Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

One day, she pulls in the driveway and catches sight of somebody in the backyard, crouching behind the fence. Startled, she runs the car into the side of the garage. Then she sees — it’s a squirrel. He jumps on top of a fence post and stares at her, oddly unperturbed by the crunch of metal against the garage wall. Cory leans over the seat to examine Alec for injuries. He is buckled in tight — new car seat of course, this one researched through Consumer Reports . Whiplash? Concussion? He seems fine, but you can never be sure.

When Scott gets home, he’s angry. “You made me leave work for this? How fast could you have been going? He’s fine. The car’s what I’m worried about.”

•

Late July a coyote digs his way under the fence. “You don’t know that,” Scott says. “It could have been anything. A raccoon.”

“Which carry rabies,” Cory says.

Scott ignores her. It doesn’t matter. She knows a coyote made that hole. It’s too big for a raccoon. And a raccoon would have climbed the fence anyway. The roll bar wasn’t designed to stop them.

She examines the spot he chose, at the end where only pachysandra thrives under a sycamore’s dense shade. Within a week she has the tree cut down, replaced by a row of hawthorn that will reach thirty feet. In front of that she plants two rows of rugosa roses, a barbarously thorned shrub the man at the nursery claimed is “almost impenetrable.” That is the word that makes her buy it — impenetrable. It sounds military.

She tells Scott the village took the tree down and paid for the new bushes. “Some contagious disease I guess.” They’d had the ash borer, so he buys it.

A week later she finds another hole. Thorny twigs broken off the nearby bushes lie about, thin and brittle as uncooked spaghetti.

That night Cory pretends to go to sleep with Scott, then gets up when he begins to snore and takes up watch at the kitchen window. It’s dark, though, and the yard is deep and large. At its furthest point shadows move without divulging their identity. Cory turns on the patio lights, then gets a baseball bat from the garage and stations herself next to the willow, where she’ll be hidden by the weeping branches. They make her think of lynchings and hangings. She imagines waking up to find her son dangling midway up, just another limb vulnerable to the wind.

Cory leans against the trunk, ready, then eventually sits, kept awake on the bony roots. Around her, dozens of broken boughs lie on the ground like snakes in the grass. We’re insulated , she thinks, but falsely . A little drywall, a metal cylinder in a doorframe stands between us and it. We can’t hear it. But it’s always there, the rustling in the woods, the crunch of twigs and old leaves underfoot, the new neighbors whispering below their densely-planted pergola.

Cory creeps over and peers between the branches of an old lilac. The moon illuminates two people, men she’s fairly sure, leaning forward with elbows on their knees, glowing embers in their hands. Cory inhales, trying to identify the scent. Cigarettes? Pipes? Cigars? Pot? Some Iranian thing she’s never heard of? They talk, their heads bent close together, and she strains to catch something comprehensible. Why don’t they speak English? What do they have to hide?

She thinks about the door she has left unlocked, retrieves the extra key from the false sprinkler head and secures the house, then returns the key to its hiding place. If someone kills her out here, she doesn’t want the key on her person.

Summer is her best chance. Knowing that neither Alec nor Scott are prone to wake in the small hours of the night, she spends this time outside, waiting. The sounds, shapes and movements of darkness grow familiar. In a stiff wind, the pine’s branches wave like enormous fans cooling the undergrowth. In the moonlight the neighbors’ forbidden trailer — hidden behind their garage and stacked with boards and lengths of gutter covered by a tarp — looks like a skiff, the tarp its sail, the hitch an emergency oar neglected and soon to slip overboard.

The first time Cory hears rustling in the woods, she readies the bat. The fiftieth time she can tell the difference between the crackles of a methodical, light-footed raccoon and the more infrequent rustles of an owl in flight. When they settle, they hoot, long and low, reassuring her. Every night the murmuring in the Persians’ yard reaches her, humming speech that mingles with the owl’s hoot and the raccoon’s scurrying. It is definitely two men — she’s gotten a moonlit look to confirm. If one is the homeowner, who is the other? No one would visit so late every night, which means he must live with the couple. A boarder? An out-of-work brother? An older son?

Of course Cory gets tired. Five nights outside, seven, eight. Once she falls asleep and wakes near dawn with a pattern like a healed burn impressed on her cheek by the willow’s bark. Sneaking into the house, she stations herself on the couch with a book across her chest, where Scott finds her only half an hour later.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Cory lies. “So I came down to read.”

Alec seems to be crying more often. Is he sick? Another ear infection? The doctor says no. Cory tries to comfort her son, playing his favorite shows and taking him to the park, where he falls and hurts his arm. At the ER they look at her like she might be to blame.

“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.