The Collection

home, but the knot of fear in his stomach was accompanied by a mor­bid and unhealthy curiosity. He had to know more, he had to know what was really going on—although he was not sure that this had any sort of reasonable explanation.

The thought occurred to him that he was hallucinating, imagining all of this. He'd left work because of severe stom­ach cramps and diarrhea, but perhaps he was sicker than he'd originally believed. Maybe he didn't have a touch of the flu—maybe he was in the throes of a full-fledged nerv­ous breakdown.

No. It would be reassuring to learn that there was some­thing wrong with himself instead of Barbara. It would re­lieve him to know that this insanity was in his mind, but he knew that was not the case. His mental faculties were at full power and functioning correctly. There really was a muti­lated woodchuck in the garage, a triangle of tortured snails on the sidewalk, an empty diary with only one word on one page.

Monteith.

Were there other signs he had missed, other clues to Bar­bara's ... instability? He thought that there probably were and that he would be able to find them if he looked hard enough. He walked around the side of the garage to the back yard. Everything looked normal, the way it always did, but he did not trust this first surface impression and he walked past the line of covered, plastic garbage cans, across the re­cently mowed lawn to Barbara's garden. He looked up into the branches of the lemon tree, the fig tree, and the avocado tree. He scanned the rows of radishes, the spreading squash plants. His gaze had already moved on to the winter-stacked lawn furniture behind the garage before his brain registered an incongruity in the scene just passed, a symmetrical square of white tan amidst the free-form green.

He backtracked, reversing the direction of his visual scan, and then he saw it.

In the corner of the yard, next to the fence, nearly hidden by the corn, was a small crude hut made of Popsicle sticks.

He stared at the square structure. There was a small door and a smaller window, a tiny pathway of pebbles leading across the dirt directly in front of the miniature building. The house was approximately the size of a shoebox and was poorly constructed, the globs of glue used to affix the crooked roof visible even from here.

Had this been made by one of the neighborhood kids or by Barbara? Andrew was not sure, and he walked across the grass until he stood in front of the hut. He crouched down. There were pencil markings on the front wall—lightly ren­dered shutters on either side of the two windows, bushes drawn next to the door.

The word Monteith written on a mailbox in his wife's handwriting.

Barbara had made the house.

He squinted one eye and peered through the open door.

Inside, on the dirt floor, was an empty snail shell impaled by a safety pin.

He felt again the fear, frightened more than he would have thought possible by the obsessive consistency of Bar­bara's irrationality. He stood, and his eye was caught by a streak of purple graffiti on the brick fence in front of him. He blinked. There, above the Popsicle-stick house, on the brick fence wall, half-hidden by the grape vines and the corn stalks, was a crude crayon drawing. The picture was simple and inexpertly drawn, the lines crooked and wavering, and he would have ascribed its origin to a child had it not been for the subject of the illustration.

Himself.

He pushed aside the grape vines and stepped back to get a better view, to gain perspective. Seen from this angle, it was obvious whom the rendering was supposed to represent. Distance flattened out the jagged veerings of the crayon which occurred at each mortared juncture of brick, lent sub­stance to the rough hesitations of line. He was looking at his own face simplified into caricature and magnified fivefold. The receding hairline, the bushy mustache, the thin lips: these were the observations of an adult translated into the artistic language of a child.

Barbara had drawn this picture.

He noticed dirt spots on the brick where mudballs had obviously been thrown at his face.

The question nagged at him: Why? Why had she done all of this?

He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled through the garden, fueled now by his own obsession. There was more here. He knew it. And he would find it if he just kept look­ing.

He didn't have to look long.

He stopped crawling and stared at the cat's paw protrud­ing from the well-worked ground beneath the largest tomato plant. The paw and its connected portion of leg were pointed straight up, deliberately positioned. Dried blackened blood had seeped into the gray fur from between the closed curled toes.

Maybe Monteith was the name of the cat, Andrew thought. Maybe she accidentally killed a neighbor's cat and had guiltily buried the animal out here to hide the evidence.

But that wasn't like Barbara. Not the Barbara he knew. If she'd accidentally killed a pet, she would have immediately gone to the owner and explained exactly what had hap­pened.

Perhaps, he thought, she had deliberately killed the ani­mal in order to provide nutrients for her soil, for her plants. Or as part of a ritual sacrifice to some witch's earth deity in order to ensure the health of her crop.

He thought of the woodchuck in the garage.

He wondered if there were dead animals hanging in other garages on the street, if pets were buried in other back yards. Perhaps the neighborhood wives took turns meeting at each others' houses while their husbands were gone, performing dark and unnatural acts together. Perhaps that was where Barbara was right now.

Such are the dreams of the everyday housewife.

The tune to the old Glen Campbell song ran through his head, and he suddenly felt like laughing.

An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me.

The laughter stopped before it reached his mouth. What if Monteith wasn't the name of an animal at all but the name of a child? What if she had killed and sacrificed a child and had buried the body under the dirt of the garden? If he dug down, below the cat's paw, would he find hands and feet, fingers and toes?

He did not want to know more, he decided. He'd already learned enough. He stood up, wiped his hands on his pants, and began walking back across the yard toward the house.

What would he do when he saw her? Confront her? Sug­gest that she seek help? Try to find out about her feelings, about why she was doing what she was doing?

Would she look the same to him, he wondered, or had the woodchuck and the snails and the cat and everything else permanently altered the way in which he viewed her? Would he now see insanity behind what would have been perfectly normal eyes, a madwoman beneath the calm exterior?

He didn't know.

It was partially his fault. Why the hell had he come home early? If he had just come home at the normal time, or if Barbara, damn her, had just been home, he never would have found all this. Life would have just continued on as normal.

The question was: Did his newfound knowledge auto­matically mean that he gave up his right to happiness with Barbara? Part of him said no. So what if she sacrificed ani­mals? She had, in all probability, been doing that for years without his knowledge, and they'd had what he'd always considered a good life. Unless she was unhappy, unless this was all part of some twisted way she was trying to exorcise her negative feelings about their marriage, couldn't he ig­nore what he had learned and continue on as normal?

Monteith.

It was Monteith he couldn't live with. He could live with the animals, with the fetishes, with the graffiti. If Monteith was some god or demon she worshiped, he could live with that. But the idea that she was seeing another man behind his back, that Monteith was a lover, that he couldn't abide.

Perhaps she was with Monteith now, both of them naked in some sleazy motel room, Barbara screaming wildly, pas­sionately.

But why couldn't he live with that? If she had been doing this for years and it had not affected their relationship until now, why couldn't he just pretend as though he didn't know and continue on as usual? He could do it. It was not out of the question. He would just put it out of his mind, make sure that he did not come home early anymore without first checking with Barbara.

He walked into the house through the garage, walked back to the kitchen, sat down at the table.

He stared at the piece of stationery, but did not pick it up.

Ten minutes later, he heard the sound of a key in the latch. He looked up as Barbara walked in.