Himself.
He pushed aside the grape vines and stepped back to get a better view, to gain perspective. Seen from this angle, it was obvious whom the rendering was supposed to represent. Distance flattened out the jagged veerings of the crayon which occurred at each mortared juncture of brick, lent substance to the rough hesitations of line. He was looking at his own face simplified into caricature and magnified fivefold. The receding hairline, the bushy mustache, the thin lips: these were the observations of an adult translated into the artistic language of a child.
Barbara had drawn this picture.
He noticed dirt spots on the brick where mudballs had obviously been thrown at his face.
The question nagged at him: Why? Why had she done all of this?
He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled through the garden, fueled now by his own obsession. There was more here. He knew it. And he would find it if he just kept looking.
He didn't have to look long.
He stopped crawling and stared at the cat's paw protruding from the well-worked ground beneath the largest tomato plant. The paw and its connected portion of leg were pointed straight up, deliberately positioned. Dried blackened blood had seeped into the gray fur from between the closed curled toes.
Maybe Monteith was the name of the cat, Andrew thought. Maybe she accidentally killed a neighbor's cat and had guiltily buried the animal out here to hide the evidence.
But that wasn't like Barbara. Not the Barbara he knew. If she'd accidentally killed a pet, she would have immediately gone to the owner and explained exactly what had happened.
Perhaps, he thought, she had deliberately killed the animal in order to provide nutrients for her soil, for her plants. Or as part of a ritual sacrifice to some witch's earth deity in order to ensure the health of her crop.
He thought of the woodchuck in the garage.
He wondered if there were dead animals hanging in other garages on the street, if pets were buried in other back yards. Perhaps the neighborhood wives took turns meeting at each others' houses while their husbands were gone, performing dark and unnatural acts together. Perhaps that was where Barbara was right now.
Such are the dreams of the everyday housewife.
The tune to the old Glen Campbell song ran through his head, and he suddenly felt like laughing.
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me.
The laughter stopped before it reached his mouth. What if Monteith wasn't the name of an animal at all but the name of a child? What if she had killed and sacrificed a child and had buried the body under the dirt of the garden? If he dug down, below the cat's paw, would he find hands and feet, fingers and toes?
He did not want to know more, he decided. He'd already learned enough. He stood up, wiped his hands on his pants, and began walking back across the yard toward the house.
What would he do when he saw her? Confront her? Suggest that she seek help? Try to find out about her feelings, about why she was doing what she was doing?
Would she look the same to him, he wondered, or had the woodchuck and the snails and the cat and everything else permanently altered the way in which he viewed her? Would he now see insanity behind what would have been perfectly normal eyes, a madwoman beneath the calm exterior?
He didn't know.
It was partially his fault. Why the hell had he come home early? If he had just come home at the normal time, or if Barbara, damn her, had just been home, he never would have found all this. Life would have just continued on as normal.
The question was: Did his newfound knowledge automatically mean that he gave up his right to happiness with Barbara? Part of him said no. So what if she sacrificed animals? She had, in all probability, been doing that for years without his knowledge, and they'd had what he'd always considered a good life. Unless she was unhappy, unless this was all part of some twisted way she was trying to exorcise her negative feelings about their marriage, couldn't he ignore what he had learned and continue on as normal?
Monteith.
It was Monteith he couldn't live with. He could live with the animals, with the fetishes, with the graffiti. If Monteith was some god or demon she worshiped, he could live with that. But the idea that she was seeing another man behind his back, that Monteith was a lover, that he couldn't abide.
Perhaps she was with Monteith now, both of them naked in some sleazy motel room, Barbara screaming wildly, passionately.
But why couldn't he live with that? If she had been doing this for years and it had not affected their relationship until now, why couldn't he just pretend as though he didn't know and continue on as usual? He could do it. It was not out of the question. He would just put it out of his mind, make sure that he did not come home early anymore without first checking with Barbara.
He walked into the house through the garage, walked back to the kitchen, sat down at the table.
He stared at the piece of stationery, but did not pick it up.
Ten minutes later, he heard the sound of a key in the latch. He looked up as Barbara walked in.
Her gaze flitted from his face to the paper and quickly back again.
Was that worry he saw on her features?
"I felt sick," he said dully. "I came home early."
She smiled at him, and the smile was genuine, all tiace of worry gone—if it had been there at all. She walked over to him, patted his head with one hand, picked up the stationery with the other. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "Other than that, how was your day?"
He looked at her, thought for a moment, forced himself to smile back. "Fine," he said slowly. "Everything was fine."
Pillow Talk
When my wife and I were dating, we used to go to this bargain theater and basically see whatever movie happened to be playing that week. One night we sat in front of two young women who were commiserating with each other about their nonexistent love lives. Just before the movie started, one of the young women said that sometimes at night she fell asleep hugging her pillow. It was an odd image, and I found myself wondering if a man would ever do such a thing.
And then I thought, what if a man did?
And what if the pillow hugged him back?
* * *
When my pillow first started talking to me, I ignored it. I only heard it speaking when I drifted into sleep, and I put it down to the inevitable merging of the material world and the dream world which occurs when the waking mind relinquishes its hold on consciousness.
But when I woke up one morning and felt the pillow pulsing beneath my head, I knew something was wrong.
I jumped out of bed, simultaneously throwing the pillow away from me. It landed flat on the floor next to my dresser and was perfectly still. I bent down closely to peer at it but could see nothing out of the ordinary. I touched it with my foot, prodding it, half afraid it would leap up at me and attack, but there was no movement at all. I thought, perhaps, that I had dreamed the whole thing.
Then I heard the pillow speak.
It was a soft voice, whispery and seductive, neither male nor female. At first, it might sound like the rustling of dry sheets on a quiet morning or the gentle stirring of clean linen on a clothesline. But those soft sounds formed human words, turned those words into sentences, used those sentences to express thoughts.