Their son has started up a business tutoring

high-school students, he said he’s found

some sort of group, gone back to school,

and it’s true they rarely see him anymore,

which is why it is so startling

to find him now asleep in the guest room

which used to be his sister’s—

there are still pictures from a horse camp

framed on the wall—his black jacket neatly

folded over a chair. His white shirt

is half rolled up his stomach,

like a child’s: she can see bruises

dappling his ribs and arms, and this—rather

than making her shake him awake—keeps her

peering at him, watching the thin chest

rise and fall, the sink of his stomach

like that of some starved animal,

though the more she looks, the more she thinks

it is her husband’s face she sees there.

There is his slack and opened mouth, the shut eyes

that flinch in sleep. The large,

almost ugly hands are her husband’s,

as are the long legs sprawled atop the sheet

embroidered with birds. For a moment,

it is her husband’s death she sees

in him, and knows, suddenly, whether

out of fear or love, how much

she does not want to survive this. All those years

together guarding the boy against his moods,

depressions at school; at home, violent

outbursts against his sister. What new

erosions of his mind would they now

be witness to? And what will be

her own future, she wonders, picturing herself

and husband twined like snakes

in a field, or dissolved inside a cloud of smoke:

a thunderclap of embroidered birds.

To disappear like this together is what

she most wants, neither one left behind, alone

with their son. Unfathomable, his anger

from which she has no defense, so never confesses

the rifled car, the shed’s smashed

lock, whatever trespasses only she

discovers, their son’s voice on the phone

demanding to know why the two of them

have never loved him. She looks at her son’s body

splayed on the coverlet. The long

and tattooed ankles. The waxy,

thin skin of his lids. Not like you love each other,

he’d accused her, as if it were her marriage

that had come between them, the guilt

that drove her now to leave small stacks

of cash for him to find secreted

inside a drawer. Her son lolls in sleep.

She stands and watches him till she hears a voice

calling by the door. It’s her husband

home from work. He’s about to mount the stairs

and find them together, and so she hurries down.

She wants to let her son sleep off

whatever he is sleeping off. To give him

time to wake, make his way into their bedroom

and find—if this is in fact what he has come for—

the newest small apology she’s left him.

She wants to go for a walk, she tells her husband,