The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (23 page)

“Are you stoned?” asked Annie.

“Do I look stoned?” I asked.

“You’ve got a little bit of red-eye there, but,” said Cranston, and then he lowered his voice and leaned in close to me, “I know tears when I see them.” Of course his statement brought a fresh flood, my eyes pouring with no restraint, and my nose too.

Annie fished a tissue from her bathrobe pocket. “What is going on here?” she asked.

“I’ve come back,” I said, and then I shrugged with my palms turned upwards. “Do you have a bed?”

Sometimes you say something stupid and the instant it’s out of your mouth, you know. Other times, a perfectly innocuous-seeming phrase can cause a clenching you can’t quite understand. I said, “Do you have a bed?” and suddenly the half-jocular conversation fell flat on its face and, in their faces, a clear shift, a sudden darkening, even though the hall blazed bright in the night.

Annie and Cranston looked at each other, and I saw some unspoken understanding pass between them. “Actually,” said Annie after a moment had passed, “the room you used is …”

“Annie here,” said Cranston, a bit too jovially, “yer old friend Annie here decided to turn your old room into a sewing station.”

Annie gave Cranston a fierce stare. “No one turned your room into a sewing station,” said Annie, still staring at Cranston. “We do, however,” she said, turning back to me now, “use it sometimes for sewing.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

“Not a problem at all,” said Annie just a tad too tightly, and then she turned to face Cranston again and said, “See?”

“I see,” said Cranston, “that this is not a problem. I also see that its half past three in the morning and we all should get some sleep.”

And then, for the first time in four months or so I was back in their house. I lugged my stuff up the stairs, turning right at the top, left by the bathroom, the route engraved in my brain, the door exactly the same, scuffed up and scarred, the knob polished onyx, I turned it and stepped inside.

The walls, those old horse-hair-plastered walls piled high with paper I’d traced through many of my nights, those walls had been stripped, scrubbed, and painted a sage green. The pine plank floor had been sanded, the previously pitted boards gleaming a golden hue. My desk, or, well, their desk, was gone, and in its place a sewing machine hinged to a table on which folded fabric was stacked. What bothered me most was the box, in the closet, holding the few things I’d left behind, stored out of sight and an obvious inconvenience. When I closed the closet door and turned around, I saw Annie and Cranston in the doorframe, looking askew, Cranston clasping and unclasping his hands, his palms making a soft sucking sound. “We made a few changes,” said Annie.

“Not a problem,” I said yet again, something achy in my voice, “I’ll just put my stuff under the bed—”

“You know,” said Cranston, trying to go jocular once more, “Benjamin Franklin slept on two boards on the floor, and he swore it built strong character.”

I looked at him, and then I looked back at the room, scanning it quickly, its changes a jolt and a jab, so much so different that it took me more than a moment to realize that there was no bed in the room anymore; where it had been, a barrister’s bookcase filled with who knows what.

“If you had called,” said Annie, her voice trailing off.

“If I had called then what?” I said, my voice suddenly gruff and low. “Then you would have reconsidered your decorating scheme?”

“Lauren,” said Annie, “for four months you didn’t—”

“Neither did you,” I shouted, and then, like a child, I kicked at the floorboards, pleased to see the dark scuff I’d made; it wouldn’t be easy to erase.

“Listen, ladies,” said Cranston, holding up his hands like a police officer. “Can we have this powwow in the morning?”

His eyes indeed looked tired, Annie’s too, and I said, “Sure. Of course. Who needs a powwow anyway? I’ll be fine on the floor.”

Annie disappeared then and I heard her rummaging in the linen closet. She came back carrying a stack of blankets and pillows, and I held out my arms and she placed the linens in them, the gesture frankly formal, so formal I felt like bowing, just a bit. “Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. After all, it was past three in the morning, the night was cold, and I had no place to go. Somewhere in this conversation I’d realized that, whether I liked it or not, I’d better behave.

The Egyptians tried and tried to change gazelles but they could not. Amelia, on the other hand, proved it was utterly untrue about a leopard always having his same spots. She’d demonstrated amply that an animal, if only for some time, could adapt to utterly strange situations with alacritous finesse. Where, then, did that leave me? Precisely where I was, as it turns out, standing in a room, under a roof, with two people who would never be my parents, no matter what my histrionics; this was not my house. If Linnaeus came back to life and decided to categorize human groups down to their smallest boxes, I would not be placed here, and that, my dear, was that.

But because humans have two hands, there is always another hand, and on this other hand were other incontrovertible facts that did not contradict the boxed-up truth but turned it slightly sideways, so it looked different under different light. The fact of the matter is that wolves will adopt baby dogs and suckle them as if they are their own; all across the animal kingdom are examples of this cross-pollination, pigs taking in lambs, goats nurturing geese; it happens. In the Bible, the guest is an honored being, a foreigner you break bread with and, by doing so, you hugely enrich your dinner. We all knew, that night of the no-bed, that I was a guest who had, for a short period of time, been something like their little lamb, minus the wool and sweetness. That night, for the rest of that night, I stayed on the floor, the moon framed like a decal in the square of the window. I didn’t sleep very well. Sometime just before dawn I got up and wandered the house, just like I used to do, when I’d been their foster child. In the bathroom I opened the medicine cabinet, poured out some pills, going so far as to put one on the pad of my tongue, tasting the tang as it started to melt, and then spitting it fast back into the bottle and closing the cap. I climbed the stairs to the attic and opened the dwarf-sized door to the old dingy closet, the canes still hung on the same hooks, just as they’d been for all these years, and the signatures still scrawled beneath them:
Harry Mumford
,
Faith Mason
,
Robert Smutter
,
Earl Greylot
. Taking a stub of a pencil from my pocket I knelt in the dingy darkness and pressed my own name into the surprisingly soft wall,
Lauren Jean Slater
, just passing through or part of the family, either way, I had been here.

The following morning, my head staticky from so little sleep, I went to make myself some breakfast, opening up the fridge and then realizing, hand on the dome of an egg, that there’d be no state paycheck to cover any of this. “Can I offer you money?” I said, and Annie said, “Don’t be silly,” but I knew I wasn’t being silly. “How’d you sleep, L. S.?” Cranston hollered, his humor feeling forced, and I said, “Great!” the faux exclamation point dangling there in the air for us all to consider, palpable, practically visible; I shrugged. “I’m a little stiff I admit,” I said, and Annie turned to Cranston and said, “Don’t we have a cot somewhere here?”

“Don’t worry, really,” I said. “There’s no need for a cot.”

“See how tough we raised ’er?” Cranston hollered again, for some reason the strained situation causing him to talk like a cowboy; I smiled at him; he smiled back, a little sadly, and that was that. All of a sudden there was nothing left to say. Now that my official tenure had ended, and with it all of our obvious assigned roles, we weren’t sure who we were to one another anymore, or how we might proceed, which made everyone extra polite.

I figured I’d stay for a couple of days and then move on. They had a full house, all the steps and halves around for the holidays. I nursed my hurt and then gradually it faded. Or rather I pushed it back somewhere, let it occupy a smaller space. And in its place, what the Trevors were best at—fine wine and a lot of lounging by the fire, Cranston reading various histories aloud to us, stopping to spread some tapenade on a crusty roll with a butter knife and then biting in, stray flakes flying all over him, the dog licking him clean. I remembered in front of that fire how scared I’d been when I first came here, years and years ago, how my ears were full of the sounds of my own home—footsteps coming closer, the crash of a glass, someone’s scream, my body coiled tight as if for a fight. Somehow here, in this house, with the hugely generous help of a certain surrogate family, along with one small but also beyond-big creature borne from its beams and innards, I’d learned a series of different sounds, a different kind of posture for a body always rigid with fright. The next morning was clear and beautiful, one of those winter days when the sun sparkles in the sky and the trees look tremendously black against their hard blue background. I put on my boots and went out into the yard by myself. Snow had fallen over the night and the Trevors’ yard was a perfect wedge of white, and as I tromped through it I saw signs, tracks, skitters, and then the markings of what had to have been a coon, the particular paw prints in the fragile crust of white. I followed those tracks for a while, let them lead me where they would, until before I knew it I was back in the woods, by the frozen pond where we’d picnicked, that hot still summer, the basket full of cheese and grapes. “Amelia,” I called, my voice echoing back to me, bouncing off branches and tree trunks. I stood for a long time and no coon appeared, although the tracks were clearly cut. I could come back here tomorrow and keep following these tracks, day after day, willing what would not be, or I could, instead, stay still, and let her nest in my memory, which was—would have to be—its own sort of house; I would do it. I would make a place within me and so keep close to me the animals and people I had loved. And what from my life would I put here, in this place of my own making—my very own house!—which I now saw could be spacious and white with turrets and many circling stairs. My mother’s keys, carp in the pond we’d fished from, a cupboard full of beans and books and blankets, many maps, my toothbrush, all the kings of England; a room beneath an eave on the right side of a certain dwelling, her fur and how it felt when it was wet and when it wasn’t, how she came from a hole in the wall, tiny and terrified, the sound of her singing, the look of her swinging,
Go now
, he said, and yes, on and on it would go, this house—of
mine
—was so fine, so grand, sitting there before me in the snow.

I took a job as a vet tech one of the years between college and graduate school. Most of my adventures concerned your common housecats and dogs, but I did by chance one day meet a girl who saved a swan on a Sunday afternoon during the time when I was on duty. The swan was at the lake, a large body of water behind the hospital where I worked. Some nights I’d go to that lake and contemplate my unhappiness. This was a time in my life when words wouldn’t come, and when the span between what I was—a vet tech—and what I wanted to be—a writer—seemed impossibly wide or impenetrably deep, I’d go to that lake and look out across it, searching for the other side.

And then the swan arrived. The girl found her on a warm spring day in the middle of April, while she was walking the lip of the lake, the willows blistered with nubs and the sun-warmed water tepid to the touch. A lot of people were out and about because the winter had been long, and the sound of melting snow—it must have been everywhere—trickling and kerplinking, made the world seem magical. And this is how, I think, the girl must have felt—as though in a fairyland—the lake, the sudden warmth of the weather, the rich mud, the tall grasses, the rustling weeds, and then appearing around a bend in the lake bed—a series of swans, one proud matriarch with her curved head held aloft, her beak bright as an orchid on a soft white stem, and her babies, also white, their webbed orange feet peddling furiously in the clear water, turning up froth. I see the girl see. I see her kneel down and scoop a stale crust of bread from her pocket. The swan family bobbed on the wavelets and swam closer to shore. They came so close the girl could see the dark dots of the mother’s beak—cygnet nostrils—where the air came and went. She could see water beading on the backs of the baby birds. She tossed out crumbs and the swans dipped their beaks in the lake, ladled up the crusts, ate quietly.

Most people know there exists in life at least two planes upon which we play our seemingly simultaneous parts. There is the apparent and then there is the down-under, where whole other plots and purposes evolve, and these plots can seem utterly surprising when they rupture the smooth surface on which we thought we stood.

Down under then, one feet, two feet, trawling along the lake’s muddy bottom, was a snapper. I’ve seen snappers before. They have domed shells, wizened heads, beady eyes, and generally indolent attitudes. Their mouths work as if on hinges, and their jaws have the power of a door slammed shut in a sudden summer storm. Above, in the daylight, the lovely swans were drifting. Below, in the lake’s lamp-light, the snapping turtle inched along.

He must have seen the peddling feet, the orange meat. The snapper nosed up out of the water, just enough so on the shore the girl could see the tip of his head, the scrawl marking his mouth now closed, and then in one swift second that mouth flashed open and closed around a baby swan’s dunked head with a clear crunching sound, and there was a struggle.

She was horrified, the girl. At least later she told me she was horrified as she stood there frozen, watching the infant cygnet with its head lodged deep in the turtle’s gulping throat, the turtle twisting this way and that, trying to snap its meat from the bone that held it fast and firm, as the petticoat of feathers swirled, and down flew, and blood bubbled up on the surface of the lake and then something also in her own throat, something stuck and struggling. And no one else seemed to see. It happened in a snap, a flash.