No use at all in pretending otherwise: in coming days folks will be every bit as sickly kind as Mabel fears. Mabel knows this without having to be told. Much as they would never say so out loud, people need the suffering of others. The grisly news will leak through town as the last three days of the twentieth century come and go. News, like much else, is not easy to hold on to. But it’s tempting, of course, to imagine the world will change when the clocks roll over, that something will finally shake this place of its grisly need for gossip. And if the end of the world does advance after all, if technology rises against them, Mabel and Will have decided it will come like a tiger: vibrant and sudden and full of claws.
The sun is half an hour sunk, and leftover light knifes across the emerald edge of the Ouachitas. Mabel and Will keep watch for the telltale orange stripes in the outcrops. But the end of the world will not climb the mountain to meet them.
▴ ▴ ▴
If the clocks were plugged in, they’d read something like five in the evening. The sun is inches, as Mabel sees it, above the mountain line. She could hold a hand out and measure the space with thumb and pointer finger. But why would she do a silly thing like that? And at a time like this? Mabel and Will are waiting on the insurance investigator to come back from the scene and check in with them.
He returns to them eventually. At first he nods, like he’s afraid to speak.
“I don’t mean to say anything to disturb either of you, of course, but”—here he swallows—“looks like the tiger wasn’t all that hungry. I anticipate we’ll come across other… well. Meals, before this is all over. I am, at risk of repeating myself, so very sorry for your loss. You say it was close to your family?”
“She, and yes.” Mabel’s thinking of strawberries.
“It is just the two of you, am I correct?”
“Just the two of us,” Will repeats. Mabel’s belly feels like dead leaves, brown and brittle and at risk of falling right off.
This last week of the twentieth century is unseasonably warm, here in the Ouachita Mountains, which folks are taking to mean the end of times. Already locals buzz about the clocks rolling over into the millennium: the question of whether computers can handle it, if all the money in the banks will disappear. And now the heat, which feels appropriately apocalyptic. And that’s not to mention the actual loose tiger.
“Mm. Well,” Hilcrest says, and drops whatever he planned to say next.
They bring him back inside, where he tears a carbon copy from his notebook. At the top he’s circled recommended for approval. Simple as that. They’ll be paid.
“Y’all have a happy new year,” he says. Then Hilcrest, the insurance investigator with the mighty deep accent, takes his stupid fleece jacket and leaves.
▴ ▴ ▴
Mabel picks her way down the ridge. She hears the men’s voices before she sees them. Hilcrest is telling Will he needs time alone to complete his investigation.
So Mabel keeps things simple. She stays back, and Will hikes up to meet her.
“He said another family reported a nearby spotting.”
“Did he.” Mabel sits in the dirt, adjusts so she’s sitting on padding. Her back and hips and uterus and head all hurt. And she’s bleeding again. What a mess of words to hold inside a single head. There is so much medical terminology she’s about to need all over again. She wonders how much she remembers from her first miscarriage. However much that is, it won’t be enough.
If Mabel listens hard enough, she can hear rustling from Hilcrest. If it’s the tiger, if the tiger smelled the body and is coming to perform its own investigation, she and Will are close enough to the house to make it inside. Hilcrest, though. Well, Mabel is still too wound-up to think about it.
Will sits next to her so they’re hip to hip. He wraps his arms around his knees. “Can’t tell if he said it to gauge my reaction. Maybe. But I was good. Told him the more reports, the faster they can triangulate the tiger—Darcy, Jesus, what a name—and the faster everyone’s pets and kids will be safe.”
“Don’t say Jesus.” Mabel isn’t looking directly at him, but feels his breath expand in his body, feels that lie harden in him. Or not a lie, but a misdirection. Will has made himself look like a man who thinks only of the safety of kids, ones who were brought to term in bodies that work like Mabel thinks they ought to. He’s keeping their secret for now.
This is good. Reputations like these are important, act like little ozones to hide peculiarities in the faceless gaze of gossip. Will’s already working on his.
Mabel needs more time to construct hers. Give her time. Together she and Will curated the scene down the ridge, and now they need only to convince Hilcrest that they’re telling the truth about how their goat died. A cool head and an emotional waver or two in the voice. They aren’t looking at too tall an order.
Yeah, much of their talk is manufactured. And though some is sincere, the former cheapens the latter. Mabel won’t be able to keep this up much longer. She needs Hilcrest out of the house.
And a bit of wishful thinking on top of that: she’d like Arkansas to be about twenty degrees cooler. This December evening feels more like April. She’d like there to be no tiger loose and prowling. Though to be perfectly honest, a showdown against an escaped zoo animal feels no more absurd than half the shit—shit—life’s dumped in her lap. She’s working on loosening her language. Within reason. And while she’s wishing (Mabel knows better than to pray for things like this), she’d like very much for Francie to still be alive and with her, fuzzy, earth-smelling, to help her with the loss of the baby. She’d like the baby tucked inside her to still be live and viable.
Though she wouldn’t be a good mother, either. She is not what one would call patient. She can’t think on her feet. She likes her third graders best when they’re on task. Their wild, emotional bursts make her enormously anxious. She has no idea how to calm an upset child. Better to keep them at arm’s length and send them home at three.
This may be the truth or it may just be what she needs to tell herself, but that’s a frivolous distinction.
▴ ▴ ▴
If the clocks were plugged in, they’d read four p.m. The insurance company sends over an investigator named Hilcrest Wyatt, a gangly fellow with one of those accents that seems to tip the scales—a drawl so deep it surpasses all stereotypes and announces his intelligence like a foghorn. One of the least important details about him—though these are often the most memorable, aren’t they—is that he wears a fleece pullover though it’s far too warm. He hangs it by the tag on their coat rack. He doesn’t even look like he’s been sweating. He shakes Will’s hand first, then Mabel’s.
Dexter, the one goat they have left, has climbed the stairs and is watching from the second floor.
“Hi there, fella,” Hilcrest says, tipping his head at Dexter.
Dexter bleats in reply.
“You’re smart to keep him inside,” he says. “Least until the zoo takes Darcy in.”
Will pops his fingers. “The tiger’s name is Darcy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Huh. Doesn’t fit.”
“I thought the same thing when I heard it, Mr. Will. I think that is quite the astute observation. It is Will, am I correct? Not William?”
Will tells him that’s right.
“Good, good. I always like to make sure I’m calling people by their proper names, and I don’t mess them up any. It’s plainly rude not to take the time to learn, you know what I’m saying?” He looks at Mabel, flicking briefly to her belly before returning to her face. He wets his top lip and smiles. “Miss Mabel, yes?”
“The same.”
“You do have a lovely home.” She notices, unnerved, that he glances again at her stomach. Another wave of pain; she grits her jaw against it. He whistles. “And look at that tree! Bet that was fun to decorate. You string this popcorn yourself? I always buy the premade shit myself.”
“We try not to use language like that in here,” Will says, and Mabel flats her hand on his back to stop him. The effort isn’t worth it. The point is for Hilcrest to be in and be out. And Mabel doesn’t need Will to stick up for her so often.
She feels pinched to be over the day already. “Mr. Wyatt—”
“—Please, call me Hilcrest.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, today’s been hard. Francie was part of our family, really.” Mabel slows her speech, inserts a pause where she thinks it appropriate. She can’t tell what she’s really feeling and what’s manufactured for the investigator. She’s vacuous in a way she hasn’t felt in years. She would like a nap more than anything. “If you could go ahead and look at her.”
She’s absolutely positive Hilcrest sees her like she feels: cracked open at the joints, melodrama leaking through the openings. Honestly she doesn’t know how she’s still standing. She lost Francie, and she never named the baby—out of superstition—but she lost it too.
Hilcrest extends his arms and flexes his fingers. He rolls both shoulders back. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be out of your hair soon. You’re not unusual, believing animals are family. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.”
Will leads Hilcrest through the kitchen and out the door. Dexter pokes his horned head down the stairs to check if they’re gone. Mabel suspects he’ll be hard to coax back outside when this is over. She suspects she’ll be a pushover.
▴ ▴ ▴
Their upstairs bathtub pinks and rinses white again, for the second time today. Mabel and Will place an extra rug over the blood spots in the den and scrub the carpet stairs with cold water and baking soda. Will insists on cleaning, though Mabel’s perfectly capable. He doesn’t know the trick about the cold water; she has to instruct him in the kitchen. Anyway, most of her blood’s on the tile, which is perfectly easy to clean.
▴ ▴ ▴
The early afternoon is bright and hot enough that both Mabel and Will have worked up a sweat. Mabel comes back under the shade of the ridge, wiping vomit off her chin with the back of her hand, feeling much better. Well, a little better. Better by some margin. By now, half of Francie’s pelt has been peeled back and Will is pulling at her guts. Rarely is he capable of such determination: the concentration stops him obsessing over the many apocalypses that’ve happened right here in front of them, and all to come.
He raises his head, wipes forearm against forehead. His skin’s dyed purple.
“Hand it over,” she says.
“Honey,” he says, “I don’t—”
But she holds out her hand for the hatchet. She shakes her head hard enough to shut him up. This was her idea. This is not a problem for him to fix.
So he chokes back a hiccup. He hands over the hatchet and the bucket.
Well, this is it. She either joins in or she does not. Mabel reaches in a tentative hand, grasps her fingers around a piece of muscle for which she doesn’t know the proper term. She bumps her knuckles on what might be ribs. She can’t think in these terms—specificity of anatomy or Francie—if she’s going to keep working.
The work is cold and slippery. She works the hatchet (they should have brought a more dexterous tool) to loosen something from something else. She gags again. The body’s starting to smell. Mabel wonders if she can still detect, under everything, the chemical odor from the shed. Out of spite her hands find a rhythm, and soon the bucket’s heavy and she’s made a sizable crater.
But she can’t stay distracted for long. She starts coughing with no clean hands to cover her mouth. At one point she sees what’s left of Francie from an odd angle, and it reminds her, forcefully, of helping Francie deliver her first and only litter. The whole event was surreal and very wrong. Francie was far too young to be a mother; as soon as she conceived Mabel felt horribly guilty. She cried. They gave the kids away the minute they could. All bad things to befall Francie are Mabel’s fault, if you ask her.
Eventually Will stands back and so does Mabel, and the mass in front of them is easier to bear. A little bit. These are incremental considerations. We’re not talking big margins here. The goat is replaced by red and gray and pink.
Mabel and Will have nothing left but to gather the supplies they brought and hike back up the ridge, to reenter their compact, sturdy house. Their plain and carefully curated home. They will bury the bucket to get rid of evidence and wash their tools and take showers, and then the investigator will come, and they will maybe be paid for their trouble.
▴ ▴ ▴
Will deals the first blow, a laceration with the tip of the hatchet into the long rectangle of Francie’s neck, a dragging motion outward. Another right below it. These he intends to look like claw marks. A strike behind the skull carves out the U of the tiger’s fatal bite. Blood spills out on the dirt and their knees. For the struggle, he wraps his hands around her horns and pulls her about a body’s length further, and that’s when Mabel excuses herself to throw up.
▴ ▴ ▴
Neither Will nor Mabel expected the insurance company to send an investigator so soon, so together they carry Francie’s body half an acre down the ridge, to a little cleft where she feasibly could have been cornered. This is where, right now, they have to pull their goat child apart, lest an investigator arrive to find an intact goat and a blushing pair of liars.
Will pushes his hand down the ridge between Francie’s eyes and trails his thumb to the end of her nose. Mabel combs her fingers through the soft belly fur. She used to feed Francie scraps from the table, used to slip outside when Will was still at work and give her big bowls of strawberries. Dexter was the more childlike of the two, but Francie was Mabel’s favorite. When she allows herself to fantasize about children, she imagines having a girl.
A brutal wave of cramps hits her, and Mabel hisses through her teeth until they pass.
▴ ▴ ▴
Before they move from one kind of couple to another, before the whole grisly business, Will convinces himself by calling the ordeal an act of closure. He can do this for her, yes. To ensure they can’t back out, Mabel calls Animal Control.
Then Will calls the insurance company, which will send someone from their closest office—a fifty-minute drive—this evening. If Will had plugged in the clocks, the display on the oven would read eleven in the morning.
▴ ▴ ▴
Will opens their refrigerator, pulls out the milk. Mabel feels a shock at the gravity of the pitcher; this is Francie’s last. This was the reason they’d decided to keep goats, since Mabel is mildly allergic to cow’s milk. When she was a child, her parents ordered it special through the grocery store, but it got more and more expensive. She and Will decided, as a kind of experiment, to see if they could milk goats on their property. They reasoned this was the only responsible option—industrial farms are an ecological nightmare. So they bought Francie. They bred her with a neighbor’s buck so she would start to produce. They bought Dexter, a wether, not long after to keep her company.
Will finishes pouring, lifts the pitcher at Mabel.
She sips the coffee, rolls the grit around her tongue. “God, no.”
Normally he would ask her why. Normally he would list his mental catalogue of the way Mabel did and did not take her coffee, even still: always lightened, with or without, depending on mood, enough sugar to stop a heart.
But this morning, they both had too much to feel, all at once—their one dead goat, their surviving goat in the house, the tiger, the baby, the baby, for God’s sake—and so he wouldn’t dare demand normalcy from her. She can’t ask normalcy of herself. When she thinks too directly all breath leaves her lungs again. The whole landscape of the kitchen feels alien. The sun against the oven door is too bright. In the corner of her eye is Dexter, watching her from his hideaway up the back of the couch.
Will is trying to communicate with her through the distance, and though she hears him, she can’t understand him.
“Fuck Y2K,” she says. She’s trying the word out.
Will gulps down what he’s been trying to say. “I’m sorry?”
“Fuck Y2K,” she repeats. The word feels delicious in her mouth; she rarely affords herself a swear in everyday speech. “The world’s not ending. It ended. It’s over. So fuck it.”
“Don’t talk like—” This is beyond even his vernacular. But then he changes his mind: “Yeah. Sure.”
But she can tell he only means to placate her. He won’t broach her language because a second miscarriage is a tragedy, and a terrible one.
And Will’s said before: bad luck is just a magnet for more of the same. He won’t get softer, more trusting, in the death of the baby. He won’t, for example, reconnect the computer, the television, until he is very sure indeed they won’t turn against him in the new year. Mabel certainly knows him well enough to figure this. He’s even taken to unplugging the blender and toaster when not in use—his return to the rational will be slow coming, if it comes at all, if they survive the new millennium.
Will takes another sip of coffee, and Mabel another of hers. The novelty of coffee is already wearing down. Still, it’s nice, but too warm for the season. She’s growing muggy in direct light. This heat wave is awful, even inside. It feels terribly wrong—though so does everything today. She fans her shirt by the collar.
She wills the sun to retreat from their little kitchen ecosystem. She wills the damp to dry under her shirt, for her clothes to feel clean again. She wills the cramps to go away too, but that’s useless even as wishful thinking. She’s forgotten how painful they were the first time.
“I keep thinking about the tiger,” he says. Mabel misunderstands at first, thinks he means to say goat. She’s distracted by cramps. “If it actually comes, we’ll see it from here.”
From the kitchen they can see a far stretch of landscape eastward. Same with their bedroom on the second floor. Past the driveway and the shed, past the little field and the tree-scrubbed ridge that marks the edge of their property, they can see from either window the higher crests of the Ouachitas. The mountains remind Mabel of storm clouds that roll in over top of each other.
Will fishes a pair of bagels from the bag on top of the fridge. He plugs the toaster back in, separates the bagel halves, and drops them in. The built-in timer starts ticking.
Will breaks the silence just before the toaster pops. “Jesus,” he says, looking at the mountain through their kitchen window. The bagels bounce in their slots, and he doesn’t retrieve them. “Jesus, it’s pretty out there. Have you ever really looked at it? I mean really looked?”
“Don’t say that.”
The smell from the toaster is sumptuous, singed, deathy. Smell is already coming back to her. In pregnancy her nose betrayed her and made delicious things awful, like chocolate and bananas. These burned bagels are the best smell in weeks.
Mabel pulls them from the toaster. She turns to the cabinet to find peanut butter but pauses with her hand out.
“Will?”
“Hmm?”
“What sounds better—peanut butter or salmon?” She’s thinking of all the things she can eat now. Two babies gone means they’ll stop trying. Mabel can eat whatever she wants, drink how much caffeine she wants, can smoke if she wants. Not that she wants to smoke—the point is that she can. She can jump off the roof of the Brigsbys’ farmhouse and land in a big stack of hay if she wants. And she doesn’t need to take vitamins.
“We don’t have salmon.”
And they can’t exactly go get it; Mabel isn’t ready, yet, to face the outside, to tell anyone about losing the baby. Nor can she just hide it—locals sniff out tragedy like pigs on truffles. Happened the first time too.
Town’s small and hasn’t forgotten Mabel and Will at seventeen, when the scandal of their teen pregnancy burned its way through Second Baptist. Mabel’s parents stopped attending for a while. So did Mabel, and that was maybe the hardest part on her. It was a second-term miscarriage, painful and shocking, bad end to an unhappy story. The only good it did was realign Mabel’s parents to her sympathy.
She and Will would have stayed together regardless; the grief drove them neither closer nor apart. The miscarriage was, instead, just one from a line of events each weathered beside the other. When Mabel healed enough to leave the house, she married Will in a private ceremony at church. Will was disgruntled about their bad treatment—he attended Sundays again, but only since Mabel expected this of him. They lasted seven years until another pregnancy.
Will spreads peanut butter on his bagel, then hers. He eats each half separately, to cut down on mess. She eats hers sandwiched. Out the window, their Ouachita Mountains are peculiar and look alive. They’re half dead from winter, and still shockingly green. Are those stripes, out there in the edge of the trees? No. No, it can’t be. The bright orange of a tiger will scream against the landscape.
Mabel can smell the milk in Will’s coffee. A terrible thought comes to life inside her.
“What if the tiger gets to Francie?”
Will talks through his bagel. “Can they smell blood that far off? I should have paid attention in high school.” He swallows. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to lock her body inside.”
She goes to take another bite, and realizes she’s already finished it. She sucks peanut butter off a finger. “That’s not what I mean.”
“You want to lure the tiger here? Why? Mabel, baby, that doesn’t make sense.”
She wipes her hand on a dish rag. “I wonder if we report, well. Finding Francie.”
“As if the tiger got to her.” He’s got a quarter of his bagel left, but he shakes his head and drops it in the sink. “No, I don’t like the sound of that.”
Mabel eyes the sink bagel. Then she thinks better of it. She’s above that, even today, which has been a day that makes her feel like she isn’t above anything. “Insurance, maybe? What if we—what if we asked for money?”
They’ve never lived on much, and this would go a long way toward another goat, if, after a while, they replaced her. They took out a small livestock plan years ago. They both believe they’re unlikely to be compensated if Francie died under such preventable circumstances. How absolutely stupid they were to leave the shed unlocked, the coolant where the goats could reach it.
▴ ▴ ▴
Mabel zombies down the hallway, takes a sidelong glance at the empty phone cradle—Will’s disconnected it already—on the wall. They’ve placed a mirror just next to the banister: she registers her defeated look, bare face flushed with acne, hair wet and flat from the bath. She looks a train wreck. But train wreck is familiar ground—she’s starting to know how to handle train wreck. She floods her lungs with oxygen to stave off another panic attack. Then she climbs downstairs.
Dexter has scaled the back of the sofa and is admiring the hanging photographs. He seems enthralled by a picture of Mabel and Will on their first date—they were pearly-faced teenagers, then, and so skinny, eating ice cream at a church social. There would be no dancing on the gym floor of the fellowship center. Instead, later, her head buried in the cavity above his collarbone, they’d dance to music pouring out the car’s open door, the radio turned to the only station worth listening to.
She finds Will at the stove, watching a pot of water. Tiny bubbles rise in a line.
“Figured you might want some.”
Mabel hasn’t had caffeine in nine weeks, and the thought of Will’s instant coffee, strong and gritty, wells up in her an animal desire. “Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.”
The water starts to boil, so he pours two mugs. He spoons coffee from the jar and hands hers over, spoon still spinning in the vortex. The ceramic in her palms pulses with heat, heat unlike this terrible humidity in December, heat unlike a whole body flush with shame.
▴ ▴ ▴
The bath water turns grisly and bright, black clumps sinking to the bath mat. Mabel keeps the tap on, uses a plastic restaurant cup to rinse her hair with clean water. By terrible coincidence, the cup is printed with garish cartoon animals, including a tiger. The heat eats away at the cramping, so for a few minutes it subsides. Soon enough she’s all clean.
The morning outside is fully light, finally. Mabel dries off from the bath—the first one of the day—and changes into new clothes, not pajamas. She avoids looking at the bed, at the dark pool that needs laundering. At the mattress they will likely need to replace. Her parents replaced the last one.
She hasn’t planned for any of this; hasn’t planned for the cleanup, the awkward conversations, the cramps. And Will is going to try to fix everything. If this is at all like the last one, Mabel figures she can expect two more days of bleeding, four of pain. A miscarriage is, at its heart, the most concentrated of periods. She tried saying so to Will, last time; he had burst into tears.
▴ ▴ ▴
The phone rang while Mabel was outside in the dark. A sleepy Will stumbled out to pick up the receiver in the hallway. He’s already disconnected the other electronic devices in time for the millennium—the television, the radio, the computer tower. He will not be responsible for either of their deaths by short circuit and house fire, strangulation by possessed electronic cords. Who’s to say it can’t happen? But he keeps the phone connected in case of emergency. He plans to unplug it late New Year’s Eve.
The voice on the line was the automated emergency alert system. Glitch. Zoo. Tiger. Hotline. And Will relays all this to Mabel once he’s properly awake. She’s corralled herself to the tile to cut down mess. That’s at his suggestion. She feels a thrill rush through her at the news of the tiger, and hollers at once for Dexter to come inside. Can’t think of losing him too.
According to Mabel’s mother, goats are just twiggy dogs. Dexter leans in to the description. Unlike Francie, he comes when called, and seems pleased to be in human company. Not that Francie was cold toward them—more that Dexter is the baby, smaller, more clingy.
He takes some coaxing over the threshold, but once in the kitchen he’s happy enough. In no time he’s climbed the table.
“So,” Will says. Dexter is at eye-level behind him; the two of them stare at Mabel with empty, questioning gazes.
She pops her lips. She can’t believe any of this is happening. “So.”
Beside them, the sun grows steadily higher through the window. Purple light leaks into the kitchen. Dexter flinches at an imaginary fly.
Will strokes Dexter’s neck. “Want a bath?”
“Desperately.”
▴ ▴ ▴
“In here,” she calls, surprised her words don’t shake.
Will enters the shed. He takes in the goat’s body.
Then he sees Mabel’s pants dyed and half-stiff with blood.
“I had no idea,” he says.
She doesn’t know what to do with the prickle in her body at his reaction, how he acts like even this is his to bear. It isn’t. The thought has more than once crossed her mind that her infertility is punishment for all the sex they had as teenagers.
That’s a ridiculous thought, of course; this is the nineties, and sex is everywhere. And here is coming a new millennium. But miscarriage still feels like a moral failing.
“And for you to go wandering—Jesus. And for you to find this, of all things.”
“Don’t say Jesus,” she says.
Will’s whole face looks like undercooked egg. “You lost the baby,” he says. “Not you, I mean, I’m not accusing you. But the baby. Died.” He takes a breath, shakes his head. “But you were so careful. We both were.”
“Francie wasn’t that old,” Mabel says. That is the first time she’s said her name out loud since she found the woolen lump of her. Fancy Miss Francie is gone. Fancy Miss Francie and the baby are both gone, and Mabel is going to have to deal with all of it, grieve all of it. All the damp on her legs is cooling, which, to tell the truth, feels nice in the humidity. That’s wrong too.
“Is the tiger even loose?” Will says.
“The what?”
“Wish we had a gun. Should have borrowed one off Dad a while ago, I guess. I’m going inside, Francie.” He scratches his head and starts to leave but turns around at the door. “Mabel. I’m going inside, Mabel. Good night.”
“Good morning,” she calls after him. This is the moment to cry, if she’s able to. But she feels wrung out; she can’t make anything come.
▴ ▴ ▴
At first Mabel takes in the sight as a series of disparate items: the open feed bag, the tipped-over coolant container, the partially chewed painter’s tarp, Francie, the blue chemical puddle.
Her first rational thought feels like dream logic: that even in death Francie shows personality, hooves splayed in typical drama, the same Fancy Miss Francie as always.
The little body of the goat lets off no breath or pulse. She’s gotten into lots of things: the feed, the painter’s tarp, the coolant.
Mabel is too shocked to feel it deeply. The warm, unrefreshing air creeps down her open shirt and cools her soaked pajamas.
Then she retrieves the coolant, sets it back where it was. How irresponsible had they been not to lock the door, to leave coolant in reach of the goats? How untenable is Mabel as a caregiver? Mabel can’t care for the goats the way she should, can’t keep a baby alive inside her.
The doctor told Mabel not to worry. If this is the first baby to take in seven years, then believe this one must really want to be born. But she’s never believed this kind of superstition will help. She figures the best she could do was delay the inevitable. The inevitable being Mabel in the shed an hour before sunrise, in pain and sticky with what will never be a baby.
Mabel paces from one wall to the other, moving artifacts, moving them back. None of this is doing much; really, it’s glorified pacing. But sometime before the sun crests the mountains, she hears a noise that snaps her to. At first, bizarrely, she thinks she hears a growl. Then it turns to may, and then to Mabel. She recognizes Will’s voice, sharpening.
▴ ▴ ▴
Mabel is a careful sort, and Will’s superstitious, but despite their precautions, she wakes from uneasy sleep with wet pajamas.
Claustrophobia settles in. She throws off the comforter, doubles it over Will so it won’t dirty. He would fuss over a dirty comforter. She tumbles out of bed and clutches at her nightshirt to escape the top few buttons. She’s had these before, the old panic attacks, but this one is of a magnitude Mabel hasn’t felt in years.
Mabel feels her way through the house in the dark. In one corner stands the Christmas tree, still strung with popcorn and all the ornaments they’ll have to repack. She registers her trailing mess through den carpet, then tile.
She can’t breathe—no matter how big a gasp she takes, Mabel can swallow no oxygen.
She feels light and heavy-headed, like she might pass out. The night air is helping a little. Not enough. Every few steps she doubles over in pain; once, she slips to a knee in the dirt. What she needs is Francie, the soft goat in whose fur she can bury her head.
“Francie!” she croaks, trying not to wake Will.
A bleat sounds near the shed. She approaches a goat-shaped bundle near the door, too dark for Francie. Dexter, the other one, bumps his horns against the shed like he wants inside. Mabel lets out a ragged breath, submerges her hand into the wool at his neck.
The door knocks on the frame. It shouldn’t have been unlocked. Mabel pulls it and remarks, like always, about its lightness. She’s glad Will isn’t here to steal this moment for himself—the thought is here and gone again, so quick it almost wrenches her back out of her panic attack. Almost.
Mabel fumbles for the solitary light chain, finds it, and pulls.
▴ ▴ ▴
Three days past Christmas and dead midnight. A goat finds a cracked door and wanders in. Somewhere in the mountain a big cat picks its way through unfamiliar trees. The new century edges closer, finds footing on paths not meant for it to take.
The baby in Mabel has died in the night. It winds a foot in the cord, as if to tether the warm dark space around it, already fracturing apart.