A love story

9

I am alone with these thoughts, these women.

What is taking him so long to come back?

"Sam?" I climb out of bed. "Sam?" I call from the top of the stairs, placing my hand against the window in the hall. There, I hear that awful sound again. A man outside coughing in the night. "Sam?" Each step down the stairs takes years. I'm frozen by terror. The photos lining the stairwell don't anchor me. Pictures of my girls at birthdays, the beach, riding ponies. "Sam?" I call from the bottom stair. The front door is locked, but the knob begins to turn against the lock and I can't move. Someone is trying to get inside. He's here, the man who has come to chop us into bits. The lock holds, but I am petrified. The man tries the doorknob again. "Sam? Where are you?"

"I'm out here." He turns the locked knob.

"You?" Sam is the man. "How'd you get locked out?"

I grab a corner of the kitchen table.

"Are you kidding?" He coughs again. It is Sam. He's at the door. I see him through the glass, coughing. Sam's the man who's come to chop us to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. Sam cannot save me from death and I am so angry. If he cannot stop me or my babies from dying, what good is he? Why is he even here?

"Open the door."

I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what's love and what's fear? "If you're Sam, who am I?"

"I know who you are."

"You do?"

"Yeah."

"Who am I?" I ask. Don't say wife, I think. Don't say mother. I want to know if I am anyone without my family, if I am anyone alone. I put my face to the glass, but it's dark and I don't reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the door. He coughs some more.

"I want to come home," he says. "I want us to be O.K. That's it. I'm simple and I want to come home and be with my family."

"But I am extremely not simple," I tell him. My body's coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There's nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my own body? There's nothing simple here. I'm ruled by elixirs and compounds I don't even know. Maybe I love Sam because my hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don't want that kind of love. I want a love that exists outside my body also. I don't want to be a chemistry project.

"In what ways are you not simple?" he asks.

I think of the women I collected upstairs, how they're inside me. I'm thinking of molds. I'm thinking of the sea and plankton. I'm thinking of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. "It's complicated," I say, but words aren't going to be the best way here. Don't talk. How can I tell him something that's just coming into existence?

"I get that now," he says. "But you're going to have to try to explain it."

We see each other through the glass. He lifts his hand to my face. We witness each other. That's something, to be seen by another human. Sam's seen me since we were young. That's something, too. Love over time. Love that's movable, invisible, love like a liquid or a gas, love that finds a way in.

"Unlock the door."

"I don't want to love you because I'm scared."

"So you imagine crazy things about me? You imagine me doing things I've never done to get rid of me? Kick me out so you won't have to worry about me leaving?"

"Yeah," I say. "Right." And I'm glad he gets that.

Sam cocks his head the way a coyote might, a coyote who's been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus morality.

What's the difference between living and imagining? What's the difference between love and security?

"Unlock the door," he says again.

This family is the biggest experiment I've ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?

"Unlock the door," he says again. "Please."

I turn the knob. I open the door. That's the best definition of love I can imagine.

Sam comes inside. But when I go to shut the door behind him he tells me no. "Leave the door open." As if there were no doors, no walls, no houses.

"Open?"

"Yeah."

"What about skunks?" I really mean burglars, gangs, evil.

"Let them in if they want."

If they even exist. If I didn't make them up. "Really?" I ask.

"Really," he says, and pulls the door open wide, as open as it can be. 

Should I write more? Please let me know if you guys enjoyed this short love story