The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Finally, Leah heard footsteps approaching. It was the woman cop who had questioned her. She was gruff and unkind and disgusted with Leah. “I’d like to know why the hell you did that,” she said. “You had me convinced. You really did.”

  Leah shook her head. “I hate people,” Leah said. But she’d already said that, and it didn’t seem entirely true. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m stupid.”

  “You are,” the cop said. “Stupid.”

  She left Leah alone again. At some point she fell asleep, and woke when her cell door opened and a cop took her to her father. Franklin was in his white shirt and suit pants, and seemed diminished without his jacket and tie. His face did not greet her. It told her nothing. When she embraced him, he did not receive her for a few terrible moments. And then she felt his arms lift and hold her.

  That night Leah and her father said very little. They sat down at the kitchen table without Noelle present. She was down the hall in the TV room, keeping a low profile so that Franklin could, Leah imagined, discipline his delinquent daughter. “I have two things to tell you,” Franklin said. “I called Max. I apologized for you. He doesn’t want to see you. He doesn’t want you near his house. He doesn’t want you near the lab.” Franklin paused and Leah nodded. “The other thing is this: I can’t forgive you quite yet. I don’t understand you, Leah. I’d even say I’m afraid of you. I don’t know when I’ll be able to forgive you. I just know I can’t tell you that it’s all right. It’s not all right. It won’t be all right for some time.”

  Leah nodded again and Franklin stood up and left her at the table.

  6

  That season ended with rain. Day after day of rain, preceded and followed by a mist that rose in sheets from the grass and trees and left the sky white and featureless. At times, thunder would accompany the storms, and black weather rolled across the lush flatness. But mostly the rain was a quiet, constant drizzle, and the days were blank and colorless. Leah stayed inside and waited, for what she wasn’t sure. Perhaps for the weather to pass. Perhaps for her final year of high school to commence and for what seemed an endless stampede of stupid classes, inane teachers, and even more inane classmates to end forever so that finally—thank God—something else could begin. College. University. Without anticipating it, Leah felt something like optimism: She entertained the thought that these future four years might be better than the years before. How could they possibly be worse?

  As she waited, as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, as she read one silly paperback mystery after another, as she walked down the hallway to piss, as she napped and woke in the middle of another white rainy day, she felt it distinctly. A weight in her chest that needed to be relieved. She wasn’t exactly sorry. It was more than that, since she knew apologies would fix nothing. It was remorse. And the demands of remorse, she was now discovering, were nearly as impossible as those of grief. She wanted simply to undo what she had done. She saw her father bent over in the front seat of his car and willed him to sit upright, willed his sobs, his fear, and shock to be undone. All of it needed to be erased in a series of simple reverse gestures. She saw Max looking up at the cops in his office, his face blue from the glow of the computer screen and all his scientific intensity, his passion for knowledge arrested by fear and humiliation. And again she willed the cops to return from Max’s office, walk backwards toe to heel down the hallway, up the stairs, and out the lab until their car doors had closed them off from what they’d long ago done, until their patrol car drove off in a backwards enactment of all that had happened, of which every event, every action, even the smallest of them, Leah saw now, was done and would not be undone.

  The demands of remorse were impossible. Nonetheless, Leah gained some relief when she stood before the district juvenile court, which was no more than a small office with two chairs, one for Leah and one for Franklin, facing the judge’s desk. “Have you gained any insights into your actions, and do you wish to share them with the court?” The judge was a thin, middle-aged woman with elegantly graying hair, a judge’s hammer and gavel at one end of her desk and a fancy aluminum travel mug at the other. She wore a black gown, though a fringe of white blouse showed at the garment’s loose neckline. Leah recognized this woman. She’d seen her going in and out of the shops at Kerrytown, seen her in the cafés on Main Street. It seemed that Ann Arbor was so small that a criminal could not escape her accusers. No doubt this woman, the Honorable Mary Shreve, recognized her, too, and this fact put Leah to shame. “I’m not sure,” Leah said. But when she saw the judge’s face respond with disapproval, Leah was afraid and began to speak of her mother’s death, of her changing home situation, and again of her ignorance. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I do now. I wish I’d never done it.”

  “You’re sorry, then?” the judge asked.

  “I am,” Leah said, and she was relieved to say so, especially knowing that Franklin, who sat stiffly beside her, had heard those words.

  Leah was charged with making false accusations, with intentionally deceiving an officer of the law. As a first-time juvenile offender, she was sentenced to eight hundred hours of community service at a nearby homeless shelter, an assignment she had chosen because she had wanted to work with lots of people. She was tired of being alone, and whenever she walked by the shelter there were hordes of homeless loitering outside or lining up for a meal. Giving to others for something that she’d taken away. It seemed too simple, too cliché to work, but perhaps it would. Perhaps it would reform her.

  Leah did not like Noelle any more than she ever had. She wished it were otherwise. She wished she could see in her some of what her father did. And when Franklin announced to Leah that they planned to marry in the fall, she acted jubilant. She hugged him. She lied and told him she was happy. She waited until she could lock her bedroom door behind her to cry, to beat her pillows with fists, to act like the brat she still was on occasion.

  Twice she tried to see Max. One afternoon she waited outside the lab, standing across the street so as to abide, technically, by her promise to Franklin not to go near, or at least too near, her former workplace. But when Max exited, he saw her waiting and retreated into the building. For several days, she wandered into Max’s neighborhood. When she saw him on a Saturday morning pushing what appeared to be a new gasoline mower, she stood across from his yellow house and waved. He refused to acknowledge her as he cut the grass in neat rows. She said it anyway. She shouted it over the roar of the mower. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She yelled the words repeatedly until she was sure he had heard them. And when he still did not acknowledge her, she walked away.

  He hated her. He hated and feared her, and the injury she had done him was irreparable.

  Finally, almost a month after her trial and sentencing, she confessed to Franklin. She told him she’d broken into Noelle’s houses. She’d tried to sabotage Noelle. She’d committed minor acts of vandalism. Once again she saw her father close his eyes and put his head down. “If you chase her away from me now,” he said, “if you take her out of my life…”

  Because Leah could not hear what he might have said next, she interrupted him. “I’m done. I finished with that weeks ago. Never again.”

  “Okay,” Franklin said. “We’re not going to tell her. I want you to promise me that you won’t tell her.”

  Leah promised, though part of her was tempted to do otherwise. Part of her still wanted to hurt Noelle. And in the wake of this impulse, Leah realized she had something else to confess. “I no longer cry over her. Mom, I mean. I can’t even picture her that well. I guess she’s been gone too long. I can’t hear her voice. Not exactly. Not the way it was. I can’t hear the way she used to laugh. Thinking about her dead, gone, used to be unbearable. Now I don’t think about it so much. And when I do, I can make myself think about something else.” Leah shook her head. “I actually forgot her birthday a few weeks ago. We were supposed to do something, remember?” Franklin nodded. “But I forgot. I let it go. It
feels wrong. It feels like she’s getting farther and farther away.”

  Franklin nodded. “I know,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

  In the last week of summer, Leah discovered that she wanted less than ever to be alone. Though she still shied away from the dinner table, she ate with Franklin and Noelle a few times a week. And to guard against loneliness, she got to know Jason Clark, the only person who would still be her friend. In truth, he wanted more than friendship. He wanted to get laid while Leah wanted to hear about the lab—the dogs, the sheep, and Max. “Max is Max, you know,” Jason Clark said when Leah asked repeatedly how he was. Jason wasn’t nearly as bad as Leah had assumed. She kind of liked him. They made out sometimes and she was surprised by his adeptness, his tender, fine kisses. Jason talked about the books he was reading, most recently a history of salt. “The staff of life,” he said. “It was the currency, the most precious substance in the ancient world. They traded slaves, tracts of land for a few pounds of it.” He loved facts. He thought they meant something, and Leah was both amazed and bored by his hoarding and reciting of them. She made him listen to jazz. She struggled through a few Mozart études on her clarinet for him. “Cool,” he said. But he wanted more than jazz and kisses, and sometimes, when they were making out, she had to push his hand away from her breasts. “You’re in love with Max,” he said once, discouraged. “You’re stuck on him.”

  Leah shrugged. “Maybe so.” But she told him it was kissing or nothing, and she was glad when Jason decided that he would settle for kissing.

  Franklin and Noelle were married in the backyard of Leah’s childhood home on a sunny afternoon in late September. Noelle chose a dress for Leah to wear, and though she didn’t care for the Victorian sleeves and its particular shade of pink, she wore it. When she cried at the end of the service, Leah did so quietly and with a smile, so that the small group of attending friends might think she was happy. And maybe she was. Just slightly happy, if not about the marriage, then about her departed grief, about her remorse, which was going to be, in the end, bearable, about the simple fact that she regretted having hurt people, and no longer wanted to do so.

  And yet, she was still uncertain, still puzzled, still frustrated by how little she knew. A few days before the wedding, Leah dreamt of Ten Bucks in his cage, wagging his tail. That desk was there, behind her. “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head” was playing, and Leah had wanted to change the channel, but she couldn’t find the radio. Slabs of flesh lay in the industrial sink. The stink of chemicals was in the air. But there was Ten Bucks in his cage. And while the other dogs yipped and leapt all around him, he remained calm and focused on her. He sat when Leah commanded it. Then he lay down. How real he seemed. He’d been restored to her. Her good dog. This time, she knew, she wouldn’t have to lead him down the hall. She knew, too, that anything could be restored: the lab, Max, her father. And she’d been so satisfied, so happy. Nothing seemed doubtful or small about that happiness. And then that dog rolled over. She hadn’t even asked him to. “You can’t do that,” Leah told him. She woke up, angry, still feeling the authenticity and nearness of Ten Bucks, as if he had just sat at her bedside, just looked at her with that open, needy gaze, just nibbled at her fingers.

  A SMALL MATTER

  When Martin and Nancy took a weekend trip in late March to Florence, escaping their home in Basel, Switzerland, they hoped to reintroduce some romance and excitement into their marriage of three years. Not that their lives together were unsuccessful. Martin and Nancy both had high-paying jobs at a large American pharmaceutical company and were living the lives of well-heeled expatriates. They had friends from Turkey, France, Germany, Latin America, and of course Switzerland. They were gradually mastering German and even beginning to understand the funny dialect the Swiss spoke. Martin could now politely request anything he wanted. Ich möchte die Butter, bitte. Ich möchte das Brot, bitte. Ich hätte gern ein Schinkensandwich, bitte. Bread, butter, sandwiches. Situations hardly ever arose in which he could not express his wants and needs. All the same, a certain compulsion had gone out of Martin and Nancy’s sex life, and they would have liked some of that back.

  Their Swiss friends, Beat and Nina, recommended Italy. “When we go to Florence, I always fall in love with Beat again,” Nina had said. Nina was in the last stages of pregnancy. Her ankles were fat and red, and her upper body had taken on a slow and bulky eminence. But she claimed to enjoy pregnancy. “I feel powerful,” she said. “I like being this size for now. People notice you. They get out of your way.” Nancy was always touching Nina’s large stomach, and Nina had once invited Martin to touch it. “Go on,” Nancy had said when he hesitated. She had even taken him by the wrist and placed his hand on Nina, right where she had lifted her maternity blouse. He was shocked to find that Nina’s stomach was leathery and as tight as a drum. He had always imagined that pregnant women would be soft. But in fact Nina was sturdy, durable. “God,” Martin said when he felt the baby move, “it’s alive.” The women laughed at him, and he began to laugh at himself, too. “Of course it is,” he said. But he could not deny that the miracle of Nina’s baby had startled him. The movement inside her—the life—had been bony and sudden and unexpected.

  Martin and Nancy were thinking of beginning their own family soon. They had achieved success in their professions and were now ready to focus their energy elsewhere. Martin was a widely published research chemist, and Nancy, a translator of medical texts, often marveled at how oblivious to his own accomplishments Martin remained. “You’re only thirty,” she said. “People in your field look to you as some sort of chemistry god, and you don’t seem to care. You seem bored.”

  “I’m not bored,” Martin told her.

  “I admire you for it. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Thank you,” Martin said.

  “Don’t thank me, Martin. It’s not a favor. You’re always thanking me for things that aren’t about gratitude.”

  Nancy was at times so forthright that Martin hardly knew what to say. In fact, on their early dates, Martin had often been tongue-tied. Nancy was slim, with small breasts and long, unruly hair she often wore up in a tempestuous ball. Martin had never imagined he would end up with such an attractive woman and occasionally he wondered what she saw in him.

  They made the decision to go to Florence on a whim the Thursday night before their departure. Nancy had just turned away from Martin’s reading lamp, pulled the covers over her, and seemed about to fall asleep when she sat up and proposed the weekend escape. Martin had been proofing an article of his that would soon be published—checking the spelling and keeping his eyes out for misplaced commas—when she said, “For once I want us just to do something. Spontaneity, you know.”

  “Spontaneity,” Martin repeated. “We have to work tomorrow.”

  “We can call in sick.”

  “I would feel wrong about that,” Martin said. Martin was terrible at deception. It made him feel uncomfortable and guilty.

  “I’ll do it for you,” Nancy said. “I’ll call tomorrow and tell them my husband, the famous chemist, came down with a twenty-four-hour bug. Then we get on the morning train and go, just like that. We’ll be back by Monday. Okay?”

  Martin put his manuscript down and looked at the wall in front of him. He meant to be considering it—the options, the pros and cons, this and that side of the issue—but instead he drew a blank, a void of will and impulse, so that when he finally said, “OK,” it did not seem like a decision at all.

  “OK,” Nancy said.

  On the train they sat with a nun and her two Latin pupils, who conjugated a few basic verbs of that ancient language—to love and to make war and to conquer. The boys were dressed in dark, formal clothing, their hair neatly combed and pomaded. They had for the most part mastered these verbs, and Martin felt a sense of triumph for them. He had also been schooled in parochial institutions, where Latin had tormented him. He had failed at it miserably, and his own Latin teacher, a chalky and withere
d Sister who wore eyeglasses of a plasmalike thickness, had often made him stand before the class and demonstrate his incompetence. The language of politics and passion, she had called it. He could not speak that language. Nor could he afford public displays of incompetence in high school, where he was not particularly well liked. His one talent—this was before he discovered his passion for the sciences—was his mediocre ability to play the trumpet, an instrument he carried daily to school in a square box. Others in his high school had not carried around the one thing they could do, a clunky accessory in a box. It made him feel morbid, as if he were hauling around a small death, a bit of his own cold self, while his peers were simply capable in and of themselves. They were handsome or athletic or charming or all these things.

  “Excuse me,” Nancy said. Martin looked up from his book and saw that his wife was addressing the sixth passenger in their compartment, an Italian businessman who had just lit a cigarette.

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “This is a nonsmoking compartment,” Nancy said.

  “Please,” he said in quite good English. “I will be done in a moment.” He smiled pleasantly at Nancy and tapped some ash into a handheld ashtray. His teeth were large and his left upper canine was solid, yellow gold. His thick rings, bulky wristwatch, and copper bracelet gave his hands a heavy, substantial presence. The smoke came from his mouth in flutes and slowly settled in the air above them. It was perfumed, rich, nauseating smoke. European smoke, Martin imagined. The man held the cigarette elegantly, pinched between his massive fingers.

  Nancy pointed to the symbols on the compartment walls. “This is a nonsmoking compartment, sir.”

  “I will be done in a moment,” he said.

  The nun turned to him and spoke a rapid sentence of Italian, to which he did not respond. “Americans,” he said, “are so sensitive about a little smoke, no?”