They had endured the deaths of parents, the divorces of friends. Turning to look out the window, John thought about all the summers he and Elizabeth had come to this house on the coast. They’d had countless meals at this table in the bay window overlooking the small yard with the little white gate leading to the sea beyond. Elizabeth had given him the stone turtle that sat among the silk African violets on the windowsill. He loved that turtle, the way one of its forelegs was lifted in mute determination. He couldn’t understand how the same woman could have made such a suggestion.
“You’re misunderstanding me,” Elizabeth said again. “It’s just not a bunny. That’s all I meant. Of course it has a right to live.”
“I think it might be a mole, Elizabeth.”
He peeked over the edge of the shoebox on the table between them and watched the stunned, fast-breathing little gray ball. Her cat had caught it, the orange tomcat he hadn’t wanted. Their first cat, Sidney, had been stumblingly aristocratic, a fluke of the gene pool, a farm cat with Siamese coloring. There was no kink in her tail, but she’d always held it very upright, as if there were. She’d died two years ago, at the age of nineteen, and he still sometimes missed the weight of her on his shoulder. She’d balanced there effortlessly, and yet often couldn’t make the leap to the kitchen counter on her first try. Now they had Hodge, the marmalade lump. How Hodge, this doorstop of a cat, had managed to transform himself into a hunter their first morning on vacation was a mystery to John.
Elizabeth moved her coffee cup away from the box. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
They’d never brought Sidney to the beach. They’d always left her in the basement of their house and asked a friend or neighbor to take care of her. Like so many things, this had seemed acceptable before their daughter, Hannah, left home, but was not acceptable now. Now, the cat came with them. Now, they owned two different cat carriers and drove twelve hours to their summer vacation with an open pan of cat litter in the trunk.
With his fork, he poked some holes in the cardboard lid.
“I don’t think you have to do that,” Elizabeth said. “I mean with a jar, yes. But a box isn’t airtight.”
“Okay.”
He could tell from the way her eyes kept darting to the top of his forehead that something was wrong with his hair. He dutifully raised one hand to his head and smoothed the curls as best he could. Seeing she had his attention, Elizabeth sat straighter and raised her hand to her own head, showing him what to do. A familiar pantomime that nevertheless made them both smile.
He fit the lid over the box. He hoped the darkness might calm the wounded creature. There was no visible damage, but when Hodge had deposited the thing at Elizabeth’s feet it hadn’t run away. And when she jabbed at it with her slippered toe, it had remained where it was, hunkered down, its head turned slightly, breathing fast. The sight had made him sick, and he’d started up from the table.
“Don’t poke at it like that,” he’d said.
“What am I supposed to do? Touch it?”
After locking Hodge in the sunroom off the kitchen (“Don’t yell at him,”
Elizabeth called. “It’s his nature to hunt!”) he’d found the shoebox and scooped the thing up gently with a dustpan.
“I’ll take it outside,” he said and rubbed his eyes again. “Will you get dressed?” Elizabeth nodded without looking at him.
“Okay. That would be good.” He took a last sip of cold coffee and pushed himself up. This slow, conditional voice he used with her now made him feel heavy, but she often spent the whole day in bed. He hadn’t meant to make the situation into a bargain, his handling of the injured animal for her getting dressed, but the morning seemed to offer no other choice.
Outside, he stood on the gravel drive wondering if he possessed the ability to kill this thing that was suffering. He wanted to put it out of its misery. But how was he supposed to do that? It was a mole, or a mouse, he really wasn’t sure. Either way, it seemed preposterous to allow the situation to derail his whole day, his first morning by the water. He went back in the house and called the SPCA. Mole or mouse, it didn’t matter, they couldn’t take it. They were overburdened with family pets, the boy on the phone explained, cats and dogs abused and abandoned.
“What about rabbits?” John asked, staring at Elizabeth’s empty chair. She’d left the breakfast dishes and gone upstairs. John could hear Hodge sharpening his claws on the carpet in the sunroom.
Yes, they took rabbits. And ferrets. They had two of these now. Also, as of this morning, one fox with a broken leg.
As John stood in the kitchen, the phone pressed to his ear, his mind reeled with the picture of so much wild misery. He could hear the chaos of this ailing animal world, the barking and caterwauling behind the voice on the phone. Above him, Elizabeth was running water for a bath. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was doing something wrong, that there was a relatively simple solution to this problem he just wasn’t seeing.
The boy seemed to sense John’s confusion. He knew of someone, he said, who took in wild animals and healed them, if possible, before releasing them. He gave John her address.
John cleared the table, washed the dishes, and wiped down the sink with a sponge. He swept the kitchen, then started upstairs to tell Elizabeth where he was going. Halfway up, he stopped on the landing and stood with his head bowed. There was no noise now coming from the bathroom, which meant Elizabeth’s bath was drawn. She was probably already soaking. If he talked to her through the door, she would ask him to come in. If he refused, she would get angry; if he obliged, he knew he would not be able to look at her in the water with the love and desire she craved. He thought it best right now, when they had only just arrived for their vacation, to spare them this spectacle of themselves. He went back downstairs and wrote a note in the kitchen.
Outside again, John felt better. A wind was stirring, the air smelled of rain. This was his vacation and he wished for simplicity, another cup of coffee, the newspaper. He crouched, put the box on the ground, and lifted the lid. The gray ball was trembling. Its black eyes glistened, alert and aware.
It took a few days to open the house, a few more to close it up again. There was the drive, which John said was twelve hours but was really closer to sixteen. He liked to say they could leave at nine in the morning and be at the beach by nine at night, but in all the years they’d been making this drive, Elizabeth couldn’t remember one in which they pulled into the driveway before midnight. John simply didn’t think about the stops required for food, gas, bathrooms. All the effort hardly seemed worth it for two weeks of sun and sand. But John loved the house, and Elizabeth, bathed now and wrapped in a fresh cotton robe, was surprised to find herself feeling fond of it, too.
She was lying on the bed, on top of the quilt she’d cleaned and stored at the end of last summer. For a moment, everything seemed all right. There were two windows in the room and all that was visible to her was white and green: a white room, a white sky, and, to the left, a bit of the willow that stood next to the house. Its long green tendrils swayed in the wind. From time to time, a gust reached Elizabeth through the screens and she breathed the salty scent. She could hear the ocean, not a sound she craved as John did, but she found it soothing. John believed there was something about the sea, some atavistic need to be near water, that all people shared. Elizabeth used to smile when he said such things. Now she was likely to say she didn’t feel that way and, in fact, had always preferred the mountains. These opinions generally made John uneasy and quiet, but after many years of a marriage in which she’d been the quiet one, the reversal thrilled her.
She looked around the room and remembered when the house had smelled of mildew and there weren’t enough sheets and towels and the mattresses were old and lumpy. It had been left to John by his father, who, in his last years, his health failing, had let the place deteriorate. It had required an enormous amount of work to get the place back in order. John and Hannah restored the back patio and repaired the small sailboat while Elizabeth replaced curtains and beds, sheets, pillows, and towels. It had not come naturally to her, keeping and decorating a summerhouse. She and John were not the kind of people who had ever expected to have one. Still, with time, it had come together nicely.
She smoothed her hands over the quilt, the tiny stitches like Braille beneath her fingers. The white cotton smelled pleasantly of rosemary and cedar, but her promise to John felt like a pool of cold water in her stomach. It should be easy to rise, dress, go downstairs, and yet she felt sluggish to the point of immobility, her physical strength as diminished as her will.
In the early years, John had arrived at the house in high spirits, a camper’s or a soldier’s sense of mission and adventure carrying him through the work of settling in. The first morning, after their late-night arrival, he would refer to Hannah as his assistant and promise her a trip for ice cream in the afternoon if she got her assignments squared away. Accustomed to her quiet, work-weary father, this new commander delighted Hannah. She giggled and played along, saluting him and running off to her tasks. Feeling slightly out of step, Elizabeth would leave them to the house, the boat, the survey and repair of patio furniture and beach toys, and go to buy the groceries.
Hannah came every summer when she was in college, but she’d graduated last year and was working in New York now. Her job allowed her only two weeks vacation. She’d come home for a week at Christmas, but the second week she wanted to spend with friends. Elizabeth understood this; John was struggling.
The house was quiet. He’s gone out, she thought. She didn’t know where. Something to do with the animal, she hoped, whatever it was. A car turned up the road and she held her breath. It passed and she exhaled. She longed for Hodge’s warmth against her leg. He usually came running when she called, but not today.
This year John had arrived as tired as she. The drive was getting harder for him. She’d watched him shift uncomfortably in the driver’s seat all day. And the fact that Hannah wasn’t coming this year had him down. One night a few weeks ago, she’d said to him, “Don’t you want to be there with just me?” and was surprised to sound more hurt than she felt.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. It’s just different. Don’t you feel that way?”
She did, but not as much. Their daughter brought out the best in John. She had fun with him and he came alive around her; the two of them joked and teased and laughed. Between Elizabeth and Hannah, the atmosphere was more solemn. Hannah talked earnestly of self-improvement, vitamins, books, exercise. She brought her candles and special teas. It was exhausting, all this evidence that she was not living the way Hannah wanted her to. No one problem ever came to the fore, but all the historic fault lines would yawn slightly. Hannah said everything was fine; Elizabeth wasn’t sure. Their relationship was like a chalkboard that had been erased over and over again, but hadn’t been washed clean in a very long time.
She called Hodge again. He had a quiet meow, more of a soft squeak that was at odds with his large body. She thought she might hear him downstairs somewhere. She rolled over on her side and stared at the white wall. When her eyes closed, she didn’t notice. She was full of sleep.
“Would you like a drink?” John shifted in the doorway. He heard the edge in his voice, and tried again.
“Could I make you a drink, Elizabeth?”
She was on the bed, her robe fallen open. The room was hot and Elizabeth’s hair was damp where it had matted against her forehead.
“Elizabeth,” John said. She stirred and clutched at the quilt. She opened her eyes, slowly focused on John, and blinked.
“I’m going to have a drink,” he said. “It’s nearly six o’clock. Would you like one?”
“Yes. That would be nice.” She sat up, pulling her robe closed with one hand, lifting the hair from her forehead with the other.
“Gin and tonic?”
“Okay.”
“It’s nice out,” he said. The cool, stormy morning had turned bright and warm. “Why don’t you come downstairs?”
Elizabeth nodded.
In the kitchen, he filled two glasses with ice, pleased that he’d thought to fill the trays that morning. He listened to Elizabeth pattering about overhead and wondered if she really would come down or if it would be another night when she asked him to bring her dinner up. Hannah used words like enabling, but it seemed to him a fine line between hurting and helping, enabling and simply taking care of.
When Elizabeth came down, she was in a pale blue sundress, her hair brushed, a bit of pink on her lips. She walked into the kitchen and stopped.
John could see she was trying. “Do you want a lime?” he asked. “You look nice.”
“Do we have any?” She looked around the kitchen. “No.”
“I thought you might go to the store,” John said.
Elizabeth smoothed the dress around her waist and walked to the counter. She picked up John’s note from the morning.
“Oh, I—” he said.
“You found someone to take the mole?”
“The SPCA recommended her.”
“Did she think it would live?”
John poured the tonic into the glasses slowly. “The animal died before I got there.”
“Oh. What did you do with it?”
“I’m surprised you’re interested,” he said. They were both watching his pouring.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I took care of it.” He lifted the bottle and screwed the cap back on. “Shall we go out on the patio?”
Their backyard was a rectangle, a narrow lane to the sea. A small cement patio sat low against the house, two empty terra-cotta planters marking its far corners. Grass grew beyond the gate, but not well.
They sat at an angle to each other: Elizabeth in a patch of shade from the willow, John in the warm late sunshine. It was high tide, but from the low patio they couldn’t see the line of waves hitting the shore. The grinding wail of a Jet Ski approached. This was safe ground; they both hated them. They turned to each other. “Terrible,” Elizabeth said.
“Absolutely,” said John. Hodge pawed at the screen door of the sunroom. “Can we let him out? He’s been inside all day.”
“No, not yet. I don’t want him to run away.”
Hodge’s claws were stuck in the soft screening. “He’s going to tear it,” John said. Several streets away, a car alarm went off with a sound like a hovering spaceship. John looked up at the deep blue sky.
After a minute, Elizabeth stood. She pushed Hodge back and slid the inside glass door closed. “Someone’s coming up the front walk,” she said, looking through the house. “Oh dear. It’s Max.”
John lowered his face and rubbed his eyes. Max Lieber lived down the street. He was a year-round resident, their summer neighbor, and every year he tried too hard to make them feel welcome. He lived alone and seemed to have few friends. A couple of times John and Elizabeth had gone out for a drink in town and had seen Max sitting alone. John felt sorry for him, but he came to the beach for a vacation, which to him meant an escape from social obligation.
“Right on time,” John said, and John and Elizabeth smiled at each other. Max was another burden they shared.
“You get the peanuts, I’ll—” Elizabeth threw back the glass door with a flourish and Hodge ran out. “Oh!” she cried. She tried to close the door and caught the cat around the middle for a moment. “John, help,” she said, but released the door and Hodge squirmed through. He ran low to the ground across the yard and hunkered down by the gate, his tail flicking back and forth.
“What do you want me to do?” John said.
“Nothing. Make Max a drink,” she said.
Max had a small round head on top of a long neck. The effect, as he sat telling them about his difficult year, twisting and turning in his seat, was serpentlike. The sun sank and they drank gin and tonics and Max told them his business was failing. He led boat tours along the coast for tourists hoping to see dolphins, but the sightings were getting rarer and the tourists were more interested in parasailing and Jet Skis. Elizabeth found some mixed nuts in the pantry and brought them out unceremoniously in the tin. While he talked, Max ate small handfuls, each time brushing the nut dust from his palms as if not intending to have any more. Slowly, he was finishing the tin. John didn’t like nuts, and Elizabeth took a small pile for herself and placed them on a napkin. She turned her chair slightly so that she could keep an eye on Hodge, who continued to slink around the yard.
“I’m sorry we don’t have anything else to offer you, Max,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh,” Max started, chewing hurriedly, rubbing his hands vigorously on his legs.
“We arrived last night and haven’t done the shopping yet.” She looked at John.
“Can I get you another drink?” John asked.
“I’m sorry,” Max said, swallowing. “I forgot to eat lunch. But I’ve already got something in the oven for dinner. Would you like to join me? I’ve got enough, I think . . .”
“We couldn’t,” John said.
“Another night,” Elizabeth said.
A lightning bug appeared and Hodge leapt toward it, landing with a thud. “Not very graceful!” Elizabeth called. The bug flashed near the house, higher, and the cat leapt again.
Max was fond of cats, and he and Elizabeth began a lively discussion while John went inside to mix the drinks.
Standing at the kitchen window, John watched them. He could see part of Max’s face and the back of Elizabeth’s head. He could barely hear Max’s voice; Elizabeth’s was quite loud. He looked at the perspiration on the back of her neck, the way her heavy bottom strained the patio chair’s plastic weaving. He lifted his eyes and far up the beach saw the signal from a lighthouse. There were several along this stretch of coastline, but he couldn’t remember their names.
When John rejoined them, Max was telling Elizabeth about a little girl he’d seen that morning. “She couldn’t have been more than four or five. I didn’t want to scare her, but I thought maybe I’d ask if she was okay. She seemed little to be out by herself so early. I stopped in front of her lawn and she looked over and said, ‘It’s my birthday.’ That’s all. She was wearing a party dress that was too small for her, white socks, shiny white shoes. The house was really ramshackle. There was a sapling in front decorated with those plastic eggs from Easter and Christmas lights still in the windows.”
Max sighed. “I know I’m being gloomy, but I got the feeling something wasn’t right.”
John looked down and nodded.
“Why?” Elizabeth said suddenly. “A little girl up early on her birthday? She was excited. A party dress? Little girls love to dress up on their birthdays. The decorations may have been out-of-date, but someone put them up for her.”
Max was nodding. “Of course, you could be right.”
“But why tell a stranger it’s your birthday?” John said.
“Because she’s a little girl,” said Elizabeth. “You’ve just forgotten,” she said to John.
Max agreed. “But it was so early, and she was out by herself.”
“She was in her own yard.”
John saw the obstinacy in Elizabeth’s face, and knew it was no use arguing. She would feel attacked if he continued to agree with Max, and the night would not end well. But her denial of the sad scene bothered him. Of all people, she should be able to recognize sadness and its ramifications. Annoyance blossomed in his chest, and he leaned forward for some nuts. Loath to eat them, he shook them vigorously in his hand.
Max started to stand. “It’s getting late. I . . .”
“No, Max. Sit down. John’s going to tell us what he’s thinking.”
“Elizabeth.”
“Aren’t you, John?”
Max stood again, this time getting to full height. “I really do have to go, but thank you both. See you soon.” He walked himself into the dark yard and disappeared around the side of the house.
Elizabeth went inside, and John slowly ate the nuts in his hand.
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
John had made dinner, and despite her insistence that she was not hungry, she had devoured the soup and canned vegetables he’d warmed on the stove.
“Thank you for getting Hodge in.”
John nodded and ate in silence.
She considered how he’d become like a cat, preferring not to talk or be touched while he ate. Maybe this was their problem; Hannah’s too. They were as aloof as cats.
John finished his dinner, then cleared their plates, washed them in the sink, and began to sweep the kitchen floor. Elizabeth remained at the table.
“Are you going to have coffee?” she asked.
“Not tonight.”
“You always have coffee. I’ll make it.”
He smiled at the floor. “That would be a treat, but I don’t feel like coffee right now. I’m tired.” John put the broom away and stood before her.
“I’m going up,” he said. “The doors are locked.”
“Okay. Good night.”
When he was at the stairs, she called to him.
With one foot already on the first step, he pivoted and stumbled slightly; a feint, she believed, to indicate the inconvenience. Still, he came. She lifted her face and they kissed. John even touched her shoulder as he turned.
“Are you coming up soon?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so. I’m tired.”
They both pretended not to remember she’d slept most of the day.
Hodge went up with John, and for a time Elizabeth remained motionless at the table. When she was about to stand, a bird started singing near the house, a sudden, piercing sound that drew her outside.
The air was fragrant and cool. She searched the outline of the willow until she could just make out the bird’s shape against the lighter sky. She didn’t know what kind of bird it was or why it was singing at this late hour all alone. The song was loud, complicated, and wide-ranging, and for the first time in a long time she felt truly alert. Circling the tree, she thought she might stay up all night. Why not? Each new day required all the thoughts that disturbed her to be rolled away once more. She grabbed and shook one of the tree’s long ropy tendrils. The bird stopped singing, and she imagined it looking down at her, its eyes bright seeds in the dark.
Yes! She would stay up all night. She would meet John in the morning, already awake, her day already under way. This never happened. It was always the other way around, leaving her feeling forever behind. She let go of the tree and walked around the house to the garage. She found the stepladder and brought it out to the yard where it would give her a commanding view of the beach and the sea; a fine perch for a night’s vigil. Climbing to the top, she felt strong, better. She might even make the coffee in the morning. If she brewed it early, John would wake up to the smell—the sign, she’d always thought, of a house in order.
The cat and John lay awake in the bed, Hodge’s paws kneading John’s leg, almost painfully. When Elizabeth came up, he was going to tell her the truth: that morning he’d given the animal back to Hodge. The cat had finished it off in the sunroom, no mess at all, and now Hodge was devoted to him. John hoped this turn of affection would be short-lived because otherwise Elizabeth’s feelings would be hurt and that hadn’t been the point at all. Quite the opposite. He’d decided what she’d said about the cat was true—it was his nature to hunt. Giving Hodge the mole had been a kindness he could do for the cat she loved. And at the moment, that was the best he could do.