When We Were Animals(88)

I think of an Easter Sunday, when I was ten.

Every year my father made a special Easter egg hunt for me. He hid them in difficult places, both inside and outside the house, then he gave me clues to those hidden treasures in the form of rhyming couplets written in script on index cards.

That year I was stuck on the last one. The clue said this:

Here lies the measure of all our worth— Look where sleeps the most precious thing on earth.

I looked in all the places in the house where we kept valuables. I scoured the sideboard in the kitchen, where we kept the china and the silverware. I looked through my father’s office drawers, where he kept important documents. I sifted through the dresser where we kept all the things that once belonged to my mother.

While I looked, he watched me, smiling. He refused to help me with any additional hints.

I scowled at him. He gazed back at me with a look I’ll never forget.

I finally found the last Easter egg. It was in my bedroom, under my pillow.

“Your father,” Jack says now. “You never tell me about him. You never tell me anything about where you grew up, or about your school days, or about what you were like as a girl. You know I’d listen. I love you. I want to hear these things.”

I look away from him toward the trees, their briefly illuminated trunks flashing by in the night. I wonder who might be out there.

“Maybe.”

*



Everyone in the neighborhood will know about my breaking into Helena’s house and about my being arrested and about the psychological rehabilitation I will undergo. At dinner parties, they will be nice. They are always very nice. They will offer their support. They will tell me they care about me and love me and want what’s best for me. Jack will remind me, as he always does, that he loves me.

It’s funny, all these people talking about love. They think love is something like a fluffy pillow where you rest your head. They think love is sweet and gentle, all hands and lips and nestling. But they’re wrong. I know what love is. Love is angrier than this. It’s harsher. It’s tasting the world on your tongue and digging your claws deep into the underbelly of life. I know exactly what love is. It’s sometimes leaning over your husband while he sleeps, while he conjures in his dreams all the fears and ecstasies he would relish if he were ever able to let himself be truly and wholly alive, breathing in the fermented air exhaled from his pink, undamaged lungs—and it’s sometimes wanting to rip out his throat with your teeth.





Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Josh Kendall and Eleanor Jackson. I owe them considerable gratitude. If you could read the first version of this book, you would see just how much.





About the Author


Joshua Gaylord grew up in Anaheim, California, and currently resides in New York City. Using his own name or the pen name Alden Bell, he has authored three previous novels, including The Reapers Are the Angels. He received his PhD from New York University and has taught high school English as well as literature courses at NYU and the New School.