Bound (22 page)
Authors: Antonya Nelson
“I had a dream about this place,” Cattie said. “It looked just like this, and I was the pilot of an airplane.”
At their feet and down the roadside incline a lush green patchwork of treetops waving in the evening wind, limber trees in summer, leaves making the noise of water, no sign of catastrophe. Bitch stood on the very edge, her black-and-white fur ruffling in the breeze.
“We came here the summer of the bicentennial,” Catherine told the girl. “I was your age. Misty hadn’t ever left the state of Kansas before.”
“She was poor,” Cattie said, crossing her arms. As if the comment had been a criticism. Catherine knew how that went, defending your mother one minute, complaining about her the next.
“We carved our names and the date everywhere. I bet I could find some of those.” From the other direction, a pair of motorcycles whined by, their riders lifting their hands in unison. “And we drank river water,” Catherine remembered. “We were trying to get giardia. We thought it sounded like a good diet. We were always inventing new diets.”
The question here on the thin open place on the edge of the cliff was: had Misty killed herself? Had the woman decided she’d come to the end?
In the unnerving, extraordinary way the girl had of knowing what Catherine was thinking, Cattie now said, “She wouldn’t have taken Max with her if she was planning to die.”
Catherine hadn’t realized she was still slightly unsure. Dick Little and State Farm had declared the death accidental; most of the ensuing evidence suggested that Misty wouldn’t do such a thing as betray the only love she knew, abandon her girl. Yet now Catherine felt a physical relief at Cattie’s assessment, a membrane of doubt borne off on the next gust of air. She’d shown Cattie the homemade asterisk on her shoulder, the one that Misty had carved there, describing the identical one that she had put on Misty’s skin. Cattie had never been treated to that information, had never noticed a scar on her mother’s shoulder. This, as always, had led Catherine to a whole associative trove of memories. The time they’d broken into a thrift store and stolen wigs. This man they’d followed in Misty’s car. This dog they had rescued from an abuser. This apparent pact they’d made, so long ago, before either of them had believed in the necessity of a will or trust or future, before they were people who thought about growing old, about actually having something, or somebody, to bestow in case of emergency, in the event of accident, in the preposterous possibility of death.
Now the girl opened her cell phone and accessed her saved messages. She held the device to Catherine’s ear. Despite the wind and the awkward angle at which Cattie rested the speaker in Catherine’s hair, she could hear her old friend’s voice, speaking to her from far away, a rambling message for her daughter about the dangers of being out in the night alone and needing to come home.
The summer was especially brutal in Arizona. Drought, heat, fires—fires begun by lightning strikes, fires set by arsonists, fires begun in witless innocence that resulted in extravagant mayhem. By the end of the summer, there would be a serial killer on the loose, some incendiary force just about to burst into flame. The Baseline Killer, he would be named, another in the lineage of infamy and notoriety. His first victims, not to mention his rapt audience, were still ignorant of his existence, of the conditions that were already conspiring to bring him to life and action. The city would be besieged and transfixed for years. It would happen again and again and again.
But for now the dog paced the confines of her backyard, its desert cacti on the other side, sand and rock and tennis balls, which she declined to chase, on her side. “Playing” was not something she understood. She panted, she waited, she slept with one eye open, all the scorching July day. This was the hottest yet in her time here in Phoenix. Left inside the house, she would do damage attempting to get out of it. In her old life, she’d had access to both, and spent her time pacing between, in and out, alert to the instant when the people returned, her own existence incomplete, on hold, without them.
Her new owner would be home soon, apologetic, loving. Anxious and guilty, too, fearful each day that she’d find the dog gone. For hours they would sit together in the cool house, the woman talking and talking, on the phone and to the dog, as well, the soothing and logical rhythm of routine. Affection, gratitude, ritual. Company. These were the components of reassurance.
For the woman who now took care of the dog, it had been the worst nine months of her life. First she’d had to break up with her boyfriend Lance, which had been rougher than she’d imagined, their having been together for some time, and the fact that everyone, including her parents, had grown accustomed to his presence in their lives. “You like him so much, you live with him!” Elise was tempted to demand. She wasn’t young any longer, and her parents, who’d had her late in their lives, the surprise and accident after three planned children, wished to see her safely settled. They’d not felt great affection for Lance, but he was at least familiar. He was a locatable body to whom they could hand responsibility—not fiscal responsibility, but Elise already was in possession of that. They couldn’t bear for her to be alone, and Lance was nothing if not capable of simply hanging around.
Lance himself had surprised her. His passionate anger at being dumped far surpassed any degree of passion he’d otherwise exhibited. Wow, did he
not
want to break up! So for a few weeks, back and forth Elise had gone, to his new room in a house of roommates, back to her town house with him. They argued over the phone, by e-mail, in person—and they made up the same ways.
He and the dog only tolerated one another. Neither was sorry to see the last of the other.
Of all the antidepressants Elise had tried, Prozac was the name that the dog responded to best. And the dog herself was a much better form of antidepressant than any drug Elise had taken. She would have probably preferred being in love, truly in love, but the dog made it possible to finally leave Lance and not look back.
And then after the breakup, her mother had grown gravely ill, and soon after, her father fell and broke both hips. This led to a nursing home, in which they both now sat, waiting to see who would die first.
Once, on New Year’s Eve, Elise had gone home with a man she shouldn’t have. In her absence, the night dissolved into disaster; the dog had escaped from her yard and been picked up by the authorities and impounded. For forty-eight hours, the duration of the holiday weekend, the shelter had tried to reach Elise, who’d made a heart-shaped plastic tag for the dog as soon as she’d returned to Phoenix with it. When those calls had failed—Elise at the party, Elise at the first bar, Elise at the next bar, Elise in this terrible man’s apartment, all the while her phone ringing and ringing—the shelter had accessed the implant in the animal’s neck. A new series of phone calls began. Long distance.
It was only luck, and her bright blond hair and her blue pleading tear-filled eyes, that had returned the dog to Elise. That other owner, that one in Houston, Texas, had not been the one who dashed at dawn to the Phoenix pound to sit for hours talking and conniving and begging and lying until the dog was finally released into her care. She’d bought it from the owner. She’d rescued it. She’d found it three years ago in her yard, she told the next person to whom she spoke. It was being beaten, she’d sneaked it out of a terrible situation. She’d inherited it from the previous owner, the previous owner had died, whatever manner of story seemed likely or useful or necessary. The point was: she could not lose this dog. It hadn’t been clearer to her than the moment when it seemed she would. Ambivalence then turned to certainty.
And so the dog had been restored to her. Plush extravagant fur, expressive eyebrows, sinuous coyote body, meek sweeping tail. She would never risk losing her again. Her fence was secured; Elise installed a new microchip. In the fall, when she made her annual pilgrimage to Colorado, to her family’s former land, she would take the dog with her. They would trespass together on private property, hike the hillside beneath Dracula’s castle, and sit haunch to haunch at the edge of the fire in the dark. She attached herself as if in marriage to this creature,
health, illness, prosperity, despair
, to a life in which she would never betray it.
Do you promise … ?
She did.
Prozac, she had named the wild yet good girl. And by now she was learning to respond to her name. You weren’t stuck with just the one. You had chances, there were choices. You could change your life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my invaluable and tireless readers Bonnie Nadell, Anton Mueller, Kathleen Lee, Mimi Swartz, Connie Voisine, Sheila Black, and Robert Boswell.
And, for support, thanks to the United States Artists Simon Fellowship, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Inprint, and the University of Houston.
And thank you ALC chum Laura Moats, singular shopkeeper Sarah Bagby, inimitable roommate Dana Kroos, and abiding angel Lillie Robertson.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Antonya Nelson is the author of nine previous books of fiction, most recently the critically acclaimed story collection
Nothing Right
. Her writing has appeared in the
New Yorker
,
Esquire
,
Harper’s
,
Redbook
, and many other magazines, and has been included in anthologies such as
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
and
The Best American Short Stories
. Nelson is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Novels
Living to Tell
Nobody’s Girl
Talking in Bed
Short Fiction
Nothing Right
Some Fun
Female Trouble
Family Terrorists
In the Land of Men
The Expendables
Copyright © 2010 by Antonya Nelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Nelson, Antonya.
Bound : a novel / Antonya Nelson.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-575-6 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3564.E428B68 2010
813'.54—dc22
2010009791
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-300-4