Anthony Brown
Connecting Hannah Ruder’s place to the breeder’s, inscribed across the intervening beanfield, is a skinny byway. Iced up in early February, flanked for the most part by windblown stalk matter, the road is broken, at one point, by a snippet of train track, where a cluster of scrap-wood signs hawks lab puppies, fresh eggs, farm equipment. There’s a little Lutheran chapel at the interval, too, and a Marathon gas station; thank God for that, because Billy needs out again. He whines and paws at the car window, offering still more evidence of the problem at hand: that he simply can’t contain himself. Hannah has quit hoping he might someday learn how. She is more or less finished with Billy.
Readjusting her grip on the wheel, she remembers skimming, just yesterday, some clickbait article about a couple who gave their three-year-old son back to the adoption agency. Back to the adoption agency! They returned him! And that had sealed it for Hannah, seeing that. Made her feel so much better about the whole thing, about being the bearer-back of this bad dog, like maybe she wasn’t the worst person on earth. A little embarrassed, sure. But not so evil.
Hannah pulls into the Marathon lot, leashes Billy up and lets him snuffle around a bit. He noses at frozen boot-prints until eventually some instinct of his confirms one place as being the right place and he jets a long hot stream of urine into the high grimy snowbank along the station’s street-edge. A passing minivan sprays up slurry. Hannah wriggles feeling back into her toes, thinking, All for the best. Hey. It’s all for the best. Excuse me, ma’am? Sir? You got a receipt for this baby?
Once Billy’s finished, Hannah belts him into her backseat, and with the creature thus secured in her rearview mirror, she watches him, watching her, panting, this dumb curly-blonde thing. Saliva drips from the end of his tongue, hits the vinyl tarp she’s laid across the seat cushion, tapping out something like a slow string of morse code, a wet, dank S.O.S.
Hannah starts the car. She shakes her head. She kills the car. “You like him,” she tells Billy once the engine quiets. “Remember? He’s your buddy. He’s your pal. He’s your buddy and he’s your pal and you like him. So: enough.”
But Billy—he’s busy considering the big puddle of drool he’s just produced, ignores her.
Great. Gross. Whatever. Hannah starts up again.
She did try. You know? She really did try. Her hand to God: No-one had ever been more prepared to love something. She’d monogrammed blankets. She’d monogrammed bowls. She’d stockpiled toys and treats and cutesy bone-patterned paraphernalia, and in this way, she’d assembled a comfortable life which lacked only something to live it. And then he came, crooked in the breeder’s elbow, his black, plastic-seeming eyes peeping out from under tufted, russet brows. Shutterstock perfect. Stupid. Christ! She’d monogrammed everything.
As the road narrows and goes to gravel, Hannah finds herself passing the occasional squat ranch model, each home tucked back from the main road, each roof overhung by red oak limbs, each mailbox marked by a disincorporated address: 411NW, 413NW, 415NW. She reasserts her grip on the wheel and slackens her face as though someone else were here in the car to see her, judge her insufficiently soft.
It flashes into her mind now: that post-adoption group shot, the one the breeder insisted they pose for. It’s a photo to which Hannah returns nearly every night, clicking through to the media tab on the breeder’s lo-fi website. In it, her family makes an awkward sort of matryoshka on their front stoop: Doug holds Hannah and Hannah holds Hunter and Hunter holds Billy like she’s forgotten he’s there. Like she’s forgotten where she is. Her face is resigned, and her eyes are marked, even cradling this sweet thing, by an uncanny sparklessness.
Well, if her child lacks some essential human characteristic, that’s hardly Hannah’s fault. It is, nonetheless, her problem to solve.
Behind them all, in the middle ground, is their house. Like a child’s drawing of a house, it cuts a two-story shape against an autumnally white and gauzy cloud cover.
***
Billy’s was a strategic adoption. Hannah is not a dog person. It’s just that Hunter was always playing this game. Online. You own “pets” in this game, and they’re weird-looking. They’ve got these big, wet eyes; they’re creatures; you take care of them; there’s an island involved, somehow, she thinks. What Hannah had managed to see of the game seemed young for a sixteen-year-old. She figured a dog was the next logical step: away from the fantasy, toward the real thing, like look: here, in front you, here: this is the truth, and it’ll bite, and excrete, and beg for food, and maul small rodents, and require you to leave your bedroom on occasion. Lo and behold, the bedroom door remained resolutely shut, and stuck on the other side was Hannah, left alone, sole custodian of a soft new life, one which had promptly begun to malfunction.
“What’s wrong with him?” the breeder asks. He handles Billy roughly, expertly, turning out the pink shells of his ears, peeling up the moist flaps of his snout to examine his gums and tongue. “What brings you back?”
Hannah taps the breeder’s chain-link enclosure with the toe of her trail boot and wonders how she ought to describe it, the ferocity of Billy’s problem, the spontaneity of his eruptions and their insane duration. She wets her lips.
Billy spews, is the thing. He expels all manner of fluids and gunk. And just when the sheer unpredictability of his smells, his consistencies, the velocities and trajectories of his spewage seem ready to resolve into a kind of pattern, awful but predictable, preparable for, then it’s like something inside of him shifts. Either he eats something different that day or whatever’s eating him—parasite, disease—it starts upon some fresh organ, and what was solid turns to slime, and what was slime curdles and turns the color of meat.
There’s simply no getting used to it.
Hannah has never wanted so badly for something to die.
“Irreconcilable differences,” she says.
The breeder glances from Billy to Hannah and back. “Snipped?” he says.
“Sorry?”
“Is he snipped?”
“Oh. Yes,” Hannah says, catching his drift. But, struck with uncertainty all of a sudden, she’s compelled to confirm, half-ducks, hardly glances at Billy’s undercarriage before thinking what?! Coming to her senses, she returns upright, squeezes her eyes shut, shakes it off. “Yes. I mean. Yes.”
“All sales final post-snip,” the breeder says.
Hannah sputters. She remembers: “But you snipped him!”
The breeder shrugs.
“There must be something we can—you know. Some way we can undo it.”
“No, ma’am.”
Tension triangulates for a beat between Hannah and the breeder and biology’s awful irreversibility, but the moment deflates, and she hears herself say, “Thanks a lot.”
***
In the increasingly brief lapses between these awful hydraulic spasms of his, Billy is extraordinarily happy. Beyond happy, he is—as he watches Hannah scoop loose vomit from the carpet so that she might more effectively get at the trickier, soaked-in, liquid layer of vomit beneath—beatific, his eyes empty.
Now, as she meets these eyes in the mirror, she thinks they just might make it home without having to stop. When he’s not looking at her, Billy stares out the window at the passing landscape—the wintery field again, the same in reverse—his nostrils fogging up the glass.
He likes the snow. Sometimes, at home, Hannah watches, from behind the sliding door in the kitchen, as he roots through huge drifts in the backyard. Sometimes the drifts are soft enough, deep enough that he disappears completely, and whenever Hannah loses sight of him like this, she holds her breath and thinks to herself: Okay. Today is the day the accident happens. But Billy always manages to find his way back to the stoop, and where he presses his snout against the plexiglass, his snot and tears trickle down the pane in a way that seems to indicate some inextinguishable internal heater.
Hannah’s wheels lose traction for one thrilling millisecond. Gingerly, she depresses the breaks, rights her course. It’s dangerous driving this time of year. The backroads are deserted. Each lone car, passing through, makes grooves in the fresh snow, and in the long interim between drivers, the grooves freeze into new, nearly invisible tracks, the upshot being that if the first car loses control and veers sightly off course, there’s a high probability that the next one will too, and in the exact same way. Deadly precedent.
One night, a little over a year ago now, Hunter and a friend were on this road, driving back from the high school, when a rotted line, hidden somewhere in the machinations of the other girl’s mother’s Corolla, snapped, and she lost control of the car, struggled frantically to right its course. Ultimately, she prevailed over the ABS: the girls made it back to their respective homes in one piece. But Hunter was shaken up, and the words ripped themselves from her as she described the vital dread she’d felt.
“Did you call your friend?” Hannah asked her daughter, once the verbal stream had stopped. Hunter’s face registered surprise at the question. She left the room.
The county neglected to clear the roads overnight, and the next day, around noon, another vehicle hit the snow-divot where the girls had lost control. This car had careened wildly, sliding over a hundred yards before cracking the thin skin of ice on the retention pond some ways off the main road.
As Hannah moves, all the more carefully now, through the underdeveloped outskirts of her subdivision, toward the denser core, a high mound overgrown with moss and scrubby underbrush disturbs, finally, the monotony of the frosted landscape. When they were much younger, the girls had liked to climb this artificial hill, which they’d christened “The Basements,” it having been formed from the piled-up dirt the developers had excavated to make room for the neighborhood’s foundations.
Hannah sometimes catches herself wondering at the longevity of the girls’ friendship. Lately the imbalance between them seems to be growing by the day. The other girl meets adults’ eyes and wears just enough makeup. The other girl’s clothes fit, and she can make conversation. But then, every so often, her mouth takes on a self-conscious set, an unintentional sort of sneer, and the logic of the friendship reveals itself to Hannah as though she’d taken a blacklight to it.
The girl’s parents own the empty lot adjacent to The Basements, a half-acre square that had, to their chagrin, accumulated a layer of trash: crushed glass, and condom wrappers, and styrofoam cups. Whenever Hannah tried to engage the mother in conversation, at school events, say, or when they were in the process of exchanging their daughters for sleep overs, this mother seemed always to guide the conversation back to her lot, to how she and her husband were determined to sell it before their daughter left for college.
“There must be a year there. At least,” the mother said.
“There must be,” Hannah replied. She made herself smile.
Maybe that’s what was causing the tension: school choice, impending separation. It had been hard on her relationships, Hannah remembers, that time. And then she’d gone and invested a year and a half of her life into a nursing program, which she’d hated.
At home, she hangs her keys on the designated hook just inside the front door, wipes her boots but keeps them on. When Hannah greets her, Hunter’s mask of calculated indifference falters, but otherwise she holds her gawky position at the foot of the couch, computer cradled in her lap, her knees spread. Hannah pinches her own eyebrow and fills Billy’s water bowl.
***
There must be, Hannah decides, some correlation between a person’s body composition and their fitness for pet ownership. She’d worry about a hundred-pound woman with a wolf hound. Only tall men should own parakeets, because if the bird were to escape and, say, perch itself on the blade of a ceiling fan, a tall man could feasibly re-capture the creature with very little trouble. Hannah manipulates her mouse. The person who’s suitable to take Billy off her hands—how are they shaped? She’s on petlover.com to find out.
The site, which bills itself as an adoption hub for animals untamable, terminally ill, or otherwise defunct, is simple enough to use. When you create your account, you register as either a furbaby or a furparent and input your information accordingly. Furbabies see furparents, furparents see furbabies. You scroll through profiles one at a time until at last you find someone you might want to chat with, and then, once you’ve signaled your interest by tapping the pink pawprint at the top of their profile, you send them a message. Maybe. Hannah hasn’t gotten that far, though her impulse is to message everyone indiscriminately in the hopes that some small percentage might message Billy back, like: someone, anyone, please! Retriever. Eleven months. Prone to frequent explosions of the bowels and gut but otherwise pretty low maintenance. Very cute and nice.
No. Better to see Billy’s future owner first, Hannah thinks. Pictures would help. She wants to make sure she’s approaching only the saintliest furparents, the ones with martyrdom in their eyes. But most of the profiles on Petlover are blank: text-only, perfunctory. She gets it. Anyone actively seeking a crazy or dying animal is probably pretty disturbed. But surely some users are normal, charity-minded maybe, like the hospice workers of the pet-owning community.
She’s only been scrolling for a few minutes when the icon at the top of her screen pings and gives a quick animated pulse. She sits up in her chair and clicks the icon to unfurl the chat box.
hi billy, the message reads. are you a good boy?
Hi! Hannah types back, knowing she sounds over-eager, not caring. Hi! Yes! Billy is a good boy! He needs lots of love but if you are patient and have tile floors, he will be a very good boy for you.
thats good you are a good boy billy, the prospective furparent replies.
For an awkward beat, the chat shows only frantic ellipses. Then: how will you prove it? the furparent asks.
Hannah furrows her brow. She’s not sure how to answer this question, and before she’s really wrapped her head around it, the furparent drops an image into the chat.
In the photo, reflected in a speckled floor mirror at an odd angle, are two men, naked but for rubber dog masks. The standing man’s left thumb depresses the button on a Nikon self-timer. His right hand holds the loop of the second man’s leash. The leashed man crouches on his haunches, his fingers steepled on the maroon carpet in front of him.
An acidic sort of embarrassment surges through her. Hannah forces it down, rolls her eyes, and races to obliterate all evidence of her ever having been here. Clearly, whatever petlover.com had once been, whoever the site had once been for, it had since accrued a different sort of clientele. She drags her cursor over to the button that will deactivate Billy’s account, clicks it, and then, for a moment, sits and stares into her dark home screen. Coming back to herself, she shakes her head.
“No dice,” she mutters to Billy, who rests his shaggy golden head on her thigh, his seeping chops wetting the right leg of her jeans. Running a cold hand over him, Hannah feels for the gentle undulation of his breathing, finds the soft, fatty lump that lives on his flank where his ribs flare. They’d run a long needle through this deposit at the vet but had made nothing of the results, had found no cancer, no infection. He was fine. For the white-coated woman who’d handled him, he was docile, limp as the crouched man in that photograph.
Hannah runs her tongue over her teeth. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s that people can be trusted neither to do the right thing nor to recognize when the wrong thing is being done to them. And to understand, but only after that fact, that one has been tricked, taken advantage of, that some small part of you is essentially dupable and stupid, this is the worst thing of all, the real damage.
Dog men and others like them are the reason why she checks Hunter’s computer. While the girl is at band practice or in the shower, Hannah sifts through her digital archive for any sign of trouble. It’s not every day that she does this—she is not one of those parents—only every now and again, and only to tame the snarling, love-cut fear in her gut. She waits until Billy noses open the door to Hunter’s room, follows him inside, and, kneeling at the foot of Hunter’s bed, cracks open her laptop.
***
Even when her knees have gone numb, Hannah can’t stop scrolling. Only when she senses movement at the other end of the bedroom do her fingers go still over Hunter’s keypad. She peers around the laptop to find its owner staring back at her, frozen in the doorframe. Still wet from the shower, the girl’s grown-out hair clings to her neck in thick, dark snakes.
“What are you doing?” Hunter asks.
From where she kneels on the carpet, Hannah bristles. It no longer hurts, what Hunter writes about her, she thinks. She has long steeled herself against her daughter’s scorn by reminding herself the woman Hunter sees is not so much her as a figment, a projection. But at least that false woman, Hunter’s invention, had always had something like a title, a pet name if not a true one. What are you doing? When had she become you to Hunter, the anonymous superintendent of so many dirty rooms?
The girl’s towel, knotted clumsily into itself at her chest, barely covers the tops of her thighs, and Hannah wants to yank it down, to cover her, feels nearly overwhelmed by the urge to go to her. She wants to force the bottom lip out from under her front teeth, take her chin in one hand and, with the other, correct the lopsided part in her hair, to bring some balance to her face. She wants to hold her face steady while she teases the pus from the zits on her cheeks, and she wants to go back in time to the moment when Hunter quit looking her in the eyes and live in the split second before. She wants to hold her, press her knees together. She picks herself up from the foot of the bed and leaves.
***
Later that night, before her mirror, Hannah applies hyaluronic acid to her undereyes, smoothing the droppered serum from inner to outer corner with her pinkies. The serum stings, and she could cry, the feeling following hard upon the physical stimulus. She runs her hands under the faucet and dries them against a clean hand towel.
The windows in her bedroom look out over the backyard, and on nights she’s neglected to pull the blinds, the neighbor’s television casts streaks of alien light that infiltrate the room. Lying in bed, watching stutters of blue and green light playing over her legs, Hannah thinks, Frankenstein, mad science, splayed skin, wrist straps, imagines an electric resurrection going on just beyond what-all she can see. It’s probably Star Wars.
As she teeters on the edge of sleep, a heaviness, like a man sitting on her chest, bears down upon her. The force of it startles her at first, but then the fear resolves itself into something else: clarity of mind, an immediacy so sharp it cleaves her, and she comes out of herself—imagines herself moving across the dark room and down the stairs, through the house, her hand on the doorknob, her right foot cold where it lands upon the back stoop—then she snaps out of it, sits up. In the corner of her bedroom, Billy, stinking, rumbling like a wet motor, rests in his crate. She has proven herself cruel enough to cage him up, true, cruel enough to make him sit in his own mess for hours, but never yet so cruel as to leave him alone.
***
Her neighborhood is a series of concentric circles, expanding out and out, and the farther one gets from the center, the fewer the number of houses filled, the greater the number unsold, abandoned, or foreclosed upon when the developers folded. Eventually, one hits the grey and shifting beanfield. They make a warped pair, Hannah and her dog in their thick winter coats, their reflections catching briefly in each darkened window. Slowly at first but escalating to a wary trot, Hannah leads Billy along the sidewalk until something hooks into her stuttering heart and stops her short.
This slate-blue shell of a model home is the last real structure before the beanfield. Years ago, a gaggle of kids broke in through the storm drain and set themselves up inside for a few days. But one of the children left the bathtub running and the police, called in to investigate the leak, threw out their salvaged mattress and alarmed the place. Through some electrical glitch, a fixed pendant lamp, visible through a window on the second floor, casts a clinical sort of fluorescence that blasts the place shadowless, baring everything, the house’s spartan innards on full display. Heart still hammering, Hannah stands very still, looking into the blindless blue house, imagining an autonomous government of junior high schoolers roving along its bare walls, over its eggshell carpets, moving in and out of empty rooms, deliberating. She stands in front of the house for so long that the motion-sensor streetlamp above her flicks off. Then she tugs at Billy’s leash, moves on.
The subdivision disintegrates into the occasional cement block, becomes beer bottles, a lone box television, other discarded things, snowed over. In the flat, bald stretch of land that leads up to the shadowy hump of the Basements, Hannah brings Billy to heel, re-looping his leash around the palm of her right hand. In her left, she grips his tag, the one engraved with his name and her cell phone number, so tightly that its metal edges cut into her palm. It hadn’t seemed right to dispose of this at home. Bottom of a trash can, back of some junk drawer, liabilities both—Hunter might have seen. And anyway, Hannah would’ve known it was there. She would have felt it was there and would have been unable to hide what she felt. She never could trust her face.
She digs a hole in the snow with the toe of her trail boot, squats down, and inserts the sharp end of the tag into the exposed ground, which, though icily resistant, eventually takes the whole thing. This done, still hunkered down, Hannah turns her attention back to the dog, who snuffles at the burial spot. Judging by the sky, by the relentlessness of the cold, it will be a few hours yet until morning; Hannah has between now and then to invent an accident, something Hunter will buy. Hit-and-run, cracked back door, it’ll come to her, she thinks. When she really needs it, the right lie will come. She releases the catch that connects the dog’s leash to the ring on his collar. Loosed, he circles himself, once, twice, as if tracking a shift in his own smell. Of course, once he’s had his fill of all this newness, he’ll put up his nose and follow her home.
#
Anthony Brown is a writer, researcher, and K-12 reading educator based in Detroit, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Wayne State University. He is a former managing editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal and a current staff reader for Cleaver Magazine. His short stories have appeared in Storm Cellar Quarterly and Malasaña.