Now, in the bar, Sunny was stirring her drink, a tic that meant she was aggravated. “So tell me. Why, out of all the mornings, did he choose that one?”
“I don’t know,” Ariel said. “I think he was just trying to cheer me up.”
Sunny rolled her eyes. She didn’t totally dislike Dex, but often tried to sell Ariel on the benefits of single life. How can you like men right now? she’d asked after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape came out. Ariel tried to explain that, in the grand scheme of the male species, Dex was a good example. He was the person she trusted most in the world, because every time she turned to him, he was there. If love was anything, she thought, it was the promise of unconditional attendance (what this said about her history of love, she didn’t like to think). There was also the fact that he made her happy—and wasn’t that the goal? Happiness? All these years later, she could still hear her mother clicking her tongue: Happiness is a hot turd straight from the ass of capitalism. The pursuit shouldn’t be happiness, it should be helpfulness. Goodness.
“So, what did you say?” Sunny asked.
“I said yes—what else would I say?”
“Well, there’s no, and let’s talk about this later, and I’m not sure yet—”
Ariel knew there was no use discussing the matter. “Sunny, I just wanted you to know.”
“Okay. Now I know.”
“What is it you wanted to tell me?”
Sunny adjusted in her seat. “I don’t want you to freak out. But I was bingeing on the news this morning, and I found this article.”
Sunny slid her phone toward Ariel. The headline read: Fire at Animal Sanctuary Ruled Arson. The hair on Ariel’s arms rose to attention. She scrolled down and immediately recognized her mother’s barn. Her stomach fell a thousand feet, hit a precipice, and fell a thousand more. A million miles away, an Otis Redding song she loved was playing on the bar’s stereo. Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa. Dex had once said of Otis Redding that he was his own emotion—You can be sad, you can be happy, or you can be Otis Redding.
“It’s your mom’s place, right?”
“Yes—that’s our barn.” A barn fire had always been her mother’s biggest fear, the way other mothers feared car crashes and cancer.
Nobody was injured in the fire, the article continued, although a mare and her foal died from smoke inhalation.
“How the fuck is that nobody?” Ariel said out loud, causing the couple in the adjacent booth to turn and look. Sunny put a hand on her arm.
Another picture revealed a swastika painted on the door of the detached garage where her mother kept the rabbits and rodents. Ariel was staring at the swastika, her heart pounding with rage, when something caught her eye. There were words next to the swastika, the letters slanted and fuzzy, nearly illegible—Dirty Jews. She blinked a few times but the words remained. Jews, not Jew. She knew, then, that whoever wrote the message intended it not just for her mother but for her as well. The article didn’t say who had done it, only that the suspect was in custody. Ariel couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. Her mother wasn’t popular in town, but she certainly wasn’t hated.
“Did you get to the end?” Sunny asked.
Ariel was having trouble seeing—there were tears in her eyes. She blinked them away, not wanting to cry in public. The last paragraph read, The fire comes at a particularly difficult time for Ms. Siskin, who put her sanctuary up for sale last month. Her stomach turned again, a wave of heat. How could her mother sell the sanctuary? Where would she go? Where would the animals go? It was impossible, like someone putting their own head up for sale. Her mother was the Bright Side, and the Bright Side was her mother.
She put down the phone. “What do I do?” she asked.
Sunny tapped the edge of her glass. “I don’t know, but if something like this happened to my family, I’d go. No question.”
“But it’s been years—I can’t just show up.”
“There’s this crazy new thing called the telephone.”
“What if she won’t talk to me?”
“And what if you don’t call at all? What’s the difference then?”
Like always, Sunny had a point.
Mona
It happened the morning after the election, during a time Mona considered holy—a workless hour when even the moths rested their wings and the stars nodded off. It was Opal the wolfhound who woke her, howling like a banshee at 2:30 a.m.
Mona had sat up in bed, head pounding. She’d drank three beers the night before—the first alcohol she’d had in years. While it was true she disliked alcohol for the effect it had on people—people like her father—she also considered it a useless expenditure, as impractical as throw pillows or perfume. The beers were Gideon’s—he’d purchased an assortment of drinks, chips, and candies for the occasion. (“What is this, the Super Bowl?” Mona had asked, to which he’d responded, “Same idea, uglier cheerleaders.”) He’d wanted to spend the evening with his girlfriend, Joy, who was at a watch party with her cousins in Wichita, but Mona asked him to stay. There’s too much work, was her reasoning, but she knew Gideon saw through her. She didn’t want to be alone.
The beers had made her light-headed and bloated, but she’d been grateful for the buzz when, state by state, the news anchors delivered the verdict, solemn as doctors reporting a fatal diagnosis. Out of curiosity, Gideon had changed the channel to Fox News, where everyone was celebrating, their faces flushed with smug cheer, as if they’d just gotten their first kiss and the whole world had been there to watch.
“How can the same thing look so different?” Mona had asked.
Gideon had shrugged. “That’s people, I guess. I didn’t drink Pepsi until I was nineteen because my dad was a Coke man.”
Mona had gone upstairs then, eyes dry and head ringing, leaving Gideon in front of the television.
Part of her was relieved to hear Opal howling; the dog was in the late stages of bone cancer and had fallen into a monk-like silence, rarely leaving the couch and eating only what food Mona fed her by hand. Mona figured they had a week left together at most.
“Hush, girl,” Mona whispered, turning onto her side. “Go back to sleep.” Outside, the sanctuary stirred. It was not uncommon for the dogs to wake in a fit of barking that would cause the sheep to bleat, the donkeys to bray, the chickens to cluck. Tonight, she could hear someone—maybe her mare, Ginger—running around and whinnying. Perhaps there was a coyote. If so, the donkeys would run it off. The animals would settle down soon enough.
Opal howled again, and Mona was about to put a pillow over her head when she caught sight of a strange glow outside her window, where her barn stood. Inside the barn was Squid, a paint horse she’d rescued from a traveling rodeo the summer before. With Squid was her foal, a sweet, knob-kneed mare Gideon had named Aleira.
Mona sat up, watching dumbly as the sky outside her window turned gray. Opal licked her hand. What’s the matter with you? Opal asked with her eyes. Get up!
Mona threw on pants and a jean jacket and hightailed it outside, Opal limping loyally behind her. By the time she reached the barn, she found Gideon already in motion. A pack of dogs had followed her from the house and were now running back and forth, barking at the fire as if it were a stranger who might be scared off. Beyond the barn, the sheep were bleating, thinking it was time for their morning hay.