Other People's Pets

by R. L. Maizes

  “I see,” said the anchor.

  “I’d skated there before and never had a problem,” Zev said.

  “Why didn’t she go in after her?” the anchor asked.

  Zev had asked himself the same question. “You aren’t supposed to.”

  “That dog never left her side.” The anchor looked into the camera. “If anyone has information about the pooch, please call the station.”

  Other stories came out. A neighbor had seen Elissa berate La La. “She’s just a little girl,” he said to a reporter. It was unfair, Zev thought, because what parent didn’t make mistakes?

  The city moved the sign to the center of the parking lot. “How could she have missed it?” people said when they drove by.

  Zev tried to comfort Elissa, telling her the scandal would pass, but she didn’t seem to hear. She moved as through a swirling snowstorm, her eyes downcast, her shoulders hunched.

  “Certain people don’t deserve to have kids,” a bank teller said, raising her eyebrows at Elissa, while a loan officer nodded. Elissa ran out without making her deposit.

  “Couples are dying to have children, and you abandon yours,” a man in line behind her at the post office said, his voice carrying throughout the cavernous room. Mornings, Elissa left La La a block from school, avoiding other parents. She told Zev the whole town was against her, especially women.

  Her life had overwhelmed her even before the incident at the lake. Though she thought his stealing was funny when she first met Zev, she assumed he would outgrow it. Early in their marriage, she decided to leave him but then discovered she was pregnant. “You’ll regret it for the rest of your life,” Zev said, when she brought up abortion. “You’ll wonder who the child would have been.” But it was Zev who would have wondered. Zev who would have felt regret. “It’s my child, too,” he said.

  Even an easy child such as La La proved too much for Elissa, whose hair lost its luster, thinned, and clogged drains. She developed acne and clenched her jaw. “This isn’t the life I wanted,” she said to Zev, a week after the accident.

  “There’s nothing we can do about that now,” Zev said. But there was something Elissa could do, and she did it three weeks later.

  He knows where she is. Months after she disappeared, he got her number from her mother, Ruth, by claiming La La wanted to talk to Elissa. Ruth said Elissa was living in Queens and had changed her last name to Roberts, so no one would connect her to the mother in the news story.

  “Don’t contact me again,” Elissa said, when he called her. “I’m finished failing at motherhood. I’m done living with a thief. Find someone else.” Occasionally, he Googled the humane society where she had found work and looked at her picture in the staff directory. He watched the animal-training videos she’d made, trying to understand how she could be so patient with pets but impatient with her own daughter. Of course, La La prefers animals, too, but Zev always assumed that was because Elissa left. Animals didn’t disappoint La La the way humans did. Or maybe it’s genetic, something La La inherited from her mother. He’s never told La La where Elissa is, not wanting her to suffer any more at her mother’s hands.

  Looking up Elissa’s workplace on his smartphone, he finds she’s no longer listed in the staff directory. He calls the humane society and is told she took a job as executive director of the Mesa Animal Shelter in Arizona.

  He returns the picture taken in the hospital to his wallet. On the dining room table, he arranges the train track. A motion detector in the ankle monitor activates if the device is still for too long, indicating it’s been set aside or that the person wearing it has died. The movement of the train should satisfy the motion detector. When the track is complete, he pushes the duplicate monitor into an open freight car. It’s a squeeze, but it fits. The ankle monitor needs to be charged daily, so Zev arranges it with the jack facing up and plugs in the power cord. By the train’s second lap, the power cord stretches across the track and the train tumbles over it, derailing. Something to work on, the kind of puzzle he likes, though the stakes couldn’t be higher.

  The last time he talked to O’Bannon, the lawyer told him Claude Thomas was showing small signs of improvement. The swelling in his brain had gone down. He had opened his eyes and responded when the doctors tested for pain. If he continues to improve, the doctors might try short periods off the ventilator. Zev’s glad something he did turned out well. Should Thomas recover, Zev won’t be charged with murder. He just has to hope the guy doesn’t remember him.

  Zev misses being outside, watching homeowners until he knows their patterns, when they leave for work and when they return. Looking for houses with obvious signs of wealth, an expensive car in the driveway or elaborate landscaping tended by gardeners. Searching for secluded homes and ones with access from side doors. Because he kept the houses he robbed tidy, his burglaries often went undetected for days, time passing before they showed up on the police blotter, someone having finally noticed the damage to a back door or an out-of-the-way window. Stuck inside, Zev paces in rooms that seem to shrink by the hour.

  * * *

  As La La undresses for bed, Clem looks up from his phone and notices the yin-yang pendant. “I didn’t know you were into Chinese philosophy. Is it new?”

  La La’s hands and face tingle. She meant to take it off as soon as she got home, but started to play with the dogs instead and forgot. “A store near the hospital had it in the window. My mom wore one like it.” She strokes it between her finger and thumb.

  “You sure you want a reminder?”

  La La pulls on a nightshirt, the necklace disappearing beneath the cotton. “I can’t help thinking about what my life would’ve been like if she stayed.”

  “Your life isn’t so bad. Is it?” He lifts the necklace above her shirt. Bends down to kiss the spot where her jaw meets her ear.

  La La’s skin warms. She longs to tell Clem everything but is afraid if she does, he’ll leave her. The woman Clem courted wasn’t a burglar. In college, La La organized a volunteer program, pairing students with shelter dogs for daily walks. After a rape in an apartment near campus, she tacked up flyers with tips on how to keep intruders out. Her life wasn’t without moral ambiguity. Her father sent money, and La La knew where it came from, but at the time, Clem didn’t, and at least La La wasn’t the one breaking the law.

  He starts to lift her nightshirt, but La La turns away. “Anything new on the blog?” she asks.

  Backing off, Clem looks at her curiously, then checks the blog on his phone. “Looks like someone’s thruway toll was paid by a prior driver. The Nobel Committee should be calling any minute, right?”

  La La snorts.

  * * *

  Thursday morning, unable to find a home with a sick pet, La La settles for giving an elderly dog a potty break before making off with the family’s valuables. It’s not until she’s back home several hours later that she remembers something about a promise to tend to animals of the poor. Does the promise count if she was under duress? She’s tempted to forget all about it. To lie down for a nap, embracing oblivion for an hour or two, the recent unhappy changes in her life disappearing. If she were more help to an animal that morning, perhaps she would.

  Instead, she decides to visit a dog park across town, where, as a veterinary student, she’d informed owners of a free spay and neuter day at the hospital. She’ll clip overgrown nails, clean waxy ears, and perform free exams to discharge her obligation. Black bag in hand, she rides the bus, hoping it will handle roads sloppy with new snow better than her car. In a neighborhood of small ranch houses, La La pulls the cord for her stop. The bus slides past a corner and lets La La off in the middle of an intersection.

  Walking toward the park, hood pulled over her head, La La passes a property surrounded by a chain-link fence, and her shoulder tenses. She’d like to investigate, but a car idles in the driveway, and besides, she doesn’t want to break into a home if she doesn’t have to. Two blocks later, in front of a house with broken shutte
rs, stiffness clamps La La’s hips. The driveway is empty, and the interior is dark. A snowman next door waves a paper-towel arm and regards La La with silver-button eyes. Perched on a fence, a magpie shrieks about death—whose, La La doesn’t know.

  She walks on, ignoring her hips, which feel like shattered glass. But as she reaches the corner, she turns around. She’ll be quick, she tells herself. She can keep her promise this way, too. When she presses the doorbell, it doesn’t ring. She raps hard on the thin door, then raps again, but no one answers. Shuffling around back, she picks the lock on a sliding glass door. Inside, a heavyset German shepherd limps toward her across a stained olive carpet. Onesies, bibs, and a pink baby blanket drape across the back of a corduroy love seat. In a playpen squeezed between the love seat and the wall, letters dance on a plastic book cover. An electric menorah and a tiny artificial Christmas tree share a small tabletop.

  “The temple priests had enough oil to light the menorah for only one night, but miraculously it burned for eight nights,” Elissa once told her, touching a match to the candles on their brass menorah.

  “Maybe they pinched oil from another temple,” Zev said.

  Elissa glanced at La La, then back at Zev. “She’s six.”

  La La eases down next to the dog and reads her tag: PETUNIA. She runs her hands along the shepherd’s tan-and-black fur, performing a gentle exam. The dog’s joints are swollen; they grind as La La manipulates Petunia’s legs. It’s likely osteoarthritis.

  An old refrigerator buzzes. Water sloshes in a dishwasher. Arranging Petunia on her side, La La massages her back leg, loosening the muscles with her palm. The dog relaxes and groans. Outside, a car hushes through the snow, slowly approaching the house. Grabbing her veterinary bag, La La starts toward the sliding door. How unfair to be caught when she isn’t even stealing. But who would believe she broke in to help? Petunia’s eyes remain shut, and she hasn’t moved. La La hates to leave her, having attended to only one side. Fear stiffens La La’s neck. Her head feels like it’s attached with a pike.

  As she clutches the door handle, the car passes. Returning to the dog, La La finishes the massage. She rummages in her bag for a bottle of glucosamine and chondroitin supplements. Another car approaches the house. Thinking it will pass like the earlier one, La La pulls out the bottle and opens it. Petunia stands and looks toward the street, her large ears erect. The dog’s heart quickens. La La leaves the bottle on the coffee table. When the car pulls into the driveway, Petunia hobbles toward the front of the house. The car engine shuts off just as La La reaches the sliding glass door, but when she tries to open it, it jams. She pushes and pulls, pulls and pushes some more, but it won’t budge. One car door opens, then another. The dog squeals happily. La La lifts the door, which has slipped from its track, back into position and opens it. “We’re home,” La La hears, as she races away.

  At the bus stop, La La sweats despite the cold. The perspiration on her face turns clammy. Someone has sprayed red paint over the schedule on the sign, and La La can’t make it out, but it hardly matters because the times are never accurate. A bus from a line different than the one La La is waiting for lets off an old man in a black wool cap and beat-up leather gloves. He looks at La La’s veterinary bag. La La attached stickers to it—Grumpy Cat and Dog Is My Co-Pilot—so she could recognize it among those of other students. “You a veterinarian?” the man asks. Areas of gray stubble dot loose skin on his cheeks and neck.

  La La shifts the bag to her other hand but too late to hide it.

  “You make house calls?” he asks.

  “Sometimes,” La La says.

  The man pulls off a glove and rubs a hand over his face. “My cat hates going to the vet.”

  La La peers down the street, willing her bus to arrive. It isn’t safe to stay in the neighborhood where someone might have seen her enter the house.

  “He needs to be put down, but when he sees his carrier he runs, and I can’t catch him anymore. I hate to upset him on his last day.” He puts his glove back on, stamps his feet, his thin rubber boots inadequate for the weather.

  “What makes you think it’s time?” she says.

  “He doesn’t eat. Cries a lot. Forgets where the litter is. I try to keep him clean, but I’ve got my own problems.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-one or thereabouts. Maybe you could come over now. It’s only a few blocks.” He motions in the direction La La came from, then sticks out his hand. “Name’s Sebastian. Cat’s name is Neapolitan, Neo for short.”

  “I really can’t. I have to meet someone.” Clutching her bag to her chest, she looks down the street.

  “I’ll pay you. I’m not rich, but I’ve always taken care of Neo.”

  La La’s bus turns the corner onto the street. “That’s me.”

  “There’ll be another.” He grabs her arm. “Please.”

  La La shakes him off. Leaving her house, she made sure to tuck the exact change needed for the round trip—two dollars each way—into her pocket. But now when she reaches for the fare, it’s missing. Except for a useless credit card, her wallet is empty. When she grabbed the lockpicks from her pocket outside the sliding door, the money must have fallen out.

  The air fills with the hiss of brakes, and the bus door opens. While La La ascends the steps, she tells the driver she forgot her fare.

  The driver continues to look through the front window. “You and everyone else. No one rides without it.”

  She climbs back down.

  “Thank you,” Sebastian says, as La La follows him. She hates to think of the cat in pain, and this can be part of fulfilling her promise, too.

  When she passes Petunia’s yard, the shepherd presses her nose to the gate, but La La ignores her.

  Sebastian’s house smells of cooked beans and coffee. A piano fills half of a small living room. The cat lies motionless on a blanket in the bedroom, dozing. He’s a calico, patches of red and brown bleeding into white. La La pets him, feeling his knobby spine and hips that jut out. Her kidneys burn. Though she performs a cursory exam, she already knows what’s required. “I’m going to give him two shots,” she says. “First one is to relax him.”

  Sebastian murmurs his assent. La La looks up dosages on a veterinary app on her phone. She fumbles in her bag for the medications she stole from the hospital and has carried since she came across a deer slowly dying after being hit by a car and had no way to help. Filling a needle with the sedative Telazol, she injects the muscle. Surprised, Neo lifts his head. His tail puffs. Sebastian holds him in place, rubbing the cat’s chin.

  As she waits for the drug to take effect, La La looks through the window. A sparrow hops on a patio table shrouded in white, the bird so light it leaves no trace in the snow. Blown off in the wind, a patio umbrella floats on a drift beneath an ash tree. La La’s limbs grow heavy. Neo’s pupils dilate; his head wobbles and drops to the blanket. “Ready?” she asks, the word catching in her throat.

  Covering his mouth with his hand, Sebastian nods.

  La La injects Nembutal to stop Neo’s heart. The cat is still.

  Sebastian caresses the cat’s head with his hands. He kisses him, whispering, “Good-bye, Neo.”

  La La looks out of the window again. Gone is the sparrow. Silently, she asks the cat’s forgiveness, despite thinking she’s done the right thing. “I can’t take him back to the clinic.”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay.”

  When Sebastian tries to pay La La, all she accepts is bus fare.

  * * *

  In the living room later that night, La La sits on the couch, cradling her laptop. She opens a people-finder website that Nat recommended. “Much more efficient than a Google search,” her friend said. The thought of actually tracking down her mother is so unnerving, she types “Elidda Gold,” then “Eliffa,” eventually using one finger to get the job done. The name yields only one woman in her late sixties, but Elissa would be in her early fifties. La La search
es for the only full name she has for her mother, “Elizabeth Gold.” Sixty-two women. That’s better.

  From the overstuffed chair, Clem watches television, channel surfing until he lands on the local evening news. Black lies on La La’s feet, warming them, and Blue rests his chin on Clem’s lap. A segment begins about an odd burglary, odd not because of the way the burglar entered the property or because he knew where to find the valuables—which were routine enough—but because he took care of the homeowners’ parrot.

  La La’s skin prickles. She plunks her laptop on the coffee table and jumps up, disturbing Black as she scrambles toward Clem. She reaches for the remote control, but he refuses to relinquish it. “I’m watching this, aren’t I?” he says. “Anyway, it’s about animals.”

  Standing in front of the house, the bronze elk visible behind him and a large News 4 emblem on his microphone, a reporter says, “We know it wasn’t a cat burglar. He would have eaten the parrot.” He chuckles, a fake newsroom laugh, then frowns. “As of this afternoon, the police don’t have any suspects.”

  Afraid to make a scene, La La returns to the couch. Since they don’t know who the burglar is, the story can’t do any harm.

  Next to the reporter, the homeowner licks her teeth, presumably making sure the thick, red lipstick she applied for the interview hasn’t migrated. She leans toward the microphone. “It’s horrible knowing someone has been in the house. I keep thinking I hear someone in the next room.”

  La La bites a fingernail impatiently, wanting to know if the police have any leads at all, someone who saw her coming or going, or noticed the color of her car.

  “He filled the bird’s water bottle,” the homeowner says. “Our neighbor was taking care of it while we were away. She’s the one who discovered the break-in. The burglar turned up the thermostat, too. Why, I can’t imagine.”