She considered leaving a voicemail, something short and small, a sentence or two to open up a channel of communication. Her voice would shake, she knew, and hearing the message would probably cause her mother to cry or gasp or unplug the machine for good, but it was the only alternative to showing up unannounced. And yet, a millisecond after the machine beeped, a robot voice took over: We’re sorry, but this voice mailbox is full.
She startled when the porch door slid open behind her. Dex asked, “Are you hungry now?”
* * *
The next day, Ariel asked her boss, Dr. Nguyen, if she could take a short leave of absence at the end of the month.
“You’re not moving to Canada, are you?” Dr. Nguyen asked, completely serious. He was on his third cup of coffee—she could tell he hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Then again, nobody had been sleeping well lately.
She smiled. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s a family matter.”
“I see,” he said, employing the same gentle voice he used to calm dogs before he pricked them with a needle or inserted a rectal thermometer. “Is somebody sick?”
“Kind of,” Ariel said, feeling it was not totally a lie.
In the end, he gave her a whole week off. It was something she’d noticed since the election: everyone was eager to dole out little kindnesses wherever possible, as if, deed by deed, they might tip the scales of the world toward goodness and restore some measure of order. She sometimes wondered what would happen if people all over the world shouted Peace! at the same time. They could organize it through Twitter or Reddit, maybe—whoever they were. There’d be time differences to contend with, but surely people would wake in the middle of the night to promote peace on Earth. Or would they? This was the kind of thing she now found herself thinking about. This, and chocolate chip cookies.
* * *
That night, at dinner, she told Dex she was planning a trip home to see her mother.
Dex stopped chewing his leftover tikka masala. “Really?”
“Really.” Ariel rarely talked about her mother, and Dex had learned, over the years, not to broach the subject; if he did, she would spend the rest of the day in an agitated silence, reading novels or taking long walks around campus. She often thought about sharing more details about the Bright Side, but each time she gathered the courage, the fear of his not understanding quelled her. Because how could he—a man who grew up in a gated community in Mission Hills, where his neighbors were, on either side, a professional golfer and the CEO of Hallmark—understand what it was like to grow up in a house that smelled of animal urine and mold and cat litter, and where nobody cared to do anything about it? And how could he, a man so squeamish he refused to handle sponges that smelled even remotely of mildew, understand that if you tilted your head just so, it was the loveliest place in the world? All he knew was that her mother had a lot of animals and that they’d had a falling-out when Ariel was eighteen.
“Is everything okay?” he asked gingerly. The look of fearful caution in his eyes made Ariel feel ashamed. She knew it was selfish, how little she’d told him about her upbringing, and yet she had never felt ready to discuss it. To discuss it was to think of it, and she tried to think of it as seldom as possible.
“Everything’s fine,” Ariel said. “I just need to go.”
“But why now? Is there a reason?”
Ariel didn’t want to lie, but more than this she didn’t want to tell the truth, a truth that would require a hundred others. “I just got engaged,” she said. “I want to tell my mother—I want her to come to the wedding. But before I do that, I need to mend some bridges.”
A look of pleasure spread across Dex’s face. “You know, I’d love to meet her. You can tell her I say so.”
So he would not ask any more questions, she leaned over the table and kissed him.
* * *
She left Lawrence after work on the first Friday of December. As she drove west, the land flattened and the billboards began to ask more questions. IF YOU DIE TONIGHT, one cartoon-flame-engulfed sign read, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’LL GO? Beneath this, in black spray paint, someone had written, confusingly: AMERICA #1.
She’d packed quickly, nervously, as if preparing for a week’s worth of first dates. At the last minute, she’d thrown in a couple gifts for her mother. Peace offerings. One was practical: a cat water fountain she’d bought on sale at Petco (she recalled how much her mother hated when the cats licked the sink faucet). The other was a photo, taken a lifetime ago, on the day Ariel and her parents moved to the Bright Side. In it, the three of them stand on the front porch, Mona’s arms wrapped protectively around Ariel and her father. They wear jeans and matching kelly-green shirts. Ariel, seven years old, holds a wooden plaque that reads: HOME SWEET HOME! What kind of family had they been, to take such a photo? To wear matching outfits? Ariel had stolen the photo the night she ran away, perhaps suspecting, even then, that she might not see her mother for a very long time.
She crossed the county line at eleven o’clock, arriving to a house so dark it was nearly indistinguishable from the sky. Growing up, Mona had been militant about conserving electricity. At nine o’clock each night, she would unplug every appliance, lamp, and gadget, forcing Ariel to read by flashlight. When Ariel was a freshman at the University of Kansas, it had taken her a month and several tiffs with her roommate, Gwyneth, to break herself of the habit. If you unplug my phone charger one more time, Gwyneth had said, I will end you.
Before she turned into the drive, her headlights illuminated the sanctuary’s sign: WELCOME TO THE BRIGHT SIDE, WHERE THERE’S LOVE ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE. If nothing else, the sign was true. Her mother may not have had enough time, money, or manpower for the animals, but she certainly had enough love. Perhaps too much. Like any other force of nature—rain, fire, wind—too much love did more harm than good.
So as to not wake her mother or the animals, she parked in the visitors’ lot and walked the rest of the way. She was exhausted from a day of work followed by the five-hour drive but was overcome by a surge of adrenaline—she was home. Her head felt weightless, her legs like they might detach and carry on toward the house without her. She wondered if any of the animals sensed her return, if they had dreamed of her the night before the way she had dreamed of them. Around her, the sanctuary was all shadow and whisper: the silhouette of a horse, the soft bleat of a sheep. Sounds thin as crepe paper. Here it was, the stage on which her childhood had played out, the place where she had spent more concentrated time than any other in the world. Stupefied, she pressed a finger to the soil and then held it to her nose. Earth. A relief that it was all still here, still intact—the same, the same, the same. It made her want to cry for all she’d missed, and so, for the first time in a long time, she did.
* * *
Before she could even turn the spare key (hidden under the ceramic goose, as always), the dogs began to bark and whimper. As soon as she opened the back door, a group of them rushed her. She kneeled down and took the dogs into her arms, let them lick her face, their tails going wild. They smelled terrible—they were sanctuary dogs, after all—but this terrible smell was also the smell of home. The feeling of animals—their movement, the stink of them, the brush of wet fur on an ankle, the slick of slobber on an open palm—it was all synonymous with home.