On our first morning in the new house, I have a strange feeling of déja vu. It is my birthday, and I go out to get us coffee. Walking down the house-lined street, I can hear the humming of lawn mowers through my one working AirPod, and I feel like my teenage self again, who had gone for long winding walks through the subdivision where I grew up, clutching a Walkman and daydreaming about leaving. To stay was to be lulled into a quiet death, every day the same dull drone of cicadas growing louder until I could no longer hear my own desires. I had to keep walking.

 

After living in New York City for years, I’d forgotten about overhead wires, the ones that make the phone lines and internet connections and electricity run through a grid of houses. How tangled and tacky they look, how dangerous, dangling precariously from an old wooden post.

 

When I get home, the mailman walks up to our porch and hands me a package. It is from my dad. Inside is the title for the pick-up truck that he gifted us for the move. I have not driven a car in ten years, and I am afraid of this one even though I’d grown up riding in the back of my dad’s truck, gleeful as the wind whipped my hair into knots. In the package is also a letter for my birthday and a wad of cash. The letter says, “I remember you being born like it was yesterday. Here’s a little something for your age, plus $4 extra for good luck!” It is $40. I am 34.

 

We saw the house upstate only once for a brief walkthrough. Our decision to leave Brooklyn was quick and the price was right. I didn’t notice that all the old doors were warped and not a single one closes all the way. I forgot that the floors upstairs are checked linoleum, hideous for trying to look like wood. There is no dishwasher, something I was quick to overlook in my eagerness to try a quieter life. The cabinets smell like earth.

 

At the back of the house is a room that the broker sold to us as perfect for a home office. It’s the first room I unpack because I need a place to put my son down. I mop the floor, unroll the rug from his nursery in Brooklyn, carefully unpack baskets of toys and stacks of board books. I turn it into a playroom.

 

Every morning we sit in the small space for hours. I try to keep him from shoving his pudgy hands into the heating grates.

 

When my dog comes into the playroom, he snarls at the heating grate until I shoo him out. Though one night, I am sitting in the dark room, putting away toys, and I hear something scratching beneath me, something living under the playroom.

 

I did not want to move, or I did, but not yet. I thought we would have another year in our apartment, though it was rapidly becoming cramped. I wanted space to breathe, to think, to make things with my hands, and I felt suffocated in the city. Still, I wasn’t ready to leave. For ten years, I had clawed my way into belonging there. I just needed a break––a small break from all of the years I had spent, all of the people I had been before now. Then, our landlord raised our rent.

 

Before we left Brooklyn, the movers took two days to disassemble our apartment, during which I had to take my son out of the house so that we weren’t in the way. It was June, but unusually cold and rainy. I had packed away all of his cold weather clothes and had to dig out a sweater and little pants. I had nothing warm for myself, so I walked around the neighborhood in a sleeveless dress. I walked briskly to keep warm, occasionally jogging while I sang to my son. Around and around and around we walked, treading paths that had become boring to me. We retraced the first walk I had taken on my own after becoming a new person, a mother.

 

Only two weeks after my son’s birth via C-section, when I was finally allowed to move more freely, I walked outside, alone for the first time in weeks. I was puffy from the fluids they’d pumped into me at the hospital, slow, sore in my lower abdomen where they’d sliced me open to scoop my baby out. I was unrecognizable to myself. My face was swollen, my body felt alien, I had forgotten what it was like to be alone.

 

I slowly made my way around a single block: 8th Street to Prospect Park West and then back down 9th Street. It was a warm summer evening and families were out for dinner. A group of young people were walking to the train from Prospect Park. They laughed loudly, limber with youth and booze. I was invisible.

 

The movers were still at work so I took my son to lunch. We went to a little Italian place with odd hours that my husband and I used to frequent when we’d first moved to the neighborhood. My son sat in a highchair for the first time, delighted. I took photos of him beaming. I felt guilty because I was moving him away.

 

It started to rain, and I covered him up and kept walking. I walked the three blocks home, past the gym where I’d gone swimming while heavily pregnant, when I used to leave the pool and walk home in only a towel because it was so hot, and I was so heavy.

 

When I got home, my dress was soaked, my sneakers waterlogged, and my son was fast asleep. I cried when we went upstairs, and our home echoed with its emptiness.

 

My husband, born and raised in Brooklyn, is only acquainted with city wildlife—rats and silverfish and roaches. Within the first week upstate, he excitedly calls me from the living room. “Look! It’s a hedgehog!” I look outside to see a groundhog, beefed up from scavenging vegetable gardens and garbage. He has climbed on top of the fence and is surveying his kingdom. A few days later, my neighbor tells me that she saw him in our driveway. His entire body weight leaning on our garbage cans, trying to topple them.

 

There are moths everywhere. They fly out of cabinets and flutter through the closets. They perch on the walls of our bedroom. My dog hops on his hind legs and snaps at them. I complain to the property manager who points out that our lease states we are responsible for exterminator fees. “I will pay for moths incurred,” I write to her, “but these moths were not incurred by me.” The landlord agrees to pay and we pack all of the cabinets and closets up again. A man comes with poison and silently makes his way through the house—I jump when I hear him in the room with me, addressing me as “ma’am.” After that, I see only their papery corpses before I vacuum them up.

 

A repairman comes to help install our washing machine. I can hear his voice echoing up from the basement. He is telling my husband about ghost hunting, a hobby of his. “A story that not many people around here tell is that the guy who constructed the clocktower on the old Dutch church was Jewish, and not only that, but he killed himself by jumping off of that very clocktower. His grave is the only one that’s facing away from the church.” There is a lull in conversation and then he says “Want me to cover up that hole over there? Something is bound to root around under the house and then find its way in here.” I hear my husband’s voice in response, but muffled, I can’t tell what he’s said.

 

I try researching this clocktower story later. I want to know why the Jewish clockmaker was so unhappy that he took his own life, but I can’t find anything. The graveyard is open and in the middle of town, so I wheel my son around it in his stroller and try to make out which gravestone might be turned away from the church. So many of them are too old, the lettering worn away, and I can’t tell the front from the back.

 

One newer stone is for a woman named Kristen who died in 2016. Her epitaph says, “She was an old soul,” which seems unkind; according to her gravestone she was only 34 when she died. The same age that I am now, standing in front of her final resting place.

 

I stay up until midnight going through papers and unpacking my office. I shred ten-year-old papers, appliance manuals for ovens in places where we no longer live, mock-ups of our wedding invitations.

 

Afterwards, I start the water for a shower, and as I remove my makeup, I turn to see that the water is running out onto the floor. The showerhead that my husband has installed is too powerful. It renders the shower curtain useless, the force of the water pushing it aside. A wave of hot water flows out into the hall, down one of the heating grates, into the closet. I am naked and trying to stop the wave with towels thrown down from the moth-infested closet. Downstairs water leaks from the light fixture in the kitchen. I sink to the floor and listen to the soft sound of the water slowly dripping and my husband opening and closing cabinets, pulling out more paper towels, mopping it up.

 

I feel certain that the animal beneath the house is a skunk. At least once a week the smell of skunk pervades the house, waking me from sleep. In the mornings, I see poop that does not belong to our dog. I google “skunk poop” to see if I am right.

 

In the backyard, I plant a small garden––tomatoes and bell peppers and shishitos. Later, arugula and broccoli and broccolini. I check it diligently, water it every day, add nutrients to the soil, but only the shishitos thrive. I bend down to harvest them and see a grasshopper on the netting, upon closer inspection it’s two grasshoppers, a smaller one on top of a larger one. Grasshoppers fucking over my garden.

 

We make friends with our new neighbors. They have a daughter who is seven days older than my son. I watch them toddle around in the confines of a baby jail and I already know that she will boss him around one day. I wonder if they will be best friends or lovers. Or maybe we will move back to the city, and they will forget each other.

 

My best friend and her husband come up for my son’s birthday. They help us set up the backyard, prepare the grill, make the birthday cake, buy the booze. My best friend entertains all the new people I have invited in an effort to be neighborly, getting to know them and making them feel welcome. She is an extension of me. That night she feeds my son his dinner and puts him to bed because I am so tired. I take a shower and fall asleep by 8. The next morning, when they drive back to the city, I cry.

 

My in-laws come to visit and my mother-in-law says that our new town is just like Staten Island. I bristle. “No,” I correct her, “there’s a thriving artist community here. I would never move my son to Staten Island.”

 

I carefully choose some new pieces of furniture for the living space. A leather couch, a Moroccan rug, two midcentury armchairs that I won in an online auction and my husband drives to Long Island to retrieve. When I arrange it all, I step back and am quiet. “It looks like a mountain lodge from the 1970s,” my husband says. Back goes the couch, into the closet goes the rug.

 

I sit on the porch and read, clutching my cup of coffee and listening to the muffled noises of my son fussing and my dog barking. I watch the birds in the pine tree out front. The black capped chickadees are so delicate, their colors so beautifully placed, as if they might actually be made of porcelain. There is a catbird that follows me from place to place, sometimes sitting on a shelf of herbs I’ve put on the porch, sometimes following me into the backyard, calling out to me.

 

“What do you want?” I ask him, but we don’t speak the same language.

 

In an effort to understand him, I research catbirds. I find that catbirds are thought to symbolize facing one’s fears, embracing danger and adapting to it. They are also drawn to people who are “embarking on projects where words are important.”

 

My husband takes long bike rides on country roads that I have never gotten to see. I am guiltily resentful of him for leaving the house and having hours of quiet to himself while my mornings consist of making breakfast for the baby, doing dishes from breakfast, letting the baby cling to my legs while the dog whines to be let out again. My husband returns, sweaty and exhilarated, thrilled by the beauty of the outside. “I love it here,” he says.

 

We share the house with spiders. They hide in dark corners upstairs. In the basement, granddaddy long legs lurk in corners, still and quiet. I let them live as long as they don’t encroach on my space. When a spider walks across my desk, I brush him away with a block of post-it notes. The second time he does it, I squash him. My husband takes our vacuum and swooshes up all of the webs in the basement stairwell because he thinks the spiders are scheming to make him walk into their webs. The next day, they have just built them back. They were here first, I suppose.

 

The skunk begins to dig little holes all around the backyard, one in which I trip while trying to chase after my son and wrangle my dog at the same time.

 

I hire a nanny after a month of searching. She has just moved upstate from the city. She’s a model, but she’s trying to get out of it. We are the same age. She says my name out loud a lot whenever she’s speaking to me. “Kaycie, I love this. Kaycie, how do I use the espresso machine again? Kaycie, look!” She hints that she went through a bad breakup with a famous boyfriend but never reveals his name.

 

A neighbor tells me that they have spotted a fisher cat in their backyard, slinking about and growling. I’ve never heard of this animal and picture a Chupacabra, but upon looking it up later, I actually find it cute, like a big ferret. I am disturbed to read about its ferocity. Fishers are one of the few predators that target porcupines, darting at them and disorienting them, snapping at their unprotected faces until they stumble. Then the fisher flips them over and disembowels them, devouring their intestines.

 

That night I dream that a fisher runs into our house. He slinks so quickly about our living room that I can’t keep up with where he is. I grab my son and our dog and leap onto the couch, clutching them to me, but the fisher is fast, and he bites all three of us even as I kick him away. My husband is standing in the corner of the room, looking at his phone, searching for information about fisher cats. “We need to go to the hospital,” I tell him, still furiously kicking away the fisher. He doesn’t look up but finally says “ah ha! I know how to trap it. We need to lure it into a garbage bag!”

 

In my dream we never make it to the hospital.

 

Flyers go up around our new small town for a fall festival. The festival is sponsored by House of Yes, a venue in Bushwick known for its sexy parties. One of the festival’s “DJs for climate change” is a duo I know from my twenties because one of them once gave me molly and took me back to their lounge, which they called the Marcy House because it was situated just outside the J-M-Z Marcy Avenue stop in the still-grungy part of Williamsburg.

 

Standing in front of the flyer now, on a quiet street far from the rumbling J-M-Z train and the din of 2010s house music, one hand on the stroller, the other searching the diaper bag for more baby puff snacks, I feel like my past self is mocking me.

 

One evening in early fall, the skunk from under the playroom reveals himself in the corner of our backyard. I wonder if he’s sick because it’s not dark yet and skunks are nocturnal. He’s shuffling about, circling his own tail, as if he’s trying to make a comfy spot for himself.

 

The nanny leaves my son on the changing table, and I find him frightened and half naked. Then she goes off for a long walk while he is sleeping and when he wakes, she’s nowhere to be found. When I gently reprimand her, she starts sending me incoherent text messages about trains and her modeling career. I fire her.

 

A few days later, I come across her photo on a website that I’m browsing for clothes, staring haughtily up at me from my phone screen.

 

What was once charming to me about this small town, I now find sinister. I feel like I have been trapped and everyone is in on it. I look suspiciously at others ambling down the uneven sidewalks while I push my son’s stroller. I sense that it would be possible to lose my mind here.

 

On a Thursday morning, my husband goes for one of his bike rides before work. I feed our son a waffle with peanut butter, half a banana. I check the time. My husband should be home soon. I open the app that shows me a map, little dots for loved ones, commuting, sitting still, starting their days. This morning I couldn’t find the little dot of my husband.

 

When my phone rings, I seize up. “I’m okay,” my husband says, trying to keep his voice light. “But I’ve been in an accident, and I think I might have dislocated my shoulder.”

 

It turns out he broke his collarbone. A squirrel ran out in front of his bike, and he swerved to dodge it and lost control. He flipped over the handlebars, hitting his head. He doesn’t know if he was passed out for awhile, but his helmet is destroyed.

 

My husband cannot pick things up, including our son. He cannot make food or wash dishes or drive. I get behind the wheel of our pick-up truck and drive for the first time in ten years to pick up his prescription painkillers. Later that night, I cry while I wash the dishes because I am already so tired.

 

The next morning, the skunk is curled up on a pile of leaves, and by that afternoon, my husband tells me that he thinks the skunk is dead. Even though his nightly sprays have tormented me for weeks now, I start to cry. A neighbor comes over with a shovel and a garbage bag. Rigor mortis has set in and it’s hard to scoop him up. I cry harder watching from the window as the trash bag is tied and dumped unceremoniously into our garbage.

 

Sometimes late at night, I hear noises, like someone else is in the building, cooking, walking, living. Only later do I remember that I am the only one who could be making those noises. There are only the three of us, and I am the only one awake.