BEFORE THE RINGING PHONE startles Jo into upsetting a stack of crackers she’d been matching to cheese, before the man asks for Josephine and she says No one calls me that, before he identifies himself as the executor of her father’s will and inhales sharply as if bracing for collision, Jo sits at her kitchen table, listening to her landlord’s children pretend to be astronauts. Two floors down in the courtyard, they’ve improvised robes for space suits. Her ritual is to eavesdrop for indications that the bigger two are excluding the little one. She likes to imagine herself interceding, lifting the bullied child into her arms while admonishing the bigger two. Today the children are getting along, so Jo enjoys an off-duty feeling. It is Sunday. She assumes her father is still alive in that she is not thinking of her father at all. After the phone rings and the crackers vault, the children yell Blast off! and the executor, braced, delivers the news that her father is dead and had lived in New Jersey, in a house that is now hers.
The will is practical, matter-of-fact. The house is to be sold, her father cremated. Whatever money is left after funeral costs and whatever is left of him—cremains, the executor calls them—are hers. Cremains. Though it sounds like a cross between a dried cranberry and a plastic comb girls use to gather hair, the word enacts violence. An unseen force yanks Jo’s shoulder blades, as if someone has pulled to smooth her the way you would a bedsheet.
The worst of the news conveyed, the man relaxes into chat. Rio Grande, he says, is a one-strip mall town. The Econo Lodge is the only motel. The other side of the peninsula is Cape May, where the beach is beautiful, even now, in midwinter. Exit Zero on the Parkway. He promises to leave the key in a lock box hanging on the front door if she will go soon, like tomorrow. It will be up to you to clear the contents of the house before it sells, and your father has a few…she hears the nervous click of a pen…sensitive items. Will you have help? Siblings or…
Only child. Jo stares at the address on the pad of paper. She is an event planner for a national organization of doctors. Right now, one hundred cardiologists are beginning their initial descent into Miami for a drug conference. She has coordinated accommodations and activities for their free time: massages, art deco tours, twilight snorkeling. I’ll have to take a leave of absence at my job. She expects the executor to sympathize. She thinks she knows his character because he is the purveyor of news that produces immediate intimacy. He remains silent. Sensitive items?
It’s on a cul-de-sac, he says. Please go soon, like tomorrow.
They have famous fish tacos, don’t they? she says, meaning the town.
He says, They have what?
Jo follows the executor’s directions four hours south to a marshland town overrun by sea reeds and canary grass. She parks in front of her father’s house, ranch-style on a prim cul-de-sac. Bright windows. Exhaust stews around the idling station wagon.
The workout resistance bands arranged next to his bed are a surprise, as are the razors in the medicine cabinet. A few of his hairs remain in the hollow of a blade. Coarse and black like hers. Jo closes the mirrored door. His bedspread, a halfhearted floral, is perforated by an array of precise divots, as if it has recently been the resting place for a constellation of stars. Later, Jo will pinpoint this as the moment she should have suspected. Instead, she ticks through a plan: She will empty one room each day. She will not take one thing—not one thing—home. She will not use her father’s possessions to puzzle out an image of what his life looked like before he succumbed to the disease she hadn’t known was hollowing his kidneys. Professional cleaners will arrive in a week, the house will be put on the market, and Jo will rejoin her life in New York. Already her phone vibrates with messages from work.
The refrigerator contains several jars of apricot juice. Lined, labels out. Jo transfers them to the counter. No milk or crusted ends of butter. Only these jars.
The drawers are stuffed with brochures for zoos from all over the world. A zookeeper’s card is fastened to the fridge with a magnet for the Cape May Wildlife Association.
Jo jerks the chain for the pantry light and finds hundreds of boxes of matzo stacked in uniform rows. Apricot juice, zoo brochures, and matzo. Were these the sensitive items?
By the end of the day, the contents of her father’s kitchen have been transferred into trash bags she bought at a Shop and Save. A week ago, Jo did not know where her father lived. Now she is dragging the most delicate part of what kept him alive to the curb. The sun has retreated behind the water tower that reads: RIO GRANDE: A GREAT PLACE TO GET FROM HERE TO THERE! The false daylight of Atlantic City hovers behind it. The mailboxes glow blue in a trick of dusk. The basalt smell of a neighbor’s fireplace. A faraway seagull laments. Jo pulls the sides of her coat tighter and checks her messages.
Her assistant, calling about a cardiologist who forgot his conference ID.
Her assistant saying never mind, he found it.
Her assistant saying never mind the never mind, please call.
The last message is her mother’s sister in California, apologizing for a change in plans that will prevent her from attending the funeral.
Jo slips the key into the lock box, imagining the satisfying crack of opening a beer in her room at the Econo Lodge.
I didn’t like him but I wanted to come for you, her aunt says. I appreciate that you have no siblings to help.
Jo hears a sound in her father’s backyard and halts. Behind a green slatted gate, something animal stomps and haws.
Your mother hoped you’d have a husband or boyfriend when the time came. Of course, she never imagined she’d go first.
Jo walks toward the yard as whatever lurks there quiets, detecting her. She hesitates before unlatching the gate. A motion sensor illuminates the driveway. She blinks to clear her vision, steadies herself against the flimsy tangle of plastic fencing.
On the other end of the line, her aunt sighs. Kiddo, there is never a perfect time.
Jo opens the gate. The yard is half-bathed in synthetic light. Dark humps of mowing equipment, planters, and rakes abandoned near the back. A picnic table warped by years of weather relents against the earth.
In the center of the yard, a silver unicorn stamps in place. Seeing Jo, it exhales sharply through its nostrils. Cold breath pillows above its head.
The motion light quits, plunging them into darkness. Jo loses her grip on the phone.
Back inside the house, Jo hunts the trash for the discarded zoo brochures. She calls the zookeeper and gets his voice mail. Howdy, he says. You’ve almost but not quite reached me. She hangs up, calls again, and leaves a message. She repeats her phone number three times.
The unicorn has followed her inside. It hooves open the pantry door and pushes a box of matzo to the floor. The fulgid, metallic hair that covers its body appears purple from certain angles, like the reed fields that turn and change color in wind. Its mouth is perfunctory and lopsided, and arranged, even when it’s chewing steadily, like it is now, into a smirk. It does not seem violent or aggressive. It seems unenthused. If it weren’t for the horn—the only pleasant thing about it, Jo thinks—navy-colored with flecks of glittery mineral issuing out from an active, spiraling core—it would look like a pissed-off donkey.
Jo understands why it has been left in the backyard. It chews several crackers at once, leaving a mess. It gnaws the knob to the silverware drawer. She cannot leave it here to destroy the house before it goes on the market. It follows her into the yard where she relatches the gate with it inside. She walks to her car and turns the key in the ignition. Heat sighs through the vents. Jo resents the added responsibility this creature brings and the havoc it could wreak on her schedule.
Thanks, Dad, she says, to no one. Her voice sounds tried on, two sizes big.
Jo drives to the strip mall, where she finds the taco shop and stands in line. Except for her father’s orderly development, nothing in this town seems governed. Thin teenagers glare by the shop, curled like parentheses. Restless zoning restrictions permit a Kmart next to a real estate office next to an apartment complex. Jo cannot see the ocean but the ocean is everywhere: pooling in the swells between foxtails, frizzing the hair at her temples. Its mascot, the horseshoe crab, appears in decal form on car bumpers, motel signs. Seagulls holler over her as she walks back to the car. Anything left out in this night will be demoralized by cold and salt. She will not think about the creature standing alone, hunching its back against the wind, shifting its weight from hoof to hoof for warmth.
Her return to the yard summons the motion light. She peers through the gate slats to where the unicorn stands, unsurprised, regarding her.
Jo converts the backseat of her station wagon into what the manual calls an after-antiquing space. The unicorn climbs in and rests its chin on the console between the front seats.
I can’t drive with your head there, Jo says.
The unicorn snorts but doesn’t move.
It’s a short ride, she bargains.
The unicorn repositions but leaves a rough hoof where it will brush against her hand when she shifts gears.
Jo and the unicorn drive to the Econo Lodge in silence. It spits when she attempts to help it unfold from the car. She leads it to her room, grateful that no one is in the reservation office or the pool decorated to look like a tropical island. Jo uses extra pillows and one of the motel’s unfriendly blankets to hew a makeshift palette. She fills the miniature coffeemaker with water and places it on the floor. The unicorn sniffs but does not drink. Jo retrieves a bottle of apricot juice from her bag and refills the coffeemaker. The unicorn laps it up. Jo refills it and the unicorn drains it again. Satiated, it flicks a critical gaze to the television, the bathroom, her clothes. It soundlessly swallows her hairbrush. Jo scrambles to zip her suitcase but the unicorn is too fast. It ingests a tube of mascara. Its tail twitches and an elegant line of feces plummets onto the thin carpet. The room fills with the tang of leather and armpit. The unicorn lowers itself onto the blanket and falls asleep.
Jo checks for balls and finds no balls. A girl, then. A feeling of solidarity shivers over her but is quickly replaced by the factual odor of dung. Jo turns on the television set. A newscaster named Jasmine reads tide reports for the Delaware Bay as Jo uses motel shampoo to scrub the feces out of the carpet. Jasmine. A fragrant kind of rice.
Later, wet hair wrapped in a towel, Jo checks in with her assistant. The cardiologists are enjoying cocktail hour. They have complimented the ice sculpture she ordered to be cut in the shape of a heart.
Jo dials California and defines the term cremains for her aunt. She doesn’t mention the unicorn farting in its sleep by the bed, its flatulence sounding like the upper notes of a xylophone, operatically high. Cremated and remains, she says. A hybrid. The overspecificity feels like a gut punch. Hocked spit after your opponent is already down.
And I will tell you what I told your father, the zookeeper says when he calls the next morning. You are not equipped to take care of a creature of this nature.
Jo is driving and swatting the unicorn away from chewing the upholstery. This morning it defecated on my suitcase.
She, the zookeeper corrects her, defecated on your suitcase.
Jo says, I thought unicorns would be peaceful and calm.
His laugh sounds like a mean bark. You have a lot to learn about unicorns.
Jo crouches inside her father’s bathtub, scrubbing grout. Her father was a retired electrician with no history of whimsy. What was he doing with a unicorn? Was it a gift meant to ease her grief? Was he holding it for someone who will show up to collect it, a wizard, or…?
His bathroom is neat but not clean. It takes three tries to whiten the tub.
Jo returns to the living room covered in bleach. The unicorn has gnawed through one of the packing boxes filled with wrapping supplies and has strewn ribbon and tissue paper across the carpet, making it look like the aftermath of a party. She bats the unicorn’s nose with an empty roll of ribbon.
Bad Jasmine, she says.
That evening she meets the zookeeper at Applebee’s. He is a squat man in high-waisted jean shorts with erratic facial hair. His speech is punctuated by the nervous, barking laugh. They sit in a padded booth and order dinner. It’s been over two days since Jo has interacted with a live human being and she is giddy and talkative. She details the unicorn’s eating habits and bad behavior. Today, Jasmine kicked out the heating vent and broke the bathroom mirror.
Jasmine? The zookeeper chuckles. That’s a little girl’s name. Her name is ______. He makes a sound like a breeze moving through plastic tubing in an open field.
He is part of a team working to repair beach erosion after a recent hurricane. Without enough sand, the horseshoe crabs won’t have room to mate. This affects the Red Knot bird population arriving from Argentina expecting to refuel on crab eggs.
Everyone here seems obsessed with horseshoe crabs, Jo says.
They’re as old as dinosaurs, he says. Their relationship with the Red Knots is important.
Suspicion deepens his eyes to a mean green. Jo is aware he is drawing lines around himself and this town, but she’s too tired to care about little birds.
What is it you do, Jo?
I plan events.
He uses his fork to lift his steak as if he will toss it over the bank of booths. You know how to make God laugh?
No, she says.
You make a…
She forks the last piece of chicken into her mouth and chews. She doesn’t feel like participating in a joke about her work.
Plan? he says, finally.
In the lull between entrées and desserts, he hitches up his pant leg to reveal the silver slap of a gun. I have one in my car, too, he says.
Jo experiences simultaneous desires to laugh and run. Who are you going to shoot at Applebee’s?
No one, hopefully. But you’ll be happy if we get robbed.
If we get robbed?
Mistaking her question for interest, he places the gun on the table for inspection.
When are we getting robbed? she says.
I wouldn’t know exactly, would I? Go ahead. Try the grip.
No, thanks. Like collecting items into a purse, Jo gathers herself inside of herself.
People get robbed here, he says. We carry guns for protection. We care about the relationship we have to our surroundings. And the names we use matter. Your unicorn isn’t an “it,” she’s a “she.” Even your father understood that.
My father? Now Jo is suspicious. Did you spend a lot of time with him?
I did. He leans against the hard plastic of the booth. We were getting to be friends, maybe. He seems to be gauging whether she is ready to hear something. He was a good man.
The waiter approaches, balancing apple cobbler on a tray. They look up from the gun on the table.
On the way back to the Econo Lodge, Jo stops into a liquor store. On a television hanging over the counter, the announcer named Jasmine reports on what she calls the ongoing horseshoe crab situation. The Red Knots are expected to land in a month. If the horseshoe crabs haven’t produced enough eggs the birds won’t be able to gain enough sustenance to endure the second leg to Antarctica. They will fall out of the sky somewhere over Canada. A Red Knot appears on the screen. It is smaller than Jo would have guessed—the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Even now, trucks from Texas are hauling tons of sand through the night, Jasmine reports. Jo imagines the zookeeper shooting bullets into a mound of sand.
At the motel, the unicorn is restless. She balks and pivots, drags her neck along the floor. Something red winks near her hindquarters. When Jo tries to investigate, Jasmine figure-eights out of her grasp. Jo traps her in the bathroom between the sink and shower and looks closer. A few inches of ribbon hang from the unicorn’s sphincter. Wrapping ribbon from her father’s house. That he used to wrap presents. For whom? She closes the door, trapping the whining unicorn in the bathroom. The unicorn has ingested an unknown length of ribbon that now wants out. Jo could cut it but has no idea how much is left inside the creature. She pours whiskey into a glass and takes a long drink.
She returns to the bathroom, closes the door, and kneels by Jasmine’s side. She pulls the tail aside so it does not impede the opening and takes the ribbon between her thumb and forefinger. She tugs, revealing another half an inch. The muscles in the unicorn’s legs constrict in discomfort. Jo has never been this close to the creature. The fur that looks bristly from afar is soft and parts easily to reveal improbably pink skin. A current of cool air circumnavigates her body—light jacket weather. Jo pulls and the ribbon emerges slow inch by slow inch. Jasmine tenses. A prolonged, high-pitched cry ripples through her long throat. Jo slows her pace. The unicorn shudders as the end of the ribbon finally emerges. Jo flushes it and allows Jasmine to back out of the bathroom and sink into her makeshift bed. Jo dry heaves into the bathroom sink.
The next morning at her father’s house, Jo finds a sleeve of Polaroids and, after initial hesitation, flips through them while sitting cross-legged on the floor. The bay at sunset. Two women, hips against his old LeSabre, rigid as coworkers. The girlfriend he left her mother for, wearing a sombrero. His parents smiling over eggs at the diner, when everyone was still alive. Jo in a bank vestibule, brandishing a lollipop. Jo honking the LeSabre’s horn. Leaping a sprinkler. Holding a turtle. Always alone. The sunset again, from a different vantage point. The sunset again. The sunset again. A tag of thumb at the corner of the photo. His thumb.
Jasmine rests on her father’s bed, licking her hoof. When she’s not chewing doorframes or urinating on Jo’s clothes, the unicorn is good company.
Jo holds out the lollipop photograph. Look, she says. This was me.
Jasmine climbs down and stretches her front legs. The bedspread is perforated by her rump, chin, and leg joints.
He let you sleep with him? Jo feels punctured, as if this would nullify an unacknowledged arrangement between her and her father, that he would stay isolated from other living creatures, as she had.
Family can slough away from you like bones shed meat in boiling water.
Jo’s mother thought daughters and fathers should talk, no matter how unwilling the daughter, no matter how disputatious the father. After she died, there was no one to force them around a table. Their twice-annual phone calls ceased. Jo never called and he never called, afraid or unwilling to disturb the quiet that Jo convinced herself was peace. She didn’t know he had been refusing dialysis for two years because they hadn’t spoken in three.
At the Econo Lodge, Jo pauses over her crossword, filled with inexpressible relief. In the gentle, rented space, amidst the fwip of television, she realizes her father’s death has canceled only his life. Their relationship, albeit one-sided, continues. When he was alive, there were times she forgot about him. Someone would mention his or her father, or the idea of fathers, and everyone would think of their own. Jo would wait the topic out, with no more emotion than one uses to write not applicable on a medical form. Existing conditions? History of diabetes? Father: NA. Then, something would catch and she’d realize, I have one of those. When he was alive, Jo never knew where her father was. Now his existence is irrefutable, his location exact and near: in incinerated fritters, sealed in the plastic depository on the coffee table, next to a box of matzo. Belief can create existence, but tonight the opposite is also true. For the first time, Jo believes in her father. This family is closer than ever.
Later, the zookeeper examines Jasmine, then he and Jo share a six-pack.
Pulling it out was the worst possible thing you could have done, he says about the ribbon. It could have been tied up in her intestines.
It wasn’t. Jo is sulky, guilty. She finishes a beer and starts another.
It’s easy to mistake her size and attitude for strength. He sits on the edge of the bed next to her. But there’s a tranquility inside her that must be protected.
He takes her hand with surprising delicacy. Jo perceives a cue in his earnest, fixed gaze. She leans in and presses her lips against his. She answers what feels like hesitance with certainty. His hands hover but don’t land on her body. She unbuttons her shirt and pushes his hand inside. Curled on a pile of blankets, Jasmine sighs, bored. Jo insists with her mouth though the zookeeper has no interest. Finally, he peels away from her grip and stands.
Don’t be upset but I’m going to leave.
Stay. Her blouse is open. Her bra is white and practically designed.
Sometimes when we’re grieving we think we want things we don’t. It is obvious he is accustomed to talking unmanageable animals into things they’re not interested in. She is not a wounded bird.
His coat sags on a chair. She roots through it and pulls out his gun. It is a cold, dumb bar in her hand. It doesn’t seem capable of something as sophisticated as a kill. She aims at his chest.
He raises his hands, smiling. I give up.
She lets it fall to the bedspread with an innocuous thump. Bang bang, she says.
He palms it and replaces it in his pocket.
Did my Dad ever…Jo says. Every word she could use to finish the sentence leaves her mind. Say…she manages…anything? She knows how pathetic she looks, unarmed on the bedspread.
About you? the zookeeper helps. He said you were as stubborn as him. She thinks he will reach out to her, but he nuzzles the unicorn’s ear, crosses to the door, and with a look in Jo’s direction she can’t decipher, leaves.
In Jo’s dream, an apricot asks her a series of difficult questions. She gets most of them right. Frustrated, the apricot lapses into a paroxysm of hooting.
Jo awakens, slick with sweat. The hooting has followed her out of the dream, transforming into a flute coming from the next room. Someone is practicing scales with the ambition of a newbie. That can’t be, thinks Jo. Practicing an instrument is something one does in a permanent home. Motel rooms are for transitory activities like preparing for a meeting or dressing for a wedding. Do people live in the Econo Lodge? A breeze through the open door chills her. The open door that, Jo realizes, is open.
Jasmine is not in the parking lot or the motel store that sells car-specific items like replacement windshield wiper blades. Wearing pajamas and motorcycle boots, Jo runs through a copse of evergreens that connects the motel to a service road. She sprints the service road, streetlights switching on above her. Seagulls make erratic arcs over a figure in the distance. Teenagers jeer and throw cans. They’ve tied a rope around Jasmine’s neck. They’ve fisted a newspaper into her mouth as a bridle. One of the boys mounts and sinks his heels into her hide. They close ranks. Jasmine blows and canters, attempting indifference. They kick out her back legs. The unicorn does not defend herself. She falls gracelessly against the asphalt.
Hey, Jo yells.
One of the kids registers her with a quick slip of his tongue while another throws a broken bottle that pierces Jasmine’s skin. Pain storms through the unicorn’s body. Jasmine rolls her eyes toward Jo, who recognizes a familial sense of disappointment. Jo doesn’t know how to put herself in between something she’s responsible for and something that wishes to do it harm. Her people were withholders.
The unicorn lifts her head to the electric wires fretting above them and bays. The sound begins as the whine Jo has become familiar with but then it grows mythically, emergency loud. Jo covers her ears. The boys scrabble across the lot into a waiting truck and yell, Go to the driver. The unicorn’s cry grows louder, splintering the back windshield. The truck screeches away as its windows concuss.
Jasmine quiets. The lot is silent. Mackerel-colored bruises bloom along her shoulders. Blood pushes through the skin where the bottle hit; slippery and silver, like mercury. Jo rests her hand on Jasmine’s neck. The unicorn shudders but doesn’t protest. Halting occasionally so the unicorn can steel herself, they walk the service road back to the motel.
The expression of the Kmart cashier sours as she turns to the line and asks, Who smells like horseshit?
Jo holds a heating blanket, bandages, a jar of apricot juice, a tube of mascara, and a hairbrush. Jasmine waits in the car.
Me, she says.
Jo and Jasmine drive to the Econo Lodge in silence. Jo cleans the unicorn’s wounds and they watch television. Seeing her in pain is like seeing someone in a bathing suit for the first time. Too much exposed softness. Jasmine seems unfamiliar now, as she places her chin in the crook of Jo’s elbow and heaves a relieved sigh. Jo is surprised by how much this intimacy pleases her. She runs her hands through the creature’s silky forelock. She rests her head against Jasmine’s and falls asleep.
On the last day, only the items in her father’s bedroom closets remain. The first holds his casual clothes; sweaters folded and arranged by color. Jo slides them into trash bags, relieved to be almost finished.
Despite her best efforts, she has pieced together an image of her father’s life: He lived on an impeccable cul-de-sac in an organized house, eating diet dinners, shaving regularly, exercising his bi- and triceps with products ordered from television, and ignoring advice from doctors and zookeepers, with a drawer of old photos and a flatulent, possibly Jewish unicorn. It was maybe not the most thrilling life but it was at least as happy as hers. She thinks of her second-floor apartment, the din of other people’s children in the courtyard below.
The last closet holds his work clothes. Twenty or so replicas of the same evergreen jacket. Pockets for his tools. His name tag gleams on each left breast—she flips through them and it is as if her father is standing in front of her, repeating his full name. Jo lifts as many coats as she can over the clothing rail. The collars press against her neck. The smell of his skin: cardboard and licorice. She stands and inhales into the gruff fabric, his battered sleeves gathering her.
Jasmine’s irritable nature, briefly anesthetized by pain, returns and, as if to make up for lost time, worsens. She takes proud dumps where it is hardest to clean, kicks through the door when Jo is in the shower. She belches and farts to fill the room with the odor of minty trash. She refuses to sleep, neighing and pacing by the foot of the bed until dawn.
After making the last of the funeral arrangements, Jo returns to the Econo Lodge to find that Jasmine has eaten most of the Polaroids. Those she has not subsumed she has mauled unrecognizable. The creature dozes in the corner, exhausted as Jo surveys the scene, mute with shock. She paces over the mutilated photos. A corner of sunset. Half of the Buick. She grips the unicorn’s head unkindly. Jasmine tries to corkscrew out of Jo’s hold but Jo is stronger and accustomed to restraining unmanageable things. She screams into her face until the unicorn’s cheeks quake and her eyes fill with pearly liquid. The unicorn cowers in the kitchenette. Jo hurls herself around the room until she collapses onto the skin-thin bedspread and dials the number by heart.
By the time the zookeeper arrives, Jasmine is trying to repent. She cozies against her. She laps up her juice, taking care not to spill. When none of it works, she leans against the kitchenette, blinking and panicked. Jo sits on the bed, dismissing television channels. They both startle when he knocks.
Even though she called him, Jo glares through the peephole.
It’s cold out here, he says.
Jo opens the door and attempts aloofness. How are the Red Knots? Has anyone heard from them? He doesn’t answer but makes the breeze-moving-through-plastic-tubing sound. Jasmine perks and trots toward him. Jo cannot anticipate the damage this act of recognition wreaks in her heart. Before she can protest, the zookeeper unfurls a gold leash and collar from his bag and secures it around the unicorn’s neck. Jasmine knickers, flirting.
What did you do to her forelock? he says.
Jo feels accused. I braided it.
He rolls his eyes and leads Jasmine out of the room to his truck. The unicorn follows his unapologetic gait, which annoys Jo, though she follows too, her breath coming in quick punches. She’s too much for me, she says, though she is suddenly not certain. A ramp extends from the flatbed and the unicorn back-walks into the kennel. She doesn’t have room to turn around.
It’s only ten minutes to the zoo. He snaps the door in place.
I was wrong to think she could ever fit into my life. The other night she got out and kids attacked her. Jo knows she sounds desperate. She has failed her father in a way she doesn’t understand. She wants the zookeeper to tell her she is making the right decision.
Sounds like you could have used a gun. He starts the engine. Look. His eyes stay trained on the roof of the Econo Lodge where a fistful of shorebirds gathers to watch. You did your best, but there was no way you could handle it. I told him that but he wouldn’t listen.
The truck joggles across the lot. The unicorn stares whitely toward where Jo stands in the doorway. Under the slate sky, her metallic coat debates gray and purple, and appears to rise. The truck turns onto the service road. Jo waits until she can no longer see the wink of it through the trees. Until she forgets she is a person leaning against a doorframe, until she remembers, and is still unable to move.
At the funeral home, Jo places the cremains like a vase in the center of a platter of cold cuts. She and the executor sit on a mannered loveseat and she signs the paperwork that concludes a life.
Were you able to take a leave of absence from your job? he says.
She is pleased he remembered. I can work from anywhere. What I do doesn’t require me to be present.
And what is that? he says.
Someone pushes through the front door. They look up in greeting but it is a churchgoer, mistaking the entrance. I make God laugh, Jo says. She thinks he will look confused, or get up and remix the dips stiffening in the parlor’s stilted air. Instead, he smiles.
That’s what we all do.
No other mourner arrives. Jo and the executor wrap the cold cuts and seal the extra rolls in bags. He was a good man, the zookeeper had said. It’s been bothering her for days.
Can I ask a question?
Yes, the executor says.
Would you call my father a good man?
He pauses transferring cold cuts to a bag. He always sent contracts back promptly.
The executor resists taking the leftover food, but accepts after Jo insists, voice breaking over the words. Leftover food at my father’s funeral.
Can you think of a reason your father wanted you to have a unicorn? he says. He took wild risks to get it. Did you like them growing up? My girls love them. They have figurines, brush their hair, make waterfalls for them in the sink.
No doubt these are the girls who crafted the #1 DAD keychain that hangs from his belt loop. Jo admits she’s considered every possibility and has arrived at no conclusion. Sometimes a unicorn is just a unicorn.
You did the right thing, giving it to the zoo. He is already looking toward the parking lot where his car waits to take him home.
She, Jo says.
Jo eats tacos and steers with her knees. She sits on the damp sand and watches the ocean hoist itself into the air. It is unapologetic and there are glints of anger in it and Jo appreciates this as she eats. She’s alone. It’s Sunday. Hundreds of miles south on another, warmer beach, one hundred cardiologists are being secured into life preservers. They will snorkel by the light of the moon then enjoy a champagne toast. Even with its detours, the week has gone according to plan.
This ocean, however, is not one you can see the bottom of. Aggravation frills its waves. A hard-tailed horseshoe crab rudders through the sand and muck. One force pushes toward the shore while another pulls, clearing the previous wave’s under-layer of silt. A seagull beats against calm air, arcing and holding, arc and hold, battling pressure only it feels.
But where are the Red Knots? Legs tucked into plumage sheared from struggle. Their gaze alert, expectant. Neutralizing their ache by communicating to one another in flight: a little more, a little more, a little more.
That morning, Jo was charged one thousand dollars in room fees for the carpet, the mirror, the drapes, the vent, the shower curtain, the coffeepot.
The motel clerk rang her up with a pitiless look. Rough night?
Embarrassed, Jo had lied. My sister gets a little nuts.
Jo finishes her tacos and balls the wrapping. She would like to see a unicorn charge across the sand. My sister, she thinks, watching the shoaling waves.
The unicorn leaps from the brush and gallops across the field. Jo and the zookeeper watch her under the darkening sky. Her wounds have healed. Her coat shines. Jo realizes—how had she missed it?—that the creature advances and retreats in the same movement, obeying two instincts, the way her father would, even in the midst of his worst tirades, pause to drag his cheek against his shoulder, as if asking himself for pardon.
You gave her to me, the zookeeper reminds her, because you couldn’t handle her.
A decision I regret, Jo says. However my father left me everything he owned, and he owned her, so she is mine.
She needs room to run. He gestures to the field. Do you have a big apartment in New York?
I have a junior one bedroom, Jo says.
The nervous, barking chuckle. He points to the walking path where goldenrods flex in the cold breeze. How about this? I’ll go over there. We’ll both call to her.
This can’t be how it’s settled, Jo thinks. A simple call and response. But the zookeeper is already walking to his appointed spot. If you know what’s best for her, you shouldn’t be worried.
Jasmine reclines in a thatch of foxtails, chawing the bulb of her heel. Darkness blots out the bordering trees making the field seem endless. Somehow they both know he will go first.
______, he calls. A vestibule where chimes hang, a benevolent sound that mothers out background noise. For the first time since entering this town, the scream of seagulls doesn’t fill Jo’s ears. The unicorn looks up but doesn’t move. He calls again. The unicorn rises and takes a few skittering steps. Jo envisions her drive home alone, mile markers flipping silently by. But Jasmine halts, investigates an infraction in the grass, and doesn’t move again.
The zookeeper jockeys from foot to foot. He rattles his keys to get the creature’s attention. He tries again, but Jo knows—it is no longer her name.
Jo stands in her appointed place, working up the correct voice. The air is so crisp it seems about to crack. Dusk hovers, carrying the threat of snow, but it’s just another worry on the field. She won’t come to you, either, the zookeeper assures her, sounding uncertain. The unicorn reclines, unconcerned by the clash of wills being wrought over her name. Jo is battered by the desire to protect this heavy, unwilling thing and understands that this battering is love. She must allow it to do whatever it wants to her when she calls: Jasmine, come to me.