“How did you say he fell?”
She doesn’t plan to tell Scott, but as soon as he walks in the door, Alec tugs his sleeve and says, “Mommy didn’t catch me so I fall and the doctor say I lucky!”
“How much is that stunt going to cost us?” Scott asks, and Cory shrugs, not sure if the stunt is Alec’s fall, her letting him on the park’s climbing wall, or her taking him to the ER. If Scott knew about her backyard vigils he’d blame her outright. If she weren’t so tired she’d have caught Alec like she promised.
At playgroup one of the women mentions that two neighborhood cats have gone missing and Cory brings up the coyotes. Everyone shrugs—“Well, that’s what happens when you let your pets roam.” No one seems concerned, even when Cory points out that the coyotes have been seen in the middle of the day.
“That means they’ve lost their fear of us.”
The women all look at her as if to ask, “What is there to fear?”
In the second week of her vigil, a new scrabbling sound and there he is, coming snout-first under the fence. Cory doesn’t move, letting him come fully under the fence and muscle his way through the rugosas. Pieces of the shrub are caught in his fur. He shakes the thorns free, then raises his head and sniffs. His erect ears quiver. What can he detect? Can he smell her boy’s peanut-butter breath? Hear the murmur of his toddler dreams? Cory’s hand is on the rough tape above the bat’s knob. She closes her fingers around it, feeling the gritty texture.
The coyote moves toward the house slowly, with a self-consciousness that makes her sure he knows something is different about the yard tonight. How often has he been here? Does he know the lay of the land as well as she does? Better? Cory eases to a stand and the coyote turns to her. Even in such dark, between the hundreds of switches dense with leaves, he seems to catch her eye. Evidence of nocturnal talents denied her and more proof, she thinks, that we aren’t God’s favorite.
Cory comes from beneath the willow’s protection, the bat held ready to strike, her feet swift on the familiar lumps of grass. The animal runs, and Cory’s nerve, about to falter, strengthens. Her shoulders are stiff and her hips click at full extension as they haven’t since she was ten, playing tag. “Stay away from my boy,” she huffs, out of shape, her breath held low in her stomach. “Stay the fuck away from him,” she snarls, as the coyote reaches the rugosas. She’s behind him and then he’s gone and she’s tangled, tripping, falling on the useless roses.
The next morning Scott notices scratches on her face: long, narrow red welts, the dermatographia of pursuit. Or escape.
“I was in the woods yesterday, dumping out those old flowerpots. I think I’m having a reaction.”
He looks at her quizzically. “I didn’t notice that last night.”
She shrugs. “Delayed, I guess.”
•
For their wedding anniversary Scott asks his mother to babysit and makes reservations at Cory’s favorite restaurant. During dinner she resists the urge to call home, but she does keep the phone on the table, where she’ll be sure to hear it ring. Over dessert, Scott brings up having another baby. “It’d be good for Alec to share you.” In the last year he’s become concerned that Alec is too attached to Cory, unaccustomed to being without her for even an hour.
Cory reminds him — falsely — that she’s been off the pill for months.
“We haven’t really been trying, though.” He wiggles his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
She laughs. “Let’s get to it then,” she says, knowing her son is safe. Her attention cannot be divided.
Alec’s moods don’t improve. One night he wakes crying and Scott discovers she’s not in the house. Cory doesn’t hear the crying — windows closed, air-conditioning on — but she sees the light go on in Alec’s room. Before she can get to the house, the slider opens and Scott’s there. “What are you doing?”
She’s holding the bat. “I thought I heard someone out here.”
“So you came out by yourself with a kid’s baseball bat?”
Cory hadn’t realized until then the bat was small and remarkably light. She swings at him in mock menace. “I could do you some damage.”
Alec begins to complain of stomach pains and when Cory takes him to the doctor and insists they scan him, they find a tumor. More tests are ordered. For a week she cannot eat. She exists on the brink of tears, her throat tight and chest weighted, as if someone is sitting on it. She sleeps next to Alec’s bed on the floor, attuned to sounds of choking or a change in his breathing. She imagines the tumor expanding like a balloon. Can it creep into his throat overnight, like the coyote into their yard? How foolish of her to think cancer would let her off the hook.
When Alec plays outside, she sits in the patio chairs with the baseball bat by her side, rehearsing what she’ll do, how she’ll spot the coyote coming up behind the pine, in the cover of the forsythias. How she’ll rush him, yelling for Alec to run inside. Run, run as fast as you can!
Then on Thursday at ten a.m. the doctor calls: the new tests confirm it’s not a tumor, but a harmless malformation.
She gets a second opinion, then a third and fourth. At that point she’s run out of doctors in her insurance network and Scott insists she stop. “You’re driving everyone crazy, especially poor Alec.”
Cory buys a gun, locks the bullets in one box and the gun in another, carries the keys in her pocket. At target practice, the recoil hurts her arm, but the ache reassures. She’s taking action.
Scott thinks she’s at yoga. He’s happy to be trusted again. “I won’t let him out of my sight.”
At night she takes the baby monitor outside with her. Alone, waiting for that scrabbling noise or a change in her son’s breathing, she would find the predictable company of the neighbors, the faint, faint odor of their smoke, a comfort — if only she knew what the hell they were saying.
On the first chilly night in September he emerges from between the thorny roses. Cory’s attention has been on the neighbors, certain words they use over and over that she is trying to memorize so she can look them up later. When the coyote finally catches in her peripheral vision, she freezes, then, regaining her focus, slides the magazine in as quietly as possible. She’s placed some dog food and meat scraps in a bowl behind the pine. He finds them and begins to eat. Cory parts the willow’s whip-like branches and creeps across the grass, moving closer than necessary for a foolproof shot. She cannot miss, cannot inflict merely leg wounds.
His shoulders are low, his tail down, his face intent on its find. Under the pine the ground changes to a million brittle needles. Crunch and his head turns. She raises the gun, thinks aim, steady, squeeze. It’s only a few seconds before she realizes she’s waiting for him to lunge. Come get me you motherfucker. She can’t shoot him otherwise. This shocks her. Wasn’t that the plan? Preemptive strike.
She moves closer. The animal takes a step back, easily clearing the lowest branch, and that’s when Cory realizes it’s a pup. The males strike out on their own in fall.
“Come on,” she begs. “Come get me.”
The pup sniffs the air, his tail still low, then takes off at a speed she didn’t think they had and in a second is gone to the darkness, the trees, the future.
In the house Scott sits slumped forward on the couch. Out the window, the pine where Cory failed to protect their son is in full view.