Fiction Short Story
A Dog Is Not the Answer
Alicia only meant to bring newfound meaning to her bedraggled life, hoping her memories and grief would be blunted by the comfort of another living creature.
The shelter warns her about behavioral issues. In the kennels, it’s difficult for the animals to display their true selves. Too much pressure. Too much noise. But the display of Henry’s true self is unbridled, immediate. A blue heeler–terrier mix, he has the pelt of a cow, the ears of a bat, and the eyes of a lamb. Panting, he refuses to drop her gaze when Alicia passes by on a blustery afternoon in February. His muzzle is thinning and white, telltale signs of the euthanasia list. He drags his claws against the concrete floor. A low whine throttles his throat, and Alicia is reminded of her own blatant desires, of wild things, of coyotes, the ones who roam the lush backyards here in Los Angeles as well as those back in Texas. She stops in her tracks, looks into the dog’s cloudy blue-brown eyes, and glimpses everything she left behind—the yellow stitch of the desert that fell between the dark, foreboding mountains of her hometown, the bright cerulean sky, her dead brother’s voice around her, everywhere.
*
The threads are what Alicia finds first. They sparkle against the dark cheap carpet of her one-bedroom apartment. When she reaches for one, it pulls a red rumpled sweater out from underneath her bed. She does not believe what she sees, for the sweater is not hers but her brother’s—or it was, nearly a year ago. She looks behind her. Her front door is ajar. Henry sits in the dark hallway, his ears flattened. She calls him to her. They have only known each other for a week and already he responds keenly to her voice, her moods, the slight sheen of sweat on her palms, which he tastes now after he moseys to her side, humble and obedient. She looks at him, then back at the sweater. A mistake? she wonders.
Later that day, after work, she is proven wrong. In Henry’s snout, something gleams. When she pulls it from his loose, rotting teeth, she discovers the USB with the viral YouTube video file that convinced Raphael to move to Los Angeles. A day later, the envelope carrying the first run of his self-photographed headshots, photos she hasn’t seen since he died, shows up tucked under her laundry basket. The third day, his childhood Stetson, the one Alicia refused to let him wear with her in public, appears on her bed. She discards the misplaced relics only to later find them next to her couch alongside Henry’s hollow tennis ball shells and the broken rungs of the bones he chews on.
Alicia only meant to bring newfound meaning to her bedraggled life. Last March, her brother Raphael died in the same car accident she survived, a memory she had hoped would be blunted by the comfort of another living creature. Instead, her past and her future now collide, then splinter, splice. She finds the dog trainer’s number, written on Henry’s adoption form before they left.
These dogs have lived lives we will never understand. It can be difficult getting to know them, she had said. You may need some extra help. Alicia had taken one look at the woman’s wide, presumptuous face and had shaken her head.
After Alicia dials the number and explains the situation, the trainer tells her all dogs have their quirks. Sounds like separation anxiety, she says. Perhaps the dog leaves to look for Alicia or anything close.
Establish boundaries, long walks each day, a comforting routine, the trainer advises. Be patient. It may take some time.
And if he doesn’t stop?
You could always bring him back.
Instead, her past and her future now collide, then splinter, splice. Alicia knows better. Henry lies close to her, groaning in his sleep. His legs twitch. His ears flap. He sleeps like a fast-moving storm, and Alicia does not try to guess his dreams. He does not so much breathe as he does chug the air. Each breath echoes like rain.
*
Alicia thumbs the vintage matchbox containing Raphael’s weed, which she finds in one of her reusable tote bags one afternoon at Von’s, and later, at a party, she feels a crinkled slip of paper in her coat pocket. She unfolds it and finds someone’s phone number written in a hasty scrawl. She holds it up to the light but doesn’t call. A few days later, a smooth chunk of quartz crystal and aviator sunglasses, gas station knockoffs, appear. She can’t always remember what belonged to her brother and what is just hers.
Once, when Alicia was nine, her brother taught her how to knot a cherry’s stem in her mouth. She peered past his open lips to see how it was done and saw they possessed the same overcrowded rows of small, crooked teeth. Same teeth, same dark eyes. In the first few months after he was gone, Alicia would see her reflection and mistake herself for him. Other times, the angry clank of a customer’s silverware at work reminded her of him. Raphael slammed doors and walked hard on his heels. Their parents couldn’t stand it, but Alicia took comfort in his perennial commotion, in the disquieting acts he committed to make himself known.
*
On her morning walk with Henry, she stumbles through the late spring fog, reaching for Raphael’s ghost. Henry dawdles in the ripe aftermath of other people’s freshly mowed lawns. They float together between the heady scents of flowering trees, as dizzy and spent as she felt when she first moved here.
Raphael and Alicia were closest in those first few months when they didn’t know where to go or what to do. They frequented dimly lit bars, sipping on sixteen-dollar cocktails, and hiked the same crowded trails as the tourists. In the evenings, they drank boxed wine on his mattress in the living room and listed everything they needed to make their dreams come true. Just one audition, Raphael insisted, and everything would fall into place. Just one more corporate job interview, Alicia echoed wryly, and life would suddenly make sense.
Henry sniffs the weeds blooming between the cracks in the sidewalk. Alicia turns away when he looks up. She fears that if she looks him in the eye, he will show her all he knows.
Where will that leave her?
She stuffs the objects Henry finds in the suitcases that have gone unused under her bed ever since she and Raphael moved here together four years ago. She’s learned that the objects will continue to reappear, no matter how many times she tries to throw them away. When she runs out of suitcases, she resorts to the plastic take-out bags that have accumulated under her kitchen sink. At dawn, she rummages for cardboard boxes jigsawed in her neighbors’ recycling bins. Come July, her apartment grows slick and full as a carcass.
*
One night, a storm overwhelms the horizon. Henry howls and buries himself under the coffee table. Alicia clenches her teeth beside him. In Texas, you know a storm is coming when it’s miles away. Here, the clouds hide under the smog and in between the high-rises. They roll by as slowly as the traffic. It’s only the wind that rushes, that shakes and pries.
In the morning, while it is still nearly dark, Alicia goes outside to take in the damage. The hardy eucalyptus next to her apartment complex is warped, its pale bark split right down the middle. Henry drags his nose against a pile of ruddy leaves and Alicia reaches her hand across his speckled coat. He feels as soft as her favorite blue sweater, the one with the bell cap sleeves and delicately knitted details around the collar, which has begun to pill. She still remembers the man who pulled her aside in the bar the first night she wore it, mouthing something about her being lovely while his eyes lingered downward. Alicia turned away to stop herself from smirking and saw Raphael eyeing them with earnest enthusiasm from their booth.
Once upon a time, she was as optimistic and naive as he was. She does not know when she changed. When her waist no longer flatlined into her hips, when other people’s promises rusted? She remained buoyed only by Raphael. She followed him here, after all, basked in everything he believed.
Come July, her apartment grows slick and full as a carcass. When she goes back inside, she sees Henry has left her something new beside the door—the bounced check Raphael once tried to use to pay his portion of their rent. What can she say? She needed him, but sometimes he needed her more.
She bends down and pulls the dog by his collar, away from the door. Henry snarls, whips his head around, and gnashes his teeth against her fingers. She moves her hand away before he can break skin and stares at him. He freezes, then shoves his snout against her side, lowering his ears. His eyes grow wide and holy. He licks her once, twice, three times over.
I’m sorry, Alicia whispers. I’m sorry. She repeats the words over and over.
Trauma echoes back for animals just as it does for people, but dogs cannot tell us what has happened. What we know of their pain comes through their raw grief. We can only observe how they react to their surroundings.
Dogs are lucky. A dog may never forget its trauma, but its memories can be rewired to mean something else entirely.
The trainer speaks in a slow, ambling voice, a voice Alicia has begun to associate with long dark hallways, with crystallized honey, with time.
Thundershirts, lemon balm, a white noise machine, Mozart for Dogs on repeat, crate training. Alicia will try anything. Sometimes, she leaves Henry with a long, overstated goodbye. Sometimes, she leaves without saying anything at all. She spends all night huddled at her desk on an Animal Planet discussion forum because dogs are just wolves, and wolves are just sad, lonely creatures in need of another being’s care.
One day, she waits outside to see if she can trace where Henry goes to find Raphael’s things. At first, all is silent, but then he is out the door, running toward her, past her. She is breathless and silent. She is as useless as the day of the accident. All she heard was the slam. It was a terse moment where nothing could be done, only remembered. Against a hazy sky on a humid day, the world thrummed then stopped. For a moment, she could not breathe. Then she could. Her relief dissipated when she saw her brother beside her, unconscious and bleeding. The memories of the moments that followed fracture, and she cannot say now whether it was she who dialed 911 or a bystander.
*
Alicia finds the neighbor’s note complaining about Henry being off-leash one sultry evening in August. The word menace stays in her head like the names kids called her brother back in school. Raphael never cared. Attention of any kind, he said, was a compliment. Once the other kids recognized his impenetrability, Alicia became the one to bear the brunt of those barbed jokes.
Inside, she crumples the neighbor’s note and tosses it into the trash. She pours Henry his dinner—a cup of dry food softened with low-sodium chicken broth—and escapes to her room. She listens to Henry eat. When he’s finished, he nudges her bedroom door open with his nose and proceeds to roll over on her carpet until he’s satisfied. Then, he noses her laundry into a pile and nestles himself inside it like a croissant. In the distance, Alicia watches the KFC sign over Western flicker like a pulse.
*
Would they take a dog? She keeps her voice even. In Texas, Henry could run for miles and see no one.
But her parents say what they always say. Come home. Threaded in their silence, she hears other words unsaid. What happens when we lose you too?
She hangs up. Henry paces next to her, his back legs shaking. She kneels and commands him to sit, but, today, he cannot be convinced. Ever in sync, he will only yield when she does.
*
At night, she cannot see the stars, only the blurred luminescence of a million other lives, a million other dreams. In the dark, she cannot even find herself. What was the allure of this place? Beyond the promise of sunshine, the sure belief that anything could happen to you. She cannot remember. She only knows the city from looking at it head-on. The first day she and Raphael arrived, the skyline reflected so much sunlight she had to turn away and cover her eyes. Raphael was beside her, driving, but the brightness didn’t faze him. He stared out the windshield, his eyes alight, until someone honked at him for crossing into the centermost lane.
The dog trainer tells Alicia, You should hold your heart as high as you hold the dead.
*
By November, the split tree behind Alicia’s apartment is gone, transformed by a squat, unwieldy stump. She begins counting the weeks only after her settlement money runs out and she starts the new job—the one that forces her to wear A-line skirts and hop between phone calls for the same wisecracking talent execs her brother badgered. Left longer alone, Henry escapes to find more of Raphael’s old possessions. What could possibly be left?
Dogs are just wolves, and wolves are just sad, lonely creatures in need of another being’s care. Under her coat rack, Alicia finds the dried bouquet she bought him after his first—and only, Alicia now realizes—callback. One day, it’s his hair gel congealed like syrup on her carpet. A half-empty pack of Marlboro Reds left in Henry’s crate reveals her brother never did stop smoking as she had asked. His belongings land everywhere, like the pale webs of Henry’s fur that drape her apartment. But Alicia no longer minds. She holds Henry close and lets the clutter fill her life.
Most nights, she can’t sleep. Everything feels too far away, too unreliable. She is unsure of certain details. She can’t decipher whether the gaps in her memory are a natural byproduct of time or a failure of her own. When she said she didn’t know how fast the other car was driving and that she merely released her foot from the brake pedal after the light turned green, the police officers narrowed their eyes. What caused the impact? A delicate way of asking, how then did he die?
Had it rained earlier? Were the streets slick?
Was the light really green?
Did they have one drink or two at lunch? Did it make a difference?
What was he wearing?
What color were his eyes?
She lies sprawled next to Henry on the floor. The shadows of the suitcases and cardboard boxes that fill her room resemble the silhouette of downtown, but tonight they won’t look too closely. They stare at her popcorn ceiling as if it were the moon, the stars, everything.
*
An afternoon storm in early December sets a record for rainfall. Cars glide across the highway like tangled strings of lights. Alicia watches the Los Angeles River swell against its concrete banks on the bus ride home from work. On her doormat, she finds a long hair she knows was once Raphael’s by the way it shines nearly violet in the sunlight.
Later that evening, she calls Henry to join her on her bed. He looks up, then down, unsure. She calls him again. He stands slowly, hesitates, and then jumps. He is almost eleven years old. She didn’t think about his age that closely when she adopted him. Tonight, she is acutely reminded.
When she wakes up, Henry is no longer in her room. A cold draft blows through her apartment. Her front door is open. A puddle has formed in the doorway. Outside, rare lightning knots itself across the sky. Sirens wail. She finds Henry outside next to the tree stump. Beside him stands Raphael. Like Henry, he is wet and shivering, but otherwise he looks the same as when she last saw him. Long curly hair. An impossibly wide smile. Small crooked teeth. They stand there for a moment, quiet, and then she invites him in. Inside, he begins to sort through his belongings. Henry follows him and sits at his feet. Alicia waits by the entrance, her hand over the doorknob, turning and unturning, until she finally lets go.
