Retreat

3 ANGELA MITCHELL RETREAT D ee’s hands itched. They itched so much she was completely miserable, her palms red and irritated from scratching, her fingers puffed up like sausages. The swelling was bad enough that the ring she wore on her right hand got so tight, it felt like her finger might turn purple and fall off. The ring had a wide silver band and pink tourmaline stone; she’d bought it when she traded off her wedding set a year ago. The only way to make the swelling go down was to run her hands under a stream of cold water. But the trouble didn’t stop there. When she finally got the itching under control on her hands, it would pop back up somewhere else, like on the inside of her thigh or between her toes or even around her crotch, right at the panty line, where she couldn’t even think about scratching in public without looking completely nasty. When an itching spell came on, it did so with an intensity, an intrusiveness that demanded all of Dee’s attention, and she could feel the raw sharpness of it deep under her skin and into her muscle and bone, nearly to her gut. Still, what caused it? Her mother, Glynn, thought it was the animals, but Dee was unconvinced. The dogs, Ralph and Mickey , were hers to begin with, and she’d never had a reaction to them before. The only thing different was they all lived with Gary now—Dee and Ralph and Mickey—and the other animals he kept. “It could be those birds,” said Glynn. “Or that old bobcat. You could be getting bit by mites or fleas or something and not even know it.” Dee rarely touched the other animals, and Gary was careful to keep them treated for parasites, so what the hell did Glynn know? It was probably a reaction to some chemical, she decided, and Dee changed her soaps and shampoo, stopped wearing perfume, wiped down the interior of her car—the steering wheel, the leather seats, the radio, and the stick shift, anything she touched. When that didn’t work, she considered her job. Could it be all the paper? She hated touch- colorado review 4 ing paper, but there was no way to avoid it at Insure-U. The thing was, she’d been touching paper all her life and never had a problem like this. Maybe, though, it was something outside, like maybe she’d gotten into poison ivy out at Gary’s place? His whole yard was a goddamn jungle. Gary liked things natural, and he let the yard grow, unrestrained. He didn’t believe in cutting back the weeds or putting down herbicide. “I don’t want the dogs walking around on all that poison, then sitting down and licking it off,” he’d said. “Or Bobbie, either.” Bobbie was Gary’s first love, a bobcat he claimed to have rescued on a camping trip, bringing her home and training her to use a litter box. She slept at the foot of his bed, where she could slap her fat paw—claws extended—over any leg or hand or foot that dared to stir beneath the sheets. Since moving in, Dee had learned to sleep in one motionless position: flat on her back with her arm resting above her head. “Your damn yard gave me something,” she told Gary, lying in his bed, digging her fingernails into her palms. The itching subsided when she and Gary made love, when all she felt were his hands and his mouth, the satisfying weight of his body. But once the excitement had passed, the threat of the itch returned. “If you cared anything about me, you’d get a lawn mower out there and cut some of that shit down. I bet it’s crawling with poison ivy.” “If you’d got into poison ivy, you’d have bumps and blisters, not swelling,” he said. Gary rubbed his hands over his face and yawned. “I think this itching is psychosomatic.” “What?” “In your head.” “No, it isn’t,” she said. “How could I imagine up anything like...