SEVENTEEN
There were small raccoons in the walls. Or enormous mice. Of course, the proper term for enormous mice is “rats,” but I felt better not thinking about rats a few feet from my head while I slept. Not that I was sleeping much, as I lay in bed listening to the frantic skittering of busy rodents. The pitter-patter of little feet, I thought, but Hunter wasn't around to make the joke to: He was up in the attic, thinking deeply about wild Romania.
In the mornings I sometimes found little corpses near our porch: mice with long, thin noses. Voles? Moles? A squashed frog, one eyeball popped out. A tiny lump of heart, a threadlike trail of viscera attached. I cleaned them up, because my husband had always been the more squeamish of us.
“Hunter, did your family used to have a cat that got loose?”
“Not that I recall.”
It was probably a feral cat. Or a neighbor's dog. I remembered hearing there were foxes around, even coyotes. But a wild creature wouldn't leave all the remains so close to human habitation, would it?
“A little project for you, Abs,” Hunter said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Solve the mystery.”
But it didn't bother me enough to want to set traps, so I did nothing. I figured I could ask Red if there was anything painless I could do when he came to dinner. Like lay down a barrier of salt, or get a dog. I quite liked the idea of a dog, maybe even a puppy.
Hunter did not. “You'll be out working, and I don't want to be stuck here all day with some bulbous-headed, lop-eared, obsequious mutt for company.”
That week I spent most of my time in the car, trying to get my bearings. It seemed to take me an hour to get anywhere on the winding, nameless back roads that meandered through endless cornfields and cow pastures. On a search for an electrician to wire the upstairs, I found a good used-book store and spent the next few days rereading books from late childhood: James and the Giant Peach; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Julie of the Wolves.
But the nights seemed endless. We didn't have a TV in the bedroom. There was a small, old black-and-white console downstairs, but it didn't get anything other than one grainy station in Poughkeepsie. I found I missed the friendly blond newscasters and the weather maps, and I felt a little lost without even the possibility of stumbling onto an old movie at four in the morning.
Something about the size of the house intimidated me into staying in the bedroom, anyhow. I couldn't even bring myself to go downstairs to the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of cereal. On our sixth night, I made it halfway down the staircase before the creaking floors and ringing silence did me in. I went back up, then past the bedroom to the attic, where Hunter had been holed away for hours.
“Hunter?”
He looked up with a false smile. “Abra. How're you doing?” His gaze had returned to his computer.
“I'm … getting used to things. You coming down?” I tried to make it sound like an invitation.
“In a while.” Hunter sighed and met my eyes again. “I am busy, Abs. You knew I would be when you agreed to this. I mean, I came here to work …”
“No problem,” I said, already moving away. “I understand.”
“In another week or so, when I've gotten into this project—”
“Sure, of course.” I almost yelled the words at him, then went to our familiar bed in its alien setting and cried. There were other people's things in here: someone else's ugly oak dresser, someone else's fragile wicker chair. On the wall, a tattered sampler attested to some luckless child's skill with a needle. I sat up, drying my eyes, and the windowpanes rattled twice, hard. Storm coming. Growing up in Pleasantvale, I had looked forward to storms. They gave you an excuse to huddle inside with a book, free from the responsibility of having to play outside with others. Living in the city seemed to blunt the impact of most storms; Lilliana, who'd grown up in Manhattan, said she'd never been frightened of lightning, even as a child.
I pressed myself closer to the window and saw that the wind was whipping through the leaves, ripping some off their branches before they'd even had a chance to change.
I could hear the howl of it, because there were no cars, no voices, nothing else to drown out the wind. This was nothing like the suburbs. This was nature, raw and unsentimental, liable to reach down from the sky and zap you. I suddenly felt very vulnerable in my cotton nightgown with my bare feet cold on the wood floor.
Oh, now that was self-pity at its excruciating worst. That was the kind of melodramatic, whiny complaint that I would expect to hear from my mother. What was happening to me here? Opening up my closet, I slipped my feet into the furry Dalmatian slippers Lilliana had bought me as a leaving present and grabbed my baby blue terry-cloth robe off the door hook. I was not going to turn into some neo-Victorian neurasthenic. I was going to go down those stairs—creak, creak, creak; I pounded my feet down extra hard—and through that kitchen, and I was going to open that back door and walk the hell out into that dark and stormy night. Because I was not afraid of a little wind and rain. And then I was going to walk back into the kitchen, make myself a bowl of Corn Pops and milk, and I was going to eat it while watching the black-and-white weather in the living room. Because I was not afraid of some heavy old furniture.
There was a clap of thunder and the Victorian lights flickered in their sconces, but I just kept going, one furry slipper in front of the other.
The moment I opened the back porch door a gust of wet wind slapped me in the face. The next gust went in a slightly different direction. I stepped out under the overhang and lifted my chin so that I could feel the rain. And then I heard it, a howl above the howl of the wind and the crackle of electricity in the air. It was a high, clear, undoglike sound, and I realized, with a leap of excitement, that I was probably hearing a coyote.
And then I heard another howl, lower, stronger. No, not stronger. Closer. I looked up, back at the house, and realized that Hunter had stuck his head out the tiny attic window. It was a good wolf howl. That Magdalena woman had taught him well.
I went back inside and picked up the old black rotary phone to call my mother, but this was not Manhattan: The line was dead.