I came home from the bar late one night and went out back to smoke. I was sitting in my smoking chair when I saw the possum’s head peek out from under the stairs. It creeped halfway out of the hole, and sat there. I’d had seven or eight too many drinks, but I swear it was looking at me, waiting for something. After a while it backed into the hole beneath the stairs and disappeared. I saw its tail as it turned around, and then it was gone.

“What do you want?” I said, but it did not answer. I am not sure if it was because it did not want to talk about it, or if it did not want to talk to someone who might not remember the conversation in the morning.

A few months after I first saw the possum I went down into the basement to empty the drainage bucket. Our basement is unfinished. The hot water heater stands in the middle of the room. The basement walls are cinderblock, usually sweating, and you can see into the crawl spaces under the house. Spiderwebs hang everywhere, and huge cicadas with armored carapaces and bulbous eyes and knees that bend the wrong way cling to the sweating walls.

We don’t go down there often. But water seeps in sometimes after a hard rain. Our landlords have been trying to fix the problem, and so started a plumbing system made of PVC pipe to channel the water into a drain in the concrete floor, but when I went down it had not been finished yet, and there was only a short length of pipe coming through a hole in the wall. When it rained, water came through the pipe and into a collecting bucket, which I had to empty after every rain.

The basement smelled of must and damp, as it always does, but the smell seemed thicker, heavier. I stood in the middle of the small room and looked up under the house for where the possum hid at night, then wondered what I would do if I actually found it, and decided that getting out of the basement would be the best course of action.

I imagined the mother possum, circling the house night after night, wondering where her children had gone. I think maybe she was looking for help, someone to get them out, because she could not, but I don’t know if possums think that way.

When I went to pick up the bucket I saw the little possums floating in it. They must have crawled through the pipe when the weather turned cold two weeks ago, and fallen into the bucket. I stood there trying to remember when it last rained, trying to calculate when I first saw the mother possum wandering around in the back yard as if she were looking for something.

Their bodies had bloated in the water. The surface was slick with oil secreted from their carcasses. Their eyes were open. They were tiny things, each smaller than a mouse, floating in the foul-smelling water.

I imagined the mother possum, circling the house night after night, wondering where her children had gone. I think maybe she was looking for help, someone to get them out, because she could not, but I don’t know if possums think that way. Did she watch the water rising, her brood trying to stay afloat? I don’t know. Somewhere above me, my children were climbing into bed, or just waking up, or brushing their teeth or getting dressed or watching TV or a thousand other things they do up there, unaware of all the dangers their parents see lurking in the world.

I didn’t tell my wife about the possum, or the babies bloated and drowned in the bucket. I didn’t want her to think of them down there, or of the mother circling our back yard night after night, looking for them. Knowing about it would make her sad, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to be the one who went upstairs a dozen times every night to check on our daughters and make sure nothing had come up the stairs after them or they hadn’t somehow slipped into something we could not get them out of.

I do it, and let her sleep.