The day of Apollonia’s party, a Friday night, I pick up an extra shift at the shelter. Bekah wants to leave early to make it to a movie with her boyfriend, so I offer to stay until we close up for the night. Actually, it’s a relief to have something to do.
It’s raining. It barely ever rains here. We’ve been going through this epic drought for five years, but it’s not like it really affects me on a day-to-day basis. I mean, the ocean still has plenty of water in it, if I ever make it out for an afternoon to the beach, and our sprinklers still click on at three in the morning every few days, keeping our little patch of lawn waxy green.
But when it does rain, it triggers some switch in my brain. Suddenly I’m taking these deep gulps of air, smelling the wetness, the dirt, the leaves, all the things that are usually too dry to have a smell at all but, dampened by rainwater, come to life.
Stanley is away visiting his mother’s cousins in Canada. He’ll be gone from now through Christmas. I sit at Bekah’s post behind the counter playing Spider Solitaire on the main computer. Ruth’s in the back somewhere, dealing with paperwork.
I feel okay. Not great, but not terrible. Okay.
When the door is pushed open, a cold gust of air blows in, a wet blast of winter. I shiver and zip my sweatshirt before I even look up.
There are three of them. Two guys and a girl, who hangs behind. They’re all white, like, really white, pale. The guy carrying the box has about an inch of blond roots at the top of dyed-black hair.
“We found this dog,” the other guy says. He’s probably the oldest, maybe twenty-five, and he’s the biggest. His face is sort of loose, like an undercooked egg. And he’s tall—gangly tall, not rangy tall. Every part of him could have been attractive. There’s nothing wrong with his nose, or his eyes, or the slant of his shoulders. In pieces, he is handsome. But in real life, the way everything comes together . . . he isn’t. “We think he was hit by a car.”
The other guy, the one with the blond roots, the one carrying the box, starts to say something, but the tall guy cuts him off. “We just thought the best thing to do would be to bring him here,” he says. Then he takes the box from the other guy, slides it onto the counter.
It’s a cardboard box, damp and limp from the rain, and the flaps across the top are crossed and tucked together to hold it shut. There’s a sound, a low, constant whine from inside. My stomach roils with nausea. I don’t want to open the box. I don’t want to see the dog. I don’t want this dog to exist.
Still, my hands go to the flaps. The cardboard feels mushy. I peel open the box.
The whine gets higher and louder as light enters the box. It’s the sound of total fear. Wet black eyes look up at me from a small brown face. The dog is terrified, I can tell, but she doesn’t move at all. She can’t, I can tell she can’t, or she would. She would try to get away. She’s a young dog, not full grown, some sort of terrier mix, maybe twelve or fifteen pounds. There’s some blood smeared on the side of the box, and it stinks of urine.
I look up when I hear the door opening again, and I see them leave—the guys already out, and then the girl, half through the door but stopping to look back. Her face—it looks like the dog’s, for a flash, the look in her eyes—and then she says, “Sorry,” and she disappears out into the rain, the door closing fast behind her.
They are supposed to fill out forms. They are supposed to sign a release. But I don’t go after them. Instead I scoop up the soggy box, the limp, broken dog, and I head into the back of the shelter.
“Ruth,” I yell, and she appears almost at once. My voice is panicked, and her face reflects it.
“What’s the matter?” Then she sees the box in my hands.
“They say she was hit by a car, but they just took off, they left.”
Ruth takes the box from me. My arms are wet from holding it, the front of my sweatshirt damp, and I smell like the dog’s pee. She carries the box into an exam room and I follow, empty-handed and shaking. She sets it on the table.
The dog’s high-pitched whine hasn’t stopped. It goes up another level, it is awful, it is the sound of pain and fear and absolute hopelessness.
“What do you think?” she says, looking at the dog, not me.
“They were lying,” I say, completely sure. “They didn’t find her like this.”
Ruth nods. She leaves the room, and I know where she’s going—to the locked case where they keep the medication.
I don’t want to see the dog. I don’t want to touch the dog. But I go over to the box. I reach inside, and I place my hand as gently as I can on the top of her head, just between her ears, the one place that I’m pretty sure isn’t broken.
“Good girl,” I say, soft and low. “Good girl, it’s okay, it’ll just be a minute. Good girl.”
Ruth comes back in, the syringe in her hand, and she’s the fucking angel of mercy. She finds a vein right away and presses down on the plunger. I keep my hand on the dog’s head.
The whimpering quiets and softens and then stops. The rapid rise and fall of breaths from the broken body cease. Her eyes don’t close but the shine fades away, and then she’s dead.
I’m crying. Ruth’s crying too, even though nothing makes Ruth cry.
“We did the right thing,” she says, to herself or to me, I don’t know, but I nod. She puts an arm around my shoulder and hugs me roughly.
Later, after she calls the police to report what’s happened, after I’ve given the best description I can of all three of them, after the vet has come and taken x-rays of the dog’s body—all four paws shattered, back broken in three places, hips crushed, likely systemic torture and abuse—after they’ve taken pictures of her body, I head home.
The rain has stopped. I walk across the parking lot and slide behind the wheel of my car. I sit there, smelling like dog urine and my own sweaty fear. I see behind my eyes those other eyes—first the black eyes of the dog, the way they went from shiny and full of fear to flattened black and dead but no longer in pain, at least—and then the other eyes. The eyes of the girl as she ducked out the door and into the rain. Those eyes were afraid, too.
I start my car. I pull out of the parking lot. The streets are unusually clear and I make it back to Irvine in less than twenty minutes. I drive very carefully, even more carefully than usual. It starts to rain again just as I turn into my neighborhood, a soft mist. For once, I hope my parents are home. I want to tell them about what happened. I want them to listen and hold me and pet my hair.
But when I open the garage door, there are two vacant black spaces where their cars should be.