“There was no rush. You’d get home eventually.”
I fume inside. It’s not the right response, though. I know that. “What can I get you?”
She is already falling asleep again.
I make a thermos of tea. I fill her water glass. I place these next to the bed beside the bottle of pain medication. I watch her for a while. I go downstairs. I scan through channels. I turn the TV off. I pull on my boots and head out the back door. There is no opening between the trees at the back of the yard tonight. I bend a few around me. They swerve as if they were made of gum and rubber. They don’t fall. The forest’s density feels more like a jungle now. I shove and form doorways for myself. I wonder where the chirps are coming from. It doesn’t seem as if there could be room enough for birds. Their vacant, avian bones shouldn’t be strong enough to form space in the tight weave of branches.
When the beach is in my sight, I feel a shove. I fall forward onto the sand. The trees have pushed me out. They’ve pulled themselves back together again. I peer into the water. The ripples show eyes staring back up at me. When I focus, the vision is gone.
I think, You should be there if she needs you. I think, This is selfish. Turn around. Your wife is in pain. You are running from it. I fixate on the pus and tissue that layered itself inside her. I feel my breath start to leave me. I try to think of something else. The feed of my thoughts, though, has been jump-started. I recognize the bright terror coursing through me. Every minute renders me closer to pitch-darkness. I want to break the seal into the next day. I want to forget what is happening now. I know it isn’t that easy. I want to believe time has already passed. I want to reason my way through it. I am overcome. The tide is fast approaching.
I let it have me. The brackish water reaches over me. Under the waves, without my breath, I find a tinted version of myself.
I can’t tell where my skin stops. I can’t tell where the night begins. I gasp for air. I cannot find it.
56
THE PAIN HAS gotten worse, but the doctor warned of this. I hoist myself out of bed to look for James. The wallpaper of the hallway undulates with a pattern I don’t remember and the floor pulses quietly beneath my feet and the air frays with blips at a frequency I can’t hear, but I tell myself that is just my head pounding. I trick open my robe to let some air in and feel suddenly warm and endangered and consider lying down in the hallway, but push forward.
I take one stair at a time, regarding the banister with expectation, waiting for everything to start reacting: any second, this world will come alive like some Fantasia playing out in my mind. I arrive at new instincts: to skip the last three stairs and jump down, to touch every door handle as if there might be a fire on the other side. I head toward the picture window, looking out at the backyard, and what I see diffuses my boldness. The trees have stretched over the lawn, nearer, almost to the back door, throbbing forward and back, and beyond that, even through the density of the forest, I can see the water struggling wide and tall through the trunks, closer than it’s ever been, and all those cranky birds silence themselves, and I should be afraid, but I am so happy at the prospect of being washed away.
I take a deep breath and I swear I can feel my blood pick up oxygen and carry it through me, delivering questions that blink rapidly behind my eyes like closed captions.
I settle my body onto the cool linoleum and wait.
57
ROLLING IN THE tide’s lace, I sputter awake. I cough up sand and burning water. I trek home, soaked through.
Inside the back door, Julie breathes deeply on the floor. I think, Again? Patterns are developing.
I wake her. I expect her to be disoriented. She isn’t. She grabs my arm to stand. She feels my wet sleeve. “Where were you?”
I skip the response. “Can you make it upstairs? I can carry you.”
“No, no. I can manage.” She moves slowly, off-kilter. She recovers from having woken up on the floor. She uses one hand to pull the other wrist over her head and then swaps sides. At the stairs, she lets out a yawn loud enough to sound like a cry. “That felt good.”
I follow close behind her. I am ready to catch her if she loses her balance. She turns at the top of the stairs. She doesn’t flip the light on in our room. I don’t either. I drop my wet clothes in a pile below the drawings on the wall. I join her.
“Talk to me.”
She does. We are both so tired and messy. Our brains have become disorganized with exhaustion.
“The woods, are they still so close?” she asks. I am confused. “Look out the window.”
I pull myself up in bed. I gaze out the back window. There is nothing to find. “Tell me more.”
“When I woke up, the forest was marching closer to the house, and the water was coming through the trees and it all felt unreal.”
“The waves were big tonight, but not that big, Julie.” I wait for her to ask me why I am wet. I wait for her to inquire about my well-being. I lie down again. I pull Julie to me. I hope to transfer the questions I want to be asked into her. I hope they permeate from my open pores into hers.
58
WE DOZE POORLY, and when we rouse ourselves, it feels like something else. Without the comparison to sleep, waking doesn’t feel like much at all.
I still feel tender, but I head downstairs to make breakfast: eggs and bacon and hash browns. James emerges to the smells and we eat as if we’ve gone without for days. I feel bolstered, as if I want to take something on. A plan forms quickly in my head and I pose it for James. “I want to return to the cave. Now. I feel good. I want to take the pictures of the walls.”
James is skeptical, but he doesn’t fight me. I dress with urgency, wincing as I lift my arms to put on a shirt, and I realize I need to hide my pain from James or he will force me to stay put.
The air is wet with summer humidity, and the ground gives soggily beneath our feet. I look at James as if to say, See? The waves reached this far. My feet work hard to lift themselves up from the soft mud, and I feel a sharp pain in my hips each time I pivot forward, but I continue.
“Are you sure you’re well enough to do this?”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, determined and wanting to be done already.
After we’ve undergone the trial of working our way through the mud, the sand shapes itself into a mold for our strides. We quicken as we approach the rocky hill, and then the beach leads into the solid boulders. The anticipation of reaching the cave has won out, and I no longer register the pain pulsing through my belly. I have trouble finding a root or rock to clutch and haul myself up the final stretch, but I grip the rough stone and push off with my right leg and raise the left as high as I can to reach the ground in front of the cave. I stand and breathe for a moment as James completes his ascent close behind me, and when I look inside, the ache returns to my gut, racking through.