by Meg Donohue
“I thought I’d covered my bases,” Henry continues. “I really thought I was doing the right thing setting up an appointment with you. But if you help Anya look for her dog, you’re only going to be encouraging her to believe she might actually find him. It’s been a month. A month. Billy is not coming back and my sister needs to accept that. I know how much she loved him, but love can’t bring him back. She needs to . . . grieve.”
“I don’t necessarily disagree with you,” I tell him. “The problem is that Anya is going to keep looking for Billy whether I help her or not. And I don’t think she should look for him on her own. It worries me when someone dealing with loss isolates herself.”
Henry rakes a hand through his hair, the gesture full of frustration. “But how long is this going to go on?” he asks. “How long can she keep looking for him? Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?”
“I might argue that you’ve just defined hope.”
He sighs. “You don’t know Anya. She could hunt for that dog for years, and in the meantime her whole life will have fallen apart. She’s only nineteen. She had a hard childhood. She’s not as tough as she looks.”
In our session, Anya had accused her brother of simply wanting to “tie up loose ends” before he moved to Los Angeles, but I don’t get that sense. He’s clearly protective of her, racked with worry—and perhaps guilt, too. The heat in his voice has dampened; now he just sounds sad.
“But you can’t force her to do—or stop doing—anything, can you?” I ask. “She strikes me as the sort of person who needs to draw her own conclusions, follow her own path. I hope you’ll trust me, Henry. I’m trying to help.” I glance down at the clock on my phone. “I don’t want to be late. I’d like Anya to know she can depend on me.”
Henry nods slowly. He seems resigned, and, perhaps, slightly less suspicious of me than he’d been ten minutes earlier. “You go ahead. I’ll come in soon.”
I nod. “Is there an apartment number?”
“An apartment . . . ? No. This is our grandmother’s house. Anya has lived with her since our parents died when she was seven years old. She didn’t tell you?”
Henry is studying me skeptically now, and I feel whatever headway I made toward earning his confidence slipping away. “No,” I answer, stretching out my fingers to pet Giselle. “She didn’t tell me, yet.”
WHEN ANYA OPENS the door, she doesn’t look like she has slept or bathed since I saw her last, but now a tangle of crisscrossing bobby pins holds her greasy hair off her forehead. I immediately foresee plenty of hand sanitizer, hot-water hand scrubs, and vitamin C in my near future. She’s changed her clothes at least, and wears a loose black sweatshirt with a trail of holes near the neck and a pair of faded black jeans. She still has on the huge boots she wore to my office. They don’t strike me as the best choice for walking shoes.
“Who’s Fancy Pants?” she asks, looking down at Giselle. Her green nose ring, I notice, has been replaced by a tiny silver spike that looks sharp enough to draw blood.
“Giselle. She belongs to a friend of mine. I hope you don’t mind that I brought her along.”
Anya holds out her hand matter-of-factly, palm up. Giselle instantly places her paw on it as though she walks up to strangers’ homes and shakes their hands all the time.
“Hello, Giselle. You’re a good dog, aren’t you?” Anya’s relaxed, almost tender tone is new. “We’ll have to swap modeling stories later.” She steps back and opens the door wider so we can pass through.
The inside of the house is in as bad a state as the outside. Overhead, a huge brass-and-crystal chandelier shakes when Anya shuts the door. Small Oriental rugs with frayed edges are scattered haphazardly on the warped wood floors. I wonder if they’re hiding holes. A long wall leading toward the back of the house has been repaired at some point but not repainted; the patches of dry wall are a dingy white color that makes the wall look like it’s oozing curdled cream.
To the left, dark molding frames the entry to a large room that must have once been used as a living room. Now there’s a tightly made hospital bed—the grandmother’s, I suppose—blocking a faded brocade couch. Rows of amber prescription bottles litter the fireplace mantel.
Behind me, Anya is turning locks. There are three of them, shiny silver dead bolts that look out of place on the thick old door with its lead-plated, stained-glass windowpane.
All those locks, I think, and yet she believes someone stole her dog.
I pull Henry’s check from my back pocket. “I’d like to give this back to you. You didn’t even stay for the whole session, so it doesn’t feel right to keep it.”
Anya looks at the check for a moment before shrugging and sliding it into the pocket of her jeans. “He’s coming, by the way. My brother Henry.”
“Oh?”
She nods. “Clive’s here already. Terrence will be here eventually. They all come for breakfast every couple of weeks. We’re just about to eat.”
I’m surprised, but before I can suggest that perhaps I should come back later, Anya points at Giselle.
“You can take her leash off.”
“It’s better if I don’t,” I say simply. Giselle seems quite happy to be pressed against my leg, and when she looks up at me with anticipation in her eyes, I imagine this is a bit of an adventure for her—after all, she’s used to long days spent lounging on her dog bed in Lourdes’s kitchen. But then I smell it—the vaguely unpleasant food scent wafting down the hall toward us—and realize she’s just angling for something to eat.
Anya seems to take in the scent at the same time. “Shit. The eggs.” She doesn’t sound particularly concerned. “Follow me.”
When we walk through the swinging door at the end of the hall, I’m so startled by the view that for a brief moment I forget to look away. Beyond a trio of windows, the entire western half of San Francisco fans out like a sequin-strewn, patchwork gypsy skirt in shades of pearl and mauve and moss. The city is bathed in the golden glow of morning sun; the wild band of frothy sea sparkles in the distance. To the north, the bright orange crown of the Golden Gate Bridge spans the bay, majestic in the honeyed light.
The view from Lourdes’s kitchen is tempered by the roofs of the houses below hers on the hill—this view, on the other hand, makes me feel like I’m suspended in the sky, untouched by neighbors. It’s impossibly gorgeous, and I enjoy it for a knife-sharp sliver of time before the vertigo hits. My stomach lurches and the floor shifts below my feet. I sink to my knees and close my eyes and begin to count my breath. I’m up to three when I feel Giselle’s wet nose on my cheek and I open my eyes.
Anya is at the stove, stirring a pan of scrambled eggs, her back to me. She shows no sign that she has witnessed any of this. I cling to Giselle for another few seconds, trying to catch my breath. The vertigo has never hit me so hard before, and I feel unnerved. When my heart no longer races, I straighten, angling myself away from the windows.
“This house is amazing,” I say. To my own ears, my voice sounds thin. I clear my throat, pressing my hand against my chest. Giselle shakes out her fur and the tags on her collar jingle.
Anya looks over her shoulder at me. In the light, her skin is so pale it appears nearly translucent; the circles below her eyes make her look as though she’s been punched. Her gaze moves around the kitchen and I have the sense she hasn’t noticed the state of the house in a long time. She gives a half grimace, half shrug and resumes scraping the spatula along the bottom of the pan.
The kitchen itself, admittedly, is not amazing. Cupboards hang from broken hinges and spidery cracks litter the ancient tiled counter. The grout between the tiles is speckled with what might be black mold, but is certainly ripe breeding ground for bacteria. I’m beginning to question whether anyone should eat anything that emerges from the room. Still, falling apart or not, a property like this—the double lot, the view—must be worth millions of dollars.
I notice that there are
several paintings on the wall, beautiful, unframed cityscapes in vibrant colors. One of them depicts the view from the kitchen window—in it, a thick blue bank of fog hangs over the ocean, looking every bit as solid and unchangeable as a distant mountain range.
“Did you paint these?” I ask.
Anya glances over her shoulder. “No, Rosie, my grandmother, did. She only stopped recently. Arthritis. But she says she’s still painting in her mind, and that’s where she’s always done her best work anyway. She calls those poor translations.” Anya points the spatula in her hand at the painting with the fogbank. “That’s Poor Translation Number Two Hundred and Four.” She turns back to the stove and gives the eggs one last, half-hearted poke. “These are . . . whatever.” She turns off the burner. “Let me introduce you to everyone.”
I follow her through another swinging door into a dining room, relieved to put distance between that view and myself. At the end of a long table, an elderly woman sits in a wheelchair, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She is frail-looking but beautiful, emitting a sort of Earth Mother elegance in an ankle-length batik tunic. Her dark eyes dart right to mine as I step into the room. She is flanked on one side by a stout, middle-aged woman with a bored expression and on the other by a sandy-haired, broad-shouldered man who is handsome in a self-aware, movie-star way.
“Everyone,” Anya announces, “this is Maggie Brennan.”
“Hello,” I say.
The blond man arches an eyebrow. “What is that?” he asks, looking at Giselle.
“Clive,” says Anya. “It’s just a poodle.”
“Her name is Giselle. I’m exercising her for a friend.” Giselle looks up at me as if to say, You call this exercise? I rest my hand on her head.
“That’s my brother Clive,” Anya tells me. Clive nods at me without rising out of his chair, the look in his eyes one of cool amusement. “And that’s my grandmother, Rosie, and her nurse, June.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, holding out my hand first to Rosie. “Thank you for having me.” I expect her hand to feel fragile, but instead it is plump and warm in a way that makes me think of Lourdes’s daughter Gabby.
“Pleasure,” she says. Her voice is clear and strong, but her hand falls to her lap when I release it as though she’d drained her small reserve of energy lifting it to meet mine.
As I’m shaking hands with June, Rosie begins to cough, a wet, rumbling sound that rolls through the room. When the cough clears, she gives me a droll smile. “I’m fine in here,” she says, raising one trembling hand to tap her forehead. Again, her hand falls back to her lap like a stone. June murmurs something in her ear. Rosie nods and rests her head against the pillow behind her. She closes her eyes, and I wonder if she has fallen asleep.
Henry appears at another door at the far end of the room. “Good morning,” he says, striding toward us. When he bends to kiss his grandmother’s cheek, she smiles, but doesn’t open her eyes.
“Henry, this is Maggie Brennan,” Anya says. “But I guess you two have already met.”
Henry turns toward us. “Have we?” he asks quickly. “No. I don’t think so . . .”
“Maggie Brennan,” Anya repeats. “She’s the therapist you made me see. You e-mailed her.”
“Oh, right. Of course. We met over e-mail. Hello.” He shakes my hand, holding the grip only slightly longer than he had outside.
Clive sets his coffee mug down on the table with a thud. “Where the hell is the Prince?”
“He means our other brother Terrence,” Henry tells me. “He’s always late. I vote we start without him.”
Anya clomps toward the kitchen door.
“Can I help you?” I call after her.
“Yeah,” she says without turning. “You can help me find Billy.”
I can’t tell if she is giving me a hard time or if it’s just her blunt way of answering my question. I feel my cheeks flush. “I meant in the kitchen,” I say, but she’s already gone.
I catch Rosie’s nurse, June, looking at me with what appears to be pity in her eyes. She stands and brushes her hands down the side of her navy-blue nurse’s top. “I’m going for my walk,” she says, glancing at Rosie, who appears to be asleep. “I’ll have my cell phone if anyone needs me.”
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Henry tells her. “Thanks, June.”
Henry pulls out a chair for me and then seats himself between Rosie and me. After a few beats of silence that no one seems in any hurry to fill, Anya pushes back through the swinging door, carrying a tray of toast surrounded by containers of jam and a butter dish. She sets the tray beside me and then clomps into the kitchen again without a word.
Rosie’s eyes pop open as the door swings shut. “You’ll want to fill up on the toast, dear,” she says to me, her dark eyes glinting with mischief.
Clive glances sideways at his grandmother and laughs.
After I place a piece of toast and some jam on my plate, I hand the platter to Henry, and then reach down to stroke Giselle’s head. She’s lying at my feet, but her head is up and her ears are alert as though she, too, is trying to sort out the tangle of tension in the room. I tuck her leash under my thigh.
“You seem young to be a doctor,” Clive says. He is meticulously spreading jam over his toast and doesn’t look up as he speaks.
“I’m not a doctor. I trained as a therapist and now I run a pet bereavement counseling practice.”
Clive’s smirk communicates that as far as he’s concerned I might as well have said I make balloon animals for a living.
“But I’m not here in any professional capacity,” I add. “I’m just a friend.”
The kitchen door swings open again and Anya comes in with another platter, this one holding the mound of eggs, now speckled with herbs. She holds out the platter so I can serve myself.
Clive glances at me, one eyebrow raised. Henry, too, is watching me. Even Rosie is leaning slightly forward in her wheelchair.
When I scoop a modest spoonful of eggs onto my plate, I realize the little black specks aren’t herbs. I wonder if they’re bits of burned egg or if that ancient nonstick pan shed its toxic lining into the scramble.
“Do you always cook for these breakfasts?” I ask Anya.
Across the table, Clive does an exaggerated shudder. “God, no!”
Anya drops the platter down next to him. “They hate my cooking.”
“Your cooking is fine,” Henry says. “Clive is just being . . . Clive.”
I lift a forkful. “I think it looks delicious.”
When Anya shrugs and looks away, I set the fork down, eggs untouched. Giselle lifts her nose and sniffs the air and then turns her head away, not meeting my eye. Anya yanks out the chair beside mine and sits. The room fills with the scraping sound of jam being spread over toast.
“Maggie is going to help me find Billy,” Anya announces.
I hurry to swallow a bite of toast. “Well,” I say, “we’re going to look.”
“Who the hell is Billy?” Clive asks. His knife hovers in midair above his plate, jelly oozing off its sides.
Anya doesn’t answer. I notice her plate is empty.
“Clive,” Henry says. “That isn’t funny.”
“Billy?” Rosie asks. “Where is he?”
Henry turns to his grandmother. “You remember, don’t you? He ran away last month. He’s gone.”
“He didn’t run away,” Anya mutters.
Henry looks at his sister. “He’s been gone a month,” he says again, his voice both gentle and emphatic.
“Oh,” Rosie says. She presses her head back into the pillow and studies her granddaughter. “Well, it proves what I’ve always suspected: Billy is the smartest member of this family. When the wanderlust bug buzzes in your ear, you don’t swat it away.”
Anya looks like she is about to respond, but voices drift in from the kitchen and two men push through the swinging door. Giselle jumps to her feet and I catch her leash before she can spring toward the newcomers.
“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!” the older of the two men sings. He is tall and sandy-haired like Clive, but where Clive appears to be made of stone, this man is made of soft clay. His face is pudgy and defined mostly by a big, bristly blond mustache. “I ran right into Huan . . .” he says cheerfully, clapping the other, smaller man on the shoulder. His face freezes and his voice trails off as he catches sight of me.
“Terrence and Huan,” Anya says, hardly looking at them, “this is Maggie Brennan.”
“Brennan,” Terrence repeats. He looks questioningly at Henry. “The dog whisperer?”
I laugh. “Bereavement counselor. All of my patients are two-legged.” As if to prove me wrong, Giselle’s wagging tail sends my fork sailing off the table. It lands on the floor with a sharp clatter.
Terrence stares at Giselle, a perplexed smile on his face. Huan picks up the fork and hands it back to me, grinning. He has shaggy black hair and a sweet, youthful face. He’s probably a decade younger than I am, closer to Anya’s age than my own.
“I’m the neighbor,” he says. “Nice to meet you.” It’s the first genuine welcome I’ve received all morning and I like him instantly.
Terrence seems to recover from his surprise at seeing me and shakes my hand heartily. “Please excuse me for being late,” he says.
Clive tells me that Terrence owns a chain of stores called Mattress Kingdom, adding drily, “So he’s a very busy man—far too busy to consult a clock.”
Terrence doesn’t seem to register Clive’s sarcasm. “You’ve heard of us?” he asks me eagerly. “You’ve probably seen our TV commercial.”
“Well, of course she has!” Clive says.
“It rings a bell,” I venture, though it doesn’t.
Terrence’s smile fades. He looks crestfallen. “ ‘Sleep like Royalty’?”
“Terrence,” Clive says, “give our guest a moment before you proposition her, won’t you?”