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  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.

  His mother hadn’t lied to the principal: Michael did have a very scientific mind. At UPenn he’d majored in biochemistry and gone on for a master’s and a PhD. He went back home once a year, for Christmas, where each year his mother seemed to
get smaller and grayer and more afraid. Whenever she would propose a visit to Pennsylvania, he’d tell her, This isn’t a very good time. Then he’d send her a check with a note: Buy yourself something nice.

  He’d solved the problem of his mother, but he couldn’t solve the problem of his loneliness. Michael reasoned that no one had ever died from a lack of human contact. If he spent his life in a lab, developing vaccines, if the most he ever saw of other people was a scraping of their epithelial cells or a few milliliters of their blood, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

  Then he’d met Tina, and everything had changed.

  He’d been in the supermarket, buying his usuals—cold cereal, frozen pizzas, grab-and-go burritos—when he’d heard a voice saying, “Would you like to try a chickpea?”

  He turned and saw a young woman with a shiny brown ponytail wearing a green apron, holding a tray full of small paper cups.

  “Chickpea?” she was saying to a woman pushing a shopping cart. “No thank you,” said the woman. The man behind her just shook his head and hurried past, and the man behind him acted as if he didn’t see the ponytailed girl at all.

  “Sir? Can I interest you in a chickpea?” She’d smiled right at him, and Michael had found himself helplessly smiling back. “They’re very high in fiber,” she said as he shifted his basket to his left hand and took one of the cups with his right. “Also, protein.”

  He tipped the cup into his mouth. Then he started coughing. The chickpea had been dehydrated until it was the consistency of a pebble and dusted with some unpleasantly raw and fiery spice. While Michael spluttered, the woman sighed, set her tray down in the deli cooler, said, “Stay right there,” and hurried away, returning with a cup of water.

  “They’re awful, aren’t they?”

  “They’re not great,” Michael had wheezed.

  “They’re my friend’s. She’s trying to get local stores to carry them, so I offered to help her hand out samples. I really want this to work out for her, but…” She’d looked down at the tray and sighed. “Well.” Then she’d brightened. “Anyhow. I owe you an apology. Can I buy you a coffee?” She had eyes the color of topaz, lightly tanned skin with rosy cheeks, a nice smile.

  “Coffee,” he’d said. “Sure.”

  After that, it had been easy. Tina made it easy. She’d asked him questions and filled in the silences when he didn’t know how to keep the conversation going; she touched him with her long-fingered, expressive hands, on his wrist and his arm and his shoulder, leaning close enough for him to smell her shampoo. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something compelling about her, some combination of the sound of her voice and the line of her throat when her head was thrown back in laughter, that made it impossible for him to stop staring, even though he knew it was rude, and that she’d probably think he was creepy. She had no preconceptions; no clue that he’d never really had friends, that his labmates avoided him, that he’d twice been called to his adviser’s office because female colleagues complained about him “lurking” in the parking structure or staring in ways that made them uncomfortable.

  Tina did not know any of that. To her, he was just a guy who’d choked down a dehydrated chickpea and been a good sport about it; a single man of the right age with no obvious flaws.

  When they’d finished their coffee, she’d looked him in the eyes and touched his arm. “My parents are having an anniversary party on Saturday night, and I have found myself dateless. Will you come?”

  He’d said yes, of course, thinking, I’ll go with you to the moon if you want. And that was it. Tina had ushered him into her busy, bustling life, full of roommates and friends and sisters and brothers-in-law. The night of the anniversary party, Tina’s mother had taken his hands. “You’re quiet,” she’d pronounced, eyebrows arched in surprise. “It’s lovely.” There was line dancing and champagne and cake, and after that there was never anyone for him but Tina… and Tina, unlike Michael, was emphatically a dog person. She’d grown up with a mom and a dad, two older sisters and a younger brother, and a menagerie of cats and rabbits and goldfish and dogs. There’d been a poodle named Maisie when she was a baby; a pair of corgis, Wilbur and Maple, had been her girlhood companions; a beleaguered-looking bulldog named Flautus had arrived when she was sixteen. After college, she’d had a dog of her own, a little blue merle rat terrier named Wendell. Wendell had died the year before she met Michael. She kept a picture of Wendell in a frame on her dresser.

  After they’d gotten married, Tina had wanted a dog immediately. But their first apartment hadn’t allowed pets. Then the babies had come, two of them in sixteen months, and neither of them had the energy to care for another living thing. Later, they’d decided. But then they found out that Chloe, their daughter, had allergies: wheat, nuts, dairy, and anything with fur, including the goldendoodle that the breeder swore was safe. After one night with Maltball in the house, Chloe had broken out in hives, and she’d been wheezing badly enough to need her rescue inhaler.

  “It’s fine,” Tina had sighed as they’d driven home after returning the pup. She’d cut her hair short by then, in a bob that she’d tuck behind her ears, the better to display the diamond earrings he’d bought her as a wedding gift. “I never wanted a dog from a breeder, anyhow.”

  Michael privately felt relieved, as he’d agreed. The kids, of course, had promised that they’d be responsible for the dog, in charge of the feedings and walkings and poop-scooping, but Michael knew how that went. He’d seen too many moms and dads whose kids had presumably made the same promise, up at six in the morning on the two-legged end of the leash. Besides, the puppy had nipped at his fingers with her small, sharp teeth. “Stop!” Michael had told it sternly, and imagined those teeth getting bigger and sharper, fastening on Chloe or Chris’s fingers instead of his.

  The kids had grown up and gone to college. They’d moved out, moved back, and, finally, moved on for good. Maura Corcoran had died of congestive heart failure, at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. Before she’d slipped into her final coma, she’d emailed Michael a story about a woman in Delaware who’d found a deep-fried rat in her bucket of KFC. Be careful and PLEASE do not eat there. I love you and want you to be safe, she’d written.

  Michael retired from UPenn, and Tina left her job at the day care center where she’d worked for thirty years. They sold the house on the Main Line and downsized to a condominium in the city, a spacious, sunny, two-bedroom in a high-rise with views of Washington Square Park to the west and the Ben Franklin Bridge and the Delaware River to the north.

  Every morning, Tina and Michael would walk: everywhere from the Italian Market to Rittenhouse Square Park to the art museum with its famous steps. They would always choose a different route, but no matter which way they went on the way out, on their way home they would pass a pet supply store called Doggy Style, which had dogs on display in the window, dogs that you could adopt. “Hello, my name is NIBLET” (or Brody, or Wallace, or Sir James, or Eggs), the tag would read. “I am a shy but friendly girl from Alabama (or Virginia, or North Carolina, or Tennessee), looking for a FUR-ever home.” Tina would stand in front of the windows, reading the signs and cooing at the dogs. In her cropped leather jacket, with streaks of gray in her hair, she looked sophisticated and chic. Michael felt proud to be seen with her and lucky, so lucky, that she’d picked him to spend her life with. He wanted her to be happy. And so, for Tina’s sixty-fifth birthday, he’d gone to the pet shop to ask about the terrier mix in the window. “Hello, my name is LADY,” her sign had read.

  “She’s very friendly. Very well behaved,” the girl behind the counter assured him.

  “No growling? No biting?” Michael asked, wondering if she’d even tell him if the dog was aggressive, or if she’d just send him home with a dog who could turn on him at any moment.

  “Why don’t you go meet her,” said the girl. She’d handed him a dehydrated scrap of chicken breast. “Here, give her a treat!” Michael had walked to the window, and Lady had appr
oached the barrier, nose twitching.

  “Good girl,” Michael said, extending the chicken gingerly. Lady sat on her haunches, her dark eyes watchful. Michael tossed the treat into the enclosure, and Lady jumped up to catch it in the air. When he extended his hand she’d sniffed it gravely and then allowed him to scratch her head, nudging at his hand when he stopped. Michael paid her adoption fees, stuck a red ribbon on her collar, and brought her home.

  “Oh, aren’t you precious!” Tina had cooed. She patted her lap and Lady hopped up and started to lick at her face. “Oh, aren’t you just the sweetest, sweetest thing!”

  “Be careful,” Michael said, seeing the flash of Lady’s teeth.

  “Oh, don’t be silly. She’s fine!”

  Lady had black fur with white socks and a bit of white at the very tip of her short, stiff tail. Her eyes were dark and perceptive, her large, pointed ears would swivel in the direction of any noise, and she had a tiny, heart-shaped patch of pink above her nose.

  “She has a very solemn demeanor,” Tina said, and Michael had agreed, even though he hadn’t noticed anything about the dog’s demeanor at all.

  Lady’s belly was still swollen and saggy—the vet had told them that she’d probably had a litter not too long ago. She weighed fifteen pounds, and the vet’s best guess was that she was two or three years old. “A teen mom,” the vet had said.

  “Oh, Lady,” Tina had said. “I bet you’ve got a story you could tell us.” And then, in the low, gruff tone that eventually became the voice she used for Lady, Tina said, “No comment. Sad memories. Hard times. This interview’s over. Lady.” (That was one of the quirks Tina assigned the dog—whenever Lady finished speaking, in her cigarettes-and-whiskey voice, she’d say her name.)

  Michael brought home plastic bowls for food and water, a harness and a leash, a bag of kibble and a dog bed, but, the first night, Lady had stood in the bedroom door, watching Michael and Tina settle back against their pillows. She gave them a considering look and then lightly hopped up to join them.