“Believe it or not, he likes it here.”
Ariel felt dizzy. She needed to sit.
Her mom was still pinching her shirt away from her body. “Listen, I’m beat. And covered in pee. Can we talk in the morning?”
“Sure, that’s a good idea.” Morning. It seemed a million years away.
“I guess you can sleep on the couch. I’m not sure if any of the extra blankets are clean. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“I gave your room to the cats,” she said, her tone brisk and unapologetic, proud almost, as if she were confessing to a crime she didn’t regret.
“I saw—it’s not a problem.”
“It just seemed a waste, to leave it empty for so long.”
“That’s all right. I’m glad the cats like it.”
“They do like it. It’s their own space.”
“That’s good.”
“And you weren’t using it.”
“I know.”
“Well, all right, then.”
For a moment they stared at each other, the last six years like a line of fire between them. Ariel remembered a time long ago, when her mother was braiding her hair for school and had whispered in her ear, One day, when I’m a little old lady, you can braid my hair just like this. At the time, Ariel had assumed this vision of the future would come true, that she and her mother would always be together. How could they not? Many nights as a girl, she would lie in bed, thinking about the death of her mother. The infinity of death. The infinity of infinity. It had panicked her, to think of a world that did not contain her mother, the person who most thoroughly knew the story of Ariel’s life. Sometimes she would lie in bed, sobbing at the mere idea of it. Now the intensity of this feeling was so foreign as to be almost impossible. What had happened to all that love? Where did it go?
“It’s good to see you, Mom,” Ariel said. She thought of the photo in her bag, the cat water fountain, but the moment didn’t feel right.
Mona hadn’t moved from her spot at the end of the hall, and Ariel hadn’t moved from hers. “If the dogs get fussy, you can unlock the dog door. I assume you closed the front gate?”
“I did.”
“Good girl.” With this, her mother disappeared up the stairs to her bedroom, Daisy and Katydid and all the other dogs trailing behind her like a tiny parade.
Deep down, she had known her mother would still be angry—certainly, if she wasn’t, she would have tried to contact Ariel by now—but a part of her, a small, secret part, had hoped, despite everything, that her mother would see her and forgive her, that she would take Ariel into her arms and say: I’m so glad you’re back—I’ve missed you every day. She understood, now, that this dream was exactly that. A dream. They hadn’t even hugged.
* * *
Ever since she’d left, Ariel had missed the sanctuary with a longing so severe it often felt like a kind of physical withdrawal, a tightness and irritation of the body she’d experienced only once before, when she’d tried to give up coffee. In Lawrence, she’d yearned for a dog. Just one dog, and then maybe a cat or two—a healthy, normal number of animals for someone in her early twenties. When she first raised the idea with Dex, he’d dismissed it. I’m just not into them, he’d said, by which he’d meant, Ariel assumed, I don’t want to be responsible for another living thing right now. And that was that. She’d dropped it, worried that adopting a dog might activate a genetic chain reaction that would eventually manifest in the same sickness as her mother’s. And what was Mona’s illness, exactly? Ariel had never found the right words to describe her mother. She wasn’t a hoarder, per se, because she only accumulated animals, and even then she didn’t keep them in the house—at least not all of them. And it wasn’t just that she loved animals. It seemed, at times, that Mona felt a religious impulse to help them, though she never talked explicitly about God. Ariel recalled a time her mother had nearly driven them into a ditch, to avoid hitting a baby raccoon. When Ariel accused her of almost wrecking the car, she’d said, What if that had been a human baby crawling across the road? It’s the same thing. The logic had bothered Ariel for days until, like a gear clicking into place, she’d realized it troubled her not because she didn’t agree with it, but because she did.
The three of them—Ariel, her mom, and her dad—moved to St. Clare from Wichita when Ariel was seven. Mona had always talked about running an animal sanctuary, but Ariel figured it was empty grown-up chatter, like when her father talked about opening a café that sold ice cream and poetry. And yet, a few months after the death of her grandpa, a man she’d never met but whom she’d always pictured with a long gray beard and hair coming out of his nose, a moving truck appeared. Everything they owned was put into boxes and sealed with tape.
Weeks before the move, Ariel had gone into tantrum mode—she didn’t want to leave Wichita, leave their house, their street, her school. She liked her teachers and had a best friend, Celia Bradbury, in whom she confided all her secrets and dreams. It was the only life she knew, and leaving it felt like a death. And yet, as soon as she and her parents loaded into her dad’s old Windstar minivan, all the terror and sorrow turned to excitement. She’d recently finished Little House on the Prairie and realized she was just like Laura Ingalls Wilder, moving out into the grasslands, the place where the buffalo lived. Lying across the back seat, she closed her eyes and imagined the van was a wagon and Ma and Pa were taking her west.
The first thing she did after they pulled down the long, winding driveway was run straight into the grass, her arms outstretched, the sky an open page above her. A butterfly landed on her shoulder, and she took this as a sign of her life to come.
Those early days, before the animals arrived, she had her parents mostly to herself. The only dogs were Peanut Butter and Jelly, the gray-muzzled black Labs Ariel had known since she was a baby. After the move, the five of them would take long walks down Sanctuary Road, Mona teaching her bird calls and the names of different clouds, her father reciting lines of poetry he could never quite remember. At night, Mona would read to her, Peanut Butter and Jelly curled at her feet.
And then the first rescues arrived—four pit mixes from a kill shelter in Tulsa. Ariel’s affection for the new dogs, like her affection for Peanut Butter and Jelly, was immediate and pure. She found herself drawn to the dogs at odd hours of the day, sneaking out in the middle of the night to visit them. She would slip into their pens and curl up beside them, rub her thumb along the soft pads of their feet. It was not just that she wanted to be with the dogs; she wanted to be a dog, to live among them, to spend her days running and rolling in mud, eating her food from a bowl, no hands. She wanted people to pet her, to coo over her, to brush the brambles from her hair. She wanted to cuddle at her mother’s feet, roll belly-up for a tummy rub. She even tried the dogs’ kibble, which was dry and chalky and tasted like old bread and dirt. When she requested to drink like a dog, Mona played along; for nearly a year, Ariel lapped her apple juice from a plastic saucer her mother set before her each morning. All the while, Ariel’s father watched on, his mouth pinched with disapproval.