by A. J. Rich
Did Bennett threaten the dogs?
• • •
Cilla helped me compose a condolence letter to Bennett’s parents. Bennett had shown me a picture of them. His old father was playing a button accordion in a farm kitchen while his mother danced in her apron. When Cilla asked me what he had told me about them, what I recalled was generic. He offered little and I wished I had asked more about them. Cilla advised me not to make the letter about my loss.
My brother, Steven, asked one of his law firm’s investigators to ferret out an address for them since the police weren’t able to find one: M. Jean-Pierre and Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau in Saint-Elzéar, Quebec, a town of less than three thousand.
“The parents don’t exist,” Steven told me when he next came to visit me in Bellevue. I was beginning my second week there and he had been coming almost every night. We sat on plastic chairs in the common room while on television Happily Never After was on the Investigation Discovery channel. Imagine filling an entire season with stories about spouses who killed each other . . . on their honeymoon. My roommate, Jody, had tagged along, knowing Steven always brought chocolate. She sported her earbuds to give us privacy, but I saw her turn off the sound.
“You mean your investigator couldn’t find them,” I corrected him.
“Next time, Steve,” Jody interrupted, “could you get the kind with bacon bits and salt?”
“Bacon in chocolate?” Steven said.
“Maybe I spelled their last name wrong,” I said.
“My guy checked every derivation. There is no one by that name in Saint-Elzéar.”
“Maybe I got the town wrong.”
“He checked all over.”
“They have to be somewhere. Someone has to tell them their son is dead.”
“I had my guy check the town’s records for Bennett’s birth certificate. No one by his name ever lived there.”
“I didn’t ask you to check on Bennett.”
“I wasn’t checking on Bennett, I was trying to find his parents for you.”
I knew my brother better than anyone else. We’d been inseparable as kids, and fiercely protective of each other, a pattern often found in the children of a manic-depressive. When our father was depressed, he ignored Steven, and when our father was manic, he attacked him. Bipolar disease is one of the rare instances where a predator and a victim can occupy the same body at the same time. It makes for an unfair fight.
“Do you want my guy to keep looking for Bennett’s parents?” Steven asked.
“Of course I do.”
• • •
After Steven left, Jody worked on her chocolate. “My creative-writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence had the same thing happen to her. She met this English guy online and fell in love.”
“Why would your professor tell you about her love life?” I asked, though I could barely concentrate on Jody. I was stuck back at the moment when Steven had said that Bennett wasn’t born where he told me he was.
“We’re required to meet privately for a half hour a week to discuss my writing. There’s nothing to say. We both know it. Turns out the guy was really twelve years old.”
“That must happen all the time.” I reached for the bedside lamp to turn it off.
“Wait. I finally figured it out. You’re the bad version of that actress, Charlotte Rampling—the sexy-lidded eyes that change from hazel to green depending on the light, the cheekbones. It’s been driving me nuts.”
“The bad version.”
“Also the short version,” Jody said. “My sister and I say we are the bad versions of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. We watch a lot of old movies. Your brother, on the other hand, is sort of the good version of Nic Cage.”
“I think he could go with that. I don’t know your sister, but I don’t think you’re the bad version of anyone,” I added, making nice. This time I turned off the light on my nightstand. “Sleep well.” I even turned away from Jody to underline my intention to end any conversation. But the light from the window in our door illuminated the room, enough that I could not pretend I was the only one there.
Why would you say you were born somewhere you weren’t?
Of all the lies men have told women, this one was baffling. It didn’t seem to serve a purpose I could identify. Unless he had changed his name. But the reasons people change their name—short of marriage when a woman sometimes changes her last name—are to sever ties to the past and to start over. And if he had changed his name, what else might he have changed—the story of his childhood? But he talked about his parents with such love. Was that the childhood he wished he’d had? Who were the people in the photograph? Bennett looked like the man in the photo.
I rolled over until I was facing the other bed. Jody was, if not asleep, then at least lying still. I could not get her silly game out of my head. Who was Bennett the bad version of? I thought of all the actors of yesteryear that I had watched on late-night TV, and I landed on the iconic Montgomery Clift. He had been in a serious car accident—he drove into a tree—while filming Raintree County, and though the facial plastic surgery he had required was pretty good for the fifties, his looks had a definite before and after. Bennett, I thought, was the bad version of the bad version of Montgomery Clift. As soon as I landed on this, I was ashamed—why the snarky take? All he had done was lie about where he was from.
Still no sound from Jody. The roommate I wished I had was Kathy. I would not have turned off my light and turned my back to her. We would have dissected the possibilities of this odd situation, escalating into wilder scenarios until we were both laughing. Ultimately, she would have made a case for duality—that I needed to do recon and take the risk that faith presents.
Faith had served her well. An adventurous, indomitable, and wise spirit had guided her through a life many would envy—up to a point. At twenty-eight, in her third year of med school at NYU, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it had already gone to the bone. She continued to attend classes and do rounds during her initial chemo and appeared on the ward with her head uncovered—no wig, no wrapped scarf. Her patients saw her bravery daily, her showing up for them when another would have capitulated.
She lived for eight years after the diagnosis. For four of those years, we shared an apartment in Vinegar Hill near the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. She died just before I met Bennett.
And now I was in a loony bin with a Sarah Lawrence student.
What would Kathy have done?
I would make a plane reservation for Montreal in the morning, use the key Bennett had given me, and find out what I could.
“I’m checking myself out this afternoon,” I told Cilla the following morning. We were sitting in her office drinking tea. I’d seen her daily since I’d been admitted, and she had promised to see me as an outpatient. I picked at the threads of my trendy ripped jeans.
“You don’t think you should stay a few more days? At least until you have a support structure in place?”
I felt that she was my support structure, she and Steven. “Steven hired a crime-scene cleaning service for my apartment.”
“You’re sure you’re ready to go home even if your apartment is clean?”
“Are there different cleaning products than the ones the rest of us use? I couldn’t even get the blood from a bloody nose out of a washcloth,” I told Cilla. “I’m not going home. I need to go to Montreal, to Bennett’s apartment to find his parents’ home number and address. I can’t go home until I face them.”
“Do you think it’s your job to tell them, not the authorities?”
“No one else could find them, not even Steven’s investigator.”
“And you think you’ll find them?”
“He was so organized. He hung his shirts and ties by color. I’m sure I can find his parents’ address somewhere in his desk. It was the neatest desk I’d ever seen.”
“So you’ve been to his apartment?”
“No, he showed me on Skype.”
; We used to have dinner on Skype. We would decide on Chinese, order in the same dishes, and have dinner as though sitting across from each other. Bennett’s table had a tablecloth; I used a place mat.
“Are you prepared for what you might find?” Cilla asked.
It was a stock therapeutic question, one I had asked while interviewing inmates at Rikers. Everyone always says yes.
• • •
But first I had to see my dogs.
I took the express train all the way to East Harlem. I thought today might be the Puerto Rican Day Parade—the PR flag was flying from so many honking cars, and the traffic was so thick—but then I realized the parade was in June, and this was September. The smell of the city pound annex hit me a block away, a mixture of feces and fear. The front door was covered over in taped-on flyers urging the spaying and neutering of pets. Just inside, presiding over a waiting area filled with crying children and expressionless teenagers and beleaguered parents, were three women who looked no older than twenty. Two were on phones, which left only one of them to deal with the emotional crowd, some there to look for their lost dog, some there to give their dogs up. At this rate, it would be hours before someone would speak to me.
I caught the eye of a burly kennel worker that one of the women at the desk had called Enrique. I asked him quietly if he knew where the two dogs that Animal Control had brought in ten days ago were being held.
He told me they get more than a hundred dogs a week: “Do you have their kennel numbers?”
I knew nothing about kennel numbers, and said instead, “The ones in the paper, the man was killed.”
“The red-nose pit and the big white one?”
“Great Pyrenees, yes.”
“They’re in Ward Four, but they’re on DOH-HB hold.” When I looked blank, he said, “Department of Health Hold for Human Bite. Though I saw in the paper they did a lot more than that.”
“They’re my dogs.”
“I can’t let you take them out or let you inside their kennels. Their kennel cards are stamped CAUTION.”
“But can I at least see them? Could you take me to see them?”
I saw Enrique look to the preoccupied women at the front desk, then he motioned me to follow him. We slipped past the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign and were instantly inside a howling asylum, not unlike Bellevue. I tried to look without seeing—the dogs crazed with fear and frustration, turning in circles in their too-small cages, water bowls overturned, feces not only on the floors but on the walls. Why were there no other attendants to minister to the dogs’ needs?
Cloud had never slept anywhere but my bed.
She was pressed against the rear of the cage, her head down, her ears flattened back in terror. I approached her and she looked up and whimpered. I cried out her name and reached for her.
Enrique stopped me. “You can’t touch the dog.”
I dropped to my knees and spoke to Cloud. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry you’re here.”
Was I looking at Bennett’s killer? No one could make me believe that this dog had killed Bennett, which left Chester and George.
“Where’s George, the pittie?”
“Next kennel over. He’s right here.”
I realized that the whimpering I’d been hearing was coming from George, who recognized my voice, my scent. I wished I’d never met this dog. I wished I hated this dog. If not for this dog, and for the now-dead Chester, Bennett would still be alive. Maybe George had been on death row for a reason when I took him home to foster. A reason other than an overcrowded shelter. But he had been so gentle and grateful. He was the only dog I knew who wouldn’t use his teeth to eat from my hand, only his lips.
I started to cry. George was the beta dog to Chester’s alpha. Did that factor into whether I could forgive him? I did not want an eye for an eye. Strange given the circumstances, but I did not want George to suffer. What about the mother whose son kills his father, her husband? Is she expected to hate her son? It’s the same boy she loved an hour before. Doesn’t she make a choice to forgive? And how is that ever possible?
“I got work to do,” Enrique told me. “I’ll send in one of the volunteers. Promise you won’t touch the dogs.”
I thanked him as he quickly shut the door behind us, and then I sat between the dogs’ cages, on the filthy floor where I could see them both and they could see me, but not each other. I wished I knew what I was feeling. I felt responsible for Cloud’s fate. She wouldn’t be here if not for my—the therapist in me took over—pathological altruism, when selfless acts backfire and inadvertently do great damage to others.
“You’re a brave woman to come here,” said a woman who entered the ward. My first thought was how clean she looked, considering where she worked. She wore a T-shirt with the shelter’s name on it. Maybe her shift had just begun? “Enrique told me you were here. I’m Billie.” She squatted beside me. She reached out to George’s cage, waited for George to rise and muster the courage to come closer, then reached inside with her fingers to let George lick them.
“You’re not frightened? You know what my dogs did?”
“Your picture was online.” She knew the whole story, yet she was now stroking George. He had pressed his flank against the metal bars so that she could touch as much of him as possible. I heard him sigh, a baritone exhalation of contentment. “He’s a love bug,” she said, her fingernails scratching his flank.
I couldn’t believe what she was doing.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, withdrawing her fingers. George turned around in his tiny cage, so that she could do his other side. She took his cue and started in on his other flank. “Was he good-looking? Your fiancé.”
It was the second thing about her that surprised me. Who would ask the grieving such a question? Yet I liked her. She was the first person, other than Cilla, who spoke to me as though I would survive this. I had learned from Kathy that surviving such an experience was possible. Only in my case, in the moment, I had to “act as if” I would make it. I could not pretend to the faith that was available to others, but I acted as if I could.
Back to Billie’s odd question—I found myself answering no. No, Bennett had not been remarkably good-looking, and when I’d first met him, I registered that and, almost simultaneously, dismissed it. I had responded to something else in him—his confidence, a different kind of strength.
“Your dogs are stronger than you think. We’d better leave before someone finds you in here. You’re supposed to have a court order to see them. Your dogs are evidence.”
I said good-bye to Cloud, but did not speak to George, although his body was still pressed against the bars.
Billie and I walked out of the ward together.
“Are they safe?” I asked.
“For now. Nothing will happen to them as long as they’re evidence.”
I didn’t ask, And after that? We both knew what would happen.
“I’ll look out for them. Here.” She gave me her card—no profession, only a name and a number. “I’m here three times a week. Call me and I’ll give you updates on how they’re doing.”
I thanked her and asked how she came to volunteer here.
“I had my own dog in here once, a shepherd mix with some chow in him. He bit a neighbor’s child. I’d have bitten the child, too, if she had been taunting me the way she taunted Cubby.”
“What happened to Cubby?”
“He wasn’t evidence.”
“And you still choose to work here?”
“It’s where I’m needed.”
Steven picked me up in his car outside the shelter. He had offered to take me to the airport. He thought I was insane for visiting my dogs. “How can you look at them knowing what they did?”
I tried out the analogy of the mother with the murderous son, but Steven said, “These are dogs, not children.”
The analogy worked for me. “You’ve known Cloud since she was eight weeks old.”
“I’m talking about the other one.”
<
br /> I didn’t plan to spend the night in Montreal. My plan was to find contact information for Bennett’s parents and leave.
Steven made me promise to return to his apartment when I got back. “I went to your place yesterday to check on the cleaning service. It’s spotless, but there’s nowhere to sleep. They took the bed away.”
“What else did they take away?”
“It looks pretty empty. But they did what they needed to do. Are you sure you want to go back there?”
This kind of concern from my brother had precedent. A lifetime of precedent. He had deflected our father’s madness when it was directed at me. Our father was not a violent man except when his mania broke and he plunged into depression. In his blackest moods, he was capable of brandishing a knife at our mother. He saw me as a smaller version of her, and just as insubordinate. One summer night when I was ten and Steven was eighteen, our father came into the kitchen and saw the empty fruit bowl.
“Who ate my peaches?” he yelled. We heard him from the finished basement, where Steven and I were watching TV. We heard him turn on our mother. “Did you let them eat my peaches?”
We heard our mother say, “They were for everyone.”
Steven started up the stairs to the kitchen and I followed him.
“I ate the fucking peaches,” Steven said, when, in fact, I had eaten them.
He took the beating for me. Two months later, our father threw him out of the house, and Steven hitchhiked to New York City. He hired on with a construction crew in Hoboken and took night classes in criminology at John Jay. By the time I got to New York, Steven had left for Afghanistan to work as a lawyer for the State Department. He traveled to outlying villages, encouraging chieftains to follow one of the pillars of Islam—to support the poor and establish a public defense system. He found the work immensely meaningful, but the living conditions wore him down. He and his coworkers lived in a hotel-turned-bunker, which was blown up by the Taliban a few months after Steven left. When he got back to New York, he went to work with Avaaz, an NGO whose name meant “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages. He felt aligned with their humanitarian mission and programs, from human trafficking to animal rights.