I’d had another restless night so at first I thought it was rubber, a practical joke. But who would have played it? Not my youngest, who feared snakes, or my oldest, who loved them with the sobriety she brought to all her passions. And not my husband: try as I might, I’d seen no signs of his ghost.

The snake shimmied, a river threading across our living room floor. I jumped on the arm of our couch, my shriek waking the girls. I told them to shut themselves in their room. The youngest obeyed. The oldest did not. Even though she usually took any opportunity to sequester herself, she now perched on the couch’s edge, where she studied the snake, which had stilled again, its only motions a mechanical tongue flick.

“Bull snake,” my oldest said.

“Is it poisonous?”

“Venomous,” she said. “No.”

I had to find my phone, but I couldn’t move. I’d dreamed of snakes on our floor, roiling wall-to-wall layers, before. I’d dreamed of string after string of snakes in our bed. My bed.

I knew most snakes were harmless. But just the sight of one assaulted me with its terrible efficiency, all its parts packed into one slim sack moving legless over land, at once dismembered core and wriggling member.

“I’ll take care of it,” my daughter said.

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll pick it up. I know how. It’ll be !ne.”

“Do not touch that snake.”

She rolled her sixth-grader eyes. “I’m just going to hold it for a second then put it outside. It’s not a big deal.”

“I said no.”

Her face squeezed into that you’re-not-the-boss-of-me look I’d come to loathe. It had appeared more frequently since my husband’s death. Still, I preferred her defiance to a horrifying new development: instead of just throwing her arms around me, she’d ask, “Mom, can I have a hug?” It’s possible, in recent months, that when she hugged me I "inched. Not because I didn’t want her touch, but because I’d forgotten, at times, that she was there.

She rose from the couch, watching me. She stepped toward the snake, stepped again.

“Sit down,” I snapped. “I’ve already lost your dad. I can’t lose you, too.”

The door of my girls’ bedroom creaked open: my youngest peeked out. I waved her away. “Inside!”

My oldest hurled herself on the couch, hugging her knees into little missiles beneath the loose sweatshirt she slept in. Her father’s narrow eyes—darkened by my genes—narrowed and darkened still, glistening with tears. Everyone said she looked like him. But I couldn’t see him in her anymore: just, sometimes, an outline, the lack of him within.

“If you want to help,” I said, “go get my phone.”

I called my neighbor. He wouldn’t have left for the garage just yet: I now knew his schedule, through the osmosis of fucking. “I’ll be right there,” he said. My oldest unlocked the door and he burst in, machete in hand.

“Don’t kill it!” she shrieked.

“Don’t worry,” he said, in the soothing voice he used on weekends with his girls. He lowered the blade to his side. “I only brought it just in case.”

He set the machete down and pulled gloves from his pocket. “Looks like a bull snake. Not venomous, but they can get aggressive if they feel threatened.”

He turned to my daughter. “Nonvenomous snakes can still bite. But you know that, right?” She nodded, hypnotized by his knowledge of snakes, of her.

She didn’t know how well he knew me.

“I’m just going to grab him real quick. You two stay back, okay?” He opened the front door, and in one smooth motion, grabbed the snake by the tail and tossed it outside. He turned to us, standing in the jumble of shoes from all seasons amassed near our entrance, one of our many messes he at once navigated and ignored. “Don’t think that sucker will bother you anymore,” he said, “but I’ll come by after work to patch up your foundation. That’s sometimes how they get in. Maybe I’ll give your grass a good mow, too. Can’t hurt.”

“I can mow my own lawn,” I said, despite the fact that I rarely did.

“Apologies,” he said, his skin turning crimson. “Of course you can.”

After he left, my oldest stared hard at the shut door, as if her vision could melt it away. What did she seek behind it? The snake? Her dad? “Mom,” she finally said, “can I have a hug?”

That evening my neighbor returned with a flashlight, a caulking gun, and what looked like a brand-new bucket of some reparative substance. “I’m just going to check the perimeter of your house, see what I can see. Always a good idea to patch up big cracks anyway. They can ruin your house’s structural integrity.”

His snake and repair spiels, I realized, contained more words than anything he said when we were alone. I wanted to tell him that he’d already done plenty on my behalf.

Instead, I said, “We’re not great about house maintenance. I mean, he wasn’t. I’m not.”

He examined his shoes, like he did every time I mentioned my husband.

“Happens to everyone,” he said.

“Not everyone,” I said. I could have blamed cancer, death, grief for our house’s sad state. But long before my husband’s illness, we had, for instance, a kitchen drawer missing, cracked under the weight of random shit I’d crammed in it instead of truly cleaning. My office, a glorified hallway without a door to hide its horrors, was a miniature landfill, bursting with papers and wrappers and bottles and books. Our kitchen sink had lost the ability to produce hot water, and I now filled a pot from our bathtub to do the dishes. Three of our stove burners didn’t work. This was but a portion of the disrepair. Granted, some of it had occurred during and after my husband’s death, but much of it hadn’t. How had this happened? I often asked myself. My self-recriminating answers to this question occupied any brainpower I might have used to figure out what to do about it: I had always been a slob, so lost in my head I couldn’t contend with the physical, my filth so virulent it had infected my laidback husband, he not much caring about the chaos because I didn’t, and I not caring because caring meant panic.

And yet, not caring meant depression: I was never more middle-class than when counting the ways I failed at upright middle-classdom. But now I treasured the mess: I loved anything that had formed before my husband’s death. 

I decided it was time for my neighbor to go.

“I’d ask you to join us for dinner when you’re done, but—” I didn’t have an ending to that  sentence.

He shook his head. “No,” he said, his brown eyes resting their warmth on me. “I wouldn’t impose.”

“Please impose,” I said, lowering my voice below my girls’ hearing range. “Just not here.”

He turned crimson again, and I expected him to run o%. But instead, he swiveled his head for an all-clear, then pressed his finger to my lips. As if to say, “hush.” As if to say, “open.” Which, for a moment, I did.

The next morning, the snake was back, right in the middle of our living room. I

yelped and stood on the couch, and my oldest emerged from her room. “Cool,”

she said.

“Not cool!”

“Wasn’t Manny supposed to keep him out? Guess he’s not as smart as he

thinks he is.”

I’d never heard her put down him before. “Why would you say that?

Manny’s always nice to you.”

“Nice isn’t the same as smart.”

“No, nice is better. But Manny’s smart, too.”

“Whatever,” she said. “Can I pick up the snake now? Manny did and he was fine.”

I now understood the gist of her argument: my neighbor wasn’t smart but removed the snake and she was smart and could remove it better.

She had inherited her father’s confidence and recklessness. Not long after we’d met, I rode beside him as he wove through traffic like a NASCAR champ and I thought it would never work between us: the laws of physics

scared me, and I tried not to think about them; his driving made that impossible.

But it also kept me interested: he contained multitudes. He was baby-faced and old-souled. He’d read all the poets and played all the video games. He used nonviolent communication and made jokes about skullfucking. He worked for nonprofits and prepared for the apocalypse. He was the parent who would throw the girls in the air, let them climb rocks, pour them second sodas. But he also cleaned their cuts, read them his favorite childhood books, played their made-up games. Since his death, I had become more permissive, but out of self-absorption: I was often too wrapped up in my grief to enforce prohibitions or grant attention. No wonder my oldest wouldn’t back down about the snake. What would she become? The wrong parent had died, but I couldn’t tell my girls that.

It was only a matter of time until they told me.

“Get my phone,” I said. “Now.”

My neighbor came and did his thing, then suggested I call a professional. He had a number lined up, a snake removal service in Boulder. After I got the girls to school, late for the second day in a row, I scanned the website. “Keep your kids away from the snake” was its sage advice. Also, “NEVER try to pick up the

snake.”

Still, I didn’t call the snake removers. I didn’t like to make phone calls, nor did I like having strangers in the house. Though I’d had my brushes with male violence, I wasn’t so much worried the strangers would hurt me; I mostly just dreaded having to talk to them.

When my husband was dying, our lives were a steady train of strangers in the house: the medical supply dude, the home health nurse, the hospice folks.

Not to mention all the goodhearted fuckers coming out of the woodwork to visit. Having to form coherent, socially acceptable sentences alongside everything else nearly pushed me to the brink. It still did.

The snake removers had some value to me, though: I brought the laptop to our dinner table that night to show my oldest the website’s directives, which launched a flurry of eyerolls and whatevers, into which my youngest injected,

“What if the snake’s Dad?”

“No, honey,” I said, before I had time to think about the sad magnitude of her claim. “That’s not possible.” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe my husband would return as an animal. In fact I’d been keeping an eye out for signs of him in neighborhood birds and squirrels. But he knew me. He loved me. He would never come back as a snake.

My youngest hopped up from her chair, as her boundless energy dictated.

I no longer tried to keep her seated during meals. She was a gobbler and runner; at age ten, she still needed reminders to use her fork, but I rarely bothered anymore.

“When I asked if reincarnation was real, you said ‘anything’s possible,’” she said. I had no memory of that conversation, which served as evidence it had happened. The more important the conversation, the less I remembered it. I could not retain any more gravitas, lest I sink.

“‘Anything’s possible’ is just a figure of speech, sweetie. What I meant is ‘I don’t know.’ Some things we just don’t know. But some things we do.”

“But how do you know the snake isn’t Dad?” said my oldest. “You can’t

Prove it.”

“I know,” I said, “because your father knew I hate snakes and he

wouldn’t do that to me.”

“That’s not proof,” said my oldest. “He also knew how much I love snakes. Maybe he came back as a snake for me.”

Had her voice had fewer knife-points, her face less fuck-you, I might have said, “I know your father would come back for you if he could. Just like he’d come back for me. And Sophie.”

Instead, I said, “He would never in a million years come back as

A snake.”

“But I love them more than you hate them.”

“You can’t quantify such things.”

“I can.”

“I think the snake’s Dad,” said my youngest, taking a celebratory lap around the room. Even photos of snakes got her clutching my arm; she was my nervous pup, jumping back at the first sign of threat. One whole year she resisted going outside, even in winter, after a run-in with a bee. But now she cheered her snake dad. Grief had made her a stranger.

“He’s coming back,” my oldest said.

I set the alarm for earlier than usual. I didn’t want the snake, if it returned, to spark false hope in my girls. I considered texting my neighbor to ask him to be on-call early, so he could dispense with the snake, even kill it, before the girls woke up. Then I thought that might be a conversation best had in person. Then I thought that what I really wanted was to fuck him again, which would be a big step, because we’d done it only once, if you just counted intercourse, and that was weeks ago, when I was even more consumed by grief and barely aware of

what I was doing.

Second fucks were exponentially more important than first fucks: a first fuck could be dismissed as a one-time thing, but second fucks often led to fourth fucks and sixteenth fucks. And what if the girls woke up and I wasn’t there? Maybe they’d think I’d abandoned them or died. Of course, going to my neighbors was also a form of leaving, which was the point: to obliterate myself without dying. So really, going there, by indulging my death wish, would provide my girls a service. Then again, what if I went to my neighbor and a sudden illness struck or a fire ignited and I wasn’t there to save them? But wasn’t such alarmist thinking its own kind of harm that would trickle down to them?

I skittered down the street to my neighbor’s duplex. When he answered the door, I said, “We have to be quick.”

After, I crossed my arms behind my head and stared at the constellations of plaster nubs on the ceiling. Beside me, my neighbor did the same. We’d left the light on, as we had last time: our couplings demanded all our senses, lest a stray one wander toward our losses. His twin-sized mattress, propped up by a spartan bed frame, forced a post-coital intimacy; our pseudo-star gazing was how we made do. Gradually, my neighbor’s breathing slowed and quieted. I couldn’t shake the habit, from my husband’s last days, of listening for the quality of a man’s breath.

“So,” he said.

I braced myself to hear his thoughts, the content of which would then require me to share or conceal mine. His bed was the land of no-thought, our bargain-bin nirvana. I didn’t want to put what we were doing here into words: those snakes of sound that would slither through the tall grass of meaning and eventually strike.

“Yes?” I finally said, nearly choking on the suspense.

“It’s weird how that snake keeps getting in. I mean, even the cracks I patched up didn’t seem big enough for a creature that size. Gotta be something else going on. You call the snake guy?” “No.” I didn’t want to explain the ins and outs of my general dysfunction, so I said. “It’s gotten complicated. The girls think the snake’s a reincarnation of Paul.”

“Huh,” he said. He shifted the arms crossed behind his head as if accommodating a big notion.

“What does ‘huh’ mean?”

He shrugged, the twin dark flames of his pit hairs jumping. “My abuela would have something to say about that.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. She believed in that kind of thing.” He eyed me, a shadow  casting over his face. “She passed.”

“I’m sorry. The good ones always do.”

“We all do,” he said. He suddenly gripped my forearm, as if I’d made a move to leave. I’m also a good one, his big orbs seemed to say. I’m alive. I’m here. “I should go,” I said. I extricated myself, the heat of his hand stuck to my flesh, and dressed with more efficiency than I’d ever displayed in my everyday life.

“Just so you know, my ex was a neat freak,” he said. “A clean house is overrated.”

After another restless night, the alarm bleated far too soon. I wandered out to the living room to find an empty floor, its emptiness enhanced by the former presence of my husband’s home hospital bed. Oddly, this was the one part of the house I’d managed to keep clean: the place where my husband once lay. Maybe I was trying to make room for his spirit. And maybe that’s why, despite my hatred of snakes, I collapsed on the couch in tears. What if my girls were right? Why hadn’t he come? Was it because I’d fucked my neighbor again? Had he returned as a snake to punish me for fucking him the first time? I don’t care, I told him. Just come back. I gulped down the noises my body wanted to expel and eventually fell back to sleep.

When I opened my eyes, there it was: the bull snake, that stippled brown river. “Hi,” I said. “Hello.” It "icked its needle tongue, its dark-seed eyes siphoning the morning light, the kinked tube of its body wider than my wrist, longer than my leg. Why so relaxed, as if basking in a prairie sun? As if it belonged here.

The longer I stared at his calm visage, the less threatening it seemed. Its head might have belonged to a turtle peeking out from a landscape pond.

“Paul?” I whispered. It took no notice of me, continued licking at the air. If his lungs filled and shrunk with each breath, I saw no sign. Even its tongue movements seemed lifeless, a tic. “I’m sorry,” I said. “About sleeping with Manny.”

The thing is, my husband probably would have understood. He always understood me. The anxiety, the depression, the dysfunction, all of it, he got it and accepted it. All those times he picked up slack with the kids because I couldn’t get out of bed. And I wanted to stab myself when I thought about it, how sure I was I couldn’t move, when really, I could have stood up, stood with him. I’d forgotten he too could suffer until suffering was all he did. In his last days, the fuzzy blue socks some nurse had put on him slipped down, and as I pried them back up over his feet, he wept. I asked if I was hurting him and, though he was half out of his mind at that point with narcotics and cancer cells, he said, quite clearly, “It’s not the physical pain.” “I know,” I said, hugging his feet. “I know.”

But I knew nothing of his pain. I was with him, but he was alone.

I feared this snake wasn’t well. I feared it was healthy. I feared it was my husband. I feared it wasn’t.

I tapped on my girls’ door, tipped in my head. “It’s back,” We crept to the couch and sat shoulder to shoulder, observing the snake for clues. “Still no touching,”

I said to my oldest. “Got it?” She nodded earnestly as the snake continued what might have been an open-eyed sleep.

“Do you think he’s okay?” my youngest asked, squeezing my hand.

“He’s always like that,” said my oldest. “Bull snakes make rattling sounds when they feel threatened. He’s comfortable here.”

How easily, though, my neighbor had tossed it from the house. Surely the snake must have felt threatened then, but it just let my neighbor sail him through the air.

My phone buzzed: My neighbor, about the snake. Asking if I needed him. “That’s okay,” I said. “We’re good.” “Are you sure?” No, I wasn’t sure. Maybe

I needed him. But I didn’t want to put that in writing. I texted back, “I’m sure.”

My girls were still warm and dopey with sleep. My youngest lay her head against my shoulder, and I breathed in the pink baby scent that lingered in her scalp. My oldest flopped her hand on my thigh like it was old furniture, its presence assumed. The snake continued to lie in peace, basking in our gaze, and I felt a pull. To be closer, to get close. To solve its mystery: Was it dying on our watch? Or "aunting eternal life? I levered my foot, in small beats, toward the rope of its body. I pointed my toe. I held my breath. The girls, too, stopped breathing, watching me as they pulled their spines straight.

But before I could make contact, the snake reared back. It shook its tail and flexed its jaw with a terrible hiss. Then it shot from our house, a zigzagging  missile, leaving us forever.