by Kelly Link
“I can’t read the name,” Carroll said. “It’s Ellen,” Mrs. Rook said. “My husband carved it.” Carroll looked at Rachel. Your mother has a tombstone for her leg? Rachel looked away.
“You can’t live without water.”
“So that’s your choice?”
“I’m just thinking out loud. I know what you want me to say.”
No answer.
“Rachel, look. I choose water, okay?”
No answer.
“Let me explain. You can lie to water – you can say no, I’m not in love, I don’t need love, and you can be lying – how is the water supposed to know that you’re lying? It can’t tell if you’re in love or not, right? Water’s not that smart. So you fool the water into thinking you’d never dream of falling in love, and when you’re thirsty, you drink it.”
“You’re pretty sneaky.”
“I love you, Rachel. Will you please marry me? Otherwise your mother is going to kill me.”
No answer.
After dinner, Carroll’s car refused to start. No one answered when they rang a garage, and Rachel said, “He can take my bike, then.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mr. Rook said. “He can stay here and we’ll get someone in the morning. Besides, it’s going to rain soon.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Carroll said.
Rachel said, “It’s getting dark. He can call a taxi.” Carroll looked at her, hurt, and she frowned at him.
“He’ll stay in the back room,” Mrs. Rook said. “Come and have another glass of wine before you go to bed, Carroll.” She grinned at him in what might have been a friendly fashion, except that at some point after dinner, she had removed her dentures.
Rachel brought him a pair of her father’s pajamas and led him off to the room where he was to sleep. The room was small and plain and the only beautiful thing in it was Rachel, sitting on a blue and scarlet quilt. “Who made this?” he said.
“My mother did,” Rachel said. “She’s made whole closetsful of quilts. It’s what she used to do while she waited for me to get home from a date. Now get in bed.”
“Why didn’t you want me to spend the night?” he asked.
She stuck a long piece of hair in her mouth, and sucked on it, staring at him without blinking. He tried again. “How come you never spend the night at my apartment?”
She shrugged. “Are you tired?”
Carroll yawned, and gave up. “Yes,” he said and Rachel kissed him goodnight. It was a long, thoughtful kiss. She turned out the light and went down the hall to her own bedroom. Carroll rolled on his side and fell asleep and dreamed that Rachel came back in the room and stood naked in the moonlight. Then she climbed in bed with him and they made love and then Mrs. Rook came into the room. She beat at them with her leg as they hid under the quilt. She struck Rachel and turned her into wood.
As Carroll left the next morning, it was discovered that Flower had given birth to seven puppies in the night. “Well, it’s too late now,” Rachel said.
“Too late for what?” Carroll asked. His car started on the first try.
“Never mind,” Rachel said gloomily. She didn’t wave as he drove away.
Carroll discovered that if he said “I love you,” to Rachel, she would say “I love you too,” in an absent-minded way. But she still refused to come to his apartment, and because it was colder now, they made love during the day, in the storage closet on the third floor. Sometimes he caught her watching him now, when they made love. The look in her eyes was not quite what he had hoped it would be, more shrewd than passionate. But perhaps this was a trick of the cold winter light.
Sometimes, now that it was cold, Rachel let Carroll drive her home from school. The sign beside the Rooks’ driveway now said, “Get your Christmas Trees early.” Beneath that it said, “Adorable black Lab Puppies free to a Good home.”
But no one wanted a puppy. This was understandable; already the puppies had the gaunt, evil look of their parents. They spent their days catching rats in the barn, and their evenings trailing like sullen shadows around the black skirts of Mrs. Rook. They tolerated Mr. Rook and Rachel; Carroll they eyed hungrily.
“You have to look on the bright side,” Mr. Rook said. “They make excellent watchdogs.”
Carroll gave Rachel a wooden bird on a gold chain for Christmas, and the complete works of Jane Austen. She gave him a bottle of strawberry wine and a wooden box, with six black dogs painted on the lid. They had fiery red eyes and red licorice tongues. “My father carved it, but I painted it,” she said.
Carroll opened the box. “What will I put in it?” he said.
Rachel shrugged. The library was closed for the weekend, and they sat on the dingy green carpet in the deserted lounge. The rest of the staff was on break, and Mr. Cassatti, Carroll’s supervisor, had asked Carroll to keep an eye on things.
There had been some complaints, he said, of vandalism in the past few weeks. Books had been knocked off their shelves, or disarranged, and even more curious, a female student claimed to have seen a dog up on the third floor. It had growled at her, she said, and then slunk off into the stacks. Mr. Cassatti, when he had gone up to check, had seen nothing. Not so much as a single hair. He wasn’t worried about the dog, Mr. Cassatti had said, but some books had been discovered, the pages ripped out. Maimed, Mr. Cassatti had said.
Rachel handed Carroll one last parcel. It was wrapped in a brown paper bag, and when he opened it, a blaze of scarlet and cornflower blue spilled out onto his lap. “My mother made you a quilt just like the one in the spare bedroom,” Rachel said. “I told her you thought it was pretty.”
“It’s beautiful,” Carroll said. He snapped the quilt out, so that it spread across the library floor, as if they were having a picnic. He tried to imagine making love to Rachel beneath a quilt her mother had made. “Does this mean that you’ll make love with me in a bed?”
“I’m pregnant,” Rachel said.
He looked around to see if anyone else had heard her, but of course they were alone. “That’s impossible,” he said. “You’re on the pill.”
“Yes, well.” Rachel said. “I’m pregnant anyway. It happens sometimes.”
“How pregnant?” he asked.
“Three months.”
“Does your mother know?”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“Oh God, she’s going to put the dogs on me. What are we going to do?”
“What am I going to do,” Rachel said, looking down at her cupped hands so that Carroll could not see her expression. “What am I going to do,” she said again.
There was a long pause and Carroll took one of her hands in his. “Then we’ll get married?” he said, a quaver in his voice turning the statement into a question.
“No,” she said, looking straight at him, the way she looked at him when they made love. He had never noticed what a sad hopeless look this was.
Carroll dropped his own eyes, ashamed of himself and not quite sure why. He took a deep breath. “What I meant to say, Rachel, is I love you very much and would you please marry me?”
Rachel pulled her hand away from him. She said in a low angry voice, “What do you think this is, Carroll? Do you think this is a book? Is this supposed to be the happy ending – we get married and live happily ever after?”
She got up, and he stood up too. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out, so he just followed her as she walked away. She stopped so abruptly that he almost fell against her. “Let me ask you a question first,” she said, and turned to face him. “What would you choose, love or water?”
The question was so ridiculous that he found he was able to speak again. “What kind of a question is that?” he said.
“Never mind. I think you better take me home in your car,” Rachel said. “It’s starting to snow.”
Carroll thought about it during the car ride. He came to the conclusion that it was a silly question, and that if he didn’t answer it correctly, Rachel wasn’t going to marr
y him. He wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to give the correct answer, even if he knew what it was.
He said, “I love you, Rachel.” He swallowed and he could hear the snow coming down, soft as feathers on the roof and windshield of the car. In the two beams of the headlights the road was dense and white as an iced cake, and in the reflected snow-light Rachel’s face was a beautiful greenish color. “Will you marry me anyway? I don’t know how you want me to choose.”
“No.”
“Why not?” They had reached the farm; he turned the car into driveway, and stopped.
“You’ve had a pretty good life so far, haven’t you?” she said.
“Not too bad,” he said sullenly.
“When you walk down the street,” Rachel said, “do you ever find pennies?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are they heads or tails?”
“Heads, usually,” he said.
“Do you get good grades?”
“As and Bs,” he said.
“Do you have to study hard? Have you ever broken a mirror? When you lose things,” she said, “do you find them again?”
“What is this, an interview?”
Rachel looked at him. It was hard to read her expression, but she sounded resigned. “Have you ever even broken a bone? Do you ever have to stop for red lights?”
“Okay, okay,” he snapped. “My life is pretty easy. I’ve gotten everything I ever wanted for Christmas, too. And I want you to marry me, so of course you’re going to say yes.”
He reached out, put his arms around her. She sat brittle and stiff in the circle of his embrace, her face turned into his jacket. “Rachel – “
“My mother says I shouldn’t marry you,” she said. “She says I don’t really know you, that you’re feckless, that you’ve never lost anything that you cared about, that you’re the wrong sort to be marrying into a family like ours.”
“Is your mother some kind of oracle, because she has a wooden leg?”
“My mother knows about losing things,” Rachel said, pushing at him. “She says it’ll hurt, but I’ll get over you.”
“So tell me, how hard has your life been?” Carroll said. “You’ve got your nose, and both your legs. What do you know about losing things?”
“I haven’t told you everything,” Rachel said and slipped out of the car. “You don’t know everything about me.” Then she slammed the car door. He watched her cross the driveway and go up the hill into the snow.
Carroll called in sick all the next week. The heating unit in his apartment wasn’t working, and the cold made him sluggish. He thought about going in to the library, just to be warm, but instead he spent most of his time under the quilt that Mrs. Rook had made, hoping to dream about Rachel. He dreamed instead about being devoured by dogs, about drowning in icy black water.
He lay in his dark room, under the weight of the scarlet quilt, when he wasn’t asleep, and held long conversations in his head with Rachel, about love and water. He told her stories about his childhood; she almost seemed to be listening. He asked her about the baby and she told him she was going to name it Ellen if it was a girl. When he took his own temperature on Wednesday, the thermometer said he had a fever of 103, so he climbed back into bed.
When he woke up on Thursday morning, he found short black hairs covering the quilt, which he knew must mean that he was hallucinating. He fell asleep again and dreamed that Mr. Rook came to see him. Mr. Rook was a Black Lab. He was wearing a plastic Groucho Marx nose. He and Carroll stood beside the black lake that was on the third floor of the library.
The dog said, “You and I are a lot alike, Carroll.”
“I suppose,” Carroll said.
“No, really,” the dog insisted. It leaned its head on Carroll’s knee, still looking up at him. “We like to look on the bright side of things. You have to do that, you know.”
“Rachel doesn’t love me anymore,” Carroll said. “Nobody likes me.” He scratched behind Mr. Rook’s silky ear.
“Now, is that looking on the bright side of things?” said the dog. “Scratch a little to the right. Rachel has a hard time, like her mother. Be patient with her.”
“So which would you choose,” Carroll said. “Love or water?”
“Who says anyone gets to choose anything? You said you picked water, but there’s good water and there’s bad water. Did you ever think about that?” the dog said. “I have a much better question for you. Are you a good dog or a bad dog?”
“Good dog!” Carroll yelled, and woke himself up.
He called the farmhouse in the morning, and when Rachel answered, he said, “This is Carroll. I’m coming to talk to you.”
But when he got there, no one was there. The sight of the leftover Christmas trees, tall and gawky as green geese, made him feel homesick. Little clumps of snow like white flowers were melting in the gravel driveway. The dogs were not in the barn and he hoped that Mrs. Rook had taken them down to the pond.
He walked up to the house, and knocked on the door. If either of Rachel’s parents came to the door, he would stand his ground and demand to see their daughter. He knocked again, but no one came. The house, shuttered against the snow, had an expectant air, as if it were waiting for him to say something. So he whispered, “Rachel? Where are you?” The house was silent. “Rachel, I love you. Please come out and talk to me. Let’s get married – we’ll elope. You steal your mother’s leg, and by the time your father carves her a new one, we’ll be in Canada. We could go to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon – we could take your mother’s leg with us, if you want – Ellen, I mean – we’ll take Ellen with us!”
Carroll heard a delicate cough behind him as if someone were clearing their throat. He turned and saw Flower and Acorn and their six enormous children sitting on the gravel by the barn, next to his car. Their fur was spiky and wet, and they curled their black lips at him. Someone in the house laughed. Or perhaps it was the echo of a splash, down at the pond.
One of the dogs lifted its head and bayed at him. “Hey,” he said. “Good dog! Good Flower, good Acorn! Rachel, help!”
She had been hiding behind the front door. She slammed it open and came out onto the porch. “My mother said I should just let the dogs eat you,” she said. “If you came.”
She looked tired; she wore a shapeless woolen dress that looked like one of her mother’s. If she really was pregnant, Carroll couldn’t see any evidence yet. “Do you always listen to your mother?” he said. “Don’t you love me?”
“When I was born,” she said. “I was a twin. My sister’s name was Ellen. When we were seven years old, she drowned in the pond – I lost her. Don’t you see? People start out losing small things, like noses. Pretty soon you start losing other things too. It’s sort of an accidental leprosy. If we got married, you’d find out.”
Carroll heard someone coming up the path from the pond, up through the thin ranks of Christmas trees. The dogs pricked up their ears, but their black eyes stayed fastened to Carroll. “You’d better hurry,” Rachel said. She escorted him past the dogs to his car.
“I’m going to come back.”
“That’s not a good idea,” she said. The dogs watched him leave, crowding close around her, their black tails whipping excitedly. He went home and in a very bad temper, he picked up the quilt to inspect it. He was looking for the black hairs he had seen that morning. But of course there weren’t any.
The next day he went back to the library. He was lifting books out of the overnight collection box, when he felt something that was neither rectangular nor flat. It was covered in velvety fur, and damp. He felt warm breath steaming on his hand. It twisted away when he tried to pick it up, and when he reached out for it again, it snarled at him.
He backed away from the collection box, and a long black dog wriggled out of the box after him. Two students stopped to watch what was happening. “Go get Mr. Cassatti, please,” Carroll said to one of them. “His office is around the corner.”
The dog
approached him. Its ears were laid back flat against its skull and its neck moved like a snake.
“Good dog?” Carroll said, and held out his hand. “Flower?” The dog lunged forward and, snapping its jaws shut, bit off his pinky just below the fingernail.
The student screamed. Carroll stood still and looked down at his right hand, which was slowly leaking blood. The sound that the dog’s jaw had made as it severed his finger had been crisp and businesslike. The dog stared at Carroll in a way that reminded him of Rachel’s stare. “Give me back my finger,” Carroll said.
The dog growled and backed away. “We have to catch it,” the student said. “So they can reattach your finger. Shit, what if it has rabies?”
Mr. Cassatti appeared, carrying a large flat atlas, extended like a shield. “Someone said that there was a dog in the library,” he said.
“In the corner over there,” Carroll said. “It bit off my finger.” He held up his hand for Mr. Cassatti to see, but Mr. Cassatti was looking towards the corner and shaking his head.
He said, “I don’t see a dog.”
The two students hovered, loudly insisting that they had both seen the dog a moment ago, while Mr. Cassatti tended to Carroll. The floor in the corner was sticky and wet, as if someone had spilled a Coke. There was no sign of the dog.
Mr. Cassatti took Carroll to the hospital, where the doctor at the hospital gave him a shot of codeine, and tried to convince him that it would be a simple matter to reattach the fingertip. “How?” Mr. Cassatti said. “He says the dog ran away with it.”
“What dog?” the doctor asked.
“It was bitten off by a dog,” Carroll told the doctor.
The doctor raised his eyebrows. “A dog in a library? This looks like he stuck his finger under a paper cutter. The cut is too tidy – a dog bite would be a mess. Didn’t anyone bring the finger?”
