The Last Animal, page 4
Lucy eats quietly. She can predict how Xavier will respond at any given moment. She knows when he’s in a prideful mood and might be offended if she offered him her scarf, though the sky is an icy slate and snow has begun to fall in downy tufts. She knows when he will curl up and doze off in her lap, weary from a long night of video games in his house with no curfew. She knows that when lunch is over, he will insist on throwing away their garbage alone, chivalrously braving the stink of the cans and the presence of the pigeons and squirrels that hover possessively around what they perceive to be their own territory.
On the way to her next class, Lucy tugs their special notebook out of her backpack, wondering what on earth she will find to write in response to the letter he has scrawled there. Xavier will be waiting for the notebook after seventh period, with his haunted, adoring face. She is no longer amazed at how he can consume her entire day, though they do not have one class in common. People often ask about him, how he’s been lately, what the two of them did last weekend. Lucy and Xavier have been a couple so long—four years now, since they were freshmen—that no one can imagine them apart. No one knows anything about her except that she belongs to Xavier. Once, in health class, as the teacher rolled a condom onto a banana and explained its function, Lucy got the giggles, imagining Xavier as her own personal condom, a barrier that surrounds her completely, keeping the rest of the world at a distance. She has no particular friends anymore. Nobody would know to ask about her dog, about the trails she has been blazing in the woods on the edge of town, about her father, now permanently in a wheelchair. Instead they ask about her boyfriend, and Lucy smiles brightly and says that all is well. People glance at the back of her hand, where Xavier has inked a heart, or at her jeans, where he penned his name along the seam, and she sees them roll their eyes, smirking.
After school she drives him home. Snow has begun to fall in earnest, the whirling flakes blurring the horizon line. Xavier dozes in the passenger’s seat, now and then coming to and remarking that she really ought to get the car cleaned—every seat is coated in golden fur, the back windows smeared with dog snot. Lucy acquiesces mildly, though like most dog owners she knows there isn’t much point in cleaning a space that will be dirtied again the second the animal returns to it. She watches Xavier slouch up the walk to his house. The place has a distinctly unloved air, the bushes half dead, the screens caked with dirt. Lucy has never been allowed inside, not once—the father is a dangerous drunk, the mother a cipher. The house has the same ramshackle, uncared-for aspect as Xavier himself, with his falling-apart jeans and his hair in an unwashed tousle. Lucy waves him inside, wishing, not for the first time, that he would be mowed down by a bus. A car accident. A plane crash. Something sudden, painless, and unexpected, as though God himself had reached down and rubbed her boyfriend out of existence with a big pink eraser. What a blessing it would be, after four long years—her entire high school career—to have Xavier out of her life, gone entirely, and to know that it was not her fault.
The blizzard continues into the evening, and by morning all of Ohio is swallowed up in white. Lucy bounces with anxiety before the radio until they announce that school is canceled. Her parents are already gone—they navigated the snowy roads early that morning to take her father for a checkup. Lucy wraps herself up in sweaters and gloves. Her dog is planted by the front door, beating his tail against the hatstand and moaning with anticipation. Lucy takes him to the arboretum. The walk is over a mile long, and soon she is loosening her coat, sweating beneath her layers. During the storm last night, sleet fell and froze, so the surface of the snow is crusted and cracking. Lucy leaves cavernous footprints. Dharma skids and slips over the uneven surface, falling through with a startled yip. At the arboretum she lets him off leash, and he pelts away between the trees, kicking up a sparkling wake. Lucy follows him down the slope and scrambles over the frozen stream, making her way to her favorite log, where she can sit and let the stillness settle over her. Branches droop, their weight doubled by a coating of ice. Here and there, snow topples off a twig, landing in a floury explosion. In the distance, the dog is barking. Every so often he appears at the top of the hill, his tongue hanging ecstatically out of the side of his mouth. When Lucy smiles at him, he takes off again, whimpering with joy.
Dharma came to her six years ago. He was technically a birthday present—she had always begged for a dog—but even then, at eleven years old, Lucy knew better. For the first time, the doctors were certain that her father would have to spend at least some of his days in a wheelchair. The house was in an uproar: ramps to be built, the bedroom moved downstairs, the kitchen remodeled so that coffee cups and plates would be easily accessible. Lucy learned to lock the bathroom door when she showered, so that the workmen would not barge in on her accidentally. She learned to do her homework at the library, where it was quiet, no hammering, no phone ringing off the hook. She learned not to ask her mother for anything—there was too much going on for Lucy to have a new backpack or a friend over, thank you very much. Even the dog was more a present for her father than herself. Her father was querulous, nervous, ashamed; he did not meet Lucy’s eye for months, struggling around in his wheelchair, hollering for help from the bathroom, where he was stuck between the tub and the sink again. He no longer felt himself to be the head of the household, the protector. Lucy was not told any of this, of course. She was told that the dog was her own gift, a combination birthday present and a thank-you for her patience and understanding. But she saw how her father nodded approvingly when Dharma barked at the mailman—how her mother smiled, watching her father—and she knew who was really being appeased.
None of that mattered, however, after the first few days. It was love from the beginning. Dharma followed her from room to room, laying his head on her knee. He clambered into the empty space beside her in bed, his body burning like a coal. He whined when she left for school. When she wasn’t paying attention, he would rush up behind her, a chew toy in his mouth, and bash into the back of her knees, hooking one paw around her ankle. Dharma was a font of unintentional humor. He howled along with distant sirens. He charged around the house at top speed and, unaccustomed to the hardwood floors, skidded full tilt into walls. Lucy was almost embarrassed by how fond she was of him. She had never been one of those girls, cooing with delight over kittens or sketching deformed horses in the margins of her homework. This was something else. Every day after school, she linked a leash around his neck and walked for hours. In the rain he would dance in the brimming gutters. In the spring they made tracks together across deserted parks. Eventually Lucy discovered the arboretum, and the two of them tried in vain to map the network of trails that wound among the trees, Dharma ducking under twining creepers, chasing the moths that hovered in the watery light.
At last the dog bounds down the hill, panting and shuddering. He has worn himself out. Lucy scratches his head, and within minutes he is curled up in the snow, a red-gold bundle of fur, his nose tucked beneath his tail, in what Lucy likes to call his Dead Dog Impression—so deeply asleep that he can scarcely be bothered to breathe. She plans to stay in the arboretum as long as she can stand the cold. Already her feet are numb. Clouds loom in the western sky, dark and smoky. The pine trees shake snow off their branches. The boulders are spangled with icicles. Dharma snores quietly, and Lucy’s mind empties out as though someone has pulled the plug from a drain. For a while she is able to contain the easy silence of the forest. One of her history teachers—a man who quite clearly regretted never chucking his career and heading off to be a yogi in India—once spent a lesson on the rudiments of meditation. Lucy never mastered it; her mind is always crowded with Xavier, so that sometimes she feels as though she has a double brain, her own thoughts bouncing around in a sea of his. She carries him with her. But in this place, if she sits still long enough, she can finally let him go. The sun emerges from between the clouds, and the snow gleams painfully. Bright whorls dance across the forest floor—and yet the light gives no warmth. Lucy is freezing. Her calves are buried in snow. Still, she can bear it a little longer. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.
Back at the house, her cell phone is waiting. As a rule, Lucy does not bring it with her to the woods. The trees block any semblance of service, giving her an excuse to render herself, while there, temporarily untethered. Three voice-mails have accumulated in her absence. She glares at the tiny screen as she towels off the dog’s feet. Dharma flings himself gratefully into his kennel, where he will sleep for the rest of the afternoon. Lucy putters around, opening the fridge and arranging the leaves of the plants on the countertop. She refreshes the water in Dharma’s bowl and stares out the window, waiting in vain for her parents to come home.
At last she can put it off no longer. All three messages are from Xavier, of course. The first is a cheerful hello, isn’t it awesome about school being canceled, so sad that he won’t see her today. He misses her. Give him a call when she climbs out of bed. Lucy sighs and skips to the next message, which contains a note of anxiety. Xavier’s voice spools out, filling the sunlit kitchen. Is she still in bed? She must really need her sleep, hah hah. He’s a little worried though—could she call, just so he knows that she’s all right, that her house didn’t lose power or anything? Lucy rolls her eyes. She is accustomed to that particular plea, the are-you-okay? gambit. By the third message, Xavier’s tone is annoyed. Lucy lays her head in her hands. The implication is clear: He celebrated their day off by telephoning her immediately, whereas she has left him in a state of bewildered abandonment. He says in a crisp voice that they need to talk about the college thing again. Where exactly is she thinking of applying? He’s been doing some research. Call him as soon as possible, please. He sounds like a guidance counselor reprimanding a wayward student.
Helplessly, Lucy dials his number. She bites her lip as she listens to it ring.
Xavier has tried to kill himself three times. This is the secret that she keeps for him. His first attempt happened early in their relationship; he went into his garage and endeavored to hang himself from the rafters. He told Lucy afterward that he did it because his father smacked him around and broke his computer. Xavier spent that night lying awake in his bedroom, gazing at the ceiling, and by morning he was nearly out of his mind. The rope was there in the corner of the garage, flung carelessly across a heap of tools. Xavier got it over the beam on the third try. He wound the knot with precise care and climbed onto the sagging hood of his father’s old Ford. Then he stepped into space. But the rope was ancient and rotten. Xavier felt a blinding pain in his throat—there was an explosion of dust—and with a groan the noose snapped clean through. He landed on the floor in a daze, perfectly intact; but Lucy knew something was wrong as soon as she saw him the following morning. He was as pale as a vampire, his brow clammy, his voice a faltering whisper. After burying himself in her arms, he tugged his collar back to show her the scar, a livid red rope burn that has since dimmed to papery brown.
The second time was different. Xavier took all the pills from his mother’s medicine chest and swallowed them ceremoniously, one by one. He and Lucy had been dating for over a year, but she was out of town at the time; her parents took her to Canada for the Christmas holiday, to visit old family friends and wander the quaint little tourist-trap shops. Lucy did not find out what had happened until she returned. Xavier went to bed, delirious from all the medicine in his bloodstream. But after a few hours he woke with his belly on fire. He spent the rest of the night vomiting into the toilet, shuddering on the bathroom tile, and trying not to wake his father. By dawn he had thrown up everything. He took the next few days to convalesce, and by the time Lucy came back he was marginally better—he looked as though he’d aged a few years, but he was well enough to gobble down the soup and crackers she brought for him.
The third incident, according to Xavier, was more of an accident than anything else. Lucy privately disagrees, believing that accidents involve things like misplacing your wallet or tripping on the stairs, rather than self-mutilation. One day in chemistry class, Xavier lost his temper and punched a hole through the window. The story is famous now around the school. His experiment wasn’t working right. One of the chemicals they’d been given was labeled incorrectly. The teacher, pausing at Xavier’s desk on her way around the room, chided him for not following directions. Xavier responded by shouting that no one else was doing any better and he was tired of being picked on. When she threatened to keep him after class, he stormed to the window and glared out. (Though she wasn’t there, Lucy can picture it vividly: Xavier eyeing his own reflection, a caged bird challenging the rival that flickers in and out of the mirror.) He breathed through his teeth. His cheeks flamed. The classroom grew still around him, everyone riveted in gruesome anticipation. At last, almost as an afterthought, Xavier hauled off and socked the glass. Blood dripped onto the pavement three stories below. His forearm was studded with icy shards. People screamed and bolted. One of the girls fainted dead away.
Lucy picked Xavier up at the hospital that evening, his arm swathed in a wad of bandages. On the way back to his house, she pulled into the deserted parking lot of a strip mall, and they sat for hours in the shadowy darkness, Xavier crying, Lucy insisting that it was time for her to tell someone; she had been aching to tell someone. But Xavier begged her not to. If anyone knew—Lucy’s parents, the guidance counselors—he would be removed from his home and placed in the foster care system. There had been a scare, apparently, back in elementary school, when he had to stay away from the house for a few nights, all his things packed in a plastic garbage bag. He did not wish to repeat the experience. He could be taken out of their school permanently, away from Lucy herself—just saying it aloud made him look terrified and desperate. Lucy was in over her head. She promised not to tell. She promised and promised again, Xavier pulling the words out of her like a mantra, like a magical incantation.
During the long months of the winter, Lucy works on her college essays. Downstairs the fire crackles, and periodically she hears her father grunt at the newspaper. The smell of wood-smoke drifts up the stairs. The dog lies by her feet, drooling into her socks.
His name, Lucy writes, had already been given to him when we got him from the animal shelter. I remember I tried to change it to something dumb and girly, like Socks or Fido, but now I’m glad my dog wouldn’t let me. Many parts of his personality were already there at the beginning. It is difficult to explain what it means to me to have a dog . . .
Lucy has been lying to Xavier. They agreed that she would look at colleges only in their immediate area. She knows his litany so well that she could say it with him, word for word: He will visit on weekends, on holidays, and if one of them gets a crush on somebody else, he will uproot himself and move to be with her. But Lucy has requested applications for schools in California, Alaska, and Maine—as far from Ohio as possible. She has been thumbing through pictures of ocean vistas, half concealed in mist. She imagines walking with her dog beneath redwood trees so tall that the canopy might as well be another planet. She will buy a pair of hiking boots. She will let Dharma chase seals down the rocky coastline, climb over glaciers, charge through swamps. It is all a dream, of course. She throws these enticing applications away as soon as they arrive, hiding the evidence—it is enough of a rebellion just to have looked at them.
Seated before the computer, she chews her fingernails, and Dharma glances up hopefully at the cessation of clatter from the keyboard. Lucy reaches down absently and scratches his ears. What she wants to say about him drifts tantalizingly at the back of her mind. There is something important here. In her anthropology class, she once read that dogs and humans coevolved, creating a relationship that stands in stark opposition to the normal pattern of domestication. In every other case, as people brought animals into their sphere (to use them as workers, food, protection, or transportation), the animals’ brains would gradually change. Over the millennia, horses lost a significant portion of their frontal lobe—the decision-making sector—as this side of things was relegated to their masters.
But in the case of dogs, the situation is different. Humans and canines both changed. In their domestication, dogs became permanent puppies, never fully maturing as they would in the wild. They did not need to mature; their owners would tell them what to do and would care for them. People, however, also lost a portion of their brains—a section that had to do with the emotional experience. Part of the human capacity to have feelings disappeared, surrendered to their canine companions.
Lucy sits up straight again, and Dharma, recognizing the signs, gloomily retires to the corner beneath the desk.
Without my dog, Lucy writes, I would not know how to feel certain things. Without him, I do not believe that I would ever feel joy.
She tumbled into her relationship with Xavier almost accidentally. At the age of fourteen, she liked a boy in her Spanish class, kissed him once or twice behind the bleachers, and before she knew it, Xavier was head-over-heels in love, planning already to marry her, picking out baby names. It happened so fast that it made her head spin. Lucy was flattered; she could not get her bearings. She had never expected to be adored so entirely. Xavier gazed into her small, freckled face as though he had been blind before the sight of her. He treated her like his own personal gift, something he had always waited for and deserved, now finally delivered to him.
