The highway is never clean of sounds. We have moved to live by this road so we won’t be afraid. If anything happens to us, surely somebody will see it and stop. But I don’t expect anything to happen to my son and me. I am hoping for nothing new.
Inside all morning, busy with silly things, I have come out for a change of light. I stand in my yard and part the grass with my new boots. I’m going to wear these boots till they fit. Can new shoes make you feel sick? A wide wave of sound washes by. A car has passed me, already out of sight down the highway. It is then that I see something up on the grass. I hope it is only a plastic garbage bag at the edge of the road and not anything that I will have to do something about. Tires keen, a car passes again. The black color ripples. It is fur.
This morning, in the midst of my noiseless sleep, there were terrible sounds. I knew it was not my dream because I dream of nothing now but my favorite houseplants. I sat carefully on the edge of my bed, same side I’d gotten in on, and tried to wake up fully. It is bad luck to get up on the side you didn’t get in on. In the room across, I heard my son, Tyler, sit up on the only side he can. I’ve pushed his bed against the wall so he only has a good luck side.
“Let’s go,” I called to Tyler. But then the sounds stopped. We thought it was good luck; it was such a short moment of sounds.
I go up to whatever it is by the road. It is a dog, dead. I lean over fast to make sure that I don’t have to save it.
It is dead. It does not look asleep. It looks tense, as if it were grinding its teeth in a determined moment. How much everything tries to keep living. Last year, I believed in determination.
I have straightened back up too fast; the ground spins once. When Tyler gets home, he and I will edge into the neighborhood and find what family this dog belongs to, so they can bury him. Tyler knows all about our new neighbors, not me. I don’t like anybody right now.
Since the dog can’t get hurt any more than he is, he can stay safely in my grass and I try to continue my day. Today is the day I send out clothes to John Hunter. His winter clothes are in boxes in my living room. He has stopped off by plane to leave me his summer stuff, taking just a few light, change-of-season clothes; he has always refused to carry heavy packages. I feel like he has left me holding his clothes for him by my fingertips while he goes out naked into the world.
We have finally, after twenty years of living together, parted forever. It’s just the clothes we can’t work out. We have gotten through with the love, anger, joy, fulfillment, jealousy, and hate. I think. I met him when I was a promiscuous young girl and he was an orderly man. He always knew how much money he had in his pockets, carried a filled-out daily “to do” list, and knew the answer to everything or how to get it. I made fun of him for that. Now our marriage has left me not even wanting to think about sex. This worries me. I know what is going to happen—this will have to change, and I no longer like the feeling of change. All this has left me orderly and him promiscuous. John tells me he doesn’t even know what room he will wake up in next. He can’t find a rented room big enough for all the clothes he’s accumulated in our marriage. He has seventeen pairs of casual slacks alone. I think I have waited till I have too much to return. I pick up his stuff. I remember at the end how we kissed with closed mouths, and I sling his best stuff into the bottom of the box.
Since we are not intimate, I do not do John Hunter’s washing anymore. I won’t do his socks. I refuse to touch the inside of his clothes. He gets hurt too easily. I’m afraid there will be stains from cuts. I fold his clothes flat and mail them, dirty. I tape and tie string carefully and will insure this package so John Hunter will not lose more things. He tells me he’s lost so much that he can’t find himself anymore.
Pieces of my clothes are missing. In the shuffle, I wonder if John has them. At the very beginning of the separation, in the last wash, a pair of my underpants got stuck in John’s jeans by static cling. My son found them and pulled them apart. What if I had mailed that message? I laughed till my eyelids rolled over.
I keep remembering favorite old tops. I have lefts and rights in shoes, but I need left-rights. My former husband tells me by phone to put my new boots in the oven till they get hot and then wear them till they give to my shape. Luckily, I think he’s crazy.
Divorced from everything, we are all living in slow motion, not at home anywhere. Tyler is trying the hardest, riding his bike round and round the circular roads and cul-de-sacs of the suburbs, meeting all the neighbors. I tell him I’m not going in there. It’s a maze, roads and houses repeating. I live on the highway; I stay aloof. I like the keening of cars in my head, the running ribbon of bumpy echoes. Because of the constant roll and roar, I feel our house is traveling, and I like that. I am trying hard not to arrive.
I have explained to Tyler, sitting on the edge of my seat and keeping my face calm, how bad it feels when you know it has to stay bad for a while. Adults know that even when something feels so wrong it needs to be left feeling wrong. Tyler’s eyes look only hazel—no expression. He is getting very sophisticated now. I can tell because he’s started saying ha, ha, ha to everything I say.
I breathe dust motes and work at clothes. Finally, elementary school is over for today. Muffin, the toasted-looking, lonely dog next door, runs his fence line, walks on his hind legs, and in his hoarse warf warf tells me Tyler is coming down the street. Sometimes this dog digs himself out of his caged yard, only to come up in the neighbor’s caged yard.
A day in the fourth grade leaves Tyler with one hip pocket inside out, a white flag fluttering behind him, not caring, thinking of other things. He is preoccupied. He cares about spiders, crickets, birds, spelling bees, truck parts, and people’s feelings.
I wait while he pets all he can reach of Muffin, his nose, then I meet him on the hot grit of the drive. “That sound that woke us this morning,” I tell him. “I think it was another dog you know.” I always listen to our conversations carefully because he puts in so much detail: the exact names, locations, and what whoever looked like at the time. He helps me find my way.
Tyler stops. The white toes of his sneakers are gnawed from using them as quick brakes for his bike.
“I didn’t go outside today till an hour ago. He’s on the edge of the grass. I’ve been sending away your father’s clothes,” I say.
His book bag hangs by one strap. He drops it, and we go slowly toward the road and the dog. “Is it that dog named Smokey?” I ask before we are close enough. Oh, I didn’t need a dead dog today.
“If it is Smokey,” Tyler says, “it didn’t bark like him.”
We approach from the rear and step onto the edge of the highway to see the front end. I say, “Does it look like him?”
“Yes and no,” says Tyler. “It does and it doesn’t. But it is.” His voice wrinkles up tight. “You and Dad promised me a dog.”
“For God’s sake, Tyler. Not a dead one.”
“Yesterday Smokey licked me in the mouth, Mom.”
He steps back, not from the dead dog, but from me. He’s embarrassed that he wants to move away from me. He puts his weight on the sides of his sneakers, running them over.
“Do you think this is something else I’ve caused to happen?”
“What I hate is you always know everything that happens before I do. I wish you weren’t an adult,” he says. His breath is short; he’s worried about telling me.
“You only blame me because I’m here,” I say. “If I were gone and your father were with you, you’d blame him. Why does somebody have to be to blame?”
Then he tells me very gently, “Oh, Mom, stop it. Don’t do that with your face. You look awful.”
I hurry inside the house, I know what he means. My face shows guilt. I will wash it. Run tap water, make a puddle in my hand, and sprinkle in the Health Beauty Grains that John Hunter gave me—I am not out of them yet! I scour my skin and the bad expression comes off. I am polished blank.
Back out, my boots slow me down—loose in spots, tight in others. “Help me go tell somebody about their dog,” I say. Tyler has made fists but they are hidden in his pockets. “Are you okay? If you’ll be okay, I’ll let you drive the car—I’m only kidding.” I pull the little blue car out of the carport while we discuss how to give bad news and Tyler shows me the way to Smokey’s home. I back carefully around his book bag. “We’ve got to pick that up,” I remind him.
It is easily walking distance but we ride around the corner of the subdivision and bump up the driveway to the carport, which looks just like ours. No one seems to be at home except a dog. “They have two of the same dogs!” I say.
“It’s okay, Mom, don’t worry,” Tyler says. “I can tell the difference.”
The big dog waits for me. When I get the car door open, she fishes at me with her tongue. I wish dogs had hands. “Shake, shake,” I say, hoping for a trick. I put my face to hers. “I’m glad people don’t look alike.” The dog kisses with her eyes open.
A young woman comes to the back door. She is out of focus behind the screen, but I recognize the look—low jeans, long hair, long shirt, like me. She comes out shoeless.
I go toward her, self-conscious of my boots because they hurt.
“Hi,” she says. My son and this woman know each other.
“This is my mom, LuAnn Wilson Hunter,” Tyler says. He gives her my whole name. “She has something to tell you.” I had warned him I’d better handle it so we wouldn’t upset anyone too much.
She looks moist like she’s been dipped. There is, not coy perfume, but an unsettling breath about her. I think she’s been making love to herself. “Hi,” she says again and apologizes for who she knows. “We rent, we don’t own, so I haven’t met the adults. I only know the kids in the neighborhood cause they come around to visit the dogs. I hear about the adults, though. I could invite you in, but things are in such a mess you probably couldn’t stand it. Wait, I could put all the extra dirty dishes in the oven.”
“No, no,” I answer twice. “Do you know where Smokey is?”
“Yes. Right behind you.”
“No. That’s your other dog.”
“Oh.” She comes out of the carport, and I think there are only two sides to her face. No front almost, as if she’d gotten it in tight places. But really it is only a very narrow face.
“I’ll call Smokey for you.”
“No, don’t,” I say. “I think we know where he is. He’s been hit on the highway at our house. We’re sorry.”
Quickly, she puts a finger in her mouth; I see her biting. I see all her nails are bitten raw. She catches herself with a sigh and takes her finger away and wipes it on her jeans. She stands on her cuffs. She’s not up to talking yet. She concentrates and nods. Tyler and I move closer, our shadows all running together. She’s feeling for the edge of a cuticle around what’s left of the nail. She gets hold and pulls. It comes up like a tiny apple peel, all in one piece; it is very satisfying. Then she bites it off like a thread. “I’m trying to grow long fingernails for my husband. Well,” she says, “he’s not really my husband.” She wipes her finger. “Is Smokey dead?”
“It happened in the dark this morning. I meant to say right away that he was dead.” The sun is in her hair. I hood my eyes with my hand. “We thought you would want him back. He needs to be buried.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “But he’s not really my dog. It’s not our house. The man who owns the house really owns the dogs. But I want to see if it’s Smokey.”
Now a slow-moving white cloud catches the sun and our shadows disappear.
Tyler gives her the directions back to our house and the dog: make one turn, that’s it.
“I’ll have to walk,” she says. “This guy I go with, he fixed my car.” The car is off the driveway on some flat grass.
“Did it have a wreck?” I ask. It has a bad paint job and a wrinkled side.
“Not this time,” she says. “He just wanted to work on it. So I spread out an old sheet and he took out the parts and laid them carefully on the sheet. Then he put everything back inside, except what wouldn’t fit. Now my car won’t work. He’s going to fix it again.”
“I’ll take you back in our car.”
The dog circles us. The woman walks slowly. I think we have to be careful of her feet. Her second toes are longer than her big toes, the nails look fragile as slips of waxed paper.
“You stay here,” she says to the dog, who does.
In the car, she sits forward in her seat. “Is he all messed up? Does he look bad? How does he look?”
“You can’t see how he died,” I say.
I feel like I’m on a long trip with this woman. I decide to put on my seat belt. Tyler has wedged into the back and hangs over the seat between us. He’s in the way when I try to see to back up. “All clear, Mom.” I listen to him.
She notices the Lifesavers that Tyler always keeps on the dash and asks, “Can I have one?”
“Tyler is saving his Lifesavers,” I say.
But Tyler doesn’t say anything. I know he’s been trying to suffer through all the yellows, oranges, and greens to keep the reds for last. She checks past the greens and yellows, plucks up a red, and carries it in her cheek. “I’m so scared, I am. I don’t like to see dogs dead.”
“Tyler? Are you still back there?” No sound. I ruffle my breath, irritated with him.
Something almost invisible hangs from my nose. I know it’s there and try to wave it off but I can’t find it. Perhaps it is the end of my still-attached hair. The woman puts her hand out and runs her fingers through the wind, but we are not going fast. Whose hair is it? Perhaps she is shedding.
Now we bump back up our driveway and pull into the identical carport, except for the book bag on the cement. I get out and pick up the bag. Tyler’s homework is hot.
When she doesn’t get out, Tyler squeezes out from behind her.
“It’s him,” she says, looking past us. She has identified him by seeing his balls out between his hind legs. That’s what I can see from here.
I’m slumped down in my jeans. I pull myself up. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Ms. Parks,” she answers softly, as if she’s unsure it’s her own name or an alias.
“Mine’s LuAnn,” I say, reintroducing myself. My voice is shaking because I’m going to ask this woman with no face to get out and help me pick up a dead dog.
Maybe I didn’t ask out loud because she doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s listening to the ringing in her own ears because she looks worse.
“Look,” I say for real, “it’s not my dead dog.”
“It’s not mine! Really. It’s not mine,” she replies. Then she says, “Oh!” suddenly as if a finger of vomit had come up her throat.
“Look,” I say. “The dog has to be buried. I’ve got to put Tyler’s homework on the table, so first let’s go inside and get cool.”
She’s lean and young but she gets out like she’s broken. I can’t touch her, the ends of her fingers are so chewed.
Tyler helps her. After that, I see that he dries his hands secretly in his pockets.
She comes in and sits pulled-up at our small round table where we just fit. My son straddles his chair. I sit sideways because I’m the server. Her long hair crouches on her shoulders. I serve my son’s purple Kool-Aid. The Kool-Aid tastes funny to me.
“Thank you,” says Ms. Parks with a purple top lip. “In all these years I’ve never learned to drink coffee. But I’m still trying. This guy I live with . . . you know what?”
“Probably,” I say. “But go ahead and tell me anyway.”
“Well, sometimes he takes his car and goes away for a while, like now. So when he comes back I say, ‘I missed you so.’ But then I go blank. Looking at him, I can’t tell exactly what I do miss.” She laughs her eyes shut, and blue shows through her thin lids.
I press the heel of my hand against where I think my heart is. Tyler says in his flat voice, “You have to keep seeing somebody or they do forget you.” We all think about this a minute. When there’s nothing left of the Kool-Aid but colored rings at the bottom of the tumblers, Tyler reaches for the ring in his with his tongue.
Ms. Parks stands up with nowhere to go. “I’d like to see your house,” she says. “It’s just like mine, but different. I like your little piles of things, your collections.”
“I haven’t unpacked,” I lie. What I have been doing is putting all the things I love together to hide them so nobody can find them. Including me. I’m taking them up that thin, collapsible ladder to the dry air of the attic. I mean pictures, books, notes, little carvings, drawings, shells, a stone collection. I’m afraid someone will notice them and ask me about them. I don’t want to tell about them. I’m afraid I’ll remember too well and break them. All but my house-plants. I was so afraid they wouldn’t fit in the car for the leaving. But right now a huge armored cactus sits at my bedroom mirror and refuses to bloom or die, a tall avocado at the glass-paned back door drops leaves with a whisper, and my braided ficus tree that sat in a pot by my other door sits by this one. They lived through it.
“A tree in a pot,” she says. She doesn’t know its name.
“Please,” I say, “don’t fuss with it. It rode two days braced in the car.”
She gives it a serious nod. “Yes.”
The sepia-colored house air breaks up with a little sunlight. It’s on her chair. She sits in it. “People in this neighborhood,” she says, “don’t love things. They don’t love their work or their vacations, or their other husbands and wives they’ve had.” She crosses her arms. Her top button is gone. “They don’t even like any of the presents they get. It’s never the right present. They keep a pet in a fence—without companionship of man or other beast. And they keep their grass too short.” Her hands with her bloody, raw cuticles slide down her long, long hair. “I run with the dogs,” she says.
“I don’t really live inside the subdivision,” I say. “I’m on the highway.”
Over the tops of the cafe curtains, only branches and leaves show. She looks out catty-corner. “You can’t see my house from here,” she says. “You have too many leaves.” Water oaks take a long time to lose their leaves. Only the top leaves have been turning yellow. “But as soon as they fall,” she says, “you need one hard, wet rain, then you’ll be able to see my house.”
I curl my unbroken boots tightly around the legs of my chair.
Tyler has picked up one of the small gifts his father sends him by mail. Little toys with fluorescent stickers on them saying “Reduced item.” It worries him that his father has started sending toys too young for him. Secretly he doesn’t want the gift. He tries to play with it, but a part pops away from him and rolls like a dime, ringing, under the table. I hear his foot slap it still.
Ms. Parks, agitated, bites a finger and warns him sideways from her eyes. “Some things won’t even stand up to normal use.”
I salt my voice to remind them. “There is this question of the dog. Let me go put him in the car.”
They let me.
Outside, I open an old newspaper to cover the spot where I’ll lay him. I read the old spread-out paper, trying to decide to ask for help again. As my former husband says, I choose to be all alone and then I need help. My self-inflicted divorce, he calls it.
I have tunnel vision now; my eyelashes get in the way of my eyes. Tyler is not in my tunnel. I cross my yard in a tight walk and kneel beside Smokey. This is not the way things should end. My face feels hot with the pressure of my own blood. John Hunter had said, “I’ve got us in a hot spot. Feel it? But you have to stay with me now because I don’t know how to get out.” Trouble. He wanted to jump out of the car, eat a razor blade, throw his “calm” pills all over the room. He was far more fragile than I.
I slide my hands beneath Smokey. To steady myself, I dig down, the dirt rich beneath my nails. I feel like I’m hanging onto my yard. There are crystals of sweat under my arms. This dog is heavy. I have him up and now I know he is mine. I rest him against the thin padding I wear.
Inside I am strumming. Numbers are vibrating in my head. I’m counting each careful move I make. John would say, “Your love is great, but it lights on the wrong things.” All of this doesn’t hurt so much for his saying it as it hurts for my knowing it might be true.
The suction of the highway is dangerous. I try to get my balance. Last year I was driving alone, reading maps on the seat beside me in a hurry to borrow money. John had lost his job. Depressed, unable to move, he couldn’t even get dressed. He said if I got a job my salary wouldn’t be enough to help us. I needed to get to those addresses and ask for a loan. I was shy; this was hard. But John was brokenhearted. He didn’t want a new job, he wanted the old one he loved back.
I think what happened was I was following the lead of someone in shock. My staying with him made it worse. John had too much hope, he believed in the unbelievable—that money would arrive in the mail from those people. We tried to stay together. Out for fresh air to break his depression, he said, “I’m going to jump in front of the mail truck.” He was a great kidder, but I kept a hand on the tail of his jacket, walking him like a dog. We had failed each other.
It was his love for Tyler that saved him; he wouldn’t let Tyler see him kill himself. During those months that he baffled himself with our problems, he was saying, “Well, we’ve got Tyler.” So I kept Tyler with us all the time.
But then I did leave. I teach remedial subjects now on call for the high school.
My nose feels stuffed with thick cloth. The breath I draw up from my tight lungs is hot as a hemorrhage. “I have taken Tyler,” I say. I try to breathe and cross my yard at the same time. “I never meant to take him away. But only separated—separated—separated—are we all safe?” I whisper the words to make them true. I stumble over my unevenly cut grass, carrying what I have picked up. I remember our leaving, the car low and loaded, plant branches pressed against the windows. He broke our cool plan and began running awkwardly toward us. Tyler had to scoop down and throw pine cones at him to keep him away so we could leave each other.
My arms hurt. Through the thick black fur, Smokey is cold, stiff, and very breakable. The nerves in my cheeks dance with my fire.
The dog doesn’t lie right on the newspaper. I have disturbed the print of his death. I see the blood now, dark as old lipstick. I am dry; I do not cry.
Tyler is in the middle of the back seat again. I put down the hatch with a jolt and join them. When the car goes in reverse, Ms. Parks looks back with me. I glare at her but she watches with me at the turn, too. I wish she wouldn’t. Her car is bashed in. Whether she did it or not, I don’t want to hear when-to-go from anyone with a bashed-in car.
Pressing the accelerator breaks my toes. A bad feeling spreads to a double eye-ache. I want to change my shoes, get back into my old ones. Then I remember I threw them out so I couldn’t wear them anymore. I’ve ruined myself in the wrong shoes.
Ms. Parks, with no face, has her ear in the wind. A hair swivels in front of me again. Then I can’t see it and I think the hair is in my throat. A long rippling gag stumbles around my mouth.
“Are you all right?” Ms. Parks asks, ready to help.
“Damn it! Damn it!”
“Mom.” Tyler is digging around, trying to pat my back.
“Leave me alone,” I say. “I’m an adult. Surely I can swallow one hair.”
Nearer the bottom of her driveway, the yard looks older and full of natural mounds and dips. I stop there. We get out on the runner of concrete. At the back, I lift the hatch and take Smokey off the newspaper and put him down on his grass. The other dog has been waiting in a nap. Now she stretches, moves her head side to side to focus, and growls. Edgy, she lopes toward Smokey, her fur lifting along her spine the wrong way. She comes to Ms. Parks and anxiously sticks out her tongue.
My boots hurt and a pulse runs across my face.
We move quickly. The sun is slipping. The grass is the color of sage. Ms. Parks brings a shovel sharp as a knife. I look at the two of them and choose myself to do it. I lift a lid in the hard woven grass. A surprise: underneath the topsoil looks like the night sky, cool and deep and glittering with mica. Now I dig. It is not easy. Past the top-soil into the loose scree and mantle, the shovel noses small broken plates of clay. Tyler is with me, a flicker of white sneaker toes.
The she-dog pounds up and down the yard.
Something clicks—an insect or a bird beak. Tyler starts the Pledge of Allegiance and then gets the right memorized words for “Our Father.” I sigh and wonder if I am an unbeliever. Between my eyelids, I peek at them. Ms. Parks tucks her face under. Will she cry or vomit? I am surprised. She prays to God knows who.
The edge of the grave mounds high. I put Smokey in and let him go. I bury him in the mantle.
Ms. Parks pushes with bare feet gentle as hands and lets the edges down around our dog. I put the lid on and poke the yard back with the sharp shovel. There is a soft spot, a new grave.
Dusk dulls, coming in on us fast. I can see only one color, yellow: leaves, a flower against the wall of her house, and the draining color of sunlight on my boots. A bird drifts down through the air and slides behind leaves of a tree.
Ms. Parks says, “I saw you peeking. I don’t look like a serious person. My mouth is too small.” I had noticed that she had a shallow mouth. “I am scared to death of things. But I do think about them. I’m a good listener, are you?” Looking past us, she says, “You know, I’ve already had a hysterectomy. I made a bad baby, the doctor said it ought to be taken. I got all torn up, you see.” A fine mist comes from her lips, hard for her to say. “I’m empty.” She points to her belly button. “Well, not really. It just feels that way sometimes.”
I give back the sharp shovel and say thank-you. A few words brim. Ms. Parks says, “See you,” to both of us. Leaving, I wade in my boots up on my toes so they won’t break.
I let the car roll the short way back down the drive.
The dog shakes her stomach and then her hips, and then leads Ms. Parks, careful of her feet, back inside.
Tyler says, “I like Ms. Parks. For an adult.”
I guide the car home, center it in our garage, draw in the limbs of the tree in a pot, wrap them into each other, and lock our door. In the kitchen, we are in the stone silence of Tyler doing his homework. He leans on the table and chips away at it, whispering his answers.
This long day is leaving me so tired that maybe I will be peaceful. I shake off my boots and the rest of me hurts. I fiddle with dinner and watch Tyler and feel the empty corners in both of us. We are missing things. I look out to where Smokey had lain for the day. I miss Smokey, whom I only knew in his death. My sadness cracks like an egg; I do miss my former husband. I miss his jokes, his help, his care, and the way he would look so far into what I tried to say. He is part of who I have become and part of who Tyler is. Even when there is no chance of love, tenderness can keep rising.
I swallow. Tears lick down my throat.
“Quit crying or I’ll laugh at you,” Tyler says. He won’t look up from his homework. He pinches hard to his ballpoint. “Things come in cycles.” His voice, too small, sings high in sarcasm. “That’s what you tell me, you know.” The ink on his homework runs, it looks like the color of his eyes has spilled. Trying not to cry but to see, he pushes his face close to the paper.
An ugly wrinkled Kleenex is in my back pocket. I pass the Kleenex to him. “You gave me a used Kleenex, Mom.” It makes him snort with laughter.
I blot his eyes and his homework. Outside, the leaves blow and sound like paper.
My headache is so big it goes in my temple and comes out my chest. Tyler gives me a one-finger test. “You’re warmer than your temperature, Mom.” My stomach tightens and pulls. I realize I am not getting sick from new boots. This is nothing I’ve done to myself. My period has begun. My grief for this dead dog and other permanently missing things roars forth with my period.
Nothing is static. Things evolve. The natural outcome of caring is grief.
Cycles. I am almost believing it myself.