As Susanne bent to hold his paw to her cheek, Roy saw that she loved the dog and he knew he wouldn’t go to the ATM. He joined her on the floor, wrapping a stiff arm around her shoulders. He stowed the check away in his jacket pocket. “Sh-h-h. There, now. There, now.”
Roy and Susanne sat by the rigid dog. She whimpered. She sounded like a tiny door creaking open. She wept and sniffled, wept and sniffled. Roy studied the wall’s molding, the wall itself, a trace of dust along the molding’s shaped ridge, an electrical outlet. What had he been thinking before the accident? He tapped his free hand against his temple and drew a blank.
Underneath his hand her shoulder felt cushioned in a way that his wasn’t. There was her skin. There was her muscle. There was her bone, her blood, and all the blood’s attendant particles keeping her alive, particles whose names he’d never know. They were strangers except for this dead dog. He thought of the yellow and turned toward Susanne, locating her lips with his own—some way of knowing her. Susanne did not react and, after a few slow moments with his mouth resting motionless on hers, he inserted a pointed tongue. She accepted it.
Roy and Susanne lay back on the rug beside the dog’s carcass, beside the coffee table. Beneath the burned odor left by the vacuum, he could smell the dust still in the rug—salt and sand and dried skin from her kids, her husband, her now dead dog. Roy inhaled. And they stayed there locked in a silent trade. It wasn’t a kiss, exactly, but something equally spectacular. The night, for all the species of insects alive in it, barely noticed.
Eventually, time passed and he buried his fingers in the hair at the nape of her neck. He pulled her closer. His other arm found the small of her back and used this handle to unlock some ancient pattern; their bodies began to move.
*
My dog died for this bit of living, Susanne thought. She did not consider her husband. She brokered no possible connection between her husband and lying on the floor with a stranger.
*
Roy’s hands moved to unfasten, unhook, undress their bodies, conducting an urgent experiment. Her face was still damp from crying. In the shock of this unexpected coupling, he pinned her to the floor and she was a bird. He found his way inside and Susanne filled the room with sound, incantations that started with the routine “Oh, yes. God, yes,” and morphed into the unfamiliar “Take it. Take it all,” before winding up at the unnatural “Paint your landscape. Storm. Storm. Storm.” Not sexy, just peculiar. Pleasure remained a far-off cousin to whatever exchange they were having.
At last, his muscles and eyes trembled. A transfer was completed and the charge between them dimmed. A film of sweat developed some guilt, some old wonder. Both Roy and Susanne began to chill. He didn’t look at her. He was unsure what he’d got in the trade, though he knew it wasn’t inconsequential. Good for him.
I should remove myself, he thought, and was about to when he felt something rough and warm, damp and thick. Curtains was licking the sweat from his scapula.
With a scream, both naked man and naked woman recoiled. He rolled, boot-camp style, a protected ball, into the shelter of the baby grand. From there he eyed the dog with dread. Susanne jumped to her feet and up onto the frantic couch.
Curtains had come back from the dead.
The dog raised his brow, wondering why these humans should act so foolishly.
Susanne lifted her hands in surrender. “The dog was dead.”
“The dog was dead,” Roy confirmed. And it was true. They’d seen it and felt it. The dog, moments ago, had been ruined, limp, no more.
“How, Suse?” Their physical intimacy had shaved away the Anne. He cradled and rocked himself, a squatting troll: a head, a rounded back, and two feet sticking out from his torso. He looked grotesque underneath the piano.
Curtains licked the thin, pale fur between his legs.
“My dog is alive.”
“But why? Why is your dog alive?”
Susanne scratched her left buttock. “You must have only knocked Curtains unconscious.”
Roy looked from the dog to Susanne. “Then how come you don’t want to touch him either?”
“Nonsense,” Susanne said, readjusting her position of retreat. “Come here, boy. Here, Curtains.”
The dog looked up from his lick and made his way over to the waiting hand. Susanne held her arm as far out from her body as possible. Curtains rubbed against it and Susanne immediately snapped her hand to her chest as if burned. She covered herself with a fleece blanket. “Back,” she told the confused dog. “Back.” Curtains, as dumb and happy as any non-dead dog, cocked his head and studied the hunkering humans before meandering into the kitchen to see if, in the time he’d been dead, someone had refilled his dish with kibble.
Quickly, Roy crawled out from underneath the piano. “What should we do?”
Susanne nodded. She stood, distancing herself from him. They were not a we. She dressed swiftly. Nodding, nodding, nodding. She tightened a belt around her sweater. “So,” she said, looking into the kitchen where Curtains had gone. “You’ll have to kill it. Again.”
Roy drew his eyes wide and wider. “What? It?”
“We’ve opened some sort of door here.” She knelt in front of Roy, resting her hands on his knees as if they really were lovers. “It can’t stay open. I have a good life.” She pinched the meat of Roy’s thighs. “You have to kill the dog.”
He closed his eyes. Reasons and excuses assembled themselves. He was dealing with an unhinged person. He’d stumbled into a TV show. The dog had simply been knocked out.
Roy opened his eyes. “It won’t work. That’s like stuffing a baby back inside its mother. You think I’ll just forget? I won’t forget.”
“Yes,” Susanne said. “You will forget.”
Once, as a girl, Susanne, alone in her grandmother’s empty barn, had heard a voice speaking to her. The voice had said, “Bow at the river,” or, maybe, “Cows at the river.” It didn’t matter what the voice had said, because Susanne, terrorized and unwilling to confront the unexplainable, the supernatural, had suppressed any memory of it. “You’ll forget.”
He put his head in his hands.
“You’ll find some way to explain it. You’ll call me a witch or a crazy person. Turn it into a dream. You’ll forget.” She stood and, searching Roy’s coat, found the check, folded it, and put it in her pocket. “You have to kill him and then you have to leave.”
Roy pulled his fingers through his hair, like a child having a tantrum. “But I don’t believe in magic.” He barely believed in God. He barely believed in chiropractors.
She kept her voice calm. “That’s like not believing in car accidents. Just because you don’t want them to happen doesn’t mean they don’t.” She clucked at him, scolding. “It’s not belief. It’s whether or not you’re going to let magic ruin your life. People pretend the world is ordinary every day.” She held her hips. “Because they have to.”
“Why don’t you kill him?”
“Come on,” she tsk-tsked. “You started this. You kissed me.”
“It wasn’t really a kiss,” Roy said. All he’d done was paint his walls yellow. “And I definitely didn’t raise your dog from the dead.”