After Melissa Originally published as the catalog text for an exhibition of large-format photographs by Lisa Roy Sachs, 2008. She sits in the yard planting the blueberry bush, and worries once again that they didn't bury the cats deeply enough. There were two of them, the boy tabby and the long-haired girl, which they brought home from the shelter the week after they moved into the house; the tabby lasted a year, the longhair a few months more. It was a car that got the tabby—she found him on the roadside after the school bus left the end of the drive. The girls watched from the bus: surely they saw, or perhaps they didn't, or convinced themselves they didn't; or they saw and understood and pretended not to have seen so as not to have had to share that experience with her. In any event she called Dave and he came home from the office and they buried him crying at the back of the yard somewhere more or less where they later put the swingset. She thinks ten feet north of the swingset, that's where they laid the flagstone, but the girls moved the flagstone when they made the grotto in the forsythia for their dolls. And the longhair, which died when the children were at school, she'd been acting strangely for weeks, sometimes stopping suddenly in her circuit of the house (for they had decided to sequester her indoors since the tabby's death) and staring straight ahead trembling slightly, as though she'd seen something terrifying, but there was nothing there to see. They thought it was a form of mourning. For the tabby. But then one afternoon during a rare moment of household calm, when the chores were finished and she was lying on the sofa with a book, the longhair walked into the room, froze, trembled, then kind of half crouched, then lowered her chin to the floor, and just fell over dead. This time she didn't call Dave. She just buried the cat. She didn't cry this time, either. The girls cried, both times. After school, their backpacks still slung over their shoulders, the three of them clutching one another in a howling clot, and after that they decided without discussion that there would be no more cats, that it just wasn't worth it. The girls never asked where the cats had gone. The corpses. Camille at eight was old enough to understand they would be buried. Or rather old enough to be incapable of concealing this knowledge from herself. Olivia was five and perhaps it wouldn't have occurred to her. Whatever the case they never asked, although she had seen them walking circles in the yard from time to time staring at the ground, as though looking, as though wondering. There was no way to tell, the grass had grown back where the flagstone once lay and she never marked the longhair's grave, she just pulled back the sod, dug the hole, folded the animal inside, filled the hole, refitted the sod. But now, sitting in the sun, her hands troweling the earth, she is worried she'll upset the graves. Because all she wanted, when they died, was to put them to rest as quickly as possible, for the event to be over, and so she didn't dig deeply enough. And this is not the first time she's worried about this. It's been three years and she has thought about it almost every day. Not at first—at first, when the girls' grief was still fresh, when Olivia still burst sometimes into tears moaning that she missed the kitties and her sister told her stop it, stop it, shut up, and then finally herself succumbed, so that their wails filled the house and Dave threw down his newspaper or magazine and stalked off to the front porch to be alone—then, she didn't think about the cats, their remains, buried shallowly underneath the grass. Later. The Christmas after it happened—seven months after the longhair keeled over—that's when she began to worry. She thought about it the first time on Christmas morning, hobbling about the room picking up debris, and Dave said to her You're mixing the trash with the recycling, Jesus Susan that's not paper, that's plastic, put it in the other box—and for some reason the sight of the two boxes, each filled with the mingled trash, the bows and paper and twist-ties and sliced up blister packs, suddenly brought to mind the two dead cats, somewhere out there under the snow, trapped under the snow, mewling to be released. Not that this is something she believes—that the cats are alive, that they are suffering. She isn't superstitious. She knows they're dead. They are utterly dead, they had no souls, they were only machines, and in truth she never wanted them, they were Dave's idea (of all people!), she doesn't like animals, she doesn't understand people's love for them. She is aware that their bodies are no longer intact, that there is nothing left but bones and patches of fur. So it wasn't about what she believed, it was just what she saw, the cats trapped underground, longing for the air, longing for one another, pawing helplessly at the frozen ground. She stood insensibly in the middle of the living room staring out the back window while Dave sat reading the instruction manual of his new camera and she just barely held her tears in check, just barely. Thank God, because she would have had to explain it to him and he wouldn't have understood. He was a good man but he wouldn't have understood, because she couldn't have explained it, because she didn't understand. And after that, every day, she thought about the shallowly buried cats. Not always that they were still alive. Usually not. Sometimes she simply imagined them rising to the surface: heaving up out of the saturated ground after a downpour, or emerging, boulder-like, from the dry eroded September dirt in a violent wind, or lying exposed in the wake of Dave's lawn tractor, the white bones sheared and scraped. She imagined the girls finding them, rotted but recognizable, and rejecting her succor, pushing her loving hands away, screaming what did you do to them, what did you do? And eventually not just the cats. Everything. Her growing disgust at Dave's grooming—his obsessive, womanly ablutions—the daily shaving and gelling and combing, the aftershave, the knotting and reknotting of the necktie. He would come in from jogging on a Saturday afternoon when the girls were with his mother, and she would want him, would press her clean hands to the heavy damp shirt, tug it up over his belly, and he would push her away, no, no, let me shower, and off he would go to render himself presentable to her, and she would have to pretend she liked it that way. But she couldn't pretend, not well enough, and she thought he knew. You're the one who wanted it, he muttered after one inadequate performance, and it was a while until the next time, after that. She has begun to fear driving the car, as well, particularly tunnels and bridges, at the beginning she merely couldn't look left or right when crossing a bridge, but now she can't drive over them at all. Tunnels, bridges. Tunnels are easier to avoid—there are two routes to the Kroger, the one that passes underneath the old train trestle and the one that goes past Costco, and it's the Costco route she takes, and it never seems strange to anyone. But bridges—if she knows they're going somewhere that will take them over a bridge, she asks Dave to drive, but if she's alone or with the girls she will go miles out of her way to avoid it. And lately, just these past few weeks, she can't even get near a bridge. She can't drive along a creek for fear of seeing a bridge. It took her an hour and a half to get to the Agway and back today; when she returned home with the bushes and Dave asked her what the hell took her so long she said there was an accident, she had to take a detour, and of course he wanted to know what accident, anyone hurt, how many cars, and she said she didn't know, she didn't know, and headed for the yard to plant the blueberries. And later, Why the hell are you planting them there, he asked her—right next to the swings where they're likely to get stepped on by the kids and their friends—and she had no good answer, she said they looked nice there, she said the swingset wouldn't be there forever, would it, they've already outgrown it. But the truth was the ladder, the ladder attached to the swing that the bushes would be blocking—she didn't want the children on the ladder, any ladder—she didn't want them climbing a tree, she didn't want Dave to climb the stairs to the attic, she didn't want him up on the roof cleaning out the gutters—I worry, she told him not long ago, what if you fall, hire a guy to do it, we have the money. And he just shook his head, threw his work gloves on the ground, went to call a service, and she knew he would be angry with her for days. If it's madness, it's the same madness everyone has. Dave's father, the way he pretends he isn't going blind, the way the girls say to him Grandpa, look out there, there's a woodpecker on the stop sign!, and he comes back with Well would you look at that! while sort of vacantly staring in the direction of the light. Or Dave's sister June, the thin white gloves she wears everywhere, it's supposed to be some kind of fashion statement, some expression of retro elegance, but Susan knows that it's germs, it's bacteria, she can't touch anything anymore, she can't go out in public without the gloves on, she's too afraid, and she bought the pearls and cream-colored suits, the white blouses and stockings, to go along with the gloves, to complete the illusion. She has remade herself, shaped herself around her fear. And their neighbor, Mrs. Coath, she crosses herself as she steps onto the front porch to get the paper in the morning, she crosses herself whenever Susan rings the bell (you can see the poor thing through the cut glass panes), she crosses herself as she gets out of her car. Why?, Susan asked her one day, bringing her back the leftover sugar she hadn't used in the children's cookies, why, Mrs. Coath? The killers, dear, it's the killers, I am thanking the Lord for protecting me against them. So it isn't so unreasonable, is it. Thinking daily about the cats. How many millions of thoughts does she have in a day? A torrent, an unstoppable deluge. Her worries are like a few scattered branches carried along on the violent river of her thoughts. The cats are nothing. The ladders, the bridges—nothing. She went to college, she took psychology, philosophy, linguistics; she knows what the mind can do to itself, the way it transforms the world into symbols and signs, the way it turns in on itself under duress, devours itself, digests itself, deforms. But what duress, she has no idea. Her sister Becca would say she has subverted her own ambitions for those of her husband, she has been the instrument, in their children, of his own desire to remake himself, that she is experiencing his displaced anger that she has not borne him sons. But Becca's vision is clouded; she has problems of her own. No, Susan never had ambitions, she only wanted to be happy, she only wanted quiet and calm, and to love. And to be loved. And she loves, and is loved. She feels fulfilled. She feels real. Mounding earth and bark mulch around the base of this bush, she feels the exactitude of this moment, she feels it so powerfully that it could crush her if she let it, she would welcome its awesome weight. The problem is not, as her sister would like to think, that Susan, that her family, that her neighbors, have buried their fears. The problem is that they have not buried them, that they cannot bury them, deeply enough. c2008 by J. Robert Lennon.