“You were right; you work well alone,” he said. “You should dump that husband of yours. You can manage alone.”
I’d just come from visiting Joe and his dry-eyed gaze, his flaccid fingers, seemed deader than ever. The nurses praised me up, glad there was somefor him. “Oh, you’re so good,” they said. “So patient and loyal. He has no one else.” Neither do I, I told them.
A month or so later, the doctor called me. He wanted to show me the dogs; prove he was looking after them properly.
A young woman dressed in crisp, white clothes answered the door.
“Come in!” she said.
“You know who I am?”
Leading me through the house, she gave me a small wink. “Of course.”
I wasn’t sure I liked that.
She led me outside to the backyard; it was different. He’d tiled the hole and it was now a fish pond. The yard was neater, and lounge chairs and what looked like a bar were placed in a circle. Six people sat in the armchairs, reading magazines, sipping long drinks.
“He didn’t tell me there was a party.”
“Take a seat. Doctor will be with you shortly,” the young woman said. Three of the guests looked at their watches as if waiting for an appointment.
I studied them. They were not a well group. Quiet and pale, all of them spoke slowly and lifted their glasses gently as if in pain or lacking strength. They all had good, expensive shoes. Gold jewelry worn with ease. The doctor had some wealthy friends.
They made me want to leap up, jump around, show off my health.
The young woman came back and called a name. An elderly woman stood up.
“Thank you, nurse,” she said. It all clicked in then; I’d been right. The doctor was charging these people for treatment.
It was an hour before he dealt with his patients and called me in.
The vampire dogs rested on soft blankets. They were bloated, their eyes rolling. They could barely lift their heads.
“You see my dogs are doing well.”
“And so are you, I take it. How’s your son?”
He laughed. “You know there’s no son.”
He gave me another drink. His head didn’t bobble. We drank vodka together, watching the vampire dogs prowl his yard, and a therapist would say my self-loathing led me to sleep with him.
I crawled out of the client’s bed at two or three a.m., home to my gaze dogs. They were healing well and liked to chew my couch. They jumped up at me, licking and yapping, and the three of us sat on the floor, waiting for the next call to come in.
SNOW ON SUGAR MOUNTAIN
Elizabeth Hand
When Andrew was seven, his mother turned into a fox. Snow freed the children from school at lunchtime, the bus skating down the hill to release cheering gangs at each sleety corner. Andrew got off last, nearly falling from the curb as he turned to wave good-bye to the driver. He ran to the front door of the house, battering at the screen and yelling, “Mom! Mom!” He tugged the scarf from his face, the better to peer through frost-clouded windows. Inside it looked dark; but he heard the television chattering to itself, heard the chimes of the old ship’s clock counting half past one. She would be downstairs, then, doing the laundry. He dashed around the house, sliding on the iced flagstones.
“Mom … I’m home, it snowed, I’m—”
He saw the bird first. He thought it was the cardinal that had nested in the box tree last spring: a brilliant slash of crimson in the snow, like his own lost mitten. Andrew held his breath, teetering as he leaned forward to see.
A blue jay: no longer blue, somber as tarnished silver, its scattered quills already gray and pale crest quivering erect like an accusing finger. The snow beneath it glowed red as paint, and threads of steam rose from its mauled breast. Andrew tugged at his scarf, glancing across the white slope of lawn for the neighbor’s cat.
That was when he saw the fox, mincing up the steps to the open back door, its mouth drooped to show wet white teeth, the curved blade of the jay’s wing hanging from its jaw. Andrew gasped. The fox mirrored his surprise, opening its mouth so that the wing fell and broke apart like the spinning seeds of a maple. For a moment they regarded each other, blue eyes and black. Then the fox stretched its forelegs as if yawning, stretched its mouth wide, too wide, until it seemed that its jaw would split like the broken quills. Andrew saw red gums and tongue, teeth like an ivory stair spiraling into black, black that was his mothers hair, his mothers eyes, his mother crouched naked, retching on the top step in the snow.
After that she had to show it to him. Not that day, not even that winter; but later, in the summer, when cardinals nested once more in the box tree and shrieking jays chased goldfinches from the birdbath.
“Someday you can have it, Andrew,” she said as she drew her jewelry box from the kitchen hidey-hole. “When you’re older. There’s no one else,” she added. His father had died before he was born. “And it’s mine, anyway.”
Inside the box were loops of pearls, jade turtles, a pendant made of butterfly’s wings that formed a sunset and palm trees. And a small ugly thing, as long as her thumb and the same color: marbled cream, nut brown in the creases. At first he thought it was a bug. It was the locust year, and everywhere their husks stared at him from trees and cracks in the wall.
But it wasn’t a locust. His mother placed it in his hand, and he held it right before his face. Some sort of stone, smooth as skin. Cool at first, after a few moments in his palm it grew warm, and he glanced at his mother for reassurance.
“Don’t worry,” she laughed wryly. “It won’t bite.” And she sipped her drink.
It was an animal, all slanted eyes and grinning mouth, paws tucked beneath its sharp chin like a dog playing Beg. A tiny hole had been drilled in the stone so that it could be tied onto a string.
“How does it work?” Andrew asked. His mother shook her head·
“Not yet,” she said, swishing the ice in her glass. “It’s mine still; but someday—someday I’ll show you how.” And she took the little carving and replaced it, and locked the jewelry box back in the hidey-hole.
That had been seven years ago. The bus that stopped at the foot of the hill would soon take Andrew to the public high school. Another locust summer was passing. The seven-year cicadas woke in the August night and crept from their split skins like a phantom army. The night they began to sing, Andrew woke to find his mother dead, bright pills spilling from one hand when he forced it open. In the other was the amulet, her palm blistered where she clenched the stone.
He refused the sedatives the doctor offered him, refused awkward offers of comfort from relatives and friends suddenly turned to strangers. At the wake he slouched before the casket, tearing petals from carnations. He nodded stiffly at his mother’s sister when she arrived to take him to the funeral.
“Colin leaves for Brockport in three weeks,” his aunt said later in the car. “When he goes, you can have the room to yourself. It’s either that or the couch—”
“I don’t care,” Andrew replied. He didn’t mean for his voice to sound so harsh. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. Anywhere’s okay. Really.”
And it was, really.
Because the next day he was gone.
North of the city, in Kamensic Village, the cicadas formed heavy curtains of singing green and copper, covering oaks and beeches, houses and hedges and bicycles left out overnight. On Sugar Mountain they rippled across an ancient Volkswagen Beetle that hadn’t moved in months. Their song was loud enough to wake the old
