The Stud Book

Actually Arena was downtown, in the street, standing in the way of a barreling TriMet bus. She yelled at AKA’s apartment building, calling his name. The bus driver hit the horn without slowing down. Arena gave the bus a glare as though her fury could stop it. TriMet barreled forward. She dove for the curb at the last possible minute, tripped on the sidewalk, rolled in the passing crowd, and flipped the bus off.

A raspy and low voice said, “Get yourself run over, that way.”

She turned toward the voice. It was a man in a long army coat and a floppy, oiled-leather hat. He had a paper grocery bag under one arm and a short cigar between his teeth. It was the hippie she’d seen in AKA’s place, the guy who wasn’t AKA’s father.

She stood up fast and brushed herself off. “We met, remember?”

He looked her up and down, took the cigar out of his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “I’d like to remember.” His voice pawed her like a hand.

“I was with AKA.”

The hippie put his wet cigar back between his lips. His teeth were dark and crooked. He worked a key into the lock and muscled the door open. “He owes us rent.” The cigar danced against the man’s lip. The gray sky had started to spit, and the man’s bag was dotted with rain. “He needs to pick up his crap.”

“Did he move out?” Arena was cold. She was shaking. Her heart was a pigeon, her lungs were all city bus exhaust.

“Disappeared,” the hippie said.

She’d already been down to the Juvenile Justice Center and asked about AKA. The suits behind their counters wouldn’t tell her anything. Confidential. At the hospital, she had to have a secret PIN number to show she was legally granted access to his information, to know if he was even there. It was all confidential. She had no clues. She’d scanned the phone poles for flyers, looking for a sign of AKA’s band. Maybe he’d play somewhere and she could show up.

She followed the hippie’s hunched shoulders into the shadows of the apartment’s stairwell. He let her. They went down skinny and unlit halls. He said, “Take anything of his you want. The rest is headed for a Dumpster.”

When she reached AKA’s room, she knocked, then pushed the door open. The windows were already open. A nylon curtain blew in the wind. Rain kicked up the tar smell of the roof outside. Blankets lay in a tangle on the mattress on the floor. There were clothes on the floor, too, like AKA had just stepped out of them.

She read the clothes the way she’d read a book. This place was her mosquito net, the source of her longing. She dropped down on the bed.

The hippie knocked around in the next room over. Footsteps came down the hall. She held her breath. The steps went on by.

Beside the bed there was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a half-full plastic liter of warm Coke, and a photograph. It was the picture of AKA and his country house. There, for a moment stuck in time, he was a long-haired, shirtless, happy kid with a dog and a tire swing. Arena turned the photo over. Somebody had written a date and an address on the back in the curling, careful letters of a woman’s hand. Below the date, it said, “The Boring House.”

Of course: AKA would go home. He was in trouble. He was hurt. Arena’s own new-age, environmental, nonviolent mom had pounded him! He’d want the safety of his parents.

Her mom was nuts with saving the rain forest, conserving toilet paper—Canadian old-growth forests!—and barely driving the car. But his mom might be the kind to buy Cap’n Crunch and watch TV with him.

She slid the picture into her pocket and left the room.

The hippie loitered in the living room, now stripped down to his post-working-day or whatever tighty-whities and a Hanes T-shirt. His hat was off. His long gray and black hair had the ring of hat head. Without the hat, he didn’t look so much like a hippie, more like just an old man who needed a haircut. He said, “You party?” He took a toke on a joint so small it was almost invisible between his thick fingers.

Party?

He held the tiny joint out.

She sucked in her stomach to slide past him. He exhaled and said, “Stay, Princess!” He followed her into the narrow hallway. He reached out. His fingers wrapped around her wrist and he pulled her toward him, smashing his face against hers. It wasn’t a kiss so much as their teeth hitting together. She pushed against his body and yanked her arm away. He threw the roach on the floor, then pushed her head down. She fought back. His underwear was tented as he pushed into her, and showed a damp spot. His hand pushed against her head, urging her down, toward that damp spot on his briefs. She brought her knee up and he twisted her wrist. It was all in seconds. He was strong, but wasted and unsteady. She screamed. The hippie was bigger than she was, but he lost his footing when she ducked sideways fast, and she shoved until he hit the ground.

She ran. He fumbled to get up behind her.



La la la …! Nyla hummed and stirred her Amish bread. Life was good, getting better all the time, if she could only shake the guilt and the ache in her side and the limp of her sore foot.

She’d called the courts and said she wouldn’t press charges—the attack was a misunderstanding, water under the bridge, right?—but the boy had a record. He was on probation. His future was in the hands of the state.

She added a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and a cup of sugar, everything in equal proportions. The starter was the “mother bread,” meant to be divided.

Nyla was the mother bread’s mother.

Every ten days forever that starter would be ready to split, like cells dividing, turning into twins, triplets, quadruplets.

Bread without end, amen.

Every ten days she’d have a new gift to give away. It was a chain letter in dough form. They’d all make bread together, tending that baby. She’d give a starter to the parents of that boy when she found them.

Her answer to the world’s despair was bread.

She lifted a cup of dough out of the starter. Two more times, and she had three gifts. Nyla had three lumps of bread dough individually packaged in plastic bags, each one round and white.

She headed for Sarah’s.

This was the day to spread her love.



Dulcet claimed it as a day to spread her legs and her latex. A day to get the bills paid. The banks had shut down one of her lines of credit, though she had made her payments on time and met their incredibly high interest rate. It was the new lending climate. Her other cards were maxed. The schools hadn’t brought her in to do the body show since the “incident,” as she thought of it, in the closet.

She had options: sell off photography equipment, give up the cheap lease on her studio, or pull out the latex suit.

Mr. Latex was her answer, her angel. He would be her stopgap.

He seemed genuine in his urges. Maybe he was a dedicated cop sustaining an undercover ruse, or a patient and conniving murderer. More likely he was a man pushing sixty who saw death skulking on the horizon and wanted his needs gratified in this lifetime. She slid out a clothing bag from under the bed. Like a vampire, the latex suit didn’t do well stored in the light of day. She unzipped the case and lifted her organs out. There was the lung vest, the respiratory system, and the underlayer of ovaries, uterus, and kidneys. The pieces were well oiled with a silicone that gave them a shine. Inside, it was dry and clean and powdered. She laid it on the bed.

The one part that was missing from this woman’s body, she thought for the first time, might be a developing fetus in the uterus. She hadn’t considered making a pregnant anatomy when she ordered the suit. She always thought of it as anti-baby.

She put her hand inside, behind the uterus, and wondered how a baby doll might work, upside down, against her own skin, under the latex.

She could take a Sharpie and draw in a simple, tiny embryo. Then she’d be in Nyla’s body, that fertile, fecund maker of babies.

Nyla was on the verge of an empty nest, and suddenly—Inexplicably! Wham!—pregnant. Ding-ding-ding! What were the odds of that? Dulcet was pretty sure Nyla had engineered the situation on purpose.

Clearly, Nyla had lost all sense of herself except as a mother.

Dulcet pulled off her dress, kicked off her underwear, then sat stark naked beside the suit and began to rub a water-based lube across her stomach. She worked lube over her bony hips and along the arch of her ass.

The goal was for the suit to happily glide on, not tear or overstretch. Latex clothes are big bucks. This one was tailor-made, and it was her income; she babied that precious fetish wear.



Nyla, uneasy about leaving the house since she had started showing up on the local news, scrambled to her car. She locked the doors and revved the engine, always grateful when the car started. She’d been recognized more than once by neighbors, as that woman from TV who beat up some punk. Her neighborhood business association invited her to teach a class in self-defense for small business owners.

The newspaper found reasons to get extra mileage out of her photo: ECONOMY WORSENS, VIOLENT CRIME ON THE RISE. And there would be her picture, the poster victim of rising violent crime. They were saving money by rerunning the image.

She didn’t feel like a victim. She’d put up a serious fight. It was possible that, out of the two of them, she was the only one fighting. That kid could not keep his hands up, to protect his face, to save his life.

Alvin Kelvin Aldrich was the prisoner who set the record for crowding in the juvenile jails. His sweet, sad face showed up under headlines such as SYSTEM OVERBURDENED.

She hurried up Sarah’s front steps. Her breathing was shallow. She was kind of a wreck. She cradled what she’d come to think of as her Bundle of Love, the starter dough, knocked on the door, and kept her coat collar pulled up high.

The city was a sprawling jail under cement-gray skies. Nyla had donated what extra money she could come up with to the Oregon Humane Society that month. She gave money to save ringed seals. She bought a magazine subscription from a kid who came to her door even though she didn’t believe the magazines would ever be delivered.

It was her ongoing effort to atone.

When the door opened, it wasn’t Sarah or even Ben. It was a big, silent, brawny, weathered man. Thieves? Nyla’s fist tightened, with an urge toward self-preservation. But she couldn’t start another fight, not ever, not in that town. She tried to think peaceful thoughts. “Is Sarah here?”

The man rotated his thick neck to gaze back into the house. Nyla took two steps away. She felt hands wrap around her shoulders, and when she moved she stepped on somebody’s foot, gave a yip, and flung her Bundle of Love.

“Hey, darlin’.” Sarah’s voice, behind her, was the burble of a river. “I was in the backyard. What’d you bring us?” Sarah picked up the Ziploc bag of white starter dough from where it’d tumbled under an azalea bush and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Salt dough clay?”

Nyla said, “Friendship bread. You can use it to make other starters, too, and expand the circle of friends.” Her voice was nervous and thin.

Inside, the house had the smell of men at work: cut planks, fresh dirt, and sweat. Ben came downstairs with damp hair like he’d just stepped out of a shower. He walked in a cloud of berry shampoo—not the smell of work at all. Sarah took the starter to the kitchen, leaving her alone with Ben. Nyla still hadn’t forgiven him for abandoning Sarah during the miscarriage.

Now she asked, “What do you have going on?”

“We’re adding a deck!” Then more quietly, confidentially, Ben said, “She’s been fragile, since the last miscarriage. Home improvements keep her spirits up.”

There were the sounds of a handsaw being drawn back and forth against wood. Sarah came back from the kitchen, and Ben put a hand on her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him. They seemed so happy together, completely partnered. They even looked alike. Nyla missed the days when she’d had a husband. She missed it more than anyone could imagine.

Sarah and Ben’s lives were perfect and easy.

All Nyla did, all she’d ever done, was work. She felt it now, watching the hired men. She’d rehabbed her own houses. She knew how to use a Sawzall, for God’s sake, that mark of an ambitious, self-sufficient homeowner.

The pain in her side spoke up in its way. Ugh. Nyla put a hand to it.

Seeing Sarah and Ben so happy together, surrounded by all that industry, improving their lives, made her miserable, even as she was happy for them, and she couldn’t hold on to both emotions at once. They seemed so suddenly Ken and Barbie, both of them lanky but an average Oregon height, where women ran tall, the two of them like a pair of grande Americanos in that Starbucks daily measurement system, or a Subaru’s compact Outback, all those ways of saying middle ground, evenly matched in their long limbs.

She couldn’t stay there. It was easy to excuse herself—she was incidental to their happiness. She got out.

She wanted to see Dulcet.

Dulcet, her dear debauched friend, that lone wolf, would be an antidote to the overwhelming hit of Sarah and Ben’s domestic bliss.



Arena marched at the edge of the road and heard her feet crunch gravel along with a symphony of crickets, tall grass rustling, and the hum of electrical wires. The road was empty and the dark was crowded with noise. There were no lights. The stars were clear but small and far away between cloud cover. Starlight? That was a joke. The stars didn’t light up anything but themselves.

She’d taken the last bus out.

She used her iPhone to find directions to the address of the house on the back of AKA’s photo. She tried to use the same phone to light her way, but that dim light only made her feel more visible against the dark.

She could use the phone to actually make a call. To talk to her mom, to tell her about the hippie. Arena’s wrist was red and swollen.

But this was her mom’s fault. She never wanted to talk to her mom again.

She wanted to see AKA, cry into his shoulder, smell him up close. The thought of his caramel skin kept her going forward. She thought about her own virginity thing. This was the time: She’d find AKA and tear his clothes off. She’d give herself over—pull his body so close even their molecules could mingle.

Her thigh muscles tightened against the cold night. She came to a mailbox and used her phone to light the numbers of the address on the side of it. She was closer.

Her legs were machines. Her breath was shallow. She could smell AKA’s mix of cigarettes, sweat, and soap, and tried to imagine his room in the house he grew up in: clean sheets, a doting mother, a woodstove. Houses in the country all had woodstoves, right?

After forever—miles?—she found the address in black numbers on gold squares stuck to a mailbox. She slid the photo from her coat pocket; it was hard to see the details in the dark. She held the photo close to the light of her phone.

This was the house.

The mailbox, covered in rust, crumbled when she prodded it with a finger. A car approached from far away. Its lights ran across Arena, illuminating her on the side of the road. She ducked behind bushes that grew in the culvert. The culvert was full of rain, though, and it soaked through the fabric of her Toms.

Could AKA be in the car?

The car slowed, as though looking out into the dark. What if an ax murderer drove down that empty road and saw her stumbling along?

She froze, like a deer.

The car sped up again, kept going, and left the night darker than before. If it had been a murderer, Arena would be dead. That’d show her mom faster than anorexia, which was the way most girls at Maya Angelou called out for attention. It’d be faster than alcohol poisoning even, and more decisive than teen pregnancy.

Her mom would love a teen pregnancy! She was nuts about babies.

Arena walked on trembling legs down the pitch-black driveway, where it was covered with the tangle of branches, leaning trees, and vines. Leaves had fallen, thick on the ground.

The house, when she reached it, looked diseased, with black patches against pale paint. There was a car in the driveway. Something moved. Arena froze.

She saw the movement again. It was so slight—like somebody who didn’t want to be seen, the shoulder of a crouched man. No, it was a tire swing on a thin and frayed rope. The screen door was half off its hinges.

“Hello?”

A window was broken. Something had happened here. A fight? The house looked beaten up. “AK?” she called. She stepped onto the porch, reached past the broken screen door, lifted a knocker, and let it fall against the wood.

She jumped at the sound, even as she made it.

When she stopped knocking, there was only the song of the invisible bugs in the grass, frogs, crickets, or the electric hum. The windshield of the car was dark with the rot of fallen leaves. Arena put her hand around the brass doorknob and turned. It gave in. The smell of the house came out to meet her.

She broke a law; she stepped inside.

An open magazine sprawled on the couch. A pan of water waited for a dog, or for the roof to stop leaking, or both. Arena stepped over matted socks and a dirty carpet. A few more steps and she saw the kitchen. The fridge was pulled away from the wall. And there he was—AKA.

He was in a photo under a Disneyland magnet. He was a boy, then older.

A house is a box for a family. She opened bedroom doors. There was a room with a sliding closet door, and the closet was open, crowded with plastic hangers and women’s clothes.

Two more doors and then she found a room with a short bookcase, a mess of T-shirts, and blue and yellow wallpaper. A boy’s room. The bed was narrow and cheap and broken.

This had to be his.

There was a watch on the floor. Arena picked it up. It was the kind with a clock face, not digital, and it had a rotating sun and moon, to show day and night. In an old movie a watch would be a clue—she’d seen that before, in Chinatown. Here the only thing it meant was a dead battery.

But something violent had happened; the house was ashamed. The family was gone. Einstein was wrong. Energy was both created and destroyed in that place—she could feel it—and the history of a family was trapped in decay.

Nobody marked off the crime scene because the crime didn’t happen all at once. A house was a horrible thing.

She was in that closed-off part of AKA’s brain, the home that would haunt him in dreams. There was no bus back to the city until morning. The night was pitch-black, and the light switches did nothing. Arena picked her way over the cluttered floor, stepping around the shimmer of puddles. She went deeper into the smell, to the kitchen. She took AKA’s school portrait photos off the refrigerator. She took the picture of him happy in the backyard. She held the photos in her palm and pressed them into a tight stack, each one cut to the same size. She collected the photos the way people bury the dead, because maybe if she got his pictures out of that house, it’d help his spirit.

Her arm hurt from fighting off the hippie. She was so far from Portland, in an awful corner of a forgotten world. There was no way home.



Nyla sang as she limped the halls of Dulcet’s apartment building. She sang anything—parts of songs, words, “Good day sunshine,” “Think I can make it now”—with one hand to her hip, bearing her second Bundle of Love. The long, yellow hall reeked with cat urine. She passed one apartment door, then another, swimming her way to France, to that metaphoric further shore, a place of forgiveness.

She’d lived in only one apartment in her life. As soon as she was married, they’d bought their old house and torn it down to the studs. They were young. And when her husband died, she kept working on that house, forever. She actually envied Dulcet’s cheap digs: Why was she, Nyla, devoted to the temple of her home? She was a servant to her house, a place for her babies.

She knocked on Dulcet’s door.

“Christ!” somebody barked.

Did it come from Dulcet’s room, or down the hall?

Nyla knocked again then put her ear to the door.

A man came in through a back door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. He stopped farther down the hall, looked at Nyla, and said, “Didn’t I see you on TV?”

There was a crash inside the apartment. Was Dulcet okay?

The man down the hall pointed a fat finger. He said, “D’oh! Better get in my apartment! You could be dangerous.” He raised his hands and crouched, in a sloppy kung fu posture. “Ha!”

He was a human enactment of the throbbing ache in Nyla’s side. Her palms broke out in a pain sweat.

She found a pen in her handbag. She leaned into the wall and wrote on the card she’d brought along, “Love is all there really is, and I love you. Love, your friend, Nyla.” Then she drew hearts, which was a way of saying love, without saying it. Could she get any more love on that card? At the bottom she put an asterisk, and a PS, and a little note: “See you at Arena’s art show!” and one more heart, and hugs and kisses.

The man down the hall said, “You use a half nelson on that scum sucker?” He fell into a coughing fit that sounded like he needed an inhaler fast.

Nyla took her phone out to call Dulcet, and as she dialed, another call came in.

Arena.

There was another crash inside Dulcet’s place. Something was wrong. Nyla could call her daughter back.



Mr. Latex scurried to put his Dockers on even as Dulcet tugged them away. She hissed, “Shhh—we’re okay.”

She wore her superhero anatomy suit, complete with thigh-high boots and a length of unspooled rubber intestine meant to serve as a whip.

The knocking didn’t stop. Mr. Latex said, “Cops?” He threw a crocheted afghan over the Volcano, where it stood like a major erection.

She said, “Why would it be cops?”

He said, “You’re in this with me.” He was high and paranoid, on the verge of flipping out. It turned out part of his game, what he wanted, was a booty bump from a latex doll. Yes, Dulcet was his doll, in her plasticized body, and he had asked for an anal administration of meth. At the time she’d said, “You’re insane, sir. That shit can kill a person.”

It’d destroy a life.

“Once,” he said. “I want to try it once. I’ve never done it.”

By the beauty of his good teeth and ordinary, unscathed skin, she believed him. She said, “The future might deviate from the past, you know. I don’t want to start something—”

He was a strange bird clawing at the ragged edge of his existence, wanting to find a genuine sensation in life before it was over. Dulcet could relate. She wasn’t there yet, but she could glimpse his pain on a distant horizon. He was an adult. He had his drugs. He’d done the legwork, if you could call it that.

There was the knock on the door again.

Mr. Latex Lover was so jumpy! Dulcet wasn’t on steady ground herself. Yes, they were high, and who was that at her door?

But the money. “We can finish,” she said.

She’d had him half-convinced to stay, even after the third knock, until a man’s voice outside the door cut in: “… use a half nelson on that scum sucker …”

Latex ducked, like they could see him. Dulcet froze. They watched the door.

She whispered, “You still owe me for the hours.” Her phone started to ring. She silenced it.

“You owe me for the pot,” he said and pulled a T-shirt over his head.

“You said you had pills.” The latex squeaked as she moved. She poured herself a whiskey.

He couldn’t leave yet. She said, “They’re still out there.”

He nodded, his teeth clacking together like a party skeleton, Day of the Dead, thinly cloaked in a temporary human casing.



Arena spoke into the phone. “Mom!”

How was there no answer? She’d run away, and what, her mom didn’t care? The house around her was a family destroyed. It was awful. There could have been a chalk line around an invisible body in every room of the darkness. She couldn’t get her words together, didn’t know where to start. She said, “Did you even know who he was?” Her hands were shaking and she hung up.





Sarah and Ben lay across their bed in a mix of postcoital tristesse and elation. She had a pillow under her ass to help the sperm swim deep and fast. Her stomach was sweaty. Her thighs were still wet with Ben’s spew. The only sound now in the room was their breath and the dog on the floor lapping loudly.

That dog! Sarah burst out laughing. She was happy, sated, and maybe even on the way to pregnant.

Ben lifted a hand and touched her hip bone, lifted as it was by the pillow underneath. He turned toward her. It was a beautiful moment, not yet dark in their room, the two of them, except the dog, Shadow, and his ceaseless lapping.

Then the lapping did cease. Shadow gagged instead, and vomited on the floor.

Ben said, “Oh, dog,” and again they laughed. They’d put up with that dog for years. Dogs are beautiful and disgusting, worthy of love and tolerance.

“Total buzz kill!” Sarah reached to turn on the lamp.

Ben got up, still naked. He said, “There’s blood in it. A lot, actually.”

When Sarah looked, there was blood pooled in Shadow’s vomit, and the dog was drooling. He wasn’t usually the kind of dog to drool, but now it hung from his lips in a stream of bubbling white spit.

“Hey, baby,” Sarah called.

Shadow walked like he didn’t know where his own legs were. He walked like some kind of clown, like he was stuck in glue. Sarah’s heart broke at that walk. “He’s messed up,” she said, and wanted to cry. He’d been fine just a little while earlier. He was old, but fine.



They dressed and drove to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet, the overpriced lifesaving dog ER. When they got there and started to explain, the woman behind the counter looked at Shadow. She picked up the phone and said, “Let’s get urgent triage to the front desk.”

Urgent.

That didn’t sound good.

It wasn’t long before the three of them were in one of the medical rooms. Ben and Sarah sat in chairs, Shadow lay at their feet. He looked better now, really. He’d stopped drooling. But he still couldn’t walk.

The vet was young and earnest and everything they needed from a specialist. He wrote notes. He said, “We’ll need to run a blood panel and take X-rays. When an animal presents in this condition, it’s hard to rule out poisoning. It could be an inner-ear problem, though that usually leads to nystagmus, a movement in the eyes. We’re not seeing that.”

They spoke at length about tests and costs—about the value of a complete blood panel versus a less extensive version.

“He presents as though he’s had some kind of neurological event,” the veterinarian said. “We’ll run him through a few tests. You can wait out front, or leave a phone number with the receptionist if you’re comfortable with that.”

Ben and Sarah were still in the front lobby, drinking water from the cooler in paper cups, when a technician called them back in.

It was sooner than they had expected.

This time, they weren’t shown to an exam room, but to a professionally arranged parlor, a living room of sorts, a tidy space like a good hotel. They sat together on a couch.

A technician brought Shadow in, and the old dog staggered toward Ben and Sarah. Shadow had a catheter in his bony front leg, held on with bright pink tape. “Oh my God,” Sarah said.

Ben was already crying, his big manly face folded up in creases under his lips, under his jaw, everything tense and sad and reddened. He wiped a hand at his eyes. Sarah leaned into him.

The vet said, “I don’t think we need to run the tests we discussed earlier. Our first X-rays give us a pretty good indication of what’s going on.” He put the X-rays up on a light board, reminding Sarah of the light boards at the OMSI science exhibit.

A white clouded patch was a mass on Shadow’s lungs. The dog had extensive cancer. “When we’re dealing with lung cancer, and the animal presents with neurological trouble, it’s generally a sign that it has progressed to the brain.” The vet said, “I’m sorry. We need to talk about options.”

Sarah ran a hand over her old dog’s silky ear. Ben took one of Sarah’s hands.

They went through a list with the vet: Chemotherapy? Shadow would likely not survive. They could take him home, see how he’d do. He might live a little longer. The vet said, “It all depends on what you’re willing to handle. His world is probably spinning right now. He may have had a seizure already. It’s likely he’ll have more.”

The dog slipped, as one foot went out from under him, and Sarah screamed; she’d been holding her dog together with her will, trying to will him back to health.

He walked lifting his feet too high, moving them in random directions.

That fast, the time had come. Shadow had seemed fine in the morning, and in the afternoon, too, but now they’d put him down. His life was over.

He was the dog of Sarah’s youth. He was the dog of their early marriage. This was a lifetime. She said, “Why didn’t I notice?” She was a goddamn animal behaviorist, an ethologist. She was supposed to be paying attention.

She ran her hand over Shadow’s head, and he looked into her eyes, and he was love. Her baby. “We have to do this fast,” she said. She couldn’t stand it.

The vet left and came back with a kit. He knelt at their side. Shadow got up on Sarah’s lap. The three of them were together on the couch. The vet said, “The first shot feels good. It’s propofol, made famous by Michael Jackson. I’ve tried it myself. He’ll be calm.”

And he slid a needle into the catheter. Shadow blinked, settled, closed his eyes. With the second shot, Sarah felt her dog’s heart stop beating under her hand. Still she couldn’t quit running her fingers through his short fur, and she couldn’t stop touching his ears long after he had left the world behind.