HIGHER THINGS by Joanna Pearson
Mara heard the animal their first night in the rental – a skittering of claws followed by a small crash overhead. Then, more clicking right above where they lay on that old-fashioned canopy bed with its lumpy, ridged mattress (listed as a queen in the rental ad, but definitely only a full). Benny slept beside her, his whiskered jaw slack, lips slightly parted, the sound of his breath rattling in his chest. His sleep was never interrupted by such things – a wonder, really, and indicative of his general unflappability.
She nudged him, gently at first.
“Benny!” she hissed, and he shifted slightly, resettling the heft of himself against her. She was sitting upright in bed at this point, her arms hugging her knees. The house was cool even though it was summer, and her arms were goosebumped. Mountain summer, mountain nights.
“There’s something in the attic.”
“Go back to sleep,” he murmured, his eyes fluttering shut again.
There was another thump followed by the sound of something soft but heavy toppling. It, he, sounded large, Mara thought. Already, she found herself referring to the animal interchangeably as an it or a he. It had a male energy – those impudent sounds, that brash thumping across the floor.
This summer rental outside of Boone had been the cheapest option they could find that still had an internet connection. Slow internet, dial‑up, but internet all the same, which wasn’t a given in these small mountain coves, these between-town hideaways tucked into the ridges. Benny had argued against having internet altogether – wasn’t the whole idea to have a summer without distraction? Time to themselves? – but the thought of this left Mara feeling strangely bereft. What would she do, she moaned, without it? What if people were sending her email, or Facebook messages? All that, of course, could wait, Benny had replied. Mara knew her reaction meant that she was a weak and uninteresting person, someone lacking adequate inner resources. But Benny had eventually relented, and they’d found this house – pale yellow planks with a narrow porch in front and a larger screened porch in the back. No cell reception, but a landline in the event that someone really needed to reach them. In the online photo, the house had appeared modest, appealing in its unassumingness like a plain-faced country girl at the Saturday night dance. In reality, the house needed a paint job badly, and someone ought to trim the wisteria that threatened to overtake it.
“It’s perfect,” Mara had said when they’d first driven up the long dirt drive from the road to the house. By perfect, she’d meant it perfectly suited Benny’s vision of himself. He was enormously wealthy – family wealth, inherited – but did not like to think of himself as such. His life had been hardscrabble still, whether buffered by the fallback of money or not, and he insisted that no one forget this. It made him the worst sort of cheapskate, a quality that Mara could still manage to find quaint, even endearing. He taught art classes, not that he needed to, and fancied himself the sort of person who taught in order to make ends meet so that he could devote the rest of his time to his art.
Mara, on the other hand, had a habit of referring to herself as a “layabout,” meaning that she actually worked three different part-time jobs, none of them impressive or desirable. The opposite of a layabout, Benny, ever a champion of the proletariat, had pointed out. It’s called irony, Mara had responded. What she did not say was that she worried she was dull, particularly in comparison to him, and so adopted a defensive strategy of self-deprecation.
But Benny loved the ramshackle, the run-down, the struggling to survive. Benign neglect, disrepair – it only indicated a devotion to higher things. Mara sometimes suspected this is what had drawn him to her.
“Not bad,” Benny had said, pulling Mara towards him. She’d let herself be dipped back, like a ballroom dancer or a bride. His lips against hers were delicate and papery-dry. She reached up to his throat and felt his pulse throbbing there. Alive, alive, alive, his pulse said. When he pulled away, he coughed hard, loosening something viscous at the center of him. He was always coughing, mucking out the slugs, he said. Slugging out the muck.
Phlegmatic, in every sense, Benny had said, not long after they’d first met. This was the kind of cool humor he allowed himself, this detached amusement at the body and its failings. Mara had laughed, later looking the word up just to make certain she understood.
The rental meant a summer alone, finally. Finally, the two of them, free of their recent counterparts: one bad boyfriend (Mara’s), and a jealous wife with two sullen, skinny boys, twins adopted from the Ukraine (Benny’s). Mara was Benny’s mistress. She was the mistress who had triumphed, the woman a man had left his wife and kids for. The woman commonly referred to as the villain, her friend Lu had pointed out.
Benny was already snoring again beside her, the curve of his back jammed too close to where she sat, cold in nothing but a ribbed tank top. There was a thump upstairs, the long scratch of something hard on wood. Whatever creature lurked up there sounded too big to be a raccoon or opossum. He was heavier than that, more substantial. There was a creak, and she thought that it – he, the creature – was definitely trying to enter the main part of the house.
The rental was all one floor: an open layout, with the master bedroom and bath in the rear with a separate opening onto a screened porch. There was a large living area with a stone fireplace and open kitchen, and one extra room which was well-lit enough to serve as Benny’s makeshift studio. The walk‑up attic was off-limits to summer renters; the owner used it for storage. Mara had climbed the stairs earlier and found the door padlocked. A little guidebook left for guests by the hearth informed them about the nearest grocery store and gas station, along with various features of the house.
Mara slid out of the bed and grabbed Benny’s sweater from a chair, pulling it over her head. Benny sighed in his sleep, the persistent rustle of his breathing like tissue paper crinkling. She realized she didn’t want him to wake up again. Slipping out of the bedroom, she headed back to the stairs that led up to the attic. Her feet were cold on the wooden steps, and she stepped the way she imagined a primitive hunter stalking prey might.
She did not want it to hear her. It, him – the animal. She did not want it to know she was coming.
There was silence except for a pounding in her own head as she climbed, pausing between each step. When she got to the attic door with its padlock, she pressed her ear against the door and held her breath.
Nothing. Nothing except the hum and creak and buzz that wove together to compose the present silence. Her heart slowed, and she focused on her breathing, counting each inhalation and exhalation the way her old therapist had first taught her to manage her anxiety.
BOOM!
She jumped back, stumbling but catching herself against the wall. The animal, as if aware that she was there listening, had slammed itself against the door.
There followed a purposeful scratching – a painful noise, that long, slow drag of hardened keratin against wood.
She half-stumbled down the stairs, back to the bedroom, back to the lumpy bed. She pulled the sheet up and pressed herself, fish-cold, against large, warm Benny, her wheezing genius, her phlegmatic ticket somewhere. Somehow, some time later, it was morning.
* * *
Benny had told her on their first date-that-was-not-quite-a-date that he was dying. A lung disease. Genetic, autosomal recessive, but not cystic fibrosis.
“But not for a long time yet,” he said, laughing, defusing her response. “Heck, I might be dying more slowly than you. People live with this thing for quite a long time now.”
She nodded slowly. He was large and captivating, a man who carried the bulk of himself handsomely. The word rugged kept coming to her mind, and yet he was a teacher. And a painter. He had won awards – famous in a minor sort of way, famous among the cognoscenti.
“CF gets all the buzz, of course,” he continued. “And what I’ve got, well, similar, same end result, but no glamour.” He laughed, then broke into a fit of coughing.
They’d met in AA. Benny was an AA veteran whereas she was a relative newbie, still white-knuckling it, still doubtful of whatever guiding force all the others seemed to have found, still teetering through the first of the twelve steps.
“And already working that thirteenth step,” her friend Lu, also an AA old-timer, had declared in her sing-song voice when Mara told her after a meeting.
She’d blushed and nodded. She’d been drawn to Benny. She couldn’t help herself. And yet she should have kept her distance.
Reasons included: Benny was married. She had a boyfriend, Raoul, who made good money working as a mechanic. She had one year of semi-fragile sobriety. Benny had twins with his wife.
And yet, and yet.
When he’d asked to paint her after a meeting, she’d cackled at the cliché. She’d been aware of his presence for some time at that point, had sensed the way his eyes followed her, how he tracked her movement through the church basement where they met.
“That’s the line you’re using?”
“You assume I’m using a line.”
She’d smiled, waiting for this to prove to be a joke, but he’d nodded, pressing his hands together. He had large, dry, capable-looking hands – hands you could imagine fixing things or punching someone in a bar fight. It was harder to imagine these same hands holding a paintbrush, making fine strokes across canvas.
“Please. Nothing improper.”
And that was how she had found herself naked, reclining on a plush blue bath towel in a pool of sunlight in his converted-garage studio. Naked on the first date – but it wasn’t a date, really, was it? She lay there, feeling herself go into a trance-like state while the sun warmed her limbs and Benny worked. The silence was punctuated only by the sound of his brush and an occasional cough. She had the strange feeling that he was seeing something in her that no one else yet had – some potential or insight, something that suggested she was more than a recovering alcoholic who worked days as an administrative assistant in an office and nights in a diner for tips.
When he was finished, he wrapped her in a big, white bathrobe, made them both cups of tea, and they talked. She noted how careful he’d been, averting his eyes as he’d put the robe on her shoulder like he knew that once he was no longer painting her, the normal social boundaries applied. He was scrupulous to avoid touching her directly.
“I’d like to show you something,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him. She padded quietly behind him to the far corner of the garage studio, waiting as he pulled out three canvases and uncovered them, then stepped aside. He watched her for her reaction.
The paintings. They were of her.
She recognized herself immediately: the first painting, blue-tinged and moody, showed her in profile, lost in thought. The second was a figure depicted at a distance in a smudgy woodland dusk, and yet she could tell by the slight hitch in the shoulder, the angle of the head, that it was her. And the third was a straightforward portrait, Mara looking head-on, something troubled and mysterious in her eyes, suggesting either imminent confrontation or tears. The woman in the painting contained a depth and seriousness that left her feeling unspeakably grateful to Benny – grateful that he’d somehow seen past all her nervous failures and unstarted ideas to this, whatever this was. It was there, in the paintings: proof. He’d been painting her already, painting her all along.
“I have a tendency to paint the things I want,” he said, and she blushed. “I paint things into being. Nature has had her day.”
He smiled, half-jokingly at first, but then, from the way he looked at her, she decided he meant what he said. He had, she’d noticed already, a magpie-love of language, cribbing bright bits, stealing shiny phrases. She’d often sense that he was quoting something, as if from a big, invisible book. He continued to hold her gaze until her cheeks burned, and she found herself admiring his utter confidence.
“Do you believe in fate? Destiny?” Benny asked her. He could deliver words like this – words that would be mere tin coming from anyone else, but from him, they were gold.
She couldn’t tell if he was spinning her another line, reeling her in even harder. She studied him for a moment, his kind brown eyes serious. Later, when she confided to her friend Lu an approximated version of this exchange, the portraits already painted in the garage, Lu had shrieked with laughter and declared this either the most romantic story she’d ever heard, or the most stalker-ish.
“I guess so.”
“I think you’re meant for something more,” he announced solemnly. “I think you’re meant for me.”
She’d nodded and felt something large and bursting rise up between them – a ripe peach splitting, big and warm and inevitable as the sun – but still they had not touched, not yet. It ran deeper than that with them; she felt she knew this already. He’d seen something promising in her, something she’d dreamed might be there all along.
* * *
Mara slept hard into the next morning, long after the summer heat had intensified in the bedroom. She was sweating by the time she walked into the kitchen. Benny had left the pot of coffee on, and she saw that he must have gotten supplies from the nearest store, fifteen miles or so away. She poured herself a mug and wandered toward the spare room, out of which spilled a cello concerto. Benny liked music while he worked.
She tapped on the door and pushed it open, just as he turned to see her.
“Sleepyhead,” he said, paintbrush poised in midair.
“I got woken up last night. Remember? The animal in the attic?”
He shook his head, smiling at her fondly, as if she were an inventive child.
“We should call an exterminator. Or animal control. I don’t know. Who do you call for an animal trapped in an attic?”
“It’s probably a squirrel. Or a raccoon,” Benny said. “We can let the owner know, but for now, I think it’s alright. It’s happy up there. It won’t bother us.”
She shivered even though the house was warm now, almost too hot. Something about the living heat and fur of the creature, knowing it was above them, breathing – it unnerved her.
“It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” Benny remarked, clearing his throat.
She sipped her coffee and glanced at the ceiling, almost unconsciously. True, the animal was completely silent now. But probably it was nocturnal. She envisioned it, vague and brown-furred, asleep in a corner nestled near a box of Christmas decorations and a plastic container of old sweaters.
Benny turned back to his canvas.
“I’m on a mandatory schedule,” he declared. “You are, too. No more talking until after lunch. Go write.”
He raised his paintbrush with a flourish, and she nodded, turning and closing the door behind her.
She had already wasted half of their first morning. This was no start. In addition to having an interlude together, finally free from the tearful remonstrations of Raoul (who’d yelled at them, obviously intoxicated, outside of Benny’s studio) and the icy messages from Benny’s wife, this was supposed to be a time for her too to tap into some dormant creative force. She would write something. For so long, she’d felt a sensitivity to things. In school, her teachers had made note of it – the way her ear was tuned to language, how she noticed little details – the flicker of iridescence on a pigeon, the chortle of plumbing at night. She was a too-sensitive girl, born into a loud, chaotic household, destined to be either an artist or simply a sufferer. So she’d grown up into a person who thought of herself as creative but who was always ever just on the brink of creating. Then: all those blackout years, evenings blurred with laughter and cheap wine, bad boyfriends, and that constant worry-cloud of debt, the ever-present menace of poverty that kept her with those bad boyfriends.
And now: Benny. Heavy, broad-shouldered, capable Benny, who was frugal by principle but who did not know the true specter of those anxieties. She was finally sober. He saw something soulful in her, something he wanted to draw out. She would write poetry.
She took her notebook and laptop along with a second cup of coffee back to the screened‑in porch. A trio of deer, dark-eyed and bold, bolted across the backyard. Her mind was like those deer. She wondered when Benny would stop for lunch, when they would lounge like lizards in the sun, when they would make love lazily on that too-small, lumpy bed. She felt pleasantly drowsy now, the morning shot. She let her eyes close and knew she would get nothing done.
She woke up to Benny nuzzling her shoulder and only then did she realize she’d fallen asleep in her chair. The long shadows cast through the trees in the backyard showed it was later, much later. The afternoon.
“Sleepy girl,” Benny said fondly. “The bird is on the wing.”
The notepad on her lap was empty. Benny was kissing the length of her neck, nibbling as if it were an ear of summer corn – sumptuous, a short-lived delicacy, but wasn’t that just everything? He had a way of savoring it all.
“Come with me,” he said, and she let her notepad fall off her lap, let herself be guided inside with his big rough hands, let herself be pulled against him, his consuming warmth – always distracting her from some thought, some sound in the distance that she could never fully discern.
* * *
When Benny had told her that he was being referred for the lung transplantation list, he spoke about this as if it were merely a precaution, like getting a flu shot or taking a multivitamin. He told her when they were sprawled, flushed and naked, on his bed back home, a photo of his snaggle-toothed twins grinning at her lewdly from a nearby shelf. She’d wanted to turn the frame facedown but didn’t want to be the sort of person who was flustered by such things. Your boyfriend’s children, your boyfriend’s ex‑wife, your boyfriend’s chronic lung disease, your boyfriend’s impending lung transplant. The glistening lungs of a dead person being lifted by gloved hands and placed gently into the maw of your boyfriend’s open chest.
“That means your lungs are very bad,” she said without inflection, staring down the twins in their frame.
“I told you that the moment I met you.”
He coughed, then reached for an inhaler on the bedside table and took a long, slow, drag.
“But that’s worse than I thought.”
She could feel the threat of something pass over her like a shadow, a tightening in the corners of her eyes that she recognized as tears forming. If there was one thing Benny couldn’t stand, it was weeping. Weakness. Weakness and self-pity. Benny would gobble weakness up with his great, life-loving jaws. He had no use for it.
He laughed his big, hoarse laugh.
“Moving up the list can take time. I qualify, based on my lung function. My doctors insisted. My parents insisted. You know how they are – at every hospital fundraising event, waiting at the heels of my pulmonologists whether I like it or not.”
She nodded. She’d heard about Benny’s parents, who embarrassed him. He avoided them for the most part, but she’d seen photos – stiff-lipped people with careful hair and worried eyes, dressed always in formal attire. They were gala-goers, charity-ball-throwers, alumni donors. Benny said they’d been this way since he’d been a child – throwing money at the institutional gods, an act of appeasement meant to prolong and save their only child. Caution was their religion, money their social currency. They were the eponymous donors after whom a wing was named in the children’s hospital where Benny had spent intervals of his childhood.
Mara had never met Benny’s parents, but in a way, she felt she understood them better than she understood Benny. Benny, with his careless ease, his unworried cheer, haunted by neither the past nor the future, was unfathomable to her.
“Okay,” she said cautiously, studying his face for any further clue of something dreadful. “It’s no big deal then.”
He laughed again.
“No bigger deal than all the rest,” he said, opening his palm to her as if with some offering. “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, et cetera. True for us all, my darling. Gather ye rosebuds, Mara. I’m gathering mine.”
He spoke like this, in allusions she might have easily recognized had she lived a different life – grown up with book-loving, moneyed parents, gone to college – but she did not. And yet, always, she felt she gleaned what he intended anyway. So she let herself melt against the warm bulk of him, comforted by the steady rise and fall of his chest. Alive, alive, alive.
* * *
They had a summer feast that night, and Mara realized that she had not heard the animal for the entirety of that day. Maybe it had left the attic. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing: invented a creature out of snatches of country sounds. That took a kind of creative ingenuity, she thought, cutting the last slice of fragrant tomato that Benny had picked up from a local farmer’s roadside stall.
“Just a hint of salt,” Benny cautioned her as she arranged the sliced tomatoes on a plate. He loved food in the way of a man who took all his pleasures seriously. Real tomatoes, summer tomatoes, he’d instructed, should not be adulterated.
Mara shucked corn next, letting the silk fall to the sink and stick to her fingers.
“You got good work done today?” she asked him.
His attention was on the okra he was frying on the stovetop – a childhood favorite he’d insisted on.
He nodded.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s a series that’s important to me. I’m closing in on it.”
He offered her a secretive smile, giving the okra a little stir with a spatula. She knew he did not like to show her his work before it was finished. He was very private this way; perhaps the only way in which she felt he held himself at a distance from her.
“Take a bite of this,” she said, taking a triangle of watermelon from a platter and offering it to him. He bit, and juices ran down her arm, and he smiled at her.
“Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,” he said, then kissed her, his mouth tasting of watermelon. The okra popped and spit in the pan.
He gave her the feeling that she would surely rupture if she did not make something, Mara realized. She would wake up tomorrow and start writing. She would prove herself to be the person he saw in her: a person who dreamed things into reality, sweet to tongue and sound to eye. She would be more like Benny.
She even admired the way he ate, with such gusto and relish, closing his eyes in pleasure at each precise flavor. It made her feel timid, a woman of blanched winter supermarket tomatoes and bagged white bread. But she vowed to be more like him. More alive.
* * *
That night, long after they’d washed the dishes and gone to bed, Mara found she could not sleep. The animal, so far at least, remained quiet overhead, yet she found herself anticipating its movements. It would walk soon. It would prowl. Benny lay sleeping beside her, the peaceful sleep of a man contented with himself and all around him. The little bedroom seemed suddenly stifling, so she got up.
She walked to the screened porch out back and sat in the rocking chair, listening to the steady, mechanized whir of crickets and frogs; the loudness of country silence. She sat there, attempting to be contemplative but shivering.
Back inside, she busied herself drying dishes from the drying rack and putting them back in the cabinets. She still felt a restlessness, a discontent verging on fear, and the fact occurred to her: she was nothing without Benny.
In the waking hours, this fact was obliterated by his all-encompassing presence. She glowed in his reflected light, borne into luminescence by her proximity to him. But when he was asleep, absent, she felt herself sink into an old, familiar, deep terror. A nothingness. She’d made it this far, and without the radiance of his being, she was nothing.
This was the old terror, she realized now, that led to the drinking. Drinking muddied the sharp edges, blurred the margins of her terror. And now, she faced nights like this, with nothing.
She wandered over to the room Benny had designated as his studio and opened the door slowly, turning on the light.
The room still smelled of Benny: his paints, his paint thinner, the specific deodorant he wore. He was an athletic painter, often sweating through the t‑shirts he wore while he worked. She picked up a clean paintbrush and flicked it under her chin. A stack of stretched canvases were propped against a wall. She thumbed one edge and tilted it back. The first was blank. But the second appeared to be finished.
It was a country scene, with a long, winding road and a large tree – an oak, maybe. The colors on the painting indicated dusk. The scene was almost idyllic except for the car Benny had painted accordioned against the tree. Crushed. She could see little brush work indicating smoke, flames. If she examined it closely she could make out the smallest indication of a figure – just a shadow, really, some black gesso hinting at a profile – crumpled against a steering wheel.
A coldness seized her, and she almost dropped the canvas. There was the smallest thump overhead, and she knew then that the animal had awakened too; perhaps she had summoned it. Instead of walking away, she felt compelled now to look at more of Benny’s recent work.
The next canvas appeared to be an elaboration of the initial scene. The car was larger in the foreground and surrounded by the smudgy yellows of headlights of emergency vehicles. She squinted, trying to make out the driver, but could only see indications of other figures scurrying around, attempting a rescue.
The animal was above her now. She could sense it listening. There was the slow scritch-scratch of claws. Although it made no sense, she had the queasy feeling the animal knew what she was up to, knew that she was engaged in a violation of some sort.
Another canvas showed the same country road, darker now, a full moon out, with the debris of the smashed car still against the tree and the rear lights of an ambulance speeding away.
There was a final canvas still sitting on Benny’s easel, and she turned now to it, the cold feeling having settled into her bones. It took her a moment at first to make out what this painting was – a departure, it seemed, from the initial triptych. She moved closer, realizing as she did that what at first appeared to be two large blobs were actually a delicately rendered set of lungs. Nothing more. The lungs took up the entire canvas – life-sized. She could discern now the thready indication of the bronchial tree, the alveoli. The image had the excruciating accuracy of a medical illustration. Healthy lungs, she knew immediately. New lungs. Lungs for Benny. The lungs he wanted and would get.
Mara felt a catch in her own chest and backed away slowly, turning the light off and closing the door.
All night, she listened to the wild thing above her drag itself, heavy-knuckled, across the attic floor. All night, she wondered what the creature above might want from them – from her – but she said nothing. She did not wake Benny.
When morning broke and Benny kissed her, Mara felt as pale and lightheaded as a Victorian lady in one of his old art illustration books.
“I see a lily on thy brow,” he said, pressing one hand against her forehead.
But she shook her head, said it was nothing that ibuprofen couldn’t take care of, ignored the thought of whose lungs those were in the next room.
* * *
The animal grew bolder as weeks passed and the summer days deepened. He moved in the daytime now, alert, it seemed, to where they were in the house. Mara heard him now when she poured her coffee in the morning – a barely perceptible snuffling just above her. It, he, unnerved her; she could hardly think. Her hands shook in the old way, the way she used to know how to cure with a drink.
“Surely you heard that?” she asked.
Benny was already finishing his breakfast, his hair still wild from sleeping. She, of course, had spent another restless night roiling in the sheets like a tiny sailboat in a rollicking ocean. She hadn’t slept well in days, weeks. Not since they’d gotten here, really. She was exhausted. It was the animal’s fault.
“Definitely a squirrel,” he said peaceably.
“I don’t like it.”
He shrugged, taking a last sip from his mug.
“I can hear it breathing over us at night,” she added.
Benny raised an eyebrow at her.
“You can hear me breathing at night. I’m a very loud breather.”
She shook her head.
“I know how you sound. This is different.”
He smiled slightly.
“After the transplant, it’ll be so much more quiet you won’t know what to think. You’ll think I’ve stopped breathing and shake me awake. How’s that for irony? I’ll finally breathe so quietly you’ll think I’m dead.”
He smiled like the thought amused him. She’d noticed by now that his sense of humor was often not really a sense of humor at all but rather a way of saying things that were uncomfortable with great satisfaction.
“You sound so certain,” Mara said.
He shrugged again and kissed her.
‘‘Like attracts like,” he said. “Remember that book that was so popular awhile back? That was the big secret. One I’ve known all along.” He chuckled slightly.
She felt headachy and did not find his kiss, his flippancy, to be charming. Her eyes held an ache under them, puffy with nights of sleeplessness. And still, she had not written anything. She spent the rest of that morning daydreaming of the perfect gin and tonic, glass sweating slightly in her hand, the first sip so cold, very cold, while Benny painted to the swooping melody of a piano concerto in the next room.
* * *
When Benny found Mara after lunch, she’d just about managed to pry the lock off the door to the attic with an old brick she’d found in the front yard. She was sweating, one of her thumbs already swelling from where she’d inadvertently bashed it.
“Jesus, Mara,” he said. He almost sounded frustrated, and he was never frustrated by anything. Imperturbable, her Benny.
She shook her head, brushing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. The animal had sensed her presence and retreated to a further corner of the attic. She could envision it crouched there, its matted fur exuding a thick must, eyes flashing narrow glints.
She did not answer him even though he stood there, arms crossed, awaiting a response. Instead, she gave the lock several more hard whacks. When the padlock finally broke, she lifted it above her like a trophy, triumphant. Benny sighed loudly and turned away, but this did not stop her. She pushed, and the attic door opened with a groan. The light, when she found it, illuminated stacks and stacks of dusty cardboard boxes. There was no animal in sight.
Benny shook his head.
“Mara.”
“If you aren’t helping, then – ” and she shoved him away. It was a gentle shove, but her voice was so brusque she surprised herself. Usually she didn’t talk like that to Benny. He looked stung for a moment, then chastened, like a little boy.
She was already shifting aside the first few boxes when he turned to go.
“I’m not having any part of this,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s pointless.”
She wasn’t listening. Her ears were trained instead for the faintest scuttle. She listened for the soft thump of its tail against the wood floor. She would find the animal – and what? She hadn’t thought that far. And yet she had the unshakeable certitude she’d know what to do once she found it.
The trouble was that there were so many boxes: round boxes, oblong boxes, boxes the size of wardrobes, rectangular boxes, boxes in every shape and size. It was a wonder that the owner could possibly have so much he needed to store. Decades and decades worth of boxes, a worthless accumulation of stuff. She moved through the boxes as through a dusty, brown forest – a landscape of hidden nooks and dead-ends and perfect hiding spots. Her hands were shaking again, she noticed. She would simply have to search in and around each box, one by one.
Mara did not stop searching the attic when Benny called up to her for dinner. She could smell basil and something spicy, a hint of lime. He did not call for her again. Her stomach grumbled, but she was unwavering. A yellow disc of light through the one attic window dwindled and then ultimately dissolved.
Benny called up that he was going to bed and she should too, but she was digging through a pile of old clothes on her hands and knees with no intention of stopping. She didn’t answer him. There was only so much space up here, and she would go through every inch. She would meet this animal, eye to eye, after so long – a lifetime, it seemed. Yes. She’d been waiting an entire lifetime. She would finally meet this thing after all.
When the landline rang in the wee hours of the morning, splitting the rural quiet with its obscene cry – after weeks during which no one had called them on that line at all, weeks during which she’d nearly forgotten the landline’s existence – she was so close to where she was certain the animal crouched, hidden, that she didn’t even pause to wonder who might be bothering them at such an hour.
“Mara?” Benny called, her name bouncing against the looming piles of boxes. “Mara? It’s happening. It’s all happening.”
But she did not answer at that point, so close was she to the animal, hunched and waiting herself, every muscle coiled – so close that she could feel its frightened breath, its curled claws, its sour odor sharp in her nose and almost human.
Joanna Pearson’s stories have appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, The Hopkins Review, New Madrid, and Mississippi Review.