We can believe things that are true, and we can believe things that are not true. Which is more important—what is true, or what we believe?
But then he says, “I don’t know what we were doing, Neen. I mean, even when we were together, I couldn’t forget about what you did last year. I couldn’t keep ignoring something like that.”
I open my mouth. I close it. I feel a hard lump rise in my throat and I cannot draw a breath. I will die here. I will choke to death in the misty midnight darkness. “But I did it for you,” I manage to say, squeezing the words around the tumorous ball that has risen inside of me.
Seth looks at me with pity. “Go home, Nina,” he says. And then he looks like he’s going to say something else, some one more thing, but instead, he doesn’t. He turns around, he walks away, and he leaves me there, on the street, with just my shame for company.
???
The next day I don’t wake up until my room is bright with sunlight and I lie there blinking and panicked until I realize that it doesn’t matter what time I get up because I don’t have anywhere to go, and no one is waiting for me.
I listen. I hear the cat scratching in her litter box. After she stops I don’t hear anything else.
Downstairs is deserted. It’s eerie quiet. The only proof that I even live with other people is the note Mom has left me on the long bare countertop—Do something useful.
I walk around the kitchen, opening and closing drawers, not looking for anything in particular. In the last drawer I pull open, I find the stethoscope. I must have looked in this drawer a hundred times over the last few years, and yet this is the first time I’ve seen the stethoscope. There it is: the long, black tube of its body, the branching apart of it into two earpieces; the silver yoke of its brace; the part that amplifies sound, round like a surprised mouth.
How did it get to this drawer? How did I miss it before?
I pick it up and fit the earpieces into my ears. I ease its round listening disc down the neck of my shirt and press it above my left breast. There it is—my own beating heart. I listen, I try to understand what it means, what it wants.
???
I’ve never been to the shelter on the weekend, but when I can’t stand to be in my sad house anymore, this is where my car takes me.
The smell of the kennel and the sound of the dogs ruin me. All I can see, all I can hear is the dog from last night, its broken body, the final dulling of its eyes. When Ruth comes in and sees me kneeling in front of one of the kennels, my fingers poking through the chain link so that the dogs can lick them, my face wet with tears, she kneels down beside me.
“Honey,” she says, and she puts an arm around my shoulders. It’s so undeserved, this kindness. I hold myself stiff, not wanting to allow myself to be comforted, but at last I collapse into her neck, and I cry and cry, and she rocks me like I’m a little baby. My glasses are smashed crookedly between my face and her shoulder, and they dig into my cheek, but I don’t want to move to fix them; I don’t want to give Ruth a reason to pull away. The fingers of my left hand are still linked through the wire diamonds of the kennel, and the dogs on the other side whimper and gather and lick faster.
I don’t know how long I cry, but it’s a long time. The dogs never give up on me, never, never. Finally I extract my fingers. They are sticky and smell like spit. I pull off my glasses and wipe my face with my flannel.
Ruth stands up and takes my hand, pulls me up, too. She hugs me again. “Come on,” she says, “let’s take out some dogs.”
We harness up a couple of the big pit bulls. Bronx is one of them, and the other is a thick bullet-shaped brindle that we call Dutch. We take them to the Play Yard. Bronx stretches and shakes his big head, and then he rolls in the dirt. With his legs up in the air, I notice that his balls are gone. That’s a good sign, that they’ve bothered to neuter him; it means they think there’s a chance he might get adopted.
We throw the old worn-out rope toys and couple of half-skinned tennis balls, and the dogs alternate between retrieving them and peeing in all the corners of the yard. Ruth doesn’t push me to talk, which is probably why I want to.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, why not,” Ruth says.
“Do you believe in unconditional love?”
“Absolutely,” Ruth says. “It’s one of the most dangerous forces in the universe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unconditional love is how dogs feel about their masters. Dogs love their masters no matter how badly they’re beaten, how rarely they’re fed, and how terribly they’re cared for. They don’t know any better than to love without conditions.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I say. “I mean, between people.”
“There’s no unconditional love between people,” Ruth says. “That kind of love flows one way, like a dog to its master. My mother loved her second husband like that. Unconditionally. Even after he shattered her cheekbone and broke her nose. Even after what he did to me. Well, she called it love. I’d call it something else.”
She speaks so calmly, she could be talking about anything—which dogs need to be bathed, dictating a list of supplies to reorder.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but she shrugs and waves her hand.
“It’s a long time past.” More time goes by, and then Ruth says, “When someone loves unconditionally, they’re saying, “I am your dog. You are my god. That’s who unconditional love is for—dogs and their masters, fools and their gods.”
Bronx is sitting right near my legs, leaning into me. I stroke his head, rub his pointed ears. He sighs.
It’s cold out here in the Play Yard, and the sky is silvery gray like the scales of a fish. The sun is a cold hard disc of light. Ruth must have a million things to do—she always does—but she stays and doesn’t hurry me. She leans back and turns her face up to the sky and closes her eyes.
What if they stood up, the Dissected Graces from their beds, the relics from their altars, the wishbone dolls from their boxes? What if they rose and walked, a horde of beautiful zombies? What if they went together to Saint Teresa, shook her gently to wake her from her dream, and helped her down from the pedestal onto which she had been placed?
What if they decided not to be beautiful dogs?
What are they then, this horde, these women, if they are not the fawning lovers of their god? Who are they, free of the conditions they have accepted like layers of chains?
Wake now, beauties. Rise and look around. Shake off the chains. Give up the ghost of love.