T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The tea was too hot but she drank it anyway, listening to the infuriating hiss of the shower and reminding herself that she hadn’t eaten because he’d denied her dinner, created a scene, acted like a cretin. Like a shit. A little shit who refused to grow up, who wasn’t a man and never would be. After fifteen minutes — he wasn’t showering, he was running the whole of Cachuma Reservoir down the sewer and out to sea — she pushed herself up from the kitchen table, looped her purse over one shoulder and went up the street to Giancarlo’s for a pizza margherita and salad. Giancarlo fluttered over her, too delicate to ask after Tim or why she was dining alone, and she had a glass of Chianti, a single glass, that was all, and by the time she left to walk back to the condo she’d begun to feel better, if only marginally. Tim’s reaction had been petty, mean, hurtful — inexcusable — but the whole thing had been so sudden he hadn’t had a chance to collect himself, to think things through, to think of her, of how she was feeling. He would come around, she was sure he would. Just give him a chance. He was her man. The father of the child growing inside her. She loved him. He loved her. She was sure of it.

She picked up her pace, envisioning him there in the steamed-over bathroom, stepping out of the shower, his muscles lean and workhardened, a sheen of dampness caught in the hair that framed his nipples, dripping from his chin, his moistened lashes. The lights of the shops and restaurants were suspended in a soft nimbus of mist. The eucalyptus rose white-limbed out of the shadows. Cars eased by. A jogger went up the opposite side of the street in a silent silken glide. She was alive all over again, her arms swinging wide, her heels ringing on the pavement. By the time she got to the front door, key in hand, she was thinking of reconciliation, and beyond reconciliation, seduction — she’d been without sex for ten days herself — and of the negligee tucked in the back of her underwear drawer.

The key turned in the lock, the door swung open. She didn’t notice that he’d moved the backpack — that the backpack was gone — not till she called out his name and got no answer. There were two wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. The closet door stood open and his mud-hardened boots lay there on edge in a spill of dirty laundry. His favorite shirt, the one she’d given him — black with an overlay of tropical flowers in bright slashes of yellow — was missing, as was the jacket he liked to wear with it. Ditto his red Converse.

She stayed up till twelve, watching a movie she barely registered, and then went to bed. He never came home. Not that night or the next night either and she wouldn’t call him on his cell, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. To hell with him. He could wither away and die for all she cared. She went about her business as if he didn’t exist, cool with Alicia, indifferent to the protestors, driving to work and back in a trance, cooking for one and losing herself in Micah Stroud and mind-numbing made-for-TV movies. When she got home from work on the third day there were signs that he’d been there — the boots were gone, replaced by the Converse, and the dirty laundry had disappeared — but he didn’t come home that night either. She called her mother because she had to talk to someone, and her mother, to the accompaniment of ice cubes arhythmically clicking against the rim of her cocktail glass, spent a vodka-fueled hour and a half assailing his character, his looks, his upbringing and intelligence, but all it did was open up the hole inside her till it was so wide she could have dropped all of Santa Cruz Island into it. Finally, on the fifth day, he left her a note pinned to the refrigerator beneath a magnet shaped like a fox in profile. I’m sorry , the note read, I know I’m wrong but I can’t help the way I feel. What it is, is I’m just not ready for this. He’d signed it, redundantly, Sorry, Tim .

The next day he was there when she got home and there were flowers on the table and he’d made her a meal and they went straight to bed, both of them starved for it, and he told her he loved her, but still he held back and the next day he was gone again. They talked it out, over and over, face-to-face and on the phone too. Her position was that she was going to have the baby whether he liked it or not and his position was that he wasn’t going to be boxed in and certainly wasn’t going to bow to any ultimatums. In the end he badgered her into making an appointment at Planned Parenthood— Seven billion people , he kept droning, seven billion —and he went with her and talked to the counselor and tried to get her to pin down a day for the procedure. She saw his point — she agreed with him — but her body resisted. November wore on. He was staying with a friend — male — downtown. Every few days he was there when she got home and they made love out of desperation, but it was sad and lonely and mechanical and they both held back, resentful, angry, at war, until finally he announced that he was going to the Farallones and she was left to do what she had to do all on her own.

And now it’s February and she’s sick in the mornings and her body is transforming itself day by day to accommodate the fetus growing inside her and nobody at work knows a thing about it. She’s been out to the island three times since the first of the year, twice with Annabelle and once with Fred Sampson, the biologist from UCSB who’s overseeing the captive breeding program for the foxes, and if she had to stand in the stern of the boat and lose her breakfast over the rail, it was only to be expected because the channel’s notoriously rough in winter, everybody knows that. The good news is that the foxes are thriving. The first six pairs, captured and caged in ’02, produced five kits, three of which were released back into the wild, only to fall prey to the goldens. Late that year they brought in another three pairs, which in addition to the two kits held back and the original six pairs, gave them ten breeding pairs. In all, to this point, four years later, they’ve produced eighty-five offspring, happy enough to breed up their numbers when there’s an abundance of fox chow, handpicked berries, freshly trapped mice and quail eggs available and nothing with claws and wings homing in on them from above. With the goldens gone, or mostly gone, and the balds re-established, it looks as if all the foxes can be released by spring. As for the pigs, Frazier and his hunters — twelve of them, with a lean scrabbling contingent of two dozen dedicated dogs — are working their way systematically through each of the five zones, far ahead of schedule.

Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday, and she observes it alone, with Chinese takeout and a laptop bristling with work she’s brought home from the office, and she’s not thinking of Tim, definitely not thinking of Tim, even when the phone rings at ten past nine and she jumps up from the couch to catch it on the second ring only to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line wondering if she’s still having stomach problems. On Friday she has to leave work early for her monthly appointment with Dr. Chandrasoma (“Everything’s normal, not to worry”), and at sunup the following morning she finds herself driving down to Ventura under a stripped skeleton of cloud and a low uncertain sun, on her way to the boat that will take her out to the island for three days of hiking the fence lines and following Frazier on his rounds. As an observer, strictly as an observer. To get a feel for things, check up on the progress, see what it means when you pay somebody else to pull the trigger.

It’s the kind of day when the weather could go either way. She was up and out the door before the paper arrived, so she hasn’t seen the forecast — not that it matters, since she’ll be going out on that boat whether it rains in obliterating sheets or the sun hangs up there in the sky as if she were transported back to the beach in Guam. She hasn’t thrown up yet, and that’s a positive, but then she hasn’t put anything on her stomach either. She’s watching the ocean as she drives, the islands fading in and out of visibility through the dirt-spattered windows, whitecaps kicking up as far out as she can see. It’ll be rough, rain or shine. And she’ll vomit. So what else is new?