The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  You entered the animal shelter through a heavy metal door next to the admin counter. The cattery came first, still air-conditioned but less chilly, a big room with floor-to-ceiling cages about four feet by four feet, in which cats of all shapes, sizes, and colors dozed or groomed or paced in the palpable ammonia fug of kitty litter and sweet antiseptic. Sometimes a rabbit hovered, twitching, down at the far end, and once, a ferret named Fred, skittering around his cage as if late for an appointment.

  Even there, you heard the dogs through the wall—they never stopped barking, an endless echoing disharmony. At the shelter, dogs were the important thing. Moving out to their kennel, you passed into a world of sound and heat and motion. The sticky summer air smacked at you, the sudden volume frantic. But in summer the kennels had their sides up, so the breeze blew right through. With the flick of a latch, each dog could slip out to the chicken wire runs that spanned the length of the building. The dogs were kept two or three to a cage: many runaway or abandoned animals got picked up or dropped off because their owners couldn’t manage them any longer. The little old dogs came in because their little old owners had died, or got sick, or gone to live in apartments that wouldn’t accept pets. It was hard to find homes for them—Stinky was one; and Elsie, a ten-year-old shih tzu with an incontinence problem; or Fritzl, the swaybacked deaf dachshund that barked almost constantly. These little dogs lived closest to the metal door; then the middle range of large, loping youngsters, mixed breeds with beautiful dog faces, dogs that wanted to roam; and finally, farthest from the entrance, the pits and their kin, with their powerful jaws and sleek, close fur, one or two so snarly that they were kept muzzled.

  Cassie and I went to the shelter two mornings a week, from nine till one. Our job was to feed the animals and clean out their cages. We wore rubber boots and rubber gloves and we got used to the smells; and it felt like a triumph when a scared, shy dog got used to you, and instead of cowering, inched toward you and dipped her head or rolled onto her back for a rub. The dogs were mostly sweet at heart. They wanted to be loved, and when you loved them, they loved you back.

  We had our favorites—mine, a trim, glossy chocolate Lab mix called Delsey, with a chiseled, square face and dark, sad eyes, was only just past puppyhood, and moved his body as if its size was still a surprise to him. Although his eyes were mournful, his temperament was happy; he loved nothing more than playing fetch in the dog run with an old tennis ball or a stick. He’d bring the slobbery catch, and you could see him debating whether to let it go or not, weighing the choice between keeping his prize or getting to run after it again. Sometimes he’d lope off still carrying it, head up, tail up, like an athlete running a victory lap around the dog run.

  Cassie’s favorite, Sheba, was a pit cross. We were allowed to feed her but we weren’t supposed to go into her cage unless Marj was there too; not because of Sheba herself, whose brindle face was almost smiley and who wagged her stumpy tail at the sight of us, but because her stall mate was a grumpy black bull named Leo, who didn’t chase sticks but chewed them into splinters given the chance.

  Cassie liked Sheba because she was beautiful but tough, a survivor. The story was she’d been found scrawny and starving in an outdoor pen next to an abandoned double-wide about ten miles inland in the backwoods. Her owners had skipped out—Cassie and I made up different stories about what had happened to them—and a couple of hunters heard the howling. They called Animal Control to come and rescue her. Cassie had asked her mother if they could adopt Sheba, but Bev had said categorically no, that any dog was too much for the two of them to manage, but that especially a dog like Sheba would be wrong, because after all she’d been through, Sheba needed a family that could spend a lot of time with her, spoil her, and make her feel loved.

  Cassie liked to pretend that Sheba was her dog. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Early on, when Leo was out of their cage one morning, Cassie slipped the latch and walked right in. Sheba, ecstatic, twitched and whimpered, and when Cassie sat down cross-legged on the concrete floor, Sheba ran over to be petted. She widened her eyes and flipped over, baring her spotted belly with its tiny unused teats, and Cassie rubbed her furiously, both of them emitting jumbled, excited little moans of pleasure.

  I lurked in the hallway with my eye on the metal door: if she got caught, wouldn’t we get sent home in disgrace?

  But when I called to her, quietly—“Hurry up, Cassie . . . come out . . . I think I hear someone!”—she first paid no attention and then got annoyed.

  “What’s your problem, Juju? Aren’t we here to make their lives better? She loves it—don’t you, my Sheba? Don’t you, my darling?”

  She didn’t get caught—we didn’t get caught—and by the time Nancy and Jo from the front office came in with some prospective adopters, we were back down the other end, Cassie sluicing out Stinky’s cage with water while I held his raspy little pug body in my arms. But Cassie had staked her claim. After that, she was always looking for a chance to get into Sheba’s cage, as if Sheba were her bad-boy boyfriend.

  On a Thursday in early August when we’d been working at the shelter for almost two months, and we felt, and they felt, that we were as familiar as the furniture, Leo was in the run outside, getting some air, if the muggy swamp of that day could be called “air.” He was alone—no other dogs, no human keeping an eye—and Marj had gone to take a phone call from the pet-food supplier about a delivery mix-up the previous day.

  “You girls keep at it,” she’d said, “I’ll be right back.”

  Once the door clanged behind Marj, Cassie hustled up to sneak a visit with Sheba. She had in her pocket a rawhide chew brought from home—bought with her own money, in fact. Rawhide chews weren’t allowed at the kennel, not least because they could get stuck in a dog’s throat and choke him; but Cassie didn’t much care. She’d already slipped Sheba a couple, and knew she liked them so much she could gnaw one down in under three minutes flat. Just like the other times, Cassie slipped the latch and ducked into the cage, holding the treat high in her hand, to play a game with it. Even this she’d done before. While Sheba was playful, she wasn’t aggressive by nature; so we didn’t even think.

  I didn’t see all that happened next. My eyes were on the metal door, anticipating Marj. I wasn’t thinking about Cassie and Sheba.

  I certainly wasn’t thinking about Leo. Because the gate from their enclosure to the outdoors looked closed, it didn’t occur to either of us to check the latch. What were the odds that Leo would tire, just then, of his solo ramble in the dog run, that he would nose his way back home and push the gate open with his snout? But he did, somehow in the brief moment when Cassie held the rawhide in her hand.

  He leaped for the chew, jaws gaping, paws uplifted. He clamped down on Cassie’s left hand, gored her inner forearm. Thank God she had the chew to give over. Thank God. She barely squealed—Leo’s snarling and Sheba’s high, desperate barks made me whip around and look, not any noise from Cassie herself—and if I hadn’t dragged her out of the cage ass-backward and kicked the door shut behind us, I don’t know what might have happened.

  It looked like she’d stuck her forearm in a wood-chipper, her skin shredded in strips up from the wrist, the blood coming so fast it dripped onto the floor.

  “Can you wiggle your fingers?” I asked. That was what my mother asked me when I hurt myself. “Can you move your wrist? How bad is it? Does it hurt?”

  “I don’t fucking know.” She slumped against the wire of the opposite cage, behind which an arthritic, white-muzzled pit named Opie stared with intent curiosity. “I don’t even know how it hurts.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I didn’t know what else to say. My mother always says that cursing indicates an inadequate vocabulary and a poor imagination; but in this case, it seemed like just the right word. I leaned in close to Cassie’s mangled hand, as if I might just touch it, but it was a pulsating bloody thing, and I couldn’t. I was only vaguely aware of Leo and Sheba growling at each other in their ba
rely closed cage right next to us, but Cassie was. She closed her eyes and started to shake.

  “It’s all fine. It’s going to be fine. I’d better get Marj.” I got to my feet and double-checked the bolt on the grille. I floated in a strange quiet, watching, as though this was happening to other people. Then, in the hush inside my head, suddenly I heard the cacophony of the dogs up and down the hallway. They all barked at once, wild decibels, and I marveled that we’d been held, those few moments, in a terrible bubble of silence.

  Walking to the metal door, I had my back to Cassie, I’d actually turned away from her, but it felt like she was a part of me. In the bedlam of the barking, stinking dogs and the hot, wet breeze gusting in from outside with its faint smell of hay, she and I were joined by an invisible thread, and that thread was no less real than everything else, and because of that thread she would be fine, Cassie would be fine, and she wouldn’t even really be alone when I went through the door into the main building, because we were umbilically linked and inseparable.

  Marj came through the door before I ever reached it. She saw in an instant what had happened, or enough of it anyway. Even as she ran down to Cassie, she paged Jo to bring the first-aid kit, and she wrapped a blanket around Cassie’s shoulders because of the shock, and had her raise her arm up to stop the bleeding, and when she ascertained the sequence of events, more or less, the only words she had for me were “Why’d you leave her?” As if somehow the whole thing, from beginning to end, were the fault of my inattention.

  After she’d got her cleaned up, Marj decided that Cassie needed to go over to the hospital in Haverhill and get it checked out. Marj tried Bev, but the phone went straight to voicemail, so she called my mother and explained the situation and she agreed we’d take Cassie. It was logical. Nobody said anything at that point about whether we’d be allowed back in the shelter—after all, we’d broken the most important rules, and even though we didn’t admit it, Marj must’ve known it wasn’t the first time—but we did feel the pall of adult disapproval, that sense that you’re being helped and punished at the same time.

  By the time we came back to the shelter, Leo had been put down. He was dead. As a dog, and especially as an unloved dog, you couldn’t attack a child and get away with it. But of course we knew, and Marj without saying it aloud made sure that we knew, that Leo hadn’t done anything wrong: we’d entered his space, with a tantalizing rawhide chew, and he had merely acted as millennia of genetic imprinting dictated such a dog would act, within the parameters of a rather vicious and impatient canine nature. We must never forget that Cassie’s act—and mine too, I guess, because I was her accomplice, like the bank robber who drives the getaway car—had brought about Leo’s death as surely as if we’d wrung his neck with our bare hands.

  But that was later. In the first instance, my mother showed up in the station wagon to take us to the ER. Grim-faced, she played NPR loudly on the radio the whole way so that there could be no conversation. We made the drive to Haverhill listening to a phone-in about the migration patterns of owls, until one caller talked about having hit a giant owl with his car as he crested a hill on a back road at dusk. That was too much for the day, so my mother turned the radio off altogether. Then we listened to the air conditioner blow. I sat on my hands, a reflexive position of childhood guilt, and something Cassie obviously couldn’t do just then.

  At the hospital, the nurse who untied Cassie’s bandage crinkled her features at what she saw. Cassie had such delicate limbs, and even after all our tanning, her skin was so fair. Swollen, her hand was purpled and blackened with clotting blood, with deep scratches, tears almost, up her arm. The fingers didn’t quite sit straight. She couldn’t wiggle them, or barely. The nurse cleaned it carefully—even though Marj had already done that, it had bled some more—and Cassie yelped at the sting of the antiseptic. Just little yelps, though. Mostly she was quiet, watching her arm with her blue eyes wide, almost as if it was separate from her.

  That was the first time we met Anders, or Dr. Shute, as he was to us then. Anders Shute was the doctor on call in the ER that afternoon. I made fun of him in the car on the way home, to try to make Cassie laugh—“Do you think they bring the shooting victims to Dr. Shute?” and “He looks like he’s already been shot. Or maybe like he already shot someone himself. Doctor, don’t shoot! Oh, shoot, it’s Dr. Shute!”

  He was tall and very thin, with pale, pale skin and protruding cheekbones like a death’s head. His lips were thin, his nose was thin, his long fingers were thin, and his eyes had a squinty quality that made them look thin too. He had long hair like a girl’s, down to his chin, and it too was thin, the kind of dishwater brown that looks greasy even when it’s clean. Dr. Shute didn’t have much of a bedside manner in the ER, but he wasn’t horrible or anything, and when he took Cassie’s mangled hand in his to look closely at it, I could tell that his gentleness surprised her: Cassie looked at him with some combination of beseeching and wonder, and for the first time she asked, “Is my hand going to be okay?”

  His smile was slight and—inevitably—thin, but he did make a special effort to warm his chilly eyes. “Your hand, young lady, is going to be just fine. As long as you’re a good patient, not an impatient patient—the ‘im-patient,’ as we say around here—then your hand is going to be just fine.”

  It struck me afterward that his was a slightly strange way of putting it, as if he were saying it was all up to her. If she would simply do the right thing, then her hand would heal. Which of course implied the fact (undeniable as it was) that if she hadn’t done the wrong thing to begin with, she wouldn’t be there at all. That’s how he was, Anders Shute: the whole way along, from that first encounter, he made out like the ball was in Cassie’s court: if she did the right thing, all would be well. And if she didn’t—well, then.

  He injected Cassie’s hand with local anesthetic, and stapled the fine, frayed edges of her skin; he dressed the gouges up her arm with special unguents and pristine bandages, and he prescribed a course of horse-pill antibiotics to stave off any infection. No more nor less than any doctor would have done.

  BEV BUSTLED INTO our TV room later that afternoon with her stethoscope still around her neck, breathing heavily, a vision in blue florals, clearly torn between distress and anger. Although she enveloped Cassie in her arms first thing, I could see, which Cassie could not, that as she squeezed her daughter her expression was troubled, like a sky across which clouds are blowing at speed.

  “My baby, my baby,” she murmured, “what were you thinking? What were you thinking?” And then, “Everything’s all right. There we are, everything’s all right now.”

  My mother stood in the doorway watching them, drying her hands with a dish towel, and her expression struck me too: it wasn’t forgiving. As if she’d drawn a circle around Bev and Cassie in her mind, and while they stood in the middle of our house, it didn’t mean they belonged there. A look that seemed to say, You aren’t like us. Not entirely.

  There was no more swimming at the Saghafis’, after that, because Cassie couldn’t get her arm wet. And for a couple of weeks, we weren’t sure if we’d be allowed back to the shelter. We had long empty days to fill, once Bev dropped Cassie off at my house before nine a.m. My mother wanted us out of her hair so she could work. She came up with a few chores—weeding the garden, sorting the books on the shelves in the TV room alphabetically by author—but she wasn’t really serious about it, and nor were we, not least because Cassie’s right hand—her writing hand—was out of commission. We couldn’t even ride our bikes. We couldn’t play tennis or basketball over at the high school, because for those things too you needed both hands.

  “Really goes to show you,” Cassie said, flicking her white-blond hair with the starchy white mitt of her dressed hand, “how hard it is to have only one arm.”

  “Do we know many people with only one arm?”

  “Wendy’s uncle,” she said, referring to a girl in our class. “Lost it in Iraq. You’ve seen him. He works
at the Lowe’s in Haverhill.”

  “Then there’s Benny’s grandpa.” Benny was a few years older. “He had polio when he was young. He’s got his hand, but it’s all shriveled up and he can’t do anything with it. He holds it like this.” I mimed the way Benny’s grandpa held his arm against his middle, with the hand hanging down like an empty glove.

  “Jesus,” Cassie said. “That won’t be me, will it?”

  “Don’t be silly. You heard the doctor. As long as you’re a good patient . . .”

  “But I’m the im-patient. I’m so bored. And this is going to go on for weeks.”

  “Not weeks.”

  “Whatever. Way too long. I don’t want to bake any more chocolate-chip cookies. These are our lives, here. Before you know it, we’ll be back at school, sitting in those horrible classrooms waiting for time to pass all over again. We’ve got to think up something to do.”

  SO WE WENT out. My house is in town, or rather, on the way into town, at the south end. Town itself is about four long blocks in one direction, and five in the other, and then there are the two strip malls on Route 29 out to the highway, where Market Basket is, and the Dollar Store and the Fashion Bug, and Friendly’s. There are more than four square blocks to Royston, but the rest of it is winding residential streets, petering out in all directions to forest, except Route 29 in both ways, with its smattering of businesses uninterrupted southward and again right up northward to Newburyport. It’s quicker to get places on the interstate, but that way you miss the old stuff, like the Golden Lotus Palace restaurant, a vermilion temple to 1960s kitsch with a huge gilded gate and black plaster dragons outside, where the food is so spiked with MSG that you come out feeling like you’re on another planet. Or the Lucky Stars motel, which finally went belly-up a few years ago: a couple of panels have fallen off the old neon sign—it looked like something out of The Jetsons when it was whole—and they boarded up the windows to keep homeless people and animals from squatting in the shag-rug rooms. There are these echoes of old Royston along Route 29, how it was before the Boston bourgeois exiles and the artists, and even before the Henkel plant.