“After a while Harrison took notice of it and he started trying to get me to go places, first around the block, then to a park, then to a doctor. And I was hurt and embarrassed, and we fought, and he would ask me what kind of life I wanted, and what kind of life I wanted for my daughter. It ended really badly every time, and then we’d forget about it, and then we’d fight again about the same thing a few weeks later. We just, you know, hated each other. Eventually, he got the dog. I guess he assumed I wouldn’t let an animal shit in the house all day, and we didn’t have a yard, so. So, yeah, he got the dog.”
“And you killed it with your bare hands,” I said. “And then you learned something about yourself. And grew as a person. And that’s why you said what you said about me, and why I deserved it, because you killed a fucking dog.”
“I never laid a finger on Jack,” said Joan, horrified in her ugly suit. She was so horrified that she actually did a comical look-around, as though concerned that someone might have overheard the terrible untrue thing I’d said about her killing Jack. The dog was Jack, I guess. I didn’t ask what kind he was, but she mentioned he was small and brown, and so from then on out I pictured him as a Jack Russell Terrier. The details to most things existed in my mind as a kind of joyless teleplay, with costumes and spit takes and ethnic housekeepers, as though I’d painted the world with my feet while watching Nick at Nite.
“He was a WONDERFUL animal,” said Joan. “All he wanted to do was be with our family. Harrison got him from the shelter. He’d been a rescue, and he was wonderful. A wonderful family dog. Wonderful with the baby.”
“Wonderful.”
“Fine, be a shit, but this was a good dog, and Harrison was right, after the first time I didn’t let him crap in the house. I would get the baby in her stroller and we’d take the dog for a walk together. I was fearful. I had a lot of apprehension for that walk, and when it was done for the day I would feel such relief, immediately followed by apprehension for the next day’s walk. Would it rain? Would the stairs have wet leaves on them? Would I fall? And I could imagine falling with the baby holding my hand and the dog’s leash all wrapped around my legs and the slow-motion awfulness of that. And the ground and the pain and the blood! And the sounds that would come out of me, all guttural and primal, and the baby screaming and crying the way babies do when they are really, genuinely hurt and not just scared or tired. The great sucking in of breath and the wailing. It was always with me, every minute. And I couldn’t tell anyone, not Harrison or anyone. I was just so careful, and I just held on to Sab and the rail so tight every time. And every time we would somehow make it back into the house alive.
“I took him afternoon and evening. Harrison would take him before work and then for his last little pee to the corner. And I had … my goodness, by the end I had exhausted every possibility I thought of the bad things that could happen. It was a very busy street that we lived on for one thing, so, I don’t know, I had these visions of, like, a car jumping up on the curb and creaming us. It was very easy for my brain to create that scenario, like a movie. The whole grill of the car, the headlights, just right there. I’ve always been really good at seeing these things. Not positive things, mind you, just horrible things. So, I made it a point not to even cross any streets, not even the really baby streets. I just made a big cube—just a big square, and gave Jack enough time to poop and sniff and then it was done. It was a ten minute deal, and that’s not even me being conservative. It was ten minutes at the outside, really.”
“I don’t have the stomach for this right now, Joan,” is what came out of my mouth, and it surprised me a little. I felt meaner than that.
“I want you to know me,” said Joan. “I want you to understand where I’m coming from,” and I looked at her and didn’t say anything for a while so finally she added, “of course I don’t expect you to be on my side about this.”
“There was a new family at the corner, at one of the corners,” she said. “Right at the corner before you got to the very busy street with the curb-jumping cars. Well, they weren’t that new, but they had a new dog, a female, a mutt. A yellow-colored dog. She was always barking but not in the usual way that a dog will bark, not just like a dog defending its territory. She barked all the time—they muzzled her when they walked her and they barely walked her, so she was bored and angry and the barking was more like screaming. Very fierce. They kept her in the yard, mostly, and the only thing that separated the yard from the sidewalk was a chain-link fence. The crazy part was that this family had kids, small kids but still older than Sabrina, a small girl and an even smaller boy. The yard was actually nice. Big. They had a wooden structure out there for the kids, a nice one. A kind of professional one where you have to actually pour concrete in the base to keep it stable. The dog—her name was Izzy, I know this because the male owner would stand there and scream her name to no avail—would put her front paws up on the fence and just go apeshit on anyone. Not just if you had a dog, of course, but especially if you had a dog. Izzy would stand there in her yard with her front paws up on the fence and bark at another dog like she wanted to kill it.
“Everyone knew. The owners, in their defense, I guess, they always behaved in a pretty chagrined way, as though they could shrug and smile their killer dog into being something anecdotal, or even neighborly, but everyone on the block still knew. Once I saw a youngish mother with her baby in one of those front-carriers, and Izzy of course went bonkers when they walked by and the male owner was just there tinkering with the garbage can lids and the young mother said to him, ‘that dog is going to kill someone one day,’ just like that. Really matter of factly. It reminded me of that part in The Exorcist when the little girl comes downstairs during the party and tells the astronaut that he’s going to die and then she pees all over the living room rug. The owner’s face was weird; it was angry and shocked and embarrassed and it didn’t know which to be first. He sort of bristled out a response that was more like a jumble of indignant sounds than anything. It sounded like when someone insults a millionaire at a party in a cartoon.”
Then, Joan said, he’d tried to make a kind of conspiratorial face with her, like what a kook, right? And Joan had looked away. She’d envied the mother in a way, the unangry telling of a thing that was hard, much like the way that my Dad once told a used car salesman that his blackened thumbnail was going to fall off while the man was handing him a complimentary pen. Joan also longed to tell the owner that his dog was out of control, and not exercised enough, and should be put down in the most humane of ways, with its family surrounding it, on its sleeping blanket, perhaps with a well-loved stuffie nearby. But this was not a thing that most young mothers did, especially not ones who had yet to shed their baby weight and felt very conspicuous and open to the cruel taunts of others. Perhaps if she herself had been wearing a stylish knit cap and peacoat and skinny dark wash jeans that made her legs a mile long she might have been more open to sharing her feelings in that way, but she was a young mother of the regular sort, wearing whatever did not have baby vomit on it, and she wanted to be done with her afternoon walk for the day.
“It wasn’t a thing I thought about every day, oddly,” said Joan. “I was way more preoccupied with things that would never happen, like the car thing. Or teenagers. Evil, roving packs of teenage boys who wanted to hurt the baby and make fun of me. It didn’t occur to me as much to fear a thing that was so destined to happen.”
She didn’t have Sab in the stroller that day, she said. Sab was getting bigger and liked having the choice between a ride and a short walk, it seemed to appeal to her growing sense of independence in a small, adorable way. It had gotten to the point where she only wanted to take the stroller when she’d brought a toy or when she was eating something. The rest of the time she was happy to jump off low stoops and shuffle through the crunchy piles of leaves.
“The strange thing is that Izzy didn’t start out barking. Had she just been barking the entire time I could’ve crossed the street at least.
Even Jack was surprised. She was just there all of a sudden up against the fence screaming at us, and I backed up and right into the baby and she went back off the curb onto her bum. And then that dog was up and over that fence so fast. I guess, I guess she wanted Jack. I’d dropped his lead and he was near the baby, that’s the kind of dog he was. She was crying and scared and he went to her. But that’s not where my mind was. All I saw was Izzy and Sabrina, and Sabrina crying.
“I saw the collar, it was red, the collar, and I got a hold of it and pulled hard and I was on this dog, the dog was down on her side and I was on top of her, holding her, pulling her away from my baby. And this dog was gagging and snarling and its eyes were rolling and red and there was this white foaming spit and I could see that this dog wanted to kill my baby and while I was lying there I could see the dog killing my baby. I could see the dog’s mouth on my baby and it shaking her head back and forth the way that they do. And all of my weight was on this animal and I was … I made a fist like this and the thing that was in my head was the way they say that you’re supposed to punch a shark in its muzzle to make it go away, or else poke it in its eyes, and I hit the dog with my fist at the side of its head. It kind of yelped but it wasn’t stopping, it was still wild, it still wanted to hurt someone, and I punched it again and this time there was blood and more white spit but I couldn’t attribute the blood to this animal; I felt as though it could be my blood, or Sabrina’s blood, and I kept … I couldn’t stop hitting this animal. If I stopped hitting her, she would overpower me, I thought. I thought she would get up and she’d be even angrier, and I couldn’t let that happen. I felt so calm inside. I can’t remember it in any other way. I can’t remember my heart beating, or if I was breathing or sweating, but I remember this animal’s face coming apart beneath me. I remember that at one point my hand went into the dog’s mouth and I thought that it bit me, but it couldn’t bite me, it was maybe not even alive then. It hurt because my fist went right through the dog’s jaws and hit the concrete and it opened a few knuckles. There was blood everywhere. On the baby. I saw it on the baby and I started screaming but it was the dog’s blood, Izzy’s blood. The baby was fine. Jack was beside her and they were watching me. Sabrina had that one face babies make when they’re too afraid to cry; it’s a horrible face, it’s horrible when you know that you’re the reason the baby is making it.”
Joan said that the owner appeared then, that he’d actually probably always been there, and that for some reason she remembered him wearing a white starched shirt and overalls.
“No pitchfork?” I said.
“I know, right? It’s amazing what the mind can do after so many years. I have no idea why I would align him, and that moment, with farming. And not just farming but play-farming, like a farmer from a cartoon or a children’s book. He just started yelling, no words but yelling, just disembodied sounds coming really oddly from his throat like he was just learning to yodel and he was also angry at the same time. Did I mention the scarf, that I was wearing this pink scarf with a really wide weave and it was just, like, lolling out in the dog blood like a tongue?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t remember how I got home, though. I don’t remember showering or changing clothes, but it’s not really as though I blacked out, either. It was something else. I don’t know if that’s a thing, remembering the horrible part of a story perfectly and then blocking out the really mundane parts. I actually would like to remember those parts. There were a lot of old people in that neighborhood, and a lot of flags. American flags of course and then that other kind of flag that you change every season, you know, one has a Jack-o’-lantern and then it’s a horn of plenty and then a Christmas tree or Santa or whatever. And I do remember an old lady coming out and seeing the blood and screaming and saying that she’d known all along that that dog was a killer. She hadn’t seen. All she saw was the blood and the baby and all of us down on the ground like that. She didn’t know.
“It was a bad scene. The owner had seen everything and he was acting like I was some kind of a … well, he was acting as though he were the victim in all of that, that his dog had only wanted to play with my dog. He began crying, which was awesome. None of us were crying by that point, but he was. He was holding the body of the dog, and, you know, she looked so much smaller there in his arms, and he was crying. He was calling me a monster. Me, the mother. He was saying he didn’t know how he would tell two people, a boy’s name and a girl’s name, I guess the kids. I guess that he was talking about the kids.
“Nobody fucking questioned me, you know? It was self-defense. The guy … I don’t even remember his last name, he was very loud on the block for a while, I guess, but everyone hated him already, everyone had hated that dog, except for its family. I saw the mother a few times after I killed Izzy. She was very pale and drawn, the kind of woman who always seemed to be wearing a winter coat even when it was very warm. I guess they got another dog immediately, another rescue, but really old. An old Basset mix. It always wore a coat, too, or maybe it was a bulletproof vest. I never saw the kids after that. And they moved, finally, the lot of them. They were just there and gone one day, like a smell. They just drifted out of the neighborhood.”
“And then you were fearless,” I said.
“No,” said Joan. “God, no. I was more scared then, and then I had a reason to be, so Harrison didn’t give me such a hard time about it. He started coming home earlier and he came home for lunch, too, so I never took Jack out again. He was hit by a car a year or so later. He got out and got hit by a car. It was for the best.”
“It doesn’t sound as though it was the best for Jack.”
“Well, yeah, I guess not. I know that it wasn’t a drawn-out process. He was just smushed, just a mash of animal, like a squirrel or a cat. Roadkill. We didn’t have to take him to the emergency room or anything. I’m pretty sure that the driver of the car didn’t even know it hit him. They didn’t stop, in any case.”
It was weird, the way she told a story, what time did while she was talking. I’d seen a Nova a few months before about space and time, about how everything started with the Big Bang, actually a very organized thing, and became quicker and more disorganized, and how it was to blame for every erratic thing that happened, every time you broke a glass or fell in the street. It said that time went slower if you were moving forward, but that the way we moved on this planet was so slow to begin with that you couldn’t really tell at all. When Joan told a story it made you forget about any kind of time, at least it did when you stopped being uncomfortable and just gave in to it. In the middle of it I wouldn’t have been surprised to walk out of the room and run into myself walking in to begin hearing the story. I had a visual on that. I was always much better looking in that visual, more pulled together. I think it would have broken the heart of my brain to accept that I looked old or tired. But if I was defying natural laws anyway I wanted to believe that I still looked like a kid.
“What I want you to know about me, is that I am a mother before I am anything else. Maybe I’m appealing to you, I don’t know. Maybe I feel as though I owe you more of an explanation now that you are a mother yourself. In that second, in the second that I saw that dog headed for Sabrina, I knew how far I would go. I am not … I am a fearful person by nature, I don’t think that that’s a secret, but I found something that I would die for, and that was the baby. It didn’t have to be a dog, it could have been a man, or a fire, or anything. It was danger, and I didn’t think about it, I just went forward. I didn’t think about it.”
“I could lose my babies,” is what I said. “If you get your way, I could lose the twins.”
“And how does that feel?”
“You suck.”
“It’s a bad situation, I want you to know that I understand that. And I don’t want that, for you to lose those babies. I just don’t want to lose mine, right? I want all of us to keep our babies. It’s fair. All I want from this is what’s fair.”
There was
a rustling against the door, and then the door opened a crack and part of TJ’s face was there.
“Knock, knock.”
“We’re all set,” I said.
TJ walked into the room with a kind of careful hopefulness.
“Wonderful,” she said, her mouth still a straight line across. “And was this little chat a productive one?”
“It was about a dog,” I said, and that was all I said. I stood up and walked out of the office and the building and to my car with everyone behind me, saying my name.
23.
THE CALL CAME AT NIGHT, OF COURSE. I HADN’T BEEN SLEEPING, NOR had the men who lived to the right and left to me. One was watching a boxing match on the television, and from the screaming and swearing I assumed it was a fight on which he had a great deal of money, and the other was making some sort of loud love to something, to another person or to himself. There seemed to be no second voice in his room in any case, but by then I had trained myself to think the best of these people so perhaps it was a mute woman he was having sex with, or a mute man.
It was TJ on the phone. My ringtone for her was Everybody Hurts.
“It’s over,” she said, the kind of thing you want to believe but won’t let yourself, like summer vacation or a plane landing safely.
She Came From Beyond! Page 25
