The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

The Blessings of the Animals_ A Novel - Katrina Kittle



Chapter One

ON THE MORNING MY HUSBAND LEFT ME, HOURS BEFORE I knew he would, I looked at the bruised March sky and recognized tornado green.
I’d seen that peculiar algae shade before—anyone who grew up in Ohio had—but my intimate relationship with storms was a bit of family lore.
When I was eight, I tried to touch a tornado.
Trying to touch that tornado is my first complete memory-you-tell-as-a-story without details put in my head by somebody else. It is mine. The story makes it easy for my parents and brother to put any of my rash, reckless acts into perspective.
I recall standing at the breakfast nook window watching a tornado approach our horse farm—the last stubborn farm still standing amid new housing developments in our Dayton neighborhood—through the acres of pasture behind the house. My little brother, Davy, had followed Mom’s instructions and huddled in the basement under the mattress she’d wrenched from the guest bed, but I stayed at the window, waiting for my father to return from the barn. I watched as hail—the first I’d ever seen—pinged against the house with off-note guitar plucks and chipped the glass under my hands. “Camden!” My mother grabbed my shoulders. “Get to the basement!” When I wrestled free, she chased me through the kitchen and living room, until I ran out the front door and into the yard.
I didn’t want to go back and hide, not when something was about to happen.
I’d been waiting for this, whatever it was, ever since the sky had turned this sickly shade at the end of the school day. Friends had followed Davy and me home, as usual, our horses and hayloft a magnet, but my girlfriends wanted to “play wedding.” I hated that game and was relieved that my brother didn’t mind being the bride—he willingly donned that itchy lace prom dress Bonnie Lytle had stolen from her sister’s closet. He put an old curtain on his head for a veil and even let the girls paint his nails and rouge his cheeks and lips. My best friend, Vijay Aperjeet, and I could usually be coaxed into playing the groom and the minister, which meant we could gallop around the barn lot in bare feet and dig in the dirt until it was time to stand there with my brother-bride and repeat the vows. I remember believing the word holy in “holy matrimony” was actually hole-y, as in “full of holes,” and I swore I’d never marry for real.
On that third-grade day, though, I wouldn’t even consent to be the groom. I just sat on the fence and looked at the sky—the sky so green and heavy with anticipation—even after my mother had told everyone to hurry home and called Davy and me inside.
Something was about to happen.
Pressure throbbed in my head and bones. The leaves turned their silver backs, flashing in the icy air. Candy wrappers, papers, and leaves floated in lazy circles at chest height. The horses sweated in the fields, their movements agitated. All I knew was that something was going to happen, that it might be dangerous, and that it filled me with a lovely, dreadful sensation.
I ran right out into the pelting hail.
The wind forced me to my knees. I stretched out on my belly and wrapped my fingers in grass. That screaming wind became the only sound. I knew it could destroy me.
I knew it could, but I also knew it wouldn’t.
In my child’s mind, this approaching tornado was a living, violent creature, just like my father’s enormous, hotheaded stallion. Stormwatch was the horse that had carried my father to three of his four Olympic gold medals. My brother and I were told to stay away from that horse, even though we played around the legs and hooves of all the other horses on the farm. I believed that both the tornado and the stallion knew I was drawn to them.
Stormwatch would snort and rear, his hooves pounding the ground around the delicate bones of my bare feet . . . and never touch me. His teeth could’ve ripped the face from my skull, but he just gnashed and snapped, closing on air. I didn’t cringe or cry. I was reverent. He liked it, that stallion. He looked at me, the way this tornado did, and something passed between us.
Stretched out in the mud, I let go of the grass with one hand and reached out toward the moving wall of air.
That tornado laid waste to our town. It crumpled homes to the left and right of ours, flipped one of our horse trailers upside down, tore off our roof, and kicked my canopy bed all the way to the grocery store parking lot a mile and a half away. That tornado ripped through our town for thirty-two miles. It killed thirty-three people, and injured one thousand one hundred and fifty others.
But it didn’t injure me. All it did was take my outstretched hand and bowl me down the driveway. It never even lifted me from the ground, it only rolled me—the way I rolled myself down grassy hills—at high speed, over the lawn, through flower beds, across the blacktop road, until I smacked up against the Aperjeets’ picket fence. The wind held me against the fence, right in the middle, without any of my limbs touching the ground. I was pressed there until the splintering of wood filled my ears, the smell of fresh cut lumber stung my nose, and that invisible hand pushed me down into the Aperjeets’ muddy yard, on my back, where I watched the boards of their fence fly away into the whirling sky above me.
When the wind stopped screaming, running footsteps drowned out my breath. My mother dropped to her knees beside me and snatched me by the shoulders. “You, you,” she said. “You.” She ran her hands over my arms, my face, everywhere she could. She squeezed my shoulders again, hard, and shook me, my bloody nose showering bright red drops down both of our shirts. My mother was drenched, a small star-shaped gash on her forehead. I remember realizing with amazement that she had followed me into the storm. She grabbed my hair as if to yank out handfuls of it, then released the handfuls and smoothed the hair instead. “You,” she kept repeating. She stood and vomited right there in the Aperjeets’ yard.
My father ran down the driveway, carrying a wailing Davy and shouting, “Where were you?”
“You don’t know when to stop,” my mother said to me, quiet discovery in her tone. It was the first of countless times she would say this. “You just don’t know when to quit.”
She was right. I knew I would do anything imaginable to repeat those last fifteen minutes.
When I grew too old to be doing such unladylike things as running out into storms or slipping onto that stallion’s back and careening across pastures, I turned to more sophisticated means of re-creating that rush, some healthier than others. I asked for a hot-air balloon ride when I was ten. I convinced the family to go white-water rafting when I was twelve. By thirteen I fell in love, at first by accident, with the pure adrenaline that kicks in with starvation. The hyperfocus, the lovely sensation of floating, the reckless certainty that I’d become superhuman. Throughout my teens I’d flirt with starvation—as well as with rock climbing, flying lessons, hitchhiking and lots of solo travel, a variety of drugs, and boys with bad reputations.
Nothing could ever compare with that tornado, though—until I met Bobby Binardi, the man who affected me like an approaching storm. A man whose family was as volatile and loud as mine was reserved and decorous. A man with lashes longer than mine and tattoos I traced under my fingertips. A man who fed all the reasons I’d been starving myself. Fed me, quite literally, because he was a chef. So, the girl who said she’d never marry did.
In our wedding video, the thunder drowns out the vows. Eighteen years ago—eighteen years? That couldn’t be possible!—a storm snatched the veil from my blond hair, toppled tables, and ripped the lily heads from my maid of honor’s bouquet. Guests gasped, clutching one another as they turned their backs against the wind. It had always been a good story to tell, one that set our wedding apart. Our wedding day suited us.
At the reception, we found out that a tornado had actually touched down only ten miles away. My relatives laughed and told all the Binardis how fitting that was.
AS I LAY IN BED, MY LEGS STILL TOUCHING MY SAD, SLEEPING husband, I pulled one arm from under the flannel sheets to release some of his heat. The back of my neck was damp. Our dog, Max, paced the hallway, his toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. The bedroom door stood open since Gabriella was away on yet another overnight debate tournament—kicking butt, I had no doubt (I tried to be impartial and modest, but our daughter was brilliant). I tried not to move or make noise, knowing that once I did, Max would bound onto the bed demanding his breakfast. Already, Gingersnap, our latest failure of a barn cat, had crawled between me and Bobby, kneading her paws on my rib cage.
It was Saturday. I had worked every Saturday for the last fifteen years of veterinary practice, until I bought my own animal hospital six months ago. With my associate vet, Aurora Morales, I had worked my ass off, renovating an old, rundown clinic. Aurora and I had painted and grouted, had interviewed and hired, trained and instructed our staff of nine, named our practice Animal Kind, and opened three weeks ago. Starting today, I would only work two Saturdays a month. And today, Bobby had a rare Saturday off for us to savor together. His restaurant, Tanti Baci, was closed until Tuesday while a new bar was being installed. Tanti Baci. Many kisses. My wish for today.
This rare time alone with Bobby was a gift. I tucked my knees behind his, pressed my naked body to his back, and wished with all my might he’d find his way out of his restless depression.
Thunder rumbled like a warning growl from deep in a dog’s throat.
Bobby had promised to make me breakfast this morning, something he hadn’t done for months, and I hoped for his famous fluffy gingerbread waffles. We’d even joked that we might prepare and eat breakfast naked. We’d been silly and giggly, like we’d been when I was in college and his sister (my roommate) was gone, leaving us the entire apartment to ourselves.
I breathed in the musk of Bobby’s neck. His happiness seemed so fragile these days that I put all my faith in that playful promise to eat naked. I felt this need to make the day monumental and sacred, as if one morning might save us.
For a moment, I even let myself fantasize about our fiftieth wedding anniversary, decades away. This was in my head because Davy—the former child bride, now happily out and with his partner, David (“the Davids,” as they were referred to by family and friends)—had called last night to remind me, “You know this fall is Mom and Dad’s fiftieth. We need to plan something. A party.”
I pictured my parents, still on the same horse farm half an hour away. I didn’t think my parents had a great marriage, but fifty years was impressive all the same. I created our own fiftieth in my head—I pictured us dancing somewhere in Italy, then calculated how much time that gave me to convince Bobby to learn to dance: thirty-two years.
In the meantime, I’d also use those years to convince him to sell the damn restaurant that visibly added burden to his shoulders, years to his face. I’d convince him he could find some other path.
So I lay there in that too-warm bed and felt flooded with the need to make this softly snoring man know how much I loved him and mourned for his unhappiness. How much I wanted him to emerge from his gloom.
The dog’s tags jingled in the hallway. I considered sneaking out of bed, letting Max out before he barked, brushing my teeth, and slipping back under the covers. But I knew Max would bark the minute my feet hit the floor. Screw the toothpaste. It wasn’t fair for one of us to have morning breath when the other didn’t. Experience had taught me that Bobby’s willingness never hinged on such minor details. Tanti baci. Tanti baci, baby.
I reached for Bobby under the covers, marveling at the heat he radiated. I slid my hands down his arm, over the gothic SPQR—Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the People of Rome”—inked into his biceps, then let them wander to his hip and the small of his back. He stirred awake with an appreciative murmur and rolled toward me, pressing the length of his hot body against mine. “Hey,” I whispered.
“Hey.”