Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

The next morning Scott notices scratches on her face: long, narrow red welts, the dermatographia of pursuit. Or escape.

“I was in the woods yesterday, dumping out those old flowerpots. I think I’m having a reaction.”

He looks at her quizzically. “I didn’t notice that last night.”

She shrugs. “Delayed, I guess.”

•

For their wedding anniversary Scott asks his mother to babysit and makes reservations at Cory’s favorite restaurant. During dinner she resists the urge to call home, but she does keep the phone on the table, where she’ll be sure to hear it ring. Over dessert, Scott brings up having another baby. “It’d be good for Alec to share you.” In the last year he’s become concerned that Alec is too attached to Cory, unaccustomed to being without her for even an hour.

Cory reminds him — falsely — that she’s been off the pill for months.

“We haven’t really been trying, though.” He wiggles his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

She laughs. “Let’s get to it then,” she says, knowing her son is safe. Her attention cannot be divided.

Alec’s moods don’t improve. One night he wakes crying and Scott discovers she’s not in the house. Cory doesn’t hear the crying — windows closed, air-conditioning on — but she sees the light go on in Alec’s room. Before she can get to the house, the slider opens and Scott’s there. “What are you doing?”

She’s holding the bat. “I thought I heard someone out here.”

“So you came out by yourself with a kid’s baseball bat?”

Cory hadn’t realized until then the bat was small and remarkably light. She swings at him in mock menace. “I could do you some damage.”

Alec begins to complain of stomach pains and when Cory takes him to the doctor and insists they scan him, they find a tumor. More tests are ordered. For a week she cannot eat. She exists on the brink of tears, her throat tight and chest weighted, as if someone is sitting on it. She sleeps next to Alec’s bed on the floor, attuned to sounds of choking or a change in his breathing. She imagines the tumor expanding like a balloon. Can it creep into his throat overnight, like the coyote into their yard? How foolish of her to think cancer would let her off the hook.

When Alec plays outside, she sits in the patio chairs with the baseball bat by her side, rehearsing what she’ll do, how she’ll spot the coyote coming up behind the pine, in the cover of the forsythias. How she’ll rush him, yelling for Alec to run inside. Run, run as fast as you can!

Then on Thursday at ten a.m. the doctor calls: the new tests confirm it’s not a tumor, but a harmless malformation.

She gets a second opinion, then a third and fourth. At that point she’s run out of doctors in her insurance network and Scott insists she stop. “You’re driving everyone crazy, especially poor Alec.”

Cory buys a gun, locks the bullets in one box and the gun in another, carries the keys in her pocket. At target practice, the recoil hurts her arm, but the ache reassures. She’s taking action.

Scott thinks she’s at yoga. He’s happy to be trusted again. “I won’t let him out of my sight.”

At night she takes the baby monitor outside with her. Alone, waiting for that scrabbling noise or a change in her son’s breathing, she would find the predictable company of the neighbors, the faint, faint odor of their smoke, a comfort — if only she knew what the hell they were saying.

On the first chilly night in September he emerges from between the thorny roses. Cory’s attention has been on the neighbors, certain words they use over and over that she is trying to memorize so she can look them up later. When the coyote finally catches in her peripheral vision, she freezes, then, regaining her focus, slides the magazine in as quietly as possible. She’s placed some dog food and meat scraps in a bowl behind the pine. He finds them and begins to eat. Cory parts the willow’s whip-like branches and creeps across the grass, moving closer than necessary for a foolproof shot. She cannot miss, cannot inflict merely leg wounds.

His shoulders are low, his tail down, his face intent on its find. Under the pine the ground changes to a million brittle needles. Crunch and his head turns. She raises the gun, thinks aim, steady, squeeze . It’s only a few seconds before she realizes she’s waiting for him to lunge. Come get me you motherfucker. She can’t shoot him otherwise. This shocks her. Wasn’t that the plan? Preemptive strike.

She moves closer. The animal takes a step back, easily clearing the lowest branch, and that’s when Cory realizes it’s a pup. The males strike out on their own in fall.

“Come on,” she begs. “Come get me.”

The pup sniffs the air, his tail still low, then takes off at a speed she didn’t think they had and in a second is gone to the darkness, the trees, the future.

In the house Scott sits slumped forward on the couch. Out the window, the pine where Cory failed to protect their son is in full view.

She tries to hide the gun in the folds of her wide-legged pajama pants. “Sorry. Did I wake you up? I thought I heard something.”

Scott doesn’t even look up. He’s staring at his hands, folded tight between his knees. “I thought you were having an affair.”

“What?”

“I heard you creeping around. At first I figured bathroom, a drink. Then I caught you outside, with the bat, and I thought, oh, she’s being paranoid, but one night I cracked the window and heard a man’s voice.”

It takes a moment before Cory realizes what he must have heard. “The new neighbor. Two men. They’re out there all hours.”

Scott nods. “Yeah, I know. I figured that out.” He looks up at her. “Did you unload it?”

Cory hesitates, then drops the bullets in her hand and hands Scott the gun.

“So why didn’t you shoot him?”

“It was a pup.”

“He’ll grow up.”

“I know.”

“Will you shoot him then?”

Cory shakes her head and begins to cry. “I can’t.”

Scott walks over to the window and stares at the backyard, streaked in light from the neighbor’s porch fixtures and the moon, half hidden behind a bank of thunder clouds.

“What do you think they’re talking about over there?”

Lawan would have been on time to pick up Gloria if he hadn’t circled back for Tricia, thinking it will make breaking the news easier, though he knows the second he drives off — that’s stupid. Tricia will make it worse. Because it’s weird to introduce a new girlfriend in a situation like this, and she knows it too, but can’t resist. She’s wanted to meet his family ever since she found out they are white.

On the way to the hospital Lawan lets Tricia choose the music while he watches the clock. Time seems to be moving faster than usual. Yesterday, Karen told him to be at the hospital by ten thirty. “They should have Mom discharged by then. You can bring her home in the van and I’ll meet you at the house.”

Lawan drives disabled kids for the county. They’re all in wheelchairs, skulls cradled by headrests and chins fixed by straps, like victims of mad scientists in the old black-and-white movies. The van he uses has a power ramp and bars to secure the chairs, and Lawan knows his boss won’t care if he drives Gloria home in it, but the way Karen assigned the task, as if he were some Negro houseboy in the prewar South, pissed him off, so he let an uncomfortable few seconds go by before saying, “I’m not supposed to use the van for personal stuff.”

Karen gave him that look. She cannot believe he works such a menial job. “This is for our mother, and it will take twenty minutes.”