Ariel never knew quite how to read her father, who felt even more mysterious and inaccessible than the dogs; sometimes, she wished he had a tail to wag, so she could know when he was happy. He was a quiet person, requiring lots of alone time in which to read and write and stare into space, brow furrowed. This quietness did not seem to match his body, which was large and powerful, his torso as wide and sturdy as the grandfather clock in the living room, his hands thick and hard-knuckled, more like pieces of pottery than the hands of a poet. When Ariel was very little, this size translated directly to love—he was her safe keeper, her protector. He could swoop her into a hug so consuming that nothing, not even the light, could get in. They were family.
In the beginning, he had seemed happy with the move. He would wake early and drink his coffee on the porch, a notebook opened on his lap. In the afternoons, he would take the dogs on a walk down Sanctuary Road, going two at a time so that everyone got a turn. Eventually, when there were too many dogs, he stopped going for walks altogether. If I can’t take them all, then I won’t take any.
Over time, he grew more and more indifferent to the dogs—tolerant but not affectionate. He would allow them to sit beside him on the couch while he watched a baseball game, but he would no longer let them lick his face or rest their heads in his lap. After one of the dogs chewed up a manuscript he’d left on the table—he was always finishing manuscripts and then throwing them away in a huff of frustration—he stopped petting them completely.
A few months before he left, Ariel heard her parents fighting. They did not fight often, but when they did, it was like a thunderstorm, rolling in slowly, changing the quality of the air, and then filling the house with electricity.
“Why am I so cold?” her father had asked. “Maybe it’s because my wife cares more about a bunch of dogs than she does about her own family.”
“That is not true,” her mother had said, but Ariel could hear the uncertainty in her voice.
“You certainly spend more time with them,” her father had countered.
“If I was a doctor or a lawyer—if I was gone all day at a fancy office, nobody would say a word. Or if I was a man! If I was a man, nobody would say I work too much, that I don’t spend enough time with my family. But because I’m a woman, because it’s animals, because it doesn’t bring in a big paycheck—suddenly I’m a heartless villain. I’m a bad mother. A bad wife.” After a few beats of silence, she added, “I will not apologize for taking pleasure in my work. You get to hide out in your studio all day, writing poems you don’t even let me read, but nobody calls you a bad husband, a bad father.”
The house had gone quiet then.
“I never called you a bad mother.”
“You certainly implied it.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“And you,” said her mother, “are putting an untrue story onto our lives.”
Ariel had thought about this accusation for days. An untrue story. Wasn’t it true that, once the animals came along, her mother had less time for Ariel and her father? After the first dogs arrived, her mother had stopped reading to Ariel at night. “You should practice reading on your own,” she’d reasoned. Ariel didn’t mind, at least not in the beginning. If she ever felt lonely or bored, she would join her mother in her chores: cleaning the dogs’ cages, taking them for walks, brushing their fur and tossing the tufts of hair into the wind where, her mother teased, they would stick into the ground and grow a prairie of dogs.
But, over the years, her mother had grown more obsessed with her work, less interested in family life. When Ariel was ten, her teacher assigned a project in which everyone had to interview their personal hero. Ariel decided to interview her mother. When she told her mom about the interview, Mona said she was busy. She was taking a nonprofit management class at Middleton Community College; someone had left a pair of very sick goats tied to the sanctuary gate. The weekend would be better. When the weekend arrived, Ariel asked her mother again, and again it was not a good time. Mona now had a paper to write, and a meeting with an insurance agent, and a Girl Scout troop coming to volunteer. Things went on like this for another week, until suddenly Ariel’s assignment was due. The morning before school, Ariel jotted off the interview herself, answering the questions how she imagined her mother might.
Q: What makes you different from other people?
A: I’m very strong, smart, and can speak to most animals, but especially dogs, who have no accent (unlike birds) and understand English perfectly. Sometimes the cats understand me but don’t listen anyway, because they are snobs!
Q: If you had to give one piece of advice, what would it be?
A: If an animal bites you, squeeze the blood out a little before putting on a Band-Aid because that way the germs won’t go back into your body.
A week later, her teacher confronted her about the assignment. “Ariel, did your mother really say these things?” she asked, standing with Ariel after the lunch bell had rung.
Ariel’s cheeks turned red, her skin burning. “No,” she whispered, for she was not, at that point, any good at lying.
“Did you write these responses yourself?”
Ariel nodded.
“And why did you do that?”
“My mom was busy,” she said, wondering, for the first time, if there was something wrong with her mother.
“And what about your dad? Was he not around to ask?”
How could Ariel explain that her dad was not to be bothered with these sorts of things?
“I’m sorry,” Ariel said to her teacher. “I didn’t mean to cheat.”
Her teacher frowned, a look Ariel interpreted as disapproval until she said, “It’s not your fault, sweetie. You did a very nice job.”
* * *
Now, in her mother’s living room, she made a nest of blankets and pillows on the floor. She had always hated the plastic couch, which reminded her of a giant rubber dog toy, coated with dried slobber and who knew what else. For a while, she lay still, listening. A cat knocked something over in the kitchen and then skittered away. Something spooked a donkey, who brayed a long, soulful complaint. One of the dogs in the pens howled, sending a few others into a fit of concerned whimpering until the sanctuary finally settled into silence. She thought about Opal, her wolfhound. Her best friend, her sister. Heartbreak hounds, they were called, for they rarely survived into the double digits. Ariel knew Opal had likely passed away while she was busy partying her way out of college. What had she been doing, she wondered, the moment Opal died? Taking a shot of tequila with Dex? Singing karaoke with Sunny? She knew that if Opal were still here, she would have forgiven Ariel in a heartbeat.
She was nearly asleep when a dog came to lie beside her. Eyes closed, Ariel allowed herself to imagine it was Opal, with her pretty black eyes and her white-gray beard that smelled vaguely metallic. The serious way she would stare at Ariel, as if to say: Human, do you know I love you? When Ariel opened her eyes, she saw a cattle dog, small and brown with a rubbery nose like a bear’s. He yawned and stretched his forelegs into Ariel’s belly. She ran a hand across the dog’s side, feeling the warmth of his body, the matted spots in his fur, the bumps of his ribs.