The Pisces
Page 54

“One day these rocks won’t be here,” he said. “The ocean will waste them away.”
“Then we could find new rocks,” I said.
“Eventually you have to choose,” he said. “That’s how the story has always been and that’s the way it will be forever.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, thinking, “I guess because the choice is always there.”
54.
When I got back to the house, Dominic didn’t bark. This was odd, because he always smelled Theo on me. I went into the pantry to check on him. He was lying there on his side, perfectly still.
“Dominic,” I said. “Domi.”
Then I saw his face. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth. His eyes were open, hazy, as though they were made of plastic. He looked like a grotesque stuffed-animal version of himself. The floor was covered in vomit and drool.
“Oh no,” I said out loud. “Please, no.”
He was motionless. I didn’t even have to touch him. I didn’t have to feel his flank or check for breath to know he was dead.
The whole summer came flashing in front of me: each of the men and behind them sweet Dominic, waiting for me in the background the whole time. What had I done? I had poisoned him. I’d been dosing him heavier and heavier, because he seemed to be getting more resistant.
“Please come back. Please,” I begged, kneeling beside him.
His eye seemed to be looking at me, or through me into space. His ear was flapped up over his head and I adjusted it so it faced downward again. It felt cold when I touched it, and detached from anything living, like a piece of loose suede. I began to cry. I thought of how he didn’t like being stroked on his ear, but he always let me. The rest of his body was cold too, heavy like stone.
I shook him a little. Where was he? How was his body here but he was just gone? Everything about him had been warmth, softness, the most gentle parts of life. But now he was the opposite: rigid and empty.
“I never wanted you to suffer,” I said. “I only wanted you to be comfortable. I didn’t want you to be scared of Theo.”
But a quiet voice inside me said, No, that isn’t the truth.
The truth was I’d wanted him out of the way so I could wander the labyrinth of my fantasy life. I had been given pure love in the form of this dog and I had destroyed him.
I sat there and waited. I waited as I had waited for Theo, because I didn’t know what else to do. And sitting on that floor, the truth was further revealed to me that I was not capable of love for anyone. I’d always imagined that there was a subjective reality. But there was nothing subjective about this. I was objectively selfish and cruel. Suddenly it occurred to me that there really were gods who could smite us. The gods were just nature itself. If you didn’t follow the gods, you blew it. I had gone against nature. I had done it all wrong.
I’d been wrong about death too. There was no gentle escape. When I had taken those Ambien in Phoenix I thought there was a peaceful way to just kind of disappear. But death wasn’t gentle. It was a robber. It stole you out of yourself, and you became a husk. Dominic’s warmth was all gone. But his spirit had to be somewhere. Where was his spirit now? Was he still in the room, hovering over me and his body? I hoped he couldn’t see himself like this. Was he watching me, angrily? Or was he already with Annika in Europe? Could she feel him?
What was I going to say to Annika? I couldn’t tell her. She was going to be devastated and blame herself. Worse yet, what if they performed an autopsy and she found out I’d killed her child? Though there was the diabetes. Maybe that was what had happened, something with his blood sugar. But I’d neglected him horribly. And Annika never had a chance to say goodbye.
I remembered my first group therapy session, when Claire had said to Dr. Jude, “Who cares what I’m doing? I’m only hurting myself.” And Dr. Jude had told her that wasn’t true. She said there would be casualties, that there were always casualties. This was what she meant.
I was too scared to get in touch with Annika right away. I decided I would go to the hospital to see Claire before contacting my sister. I cleaned up the vomit and drool, then wrapped Dominic in the blanket I had used to smuggle Theo on the wagon.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said to the poor baby, even though it wasn’t.
I sat with the dead dog on my lap and stroked him through the blanket for a long time. It was the most care I had given him in weeks.
* * *
—
This time Claire looked alive again—not overly drugged.
“My darling,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“Yes, for both of us,” I said. “You look like you again. You look like you’re back.”
“Oh I’m back, baby.”
“I really thought for a minute there that you had become sane.”
“Never.” She laughed. “I will never give up on suicide again. They thought the meds were making me too Valley of the Dolls, I guess, so they changed them. Well, that didn’t work and I had another attempt. I tried to hang myself off the bathroom door handle with a four-hundred-dollar cardigan from CP Shades. They had to break in the door and found me naked on the floor of the bathroom, not dead yet, but passed out. It was brilliant.”
I laughed with her, but also I shivered. This was what happened to girls like us. We were wired to die.
“Are you still giving up men?” I asked.
“Christ no! Do you want to know the best part of all this? David found out about this last attempt. He’s been writing me letters compulsively. Two of them a day, pages and pages. He doesn’t even mail them; he comes here and drops them off for me. It’s like the more suicidal I am, the more he wants me. When I get out we are going to try and live together. Arnold is going to get full custody of the kids in the divorce and I can’t be arsed to give a fuck. So I’m too crazy to be a mother? Well then, that’s fine. I didn’t make myself this way. It is what it is.”
“You sound…good,” I said.
“I’m great,” she said, tugging at her hospital gown. “And what about you?”
“I’m a mess. I think I may have poisoned my sister’s dog.”
“Oh my God.” She giggled. “You did what?”
“It’s not funny. He’s dead.”
“That beast you brought to my house? You poisoned him? With what, bad Alpo?”
“No. Tranquilizers.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
“A junkie dog. Jesus, who would have thought? You know, I could tell he had a drug problem. He tried to steal my TV.” She snorted.
Now it wasn’t comforting at all to have the old Claire back. Why was she laughing? She was like one of those young boys who shoots animals with a BB gun and then has no remorse. Except I was the one who had killed Dominic. I wondered if we were both inherently evil people. Bad women. Were we? Evil people rarely know they’re evil. Someone had told me that once. What if we were put on the planet to fill some purpose but that purpose was bad? Maybe this was why we had to die.
“He was such a sweet dog,” I said. “It’s horrible. My sister is going to be destroyed. I don’t think she will ever forgive me.”
“Listen,” she said, “it’s not your fault he couldn’t handle his shit. Never trust an addict, Lucy, not even a dog.”