The Dogs of Littlefield (13 page)

Hannah raised her hand again. Ms. Manookian peered around the room to see if someone else might have an answer.

“Yes, Hannah?”

“The Washington Monument was built to honor George Washington.”

“Very good. And what did George Washington do that we honor him with a monument?”

“He's on the one-dollar bill!” shrieked Brian Hobika.

Under the poster of Gandhi, Mr. Anderman adjusted his aviator glasses again.

Julia sighed. She almost never participated in class discussions, but now, for reasons she did not fully understand, but which involved a stirring of sympathy for Ms. Manookian, because she had an Adam's apple and was new this year, and also involved the possibility that Ms. Manookian might report something favorable about Julia to her mother next week during parent-teacher conferences—she slowly raised her hand.

“Julia?”

“George Washington led the American Army in the Revolution against the British.”

“
Yes
. Thank you.” Ms. Manookian beamed.

“And Norman said he was going to blow up his monument.”

“That's right.” Ms. Manookian looked at her encouragingly. “And how else might they be connected?”

“They both tried to kill people,” said Albert Chang, flipping his pen excitedly.

“No,” said Julia, then stopped, realizing too late that she was in for it now because she'd have to correct stupid, fat Albert Chang, and then lunch would be hell, Albert telling everyone she'd made him look dumb, breathing on her sandwich, asking if she wanted to trade bites.
I gotta big bologna
.

Stupid class, stupid Ms. Manookian, stupid entire universe. “Yes, Julia?”

She took a breath. “Norman threatened to blow up the monument because he
didn't
want people to be killed. He was against nuclear weapons.”

“Very good. So, Julia, do you see any other connection between George Washington and Norman D. Mayer?”

She was aware of the whole class watching her, especially Anthony Rabb, slouched in his seat by the windows, wearing his Red Sox jersey. Narrow green eyes, angelic blond curls, soft brutal mouth. Beautiful and ruthless, an expert sniper, picking off anyone who showed signs of intelligence.

“Norman was a loser freak who hated America,” said Albert Chang.

“And George Washington loved America!” Amelia Epstein swished her ponytail.

“Class!” Ms. Manookian patted the air with her palms. “I'm glad that you're so interested in this subject, but people must raise their hands if they want to speak. This is a democracy.” She gave Mr. Anderman and Dr. Watkins an aren't-kids-something look. “Now,
Julia
was in the middle of answering my question.
Julia,
what were you going to say?”

Julia was staring at her desk, trying to decide if it would be better to cut her losses and not answer at all, when from the windows came a sibilant whisper:

“
Julia's
a loser freak.”

Several girls giggled.

“Quiet!” Ms. Manookian glared toward the windows. “Julia?”

But Julia was not there.

Millions of microscopic fragments of Julia now lay, invisibly, on the speckled beige linoleum tiles of the classroom floor. What was left in her chair was a phantom Julia, which she had learned to project at these moments, by sheer force of will, until she could reassemble herself, a process that would take days, even weeks, and was never entirely successful. Atomic particles of Julia could be found in many classrooms, in fact, on the playground, on the soccer field, in her oboe teacher's studio, even on the kitchen floor of her own home. They made a faint gritty sound when trodden upon, almost imperceptible except in moments when there was no other ambient noise.

The classroom wall clock was very loud.
Tick tick tick
. Like the imaginary explosives inside Norman D. Mayer's van as he faced a battalion of police cars beneath the Washington Monument. Outside the second-floor classroom windows the snow had stopped, revealing a bulging gray sky impaled on black twigs.

“So does anyone see any
other
connection between George Washington and Norman D. Mayer?” Ms. Manookian's voice was unnaturally fluty. “Nobody?”

Nobody.

“Well, all right. They were both in their own way revolutionaries.
Quite
interesting when you think about it. Okay, class. Let's open our textbooks to page 243, and look at the section on early drafts of the Declaration of Independence.”

“Ms. Manookian?”

Julia peered through her hair to see that Albert had raised his hand.

“Albert?”

Albert winched himself around in his seat to face the back of the classroom. He was wearing a green T-shirt printed with a skull surrounded by flowers.

“I was just wondering. I mean, if Norman and George Washington were both, like, revolutionaries, do you think they were both right?”

“Explain what you're getting at?” said Ms. Manookian.

“I mean”—Albert was frowning at the back wall—“was Norman more kind of like someone like Gandhi? Or more kind of like that person who poisoned that dog?”

Ms. Manookian clasped her large hands and knuckled them against her lips, gazing over the tops of her reading glasses.

“What a good question, Albert,” she said at last, her voice reluctant, unsteady, the sound of a teacher who didn't have an answer ready and was stalling for time. Julia shivered.

But the very next instant a deafening clamor filled the room, a sound like ten thousand marbles shaken inside a huge tin drum. A sound that had become all too familiar in Duncklee Middle School over the last few months. Mr. Anderman sprang to his feet. The children clapped their hands to their ears. Someone had pulled the fire alarm again.

I
t was Bill's idea to host a
Christmas dinner this year instead of going to the Number One Noodle House as they usually did. His idea to invite anyone they knew who did not have Christmas plans, which really meant anyone who was Jewish. For years Margaret had offered exactly this suggestion—probably to make up for neither of them having much family, Margaret's parents both gone and now his mother in Arizona with her sister—but Bill had always demurred. Christmas Day was tiring enough as it was, with Julia overexcited in the morning and then dejected all afternoon, sloping about the house with a long face, fingering her stocking to see if she'd missed something in the toe. The whole commercial thing was toxic. Then let's volunteer at a soup kitchen, Margaret always said, and he always agreed that was a great idea, and every year they had dinner at the Number One Noodle House.

This year looked to be no different, starting with Christmas cards shuffling through the mail slot, most of them picturing kids and a golden retriever all wearing red Santa hats, posed in a snowy front yard.
Season's Greetings from the Schmidlapps! Greetings from the Wu Family!

Greetings from the Necropolis.
That would have been their Christmas card. With a photo of Julia's animal graveyard under skeletal hydrangeas in the snow.

A week ago, Margaret had said, “Why don't you just
act
like you love me? Sometimes if people act the way they want to feel, then they start to feel the way they want to feel.”

Dr. Vogel said, “Say more about that,” but Margaret said it was Bill's turn to say something. They both sat staring at the pink lotus blossoms of Dr. Vogel's Oriental rug. Finally, Bill said, “So you want me to pretend to feel something? Like some kind of robot?” When she didn't answer, he said, “Why don't you tell Dr. Vogel what you told me, about seeing dead dogs everywhere?”

Dr. Vogel had of course wanted to hear more about that, but it was almost the end of the session and Margaret said she'd rather talk about it next time. On the way to the car she wouldn't look at him.

“Okay,” he said that same evening at dinner. “Let's invite people over on Christmas. Let's really do it this time.”

It was the stress of what they were going through—it was infecting her, doing something to her brain. He'd read about this kind of projection stuff in a copy of
Psychology Today
in Dr. Vogel's waiting room. Neurotic obsession. Common for people going through a bad time. The same thing was happening to him. For the last several weeks he'd woken every morning convinced the bed was full of bedbugs; his whole body itched. When he told Margaret they might have a bedbug infestation, she said he was just allergic to the new laundry detergent. Yet as soon as she used the word “allergic” he understood what it was: he was allergic to her, to sharing a bed with her, and then the whole projection thing made sense.

But the stress was starting to infect Julia, too. She stayed shut up in her room, coming downstairs only for meals, sitting hunched over her plate, hair hanging in her face, the pale nape of her neck exposed. Whenever he asked her questions about school, she answered in aggrieved monosyllables, like a prisoner being interrogated. Maybe having a party would help. Maybe Margaret was right: if they acted like a regular family, and people saw them looking like a regular family, maybe they could trick themselves into feeling like a regular family.

The more he thought about it, the more the idea took hold of him. He pictured polishing the dining room table himself, the way his father used to do it, with a rag and linseed oil, making the old wood shine. He pictured people standing around Margaret at the piano, everyone holding plastic cups of eggnog and singing “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night, Holy Night.” A kind of exorcism, maybe.

“Invite anyone you want to invite,” he told Margaret, mentioning the subject again the next evening. “Tell Julia to invite Hannah. Invite her folks. The more the merrier.”

He'd figured Margaret would be glad he was finally in favor of a holiday dinner, would interpret it as a sign of commitment. But she only looked at him in a drained, hopeless way and said, “No thanks.”

He should have been more sympathetic. It was practically obliterating her, what they were going through, and it was his fault, or mostly his fault. But he couldn't stand the thought of spending another Christmas dinner alone in a restaurant with Margaret and Julia, the three of them sitting wordlessly over spring rolls and shrimp lo mein. So he brought it up again later as they were getting ready for bed, finally asking, “Is this how you want Julia to remember her childhood, Christmas in a noodle house?”

“How do you want her to remember it?” she said.

Plenty of people had midlife crises and came out all right. Three-quarters of the couples in town were in counseling and the ones who weren't probably should be. And yet Bill couldn't bring himself to say to Margaret, “We'll be all right.” Not only because he didn't believe they would be all right—which he didn't, but at this point he was prepared to pretend if it would make her feel better—but because it was no longer just their marriage that wasn't all right.

Three weeks ago he and the rest of the management at Roche Capital had been informed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company was being investigated. Allegations of insider trading. Everyone was going to be questioned.

He hadn't seen it coming. Who had made these allegations? What kind of insider trading? No one had told him anything and he himself had mentioned nothing to anyone. Not even Margaret. All he knew, and this from Passano, was that when the office computers had crashed that afternoon in September, it wasn't a problem with their network server: while he'd been staring out his window at the river below, a remote-monitoring device was being installed in their system.

Now the green banks of the river were covered in snow, the feathery trees gone bare. As he sat at his desk, as he drove home, as he brushed his teeth before bed, he pictured SEC investigators rising up out of the gray water, as impassive as frogmen, flat-footing up those banks, filing into his office in black suits, carrying black briefcases, their dark, gelled hair gleaming.

Could we speak with you for a few minutes, sir? We'd like to ask you a few questions.

But I don't know anything, he'd have to tell them. You may not believe me, but I really don't know how things got this way.

— —

“It's got to be one
of the gardeners,” Margaret was saying.

“There's no evidence pointing to a gardener.” Bill patted his red and green striped tie, a present from Margaret that morning. He'd given her pearls, forgetting that he'd given her pearls last year. He glanced around the living room at their guests. “Let's not make wild accusations.”

“I'm not making a wild accusation,” said Margaret querulously. She was already on her second glass of wine. “Look at all that graffiti.”

Since the death of Boris the sheepdog, graffiti had been appearing all over the village:
LEASH YOUR BEAST
.