Surrogate Needs

When Mindy watches Carter’s house through binoculars at night, his curtains are always closed.  He doesn’t linger in front of backlit windows, and she suspects he suspects someone outside is spying.  Tonight, Mindy parks two houses down on the opposite side of the road.  The Driscolls’ porch light is out.  Each October they visit grandchildren up and down the Eastern seaboard.  She backs into their driveway and turns her headlights off.  The air is crisp.  Her breath fogs up the windshield quickly.  She wipes greasy streaks in the condensation so she can see.  Even with her binoculars, she can’t be sure if the shadows shifting behind Carter’s curtains are made by one person or two, a man and a woman or a man and a dog.  Inside, the television glows blue behind canvas shades, and lights on in every downstairs window make the house, from her vantage point, seem full of life and people.

Mindy’s dog stays with Carter every other week.  During these long stretches when Mindy is alone in her new apartment, rearranging furniture and photographs to cover cracks in her plaster walls, Mindy misses her dog disproportionately more than she enjoys the dog in person.  She misses stroking Gracie’s wet snout and steeling herself against Gracie’s ambushes of sloppy love.  She misses the way Gracie’s tail thunks against the television during shows about full body makeovers or celebrities on the skids.  Tonight when Carter takes Gracie out before bed, Gracie bounds towards the hedges, and Mindy trains her binoculars on Carter, alone.  He stands in the walkway, wearing a shapeless sweatshirt, a pair of jeans.  He picks a Styrofoam cup off the grass and stuffs it in his pocket.  Then he ducks out of sight, and Mindy moves her binoculars up and down, left to right.  When she spots Carter, he is squatting in the grass.  Gracie licks his face.  Carter squints and throws his head back against the onslaught of Gracie’s tongue.  Mindy puts her binoculars down.  The lenses are hard to focus.  No matter how she zooms in or out, she loses Carter every time he moves.

The other woman doesn’t come until after ten.  She is Cindy Chiu, the meteorologist from Channel 6.  Mindy recognizes her tonight, as always, by her narrow heels, which sink into the grass, and by her orange suit coat, which matches her pencil skirt, which matches her purse.  In recent weeks, Mindy has watched Cindy Chiu use a key which Carter must have given her and arrive each night without an overnight bag, suggesting somewhere inside Carter’s house there are more bright skirts and pert jackets waiting to be pulled on in the morning.  Tonight, Cindy Chiu drops her key in the bushes by the porch and, after crouching to retrieve it, stands and is in some kind of pain.  She puts her hand to her lower back and holds it there.  Looking towards the road, Cindy Chiu surveys the surrounding stonewalls and bungalows as if she has heard a threatening noise and is trying to pin down its source.  Mindy stares at her, with her compact body and perky bob, willing her to look in the direction of the Driscolls’ driveway.  Left, left, Mindy thinks, down, down.  Now stop.  When Cindy Chiu passes over Mindy’s car without seeming to notice the woman inside it, Mindy slinks down into her seat so her forehead is level with the steering wheel.  She wonders if there is a speed a heart can reach where it just stops beating.

On Sunday mornings, Mindy runs the small islands off the coast.  She wears mesh shorts even though it’s mid-October and is so fit from jogging nothing jiggles when she runs.  The islands are twelve, fourteen, fifteen miles around.  By the light house at mile ten, brown spots obscure her vision, and Mindy feels faint but presses on, ascending the hills towards Owl’s Head Point where her exhaustion gives way to a delirious runner’s high.  Each week Mindy runs, her stamina builds as if it’s still in its infancy and has limitless potential for growth.  On the ferry back to the mainland, Mindy turns sideways in front of the tinted cabin windows and admires her toned-tight arms and abs.  In high school, she wore size-14 jeans and a D-cup bra.  She nicknamed her love handles Flabby Abbey and Gabby to poke fun at her figure before any others could.  In college, she stuck her finger down her throat.  The girls who shared showers and stalls in Porter Hall’s third floor bathroom traded tips about laxatives and purged together after binging on Dominoes pizza.  But Mindy stopped after several months when she met Carter at a mixer.  More than her hips and fleshy underarms, she hated keeping dark secrets from people she longed to be close to.  Plus, Carter loved her voluptuous curves.  His definition of sexy was a woman who ate prime rib and could lift half her body weight in cases of Coors Light.  “Come here,” he said time and again, during the course of their marriage, whenever he caught her making evil faces at her reflection in a mirror or car window.  “Step away from the shiny surface.”

Last spring, when they’d adopted Gracie, the vet had insisted not all couples could manage a Rottweiler/German Shepherd mix.  Gracie had taut, muscular haunches.  She could topple a small adult if she became too excitable and could drag a handler fifty feet if she decided to chase a squirrel while leashed.  “You look strong, though,” the vet told Mindy, meaning it as a complement, but when Mindy and Carter got home, Mindy precipitated the same old argument about what type of woman she was and was not.

“Those men in white coats,” she said.  “They assume just because they can read a thermometer and draw your blood, they know everything about you,”

“This one was only a vet,” Carter said.  “You can’t take everything they say to heart.”

In the afternoon, Mindy drives to the Eastern Prom where Carter, Gracie, and a series of other handlers and dogs assemble in pairs on the beach to learn simple commands like “sit,” “down,” “come.”  Mindy watches the dogs from a bench on the hill.  Her calf muscles twitch, and loose ponytail hairs stick to the back of her neck.  Carter expects her to show up, and the distant islands and lobster boats make her binoculars seem appropriate.  Below her, Carter faces the water, and orders Gracie to come and stay. Gracie’s tongue dangles over her mouth as she mulls over whether to mind or defy him.

Mindy sets the binoculars down, knowing the obedience routine by heart.  After the dogs stay in place, they sit, then stand, then heel.  If there is time left over, they practice fetching sticks.  Mindy rehearses these prompts with Gracie every other week, instructing Gracie to sit beside the weight machine in her living room or move away from the Gatorade stockpiled in her hall.  Mainly, Mindy wants to train Gracie to become a better companion, to bark pleasantries like “Thank you,” to catch a Frisbee between her teeth.  After dinner, Mindy plays Frank Sinatra on the stereo and arranges Gracie’s paws on her shoulders, and they waltz across the linoleum.  Some weeks with Mindy, Gracie takes two steps back.  She lunges at a neighbor’s cat or snaps at the Somali boy who lives downstairs.  Or she tries to escape through Mindy’s open windows, and Mindy gives Gracie rawhide, red meat, things she’s not supposed to, to distract the dog and calm her, so Gracie will not leave.

When Carter sees Mindy standing behind a fence, he holds up a hand, and Mindy nods.  When class ends in fifteen minutes, Mindy and Carter will meet in the parking lot and transfer Gracie’s chew toys in a duffel bag.  Carter, who is six feet of solid bulk, will carry Gracie’s plastic kennel which is the size of a small shed, and Mindy will hold Gracie’s leash and make a big deal out of having missed Gracie tremendously and Carter not at all.  Both Mindy and Carter will pretend their parking lot handoffs can go on indefinitely.

Kneeling in the sand beside Gracie, Carter talks to the dog but looks directly at Mindy.  “See, Gracie girl.  She decided to come back.”

“I heard that,” Mindy says.  “I’ll never let her go.”

Mindy and Carter adopted Gracie last spring when it became clear they might not have children.  They had exhausted every combination of drugs and procedures and tests; pills that made Mindy bloated and mean, hormonal injections that Carter needled deep into her thigh.  Carter learned to slide the needles out slowly so Mindy wouldn’t bruise.  Mindy learned to test if she was ovulating from studying the consistency of her spit.  She cupped her breasts in the bathroom, weighing them in her hands, trying to determine if they had grown, and she and Carter tried different positions different times of day.  Carter made line graphs at work, charting her irregular cycle with software intended for forecasting change in financial investments.  Mindy quit her job as a freelance photographer, convinced the stress of photographing babies and blissful brides was contributing to her inability to conceive.  She tried knitting, which was too stationary an activity to provide an outlet for her agitation, and turned to long walks that became life-or-death sprints whenever she spotted a mommy pushing a stroller within socializing distance.

Last fall, she and Carter cashed in their savings and 401(k) s.  Four fertilized embryos were implanted inside her womb.  None of them thrived.  They tried again.  Mindy was a model patient, blinking back tears when one doctor hinted her weight might be to blame.  She slipped her heels into the stirrups exactly as she was told.  In January, she revisited the IVF clinic in Boston so specialists could harvest a third and final batch of eggs.  Carter sat on the edge of her exam table and instructed her to visualize positive things, like the time they’d parasailed in Mexico or the soft, lavender color they planned to paint their baby’s room.  “Don’t cry,” he said, stroking her forehead.  “This is peanuts compared to the laparoscopy.”

The nurse preparing the ultrasound told Mindy, “Go ahead and let it out.”  The nurse’s tone was tough, but soft.  Mindy couldn’t stop weeping.  The nurse put the slick, plastic ultrasound wand down on the clean chrome table and held Mindy’s hand.  She had the warmest, brownest eyes Mindy had ever seen, grey hair and beautiful wrinkles, and a face that registered the kind of pain Mindy couldn’t keep swallowed a single second longer.

When this third batch of embryos didn’t take, Carter suggested they adopt a dog.  When they picked Gracie up at the shelter, the vet said she was between the ages of two and seven.  She had already been spayed, possibly abused by a previous owner.  Dr. Leonard raised his hand, and Gracie flinched and clawed across his cold chrome table.  “See the way she cowers,” the vet said.  “This is how you know.”  The vet showed Mindy divots in Gracie’s coat where you could see past her fur to her pale, pimpled skin.  Gracie’s scars looked like lines drawn on with a thin, white pencil.  Mindy didn’t want to touch the dog because she did not want to hurt or scare her.  She imagined her own insides pitted with gray craters where metal instruments had scraped away scar tissue and cells and wondered if she had enough love left to give an animal, much less another human.  On the other side of the examining table, Carter discovered how the dog liked to be rubbed.  “Watch,” he said as his hands disappeared into Gracie’s fringy underside of caramel-colored fur.

A half hour later, Carter drove them home in the Blazer, and Gracie whimpered inside her kennel in the back.  Mindy sat in the front and kept turning around and sticking her fingers through Gracie’s kennel door, then pulling them back before Gracie could sniff or lick them.

“Almost there,” Carter said.  “Almost home, Gracie girl.”

“What’s so funny?” Mindy asked when she noticed Carter grinning shamelessly.

“Did you do the math?  In human years, she’s between 14 and 49.  We could be bringing home a teenager or a menopausal woman.”

“She’s a dog,” Mindy said.

He squeezed her knee.  “We’re not going to give up.  A dog will be good practice.”

Last May, they were still living in the same house.  A freak snow storm brought thunder and heavy squalls. Gracie dashed up the stairs and leapt on the bed where Mindy lay awake.  The dog whimpered, hiding her head beneath her paws.  Mindy uncovered Gracie’s ears and stroked the velvety tips where caramel-colored fur grew into soft points.  Mindy sang the song about bows and flows of angel hair.  Downstairs, Carter shut the windows so snow wouldn’t seep in through the screens.  The day had been bright, nearly sixty.  The cold had arrived after dusk, a surprise attack.  When Carter poked his head into the bedroom, Mindy said, “She’s wigging out like it’s the end of the world,” and Carter cut the light and sat on the corner of the bed.  He wore boxer shorts and a t-shirt from a financial planning convention in Houston.

Mindy continued with the verse about moons and Junes and Ferris wheels.  Her voice was wobbly but full-sounding too, and Carter said, “She likes it when you sing.”  He stroked Gracie’s coat and said, “Atta girl.  Listen to Mommy’s music.”

Mindy sang one more verse but then couldn’t go on.  The next word was right there on the tip of her tongue and then it was nowhere, dissolved like the snow that melted as soon as it struck the window pane.  Mindy continued but felt her voice crack even before she heard it.

Carter picked up where she stopped, repeating the bit about bows and flows of angel hair, only lower and off key, but he didn’t know the words, and a minute later, the room fell silent except for Gracie’s panting and the eerie whistle of wind swirling snow and wet leaves against the slick side of the house.  The squalls came in fits and bursts, one gust so fierce their headboard trembled.

“Don’t stop,” Carter said.  “What’s wrong?  What didn’t I do?”

“I’m not Gracie’s mommy,” Mindy said.  “Gracie’s mommy shits in the bushes and eats off floors.”

Carter stopped tracing circles on Gracie’s coat.

Mindy pulled her knees up to her chest.  “Every time we fuck and nothing happens,” she said, “I feel more and more unfixable.  Maybe I can’t.  Maybe I wasn’t meant to.”

Carter pulled his hand away from the dog.  The hallway lights flickered off.  Darkness drowned the room, and Gracie whined.

“Men are fucked-up too you know,” Mindy said.  “Some have low sperm counts.  Some shoot blanks.”

Carter sighed.  “I’m not doing this tonight.”

“I want to stop doing this forever.”

“You say the word.  We’ll quit.”

“Let’s quit,” Mindy said.  “Let’s quit tonight.”  And, although she hadn’t initially meant it, she immediately felt relieved of the burden of trying, of the limbo caused by waiting.  They wouldn’t have a baby but they would bond in the future over surrogate things, more pets, trips to new continents, the stuff childless couples shared.  The lights flickered on, and Carter cupped his hands and studied the creases in his palms.  Mindy waited for him to move towards her and hold her.  She wanted to stop being furious at him for no good reason.  She wanted to stop wanting to hurt him.  But he put his face in his hands and remained removed on the corner of the bed.

“One more thing,” she said.  “You don’t think it’s quitting if we stop?  Because it’s not quitting if it can’t happen.  It’s called being reasonable.  It’s called accepting what you can and can’t do and moving on.  And we can’t make a baby, so accepting that’s owning our shit.”

Carter lifted his head from his hands.  “But I can,” he said.  “I did.  In college.”

He rubbed his face, and Mindy didn’t recognize his mouth or nose.  All of his features were contorted, a little bit off.   Outside, wind whistled above the sweeping-sound of snow, and streetlamps cast a dim glow across the bedroom, giving their gestures a blurry, liquid feel.

Mindy smoothed the wrinkles in the bedspread.  “With who?” she asked.

Carter shook his head.  “It doesn’t matter.  She didn’t go through with it.”

“You’re sure it was yours?” Mindy asked.

Carter started rubbing his eyes.  “I prayed it wasn’t.  I prayed for worse than that.  I made all types of mental deals for it to go away.”

Mindy thought of Carter as a child.  She’d seen pictures of him which made her insides melt; a scrawny boy with satellite ears, grinning in between parents who were visibly miserable, a gawky teenager, right after his parents’ divorce, setting a placemat at Christmas dinner for a framed picture of his absent dad.  Usually blissfully unaware and optimistic, Carter now looked like he might cry.  Mindy reached out to touch his face but pulled her hand back, wanting him to apologize first, wanting them to cry together, if at all.

She grabbed her pillow and hugged it to her chest.  “If you left me,” she said, “I wouldn’t blame you.”

“That wouldn’t be right.”

Mindy said, “You’re supposed to say: ‘Don’t be ridiculous.  I could never leave you.'”  She got off the bed.

“I couldn’t leave you,” Carter said.

Mindy headed towards the stairs.  “You shouldn’t rule out any options,” she said from the doorway.  “I don’t want to become the people we’re becoming.  I don’t want to be the wife who you’ll resent.”

Carter found Emmanuel, a Guatemalan boy with curly hair and chipmunk cheeks.  He was one and a half.  In his on-line profile, he played with a piece of scotch tape stuck to his nose, and his wet eyes glistened as they crossed his nose to bring the tape into focus.  Mindy stood behind Carter’s desk chair, straining to see the picture on the screen.  In Emmanuel’s eyes, she thought she recognized the expression of a kid who clowned around because he was too frightened to reveal the enormity of his needs.  His chin had a cleft so deep it could’ve held a tiny stone.  She would have loved to have loved him, to have squeezed him and tickled him and saved clips of his hair in Ziploc bags.  For a moment, Mindy cut and pasted him into her fading idea of her future, first inserting him into the wooden cradle in the lavender bedroom, then folding him into the off-white christening gown Carter’s mother had given her as a special gift before their wedding.

“Or,” Carter said, quickly pulling up a brand new image of a brand new foreign child, “there is Nadia from Moscow or little Ginger from Taipei.”

“Go back to the boy,” Mindy said.  “No, wait.  Stop scrolling.”  It irritated her how disposable the children seemed as Carter skimmed over them, scanning for the young and healthy.

“Forget it,” Mindy said, stepping away.  “I don’t even order shoes on-line.”

“So we could go there in person.  Russia, China, wherever you decide.”  Carter navigated to a website that estimated airfare to Beijing.  He typed in hypothetical travel dates, the second week of June to the first week of July.

Mindy said, “I signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment at the top of Cooper Hill.”

Carter swiveled around in his chair.

“I only did it yesterday.  I thought we could use some space.”

Carter opened his mouth.

“Consider it a trial-basis kind of thing,” she said.

He said, “I don’t want to try living separately.  I want to try harder at living together.”

“But I can’t look at you without wanting to hit you.  I can’t watch you drink water without hoping that you’ll choke.  That sounds so awful,” Mindy said, “I know.  But it’s not because I want you to die.  I just want you to hurt with me, in a similar way.”

“Hit me,” Carter said.  “Pummel me.  But let’s move on.”

“I can’t,” Mindy said.  “Not yet.  And you deserve better.  Even when you’re being an asshole, you deserve to be an asshole without a wife that wants to punish you.”

For a short while after Mindy moved out, it seemed as if they could be friends.  On the first day of her lease, Carter carried her crates and furniture up to her third floor walk-up, and later he fixed her kitchen sink when a pipe burst in early June.  Alone, in her new apartment, Mindy baked stuffed shells and brownies and delivered them to Carter’s doorstep, flagged with encouraging notes.  Good luck with your clients.  Hope you have a terrific week!  They called each other first thing in the morning and last thing each night, sharing small facts they’d discovered living singly.  Like how Carter spent too much time checking stocks on the Internet, or how Mindy had lost her appetite and didn’t need as much sleep or rest.  “I’m starting to run,” Mindy said one night, staring out at her new yard, a pitch of gravel pocked with weeds.  “Like really run, and train, maybe even for a marathon.”  She told Carter how she’d jogged with Gracie around Dogfish Island, leaving out the part about nearly collapsing at Windsor’s Bend after eating only a rice cake and apricot for breakfast.

“You run?” Carter said.  “You?  The girl who thought exercise was criminal?”

“What can I say?” Mindy said, and she felt, in their loaded silence, how much he wanted her to say that people could change, move back together.

They enrolled Gracie in obedience school in mid-July.  Mindy stood on the beach and gave Gracie commands while Carter stood behind the fence and offered mild encouragement.  Then they switched roles and after class walked along the water before parting ways.  Carter brought binoculars and pointed out egrets, herons, a peregrine falcon.  Mindy brought artsy pictures she’d taken of her neighbors, their silly kitsch; a black and white shot of a Virgin Mary in a half shell, a blurry colored print of a neighbor’s gutted Mustang.  They didn’t talk about babies or the lucky women who could have them.  Mindy wanted to show Carter she was ready to move on.  “I’m even taking pictures,” she said, flipping to a head-shot she’d taken of the frail, bird-boned woman who lived downstairs.   “She’s about ninety years old and has just as many cats, and she waits by her window and always seems to want to talk to me.”

“What about other people?” Carter asked.  “Can we talk about other people?”

“Has that come up for you?” Mindy said.  It hadn’t come up for her.

“We’re separated,” Carter said.  “I’m just saying, if it does.”

“But has it?” Mindy asked.

“Forget it,” Carter said.  “What about putting our house on the market next month?  I think September’s as good a month as any.”

“Tell me,” Mindy said.  “We’re friendly.  Friends talk.”

“Are you moving home or not?” Carter asked.

Mindy said, “Look.”

He said, “Where?”

Mindy held the binoculars up to his face.  Across the bay, an eagle’s nest was tucked into the top of a pine tree.  A tangle of twigs and needles supported the outline of a muscular bird.  Carter said he couldn’t see it, and Mindy leaned into his torso, her right shoulder touching his left arm.  She inched the binoculars across his face so that the lenses were better aligned with the nest.  What if they could start all over, recover their former closeness?  Carter looked through the binoculars while Mindy looked at him.  The tag of his shirt was sticking up, and Mindy folded it down, flattening his collar with her palm.  Her fingers touched his neck, and Carter jerked the binoculars away from his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“With what?”

“With our lives,” Carter said.  “You’re leaving me hanging.  I asked you a question.”  His voice was bitter; something in him had turned.

Mindy said, “I don’t think I can move back.”

Carter started walking towards their cars.  She watched him pick something off his sleeve, one of her long, brown hairs, which, more and more frequently, she was finding tangled in the drain of her tub.

Today, when they meet in the parking lot after obedience class, Carter asks, “How are things?”

“How are things with you?” Mindy responds.

“Fine,” Carter says.  “Things with me are fine.”

Faithfully, they stick to neutral topics of conversation; the tanking stock market, the price of gas, whether the tide is coming in or going out.  The waterfront swarms with people and pets.  Dogs sniff beneath each others’ tails, and toddlers waddle away from parents’ outstretched arms.  Walking towards Carter’s Blazer, Mindy trails her fingertips along Gracie’s coat, and Gracie’s tail thumps Mindy’s leg.

“You must be cold,” Carter says, gesturing towards Mindy’s running shorts.

“I’m fine,” she says.  “Earlier it was warmer.”

A flock of grounded seagulls part as they approach.  Mindy crouches on the asphalt and tucks her nose behind Gracie’s ears.  “Do you want to come home and waltz to Frank Sinatra?” she whispers as she inhales Gracie’s scent of musk and fleece and pretends, for an instant, she has become so small she can pitch her tent in the wrinkle of fur above Gracie’s collar.  A car honks to her left, but Mindy stays down, ignores the burn in her knees.  “I’ve got you under my skin,” she sings to Gracie.  “I’ve got you deep in the heart of me.”

“Jesus,” Carter says.  “Let’s go.”

When Mindy stands, brown spots muddy her vision, and instinctively she reaches out and grabs for Carter’s arm.  Although he doesn’t pull away, he turns his head, surveying the rows of cars, the clusters of seagulls, as if he’s just found his seat on a plane and is searching for the nearest emergency door.  Ahead of them, an elderly man struggles to get a Husky into the back of a Sedan.

“Take her,” Carter says to Mindy.  “I’ll meet you at my truck.”

Observing the way Carter puts the man at ease with a gentle pat on his shoulder and how he guides the Husky into the vehicle with little more than a light rebuke, Mindy gets goosebumps along her neck and arms and shoulders.  She hugs herself and looks away, rolling her eyes at no one in particular, pretending to be disgusted by Carter’s relentless cheerfulness, although she once loved Carter especially for this.  After Carter finishes helping the man, he unlocks his Blazer and removes Gracie’s duffel, a chew-toy dragon, a miniature foam ball with one half of one side torn out.  On his front seat, a Fortune magazine is half-covered by a woman’s purple jacket, and there’s a News Center 6 travel mug beside his cell phone in the cup holder.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Carter says.

“I can walk twenty feet without a chaperone.”

“I’ll walk you anyway,” he says.

At her car, Mindy unlocks her door, and Gracie jumps into the back seat, seizing a rawhide bone off the floor and shaking out her coat so the bone slaps against an arm rest.  Carter pries the scrap from Gracie’s mouth and pitches it into the tall, brown grass.  “You’re not supposed to give her those,” he says to Mindy.  “If pieces chip off, they’ll balloon-up in her stomach.”

Mindy mock-slaps her wrist.  Carter steps towards her, blocking her view of the beach.  He’s missed a spot shaving on his neck, a patch of light hair which Mindy would have once touched, made a light joke about, possibly kissed, but now only notices because they’re facing each other, standing still.  Carter’s girlfriend is on the six o’clock news five nights a week.  She gestures towards clouds and cold fronts, talks about the temperature.  When she reappears during news briefs squashed between Access Hollywood and some dumb sitcom, her cool composure is a punch-in-the-gut reminder that Carter has traded-up.

“I ran into Tina from your old work yesterday,” Carter says.  “She asked if you were coming back.  She said she almost didn’t recognize you when she ran into you at Dryers.”

“I was wearing sunglasses,” Mindy says.

“She asked about your weight.”

“I bought a potted cactus and some bulbs.”

“Are you still talking to Dr. Studeman?” Carter asks.

Gracie is curled into a crescent in the backseat of the car.  Mindy flicks wet sand off Gracie’s coat.  During rare moments like these, when Gracie is still and resting, when her tongue lolls over the slippery sides of her teeth, Mindy almost believes she desires nothing more than Gracie’s warmth at the foot of her bed, Gracie’s tongue between her toes the moment she slips off her sweaty sneakers.

Carter touches her back.  “I have to tell you something I don’t want you finding out from someone who’s not me.”

She strokes Gracie’s ears.

“Just for a minute,” Carter says, “could you turn around and look at me?”

Mindy grabs Gracie’s collar and shoves past his shoulders.  She wrenches Gracie down towards the water, first dodging a stroller, then sidestepping two shirtless men flipping a Frisbee over a terrier’s head.  Brown spots swamp her vision as she charges towards the edge of the beach, but she keeps running, keeps commanding herself to run, the powerful pound, pound, pound of her feet momentarily stomping out an intrusive ache she can’t permanently elude no matter how quickly she sprints or how insubstantial she becomes.

The world is black, and when Mindy opens her eyes, she’s lying on her stomach in the sand.  She tastes copper, spits grit, feels a vice clamped to her chest, which only slowly loosens.  Carter squats beside her, sunlight sizzling around his hair.

“You bit me,” Carter says, holding out his hand.  “After you fainted, I tried to help you, and you bit me.”  His hand bleeds in a perforated smile below his thumb.  He touches her eyebrow.  “You’re bleeding too.”

Water glitters like a strobe behind Carter’s shoulders.  Her heart beats inside her head.  Strangers’ footsteps shudder through the sand below like seismic shifts from a fault line only fifteen feet beneath the ground.  Gracie digs through mounds of seaweed, trailing her leash behind her, and Carter sits so close, Mindy could lean over and nuzzle his neck.  She slides back into a sitting position.  Carter touches her knee.  What she misses most about trying to rebuild a life alone is the warmth of someone else’s touch confirming she has not yet become invisible.

Last week, she fainted after running around Star Isle.  She bent for her keys stowed in her sock in the mainland ferry parking lot, and when she opened her eyes, her head was level with the asphalt.  A Snickers wrapper floated in an oily puddle behind one wheel.  She pushed up, brushed gravel off her knees, counted her teeth with her tongue to make sure none were missing, and looked around to see if anyone had seen her fall.  Families disembarked from the ferry with bikes and backpacks, with bottles of alcohol wrapped in paper bags.  Children with balloons tied to their wrists skipped by.  Men, Mindy’s age and older, who three years earlier would have stopped their bantering to appraise her curves, didn’t even slow to a saunter as they hurried past her Hyundai.

“Maybe you have a concussion,” Carter says, orbiting his hand around her head.  “Let me take you to the ER.”

“I’m fine,” Mindy says.  “Ask me a question.  Like where I live or what my name is.”

“Right there?” Carter asks, touching her forehead. “Is that where it hurts?  Open your eyes.  Let me check your pupils.”

Mindy keeps her eyes closed.  She knows his face by heart.  The cluster of freckles on his nose, the scar beneath his mouth where his teeth spliced through his lip when, as a child, he dove off a wheelbarrow testing a hang-glider made out of feathers.

“I’m Mindy Harrington,” she says, “and you’re Carter Flint.”

He says, “Let me help you get up, get home.”

“I live at 12 Trenton Street, apartment number four.”  She says, “Today is the third Sunday in October, and last month we got divorced.  It was a gorgeous fall Wednesday.  Sixty-two degrees.  Not a cloud in the sky.  Maybe a high cloud, a twenty percent chance of precipitation, but those weather people always overestimate the likelihood of rain.”

He frowns at her.  “You don’t make it easy to keep you in my life.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Mindy says.  “If my mother hadn’t been such a workaholic and if your father hadn’t left, do you think it would have meant less to us to have a baby and do it right?”

Carter says, “If I hadn’t loved you, it wouldn’t have meant so much to me.”

When Mindy opens her eyes, he is no longer blocking the sun.  He kneels in front of Gracie, pressing his forehead to her snout, whispering calm commands Mindy can’t hear above the wind and waves.

“When were you going to tell me?” Mindy says.

“About the house?  The offer from the retired couple from New Jersey?”

“About her,” Mindy says, looking away.  A beach house with a widow’s watch is the only thing she sees.  Carter walks over to her and puts a hand on the top of her head.

“Stop touching me,” she says.

“I’ll put Gracie in your car.  I’ll crack the windows open.  Phone me when you get home.  Let me know you made it safe.”

He walks Gracie towards the parking lot; Gracie’s flank against his thigh.  Mindy hums inside her head, writing her name in the sand, mimicking her handwriting as a girl; I’s topped with heart’s, the tail of her Y a curly tendril.  She has started taking pictures of herself naked in the bathroom.  Her body is shrinking in dramatic, startling ways.  When she smiles, small bones in her face pop out like temperature-testers stuck in turkeys, and along her back, her vertebrae emerge like pointed fins, each one knobby and individuated, an enormous bulging knuckle.  Hair grows on her stomach, translucent and fine.  Dr. Studeman says she is not eating enough.  She is running too hard and long.

That night in her apartment when Mindy turns on the television, Cindy Chiu is filling-in for the weekend weather woman on Channel 6.  Mindy sinks into her couch, and Gracie pounces on the threadbare cushion beside her.  Gracie licks sand off Mindy’s thighs, bites the remote control in Mindy’s hand.

On television, Cindy Chiu is dressed in a lime green jacket and frilly blouse.  She wears gold hoop earrings the size of bangle bracelets.  She sits behind a news desk, waiting her turn to deliver the weather.  Mindy approaches the television and kneels on the floor in front of the screen.  She touches her nose to the televised image of Cindy Chiu’s face, staring deeply into the monitor’s grainy, winking pixels.  She can’t make out the shape of Cindy Chiu’s hips or waist beneath her suit coat.  Maybe Cindy Chiu has been pregnant or is pregnant or will become pregnant, but up-close Cindy Chiu is even more of a mystery than when studied from a distance, a plastic woman inside a box, a pointillist image of dots and static.

Mindy falls back onto the couch and pretends the remote control is a stun gun.  If she presses certain buttons, Cindy Chiu will feel electric shocks.  The Favorite Channel button sets off the highest possible voltage, and when Mindy presses Mute, Cindy Chiu loses the power of speech.  Mindy un-mutes the television and holds down the volume button until Cindy Chiu’s voice surrounds her, glass-shattering and shrill.  Every new weather prediction Cindy Chiu enunciates rattles through the floorboards, resounds in Mindy’s throat.  Gracie springs to the window, growling, bearing teeth.

Mindy turns the volume down, gets up, and checks her locks.  When she peers through her peephole, she inhales sharply and drops the remote.  The remote scuds across the kitchen linoleum, and Gracie chases it down, nosing it under the oven.  Then Gracie lunges at the back of the door, clawing divots in the chipped white paint.  Mindy looks through the view-hole again.  A nose, as large as a gourd, confronts her.  When the woman in the hallway tilts her head, Mindy sees a milky pupil bobbing in a sea of reddish veins.  Mindy steps away, forgetting the old woman can’t see her, and presses her back to the door, sliding down onto the cold linoleum.  “Do you need something?” she asks, loud enough so her voice will carry above Gracie’s howling.

“A minute of your time.”

“Maybe later?”

When the woman doesn’t speak, Mindy assumes she’s gone away.  She stands up, peers out through the view-hole to the shabby, dinged-up hallway.  She recognizes the bird-boned woman from downstairs; O’Connell or O’Donnell is the name above her mail slot.

“I heard somebody shrieking,” the woman says from the hallway.  “Just tell me you’re okay.”

Mindy says, “That wasn’t me,” and the woman shies back, trailing one hand against the far wall, teetering on orthopedic shoes.  She apologizes.  “My mind’s not what it used to be.  Sometimes I hear ghosts.”

Mindy unbolts the door and uses her body to block Gracie’s access to the hallway.  “Wait,” she says.  “What kind of ghosts do you hear?”

When the woman turns, her head sinks into her shoulders.  “My late husbands, Arthur and Carl.  Sometimes they keep me company.  Sometimes they keep me awake.”  She studies Mindy.  “Are you okay?”

Gracie butts her nose at Mindy’s hip, trying to break a clear path into the hallway.  Mindy warns the woman to stay back.  “Before we got her, she was hurt.  Now she lashes out at everyone.”  Mindy offers to lock Gracie in her bedroom.  When Mindy returns, the old woman has started to inch away.

“Can I get you something?” Mindy asks.  “Gatorade?  Green tea?”

When the woman shakes her head, loose skin quivers around her throat.  The sound of toppling furniture comes from inside Mindy’s apartment, and when the woman startles, Mindy steps towards her, close enough to breathe the woman’s scent of cat food and old age, and to see her skin, like tissue paper, stretched over jutting bones.  “My crazy dog,” Mindy says.  “I don’t know what to do with her.”  A tiny raw sore on the woman’s scalp is struggling to heal, and Mindy touches the woman’s hand, testing to see if she’ll pull back.

“I’m probably not okay,” Mindy says.

The woman nods but doesn’t shrink away.

“I probably need to get help,” Mindy says.  “That was my TV you heard.  I’ll try and keep it down.”

Before it’s due to close, Mindy and Gracie stop at the Dairy Queen off the coastal highway.  Gracie’s favorite treat is a cone of vanilla soft-serve dipped in cherry coating.  At the takeout window, Mindy orders two large cones and carries them to her car.  Gracie sits in the passenger seat while Mindy holds her own cone in her left hand and balances Gracie’s in her right against her thigh.  Both dive into their melting ice creams.  When Gracie gets distracted by children squealing outside, Mindy finishes Gracie’s cone too, scanning the parking lot before gobbling it down, then picking crumbs off the console and popping these into her mouth.

It’s after nine when Mindy pulls into Carter’s driveway and walks Gracie on a leash to Carter’s door.  In the street, a young couple passes, flashing flashlights and giddy grins.  When Carter opens the door, Mindy can’t think of what to say.  He is dressed in bright red sweatpants; his hair, a mess where he’s raked it with his fingers.  Spaghetti sauce stains the corners of his mouth, and Mindy wants to tell him to look in the mirror, thinking of the weather woman, her polished poise, how little it finally takes to drive a person away.

“Do you want to come in?” Carter asks.  Mindy shakes her head.  She asks to see his hand where she’s bitten it.  He raises it up, showing her both sides, and she reaches for his thumb and lifts his hand closer to her face.  She can see her teeth marks, an arc of splintery scabs.  She drops his hand and looks in the direction of her car.

“We ate cherry dips from Dairy Queen,” Mindy says.

“You and Gracie?” Carter asks.

Mindy says, “I want you to take her.”  She nudges Grace towards the crack of light where Carter’s door is not quite closed.

“Tonight?” Carter asks.

Mindy says, “For good.”

Carter bites his lip.

“I didn’t want a dog.  I wanted to have our baby.”  She touches his hand, and Carter steps towards her.  They stand stiff and silent, while moths fly into the porch light overhead.

“Some of her things are in my car,” Mindy says.

“I’ll come with you,” Carter offers.

Mindy holds up a hand up to stop him.  Without glancing over her shoulder, she walks to the driveway where the air is colder and smells of smoke.  Stars blink in the sky as she opens her trunk and unloads the contents of her car on the damp grass beside Carter’s Blazer – Gracie’s duffel bag and water bowl, a purple chew toy and plastic kennel.  Kneeling in the grass beside Carter’s driveway, Mindy tucks her binoculars inside Gracie’s duffel bag and zips it closed.

His house, once theirs, is the first thing to disappear in the rearview mirror as Mindy drives away, and then broad oaks and neighboring bungalows crowd-out Gracie’s kennel, and the dark purple swatches of Gracie’s duffel bag blend with other shades of night.  Carter’s mailbox shrinks to the size of a postage stamp and soon is obscured by the rise in the road too.  The sharp left to Cooper Hill is straight ahead past the bridge and evergreens.  If Mindy squints, she can see through the dark beyond the trees to this left where she will turn.