Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

He could’ve understood, and explained away, the sensation if it was merely desire. But it was larger than that. Seeing her exposed, and unafraid, had made him feel responsible for, and protective of, her. She knew very little about their troubles with John. Perhaps that was part of it. He knew Sarah felt affection for him, but also knew that was where it ended. He regretted telling Joan about seeing Sarah by the river. Recently, she’d confessed that she’d come to imagine Sarah as the daughter they’d never had: a successful, out-in-the-world-and-thriving child who offset the leaden feeling that congealed the air in the room whenever they talked about John. She didn’t like that Sarah was waltzing around naked, for anyone to see. Right, Thomas had said. That’s not what I was talking about, but right. That was five months ago, before John had become worse, before Sarah had stitched Thomas up. Before John’s last visit. Before they’d decided, together, that relieving Zachary from the burden of his pain was the humane thing to do, and was, in fact, something required of them.

Outside, the clouds were low and gauzy, and walking across the lawn to the garage, Thomas put his hand on the hedge and realized that this day held only the promise of things he wasn’t looking forward to: he didn’t want to see his son, their only child, a man now, who had begun to view his entire life as someone else’s fault; he didn’t want to drive the dying alpaca to the pit, unceremoniously shoot it, and leave it to nature so they could present a home front untouched by sickness; and he didn’t want to see Sarah. Earlier this morning, when Thomas had gone to the garage to take care of Zachary, there’d been a strange car, a red VW, in the driveway, parking him in. Someone visiting Sarah. This was a first. It was before dawn. Sarah’s lights were still on, but he didn’t knock. He didn’t say: I’m blocked in down here. He’d stood near the car for a few minutes, feeling strangely deflated. Then he’d turned and walked, quietly, home. He would wait for whomever it was to leave. It was an intrusion he didn’t like, but could do nothing about.

He was, however, looking forward to the storm. Deep snow, the kind they got in eastern Washington, dampened the landscape, rounding angles, muffling sound; everything became globular and remote, unrecognizable under the blanket. He wanted sloping drifts, up to the eaves. He wanted a crunch under his boots, the cold, granulated air in the back of his throat. Growing up, John had loved to shovel byzantine, snaking footpaths so one had to go first to the street, then in a small circle, and then, say, around the cherry tree in their front yard before getting to the car. Charming then. Indicative of character now.

The alpacas—there were ten of them—stood like a cluster of mops near the fence, away from Zachary, who was on the ground with his head nestled in a patch of grass, as if he were listening to the earth. “Hey, buddy,” Thomas said as he approached. The alpaca stirred and let out a soft moan, then regained his stillness. The others would watch this taking away, Thomas knew, with the same slack-jawed and impenetrable apathy they greeted everything else.

“Ah, poor little guy,” someone behind him said. He turned and saw Sarah. She was standing just outside the garage door, smoking a cigarette; he didn’t know how he’d missed her. She wore only a thin, white undershirt, and sweatpants tucked into a pair of oversize Sorel boots, seemingly immune to the cold. She was in her late twenties, the same age as John, but looked, on account of her round face, younger. And healthier. Her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail.

“He’ll be all right.”

“No, he won’t,” she said, taking a deep drag and blowing it out. “Isn’t that the point?”

A doctor who smokes. Thomas looked at the sick alpaca, and then back at Sarah. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see the dark outline of her nipples through her shirt. “Not exactly tee-shirt weather,” he said before he could stop himself.

“Snow-mageddon!” she said cheerfully. She took another drag, and then nodded in the direction of the herd. “Some of those guys are pretty seriously dreadlocked. You should call them rasta-pacas.”

“What-apacas?”

“Rasta. You know, like Bob Marley.”

“Ah,” Thomas said. “That works. I get it now.”

Sarah stubbed her cigarette in the coffee can she kept outside for that purpose. Thomas walked over to the sick alpaca and roused him with a soft hand on his neck. The animal startled, then stood and allowed himself to be led to the trailer. Sarah watched with her arms folded over her chest. “It’s brave of you to do this,” she said when Thomas had the animal near the gate. Upon seeing the trailer Thomas had hitched to the back of his truck, Zachary teetered, then dropped to his haunches. Sarah kneeled, and took Zachary’s blank face in her hands as if, Thomas thought, to kiss it.

“I don’t know if brave is the right word,” he said back.

Sarah stood, reached into the pocket of her sweatpants, emerged with another cigarette, and lit it. “That vet’s an asshole. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

“He couldn’t be bothered with it until after Christmas, apparently,” Thomas said. “Joan and I talked about it. It doesn’t seem right to wait that long. This is something we can do. Something I can do. He’s in pain. We discussed it.”

“You want me to come?”

Thomas looked at the alpaca. “It’s going to be messy, I think,” he said.

Sarah snorted. “You don’t know messy. Try the ER. Try arterial blood. Try a bunch of maniac drunks trying to kill each other in the waiting room. Blood doesn’t bother me.” She smiled, and looked at him. “As you know.”

“We,” Thomas said, “your legion of lucky patients.”

“Lucky indeed. That’s me. Dr. Luck. That’s what I’ll be called.”

“It’s going to be cold,” Thomas said. “And probably awful. I can handle it.”

“Let’s not worry about it,” Sarah said. She stubbed her second cigarette on top of the first. “I don’t have much else to do. I’ll get my coat.”

As she disappeared back into the garage, Thomas hushed the sick animal into the trailer and closed the gate behind him. Zachary nestled down in the center of the trailer as he had in the field, as if, Thomas thought, he knew the sort of remoteness required of him now. Thomas could hear Sarah clomping up the garage steps, heard her door closing. He looked up to her window—he’d wave her off, say thanks but forget it—but the shade was drawn. Maybe her company would be welcome after all. It would prevent him, at least, from thinking too much about John. He dropped his keys in the cab of his truck, went back inside the house. He yelled good-bye up the stairs to Joan, and retrieved one of his shotguns out of the gun cabinet on the first floor. When he came back, Sarah was already sitting in the passenger seat, and the two of them drove, with the sick alpaca, out of the driveway, and away from the house.

S uicide, Ma, John had said on the phone to Joan three months ago . Don’t you ever think about it? Once she heard this, the receiver she’d been holding to her head had suddenly turned heavy and cold on her ear. John had been talking about his new obsession: the death of a childhood hero, a musician who’d stabbed himself in the heart, collapsed in a bathtub, and hadn’t been found for seven days. That guy, he had the whole world in his hands. And decided to end it. So tell me what I’ve got? Why are you so sure I’m going to pan out? He went on, digressing here and there, grandstanding, and backtracking. It was manipulative talk, but John had always had a bit of that in him. This conversation was different, both aimless and purposeful, and she didn’t recognize where it was coming from. It felt stagey, mobilized to elicit a response which, she knew from past experience, would only send him further down his own private rabbit hole. Nothing she said was ever “right”; nothing she’d ever said to John had been “right.” Her therapist had told her she ought to take the things her son said both seriously (engage with the ideas presented) and not seriously (not to let those ideas infect their relationship). What relationship? she’d wanted to say. I’m a life-support machine here, all tubes and knobs. Fuzzed-out beeps, posing as sentences with a life of their own.