Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

Ba Baboon

For a long time they do nothing but hide and wait. Very little light creeps in under the pantry’s double doors. Brooks examines the cans on the shelf level with his head: beans, corn, soup. This pantry does not belong to him — or to his sister, Mary. They are in someone else’s home. Mary has her eye pressed to the door crack.

“Do you have to breathe so loud?” she asks. “I’m trying to listen.”

The pantry is small but not coffin-small, not so small that Brooks can’t stretch his arms wide like a — well, like a what, exactly? Like a scarecrow on a pole. Okay, a scarecrow, sure, but where did that image come from? From the muck of the way back when, no doubt. “Your long-term memory seems to be hunky-dory,” Dr. Groom has told Brooks more than once, jubilantly.

Sure enough, a student theater production from almost thirty years ago bubbles up fresh, unbattered: the out-of-tune piano at the end of the stage, the hard crusts of chewing gum under the seats in the auditorium, the flattened cereal boxes cut into rectangles and painted to look like a road of yellow bricks. Fourteen years old, Brooks nearly landed the coveted Scarecrow role in The Wizard of Oz, coveted because of the beautiful blond-haired fifteen-year-old playing Dorothy Gale, a girl who later, according to three munchkins, gave it up to the Tin Man in the janitor’s closet. It could have been Brooks she gave it up to if he hadn’t screwed up the song in auditions and been cast instead as a member of the dreaded Lollipop Guild.

“If I only had a brain,” Brooks sings.

“That’s not funny,” Mary says, and looks over at him. “I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that. It’s upsetting.”

Say things like what? Oh, the bit about the brain. Brooks gets it now, why he’s thinking about the mindless scarecrow after all these years. Somewhere up in his head is the Old Brooks, that asshole, and he’s poking fun at this moodier, slower version of himself. If you only had a brain, Old Brooks is singing, a malicious smile on his chubbier face, his brown hair combed over neatly and not cropped short with scabby scars across the scalp.

“You might feel irrationally angry sometimes,” Dr. Groom has said. If he’s feeling agitated, Brooks is supposed to ask himself why, to interrogate his agitation, but God, does he want to punch something right now, anything, the angel-hair pasta boxes or the cracked-pepper crackers, the clementines or the canned chickpeas, so many chickpeas, a lifetime’s supply of chickpeas. He could punch the peas into a mash and lick his knuckles clean. Brooks has lost all sense of how long they’ve been hiding in this pantry. He plops down onto a lumpy dog food bag beside his sister.

“I don’t hear them anymore,” Mary says. “They might be upstairs. Maybe they’re asleep.”

Brooks nods, then lets his eyebrows scrunch. He can feel his sister studying him.

“Have you forgotten why we’re in here?” Mary asks. “Have you forgotten about the dogs?”

The events of the afternoon float and constellate in his memory: a turkey sandwich, his sister’s Taurus, a small brass key from under a rock, a tiled kitchen floor, two snarling dogs. It’s like standing inches away from a stippled drawing and being asked to name the subject. And the artist.

Mary gives him one of her pity smiles, where her upper lip mushrooms around her bottom lip, consumes it. She is a compact, muscular woman, still a girl, really, with a body for the tennis court, not the sort of person you could knock over easily.

The dog food pebbles crunch under his sharp butt bones when he shifts. He’s lost weight, probably twenty pounds since the accident. Brooks doesn’t remember anything from that night, but according to the police (via his mother), he was alone at the time, unloading groceries from the back of his car on the street in front of his townhouse. Someone smashed the left side of his head with a brick. A brick! The police found it down the street in some bushes, along with bits of Brooks’s skull. The assailant took the car (which still hasn’t been recovered and probably never will be) and his wallet. “A random act of violence,” his mother called it. “A totally senseless thing.” Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is a random and senseless place.

“I need to go,” he says.

“We can’t.”

“Go, as in pee.”

“Right,” Mary says. “Of course. I’m sorry. Let’s just give it a few more minutes. Just to be safe. The last thing we need is to go out there and get bitten.”

He squirms.

“Here,” she says, and offers him a third-full bottle of organic olive oil. “You can pee in this.”

• •

You can pee in this. Mary feels like one of the nurses. Brooks is staying with her for a month, and that means she is responsible for his meals, for his entertainment, for getting him to all his appointments.

Yesterday they had to wait forty-five minutes for the doctor to return to the examining room. Brooks was a broken record while they waited: “Pencil box screen door pencil box screen door.” Dr. Groom was to blame for this. One of his memory games. The doctor often began his checkups by listing a random series of words for Brooks to later repeat on command, a test of his short-term memory. Before leaving on her month-long adventure to Bread Island, Mary’s mother warned that Brooks might attempt to scribble the words on his hand when the doctor wasn’t looking. Brooks, her mother had explained, wanted his independence back almost as much as they wanted to give it to him. But that wasn’t possible yet. He still had what she called “little blips.” He could be coherent and normal one minute, and the next… well.

“Pencil box screen door pencil box…”

“You don’t have to remember it anymore,” she said. “The doctor already asked you, and you got it right. You already won that game.”

That didn’t stop him. He hammered each syllable hard, except for the last one, door, to which he added at least three extra breathy o’s. He ooooohed it like a ghost or a shaman might. Maybe he is a shaman. Who can say? What the doctors call hallucinations and delusions — maybe they are something else entirely. Mary read an article somewhere online explaining that people with brain injuries sometimes report unusual and even psychic side effects. There was a stroke victim who said he could read a book and be there — actually be in the book, tasting the food, smelling the air. A teenager in a car accident lost his sense of taste but said he could feel people’s emotions. It had something to do with unlocking previously unused parts of the brain.

Watching her brother clumsily tap his fingers on the shiny metal table, Mary wondered if it was possible he was in communication with something larger than both of them: a cosmic force, the angels, Frank Sinatra, anything. She doubted it. Her poor brother could barely button his shirt. And as for those words, the skipping record, maybe he’d fallen into some sort of terrible neural feedback loop. He seemed to be saying it involuntarily now.

She was almost ashamed by how much she wanted to slap her brother. Her whole life, Brooks had been the one looking after her — and so what right did she have to be irritated now? When things got rough with her boyfriend Tommy after college, it was Brooks who drove all the way down to Atlanta and helped her pack. It was Brooks who defended her to their mother when she quit her job with the real estate company. It was Brooks who wrote her a check to buy the Pop-Yop, her soft-serve franchise.

She worried that it would never be that way between them again, that the balance had forever shifted, and then she felt selfish for worrying about such a thing. Brooks needed her. It was her turn.

“Your pants, Brooks,” she said, and handed him his khakis.

He stood there beside the exam table in his white underwear and a wrinkled blue shirt, holding the khakis in front of him like a matador’s cape. Mary was supposed to have ironed his shirt for him before leaving the house that morning, and that she hadn’t fulfilled this duty was a source of some anxiety for her big brother. He could no longer tolerate creases — in clothes, in paper, in anything. Watching him step into his pant legs, she worried that he was about to bring up that morning’s ironing debacle again, but he tucked the shirt and zipped his pants without comment.

His crease intolerance was one of many changes that had come with the accident. A longtime smoker, he now said that smoke made him feel sick. A closetful of dark clothes that these days he deemed depressing. In fact, his new favorite article of clothing was a tight bright pink and purple sweater that they wouldn’t let him wear outside the house because it wasn’t his but their mother’s.

When, finally, Dr. Groom returned to the room, Mary stayed seated in her little plastic chair, eyeing all the instruments, the cotton swabs and tongue depressors in the glass jars, the inflatable cuff of the blood pressure device, the trash can with the metal step-lid, biohazard stickers plastered across it, all of it highly unadvanced medical paraphernalia, stuff you might have seen in a doctor’s office a century ago. The bigger, more impressive machinery was somewhere else, in another building. The nurses had trouble keeping Brooks still in those machines. Apparently he got antsy.

A frail smile formed on Dr. Groom’s face. His eyes were large and blue behind a pair of fashionable glasses. According to Mary’s mother, he was the best traumatic brain injury doctor in the state.

“Pencil box screen door,” Brooks blurted, all trace of shaman gone from his voice.

“Very good, Brooks,” the doctor said, and then leaned back against the table to explain the scans, how they were looking fine, better than expected given the nature of the accident and Brooks’s age, which was forty-four. Of course, he said, it wasn’t all about the scans. The scans wouldn’t show any shearing or stretching, for instance. But Brooks was doing well, that was the bottom line. He wasn’t slurring his words. His headaches were less frequent. Even his short-term memory was showing signs of improvement. A fuller recovery, the doctor said, might very well be possible.

• • •

Brooks is not sure how possible it will be to pee, cleanly, into a third-full bottle of organic extra virgin olive oil, especially given the tiny circumference of its plastic top. The tip of his penis will not fit into that hole. The bottle is a little slippery. He pops off the black top that controls the outward flow of the oil and hands that to Mary. He turns away from her and unzips.

“I’ve got this can of Pirouette cookies if you run out of bottle,” Mary says.

“I just need you to be quiet.” He concentrates — or, doesn’t. What’s required is the absence of concentration. That should be easy, shouldn’t it? He’s a pro at that now. He sees a yellow brick road. The urine comes in splashy spurts at first and then streams steadily. The bottle warms. The urine pools in a layer above the olive oil, all of it yellow. Thankfully, he doesn’t need the cookie tin for overflow. Mary hands him the top when he asks for it and tells him job well done.

Bottle plugged, they decide to store it under the lowest shelf, out of sight for now. He plops back down onto the dog food bags. If he had to, he could sleep like this. He checks his wristwatch with the shiny alligator leather strap, a gift from a long-ago girlfriend. Which girlfriend, he couldn’t say.

“We’ve been in here for an hour,” Mary says. She stands and peers again through the crack in the double doors. “Maybe we should just go for it. I don’t see the dogs.”

Her left eye still at the crack, she crouches down for a new angle on the outside world, her small hands on either side of the white doors for balance.

“Let me,” Brooks says, rising. He grabs the brass knob near her left temple. He shoves the doors open, outward into the house, and Mary slides away to let him pass. He emerges from the pantry. To his right, through another open doorway, he can see a kitchen with high white ceilings and recessed lights. To his left a long unfamiliar hallway unfolds, hardwood floors with wide dark red planks, at the end of which a cantankerous grandfather clock ticks.

“Not that way,” Mary says when he starts down the hall.

He hears a distant clacking of nails, a jangling of collars. Never has such a tinkly sound seemed so ominous. Mary is behind him now, tugging at his shirt, his arms, pulling him back into the sepulcher of the pantry. The dogs are approaching, their stampede echoing down the hallway. When his back collides with the food shelves, two fat cans drop and roll at his feet. Mary pulls the doors shut again. Seconds later, the dogs galunk into them. Their bulky, invisible weight shakes the flimsy wood of the door so hard Brooks wonders if the hinges might pop. Mary holds the brass knobs tight, as if worried the dogs are capable of turning knobs. The dogs growl. It’s hard to think straight over that noise.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have let you go out there. That was dumb of me.”

“What are they exactly? What breed?”

“Rottweilers? Dobermans? I don’t know what they are, but they’re freaking huge. Biggest dogs I’ve ever seen. Genetically modified, maybe. Wynn would do that. Order a bunch of genetically modified military dogs. That would be so him. There are two of them, Baba and Bebe. Wait, let me try something. I think I just remembered it.” The dogs are still clawing at the pantry door. She sticks her lips to the crack and says, “Baba Ganoush.” The dogs don’t stop their attack. “Bebe, Baba, Baba O’Riley. It’s something like that.”

“What is?”

“The safe command. Oh, Goosie, I’m sorry I got you into this.”

Goosie. When was the last time she called him that? Back at his townhouse, in the drawer to the right of the stove (his mind still has that power at least, the power to conjure up images, to see things that aren’t directly in front of him), he must have a hundred thank-you cards addressed to Goosie. Thank-yous for the loan, the money that helped Mary buy the soft-serve place that she had, until then, only managed. The golden egg, she called his loan. Him, the goosie.

“The safe command will make them docile,” she says.

“Remind me again who Wynn is to you,” he says.

“A friend,” she says quickly. “He’s out of town for a few days, and I agreed to feed his dogs and bring in the mail. He gave me the safe command before he left. I should have written it down.”

“Could have just told me. I would have remembered.”

She smiles.

“Let’s just call someone for help,” Brooks says.

“I would if I could. My cell is out in the car.”

Brooks fishes around in his pockets.

“Yours is in the car too,” she says.

“Well, that’s bad luck. What should we do now?”

“When they settle back down again, we’ll go together. There’s a door in the kitchen. That’s, what? Like, thirty feet from here?”

Brooks isn’t sure but nods. The dogs are no longer scrabbling at the doors but whining. They walk in circles, with clicking nails, outside. Mary reaches over Brooks’s shoulder for a bag of pistachios. She rips open the plastic at the top and offers him some. “We missed breakfast,” she says.

He doesn’t want any nuts. He sits down on the dog food again, his head back against a shelf. His medication can make him groggy. He needs to rest his eyes.

• • •

If only she had poison. Mary imagines Wynn coming home and finding both dogs dead. She imagines him cradling their bodies and weeping. No, Wynn wouldn’t weep. He’d probably just buy two more dogs, recycle the names, and move on with his life. Mary has never killed an animal as big as a dog. She veered her car in order to hit a squirrel once and regretted it for two days.

She eats another pistachio. She forgot to put out breakfast this morning because her mother called early from Bread Island for an update.

“How’s my boy doing?” she asked.

“He’s still asleep. He made dinner last night for both of us. He dropped an egg, and he freaked a little. But mostly he was fine. Good report from the doctor yesterday.” Mary did her best to repeat the doctor verbatim.

“Did you ask him about the morning headaches?”

“I forgot, I’m sorry. But Brooks hasn’t mentioned them since you left.”

Her mother sighed. “I’m going to cut my trip short,” she said. “I don’t like not being there.”

“Mom, you don’t have to do that, really. We can manage. Are you staying warm?” Mary pictured her mother layered up in animal furs like one of the Arctic explorers of old, posing at a pole, her cheeks red, the fuzzy dark hair on her upper lip frozen, seal blubber on the bottom of her shoes.

“It’s three in the afternoon. We keep the woodstove burning all day, and we’ve got electric heaters too, but Lord, my butt’s been numb ever since I got here. You can take a southerner out of the South but you can’t — well, you understand. The point is, don’t take her out. Just leave her be. But Cora has been great with me here, she really has. This morning she convinced me to visit one of the mining camps with her. She was doing her interviews. I didn’t understand a word of it, of course. All I can do is hold the microphone steady.”

Cora was her mother’s “roommate,” a term they’d used around town for years, with a wink, of course, since they owned separate houses. Cora was a sociologist at the university and had recently won a Fulbright to study the few people who lived on Bread Island, a mostly wild and rocky dot in the ice-cold Baltic Sea. Besides the miners, the only other inhabitants were a small indigenous population that kept to themselves. Mary’s mother, who had never even been outside America before she met Cora five years ago, was on the adventure unofficially as an assistant. Internet access was limited and, because of the time difference, so were phone calls.

“Did you get the pictures I sent?” her mother asked. “Of the frogs?”

Yes, Mary had seen her mother’s photos of the snow frogs, slimy and shimmering on the edge of a half-frozen pond. The frogs, while strange, had been a nice change. Mostly her mother just wrote to complain — about the temperature, about the long days, about all that white, white, white, as far as the eye could see. She said it was like the inside of a crazy person’s head. They found white skeletons in the snow. The wolves ate the musk oxen. The polar bears ate the seals. Everything ate something else. Probably she would be eaten too.

But the frogs, she wrote, were a real inspiration.

“Their eggs are neon-blue in the lake behind our cabin,” her mother said. “The eggs actually glow. It’s amazing. When I’m feeling sad I go down there. Then I remember that everything will probably be all right.”

“Be all right?”

“Didn’t you see my picture of the frogs hugging? Okay, not hugging exactly. The gentleman-frog hitches a ride on the lady-frog’s back, and he fertilizes each egg as it comes out. Cora says they stay that way for months if they go into hibernation together. Romantic, isn’t it?”

Two nasty, clammy frogs squeezing each other for weeks on end in the middle of some frozen field? Romantic was not the first word that hopped into Mary’s mind, not at all, but then again she understood what her mother was getting at, she really did, two otherwise lonely creatures conjoined, clinging to each other, not giving up on each other, swimming into the dark and watery deep, down to the cold, cold bottom of things where nothing else lives. There was, if you disregarded certain details, such as the sex itself, something beautiful about it…

“What’s the matter?” her mother asked. “I can’t tell if you’re crying or if the connection’s gone bad. Are you crying? Did I say something wrong?”

Mary apologized. It was nothing, she said, just something silly. “Stupid boy stuff.”

“Tell me.”

She had kept her mother out of the loop these last few months because of everything that had happened with Brooks. She hadn’t wanted to bother her mother with any of her own troubles. But now that her mother was far away and free, she didn’t mind unloading, at least a little bit. She told her mother about Wynn — about Wynn’s chin, his blue eyes, the perfect gray streak in his long windswept hair, their weekend at the house in Myrtle Beach, and then about his crazy wife, the pediatrician, who was hardly ever around.

Her mother was silent.

“Come on, you can’t judge me. You used to be married,” Mary said. “To a man.”

“I’m not judging you. And for the record, I wasn’t married when I met Cora. In case you’ve forgotten, I was alone for almost eight years after your—”

“None of this matters anyway,” Mary said. “I broke up with him. I didn’t love him. I barely even liked him.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Mary sighed. “I did some things I’m not proud of.”

“What sort of things?”

“He liked to — this is embarrassing — make movies.”

“Oh, Mary.”

“I know. It only happened once. He says he taped over it — but still.”

“Don’t provoke this man,” her mother said, meaning what? Provoke him how?

“Just don’t do anything you’ll regret,” her mother said. She thought the best and wisest course was for Mary to let it go. To move forward with her life. To just forget the tape.

• • •

He is halfway in a dream when his sister announces that it’s time for another escape attempt. The dream is about fishhooks. Well, not about fishhooks, but it involves them. He is looking for one in the bottom of a tackle box. Brooks hasn’t gone fishing in more than a year, probably not since his last trip to Nicaragua. His company, which he started with a friend a decade ago, manufactures medical devices and has a factory outside Managua. The last time he was down there, Brooks took a few extra days and chartered a deep-sea fishing boat out of San Juan del Sur. He caught a striped marlin, though it was the captain who did the hard work, setting up the rod, finding the right spot. All Brooks did was wait and take orders, reel when the captain yelled to reel. Going deep-sea fishing is, actually, kind of like how he lives now. Sure, he can fry a few eggs, but only if there is someone there to help him, to keep him on task, to clean up the mess when his hands fail him, to calm him down when he loses his temper, to reel him in.

“You have gunk on your face,” Mary says, and wipes it away with a wet thumb. “I think it’s old soy sauce.”

“Are you sure we should go for it again?” he asks. “How long will the owners be away? We could survive in here for days.”

“No,” she says. “I got us into this mess. I’ll get us out.”

Brooks knows this is the truth, that his sister is to blame, but he can’t let go of the feeling that he should be masterminding the escape. After all, he’s the big brother. He’s always taken care of her. That’s just how it is. His former self, the Old Brooks, up there somewhere, would know exactly what to do in this situation. Old Brooks sees a solution, surely, but he’s keeping quiet about it. He’s enjoying all this confusion. “Try not to think about who you were before the accident,” Dr. Groom has said, “and concentrate on who you want to be now. Accept the new you.” Sometimes Brooks wants to toss Dr. Groom out the window.

Mary opens the pantry doors and peeks out into the hall. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “Maybe they’ve gone upstairs.”

He follows her to the kitchen entrance. She turns, a finger to her lips, but he has not made any sound. He watches her inch into the kitchen. To his right is a refrigerator. Photographs and appointment cards attached to its white side with magnets. In one of the photographs are two children, an older boy and a tiny girl, on a seesaw. Across the bottom someone has written, What goes up…

“Stop moving,” Mary whispers, at least forty feet of tiled floor left between her and the exit.

But Brooks sees something on the wall, something that might help them: a cordless phone. Mary can just call her friend and get the safe command, and all this will be over. He reaches out for the black phone with the glowing blue screen, unhooks it from its cradle. When he turns to show it off to Mary, he realizes that she has come to a full stop at the entrance to the living room. “Easy,” she says.

Through the door he sees them, the dogs, heads low, tails stiff, coarse black fur Mohawked up along their backs. Is it possible that the dogs have set an elaborate trap for them?

Mary inches backward. The dogs growl. “Baa, baa, black sheep,” she whispers. “Bibi Netanyahu.”

Brooks could probably make it safely back to the pantry. But not Mary. She’s too close to the dogs, too far from the pantry. Behind him, on the stove, is a grimy cast-iron skillet. He grabs that. “Top of the fridge,” he says.

“What?” Mary sneaks a look over her right shoulder. The dogs come at her with their clicking nails and soggy growls. She lunges at the fridge. She tries to use the ice dispenser as a foothold, but the freezer door swings open. She slams it and scrambles up onto the soapstone counter, knocking aside cookbooks and an old Mr. Coffee pot that shatters across the tiled floor. From there she pulls herself up onto the fridge. Brooks is two steps behind his sister. Phone in hand, he flings himself onto the counter, belly first. He feels like a spider with all its legs ripped out. He reaches for a cabinet knob. One of the dogs locks on to his ankle, and he screams. He writhes, swinging the phone back and forth. When the phone connects with the dog’s head, he loses his grip on it and it goes clattering to the floor. But he’s free now. He’s able to clamber up beside his sister.

They have to crouch on the dusty fridge-top or else their heads will touch the ceiling.

“You’re bleeding,” Mary says, bending down to his ankle.

“Don’t bother with it now.” He looks down at the dogs, at their giant stinking faces. One dog is on the floor whimpering, and the other is pogo-ing up and down the front of the fridge, knocking loose all the photos and appointment cards. Its back paws come down on the phone and launch it sideways.

“I dropped it,” Brooks says. “The phone. Sorry. We could have called your friend.”

Mary is prodding at his ankle unscientifically. “Don’t worry about it. That wouldn’t have worked anyways.”

“Why, he’s out of the country or something?”

“Well—”

“He doesn’t know we’re here,” Brooks says, surprising even himself.

His sister looks at him as if she were the one with the dog bite.

• • •

The night Wynn first brought out his video camera they were in Myrtle Beach at his family’s beach house. Mary listened to the waves through the open window as Wynn fiddled with a tape. Then he told her to start playing with herself. Already she could anticipate the regret. Maybe that was part of the fun. Her friends had warned her about Wynn. They’d heard strange things about him. Perverted things. According to a guy who used to work with him, he cheated on his wife constantly. He’d been with a hundred women. Probably his dick was contaminated, her friends joked. At least make him wear a condom, they said.

Did she enjoy making the video? A little bit, sure. For the newness of it. But not for the sex itself. It didn’t even feel much like sex to her. It was like something else. She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation. The pillowcase smelled like potato chips and sweat. She wondered if he’d even washed them, if maybe this was one of the kids’ bedrooms. He smacked her bottom, and she almost laughed. It wasn’t risqué, it was silly.

She broke off the affair a few weeks later when he proposed a new video, this one in his bathroom at home. His wife was at work and the kids were at school. He already had the camera out.

“Do you ever watch these later?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said. “It’s not about that. Making them is what’s fun. It’s fun, isn’t it?”

She was in a white towel, examining the shower. There was blond hair swirled around the drain. His wife’s, no doubt. One of the drawers was halfway open, and she could see hair products and cotton swabs and a box of tampons. She opened the medicine cabinet and found three different kinds of antidepressants.

“Not mine,” he said. “Let’s start with you in the shower. You ready?”

She was not ready. She slipped back into her underwear and told him it was over.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I want the tape,” she said. “From the beach.”

“I erased it. I always tape over them.”

She left him half naked in the bathroom. Later she wondered if she might have gotten the tape from him then if she’d only been a little bit more persistent. She thought about it constantly. At work, ringing people up, she lost track of the numbers. She spilled a box of rainbow sprinkles, and what should have been a ten-minute cleanup took her almost thirty.

“You’ve got to get the tape back,” her friends said. “What if he puts it online?”

Online! She started visiting pornography sites, just in case. There were so many sites, so many categories of sex. She couldn’t believe all the categories: Mature, POV, MILF, Amateur, Ex-Girlfriend. How might Wynn have categorized her?

She called him and demanded the tape.

“I already told you,” he said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“Listen, if I had it, I’d give it to you, but I don’t. You can’t just call me like this. I’m at work.”

She imagined a locked desk drawer in his home study, a hundred tapes, each with a label, her name on one of them, the date, the location, the positions, the noises made, all of it charted out and diagrammed.

This was her situation to fix. Wynn kept a key hidden under a rock on the back porch. She remembered that. All she had to do was wait for the right day, the right moment…

• • •

“And so you think he has the tape here,” Brooks says. “Somewhere in this house? And that’s why we broke in?”

She nods.

“You could have just told me earlier,” he says.

“You would have judged me.”

“Sure, but only a little.”

“Would you have gone along with it? If you’d known we were breaking into someone’s house?”

“No, of course not,” he says. “I would have waited in the car.”

She smiles at him, and he is relieved to see that it’s a real smile, without a trace of pity. “So where is Wynn now?” he asks. “How much time do we have?”

“A few hours, maybe. They drove up to Chapel Hill for the day. His son’s looking at colleges.” She knows this because Wynn shares so much of his life online. When she was with him, he was always typing something into his phone.

“If I had a sex tape, I don’t think I’d keep it in the house for my wife to find.”

“You don’t know Wynn.”

The dogs have stopped barking. They sit patiently at the foot of the fridge. Brooks’s ankle throbs. He doesn’t know what to do next. If only he could curl up on top of the fridge and take a nap. But the dogs will never give up. They are trained to attack intruders, and that’s exactly what he and his sister are: intruders. Brooks has broken into someone’s home. He needs a brick. Where’s his brick? Give him a brick.

Brooks jumps — not over the dogs and toward the door but to their left. He lands on both feet and sprints back down the hall. The dogs follow. He’s the distraction, the bait. “Find it!” he yells back to Mary. He passes the pantry. Ahead of him is the grandfather clock. A blue Oriental rug shifts sideways as he turns left at the end of the hall. He runs up a wide staircase, hand on the rail, and at the top he sees that there are doors, three of them. They look the same. It’s like a terrible game show. He grabs the knob of the middle door, but his fingers won’t grip right. “Some things will get better and others won’t,” Dr. Groom says, and Brooks will have to accept that.

But it’s not his fingers, he realizes. The door is locked. He slings his shoulder into it with all his weight. Thankfully the lock is cheap and the door pops open.

Closing it behind him, he finds himself in a room with hot pink walls decorated with gruesome movie posters. A stereo and a television barely fit on a small white desk beneath the window. In the dead gray television screen Brooks can see his own warped reflection staring back: his terrible haircut, his skeletal face. Overhead the ceiling fan spins. The bedspread moves.

Moves? A tiny wiggle at the corner of his vision. An almost imperceptible change in the arrangement of wrinkles in the blanket. Like a scene from a horror movie.

In the months after the accident Brooks experienced what he now knows were mild hallucinations. At the hospital he became temporarily convinced that a family of goats had taken up residence under his bed. They had gray coats and wet black eyes, and at night they came out to lap water from the toilet. If Brooks called for help, the goats would scatter in all directions. They would duck for cover and hide. Dr. Groom explained that Brooks could no longer implicitly trust everything he saw and heard. What Brooks needed, he said, was a healthy dose of skepticism. If goats were ransacking his room, he was supposed to remember that it would be very tricky for a goat to somehow get past the hospital front desk and take the elevator to the third floor. If the coat rack asked him for a grilled cheese, Brooks needed to remind himself that coat racks did not typically require human food, especially not grilled cheeses. If the bedspread sprang to life…

He steps toward the bed. There are pillows piled at the head and foot. In the middle, under the bedspread, is a person-sized lump. He watches it closely. It might be rising and falling, but then again—

“Who’s under there?” he asks.

The lump is very still.

“I’m trying to leave,” he says. “So don’t be afraid. All of this was a big mistake. Us being here, I mean. We know your dad. We got trapped. By your dogs.”

The lump doesn’t move.

“I’m Brooks. I’m not sure if you’re actually under there. Maybe I’m talking to nothing. I can get a little confused. I haven’t always been this way.” He steps toward the desk. “I’m moving your desk so I can go out the window. Your dogs want to eat me. So I’m going out the window. Sorry.” An apology to a ghost.

He slides the desk toward the closet, everything on it rattling. A water glass topples over and the liquid rolls. He grabs a soccer sock off the floor and sops it up before it touches a closed laptop covered in pink monkey stickers. “I spilled some water,” he says, “and I had to use one of your socks. Sorry. Your laptop is fine, I think.” He gets the window open and pops out the screen, which lands below in some holly bushes. He sticks one leg out and straddles the sill. It’s a long way down but not so far that he will necessarily break a bone. Still, this is probably going to hurt.

“Ba baboon,” the lump says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Say that to the dogs and they won’t attack you.”

“So you’re really under there?”

The lump doesn’t answer.

“Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m Brooks.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be off with your family or something?”

“I got out of it. Please go now.”

“I hope you’re not just in my head,” he says, and goes to the door. “Because that would mean ba baboon is total nonsense, and I’m about to get bitten again.” The lump doesn’t answer. He’s about to turn the knob but stops. He walks back over to the bed. “By the way, just in case this ever happens again—”

“God. Why haven’t you left yet?”

“I will. I’m about to. But next time this happens, you should really consider calling the police — or at least your parents.”

The lump is quiet.

“Just an idea,” Brooks adds.

The lump sits up fast, the bedspread transformed into a mountain. “Look, my mom, like, stole my cell, all right? I told you what to say, now go. Just get out of here.”

Brooks isn’t sure what to say. He considers apologizing again.

“Actually, I lied,” the lump says. “I did call the police. They’ll be here, like, any minute. You’re going to jail.”

“Okay,” Brooks says, hand on the door. “Okay, I’m going.”

• • •

When Mary climbs down from the fridge, part of her just wants to leave and forget the tape. But she can’t do that. Brooks could be hurt upstairs. He could lose his way. He could trap himself in the linen closet and, in the dark, lose himself entirely.

Until her brother’s accident, Mary never gave much thought to the idea that personalities may be not only malleable but also divisible from the self. There has to be more to us than memories and quirks that can get smashed away so easily. This raises questions of accountability. What part of her is accountable for her decisions if all that stands between Mary being Mary and not someone else is a simple bump on the head?

Wandering down the hall in search of her brother, she finds a room with a computer on a mahogany desk and a leather chair on a clear plastic mat over the carpet. Wynn’s camera is in the chair, and in a metal tray beside the computer she finds a stack of small gray tapes. She can’t sort through them here. She’ll just have to take them all with her. She dumps out a bag of tangled cables, connectors, and start-up discs and loads the tapes into the bag. Then she adds the camera, just in case.

The hallway is quiet. Brooks is upstairs, somewhere — and the dogs? At the bottom of the stairwell she hears their nails. “Get out, Brooks,” she yells, and runs back the way she came, down the hall, past the grandfather clock and the pantry, into the kitchen, all of it so familiar now. She goes out the back door and runs out into the yard, the sunlight on her face, a stultifying whiteness. One day she will forget everything, and there will be nothing left of her except… This. Whatever This is. Total erasure, maybe.

She wanders around the perimeter of the house, searching for any sign of Brooks up in the windows. She sees a popped-out screen in the bushes — but no Brooks. On the front porch she leans into a narrow window beside the door with her hands cupped around her eyes. Through the thin white curtain she can barely make out a table in the foyer, a painting on the wall above that, and the base of the wide staircase. She rings the doorbell three times, hears it echo in the house. She is about to abandon the porch when, through the window, she sees feet on the stairs, then knees, then a torso. Brooks is striding down the stairwell like he owns the place.

The dogs follow him, no longer vicious at all, their heavy dumb tongues lolling over sharp, crooked teeth. Her brother has tamed the beasts. The dead bolt clicks open, and there he is, framed in the doorway: her big brother.

• • •

The dog bite isn’t deep enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. “No more stitches,” he says. “Please.” Back at Mary’s, he takes a hot shower and lets the water trickle over his wound. Blood swirls around the drain. He towels off and wraps his ankle with gauze and then falls into a long nap on top of the covers. When he wakes up again, it’s dark out. He does his exercises at the foot of the bed and checks his email.

His mother has sent more pictures of the frogs. He scrolls through them: big-eyed blobs in the white snow, their neon-blue eggs like a thousand eyes under the freezing water. The final photo is of his mother and Cora crouching. Seeing his mother this happy in such a bleak landscape makes him smile.

He prints the picture to show his sister and heads downstairs. In the den, the blinds are drawn and the television screen casts a blue light across all the furniture, the plush couch and ottoman, the wall of framed photographs from Mary’s semester abroad in Rome — her black-and-whites of the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, so many gardens, basilicas, crumbling stone baths. On the den floor stacks of gray tapes surround a video camera tethered to the television by a long cord.

Brooks sits down cross-legged and brings the camera into his lap. He can hear Mary in the kitchen, pots rattling, a dinner being prepared. The tapes all look the same. He picks one and pops it into the camera. When he pushes play, he keeps his finger on the button, just in case he’s presented with something no brother wants to see.

Two lines squiggle across the screen, and then a patio appears, a concrete space bright with sunlight. The camera is bouncy in someone’s hand. Two kids are on the ground, dyeing Easter eggs in red Dixie cups. The boy, maybe twelve years old, gives an egg to his younger sister. Holding it between two fingers, she dips it in the cup.

“Hey, didn’t know you were awake,” Mary says, striding into the room. When she sees what he’s watching she sighs and sits down beside him on the floor. They stare up at the television together. It’s been years, Brooks thinks, since he last saw this tape, but it’s all coming back to him now: their dye-stained fingertips, Easter eggs buried in the pine straw, the smell of the azalea bushes, his mother lounging in the yard with her Bible and People magazines.

“Seems like yesterday that was us,” Mary says.

The little girl on the screen knocks over the cup, and colored water spills all over her dress, the blue dye splashed up across her chest. She faces the camera bewildered, looking for help or reassurance maybe, and begins to cry.

“We shouldn’t be watching this,” Mary says, and grabs the camera from Brooks’s lap. “It’s wrong. Do you think I should try and return all this stuff? I feel awful about it. I guess I could leave it all on the doorstep.”

As she’s saying this, a woman Brooks doesn’t recognize rushes onto the screen with a handful of paper towels for the little girl’s dress, and only then does he fully understand that this isn’t their patio or their Easter or their mother. This isn’t their childhood at all, and it never was. “Stop clinging to the Old Brooks,” Dr. Groom likes to say. “And guess what? You’ll still be you.”

He looks over at Mary, her finger poised on the Stop button. But she doesn’t press Stop. She doesn’t pull the cable from the camera or gather the tapes back into the crinkling bag either. She is watching the boy, on screen, as he holds up a perfect egg and then runs out of the frame. The little girl crashes into her mother’s lap and cries into her shoulder. The scene ends and cuts to another. The kids are off searching for the eggs — in tree limbs, desk drawers, mulch beds, and, improbably, under a doormat. “Not there,” Mary says aloud. “I mean, really.”

When that video ends, the room is dark, and they are quiet. Brooks waits a few seconds before sliding another tape to her across the floor under his hand. Mary’s eyes dart up his arm and to his face, his ears and nose and forehead and scalp, her expression so serious he wonders if she’s really allowing herself to see him for the first time since the accident. He mushrooms out his upper lip, imitating her pity smile, and she rolls her eyes.

Then she loads the next tape.