Authors: Katie Crouch
Men and Dogs (2 page)
A boy had been stung by a bee. He was in shock. His throat was swollen, and his tongue was the size of a pickle.
I’m a doctor, Buzz told the boy’s mother. He always stood up a little taller when he said this. Hannah, get my doctor’s bag.
Center console, in the flare box.
Hannah ran back to the boat, found the flare box, and retrieved the bag, a perfect leather triangle that opened and closed with a reassuring snap. Inside, set rows of neatly arranged syringes, bottles, and rubber tubes. One of her favorite things to do was to put her hand inside. It was always cool, as if it required its own separate air.
Later, Hannah looked up what would have happened if her father hadn’t stopped to help that day. The bee venom was almost as lethal as cyanide for the boy. When the tip of the stinger pierced his skin, an army of histamines split from the heparins and flooded his body. Water was released from the cells, causing his skin to strain against the liquid. He would have turned blue and choked on his own tongue while his mother watched.
Afterward, a party. The boy’s father brought out another cooler of beer, and the neighbors came, carrying plastic folding chairs and bags of potato chips and a great bowl of pink, curling shrimp. Candy-lipped mothers rushed back and forth with more food. The afternoon poured away.
We have to go, Buzz said after a while. Thank you for the good time.
So we’ll come see you, Doc, the boy’s mother said. She was leaning into him slightly. You’re our doctor now.
Buzz looked down at her and squeezed her shoulder. There was a pause, then he broke away and began running. Hannah and the others watched, openmouthed, as he did a cannonball off the dock.
He’s swimming! the boy screamed. The doctor is swimming!
He ran after Hannah’s father and flung himself in the water. Now people all over the dock were following Buzz. They jumped in with huge splashes, showing off awkward half dives in their shirts and shorts.
Come on, Hannah! her father yelled. He spouted water through his lips.
No, that’s OK, she said. She was worried about her hair. She’d sprayed it up, a proud open lily.
Hannah! Swim!
She shook her head. The boy’s mother was swimming near her father. She gave him a little splash.
Hannah, he called. How many times a day does a human breathe?
Twenty thousand.
How many heartbeats?
A hundred thousand.
Come on, sweetie.
No.
Scared?
No.
Come on, honey.
Why?
Because.
Why?
There won’t always be a why.
They were all waiting. Her father, the not-dead boy, his mother, the strangers. It was April 6, a day she would come to circle in red each year and label: dad. 1985. What was happening? Hannah Legare can tell you. It was the year of New Coke. The number one song was “One More Night.” Christa McAuliffe was slated to ride the
Challenger
. Ronald Reagan was sworn in for a second term. As for the Legares—they were still a family. Hannah, eleven; Palmer, thirteen;
Daisy, thirty-six; Buzz, forty-one.
On April 6, Hannah was a plain sixth grader with a bad perm. She was a bit scared of the water, and was shivering on a dock.
She closed her eyes and listened to her heart, then held her breath to try to make it stop. It didn’t, so she jumped, because her father told her to.
W
HEN HANNAH OPENS her eyes, she knows something is wrong. She sits up slowly, orienting herself. There is a ripping sound as her skin parts from the hammered-leather couch. It’s not the sort of couch she would ever buy; nor would she purchase anything resembling the fluffy, synthetic white rug spread across the concrete floor, nor the enormous plasma TV and entertainment system complete with Wii, nor the oversize, framed sci-fi movie posters. But, having been turned from her home, Hannah is currently subletting an overpriced, furnished loft in San Francisco’s South of Market district. The place is cavernous. The ceiling is twenty feet high; the gray walls yawn past the gleaming kitchen to a cold bedroom housing a large closet filled with old computers and an S&M-worthy wrought-iron bed. Though many, she knows, would be impressed by the loft’s Trekkie-esque grandeur, Hannah can’t help but see it as a very expensive, geeky prison—pretty much where she deserves to be living right now.
She sits up and takes a reluctant lap around the space. Her husband must have carried her up, dumped her on the couch, and left. She sits on the kitchen stool and rubs her eyes. Clothes are strewn on the floor, dishes and take-out containers litter the stone countertop. She is still drunk, but it is not a pleasant state of intoxication. In an attempt to solve this, she pours herself a drink. Then she reaches over and picks up a pad of paper and a pen in order to make a list.
Things to Get for Sublet
Better rug
Better sofa? (How long will I be here?)
Music contraption
Pictures of normal people
More wine
Husband
She sighs and throws the pad down again. So Jon didn’t stay. She feels the dull reality of it, a cold ache. She pictures where her husband might be now. At a club, maybe, leaning into Denise on a velvet banquette. Or, worse, with Denise in Hannah and
Jon’s bed—a mattress selected according to her own finely tuned appraisals of width, springs, and plushness. No, her husband wouldn’t do that. Would he? She doesn’t know, actually. She’s not sure anymore.
Maybe he called? She finds her purse. No missed calls. No messages. She tosses the phone on the sofa, wondering how this happened to her. Yet it didn’t happen to her.
She
did this. Still—Denise? She’s a PR consultant, for God’s sake. A very pretty one, and smart, but . . . she’s a twentysomething hippie.
She teaches a hula-hooping class in her spare time. Whereas Jon is a man—a nerd, really—who believes that Craig Newmark deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Who never swears. Who subscribes to
Tin House
and
The Believer
and actually
reads
them cover to cover. His light-brown hair in the morning looks like hay; his favorite possession is his mother’s quilt; he once threw a party to plan Britney Spears’s mercy killing. He’s dorky and hilarious and generous and perfect and she’s really fucked up this time and has to do something about it.
Hannah finishes her vodka soda, tops it off with half of a sugar-free Red Bull left in the fridge by the previous renter,
then downs a tumbler of water to stave off tomorrow’s hangover. (A futile attempt, but each new day deserves a fresh chance.)
She molts the dress, puts on Jon’s favorite outfit—jeans, T-shirt, braless—and calls a cab.
Even after more than fifteen years, Hannah still has a mad crush on San Francisco. She loves the confectionary mansions,
the thickets of crack dens, and the dense, surprising pockets of eucalyptus. The cultural compartmentalization warms her—Hannah can look at nearly any person she meets and almost instantly peg where they live. That girl in the Atari shirt and the green eye shadow? The Mission. The guy in the pink button-down and Dockers? Somewhere in between Cow Hollow and Pac Heights.
The Indian guy in the jeans with a knife crease is Potrero. The woman with the sport top and the sunburned nose, either the
Presidio or the Outer Richmond—somewhere with enough room for her surfboards.
The car slams on its brakes. A homeless man darts in front.
“Careful!” she shouts.
“The guy’s on meth,” the driver says. “What do you want?”
They stop at a light. Hannah turns back to look again, checking the man’s height, hair, approximate age. Too short—not her father. She leans back into the seat, the man leaving as quickly as he came, replaced by what she will say to her husband.
The words slip dangerously through her mind.
I didn’t mean to
. No.
I meant to, but I’m really sorry about it
. Try again.
I was stuck. I was depressed
. Too much “I.”
You are
everything to me
. God.
Without you I am a meaningless pile of
nothing
. Maybe.
Please
. Maybe that?
The light turns green. The man retreats to the shadows, out of the limits of her sight.
Hannah sees her father about once a month. Not all at one time, of course. Not the whole person. And never when she’s consciously looking. Last week, she saw his shoulders at a wine store. Then one of the buyers at Saks surprised her by having his hair:
early-forties thickness, light brown with a little gray.
Her biology professor at Stanford had his nose. It was the first time she’d seen the nose on anyone other than her father—a rare find. Since then, she’s spotted it only on the face of her hair stylist and one of the contestants on
Top Chef
. During the first class she had with the nose, she was mesmerized. It was a stupid class, and, as with many at Stanford,
Hannah coasted through on autopilot. Still, after seeing the nose, Hannah found herself going to office hours twice a week and spending long, unnecessary tutoring sessions with its owner.
The rest of the man was nothing like Buzz. Short and dark, with bushy eyebrows and a smug, charmless voice, he immediately assumed Hannah had a crush on him. And who could blame him? She constantly made up excuses to see him, thought up inane questions about plant phyla and bird species and brought in flowers plucked from the quad. At first the Nose seemed to find her charming,
but near the end of the term, he became exasperated.
“I have a wife, Hannah,” he said, his caterpillar eyebrows straining to meet. “This is very flattering, really. Listen, you’ve got an A. An A plus, if there is such a thing. I promise. Just please, don’t come back.”
Hannah didn’t bother to tell the professor her story, because doing so would be a self-indulgent action that would defeat the proverbial point of moving to California. For that reason very few people know that she has a father who went fishing at dusk when she was eleven and never returned. They don’t know that Buzz Legare disappeared into thin air, leaving no note,
body, or explanation.
The fact is, Hannah has a hard time getting those close to her to understand how she could be so preoccupied by someone who left more than twenty years ago. Under her mother’s direction, she and her brother were discouraged from hanging on to things.
Sentimental clutter in the form of, say, photo albums and bulletin boards are not encouraged in the Legare family. Daisy is nothing if not a responsible mother; after her husband’s disappearance, Hannah and Palmer were dutifully sent to church and to see a family counselor, his office complete with painted inspirational posters bearing troubling slogans such as PUNISHMENT HALVED IS JOY DOUBLED! and YOUR YESTERDAYS ARE ONLY YOUR TOMORROWS, AGAIN.
Did the sadness subside? It did. And that’s exactly when, with a groaning crack, the glacial divide in the Legare household began to form. For her brother, Palmer, the topic of her father was closed. Her mother, too, seemed over it, having remarried within a year, something Hannah has never quite been able to forgive her for.
So Hannah entered her twelfth year more than a little baffled. She still had—
has
—questions. For her, an empty boat floating on the harbor is not an obvious conclusion.
Hannah believes her father is alive. As in, still in existence and breathing the same air as she is, on this very Earth. It’s not that she isn’t tempted to believe otherwise; there are just too many unexplained factors. For instance, how does one fall off a boat on a calm spring evening? And why did no one see her father out in the harbor? And why was he fishing on a Monday at twilight? And if he drowned, why was no body ever found? And finally, why,
why
was the dog still there?
After six years of probing, Hannah succeeded only in estranging herself from her family. Palmer, Daisy, and her stepfather were tired of her questions, tired of what they saw as her relentless desire to cause upheaval in their lives. “What do you need?” Daisy once snapped in exasperation. “A shark-eaten carcass?” So when it came time for college, it became clear that
Hannah’s best option was just to leave. Since high school graduation, she’s been back to Charleston only four times: a wedding,
a Christmas, a funeral, and once with Jon—each visit an awkward jail sentence. It isn’t that she doesn’t appreciate the place. Who wouldn’t adore the beaches and a local accent so complex it allows a woman to simultaneously seduce and reprimand in one single word? She probably loved it more than anyone, right up until that day in April when her father took off in his boat to find something better. A crappy thing for him to do, but as she’s gotten older, she’s come to admire her father for it. She’s almost grateful, even.
Because certainly her father’s departure gave her an unquestionable license to leave without looking back.
And she’s thriving, isn’t she? Stanford, a start-up, then Stanford again for business school, and now another start-up out of the ashes of the first. Three marathons, two biking centuries, a marriage (albeit slightly screwed) to a highly appropriate life partner.
Her father never would have dreamed of such a future for her. Often she wakes up in the middle of the night,
wanting to tell him. I’m killing it, Dad, she’d say. How about you? She googles his name once a week. He left long before the Internet; still she sends e-mails to the kinds of addresses he might choose—[email protected], [email protected]
But she receives only auto replies from strangers.
Action failed. Error. Your message did
not go through
.
Taxis always have trouble finding Hannah and Jon’s Upper Terrace apartment, and this one’s no different. Not that she can blame the driver. On a map, the neighborhood looks like the inside of a brain. He refuses her help at first (pride, directions,
men), and for a while, her inner Southerner politely lets him wander. After the second wrong turn, though, she becomes impatient and barks the directions. “Up Fell. Left on Masonic. Keep going. Keep going. Top of the hill. Around the bend. I know it’s curvy, but I promise the street keeps going. Yes, this one. Thanks.”
It was Hannah who found the apartment, a one-bedroom with good fixtures and spectacularly unfriendly neighbors. Not the best deal in the world; they paid $920, 000 cash in a market that could only slither downward. Still, it’s perched on one of the highest hills in San Francisco, meaning that from the living room, one can see the whole city—the coppery tops of the new de Young Museum, just now beginning to green, the washed-out Sunset District, the Crayola smear of the Golden Gate Bridge stretched out against miles of churning sea. The place is small, but that view, at least, Hannah reasoned at the time, had to be worth almost a million dollars. Jon was a bit reluctant, as there would be no room for pets or kids, but that fact,
for reasons Hannah couldn’t clearly explain, only made her want the place more.
The view has its consequences, of course.
With nothing between the windows and the Pacific, the building is constantly under an onslaught of gale-force wind. Gusts rattle the windows, and sometimes, coming around the corner from the protection of the garage, Hannah finds her own private rainstorm opening up just above her head.
It’s not raining tonight, but the wind is high. It whips at her hair and through her shirt. She looks up to the third floor.
The lights are out. She’d use her key, but the locks have been changed. She knows this without even bothering to try them.
It’s a ritual she’s gone through several times now: she screws up; her husband gets new locks. Then, after a large amount of seducing, cajoling, and gentle reasoning, he lets her back in and she pays the locksmith to make her another copy of the new key. Ringing the bell isn’t an option either; he’s most likely not home, and if he is, he won’t answer.
Surveying the building, she thinks of the call she made to her brother a few weeks back. They rarely speak, but she had to do something that day to ward off the afternoon loneliness. Her brother’s voice, still Southern, carried an unmistakable note of annoyance at the news of her separation.
“It’s marriage,” she explained. “I can’t deal.”
“How original,” he said, sighing.
“I know. It’s faith.”
“Faith?”
“Being faithful,” she said. And, after a pause, “It’s a problem.”
The first slipup—shortly after their wedding a year and a half ago—was reasonably innocent. Jon was out of town and she’d gone to a business dinner, after which she’d had too much Maker’s Mark; the next morning, she was naked in a hotel room. Hannah hates secrets, so she told her husband immediately. He was angry but forgave her with sad, unbearably tolerant eyes. Shortly after, she slept with her yoga instructor. And then there was the thing at her college reunion. But when the yoga mistake happened a second time (different instructor), Jon finally took his mother’s heirloom ring back and kicked her out for good.