The Heaven of Animals: Stories Read online

  “I give up,” Kate said.

  He thought she meant her role as his career counselor, but she meant the marriage, meant him. “You’re too unhappy,” she said.

  Brig argued that he’d never been happy, at least not as long as she’d known him, and Kate admitted she knew this, she’d known, but that he used to be better at faking it. “I liked it better when you would pretend.”

  “What?” he said. “So I can’t be myself?”

  “Honestly, Brig, what does that even mean?”

  He didn’t know. He only knew what he’d thought, which was that Kate could be happy enough for the both of them. But a couple couldn’t keep on like that, one person content, the other whatever he was. There was balance to account for, harmony. Without it, they were just two people sharing the same cutlery.

  The morning he left Atlanta, the sun beat down on the roof of the cab and hot air came in through the open window. The truck had A/C, but no radio, and it was going to be a long drive west. Kate stood in the driveway, frowning at him. But, then, she’d been frowning at him for years. Perhaps he’d given in too easily. Could her declaration have been an experiment, a test to see what he was willing to fight for, and what he wasn’t? Perhaps if he said no, got his act together, refused to leave . . .

  But, then, he was already in the truck, belongings boxed, emergency brake disengaged. The thought of undoing, after all of this—it seemed like so much work.

  Kate reached a hand into the cab. She squeezed his shoulder the way you would an aging aunt’s. She asked where to, and he told her. He had some experience in pharmaceuticals, and, because Arizona was where old people went to die, he figured he’d find work fast. He had three thousand dollars—a gift from Kate—to live on until then. He’d seen pictures, the city ringed by mountains, monsoons in summer and the blooms they left in their wake. Saguaros huddled like hat racks on the ridges. The desert was not the moonscape people thought it was. It was brown, but it was also sage and green, sand busy with the footprints of animals. And he would see it all. He would see and he would sell, and he would do his best to put Kate out of his mind.

  If this was a test, he thought, then let it be hers. Let him back down the driveway. Let him call her bluff.

  But all that happened was that Brig drove away. In the rearview, Kate waved, then turned, her back to him before he’d made the first bend in the road.

  . . .

  A chain-link fence circled the pool. Lily produced a key from her front pocket, fitted it, and the gate swung wide.

  “Travis has a crush on me,” she said. Travis was their unit’s maintenance man. Blue-jeaned and droopy, Travis could often be seen skimming the pool or sawing the dead limbs from tall palms. Too early Sunday mornings, he pushed a mower down a Mohawk of grass five feet from Brig’s door.

  Brig imagined Lily flirting, then following the man to his shadowy utility shed. He reminded himself that Travis was twice her age. But, then, so was he.

  Picturing Lily wasn’t hard: her on top, surprising Brig with her sexual prowess. He could see her completely comfortable at the breakfast table, sun coming up, her confession that she hadn’t been grounded for grades, but for sneaking out nights.

  Brig was considering all of this, what he might want and what that made him, when, quietly, and without warning, Lily took off her arm.

  There was a snap, followed by a little click, and the limb unhinged at the shoulder. Click, just like that. The arm slipped through the red skin of her sleeve and out the hole where the hand had been.

  “If it bothers you,” she said, “I can put it back. I just can’t get it wet.”

  Brig shut his eyes. The pot had been good, but not that good. He opened his eyes.

  Her sleeve hung empty at her side. In her right hand she held her left. The arm dangled, a parenthesis unyoked from the pair. Its color matched the shade of her face exactly.

  “Catch,” she said, and then the arm was airborne and coming at him. He braced for something solid, but what he caught was light as a baseball bat. It was one piece, bent slightly at the elbow. From a distance, the hand had looked real. As he held it, though, the fingers revealed themselves to be plastic—sculpted, lined and veined to look real as anything in one of those creepy museums stuffed with wax celebrities. A pair of buckled straps hung loose from the arm’s shoulder end.

  “Starter arm,” Lily said. “The good one bends, and I can pick stuff up with it, but people see the pinchers and they freak.”

  Brig wondered—he couldn’t help it—whether the arm made her more likely to be the girl who put out, or whether it made her less. He wondered where this left him. He wondered what he wanted, whether he wanted her still, whether he wanted her more. His parents would say damnation awaited anyone who messed around before marriage, would say that their son, divorced at twenty-seven, could never have sex again without rolling the dice on his soul. Mormons didn’t teach hell, not exactly, but that hadn’t kept Brig’s father from threatening it. Brig didn’t believe in hell, and he was scared of hell. He was scared of a hell in which he didn’t believe.

  He held the arm in both hands and watched the wind unsmooth the surface of the pool.

  “Yep,” Lily said. “You’re one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “The don’t-lookers,” she said. “There’re those who look and those who don’t. And then there’re those who look too much. Like: Look, I’m so comfortable, I can stare right at it. That kind of looking.”

  Brig looked. He forced his gaze on the sleeve where the arm had been.

  “I’ll tell you when it’s been too much,” Lily said.

  She smiled and pulled off her sweatshirt. Pool shadow slithered over her abdomen. A gecko rode her hip, red and orange. A blue bra pushed up her breasts and partly hid what looked like a holster. Her shoulder, where the arm went in, dissolved into a knob of flesh like the licked end of an ice cream cone.

  She slid the holster out from beneath the bra, draped it over a deck chair, and then she made her way to him. She reached, and, for a moment, both of their hands were on the arm. A current ran the arm’s length, electric longing down his body and back up. He let go. She propped the prosthesis in a chair. She undid her shorts and let them drop to the pool deck, then stepped out of them.

  Even in the looking away, Brig couldn’t help noticing the shaved legs, the blue panties and black curl beneath. His eyes wound up back on the shoulder, that trinity of collarbone and neck and the gradual slope into nothing.

  “Here’s the short version,” she said. “My parents are missionaries. They brought me with them to Brazil. We were hiking, I fell, and a fer-de-lance went up my sleeve. It’s a snake, a viper. The doctor said I was lucky to lose just my arm. This was three years back.”

  “God,” he said. “Your parents must feel terrible.”

  “Not really. Dad says all things work together for the good of the Kingdom.”

  If there was a kingdom, Brig had been left out of it. He wanted to say as much, to tell her that this kingdom business was what you said when you didn’t want your daughter blaming you for Brazil, except, here she stood, one-arm-happy, and Brig had the strongest sensation that it wasn’t his place to say.

  Instead, he said: “And you’re sure of that? That all things work together for good?”

  “I’m sure of one thing,” she said. “At meets, this arm wins me sympathy points, big-time.” She turned the shoulder toward him, and the end, that ice cream cone end, wiggled just like the tip of her nose. Then she moved past him, around the pool to the diving board, and he understood what she’d wanted him to see. Not her nakedness, not the arm, but this.

  The diving board had three steps. She climbed them, then walked the board’s length. The end sagged. She bounced, and the board’s lip broke the surface. The tap sent rings shivering over the water.

  “I’m more of a platform diver,” she said. “Plus, a springboard should be a meter up. This one’s a foot, maybe, so don’t hold th
at against me.”

  She backed up, then charged forward. She leapt. She bounced. She flew.

  Her body, in air, was a ball, and the ball made one, two revolutions. Then the ball unfurled and Lily’s body snapped straight. She hit the water like a wand—hand, head, torso to legs, toes last. Where two hands might have met overhead, there was only the one, sure and unwavering as the blade of a knife. She cut the water clean, splash so small it was almost no splash at all.

  It happened very quickly, so that Brig hardly had time to register it before she was climbing the pool ladder and standing before him. Her hair hung tangled and dripping, nipples dark beneath the bra. Brig stepped back and fell into a chair. He reclined like the chair was one he’d meant to lower himself into, and Lily looked away laughing.

  She moved to the board and dove again. This time, the air seemed to cradle her before it let her go. Her body folded, a toe touch, then unfolded in time to hit the water clean.

  She dove and dove, and his gaze returned, again and again, to the arm—to the space in air where an arm belonged. The diving, which might have drawn attention away from the arm, instead emphasized it. He wondered whether she knew this, or, knowing it, whether she cared. He felt weirdly and suddenly protective of her, like the arm-void was sacred, her body a saint’s, the poolside his station. He was a guard in a Roman cathedral. He glanced around, but around him were only bug noises and night. Through drawn blinds leaked the light of a single, flickering TV, but no tourists came to see. They were alone.

  Lily climbed the ladder for the last time, moved to him, and took his hand. The air was warm, her body cold. She pulled him out of the chair and close. He was ready for the kiss, but there was no kiss, only tumbling and a sky spun like a turntable.

  They hit the water together, and Lily came up laughing. He’d gotten a mouthful. He spit. He cursed. His head buzzed and he tasted chlorine. He gripped the wall, shaking.

  She swam at him, and he shrugged from her touch. He spit again.

  “I could have broken my neck,” he said.

  Lily backed away. She treaded water at the pool’s center, a graceful, wing-broke ballet.

  “I don’t really think you could have broken your neck.”

  Brig clung to the wall. He couldn’t catch his breath. Finally, he just said it.

  “You can’t what?” she said.

  “Swim,” he said. “I never learned how to swim.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh! Let me help you.”

  She swam at him, and he held up one hand, then quickly returned that hand to the wall.

  “I’m okay. Just give me a minute.”

  “If I’d known,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “People throw people into pools. This isn’t the first time. I’ll live.”

  Lily moved to the shallow end. She lifted herself onto the pool’s concrete lip and crossed her legs.

  “At meets, we throw the coach in when we win,” she said.

  Coach. He laughed. He was stupid. Stupid and old. He considered the current, the prosthesis between them. Had he really thought this girl, this beautiful girl with Kate’s face—her emerald eyes and button nose—could feel what he felt at her touch? She didn’t belong here with him in a pool. She belonged at prom with a boy her age, some kid who’d take whatever she gave him with grateful admiration.

  Then again, high schoolers were high schoolers, adults minus the manners, and so maybe no one had asked her. Maybe she’d asked and more than one boy had said no, which would be too bad. This girl was funny, uninhibited, smart.

  Kate had been smart. Smarter than him. Smart enough to know when to get out. He didn’t feel ill will toward her as much as he missed her. She’d been more than someone to come home to. She’d been, what? A friend? How was it a friend felt more intimate than a fuck? Not that Kate couldn’t fuck. They’d been fine in that department, right up to the end.

  Had it really been three years?

  He peeled off his shirt and heaved it at the deck chairs. It landed with a thwap not far from Lily’s arm. He pulled off his shoes and set them on the deck. He balled his socks and dropped them, soggy, into the foot holes.

  “I’m thirty,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m not twenty-whatever-I-said. I’m thirty. Next month, I’ll be thirty-one.” He kept one hand on the wall, but turned, as if for her to take in the chest hair, the flabby pectorals and rotund gut.

  “I know,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t know know. I just knew no way were you twenty-four. But you were trying so hard. It was, I don’t know, cute.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Endearing, then.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

  She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. She was small, but her thighs were massive, muscled as an animal’s. He began working his way down the wall, hand over hand. The water was warm as the air.

  “I don’t feel sorry for you,” she said. “I’m impressed. You told me something true. Took you a while, but you did. You know how often that happens? To me? At swim meets? At school?”

  “How do people speak to you?” He imagined the name calling. Captain Hook, he was thinking. Or, who was the other one, the guy with scissors for fingers?

  “That’s just it,” she said. “No one talks to me. Or they talk, but they’re only saying what they think they’re supposed to. Like, last week, this lady comes up to me after a meet and tells me I’m brave. I wanted to punch her in the face. But I didn’t punch her in the face. You know what I did? I said thank you. So, I guess I have a problem with the truth too.”

  She wrapped her arm around her middle and looked away. The bug sounds had coalesced into a pulsing, rhythmic thing, a super-cricket amplified a few thousand times.

  “What I mean is, I know all about people feeling sorry. I know how it feels, and it sucks. I try not to feel sorry for anyone, and I definitely don’t feel sorry for you. Even if you’re old.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And can’t swim.”

  Brig laughed. “You’re a trip, you know that?”

  It was what his dad would have said. When Brig, as a child, did something goofy or precocious or unexpectedly kind, his father would run a hand over his hair—not ruffling it, just a stroke, crown to eyebrows, like petting a dog. “You’re a trip,” he’d say.

  The last time he’d seen his father, the man had come to watch him pack.

  “I won’t help,” he said.

  “I’m not asking you to,” Brig said.

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said, and, when Kate walked into the room, he added, “both of you. You’re both making a big, giant mistake.”

  But Brig had heard that before. Leaving the church had been a big, giant mistake, along with marrying Kate, a Methodist. Not having kids right away had been a big, giant mistake, then not having kids at all. His father hadn’t been quick to pronounce Brig’s whole life a big, giant mistake, but maybe, if he did, he’d be right. Thirty years down, who knew how many to go, and still Brig had no partner, no profession, no place to call home.

  Fuck, but he had to quit this line of thinking. The only thing worse than having someone feel sorry for you was feeling sorry for yourself—not exactly a profound sentiment, but sometimes the truth wasn’t.

  Brig’s toes scraped the bottom, and then he was standing. He let go and waded to where Lily sat on the wall. He didn’t want to try lifting himself out, flopping like a doomed fish in front of her, so he used the stairs. He joined her on deck, feet in the water. He ignored the wet press of his khakis, boxers blue beneath. He gave Lily space, a few arm lengths between them.

  Lily was watching the water. “Tell me something else that’s true,” she said.

  “I’m divorced,” he said. It shot out, a spring-loaded snake from one of those trick cans labeled NUTS.

  “How long?”

  “Years.”

  “What happened?”

  “I forgot h
ow to be happy,” he said. But that wasn’t quite it. With Kate, he’d only forgotten how to fake it.

  As for happiness, true happiness, unadulterated happiness—he tried thinking back to when he’d last been happy, but all he came up with was his father’s hand on his head. The world had been so orderly then. Heaven and hell and a surefire way to trade one for the other. He’d had all the answers, the keys to kingdom—kingdoms, three of them. Outer Darkness yawned at his heels, but he’d never tip back, not unless he rejected what he knew. And then he rejected what he knew. Better never to have known than to know and let go—that was unpardonable. That was the unforgivable sin.

  He’d tried to find his way back, but if belief is an uphill battle, believing again is a war, musket fire and bayonets grooved for blood.

  What did Brig believe now, poolside in wet pants on a night with no moon? He believed whatever he felt. Moment to moment, he was sure he could walk this girl to his room just as he was sure that he couldn’t. Was sure he would find the runaway cat, and sure the cat was dead already. Sure that, one day, phone in his fist, Kate’s voice would bloom, a rhododendron in his ear, and sure, so sure, that she was gone for good.

  “You still love her?”

  Brig breathed in, breathed out. “I think answering that question would require another joint.”

  Lily laughed.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “You want me to say what you’ve already guessed?”

  “No date?”

  “No date.”

  “Sucks,” he said.

  “Yup,” she said.

  They were quiet awhile. A light came on in one window then went out again.

  “Tell me something else,” he said.

  She kicked her feet underwater, and the surface mushroomed in little burbs.

  “One time,” she said, “changing classes, it unsnapped, just . . . fell off. Swim team’s one thing, but school? It was like I’d rolled a grenade down the hall. One girl screamed so loud, I swear the lockers shook. Everyone got out of the way. Then everyone tried not to look, they just . . . walked around it, like one of those yellow signs custodians put up when the floors are wet.”