The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  ‘Help!’ she finally cried, looking toward Ms Manookian. ‘Help!’

  As if in response a fire truck and two police cars pulled up to the fence above the pond, red sirens revolving. Several firemen in black boots and fluorescent green overcoats jumped from the fire truck as two policemen in dark blue padded jackets began climbing over the fence. The first policeman across slid down the snowy slope, motioning with a hand to the man with the red scarf, while another policeman walked slowly toward Binx, holding out his fist. Binx stopped barking and sniffed the policeman’s fist, then wagged his tail. Now the firemen were wrestling what appeared to be an inflated yellow sled out of the back of the fire truck. It had long metal runners; they were hoisting it over the fence.

  A third policeman held a gray bullhorn. He stood behind the fence looking out at Julia, his head tilted toward Ms Manookian beside him, who was telling him something and gesturing with her long bare hands. A moment later he raised the bullhorn to his mouth.

  ‘JULIA. STAY CALM.’

  At the clear, definite sound of her name booming across the ice, she shuddered. Cold air was seeping up through her jacket and her whole body felt numb. She looked at Ms Manookian standing beside a policeman, firemen now climbing past them over the fence, and forgot about the puppy and thought instead of the National Mall, as wide and flat as an airplane runway. Lined with enormous stone buildings built like tombs, filled with the most important things in the world. Natural History. Air and Space. And in the middle of it all, caught in the gravitational field between the white-domed Capitol and the granite obelisk of the Washington Monument, had stood Norman D. Mayer in his snowsuit and helmet, as lonely as an astronaut.

  What had he felt as the police called his name and ordered him to surrender? Had it been like this, a strange feeling of lightness? He must have viewed the tiny swarming scene before him with a kind of pity, realizing that laws no longer applied to him, even gravity no longer applied to him, he was held by nothing in the world but himself.

  She turned her head to glance back at the puppy, but it wasn’t there. When she looked around again, another crack had appeared in the ice in front of her.

  She took one more step backward.

  ‘JULIA. DO NOT MOVE.’

  The ice is cracking around my feet, she wanted to say, but she had lost her voice.

  Ms Manookian was speaking to the policeman with the bullhorn; he listened and nodded, holding the bullhorn away from his mouth. The man with the red scarf had thrown his scarf to the policeman on the bank, who was hauling him out of the water. Another policeman was inching down the slope carrying a blue blanket; in a few moments the two policemen had wrapped the fierce-looking bearded man in the blanket. Even from a distance Julia could see him shivering; his teeth were bared and his face had turned the color of clay. Both policemen stayed close to him, one with a hand on his shoulder. At the fence, people were calling out suggestions and comments, taking photos with their iPhones.

  Julia shuddered again. The bumpy ice around her feet looked like a smashed windshield.

  ‘JULIA. REMAIN CALM. WE HAVE CALLED YOUR PARENTS AND THEY WILL BE HERE SOON.’

  Ms Manookian waved. She cupped her hands around her mouth, crying out in a voice that sounded thin and unreliable after the bullhorn, ‘Don’t worry! Don’t worry, Julia!’

  One fireman had dragged the yellow sled down the slope and was nosing it onto the ice. The other fireman was pulling on a black rubber suit.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ cried Ms Manookian.

  The fireman in the black rubber suit was lying on the sled, propelling it toward her by pushing against the ice with his black gloved hands while the other fireman played out a length of rope. From far away came the steady throb of a helicopter.

  Julia looked up at the sky to see that the cloud with the fin was still there.

  I hope you’re satisfied, she addressed it tiredly. Then the ice cracked again.

  16.

  For weeks Margaret had hardly left the house. She sent Bill to the grocery store, the drug store, on whatever errand must be run; Binx had to be walked, but she kept those walks as short as possible, heading away from the village, hurrying home again, keeping her head down, and especially in the evening doing her best not to look at anything but the sidewalk. They were there, they were always there, but it was her job now not to see them.

  It was her job to stay home. In the days immediately after she fell through the ice on Silsbee Pond, Julia had not wanted to be alone. It was like having her again as a young child, when she wanted to be with Margaret everywhere, followed her from room to room, clung to her hand at bedtime and begged her to stay until she fell asleep. For a while, when Julia was six or seven, she used to ask the same questions, every night: What’s the saddest thing that ever happened to you? What’s your worst memory? Margaret worried Julia must have overheard something about the years before she was born – though Margaret couldn’t imagine how, since she and Bill never discussed it – but unwilling to explain what she was sure Julia could not understand, she had talked about her parents, who had died within a few months of each other several years earlier. They had been elderly, both in poor health. Julia had seemed satisfied with this information; she had scarcely known her grandparents but their deaths were logical sources of sorrow, and eventually she stopped asking her unsettling questions. But now she had started again, more probingly: Was that really the saddest you’ve ever been? Yes, Margaret told her. That was the saddest I’ve ever been. Are you still sad about them? Night after night, Margaret sat at the end of Julia’s bed, leaning against a bolster, listening to her breathe, Julia’s body so slight beneath her quilt she seemed hardly to be there.

  Don’t you dare, Margaret said silently to the dark windows. Filthy beasts.

  She told Bill that Julia needed to stay home for a week or two, as long as she wanted. To rest, she said. To recover, though it was true, Julia seemed fine. An ambulance had been waiting when she was brought off the ice; in five minutes she was at the hospital emergency room, where Margaret and Bill rushed in to find her sitting on a gurney behind a curtain, swaddled to her nose in a quilted white electric blanket, a tuft of soft brown hair sticking up on top of her head, like a damp chick hatching from an egg.

  The doctors all said she was fine. Kids are resilient. A little shaken up, but fine.

  ‘I want her home with me,’ Margaret told Bill.

  He thought Julia should go back to school after a day or two. Get back to normal. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘You’re going to make her think this was something more than it was.’ But in the end he gave in.

  She’d spent those days in the house with Julia listening, waiting to hear her footsteps on the stairs, the sound of her moving about in her bedroom. When Julia was a baby, Margaret had been terrified she would stop breathing in her sleep and during Julia’s naps would hurry to her room, sometimes two or three times, to peer in at her from the doorway; in the middle of the night she would wake even out of a deep exhausted sleep and run down the hallway to Julia’s room to check on her. Now she invented excuses to knock on Julia’s door for the simple relief of seeing her cross-legged on her bed, reading a book or hanging over the laptop. ‘What?’ Julia would look up. ‘Why do you keep coming in here?’ And they would have their usual arguments, about Julia’s tone of voice, about whether she spent too much time on the computer, until Julia said something spiteful, which was the real relief, because then Margaret could retreat, flushed, angry, buoyed by hurt feelings, until the old dread seized her again.

  But soon Julia wanted to go back to school. She really was fine. Her fall through the ice had become a story to be told again and again to Hannah and in answer to questions posted on her Facebook page, every day more exaggerated, less serious, requiring more exclamation points, emoticons and double question marks.

  Her explanations sounded so reasonable: she thought she’d seen a puppy. A white puppy. But it was just a lump of snow. It was early morning, the tim
e of day when the light plays tricks on you. Why was she walking by the pond in the first place? She wanted to take Binx for a walk. He was getting fat because he didn’t get long walks anymore. Of course it was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do, all Margaret’s friends agreed, but kids are so impulsive; at least now she’ll never make a mistake like that again, at least she’s learned a lesson about being careful. Although it was hard to tell what Julia had learned, once she went back to her iPod, to her monosyllabic replies at dinner and to keeping her door closed.

  ‘What did you see?’ Margaret asked, again and again. ‘Tell me. You can tell me.’

  ‘Nothing, okay? I thought I saw something but it was nothing. Leave me alone.’

  Julia had gone back to school last week. Kids had put up signs, decorated her locker. ‘Welcome Back, Julia!’ was displayed on a computer monitor mounted on the wall in the foyer. Julia had not disclosed any of this herself; Hannah had told Naomi, who reported it to Margaret. Someone had captured her fall through the ice with an iPhone and posted it on YouTube; Julia had become a minor celebrity.

  Margaret had to resist the urge to text her four or five times a day (Bill had bought Julia a cell phone, for ‘emergencies’), just to ask how she was doing; she had to limit herself to two or three questions when Julia finally walked up the front steps in the afternoon. How was school? Anything interesting happen today? Really, nothing?

  It had been weeks since Margaret slept more than an hour or two, and when she did sleep her dreams were thin and restless. She kept having one dream over and over: of herself riding on a bus and looking out the window. The bus passed a grassy triangle where three roads met, with the river beyond, and on the grass stood a dark-haired man in a bright blue suit. As he turned to look at her, staring at him from the bus window, she saw he had the face of a vicious dog. But she was not surprised – or she was surprised, but only in the way one is surprised to see an old acquaintance in an unexpected place. The dog-faced man seemed to recognize her, too, and lifted a hand as the bus passed by.

  Finally Naomi gave her a vial of Ambien. ‘You’ve got to get some sleep.’

  Naomi kept saying Margaret needed a break. A change of scene. Margaret herself had started to wonder if this might be true. Just yesterday morning as she walked Binx down Rutherford Road, the sun had come out for the first time in days and she had felt a little better. The air seemed milder than usual. Errant warm currents flowed up from the sidewalk, escaping from beneath melting banks of snow, and she had been seized by a desire to keep walking. Somewhere in the world people were sitting outside at round café tables with iron tops perforated like lace, sipping wine and wearing sunglasses. What if she drove to the airport with Julia, got them both on a plane and flew to – Florida, the Bahamas? Just got up and went? She heard a clatter of palmetto fronds; a balmy sea wind wafted from the east. But then the temperature dropped and once more it began to snow.

  Yesterday morning Naomi had called to ask if Margaret would drive Clarice Watkins and Hedy Fischman to tonight’s book club meeting. George Wechsler was at last coming to talk about his novel. Clarice’s car had a broken headlight and Hedy never drove at night anymore. Margaret said she wasn’t sure she was going; she would have to think about it. Hedy called next: neither she nor Clarice had read George’s novel, but Hedy wanted to see what all the fuss was about and Clarice had never visited a book club; she was curious to see what one was like.

  Margaret figured Naomi had engineered all this, so she would feel obligated to go to the book club meeting and wouldn’t be able to back out at the last minute. She said as much to Bill when he came home from work that evening, adding, ‘I don’t really want to go.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, turning away. ‘Get out of the house.’

  Now Hedy and Clarice were sitting in her warming car while Margaret cleared off the windshield and the back windows with a scraper, snow squeaking under her boots, brushing off the headlights, which glowed through lids of ice. Snow sifted down the back of her coat collar and settled into her hair. By the rhododendrons she saw something move, but it was only the shadow of a branch in the headlights.

  ‘Well,’ she said a few minutes later, inching out of her driveway. ‘Here we go. Wish me luck.’ Beyond the windshield wipers, the world was filled with static.

  ‘Bill’s home,’ she said a moment later, though no one in the car had asked about Bill. ‘And Julia can always call if she needs me.’ She thought of her bathrobe, the lamp by her bed. Her nightstand, on which waited a glass of water, her book, the vial of tablets.

  She bent over the steering wheel as they reached the street. Clarice said that she was doing fine and that the road looked pretty clear.

  ‘I’m a little nervous,’ Margaret confessed. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve been out. And to be honest, I don’t know how I’ll face George again, after what happened at Christmas.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Hedy, mummified by scarves in the front passenger seat. ‘It was a nice evening. Wasn’t it, Dr Watkins? We all had a very nice time.’

  George, to his credit, had been a gentleman. Emailed her the next day to say thank you for dinner and to say he hoped she was feeling better. Margaret gave a little laugh. For weeks she hadn’t been able to think of that night without slight vertigo, and yet now it seemed hardly worth remembering.

  They had left Rutherford Road and were heading toward the village. The streets looked so different at night, muffled by snow, bushes turned into small hills, dark houses into mountains. A white mailbox stood on four legs by the curb, watching her drive by.

  The three of them were squeezed onto a couch, amid an assortment of kilim pillows, each holding a glass of wine, Hedy still wrapped in her big black coat because she said she was chilled to the bone. Margaret was playing with the silver ostrich charm hanging around the stem of her wine glass. Naomi had given everyone an animal charm, to protect against mixing wine glasses and spreading germs. Flu season.

  Yes, Julia is doing much better, thank you. Back to normal. It was very scary but we think she’s learned a lesson. You know kids: act first, think later.

  She’d listened to herself repeat this short litany four or five times since their arrival as women she knew came up to inquire after Julia. Too much homework, everyone murmured. Too many reality shows on TV, making kids believe they can do anything. Look at the way they cross the street without looking. But clearly all of them thinking: screwed-up parents. She stared at the plate of cheese and crackers on the coffee table.

  When she looked up again Sharon Saltonstall was standing over her in a green cable-knit sweater, her wide face a cauliflower of concern. Margaret repeated that Julia was doing much better. Then she said she was sorry to hear about Sharon’s dog.

  Sharon said it had been hard, but Lucky went quickly and didn’t suffer, and it turned out to be an aneurysm, natural causes after all. In any case, compared to what Margaret was going through, she couldn’t complain.

  ‘Boy, you guys have had a tough time.’ She was leaning down, hands braced on her thighs. ‘What a scare with Julia. I don’t know how you let her out of your sight. I’d be home with her every minute. Really sorry to hear about your husband’s firm, too. Boy, that’s rough.’

  Margaret agreed it had been a hard time.

  ‘That story in the Globe was awful.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Gosh, hope he’ll be able to find another job.’

  From across the room, Margaret saw herself sitting on the sofa, a slim blonde-haired woman in a blue silk blouse, holding a wine glass and smiling, a small piece of barbed wire in her mouth.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll get some more wine.’

  When Margaret sat down again, Sharon had vanished.

  ‘Odious woman.’ Hedy leaned forward among the scratchy pillows. ‘Poof! I got rid of her. Piece of cheese?’ she said, lifting a cracker toward Margaret.

  Hedy had at last taken off her coat to reveal
a hairy brown cardigan that looked like coconut matting. In the living room’s low light, her small dark face might have been a carven mask, cheeks sunken, nose beaky, heavy pouches under half-closed eyes.

  ‘She will be fine. Isn’t that right, Dr Watkins?’ Hedy ate the cracker herself, then reached out to pat Margaret’s arm. ‘Your Julia. She is very young. She will be okay. And Bill,’ she added. ‘Him too. You will see. In the end, it will be okay.’

  Margaret saw herself turn her barbed smile on Hedy.

  ‘You will see,’ said Hedy, subsiding back into the pillows.

  She had gone to sit shiva with Hedy after Marv died. Hedy had worn the hairy brown cardigan then, too. The house had been airless and overheated, full of the odor of damp wool coats and the nutty stale smell of rewarmed coffee. People sat in twos and threes in the darkened rooms, eating poppy seed cookies and talking in soft voices, while Hedy’s little gray dog ran in circles, yip-yapping.

  ‘It needs to be fed,’ Margaret heard someone murmur.

  ‘That thing always needs to be fed,’ said someone else.

  Margaret went into Hedy’s pantry and found a bag of kibble in a cabinet; she poured a cupful into the dog’s dish with a sound like hail on a tin roof. As soon as she put the dish on the floor the dog began gobbling, little black eyes bulging. Finally it looked up from its bowl and she thought she heard it say thank you.

  In the Melmans’ living room women clustered in the soft lamplight, holding wine glasses, admiring Naomi’s collection of Kokopelli figures playing pan pipes on the mantelpiece, everyone dressed in silk and light wool, their animal charms winking. Naomi’s children had been banished upstairs, along with Stan and Skittles the dog. Every now and then screeches of TV laughter came from above and the sound of Skittles’s tail thumping the floor.

  George arrived a few minutes late and was surrounded by a pack of women, led by Naomi. Hedy was in the middle of telling a story about a Viennese uncle of Marv’s, a medical student studying to be a psychiatrist who had known Freud and had once been allowed to photograph Freud lying on his famous couch. When Marv’s uncle fled Vienna, he gave the photograph to his landlady. What that photograph would be worth now! George turned around and caught Margaret’s eye; he smiled at her. Hedy was still talking about Marv’s uncle, who became a hat salesman in Newark because no American medical school would accept his Viennese degrees. ‘And he could have been another Freud.’ Hedy raised both palms.