Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard.The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.

A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember any more, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field.You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing.The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.

“Tell me that you can see her,” you say, and I start to say that I don’t see anything at all, that I don’t know what you’re talking about and we really ought to go back to the car. Sometimes, I try to remember why I let you talk me into pulling off the road and parking in the weeds and wandering off into the trees.

It’s easier to steal your thoughts than make my own.

“Please, tell me you can see her.”

And I can, but I don’t tell you that. I have never yet told you that. Not in so many words. But I can see her standing there in the wide field, the tall, tall girl and the moon washing white across her wide shoulders and full breasts and Palomino hips, and then she sees us and turns quickly away. There are no clouds, and the moon’s so bright that there’s no mistaking the way her black hair continues straight down the center of her back like a horse’s mane or the long tail that swats nervously from one side of her ass to the other as she begins to run. Sometimes, I take your arm and hold you tight and stop you from going over the stone wall after her. Sometimes you stand very still and only watch. Sometimes you call out for her to please come back to you, that there’s nothing to be afraid of because we’d never hurt her. Sometimes there are tears in your eyes, and you call me names and beg me to please, please let you run with her.

And we stand there a very long time, until there’s nothing more to see or say that we haven’t seen.You’re the first to head back down the hill towards the car, and sometimes we get lost and seem to wander for hours and hours through the orchard, through tangles of creeper vines and wild grapes that weren’t there before. And other times, it seems to take no time at all.

And this last part, this is only a week ago.

I wake up from a dream of that night, a dream of wild things running on two legs, wild things in moonlit pastures that seem to stretch away forever. I wake up sweating and breathless and alone. She’s gone to take a piss, that’s all,I think, blinking at the clock on the dresser. It’s almost three in the morning, and for a while I lie there, listening to the secret, settling noises the house makes at three a.m., the noises no one’s supposed to hear. I’m lying there listening and trying too hard not to remember the dream when I hear Helen crying, and I get up and follow the sound down the hall to the spare bedroom that I’ve taken for my studio.

Helen’s found the canvases I hid behind the old chifforobe and pulled them all out into the light. She’s lined them up, indecently, these things no one else was ever meant to see, lined them up along two of the walls, pushing other things aside to make space for them. I stand there in the doorway, knowing I should be angry and knowing, too, that I have no rightto be angry. Knowing that somehow all my lies to her about that night at the edge of the field have forfeited my right to feel violated. Some lies are that profound, that cruel, and I understand this. I do, and so I stand there, silently wondering what she’s going to say when she realizes I’m watching her

Helen glances at me over her shoulder, her eyes red and swollen and her face streaked with snot and tears. “You saw what I saw,” she says, the same way she might have said she was leaving me. And then she looks back at the paintings, each one only slightly different from the others, and shakes her head.

“You asshole,” she says.“You fucking cunt. I thought I was losing my mind. Did you even know that? Did you know I thought that I was going crazy?”

“No,” I lie. “I didn’t know.”

“How long have you been painting these?” she asks me, and I tell her the truth, that I painted the first one only a week after the night we walked through the orchard.

“I ought to have them framed and put them on the walls,” she says and wipes at her eyes. “I ought to hang them all through the fucking house, so you have to see them wherever you go. That’s what I ought to do. Would you like that?”

I tell her that I wouldn’t, and she laughs and sits down on the floor with her back to me.

“Go to bed,” she says.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I tell her. “I wasn’t ever trying to hurt you.”

“No. Don’t you darefucking say anything else to me. Go back to bed and leave me alone.”

“I promise I’ll get rid of them,” I tell her, and Helen laughs again.

“No, you won’t,” she says, almost whispering. “These are mine now. I need them, and you’re not ever going to get rid of any of them. Not tonight and not ever.”

“I was scared, Helen.”

“I told you to go back to bed,” she says again, and I ask her to come with me.

“I’ll come when I’m ready. I’ll come when I’m done here.”

“There’s nothing else to see,” I say, but then she looks at me again, her eyes filled with resentment and fury and bitterness, and I don’t say anything else. I leave her alone with the paintings and walk back to the bedroom. Maybe, I think, she’ll change her mind and destroy them. Maybe she’ll take a knife to the paintings or burn them, the way I should have done months ago. I sit down on the edge of the bed, wishing I had a drink, thinking about going downstairs for a glass of whiskey or a brandy, or maybe going to the medicine cabinet for a couple of Helen’s Valium. And that’s when I see the owl skull, sitting atop the stack of books beside her typewriter. Bone bleached white by sun and weather, rain and snow and frost, those great empty, unseeing eye sockets, the yellow-brown sheath still covering that hooked beak. I looked for it after that night in February, three months ago, the night Helen brought the blonde woman home, but I never found it. So maybe, I told myself, maybe that was just some other part of the dreams. I lie down and do my best not to think about Helen, all alone in my studio with those terrible paintings of the thing from the field. And I try not to think about the owl skull; too, too many pieces to a puzzle I never want to solve. And before Helen comes back to bed, as the sky outside the window begins to go dusky shades of gray and purple with the deceits of false dawn, I drift back down to the orchard and the stone wall and someone has turned the ponies out again.