Woundwood
by Laura Carnes Williams
I was finishing up a late-night pee when I heard the tinkle of glass smashing downstairs. Then, the patio door, sliding open with its customary squeal. I rushed back to the bedroom and shook Sean, the snore catching in his throat.
“There’s someone in the house,” I said.
Sean sat up and turned off the fan next to the bed.
I held my breath, ears dialing in. A creak on the stairs. Then another.
“Fucker better be wearing a helmet,” said Sean, reaching for the bag of baseballs kept next to the bed, a self-defense tactic he called the “Randy Johnson Method.” He grabbed a ball and cocked his arm.
My eyes narrowed in on the doorknob turning in its socket. The door opened. A tall figure stood in the doorframe, backlit orange-yellow by the hallway night-light.
Sean whipped the first ball. Crack, a direct hit to the head. He continued pelting the body, now on the floor—thud, thud, thud—until the bag of balls was empty. I expected the intruder to rise up like some relentless, subhuman horror movie villain, but they stayed down.
I dialed 911 as Sean went to inspect the body.
“What’s your emergency?” said the dispatcher.
Sean fell back, shaking his head—no, no, no. Then he turned and started dry heaving.
“What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher repeated.
“Hold on,” I said, as if she’d called me. One step, then another brought me to the doorway, to the crumpled form.
“Ambulance,” I managed. “We need an ambulance.”
Time got away from me after The Tragedy. I was doing the best I could, trying to stay sane and live in the moment. If I allowed my brain to consider things like my last period, I’d have to rewind past the memory of my neighbor, Frank, so drunk he’d lost his keys and broken into the wrong house. Cause of death: a fastball, a shattered skull, a subdural hematoma.
I wasn’t eating, so when I couldn’t button my jeans, I knew.
I took a home test, leaving it next to the bottle of Jim Beam where Sean was sure to find it when he got home from work. It was the kind that said “pregnant” on it, leaving no room for misinterpretation.
Would I have married Sean if not for the circumstances? I think it was Kierkegaard who said: Do it or don’t do it—you will regret both.
The night we met, Sean had just signed a contract as manager of the city’s minor league baseball team, and I was out celebrating my PhD. I often wonder if we were just vibing off each other’s big-shot energy, if we’d even have noticed each other on a normal night out. Sean was goofy-looking, sunburned, annoyingly loud, and dressed like a frat boy. Later he would tell me he normally didn’t go for blondes, and I was smarter than any girl he’d ever dated.
He was at the bar entertaining a group of friends, reading a list from his phone, Zero Fucks Given, translated in five different languages:
In German, they say: It’s sausage to me.
In Dutch: It can oxidize on my anus.
In French: I slap my balls on it.
In Greek: Flowers on my dick and all around.
In Finnish: It’s as interesting as a kilogram of shit.
“You’d better check your facts,” I said, ambling up next to him. “I’m from Finland. And the only kilogram of shit is the one coming out of your mouth.”
His friends gave me props for the burn then dispersed like blown dandelion seeds, leaving us alone to slam back Irish car bombs and start planning a “Zero Fucks Fact-Checking Vacation” to Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Athens, and whatever the capital of Finland was. For the next two years we were a work-hard, play-hard power couple, hedonistic DINKS, each with ample amounts of wanderlust and energy. But if I had to pin down what made our relationship so special, I’d say we drew the weird out of each other: sword fights with hotdogs, mirror mazes, haunted houses, hot sauce challenges, impromptu this, impromptu that. But, after The Tragedy, there was no more impromptu anything.
I got therapy, started writing, and learned how to knit. I read all the baby books, did prenatal yoga, went to childbirth classes, and joined online parenting groups. I went for walks in the woods and stopped eating meat.
Sean made us move to the suburbs, started golfing, and joined a fantasy football league. He leased us each a Lexus. He’d been the last person I knew to get a smartphone, but now needed all the latest gadgets with all the newest upgrades. Lately it seemed like every sentence out of his mouth started with “Alexa.”
Alexa, who’s pitching for the Yankees tonight?
Alexa, schedule my personal trainer for 8am Thursday.
Alexa, remind me to trim my toenails tonight.
Alexa, play the new Vampire Weekend album.
Alexa, what wine pairs well with a Delmonico steak?
I did my best to be patient with him and give him grace. The Tragedy was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I wasn’t the one who killed a man.
Nine months on, nine months off. Sleep when the baby sleeps. Cry when the baby cries. That last one, a joke, but the only one that worked for me.
Four years after Lucinda was born, I still carried an extra twenty pounds and I never got more than a few hours of sleep at a stretch. She was a colicky baby, a needy toddler, and now at age four, scared of the dark, imaginary bugs, and her dolls coming to life and murdering her.
Whenever I recruited Sean to help with her night terrors he made the situation worse with tough love, uttering threats like, “go to sleep or I’ll give you something to be scared of!” Such an asshole.
I had to work full-time to afford our lifestyle and my job didn’t offer a remote option. I got Lucinda ready for pre-K, brought her there, and picked her up. I cooked three dinners each night: vegetarian for me, paleo for Sean, and a kid’s meal for Lucinda. I spent weekends grocery shopping, doing laundry, and cleaning (Sean didn’t trust strangers in the house).
One day, when scrolling through my Facebook page, I came across a meme: What if your marker for success was how well you slept at night? How easily you laughed? It was a pseudo-profundity, something people shared to give off the illusion of happiness and depth, but it sent me down a dark hole, bad thoughts accreting like droplets of mercury, poisoning my brain. I continued scrolling and found another: Women should be proud of their wrinkles—proud of the lives they lived! I spent much of the next hour looking in the bathroom mirror, crying, not so much about wrinkles, but about the life I was living. Somehow, I’d assumed a clusterfuck of responsibility while Sean’s life had remained relatively unchanged.
My friends said, same girl, same, but I could tell they didn’t share my exasperation. They all seemed to buy in, accepting their superhero status as Wonder Women. Doing it all. When I told one that I fantasized about quitting everything and running off to the woods to write poetry, she told me I should go on antidepressants.
I found Sean in the garage, polishing his golf clubs.
“We need to talk,” I said, careful to keep my tone even. I wasn’t trying to pick a fight.
“What about?” He removed the fat-headed golf club and stroked it with a towel.
“Equity in this marriage. I’m exhausted.”
He was quick to recite a list of all the things he did, things that wouldn’t even cross my mind: scheduling oil changes, doing the taxes, getting the driveway sealed, caulking the bathtub. And the dishes. He did the dishes every night.
“It’s not just the division of household chores,” I said. “I do all the emotional labor.”
“Is this your way of saying you don’t want me going golfing tomorrow?”
I imagined taking the club and bashing him in the face, but Lucinda was in the living room within earshot and I believed a form of generational wealth was having parents who could regulate their emotions. I turned and walked away.
As Lucinda played in the bathtub, I looked out the window to see Sean mowing the lawn. He wore his sound-canceling headphones and his special “mowing sneakers,” the white bottoms stained green. Why did the sight of him inspire so much disgust? Was it his polo shirt tucked into his salmon-colored khakis? His vacant stare? Then I realized: he’d mowed just two days ago. His compulsion about the lawn was a luxury I could never afford.
“Look at me, Mommy. Look at me!”
I pulled my attention back to my daughter in the tub, wearing a beard of bubbles.
“Where’d you come from, Old Man?” I said. “Where’s Lucinda?”
Her smile stretched wide across her face.
Outside, the mower clunked, spit out a rock, and continued whirring.
Shinrin-yoku, aka “forest bathing,” was an integral part of my mornings, twenty minutes just for myself, wedged between dropping Lucinda off at school and going to work. I tipped my head back to take in the sky, a white-washed cloud canvas, brushstrokes of crisscrossing branches forming a dense dendritic mass overhead. Under my feet lay a subterranean universe, intricate nests of roots and interstitial fungi. There were no individuals here. Except me.
When I was in elementary school an Indigenous poet visited my classroom and asked: Do you care about Nature? Of course we all nodded. We’d read The Lorax and believed with all our hearts that we’d do better than the previous generations. The next question was harder. Does Nature care about you?
I could almost feel the electricity moving beneath my feet, the forest communicating my presence. Interloper. Perhaps I was misreading it. The similarities between the whirls inside a tree stump and my own fingerprint suggested I belonged here.
When I pushed against the pliable arm of a sapling, it whipped back. I bobbed and weaved around branches as I made my way along the trail, then walked a fallen log like a balance beam with my arms spread out horizontally. I stopped.
Nailed to a tree, a note written in Sharpie: To Whom it May Concern, these woods raised us and we will not watch them be destroyed in the name of private housing developments for the rich. Whoever had written the note had put it in a gallon-sized Ziploc baggie to protect it from the elements.
I didn’t know this area was earmarked for destruction, but it made sense. We lived in a good school district.
Driving to work, I passed a wall where someone had graffitied the words: life is pain. Underneath, in a different color and script, an addendum: au chocolat. Later, I overheard a conversation at the post office, someone talking about a celebrity named Burlington Coat Factory. Their friend laughed and said, you mean—Benedict Cumberbatch? Driving home, I saw a man and his dog wearing matching sweater vests.
In the early days of our relationship, Sean and I would share our observations: the strange, the interesting, the ugly, the beautiful. It had been a while, but I wondered, maybe he’s still in there—My Sean. At dinner, when I finished telling him what I’d seen and heard, he looked up from his phone and said, “what?” Everything in his face suggested he gave zero fucks.
“Flowers on my dick and all around,” I said.
“What?” His eyebrows lifted so high he had about five lines on his forehead.
“Nothing.”
I came across a story recently about an elk with a tire stuck around its neck. The tire couldn’t have fit around the elk’s antlers, so it must have been there for years, acquired when the elk was just a calf. When park rangers shot the elk with a tranquilizer gun and cut the tire off, they discovered ten pounds of forest debris in the lining. Can you imagine what it must have been like for the elk? Experiencing that kind of lightness and freedom after so many years? I can.
Debt. Misplaced time and energy. Skewed priorities. Sean had become someone who wore his tire like a weighted blanket lest he float away, but I just couldn’t live that way.
I told him he could have everything except Lucinda. Of course, he tried to take her, too, citing my decision to buy a tiny house, a twenty-year-old Toyota, and drop down to part-time at work as evidence of my insanity. But by the time all was said and done, Sean had a new wife and could hardly keep up with the shared custody arrangement.
When a tree is hurt, it seals off the injured area and creates a bandage of new wood, stronger and thicker than the original. This process is called compartmentalization and the resulting scar tissue, woundwood. During my walks, I saw it everywhere—knots in trees, stumps from amputated limbs, evidence of trauma and resilience.
In any long-term relationship, partners evolve, sometimes to the point where it can seem like the best version—the version you loved—has died. But maybe it’s not death. Maybe that part of them is just calcified, sealed off.
What a horror story though, to imagine my beloved Sean, rattling around like a nesting doll, trapped inside the body of a humorless prick.
We are not trees.
Laura Carnes Williams is an emerging novelist from Syracuse, NY. Her writing has been published in Catamaran, Every Day Fiction, Letter Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys drinking black coffee, doodling, and doing workout DVDs from the 1990s. Please visit: www.LauraCarnesWilliams.com to learn more.
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 23.
Photo by Luke Galloway on Unsplash