Authors: Cynthia Tottleben
“I had a good day with you,” she said from the free zone outside my room. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
“I love you, Mom,” I said loudly as the lock turned.
Tippy immediately let loose a string of curses.
Mom stood stiff on the other side of my door. I put my hand against the wood and imagined her doing the same thing.
“Goodnight, Lucy.”
When I went to the window the moon was gone. Fog settled in, obscuring her. Tippy nipped at my ankle and jumped on the bed. I followed her, exhausted. But finally clean.
* * *
My thoughts paraded around the room, random but as comfortable as an old pair of sweat pants.
Applesauce.
Bananas.
Hot blackberry cobbler, the deep purple of its heart washed clean with rivulets of melted vanilla.
Rolling snow man parts with Brandy in the side yard. Our scarves crocheted and colorful. Tippy, jumping with excitement beside us, her tail slicing arcs into the fluff, better than any trail of breadcrumbs to follow home.
The early onset of evening. Candles gathered in groups throughout the house, caroling, a silent chorus warming all our hearts.
Harvest spice. Winter wind. Speech class, the albatross of every freshman. Making the required three-minute commercial that was always the first-semester final exam.
My sister, teaching me to first lurch like Frankenstein, then mimic her ballerina twists and twirls as we explored the land behind Mr. Varnell’s half-collapsed barn. Our hair, nests filled with leaves. Mom cackling—Old Mom cackling—as she tried so hard to comb out the mess.
Shopping with our allowance. Saturday morning bike rides to town. Stickers at the Hallmark store. Nickel candy at the old hotel where the creepy men who had never quite made it back mentally from the war lived. Buying socks for the old folks at the nursing home. Dancing for them. Brandy kissing all the forgotten women the nurses said never had visitors.
Trying our roller skates on the road out front, but unable to stand up with all the rocks in the way. Brandy showing me how to ride my bike with them tied around my neck. A balancing act. Swinging back and forth on the basketball court outside the YMCA, our hands intertwined, screaming with delight, the wheels so unencumbered on this surface, our bodies a vortex pulling all the joy in the world right into our center, into our hearts, entwining us, that moment, for all eternity.
Lines for the school play. The church Christmas program. Girl Scouts before Mom stopped letting me go. Before she turned off the phone. Wouldn’t let me get the mail.
Jester, the cat we fed out back. His gold specks good fortune, Brandy told him.
My silly sister. Crawling into bed with me. Putting her ice cube toes into the backs of my knees. Tickling my sides. Telling me stories about her father, the dad who never looked me in the eye, a man who lived like a fairy tale in both our lives.
Scrabble.
School Olympics. The long jump, an event just for me. My gold medals. A whole day out of classes, at the university’s football field, other kids’ parents coming out to watch.
The homey, warm smell of chlorine. The heat of summer dissipated with one leap from the diving board. Learning to float in swimming lessons when we were too young to be in school. Brandy sinking.
Bible camp. Canoeing. Brandy running off with Rick Remsburg, the counselors hunting for them, yelling as they walked through the woods, my nerves on edge, worried. Her voice whispering in my ear after all lights were out. Her first kiss. My jealousy. My sister, so beautiful, so brave, my smile her personal hostage.
Dancing while the whirlybirds coated the sky. Raking the leaf pile. Tearing it apart again with Tippy, the three of us jumping in and out, gathering up handfuls, useless leaf bombs we threw anyway. The rest of the world hidden from us by a mountain of our own creation.
* * *
I stopped the whole hash mark gig, preferring not to know how many days of captivity we had suffered.
Instead I took to drawing on my walls, making a mural with the colored pencils I had hidden weeks ago. I drew the deer from the cornfield, Brandy, a tree about six miles from here that was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Of course I had scores of birds and even some fairies soaring through my landscape.
Tippy, however, followed her own muse. I could barely even look at her work, the content was so disturbing. Mom with a knife in her back. Mom hanging from the same tree, her eyes bulging and covered with flies. Shit piles. Also with flies. Flames and eyeballs, all watching me while I slept.
Tippy formed big block letters screaming FUCK YOU BITCH from the middle of the wall. Every night she filled the words in with her vicious rantings after I went to sleep. Her lexis was so twisted that I had long ago stopped reading.
My dog wouldn’t discuss it. I empathized with her frustration, but her negativity wasn’t going to get us anywhere. We were lucky Mom never came into our room. I couldn’t imagine how she would have tormented Tippy over her “artwork.”
“I blame you for this,” Tippy told me, in one of her moods.
Like Mom, Tippy fluctuated all over the place. One day she was all about snuggling and having her back scratched, the next berating me for my weaknesses and inability to free us.
“You don’t even try the door. Maybe you could break it down.”
“Tip, I can barely get the window open. How would I manage the door?” My energy was so depleted anymore I had problems holding up a book to read.
“If you weren’t such a coward you would find a way,” she barked at me.
“Why don’t you do it?” I yelled, thankful Mom was at work. I couldn’t tell if the words came out of my mouth anymore or just festered in my head.
“That’s the winning solution. Why don’t you crawl out the window? You could slide off the roof and the snow would cushion your fall. The neighbors would surely come let me out, if you could tell them I’m stuck here….”
“It’s always about you, Tippy. I thought dogs were loyal.”
“I was. Until this. Shit, I put up with your quivering for years and never said anything. I felt pretty sorry for you. But I have to draw the line somewhere.”
I didn’t talk to Tippy for two days. Or at least it seemed like two days. The darkness was so familiar I couldn’t tell when one ended and another began anymore.
She finally apologized but stayed on her side of the room.
“The hungrier I get, the tastier you look,” she spouted while I hovered over the wastebasket.
“You are really starting to annoy me. How can I look tasty?”
“I was talking to the trash can.”
“Jesus, that’s sick!” But I couldn’t help the giggles that set in.
Tippy smiled and joined me on the bed. Her apology this time was genuine, her tail practically bruising me with each ferocious wag. We cuddled and I could feel her tension ease.
“We need a plan, Lucy. If you don’t do something soon, we’ll both die in here.”
“She’s my mother, Tippy. I can’t hurt her.”
Tippy
I have been here before. Years ago. Locked in a cage, sad and quiet. Lonely and waiting. Looking out the door, trying to have a conversation with every bird or human or scrap of paper that came near me. Amazed that I, then known as Winnie the Wiener Dog, was trapped and no one seemed to care.
When your pack abandons you, it’s hard to recover.
I have always lived with high integrity. Pooped where they told me to poop. Didn’t jump on the furniture. Didn’t lick the kid’s hands, even if they were coated in all kinds of delicious foods. Played and performed and pleased my pack.
Yet one morning they promised me ice cream. We got in the car. I got to watch the neighborhood roll by—and barked at Felix, the stupid cat next door—looked out the window, tolerated the kid, let everyone know how happy I was to be with them.
I could smell the place miles away. Death. Desolation. Depression. And they drove me to it anyway. Me, Winnie. My pack walked me in, walked back out. I thought of the times they’d dressed me up in that stupid hero cape and I hadn’t even complained. Itched, yes. Complained, no. Hadn’t I done what my humans wanted?
Cages sitting on cages. Cats. Mice, even. A dozen birds. Everyone hollering for attention. The cute ones getting it. Me, with my bad eye, getting ignored. Laughed at.
The eye wasn’t even my fault. The kid did it, not long before they left me. Put a plastic sword in and pulled it out, his mom screaming at me when I yelped. Like I had done something wrong. Like I wasn’t good enough because he had disfigured me. My scar, hot. The place my eye had been a physical longing that I could never fill.
By the time you came I was putting on my best ostrich routine. Paw over my face. Shivering. Backed in the corner. Out of my head. The cage metal my pack had rammed through my heart. Winnie the Weiner Dog, skewered. And on display.
Your speech was song to me. Liquid. Smooth, flowing, easy. I uncovered my face. Waited for your head to bounce back. Worried about the awful words you might call me.
“Hi, beautiful. What’s your name?” you asked.
I could smell my own waste on myself. In my former life this elicited horrible feelings of shame. But you only drew closer. You didn’t seem to notice the depths to which I’d fallen.
My gaze met yours. I didn’t want to play games and hide from you. Better to just let you see the badness and then you could run.
“Can I pet you?” Your finger slid through the bars, across the tip of my snout. I scooted closer and let it run over my cheek. Fell into you. Put the scabby wound against your palm and let you siphon the pain right out of it.
We melted together. The spike came out. Memories of the old pack, gone. My good eye focused on your tender face, and I knew that you would be my girl. That this time, this crate, the eternity I had lived in this foul-smelling building were well spent if I could cuddle up and feel your arms wrap around my body.
You turned your chin to the side. Smiled. Kissed my snout when I pushed it between the bars. We were so close I could see it. Your eye, also sick. Your eye, with a circle blooming inside like a flower.
I sniffed it. Your wound gave off a scent like the basement of my old home. Moldy. Wet. Slightly sick.
Excitement overwhelmed all other thoughts. Another girl joined us, your sister. Then your mom. She paused when she looked at me, her attention on my deformation. What was it she saw and you didn’t?
You saved me. Opened the door, let me jump into your arms. Freed me. Loved me.
We shared the same seat in the car. You called me Tippy and it fit. I was no longer a Wiener Dog wearing a cape and doing flips for chunks of biscuits. I was Tippy, Princess of the Tea Party. Tippy, the Mouse Stalker. Tippy, Cuddler Extraordinaire.
And you were my girl.
I have been through this before. The wind is cold. I do not miss the outside. I have enough room to stretch my legs and roam from wall to wall. My cage this time is enormous compared to the last.
But not you, my little one. Your cage is so much harder to bear. I see your humiliation and it is mine from old. Pissing where one shouldn’t. The sickness creeping through your system. Your scent no longer that of girl but of that familiar mildew spread from your face to your fingertips, even the bottoms of your toes.
I was alone when my pack left me. Stranded. Isolated. Left without explanation. The cape removed, the biscuits hidden.
My world was nothing but darkness when you found me. Saved me. Looked at me with your own polluted vision and held me despite my ugliness.
Now our roles have switched. Your pack has dissolved, your alpha powerful but ruled by a different moon. Together we are held against our will. We may be hungry, but we are sisters and we have each other.
We can warm the sheets together. Chase spiders for protein. Tell stories while I fold into you and calm you with my heartbeat, the kisses I slather across your cheeks.
This time, my girl. This time I will save you.
I have a plan.
Joan
Six months after Mom passed I got the FedEx box in the mail.
Aunt Evelyn’s books. Sent from a storage company in Maine, with explicit instructions from Mom’s estate to turn them over to me once she was gone.
I locked them in the closet. When we moved to Iowa they found their way into the attic. I had no use for them.
After all, the rest of the family was long gone. Evelyn, dead at the table that day when I was a young girl. My Grandma Sweeney hit by a car four years later while getting her mail. Cousin Jackie drowned on a canoe trip on her thirtieth birthday. Her twin daughters suffocated, locked in a refrigerator playing hide and seek a year later. The whole Lang family wiped out during a tornado on the Fourth of July. Mom, her hands sawed off less than an hour before she finally bled to death on my living-room floor.
I brought them down the winter of your eleventh birthday. By then your birthmark and I were quite familiar, as it liked to tease me more and more as you matured, coming out to join us for a snack when it was pitch black outside and we were playing Sorry! at the kitchen table or hovering in the morning air before it had scrambled for cover after you had just crawled from bed. I had gotten to know it so well we were almost on a first-name basis.
I took to my room that first night and struggled to draw myself back out after I started reading. Aunt Evelyn had been very thorough, attaching notebooks to ancient journals so her study could be interpreted with each original document.
Banking didn’t lend itself to historical research. I spent my days selling mortgages and signing customers up for car loans that everyone knew they couldn’t afford. What did I know of Portugal? Kharakhorum? Monkshood?