Hands smaller than half-dollars. Soft, tufted ears. Their faces looked nearly human. I picked up the one on the left and turned it over to make the first long incision across its belly.
Back, back.
Whenever Brynn talked about leaving, she made it seem like a big production, like the plot to one of those stupid movies she liked on the Hallmark Channel. Never anything remotely believable. I’ll go to California and live next to the desert, she said, cutting crusts off the kids’ PB&Js. There’s still time for me to get into acting. Like, I could do character work or something. Only wear linen dresses.
What about Milo? I asked, pushing a hunk of dirty hair behind her ear. You’re gonna abandon him and take the kids? Heartless. Beautiful and heartless.
She laughed and kissed me. You know I’d never leave you guys. Who’d take care of me?
It was true that we both knew what she wanted. What she liked. We were willing to give those things to her, no questions asked. Milo worked, brought home money, and listened to her when she was upset or hurting. We both took care of the kids without complaint, soothed her fears when she worried and fretted and hated herself. I gave her friendship and passion and provided an outlet for her anger. Milo was the one who could calm her, make her feel sane again. When I wanted to strangle her, he was there with a hug and a sweet, romantic gesture like a stuffed toy or some stupid candy she liked. When he was too sentimental, I let her be selfish. She could be kind and sweet around Milo and not feel vulnerable. She knew she could be mean and awful around me and I’d love her anyway.
I’m too much for one person, she whispered to me once, biting the shell of my ear.
But she didn’t go to California, and she didn’t take the kids. She left us all a little after lunch on a Tuesday. There was nothing special about it. No precursor to the event, no giant fight or ultimatum. It was like any other day.
I thought about that a lot, after. How mundane it was. It was so unlike her to make it into nothing. Just a regular, average afternoon with lunch and work and home. I felt cheated.
We all ate together. My father and I home from the shop, my mother heating bowls of chicken noodle soup in the microwave. Milo was working a late shift, and when he left, Brynn kissed him hard on the mouth and smacked him on the ass. She brought out a roll of paper towels and gave Lolee and Bastien their soup. When one of the kids spilled a Coke on the table, she didn’t even get upset. We cleaned the dishes together, and I stood outside with her on the porch while she smoked a cigarette. She wore an old dress, faded blue and sleeveless, and scuffed around in my brother’s oversized flip-flops. Then my father and I left to go back to the shop, and my mother ran to the store.
I was only gone for twenty minutes. My mother shook her head, as if trying to calculate how Brynn could’ve gotten all her things together and left in such a goddamn hurry. I never thought she’d leave the kids there, not alone.
But she did. She put Lolee down for a nap and turned on a movie for Bastien, one of the Disney ones they’d already watched a million times. Then she gathered most of her clothes, got in her car, and drove away. When my mother got back, Lolee was asleep and Bastien was still sitting on the couch. Neither knew where their mother had gone.
Brynn didn’t come home that night, and she didn’t answer her phone. I called over and over again, sure that if I could talk to her for just a few seconds, she’d come back. The phone stopped ringing through after a couple of days. It just went straight to voicemail.
Work. Always, there was work. If I could focus on that, I’d know where I was. I’d be safe.
I scraped methodically at the raccoon skin but couldn’t disengage. I was so out of it I hadn’t stopped to put on gloves. Raw meat slid under my fingernails, lodged in the cuticles. The bones were slick with blood and hard to separate. Intestines had burst inside the first raccoon, smearing everything in shit and bits of digested food. Halfway through the first animal, my stomach roiled.
The raccoon’s eyes were glossy. Its lashes folded over the lid in a charcoal fringe that made it look sweet and bashful. When I pressed down on the back to get better leverage through the rear legs, the lids slid down in a slow blink and opened up again. Brynn had always wanted a raccoon for a pet. She liked how wild they were—one second sweetly playing, the next hissing rabidly at you from a garbage can. Never tell if they’re gonna bite you or hold your hand, she said, showing me a video on her phone. We should get one, Jessa. Little tame raccoon we could take on walks around the neighborhood. Wouldn’t that be cute?
I set the bones into a dissolving bath and walked straight into the bathroom. I stared at my reflection in the mirror over the sink, breathing in through my nose and hissing air out through my teeth. A bit of raccoon flesh dotted the toe of my boot. I leaned over the toilet and retched up all the things I’d eaten that night: chips and salsa, the beers.
When I was done, I wiped the flesh off my shoe with a square of toilet paper and flushed it down with the rest. I slapped at my face until color came back into my cheeks. Then I cracked open another beer from the fridge and drank it, ignoring the rawness of my throat.
I flipped the second body, setting it beside the newly stripped pelt of its brother. Taking the scalpel, I dug a track through the middle of its belly that opened into a deep well of gore. It was the worst trauma I’d ever seen. The raccoon’s entire system had been obliterated; but from the outside, it looked totally normal. Emptying the mess of it into the gut bucket, I started the whole process over again.
How to leave the past when it’s staring you in the face all the time? When it’s got its teeth dug into you like a rabid animal?
After Brynn left, I thought about transitions a lot. The sameness, the dullness of everything. How nothing in my life ever felt like it was moving fast enough, but at the same time I couldn’t stand to leave the one place where Brynn had left me. The last place we’d loved each other.
Limbo to me felt like remembering pain. The memory of slamming your fingers in a car door or smashing your littlest toe into a wall. It was the shivery feeling you got if you remembered ramming your shin into a desk. You could remember feelings over and over again and they never changed or got any better. They always hurt the same, and it seemed they always would.
Where did Brynn go? Nobody knew, especially not Milo, who was never home the month before she disappeared. Working overtime at the dealership so they could afford to buy a house instead of throwing money away on rent. It should’ve been funny, Milo working so much though his whole life he’d done anything to avoid it, when in reality it was the work that allowed Brynn to slip away, unnoticed. If he’d stayed home with her, lost that job or just worked at the gas station, would she have ever left?
I could barely stand to look at him. My whole life I’d loved my brother without fail, without question, but Brynn’s departure had severed our closeness. I’d go to my parents’ house to see the kids and he’d sit beside me on the couch, asking unanswerable questions:
Have you heard anything?
Do you think she’ll contact the kids?
Doesn’t she love me?
He cried, often. Talked about how happy they’d been, describing their relationship in minute detail, searching for the trigger that had blown up our lives. Their marriage. Their kids. The house they’d wanted to buy—furniture she’d already picked out from the rent-to-own place downtown. I couldn’t tell if I was angry at him for not anticipating her leaving or just mad at myself.