As Kay packed, she found the tadpoles her children had so carefully and proudly placed in jars. The jars were murky, torpid, and when she opened the lid, the stink reminded her of the rotting stalks of cut flowers. Nothing was alive, she could see, the tadpoles had congealed. She opened the window and hurled the jars far out into the long grass beyond the lawn.
Tom’s t-shirts, Freya’s panties, their books, colored pens, a paltry scattering of toys: everything fit into one suitcase. This had also been the point of coming here: to break from things, plastic, synthetic, technological. City children, they would commune instead with nature—leaves, earth, rain, sky. They’d learn the elements. They’d learn to track. They’d learn about different trees. They’d be barefoot, carefree. Not angry, scared, abandoned. Not finding their mother’s porn. Not finding their mother, who she really was.
Children were under the impression that adults understood the world, were experts in its navigation. How frightening, then, to discover they were, in fact, lost, fallible, dull, and vain; that no one knew the way, after all.
Off her desk, she swept the notebooks, dozens of them, her former life. There would be no book, no ground-breaking memoir, no investigative piece about drugs and logging in not-so-quaint Vermont. She must burn these all or throw them out.
In the bathroom, she scooped up the shampoo, conditioner, toothbrushes and toothpaste, her single jar of night cream, a stray wand of mascara.
It was a whim, perhaps, but all she had left, because the mother person’s skin did not fit, too tight, too loose, she was whittled down to the scurrying creature that rifled garbage bags on the side of the road. She went downstairs, to the kitchen sink and picked up the hammer. She grabbed the flashlight from the hook by the front door. She knew where everything was, now, as if it were her own house. She returned to the bathroom.
She crawled into the cupboard on her hands and knees, then squatted.
The hammer swung back, then forward, the momentum of the heavy steal head. What tools are for, to improve on the human hand. The hammer’s head split the wallboard. Kay swung again and again until she’d gouged out a hole big enough to climb through. She entered the crawl space under the roof.
Shuffling forward, she swung the flashlight around, scanning the eaves of the house, the floor covered only sparingly with wide, old boards; otherwise, pink insulation bristled up. She shuffled along, scraping her knees, squinting into corners, pulling up the odd bit of insulation.
There was nothing. She lifted the loose floorboards. Nothing. She pressed the flashlight into the corners. But there was nothing, nothing, only the house as it should be.
Kay sat, rubbing her knees in the dark. If Michael saw her like this, he wouldn’t be surprised. Crazy, he’d called her, you’re crazy. She was an unhinged person in a dark crawl space looking for something that wasn’t there. She was a child stuck up a tree—a child who climbed there of her own volition—she could not see her way down. Or out. Or back. Or forward. She would put everything in the car and drive, any direction, until dark, and then find a motel. She would be a drifter, motels, interstates, truck stops, it was almost romantic.
Switching off the flashlight, she grabbed the hammer and crawled back out. She shut the cupboard, and went back down to the cellar, to Frank’s tool bench. She opened the drawers and mixed around the tools, tossing about the chisels, disorganizing the screwdrivers. She took a box of screws and dumped them out on the floor. She thought to go on, but she’d made her point. She opened the drawer reserved for “Saws” and carelessly shoved the hammer all the way to the back. But it caught on a larger object lodged even further back. Pulling the drawer all the way to the end of its runners, she peered in and saw a white plastic handle, vaguely like an electric egg-beater.
She reached in, grasped it, retrieved it.
An electric carving knife. Smeared in a rusty substance.
The rust flaked off onto her fingers. She knew, of course, it wasn’t rust.