The Invited(33)

“What is it?” she asked. “What do you see?”

“Nothing here,” he said. “But I still hear it. It sounds like it’s right underneath us.” He stood up, his white boxers and T-shirt glowing as he moved down the darkness of the hall.

“Where are you going?” Helen’s voice was squeaky and frantic and she hated herself for it.

“Outside,” he said. “To look under the trailer.”

She scooted out of bed, padding behind him down the hall to the front door. She stood in the open doorway while he made his way down the steps. It was a clear night, the moon hanging low in the sky, the stars looking bright and close, the air damp and cool. Goose bumps prickled her skin.

“Be careful,” she said as Nate crouched down, shone the light into the crawl space beneath the trailer, which rested uneasily on crumbling concrete blocks.

“Oh!” he said, startled. He stood up straight and took two steps back.

If whatever was under there scared Nate, it had to be bad.

“What is it?” Helen asked, nearly frantic now, and not really wanting to know what he’d seen. She wanted to grab his hand, yank him back into the trailer, bolt the door, turn out the lights, and hide.

“Nate?” she asked, voice shaking. “What do you see?”

He laughed, relieved. “It’s a porcupine!”

“What?”

“A quill pig, that’s what some people call it. But it’s actually a rodent, of course. It’s so much bigger than I thought! And he’s kind of cute, honestly. Come see.” Nate was talking in that fast, excited way he did when he encountered a new creature.

A porcupine. Only a woodland creature, not the wild witch of the bog. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let herself climb down the front steps.

“Will I end up with a face full of quills?”

“Not if you don’t get too close,” Nate said.

“Don’t they shoot them out?”

    “No, that’s a myth. You’d have to touch him to get quilled. The quills are hollow and have little barbs. Come on, hurry up! I think I scared him off. He’s heading out under the other side.”

She joined him, took his hand, and together they circled around the trailer, the blazing bright beam from the flashlight illuminating everything in their path.

“There he is.” He pointed. “See!”

She looked and saw a thick, squat animal the size of a large cat lumbering along. She could make out its quills. She laughed at its clumsy waddle, its complete lack of grace. Nate put his arm around her, and together they watched it disappear into the woods. “So cool,” he said, and Helen turned and looked at him, saw his huge, excited smile.

“I love you,” she said, kissing his cheek.

Nate went back to the trailer, got down on his knees, and peered underneath.

“Man, those teeth do a lot of damage. If he’d kept at it, he would have gone right through the floor and ended up cuddling in bed with us.”

“God, I hope not!”

“I’ve heard porcupines like plywood. It’s the glue, I think. They also like anything people have sweated on, like ax handles.”

“Glue and sweat, great tastes.”

“To a porcupine, yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to bed.”

On the way in, he stopped in the kitchen, grabbed his nature journal to write down the details of the porcupine sighting. So far he had several pages of notes and sketches, mostly of birds, including the great blue heron.

“Come on,” she said. “You can document your Mr. Nibbles encounter in the morning.”

He crawled into bed beside her, put his arm around her. “Nothing like that at the condo in Connecticut,” he said, clearly still excited. A supersized rodent that ate plywood and ax handles might be a nightmare to some, but to Nate it was a thrill.

She kissed his neck, gave it a gentle nibble as she pushed her body against his, heard his breathing quicken. “Still thinking about the porcupine?” she whispered.

“Not at all,” he said, his hands moving up under her nightgown, tugging it off.



* * *



. . .

An hour later, she lay awake thinking of the porcupine, remembering the terrible grinding sound of it chewing. Nate, of course, was out cold, naked beside her, his limp arm draped over her stomach.

She closed her eyes, willed herself to sleep.

But she couldn’t get the chewing noises from her head.

She imagined an old woman with pointed teeth chewing her way up through their floor.

My, what big teeth you have.

She woke to sunlight streaming in through their small, narrow, prisonlike rectangular bedroom window. God help them if there were ever a fire in another part of the trailer—they’d never get out.

Nate was not beside her. She looked at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How had she managed to sleep so late? And how had she not noticed Nate getting out of bed?

She crawled down to the bottom of the bed, slid off, and grabbed her robe from the door. There was a pot of coffee waiting in the kitchen. She poured a cup, pulled on her sneakers, and went outside to find Nate. The sun hadn’t come up from behind the hill yet and the air felt cool. But the black flies were out: tiny, godforsaken creatures that swarmed, found every patch of exposed skin and left bites that itched like crazy. They’d already gone through three bottles of eco-friendly DEET-free bug repellent (which Helen was convinced the little bastards actually liked the scent of) and Nate was finally at the point of agreeing to try something a little more hard-core. As they swarmed her face, Helen vowed to go buy a can of OFF! today. And maybe a hat with an attached veil made of fine mesh netting—she’d seen one at Ferguson’s in the hunting section. She’d look like an idiot, but she was sick to death of being eaten alive.