Why They Run the Way They Do (20 page)

“Is Charlie out there?” she asked. She propped her guitar against the arm of the couch.

“No,” he said. “He's not home yet.”

“That's weird,” she said. “But sometimes the buses run late.”

“Yes,” he said, with an air of finality he hadn't intended. The room fell silent, no boy's footsteps or dog's pants to fill the space. She sipped carefully at her tea. Unable to think of anything else to talk about, he added, “Do you ride the bus?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “My boyfriend has a car. But I used to. Do you remember when the guy was run over in the school parking lot? That was
my
bus that did it.”

“Really?” he said, though he had no memory of the event.

“He died like
that,
” she said, snapping her fingers in an approximation of instant death. “It was the last day of school. Someone dared him to lie under the tire, and he did it because he didn't think the bus driver was even on the bus, but it turned out the driver was just bent over picking a candy wrapper off the floor, and then the driver sat up and pulled forward.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn't know him. He wasn't in my grade or anything. But it was still horrible.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You want to hear the really freaky part?”

“It gets freakier?”

She nodded. “They said they got a new bus, over the summer, because a bunch of parents called and said they shouldn't make the kids ride a bus that killed somebody. So on the first day of school the next year we had a shiny new bus with a new number. But then I sat down in my seat, the third from the back, where I'd always sat since third grade, and ever since third grade there'd been this little flap in the seat in front of me where I could stick my gum in the morning and pick it up again in the afternoon, and I thought now I'd have to swallow my gum because I wouldn't have the flap anymore. But guess what?”

“What,” he said.

“The flap was still there. Even my gum was still there, inside it; I never picked it up the afternoon of the accident. It was gray. The gum, I mean.”

“It was the same bus,” Simon said.

“Exactly,” she said. “They just painted it and gave it a new number. I wrote a song about it: ‘You Can't Just Change the Number.' You wanna hear it?”

“Wow,” he said. “Absolutely.”

She reached for her guitar, pulled it into her lap. “It's kind of a metaphor,” she explained.

“Cool,” he said, sitting forward in his chair.

She strummed one note, a particularly sad one, Simon thought, which was odd because it seemed like a note should not be able to be sad on its own but only in its relationship to others. But then something stopped her—he could see it come across her face, the realization that something in the house was off, even corrupt—and she lay her hand over the strings to silence them.

“Aren't you worried about Charlie?” she asked. “He's really late.”

“Charlie's on vacation with his mother,” he said. “And the dog's not in the backyard. The dog's dead. She died on Sunday.”

“Oh no,” Lucy said. “Oh, Mr. Winter, I'm sorry. She was a sweet dog.”

“She never tore anything up,” he said. “Not one shoe. Not one piece of mail. And she'd even let you give her a bath, you know? She'd just stand there while you held the hose on her.”

“I know,” Lucy said. She stood up, holding her guitar in front of her. She looked slightly nervous, Simon thought. Well, he reasoned, he'd outright lied to her; maybe she had a right to be nervous. “Listen, if Charlie's not here, I think I should probably get going,” she said.

“You want to stay for dinner?”

“It's quarter to four,” she said.

“We could have an early dinner,” he said. “I could put some burgers on the grill.”

“Mr. Winter, it's like forty degrees outsi—”

“Your boyfriend could come,” he said. “And your parents. Are they home? I could call them.”

He had an image now of a yard full of neighbors, though except for Lucy he didn't know a single one of them by name. In the picture in his mind he was standing at the grill wearing an apron that said “Top Chef.” He was surrounded by a crowd of trim people with gleaming white teeth. They were all laughing and drinking beer; an attractive black man slapped him jovially on the back. The scenario was so familiar that for a moment he thought this had once been his life, a life snatched from him by Rachel. Then he realized he'd seen it all recently in a TV commercial.

“Never mind,” he told Lucy. He stood and walked with her to the front hall.

“Did you have her cremated?” Lucy asked. “When my dog Willoughby died, we had her cremated and then we sprinkled her ashes at every house on the street. All the places she used to pee.”

“She's in the freezer,” Simon said, opening the door for her. He was suddenly very tired from all the company at the pretend barbecue.

“What freezer?” she said. “You just have that dorm fridge.”

“I got a full-size freezer in the divorce,” he said. “It's in the basement. I had some Bomb Pops in there but I threw them away.”

Lucy's eyes widened. “She's really in the freezer?”

“Yep,” he said.

“Can I see her?”

“No,” he said. “You were right—you should go.” He didn't want anyone to see the dog. If someone else saw her it would be real, irrefutable, kaput. As long as he was the only witness there was a slim chance it wasn't true, because he was half out of his mind anyway, so who was to say the dog wasn't at the kennel, or down at the park with a soggy tennis ball in her mouth, just waiting for someone to wing it across the sky?

At 10:30 he put on his coat and left the house for his nightly dog walk. He nearly carried the leash with him, imagined dragging it limply behind him, but to do so seemed showboat-y pathetic, something a sad sack would do in a silent movie. Every night that Charlie wasn't staying with him, he and the dog had walked the same walk, left at the end of the driveway, past the neighbors he almost never saw, past the house with the old black Lab who watched from the window but never barked, past the house with a half dozen rusty bicycles in the yard, past the house where Lucy lived with her parents, on down the street to the stop sign, a left turn, and past the house where the young man sat smoking on the porch, past the house with the alarmed beagle, past the house where the windows were always dark, past the house with the Redskins flag fluttering from a pole, past the house where the kids were always screaming. He stopped now and listened to them, their voices genderless, the kids—at least three of them, maybe four—preteens and furious.

He saw his life taking shape before him, falling in line like so many houses down this street, saw Charlie returning home from the Poconos and almost immediately asking for the car keys, then departing for college, then at the altar, then an infant sleeping on his chest. He should have slowed things down somehow, back when he had everything, should have dug his feet into the ground four or five years ago and refused to let the earth spin those seasons away.

The next house was the one with the fat gray cat who always sat on a chair on the porch, who raised its head when he passed with the dog and then, seeing nothing of interest, set it down again upon its paws. Simon had never seen another soul on the porch, never seen anyone petting the cat, though it was fat and well groomed and obviously lived in this house. Who were these people? he wondered. Were their lives so full they couldn't take five lousy minutes out of the evening to spend with their cat?

He stopped in front of the house. It was cold, and he could see tiny cat breaths billowing from the cat's mouth. He glanced up and down the street and saw no one. Quickly he climbed the six steps to the porch and scooped the cat, mid-billow, into his arms. He cleared all six stairs in a leap, stumbled two steps on the sidewalk, then dashed down the street and around the corner, already fumbling for his keys with his free hand. When he reached his house he opened the door and then quickly shut it behind him. Still holding the cat, he pressed his eye to the peephole. The street was vacant. No one had seen him. Breathing heavily, he stepped away from the door and gently set the cat on the floor. The cat flopped lazily onto its side, licked the bottom of its paw, then looked up at him with almost no interest whatsoever.

He knelt down and stroked the cat, and the cat raised its back into his head and flicked his tail. It didn't seem concerned at all to be in a new place. Simon had never had a cat, but he knew what people said about them, that they were aloof and superior and had few loyalties. It had probably already forgotten its old home, Simon thought; the memory of the rotten family who'd kept it outside day and night was at this moment swiftly evaporating within its miniature brain. But then the cat stood up and walked over to the door and batted its paw in the direction of the doorknob.

“Mrow,” the cat said.

“No, no, no,” Simon said, shaking his head. He picked up the cat and turned it so they were face to face. “This is your home now. On Saturday Charlie'll be here. He and I'll take good care of you. We won't leave you sitting in the cold all night long.”

He carried the cat into the bedroom and set him on the end of the bed. The cat again flopped onto its side and unenthusiastically licked its paws while Simon changed into his pajamas and then stepped into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When he came out the cat was gone. He found it back in the front hall, lifting its paw and talking to the door.

“Mrow,” it said.

“No, no, no,” Simon said. He picked up the cat again. “Listen,” he said. “Tomorrow I'll get you some canned food. Top of the line, okay? The one on TV where the cat eats out of the crystal bowl. And I'll get you a litter box and a new collar and some little mouse toys. Okay? Okay?”

He carried the cat into the bedroom and laid down on the bed with the cat resting on his stomach. He stroked the cat and the cat was content, for a minute or two, and then as Simon was drifting off he heard the thump of its feet on the floor.

“Fine,” he said, swinging out of bed, suddenly wide-awake and furious. “If that's the way you want it.”

He stomped out to the front hall and yanked opened the door. The cat walked outside and flopped down on the front walk. It hadn't wanted to leave, Simon realized. It had just wanted to go outside. Simon looked at the clock. It was a little after midnight, a few minutes into Thursday. He couldn't wait until Sunday to bury the dog. Rachel was right: he was losing his mind. She hadn't said it in so many words, but it was surely what she'd been thinking standing there with her one paltry bar, and she was right. He had a frozen dog in his basement and he'd just stolen a cat off somebody's porch, which was probably a felony. Who knew what he'd do next?

He was going to have to bury the dog, and he was going to have to do it now.

It had been easy, getting her down the stairs and into the freezer, because she'd still been warm and pliable and had relaxed into his cradled arms as if she were a sleeping child. But now she was cold and hard and he understood the term “deadweight.” At first he tried balancing her across his arms, but she kept slipping off to one side, so then he tried putting her over his shoulder, but she slid off and made a sickening cracking noise when she hit the basement floor, so he decided he'd have to drag her up the stairs. He tried to do it gently, pulled her backward by the shoulders. When he reached the kitchen he picked her up around the middle, pretending she was a statue instead of a real dog, and pushed out the back door into the yard. He lay her under the maple tree, the place he and Charlie had chosen for the grave, and then went to the garage to find the shovel.

But of course there was no shovel. The shovel he had so clearly pictured hanging on a peg in the garage was actually hanging on a peg in another garage, three miles away, in a home that was no longer his. So she'd taken his shovel, too. Yes, it was true, he'd told her he didn't want it, couldn't remember ever using it, but she'd been awfully quick to accept the shovel . . . and the spade, and the hedge clippers, and the weed whacker, and all those other gleaming things they'd bought at Home Depot but never used. He poked around the garage and found some of Charlie's old sand toys. It was worth a try, he thought.

He went back out to the yard and got down on his knees on the cold ground, stabbed at it with a blue plastic shovel, which immediately snapped in two and sliced his hand open as it broke. He swore, pressed the wound to his pajama pants, then grabbed a bright-yellow, claw-like implement, which managed three decent scratches in the dirt before it, too, snapped in his grasp. He went through another half dozen toys and, by the time they all lay scattered and broken around him, had made a shallow trench possibly just large enough to bury a goldfish.