by Neil Plakcy
Though most of the holiday snow had melted, there were still piles of it around the edges of the drugstore parking lot, and I walked carefully across the pavement, wary of ice. Once inside, I loosened my scarf and put my gloves in my pocket, and headed for the catch-all aisle, where locals who didn’t feel like heading out to the superstores along the highway could buy everything from ice scrapers to drain cleaner. I found a good-sized roll of tape and headed for the register.
I stopped short at the vitamin aisle. Did they really sell potassium in drugstores? In what form? I meandered down the aisle until I realized the supplements and vitamins were all in alphabetical order, then pushed past dietary fiber, goldenseal, and neroli oil, until I reached the Ps.
There were four different brands of potassium supplements, on its own or mixed with calcium and magnesium. I picked up a bottle of potassium and looked at the label. It contained 99 mg of potassium, “from potassium citrate and potassium aspartate.”
Was that the same as what had been in the vials stolen from Dr. Horz’s office? I made a note of those names, paid for my duct tape, and drove home. I opened my laptop and went to the student’s best friend, Wikipedia, where I learned that potassium citrate was a potassium salt of citric acid. Not helpful, since the last time I’d taken chemistry was back in high school. I did understand that it was used to control kidney stones.
Since Wikipedia had no entry for potassium aspartate, I had to look farther for a definition. It was a nutritional supplement that combined potassium with another salt compound, aspartate, which helped the body absorb the potassium more effectively.
None of that made much sense to me, so I pushed it aside and focused on what I did understand: that when you don’t pay attention to dogs, they get into mischief.
Lili was upstairs in the office doing some research on homelessness so I stayed downstairs, reading and playing with the dogs. She joined me in walking them that evening. “There’s stuff for salad in the fridge,” she said. “And a couple of TV dinners.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I have the dogs to keep me out of trouble.”
I bypassed both the options Lili had mentioned and boiled up a big pot of elbow macaroni, topping it with butter and grated parmesan cheese. My mother had gone back to work soon after I was born, and hired a live-in housekeeper to take care of me and do the housework. Roxie lived with us for about ten years, and when I was sick and had to stay home from school, she made me elbow macaroni that way, though back then the only way we bought grated cheese was from one of those green cans that didn’t need refrigeration.
Now I bought artisan pasta, organic butter and shaved Parmesan that came in plastic tubs with an artist’s rendering of an Italian farm on the label, but the end result was the same: comfort food. Since I had time to kill while I waited for the pasta to boil, I pulled a box cake mix, left over from my bachelor days, from the cabinet. I added eggs, oil, water and some vanilla extract, and popped it in the oven before I sat down to eat.
By the time I’d eaten and fed the dogs, the cake was done, and I set it on the counter to cool – far back to keep away from inquisitive canine noses and tongues. I played fetch with the dogs until the cake cooled, then iced it with a can of chocolate frosting. Both dogs were desperate to join me in licking the spoon and bowl, but I had to shoo them away.
By nine o’clock, I started to worry about Lili. A lot of the country roads around Stewart’s Crossing ice up at night, and I kept imagining her, slightly tipsy after a dinner lubricated by alcohol, sliding out of control on a bad patch of road. I thought about calling her cell, but I didn’t want to seem like I was checking up on her, and if she was on her way home, that momentary distraction could be enough to send her careening off the road.
I wasn’t jealous; I knew deep down there was no way that Lili had scooted off to some no-tell motel with Van Dryver. And I knew that Lili was a strong, capable woman who could take care of herself. So what was I worried about?
Opening my heart and my life to Lili had been a big leap forward for me. Mary had served me with divorce papers as soon as I was arrested, and it hurt not to have her stand by me during my trial. After all, what I’d done had been for her as well as for myself.
I comforted myself at the time by calling her a bitch and a variety of less printable names. After a while, I admitted that our marriage was on the rocks anyway, and would have ended sooner or later. But the experience had scarred me more deeply than I knew at the time.
In prison I closed in on myself like a turtle, hiding in my shell and protecting my tenderest parts. When Rochester came into my life, he forced me to care for someone else, and he returned my attention with love.
In turn, that emotional unfurling allowed me to open up further, to Lili. I was scared of losing her or Rochester. When I paced around the living room, the dogs sensed my agitation and followed me, getting underfoot. To calm them down, I had to sit on the floor rubbing bellies and scratching ears and telling them what good boys they were.
The dogs raised a huge ruckus when Lili’s car pulled up in the driveway, and I had to stand by the front door and body block them from lunging at her as she walked in. I kissed her hello; her cheeks were cold, as if she’d been driving with the windows open.
“How was your dinner?” I asked as I helped her off with her coat.
“The food was great,” she said. “We went to Le Canal in New Hope. I remembered why I liked that place so much. We should go again, soon.”
I couldn’t help myself. “And what about the company?”
“Van was as self-involved as ever,” she said. “Every time I asked him a question, he’d say he was protecting his sources or something equally pompous. I realized that the only reason he invited me was to grill me about living down here. Were there a lot of properties for sale? Did I know anyone who was underwater on a mortgage? Anyone who’d gone through foreclosure? I felt like I was back in graduate school, being badgered by a cranky professor.”
“The way our students probably feel.”
“Speak for your students,” she said. “Mine love me. Five stars on Rate My Professor.”
“They think you’re hot, too,” I said. “I’ve looked.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“You get five stars from me, too,” I said. I kissed her again, and then we went upstairs to bed and I demonstrated exactly what those stars meant.
15 – Goat in the House
Sunday morning, I left Lili in bed, and fed and walked the dogs. In the snow it was very evident where dogs had passed. When the grass was green, especially when it was overgrown, the poop and the pee could be hidden. But against a blanket of white it was clear that a dog had mushy poop, another had urine a bright yellow. The visibility of the poop in winter was kind of like the way an ex-con like Felix or I could keep our backgrounds private, but periodically something happened so that everyone could see where we’d been and what we’d done.
I returned to the kitchen with the newspaper, in a thoughtful mood. I nibbled on a slice of the cake I’d baked the night before and flipped through the pages.
Disasters far and wide filled the pages of the international section – an avalanche in the mountain west, a capsized ferry boat in Asia, a rebel group in Africa shooting up a village. I was grateful to be warm in my own house, well-fed, and surrounded by the love of a good woman and a good dog.
I reached down to pet Rochester, who was sprawled at my feet. I would have petted Brody, too, but he was a few feet away, snoring on the kitchen tile, and I didn’t want to disturb him.
I wasn’t quite old enough to begin the paper with the obituaries, but I did get to them eventually. That morning one name stuck out: Malavath Divaram. It took me a moment to remember she was the East Indian woman I’d met on my second visit to Crossing Manor. Her obit was brief; she had died suddenly the day before, survived by son Adeep, of Sunnyvale, CA, and two grandchildren.
I tried to remember what was wrong with her, if
I’d even known. She had seemed very alert when we met, and her only complaint was that her son had warehoused her a continent away, preventing her from seeing him or her grandchildren. But I assumed she had some underlying health problem – cancer, a bad heart, liver or kidney dysfunction, that kept her at Crossing Manor, and eventually had taken her life. Or could it have been a heart attack – one caused by an overdose of potassium?
Lili came down soon after, and the dogs jumped up to greet her. “Yes, you’re going home today!” she said to Brody as she scratched behind his ears. “You’ll be happy, and so will we.”
I got up to get her a muffin and make some coffee, and she petted Rochester on her way to the table. “You’re not reading the obituaries, are you?” she asked me. “That’s morbid.”
“Rochester and I met Mrs. Divaram when we went back to Crossing Manor, after Edith went home,” I said. “He liked her.”
I handed her the muffin on a yellow Fiestaware china plate, another of the things she’d brought to the house. “I remember her saying that her son lived far away,” I continued. “She felt abandoned.”
“Families spread out,” Lili said. “Look at my brother and me. We haven’t lived in the same time zone for years.”
“Even so, it’s sad. She’s the third person we’ve met from Crossing Manor to die. That’s sounding very suspicious to me.”
“Maybe Rochester really is a death dog, the way Rick says,” Lili said. “Keep taking him there, you could clear out the place.”
“That’s not what Rick meant and you know it,” I said, but I smiled.
“Seriously, Steve. The people who are at Crossing Manor are there because they’re very sick. For some of them, it’s the last place they’ll stay before their final rest.” She began to howl something that sounded like an African chant, and both of the dogs jumped up. It was only when she got to the English part that I realized she was singing “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King.
Both dogs were up on their hind legs. Lili grasped Brody’s forepaws, and I got Rochester’s, and we danced around the kitchen together, celebrating the joy of life and the power of the almighty Mouse to penetrate every part of our lives.
After breakfast, we relocated to the living room, where Brody kept pestering Rochester to play. My dog looked up at me with baleful eyes. “Don’t worry, he’s going soon,” I said.
“Not soon enough,” Lili muttered as Brody tried to nibble on her shoe.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “My dad used to tell this joke, about a man in some shtetl in Russia whose house was too small for his family—kids, in-laws and all. He went to the rabbi and the rabbi asked him, ‘Do you have a goat?’ The man said yes, and the rabbi told him to take the goat into the house, and come back in a week.”
“You are not a goat, Brody!” Lili said. “Leave my shoes alone.” She curled her feet under her on the sofa.
“So the man does what the rabbi says, and then goes back a week later. ‘Rabbi, it’s even worse! The goat smells and tries to eat everything.’ The rabbi tells him to go back home, bring his donkey inside, and come back in a week.”
“This is an awfully long joke,” Lili said.
“Maybe it’s a fable more than a joke,” I said. “It goes on for a couple of weeks, until the man has all his farm animals in the house and he’s going nuts. The rabbi tells him to take all the animals out and come back in a week. He does, and he says how wonderful his house is now without all the animals inside.”
“And the moral of this story is? Don’t bring livestock into your house?”
“The moral is to appreciate what you have, because things could always get worse,” I said. I leaned over to kiss her.
“And by worse you mean Joey could fall overboard and we’d have to keep Brody forever?”
“Something like that,” I said. I faked spitting three times, the way my elderly relatives had when mentioning anything especially good or bad. “Pooh, pooh, pooh. It shouldn’t happen to a dog.”
“Or to us,” Lili said. “My bubbe, my mother’s mother, used to tell stories like that.”
“You’ve never talked much about your grandparents,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew them growing up.”
“Not for very long, unfortunately,” she said. “My father’s parents, the Weinstocks, came from a small town in Poland, along the border with Germany. They were on their honeymoon when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews for the concentration camps. They came home and found the village nearly deserted.”
“That must have been awful,” I said.
“My father says that the smartest thing his father ever did was spend every penny he had on the honeymoon and the wedding rings, because that saved their lives. They missed the Nazis by a day, and then they sold my father’s ring to smugglers who took them through the Alps to Trieste, where they got passage on a ship to Libya. They were told that there was a Jewish community in Cyrenaica, what’s called Benghazi now.”
“How did they get from there to Cuba?”
“It wasn’t easy, but they were lucky again. The British took control of Cyrenaica in 1941 for a brief time, then lost it. But my grandparents were able to be evacuated with the British soldiers. They couldn’t get to Palestine so they tried for the United States. Couldn’t get in here either, so they ended up taking a ship to Cuba. But all that moving around really took a toll on them, and my father’s father died right after he graduated from engineering school. His mother died a year later, and when I was born he gave me her name.”
“Wow. Those stories always make me so grateful for all that my grandparents did so my parents and I could be born here.”
“I know how you feel. I was so overwhelmed when I got U.S. citizenship. It was like the end of a very long journey.”
“What about your mother’s parents?” I asked.
“They had it a lot easier. Bubbie’s cousin had moved to Havana a few years before the Nazis invaded Poland, and when she and Zayde couldn’t get visas for the United States they went to live with him and his wife. Of course, everyone they left behind was wiped out, but at least they survived and they avoided the camps.”
“And then got out of Cuba after Castro took over,” I said. “Your father was lucky he had those engineering skills and connections to get that first job in Mexico, and then to be able later to bring his family to the States.”
“He always said you have to make your own luck,” she said, as she reached out to squeeze my hand. “I think we’re doing pretty well in that regard.”
We sat together companionably reading, and about an hour later, Brody recognized the sound of Joey’s truck in front of the townhouse. He went nuts, jumping up on all fours and twisting himself into wild contortions. Rochester thought he wanted to play, and was puzzled when Brody ignored him to start scratching at the front door.
I opened it, and Brody launched himself at Joey, forty pounds of white puppy airborne like one of Santa’s reindeer taking flight. “Yes, I missed you too,” Joey said, picking up the wriggling dog and kissing him on the snout.
Mark trailed behind, carrying a duty-free bag. His normally pasty complexion was ruddier, though he hadn’t tanned as well as Joey, whose skin glowed. “We hope you like rum,” Mark said, handing the bag to me. He leaned forward and whispered, “Though you’d have to bring me a whole distillery to convince me to keep that puppy for a week.”
“Brody was a perfect houseguest,” I said. “No major accidents, nothing important destroyed.”
“How was your cruise?” Lili asked as Joey got down on the floor and romped with Brody, both of them so delighted to be together again. “You both look so tanned. I’m jealous.”
“We had a great time,” Mark said. “Joey convinced me to go snorkeling, and I didn’t drown. We dozed in lounge chairs and drank rum drinks. We stuffed ourselves at the buffet and the specialty restaurants. And as a bonus, neither of us had to be carted off the ship on a gurney and sped off to a hospital like one of the other passe
ngers.”
“Someone got sick?” I asked. “Not one of those cruise ship viruses, I hope.”
“We were told he was an elderly man with a history of heart problems. Nothing for us to worry about.”
“But Mark still worried,” Joey called from his place on the floor.
Lili, Mark and I sat down at the kitchen table. I was reminded of the potassium I’d researched earlier, and how an overdose could lead to heart failure. Would a cruise ship be a good place to carry out a murder like that? The victim would be away from his personal physician, in a foreign country. It would probably be easy to cover up a crime that way, though the suspect list had to be smaller because of the confined environment.
“Where was this?” Lili asked.
“Roatan,” Mark said. “An island off Honduras. God knows what kind of hospital facilities they have there. It was beautiful, but very Third World.”
“Mark considers anywhere without a Starbucks as Third World,” Joey called.
“No comments from the peanut gallery,” Mark said back to him. I was glad to see that they were still joking with each other after a week spent together.
“I had an intestinal virus in Honduras once,” Lili said. “Couldn’t stop vomiting long enough to get on a plane, so the reporter I was working with took my camera and film and flew back to New York, and I stayed in the hospital there. I was lucky; it was very clean, and the nurses knew what they were doing, and in the end I wasn’t that sick. But I’d hate to be somewhere like that and need advanced care.”
Joey and Mark left soon after with Brody and his assorted paraphernalia, and Lili, Rochester and I were all glad to see them pile back into Joey’s truck and drive away. “I’m going upstairs to read,” Lili said. “Maybe I can actually get into something without having to worry about that puppy all the time.”