The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Page B

that have happened?” I asked Russell, who was now standing next to me looking up at the bird. I normally would have yelled at him for leaving Duncan alone in the car asleep in his car seat, but we were standing just a few feet away and the passenger-side door was still open.
    â€œIts head must have gotten stuck, but I don’t see how,” Russell said.
    It was an omen—a gruesome symbol outside the home of a dying man.
    â€œShould we tell him?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Russell said.
    What would he do about it if we did? I wondered. He was much too weak from his chemo treatment to climb a ladder. And if he could climb up, what then? If you pulled the bird down, you would have to just tear its body away from its head or even cut it with a knife. There seemed no other way.
    â€œWe could show it to Anya. Maybe she could call someone to take care of it,” Russell said.
    Anya was Marlon’s live-in nurse who had agreed to stay with him in the country for what was supposed to be his last summer (again) in exchange for him paying extra to send her son to a nearby day camp. “I think Anya’s been through enough,” I said. I couldn’t think of a worse fate than being locked up with Marlon in that house with a dead bird as its bowsprit. “I’m not going in.”
    I got back in the car. A few minutes later, Russell came out still holding the doughnuts and got back in the car. He looked sick to his stomach. Marlon was dead, I thought. I remembered my black suit was at the cleaners, abandoned there since my layoff.
    Russell turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway. “Is everything . . . okay?” I asked.
    â€œYeah, it’s fine,” Russell said. “If you call walking in on Marlon having sex with Anya fine.”
    We ate the doughnuts in silence for the rest of the trip.

    We pulled up to our house, and, as much as I hated it, I was relieved to see it still standing. It was dark now and Russell always went in first to turn on the lights, check the mousetraps, and check Duncan’s room for spiders.
    He got out of the car and I watched him sinking deep into the snow with each step. As he walked in the dark toward the house, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he were attacked by a grizzly bear.
    There were bears in the area; we’d seen them once, a family of three lumbering across the road. There had been a horrifying story in the newspaper about a Hasidic family who filled their baby daughter full of milk and put her out on the porch in a bassinet and a bear came and carried her away. It was winter now, and they would be hibernating, but there had also been an article about their not having gathered enough food and coming out of hibernation early, or maybe it said they weren’t hibernating at all. I imagined Russell’s piss-pants fear when he saw the bear coming right at him, nosing him, sliding his claws down Russell’s face as he looked to the car, to me, for help.
    I could survive trapped in the car for at least three days, I figured, if the bear wouldn’t leave. We’d already eaten the doughnuts but there was one bottle of water in the car and a few nuts on the floor. I regretted weaning. If I hadn’t stopped breast-feeding, I could have made enough milk for the baby to survive for days, or until someone in a passing car saw the bear circling the parked car and Russell’s carcass lying on the blood-stained snow, and called for help.
    I could hold the funeral at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on the East Side and afterward, at home, lie curled up on my bed, our bed, as visitors came to sit beside me to comfort me. We had life insurance, now that I thought about it, and I could sell this house if I could find it without Russell. I had never learned how to drive. The Second Avenue Deli had moved but I was pretty sure they would still deliver sandwich platters for the shivah.