“Are you sure you’re up to this?” I asked.
She met my eyes. “It’s just sitting,” she said.
So we made our way into the gorilla house later that day. It was set up so that it felt as though the people were enclosed in glass and the gorillas had free reign of their hillside. The gorillas lounged around like teenagers, digging through their fur and chomping steadily at something in their mouths—bamboo, I imagined, or gum. One relaxed on a fallen log, gazing up the hill with a foot propped up on a rock. The gorilla picked up a long stick, plucked at the bark, and contemplated it, his brow low and his long, leathery lips working slowly.
“Watch,” said Kate. “He’ll bend it into a wheel.”
I chortled. “They’re probably building a barbecue pit on the other side of the hill.”
I was glad we’d come, surprised to find I still enjoyed something as simple as staring at an exotic animal. Morally, I had my doubts about zoos. You could argue that some of the animals at least were alive here when they were nearly extinct elsewhere, but there was something autocratic and lordly about the whole notion of importing them here for our pleasure, or at least our intermittent interest—what were they supposed to do with their lives in the meantime? That day, however, misgivings
or not, I gave in to the pleasures of the privileged, meandering alongside Kate’s chair over the paved, wide paths—at a stately pace Kate called a “stroll-and-roll”—and gazing through the glass at the gibbons and elephants. It was fascinating, actually: What bored prince had been the first to have some beast paraded before him and penned nearby, out of idle curiosity?
The gorilla’s walnut-brown eyes roved past me as he took up another branch. He seemed so mysterious and unknowable, even a few feet away. Kate murmured something, and I stopped pondering and saw that her hand had fallen from the control of her wheelchair and lay bent in her lap.
“Sorry,” I said, fixing it. I looked her over once more to see if anything else was out of place; then we turned back toward the gorilla.
We were sitting right up at the glass. Another gorilla had come up to the edge to stare at the caged people. He looked listless.
“We ought to be entertaining him,” a voice said. I smiled to myself, agreeing with the voice even before I had registered that it was one I knew. Kate turned her head. “Maybe they need more to do in there.”
It was Evan. Now both of us turned to look. He was about ten yards away, standing on a deck that allowed a better view of the gorillas. I was about to exclaim at the coincidence, when I glanced at Kate and saw the expression—defiant, sheepish—on her face. Our eyes locked.
“Why didn’t you tell me why we were coming?” I asked her. We had followed him here. For a moment it all seemed perfectly decipherable: She had sought him out, the first time since they separated. It had to mean a reconciliation. But I had heard the petulant note in my own voice and understood, horrified, how much the prospect upset me.
I saw Evan look at us, his face slack in surprise before he recovered and turned to one side. The crowd of people shifted, and I saw that he was leaning over, murmuring something to the woman next to him.
“Cynthia?” I murmured. Kate nodded.
“Well, my checkered past and I are here, too, so it must be adultery day at the zoo,” I said lightly, refusing to acknowledge any possible reason the scene could upset Kate. She didn’t respond, so I gave up that tack. “I don’t get it. Did you just want to see her?”
“Sort of,” Kate said.
There was a silence. I brushed her hair off her forehead and re-draped her red scarf. She resettled her shoulders, squaring them slightly, and I looked toward the exit, hoping for a clear path. She couldn’t want him back, surely, I thought, but her face was a studious blank and I was uncertain. She did miss him, after all. We had followed him here. A streak of pity ran through me, almost stopping me cold. I had never, ever pitied her before.
“Let’s go over,” she said. I started to protest, but she gave me a look and I stopped. You’re not you, I reminded myself. You’re her. So I followed Kate to the base of the platform where Evan stood. By the time we got there and Kate craned her neck to look up at them, Evan and Cynthia were very still.
“Hello,” Cynthia said, smiling awkwardly. She wore black pants and a blue silk shirt. I had wanted her to be cheap-looking and brassy, but she was as polished as Kate. There were pearls in her ears and her auburn hair was drawn back in a knot. “You must be Kate.”
I placed myself close to Kate. It was loud in the ape house.
“Yes,” Kate said. “Yes,” I repeated. There was a silence. Kate looked at them, but they kept looking at me, maybe because I was the last one to have spoken.
“I guess I mentioned we’d be here today,” Evan said. Kate shrugged. Without meaning to I gave a little shrug myself.
“We used to come here sometimes,” Kate said to Cynthia. I translated.
“Yes, well . . . I hadn’t been to a zoo since I was little,” Cynthia said.
Kate lifted her chin to swallow and took a breath.
“How are you, Evan?” Kate asked.
I could see him debate how to answer without annoying either woman too much. He settled on, “Fine, thanks.”
“Good,” Kate said. “I’m doing well, too. Thanks.” Her voice, which in its weakness always seemed to issue from some flaccid muscle low in her throat, was higher, stronger, but it shook.
We all stared at each other. Evan and Kate watched each other.
Cynthia stared at me. Finally Evan leaned over the railing at the edge of the platform.
“This is uncomfortable,” he said. I stepped to one side and looked at Kate. Before she could say anything Cynthia joined Evan at the rail.
“I don’t quite understand why you came here,” Cynthia said. She too leaned over, holding on to the rail with both hands. Her long nails gleamed with clear polish. “It seems counterproductive, but maybe you just had to see me. I’m not a monster.” She paused, flicking something off the railing, and then said, “In fact, you’ll think I’m crazy, but in a way I understand why you had to separate. Evan too. Think how hard it was for him to watch you go through this.”
She was crazy. It was obvious.
Kate sighed. She looked worn out. I had the sense she’d forced herself to come here and speak to them, whether she wanted to or not. I watched her profile—her long nose, the firm curve of her jaw—as she tipped her head back to contemplate Cynthia. I watched her mouth flicker into a smile, something so weary it was almost gentle. What had Kate expected of an encounter like this? I didn’t understand her at all; her face suddenly seemed entirely foreign to me.
“I doubt you understand why we separated,” Kate said. She looked over at Evan, then back to Cynthia. “I’m not sure Evan even does.” She didn’t sound bitter but resigned, even slightly indulgent, like a parent who’s given up for the time being.
I repeated it for them and looked back at Kate. She turned her gaze toward the entrance, and rather than wait for her to do a three-point turn with her chair I moved it myself. It was the sort of moment you need to handle with efficiency, the equivalent of turning on your heel and striding off. So I lifted the front wheels off the ground and pivoted the chair, then stepped behind it and followed her out.
“CENTER ME,” KATE SAID
, later that week. “The exact center.”
She was stretched out on the bare mattress. I stepped back to get a better view of her: her hair spread out around her face, her hands flat against the mattress, her legs a few inches apart, all of it bounded by the quilted white fabric of the mattress. Despite the sweater and skirt, her dark tights, she looked a bit like a sunbather. I moved her a few
inches to the right. “Okay,” I said, and I knelt on the bed next to her midriff and uncapped a black Sharpie. Before I touched the felt-tip to the fabric just above the crown of Kate’s head, I paused. We exchanged a look, and Kate smiled and let her gaze move past me and settle serenely on the ceiling.
So I began. I kept the path of the marker as close as I dared without getting ink on her clothes or skin. I wanted the silhouette to be crisp and unmistakable.
We were in her old house, now Evan’s, in the master bedroom. A royal blue comforter, sheets, and mattress pad were heaped on the floor. A box containing the last of her things sat by the bedroom door: A few minutes ago I had walked through the house, picking up the items Kate nodded her head at, putting them in an old nutrition-shake box. She chose a framed photo of herself and a friend who had since died in a plane crash, a gilt-edged copy of
Jane Eyre
, a book on dictating an effective living will, a stray makeup brush, and a big stone molcajete, its pestle set at a jaunty angle inside the huge bowl. It was time to make one last trip to the old house, Kate had informed me that morning, and get any leftovers all at once.
I’d grinned when she indicated that the molcajete, sitting on the counter next to the stove, should go into the box. The meals I made for our caregiver dinners three or four times a week were of varying complexity: Like any cook, I got overwhelmed sometimes and fell back on pasta or turkey burgers, especially once Simone admitted she ate meat. But the prospect of a new gadget excited me again, and I knew I’d be grinding cloves of garlic, pumpkin seeds, or rings of sliced onion against the rough stone bowl, while she watched and gave directions. Since the toast, I’d been able to persuade her more often to eat in front of me, and sometimes at our shared meals with other caregivers: a shred of beef, a crescent of poached pear. I’d feed her guacamole, I decided, pale green and unctuous, rich as butter.
I had situated the molcajete in the box and then paused outside the kitchen, resting the heavy box on the table that held the nude statue in the living room. The spider plant still hung above her, but the statue had been moved, yet again, a few inches to the left and out from under the vines.
“Let’s take her,” I said, and Kate looked at it with distaste. “For a hat rack,” I went on, and Kate laughed. “We’ll set her in the garden, let her get overgrown with pea vines.”
Kate had looked toward the back of the house. “Maybe we’ll do something else instead,” she hedged.
I nudged the statue back beneath the plant and followed her back to the bedroom. Something about being back in this house, alone in the silent neighborhood on a dark winter day, had made me restless, nervy. I wanted to crack an egg behind the radiator, knock over the milk, loosen the salt shaker cap. It was the kind of diffuse mischief a teenager would feel while cutting school. Did it even matter whose house we were in? I might have felt the same impulse anywhere to chuck a rock through a stranger’s window or dig my nails into the fruit at the grocery store. Maybe it was only winter, the impersonal stillness of the air outside.
“A friend of mine lived with a guy who collected board games,” I told Kate. “Which should have been a clue. Anyway, when she moved out she went through and took one necessary piece from every single game.”
She grinned. She was surveying the dresser top for her possessions, and I set down the box and observed the room while she wheeled around the perimeter. I sat on the bed, thinking about the first time I’d had to get her up, reaching across that expanse of sheet and comforter and blanket to where she had lain, marooned at the center.
“I wonder if he’ll notice the wheelchair tracks,” she mused.
“Probably. We could rub something messy on your wheels just to be sure. Why?”
She shrugged, then said, “I know him. I bet he can pretend I was never even here.”
“Leave handprints on all the walls at wheelchair level.”
Kate did a three-point turn in the chair. She let her head lean back against the headrest, her chin raised and her eyes slightly lowered as she looked at me, sly, imperious.
“No. We’ll leave an outline on the bed,” she said.
I stared at her. I’d been feeling hyper but hadn’t planned to act on it. First the zoo, now this? Was this how things were going to be—following
Evan, getting at him? I thought of all the times Jill had stopped me from calling a guy, or going to see him, and wondered if Kate was just beyond worrying about all of that. It was something to imagine—what if I had just called Liam one of those times, talked to his wife as though I were a coworker, a telemarketer, to see what it led to?
“Are you sure you want to start this kind of thing?” I asked her carefully.
She was already waiting by the side of the bed. “I’m not starting a sad pattern of harassment,” she said. “It’s a one-time thing, I promise.”
I gave in, and I had to admit that once I began the outline I enjoyed it. I loved the sneakiness of it. An outline, beneath all the bedding, drawn directly onto the bare mattress. No one would see it for weeks if Evan was the sort of sheet changer who left the mattress pad untouched. It wasn’t malice, only mischief. I made the lines of ink as thick as I could.
I traced around Kate’s hair, which, a day or two after the zoo, she’d had cut into thick bangs swept across her forehead, stylishly haphazard wings framing her face and neck.
I got just right the silhouette of her earlobe and the hoop earring where it peeked out from a bell of dark gold hair. Next I traced the stem of her neck, in which a tranquil pulse beat just beneath the curve of her jawline. The small shoulder was easy, then the line of the arm, so slender it tapered below the shoulder joint, swelled at the elbow, and clearly showed the bone of her wrist. On the middle finger of her right hand was a thick gold ring with a topaz set flush in the metal. I spread the fingers enough to trace the outline of its bulky band. I coveted that ring, and though Kate offered to let me wear it, the ring needed slim, neat hands like hers. Mine were long but now bore the signs of a cook: healing nicks and burns, nails a little too short. Maybe if I took more care with knives and hot pans.
I moved the marker along her rib cage, from the tuck of her waist to the arc of her hip. The outline of a slim thigh was effortless, and of the knees. Below the calves, the cool purpled skin was puffed with fluid that obscured the bones in the ankle and in the tops of her feet. Except for the feet, the silhouette would be all sweeping lines, slim bone. By now I was kneeling at her feet, one hand braced by her leg.