She was my first dog, in fact. I kept forgetting that.
I saw someone walking across the pasture toward the house. When the person got closer, he looked familiar, although I still couldn’t tell or remember just who he might be. He smiled and waved when he was just a stone’s throw away, maybe, and I waved back, and he walked up to the house and stood in the yard a few feet away from the edge of the porch and looked up at me. He was a tall man, dark hair cropped short and receding in a widow’s peak, heavy beard shadow, horn-rimmed glasses, a kind expression. He wore a conservative, narrow-lapeled suit and a modest narrow necktie.
“You look familiar,” I said.
He said, “I’m Lowell Bishop, your sixth-grade teacher.”
“Oh,” I said. “My God. Mr. Bishop. I always wondered what happened to you.”
Mr. Bishop had been a substitute, that year, for another teacher who’d gone on unexpected maternity leave. He hadn’t been a very good teacher, kind of lazy, actually, but I’d liked him and always hoped he’d had a good life after leaving our school and going on to whatever his next, probably temporary, job may have been. He’d been the only teacher who hadn’t treated me as if I were invisible.
“I did all right,” Mr. Bishop said. “I went back to school. Psychology. I was still fairly young.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I’d kind of worried about you.”
He laughed. “I don’t doubt you did.”
Mr. Bishop had rented a garage apartment a block or so from my home while he’d lived in town. And on the day after school ended, I’d gone over there to say goodbye. When I knocked, he came to the door wearing his school trousers and an undershirt, the kind without sleeves, and he needed a shave, and behind him in the little kitchen area were two other men in similar shape, sitting at the dining table with hands of cards before them, a whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, and cigarette smoke filled the dingy light in there.
“Hey there!” Mr. Bishop had boomed at me. “Come on in!”
I declined and told him I just wanted to say goodbye.
“Suit yourself,” Mr. Bishop said. “But you be good, be a good student, now. If I come back through here in a couple of years and you’re not being a good student, I’m going to beat the crap out of you!” And he laughed. I all but ran away from his place.
So I had worried that Mr. Bishop was just an affable, unfortunate drunk.
I said to him now, standing there somehow in my front yard at our house in the country, some nine years later, “What are you doing here, Mr. Bishop?”
He smiled up at me in a curious and almost sad kind of way for a long moment before replying.
“I’ve come to tell you that now you have to go back to where you came from,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll know when you get there,” he said. “We just want you to know that we appreciate your cooperation.”
After a moment, I said, “With what?”
Olivia stepped out onto the porch beside me then. She smiled and nodded to Mr. Bishop. She was holding Leo against her hip, and he was clinging to her as if something had upset him, inside.
“Is everything okay?” she said to me.
I was gazing at them, my beautiful little family, and so in love I thought I might be drawn into their eyes and entirely absorbed, and disappear from the world, and be nothing but some barely traceable element in their very cells.
And then the light began to fade from the sky as if the arrival of evening had accelerated, the turning of the earth somehow sped up, and the image of Mr. Bishop before us darkened along with the rest of the world and was gone.
OLIVIA WAS STILL PREGNANT, of course. We’d been out for only a couple of days. Our parents stood next to our hospital beds. Our mothers were tearful, holding our hands. Our fathers seemed stunned, hands in their pockets, standing behind our mothers, rocked back on the heels of their shoes. The nurse disappeared and a few moments later came back in with a doctor.
“Well, well, what have we here?” the doctor said. He checked Olivia’s pulse, looked at her pupils, then did the same with me. He turned to our stunned parents and said, in a bright manner, “May we have a few minutes alone with these two?”
Our parents, like confused tourists in a foreign country, stared at him for a moment and then nodded and shuffled out of the room, bumping into each other trying to let one another out of the door before them.
The nurse stepped forward to stand beside the doctor. They stood there looking at us, smiling in an odd kind of way, I thought.
“Hello,” the doctor said then. Olivia and I looked at each other from across the little space between our beds.
“How’ve you been?” the nurse said then.
They looked nothing like the couple from the asylum, except there was something in their manner that was exactly that way.
Olivia watched them, a kind of vacant look on her face.
“I’ve been fine,” I said then, carefully.
“How did you like your experience?” the nurse said.
The doctor raised his eyebrows, waiting for one of us to reply. He tapped at his clipboard but didn’t necessarily seem impatient.
“What do you mean?” Olivia said.
The doctor laughed softly to himself, and scratched at an ear.
“Very different,” the nurse said, looking from the one of us to the other. “You’ll have to discuss that, soon enough.”
“What are you talking about?” Olivia said. “What are they talking about?” she said to me.
“You should have told her about us, I suppose,” the doctor said to me.
“Told me what?” Olivia said.
The strangest thing was, I was pretty sure I’d seen this doctor, off duty of course, around the old country club. He had a rather stolid expression, but also a head of neatly clipped, boyish blond hair. I’d never seen the nurse before. She was older than the doctor, with an old-fashioned perm, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, but with red lipstick and bright red nails, and a querulous expression.
“We just woke up,” I said.
“It’s not important,” the nurse said to the doctor.
“I will attempt to be more patient with the patient,” the doctor said. “How’d you like the lion?” he said to me then.
After a moment, I said, “It was amazing,” and then I felt something like a deep sadness well up in me.
“Very creative,” the doctor said. “Impressive.”
“And the fish,” the nurse said.
“And the frequent, vigorous intercourse,” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows again and smiling.
That made me a little bit angry, that.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “We’re scientists. I was only joking.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” I said.
He seemed amused.
“The house in the country, though, and the various elements of sentimental perfection,” he said. “Something of a disappointment, there.”
“They’re very young,” the nurse said to him. “It’s a long shot, to expect much better.”
“Interesting, isn’t it,” he said to me, “how curiously time moves when it’s decoupled from physicality.”
“Yeah,” I said vaguely.
“What in the world are y’all talking about?” Olivia said. She looked frightened.
“The sixth-grade teacher, though,” he said. “That was a nice touch.”
“Touching, actually,” she said.
The doctor laughed his quiet laugh again.
“You did that,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“It was all certainly more substantial than hers,” she said. “How did you like your experience, sweetheart?”