Page 66 of Nightwatching

Their sugar highs had melted away, holiday hyperactivity transformed into tiredness. They looked at her with big eyes, worried for the radiant, terrific, humble pig.

“Oh, honey, no, I’m sure they won’t eat the pig.”

“Charlotte wouldn’t let it happen,” her daughter insisted. “Charlotte will help him live forever.”

“Nothing lives forever,” she told them. “That’s what makes living things special. But Charlotte is smart. She’ll help make sure they don’t eat Wilbur.”

“Wilbur-bilbur-silber-pilbur,” her son rhymed sleepily. “Can we get a talking pig, Mama?”

“Tell you what. You find one, we can keep it.”

After tucking them in, she went downstairs to lock up and turn out the lights. In the darkness she saw the snow had stopped, that the yellows and reds of the fall leaves were coated with a thin layer of white. The temperature was below freezing. She crossed her fingers the way her children had in the car that the weather held.

In bed she inched her feet into the circle of warmth her husband’s body always made, pressed her forehead to the spot between his shoulder blades she liked best. When he was sleeping, when his warmth and smell surrounded her like this, she could believe that someday the edges of her hurt would soften. That someday he would understand the way he’d smashed things, atone for suspecting she’d somehow induced, was at fault for, her father-in-law’s violence.

After all, she was full of broken pieces that had mended. Even if they’d knit together at odd angles. Even if they were still tender. Unlike the old saying, her broken places hadn’t healed stronger. But so far they had always come together enough to allow her to function.

And her husband still wasn’t speaking to his father. That had to mean something. That had to be a start.

What tortured her most thinking back on it later was how happy she’d been to hear her husband leaving in the dark hours of that morning.

Each day her husband needed to feel he’d gotten things done. He was incapable of being in a good mood otherwise, yet everyday chores—the laundry, the dishes, the picking up after children—didn’t sate the “get things done” thirst. No, each project had to be something finite but showy and, most irritating of all, had to be the center of her day, too. If she didn’t help him move the woodpile from over here to over there, fix that door, replace a cracked tile, didn’t assist with the dullest parts of his work, reviewing his just-received prints for flaws, didn’t sign his name on them as he happily told her, “You do my signature better than I can!” he’d mope—a mood that could last for days, souring every interaction. She suspected that mainly he wanted her close more than he wanted her help. But she resented that the everyday chores still waited, and she was left to do them alone once he was finally able to relax, things done.

So there in the darkness, she curled comfortably in bed, knowing she’d be in charge of her own day. She could get the thankless work out of the way while it was still daylight.

She contentedly cowled the blanket over her head, muttered, “Fly safe,” as he closed the bedroom door. There was a muffled rattle-pop from downstairs, and she lightly frowned that he’d slammed a door so hard, remembering his endless complaints to the children: “Guys, don’t slam doors, stop being so noisy, why are you always so hard on things?”

When she woke again, it was light outside. She grabbed her phone, saw it was after seven. How long did she lie there? From bed she peeked outside at the snow-crusted, sunlit beauty of the new day. She imagined her husband circling above in his little plane.Thinking about how brutally icy the air must be up in that other dimension, she snuggled in deeper. She scrolled on her phone, enjoying the luxury of time wasted. Finally, she got up. Brushed teeth, showered, dressed, started gathering a load of laundry. Didn’t dare peek in at the children for fear she’d wake them.

Ever since lockdown began seven months before, winding down into an unscheduled summer followed by partly remote school, being alone had become a rare and precious thing. She’d grown to savor any sliver of silence. There was hardly a single recent moment she could remember being actually, physically, by herself. Hardly a waking hour where her family wasn’t asking her for something, pulling at her, needing help, to “get things done” or be soothed or fed or amused or helped or taught. For the past seven months she’d walk down the stairs, and all eyes would turn to her, saying, “What do you have for us today? I need, I need, I need. I want, I want, I want.”

Exhausted by the constant violation of even the last vestige of her privacy, she’d put a bolt on her bathroom door, high up enough that the children couldn’t reach it and accidentally lock themselves in. Even then they scrabbled at the door. “Mama? What are you doing in there?” She’d rest head in hands, say, “What do you think I’m doing in the bathroom?” She’d hear them pad away, then her husband would give a crisp knock. “Honey, you okay in there?” She’d look at her phone. Never more than four minutes had passed. With eyes closed she’d reply, “I’m fine. I’m coming out.”

Heading to the stairs, she was thinking about having the whole coffeepot to herself, unloading the dishwasher while watching the kind of guilty pleasure television she’d never dare stream when her husband was in the house. She wondered if she would enjoy these shows so much if his disapproval didn’t give them an air of the forbidden.

“How can you stand that trash?”

“Just something to watch while I fold the laundry,” she’d say, and shrug.

She couldn’t explain to her husband why she was fascinated by the women in these shows. They had long ago learned the exact dollar value of their beauty, yet their carefully tended surfaces showed how impossible it was to always be your most attractive, most intriguing self. Understanding the size of their stage, they buckled at even the slightest criticism, exploded spectacularly, and were then embraced by an audience who lived vicariously through that fun-to-watch losing of shit, the viewers able to only dream of being allowed to show such anger. And when these women became wealthy, famous, beloved, when they were sure they’d got their fingertips on the brass ring, their husbands, boyfriends, partners, left them. Every time. After all, their men had never learned how to be supporting players.

Later, the fact that as she came down the stairs she’d been thinking about these husbands, these needy reality show husbands, gnawed at her.

The scene at the bottom of the kitchen stairs was so out of the ordinary she paused midway down, confused.

“Love?”

Her husband was on the floor by the big pine table they used as an island in the kitchen. He was on his side in a fetal curl, hands clasped tight and tucked under his chin. It was the same way their son always slept, looking like a tiny, praying angel.

“Are you—are you okay?”

He was resting on a blanket she didn’t immediately recognize. It was so smooth, so cleanly reflected the light through the kitchen windows, that she thought it was silk. A beautiful color, darker at the edges than at the center where he lay. Just outside its perimeter, she saw his phone on the floor.

The screen was shattered. Seeing the jagged destruction of that glass, she was finally able to understand.

She called 911. Said “husband,” said “stairs” and “bleeding.” They told her not to move him. To stop the blood if she could. The blood that pooled around him in that shining blanket was coming from somewhere between his skull and the floor, but she was afraid she might irreparably hurt him if she lifted his head. She pressed a towel over his hair and lay behind him. Put her arm over him as the towel turned red. Told him everything was going to be fine, just fine, as she felt the shallow lift of his lungs under her palm.

The medics put her husband on a white plastic board. The police asked her questions. Their voices traveled distorted as if through a tunnel.

---