She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.
The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise.
In any event, her husband will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband takes the form of warm pragmatic flesh.
She picks up her cell—she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, about her sudden overwhelming love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist—but then she remembers that Meg doesn’t want to be her best friend anymore.
A week ago, Meg said very gently, I’m sorry, I just need to take a break.
Outside, in Florida, there’s still the hot yellow wool of daylight.
In the kitchen, her sons are eating their dinner of bean tacos glumly.
They had wanted to be ninjas, but she had to concoct something quickly, and now their costumes are hanging up in the laundry room.
Earlier, she put her own long-sleeved white button-down backward on the younger boy, crossed the arms around and tied them in the back, added a contractor’s mask she’d slitted and colored with a silver Sharpie, and because he was armless, she pinned a candy bucket to the waist.
Cannibal Lecture, he is calling himself, a little too on the nose.
For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South; she hopes that the effect is mitigated by the rosebuds along the hems.
She also forgot the kindergarten’s Spooky Breakfast this morning; she’d failed to bring the boo-berry muffins, and her smaller son had sat in his regular clothes in his tiny red chair, looking hopefully at the door as mothers and fathers in their masks and wigs who kept not being her poured in.
She wasn’t even thinking of him at that hour; she was thinking of William Bartram.
Her husband comes in from work, sees the costumes, raises an eyebrow, remains merciful.
The boys brighten as if on a dimmer switch, her husband turns on “Thriller” to get in the mood, and she watches them bop around, a twist in the heart.
It’s not yet dusk, but the shadows have stretched.
Her husband puts on an old green Mohawk wig, the boys shimmy their costumes on again, and the three of them head out.
* * *
—
She is alone in the house with the dog and William Bartram and the bags of wan lollipops that were all that remained on the drugstore’s shelves.
It’s necessary to hand out candy; her first year in the house, she righteously gave out toothbrushes, and it wasn’t an accident that a heavy oak branch smashed her window that night.
She can almost see three blocks away into the kitchen of Meg’s house, where beautiful handmade costumes are being put on.
Meg loves this shit.
A week ago, when Meg broke up with her, they were eating ginger scones that Meg had made from scratch, and the bite in her mouth went so dry that she couldn’t swallow for a long, long time.
She just nodded as Meg spoke kindly and firmly, and she felt each rip as her heart was torn into smaller and smaller pieces in Meg’s capable hands.
Meg has enormous gray eyes and strong hips and shoulders, and hair like a glass of dark honey with sunshine in it.
Meg is the best person she knows, far better than herself or her husband, maybe even better than William Bartram.
Meg is the medical director of the abortion clinic in town, and all day she has to hold her patients’ stories and their bodies, as well as the tragic lack of imagination from the chanting protesters on the sidewalk.
It would be too much for anyone, but it is not too much for Meg.
On the mantel in Meg’s house, there are pictures of Meg with her children as babies, secured on her back, all three peering at the camera like koalas.
She, too, has often felt the urge to ride nestled cozily on Meg’s back.
She would feel safe there, her cheek against her strongest friend.
But for the past week she has respected Meg’s wish to take a break, and so she has not called Meg or stopped by her house for coffee or sent her children down the street to play with Meg’s children until someone runs home screaming with a bruise or low blood sugar.
What is it about me that people need breaks from? she asks the dog, who looks as though she wants to say something but, out of innate gentleness, refrains.
A generous kind of dog, the labradoodle.
Well, William Bartram won’t need a break from her.
The dead need nothing from us; the living take and take.
She brings William Bartram in his book costume out to the front porch, where it is cooler, and fetches the candy in a bowl and the dog and the wineglass so big it can hold a full bottle of ten-dollar Shiraz.
She settles herself under the bat lights she plugged in because she forgot to make jack-o’-lanterns and watches real bats swinging between the rooftops.
William Bartram seduced her with his drawings of horny turtles and dog-faced alligators, with his flights of ecstatic gratitude that lifted him toward God.
A week ago, after the ginger scones and suffocating with sadness, she took the afternoon off from work and drove to Micanopy to look at antiques, because she feels solace when she touches things that have survived generations of human hands.
She stood in the center of Micanopy hating her unsweet tea because it was encased in plastic foam that would disintegrate and float on the surface of the waters forever; but then she found the plaque about William Bartram, who had passed through Micanopy in 1774, when it was a Seminole trading post called Cuscowilla.
The chief there at the time was called the Cowkeeper.
When the Cowkeeper heard what Bartram was doing, traipsing about Florida collecting floral specimens and faunal observations, he nicknamed him Puc-Puggy.
This translates, roughly, to Flower Hunter, which—as bestowed upon Bartram by a warrior and hunter and proud owner of slaves he’d stripped from the many tribes he’d brutally subjugated—was probably no great compliment.
Still, what would bright-eyed Puc-Puggy have seen of Florida before the automobile, before the airplane, before the planned communities, before the swarms of Mouseketeers?
A damp, dense tangle.
An Eden of dangerous things.
A trio of witches comes up the walk, and not one says thank you when she drops her bad candy into their bags.
An infant dressed as a superhero, something like sweet potato crusted on his cheeks, looks on as his mother holds the pillowcase open for the treat and then clicks her tongue in disappointment.
But her street is a dark one and full of rentals, and the savvy trick-or-treaters mostly stay away.
It’s just before twilight, and the sky is a brilliant orange.
She is inside the pumpkin.
* * *
—
In the absence of tiny ghouls, the lizards come out one last time, frilling their red necks, doing push-ups on the sidewalk.
Like Bartram, she was once a northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna here, but that was a decade ago, and things that once were alien life have become, simply, parts of her life.
She is no longer frightened of reptiles, she who is frightened of everything.
She is frightened of climate change, this summer the hottest on record, plants dying all around.
She is frightened of the small sinkhole that opened in the rain yesterday near the southeast corner of her house and may be the shy exploratory first steps of a much larger sinkhole.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
She is frightened because maybe she has already become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she’s frightened of what he sees on the other side.
She is frightened that there aren’t many people on the earth she can stand.
The truth is, Meg had said, back when she was still a best friend, you love humanity almost too much, but people always disappoint you.