Dept. Of Speculation

40

The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped handwriting on a grocery list. She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea.

But only possibly.

Fall comes early here. And it is unnerving to see so many stars. At night, the wife lies awake worrying about bears and chimney fires. About the army of spiders that live within. The husband wants goats. The daughter cries for Brooklyn.

The wife keeps finding $20 bills she has stashed away in books. Also tiny pieces of paper she has written on. Here is something she scrawled on the back of a credit card receipt. She squints to read her own handwriting. I teach immaculately, but lately … lately, I’ve got some dirty windows, it says.

She can’t help thinking about how she has another thing squirreled away in a book. A Monopoly card sent to her by a divorced friend. GET OUT OF JAIL FREE, it says.

But she is tired all the time now. She can feel how slowly she is walking, as if the air itself is something to be reckoned with. The shrink says it’s because she has been running on adrenaline until now and that this is starting to recede. “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t let your mind go to a dark place.”

Right, the wife thinks. Gotcha. She does not mention how she goes out to look at the sky in the middle of the night. How she stands there in a T-shirt and bare feet, shivering. Witness this wind, this flimsily constructed tree. Theatrical, this terror, she feels.

And everyone drives too slowly here. Sorry, the wife thinks as she weaves in and out of lanes. Sorry, sorry.

They never talk about it when the daughter is awake. They keep it from her like the bugs, but still it is there under everything, a low hum like furious weather.

One morning she takes her to a playground. The sun beats down on them. “Where is everyone?” the daughter says. She swings listlessly on the monkey bars and then they go home again.

The wife has to remind herself to notice that it is beautiful here. She goes for a walk in the woods after a week of rain, wearing the husband’s heavy boots.

The rain has brought the mosquitoes back. The wife unpacks the bug zapper that the almost astronaut gave her. There are still a lot of boxes in the attic. I should be more efficient, she thinks. The husband sets up their old telescope. There is almost no light pollution here. The wife looks up at the sky. There are more stars than anyone could ever need.

One day while the daughter is at school, the husband and wife drive to a neighboring town to see a movie. On the way there, they pass a Holiday Inn Express. The wife stiffens. “What?” he says. She points to it. “I spent the worst night of my life in one of those.” The husband looks at her blankly. “In a Holiday Inn Express?” They drive a little farther. He reaches over and takes her hand. It seems they have taken a wrong turn somewhere because there are farms on either side now, not businesses. The wife looks out the window. A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light.