“My snake came home,” Perley said, and raised his arm to show me. A black snake coiled twice around his arm. I went for it, swiped that snake down Perley’s arm like taking off a bracelet, then swung my baby out of bed and onto the floor, falling headlong over Karen. She woke up.
“What the fuck, you’re crushing me,” she said. Perley and I knelt on the floor beside the bed. Sulfur engulfed us. The snake fled to the far corner of the mattress, stiffened into crimps. Karen sat up.
“It was in the bed with us,” I said.
“What was?” she asked.
“The snake,” I said, pointing. The snake, as if ashamed, seethed down into the crack between the bed and the wall.
“Perley, did you bring that snake into the bed?” asked Karen.
“When I woke up my snake was next to me,” Perley said. “Mama L said gentle touch.”
Karen grinned at me. “I thought you and Helen got rid of the black snakes,” she said. “Don’t tell me the humane traps haven’t worked.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. I ignored her satisfaction.
“Snakey’s cold,” Perley said. “He wants to go under the covers.”
“Perley, snakes don’t belong in our bed,” I said.
“Actually, Perley, you’re exactly right,” Karen said. “The snake doesn’t make its own body heat. It’s cold-blooded, so it wants to get near us, into our clothes and even into our beds, to keep warm. It’s natural. And it’s not going to hurt you.”
We climbed down the ladder to breakfast, and Karen took such pleasure in telling Helen about the snake in the bed that I felt sorry for Helen and her feverish can-do attitude. “What did I tell you? This is a habitat,” Karen said.
“Our habitat. Not the snake’s habitat,” Helen said.
“I think what we’ve learned,” Karen said, “is that our habitat and the snake’s habitat look very much alike.”
“Do you have any new ideas, Helen?” I asked. Karen laughed.
“This isn’t over,” Helen said. “I just have to think about it.”
Who doesn’t love a common enemy? The snake in the bed should have made us pull together. The snake in the bed should have forced us to make common cause. But the snake in the bed didn’t. We were pushed over the edge, all right, but not into action. Instead, the snake in the bed divided us into defiance, avoidance, competition. Of course, those words are just ideas. And ideas are nothing against an actual black snake in an actual bed.
Helen didn’t exactly admit defeat. But she picked up more tree jobs with Rudy and was gone most days. When she was home, she paid less attention to the snakes, and she tanned hides, planted ginseng deep in the woods, sprinkled diatomaceous earth on the pantry shelves to keep the ants away, pressure-canned venison. She stored the Best Practices Binder on the shelf near the stove. “Easy,” Helen said. “Right there for whenever you need a quick tip.”
“Thanks,” I said. But I didn’t use it. Helen added to it every day, watched us to see if we were watching her. I looked away. Karen never opened the binder, not once.
The snake in the bed stayed. Night after night, it stretched itself along the headboard or cascaded down into the comforter. It slept near our bellies, where our cores glowed hot. The snake preferred the bed, so I moved Perley to a camping mat on the floor, tucking him in with one of Rudy’s smelly T-shirts, which he’d delivered freshly dirty each week since Perley was a baby.
“I miss Snakey,” Perley said.
“This is just until we figure out how to get the snake out of the bed,” I said.
“But where will Snakey sleep?” Perley asked. “He’ll be cold.”
Karen smiled.
On the floor, I nursed Perley and sang him his shipwreck lullaby until his head fell back off my nipple, milk pooling into Rudy’s shirt. Then I turned to Karen.
“Perley’s not one of your projects,” I whispered. Through the thin partition, we could hear Helen turn over in bed.
“Project?” said Karen. “You’re the one who got all worked up over that orangutan thing, and we’re still stuck with Rudy’s shirts.”
“That’s just a precaution,” I said. “But you’re too hard on him. He’s not one of your elves with some kind of snake magic. He’s a kid. You don’t even let him play.”
“Is that where he learned the word play?” Karen asked. “From you? I was wondering where he learned that concept.”