The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (14 page)

I didn’t tell Wendy what I had found. Instead I told her everything went fine, and then I asked her how she felt, and we went about our day, the secret of what was waiting for her at the animal house making me tense and nervous. I would act surprised, of course, shocked and devastated, would offer theories—It must have come in after me, whatever it was, early this morning, maybe?—when she told me what horrors she’d found, and then offer to help her clean the mess up and console her as best I could. But when the time came for her to go tend to her animals, she began to throw up again, and I left in her place.

By the time I arrived at the house, I had prepared myself to find there nothing but death and decay and had presumed that whatever hadn’t died naturally, or because of my negligence, would have been taken by whatever had taken the first five animals. But the animals weren’t dead. They seemed, in fact, energized by my arrival, as if they were hungry and thirsty and they knew that I was the one who had made them so.

I searched the house first, ignoring the cries and caws and barks of the animals waiting to be fed and watered, but I didn’t find any sign of a brutal struggle, and didn’t count any more among the missing. Feeling obligated to make up for my poor showing the night before, I opened the windows to air the house out and then began feeding the animals, giving them water to drink, and, one by one, cleaning their cages. I cleaned the blood on the floor as best I could, and I removed the empty cages, feeling that, had it been me, I wouldn’t want to live side by side with such a graphic reminder of the fragile nature of life, the inevitability of potentially violent death, and so on. I did all of this and felt somewhat cheered by the work, which was methodical and mechanical. Even handling the animals, which seemed to have been tamed by Wendy or else were simply too sick and weak to care who lifted them from their cages, calmed me. I enjoyed it, and while I didn’t think it was necessarily the right thing to do or that it would help any of them, I gave the animals the medicines as Wendy had instructed—medicines of a questionable origin and usefulness, I would add—and when I finished it all, I left.

The next night, I did the same, and the night after that, and the night after that, and so on for a week, and then two weeks, and then a month, each night expecting to find them all dead in their cages, or half of them dead, and some number of them stolen away, but over the next month, they only seemed to grow stronger, and I wondered if maybe they were getting well and if one day they would be well enough that I could set them loose.

You could say, too, that over time I became attached to these animals. Not to all of them, but to enough of them that on occasion I had to stop myself from giving a certain squirrel or a certain pigeon a name, and that on other occasions, unable to stop myself from naming a raccoon, say, I had to stop from speaking that name aloud, from trying to scratch it behind its ears, had to stop myself from thinking of them as pets or friends.

You could also say that being in that house, spending time there, more time than was even necessary, was a release to me. That the house, despite the smell and despite the noise, or because of these things, became a place I often wanted to return to, became the place I thought of when I was at our home, when I was home with Wendy.

Wendy hadn’t gotten better, or, rather, she would begin to feel better, gaining her strength and her color, and then fall back into whatever sickness had taken hold of her. For a time, I worried that she had contracted something chronic and incurable, potentially contagious, but then the idea that she wasn’t sick, that she was pregnant, began to sprout between us, though this possibility was a thing we never directly spoke to. Instead we ruled out, over and over again, the things it couldn’t be.

“Not syphilis,” she said.

“Oh, no, certainly not that. I think the symptoms are all wrong.”

“Heart palpitations, perhaps?”

“Let me check my
Physician’s Desk Reference
,” I said, and she smiled weakly.

“I don’t suppose you’ve fallen prey to something so silly as the flu. Or mono?”

“If I have mono, it’s certainly all your fault.”

“Well, then, no, I suppose it must be malaria. Or diphtheria.”

And after a while, this conversation, like the others before it, came to an uncomfortable, winded end, the two of us having painted ourselves into a corner, the fact that she must be pregnant soon the only idea left to us and still the only idea neither of us wanted to verbalize.

Unsettled by this and what to do about it, I often left our house and Wendy in it, after she had fallen into a restless sleep or shuffled herself quietly into a corner to let herself wallow in nausea. I walked up and down the streets of our neighborhood, wondering who if anyone lived in these houses around us, surprised sometimes to see a light on in a living room or a kitchen or on the porch, having forgotten that there were people around us who had their own lives, who lived in these run-down houses, but with furniture and appliances and families. Then, eventually, I would find myself back at the animal house, and there sit for hours with one or two of the animals set free from their cages and allowed to hesitantly sniff out a safe perimeter around the other cages. On occasion, I would lure one into my lap with a piece of food, some special treat, but mostly I just sat there alone and quiet and watched the animals sleep or turn about in their cages, or I would close my eyes and go to sleep myself, and soon I began to consider possible outcomes for us, the consequences of a pregnant Wendy, a new life brought into our routine, and I began to make plans, vague and potentially unworkable plans, but regardless, through this I came to feel certain about a burgeoning and sustainable new life for us, for our small piece of this world.
Look,
I would think to myself,
if you can take care of these animals—and not just you, but Wendy, too—if you and Wendy can take care of these animals, how much harder is a child?
And I would start to imagine this life, Wendy and myself and some faceless, sexless person bundled to one of our backs as we tended these animals and as we moved through our days together, but I never got very far with these images, and soon, no matter where I was, with Wendy at home, or wandering aimlessly through the streets, or at the animal house, I felt agitated and jittery and unhappy, so that when the thing came back, I at first welcomed the distraction.

Once it returned, though, the thing, which I only once saw the barest glimpse of, made short work of all I had done.

Feeling emboldened or strong or simply desperate, it went first for the dogs in the backyard. I like to think that I heard them howl that night they were killed. At some point in the night, I woke with a start, unsure of where I was or why I was there, and then turned to see Wendy next to me, and then slowly settled myself back into a tense and restless sleep, but it was just as likely a foul dream or thoughts of pregnancy that woke me. After I found the dogs, or, rather, their cages, mangled and empty, I knew it was back and I set to work on the house.

I boarded the windows. I boarded all but the front door. I stood on the roof and patched whatever holes I could find. I found steel wool under one of the bathroom sinks and began to stuff it into every open space. I searched the basement. I searched the attic. Closed every entry I could find. Still it found its way inside and stole next the nutrias and then the raccoon. Soon, I noticed a pattern—attack, rest two nights, attack, rest three nights, then attack again, and with each successive raid on our house, it would steal more. No amount of preparedness, it seemed, protected the house. The thing bored holes into the walls and dug underneath the house and found weak spots and exploited them. So I changed tactics and waited for it. There were days and nights I spent crouched outside the house, hiding, hoping to catch the monster in the act. I had found a knife, a kitchen knife, the blade dulled but its point still sharp, sharp enough. I waited and I consoled the animals it left behind and I cleaned up after it had done whatever damage it could attend to while I was gone or even as I sat outside waiting for it to arrive.

During that time, I dreamt about the animals in their cages, and sometimes I dreamt about the baby, and these were disturbing dreams, but not so disturbing as those nights my dreams bled one into the other and I dreamt that either the baby was the monster terrorizing Wendy’s animals or that the baby was one of the animals, a weak and wasted thing living in one of those cages waiting for death—natural or violent—to come for it. And then there were times when I was inside the dreams, too, and these were the worst of them, though not when in the dream I was the monster or when I was my own child trapped inside that cage, or even when I was one of the other animals bearing witness to the massacre of my child, fearful of my own death, which was surely forthcoming, but when I was myself, when I wasn’t anything or anyone more frightening or disturbing than myself, and it was me who unlocked the door to the house and ushered the beast inside.

And then all but the last of them was gone. I could tell even as I stepped inside. I walked through the house as quickly as I could and found it, the bird Wendy had rescued from our backyard what seemed so long ago. It looked sad, shivering from the cold or fear in its cage, which had been set atop the kitchen counter, which might have been why it had been spared. I went to it, kicking aside the mangled, empty cages littering the floor. I gently lifted it out of its cage and looked it in the eyes.

“Can you fly yet?” I asked. “Your wing all better yet?”

Then I put it back in its cage. I carried it to my father’s hardware store and broke in through the back door. I grabbed some twine and some washers and a gas can and some scissors and a water hose and some rags, and then I walked all the way back to the animal house, stopping every so often to siphon off some gasoline from parked cars along the way.

When I got to the house, I set myself to work. I lined up a trip wire, tying off washers at the end of it to alert me when the trip wire had been tripped, and then I stacked the cages in a tight circle around the middle of the living room, into the center of which I placed that small bird in its small cage. I set the cage open just a crack, just enough so that if that bird got curious or scared, if it nudged that door, it would nudge the door open, and then I left.

I waited outside. Then I fell asleep. I dreamt the creature had followed me home. That it had waited for me, watched me enter the animal house, listened for my despairing cry, and then waited so it could follow me, thinking maybe I had another houseful of easily picked morsels for it to eat. It followed me, and as Wendy opened the door to greet me, the creature lunged at her, and in my dream, I pushed her aside and let the thing take hold of my arm, and for a moment, I was happy, or not happy, happy isn’t the right word for what I felt, and not content, either, but I was satisfied, I was prepared, this was something I had prepared for, and even above the pain and the sight of my own blood and the sharpness of the monster’s teeth, this fact stood out in my mind, and for the moment I was able to ignore the rest, ignore the rest just long enough to take that blade and shove it deep into that beast’s head or through its neck, feeling like some modern Beowulf or knight, shoving it deep and then twisting it around and then slipping it out and pushing that knife back in, again and again and again until long past the point the animal had let go of my arm, had stopped moving entirely, and lay cradled in my bloodied lap, looking no more threatening than any other big dog or German shepherd. And then I woke up, and then I turned to Wendy only to realize I hadn’t gone home yet. The dream was fresh in my mind, so fresh that I had to clench and unclench my fist to make sure I didn’t have a knife with me, hadn’t picked it up somehow while I slept. I tried to go back to sleep, and then the washers started rattling and jerking every which way. I jumped up and ran to the house carrying the gas can, and I did a quick sprint around the house, splashing gasoline around the front of the house and on the front porch and around the back and the sides and then to the front again. Then I soaked some rags, and I wondered why I hadn’t prepared this stuff beforehand, but I heard a commotion going on inside still and hoped it would last. When the rags were soaked, I kicked open the door, and down the hall I could see the little bird flying and flapping like mad, a second or two above the wall of cages I’d built, and then it would tire, or be knocked from the tenuous perch it had found as that thing scrambled to get at it.