Then, after a minute, she pushed the animal off. She didn’t pat its head again or reach down for the wood she had gathered. She strode toward the door where I was
standing, pushed past me, and closed it, saying, “Fuck, fuck, mother-fuck.”
I could hear the dog crying at the door for more love.
“What?” I asked.
“Fleas!” She was peeling off her coat and her clothes, which were wet and muddy from the dog, dancing around in her boots, getting slush everywhere, even the carpet. “Launder these. Right away.”
“That’s a wool coat,” I said, skeptical of what would happen to it in the washer.
“Fucking now! I don’t know what I was thinking—my arms just went out to it. Damn dog. If I die because of a damn dog …”
She was overreacting, but I took the coat, her shirt, and her sweater, and ran to the pantry, where the washing machine was. She stripped her jeans off without even removing her boots.
“Shit.” She was standing there in a beige bra, the jeans caught around one giant booted foot. She stopped yanking to scratch herself all over, leaving deep red carvings behind on her dry white skin.
The dog was still whining at the door.
“Easy,” I said. I went over and helped untangle Grace, but she kept scratching. “Calm down, Grace.”
She began muttering to herself.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she repeated.
“Why don’t you take a shower?” I proposed, hoping it would make her stop scratching. She was visibly shaken, and now the dog had started to bay.
“He wants food,” she said as she headed past the pantry into the bath.
“Should I feed him?”
“No!”
she shouted emphatically. She was so distressed she hadn’t shut the bathroom door. I heard the spigot go on full blast, then rattle down to practically nothing.
“The laundry,” I said, and ran over to the machine and stopped the cycle, and the shower came back again.
“Don’t feed it, whatever you do,” Grace said through the shower curtain. “It will keep coming around. Oh god, this is wrong, it’s wrong. Forgive me,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, the water must have run cold but she was still in there, and still muttering. I watched the dog, who hadn’t given up and was still sniffing around on the porch, occasionally making eye contact with me through the window and giving plaintive yelps.
I didn’t know anything about dogs. I didn’t know whether they had fleas in winter or not. I just thought that the way Grace was acting, she must have felt a bite. I went to the kitchen cabinet drawer and yanked it open. There was a knife as long as a ruler. I stood looking down at it. It was my best weapon. I pulled it out and went to my sofa and hid it, flat beneath the cushion, in case. Then I went back to Grace.
I stood in the doorway of the bathroom and said, “If that’s gone cold, you need to come out.”
The water stopped, but she didn’t come out. No one got SHV that quickly, I told myself: go in. Go in and get her out of there. I pulled her towel off the rack and yanked back the curtain.
Grace’s eyes were tightly shut and she was holding her fists in front of her body. She was standing the way you might if someone had just poured freezing water on you. She was shaking. Her nipples were hard and there were goose pimples all over her. Because she removed all her hair religiously, she was more naked than naked, and I could see her you-know-what. I threw the towel over her, but she didn’t grab it. I went to work drying her off. “Get out,” I commanded, and she opened one eye and stepped out of the tub, leaning so heavily on my shoulder, I thought I’d lose my balance. Outside of the tub, she seemed to come around a little.
“Fucking animal, fucking animal,” she said. She grabbed hold of the corners of the towel, pulling it around herself.
“Did you feel a flea bite you?” I asked, backing away.
Her teeth chattered.
“Go sit by the wood stove.” I ran to the bedroom area and grabbed her bathrobe. I glanced out the window again. The dog lay on the steps as if he lived here too. When he saw me looking, he jumped up and gave a woof. I realized all the wood for the stove was out there on the lawn in the snow, getting wet. There was enough wood inside to last for a while, I decided, and we also had a small electrical heater, built into the wall, though it didn’t project very much or very far. When Karl had brought me here, he’d talked about “the bones” of a
cottage, kind of proudly, like he didn’t care for all the things he had in Toronto, even though he completely did.
Instead of sitting in her usual chair, Grace chose my spot on the couch. She was sitting on the cushion where I’d just stashed the knife.
I made her a bowl of chicken soup, but she said, “I can’t eat. I feel terrible.”
I eyed her, my heart racing. Wasn’t lack of appetite one of the first signs?
Then she said, “That poor fucking animal. Someone’s abandoned it because of the pandemic. There’s only so much my heart can take. I know I shouldn’t have touched it, but it’s going to starve. I want to feed it, but we can’t feed it or it will come around here all the time, and it’s been living outside, so it must have fleas, and we can’t, we can’t …”
I held the soup bowl out to her. She wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve, then took the bowl, her fingers shaking. “Fuck it,” she said, and ate, a forlorn expression I’d never seen before on her face. When she finished she said, “You never had dogs, did you?” and I shook my head. “You were too poor, weren’t you? Couldn’t afford the extra expense.”
I was kind of surprised that she could deduce all that from one fact about me. I sighed.
“Karl liked you because of it, you know. He said that you were a rotten academic, actually, but that you reminded him of himself. A ragtag little thing from nowhere.”
I thanked her for the compliments, such as they were.
“Is the dog still there?” she asked.
“Down by the road. I can see his tail. He’s going. He’s gone.”
I asked what kind it was, and she said, “Lab.” She seemed to be back to her usual crunchy self, but I decided I would monitor her closely for a few days.
After a while, she confessed that she didn’t actually know if a flea had bitten her, or if she’d just imagined a bite when she realized one
might
. But I wasn’t sure if she was lying to me. I knew that if
I’d
been bitten, I might very well lie about it. The British claimed that fleas were not the vector, I remembered. But I left the knife beneath the cushion just in case.
I woke a few nights later with Grace hanging over me, a hefty flashlight in her hand, turned on, casting its light up at the ceiling, but poised as though she were going to strike me with it. I shrank back as much as I could, given my girth.
“What are you doing? Get away from me!”
I didn’t need to ask twice. She jumped back. She peered at me, but in the dark and without my glasses I couldn’t make out her expression. Plus, the flashlight beam was weaving around the room.
“Are you all right?” she asked, a steely tone to her voice.
I struggled to sit up.
“You were making sounds.” Grace clutched the flashlight, which was the size of a baton, as if she still wasn’t convinced.
“What kind of sounds?”
“Moaning.”
“I wasn’t, I—” Then I knew what she was talking about because the pain hit me again and I groaned. “Oh …” It felt like bad gas. I clutched my stomach and held out a finger for her to wait a minute. The pain kept coming.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s happening?”
“I’m—I’m not sure.” I struggled into a better position. “Maybe you shouldn’t have scared me.”
“Just wait,” she told me. “Wait it out. This is way too soon.”
She was right. I was only thirty-two weeks along. But your taps and jabs had become forceful, like you were eager to come out, and sometimes I could see you wavering beneath the skin, sending small ripples across my belly.
Grace turned off the flashlight and we waited in the dark. We didn’t put the lights on. Grace sat in Karl’s chair and said things like, “What’s happening now? Are you in pain? Do you think it’s a contraction?”
And I said things like, “I don’t know. Sort of. No, not really. Wait—
erggggh
.”
She got me a bag of peas from the freezer and I clutched the cold packaging against my side.
Eventually the cramps subsided and I fell asleep again. When I woke Grace seemed to have found her way back to her bed. Morning light was coming through the window like pale smoke. I rubbed my hand over my abdomen and you gave a half-hearted roll. I felt like you were still positioned at the top of my belly, like you hadn’t turned over in the night or
dropped, although really, how would I know? The last person who had told me what to expect about any of this was Nurse Ben back at the WEE, and his pamphlets didn’t describe months seven and eight.
I took my opportunity to slip the kitchen knife out from under the couch cushions and back into the drawer. No need for Grace to know.
We saw our dog again, a couple weeks later. He was down by the road but didn’t come up to the cabin.
“There’s Alf,” Grace said, which is what she had taken to calling him behind his back.
“Is that him again?”
“Think so,” Grace said. “He looks better.” I couldn’t tell, but she insisted he was fatter and cleaner, like he’d been bathed. She said someone must have taken him in, thank god, otherwise we’d have seen a lot more of him; he wouldn’t have given up on us so easily.
“I always wanted a dog, but Karl said it wasn’t fair in the city, in a condo, and out here only a few days once every couple months,” Grace said. She folded her long arms, still staring out. “They had a lot of dogs on the farm outside Lethbridge when he was growing up. I suppose they were treated like farm animals. They probably ate cheap food, and slept outdoors, and wandered out onto the highway, and didn’t get their shots. They didn’t live that long. Little Karl Diclicker definitely had his share of heartbreak.”
I can’t even imagine Karl as “little Karl,” even though I’ve since seen photos.
“You could get one, when the epidemic has passed, when it’s safe,” I suggested.
Alf’s tail floated like a dandelion seedling as he jumped through a snowbank and disappeared in the opposite direction through long, dark lines of trees.
“We could,” Grace said. At first I thought she meant me and her. Then, by the faraway look on her face, I realized that she meant her and Karl, that she sometimes slipped into those words,
we
and our, without thinking.
Once, she told me that when he slept, Karl always tucked his heels together, then positioned his feet against her calves, facing away from her. I could see him in that position; he may even have slept that way with me the two nights we spent here, and it made me feel funny, to think of him curved against her back like that. Like a boy, Grace said, almost with longing.
There’s one photo of Karl and Grace before they married. I found it up in the attic. They’re at some event, leaning against a shiny bar. It must be back when she was still a student. She’s wearing skinny black jeans and pointy-toed stiletto boots. A rough-cut shag haircut frames her face and she’s posing, pouting into the camera. In that picture she can’t be much older than I am now. In contrast, Karl is all in brown, faded, with the exception of a glimmer of shirt beneath his jacket, and although he’s looking at the camera, he seems unbearably bored. He’s
younger, thinner even than the Karl I knew. His hair is thick, and there’s much more of it, darting across his forehead like an animal. But beneath it, he looks sallow, swallowed, dazed maybe. I suppose you could pull up any photograph of any couple and use it as an indicator of their relationship and what it might say about them, but … Well, there aren’t even any photos of me and Karl—not one—so what does that say?
It’s not that I believe they brought out the worst in each other; I believe they just got lost from each other.
I remember Kovacs’s mouth when she said “That bitch” about Grace, on that busy street in New York, the way it dripped out of her—and yes, Grace is, Grace can be, a
bitch
. But it’s more than that, more than Grace alone. If there was one thing Karl was good at, it was waffling. He devoted himself to things, ideas, objects, obsessions, but not to people. He married Grace, but he still couldn’t find it in himself to commit.
When Karl brought me here that first time, I remember it smelling like woodsmoke, coffee, and the mustiness of a place that’s been closed up. It felt like something waiting, just for us, and I remember his long steps across the place to open up windows and air it out, to turn on a space heater to warm the room. He was jangly, nervous. I stood in one spot on the mat. I could hear him throwing framed photographs and other items into drawers. The place was very much him, but it was Grace too—and her touches stood out to me more then, before I knew her. A throw rug in the kitchen with a design of coffee cups on it. A framed print titled
Birds of Northern Ontario
. Some decorative plates hanging on the
panel above the kitchen window. These weren’t things that fit with Karl.
I can’t—oh god—it’s hard for me to say this, especially looking around this space and remembering him moving through it a year ago. Long, long ago. Before I showed up and found Grace here. Your father—I’ll tell you this now because Grace still isn’t back—well, he did something I’ve come to think of as a suicidal act.
The night Grace told me how Karl’s death happened, she had switched from wine to the whisky. We were sitting before the blank, useless TV, and she was whisking one fingernail up and down the chair’s arm.
“I never should have taken him from Wanda, the same way you never should have taken him from me,” she said.
You were unusually jumpy and I wasn’t paying attention to Grace at first. It took me a second to realize that when she said “Wanda” she meant Dr. Kovacs.
She must have interpreted my surprise as denial that I’d, indeed, taken him, because she set down her glass and said, “You left him. It might have been different if he’d tired of you. But now, you’ll always be the last one. He was ruined, you know.”