Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (8 page)

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signs, the call from Colorado. The thief hadn't bothered to remove his tags. José took off his gloves and said, stroking Duncan's head, "You are one lucky dog. Why you, little guy? Who you got looking after you?" Duncan breathed his terrible breath into the small room. "Why you?" José said again.

In the car, the dog in the front seat, nose glued to the vent, Lillian asked herself the same question. Why Duncan? José had said, "I don't know about you, but I detect some divine intervention here." Lillian thought the sky looked too calm for God, too bland for anything but the occasional plane, sparrow, or column of pollution. At least she could thank Jim and Kris and get rid of those signs.

But Kris had quit, the bagel manager said. Lillian asked for a forwarding address. Kris was a friend. The manager gave Lillian a glance as if trying to assess the likelihood of a bond between someone with a haircut like Kris's and a woman with a handbag like Lillian's. He said it was against policy to give out personal data on employees. "But she doesn't work here anymore," Lillian pointed out. The policy extended to former workers, too, he added. "Well," said Lillian and haughtily bought a tub of scallion cream cheese.

She took Duncan with her into the copy store and waited to present herself until Jim finished taking an order for wedding invitations. "Hello," she said, "I was in here the other day and you Xeroxed posters about my lost dog. I wanted to tell you he's back and to thank you for your kindness." Duncan panted at her ankles.

Jim looked confused for a moment then said, "Oh yeah, the dog with the ribbon. That's nice, ma'am. I'm glad for you."

"He's here," said Lillian and she picked Duncan up to be introduced. The dog blinked in the flashes leaking from the copiers.

Jim looked a little uneasy. "I'm happy for you, ma'am," he said and glanced past Lillian, who turned to see a line of customers lumping up behind her.

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"I'm so sorry. I just wanted to say thank you."

"You're welcome," said Jim. "Thanks for using Top Copy."

Driving home, Lillian remembered Jim's cat had just died. "How could I have been so thoughtless?" she asked Duncan and recalled the essential pleasure of the company of dogs: mute tolerance for all ramblings. She sank her right hand in the fur below his collar, steering with the other through thickening traffic to the house. "I'm sorry, Jim," she said. Duncan moaned. At a stoplight, she dipped her finger in the cream cheese and gave it to the dog to lick.

Lillian and Duncan entered the house in near dark. She filled his bowls and nudged him his favorite bone. "We're home, dear," she said. Duncan lapped some water and trundled from room to room, nose twitching at sofas, door frames, potted plants. "What are you looking for, boy?" she asked, walking behind him and switching on lights. "What is it?'' she asked. She hooked her thumbs in his armpits and lifted him. Fat and fur rumpled around his neck, front paws paddled the air. He panted. "Where have you been?"

Duncan panted louder. "Who took you?" He started to squirm. "Why did you go with them?" She shifted him into her arms and buried her face into his ears. Not a trace of someone else's perfume, strange food, an unfamiliar city. He must have spent a long time in a car, staring at a blur of New York, Ohio, Kansas. "Why did you go?" she asked him again, taking his snout in her hand. "Were you trying to come home?" He screwed up his eyes and sneezed. She put him back on the floor. In the kitchen, he circled his blanket three times and settled in to twitchy sleep.

She'd never know. How strange it was not to have any idea what Duncan had seen and done, listened to or eaten. Lillian found herself near tears and wondered why. Her dog was home. Her husband still her husband. Her boys alive and thriving. It was that woman in the alley again. The strangeness of not knowing why she'd died, why it wasn't someone else, a neighbor, an old

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man, a Serb general. You made her up, Lillian told herself. You made her up.

Sitting there in the kitchen filled with blue light, Lillian noticed the blink of the answering machine. Owen had rewired it and now they could receive the messages of the world. There they were. The inaugural calls. Lillian hesitated before pushing the button and was almost relieved that the first one was just a breath and a click. A captured hesitation. No news at all.

To her surprise, the second call came from Claudia Merchant. Lillian and Owen had always laughed at Claudia's molded hair, Bob's signet ring, their trips to exotic places that never seemed to change them. She was taken aback at how it pleased her to hear the thin voice. "Lillian," Claudia said, "I'm astonished you and Owen have one of these things. Anyway, I wanted to ask you a favor about my Siberian iris. I left the corms in the garden and was wondering if you'd mind asking the new family about digging them up." She left her new number as if she'd never had another her whole life and said she'd call later.

"How typical," Lillian said to Duncan, who flicked an ear. Behaving as if she could make a sort of Xerox of her garden. That was Claudia's problem, trying to manage every last detail. No wonder she had a daughter so troubled she lived like a stunned animal in the corner of a hospital room. Claudia, too, had spent her time away, returning glassy in the eye and far too lean.

That's what could happen when you pretended too well that pruned shrubs and smooth hair led to control. Then again, it occurred to Lillian, maybe Claudia knew all that. Maybe she had realized it was a matter of geography and blessed history that bombs hadn't fallen here yet and that given some small shifts and bad decisions, it was just a matter of time. Maybe the South with its shield of magnolias and heat seemed safer. In Sarajevo, Lillian thought, people probably didn't waste time thinking about control or the loss of it. You didn't have time. You had soap to buy, and carrots.

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Lillian said, "Wake up, Duncan," and the dog groaned and rolled to expose his belly to the ceiling. In the garage, she picked up a trowel and went to the driveway to wait for Owen. It came to her then why she was disappointed when she heard Duncan was alive and coming home. She'd done nothing to earn all this rich luck. She'd expected at last to be punished.

Owen drove in and the garage light sprang on automatically. Lillian saw her husband bend to gather his briefcase and the rumpled paper. He wore a gray suit, a color some men at sixty could nearly turn to silver, buffed as a trophy. "Hi," said Lillian.

"Is he back?" Owen said. "What are you doing with a trowel?"

"Yes, he's back. Fast asleep in the kitchen as if nothing had ever happened. It's sort of odd." Lillian looked at Owen, the same clear, rare look she gave Duncan at the airport, as if she hadn't seen her husband for weeks. "Claudia called and wants her iris. I felt like digging. Why don't you come?"

"Iris? Now?" said Owen, shifting his briefcase to the other hand.

"Yes, now," Lillian said.

"You're going to march into their garden and start demolishing flower beds? Aren't there twelve children and a stable of au pairs?"

"Probably all at home, too," said Lillian and started walking toward the Merchants' old house.

Owen followed, arguing. "Lillian, it's trespassing."

"I know, Owen," Lillian sighed, holding the gate for her husband. Lights shone upstairs. Children's voices warbled from the windows along with shrieks and splashing water. Bath time.

Owen whispered, "Don't be crazy."

"Are you coming?" she said in a normal voice.

Owen came behind her, treading carefully. The iris beds sat near a new swing set made of hollow metal tubes. Lillian sank to her knees. The earth was warm on top, wriggling and cool with pine needles an inch lower. There was the first one: the corm

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Claudia wanted, cool and flaking. "Lillian," Owen hissed behind her. Then she heard a crash. She turned to see he'd slipped on a plastic dump truck and fallen on the swing set, smashing his knee against the seesaw.

"Goddamn it!" he shouted. A light flicked on downstairs. Lillian heard footsteps on hardwood floors. "What did I do to deserve you?" Owen yelled. His briefcase had burst open, page after page of legal paper scattering around the toys.

Leaving the iris and the trowel on the ground, Lillian heaved herself up and went to her husband. She gave him her hand. When he was upright, she dusted his lapels. "We're going to be caught," she said. Her knees were stained with dirt; her hair was probably a mess.

A bulb on the porch snapped on. A tall man in a suit stood there, his face crumpled in a scowl as he peered into the dusk. "What's going on here? Who's there?" he called out.

They stood in the garden, blinking slightly. "Hi," Lillian said. "My name's Lillian. This is Owen. We're your neighbors." She felt blurred and fragile, as if she might not stay whole if she didn't hold hard to her husband. With the other hand, she waved at the angry man, in a gesture that was half surrender, half hello.

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A Private State

I sat on our porch and played with the plastic fingers of the skeleton my father had bought in New Orleans during his residency. His name was Louis, in honor of the state, and he'd recently lost another metatarsal. Our moves had not been easy on him. Here in Maine, his elbows rattled in a wind that smelled of salt and stranded crabs. It was Tuesday night, three days before the end of school, and I found myself reciting the names of the bones he still had left instead of solving the last equations of the year.

I was also thinking about Jake Loiseau, the dark boy who sat a row ahead in math. Like me, he was at sea in numbers. The son of the chemistry teacher, it was odd he had no flair for the quantitative. Instead, he had stillness, and I knew it came from living in the same town his entire life. Jake seemed to me to be the essence of Maine, which appeared to be a very private state.

Unlike Florida, our last home, a place I remembered like a short, violent dream, in fragments of alarming colors. The Doctor had only worked there six months when Naomi, my mother, started wondering, often and aloud, if a woman could actually die from humidity. If the Doctor heard the word one more time, I thought he might kick cracks in the pots of bougainvillea, Pensacola's one boon. So last August, he'd called in a favor and found a job at St. Dympna's, a hospital inland from Biddeford. "Spruce,

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it's got spruce," he said during one of our last Florida suppers, and attacked his dinner in that silver-knife way he had, the style that survived all our dislocations.

Though I was fourteen, no one mentioned schools. But if either of my parents had asked, I could have told them how I handled a new town. You had to touch a place to know it. The cracked paint of a window sash, the wet pole of a parking meter. And as usual, no one was around to talk to. The Doctor was on duty at the
E.R.
; Naomi'd scrawled a message that said "Out 'til 10." Naomi was vague on numbers, too: 10 might stretch to 11, though she'd dash back before the end of the Doctor's shift. I let the porch door slam and drifted away from word problems. I was starting to wonder what it'd be like to touch not a mailbox flag or the knob on a cigarette machine, but an actual boy. Not that this would happen soon. I was heads taller than the ones I knew, which we all found quite scary.

Heading downtown, I let my knuckles brush hedges that hid noisy families in yards. People had touched each other in those houses and as a result, babies had been born. Toys in colors worthy of Florida crowded their drives. Everyone on our street was home tonight: the Nasons, the Ballards, the Marcottes, names I turned over in my head like smooth stones found on beaches. Next came Mr. Fleming, the butcher, who'd been glimpsed in a woman's slip when his blind was three inches from the sill. All people had seen was a lacy hem and an inch of Mr. Fleming's pale, haired thigh and that was it. Now it was impossible to buy steak without looking twice at his stumpy fingers.

I'd heard about it in the Purity Supreme, in line behind Mrs. Nason who was telling the cashier, the sort of news that made me feel at home somewhere. But passing Mr. Fleming's, I told him silently I'd remember him more for his clean store and honest scale.

Naomi said she'd always had doubts about the butcher. He fit in too well. No matter where we lived, being taken for a native

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