Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (33 page)

All the signs were there. We even talked about them, way back when. “The owners must love frogs,” Eric said as we toured the back yard of the house in Houston that would become our home when we left the islands. He nudged a knee-high pottery frog planter with his foot.

“Umm hmmm,” I said. I couldn’t have cared less. I was calculating our offer.

“That one is odd,” he said. He pointed at a large concrete frog Buddha, almost hidden by giant elephant ears and bougainvillea beside the waterfall that poured from the top pond into the middle one. You could see the ponds all the way from the front door, through the seamless full-length back windows. It reminded us of home, of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, of our beloved rainforest home Estate Annaly. How could we not buy this house? Eric continued, “It’s like a frog shrine.”

I remember saying something noncommittal, like, “Whoa, that 
is
 odd,” as I walked back into the house with the real estate agent. In retrospect, she seemed . . . in a hurry.

We moved in on the ninth of March, springtime in Houston. Beautiful springtime. For roughly six weeks, the temperatures are in the seventies and there’s a soft breeze. Flowers bloom but mosquitoes don’t yet. Sunlight dapples the ground through the vibrant foliage of the trees. Birds don’t chirp, they sing. The fragrance is clean, more than sweet. It’s heaven. We moved in, and our new house was like heaven.

Until everything arrived from the islands in another month, we had exactly one piece of furniture: a standard double mattress on the master bedroom floor. The kids slept in sleeping bags. It was spare. We ate our meals on paper plates sitting cross-legged on the floor. When we called to each other, our voices bounced from wall to wall in our 4,000-square-foot echo chamber. Still, it was like heaven.

But around midnight during our fateful third week in Houston, the first frog croaked. His piercing rasp drew our attention, but not our consternation. What was one frog to us, here in heaven?

Oh, had it only been one frog. Or one hundred frogs. Or even one thousand. By three a.m., Eric was standing pondside in his skivvies with three hundred pounds of canine looky-loos beside him in the forms of Cowboy the giant yellow Lab, Layla the Gollum-like boxer, and Karma the emotionally fragile German shepherd. I stood in the doorway.

“Fucking frogs,” Eric said, no trace of love in his voice.

Well, yes. Yes, they were. Frogs were, ahem, 
fornicating 
everywhere. It was overwhelming, really. I swear, if you’d Googled “swingers’ resort for frogs,” you’d get our address. The amorous amphibians held their tongues as soon as Eric switched on the backyard light. Muttering more curses, he snatched them up in stubbornly conjoined pairs and flung them over the fence. I did not dare ask his plan and after ten minutes, I sneaked off to bed.

Night after sleepless spring night, Eric battled the frogs with a homicidal drive. Day after spring day, he shirked his work as a chemical engineer and looked online for ways to off them. This campaign was beginning to drive me insane, too. Their sounds had long since become white noise, or at worst, bedtime music to me. Eric’s tossing, turning, cursing, and trips in- and outside, on the other hand, kept me wide awake. He would report the body count when he returned to bed.

“If I could just think of a way to poison them, I could sleep,” he said.

“If you poison them, you’ll poison the dogs, maybe even birds,” I said into my pillow.

“Acceptable collateral damage,” he replied.

In response to my urgings for him to quell his frog-blood lust, Eric tried to repatriate his little nemeses. He loaded them into industrial-sized black garbage bags and headed for the bayou. Unfortunately, the good citizens of Houston were on alert for a serial murderer that spring, and a man seen dumping lumpy garbage bags into the waterway attracted attention. Eric had only just barely returned home before the cops came to check him out. Reluctantly, I vouched for him.

The kids got into the spirit. Instead of just one underwear-clad man in the back yard, we now had him (thank the Lord, he’d started taking the time to don a pair of camo shorts—although I had the feeling he’d spring for camo face and body paint, too given the chance) plus the nine-, eleven-, and thirteen-year-old kids. Like me, the dogs were sleeping through most of it now, except when one of the kids would make a particularly good snatch and yell in triumph. At least it was taking care of any lingering need for sex education.

When the children created an offering of dead froggies to the Buddha, I feared the repercussions. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear their numbers doubled that night. It was bad. It was very, very bad.

It pains me to admit that I conspired by my silence in the deaths of hundreds of croakers that spring. They died in an endless variety of ways, but mostly Eric heaved them—THUMP, or occasionally SPLAT—against the house. Sometimes he aimed high, and more than once we found dead frogs clear on the other side of the house the next morning, or their desiccated bodies on the roof weeks later.

“Maybe I should have let the cops take you after all,” I groused one night as he stomped off. The man seemed by God determined to ensure that I shared his insomnia.

“What?” he said.

“Maybe I should come out and help you after all,” I said, and got out of bed. Ugh.

The calendar pages flipped slowly forward. May passed. It wasn’t seventy degrees anymore. The flowers wilted and the mosquitoes hatched. A faint smell of decay—mold?—permeated the house, but it smelled no better outside. The sun burned everything in its searing gaze, yet still the frogs croaked out their horny croaks and gamboled nightly in sexual abandon.

“They’ll be gone by summer,” I said, certain that they would not. That they would never leave. That my husband would be scribbling 
REDRUM
 across our bathroom mirror by August while the frogs croaked on. Because “frogicide” written backward doesn’t spell anything.

And then one day, they stopped. Silence. Sleep. Happiness. Months went by, blissful days leading inevitably toward April. 
Make the clock move slower
, I prayed to God.

January. February. March. We hadn’t heard them yet, but the little fockers would be here soon. Apri-ri-ri-RIBBITTTTTTT. Eric leaped up in bed as if the frogs were in there with him.

“Honey, stop,” I said.

He glared at me. All my man could see was frogs.

I handed him a pair of earplugs that I’d scavenged a few weeks before from his bag of work safety wear. “It’s evolutionary, honey, Darwinian. If our species is to survive, we must adapt.”

He stared at them, foamy yellow plugs on either end of a neon-orange string. I took his hand, placed them in his palm, and gently closed his fingers around them. I tugged him out of bed and led him out into our humid back yard, picking up a candle and matches on the way. I left the outside lights off and the male frogs sang out in carnal frenzy. I felt primal, like I was entering a hedonist temple.

Before the frog Buddha, I knelt with my husband. I handed him the candle and matches, then nudged him when he didn’t respond. “Light it, my love.” He did, a penitent virgin on the altar. He lit the candle. “Now, repeat after me,” I said.

He mumbled assent and I began. “I, Eric, present myself before you, Buddha of the frogs.”

The look he shot me said, “You’re out of your flippin’ gourd,” but I didn’t waver, and he repeated my words.

“I promise to do no harm to any of your frog brothers and sisters, henceforth and forevermore.”

“I’m not saying that,” he said.

“Humor me. We did it your way all last summer,” I said. 
And honey, I’m voting you off THAT island,
 I thought.

He complied with the enthusiasm of Morticia Addams.

“As a token of my sincerity, I pledge to you to wear these earplugs, and to install a frog shrine in our bedroom immediately.”

He repeated the oath, then we blew out the candle and tiptoed in perfect solemnity back into our room. There, I pulled two jolly stuffed frogs from a bag and propped them up on a pedestal table by the back window, between Eric and the live frogs.

“You actually went out and bought these in advance?” he asked.

“I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. I love you, and I want our marriage to withstand the test of frogs.”

“It’s that bad, huh?”

“Oh yeah, it’s that bad.”

Eric finally—FINALLY—smiled and swatted me on the behind. He put the earplugs in.

“Those are kind of sexy,” I said.

“What?” he yelled.

Mission accomplished.

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Puppalicious And Beyond
.

They say youth is wasted on the young. They are full of it.

Youth is too full of angst and drama for me. Give me middle age, wisdom, and a healthy libido any day. Give me some crappy life experiences so I’ll recognize awesome when it lands in my lap. Give me cellulite and wrinkles so I can get the hell over myself. Give me boredom so I can appreciate a challenge, and give me a failed marriage to humble me. Give me hot flashes and migraines so I can enjoy feeling good the rest of the time.

And then, then . . . give me a hot day in June. Let me fill our beater Suburban to its capacity with tweens and teens, some of them mine, some of them his. Let us pick up my second and last husband at the airport after a long and tiring business trip, let us giggle all the way home and nearly burst with the pressure of our shared secret. We have a surprise for him, you see.

We whisk him home to his bicycle and tri bag.

“What’s this?” he asks, dark circles under his camouflage-colored eyes. Eyes that are sparkling now between the red lines.

“Here!” his daughter Liz cries, unable to hold it in any longer. She waggles her hand at Clark and Susanne, who pull t-shirts on over their heads. The hand-ironed custom logo is slightly askew on each of them. It reads “The Eric Ralph Hutchins First Annual Invitational Triathlon” above a (really bad) picture of Eric.

“Those are great, guys, thanks,” he says as Liz hands him his and he slips it on.

But that’s not all. “Put your swimsuit on, honey, because the race starts in fifteen minutes,” I say.

Now he’s grinning ear to ear. We all jump on our bikes and pedal over to the Marilyn Estates pool. We swim ten thrashing, splashing, laughing laps of the tiny rectangle of water. We race our motley crew of bicycles around the block. And we finish by running figure eights around the trees in the park by the pool. Fifteen minutes later, we each get a trophy, with awards for first (Liz), second (Eric), poutiest (Susanne), goofiest (Clark), and best-looking, AKA last (me). We’ve attracted quite a crowd, and they cheer as the kids present the awards.

My husband doesn’t seem tired anymore. He looks like the luckiest middle-aged man in the history of the world. Although he doesn’t look middle-aged, which makes me the luckiest middle-aged woman ever.

This. Give me this. Or something a whole lot like it. Give me beautiful days together, active and alive, happy and feeling fifteen instead of closing in on fifty.

This, or something like it.

I am a planner. I plan and schedule and plot, much to the delight of my engineer/triathlete husband, who loves to live by a plan. Even more, he loves for me to make the plan and then for us both to live by it. And what he loves most of all is when the plan I make and we live by includes a healthy dose of us bicycling and swimming together. I believe a plan is a structure to make reasonable changes in, while Eric casts his plans in cement. Obviously, I am right, so there usually isn’t much of a problem.

But I did not plan what happened to us in the Good Old Summertime Classic, a sixty-nine-mile bicycle ride along some of our most favorite cycling roads anywhere. The bike route runs in and around Fayetteville, Texas, and includes the tiny old town of Roundtop. We had trained for it. We had talked about it with joy and reverence. Eric even accidentally went to get our packets a full week before they were available for pickup. (Don’t ask.)

The night before the race, I developed a PMS
^[1]
/hormonal migraine. Because it was the middle of the night, I took one of my gentler migraine prescriptions, hoping that this pill plus sleep would be all I needed. But when I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the mother of all migraines, I caved in and went for the elephant tranquilizer. When morning came, I was so nauseous that I couldn’t eat. My husband, a man of immense patience and even greater kindness, suggested we stay home. But we had made a plan, so I got in the car. I theorized that I had no idea now how I would feel in two and a half hours—but I kinda did know, and just didn’t want to admit it.

I should have listened to my husband.

On the way to the race, driving in the dark, the unthinkable happened. I had my head on Eric’s shoulder, sweetly sleeping (make that “snoring and drooling under the influence of the elephant pill”), when he let out a tiny swear word. Actually, I believe it started with an F, and was preceded by the word “mother,” and that his voice blasted through my cranium and echoed madly inside my impaired brain.

“What happened?” I screamed, heart pounding, hand clutching throat, eyes sweeping the road for signs of the apocalypse.

“I hit a cardinal.”

OH MY GOD. HE HIT A CARDINAL.

Since the time he could speak, my husband has proclaimed himself a fan of the Chicago Phoenix St. Louis Arizona Cardinals football team. His screen saver at work has always been a giant Cardinal head logo, until very recently when he finally switched it to a picture of us, under teensy-tinsy little applications of subtle pressure from me. He watched their 2009 playoff game at 2:00 a.m. from his hotel room in Libya through a webcam picture of our TV on his laptop. He collects cardinals and Cardinal paraphernalia and insists on displaying them prominently in our bedroom, which is painted Cardinal red.

Despite his lifelong obsession, Eric had never seen an actual live cardinal bird until we moved to Houston. Growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he’d caught glimpses of them on TV, and he pictured them as red, fierce . . . and large.

One day while unpacking boxes in our new house, I saw a male cardinal through the window. Nonchalantly, I called out to my sweetie, “Hey, Eric, there’s a cardinal in our bird feeder.”

Eric, whose physique looks like you would expect it to after twenty years of triathlon and cycling, pounded into the living room like a rhino instead of his usual cheetah self, wearing an expectant grin and not much else.

“WHERE IS IT?”

Lost for words, I pointed out the front window and prayed the elderly woman next door was not walking past our house.

“It’s awfully small.” (That was Eric that said that, not the elderly neighbor.)

He was crestfallen. The mighty cardinal was a tiny slip of a bird.

Back to the car: ear-splitting expletives and wife under the influence. “Honey, I didn’t feel an impact. Are you sure you didn’t miss it?” I asked.

“They’re awfully small birds,” he said.

Ahhhh, good point. We drove on, somberly. We arrived at the race. I stumbled off to the bathroom. When I came back, Eric was crouched in front of the grill of our car. I joined him, confused. He held up a handful of tiny red feathers.

I swear it was the drugs, but I burst out laughing. “You, you of all people, you killed a 
cardinal
?”

He glared at me as he picked out the brightest of the small feathers and tucked it reverently into the chest strap of his heart monitor. “I’m going to carry this feather with me in tribute, the whole way.”

So we got on our bikes: me, wobbly, cotton-mouthed, and somewhat delirious; Eric, solemn and determined. This, the ride for the cardinal, would be the ride of his life. Sixty-nine miles to the glory of the cardinal.

I made it all of about two miles before I apologized. “I’m anaerobic, and we’re only going twelve miles per hour on a flat. My neck and back are seizing up. I don’t know if it’s drugs or hormones, but I’m really whack.”

“You can do it, honey. We came all this way. Now we’re riding for a higher purpose.”

I gave it my best, I really did, but a few miles later after a succession of hills where going up with a racing heartbeat was only slightly less awful than cruising down with a seriously messed-up sense of balance, I pulled to a stop. “I’ve never quit before, but I can’t do it today, love.”

A beautiful male cardinal swooped across the road in front of us. Eric bit his lip. “I understand. Do you want to flag a SAG [support and aid] wagon?”

“I can make it back if we just take it easy. I’m sorry, honey.”

My husband treated me like a princess that day, but all the excitement had drained out of him. This race was not to be, and a teacup-sized bird had sacrificed his life in vain because I’d overdosed on Immitrex and ruined the plan. The waste of it all, the waste of a day, the waste of a life—it was hard to overcome. But Eric tried; I’ll give him credit for that, the man really tried.

That night, after we did a make-up ride on the trainers while we watched 
We Are Marshall
 (interrupted occasionally by Eric’s sobs, because the only thing worse than a dead cardinal is a dead football player), I pulled our sheets out of the drier and brought them into our room. Eric, wearing his new Fayetteville Good Old Summertime T-shirt, helped me put the warm, clean cotton on the bed.

As we hoisted the sheets in the air to spread them out over the mattress, a tiny red feather shot straight up toward the light and wafted down slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until, pushed by the soft breeze of our ceiling fan, it landed on the pillow on Eric’s side of the bed.

Above: Actual cardinal feather on Eric’s pillow.

Steeling myself for the worst, I shot a glance at him to see if he had noticed. I did not exhale. Maybe I had time to brush it off quickly? Too late—he was staring at the feather. “Is that damn bird going to haunt me for the rest of my life now?” he asked. But he smiled.

Now I could breathe. And tease. “Probably. You did senselessly murder a cardinal, Eric.”

And he laughed.

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Hot Flashes And Half Ironmans
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