Meadow suggested they all say cheers. Dutifully, the family clanked their glasses together. There were wine-colored claw marks on both arms and creeping out the top of her brother’s shirt. Meadow had glimpsed them and knew they stretched down his belly, tore one of his nipples, and she had seen two slashes, twinned like life and love lines across his back.
“Take your antibiotic, too.” Their mother was rummaging through her purse.
“Those poachers,” he said. “Killing that alligator. Who do those punks think they are?”
“Knock it off,” said their dad and flicked through the menu.
“It’s not fair.”
“How could you say that?” Their mother shoved the thick pair of pills to him.
“He did get in the alligator’s pond,” Meadow said. “That is his house.”
“Yeah,” Christopher said.
“They said it was a female, actually,” their father said as he got anxious, scanning for a waiter. “Probably has a nest nearby. Had.”
Christopher seemed taken with this. “Is that true?” he asked.
“Why do you care?” said their mother and rolled her eyes. “Let’s talk about something else.”
Christopher settled after this, dreamy and staring at the summer sway of green out the front door. Their mother played solitaire on her phone and Meadow watched a muted episode of Jeopardy on the foggy restaurant television. Their father cut her brother’s pancakes coated in butter and syrup into little triangles and received no acknowledgement for his care. The four ate in silence, music drifting down from above that reminded Meadow of hallways and the doctor’s office.
The days after her brother came home from the hospital passed too easily. Their parents took two weeks from their decades of saved vacation time, and the whole house slept late into the mornings. Meadow and her mom got lunch at Mexican places, and they would wander around the flea market or walk on the beach and talk about Christopher and how he refused to get out of the car at the physical therapist’s office, not even for cash bribery.
Their dad spent long afternoon hours in the garage or fiddling in their overgrown yard. If Meadow wasn’t with her mom or her friends, she tanned in the backyard with sun-strewn shapes across her torso and legs. She never thought about school, some short weeks away. It was takeout almost every night and they watched a lot of movies together as a family in the darkened living room, the air running high and blue cigarette smoke drifting to the ceiling.
Nobody talked about it.
Christopher slept until three or four in the afternoon and then wandered around the backyard, stroking palm needles with his face to the sun. He’d charm the neighbors and float in their pool or smoke weed on the porch and nag their mother to drive him to the grocery store, or nap on the couch into evening. They all tiptoed around him there. With his bandaged wrist thrown over his raked chest, he looked dead—mockingly corpselike.
Everything was the same, but now Meadow saw alligators everywhere. More than a speeding glimpse out a car window: she saw dark shadows smeared in roadside ditches or shredded to smithereens by a speeding semi. She could be twilit talking on the phone in the front yard, and when the ferns exploding at the porch would shift, her heart would pick up, her body rigid with sudden fear. Everything, though the same, was alive to her in new ways. How like an alligator the fern was: all green braids and Vs.
At night she dreamed what happened had not yet happened, and upon waking, she stayed in her bed and tried to sort out what was real. She traced out alligators in the shape of the trees and in the smell of the afternoons before the storms. There was the panic attack she’d suffered while driving over the crisscrossed freeways, hung over the ebony canal system teeming with huge lizards and invasive snakes and her dad’s eyes on her reflected in rearview as she thought for the first time that she was having a heart attack. Her dad pulling over and cars zooming toward Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale and a triangled trio of ibises floating overhead, breaking up the thick afternoon air.