Any Fool: The Serpent, Too

What is there to say? 

Your youngest squirms in his mother’s arms, burying his face into the crook of her neck. She bounces him and shifts from side to side on instinct, resting her chin against his cheek. They look like a painting you might find in a church. The newly setting sun provides her with a gilding that dapples under the sweet smelling leaves and shines with the slightest hint of green. 

She’s a sponge for it. The color and light. It converges on her, reflects through her, and she appears to glow. There’s something animal in you that wants to worship her.

If she’d let you. 

She won’t. 

What is there to say? 

You take stock of the changes between now and the day you dropped her off here. There's a fullness in her cheeks and a lightness in her gaze. Her olive skin is a few shades darker, her black hair flared with tawny streaks. Freckles have sprouted up in droves over her cheeks and shoulders, freckles you’ve only seen in childhood photos. There’s an obvious life in her you haven’t seen in years. Something numinous and perfect, more real than yourself or anything else. 

The doctors had to shave her head to give her stitches, but now there’s enough hair to be put into a tiny ponytail. For as long as you’d known her, her hair had never been shorter than the small of her back. She still looked beautiful without it, only a little more raw. Somewhat undone. You thought a lot of Samson that first week. She would stare at you or off into the distance, running her palm back and forth against the stubble, looking like the ghost of a kicked puppy.

She stayed at your place with the kids for nearly a month’s worth of her recovery.

It killed her a little. 

To stay with you. 

Half the time, she’d wake up thinking you were still married and try to recall what she’d put you on the couch for. She’d often try to coax you back to bed with her in the wee hours of the morning, sweet and confused and soft. And not herself at all. Not the version of her you’d come to know-- or accept, rather. 

That started to kill you. 

You’ve never been so lucky that none of her friends like you. The immediacy with which they swooped in was just as much a comfort as it was alarming. She’d wanted to stay with you, of course. Because of the kids. She felt safest with all of you together. But in a rare moment where you knew better than her, you got to talk her into ‘vacationing in the countryside.’

One of her friends owns an apple orchard. 

What can you say to her? 

It smells like cider, sweet and round, blending with petrichor and raw, overturned earth.

You’re missing a rib. 

And there isn’t any way to fold her back into bone and slip her inside you, she doesn’t belong there. Your body has rejected hers once already. After two decades, you let parting precede death— by more than a hair’s breadth, hopefully. It’s the hope that makes you furious. You’d burn the kingdom of heaven to the ground before you let it try to take her from you again.

And still, she’s not yours. 

You have never belonged to each other, but there is a greed in you. A hungry wrath that boiled you into a new shape when you found her crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. A terror and grief that kept you from visiting her until now. That kept you from being what she needed, even in your marriage to her. This is where it bares its naked face to you for the first time.

As it stills you. 

As it bares, also, a terrible pride that laps at the ichor of her wellbeing. Something horribly self congratulatory that wants to be responsible for her in all her splendor. That wants to shine with her light, wants to deserve it. That rends the world into a still image. That would kneel before her just once more if it could, like any fool who’s ever stood before a woman in a garden.

She stares at you, waiting. 

With each second, her stare slips from anticipation to apprehension. She blinks at you, and there in her eyes, you watch her run away with your silence. Watch the clockwork in her head start to spin out and tear through the passing moments for meaning. You always do this. Leave her to construct you in your absence. 

You both open your mouths at once. You both offer a useless little nod. A useless little, “hey.” 

This cracks any last traces of stillness you were able to render. A wobbly grin splits its way over her lips. She laughs without enough air for sound, nose crinkling into a snort that startles you both. A chuckle works its way out of the tightness in your throat, and your son laughs, too. 

She turns her attention to him. A cloud passes over the sun. The breeze offers a nice reprieve from the bits of direct sunlight you were getting, but you still miss the warmth.

She squeezes his little shoulder and cranes to try and see his face. “That funny Benny boy?”

He giggles and twists so that he’s hugging her more directly, resting his chin on her shoulder. His back to you. 

“You, uhm…” You start because you can’t stop yourself. Because you’re right here and she’s right there. Because it’s been months since you were right here and she was right there. Only, you can’t say ‘I love you,’ or anything that sounds like it. That wouldn’t be right, not now. You’re not sure what else there is, though. ‘You look like the beginning of time? The start of the world? My heart?’ How do you tell her she doesn’t even look like the woman you fell in love with, she’s someone new. Someone happier, somehow. “You… look good.” 

Abysmal. All your inadequacy in three little words. You’d curl up and die now if you could. Save her the trouble of having your head. 

Her lips twist out of her grin with a little scoff that might have been a chuckle if today were a good day. (It’s not.) She runs her tongue over her teeth and glances to the left like she’s lying. “Thanks.” 

You swallow hard and put a hand on her elbow. Her sunkissed skin is warm under your finger tips and you can’t remember the last time you touched her like this.

She looks at your hand with something frozen crackling in the corners of her eyes.

You steel yourself to say it. All of it. That she’s in the earth of you. That love or no, hers is the first name on your tongue every morning. That you have spent every day since you met her running away from her, afraid of what losing her would be like. How much you’d like to try to fill the absence in retrospect. 

And… you say nothing. 

The words don’t come. 

In their absence comes honesty.

You can’t do it. It’s time away from you that’s done her all this good. 

“I mean it.” And that feels inadequate, too. But it may be the first unselfish thing you’ve ever said to her. 

She looks you up and down. Her lip curls, her eyebrows dip. You watch her canines flash in the gold flickering all around you, stomach twisting at her plain disgust.

And then she stops. 

Stops breathing, stops bouncing Ben. 

And she sees you. 

Heaven and earth move. 

The cloud passes. 

She resumes all her little movements, eyes glossy. 

She swallows. Nods. “Thank you.”