The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (22 page)

I fell asleep then. We all fell asleep on a frozen night deep in December, Cranston feeding the wood stove kindling and papers from the pile on the side of the stone hearth. The stove had a glass window in it, and you could sit and watch the spastic flames leap and lick, and if you turned out the lights their orange intensified until they looked liquid. I fell asleep in front of that fire, wrapped in a grey blanket, and when I woke up the night had thickened to the point where all objects were eradicated, the wood stove out but the smell of smoke stronger than ever, a tang on the tongue, in the air. I instinctively turned towards a window, looking for light, for life, and that’s when I saw it, not here but there, four houses down, the old abandoned house blazing away and now the sound of sirens, the flames visible and unreal, their edges so defined against the darkness they looked like Halloween cutouts, orange paper pasted on a black background. Amelia was in there. No, maybe not. Sparks showered and radios crackled commands as well-aimed water shattered whatever windows there were. We all put our parkas on over our pajamas and went outside to watch, the air so thick with smoke I could smell it on my skin after everything was over.

I awoke late the next morning, a Saturday, 11 a.m., my mouth gummed up, my lips flaking flesh, the skin beneath a perfect intact pink. The whole house was sunk in silence, strange for this time of day, and because of this silence, and the smell of char still clearly in the air, and Amelia not here, and who knew where, dread spread through me. Our windows were crystalled with cold, smashed stars limiting my view. My bedroom door screeched when I opened it, the sound so sharp in the silence my insides jumped. When I peered in the master bedroom I saw Annie and Cranston immobile on top of their sheets, their sprawled bodies still and white in the flashing sunlight. Sometimes this happens to me, a thought, a vision, both gory and absurd. I couldn’t see their breathing; the whole house was dead, I was totally alone, surrounded by rot. “Annie,” I yelled, and when she failed to move I went forward, poking my finger into the soft spot at the side of the human head, where the pulse prods on, if we’re lucky. “Annie,” I yelled again, and suddenly, from the other side of the bed Cranston stirred, his movements massive and jerky as he bolted upright, his hand blindly grasping for his glasses on the table beside him. “What is it, what is it?” he asked, his voice at once gruff and childish, fringed with fear, a sound that made me sad. “What is it?” he asked again, unaware I was there, staring as he struggled up from sleep. I saw him reach up and rub his eyes; the glasses clattered to the floor as, for a reason I don’t understand, I ran from the room.

Gradually, as if struggling out from under a hundred-year spell, the house started to stir. I heard Cranston groan as he stood upright, and then from various doors the other children emerged, tying their terrycloth bathrobes or shuffling in shaggy slippers. At half past the hour of noon, despite the Trevor’s prohibition, I took the yellow saucer from the shelf where Annie had stored it and, after filling it with milk, set it on the stoop to see if she’d come by. By late afternoon the dread I felt had settled firmly in the pit of my stomach. Stepping outside, I made my way towards the burned-out building where yellow tape flapped in the breeze. I walked easily across the line, looking here and there, whistling the notes, two high, one low, no show. I saw broken bits of glass and chunks of charred wood and, right out in the open, just sitting in the snow, a single blackened staircase I climbed to the top of, looking out over the dismal land. Clouds rolled in, low and full. From up there on the staircase I scanned the land for bodies: cats, corpses, her, but there was only debris. When I came down sleet started, flying sideways into my face. I didn’t put my hand up; I just let the frozen granules melt against my skin, slide downwards, wetting my scarf.

For the next seven days I set the yellow saucer out for her, and the Trevors, seeing my sadness or maybe knowing it wouldn’t matter, let me do it, but Amelia didn’t return. I went, then, back and back to the ruins, whistling my whistle, the cold air clarifying the notes. Perhaps, I thought, the fire had not taken her. Perhaps the sirens had scared her away. When I held out my arm I saw her marks on the satiny skin of its underside, scratches from claws, a cleft where she’d taken some flesh. Perhaps she knew she’d outgrown us. Perhaps somewhere in that bean-sized brain she’d always seen how it would happen. Amelia, I now knew, had never been mine, which didn’t mean I didn’t love her, but she could never belong to me same as I could never belong to them. What these long-term loans meant in terms of love I was not so sure, but that love was a component, I saw that.

In my mind, when Amelia left, my stay with the Trevors was over. In fact that’s not true. I lived with them for three and a half more years, going from sophomore to junior to finally senior, busy with tests and homework and theatre and sports, applying to college, during this time losing contact completely with my family of origin, my mother claiming I was wild and beyond help, her proclamation, uttered so many times during the years I was under her roof that I often wondered if it was true, if I carried some criminal smell, some snarl that rendered me permanently unfit for human culture, the Trevors assuring me I was fine, but I’ve never known for sure. Not even now do I know. There are facts, there are feelings, and then there is memory, and in my memory Amelia went out like an ember, and the next thing I knew I grew and I grew and I grew, with each added inch that much more to be managed, to be burned, and so quickly, how it happens. Fires. I hate the sound and sulphur smell of a striking match. I hate how the flames are jerky and irrational. People talk of taming fire as though it, too, is an animal we’ve leashed, but fire is a force altogether other; it has no heart, no hide, no evolution. The universe is full of such timeless powers and when we face them—person, primate, horse, hare—we are all wild; we all respond with the same untamed terror that tells me how much the species share, when you get right down in the dirt. When the wind turns tornado or the heat too high.

Three and a half years after Amelia disappeared, I did too, packing my bags for college and leaving early one morning, when the house was still slumbering, so I could avoid the good-byes. I arrived in the freshman quad of my new university by 7 a.m., the first one there in a series of cinderblock dorms with metal beds and see-through curtains on the shower stalls. Soon enough my Swedish roommate appeared and then the orientation started, all of us freshmen divided into groups and led around, campus building by building, the bulletin boards layered with fliers for political protests, for housemates, for help. Classes began and with them late nights at the library, the days blurring by, I so stunned by the newness that I recall little from this period but a feeling of automation and the occasional breakthrough of a loneliness so pure I wanted to whinny, to make some sound or find some shape to pour it into. I didn’t, of course, because I couldn’t, and because I, at age eighteen, knew enough not to break down in public places, which meant I wasn’t wild, right? I tried hard, dressed according to code, did what I could to prove her wrong. And then came the day, three weeks into it all, when I, an official adult now, old enough to vote but in reality still a kid, trying to pick my major, well, then came the day when I took my tiny key and, opening my silver post office box in the university’s mail room, found the formal typed letter from social services explaining that I’d aged out of custody, out of the foster-care system. Despite the fact that I’d already known that, reading the official letter sent me spinning. I heard a snap, in my head, or in some space, and then the feeling of free fall even as I stood, still, frozen in the bustling busy mail room, clutching a letter that meant everything and nothing. After all, we are always alone, in some fundamental sense. And yet who amongst our species does not yearn for the yoke that tethers you, if only in fantasy? Of all the mammals we have domesticated, we have forgotten to count ourselves, the human being, Homo sapiens, shaped by the cultures we’ve created, hooked up to harnesses, we flail to be free as we feel their weight with real relief, because how else would we know we are here, amongst others?
Amongst others.
I read the letter again and again and a field appeared around me, growing and growing until at last its edges curled from my sight and, then with nothing left to do, I walked across campus, my cinderblock room a real relief, a roof, if only for a while.

I could have done things differently, and I cannot explain why I chose what I did. I threw out the letter from social services, crumpling it up and tearing it in two, as if that might somehow solve things. But its words—“aged out of custody; no longer in custody”—stayed with me, a ringing in my ears, and rather than call the Trevors for succor, I chose instead to avoid them, brashly trying to make my way on a campus seething with beer steins and wines, political uproars and classes on Caravaggio, the angry artist who painted himself holding his severed head in his hands. Freed from custody, undomesticated, with no turf I could really claim, I threw myself into whatever currents came my way, too busy to see the lack of this solution. That autumn was brilliant, though, the trees all ruby and gold, leaves floating in puddles that iced overnight, trapping them there, pointed and perfect. I smoked clove cigarettes, unfiltered, my previously clean lungs burning with each aromatic inhale, my head in a whirl as I chased the burn with beer. Somehow, between studies and cigarettes and parties where I chatted with everyone and talked to no one, time scrolled on and out, and the trees lost their leaves and a bone-cold December came with a burst of blizzard. In my dreams the animals arrived, all those we’d tried and failed to tame, and then they ran free towards a speckled sky I fell through.

I was so busy with all this—falling and fleeing and studying and sleeping—denying half my life while whooping it up in the other half, I failed to see the trap I’d set for myself. Christmas vacation was coming, and with it a mandate that every student vacate the dorms for the month. Where oh where would I go? Students packed up and left with bulging bags, driving their own cars home or picked up by parents, until finally the campus got very quiet while the temperature plunged and stray flakes fell from a sky so clear I could see, it seemed, the edges of every star.

I stowed away two nights alone in an emptied-out dorm, but the heat was too low and when I woke in the mornings my breath hung before my face, a scrim. I didn’t even have a dime to make a phone call. In the “freed from custody” letter it indicated that the Trevors had been CCed; but they hadn’t called me. On the third day, I tossed some clothes in a suitcase and loaded my busted-up car with books and bedding, and then I went back, past midnight, doing whatever I could, I think, to make the reunion difficult, wanting them to take me in no matter how hard, how wild I was.

And then their house was before me, as old and as new as it had been that day, four years before, when my father had said,
Go now.
Sitting in my car in their driveway, the engine ticking as it cooled, the moonlight bright on their white chimney, I contemplated ringing the bell and wondered what they would do when, still half asleep, they saw me.

I knocked first, very softly, and when no one answered, louder and louder, and when still no one answered a senseless panic descended and I forgot about the bell, instead banging on their door like a mad girl or woman, whatever I was, at age eighteen. I banged and banged and called their names like they were all I had in the world, which wasn’t true. They were not. I had my arms and legs, a head, a heart, a whole self to wedge into the ground and from which to make my proclamations, but I hadn’t grasped that yet. Instead I rained my fists down on their door and called them through snot and tears, and I was so immersed in this odd tantrum that I failed to hear their footsteps or the turning of the locks and it wasn’t until the door was open and their slippers suddenly appeared before my downcast eyes, it wasn’t until then that I realized: I’d been heard.

Animals can switch states very quickly. I’d seen Amelia go from a full growl to a sweet simper on the turn of a dime. As soon as I saw those slippers, everything bad went away—my tears and the snot from my snoot and my frenzied fists—it all got calm quite fast. “Hi,” I said, as though it were a normal mid-morning and not 3 a.m., and then I swiped the wetness from my face with the heel of my hand. “Cold out there,” I said. “Brings tears to the eyes.”

Annie and Cranston were, well, surprised to see me. They stood on their threshold, which had also once been my threshold, and stared at me for a few seconds, seconds that felt full of weight, because what would happen next? How could I explain this? “I know it’s late,” I said, “and—”

And then, before I could say another word, Cranston grabbed me by the collar and hauled me in. “Jesus effing Christ,” he said, and I flinched and then he hugged me, hard. “Where the hell have you been?” he said. And then he stepped back, Annie and Cranston both stepped back and took a good long look at me, and then Cranston said, “So, yer a college freshman. Have you learned all the kings of England yet?”

I reached up to rub the back of my neck, because it hurt where he had hauled me, and into my mind then came the image of Amelia, how he hauled her from the wall and made her ours, if only for a while. “I don’t do Kings and I don’t do England,” I said. “I’m majoring in anthropology.” And then, just to bug him I said, “But wasn’t Cromwell number six?”

“You can’t be serious,” said Cranston, and just at that moment Annie flicked on the switch so light flooded the hallway and there were their familiar faces, with all the same grooves and lines. Past them and up the stairs I could see their sleepy kids peering from behind a line of doors, and Emma, now ten, lifted her hand in a salute. “Lauren Jean Slater,” Annie said, enunciating my name in all its difference from theirs, “may I ask why you picked this time to return?”

“Oh Annie,” said Cranston. “Don’t be such a. She’s a freshman in college. She has no judgment. She’s probably stoned out of her mind.”