Chapter 3: Crisis, of the First Part

“I don’t understand it.” Colin poured his first cup of coffee into his favorite dancing monkey mug and popped it into the microwave. “It just isn’t working.”

Sylvia, who had been up for three hours before him, sat at the kitchen table sipping her coffee slowly and looked up. Her eyes were red.

“We have to talk,” she said.

“I’ve put too much time into this novel, and for what?”

“Colin . . .”

“You’re right. I haven’t put that much time into it. The thing is, I expected more of response. I’m selling something you can’t get from anywhere else. I’m selling people their dreams, or at least a reasonable facsimile, thereof. Maybe people . . .”

“Colin . . .” she interrupted.

The microwave beeped. Colin sat down across from Sylvia, took a too-hot sip from his coffee, and continued, “. . . maybe people don’t need those sorts of dreams anymore. Maybe they’re really happy having their own stories handed to them, and it’s just something I don’t understand. Maybe what people really want is to putter around in whatever six-cylinder sedan Madison Avenue says will boost your libido and the libido of those around you. Maybe people are actually happy having their lives handed to them and letting their sofa’s ratio of cushion-to-ass determine how well they sleep at night. Maybe I don’t really know what people want or how to give someone a moment that will have half as much meaning to them as a BLT. Maybe, I just don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Maybe . . .”

“Colin, slow down.”

Colin took another sip of his coffee. It was cool enough. “Maybe the message is just muddled. I just need the project to resonate with one person and for that one person to make a donation. No one wants to be the first in anything. Sure, we’re all like, look at that, first man on the moon, but maybe Armstrong actually got the short straw. Maybe NASA figured if anyone’s expendable, it’s that guy.  But hell, so far, I’ve only gotten like 25 hits, and half of those were me editing the damned thing. All I have to do is convince people—people who might not otherwise stick around long enough to read an entire novel, that this is different, somehow worth reading, that the novel will morph and change to their dreams, that this string of sentences and fragments is something worth paying attention to, that, at the very least, it can take them away from themselves.

“Maybe they aren’t listening.” She glared at him.

“I’m glad you understand.”

“I’m not sure I do, but you’re not listening. We need to talk.”

“Sorry. It’s just . . .”

“Colin.”

“Sorry. I know, I know. What did you want to talk about?”

“My unemployment ended.”

Although Colin had known this moment could come any day, he was still unprepared for the news. He’d somehow managed to work up enough self-delusion to carry him through the first blow of his own unemployment ending a month earlier. He still had managed to believe—somehow—that Sylvia’s unemployment would last at least through the 4th of July holiday and that the Democrats would break the Republican filibuster—either by making some paltry concession on immigration, by changing the Senatorial rules to eliminate the need for a supermajority, or by simply shaming their Republican colleagues into a momentary retreat. Yet, here the news was, tightening around his neck like a boa constrictor. He struggled, momentarily, for breath. He sought out any of the words that had, a few moments before, poured from his mouth in an unceasing stream. He could find none.

Jacob, their beagle, having woken from his second mid-afternoon nap, trotted into the kitchen and stretched a long stretch, then sat directly in front of Colin, staring intently up at him. “The dog needs out. Let’s talk outside.”

They followed Jacob outside and watched as he began to sniff the perimeter of the yard frantically and trotted along the fence line as if he might still track down whatever woodland creature had left behind its scent. Colin kept watching him while Sylvia gazed down at the sun-wilted ménage of spiderwort, calla lilies, dandelions, and hosta that passed for a flowerbed.

“We really do need to do something about those flowers,” she said.

“Do you think someone would buy them?”

“Not helping.”

“Well, we have to do something. How are we on money?”

 “Let’s just say you can put off that vacation to Afghanistan. I have to check, but we’re not making next month’s mortgage without a minor miracle.”

Jacob had found a place to go in the middle of the yard and was looking up at Colin with eyes that almost seemed guilty. Colin turned away, tried to focus his attention on Sylvia, like he thought she deserved.

“Or a job.”

“Right, a minor miracle.”

“Seriously, Sylvia, we should sell something else.”

“Your soul?”

“Too late.”

“You got a raw deal then.”

“Didn’t we all? Let’s just sell everything. Be done with possessions. Move to a commune in West Virginia.”

“West Virginia?”

“I like to be different.”

“I kind of like it here, Colin. I’d kind of like to keep our house.”

Colin sighed. “I know. . .”

“Let’s go inside,” Sylvia suggested, “we can have a drink and . . .”

“Look at porn?”

“No, you perv. We can relax and then start making lists with a slightly calmer mind. We can brainstorm ideas for what to sell.”

“We can also try to come up with other ways to make money.”

“Like your novel idea?”

“Yeah. Fine. Let’s have that drink and talk and list.” Colin turned toward the yard and screamed, “Jacob! Jacob!”

He didn’t hear anything other than Sylvia opening the back door and heading inside. He whistled. “Jacob! Jacob!” Nothing.

He walked out into the yard, peered behind the overgrown peony bushes and under the untrimmed holly shrubs and yew. Jacob was nowhere to be found.

Colin opened the door and screamed, “Sylvia! I can’t find Jacob!” 

Chapter 2: Nesting

It was a night very much like this one. Andrea Parker could not get comfortable in her bed. She tossed and turned on the well-worn guest-room mattress, trying to angle her side into one of the few remaining spots that wasn’t compromised by distended springs. Every thirty minutes or so, she could hear Michael, her long-term boyfriend, banging about in the kitchen in search of another snack to, as he said on countless defensive occasions, stave off the emptiness of not staving off emptiness with pornography or a new video game. Andrea turned over again, clutching her pillow and tried, as she had in childhood, telling herself her own bedtime story, letting the images blaze across her closed eyelids until the faint glow of the nightlight became cragged rock, pebbled shores, a constant clapping of foamed surf, a bank of fog, a fisherman with netting dangling at his side as he plodded toward an unmoving shape, supine at the edge of the sea.

It was a woman, naked and wet with the salty sea. Her auburn hair was matted, clumped. Her pale skin, a field of goose bumps. It was a story Andrea had told herself a thousand times from the cusp of sleep. The fisherman would find her, cover her with his nets, hold her into warmth, and carry her from the violent shore to the edge of a field overlooking the sea and over the threshold of his small stone cottage. He would let her sleep through storm, curled in netting and wool beside the soft crackle of the cottage’s hearth. She would remember nothing when she woke save the taste of leek and salmon from the stew he would spoon feed her. She would struggle for words, until a late night when his name whistled through her lips like birdsong. Piecemeal swaths of Gaelic would cover her like netting until she mastered the word ngrá and let it drape over her, covering what was missing, hiding the loss of something, something like skin.  

Soon, her belly would grow. Soon, there would be children. Soon, they would move further inland, buying one or two sheep from the parents of the children their children played with. Soon, there would be stews and pies that she would prepare, sweating over a larger hearth. All would be love, until the night, that single night, the night that always came, when she would wake to sound of her eldest daughter sifting through her father’s trunk, and she—mother, wife—would nearly know what was missing. That morning, her daughter would show her a ragged net and a pelt of fur she’d found at the very bottom of the trunk, locked within another box. She would take it from her daughter and lift that softest of pelts to her face. She would hold that pelt to her cheek, feeling—though water was nowhere near—the damp of sea, the scent of salt, the sound of a tide cresting with a summer storm. She would hold the skin to her body. She would slip the skin over her body. She would remember. She would leave.

Michael came into the bedroom, cursing quietly as if he couldn’t stop the cascade of expletives but didn’t, exactly, want to wake Andrea.

“What’s wrong?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was . . .” She hesitated. In the five years since she’d moved in with Michael, she’d never been able to articulate her sometime ritual of imagining, “. . .well, I was dreaming, let’s say.”

“About?”

He still didn’t understand. “The same. Now, tell me.”

“Don’t worry. I have some leads.”

“Better than last time?” Andrea turned over and twisted on the lamp.  She sat up, staring at him. She could tell he hadn’t showered all weekend.

Michael sank to a seated position on the edge of the bed, looked into her eyes for a handful of seconds and looked away. He stared into the half-open closet and took a deep breath.

“Why do these conversations always seem to be about me?”

Andrea felt the question like punch in the solar plexus. Five years, she thought, even after five years he thinks the questions have nothing to do with me, that they aren’t about us. She continued staring, felt her eyes harden like crystals.

“Well, what do you want to talk about? Halo?”

“That’s not fair, Andrea.”

She knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but she could already feel her eye beginning to twitch involuntarily. She could already feel the fermenting brew of bilious anger and abyss-bringing sadness welling up within her, so she said it anyway. “Life isn’t fair, Michael. How else do you explain me being with you?”

“I can’t explain that anymore than I can explain why you stopped writing.”
Michael stood up from the bed and walked toward the doorway. “I’ll be on the couch if you need me.”

Andrea sat up in bed and reached for the book on Celtic myth she’d been reading before bed. She knew Michael was—in some ways—right. She did work more on shaping him than on shaping herself. And, she did have trouble articulating to him why now was not the time to attempt a resurrection of her fledging writing career. She needed quiet. She needed contemplation. She needed the right story to click into place the way, long ago, Michael had seemed to click seamlessly into place in the structure she’d made of her life. But what happened then? How had she arrived here in a one-bedroom apartment with a man she hardly knew, no job, and her body still feeling hot as if her skin had been singed from her body? How could she repair the crumbling structures of their lives? Sew hope back onto the edifice like a button on a pair of Michael’s raggedy slacks?

She needed a story that others could slip into, a story that would overflow its sentences, a story like love.

She tried opening the book again. It fell to the chapter on Selkies that she’d read more times than she cared to count. The spine was broken. She tried, again, to slip into the myth, reading through the commentary of middle-aged Brits who couldn’t see the real point of the narrative through their heavy breath-fogged monocles. She closed her eyes, let the story itself return. The netting. The heath’s warmth. The pelt.

She slammed the book shut. Not tonight, she thought.

She flicked on the TV. A corpulent man in pin stripes stood at a chalk board, sketching an outline of Socialism and its, apparently, vampiric dangers. She wondered if the man had ever struggled for more than fifteen minutes in his entire life, if he’d ever changed a tire himself, if he’d ever been laid off because someone who couldn’t remember his name thought that it would be the fastest way to save the company he’d given seven years a few thousand dollars, if he’d ever been on unemployment, if he’d ever watched his unemployment suddenly vanish over a holiday weekend. She doubted it.

Andrea wanted to sleep any trace of the day away. She wanted the fat man in pinstripes to disappear in a sudden flash of light as he did when she flicked off the TV. She wanted what she supposed most women had wanted from the first moment they had found the blessing and curse of speech: she wanted to feel safe. She scanned the bedroom, taking in the paintings her friend Liza had given her the day she left Ohio. Abstractions. Shores. Vistas of salt and sea.

She would show them. Somehow, she would show them.

She pulled herself, heavily, from bed and went to the computer. As if from habit, she checked her email, checked both social networking sites, and then opened a new word document. She would make something, she told herself, something so beautiful and so real that it would outlast the memory of the chubby man in pinstripes. It would silence Michael. It would give her back her skin.

She began to write:

There was a woman, naked and wet with the salty sea. Her auburn hair was matted, clumped.