Listen to David Hansen read an excerpt from “Scotch Pine.”

Janie and I were driving through Beacon on one of those insane roller-coaster roads when we hit and killed a cat, a little black-and-orange-and-white calico.

“Oh, God,” I said, as I was the cat lover.

I was sad and sickened and could not look at the body. Janie, who was—and is—an ER nurse, had no such difficulty. She checked its vitals. Then she checked its collar.

“2929 Cartwright,” she said.

I looked at the houses but was too agitated to clearly make sense of something like a number. I just saw shapes—mostly rectangles—and colors, pale blues and yellows and reds.

“This is Cartwright,” said Janie, pointing at a street sign. “And that’s 2517,” she said, pointing at a house. Looking at the cat again, she said, uncharacteristically wistful, “Far from home.”

So we took the cat to the back seat, where I had a towel draped, a remnant of a beach outing from a happy day some days prior. And here that towel still was, as if for this very purpose, a shivery coincidence I told myself was meaningless. We set the cat on the towel and drove slowly, watching the numbers go up.

Presently we saw a house where there was plainly a funeral reception happening. Old couples in black suits were going slowly up the walk through the open doors.

“Jesus God almighty, tell me that’s not 2929,” I said.

Which of course it was.

“This doesn’t change anything,” said Janie.

“Yes, it does,” I said. “It changes everything.”

But it really didn’t. All it meant was we sat awhile longer in the car, ginning up the courage.

We went up to the house and then stopped, stymied by the open doors. We could hardly walk through them. Not like this. Janie held the cat’s body to her own, concealing it in the towel’s folds.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I really and truly don’t. Do I ring the bell? I can’t just ring the bell.”

“Ring the bell,” said Janie.

So I rang the bell. The bell rang loud, close. A man came. He was perhaps forty. Bluntly I told him what had happened.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” he said.

“I wish I were,” I said.

Beyond this man I could see other bodies, other faces, in a dim anteroom, taking gradual interest in what was happening here.

“Virginia is going to flip,” said the man. “This will push her right over the edge. I need to think.”

He stepped out, closed the door behind him, and pressed the fingertips of one hand to one temple. I felt for him. Obviously he was not the cat lover of his household, not the chief mourner. These deaths were not for him. That’s a difficult spot. Someone came up the walk, a big-bellied, sweet-smelling man who hadn’t dressed up. He wore a black shirt with red and yellow flames. He walked right past us and went in. Not a word. Every family has one.

“Fuck it,” said the man, our man, the one we were talking to. “Give her to me. I’ll put her in a shoebox. Something. Put her somewhere. Deal with her later.”

Janie hesitated. I guess she thought this was a bad idea. That’s her. She always thinks it’s a bad idea. But then she handed the cat over, the cat and the towel both. And just as she did, just as the cat was in transit, a woman opened the door, came to the top step. Her face was the color of ham. Her mascara was black and still wet, freshly reapplied. She looked over our heads. Blinded by the sun, I suppose, which was that autumn sun, so white, so hard on you.

“Virginia,” said our man. “Go back inside.”

“What’s happening?” said the woman, Virginia. “What’s going on?” She said this in the way you do when you have an inkling what’s going on.

The big-bellied man appeared behind her. I don’t know how he knew. We were all being very quiet. Maybe he just sensed an event taking shape.

“Tom,” said our man, “take Ginny inside.”

“What’s going on,” said this Tom. “What have you got there?”

“Oh, God,” cried Virginia. I guess she’d gotten a glimpse. “Oh, God.” Funnily, to me, her horror seemed performative. I really didn’t think she was all that upset.

“Tom!” said our man, whose name we never learned. “Get her inside, for Chrissakes, and let me deal with this!”

“You monster!” cried Virginia. Referring, I think, to our man, her husband.

“Ginny, baby, come on in,” said Tom. “Come on in, baby. I want to tell you something. Something important.”

“They hit her, Ginny,” said our man, holding up the bundle. “It was an accident. They came to tell us.”

“What have you done!” she said. To him. Not us. Thank God. Something was working out.

“We’re very sorry,” I said, holding up my hands, like, don’t shoot. “We’ll leave you to it.”

Unbelievably, nothing more happened. No one said anything else. Not to us, not to one another. It was like a UFO beam froze them in that state. Janie and I got in the car and drove right off. We went back out on that roller-coaster road, up, down, all around, whizzing in slow arcs that curved along both X and Y axes. The fields were so green with perfectly formed haystacks in them, bright yellow, like lemon gumdrops.

And do you know what, we laughed. It felt so good, to laugh. We hadn’t laughed in so long. We were in such a fix, you can’t imagine. Janie was pregnant. We were on hiatus, in straits. The outlook was bad. Distance had made our little problems bigger. That was our purpose today; to drive around, talk practicalities. Never mind our hearts; what were we going to do. So we’d gone to a place that was special to us. A little spit where the Metro North runs alongside the Hudson. When she was still a student—not my student, just a student—we’d come here, walk up and down, talk. I don’t even know what of. Her past. That I remember. It was quite a past. She was born on a horse ranch in Idaho. Her mother and father were cultists. They killed horses in their rituals. I could go on. You never heard such a story.

Now we’d come to talk again. To really and truly talk. But the pregnancy was so current, so immutable, so hard to think of. I knew what Janie wanted. She wanted to be rid of it. But she wouldn’t without my blessing. Or said she wouldn’t. I’m the one who didn’t know. Rather: who knew but couldn’t admit. That baby, however primordial and ill-formed, was the last of us. I was loath to do away with that. I’d said nothing of value; Janie had to talk around and through my words, guiding me through a forest dark, as it were. We walked up and down. The commuter came through twice. Both times we didn’t hear it until it was whipping past. We stood there, watching it go, whip-whip-whip-whip-whip, temporarily mindful of death’s omnipresence. Now, whizzing along these roads, we laughed our heads off.

“That poor guy,” I said. “I mean, can you imagine.”

“Slow down,” said Janie. “You’ll hit something else.”

When I think about that part of my life—because of course this was just a part of a part—I think of this thing first. Laughing with Janie on those up-and-down roads. It was the last thing we shared. Really shared. The rest we’ve gone through separate, one and then the other.

Long story short, a couple weeks later I cancelled my classes and picked Janie up at her apartment and took her to the clinic in Annandale. We talked softly, kindly, with long silences. There was little trace of the mirth from before. The facility itself was quaint, antiquey, woodsy. The big windows let in enormous amounts of golden sunlight. Dots of dust hung in the air, glinting. The intake nurse seemed happy to see us. We waited in chairs, side by side. I held Janie’s hand. It was cool and ever so slightly damp. We didn’t say very much to each other. I don’t know what we’d have said. But I still regret that.

Then the nurse—a different nurse—called Janie’s name.

“Wait,” I said.

Janie looked at me and I at her. Mostly the latter.

“What,” said Janie.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And I wonder: if I’d said something—anything—what might have happened. Where might we be.

But you can play that game forever. She went in and an hour later came out, and I drove, very slowly, the way we’d come.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“It was nothing,” she said.

After that we had no contact to speak of for almost five years. When next we met, it was because she’d taken up with a friend of mine. Pure coincidence. They wanted to get dinner with me, to explain themselves, make sure there were no feelings of betrayal. We went to this crazy place in the woods that isn’t there anymore. Not even the highway. They tore it all up and planted more trees, an endless span of Scotch pine, those dark, pointed, foreboding trees, so like a child’s drawings of trees, forever and ever and ever.

“Please,” I said of the fawning, the needless apologies, “please. This isn’t necessary at all. Can’t we just . . .”

And I poured tall glasses of wine and soon we were all chummy. Between courses I toasted: “To friendship.” We ate veal Milanese and a silky risotto. Janie talked about the hospital where she now worked, a little rural hospital where nothing happened and she was more or less in charge. She complained. There was so little to do. They’d gotten into skydiving and told me all about it. I goggled at what they said. “Tandem jumps under the canopy.” “Swoops.” “Flares.” Etc. I had no clue what to picture so I pictured the D-Day invasion. The paratroopers that dropped behind enemy lines. Those poor men, drifting gently out of the sky, into hell.

“It’s really something,” said my friend. “It puts all this—”

He gestured frantically, encompassing this beautiful restaurant, the three of us, our empty plates, this nice night we were having.

“—in perspective.”

I know he didn’t mean anything, but that stung. It made me feel like something that didn’t cost much, something you wouldn’t look for if you misplaced it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I like my perspective just fine.”

“I knew that’s what you’d say,” he said. To Janie, he said, “Didn’t I tell you that’s what he’d say? Those words exactly?”

“You did,” said Janie.

He turned his attention to me. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said.

About this, too, I have to tell myself he didn’t mean anything.

“So what have you gotten into,” said Janie.

It’s funny: I can’t say my life stopped that day, the day we hit the cat. But it did seem to start up again after this night with Janie and my friend.

Which is to say, I didn’t have a good answer. I cast about. I made small things up. I said I was planning a new book. Then I said, “Maybe I’ll try skydiving after all,” and the subject dropped. The check came and I paid it. No one objected. Chivalrously, after we’d walked out, my friend went back inside. “To use the bathroom.” So Janie and I could have a moment. It was chilly out here. Chilly and navy blue. The stars were yellow and painterly. Black clouds on an almost-black sky. No moon. None that I could see.

“You look great,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t die up there,” I said, pointing up at the sky.

“I won’t,” she said.

Then she looked at the restaurant oddly, as though no one might ever come out of it again, and said, “I thought you’d tell me not to.”

“It’s not my place,” I said. “He’s a great guy. It’s your life.”

I thought this would impress her. A measure of the nobility I’d shown so little of back then.

Instead her face became extremely sad. So sad I worried I would need to explain myself if my friend came out and found her like this. But when he came out he seemed not to notice. And then I was sad, too. We did our best to hide it from him, Janie and me. We all said our goodbyes and promised to do this again soon. I stood and watched them drive off. I could hear the car after it disappeared. When it was out of earshot, it was just the sounds of this spellbound place, no longer extant. Winds through tree boughs. The crunch of gravel settling on itself. The bounding of deer through thickets.

And from the corner of my eye, I saw a cat creeping along. Not just any cat; that calico cat. The one we’d run over. It wasn’t really there. It was just my mind playing a trick. But it had been happening ever since that day. If I looked it would disappear. So I didn’t look. It crept along, very low, stalking something, perfectly silently, with no earthly idea the danger it was in. ■

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