The Newts

It’s always rainy up here, which is no good for the house. The walls will rot, things will crawl in. If my daughter changes into a newt, I won’t know what to do. 

I got the house in the divorce. Ethan wanted it, but it was all about principle for him. For me, it was one less thing to worry about. It made sense for me to have it. But it’s lonely, damp, and gets no sun. 

For one thing, there’s trees all around. White pines, hundred-footers, knocking cones against the windows whenever a breeze comes up the mountain. They’ll take out the roof someday. It’s a miracle they haven’t yet. At night they scratch so hard I’m afraid they’ll scrape the walls to bits. 

It’s isolated, too. What I want is to get Rosie nearer to school and other kids, but she hates hearing that. She’ll pretend she doesn’t have ears. But newts do have ears, I say, they’re just flat. So then she does have ears, but she has to reserve them for hunting insects. There’s always an excuse. 

I want to move. I’m so sure we will I haven’t even replaced our washer. Though that’s one thing she doesn’t mind: going to the laundromat and watching our pants spin around. I’ll sit reading my phone and allow her one hour on hers, which she’ll spend looking at amphibians. 

It’s probably my fault. Too many summers at work with me. The nature center and the water testing. Her world’s all about owl pellets and skink footprints. Nematodes and deer that drink from a stream, fall in, and clog up a drain somewhere. 

Gumboots and raincoats. I’m always looking for her raincoat in the trees. It stands out fire-engine red against the grays and greens. 

The jingle of her picnic basket. 

“Where have you been?” I’ll ask.  

“Can you wash these, mom? The newts used them.” 

Then she’ll empty the basket by the sink, brush wet pine needles off the plates, and line up plastic teacups on the counter. 

At night I tuck her in, turn on Vivaldi, and ask: “Do you really want to turn into one?” 

Yes, she really does. It’s only a matter of time before she’s a newt. They all came out of the pond and said so. There was a meeting and it was decided there. They would take her in and she’d become a newt just like them. 

I laugh it off until I worry. I look out the windows to see where she is, up on the mountain or down by the pond, or go up to the top of the house to listen for her bear bells and squint through the wet trees for that raincoat. 

I’ve tried so many things. If we go to school events, she sits next to me and slips her hand in my lap. Other kids don’t come over, and there’s always some guy – a dad or a teacher – who wants to hit on me. 

Structure is a problem. I tell her: “Think of things in relation to time. When you leave the house, when you see them, when you come back in.” If she comes in early, I reward her. I explain all I know about insects, cloud formations, and why the toilet gets so damp on hot days. I buy her all sorts of crap. A microscope, notebooks, color pencils – anything so she’ll stay in longer or come in sooner. I encourage her to think of sink mildew as wildlife worth investigating. 

My latest innovation is a kitchen timer I smack on when she starts homework. I let her out when it goes off, so long as she says where she’s going. She takes the timer and when it rings again, wherever she is, she must finish up. 

Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. Then I go to the top of the house and shout down to her, pausing on the landing to check the robin’s nest in the maple with the pretty blue eggs in it. 

“What did you see today, Rosie?” 

That’s our routine. Before I tuck her in and turn on Vivaldi, we discuss her day. Maybe she lets me braid her hair. Maybe she tries on my shoes. Lately she’s been showing me what she can shove through the gap in her teeth where she lost a canine. Mainly pens and paper clips. But before Vivaldi comes on, she has to show me what’s in her notebook, what she drew, what proper names she found for the plants and animals she saw on the trail. I always praise the scientific rigor of her pinecones and caterpillars and turn the pages carefully since the objects she collects – flowers, leaves, moth wings – flutter out if I go too quickly. 

There’s always a newt. I never get used to it. Those flat faces, like smiley tadpoles. 

“Rosie, what am I looking at?”

“A mom with babies.” 

Forty babies will be clustering all over her back, like dark beads of honey. 

In another picture, I’ll see her red hair, but on a newt. 

“Oh, Rosie, are you still turning into a newt?”

“Yes, that’s still happening.” 

“Why would you want to be a newt?” 

“It would be so good being a newt!”

“Isn’t it good being a person?”

She does her “I have no ears” routine. 

“When I’m a newt, I’ll crawl on the old newts who are trying to sleep. I’ll be this long and get longer, 35 inches nose to tail.” 

“Honey, can you listen to what I’m asking?”

“When I’m a newt, I’ll put my head on the ground and listen. I’ll open up logs and eat what’s in there.”

Sometimes I ask Ethan what on earth they talk about. Of course, it’s newts. Burrows full of newts. Newts rising out of the pond or gliding across it with babies on their backs. It really is mainly newts with this girl. 

I asked him once if he wanted to switch houses and he expressed concern that I would even suggest an idea involving so much paperwork. So here we are in his lousy house. 

Lately I haven’t even been able to see from all the pollen. My eyes are swollen shut. But I go on sharpening pencils for her and setting the timer and yelling down constantly from the top of the house when I hear her running between the trees and sliding in the mud. At work we pull beer cans and raccoons out of drains. I imagine a drain stuffed with her raincoat. Then I check the time and think: she’s still at school. In another hour she’ll be on the bus. And for an hour and a half after that, she’ll be sticking her head in a log or putting it on the ground to listen. 

She turned eight last Sunday. The night before that, she didn’t come in. When I yelled, I couldn’t hear myself over the insects. My view was blocked by branches the rain was pressing over the windows. At least I could see. The rain had temporarily lifted my eyelids and driven the pollen down the trail in a yellow stream. 

There was no moon out. I went for the flashlight but it was gone too. It was too dark to make out anything from the top of the house. The sky was dripping and the pines were clicking. 

Going out, I startled something. The branches cracked away in the distance. I ran after it, slipping in the mud and jogging halfway down the road before I realized I was invisible out there.

When I went back insects sprang into the hall with me. I kept thinking: this is it, she’s done it. 

“I’m locking this door!” I shouted, stomping in to search each room thoroughly and yell her name in all the closets. 

When I reached the landing, a light went off in the maple. Her raincoat hovered in the afterimage. 

“You are not ever to go out again when I’m not home!” 

All evening she cried and shouted. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. The things she said. 

I paced around her room, apologizing. I’ll try to love the newts, I said. I know they’re important too. I know you need me to love them, so I’ll love the newts for you. 

“The newts don’t do shit for you, they don’t fight for you, they don’t buy food for you, it’s not the same.” That’s what I wanted to say. 

I came back later and lay next to her, holding her close, but she didn’t wake up and my thoughts kept circling around while I listened to Vivaldi and the noise in the trees. I turned over to watch the shadows on the ceiling and saw these tunnels, these narrow corridors I moved down quickly. While I moved I heard someone whispering, but I never got close enough to hear the words. 

Her body would change, then her face would change. One winter, when Ethan was still here, we had snakes in the walls, and you could hear them rustling whenever they turned over or moved in their nest, and I’d dream about them, snakes crawling in the house. 

“Why don’t you check on the robins?”

I can’t have said this. It was the dead of night. But I remember part of an eggshell being left, and the way they stuck their mouths up and wagged their beaks until food went in. It must have been a lying-awake dream. 

The trouble was, when I closed my eyes, I’d see pearly backs in the grass under the moonlight. 

When I reached over to turn Vivaldi back on, everything stopped. I couldn’t hear anything from the window. Then a strong smell came up, like wood glue or vinegar, and it hung there for a long time before the wind came oozing through the pines again. 

So that’s what they smell like, I thought. 

“When I’m a newt,” she told me, “I’ll check on you, I’ll peek in at you.” 

“You’re not doing that. You’ll miss your birthday if you become a newt.”

That’s what I said to her. 

What I wanted to do was text Ethan, say it was off, not to come. But I didn’t have the energy to get my phone. 

When he showed up in the morning, I was almost surprised to see him. “You’re looking different,” he said in the doorway. But I wasn’t. 

I could hardly make him out. The morning was so dark it felt like night. He was different. His hair was thinner. It had gel in it. He was trying to look confident, but I could tell from the way he sank into the ottoman, holding his shoulders in and squeezing his knees, that he wasn’t doing well. 

“Where’s Rosie?”

“She’s coming now,” I said, hearing the steps creak. 

“Hey Rosie,” he called up. 

I gave them time, going into the kitchen to finish the cake, but from the sounds I could tell they weren’t saying much. 

Ethan was asking about Rosie’s microscope when I came back, but she turned to me looking green. 

“Why don’t you show your dad some pictures?” She thought I meant the ones in her notebook. “I mean these ones, on the shelf. The photos.” So Rosie took them down and tried explaining them, looking at me when she said anything. 

I pretended there was something else to do in the kitchen. When I came back, Rosie was gone and Ethan was looking at his phone. 

“She wasn’t feeling good,” he said. 

“Did she bring up the newts?”

He shrugged. “I thought she was supposed to be turning into one.” 

“She’s always like this when she has to sit still. I’ll coax her back. Might want to get your present ready.” 

I led her down, pointing at Ethan’s present, which he handed over without a word. Her eyes were red. 

This was a mistake, I thought. And I went to grab the cake. 

I struck some matches in the kitchen, pressed the candles into the icing, and ran the cake out to the table by the window. The trees blocked my view of the trail, so I moved my chair next to Rosie’s while Ethan took a seat on the other side. We all sat waiting for Rosie to become a newt.