TWENTY-SIX
Inside the dark and empty house I found a flashlight and two candles, and then I tripped over the torn and bloody carcass of an opossum in the kitchen. Red had been right about one thing: The corpses were getting larger. I wrapped the naked-faced creature in an old kitchen towel and threw it outside the front door, and sat in the living room, waiting for Hunter to come home.
I'd cheated on my husband. I'd had oral sex with another man. With a wolf man. I'd just seen a man turn into a wolf. Or a coyote. No, I'd made a man turn into … what ever it was.
And Jackie knew.
I yearned for a hot shower. For television. For a book to read. For any distraction at all. Instead, all I got were questions. Was I going insane? Had Jackie slipped me a tab of acid in the mac and cheese? I felt my heart race and tried to stop myself from panicking. This wasn't a drug-induced hallucination. This was my life.
Which led me to the question: Where was Hunter, car-less, on a night like to night?
I felt instinctively he was not looking for me. I felt he was off on his own adventure. At Moondoggie's? With that waitress? I wouldn't even have the right to object. He could be in her mouth right now, or his mouth between her legs, and I would be powerless to object, because I had been just as guilty.
Except that now I suspected that he'd never been faithful at all. It wasn't just Magda. If he was sleeping with me and cheating with that waitress, then there was every reason to think he had never really been monogamous. And knowing this changed the shape of our past together. It made my memories of our marriage incomplete.
Well, at least I had one man who wanted me. Maybe Red was right—maybe he would be better for me.
Sure, because a man who was also a dog would be a perfect companion. No, wait, that was crazy. He had gotten scared and run off, and then I had seen a coyote. I was sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline, and I was having some sort of weird mental episode.
Red had gotten scared and run off, and a coyote had appeared and guided me home. That didn't make much more sense, but at least I didn't have to get myself committed in the morning. And wasn't it just like a man to run off the minute you finally decide to let him in?
And then, sitting on my dark couch in the dark house, came a shower of memories. Me at nineteen, still young enough to believe in the magic of transformations; still young enough to believe the magazines when they said the new hair, a prettier you, thinner thighs, better sex, making him want you. I had met Hunter still na?ve enough to believe that I was on the verge of inventing a new, happier, stronger self, that in choosing the right college, the right career path, the right man, I might shed the old skin of my old life.
But here I was, in a house that was big and old and alien, waiting for someone who didn't really want me anymore to walk in through the door. When he did, it would be time to leave him and face the prospect of life on my own.
No wonder most people don't leave a marriage without a lover to help them open the door. So comforting, the thought of that lover in the background. Too bad Red couldn't have been a little more convincing in the role.
I fell asleep without knowing I had done so. I wakened partially when the first rays of daylight hit my face from the living room window, but then I closed my eyes again, too tired to move. Suddenly, there was a crashing sound behind me, and I whirled. My heart lurched into a faster rhythm a full half-second before my brain caught up with the information: Front door slamming open. Husband standing there. Naked. And bloody.
“Abra.” Hunter looked at me with the strangest expression on his face, a look of rueful embarrassment that did not really go with the deep lacerations on his shoulders and chest.
“Oh, my God.”
“I see you're back. Well. That's good.” He brushed his hands off on his thighs, for all the world as if he'd just come back from a day's gardening. “I think I'll just take a shower, then.”
“Hunter, you're bleeding.”
He looked down at himself. “Ah. Yes. The thing of it is, I was out looking for you, and—”
“You're bleeding and you're naked.”
Something shifted in Hunter's strange expression. “Abra,” he said, and it came out clogged in his throat. His eyes were dark with pain and confusion.
“What happened to you?” My voice was softer than I thought it would be. I pulled a throw off the back of the couch and carried it over to my husband. “Here.” I wrapped it around his shoulders.
“I can't remember.” His arms came around me and he slid down my body, his face pressed against my belly, as Red's face had been not so many hours ago. “Abra.”
“I'm here.”
“Don't go.”
“I'm here.”
His arms convulsed around me, hugging me so tightly that I nearly lost my balance. I stroked his hair, not knowing what to say, guilty and a little repulsed by the sweaty, humid odor of blood and dirt. I couldn't remember Hunter ever going down on his knees before me. His sudden need of me was seductive, and I tried to pull back a little. “Were you—did you drink something?”
Hunter pulled back. “You smell funny.”
“I smell funny?”
“Like …” His brow furrowed. He looked up at me. “Are you leaving me for him?”
“You have some nerve.” Now I did try to step back, but Hunter prevented me, holding me even as he stood, his arms moving up to grip my arms. “Where have you been all night? With that waitress? And how about all this past summer? Want to tell me again how it wasn't like that with Magda?”
Hunter inhaled so deeply his nostrils flared. “He didn't come on you,” he said harshly. “Did you come on him?”
“No! How dare you!” I yanked my wrists from his grip, my voice coming out very calm and precise and overly deliberate, like the computerized voice on the radio warning about the storm. “How dare you go on and on about Red when you—”
“But it means nothing to me!” His face was flushed with anger, and I realized I'd never seen Hunter lose control before. “F*cking some girl when I'm away from home—that's like scratching an itch to me, Abra. You know that, deep down. That's why you never paid attention when I—”
“I didn't know!” I was hitting him with my fists, and he caught each blow. “I didn't know, you bastard! I trusted you because you'd already had a thousand stupid bimbos!”
“And you didn't care!”
“We weren't married then!” We glared at each other, but I could feel that my rage was burning hotter. He was blocking my fists, but then I started clawing at his already bloody shoulders, and I could feel him flinch. “What about Magda? What about those letters you didn't send? Are you going to tell me she didn't matter?” I stood there, waiting for his answer, before pushing him away and walking over to the window. His hesitation had said it all. “Magda was different, I admit it. But it wasn't what you think, Abs. She was my teacher—”
I sobbed so loudly it was almost a wail.
“And for a little while, I thought it was more. I admit it, okay?” He was beside me now, his head bent forward, forehead touching mine. “I thought—she'd changed me, and I was different. I thought you and I wouldn't work together anymore. But I was wrong. You came up here with me. You gave me—you always give me the space I need to figure things out.”
I couldn't look at him. I hated having him so close, but I couldn't seem to move away. “Then why were you out all night with someone else? What was that—another itch?”
I could feel his sigh. His hand behind my head felt sweaty, too warm. We were as close as if we were about to have sex, and I felt real nausea building at the back of my throat. “Abra, last night—I started by looking for you. I was mad you'd taken the car. I hitched to Moon-doggie's and started getting drunk, and then—no, it wasn't an itch. It was a fire. Ah, don't cry. Look at me, will you?”
I looked at him. “I hate you,” I said. “I want out.”
“You don't mean that. Red's just—”
“It has nothing to do with Red. Have your waitress. Have them all. I'm going back to the city.”
“Okay.” He nodded quickly, as if I'd asked for his agreement. “Okay, you go back. Maybe that's best, a little space—”
“No.” I stood up. “This isn't about me giving you room to be single while still staying married. This is about me. Leaving you.”
Hunter seemed frozen. “All right,” he said. “All right.” He seemed to have decided that he was going to be reasonable, calm, no matter what.
“No, it's not all right,” I said, crying harder now, and then the nausea became more than a feeling, and I clapped my hand over my mouth and ran for the bathroom, too late.
I threw up on the peeling linoleum while Hunter held me from behind, supporting me until all I could bring up was bile. We collapsed on the floor together, me sitting between his legs. Hunter stroked my hair from my face as I watched a trail of vomit trickle down the sloping floor toward the claw-foot tub. My breasts ached from the impact of landing hard on my tailbone, and I tried to remember when I'd had my last period. Last month, I thought. Which could mean that I was due now, except that I was never that regular, and my premenstrual symptoms had never been like this: savage anger roiling inside me, a violent rainstorm of emotions threatening to break down everything in its path.
“Oh God,” I said. “Oh God. I think I'm pregnant.”
Hunter's arms tightened around me and he held me without saying a word. The sour smell in the room grew stronger, and still I made no attempt to rise. In between the wood cabinet and the sink, there was a small brown spider sitting on her web. A tiny ant was heading her way. Things you wouldn't notice if you happened to be standing upright, on two legs.
“How far along?”
Hunter's question jerked me back into myself. How far along? A minnow, a tadpole, a salamander, a piglet? How far along the evolutionary scale; did it have that downy fetal layer of fur yet, or a vestigial tail—no, that came later, along with the fluttering movement of eyelids, the possibility of dreams. “Not far,” I said, thinking of Hunter's long-standing objections to our having a child. His loss of freedom. My loss of independence. The possibility of his mother's schizophrenic genes getting stirred into the fetal pot. Except that it might not be schizophrenia—it might be lycanthropy.
“Do you want it?” His hand slipped down to my belly as he asked the question, cupping my lower abdomen.
“Do you?”
Hunter's thumb moved in a gentle caress. “Oh, yes.” There was something poignant to me about the way he was sitting, naked thighs wrapped around mine, his hand over my womb, holding me safe. “I want my baby in you, Abs. I want it very much.”
“I do, too.” I was crying. Hunter moved his hand to my chin, lifting it. I let him kiss me, my tears running into our mouths. His hand cupped my jaw, flooding me with tenderness. Until the next moment, when I felt the beginnings of an erection stir against my lower back, and remembered that he had no clothes on. But the man had good instincts. Just before my awareness of Hunter's arousal shattered the moment, he drew back, his eyes so warm with emotion that I felt almost frightened.
“I do love you, you know.”
“I love you, too.” It was nearly too much, this happiness after that rage. I was not equipped for such highs and lows, and I found myself wishing for my old husband back, the one with the faint air of amusement, the one who treated even the most savage emotions as if they were merely big, tame cows.
“Well, then. Let's get cleaned off.”
“All right.”
He offered me his hand to help me up, and after a moment's hesitation, I took it.