“Hey, babies,” she whispered. “Hi, hello, hello.” She’d come prepared, with a baggie of Milk-Bones and Beggin’ Strips. She doled out the goodies, letting the dogs lick her fingers clean. “I missed you, I missed you, I missed you.”
She then flipped a light switch, exploding the living room into color. There was the Oklahoma-shaped stain on the shag rug, the bendy standing lamp that had always reminded her of a dejected old man. Across the room was the sunporch where her father had written poetry—a room Ariel had been prohibited from entering and which Mona had promptly packed with dog beds after he disappeared. On the mantel: a butter cookie tin filled with loose change, a mason jar of dog teeth, a pile of sun-bleached Horse Illustrateds. Here it all was. The same, but somehow both smaller and larger than she remembered, like a dream version of the house she once knew.
Ariel tiptoed down the hall, the dogs trailing excitedly behind her, and opened the door to her old bedroom. She expected to see her twin bed and the apple-crate desk her father made for her tenth birthday; her towers of novels and old journals; her Harry Potter poster and Opal’s hot-pink dog bed tucked into the corner. Instead, there were cats. A dozen, at least. Some sleeping, some playing, a pair hissing at each other, paws raised. A ragdoll scratched at a hole in the wall’s plaster while a fat calico lazily licked the inside of its thigh. She recalled what Dr. Nguyen told patients whose cats were exhibiting signs of stress. If there’s more than one cat in the house, separate them. They’re probably driving each other nuts. Where her bed had been there was now a mound of towels and blankets. Shoeboxes and felt mice and scratching posts and a gigantic brown cat tree. A row of litter boxes occupied what had once been her closet. The odor was all-consuming, like a fetid scarf wrapped around her face. She felt a tingle on her ankle and realized it was a flea. As she turned to leave, gagging, she accidentally stepped on the paw of a terrier, who released a shrill yelp and then began to rapid-fire bark, its body jerking up with each cry.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Ariel said, stooping down to calm the dog. “Shhh. Everything’s okay.”
Suddenly a German shepherd was bounding down the hallway, growling, teeth bared. Ariel closed her eyes, afraid the dog might actually bite her—she had been bitten by dogs several times before, and it was not an experience she wanted to repeat—but soon felt the dog sniffing her hand, a moment of cold wetness as its nose touched her wrist. She realized it was Katydid, who’d come to the sanctuary as a puppy, her ears the size of candy corn, her tongue the color of bubblegum. Over the years, Katydid became a sort of godfather among the house animals, arbitrating skirmishes between cats and dogs, offering protection for the weak. Once, Ariel swore she saw a cat paw a Milk-Bone to Katydid across the kitchen floor—payment for some unknown favor.
“Katydid,” Ariel said excitedly, trying to keep her voice down. “How’s it going, girl? Remember me?”
The dog cocked her head, as if to say: Ariel? That is so weird! We thought you were dead!
Ariel then heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs. A human someone. She took a deep breath, steadying her heart, and prepared to see her mother.
Dex
“A long weekend,” Ariel had said. “If it’s any longer, I’ll call you.”
She had too much luggage for a long weekend, but Dex said nothing. He understood that this trip was important to her and his job was to step aside and let her go. “I’ll miss you” was what he’d told her.
She’d kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll miss you, too. Be good while I’m gone. No parties.”
“I’ll try, Mom.”
Part of him had been excited for the time alone—he could play his records as loud as he wanted, eat Oreos and string cheese for breakfast—but as soon as she was gone, he felt a pinprick of emptiness plunge through his middle. He missed her.
Over the years, he’d come to shape his week around Ariel—he woke when she woke, ate when she ate. Or maybe she woke when he woke, ate when he ate—there was no telling the difference. Sunday nights were movie nights and on Wednesdays they went to trivia at the Burger Stand, where Ariel dominated every subject except for music and pop culture, which were his domains. He was secretly grateful for the routine. For too many years, he’d lived as a bachelor, staying out as late as he wanted, drinking as much as he wanted, subsisting on toast and macaroni and cheese and shrimp ramen noodles, telling himself he had it good when all he really wanted was someone to tell him to come home and eat some fucking vegetables. That he had found Ariel—a person whose sense of order balanced his tendency toward chaos, whose practicality kept his head from floating too far into the clouds—was a relief he felt over and over again each day. Before her, he’d been a puddle of warm Jell-O—messy, ludicrous, confused. She was his mold.
There were other things he loved about her, too. How she laughed a certain way only around him—a special laugh, with a rounded, buoyant quality, like a cluster of red balloons. How she noticed things he didn’t: the iridescence of a housefly, the color of someone’s eyelashes, how the pressed tin ceiling at their favorite brunch spot matched the pressed tin ceiling in the record store’s bathroom. How she so rarely relaxed but when she did, she went all the way, burrowing into a couch or bed with so much abandon he worried she might dissolve. This happened when she danced, too—she would close her eyes, tilt her head back, disappear. He was always surprised by how much she liked to dance, despite the fact that she had no rhythm and always looked wildly out of control. She was odd despite wanting, desperately, to be ordinary, to fit in and be loved.
For as different as they were, there had always been an ease between them. They could talk about inane subjects with the conviction of political pundits (they’d once argued about the merits of sugarcoated versus plain gummy worms for more than an hour). Mostly, he loved that he loved her, that out of the world’s seven-point-something billion people he had found his person, a person who surprised him as regularly as she disappointed him. (Of course she disappointed him, they had been together for almost six years.) And who, at the end of the day, went with him to bed and woke with him in the morning, proving, in this simple yet essential way, that she wanted to go through the world beside him, that he did not have to do it alone.
On Friday nights, he and Ariel usually ate dinner downtown. Then they’d see a show or have drinks at Harbour Lights, playing foosball or darts until Ariel was ready to go home and watch exactly one episode of The Office before falling asleep, her head on his shoulder. Now he was hungry, bored, and lonesome. His main crew of friends was out of town for the weekend, at an EDM festival in Kentucky. He thought about calling Buddy, but this would be admitting defeat.
The problem with Buddy was that, two years before, he’d gone to the most beloved Thai place in Lawrence and ordered a plate of pad see ew in whose perfect golden noodles he’d discovered a piece of steel wool, an egregious breach of health code that resulted in a week of severe intestinal pain and “atypical” stools, or so he told his lawyer. When Buddy won the lawsuit, he quit his job scanning receipts at Best Buy and became something of a professional pothead. Meanwhile, the Thai place went out of business and Buddy became, overnight, one of the most despised people in Lawrence. While it was true that Buddy was annoying, arrogant, lazy, and crude, he was also terrifically fun. They had met their first day of college and, over the years, had endured more escapades together than Dex could accurately recall. At some point, during these escapades, they’d transitioned from being drinking friends to just friends.