by R. L. Maizes
The housekeeper blows through their home like a sparkling wind once a week but refuses to enter Paula’s office. “I can’t clean in all that mess,” she says.
Thwap. Thwap. The sound is unnerving because Petal and Tanner are dead, and Roger has taken the dog door out.
Roger would rid the house of all the dog paraphernalia, box up everything for a shelter or put a carefully worded ad on Craigslist, but Paula clings to each artifact as if she believes in canine transubstantiation, that a leash will become a tail, a collar, a neck.
Heading to the kitchen for another cup of tea, Paula detours to the porch, where Roger sits in a wicker chair reading Modern Architecture. His frayed Columbia sweatshirt no longer swallows him. She gathers a scarf from a bench and leans in to wrap his neck, but his hand springs up to block her. Though he could sprout curls—black, sprinkled with gray—he has continued to shave his head, a look that highlights his angular cheekbones and is harsh, perhaps what he intends, a reminder to himself and others of what he has been through. Not the Roger she married, not the Roger who was sick, but someone new, someone who rubs his scalp as if discovering it.
“Don’t you hear it?” she asks.
“Hear what?” His tone is flat. They have discussed the noise before.
She has a look at the back door and finds what she expects. A thin wood panel covering the dog-size hole painted by Roger, dark green to match the door. As if they could forget there was a hole. As if their eyes wouldn’t always settle there.
No yellow Lab and brown Aussie jostling to get through. Once they struck the dog door simultaneously and got stuck, heads out, rumps in. Paula dropped to her knees and maneuvered Petal, the Lab, back inside. She buried her face in the dog’s flank, inhaled her musty aroma, and felt as she always did in the presence of that smell, that she would never grow tired of it.
Petal, five, vaulted into strangers’ truck beds. Tanner, four, anointed himself with excretions—goose, cow, horse, it didn’t matter. They ate everything. Shoes, furniture, once, a set of briefs. She reported their escapades to Roger like she would those of mischievous children and took to sprinkling her possessions with pepper.
Thwap. Thwap. If their ghosts are lingering, she wants to know why. What unfinished business might dogs have?
She sets the hot mug on her desk beside two cardboard boxes. Inside each, a translucent plastic bag filled with ash and bone. She lowers a box onto her lap and opens it, feeling through the plastic to the remains. It is all she has left of Tanner, who bared his teeth at other dogs—even at Petal sometimes—and growled, guarding Paula. A dusting of ash has somehow made it to the outside of the bag, too. The dry powder coats her fingers. There are no real barriers in life. Her unhappiness blankets Roger. The dogs’ energy buoyed them in the midst of his illness. She could use some of that energy now. Since they died, she’s struggled to be productive. She closes the box and slides it onto the desk.
To a real-estate contract she appends contingencies: government approvals, environmental testing, loans at specified rates. Her job is to anticipate anything that might go wrong.
When she finishes the contract, Roger is in the shower. “What do you want for dinner?” she calls through the spray.
“Why don’t we go out?”
She loathes the prospect of encountering someone they know and hearing Roger describe how good he feels. It doesn’t make sense. She should celebrate his recovery. It isn’t that she’s afraid he’ll jinx it. She relished nursing him, shuttling him to appointments, elevating his needs above her own. It made her feel generous and purposeful in a way racking up billable hours can’t match. These days, when she helps him, she can briefly forget the dogs. She doesn’t want him to die. But she wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed sick a bit longer. It’s monstrous, she knows. “I thought I would just make something. We’ve got pork cutlets in the freezer.”
“Why bother asking then?” He shouts, only in part, she suspects, to be heard above the water.
He shuts the tap and ignores the robe she holds out, reaching around her to grab a towel.
While she pounds the pork to tenderize it, she feels the dogs hovering, waiting for her to drop something into their bowls. They gained weight when Roger stopped setting them loose in the countryside because he couldn’t follow behind. Petal sausaged around the middle, Tanner thickened everywhere, while Roger melted away.
“If they lose a couple of pounds, it will really extend their life spans,” the vet said at the end of their last routine visit. She began running the three-mile loop around Spirit Lake with them as often as she could.
When she wakes the next morning, Roger is still asleep. He lies on his side, revealing the slashing scar across his chest. She wants to trace the scarlet line with her finger, surf its bumps and ridges, discover if it’s hot or cool, but she doesn’t. Since the surgery, they have barely touched each other.
Morning had been their favorite time. In the winter, still dark outside and quiet, dogs dozing on their beds in the corners of the room. With her fingertips, she would brush the small, dark moles that dot his shoulders. Register the subtle tint to his skin, reddish-tan in the dim light. Once, as they lay on their sides and held each other, they heard coyotes laughing, and Roger said, “We enjoy the sound because we lack imagination,” and she understood what he meant. The coyotes’ kill was invisible to them. They moved against each other as the sky purpled—the color of bruises after surgery.
Doctors proclaimed him lucky, said the position of the tumor allowed them to get it all. From other patients she learned “got it all” is a doctor’s mantra, and only sometimes true. Since he was diagnosed two years ago, she has been picturing his side of the bed empty. She read somewhere that this is how actors summon tears, imagining funerals of loved ones or themselves.
Paula showers, lingering under the hot water. She runs a comb through her thin hair but doesn’t style it and ignores eyeliner and blush that were once part of her morning routine, though Joyce, her paralegal, says she looks pale. A strand of Petal’s fur rides Paula’s black wool pantsuit. She plucks it off and adds it to her collection, depositing it in a plastic sandwich bag she keeps on her desk.
She is fifteen minutes late for her first appointment. Joyce greets her—round, heavy face puckered with worry, thick shoulders bowed. She has brought the client coffee and made conversation. “I can’t stall him much longer,” she whispers, as Paula drops her briefcase in her office.
Paula apologizes to the client, Barry Terwiller, who sits in the reception area, large, moisturized hands grasping the edge of the couch. He leans forward, poised, she fears, to rise on his gleaming shoes and leave. She’ll be with him in a minute, she says, and then realizes she’s forgotten her laptop with the real-estate contract at the house. Fuck. She calls Roger. He’s working at home, preparing engineering drawings for the new hospital. He e-mails Joyce the contract.
Though she hasn’t asked him to, Roger drops off the laptop while she’s in her meeting. He reprogrammed the screensaver to say, “Lawyers do it briefly,” which she realizes only after she turns the machine on in front of a client.
Her office depresses her. Just five years ago, she floated through a store, picking out the glass-topped desk shaped like a gourd, the slender ergonomic chair, the floor lamp that lights when you touch its base. It was all so modern and hopeful. Perfect for the third-floor office with views of Main Street below and cornfields beyond.
Now if it weren’t for Joyce, she would labor in the semidarkness of the laptop glow, because Paula never touches the lamp or opens the shades. Joyce does that midmorning, moving nimbly, bringing a cup of tea Paula hasn’t asked for but drinks. Too bad Joyce can’t do anything about the files that rise in unsteady towers on the desk. A sloppy stack of loose papers conceals unanswered mail, unfiled motions. Her voice mail is full. She doesn’t know where to begin.
At six, she stuffs her briefcase with work she intends to do after dinner, grabs her laptop, and heads home. H
alfway there, she realizes she has forgotten to pick up Roger’s blood-pressure medication.
She abhors the pharmacy, hates the false cheerfulness of the tinkling bell that greets her, the factory-scented herbal shampoos, the shelves of too-sweet candy, and most of all the medications, secured behind glass, that promise health, life even. She despises the pharmacists in their white coats, though she is not proud of that and knows it is unfair. Nothing that happened was their fault.
She can’t visit the building without remembering the Saturday in early May when she stopped there on her way to take the dogs for a run at Spirit Lake.
The day began well. She and Roger had breakfast on the porch. Petal and Tanner lay at their feet, Petal licking crumbs, Tanner licking himself. Crab-apple blossoms perfumed the yard. It was hard to believe anything could be that pink. They talked about vacationing in July at famous hot springs in the southwestern part of the state. Paula’s mother could watch the dogs. Even with Roger’s illness, Paula had fallen only a bit behind at work.
After breakfast, Paula planted the front bed with geraniums, zinnias, and phlox, risking a hard freeze that could come as late as the end of the month. She felt confident of her luck. Roger was responding well to chemo—better than expected, the oncologist said. It looked like their lives would return to normal. That was all she wanted then.
In the afternoon, she corralled the dogs. The asphalt driveway sparkled under the midday sun. Paula waved to a neighbor swapping out a storm door for a screen. Giving winter the bird, she thought. The dogs scrambled into the back of the 4Runner. Raising her face to the sky, Paula closed her eyes and let the sun’s warmth relax muscles that had been stiff with fear all winter.
As she drove, Petal and Tanner thrust their heads out the window and opened their mouths to the breeze. Jowls flapping, their exhilaration was contagious.
She stopped at the pharmacy for Roger’s chemo pills and was just leaving when Peter Cornish called. “Hate to bother you, but the parcel behind my property is going on the market tomorrow. I’d like to get it under contract tonight. You think you could look at a draft in the next couple of hours?”
It was only two o’clock. There was plenty of time. She would stop by his office to pick up the document. The weather was cool enough; the dogs could stay in the car. She’d look at the contract after she got back from the run.
At his office, he got into the details: crop leases, hunting easements, loans by the seller. Occasionally, she interrupted with questions. The meeting took longer than she thought it would. When she returned to the car, the dogs were curled up in the back, asleep.
“Want to go to Spirit Lake?” Petal’s tail thumped the seat. Next to her paw, the shredded white bag. Gnawed capless bottle. Not a single pill inside and none on the floor.
Stillness blanketed the car. She couldn’t move though she knew she had to. The dogs looked fine. She told herself the vet would save them.
Chemo was poison even when properly administered. In small doses, a human could tolerate it. By the time she reached the vet, the medication had traveled across the dogs’ stomachs and intestinal linings into their bloodstreams. There are no real barriers in life.
The vet did what he could, keeping them alive for seven days. She and Roger visited every day, feeding them roast chicken by hand, petting them through the kennel bars.
Petal died first, and as if taking a signal from her, Tanner died a few hours later. Hardly more than puppies. Paula and Roger crawled into their kennel, sat with their lifeless bodies. Paula covered herself with their ragged yellow blankets and petted them, though their hearts had stopped, her own heart having risen into her throat, beating a dull ache.
Why hadn’t she put the medicine in the glove box? Or carried it into Peter’s office in her purse if she didn’t want him to see it? When it was over, she could think of a million ways to protect them. But she hadn’t. Fucking chemo drugs, fucking cancer. She hadn’t let herself feel resentment until Roger was well.
The pharmacist waves as Paula enters the drugstore. “Roger was in earlier.” Of course. He picked up the drugs when he delivered her laptop.
At home, Roger has prepared dinner, a pasta and salmon salad. “I would have done that,” she says.
“I’m the one who likes to cook, remember?”
She throws her suit jacket over the back of the chair. As she takes her first bite, she hears it. Thwap. Thwap. Roger must see her looking toward the back of the house, because he says, “I miss them, too, you know.”
But it’s not the same. He didn’t kill them, after all. Paula remembers watching Petal in a lake, paddling, snorting, a stolen Frisbee in her mouth. When the dog emerged on the shore, her coat slick and heavy, Paula wanted to cry, she loved the dog that much. Paula rescued the toy, while Petal shook, soaking her.
“I picked up more work, doing drawings for the new elementary school.”
She can tell Roger is pleased by the way he puts down his fork before making the announcement. “Do you have the energy for it?” she says.
“That’s the second thing you’re supposed to say. The first is congratulations.”
“Congratulations.”
“Too late.”
As she pours water from a pitcher, ice cubes plop into her glass and splash water on the tablecloth. She blots the spill with her napkin. “You’re working a lot. You’re supposed to rest.”
“I feel great. Doctor Peterson said to listen to my body. Being productive makes me happy. Like making dinner. You’re welcome.” He isn’t smiling.
“Thank you.”
He refills his dish from the pot on the stove but doesn’t offer to refill hers.
“I’m just worried about you,” she says.
“It’s getting tiresome.” He looks down at his plate, picks out a piece of salmon, and eats it. “I’m thinking of taking a place in town.”
She stares at him, but he doesn’t look up. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m tired of being a patient. I need to take care of myself.”
“I’ll let you.”
“You won’t. You’ll hover.”
“I’m sorry for caring about you.”
“You could call it that.”
She lifts the damp napkin, squeezes it. “I’ve lost the dogs, and now I’m going to lose you.”
“Don’t bring them into this. I saw a shrink. She said we’ve gotten into a pattern that’s hard to break.”
“You saw a shrink?” She is having trouble breathing. The same stale air, a fraction of what she needs, trickles in and out of her lungs. “When?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. I want to know how long you’ve been keeping things from me. What else haven’t you told me?”
“I rented a place.”
The room pulses. The appliances blur. Only Roger’s calm, healthy face is clear. She would like to strike it, but she can’t rise from the chair or lift her arms. She is paralyzed.
“It’s furnished, so I don’t have to move anything out. Just take some clothes. It will be good for you, too. You can focus on your practice. Catch up.”
She doesn’t think anything she says will matter. “I’m keeping their ashes.”
He rises from the table. She follows him through the house as he packs a large bag, clothes for several seasons. He places the essentials of his office in cardboard boxes he must have gathered earlier and carries the boxes to his truck. From her desk, he takes a picture of the dogs but none of her.
Awake most of the night, she thinks how unfair it is that he left her after she took care of him. Though she has no reason for suspicion, she wonders if he met someone else. She remembers going to the shelter with Roger to adopt Petal, how excited they were to enlarge their family, to share the affection they had for each other, which seemed boundless.
The following day, Roger calls her at work to say he’ll be at the house that afternoon. She breathes deeply for the first time since he left, thinking he’s coming home, but th
en he says he just needs to pick up a few more things.
In bed that night, she turns on a reality television program in which drunken housewives scream at each other and throw punches. The show makes her feel sane, and she watches it for hours. When she finally turns the television off, the silence is oppressive. She stares at the photograph she relocated to the nightstand, of Roger and the dogs. How has she lost everything she loves? A tidal wave separated her from the best parts of her life, and she is that wave.
* * *
A week later, Joyce brings tea and says they ought to celebrate by going to lunch. “I’m not sure if you realize, but it’s the fifth anniversary of the firm. November tenth. I know because it’s the day I started.”
“I don’t feel like celebrating. Maybe another time.” Paula stands and walks to the door, hoping Joyce will take the hint and follow, but she moves slowly because she likes hearing Joyce’s voice.
“I’ve always wanted to tell you this,” Joyce says, sitting in the chair opposite the desk. “I don’t know why I never did. You saved my life. I’d gone on a million interviews, and no one hired me. No one said why, but I knew. I’ve been facing it all my life. People see a big woman and think I’m stupid or lazy or both. I was down to my last month’s rent.”
When Paula first met Joyce, she thought the paralegal’s open face and clear eyes would put clients at ease. Paula feels awkward standing by the door, addressing Joyce’s back, so she returns to her chair and grasps the handle of the fresh mug of tea. With the fingertips of her other hand, she strokes the cup’s glazed surface, lightly, to avoid burning herself. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it.”