Read Online Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet - Free Book Online

a harelip. She’d thought he would die right there, she said, and she would have to watch it, but the poison took longer than she expected. She thought it would be instant but he was out the door not two minutes after she gave it to him, his hair slick with pomade, taking all the money from her paycheck. They told her later that he fell down in a crowded subway car, at the feet of two older ladies from Brooklyn, where he jerked and wriggled until the car was stopped at a station and they loaded him onto a stretcher. When the police came to her door it was only to give her the bad news, she said, but she nodded and went with them right away. She
put on her coat, picked up her handbag and walked right over to the morgue and then back to the precinct building.
    â€œWhy did you tell?” I asked. “You might have gotten away with it.”
    I was sad it had come to this. Not for Marco—the one time I’d met him I’d known he was a vicious kind of person who more or less deserved for bad things to happen to him—but for her. I wished she could have just divorced him, a thing that went against her beliefs even more than murder. Because she wouldn’t get out of Sing Sing anytime soon, I was thinking. She would be an old woman by then.
    â€œIt didn’t matter,” she said. “I already saw the dove.”
    I was looking at the groove in her upper lip and thinking how she was a better worker than I was. She worked without stopping and she always did exactly what they told her. If someone told her to wash the same wall six times, she would do it. Myself I would often stop cleaning and stare into the air, pretend I was floating in a cool lake or flying.
    â€œThe white dove?” I asked her. I figured she had pretty much gone crazy.
    She said yes.

    â€œI thought the white dove was dead,” I said in what I hoped was a gentle way.
    â€œShe was,” said Pia.
    â€œOh,” I said, and nodded.
    â€œWe were there on the steps,” she said, “with all of those birds. And in between them was the space where she wasn’t. Mr. Tesla showed me. ‘This was where she was once,’ he said. The third step from the top, I think. We just stood there and threw down the seeds. But I looked at the space. That was when I saw it.”
    She grabbed my hands and pressed them. She was shaking, she was that agitated, and her hands were warm and damp.
    â€œWhen Jesus died for our sins,” she whispered, “he turned into the universe.” She was hurrying to get the words out, as if she feared someone might come in and stop her from speaking. It all came out in a rush.
    A minute later the guard came over and made us separate our hands. No touching was allowed. But by then I was almost relieved.
    I never found out what happened to her in the end. I know she got an infection from some kind of internal injury; there had been rioting in the prison before she got there and it was still pretty rough. They beat her
up worse than Marco had. She wrote and told me she was sick, and I sent a letter to her but it came back to me. By then I wasn’t cleaning anymore. I had saved my money for secretarial school and worked as a waitress in the evenings. I slept the rest of my hours away and had no time for friends, absent or otherwise. I thought of the house I would live in one day, with its flower garden and light shining forth from small golden windows.
    The prison said she had been transferred, but the second prison had lost track of her too, as though she had never been there.
    For me she did not disappear. I had her words and I could never shake them; I had her love for Tesla and his love for the bird.
    My own love, it has seemed to me, has only ever been a love of feathers. However hard it tries, it never gets beneath.
    She told me Jesus was the world. The sun was God’s eye, she said, the oceans were the water of his body, the rivers were the veins carrying his blood. Did I