My husband looked roughly the same, aside from the unkempt hair and the three-day stubble, but something inside his brain was unraveling. At first, I didn’t realize it, so I only half listened when he said he wanted to rent a backhoe and landscape our yard. During our decade of marriage, he had imagined and then executed a steady stream of successful home improvement projects. Until the summer when something metastasized.
Throughout the night, a growling engine interrupted my dreams. The relentless beep of a construction vehicle bounced off the foothills. It yanked me out of sleep and threw me headlong into the wilted pillows time and again. My husband, Randy, was on a mission to rearrange the topography of our land.
I fought to untangle my legs from the sweaty sheets and walked barefoot to the bathroom where a window overlooked the front yard. A miniature backhoe crawled along the ground, headlights illuminating bits of terrain. Randy at the helm, seemed unfazed by the clash of metal on stone. He was untouchable, as if driving a rover on the moon. I considered venturing outside, waving my arms and hollering above the din, but some part of me knew he couldn’t be stopped.
Instead, I went across the hall to check on our six-year-olds. Their nightlight cast an amber glow over carpet and curtains. Of course they were fast asleep. Twins knew how to snooze through all sorts of commotion. While the backhoe hollered in the night, Rowan snored softly in his bed. Chloe was tucked into the alcove, a cozy cave that Randy built, where the sloped ceiling met the wall.
It was there that I had nursed our babies through the early months of sleep-deprivation, Randy joining me for every night feeding with a bottle in hand. Chloe gobbled her milk so quickly, he once said in a southern drawl, “Little lady, you better slow down or I’m going to give you a feeding ticket.”
Relieved that the kids were sleeping soundly, I went back to bed and considered whether the noise would disturb our neighbors. We were in the foothills above Boulder, where the land was left to its own whims. Cactus and yucca, partly submerged rocks, and ponderosa pines. Few people lived close enough to hear the racket, and most were free spirits who didn’t mind weird projects, loud chainsaws, disassembled cars and wayward horses.
During our decade of marriage, I had grown accustomed to Randy’s construction projects. He was an electrician whose father had been a general contractor, so he often undertook home improvements. I usually ignored the process and appreciated the results, but this time the sleep deprivation was pissing me off. He had rented the backhoe for forty-eight hours and claimed he could optimize the time by forfeiting sleep.
When he came home with it in his pickup truck, Rowan rushed to the window.
“Look what Daddy has!” he hollered, flinging the front door open. August heat spilled into the living room. Chloe and I trailed him down the path. Randy opened the tailgate, biceps flexing as he unloaded two metal ramps. He grinned at Rowan and wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Hey buddy, want to help me drive this thing?”
“What is it?” Rowan asked.
“A bobcat. We’re going to do some landscaping.”
“Cool!” Rowan leaped from foot to foot.
I’d never seen such a small backhoe.
“It’s pretty cute,” I said, giving Randy a kiss.
“You’re pretty cute,” he said.
Rowan seemed to be considering a climb on the ramps, so Randy scooped him up for a closer look.
Chloe took my hand and peered into the truck bed. “What’s it going to do?”
“Smooth out the yard a little, so you can play there. Make a flat spot for my telescope.”
The land was rough and rugged. Mostly dirt with random patches of grass. I liked the idea of making it more kid friendly.
Randy backed the bobcat down the ramps and onto our dirt driveway, like a horse from a trailer. Rowan climbed onto his father’s lap, driving the tiny vehicle like an amusement park ride. They both smiled. One mouth full of baby teeth, the other forming dimples in unshaven cheeks. They had matching eyes, brown as roasted almonds, as soil. I got out my phone and snapped some photos.
“I want a turn,” Chloe said, her curly pig tails sprouting asymmetrically.
For the next two days and nights, Randy labored nonstop in his green vehicle, a giant in a child’s toy. The kids and I came and went through a side door, so it was easy to ignore the mess in the yard. When I objected to the noise, he assured me it was almost done.
On the final morning, I reached to the empty side of the bed where the fitted sheet had torn loose from its moorings, and I wondered if he had slept at all. I woke the kids and prepared them for school. The machine was still groaning outside. It stopped when we came out the front door, lunch boxes in hand. Randy bounded out of the driver’s seat, hair tufted at all angles like a great horned owl. Chloe hugged his leg while Rowan hooked fingers into his belt loop.
“Check it out!” Randy said waving his arm in a proud semi-circle.
The familiar terrain of our yard was pocked with craters. Dozens of boulders had been extracted like the teeth of the earth and piled in an odd line bordering the edge of the road. The damp smell of churned dirt lingered. The job, which should have been finished, was a disaster. I walked into the mess hoping to find something that made sense. The saplings that we had planted lay toppled, their roots exposed. My mother’s iris bulbs had been exhumed. Our children’s plaster mosaics were flattened and cracked.
Overwhelmed with confusion, I couldn’t tell what he had accomplished. For two days I had condoned my husband’s obsessive behavior, trusting that he had a plan. Even now, I tried to rationalize the destruction. It must be a problem with my perception, I thought. I was somehow failing to see his design.
“Can you fill me in?” I asked. “I’m having trouble seeing what it’s going to be.”
“It already is!” Randy yelled, reaching his arms above his head. “It’s a work of art! It’s a work of art! See?”
That’s when I understood that he was gripped by something unfamiliar. His gestures and his exuberance were completely out of character.
“I don’t get it,” I started to say.
“It’s a work of art!”
My mind skidded sideways, trying to get traction.
Chloe crouched over her mosaic.
“It’s broken,” she said.
Rowan let go of his father’s belt loop and went to see.
“What the heck?” he demanded, hands on his hips.
We all glared at Randy. He wrung his hands, as if trying to remove something sticky.
Frightened of upsetting this stranger in my husband’s body, I strained to keep my voice even. “What happened here?”
“Nothing happened. The bobcat must have run them over,” he said.
Rowan hurried to me, “Mommy?” The kids could see it too. Something was off.
“Let’s get you guys in the car,” I said, overcome with an urge to escape.
I had waited days for a level yard to materialize, hoping that Randy’s fixation would add up to something rational. Hoping that he would prove to be in his right mind, and our life together wasn’t on the verge of disintegrating.