“It’s okay, it’s okay. They’re prey,” I soothed.
The deer silvered under the wind. Their pink ears twitched. I knew they would take off in an instant; I could see their haunches tense. But even I had the irrational thought they were about to run right for us. They seemed ready to bear down.
Then off they went over the far ridge, white tails lifted. Hopping with that mechanical grace animals have—grasshoppers and birds—as if nothing, save death, could interrupt the repetitive beat of their movements. Branches rattled old rain down on us. We were alone.
Fee-fi-fo-fum. Soup from a can, lettuce from a bag. Cat hair on my sweater. The cats creeping from the windowsill to the rug, where they rolled religiously, unlatching their claws on each other. A video of a talking dog, book after book. “Slow down, Paul,” who was gulping apple juice so fast it seeped down his chin. My hunting jacket hung from a hook, still holding the shape of my hunched-up shoulders. On the roof, squirrels scampering. In the ground, maple seeds and bearberry, leeching down hairy new roots. Across the lake—across the lake and beneath the pines—dogs. The dogs dragging their chains, getting hungry, waiting for me to come home. Across the lake my mother, too, forgetting to turn the light on in the evening and maybe, or maybe not, watching everything.
Patra, after Paul went to bed. She came out of the back bedroom with her hair stuck to her face, as if she’d been sleeping. She’d given me a hundred-piece puzzle of an Appaloosa horse to work on while she gave Paul a bath, and when she came out, blinking, she seemed surprised I was still at it. “Oh, Linda!” she said when she saw me at the table, surrounded by the scattered debris of the puzzle. I put my hands under the table, found a thread on my sweater’s cuff to unravel and tug. “Hey,” I told her.
She felt bad about forgetting me I guess, because she got busy fast fixing snacks: microwave popcorn and hard-boiled eggs. She put them into two Baggies for me to eat as I walked home—everything white and warm, one light as leaves, the other steaming up the plastic. I put them in my two jacket pockets.
“Is it too dark to walk in the woods by yourself?” she wondered then, but only idly as she glanced out the window, where a branch clicked the glass. She fished a ten-dollar bill from her wallet and handed it over.
“Nope,” I said, rolling the bill into a tube, which I pretended to survey her through, like a miniature telescope. “There you are!” I said.
“Ha,” Patra replied. But she wasn’t really laughing.
I folded the tube in half. And then, just like that, a gust of humiliation shot through me—as if I were Mr. Grierson making the telephone joke, as if Patra were Lily humoring me to get done with things. Ha. Even her laugh was saying good-bye.
Why didn’t I just leave? All I had to do was blink. All I had to do was lift my mind away from her, and I could already see all those old trees blowing overhead as I walked along the lake, the same old moon scraping open some clouds and laying down a path of light. Oh, I liked night. I knew it well. For some reason, though, I was finding it hard to open the door. I stashed the folded bill in my pocket with the egg and spent a long time on my jacket zipper.
“What’s your husband writing?” I said, at the last minute.
“Um.” She looked reluctant.
I put my hands in my pockets, weighed popcorn against egg.
“It’s quite interesting I guess. It’s about space.”
“Duh,” I said.
She offered a little smile, bending over as she did and holding out one hand to the black cat. It came across the rug and landed in her arms just like that—as if tugged by fishing line. So willingly caught. It squinted at me under her palm, gave me a smashed jack-o’-lantern look.
“I’m sorry.” She let the cat rumble and hum under her hand. “It’s one of those things not everybody understands. You know Newton?”
“They killed him?”
She shook her head. “That’s Galileo that was almost beheaded. Newton was knighted.”
“Right,” I said.
“Sir Isaac Newton says that space is just space. Like, nothing worth mentioning. Then Einstein is like, no. Objects act on it, it reacts.” She was stroking the cat in a way that made a tiny crackling of static under her palm. “Nothing is something after all. There’s math that proves this, of course, but also observations. I know it seems like math and observations are opposites. They can seem like that sometimes, my husband gets in all these arguments. But in the grand order of things, they fit quite snugly.”
“That’s the book?” I was skeptical.