Things Withered (23 page)

The dogs were being led away. They went happily enough, without so much as a goodbye to Dass, the smell of food that he couldn’t smell likely heavy in their nostrils like the smell of warm beer in a cardboard carton in from the cold.

Marnie.

I don’t have any money. He wasn’t sure he said it. So he repeated it. “I don’t have any money.”

The woman sighed heavily.

“You can take the dogs back with you, sir,” she said, but made no move to call the other woman back with them. “Are you able to care for them?”

“I thought—”

From behind a door, dogs yelped and squealed and hollered for release. He thought he recognized Yellow Dog’s bark among them. But they all probably sounded the same.

“I thought—”

“We will care for the dogs if you cannot pay the fee. We don’t like to—we are a charitable organization, sir. We rely on the donations and administration fees of the people who use our services in order to stay alive,” she said, the words heavy with meaning and disapproval, but it was rote, and not necessarily personal. Not any longer. She turned away from him and began shuffling papers, putting a bright orange sticker on each sheet. Letters. The sticker had a picture of a smiling cartoon cat.

“If you could fill out the form, in any case. Any history you know about the dogs, their names and ages—if you don’t mind,” she said, her back to him.

He picked up the pen, his hand shaking.

Surrender. You want to surrender the dogs to us, is that right?

Was that right? Dass couldn’t seem to think. Couldn’t remember if that was right at all. Surrender didn’t sound right. Not at all.

He wrote Yellow Dog and Butcher for their names. He guessed wildly at ages. He wrote his address and put his and Marnie’s name as owners, using her last name, leaving the phone number blank.

“We can get the dogs back?” he said. He looked for a place to put the pen, and there was no place. He thought about sticking it through the narrow coin space in the Humane Society donations can beside the cash register, but it was too small. He poked the pen through the slot a little to test it anyway and the can rattled and shifted sluggishly, fat and heavy with coins and maybe dollar bills. The pen fell off. It rolled off the counter and on to the floor. He ducked to pick it up and just held it.

The can had an orange sticker like the one on the forms, but bigger. There were two dogs on the sticker, a big one and a smaller one, then a cat, tucked nicely between them. Didn’t cats and dogs fight? The slot on the top was just the size and shape to fit a folded up dollar bill through. (Or maybe bigger, maybe tens and fives, rich people liked dogs too, didn’t they?) He dragged his eyes off the can when the woman started talking again.

“This is not a kennel, sir. You cannot bring animals in and then retrieve them later. If you want them back, there will be fees for their care and feeding, any veterinary bills they might incur, including a standard de-fleaing and bath. Do they have their shots?”

“Yes,” he lied. He nodded for emphasis.

“It usually runs to about $80 a dog,” she said, and then she looked at him briefly, showing her disapproval. There that’ll get ya.

$160. For the two of them.

He nodded, white-faced. Backtracked. “Maybe I should just take them back with me now—” he said. His mouth was so dry, his insides so uncertain that the words came out garbled. But she understood.

“Can you take care of them?” She accused.

The door where the dogs were kept was ice-coloured glass with mesh screen. A heavy door. It sounded like there were thirty-forty dogs back there, all barking, freaking out with the new pair.

“I better take them,” he said fast.

“I don’t think you’re in a position to care for them. Do you have dog food at home?” she fired questions quickly. “You said yourself the primary caregiver of the dogs was going to be away and couldn’t help take care of them. Didn’t you? You are the dogs’ proper owner, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Yup. I better take them,” he said.

“Maybe you’d better think about it. If you can’t properly care for your animals, they could be seized.”

Seized.

“I don’t have no $160.”

The woman leaned forward and said gently, “We can find proper homes for the dogs, you know. Good homes. They’re in good hands here. Maybe you want to think about that.”

“Marnie loves those dogs. They sleep with us.” She nodded.

“Excuse me,” she said, not unkindly. And she disappeared into an office, leaving him standing there.

All his thinking rushed forward on him at once. She didn’t seem to be getting the dogs. The dogs were in the back. He thought maybe she was calling the cops. Why why? Why would she do that? There was no reason, but sometimes there wasn’t. Maybe security. Would a place like this have security? Maybe big mean dogs they couldn’t unload.

Good homes.

Maybe she wasn’t even coming back out. Maybe he was dismissed. No she said think about it. Maybe she was leaving him alone with his thoughts.

$160!

And no drink. No smokes even, for a moment like this. He ran dirty hands through his sticky hair and over his stubbly chin and under his neck, scratching his finger on his zipper. No drink no drink no drink no

And no dogs.

Of course he took the bright orange can with the coin (maybe more!) donations from tired fathers and mothers talked into being good homes by little kids. When he had drink in him he’d think better. He’d figure something out.

Truth was, they stole those dogs. Right from under him.

Tucker and Digger. Marnie’s boys.

The can rattled all the way to the back of the hotel. He broke it open with a rock, all the time singing in his head Tucker and Digger Tucker and Digger.

Dass’s head was full of shadows and fog by then, so rattled with the need for a drink that the actual getting of one was a near-letdown, except for the having it. He drank a full glass right there at the bar and ordered another one—shitty watered-down draft and it tasted like some kind of nectar like they always said. Nectar of the dogs.

Bartender didn’t ask him why he was crying at all, just gave him his beer glass, full, golden, icy cold like his fingers and told him to take it to a table.

Their names were Tucker and Digger. Nectar of the dogs.

Shara wondered if the Mac was ruined. The corner was dented as if it had been dropped from a height, like the top of a dining room table. There was blood on the corner that spread across the lid in a delicate spray that reminded her of the Magic Spin Art kit she’d had when she was little. It looked like batik. Groovy.

The Mac was brand new.

Hilary, on the other hand, looked used up and spent. She lay on her left side, arms out in front. She lay on a pile of leaves and forest detritus, where Shara had dragged her. Her eyes were open, staring up at the sky through trees.

There was a dent in her, too. The top right side of her skull was mashed in. Blood made her blonde hair red.

Shara slumped to the ground beside the body, still holding the Mac. She was still shaking. She felt exactly as she did after masturbating, relieved and shameful. In fact, the whole thing was much like that: the exhilaration of arcing her arm over her head and bringing it down, full force, the meeting of force and flesh, and the knee-weakening result.

Leaves and earth clung to Hilary’s bare midriff, where the ground had tugged her top up. A single gold leaf and several shapely red ones.

Morus Rubra.
Red Mulberry leaves. Kind of rare in Ontario. Some people thought they looked like oak leaves. The
untrained
eye thought that. Shara’s eye was quite trained. Wasn’t that why they were here in the first place?

She didn’t know what to do about the Mac. It was blood-covered. She wondered if it would still even work.

It was shady where she’d dragged Hilary’s body, but rays of sunlight cracked the treeline somewhere behind her. It was getting late.

Shara opened the lid and turned on the laptop. It sang awake, popping up a photo of what Shara knew was Hil’s favourite flower.
Myosotis
. Forget-me-nots.

“Now your favourite flower should be a lily,” she said to the corpse. “See that’s a joke, Hil. I do
so
have a sense of humour.”

The Mac still worked. She rubbed the blood off as best she could with Hil’s skirt hem—a Stella McCartney. Hilary and her mom had made a trip to London that summer to buy school clothes. It was ruined now. But it left a lot of her flesh exposed.

The temperature was cool on the forest floor, Hil’s body hidden by overgrown fern and ground cover. Shara heard rustling in the shadows to her right.

She left her like that, in the woods.

Shara had been driving in Hil’s car. They’d been sharing the driving, bickering off and on, like sisters, like girls who’d known each other too long to be objective.

I have to pee
Hilary had said, right on the heels of
I work just as hard as you do
.
Why shouldn’t I get it?

She’d said it with that open-mouthed
duh, bitch
that she’d lately picked up using, after summer at tennis camp. Hilary had come back no better at tennis, but with a small tattoo that her mother didn’t know about and a snotty attitude.

Shara had spent the summer at study camp, tutoring freaks in science, her first ever paid job.

Her student advisor at the U set it up. Shara had put off the inevitable in a persistent fog of denial for most of the previous year. Tuition had only been half-paid and she was wait-listed for a dorm room. Of course, Hil had invited her to stay with her at the apartment her dad rented for her off-campus. In return she could do Hil’s laundry.

(
It’s the least I can do
she’d simpered and Shara, remembering all the homework answers and French essays and class notes and assignments she’d given/done for Hil
aw c’mon please Shar-shar-shar you know I’d do it for you—
had thought that it WAS the least she could do for her)

It had all been settled.

I have to pee
.

Shara, who was driving, had pulled over; maybe without thinking her eyes scanning the horizon for just this copse of trees. She’d written a paper on the area:
Anomalies in Flora in the Canadian Shield.
She couldn’t see what she was looking for from the road, but she stopped very nearly exactly at the spot. And they were talking about The Canadian Shield Award, for Botany. They were both up for it.

I work just as hard as you do, why shouldn’t I get it? Anyway, my paper was better.

There were so many answers to that. The thing is, it was about balance. A level playing field. Shara knew that, it was an unspoken agreement. Balance.

Hilary was the pretty one.

Shara had gotten out of the car with Hil and leaned against the passenger side. Hilary had been sorting photos on her Mac. The computer was on her seat.

Hilary had walked about twenty feet into the forest and squatted, her skirt held around her waist.

And then she said—

(with her mouth twisted up into that
duh bitch—
)

—
you’re not the only smart one—

Hilary’s paper was not better. Not.

There’s a plant genus
Artemisia
—wormwood—that has all sorts of applications and uses in real life, but which is bitter and sometimes even poisonous. Their first year Botany prof had made them put a little on their tongues. Butterflies eat them, jamming their proboscis into the veins of the plant and sucking out the marrow. To the human tongue, however, the taste is repellant regardless of preparation or benefit.

Like poison.

That was what it was like when Hilary said:

You can stay with me in the apartment off-campus

I work as hard as you

My paper was better

Duh

You’re not the only smart one—

It all tasted like wormwood.

There had been nothing to say then. There had been no breeze and no traffic—it had been quiet enough that Shara heard Hilary’s urine splash on to the Bishop’s Weed and ivy.

What had she even been thinking?

Hil’s Mac was brand new with a 17” screen and aluminium casing. Shara reached in through the car window and picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy. Peripherally she saw Hil drop a tissue to the ground, bright white on the brown-green covered earth.

There had a been a snap of panty elastic.

I’m not in love with this skirt I don’t even know why I bought it—

Shara saw her life like a single thought in that moment. Not so much a picture as an ugly knowledge, the feel of cancer growing inside you. Nothing good was ever going to happen to her. She was going to be trapped in an ordinary life: no schooling, no money, no future, no boys.

Shara
had
to kill her.

When Hil got close enough Shara brought the Mac down on her head
with a godawfulsatisfying
thunk
! And Hil dropped elegantly to the forest floor.

She’d had to do it. It was about balance. One pretty, one smart; one live, one dead.

Shara had dragged her body through the trees, leaves clinging, being pushed aside even as they dropped on both of them from above. Her heels dug shallow furrows into the damp ground. Her head bobbed with every step Shara took. Like the Mac, Hilary was heavier than she looked.

Shara dropped her and she hit the ground, her head lolled to the side a little, like when they posed for photos fooling around at keggers in first year, chin down, eyes wide, head tilted; that was before all of this shit started, before Shara was a thing to be carried, before her father lost everything, before her life was shit and poverty.

They’d vamp for the camera.
Smile! Say . . . Khloe Kardashian!

The rustling to her right sounded closer; a curious something coming closer to see. It would start with animals, more drawn to Hil as her body putrefied, if it lasted long enough to putrefy. The forest was unforgiving. Fauna, flora, all of it starving.

Most people don’t think about it, but an ecosystem is like the human body, with every part having function, every function requiring fuel to operate. The forest floor was a series of systems, intricately involved, consuming whatever fell prey to it, to feed its parts to function, every function requiring fuel.

She left her there like that, for the forest to eat.

Shara parked Hilary’s car on the street outside the apartment building. She sat a moment, gathering herself. The building and the street were popular with student renters. The front of the building was lit with a set of spots on either side of the front lobby.
Heathrow
. Everyone called it Deathrow. Funny, that.

Now it was.

They’d always had a system, in case one of them needed the car. Shara put the keys on the top of the tire under the wheel well on the passenger side and left them there.

A girl crossed the street a few yards away, lugging a book bag. She didn’t even glance in Shara’s direction. Nonetheless, Shara’s knees were shaking when she walked across the lot. She made three trips, each time, watching for watchers, dragging up both their luggage, her own laptop as well and the bloody Mac.

On the last trip up, her eyes darted back and forth across the lot, but it was practically deserted. There was a couple standing at the trunk of a car, unloading; two girls dragged wheeled suitcases somewhere. Farther away yet she could see the front of the school. There was a canopy set up, lit with tiny white fairy lights. She could hear faint music. First Days had started, first year students were picking up Welcome packages, and in the quad there would be a mixer. There would be a half dozen activities going on, no one close enough to see her, what she was doing.

Hilary would have been rushing to get there. Wanting to change, to borrow something. She would have coaxed Shara into going. Shara would have gone. Would have spent the evening watching Hil tart around.

No more.

In the hall another girl passed. She looked at Shara a moment, a pause before saying
hello
and passing her on the stairs.

Hello
Shara said back, and wondered how it sounded.

When Hil lost her virginity in first year she came to Shara’s dorm.
Do I look different? Can you tell?

That was how she felt as the girl passed her by. She couldn’t help it, she looked back at the girl as she swept out the doors, the night air breezing in through the building. It smelled like cut grass and faintly of wood smoke from the quad.

Sweat trailed down her spine and under her arms. Absently she swiped at it, as if an itch.

She’d studied Hil the morning she’d come in to ask
Do I look different?
, studied her for signs of sex and there had been none.
Can’t tell at all
she’d said. It would be the same now.

No one would be able to tell.

Her body itched, between her shoulder blades, under her hairline, even between her legs. She was probably covered in bits of leaf and dirt. Hilary didn’t exactly drag herself into the woods.

Shara scratched under her hair and headed for her dorm.

Do I look different?

Of course she didn’t.

Shara didn’t go to the quad, skipped out on the First Days festivities all together. She put Hilary’s bags in and around the other bed in the room, as they might be if someone had run in and ran out again without unpacking.

That’s what she would say.

“Oh, yeah. She dropped her stuff off and ran out again. I guess she went to First Days,” Shara practised it in the mirror. Twice. And then she fell into an exhausted sleep.

She slept heavily, for an hour, waking only once. She woke in the sweaty heat of the room, thinking she’d heard a rustling, and felt a tug, on her foot.

Dream.

“Hey, I know you,” said a boy. Shara turned. “You used to study in the library, every night. Last term, right? I’m Donald Keele. I work in the library. I stock shelves.” The boy stood beside the registration line, his packet tucked under his arm. Shara stared without recognition.

“It’s okay,” he said. His cheeks got red. “You hardly looked up from the books. And it paid off. You won that award, didn’t you? The big money?”

“It’s not been announced yet,” she said automatically. She’d been saying it for months. What did Hil say?
They haven’t contacted me yet.
As if she was just waiting to hear.

She blinked. Her eyes were dry as sandpaper. A shower and a nap had not refreshed her the way she’d hoped. She’d missed a meeting with her advisor already, but she’d had a terrible time getting out of bed.

She was feeling off; just
off
.

“I bet you will. Me, I’m strictly a C student. I wouldn’t know much about prizes,” he laughed.

The girl at the table asked her for her student card. Shara gave it to her.

“Oh,” Shara said. The boy, Donald, wore his hair longer than Shara normally thought was attractive. His shirt was thin from washing and the collar was fraying. Whether this was student affectation or genuine poverty she couldn’t know, but it was disconcerting, distracting. He was a bit hipster for her.

She could smell herself. She had woken to a smell. At first she’d thought it was coming from outside the window, something in the street, dropped and left to spoil. But she could still smell it. She tried, discreetly, to smell herself. The boy was waiting for her to say something else.

“Do you still work at the library?” she asked politely.

“Yup. And the cafeteria in the morning, and I’m a TA for Professor Lange. Philosophy. I’m a Philosophy major.” He blushed, as if this were an embarrassing thing. She nodded. She had no electives and so did not take Philosophy.

“Here you are,” the girl said.

“A couple of us are going to the Cub for tacos, you should join us,” Donald said. The girl at the desk gave Shara a fat envelope and handed her student card back. A space in the small of Shara’s back was sore. She rubbed it, closing her eyes. There was a note clipped to her envelope.
See me, P. Duggan.
Her advisor.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I have something I have to do.”