“For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.” —D.H. Lawrence

A small snake was in my shower, but snakes terrified me — small ones, dead ones, grass snakes, and garter snakes. Catherine once claimed it was all about Freud. I jumped out of the stall and went to the office to tell the director, who called the maintenance person. The director put the maintenance man on his speakerphone.
“A poisonous snake?”
“I don’t know.”
“What color is it?”
“Green.”
“Sounds like a garden snake.”
“He isn’t in the garden. He’s in my shower.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t get there for about an hour.”
“Okay.”

I wasn’t volunteering for snake removal, even if the snake was harmless. He might think I was a coward, but I didn’t care. My mother was fearless, breaking the neck of an injured bird, barely flinching when a rat jumped out of the produce bin of our old refrigerator, and not joining in when we screamed as a lost bat swooped into the living room.

The maintenance man wore flip-flops, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. He carried a wrench that seemed like a prop.
“Where’s your snake?”
“In the shower. And he’s not my snake. I hate snakes.”
“Okay, where’s the snake?”
“In the shower.”
We went into the tiny bathroom and stared down into the drain. The snake had left.
“It was here a minute ago.”
“Yes, well, snakes are unreliable, especially when there’s screaming involved.”
“I didn’t scream.”
“A snake tried to take a shower with you, and you didn’t scream?”
“What do I do now?”
“Ask him to wash your back?” The maintenance man snickered, and I resisted hitting him with his wrench.
Scott came through the open door. “Hey,” he said. “Feel like a coffee?”
“Get her something stronger. She’s all shook up.”
“I’m not shook up. Put down some snake repellent or something.”
The maintenance man nodded.

I watched as a toddler pulled a sandwich out of his mother’s hands as she was about to take a bite, bite the sandwich, spit it out and drop the entire thing on the floor. The woman looked tired and possibly hungry. Luke would endlessly toss Cheerios off his highchair tray as long as I picked them up. Mothers were poorly paid servants who were never set free. Toddlers specialized in testing others, throwing things, screaming when you tried to stop them from throwing things, refusing to do whatever needed to be done in a timely fashion. The little girl looked feral and she seemed alarmingly glad to be depriving her mother of lunch. Her mother wearily picked up the half-eaten sandwich and threw it in the trash. Her daughter started screaming “Sanwich, sanwich, Mummy, sanwich!”

“Missing Luke?” This was a delusion of the childless, I thought. People without children believed the sight of any child, no matter how charmless, would make a parent long for the company of their own. Scott was wearing a t-shirt spotted with bleach, sailor pants, and sneakers without laces. He had his hair pulled back in a bandana, which made him look like a pirate. Was he really so handsome? I glanced around the café and realized every woman in the place was either looking at him or deliberately looking elsewhere. Even the feral child’s mother was shaking crumbs off her lap, checking her lipstick in the butter knife. Men were either staring at him or also looking away. I felt like announcing I was not, in fact, his lover, I was married to someone else, and if they so desired, they could line up at Scott’s shoulder and pitch him their best vision of future happiness. “I miss him terribly.”

I also missed London's modesty, gray solidity, unapologetic shabbiness, and the availability of cream buns. Following Luke’s’ birth, I was buried deep in baby land, bottles, diapers, breastfeeding, and mysterious rashes. Would he sleep? Was he happy? Would I ever not be fat? Did I bore Kevin? In our Islington flat, I looked out the window and saw men on scaffolds, badly dressed mothers pushing prams, and someone in an old car parking badly. At the swimming pool where I took swimming classes with Luke, there were women in old bathing suits, tired, overweight, and middle-aged.

In Taos one was assaulted daily by natural beauty; sunsets, mountains, burnt ochre desert landscapes violently scarred by wild flowers, and the moon and the stars arching overhead in shocking detail, the air washed clean overnight, one day more perfect than the next. Some people looked like models and movie stars wearing artless, oversized, pure hemp or linen outfits, or people who looked like movie stars and models who sat in the cafés looking impossibly chic amongst the cacti and the street people. There was a constant list of gallery openings, movie screenings, theater, and music events where you could have edgy conversations about whatever you resented or adored. It was Manhattan in the desert, but now I was older and tired, and I had deserted my only child and loyal husband for this fantasy and the gray-green eyes of the Canadian explaining why he felt my novel was splendid.

“I think I have to leave early,” I said, avoiding looking at Scott’s face. “He cried on the phone last night.”
“Kevin?”
“Luke.”
Scott leaned forward, all of the women and some of the men, the feral baby and possibly the barista also leaned forward. They were probably thinking, who is that chubby, middle-aged woman dressed not in lace and feathers à la Stevie Nicks but in mommy clothes and bad shoes? Could the tall, handsome Canadian possibly be involved with her?

“Don’t do that.” I felt his breath on my face, which smelled of art and Canada.” I have to go back.”
“Why?”
“He just kept saying ‘Momma,’ over and over again.”
“How many words does he actually know?”
“Momma, Dada, green, dog, no, go, more. Always more.”
“What if he’d said ‘dog’ over and over again.”
“He said ‘Momma’. Not ‘dog.’”
“You need more time here.”
“I’m not writing that much. I run and sleep and go out to breakfast.”
“It’s process, Molly. It clicks, and you’re on a roll. It took weeks for me to get going, but then I was on fire.”
“I miss my son. Even though I know the minute I’m back, he’ll treat me like a trampoline and then dash away. I’m the rock he touches. How old were you again when your mother died?”
“Thirteen.” Scott looked away. One of the decorative mommies tried to catch his eye. He looked down at his hands, speckled with paint.
“I had started being a mean teenager, but she was infinitely loving. There were so many conflicting feelings, and then she was sick, and then she was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “You don’t know how much you miss the light until everything goes dark.”
I saw the son watching his mother slip away; the mother was forced to relinquish his future as well as her own.
“She must have been wonderful.”
Scott nodded. He kissed the palm of my hand.

Love is love, I thought; it is so fragile, and yet it remains after everything, after the lingering goodbyes and the shattering of hope. They were the same; her and Scott and Kevin, everybody sitting on their cushions counting their breaths, all trying to remain in the terrible world long enough to accept grace, long enough to tie their shoes and wipe their face and kiss goodnight and there was peace in that understanding as well as an awareness of loss. The parents of the dead babies in Oklahoma must look back at the time they had spent with their children and wonder “Why so brief?”

“Do you want an unhappy woman with a child?” I said, watching his face.
He didn’t flinch, but across his eyes, I saw something flicker, the idea that maybe this thing they were stoking and feeding could turn savage after all. “Why unhappy?”
“I love my husband. He loves our son, who loves both of us.”
“And you?”
“I’m not sure he knows how to love me.”
“He doesn’t deserve you.”
“No one gets what they deserve.”
“I want to show you something.”

Scott stood and held out his hand. It was the first time we had really held hands. I felt a shiver move up my spine while there was an audible inhalation in the coffee shop, a sense of having missed the moment the fireworks exploded, the whale breached. He interlaced his long, strong fingers with mine and pulled me close. “If I’m losing you, I want something,” he whispered. “I want some part of you to always be with me.”
“A hank of hair, a pound of flesh?” I was nervous.

He didn’t answer but pulled me outside towards a dirt road that ran along the side of a mountain. We walked silently, holding hands, and as the road gradually climbed higher, our breathing went deeper and together. I remembered holding my father’s hand when we walked; how old was I when one of us let go? Why did we let go? My father had saved my life by listening when I told him I couldn’t stop drinking; my father nodded and helped me. There was no yelling or tears or statements like, “I didn’t make you an alcoholic,” my mother’s response to any attempt at honesty. My father said he loved me so I could maintain some sense of myself despite the humiliation of my fall. For once he didn’t judge but held my hand and said “I will help you.”

As we climbed higher, I saw Catherine lying still and white beneath a sheet. They had unplugged the machines and for some reason, maybe I had the time wrong, Catherine was all alone in a room covered with bandages, only her bruised hands visible, her beautiful hands, hands that had stroked my face and told me I was a good girl when the world was falling apart. I stood in that room and tried to find something to say besides “I love you” and “I’m sorry” until I promised not to drink again, a promise I broke but now I was walking up a mountain in New Mexico, ten years sober.

Scott stopped. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice hushed as if someone might be listening. I felt my face and realized I was crying, but the tears were just because I remembered her again, which made the stabbing ache of her loss emerge from the depths of my heart. I was crying for the person I had been then, broken and alone, and I was crying because I realized I was not going to save my marriage.

I kissed his hand and felt the sweetness of the moment, a perfect, quiet intimacy that would survive what would come and a snapshot to be kept forever. We approached the hot spring and silently shed our clothes. For the first time since I’d given birth, I felt whole and perfect. To be human is to be alive, and I am alive, I thought. I let the sun bathe me in light, aware that my physical flaws were illuminated but I stood tall, stretched, and then slipped into the water, Scott next to me.     

We both exhaled, and then he moved behind me in the pool, pulling me back gently against his body so I felt everything, but I knew I would not, could not fuck anyone besides my husband until we were done. I doubted Kevin would appreciate my decision or view it as an honoring of our wedding vows. Every man I had known acted as if he were the keeper of my body, never mind my soul, and they didn’t accept varying levels of infidelity. You were a slut or you were a wife. Clearly I was a slut, but I wouldn’t fuck him. Desire was a powerful pressure, but clarity seemed even more important. This intimacy was delicate and easily shattered. Infidelity would produce guilt and remorse, negating what I had found in Taos.

Scott gathered my hair in his hands and swept it from my neck, his lips moving down and across my collarbone, murmuring something.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. This is enough.”

Then I could relax and dissolve into the warmth, the heat of the spring sending steam into the air. His hands moved slowly, coyotes howled, and small things rustled in the juniper bushes. I allowed my body to feel as it felt, no longer a mother or even human. The words of Leonard Cohen passed through my mind, “when she came back she was nobody's wife.” This moment, finally free of the heavy burden of any man’s need to control, to contain, to wound. I tasted the freedom of passion, the sweetness of trust.

“I love you,” I whispered into the gathering dusk. “I don’t understand how it’s possible, but I feel you are like another skin. I love you.”

He turned me around and kissed down the curve of my neck and across my breasts. He wrapped his strong painter’s arms around me and we merged into a single body. The coyote howled.

—Molly Moynahan