All night long, a growling engine and grinding gears permeated my dreams. The relentless beep of a construction vehicle echoed off the foothills. It yanked me out of sleep and threw me headlong into the wilted pillows time and again. It was my husband, Randy, on some obsessed mission to rearrange the topography of our land.
Sweaty and exasperated, I fought to untangle my legs from the sheets and walked barefoot to the bathroom where a small window overlooked the front yard. A miniature backhoe crawled along the rutted ground, headlights illuminating bits of terrain. Randy was at the helm, 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 was unstoppable.
Instead, I went across the hall to check on our children, who were six years old. Their nightlight cast an amber glow over carpet and curtains. Of course they were fast asleep. Twins knew how to snooze through one another’s cries and all sorts of commotion. While the backhoe hollered into the night, Rowan snored softly in his bed. Chloe slept in 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 listened to the backhoe rumble. I wondered if this would annoy our neighbors. We lived in the foothills above Boulder, Colorado where the land was left to its own whims, cactus and yucca, partly submerged rocks, and ponderosa pines. Few people resided close enough to hear the racket and most were free spirits who didn’t mind weird projects, loud chainsaws, disassembled cars and wayward horses. There were no homeowners’ associations like the ones that dictated suburban life in the lower elevations.
Throughout 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 made home improvements. I generally ignored the process and appreciated the results. Whatever he was up to in the yard would be worth it, but the sleep deprivation was pissing me off. He had rented the machine 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 door wide open. Late summer heat spilled into the living room. Chloe and I trailed him down the path. Randy was opening the tailgate, his biceps flexing as he unloaded two metal ramps. He wiped his hands on his jeans.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s a Bobcat,” he told me. “For landscaping.”
“What kind of landscaping?”
“You’ll see,” he answered without answering, and brushed past me.
Chloe took my hand and peered into the truck bed. Rowan seemed to be considering a climb up the ramps. Randy scooped him up to give him a closer look.
“Hey buddy, want to help me drive this thing?”
My throat tightened with a familiar dissonance. On the one hand, my husband was dismissing me and using our son’s enthusiasm as a buffer. On the other, I admired his expertise. He made solo decisions about house projects, and I planned family trips without input. It mostly worked, yielding to each other in these ways.
Randy backed the Bobcat down the ramps and onto our dirt driveway, like a horse from a trailer. The kids were excited, and I chose not to deflate the mood. Rowan leaped from one foot to the other. Before long he was on his father’s lap, driving the tiny vehicle like an amusement park ride. They both grinned. One mouth full of baby teeth, the other forming dimples in unshaven cheeks. They had matching brown eyes like roasted almonds, like soil.
“I want a turn,” Chloe said, her curly pig tails sprouting asymmetrically.
For the next two days and nights, Randy labored nonstop in his little green vehicle, like a giant in a child’s toy. I went about my routine, taking kids to preschool and doing errands. We came and went through a side door that bypassed the front yard. I wonder now if I was intentionally averting my eyes or simply unconcerned about how the project was progressing. The noise was what irked me. It bore into my brain at night. Half asleep, I reached to his side of the bed where the folds of the fitted sheet had torn loose from its moorings. Had he slept at all?
On the final day I woke and stumbled into the kids’ room to prepare 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, his dark hair at all angles like the tufts of 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-up dirt lingered. 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.
I could have protested. I could have been furious. Instead, I was overcome by confusion. This was so surprising, that I couldn’t metabolize it. For two days I had told myself the lie that there was a reason for my husband’s unusual behavior. He had a grand plan, he was a hard worker, his projects always turned out well. Now despite all the evidence, I continued to search for a way 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 said, carefully. “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?”
“I see a pile of rocks, the grass is all torn up. I don’t understand.”
“It’s a work of art!” he said again.
Chloe crouched over her mosaic frowning.
“This is broken,” she said.
Rowan let go of his father’s belt loop and went to see.
“What the heck?” he asked.
We all looked at Randy. He wrung his hands feverishly, scratching, massaging, 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,” Randy said, working his jaw.
“Mommy,” Rowan said it like a question.
“Let’s get you guys in the car. Come on.”
I had waited days for something to materialize, hoping that the destruction would add up to something beautiful. Hoping that my husband would prove to be in his right mind, and our life together wasn’t on the verge of crumbling.