The problem with calling a woman your unicorn is that unicorns, historically, are either slaughtered for their horns or they do not exist at all. I was arrogant enough to believe I had found a third option. I was wrong. I am writing this down to tell you I was wrong in all the right ways, and that I am still sitting in the forest, waiting.
The forest, at present, is a two-bedroom house in the East End of Williamson, West Virginia, and I want to be honest about that from the start, because honesty is the whole exercise. The house was my mother’s. The waiting is my own fault. The unicorn, I will get to.
I should explain the name thing now, because it will save us both trouble. Everybody in this end of the county called her Mawmaw Lucy. Her friends called her that, the church called her that, my half-sister’s girl called her that, and so did the mailman, probably. She was my mother. I called her Mama until I was eighteen and left, and somewhere in the twenty years after, she became Mawmaw Lucy to me too, same as everybody, which is a loss I cannot fit in this paragraph and will not try.
The trip to Third Avenue that morning was for a plumbing book. The pipes in my mother’s house knock when the heat comes up, a two-note bang from under the floor that tells you the heat is coming and tells you who is not, and I had decided to fix it myself, which tells you the kind of January I was having. A man does not decide to learn plumbing from a used book because his life is going well. He decides it because the alternative is sitting in a quiet house noticing things.
Irene Baisden keeps the shop the way her mother kept it, which is to say the shelves are suggestions and the system is grief and memory. Westerns by the window because the sun fades them anyway and nobody cares what a western looks like. Cookbooks in milk crates. A spinner rack of paperbacks with the covers half torn, priced at fifty cents on the honor system, honor being a coffee can with a slot cut in the lid.
The plumbing section was one shelf, knee-high, between beekeeping and a stack of National Geographics old enough to have maps of countries that no longer exist. I found what I wanted, a Reader’s Digest fix-it manual with a heating diagram in the middle. Next to it, shelved wrong, was a children’s picture book.HOW TO CATCH A UNICORN.
Pink cover. Gold horn. A little girl in overalls holding a rope she clearly had no business holding.
I should have laughed and put it back. What I did was stand there with my thumb on the spine like it had a pulse. I stood there long enough to learn something I had spent a year refusing to learn, which is that some wounds do not heal. They learn to dress better. Because I called a woman that once. Unicorn. I said it out loud, more than once, sometimes to her face, sometimes to strangers at parties, the way a man says a thing when he thinks it makes him sound like a poet instead of what it actually makes him, which is a boy with a rope.
I took it as a sign. That is the kind of man I was, and a couple hundred miles north of here there is a woman who can testify to it. Everything was a sign to me. A song in a grocery store was a sign. A cardboard box with no note was a sign. I read the world like tea leaves because reading it straight would have meant admitting I had done the breaking myself, with my own two hands, steady as a surgeon.
So I bought it. Six dollars, marked up from fifty cents on account of the condition, and I paid it without a word, which if you know anything about me is its own kind of sign.
Irene took my money at the register, a card table with a cigar box on it, and she looked at the book and then at me and then at the book again. She had reading glasses on a chain and a nail filed down from gardening.
“Honey, I knew your mama before you was born,” she said. “You’re Lucy’s boy.” Not a question. In this town you are somebody’s boy until you’re sixty, and past sixty you’re somebody’s boy who got old.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Eli.” She said it like she’d found a coat she’d lost. “I heard you were back. Stayin’ in the house?”
“For now.”
“House’ll be glad of it. Houses get sad.” She rung me up on a calculator with a roll of paper in it, tore off the receipt with a rip you could hear in the westerns, and slid the books into a plastic bag from a grocery store that closed in 2009. Then she tapped the pink cover with one finger and said, “You know there’s a second one.”
“Ma’am?”
“How to Keep a Unicorn.” She said it plain, a grandmother’s plainness on the words. “Sequel. Came out a year or two after. I had it once. Sold it to a preacher’s wife from Delbarton, which I have regretted ever since.”
There I stood with my bag and my six-dollar mistake, and I did not ask her to find me another copy. Some things you do not ask a woman who knew your mother.
The walk home is eleven minutes if you take Third toward the East End and cross the tracks where the coal cars sit waiting on the siding, brown with rust, and the river runs behind the floodwall, the Tug, low and gray-green and minding its business. January in Williamson is not pretty. The hills are the color of an old penny and the sky sits down on the ridge like it lives there. A man from Columbus, which is what I had been for twenty years, would call it bleak. I called it bleak myself, in my head, in my Ohio voice, the flat one, the one I paid for with twenty years of meeting rooms.
Then I passed the corner house on Fifth Avenue where Miss Hazel used to sit out in the summer and wave at cars whether she knew them or not, and I heard myself think, Hazel’s been gone since before Lucy, and the thought came out in the other voice, the one from before, the one with the mountains in it. Nobody heard it but me. I noted it. I have been noting it for weeks.
My mother’s house is white siding gone the gray of dishwater, a porch with wooden steps that creak in an order my knees still remember, a back screen door off the kitchen that clicks instead of slamming if you love it right. The front door sticks. You have to lift it by the knob and put your shoulder into it, and then it gives all at once, the house deciding to let you in.
Inside, the calendar on the kitchen wall still says April. April of 2025. There is a tulip on it, a photograph, orange, and under the tulip the little squares stop meaning anything because the woman who changed the calendar died in May. I have not changed it. I have not taken it down. I cannot give you a good reason. I can give you the true one, which is that some mornings I come into the kitchen and check the date and for a half a second the house is right again.
I made coffee. I want to tell you the coffee was bad because I made it wrong, scoops counted careless, water from a tap that runs rusty for three seconds before it clears. The truth is I make it exactly the way she made it, can for can, scoop for scoop, and it still comes out wrong, and I have some ideas about why that do not fit in this chapter.
The plumbing book I opened on the kitchen table. The unicorn book I opened on the couch, in the front room, with the afghan over my knees because the front room never heats right and never has.
It is a terrible book. I want that on the record. The little girl sets traps for the unicorn. Box traps, net traps, a hole in the ground covered with sticks, baited with hay, and page after page the unicorn walks around the traps like it is reading her mail. The girl gets madder and madder. The traps get bigger. On the last page the unicorn comes and puts its head in her lap while she is sleeping off her fury under a tree, and the words say, more or less, that the unicorn was never caught at all, it only ever chose.
I read it twice. Then I read it a third time with my jaw set, the way a man reads an indictment.
Because that was me. Not the girl with the rope. Worse. The girl with the rope at least knew she was hunting. I called it love. I built the traps out of attention, which is the sneakiest material there is, and I baited them with remembering, what she ate, what she wore, which side of the bed, and I called the bait devotion. And when she walked around my traps, reading my mail the whole time, I did not get mad like the girl in the book. I got sad, and I called the sad noble, and I sat in the forest of my own making and waited for her to come lay her head down out of pity.
She did not. She was right not to. That sentence cost me a year, and I will not take it back.
Down the hall is the back room, which is where I used to sleep, and now it is where I sleep again, which is a sentence I never expected to write at thirty-eight years old. It smells of cedar and old quilts. Twin bed, narrow, pushed against the wall where it has probably always stood. My feet hang off the end past the ankle. There is a wallpaper border of ducks at the ceiling line that I chose when I was four, and a crack in the plaster above the window shaped, if you are a man given to signs, like the state of Kentucky, and if you are not, like a crack in the plaster.
On the pillow sits a stuffed unicorn. White fur gone gray at the seams, horn bent to the left, one eye scratched so it looks like it’s squinting at you, skeptical, which is fitting, because the woman who sent it to me was the most skeptical person I have ever known, and I include in that accounting every editor, lawyer, and nurse of my acquaintance.
It came in a cardboard box in March, three months after she left me, no note, no card, no return address I let myself believe meant anything. Postmark from an airport two states away. I have slept with it since the night it came, which is a thing a man should probably not admit in writing, but I told you at the start: honesty is the exercise. I am thirty-eight years old and I sleep with a stuffed unicorn because a woman I loved sent it to me with no explanation, and the not explaining was the message, and I did not understand that until the afternoon I stood in a used bookshop on Third Avenue reading about a girl with a rope.
After dark I did what I do, which is the thing this book is actually about, so watch close, because I did not.
I got down the notebook from the shelf in the closet where I keep it behind Lucy’s afghans, the blue spiral pad, the wire bent where I had bent it and bent it back. Forty items. I know the count the way you know the count of your own teeth. I did not read them. I have them memorized, which is part of the problem, part of the whole problem, the original problem wearing a hat.
It was not my first notebook. That is a thing I had not admitted to anyone, Marcus included, until this paragraph. I have kept lists of people since I was a boy in this house, small soft-cover books full of which nights Stacy’s van never came home and what time the mail ran and which Sundays my father’s truck came at ten o’clock and which it did not. A boy who watches from windows learns that writing a thing down feels close to understanding it. He learns wrong. It took me thirty years and one Anne to find that out, and I am getting ahead of myself, which is the whole reason for the notebook in the first place.
I sat at the kitchen table under the April tulip and I opened to the first clean page and I wrote:
Item 41. This is how it happened.
Not what happened. You will notice, if you are the kind of reader I am hoping for, that I did not write what I wished had happened, and I did not write what I was afraid had happened, and I did not write one single word about her, though she is in every item before it like salt in bread. How it happened. The mechanism. The crime scene, walked through by the man who committed it, in the house of the woman who raised me, God help her, and God help all of us.
Then I closed the notebook and put it back behind the afghans, and I lifted the stuck door and put my shoulder into it and checked the lock twice, out of twenty years of city habit, and I went down the hall to the twin bed and the bent-horned unicorn and the crack shaped like Kentucky.
The pipes knocked twice in the crawl space. Bang. Bang. Like somebody down there with a wrench, patient, waiting for me to learn how to fix it myself.
I did not know yet about the sequel. I mean I knew the name of it, Irene had told me, but I did not know what it would take. Keeping. There is a word. Catching is a Saturday; keeping is the rest of your life, and nobody writes the children’s book about that, except apparently somebody did, and a preacher’s wife from Delbarton has my copy.
Tomorrow I will learn plumbing. Tonight I am going to lie on the right side of a bed I do not fit, in a room I have outgrown, in a house that is April, and I am going to hold a stuffed animal that a woman sent me from an airport with no note, and I am not going to call it a sign.
I am going to call it what it is. A thing she chose to send. A head in the lap, freely given, taken for granted, lost through wanting to hold it still.
The unicorn was never caught. It only ever chose.
I know that now. Now. Which is another way of saying too late, except that I am still sitting in the forest, and the forest is Williamson, West Virginia, and it is January, and the woman in question does not know I am here, and I do not know where she is, and the notebook is behind the afghans with forty-one items in it that I wrote instead of asking her a single question that started with why.
That is where we start. A man, a notebook, a dead woman’s house, and a book about a rope.
Hold on to your horns.