Dog People
Michael Corcoran stood in the bedroom, clutching the pillow in his hands so tightly that his fingers creased the fabric. The bedroom was dark, but he could still see her, curled on her side, the way she always slept, with her head resting on the pillow, making the little whistling exhalations that were not quite snores.
This can’t go on, he thought. He promised himself that he’d get away with it, that he’d never be found out. A clever detective might look for burst blood vessels in her eyelids, he knew, but at her age, would they bother?
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. So sorry,” he murmured. He shut his eyes and tightened his grip, summoning the strength to do what he needed to do.
* * *
By the time he was thirty, Michael Corcoran thought he knew what his life would look like: a one-bedroom apartment, frozen-pizza dinners, long days of work and quiet nights at home, alone, with a book and a ball game on TV. He thought he would live and grow old and die alone. Then he’d met Tina, and everything had changed. Instead of frozen pizza, there was home cooking, roasted chickens and homemade bread and Sunday gravy that simmered for hours and perfumed the whole house with its goodness. Instead of sprawling alone on the couch, he’d sit with Tina tucked beside him. Instead of being alone, he had a partner, and eventually a son and a daughter, and finally, when the kids were gone, a dog.
That last development was the most unexpected of all. Michael Corcoran had never been a dog person. His father had died when he was very young. An undiagnosed aneurysm had exploded in his brain as he bent down on the front step to retrieve the newspaper. He’d been dead before the ambulance arrived.
Then it was just Michael and his mother, a little boy and a middle-aged woman who’d had Michael when she was thirty-nine, who’d never thought she’d have children and had certainly never planned on raising one alone, on an administrative assistant’s salary and the small insurance settlement she’d received after her husband’s death. Maura Corcoran was tiny, barely five feet tall, with pale, papery skin, faded reddish-blond hair, muddy hazel eyes, and a whispery voice that rose to a hectoring near-shout when she was using it to get what she wanted, or to keep her son in line.
“You were born with the cord wrapped around your neck,” she would say when he’d asked why he couldn’t go trick-or-treating, or sign up for soccer, or swim in the deep end with the other kids his age instead of splashing around the wading pool with the babies. “You were blue. They had to rush you away and give you oxygen. You could have died,” she would tell him, and “I lost my husband. It would kill me if I lost you.” Even though Michael was, according to his pediatrician, a normal, healthy boy, his mother would talk endlessly about the cord, his blue skin, how the doctors had raced him right to the NICU to give him oxygen. “It was touch and go,” she’d say. “They weren’t even sure you’d survive.” The experience had left her convinced that her son was fragile, perpetually at risk of a painful and premature death, that every sniffle presaged pneumonia, that every splinter could lead to sepsis, and that every dog, even the smallest, cutest one, was just a few seconds away from turning into a snarling, ravening, bloodthirsty beast.
She was his protector and his warden; his defender and his jailer. She was his mom, and, as she said, no one would ever love him as much as she did… and if she saw doom in everything from a book of matches (You’ll burn the house down!) to the jagged edge of a tuna-fish can (You’ll cut yourself and it’ll get infected!), she was the adult, and she knew better than he did.
“I just want you to be safe,” she’d tell him, and “Everything I do, I do out of love.” When Bobby Ridpath invited the entire kindergarten class to a pool party, she’d forbidden Michael from going—“All those boys in a pool, and just one lifeguard!” she’d said, and balefully told him a story of a little kid who’d drowned in a public swimming pool right in plain sight, how his small body had been obscured by the other swimmers and how no one had even noticed until it was closing time and they’d seen his small, lifeless body on the bottom of the pool. “Right in plain sight!” his mom repeated, and Michael, knowing he was defeated, had asked, “Can we get pizza for dinner?” and his mom said, “Of course.” She got root beer, too, his favorite, and let him stay up late to watch the midnight movie.
In fourth grade, she hadn’t let him go to the class picnic—“You could get heat stroke,” she’d said. “Your lungs are very delicate. We can’t take that risk.” That time, Michael had asked for a microscope, and she’d bought it for him and let him turn their little-used dining room into his laboratory.
On the day in fifth grade when the janitor had traced the source of the awful smell permeating the school to Michael’s locker, she had marched into the principal’s office to insist, in a loud, shrill voice, that her boy hadn’t done anything wrong; that those mice had been dead when he’d found them, that her boy hadn’t tortured them, that he’d been performing a dissection. “Michael has a very scientific mind,” she’d said, with her hands on her skinny hips and her chin jutting out. “And clearly, the school isn’t challenging enough to keep him engaged.”
He’d been suspended for a week, but not expelled. His mother had driven him home, her hands gripping the wheel in the ten and two o’clock positions, her torso angled forward and her eyes on the road. She’d pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. Without looking at Michael, she said, “I’m going to go to the beauty salon. I’ll be back in an hour.” She didn’t say If there’s anything I shouldn’t be seeing, in your closet or in the garage or in the shoeboxes under your bed, this would be the time to get rid of it. She didn’t have to say it. She was his mom. She would keep him safe. And no one would ever love him as much as she did.
The story of fifth grade clung to him all the way until graduation, like a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe, told and retold, twisted and amplified until by twelfth grade kids were saying that the janitor had found the corpses of babies that he’d been keeping in a freezer in his basement (he’d never had human remains in his lab, although he had kept bits of a few stray cats there for a while). He had excellent grades and no friends. When he wasn’t in school, he was home, alone, conducting experiments, or watching movies with his mom.
He’d applied to the University of Pennsylvania almost on a whim, and when he’d been accepted, with a full scholarship, he’d decided to go. Philadelphia was nine hundred miles from home, and his mother had not taken the news well. “You need me!” she’d wept. “What if you get sick? A boy needs his mother!” No, you need me, he’d thought. He’d realized the truth by then. He was healthy. She was the one with problems. But, of course, he couldn’t say so. He had peeled her fingers off his arm and said, “You’ll be fine, Ma,” as she’d wept and wailed and clutched at him, sobbing. “I won’t!” she’d screamed. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!” Driving away, with each mile that passed, he imagined he could feel a few ounces of weight lifting, as if gravity itself was releasing its hold. He felt buoyant and happy, as if the world was full of possibilities; as if maybe it wasn’t too late.