The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  There’s some inane banter between the field reporter and the anchorwoman, then photos appear on the screen of the three men the police managed to arrest. One of them is Aaron, the red-haired man with the unfaithful wife; the other two I recognize vaguely from the meeting.

  “Platt is still at large,” the anchorwoman says. “If you have any information, please notify the police.”

  So Remo managed to get away with Dog J. And Lucas managed to get away with Lorelei. I turn off the TV and pace around the living room for another couple of minutes. I put on my jacket and get ready to leave for the police station, but before I get a chance, the doorbell rings. It’s a police officer.

  “Paul Iverson?” he asks when I open the door. I nod. “Come with me,” he says. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  It’s nearly daybreak by the time I return home. I’m exhausted; it’s been a grueling night. It turns out that the police have been keeping an eye on me. After Dog J’s disappearance, they did some research into Wendell Hollis’s recent correspondence, and of course my name came up. In fact, they followed me to the meeting tonight. It took some time for me to convince them that I’m not exactly a key player in the Cerberus Society. And the words “I was just on my way to the police station when you arrived” didn’t seem to carry much weight. In the end, of course, I didn’t have any information that could help them. I had no idea where Remo might have gone; I knew nothing about the details of the kidnapping or about Remo’s plans for Dog J. And though they took down a description of Lorelei and told me they’d let me know if she turned up, it was clear it wasn’t going to be a priority for them. She’s not the dog the public wants them to find.

  At least they didn’t arrest me. It certainly seemed like a possibility at first, although I was able to establish fairly quickly that I hadn’t had anything to do with the kidnapping. But rarely in my life have I been so humiliated. The detective I spoke to, a great bully of a man named Caffrey, was very menacing until he’d decided I wasn’t a threat. Then he treated me like an imbecile. When I told him the story of Lexy’s death and my subsequent work with Lorelei—it seemed important that I explain the circumstances that had led me to attend the meeting—he actually laughed.

  “So should I put the word out that we’ve got another talking doggy on our hands?” he asked, smirking.

  “No,” I said quietly. “She hasn’t learned yet.”

  “I see,” he said. “She hasn’t learned yet. Well, we’ll certainly let you know if she comes in here asking for help.”

  Just then, Detective Anthony Stack, the man who had presided over the scene of Lexy’s death, walked in.

  “Dr. Iverson,” he said. I could have hugged him for calling me doctor. “I heard you were here, and I thought I’d come say hello.”

  “Detective Stack,” I said. “It’s so nice to see you. I was hoping I might be of some help with the Cerberus Society case, but it doesn’t look like I have any useful information.”

  “I was a little bit surprised when I saw your name come up. I couldn’t believe you were mixed up with those guys.”

  “Well, I’m not really,” I said. “I was just telling Detective Caffrey, here . . .”

  “The professor here is trying to teach his dog to talk,” Caffrey said. “He’s going to turn her into a police dog. She’s going to solve the mystery of his wife’s death.”

  “Dr. Iverson,” said Detective Stack, “you know your wife’s death was ruled accidental.”

  “Yes, well,” I said. “I just wanted to . . . There were some incongruities,” I finished lamely.

  Detective Stack gave me a searching look. He nodded doubtfully.

  “But as I was telling Detective Caffrey,” I went on, “my dog’s disappeared. One of the men from the meeting took her.” I could hear how I must have sounded.

  “And apparently,” Caffrey said, “the dog’s the only one who can figure out those ‘incongruities.’”

  Stack shot Caffrey a warning look. “Well, we’ll see what we can do about your dog,” he said to me. His voice was gentle. “Now, why don’t you go home. Do you need someone to take you back?”

  For an instant, I saw myself as he must have seen me—shabby, frail, broken—and I felt ashamed. “No,” I said. “Thank you.” I walked out of the police station into the starless night.

  Now I’m back in my empty house, and the sun is starting to come up. Late as it is, I don’t feel much like sleeping. So I do what I always do lately when I have a few moments’ time on my hands. I pick up the phone and dial the number I’ve learned by heart.

  “Thank you for calling our Psychic Helpline,” the woman on the other end says. “This is Lady Arabelle.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  This is Lady Arabelle,” she says again when I don’t answer. “Extension 43981. I’m going to do a tarot card reading for you, so why don’t you start by giving me your name, your birthday, and your address.”

  “Is this really Lady Arabelle?” I ask, though I know her voice by heart.

  “Yes, it is,” she says. “And who am I speaking to?”

  “Paul,” I say.

  “Well, Paul, honey, why don’t you tell Lady Arabelle your birthday, so we can get started.”

  “September twentieth,” I say. “But I’m not calling for a reading.”

  “Oh, no?” she says. Her voice is smooth as warm caramel.

  “No,” I say. I try to figure out where to begin. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. You see, my wife died last October, and then a couple of months ago, I was watching TV, and I heard you talking to her on one of your commercials. She’s the one who said, ‘I’m lost, I don’t know what to do.’ Do you know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Well, of course I know the commercial, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about any one particular call. It’s confidential, for one thing, and to be honest with you, I can’t say I remember the details of every call I take.”

  “No, of course not. But if you could just think about it for a minute, if you could just try to remember. It’s very important to me.”

  She starts to say something, but I interrupt her and go on in a rush. “As for confidentiality,” I say, “I’m sure you have your rules, but do they still apply when the person you spoke to is dead?”

  Lady Arabelle sighs. “You know,” she says, “it may not even have been your wife’s voice that you heard. It might have been another woman entirely. Isn’t it possible that in your grief you might have been mistaken?”

  “I know my wife’s voice,” I say. I’m surprised at the coldness of my tone. I take a breath and compose myself. “Anyway,” I say, “I found it on my phone bill. October twenty-third. Eleven twenty-three P.M. Eastern time. You spoke to her for forty-six minutes. Surely you can remember something. You can at least try.” She doesn’t say anything, so I continue. “Look, you’ve got me on the phone for five dollars a minute, and I’m not planning on hanging up until I get an answer out of you. How often does an opportunity like that come along?”

  She doesn’t laugh, but when she speaks, I can hear she’s softened. “Why don’t you tell me about your wife?” she says.

  And so I do. I tell her everything I can think of. I tell her about how I met Lexy; I tell her about how Lexy died. I tell her about the lonely months I’ve spent since then, unraveling clues that may not be clues at all. My work with Lorelei, the open gate, the empty yard. I have no idea how long I’ve talked, but when I finally stop, my throat is dry.

  There’s a long silence after I finish talking. “Lady Arabelle,” I say. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here, baby,” she says.

  “So . . . did that help?” I say. “Did it help you remember anything about Lexy’s call?” My voice cracks. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if she says no.

  “I think I can help you,” she says. I let out a breath that sounds like a sob. “I don’t remember the call, I have to be honest with you. I get a couple hundred
calls a month, and most of them sound pretty much the same after a while. But I do keep notes.”

  Notes! Oh, God, she has notes from Lexy’s phone call! I don’t trust my voice to answer her.

  “I’m writing a book,” she says. “About my experiences as Lady Arabelle. Starting last fall, I’ve kept notes on every call I’ve taken. If you give me the date and time again, I can look and see what I have, and I’ll call you back.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you. I can’t tell you . . .”

  “I know, baby,” she says.

  I give her the information and my phone number, and we hang up. I’m shaking all over. I feel jubilant, and I feel afraid.

  It’s full morning now, and the sun is coming through the windows. I’ve got to calm down. I’ve got to find something to occupy my mind while I wait for Lady Arabelle to call me back. I sit down to compose a “Lost Dog” ad, but as soon as I write the words “Missing: Eight-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback,” tears come to my eyes and I have to put down the pen. Instead, I go into my office and turn on my laptop. I still haven’t finished listing the books on the shelf. I stretch out on the floor in front of the bookcase and begin to list the books on the bottom two shelves.

  To Have and to Hold (Ours. It’s a book about writing your own wedding vows. We bought it before we got married.)

  The Toad Not Taken: The Linguistic Value of Puns (Mine.)

  Out of the Rat Race and into the Chips (Mine. It was written by the grandfather of a girl I dated in college. It describes how the author started his own mail-order business and was able to make lots of money and still play golf every afternoon.)

  Your Fortune in Mail-Order Selling (Mine. Same girlfriend, same grandfather.)

  Exercises for a Healthy Heart (Mine. It’s a novel that I found misshelved in the fitness section of a bookstore.)

  A Handbook of Dreams (Hers. A book on dream interpretation.)

  Flesh Wounds (Hers. A wryly funny collection of short stories.)

  Papier-Mâché Arts and Crafts (Hers.)

  Put a Lid on It: Managing Your Anger (Hers.)

  Learn to Play Piano in Fourteen Days (Mine.)

  The City of One (Mine. A futuristic sci-fi thriller.)

  A History of the English Language (Mine.)

  Stone Shoes and Other Fables (Hers.)

  That’s all of them, and I still know nothing. I’m beginning to feel sleepy. I was up all night, after all. I put my head down on the carpet. It feels blessedly soft against my cheek. I close my eyes and sleep.

  I dream that I come upon Lexy sitting in the kitchen, chopping an onion. In the dream, I can feel my eyes stinging from the sharp smell.

  She looks up at me and smiles. “I was going to peel it,” she says. “But you can only peel so many layers before you have to cut it.”

  “Lexy,” I say, “you’re alive.” But what I feel isn’t surprise or joy or wonder. I’m furious at her. I’ve never been so angry.

  “I meant to call,” she says.

  “You meant to call?” I say sharply. “Well, that does me a lot of good.”

  Lexy laughs. “Sorry,” she says.

  “You can’t just come back here,” I say. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? What the fuck were you thinking?” I’m shouting at her now.

  “Do you want me to go?” she says, standing up from the table.

  “No,” I say. “Just go back to cutting your fucking onion.”

  The dream gets strange after that—there’s something else, something about how Lexy needs her body back, the body I buried. I don’t know how we’re going to get it back for her. “This is your fault,” I yell at Lexy. I’m screaming, I’m out of control. “If you hadn’t let it go in the first place, we wouldn’t have to get it back.”

  I wake up with the anger still hot in my stomach. The phone is ringing. I look at it for a moment, disoriented, before picking it up.

  It’s Lady Arabelle. “I found my notes,” she says. “There’s something you’re not going to want to hear.”

  I take a deep breath. “I’ve got to know,” I say.

  “All right, honey. Listen to me, now.” She waits a moment. I can hear her rustling through pages of notes, although I know she already knows what she’s going to say. Break down Lady Arabelle and what do you find? Read and bleed.Lay bare.

  “Your wife,” Lady Arabelle says. “She was pregnant.”

  I’m silent for a long time. When I finally speak, my voice sounds very far away.

  “Yes,” I say. “I know.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  I didn’t know before she died. She never told me herself. It showed up in the autopsy, of course; Detective Stack called to give me the news. She was two months along. But I knew even before that. I had found a scrap of paper, a corner of cardboard from a box that had contained a home pregnancy test. I didn’t find the test itself; she was careful to get rid of that. But in the bathroom trash—I’ll admit now that in those first days, I tore apart the house looking for hints as to what had happened, I went through every piece of lint on the carpet and every soggy, coffee-stained envelope in the garbage—and in the bathroom trash, underneath the tissues and cotton swabs and tangles of minted floss, I found a scrap of pink cardboard that she must have missed. It was one of the . . . anomalies I found during those terrible days. One of the clues that started me down this path. The piece of cardboard had three letters on it: CLE. I didn’t recognize the lettering or the color of the cardboard as anything we had had in the house recently, so I went to the drugstore with my little pink scrap in my hand, and I walked the aisles until I found the box it matched up with. The letters were from the word “clear,” and the box contained a home pregnancy test. And I knew.

  It didn’t happen in New Orleans, certainly; that’s much too early. But when? We were using birth control all along, and I don’t remember any specific incident when we thought it might have failed. I suppose I’d always had some romantic notion that when you conceived a child, there would be some cataclysm, some indication that something momentous had occurred. But there was nothing like that. I’ve looked at the calendar, using the autopsy report as my guide, and I’ve pinpointed the week when it must have happened. I can recall certain things about that week, some of them quite happy, but there was nothing special, nothing earthshaking. It was just another week in my life.

  What does it change, though, to know that she was pregnant? What good does it do me? It hasn’t made things any clearer. It has only widened the circle of images at play in my mind. I’ve thought, for example, well, if she was pregnant, then she might have been dizzy. She climbed a tree for reasons I cannot fathom, but that may have made perfect sense in the moment, and she got dizzy and fell. Or hormones. Pregnant women have mood swings. A wave of despair just as she attained the highest branch. A wave of despair caused by a hormonal shift, having nothing to do with how she felt about me or her life or our child. There are so many ways it could have happened. She had not yet begun to show. Or had she? Had there been a new roundness to her that I was slow to notice? I’ve racked my brain but I can’t remember how she looked the last time I saw her naked. I can’t even remember when it was.

  How we come to take these things for granted when we see them every day! There was a time when the sight of her bare body would make me lose my breath. When I couldn’t even look upon her without a wave of arousal passing through me like fire. How long had it been since I came up behind her and cupped her breasts in my palms? How long since the sight of her stepping out of the shower had begun to seem commonplace? My body singing at the sight of her. It’s not that we were making love less frequently than before—well, of course, it was a little less frequent than it had been in those early, heady days. Who can maintain such constant passion for more than the first year or so? But sex was no longer the underlying current of everything we did. Did she notice that? Did she feel I no longer loved her as well as I could? Did she feel rejected? Had my lust for her fallen too far into the b
ackground, become too much the wallpaper of our lives and not enough the centerpiece? Oh, God, oh, God, did she think I no longer found her beautiful? Did she worry about the changes a baby would write on her body? No. She wasn’t that petty, that insecure. What, then? What did I do and what did I neglect to do? How did I fail her? How many different ways? In what way am I to blame—I know I must be, the problem is figuring out the details of my failure. The problem is explaining it in a way I can understand. Perhaps even Lexy couldn’t have done that.

  Lady Arabelle’s notes aren’t able to tell me much more. The rest of our conversation focuses on the tarot card reading she did for Lexy.

  “I do a ten-card tarot reading,” she says, “in a Celtic cross spread. Do you know anything about tarot cards?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Well, in a reading, I lay out ten cards, and each one has a specific role in the reading. Taken all together, the cards give me a picture of a particular moment in a person’s life, you see? And I can look at the spread and get an idea of what paths this person might take from here. I’m not telling the future, you understand. The future isn’t fixed in place. It all depends on what actions you choose to take from this moment we’re looking at right now. And the cards can help determine the best course of action. You got that, honey?”