Just Life

by Neil Abramson

  “Time to sip the coffee, Isaac.”

  “Right. By this time Isaac realizes he’s pretty well screwed. Abraham, out of duty to, or his love or fear of, God, ties up his son who he loves more than anything else in the world, and prepares to slit his throat.”

  “Nice,” Beth said.

  “As Abraham lifts his knife to strike the sacrificial blow to kill his only child, God says, ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do anything unto him for now I know that thou believest in me, seeing thou hast not withheld thine only son from me.’ And—drum roll please—a ram appears in the thicket for Abraham to offer as a sacrifice instead of his son. Another happy ending.”

  “Unless you’re the ram,” Beth snorted. “Yeah, I remember it now. In Hebrew school we were taught that God was testing Abraham’s faith.”

  “Or perhaps the other way around. I wonder these days if maybe Abraham was testing God—how far would God let him go with it? Perhaps Abraham was calling God’s bluff.”

  “Still, it’s a crappy thing to do to a kid.”

  “Agreed. Bible stories are like Grimms’ fairy tales when it comes to kids. Bad stuff always happens to them.”

  “So what happened to the window?”

  “Some idiot who apparently felt the same way you do put a rock through it.”

  “Did you catch him?” Beth asked.

  “Oh, I know who did it.”

  “Are you gonna get it repaired?”

  “They wanted me to fix it, but then I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t just break it again, so what was the point?”

  Beth did a double take. “You? Why?”

  “Because…” Gabriel closed his eyes to his truth. Because the premise that a child must be threatened with harm to earn God’s blessing is no longer acceptable to me; because that smug face cannot be the face of my God; because a rejecting and shaming God is a God of men created by men to serve the agendas of men; because I couldn’t find any stained glass window maker who is able to capture the face of the God I want to see—the God of hope, of compassion, of acceptance.

  He couldn’t give voice to any of the real reasons and didn’t want to lie. He put a finger of silence to his lips and rose from the pew.

  Gabriel disappeared behind a vestibule door and returned a few seconds later with a pillow, a sheet, and a blanket. He placed these on the pew next to Beth and dropped a hand onto her shoulder. “The third pew on the left,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “For some reason they made that pew wider than the others. I find I don’t roll off so easy. Your nightmares won’t find you here and mine are otherwise occupied. Get some rest.”

  Beth reached up and covered Gabriel’s hand with her own.

  16

  Andy felt his breath come easier once he crossed the entrance into Central Park. This was always the way it was for him. The air suddenly became less dense, and somehow more satisfying. Time was different too, making each breath longer and deeper.

  The nighttime pedestrians who lingered on the outskirts of the park with their dogs or cigarettes or worries of the day barely noticed him—another kid in a denim jacket with a large, worn backpack, shrouded in shadows. He quickly made it past the convention party construction site, now quiet but ominous in the darkness. The lone overnight security guard stationed in a booth near the fake Lincoln Memorial eyed Andy for a moment, but then returned to his iPhone.

  The deeper into the park Andy traveled, the less noticeable he became. If he ever felt safe, it was here. He couldn’t really explain that—didn’t even want to try, for fear that understanding would cause it to unravel—but it was true. He could walk by the creepies and the preds without causing a glimmer of recognition or interest in their eyes. The only exception was the old black guy with the long coat. He always seemed to notice Andy, but only with a nod or a wave. There was no menace to that man, just presence.

  Fifteen minutes in, Andy passed through a dense ring of Ailanthus altissima, improbably lush despite the tons of city concrete just beyond throwing distance. As Andy approached the rock formation hidden within these trees, he felt the sharp change in temperature. It was usually at least ten degrees cooler near the rock.

  By any rational explanation, the cavern should not have been here. Some days Andy could almost swear that it wasn’t. He would look for the thin crack in the rocks for an hour or more before he would finally find it and slide down into the space below. And if the cavern really was here, then by the sacred rules that govern all things in New York, it should have been vandalized or taken over by squatters or sealed up by the Parks Department as a hazard. Nevertheless, here it was, just as pristine as the first day he’d found it; the only squatters in it were the ones he always prayed he would find.

  Andy took off his backpack, fished out his flashlight, and found the crevice without any trouble this time. He slid in feetfirst, holding the backpack over his head. The tunnel led him downward at a forty-five-degree angle for about fifteen feet and then dumped him into the empty cavern.

  The cavern was tall enough for Andy to stand in, although he could actually touch the stone ceiling if he reached straight up and stood on his toes. The floor of the cavern also was stone, but it was dry and spread out before him for about three hundred feet.

  Andy opened his backpack and heard the first stirrings of movement from the cave opening. He smiled at the sound. They’d probably been smelling him since the park entrance, but they wouldn’t trust odors alone. “C’mon now,” he called into the dark. “I don’t have all night.”

  Andy sat and removed the contents of his backpack—first his violin case, then the cubes and slices of meat carefully wrapped in plastic and foil. The one he called Pacino, a big, brooding female pit bull with a scarred muzzle, came first. She tenderly took a cube of sirloin from Andy’s open hand and then moved off. Penny came next, a copper-colored short-haired mutt of maybe fifteen pounds. Others followed—Onyx, Greybeard, Ginger, Shadow, Gold. They were each gentle with him, as if they recognized him as one of their own, and he had no doubt they would circle to defend him if it ever came to that.

  Andy didn’t know how many strays in total actually lived in the park or how many called the cavern their home. Different dogs showed up on different days. He had named nine of them, but assumed there were probably more who never came forward. He couldn’t blame them given some of the scars he saw.

  In minutes almost all the food was gone. Andy held back a single chunk of meat for the one who always arrived after the others had eaten. A warm current of air touched his cheeks and then she was there—a beautiful mix of husky, golden retriever, and shepherd, with doleful brown eyes and a badly damaged right ear. The ear had been torn or cut off so close to the dog’s head that it was little more than a memory. She came to him and gently took the meat before settling beside Andy with a sigh.

  Andy spent many nights in the cavern under the protection of the one-eared stray. He once had tried to take her out of the park, but that had proven impossible because she had turned into a screaming terror when Andy brought her near the park gate. That was the one and only time he tried. He understood the park was her home; Andy would need to come to her. And he did.

  The one-eared girl had been his first find and she had eventually brought the others to him. These creatures were cautious and almost impossible to find against their will in the huge expanse of the park. To the outside world, they were all but invisible.

  Growing up in the city, Andy had often heard about the legend of the Central Park Pack—that a group of stray dogs had formed a tight-knit unit around a leader and roamed Central Park subsisting on rats, squirrels, and pigeons. The lore was that they would come to the protection of people about to be assaulted or robbed in the park. A few robbery victims swore that this was true, but those reports were always dismissed. No one had ever found conclusive evidence of a park pack, only the rare injured stray or stray sighting. In the way that New Yorkers celebrate the odd, the misunder
stood, and the mysterious, the Central Park Pack had assumed a near-mythical status in the city—somewhere north of natural wildlife and just south of Sasquatch.

  Andy didn’t know if he had found some recent incarnation of the fabled park pack. He just knew that, as stated in the legend, it had saved him.

  When all had eaten, Andy rose with his violin, rosined his bow, and began to play. The music he selected for the cave was always the same—the violin half of the concerto for violin and viola he had started writing but could never finish. Only one other human had heard the piece and Andy had promised himself that no one else ever would. He was afraid that what he had written might be beautiful and he didn’t want to bring a thing of beauty into this world. He played now for only one reason. Even though he could perform only half of the notes, when they bounced back to him from the sides of the cavern, he imagined she was accompanying him. Then Andy’s always-fragile shroud of time and memory parted. With the one-eared dog beside him, he allowed the individual threads of notes to entwine and become strings, and the strings to become rope.

  The rope pulled him backward to Alexa. He was piking.

  Their music had introduced them.

  A special summer program at Juilliard for the college-bound musically gifted… a hot classroom… a pleated skirt… blue eyes narrowed in concentration… her fingers almost as long and agile as his… a shared glance and then a smile.

  It was the warm glow of her tone on the viola and the power of his timbre on the violin during the Mendelssohn that actually brought them together after class one evening. He had nothing except his violin and his scars. She had a family that wanted her to be something unique and specific—Juilliard, Oberlin, summers split between the Hamptons and music studies with the best of Europe.

  The offer of coffee… that surprised first kiss, the clean, sweet taste of her mouth… then the second… the smell of her hair, like sandalwood and fresh-cut grass.

  One night led to seven more. Andy at first assumed it was a mistake or that she would be gone as soon as she understood who he was, but she remained. She asked him questions and he answered without lies.

  Weeks later Alexa took Andy home to her parents’ huge apartment on Central Park West to show him off.

  “Relax,” she tried to convince him. A doorman… clean white walls… oil paintings in the hallway of squiggles and lines… staring at his battered shoes, waiting… judgmental frowns… “Beneath you,” her father sneered.

  They sent the boy away, disliking him instantly for everything he didn’t have. Alexa left with him.

  The two met frequently after that night, but always within the shelter of the park. They weren’t virgins when they met, but for all they came to feel for each other, they might as well have been. There were many secluded places in the park and Andy knew most of them, but they discovered this rock formation and the hidden cavern together. Here, under the beam of a powerful flashlight, they played for each other and soon began composing their own concerto. Their fantasy was that if they could complete the music and perform it for her parents, they could prove their bond was unique and worth protecting.

  He and Alexa had once been inseparable.

  He believed they still were.

  At the middle of the adagio, Andy’s bow clattered to the stone floor. The last echoes of rope thinned to strings, then to threads, and, finally, to the silence of his present. The composition remained incomplete, locked at the exact same measure. Andy had tried to finish it, but that had proven hopeless; even though he could see the entirety of his past, he could no longer envision a single note of his future.

  Andy dropped to the ground, his back against the wall and his knees drawn to his chest. The one-eared dog joined him first, but the others quickly followed. They made a tight circle around him, paws and fur next to skin and hands.

  Eased by the comfort of their touch, Andy soon fell asleep.

  Book II

  Hands

  1

  Sam woke to the sensation of the cold shelter floor pressed against her cheek and the sound of snoring. Although the left side of her body was completely and unpleasantly numb, she didn’t feel her usual morning panic. Instead she inhaled the overwhelming scent of dog as she listened to the wall of heavy breathing and smiled.

  No snickering. No afterimage of sutures sealing unforgivable incisions.

  A dog’s combined senses are about a thousand times more powerful than those of a human. A dog can hear a mouse tunneling under six inches of snow, smell the presence of another dog from a block away, and sense an owner’s return from work minutes before the car appears in the driveway. Sam knew that for most dogs, particularly dogs of abandonment and abuse like her own crew, deep, paw-twitching slumber did not come easy. Trust was always a prerequisite—trust that violence would not visit; that a toy, bone, or blanket would not be stolen while unguarded; that a loved one would not vanish while eyes were closed. So Sam always experienced a little lift when Nick fell asleep in her presence, as if somehow she had been judged and deemed worthy.

  That two dozen sleeping dogs were now following Nick’s example, encircling Sam on the shelter floor, left her feeling both blessed and like a fraud. Very soon she would not be there to stop the violence, or protect the toys, bones, and blankets. Even if Sam could find another shelter to take all the dogs, it would not be her shelter. She would be gone to them and thus proven irredeemably undeserving of the trust these creatures had placed in her. One morning just thirty days from now, these dogs would open their eyes and learn that a loved one had indeed vanished.

  Because Sam suffered from acute anthropomorphism, intense humanity, or a combination of both, she imagined that her dogs would wake that morning and pose silent questions to each other:

  “Why are we here?”

  “What is wrong?”

  “What did we do?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Why are we all alone?”

  Sam heard these voices laden with shame and learned helplessness. They crescendoed in her ears, drowning out the comforting noises of sleep.

  Nick woke and licked Sam’s cheek. She lifted her head off the shelter floor with a groan and pushed herself into a sitting position. She managed to focus on the office clock. It was 6:03. Another fun-filled Friday night, she thought. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you’ll go out and get me a cup of coffee,” she whispered to Nick. The dog stared back, his head at a tilt. “You’re right,” she said. “That was unfair… ten thousand dollars.”

  A few of the dogs began to stir at Sam’s movement. The rest followed and the room soon filled with yawns, “downward dog” stretches, and playful biting. They all would need to go outside to pee before they ate breakfast, and it would be at least another hour before Greg showed up to help.

  Sam led the dogs out the back of the shelter to the fenced-in yard she normally used only when a dog was too weak or sick to get to the park. The space was too small to allow for much play this morning, but it served her intended purpose. She made a mental note to hose it down later.

  Sam was about to let the dogs back into the shelter to begin the breakfast process when she noticed that Blinker and Scrabble were watching her expectantly. Others soon joined them. That was when the truth hit her with a devastating clarity. Somewhere during the daily rituals of feeding, exercise, and elimination, somehow, by filling the interstices with affection, love, and kindness, her shelter dogs had become a pack and Sam not only was a member of this pack, she was their alpha.

  She recalled the silent dogs in her father’s lab and had a ridiculous idea. She raised her head to the sky. She thought of her mother and her mannequin-like appearance in the casket; Charlie and his look of defeat as he closed the door to their apartment for the last time; the panic in Little Bro’s eyes; her father’s cold stare; the little jelly bean canisters on the shelf of her office; the pendant around her neck.

  Sam recalled all of these things,
tilted her head back, and howled.

  Scrabble joined in first, then Blinker, Nick, and Hips. Soon all the dogs were howling with her. Together they created a huge, beautiful, cacophonous mess.

  Sam howled until her voice cracked. When she could howl no longer, the dogs gave her their voice.

  By the time Greg, Luke, and Beth arrived at the shelter, Sam was already on the phone in her office. “Just one second,” she said into the receiver, and grabbed a pen and scrap of paper off her desk. “I got it.” She wrote down the information. “Any phone numbers?… Really?… Yes, it was hard for all of us… Thank you so much, Jonathon… And please give my best to Miriam and the girls… I hope soon… I certainly will tell him… Thanks again.”

  Sam disconnected the call and quickly dialed another number before she lost her nerve entirely.

  Tom answered on the first ring. “Walden.”

  “I have an address,” Sam said. “It will be about a three-hour drive.”

  “Dr. Lewis?”

  “Pick me up outside the shelter. We’ll take your car. The radio in mine is broken and I want to have something to fill the silence.” Sam hung up without waiting for Tom to answer. Then she ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  Beth bumped into her on the way out. “You don’t look so good,” Beth said.

  “Stress,” Sam shot back. “It’s a killer.”

  “You just need to realize that today is the gift that makes tomorrow’s post-traumatic stress possible.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You want to grab a carrot stick or a head of iceberg lettuce for lunch? Maybe score some crack?”

  “Yeah, would love to, but I can’t. Gotta meet someone.”

  “Ah. Early date?”

  “Hardly. I’ve got to go see a man I despise to convince him to help someone I don’t trust.”

  “No one ever said you didn’t know how to throw a fun party.”