Lydia Millet - Magnificence

So she lifted it, though its bulk was awkward, and walked slowly toward the reptile room, where she put it down on the table while she unlatched its glass case and raised the lid. As she did so she thought of archosaurs, the dinosaur lineage of which only birds and crocodilia remained. . that was the problem with organization: it was never perfect. Sometimes she wished she could have laid out the house in evolutionary terms — put the birds and crocodilians together, for instance. But then there would be the strangeness of genetics to contend with, the oddness of the fact that some animals who seemed to be nearly the same had borne almost no relation to each other over the course of history, according to the scientists, and that, conversely, some animals who looked like they had zero business together were actually close relatives.

Only as she left the reptile room did she register the far-off drone of the jackhammer, still drilling. She wondered if the slab covered an old, capped well — they must have had wells here once, she thought. Pasadena had more of its own water than Los Angeles proper, she’d once been told. Maybe she could have her own well again, in that case, ask them to drill deeper, deeper, down to where cool water flowed beneath the soil, to where it trickled through the rock, the caverns of the earth. Maybe she could make the whole house into a living kingdom then — its flora and fauna, both dead and alive, its circulatory system of ponds and rivers. . vegetables growing, the fruit of the trees to eat. . but no. That was a pipe dream. It was a terrarium, the house. It should not attempt to simulate nature.

There were zookeepers, in the order of things, and curators. Previously she had been neither, but now she fell into the curator category. She was not going to keep a menagerie here, she was not going to farm and live off the land, clearly. Living, even the koi were too much work for her alone. But the dead animals were enough. In any case the dead were almost as beautiful as the living, sometimes more so. They had far fewer needs.

No: this was a museum of killed animals, pure and simple. An amateur museum, yes. It was not professional. But no less beautiful for all that — maybe more beautiful, even. She welcomed the flocks of suburban parrots as they alit in the trees and she wanted to keep the koi, could even foresee adding to them — bringing in native frogs or toads, maybe, or the cocoons of butterflies, as long as they weren’t a kind that would defoliate her trees. These were mere accents, of course: the center of the house was the skins hung on their plastic bones. The center of it was the crouching, leaping, preening, the frozen poses, the watchful blind eyes; it was a house of ghost prey, ghost predators, innocent killers trapped by the less innocent.

“Mother,” said Casey.

She jumped. She’d had no idea she wasn’t alone — had been staring at nothing. Staring at a door lintel.

But there was Casey, in the hall. Clearly had just entered.

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me,” said Susan.

“Sorry,” said Casey. “You know — I have that clicker in my car now. For the gate. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, no,” said Susan. “Course, make yourself at home. You want something to drink?”

“What is that, construction?” asked Casey, and cocked her head at the jabbering noise of the drill.

“Some cement in the backyard I’m having ripped up,” said Susan.

“Ground granulated blast-furnace slag?”

They smiled at each other. Susan knelt and put her hand on Casey’s arm.

“How’s married life treating you, honey?”

“I really like it.”

“Good. Good,” said Susan. “I’m really happy, then.”

She thought she might choke up at Casey’s unaccustomed sweetness.

“Angela came out of her room,” said Casey.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Susan.

“But here’s the thing,” said Casey.

Susan’s knees were hurting so she stood up again.

“Yeah?” she asked. “Follow me to the kitchen, I’m thirsty.”

“Wait,” said Casey. “Seriously.”

Susan waited, listening.

“We’re going away.”

“The rainforest thing?” asked Susan.

“Malaysia. Malaysian Borneo.”

“Oh,” said Susan.

“And it would be a lifesaver if you could take her again. Her and the dog. Both of them.”

“Her and the dog,” repeated Susan.

“And T. says we could pay for someone else to live with you here and help her. A new Vera. So you wouldn’t have to do much in the way of like, care or whatever. Just let her stay here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we’ve got her to come out of her own room finally but she’s still shaky. And there’s nowhere else she’ll willingly go.”

Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.

“Please,” she said. “Please?”

Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.

“You got a manhole in your backyard,” he said.

“A manhole?”

“Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing’s not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, hell if I know. If you want to open the lid you’re gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. Hell. The drill won’t do any more for you than it’s already done.”

“Oh. Well. Thanks, though,” said Susan, disappointed.

“Is it like a city manhole?” asked Casey. “It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there’s some high-voltage line or shit like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?”

“No letters I could see,” said the jackhammer guy.

“I’ll call the city anyway,” said Susan. “OK. So. Thank you.”

“I still gotta load up the truck. I’ll come back in when I’m done. Be a hundred fifty,” said the guy. “Cash or check.”

When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause — Casey’s request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There’d been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone sex, of Casey and phone sex and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the association was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut — it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression. In a rut could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.

It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.

“You’re not doing that phone-sex job still, are you? Now that you’re, you know, married and all that?”

“Nah,” said Casey. “It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted.”

“So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don’t see you living off T.’s money. I don’t see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings.”