist. He was a full month old before his lungs were strong enough and his heart repaired enough for him to be discharged, but two weeks into his life he was tube- and IV-free for the first time and learning to eat on his own.

•••

Those of us who have faced the potential loss of a child will never bear the pain of those for whom the potential became a fact. We may have stepped on the Dead Baby Walk, but we haven’t bought a commemorative brick. All I can say is that the fear has come close enough to unshroud itself, to touch the heart. Every parent fears losing his or her children. The physical hazards and accidents—cars, drug addiction, sudden peanut allergies, a million unthinkable possibilities—haunt us. It is something else, though, to have that fear cupped in your hand, to acknowledge it by name. To be warned: “Prepare yourself.” Because once prepared, once you know, the Dead Baby Walk’s existence stalks your footsteps. Like all traumas, it becomes embedded in our physical bodies as well as our psyches.

Before his third birthday, John was hospitalized twice for asthma. The second time was the same day we brought home his new baby sister. I held her while Ian drove away with John strapped in the back, his chest caving to expose ribs and diaphragm while he fought to inhale oxygen. His lungs had been too weakened by their early struggles; a simple summer cold caught his alveoli in a tight grip and laid him flat.

He’s seven years old now, and, if all goes well, on his way to being diagnosed asthma-free, despite the incessant coughing that exhausts him every time he catches a cold. I yell at him on a regular basis—brush your teeth! turn off the TV! please stop whining!—something I couldn’t have envisioned doing either during the NICU-month-of-hell or his later asthmatic episodes. He plays Minecraft, rides his bike, does his math lessons, throws a fit when I ask him to pick up his Legos. He’s a normal kid.

But I don’t feel normal anymore. Or maybe it’s that I have been normalized. Maybe avoiding loss, pretending death doesn’t exist, is the abnormal state. I’d hate to believe humanity’s fate is to walk shadowed with grief, sorrow slipping into us painlessly like milk down a gavage tube to a premature baby’s stomach. But on our hospital visits for John’s chest X-rays and to his pulmonologist, and when I returned there for monthly visits to the high-risk perinatologist during my second pregnancy (being at a 25% risk of developing HELLP or various other complications again), the Dead Baby Walk still made me jump like an animal that’s seen violence. Its existence reeks of trauma and fear. It’s a reminder of how linked we are: We clutch at the good moments, the small joys, while the greater sorrows, the losses that eat us alive, lie waiting beneath our feet.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK’s essays have appeared in a variety of publications, and are forthcoming from The Washington Post, Orion, STIR Journal, and The Atlantic. You can read more of her work at antoniamalchik.com, and about her experience with HELLP Syndrome on BuzzFeed Ideas. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers

By Eaton Hamilton

She’d left so many bruises that I needed long sleeves in August, and I finally told her, quietly, firmly, that I couldn’t stand covering up through the heat wave any longer.

“But the windows open now,” she said, annoyed since I’d just hired people to reconstruct the living room sash and pulls.

I’d learned how to phrase things so that I wasn’t talking about what I was really talking about. “Which is really only helpful…” I said, pushing slick strands from my forehead in the thick-aired room, “if there’s a breeze. What I really need is to be able to wear summer clothes.”

•••

She never felt remorse after the intimidation, after the bruises.

Only once, after she scared me seriously with back-to-back rages, a raised fist, and trying to yank me out of my escape car, did she apologize, but even that regret vaporized in twelve hours.

•••

One time she screamed in the middle of a rage, “Tell me who I am!” and her voice went wobbly at the word “am” while she grabbed her hair and shook it.

I don’t know, I wanted to say. Nobody I’d like to meet in a dark alley.

•••

Within three weeks of our knowing each other, she had her first meltdown. That’s the name she already had for these things, her meltdowns.

Her meltdowns.

My wife as a nuclear power plant. My wife as reactor #1 with complete core deliquescence. My wife as a fuel rod with explosive concentration limits.

Red-faced rage is what it was.

I’d risen from bed an hour after she started snoring because I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stand my insomnia one minute longer. I watched TV in the living room until I nodded off.

I woke to her screaming inches away from my face, spittle rain. “Why are you out of bed you know I can’t sleep if you’re gone you know I need you in bed beside me you’re so fucking selfish you know I can’t be alone!”

I was—I don’t remember what I was. Shocked. Dazed with sleep. Confused. Certainly scared.

“I have to get up unlike some of us I have an important job do you want me to kill someone when I’m overtired because you kept me up?”

If I didn’t sleep beside her, properly, someone could die.

•••

When she was good

She was very very good

And when she was bad

She was horrid

•••

Rinse and repeat. Add suicide threat and shake well.

•••

There at the beginning, she was regularly grumpy and snarky and mean like a child decompensating after a school day.

Eggshells. Crunch, crunch, under mine and the kids’ bare feet, sharp shards of white across our lives like carpet.

But then she got diagnosed and put on a “mood regulator.” It worked like flipping a switch—now we got the other side of her, the woman I had fallen so madly in love with. Her good side was a drug to me; I did anything I could think of to court it.

She was funny and quick, and she thought I was hilarious. I lived for her peals of ready laughter. She was dependable, sweet, and attentive. We read fiction together. We could discuss politics, social justice, feminism. She was plot doctor for my novels. I counted on her intelligence. We made a family together. We bought a house. We adopted a cause, and together with other folks, we sued the government and changed our country’s constitution. We grew a garden. We went to Africa, to Greece, to Paris, to Fiji, to Thailand, to Cuba. To art museums, to dinners, to dance and symphony. We slid down sand dunes in Oregon and Fiji and Namibia; renewed vows on elephant back, at the top of the Empire state building, in a hot air balloon, in a Thai tuk-tuk. When she was happy to see me—which was always until she met someone who’d had a vituperative divorce and she became, herself, imitatively scurrilous—she’d turn around and wave her butt as if it was a thumping tail.

•••

But this was how we still talked about her violence after nearly two decades: politely, with obfuscation. We did not need to refer to where I got the bruises, since both of us knew that, or what she had done to cause them—the two or three times a week, she held me by force and I would repeat, my voice half dead from weariness and repetition, Stop. Let me go. You’re hurting me. Trying to wrench away, I knew, would make things worse. As the bruises bloomed like black roses, five to each stem, she pretended that I had a blood disorder, and once, once, when there were so many, she directed me to have the test to prove this. I did that, and it came back negative.

“You were trying to drag me out of the car that day,” I said.

“That was just one occasion.”

“We fought again and you grabbed me,” I said.

“The things you do. The things you do provoke me. I’m not putting the blame on you. I’m just saying be careful of what you do, be careful of what you do and how you do it.”

•••

I didn’t blame her, so forgiveness wasn’t needed. She was an important woman saddled with employment burdens, and for her, different rules, I thought, applied. She thought so, too; whatever rule applied to the rest of us was not applicable to her because she was smarter, more educated, held aloft by the reverence her job provided her.

I gave her every benefit of doubt: She didn’t mean to hurt me. It wasn’t the real her who did those things. The real her was the good her.

•••

This is what I did with her violence when I was alone: I added it up—made charts—to see how much of it there was, relative to homework and cooking and sleeping and doing laundry and watching TV and celebrating occasions and ferrying kids and gardening and dancing—and stuff, you know—and it was less than one percent. 90% of the time, we were glowing: engaged, productive, tickled with each other; 9% of the time, we were like any long-term couple, a little inert, unexcited with each other; and only one percent of the time did things go topsy.

I shredded the charts afterwards so she wouldn’t find them.

After she made me leave her, my therapist said, “Would you tell me a car with bad brakes was basically a good car?”

I looked at her.

“If you were on the top of a hill, those bad brakes would be a pretty important flaw, wouldn’t they?”

“We could have moved to Kansas,” I said. “It’s flat in Kansas.”

She cocked her head. “I hate to let you in on this, Dorothy, but nobody lives in your Kansas. Toto doesn’t live in your Kansas. Your Kansas doesn’t even exist.”

•••

Her father went after me, after us, about six months after his wife died, after I started calling him Dad, even though all the other wives called him Dad.

There was no welcoming nomenclature for me, the lesbian. When I tried out my wavery “Dad,” he soon said I (and by extension, his daughter) had killed his wife with my “gay stuff.” I had disrespected his wife. I exploited his daughter. My house stunk and I smelled, too. “Gaijins know they stink,” he said.

This is the problem with never learning even rudimentary communication skills. Things percolate to the surface in destructive tsunamis. After his blow-up, the man refused to see us, his daughter and daughter-in-law, his two granddaughters, his great-granddaughter, for seven years, unless I would stay home.

From father to daughter, the inheritance of bullying.

•••

My relationship was continually under threat from my wife’s disrespectful peregrinations towards break-up, and since she never talked about these, I just sensed them, or wrangled with each lie on its own terms, and did whatever I could, anything I could, to protect us as a couple—silly things like putting white light around her, and her car, around our whole house of cards.

•••

Define domestic violence. Big dudes spring to mind, furious and fisted, their abuse flagrant, flamboyant, fervid. But butch though my wife was, she was not hefty, nor quintessentially angry of spirit, and if I asked you to pick out the likelier batterer in our relationship, ten out of ten people who didn’t know better, I’m guessing, would pick me, because I am raunchy of mouth, untactful, and larger, and just, you know, not “nicey,” whereas she is small, polite, warm, and obsequious.

They’re quite lovely, most batterers.

Lovely at home, too.

Until they’re not.

Size, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with being battered. And neither does gender.

All that you really need for battering is one person willing to batter.

The thing about batterers is that you can see what they’re not doing to you just as much as what’s transpiring. Yes, they are pinning you, but you can also see their gaze sliding sideways and fixing on the knife rack, considering. Yes, they are pulverizing the sofa, but you know by what they’re saying that they wish it was your face. Or they throw a bunch of stuff and then come rushing at you, fist raised, even though at the very last minute, they drop it.

I never hit you is technically correct.

But they have their ways of letting you know where their violence could go—if they want it to.

And this is always clear: You don’t get to decide.

They get to decide.

•••

At first we had a potted garden, but when we moved into our house, she went at the hard clay with a pickaxe, double digging, and we dumped bales of moss and vermiculite and compost into the soil four feet down. Together, over years, we made a perennial garden with different rooms and arbors and sunken pits and water features and pergolas.

Wisteria, roses, clematis, poppies, lilies, hydrangeas, palm trees.

•••

It didn’t fit with her self-image to be an enraged beast—it shamed her, so she “disappeared” it. After flagrant episodes, she’d threaten to kill herself.

Or else threatening to kill herself just ended the fight without dealing with the matters at hand.

•••

After I left her, she admitted that she had no sense of self, and said she had a personality disorder (she declined to say which). She said that she had never—ever, not once—told the truth to anyone. “I just tell them what I think they want to hear,” she said, “and nobody has a clue.”

“What?” I said, “what?” I had lived with her for almost two decades. Wouldn’t I have known this?

“Even you,” she said. “I lied to you from the day I met you. Every word out of my mouth? Lies. Every word.”

•••

I was disabled, and she became my legs; over the years, as I grew sicker, I became more and more dependent on her care-giving and support.

She always ran ahead of our lives to see whether I could handle the terrain—and I believed that she didn’t mind. I thought she was in it for me, and I was in it for her, and we were in it for our family.

But after she broke us, she told me that living with a cripple had been like living a quarter life.

“Not even a half life?” I said, blubbering.

“A quarter life,” she repeated.

•••

We made up new words or we mangled the pronunciation of extant words. Our convos looped and spiraled until we were linguistically charmed.

•••

In 1997, she adopted the kids when our laws changed to allow it. They needed independent counsel to understand what rights they were waiving and what rights they were gaining; someone to make certain we weren’t coercing them. In those early years together, we couldn’t, as a lesbian couple, get married, but the adoption made us family and confirmed that we would always be linked, and confirmed who would inherit if she died.

•••

She had breast cancer, in situ; lumpectomy and radiation recommended. She opted for chemo, and the less-generous-me wondered if it was so other people would see her suffer.

After she healed, she held her illness over me like a sword.

“I’m having trouble swallowing,” she said when wouldn’t eat her dinner and didn’t want me to know that she’d already had dinner with her lover.

•••

She twisted my wrist when she held my hand—not once, not a dozen times, but hundreds of times. I talked to her about it often, saying how much it upset me, and also how it wrecked my hands, wrist, and elbow, gave me carpal tunnel and tendonitis etc., and for a few minutes after I said something, she’d stop squeezing, stop twisting, and we’d be just sweethearts, walking, like all the other queer sweethearts strolling around Trout Lake, madly in love, until she started again, bearing down hard, wrenching it left.

My interior monologue ran like this:

She’s happy she loves me she wouldn’t hurt me not on purpose it can’t be voluntary it must be because she’s learning to lead in dance and she’s working on developing a “frame.”

As if sense enters into battering. As if logic has the slightest role to play.

•••

In our long-time house, we had a hot tub, my wife and I. We had it installed right outside our back door, half roof-covered, half exposed, so that it was possible to be protected from the elements or not. We used it every day, pretty well, and that was where we decompressed from the stresses of our days—where we met in chit chat and bubbles.

Where I first saw her naked with the other woman.

•••

There was something hinky in how I loved her after her cancer, how besottedly I cared. I took the car in, dealt with laundry, made dental appointments, hemmed her pants, cleaned the windows, bought the paint, changed the sheets, scrubbed the fridge, ferried the kids, ground the coffee, bought the birthday gifts, sent the thank you notes, booked the ferries, hotels and air, picked up the bulbs, arranged delivery of the compost, paid the bills, renewed the mortgage, and she pretty much worked, came home, and did the heavy lifting I was too ill to manage. She looked at me often, sometimes with derision, and said, “Oh my god, you are just so kind.”

But I was absolutely terrified to lose her. My favorite thing was being with her. Doing anything.

•••

Every year, or every two years, she’d decide she didn’t need her meds anymore, giving us a two-day slide into the bad old behavior.

And I’d ask myself: Which of her is real? Happy or harridan? I wanted to believe in the former, because she glowed with health and satisfaction, but a niggling part of me believed that, actually, it was the latter.

If both were, she was deeply bifurcated.

When off her pills, she’d pick fights. She’d pick pick pick pick at my Achilles’ heels. Bland, I’d remind myself, be bland bland bland, but about day four or five, I’d say something a teeny bit snarky back.

Then I became the reason she was mad. Me being a fuckhead became her explanation for everything.

•••

When she told me that she was leaving, she said that she’d wanted to go since thirteen years before, when she’d had cancer. But that wasn’t what she’d acted like at the time: during that hell, she’d stood on the rocks on a Pacific Ocean beach and asked me to marry her, then we’d become litigants in the same-sex marriage case and fought hard, against the government’s fifty lawyers, for three years—to marry each other. When we’d wed, she was as transported as I was. I’d swear it.

•••

We never stopped having sex, not all through the good times or the bad times, not even through the break-up.

•••

“I’m sorry that I scream,” she said. “Mine just comes out as rage and meltdowns. Yours comes out as hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt. Hurt, hurt. It’s not just me. I will take—I know I’m being fucking insane right now. Please. Please.”

•••

It wasn’t until after I left her and was blemish free that I understood that I wouldn’t have bruised at all—with ease or difficulty—if her fingers hadn’t been pressed into my flesh. It wasn’t until after I left her and I no longer had carpal tunnel, tendonitis, ulnar nerve trouble, and bursitis in my arms that I realized that it hadn’t been computer work causing the pain as she’d said.

•••

That last year, I had a bad reaction to my October flu shot, so the top of my arm was three times swollen, red, and griddle hot. No sleeve was large enough, so I was half-shirtless, my top jerry-rigged, part of the neck under my armpit. My wife pulled back her arm as if winding up to throw a baseball, then slammed her palm onto my wound, shaking her hand vigorously.

While smiling. Not a serial-killer-smile like on TV, but a loving smile.

A smile that ultimately told me whatever was going on inside her was in a code that I was never going to break.

•••

When I got more direct, challenging her on the uptick in violence as our marriage had gone to hell, she told me I had abused her, too. I asked how and she said by rolling my eyes, by smirking. And then she said, “By making me dance.”

In the years when I was well enough: jive, night club two-step, west coast swing, waltz, cha-cha, mambo, samba, meringue, rumba, salsa.

•••

That mid-August week in 2011, we negotiated ways to beat the summer heat so she could go on hurting me in her preferred manner. She set up a fan in front of one of the new windows to push the air around, and even though I lived there, in that room, largely, all day long, because I ran my photography studio from it, and I knew that it wouldn’t work, I appreciated it.

I appreciated it.

I was glad I had a considerate wife.

This is true.

By the next Wednesday, the bruises on my forearms had faded into yellow smears, and my new bouquets bloomed only my upper arms.

She looked at my arms and said, “Well, never say I didn’t bring you flowers.”

I laughed and snorted. Then I sobered. “Hon? Short sleeves I want to wear are, um, a lot shorter. Um. You know. Not, you know, down as far as my elbows.”

Blank stare.

I pulled my shirt back on. “I mean…” I lightly karate chopped my mid-upper left arm. “They end about here, right?”

The next week a new set of marks, dark, circular, insistent, appeared, but just on my shoulders.

•••

Her wedding vows:

“I feel so lucky. We have had ten wonderful years together. I already know that you will love, honor, and cherish, that you will comfort me in illness. I know that we can laugh so hard we end up crying. I now that you will wipe away my tears. I know that we can be angry without hate, that we can confront without fear, that we can resolve without resentment. There are no doubts, no questions. There is only this love. The synergistic miracle that turns one plus one into a billion shining stars. You and I together can do anything. I feel so lucky.”

2003, when she’d already wanted to leave me for five years.

•••

We spent years play-wrestling, giggling our way across our bed. But then I started getting injured, a whack to the head, an elbow pushed into my back, a neck pin. “Can we just go back to how we wrestled when you didn’t hurt me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

•••

She leaned forward to confide in our couples’ counselor. Exasperated, long-suffering, she said, “I’ve been waiting—and waiting—and waiting for Jane to die.”

The counselor didn’t know what to do. Long, stilted, uncomfortable silence while I waited, sobbing, holding my hands over my face, and then the counselor changed the subject.

My wife hung two voodoo dolls, one white, one brown on her work bulletin board. She shoved pins, lots of pins, through the white doll’s chest. Brown doll, white doll. Asian wife, white wife.

•••

I remember all the energy I expended to keep her alive—all my care and concern and sacrifice and worry, how hard I worked to pick up income so we wouldn’t be saddled with financial worries—and when it hits me how she met that hope and drive and protectiveness doing exactly the opposite, wanting me dead, I have to breathe very deeply and slowly not to weep even now, even after four years.

•••

She started going all-the-time hooey when she turned fifty—broody and paranoid in slow increments. It was creepy and weird; she’d curve herself above me in my office chair so that I couldn’t get up, intimidating me, her voice thin and threatening. She’d lay waste to anniversaries and holidays. I took to counting her pills to see if she was medicated because I couldn’t always tell.

And then she didn’t want to garden. She didn’t want to work around the house. She wouldn’t clean the hot tub. She became a vegetarian. She lost sixty pounds. She became a gym fanatic and had to practice multiple musical instruments every evening, plus find time to meditate. During this mania, I knitted and watched TV, waiting for her to snap out of it. She seemed breakably happy. It never occurred to me that the woman she hung out with was her lover, not then, because I thought nothing could threaten us. But my wife no longer really slept. She showed signs of major anxiety—trichotillomania, twitchiness, flicking her thumb hard across her chin. She started referring to our kids as my kids instead of our kids. She started referring to her extended family as her family not our family. She stopped calling me by my nickname.

Her lies grew florid and silly.

She sat me down and told me gravely that she was sure her cancer had come back. Her cancer had been gone for thirteen years, yet everyone—not just me, but all her friends—treated her like it was active, as if she deserved special attention. Okay, I thought, cancer. Cancer again. We can do this. Even if, as I imagined likely, the metastasis was in her brain.

This particular lie, meant to throw me off the scent of her love affair, led me to push her hard towards a series of wholly unnecessary medical tests as serious as endoscopy and colonoscopy.

•••

Love and violence,

love and violence,

go together like

secrets and silence.

•••

Stockholm Syndrome.

•••

She blurted out that she was not a lesbian anymore and was going back to men. When I tried to sit her down to discuss it, and what it would mean to us, she refused to admit she’d said it.

She said I was nuts. You’re crazy. This is what you do. You make up stories.

Did she know she’d said it? Or not? I just could not tell.

In therapy, I brought it up again. I need to talk about some of these things she’s been telling me, I said. She repeated that she had not said it.

You only think that’s what she said, said the therapist. That’s what you heard.

No, I said, what she said was, I’m not a lesbian anymore. What I heard was that my marriage is in grave trouble.

A week later, at check-in, my wife said, Remember what Jane said I told her? Well, I did say that. Beat. Long beat while the therapist and I sat baffled. But I only meant that I had a hard time coming out eighteen years ago.

I said, How does ‘I’m not a lesbian anymore’ equate to ‘I had trouble coming out?’

Jane, said the therapist. If that’s what she says she meant, I’m sure that’s what she meant.

A later therapist said that my ex had just denied the things she’d said to mess with my head, a bully’s tactical maneuver.

To mess with my head.

The whole idea that anyone did anything just to mess with someone’s head was foreign to me, like a humanity-abruption, something shearing off, alien and grotesque, from the human womb.

•••

She believed my tears were exactly equivalent to her rages.

•••

I told her I was leaving with two weeks notice. I paid our common bills and took my half of our line of credit to live on until we could settle matters. It was finally clear to me after six months of trying, after therapy and one more chance after one more chance, after her telling me she was moving out and then not moving, after couples’ counseling that made everything worse, after her endless gaslighting and mendacity and threatening and pernicious lacks of basic good, after being scared out of my mind that she was actually going to kill me, finally, during those last months when I came to believe she wanted me dead in order not to split assets or pay support, that I had to get safe. But still I was, as I always had been, out of my mind with love for her. Unconditional love. I’d never imagined being apart. I was committed to her. We’d said forever. We’d challenged a government to prove it.

So I shaped leaving as a temporary separation just until she could get through anger management classes.

How do you leave someone you’re still smitten with?

But how do you not?

I was disabled and getting sicker faster and fifty-seven. I would have no income since I was too ill to work and, also, was leaving my studio behind in the house; I was leaping into a very deep well.

I did not believe that I could survive separation, and indeed, according to a cardiologist, I was only ten minutes from the truth. Losing my marriage pushed my disease into months of unstable angina and finally a massive heart attack, leading to more permanent cardiac damage, open heart surgery, and a chancy recovery beset with heart failure.

•••

The kids were packing boxes in the basement when my wife hip-checked me from the dishwasher. She emptied the dishes that I had stacked while I leaned on the kitchen counter behind her. She was more verbally pleasant to me than she’d been for weeks, because the kids were home. She restacked the dishes.

She sent me over a sweet, small smile.

I smiled back, tilted my head in puzzlement. She hadn’t smiled at me in months. Many times, I had asked for hugs. Many times, I had stood in front of her and nakedly said that I admired her, appreciated her, loved her while she stood with dead eyes just staring at me.

Now she came waltzing across the black and white tile and wrapped me in a bear hug. I didn’t know how to react. I started to cry right away from my sheer dumb human need for a little kindness, and from this woman who had been treating me like dog poop for months, and I wrapped my arms around her, too. She was being nice to me? Loving? So sweet, so long overdue.

But then I felt her thumb drilling into my left shoulder. At first it was like deep tissue massage that pinpointed pressure, until I registered pain. Pain? I thought of the children downstairs, embarrassed, and then I just succumbed to it the way I had to a heart attack. My arms fell.

Anyway, I knew our rules: This was (as always) a game of chicken.

I was (as always) half angry and half annihilated. Both together.

The annihilated one said, I am hurt. I believed in you. I trusted you. I gave my whole future to you. How could you do this to us, to me? To yourself?

The angry one said, Go ahead, take it further, you pig, I dare you. Do it. Do it, asshole. Do it harder. Want me to flinch? Well, fuck you fuck you fuck you. I will not flinch.

Who would stop first? Her, hurting me, or me, getting hurt? It wasn’t going to be me, goddammit. It was some point of obscene honor. I wasn’t going to give her my capitulation. I wasn’t going to hand her shrieks of weakness. I was leaving her to get safe when all I wanted was to stay—wasn’t that enough, losing my wife, my best friend, my business, my animals, my home, my garden, my income? Yes, that was all she could take. She didn’t get to see me on my knees, too.

If the kids had come upstairs, all they’d have seen was a hug.

Sure, she had rages. Sure, she threw things. Sure, she came at me with her fist raised. Sure, she screamed. Sure, she threatened suicide. But a lot of her violence was this kind of violence, stealth violence that was hard to put into words (I think she counted on that).

It wasn’t spontaneous, this attack; it couldn’t have been. She’d had to conjure it up the way she conjured up sticking pins in a voodoo doll’s chest, the way she had to pre-think wrist twists. She probably had to research anatomy, unless it was something she’d learned in training. What I knew when she finished, I knew clear as a bell—she’d been planning this assault, strategically biding her time, studying up for its precision (even choosing my non-dominant arm). I knew that much, and maybe it was the first time in hundreds of incidents that I saw her for what she really was.

With everything else stripped away: a batterer.

At last she lifted her thumb. She broke the hug and fled.

I stared down at my arm, fascinated. It didn’t hurt. Instead it was—gone. My hand and arm were paralyzed. I hadn’t been expecting that; I’d assumed she was just hurting me like normal.

I went slowly upstairs. I didn’t know how to loop a sling without help, and it was clumsy, but I got fabric and used my right arm, my mouth, to rig it, my teeth to help tie the knot. I went back downstairs. She sat in the living room with a packing box and looked up, black-eyed.

“I have to go to Emerg,” I said. “I’m paralyzed.”

“What’s Emerg going to do?” she said. “Think that through. They’ll put you in a sling. You’re already in a sling.”

I thought, Yeah, she’s right, I guess. She’s the medical expert.

“Let me fix the sling,” she said.

So she did.

The kids came up from the basement. “What happened to your arm?” my daughter asked.

“I hurt my shoulder,” I said. Not, your mother paralyzed me. Not, I just got attacked.

The paralysis lasted three days in my arm, and five days in my hand, and damaged my hand permanently.

•••

After the house was sold, the roses were ripped out or died, Dortmund, New Dawn, Compassion, Charles Aznavour. The water feature was unplugged, the birdbath emptied, the mason bee house shaken until the bee-plugs fell. The chairs and table and heater were taken away. The delphiniums bent double on their stalks. New owners trashed the Chinese wisteria with the white raecemes two feet long. Someone threw renovation debris atop the garden beds that we’d carved out of clay, earth, and rocks, junked the sunken garden that my ex had built from glass beads during chemotherapy.

•••

Once, she and I had danced in the Milky Way under the Perseid meteor shower while bats skimmed our heads, out on the yard, me in bare feet, the grass cool and damp and impossibly green in strong moonlight, slugs munching the hostas, snails in their soft, translucent protoconchs slithering out for calcium.

Now I dreamed I walked through Allium giganteums alone, and they were high overhead, big balls, purple and bristling. I dreamed I walked under Magnolia grandiflora, and white blossoms floated down to cover me like tissues. There was a blue sky, but I couldn’t see it for the waxy leaves. Morning glory, tough, with white insistent roots, twined around my ankles and began to climb me, up over my calf and around my knee, binding me, a series of green hearts, then moved higher, higher, until it touched me where she had once put the tip of her tongue, and it stopped there, twitching.

And I stopped there, stopped.

When I woke again, it was moving day.

•••

EATON HAMILTON is the Canadian author of eight books, including the just-released poetry volume Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes (available only in Canada). This piece first appeared in shorter form at Letter of Apology. They are the two-time winner of the CBC Literary Awards (2003/2014). Their winning story “Smiley” can be found online at CBC. Their twitter: @eatonhamilton.

Unfinished

dogplane — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Marcia Aldrich

The 16^th of November was eerily warm, and neighbors were out in full force with their leaf blowers, trying to clear their yards before the weather turned. My husband was raking enormous piles of leaves onto the blue plastic tarp and then dragging them to the corner of the yard. We live on the banks of the Red Cedar River in a subdivision adjoining several natural areas, and the deer cross through our yard every day and bed down in the leaves for an hour or so before moving on. We hadn’t seen any for days since hunting season had opened.

In the previous week, we stumbled upon deer bones at Sander Farms, a natural area near the busy Dobie Road, a death trap for deer. Most days we take our dogs, Quin and Omar, to Sander Farms where they run off leash. A person I’ve never seen mows a trail through the tall grasses. Omar found the first bone—what looked like a leg—on the side of the trail at the entrance. Each day we found another piece of the deer, another leg with the fur still on, a rib cage, the pieces scattered through the fields as if one animal after another had taken him up and then put him down.

On this day, only Omar was with Richard in the side yard. I hunted inside the house for Quin and found him lying at the foot of the bed on the carpet breathing hard. His chest was rising and falling. Earlier that morning, I had stopped to talk to him when he was lying on the stairs’ landing. He didn’t lift his head in greeting or wag his tail. He didn’t give any indication that it mattered to him that I was sitting on the step caressing his beautiful face that had in the last year become shot through with white hair.

He was the dog who came from wherever he was to greet me at the door when I came home and made sounds that welled up inside him like a moaning, but they were not caused by pain or discomfort—they were caused by relief and happiness that I had come back to him.

Lately on our walks, Quin would stop and then after a few minutes be ready to continue. Last summer after leaving the fields, he’d lie down in the shade of a yard before continuing home. He had grown slower, bringing up the far rear, so far that it often felt as if Quin and I were on our own separate walk from Richard and Omar. Sometimes he stopped right at the edge of the driveway as we were entering the street before we had even started.

He struck me as far away, sunk into himself as if he was in pain and was conserving himself. I suspected that despite the pain medicine, he hurt. Still I thought his difficulties had to do with arthritis and joint deterioration. I didn’t think anything else was going on. He always had a good appetite.

But he stopped wanting to sleep on the bed, preferring the floor in his own space. Then he developed a cough, the telltale cough, it turns out. A dry, hacking cough. He wasn’t coughing all the time. Some days it didn’t seem as if he coughed at all, and we forgot about it. Richard said Friday that he thought we should take him to the vet on Monday. It was time to do something but still not urgent. Saturday morning he didn’t eat breakfast, didn’t go out into the leaves, sat unresponsive on the steps, and I Googled coughs in dogs and found they could be a sign of illnesses like congestive heart failure and cancer.

I wonder now why I didn’t Google the cough before. Hadn’t I been paying enough attention or hadn’t I wanted to see what was going on because I knew that seeing it, really seeing it, would be the first step down an unhappy road? And so I put those steps off. Now I looked at his breathing and I knew we couldn’t wait until Monday. Our vet doesn’t work on the weekends and I took Quin to the Emergency Clinic at the Michigan State University Veterinary Center.

I arrived at one-thirty and things went very fast even though I was sitting for hours in the waiting room. Someone came to the front desk right away and took Quin to the back of the clinic and I never saw Quin again. He jumped up on me in his anxiety. And I hugged him and lowered him to the floor, resting my head on his cheek as was my custom. And then he allowed himself to be led away. I’ve gone back over this part a hundred times; at that moment I believed he would be returned to me and that this was not our goodbye.

After the first hour, an assistant returned to update me about the primary vet’s concerns on the basis of the preliminary examination. They put him on an I.V. to give him some liquids. His gums were pale, his breathing and heart rate advanced. They were going to do more investigation and be back. The assistant hung back a bit and said I might have to make a decision today. He was kneeling down, in a kind of crouch, and he looked up at me when he said that, as if it pained him to sound so ominous.

I called Richard and said, “This is not good.” And then I waited. But I knew.

When I decided to take Quin to the clinic, when I helped him into the back seat, I didn’t know I’d have to make the decision, that we had arrived at that awful place, a place I had been before.

I noticed boxes of Kleenex scattered everywhere. I was not alone in requiring them. While waiting I had watched a woman carry in a puppy near death and then walk out an hour later alone. She arrived sobbing so loudly that they could hardly understand her at the front desk. She left in silence.

The young vet appeared, and we went into one of the small examination rooms and he told me what he feared but couldn’t yet confirm. He wanted to do a chest x-ray. Cancer. He thought the cancer started in the spleen perhaps and had moved to the lungs. The chest x-ray might show us something. And then he was gone. Primary lung cancer is very rare in dogs—they don’t smoke. If you find cancer in a dog’s lungs there is a ninety-nine percent chance the cancer originated elsewhere and is inoperable.

I called Richard again. This time he was riding his bike to the clinic and the noise from the wind and traffic was terrible—but he was on his way.

More waiting.

Then I saw Richard ride by on his bike and a few minutes later he walked in—his clothes filthy from raking leaves for hours, his hair plastered away from his face by the wind. Another hour passed and still it felt like time was flying. I wanted to hold it in my hands and quiet its pace. Employees kept apologizing for the delay—I wanted to say don’t apologize, don’t speed things along. I want a lifetime of delays.

Then the young vet appeared again, Dr. Carver. This time I caught his name. Without his having said a word, I could see in his face the news he was about to deliver. I’ve seen this look before—the look that says your dog is dying, we can’t do anything, and you are going to have to put him down. The look that says this news will devastate you, how shall I tell you?

We stepped back into examination room # 5—this time I noted the number as I noted the vet’s name—and he said “I’m sorry.” The x-ray shows that Quin has cancer in his lungs, and there is nothing we can do about it. Did we want to see the x-ray?

No, we did not. I’m not sure why we didn’t want to see it. I’m not exactly sure why in this moment and the moments that followed that I wanted to shield myself from seeing. I didn’t care to have the images of his ruined lungs. I didn’t want further tests to nail down whether there was a tumor on his spleen or liver or abdomen or all three. What did it matter? In a matter of minutes I knew I would decide as I must to let him go. We would never have a complete narrative of his decline.

If Quin were a person, he would have come home and had hospice care for the remaining time. But we don’t do that with dogs. None of my animals have had a natural death at home. They have all had a precipitous decline and I’ve taken them to a vet where it has been determined that they are dying, that nothing can be done, and then I have had the dog or cat put to sleep.

My daughter and I carried Irene, our first dog, into the vet. We lay her down on a blanket in the exam room and held her as the drug was administered that would stop her heart. It happened in a second and was utterly quiet. And then we left, walked to the car, and drove home. We left Irene there to be picked up for cremation.

The death of Larry, our second dog, was not so smooth, if that’s what you could call it. He had a tumor on his spleen that I knew could rupture at any time. Still I had some months with him, watching him every day for signs, saying goodbye every time I left the house as if it might be our last. His spleen did rupture. By the time I realized what was happening, he was very weak and I could barely get him into the car to drive him to the vet. Twenty minutes later, he was too weak to get out of the car. Several of us had to carry him into the exam room where he lay on the cold floor. With the greatest difficulty I had him put to sleep. His head was in my lap, he looked at me as he died.

And I will never be able to do that again.

Now when I see Larry I see him on the blue speckled floor, I see his eyes looking at me for assurance, to somehow make it all right as I had done for ten and a half years. But there was no making it right, no reassurance. The vet kept saying he’s looking to you to let him go. Was he?

I didn’t want that power. Eventually I let him go and he died. We walked out of the room and got back into our car and left my great boy behind. That’s what you do. Some people bury their dogs in the yard as in days of old but Larry was a ninety-pound field golden retriever and our yard was exceedingly small, postage stamp size. And we knew we weren’t going to stay in that house forever. I couldn’t imagine leaving my buried dog behind. There was no burying him. There was only cremation and picking up his ashes and keeping them near me.

•••

I wasn’t in attendance when my mother and father died. They died in Pennsylvania and I lived in Michigan. They were not young and they weren’t in good health; nevertheless their deaths, when they came, were sudden. My mother woke up complaining of a headache. After lunch she said the pain was unbearable and my father called an ambulance. She was dead by nine-thirty that night—she had sustained a massive cerebral hemorrhage. My father returned to his apartment after a week’s trip in Florida and had a massive heart attack. He died before he reached the hospital. Never stood by their hospital beds, never saw their bodies slip into death, their faces in death. Never saw their bodies wheeled away and stored in a refrigerator with a bunch of other dead bodies until the funeral home could pick them up. My parents’ deaths were managed, and their bodies were managed without me. When a person or a dog dies, we relinquish them to someone—to coyotes, to medical experts, to funeral managers, and to the people who work the crematoriums.

I have seen two of my dogs die. I thought I should be with them, touching their faces, looking at them, saying goodbye. I should be there. And I was. With my parents, I felt pained by my absence. It wasn’t something I decided. My sisters stood by my mother’s hospital bed as she died; they touched her hands and spoke to her. They both arrived at the hospital after my father had died in the ambulance, too late to say goodbye. But they saw him in his death. I feel that I let my parents down and at the same time I feel grateful that I did not see their faces rearranged by death.

Dr. Carver asked, “Do you want to say goodbye to Quin? Do you want to be with him for his final moments?” I put my head in my hands and sobbed. Give me a minute, I asked. I have to think. But I knew I couldn’t see Quin die. I didn’t want that to be the last image of him I had. I wanted to remember him as he emerged from Lake Michigan after an afternoon of swimming or pulling an enormous fallen branch through the snow. I wanted to see him alive, unfinished. I am not a novice in this dying business.

Now I know that the last image will be the one I carry with me forever—it will write over all the others. Selfish is what I am. I chose not to be the angel of death. I did not give my Quin the sign that he could go. Richard said goodbye. I didn’t even want to hear about it, didn’t want to know how Quin looked, what the room was like, was the lighting bright, was it low, what color was the floor, was he on a table, who else was in the room, did he lift his head, did he know? I didn’t want to know.

Did I fail him as I hadn’t failed the others? After nine years of never failing Quin, did I fail him in the end? Was I unable to summon up that last bit of strength to serve him? It was so fast. I would be undone forever to see him die. My refusal wasn’t about the insufficiency of love.

And then like all the other deaths, we waited for the assistant to retrieve his leash and collar and walked out the doors of the clinic and got into our car and drove the long ride home. It was dark now and it would begin to rain shortly.

•••

When we came home without Quin, Omar looked confused and anxious. He lay by the door, facing it, ready for Quin to walk through it. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. At some point, Richard asked if I wanted to take Omar to the fields. Yes and no was my answer. But we went because we still had a dog and he needed exercise and some sense of normalcy. We passed a couple we knew who walked their two dogs every night. When they saw that Quin wasn’t with us, that it was just Omar, the woman started to ask where and stopped. Something about our faces, our forlorn figures told her that Quin had died. We got to the fields relieved we hadn’t run into any other people who would inquire where Quin was and realized we had days and days of being asked the dread question ahead of us. We let Omar off leash but he didn’t take off. We walked the trail and he stayed right by us. On the slight slope uphill he found the deer’s skull not far off the path, the last part of the deer to emerge. I don’t know if a more perfect thing exists. So delicate and small, as white as can be, lying in the grasses and mud as if it belonged there. And perhaps it did belong there. Where else should it have been?

The next day was a terrible day. Dark, foreboding, with winds up to sixty miles an hour, and intermittent torrential down pours. By evening, we lost power and huddled in the bedroom listening to tree limbs being ripped from trees and flying against the windows. And it went on like this for most of the night, and I thought yes, this is how it should be, the world should come unhinged, it should flail and bang because something great has left it. Of course, it was me who was unhinged. It was my grief that I saw in the storm.

And the next day came as it does and the storm was over, power was restored, and the temperature plummeted. It was winter now. The leaves had been stripped from the trees, what had remained by mid-November. Some roads were blocked because trees had fallen across their way. I heard saws buzzing nearby.

I pulled out a photo of Quin at Sleeping Bear Dunes in 2005 when he was young. He’s just emerged from the lake, no doubt fetching sticks we were throwing. He’s running towards the camera, sand and foam coats his face, his fur is wet and deep red, and he looks right at me. I take the photo. Our eyes are locked. This was the face I wanted to remember. Not because I am deluding myself in thinking someday I’ll return home from work and find Quin waiting at the door for me, or that it will be Quin sitting on his perch on the landing overseeing our world, or Quin emerging from the dry brush of the fields and running towards me, but because I know he won’t.

•••

One week to the day after Quin died, his ashes arrived in the mail. They arrived in a small metal container about three inches tall, blue larkspur sprays on the beige background.

Thanksgiving morning, Richard and I bundled up against the cold and, with Omar, walked through the falling snow to the fields. No one was on the streets and the fields were empty. At the place where we enter the fields, we unleashed Omar, as we had always unleashed both dogs. They’d bound into the fields and then abruptly stop to smell whatever they smelled before hurrying on into the open area. Here I pulled out my little baggie, dipped my bare hand in and gathered some of Quin in my fingers and scattered it. The first fingers of ash were smooth, like sand, and they blew in the wind and carried a little ways off the trail to coat the dry stalks. “To Quin,” I said, “your final pasture.”

But the pain of losing never is finished. A friend writes about how she dreamed she found her lost dog sitting on a shelf in a second-hand shop on sale for nine dollars. “I picked her up and she smelled exactly the same, and she started licking me. It was as if she’d been waiting for me for ten years. Then I woke up, but for a moment there, life seemed healed.”

•••

MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her website is marciaaldrich.com.