The Heaven of Animals: Stories (18 page)

“Sure,” Lisa says. “It’s the Nile. For the most part, it’s no problem. Typically, the crocodiles leave the hippos alone. Nothing can take down a full-grown hippo. But, sometimes, if a group of crocs is hungry enough, they’ll attack one of the younger hippos.”

I try to picture it, a crocodile wrestling a hippopotamus, the splashing, the waves, the water’s red surface.

“But, here’s the good part,” Lisa says. She smiles. “What really got me was this footage they shot of a hippopotamus funeral.”

“A funeral?”

“Well, sort of. Something that had never been caught on tape. See, this baby hippo had been mauled by crocodiles. It managed to pull itself onto a sandbar in the middle of the river. Then the other hippos surrounded the calf until the crocodiles swam away. Once it died, the hippos licked the baby.”

“What do you mean ‘licked the baby’?”

“I don’t know how else to explain it,” Lisa says. “The hippos made a circle around the dead baby and licked it. And they actually have these very long tongues. They must have licked every square inch of it, then they all lay down and rested their heads on the body. After a while, they stood up, walked back into the water, and swam away.”

“That’s wild,” I say. “So, why do they do it?”

“Who knows? It’s an entirely unexplored phenomenon. At the very least, it proves these particular animals have learned to mourn.”

For a moment, neither of us speaks. We contemplate the complexity of nature, the mystery, the beauty of love manifested among hippos.

“That’s fucked up,” I say. Lisa frowns. I have miscalculated. “I mean, it’s weird, that’s all. Sad hippos.” But it’s too late. The magic was gone the second I opened my mouth.

“It’s not weird,” she says. “It’s beautiful. How can you not see that?”

“Lisa, I didn’t see the show.”

“But the idea! These animals, they lost one of their own, and they came together to grieve. Can’t you see the beauty in that?”

“Honey, we’re talking hippos here. They don’t
feel
anything. You taught me that, about animals and emotion, how they don’t experience loss like we do.”

“You’re right,” Lisa says. “They don’t. And you know what else they don’t do? They don’t abandon their mates. And, get this, more than anything, instinctually, they know enough to care for their young.”

And there it is.

I pull the chain on the bedside lamp. Lisa begins to cry. I move to the edge of the bed and squeeze my pillow to my ear to muffle the sound. But, when I close my eyes, I picture the hippos. I fall to sleep, and they follow me into my dreams, chasing me with their big, pink tongues. I spend my night on the banks of the Nile, running from them, and the next morning I wake, shower, and eat breakfast, all the time unable to think of anything else.

.   .   .

I was the one who discovered June. It’s why I don’t sleep well, why morning sends me looking for the cradle that’s no longer there.

At first, Lisa wouldn’t let me disassemble the cradle. For weeks, it held only a pillow, a pacifier, and a yellow stuffed duck. One Sunday while she was at church, I took the thing apart, packed the pieces into a box, labeled the cardboard with black Magic Marker, and carried the box to the attic. When Lisa got home, I was in bed. The morning had taken everything out of me. Lisa stepped into the bedroom, stopped, and for the longest time stood very still.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, knowing full well the thing she was missing.

“Nothing,” she said, everything easier this way, everything unspoken.

.   .   .

Wednesday night hurls us back into argument. Lisa comes in from gardening, one of her hobbies. Her hands are stained with Georgia red clay, but otherwise she’s clean.

“I’m going to shower,” she says.

“What for?” I ask.

“Group. We have to leave in less than an hour.”

“We? What’s this
we
? We had an agreement, remember?”

We pull into the parking lot five minutes late. Lisa, who despises tardiness from both her students and herself, hurries toward the church doors.

I linger by the car. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I call across the lot. I look up and the sky is a disappointment. From our yard, just outside of town, the night is black and the stars are bright. Here, though, electric light bounces off of everything, light commingling with light, the stars obscured by a hazy luminescence.

It will be my last night with Lisa. By morning, I decide, I will be gone.

.   .   .

Pam opens with the usual prayer, the one that concludes with our standard chant: “Lord, grant us peace. Let us rejoice in your glory. And give us strength, that we may rejoice in our suffering, for we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character the hope that springs eternal. Amen.” I mouth the words but refuse to speak them.

Pam asks who would like to share, and, immediately, Lisa raises her hand. I know that she is going to tell everyone about the hippos, and then she does. By the end of the story, everyone is crying, even the men. Everyone but me.

Lisa shoots me a look that says,
I told you so
. But she doesn’t stop there. Next, she relates the hippos to her own grief, and someone goes for another box of tissues. Finally, she reminds the group that tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of June’s death.

Before I know what I’m doing, I stand. My chair tips, falls to the floor behind me.

“They’re just hippos!” I bellow.

I have everyone’s attention, and I’m seething, an animal myself, trapped in the circle. No one says a word.

“Don’t you get it?” I say. “You keep searching for reasons and meaning and signs, but there is no meaning. None of it means anything! Our kids are dead. We’re not special. We just got fucked by chance, by bad luck. Everyone in this room just has really, really shitty luck.”

Lisa looks pale, horrified.

“Why can’t we get past this? I just want this to be over already.”

Pam approaches me. “Richard,” she says, “it’s never over. We just keep going, and this is how. This is how we continue.” She places a hand on my shoulder. “You’re angry, but I promise you, it gets easier.”

I can’t explain what happens next, but here it is: I am laughing.

“Remember,” Pam says, “God will not give you more than you can bear.”

I laugh so hard I fall forward. My knees hit the floor, and I sit.

“Let’s pray over him,” Pam says, and then I’m surrounded. My laughter is like a drawn-out roar. People speak, but the words don’t reach me.

It’s when I start feeling the hands all over me that everything stops seeming so funny. They come from every direction, patting me, stroking me, holding me. A hand touches my face, and I know without looking that it is Lisa’s. I miss most of what’s said. The words are all tangled up. But the feeling of hands on my body stays with me, even after the hands are gone, after I’ve left the church. Even in bed, the feeling remains: the heat, the press of palms on my skin.

I fall right to sleep. It’s not the same sleep as the last few hundred nights. Nodding off, I feel something holding me down, heavy as light, silent as summer rain. It’s like leaving purgatory at last. It’s like, at last, being dead.

.   .   .

In the morning, I wake and look at the clock. It’s nearly nine, impossible to make my escape now without causing a scene. I head downstairs, drawn by the smell of coffee. I pause on the bottom step, thinking about whether or not I should leave Lisa. But I cannot make up my mind.

Lisa stands at the window in the kitchen. She wears her bathrobe, a mug of coffee in one hand, the curve of her neck cradled in the other.

I go to the window. As I expected, there are deer on the lawn.

Our property is situated on an acre in the country, woods on one side, road on the other, our house and the lawn and Lisa’s flower gardens in between. I’d always taken a kind of maniacal delight in lawn care: the geometry of mowing, the chemistry of fertilizers. For years, the deer came, drawn by the lush, green fescue. After June died, though, I let the grass go to shit. Now the lawn is pocked with brown spots and weedy throughout. Except for Lisa’s well-groomed gardens, the yard is an embarrassment. Still, the deer come, two or three at a time, at daybreak or dusk. They eat around the dead places.

This morning, there are four of them, and it’s nice. I can’t remember the last time we stood at the window and watched the deer. It was before June died, I’m sure of that.

“Coffee?” Lisa says.

“Yes, please,” I say.

She moves to the cupboard, the stove, and returns with a second cup. I reach out, and the mug is hot in my hand. I twist the mug around, hold it by the handle. Outside, the deer approach the house. Soon, they are close, closer than I’ve ever seen them come. Is the grass near the house that much better than the grass at the end of the yard?

“They must be hungry,” Lisa says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Richard?”

But the deer are advancing, and all of a sudden they’re in Lisa’s garden. One paws a tentative hoof at the mesh encircling a flowerbed, then stretches its neck over the wire and nibbles at the head of a pansy.

Lisa throws open the window and leans out of the house. “Hey!” she screams. “Hey! Shoo! Get out of here! Out! Out!”

The deer lift their heads and their ears flick forward. For a moment they look like lawn ornaments, deer statues. Then, they explode, deer in every direction. They run to the edge of our yard and into the thicket. Lisa falls away from the window and slips to the floor. Sitting with her back to the wall, she looks up at me and her face is wet. I feel like I’m meeting her eyes for the first time since the funeral, and I am scared and ashamed and full of hope.

“Lisa, I don’t want to go.” I say it and, suddenly, it’s true. Because it would be the easiest thing in the world to walk out that door, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter who’s suffered most or what’s been said.

There’s a graphic organizer in mathematics called the Venn diagram. It’s two circles, a pair of rings run together, and the place they intersect is called the union. For the last year, Lisa and I have traveled in circles, both charting our own paths around what’s happened, each of us pursuing an unending course. And only now have we met in the middle, in the quiet overlap, the space between.

I kneel beside Lisa and help her up. Holding each other, we stand very still and look out the window. We stand and we wait for what feels like days.

Stay,
she will say. I imagine it, try to summon the words into being.

And, when the invitation comes, it is as if there was never the need for a choice.

“Stay,” she says, and I do.

The Geometry of Despair

II. Wake the Baby

L
isa sleeping. Lisa turning in sleep, moonlight sliding cheek to chin. She kicks. She wakes, watches me.

At last, she says, “Another one.”

“Which one?” I say.

“The one where she’s five,” Lisa says. “She was five and we called her Junie.” She uncovers herself and stands. “Would we ever have called her Junie?”

Lisa moves to the bedroom door.

“Please don’t,” I say.

“I won’t wake him,” she says.

In a minute, in the other room, Michael is crying.

.   .   .

The next morning it is Sunday and we take Michael to the park. We sit on a bench and watch the big kids climb the jungle gym. Lisa holds Michael in her lap. He laughs and points when birds fly overhead.

“Let him crawl,” I say.

Lisa ruffles the grass with the toe of her sneaker. “It’s dirty,” she says. “There’re bugs.”

“It’s nature,” I say. This is not really true. The park is a twenty-acre rectangle of green at the city’s center. Stand anywhere in the park and you still hear cars whiz by. But there’s a playground, a walking trail, a duck pond. It’s the best you’re going to get downtown.

“Do you want to see the ducks?” I say.

Michael gurgles. He’s not quite a year old, and he’s not walking just yet, another thing Lisa worries about, though the pediatrician assures us that he’s fine, he’s healthy, that all is well.

“Let’s go see the ducks,” I say.

Lisa holds Michael close as we walk the pond’s perimeter. We find another bench and sit. Some of the ducks paddle our way, and this really gets Michael going. He reaches. He waves. He shrieks.

“You like the duckies?” I say.

“Gaaaauuuuu!” Michael says.

There’s no fishing allowed, but an older man in overalls stands with a bucket and rod on the other side of the pond. He tips his hat, and I half-wave.

The diaper bag is in the car, so I look through Lisa’s purse.

“Anything to eat?” I say.

“Animal crackers,” Lisa says. “But those are Michael’s.”

“Not for me. For the ducks.”

“Oh, don’t do it,” she says. “You know how much I hate that.”

“But he loves it,” I say. “Don’t you?” I say to Michael. “Don’t you love when Daddy feeds the duckies?”

I find the crackers, pull out a lion, and snap off its head.

The head in the water excites the birds. Soon, there are a dozen of them: a mallard with its scaly green cap, a couple of drab brown ducks, a white swan with a tumorous orange knob sprouting from its beak. There’s a cluster of sleek, black and tan Canada geese, all honking, their heads bobbing on question-mark necks.

I fling crackers, and Michael squeals. I’ve done this before, but, this time, something is different. The birds are louder, closer, like they’ve been promised food all day and I’ve just now shown up without enough to go around. They’re frenzied.

I take a step back. They hurry forward on their little yellow dragon feet, wings flapping, beaks shish-kebabbing the air.

“Gaaaaaaa!” Michael screams.

“Honey?” Lisa says.

I’m out of crackers, but the ducks, the geese, they keep coming.

“Richard!” Lisa yells.

She stands, and, as she stands, the white goose charges, hissing. It plunges its orange bill into Lisa’s leg. Lisa doesn’t make a sound.