by Susan Perabo
Lucy’s eyes widened. “She’s really in the freezer?”
“Yep,” he said.
“Can I see her?”
“No,” he said. “You were right—you should go.” He didn’t want anyone to see the dog. If someone else saw her it would be real, irrefutable, kaput. As long as he was the only witness there was a slim chance it wasn’t true, because he was half out of his mind anyway, so who was to say the dog wasn’t at the kennel, or down at the park with a soggy tennis ball in her mouth, just waiting for someone to wing it across the sky?
At 10:30 he put on his coat and left the house for his nightly dog walk. He nearly carried the leash with him, imagined dragging it limply behind him, but to do so seemed showboat-y pathetic, something a sad sack would do in a silent movie. Every night that Charlie wasn’t staying with him, he and the dog had walked the same walk, left at the end of the driveway, past the neighbors he almost never saw, past the house with the old black Lab who watched from the window but never barked, past the house with a half dozen rusty bicycles in the yard, past the house where Lucy lived with her parents, on down the street to the stop sign, a left turn, and past the house where the young man sat smoking on the porch, past the house with the alarmed beagle, past the house where the windows were always dark, past the house with the Redskins flag fluttering from a pole, past the house where the kids were always screaming. He stopped now and listened to them, their voices genderless, the kids—at least three of them, maybe four—preteens and furious.
He saw his life taking shape before him, falling in line like so many houses down this street, saw Charlie returning home from the Poconos and almost immediately asking for the car keys, then departing for college, then at the altar, then an infant sleeping on his chest. He should have slowed things down somehow, back when he had everything, should have dug his feet into the ground four or five years ago and refused to let the earth spin those seasons away.
The next house was the one with the fat gray cat who always sat on a chair on the porch, who raised its head when he passed with the dog and then, seeing nothing of interest, set it down again upon its paws. Simon had never seen another soul on the porch, never seen anyone petting the cat, though it was fat and well groomed and obviously lived in this house. Who were these people? he wondered. Were their lives so full they couldn’t take five lousy minutes out of the evening to spend with their cat?
He stopped in front of the house. It was cold, and he could see tiny cat breaths billowing from the cat’s mouth. He glanced up and down the street and saw no one. Quickly he climbed the six steps to the porch and scooped the cat, mid-billow, into his arms. He cleared all six stairs in a leap, stumbled two steps on the sidewalk, then dashed down the street and around the corner, already fumbling for his keys with his free hand. When he reached his house he opened the door and then quickly shut it behind him. Still holding the cat, he pressed his eye to the peephole. The street was vacant. No one had seen him. Breathing heavily, he stepped away from the door and gently set the cat on the floor. The cat flopped lazily onto its side, licked the bottom of its paw, then looked up at him with almost no interest whatsoever.
He knelt down and stroked the cat, and the cat raised its back into his head and flicked his tail. It didn’t seem concerned at all to be in a new place. Simon had never had a cat, but he knew what people said about them, that they were aloof and superior and had few loyalties. It had probably already forgotten its old home, Simon thought; the memory of the rotten family who’d kept it outside day and night was at this moment swiftly evaporating within its miniature brain. But then the cat stood up and walked over to the door and batted its paw in the direction of the doorknob.
“Mrow,” the cat said.
“No, no, no,” Simon said, shaking his head. He picked up the cat and turned it so they were face to face. “This is your home now. On Saturday Charlie’ll be here. He and I’ll take good care of you. We won’t leave you sitting in the cold all night long.”
He carried the cat into the bedroom and set him on the end of the bed. The cat again flopped onto its side and unenthusiastically licked its paws while Simon changed into his pajamas and then stepped into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When he came out the cat was gone. He found it back in the front hall, lifting its paw and talking to the door.
“Mrow,” it said.
“No, no, no,” Simon said. He picked up the cat again. “Listen,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll get you some canned food. Top of the line, okay? The one on TV where the cat eats out of the crystal bowl. And I’ll get you a litter box and a new collar and some little mouse toys. Okay? Okay?”
He carried the cat into the bedroom and laid down on the bed with the cat resting on his stomach. He stroked the cat and the cat was content, for a minute or two, and then as Simon was drifting off he heard the thump of its feet on the floor.
“Fine,” he said, swinging out of bed, suddenly wide-awake and furious. “If that’s the way you want it.”
He stomped out to the front hall and yanked opened the door. The cat walked outside and flopped down on the front walk. It hadn’t wanted to leave, Simon realized. It had just wanted to go outside. Simon looked at the clock. It was a little after midnight, a few minutes into Thursday. He couldn’t wait until Sunday to bury the dog. Rachel was right: he was losing his mind. She hadn’t said it in so many words, but it was surely what she’d been thinking standing there with her one paltry bar, and she was right. He had a frozen dog in his basement and he’d just stolen a cat off somebody’s porch, which was probably a felony. Who knew what he’d do next?
He was going to have to bury the dog, and he was going to have to do it now.
It had been easy, getting her down the stairs and into the freezer, because she’d still been warm and pliable and had relaxed into his cradled arms as if she were a sleeping child. But now she was cold and hard and he understood the term “deadweight.” At first he tried balancing her across his arms, but she kept slipping off to one side, so then he tried putting her over his shoulder, but she slid off and made a sickening cracking noise when she hit the basement floor, so he decided he’d have to drag her up the stairs. He tried to do it gently, pulled her backward by the shoulders. When he reached the kitchen he picked her up around the middle, pretending she was a statue instead of a real dog, and pushed out the back door into the yard. He lay her under the maple tree, the place he and Charlie had chosen for the grave, and then went to the garage to find the shovel.
But of course there was no shovel. The shovel he had so clearly pictured hanging on a peg in the garage was actually hanging on a peg in another garage, three miles away, in a home that was no longer his. So she’d taken his shovel, too. Yes, it was true, he’d told her he didn’t want it, couldn’t remember ever using it, but she’d been awfully quick to accept the shovel . . . and the spade, and the hedge clippers, and the weed whacker, and all those other gleaming things they’d bought at Home Depot but never used. He poked around the garage and found some of Charlie’s old sand toys. It was worth a try, he thought.
He went back out to the yard and got down on his knees on the cold ground, stabbed at it with a blue plastic shovel, which immediately snapped in two and sliced his hand open as it broke. He swore, pressed the wound to his pajama pants, then grabbed a bright-yellow, claw-like implement, which managed three decent scratches in the dirt before it, too, snapped in his grasp. He went through another half dozen toys and, by the time they all lay scattered and broken around him, had made a shallow trench possibly just large enough to bury a goldfish.
He went back into the house, muddied and spattered with his own blood, to find something else to dig with. In the kitchen he seized upon a trio of possibilities from the items he’d won from the marriage: a spatula, a meat fork, and an ice cream scoop.
He returned to the shallow trench. It was cold out, but in minutes he’d worked up a sweat and he peeled his shirt off so that he was wearing only his pajama pants and his slippers, whic
h were quickly becoming caked with dirt. The spatula was useless for anything but scraping, but the combination of the meat fork and the ice cream scoop showed promise. He could loosen the soil by stabbing with the meat fork, then shovel it out with the ice cream scoop. He paused for a minute to wipe sweat from his eyes and saw that the cat had come around the corner of the house and was standing at the edge of the patio watching, looking from person to dog and back again, trying, Simon imagined, to decide if either of them (scoop-handed man, lying-down dog) posed any kind of threat.
He went back to work, digging with both the scoop and his bare hand. He guessed he’d made about enough progress to bury a guinea pig. At this rate it would take him until morning to dig the grave, and the dog was de-frosting by the minute. When the sun came up, things would likely get ugly in a hurry.
A wave of light burst across the yard.
“Everything okay here?”
Simon stood and turned and blinked into the blinding light. He could make out the dim outline of a figure behind it. It was a cop, he thought. Of course, a neighbor had seen him out here, digging like a maniac, blood on his shirt, and called 911. Simon couldn’t see much in the glare, but for all he knew there was a gun leveled at him, the safety unlocked, the trigger fingered. For all he knew, one move and he was dead, fallen beside his thawing dog. Fitting, yes, that it would come to this, that Rachel would get another call on her failing phone, this one to inform her that he himself was dead, was lying in a freezer that was not a Frigidaire Elite. But then, as the possibility of this last drama was at its ripest, he imagined Charlie without a father and without a dog. The drama deflated before his eyes. There was, finally, a limit to the damage you could inflict on a person all at once.
“It’s Ted Oliver, from down the street,” the voice behind the flashlight said. “Lucy’s dad. Are you all right?”
“My dog died,” Simon said.
“That’s what she told me. I was bringing the trash around and heard you down here. Thought I’d come see what you were up to.”
The beam of light dipped to the ground around his feet, where Charlie’s sand toys and the muddy utensils lay.
“You’re digging with a fork?” Ted Oliver asked.
“I don’t have a shovel,” Simon said. “My ex-wife got it.”
Now Ted clicked off the light and crossed the yard to the tree. He was a thin man with round glasses and a neatly trimmed beard.
“I’ve got one of those,” he said.
“A shovel?”
“No. Well, yes, that too.” He smiled and adjusted his glasses. “An ex-wife was what I meant. Lucy’s mother. Left in the middle of the night when Lucy was three years old. Took the car and the credit card, didn’t even leave a note. She was screwed six ways to Sunday but I missed her so much it nearly killed me.” Now he nodded to the dog. “Old age?”
“Cancer,” Simon said.
“Want some help?” Ted asked. “I’ll grab that shovel. I suspect we could make quick work of it together.”
Simon considered. “Okay,” he said finally. “I mean, if you want.”
“Nobody wants to bury a dog,” Ted said. He knelt down beside her and lay his hand gently on her head. “She seemed like a good one,” he said. “I’d see you walking. She matched you stride for stride.”
Simon looked at the dog. Her fur was wet now, slick like after a bath. She looked like herself again, and he was sorry he’d kept her down there so long, becoming all the things she wasn’t—cold and hard, freakish, a memory of another life, a bad joke. She was just a dog, a friendly brown dog, whom he’d untied from a post in the middle of the night and taken in, and loved.
INDULGENCE
My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking. She had dodged the bullet of lung cancer after all, she triumphantly announced to me on the phone that summer afternoon. All those years my brothers and I had hassled her, lectured her, begged her, berated her (“Don’t you want to see your grandchildren graduate from college?”)—and for what? Her lungs were fine! She’d finally quit two years before, after a bitter and tumultuous relationship with patches and gum and hypnosis and electric cigarettes, but look! There’d been no need! The long-dreaded cancer had found some other place to roost.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked her. “Throw a party?” I was trembling from the inside out—my mother was dying—and furious at her for reporting her diagnosis so flippantly, as if I, too, would be so thoroughly amused by the irony that the news would just roll right off me. I looked out the kitchen window and saw my children in the backyard, their half-naked bodies slick from the sprinkler, their hair nearly sparkling in the sunlight. It was a suffocating Midwestern Saturday smack in the middle of July. My son was rolling up my daughter in a badminton net.
“I would love a party!” she said. “Just the two of us. Leave Kevin with the kids, and we’ll send your father away and indulge for a few days. Can you?”
“I don’t know if I can think of it as a party,” I said.
“You can,” she said. “For me, you can. I’m like one of those dying children who gets to make a last wish. What are they called?”
“Dying children,” I said.
“See?” she said. “You are ready for a party. Can you come?”
I could. I did. I went the next day. Not quite the next day. Arrangements had to be made: work, children, husband—the full catastrophe, as Anthony Quinn famously said in my father’s famously favorite movie. I went the next weekend. I got off the plane on a Friday morning with four cartons of cigarettes in my carry-on: two Carltons, her old brand, and two Winston Lights, the brand I had appropriated from my oldest brother when I was a sixteen-year-old cripple.
“Oh, honey,” she said breathlessly, when I opened my carry-on to reveal the precious cargo. “Oh, honey. Really?” She had to set her hand on a chair back to steady herself, and she wasn’t being funny or dramatic. The last time she’d looked at me that way was the first time she saw me pregnant.
“The cigarettes are innocent,” I said. “We must celebrate the cigarettes.”
My father knew when he wasn’t wanted. He hugged me in the driveway and went to visit my nearest brother for the weekend. My father had never been a smoker. He had no dog in this race. He was just a regular guy, a skinny engineer who could kick your ass at Ping-Pong and whose wife was dying of brain cancer. Six to eight months, the oncologist had told them, time enough for her to have a few days alone with her only daughter.
“You look great,” I said, after I’d dumped my stuff in my old bedroom and come out to the living room. I wasn’t lying; she didn’t look like a person suffering from anything. She was a tallish woman with still exquisite posture. Her black hair had never grayed and now never would. She wore solid-colored cardigan sweaters nearly every day, even in the summer, because air-conditioning always made the hair on her arms stand up. She looked essentially the same as she had the last time I’d seen her, when they’d come west at Christmastime and shared my son’s bunk bed, my father on the top bunk because my mother “didn’t like heights.” (“It’s not really a height, Nana,” my son had told her, and they’d laughed about it all week.)
“I feel fine,” she said. “If they hadn’t told me I was dying, I’d never know it.”
She’d already broken into a carton of Carltons, in exactly the way a dog would break into a package of bacon thoughtlessly left on a coffee table. Pieces of the box were strewn across the room. Now she flicked the lighter and took a drag so deep that I thought the smoke might seep from the tips of her shoes. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god, Christine, thank you.”
I sat down on the couch and opened my own carton, removed a pack. I remembered once, on a Christmas Eve many years before, my father had left the festivities to buy my mother two cartons of cigarettes, and when he got home he commented on the irony that the cigarettes were more expensive than any of the Christmas presents he’d gotten her. And more beloved, we’d all though
t, though no one said it.
“Are you in pain?” I asked her.
“Very little,” she said. She ashed her cigarette. Ashtrays had already sprung up all over the living room; apparently when they’d been removed, they hadn’t gone far. “Even less right now.”
I smacked my pack of cigarettes on my open hand until my palm stung, then undressed the cellophane and—with a quick strike to the index finger—knocked the first cigarette loose. I withdrew it gently from the pack and slowly ran it under my nose. It had been a dozen years since I’d had a cigarette—I’d smoked through grad school, simultaneously earning a master’s in architecture and a thin, musical wheeze—and twenty years since that wonderful winter and spring I’d spent chain smoking with my mother. The tobacco was sweet and made my nostrils tingle.
“First this,” my mother said, sitting down across from me and pushing a stack of papers across the coffee table.
“What is it?”
“For pulling the plug,” she said. “I don’t think your father has the stomach for it. And your wishy-washy brothers won’t—”
“I just got here,” I said. “I haven’t even taken my shoes off.”
“I’m getting my affairs in order,” she said. “Haven’t you seen any movies about people dying? The plot demands it.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “But only because the plot demands it.” I signed the paper as the X instructed. It occurred to me after I set the pen down that I should have actually read the document. It could have demanded anything. I could have just agreed to give her my own brain. I could have agreed to sprinkle her ashes on my cereal. But I was anxious to get to my cigarette.
“No extreme measures,” she said. “When you think I’m gone, pfffft”—the cigarette like a blade across her neck—“I’m gone.”
I rubbed my thumb on the lighter before igniting it. “If you just drift off on the couch—?”
“When you think I’m gone,” she said, “I’m gone.”