This month has been bad. I am -- I am not exactly sure where to go from here.Generally speaking, John stays downstairs from three days before until two or three days after. We consider this to be a conservative time frame -- it gives us plenty of time to get everything secure while John can still be counted on to be rational and helpful, even pointing out things that I may have forgotten to double check, and plenty of time afterwards to make sure that John is back, and that the ... the whatever it is that takes John's place, the NotJohn, I sometimes think of it ... is really and truly gone back to whatever subconscious swamp it disappears to. You would think that the shift would be obvious, but often it is not. We have a number of emergency plans and code words and traps and bells and whistles and pulleys set up to cushion us if things go awry, most of them involving keeping the kids well away and all of them not worth discussing because they are either obvious or they would horrify you. Or both.
Sometimes it is not enough.
On March 4, a full week before the full, both kids were spending the day at a friend's house. John and I were taking advantage of the offspring-not-underfoot time to do a little spring cleaning. We were delighted to have organized a day with each other and with no distractions, and now every time I replay March 4 in my mind, which I do every night while John breathes beside me, there is a panicked beat under my memory that yammers what if the kids had been there what if they had seen what if John had turned and they had gotten in the way and it was just dumb luck that they weren't there oh my God --
John made dinner -- soup and sandwiches, simple but awesome. When we were both almost finished and down to picking at crumbs, John smiled at me across the table and took my hand. "You look great", he said.
I smiled back. I wasn't really in the mood, but the kids were gone and we were alone, so I was ready to be persuaded. I happened to glance down at John's hand, resting on the wooden Ikea table and intertwined with my own, and I saw one hair, a red hair, growing out of the index finger. Before I could even tense, another hair grew up beside it. I looked up and John was still smiling, but there were suddenly too many teeth in his smile. Too many too shiny so sharp and what if the kids had been there --?
"You look good enough to eat", John said. Some detached part of me had time to think really? That's what you're going with? What a cheesy line. It's like something out of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for God's sake! I extracted my hand and stood up slowly. John looked up, his polite concern made feral and awful by the stubble he had suddenly sprouted and the visible pulse in his neck. "What's wrong, Meg?" he asked. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I had even organized my voice into non-trembliness, John added, "Are you still hungry? I'm still really hungry" and lunged across the table at me.
I ran. He pursued. It's the classic boy meets girl story. You know, Wes Craven style. I don't remember, I really purposefully put a great deal of time and energy into not remembering, the details of the few minutes that followed. Obviously, I somehow got the best of John, or the NotJohn that takes my husband away, because here I am, wringing my hands but still in possession of my hands and the will to wring them. I have a broken toe, which is the stupidest and most anti-climactic of all possible injuries, but I must have tripped on something during the course of the whole adventure. I am not sure which trap or net or snare I used to immobilize NotJohn, but I do have a nightmarishly clear vision of myself knocking the thing that still looked heartbreakingly husbandly unconscious with a heavy wooden vase that we received as a wedding present.
On the 13th, eight unedurable days later, John came back to some semblance of himself and began asking for me to go downstairs. He was somewhat peeved by the fact that I would not let him come up until the following Monday. The trouble is, he says things while he is compromised, he calls for me, he cries, he recites much-loved poems, and it is all an act a trap the NotJohn attempts to set for me using my husband's knowledge of me and the only reason it doesn't quite play is that his voice is just a shade too dark and too hoarse and there is some sense of rabid humor in it. John had no memory of any of it, although if I were him and I did remember, I might claim not to, too, so who knows.
It's happening earlier. And it's getting worse. And I am haunted, as always but so much more sharply now, by how seamlessly a seductive and tender moment with my husband bled into those teeth chattering with desire for my blood. And what if the kids had been there it was so early and so unexpected and I might not have been fast enough for all three of us oh God --
