Terribly Grateful
EMILY BRISSE
It’s spring, the week of the great melt, when most of the winter’s sixty inches of snow turn at once to water, rushing down the driveway in inspired streams. The rainboots I slip on my daughter’s feet have mud wedged in the soles from the morning, and all the other mornings we have walked about the yard, scouting for green. “Outside!” she keeps cheering. The afternoon sun beams in through the window.
I’m thinking about gratitude.
It’s then that my son swipes open the door, his voice strange and high, announcing there’s something in the front yard: “A raccoon, it’s moaning.” A bitter taste fills my mouth. Leaving the children behind, I step into the sun, inch as close as I dare to the writhing, shivering creature, then toss a snowball, yell “Shoo!” But it barely lifts its head, and I see its black button eyes, and within them the suck of something retracting.
Terrible, I think.
I call our city. The lady on the other end says she’ll send police: “Don’t watch.” I corral the children in the kitchen—crayons and coloring paper, Legos, fruit snacks. My daughter sings in her highchair. But my son asks and asks, “Is he still there?” So I check, and check, and each time say yes, the animal’s body a mound of fur that almost matches the winter grass.
The end is terrible, too: the four sharp shots we hear, sitting around the dining room table. And then the silence. How I can’t keep myself from peering one final time out the window, the memory of that twitching foot lingering long after it finally rests.
What’s worse, though, comes before I know the end is the end.
My hand is on the window sill, checking. I feel small grains of gravel under my feet. I peer down, my children’s coats and hats and mud-covered boots scattered about the floor, their bodies so easily unburdened. And then I blink up, and there’s a man in my front yard with a raised gun. I had not seen him approach. One moment he is not there. And then he is, the level barrel of his handgun long and thin and glinting in the sun. It doesn’t matter that he is wearing a uniform. It doesn’t matter that I had asked him to come. I trip over the boots. “Stay back!” I holler to my children, locking them in my arms, putting my body in between.
Later I’ll return to gratitude. Just a poor, sick animal. That my son was not—That we were not—How safe we are here, how protected, that good man in uniform, this house made of brick tucked snug under trees. But a bitter taste will remain. I’ll feel tingly the rest of the day, watching the night come on. I’ll think about rarity, about the implication of shock. What is worse? I will ask myself, walking between windows, imagining myself another woman, in another place, the circumstances something other, less protected. I’ll flail between my fear and my guilt and my children.
But first—my boy. He calls me back with his unending questions, with his round eyes that are my eyes in him, that insistence. So, after the officer leaves, I go with him outside.
The melt water trickles down the driveway. The trees are empty of bird song. Smoke and a feral tang thread the air. It’s colder.
I hold out my hand; he takes it.
Together we enter a once-familiar place. There are dents in the grass from the bullets, streaked by small splotches of red. A ways off, I notice scratches in the mud: claw marks, a final struggle against an overwhelming power. “What happened to him?” my son asks. I haven’t told him the whole story. He is too young, I think. He doesn’t need to know this yet, I think, grateful, so terribly grateful, that there are clouds on the horizon, and it looks like rain.
