I could never stay angry, not even about the snakes. “Don’t worry,” I whispered to Karen, as the light on the other side of the partition went dark. “Helen doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” I climbed into bed. I couldn’t sleep with a snake, but I also couldn’t sleep without Karen. She was still my person, my warm one, my buddy, my pack, the woman with the sumac smeared on her thighs. Despite everything, I still wanted her to think that I was game, that I was up for this, the life we were making together from scratch, the life that other people might not understand. But fuck other people. It was each other we wanted. Us and our Perley and our preparations.

I lay on my back on the bed, hearing Karen breathe on one side of me and, on the other side of me, the breath of the snake. The breath of a snake is canceled sound. It’s silence. It’s the whine of the demon whose bone you’ve stolen. The demon who wheedles to come in. I lay awake and listened. I would swear that my eyes never closed. But I must have dropped off, because each morning I woke with Perley in my arms. He’d climbed back into bed with Karen and me sometime during the long fraught night.

PART II

WOLF TREE

5

PERLEY

The snake has strong beliefs. The snake has strong beliefs about territory my Mama K said when the snake began to sleep with us in our bed. We tried to ignore him, at least I think it was a him. He wasn’t the biting kind, but he had a piss flinty smell which was hard for Mama L to sleep through. The snake considers our home to be its home. Who will say whose home it is? It’s the same with the wasps. We let them nest up there in the rafters they are a bunch of grapes. They sometimes lose their grip and drop onto the sofa like anyone would. They sting you if you sit on them like anyone would. Who will say that this is their fault? What would you do if you were a wasp?