Why They Run the Way They Do (19 page)

But this day, Saturday, was the worst yet. She hadn't eaten since Thursday, had been unsteady on her feet when going outside to pee on the damp leaves that covered the yard. And she hadn't even wagged her tail when the doorbell rang.

“The dog'll probably outlive us all,” Rachel said. “I'm not giving up this trip.”

So what could he do? He watched his son kiss the dog (on the lips) and the dog thumped her tail once. This was a powerful tail, a tail that had knocked Charlie down at least twice a day when he was a toddler, a tail that had swept glasses and candles off tables, a tail that could sting shins like a belt. One thump was what it had left for Charlie, and one thump was what he got. And then, Sunday afternoon, Simon had been on the couch watching the game and the dog was lying next to the TV. She'd been making sounds, little moans in her sleep, for weeks. Midway through the third quarter he became aware that she was no longer moaning, though he could see the rise and fall of her fur as she lay on her side. He put the game on mute and watched her, rise and fall, rise and fall, no moan, rise and fall, a little flutter of the eyelids, rise and fall. And then: nothing.

He counted to ten, then to twenty, then another slow ten. Still nothing. His eyes moved back to the TV. He watched a down; a penalty flag was thrown. He and Rachel had found the dog tied to a concrete post in the garage of Rachel's apartment building. This was before they were married. He had his own place but spent most of his time at hers. They'd said hello to the dog for three days, coming and going from her car. Then one night he'd gotten up to go to the bathroom, and something (more than a compulsion, but not so fully formed to be an idea) made him go down to the garage and the dog was there, asleep on the concrete, and it was 4:30 in the morning so he knew the dog really belonged to no one, and so he untied her and brought her up to Rachel's apartment and when she woke up she said, “Is there something breathing on my feet?” and they had both laughed about this for years afterward.

The thing was, he'd promised Charlie a funeral. The dog had been a sack of cancer for over two months, time enough for him and Charlie to discuss what would happen. Either Simon would take her to the vet to have her put down, if she seemed in too much pain, or she would die at home. After that, they would bury her in the backyard. Charlie had written out the order of the service one night, while the dog lay at his feet under the kitchen table. The sheet of paper was magneted to the refrigerator.

Charlie had known the dog his whole life. Family and friends had often joked that Charlie was actually Simon and Rachel's second child. A year ago, in the messiest stretch of the divorce, it seemed they might fight over the dog, too. But then Rachel had relented. It was going to be hard enough, she said, shuttling Charlie back and forth every Wednesday; to share custody of the dog was madness. And, Simon knew, there was more than a little guilt involved. She was throwing him out. There was, finally, a limit to the damage you could inflict on a person all at once. Let the man have his dog, for Chrissake. And so he had moved a few miles away to a small house in a cluttered neighborhood, and soon enough the dog learned that this was the way things were going to be, and she stopped straining at the door when Rachel came to pick up Charlie.

Simon descended the stairs again. It was Tuesday night. He'd taken the last two days off work. He could not leave the house with the dog in the freezer. What if he was killed in a car accident? Someone eventually would find the dog in the freezer and think he'd gone insane. Maybe they'd even think he'd killed her, then crashed his car intentionally. Would Rachel believe this? Would Charlie?

The phone rang and he was so startled that he dropped it; it clattered down the stairs and he rushed to retrieve it, then struck his head on the banister so hard that when he straightened up for a moment he thought he was going to faint.

“Hello?”

“It's me,” she said. “I know I said we'd call. I'm sorry. There's no access at this place and—”

“She's dead,” he said. “I've been trying to call you since Sunday. She died. She's dead.”

“Oh, my sweet baby,” she said, and he knew that if he'd been able to tell her in person that they would have embraced now, that it would have been
the thing
that finally overshadowed everything else and he would have gotten at least one goddamn decent moment out of all this. But like this, three hundred miles away, he gained nothing from her sadness. Her grief was as worthless as his own.

“Do you want me to tell him?” she asked.

“I'm not going to fight you for it,” he said.

“That's not what I meant,” she said. “I just meant—”

“When can you leave?” he asked. “Can you get home tonight?”

There was a pause. Then: “What?”

“Can you leave tonight? If it has to be the morning it—”

“Why would we leave?” she asked.

“We have to have a funeral,” he said. He crossed the basement to the freezer. “I promised him we could have a funeral.”

“You can have one when we get back,” she said. “It doesn't matter when it is, does it?”

“I have to bury the dog,” he said. “I can't just—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You haven't buried the dog? When did she die?”

“Sunday,” he said. “Before dinner.”

“Well, where is she? At the vet?”

He opened the lid and looked inside. “She's in the freezer.”

“The freezer. Our freezer?

“
My
freezer. You got the fridge; I got the—”

“The dog is in the freezer?”

“I told you, we have to have a funeral. He and I have—”

“Stop, Simon. Listen to me. Bury the dog today and then you can have the funeral when we get back.”

“There is an order of service,” he said. His ear hurt, and he realized he was grinding the phone into the side of his head. He switched to the other ear. “He had a plan and the burial is part of it and I'm not going to take this from him.”

“Don't pretend this is about him,” she said. “I think he'll be willing to change the order of service, just maybe, so that the dog doesn't have to lie in state in your basement.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Is she frozen? Is there, like, frost on her and stuff?”

“Her tail's like a stick,” he said.

“Jesus, Simon,” she said, tenderly, though he thought the tenderness was more for the dog than for him. “Bury her, please.”

“Bring him home,” he said.

“We'll be back Sunday,” she said. “My parents have waited a long time for this trip with him. I'm not going to just sweep him away because you're too messed up to bury your dog.”

“It's his dog, too,” he said. “He wants to give her a proper burial.”

“He's eight,” she said. “I think a memorial service will suffice.”

“Put him on the phone,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not when you're like this.”

“Put him on the fucking phone or I'll call the lawyer.”

“Simon,” she said. “Jesus, Simon, he's not even with me, okay? He's out with my dad. Will you call somebody, please? Will you call Jerry or your sister or somebody? You need somebody to—”

He touched the dog's icy stomach. “You remember that time in the park when she picked up that turtle? You remember—”

“No,” she said. “I'm not doing this. We'll call you tomorrow, okay? Get yourself together and we'll call you tomorrow and you can talk to him. And we'll be home in a few days. I have to charge my phone, okay? I have like one bar left and I have to stand in the middle of this town to get anything. I swear to god I'm standing in the middle of an intersection right now.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand. You only have one bar left. You've only had one bar left for about the last five years.”

“Good-bye, Simon,” she said.

And then, abruptly, she was no longer beside him in the basement but instead standing in the middle of a snowy intersection in a little town in Pennsylvania. He pushed the off button on the phone, looked down at the dog. Once, when the dog had stepped on a nail and gotten six stitches in her paw, Rachel had made a bed on the living room floor and they'd all spent the night huddled together like a litter of puppies. He imagined her now, at the snowy intersection, blowing into her hands. Her knuckles were bright red. He imagined holding her cold hands, squeezing them between his own, until her fingers broke.

He had some drinks. He could have called someone. He could have called his friend Jerry and Jerry would have come over and had drinks with him and talked trash with him about Rachel and told sweet stories about the dog, but frankly he was not interested in anyone intruding upon his misery. After Rachel had thrown him out his sister had come over every day for two weeks. She'd cooked for him and done his laundry and said lots of encouraging things and finally he'd asked her to please stop being so supportive and go home.

Now it had been almost a year since the split and his sister and some of his friends were trying to fix him up. His sister had told him he was a hot property, that for every date-able guy in his midthirties there were ten datable girls. He didn't doubt this was true. But he didn't want to date anyone. Dating was awful, and he resented he'd been put in the position to endure it again. He was supposed to be finished with that part of his life. He'd done it already, had succeeded at it, found the woman he wanted to marry, and that was supposed to be that.

That she had someone else was what he'd thought, of course, when she'd sent Charlie to her parents a year ago and said they had to have a serious talk. There was someone else—it hit him with complete clarity and certainty—and as he sat down at the dining room table across from her he could picture the guy perfectly and instead of anger he felt sheer panic, like he was blindfolded and standing on the edge of a building. And then she had said this thing:

“I don't know where I'm supposed to end up, but I know it's not with you.”

And then she had apologized! “I'm sorry, Simon, I got the sugar-free ice cream; I'm sorry, Simon, I forgot to take the dog out; I'm sorry, Simon, I don't know where I'm supposed to end up, but I know it's not with you.”

For a moment after her apology he ceased to be a man and existed merely as a cliché. The wind was knocked out of him; his mouth fell open; his vision blurred. His actually felt a stabbing pain in his heart, as if she'd gone after him with a couple of her knitting needles. Who knew it could really happen like that, just like on TV? All the obligatory crap, it all came down. The weeks that followed proceeded like an endless colonoscopy, one indignity after the next. And now his dog was dead. So it was only right that he have a few drinks.

At 3:15 the next afternoon the doorbell rang. It was Lucy, the high school student who gave Charlie guitar lessons. Lucy kept her hair in a long braid and wore faded flowery skirts thay swayed at her ankles. She lived down the street and came every Wednesday after school to work with Charlie on songs like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Five Hundred Miles.” Simon had forgotten to tell her not to come this week; when he saw her shivering at the door his heart briefly lifted, so he invited her in and got her a cup of tea and sat down with her in the living room. When she asked after the dog, who usually greeted her with at least a healthy wag, he told her she was in the backyard.