Chapter Thirty-Four

David

We moved into the house that very evening. It was only once we were there, inside the cool stone building, designed to absorb the heat, that I realized how confined and hot the boat had been.

The airiness was a relief. Lou ran through the rooms. So much space—she’d never had so much space before.

She changed her mind three times before she decided where she wanted to sleep: in a floral-patterned attic room begging to be inhabited by a little girl. With lace curtains and soft pillows on the bed.

For a few days she would live there. Now.

I poured all the water we had into a transparent plastic container in the kitchen.

We would run out of water sooner now that there were three of us. Much sooner. It wouldn’t be enough, it wouldn’t last until the rain came.

But we weren’t going to live long anyway, and right now, right here, this was the life we had.

Dogs experience time differently from humans. For them, each day is like several weeks; for an ant the days are even longer. That’s how I thought, that’s how we thought, that was the kind of thing we said to each other, Marguerite and I.

We didn’t have the strength to fight any longer, to struggle. We just wanted to be here, together.

The few days that were ours would become a life.

When Lou had gone to bed beneath the flowery heaven in the attic, when she had curled up, reveling in the clean sheets, then Marguerite and I came to life.

The energy we had formerly spent on struggling, fighting for our lives, we now applied to each other.

I invested all my strength in her and she invested hers in me. And the heat intensified everything.

We made our way around the house. We were everywhere. First in the beds. Then on the couch. Against the kitchen counter. In the bathroom, in the dry shower. On the coffee table.

But then an evening came when the heat was intolerable, when it felt impossible to move inside the house.

Then we took the blanket outside, lay down on the dry grass, on the ground under the trees, beside the trace of what had once been a brook, while the day slowly faded away.

There we had sex again. Quickly. It was too hot to continue for long.

Afterward we lay beside each other breathing hard.

My gaze slid across the darkening landscape. Across trees releasing dry leaves to the ground. The soon-to-be-empty branches, where no birds were singing any longer.

My gaze slid onward, into the darkness between the trunks.

I jumped. Because there she stood. A little white face. An astonished child’s face, which slowly changed, as she gradually realized what she had just witnessed.

All at once there were tears in her eyes and she turned around and ran.

Dammit!

“Lou!”