Richard Ford - Wildlife

I looked out my mother’s window, between the closed curtains, and into the yard. Maybe ten minutes had gone by since I saw her leave in her bathrobe with Warren Miller carrying his boots. There were no lights on in the houses on our street and no cars moving. I could just see the back of Warren Miller’s car, see the exhaust still coming out of it. I could hear, I thought, the low rumbles of the motor. I guessed that whatever they’d been doing in my mother’s room had all of a sudden been hard to do or had made too much noise, so that the car had seemed like a better place. Out in our little yard the grass was white with frost and moonlight. The weeping birch tree cast a wider, denser shadow toward the street. A magpie stood in the middle of things there, alone. It moved, a hop one way and another, picked into the grass, looked around, then moved again. I put my flashlight flat against the glass and clicked it on and shined a dim light out onto the bird where it stayed still and did not look up or at me, but stared straight ahead — so it seemed to me — at nothing. It did not know I was there. It could not feel the light that was on it, couldn’t see anything different occurring. It just sat as though it was waiting for something to start to happen that would give it a reason to move or fly or even look in one direction or the other. It wasn’t afraid simply because it knew nothing to be afraid of. I tapped the cold glass with my fingernail — not loud, just enough for the bird to hear. It turned its head so that its red eyes went right up into the light. And it opened its wings once as though it was stretching, then closed them, hopped once toward me, then flew suddenly straight up at the light and the glass and at me, as if it was about to hit the window or break it through. Only it didn’t touch anything, but flew up into the dark and out of my sight completely, leaving me there with my heart pounding, and my light shining onto the cold yard at nothing.

I heard a car door close. I switched off my light and stood by the side of the curtain so that I could still see out but not be seen. I did not hear anyone’s voice speak, but my mother appeared on the sidewalk then, hurrying the way she had before, her arms folded across her chest, her shoes tapping the concrete. She turned in the driveway and went out of my sight. And when she did, Warren Miller’s car moved away slowly in the dark without its lights. I could hear it, its big muffler making a deeper rumbling sound down the quite street. I saw its taillights snap on red, and then it disappeared.

I walked out of my mother’s room and back down the hall in the dark to the spot I had been in when she and Warren Miller had left the house fifteen minutes before, or maybe thirty minutes before. I had lost track of time, though with all of what was going on it didn’t seem to matter. I heard my mother open the back door. She opened it just the way she would any day — as if everything was normal. I heard her in the kitchen. The ceiling light went on. I heard her running water in the sink, filling a glass, and I knew she was standing, drinking water in her bathrobe — something anyone would do on any night. I heard her run more water, then wait, then put the glass away and go and lock the door. Then she walked straight out through the kitchen into the hall where I was waiting in the shadows as I had been before.

But she did not see me. She did not even look in the direction I was, toward my door. She passed across the hall and went into the bathroom. I had only a moment to see her. Her bathrobe was open and I could see her bare knees as she took her steps. Inside, she turned on the light but did not close the door. I could hear her use the toilet and then the flushing sound and water running in the sink and the sound of her washing her hands. I was waiting there, outside the light. I had nothing planned to say or to do. I must’ve believed I would say something when she came back out, or just wanted to say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘This is all right … I don’t mind.’ Or ‘What are you doing?’ But none of those words were in my mind. I was simply there, and it occurred to me that she didn’t know it yet. She did not know what I knew about this — about Warren Miller and her, about what I’d seen or thought of it. And until she knew it, until we talked about it — even if she assumed everything and I did, too — it had not exactly happened, and we did not exactly have to have it between us after tonight. It would just be a thing we could ignore and finally forget. And what I should do was go back inside my room, get into my bed and go to sleep, and when I woke up try to think about something else.

But my mother came out of the bathroom before I could move. Again she did not look in my direction. She turned toward her bedroom, where I had been five minutes before. But all at once she turned back because she’d left the light on in the bathroom, and I suppose wanted to turn it off. And that is when she saw me, standing in the shadows in my underwear, watching her like a burglar who’d broken in the house to steal something and been caught.

‘Oh God damn it,’ my mother said before I could say a word or even move. She came down the hall to where I was, and she slapped me in the face with her open hand. And then she slapped me again with her other hand. ‘I’m mad at you,’ she said.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t try to move or raise my hand or do anything. Her bathrobe was open in front, and she was naked underneath. I could see her stomach and all of that. I had seen my mother naked before but this was different and I wished that she had her clothes on.

‘I wish I was dead,’ she said, and she turned around and walked back down the hall to her room. She was not crying. And she did not try to close the front of her bathrobe. When she got into the light that came out of the bathroom, she turned around and looked at me. Her face was angry. Her mouth seemed large and her eyes wide open. Her hands were made into fists, and I thought she might be thinking of coming back down the hall and hitting me again. Nothing seemed impossible. ‘You probably want to leave, don’t you? Now, anyway,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. That’s the way everything always happens. People do things. There isn’t any plan. What’s next? Who knows?’ She raised her hands with her palms up in a way I’d seen people do before. ‘If you’ve got a plan for me, tell me. I’ll try to do it. Maybe it’ll be better than this.’

‘I don’t have one,’ I said. My face was beginning to throb where she’d hit me. It hadn’t hurt at first, but now it did. I wondered if the second time she hadn’t hit me with her fist — maybe by accident — because my eye hurt. ‘I don’t care,’ I said. I stood back against the wall and didn’t say anything else. I could feel myself breathe, feel my heart beat, feel my hands going cold. I must’ve been afraid but didn’t know it.

‘A man like him can be handsome,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t know about that. You don’t know anything but just this. I guess I should be more discreet. This house is too small.’ She turned around and walked down the hall and into her room. She did not turn the light on. I heard her shoes hit the floor, heard her bed squeeze down as she got into it, and the sound of her bedspread being moved to cover her up. She was going to sleep now. She must’ve thought that was all there was to do. Neither of us had a plan. ‘Your father wants to make things better,’ I heard her say out of the dark. ‘Maybe I’m not up to that. You can tell him all about this. What’s the difference?’

I wanted to say something back, even if she wasn’t talking to me but was just talking to herself or no one. I didn’t think I would tell my father about this, and I wanted to say so. But I didn’t want to be the last one to talk. Because if I spoke anything at all, my mother would stay quiet as if she hadn’t heard me, and I would have my own words — whatever they were — to live with, maybe forever. And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling my father about all I’d seen or telling my mother that she could rely on me to say nothing, were those kind of words — better off to be never said for simply being useless in the large scheme of things.