Animal Dreams

1 The Night of All Souls

His two girls are curled together like animals whose habit is to sleep underground, in the smallest space possible. Cosima knows she’s the older, even when she’s unconscious: one of her arms lies over Halimeda’s shoulder as if she intends to protect them both from their bad dreams. Dr. Homer Noline holds his breath, trying to see movement there in the darkness, the way he’s watched pregnant women close their eyes and listen inside themselves trying to feel life.

A slice of white moon from the window divides their bodies deeply into light and shadow, but not one from the other. No light could show where one body ends and the other begins when they’re sleeping like this. Maybe a mother’s eye could tell, but that is the one possibility that can’t be tried.

Halimeda’s bed is still made. In the morning she’ll rumple it so he’ll believe she slept by herself, and then the girls will make it again. Their labors at deceiving him are as careful as surgery. But morning is worlds away now, it’s still early night on the Day of All Souls. The two of them spent the whole day playing in the cemetery with neighbor children, Pocha and Juan Teobaldo and Cristobal and the twin babies, helping Viola Domingos build a bower of marigolds over the grave of a great-grandmother who is no part of this family.

For a long time he stands gripping the door frame, which is exactly the width of a newborn’s skull and curves similarly against his palm. He watches his daughters, though there’s nothing to watch, and thinks these words: “A great-grandmother who isn’t their business.” He decides this will be their last year for the cemetery and the Day of All Souls. There are too many skeletons down there. People count too long on the oblivion of children.

They’re deep in the corpselike collapse that takes hold of children when they are exhausted, but still he won’t risk going in to stand over the bed the way he once would have. He would see the usual things: unraveled braids and the scraped shins hidden from his punishing antiseptics. Tonight he would also see cheeks and eyelids stained bright yellow from marigold pollen. He’s spent a lifetime noticing small details from a distance. From the doorway he smells the bitterness of crushed marigold petals on their skin.

There is a deeper draft of breath and they both move a little. Their long hair falls together across the sheet, the colors blending, the curled strands curving gently around the straight. He feels a constriction around his heart that isn’t disease but pure simple pain, and he knows he would weep if he could. Not for the river he can’t cross to reach his children, not for distance, but the opposite. For how close together these two are, and how much they have to lose. How much they’ve already lost in their lives to come.