Mountain, mountain, mountain.
Mountains on every side. Mountains that looked pixelated by gravel and chaparral, mountains that looked like their faces were crumbling. At certain hours of the day, with the sun disappeared and the mountains outlined, the mountain range looked like a tidal wave, about to crash down, about to sweep everything clean.
The steady desert heat meant Thora applied and reapplied medicated lip balm, refilled her water bottle from communal jugs, water tinted by lemon slices and mint. They werenât allowed cell phones but could call home as much as they liked â after the first week, anyway. They could go into town with staff supervision. Thora didnât leave the Center, but her roommate, Ally, came back with turquoise dreamcatchers and magazines, big Saran-Wrapped cookies from the bakery.
When Thora wasnât in group, or doing check-ins with her counselor, she and Ally sat out by the pool in terry cloth robes, on lounge chairs that smelled a little moldy. Ally was twenty, the daughter of a senator. She wondered aloud how many Instagram followers she might have lost over the last month without her phone. Because Ally had diabetes, the staff let her keep her insulin and syringes, which she carried around in a pink zip-purse with a crown on it.
keep calm and carry on.
Thora liked to watch Ally inject herself, pooch up the pale skin above her waistband. It was almost like doing drugs herself.
All in all, it was a nice place. The landscaping was professional, attended to by many sunburned men. The food had a pre-chewed quality, lots of purees and smoothies, though, famously, the meals were good, better than at other places. Thora could attest to that, no soggy chicken fingers, no frozen chocolate cake crispy with ice shards. They were well nourished. The staff gave out vitamins in plastic organizers, grainy vitamins, probiotics in gummy form, which was another way to tell this was not quite rehab but some way station before rehab, the rules loosely enforced, the idea of authority introduced without the necessary follow-through.
It was more of a holding pen, a quiet place â it was assumed that everyone there was very tired. They were all overworked, stressed, and perhaps that had led them to make bad decisions that
had adversely affected the people around them. The Media Room was stacked with old Academy screeners, though every night for the last two weeks, Ally and Thora had watched a Ken Burns documentary about national parks. This alone seemed to take years off their lives.
When Thora called James, once a day, she could tell he was summoning a sort of gravitas, performing a solemnity he would later report to his therapist. He was attempting, she realized, to be present. Thora had only been gone two weeks: already James had started to seem theoretical, a series of still photos that didnât quite coalesce into someone she had married.
âYou sound strong,â James said. âReally.â
âMm,â Thora said.
âI love you,â James said, somber, his voice dropping an octave.
For a moment, she studied the silence between them with curiosity: suddenly she could do things like this, stop answering, stop talking, and it was fine.
She forced herself to speak. âI love you, too.â James was, she knew, not a bad person.
They were bored, lights out, Thoraâs headlamp illuminating the corners of the room: the not-bad abstract paintings, the window cracked to let in the chilly night air. Outside were the dark shapes of the big aloe plants, the cacti. Thora stared at the twin beds, the matching coverlets. She hadnât shared a room since college. It had been so long ago: she couldnât remember if sheâd actually liked any of her friends, the girl she lived with who kept her hair short, who baked loaves of sourdough in the dorm kitchen. She was a wilderness guide now. Thora was sure her life would seem appalling to the girl. Maybe it was.
Ally slept naked. Thora couldâve complained about this, she guessed â complaints were almost encouraged, showed they were setting limits and responding proactively to their environments â but she didnât care. Thora liked the blunt fact of Allyâs presence, liked watching Ally move around, inspecting one of her pale tits for nipple hair under the lamplight. They took away Allyâs tweezers after she plucked every hair from her left armpit, though she showed Thora she could do it with her fingernails, too. She often fell asleep with one hand on her crotch, as if it was a pet. That night, Ally was reading the book sheâd been reading the last two weeks. Thora had seen a lot of people carrying the book around the Center: making a big deal of bringing it to lunch, women squeezing the hardcover tightly to their chests as they walked to Restorative Yoga.
âCan I see?â Thora said. Ally passed it over.
Thora read just a few pages. It was about a plucky doll maker in occupied Paris during World War II. It seemed like a book for people who hated books.
âThis is terrible,â Thora said, flipping the book to see the author photo. A woman stared back from a razzle of Aztec jewelry. âThe author looks like the worldâs most cheerful nine-year-old.â
âItâs actually really good,â Ally said, snatching it back. Thora had hurt her feelings.
âSorry,â Thora said. Ally didnât respond, on the edge of pouting. She had pulled the covers up over herself, turning away from Thora.
âWanna test my blood?â Thora said.
At this, Ally brightened. She sat up. She had been begging to test Thoraâs blood sugar.
âCome here,â she said, patting her bed, taking out her little pink purse. Suddenly she seemed very professional, despite her nudity.
Ally held Thoraâs right hand in hers, palm up, the fingers splayed.
âHere we go.â
She jabbed Thoraâs finger, then held a tissue to it to absorb the drop of red. It stung worse than she had imagined it might. Thora sucked her fingertip hard.
âYou do this to yourself all the time?â
âOne-oh-five,â Ally said, briskly, after feeding the paper slip into her little machine. âVery nice.â
Ally dropped the used needle into an empty seltzer bottle, a poky mess of trash and bloody napkins that she kept on her nightstand, like a gory snow globe.
Thora woke in the blue morning light, Allyâs voice coming from the bed next to her. âThe people are eating,â she muttered. âThe people are eating.â The medication Ally was taking seemed to make her a little crazy. When Thora went to check on her, she saw Ally was still asleep, a pillow clenched between her knees.
âYou just kept repeating yourself,â Thora told her at breakfast. âOver and over.â
Ally pushed for details, asking Thora whether sheâd said anything else. âI can handle it,â she said, âjust tell me,â and it struck Thora that Ally wasnât nervously patrolling the spill of her psyche, worried about what poisonous things sheâd let slip, but that Ally genuinely hoped to learn something valuable and unknown about herself.
Before sheâd come here, Thora had gotten in what her counselor Melanie would call a bad spiral.
It was the afternoons that did it, three oâclock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms? The last time she had been in a chat room was in high school, sleepovers where girls crowded around a desktop computer and wrote sickening things to men, all of it a joke, then furtively masturbated in their sleeping bags. Or at least Thora had. And now she was back, typing in a username.
Thora18.
How quickly the messages had come in:
Hey Thora! Cute name Asl
Asl
Wanna chat Asl?
Are you 18 or 18 isshhh
It amused her, on her laptop in bed, her husband at work, to reply to these men. To conjure an eighteen-year-old that did not exist, an eighteen-year-old that Thora had never been, certainly: blond, blue-eyed, a member of the cheerleading squad. Did high schools still have cheerleading squads? Had they ever? It didnât matter how ridiculous the things she said were, how big she made her tits, how short she made the skirt of her supposed cheer uniform, the men seemed to believe, wholeheartedly, that she was real. A ludicrous illusion they were building together, and she found she enjoyed the back and forth. Pretending not to know why the men were chatting with her. Writing hahahaha whenever they brought up sex. Whatâs that, she typed when someone mentioned double penetration. When they asked her pointed, leading questions about her real age, she finally agreed that she was, in fact, only sixteen.
They were ecstatic, writing back instantly, the sudden use of exclamation points like cardiograms from their throbbing erections:
I wonât tell babe donât worry!!!!
Her stupidity delighted these men. They had found her, at last: a teen cheerleader who wanted to learn about sex, who wanted to learn about it from them! Too stupid to understand what they were taking from her!
After a while they wanted photos. She ignored the requests, usually, closing the window, but then she thought, why not?
She spent a good hour on the bed, trying to take a photo with her face mostly hidden, a photo where she didnât look thirty-five but instead looked like a teenager: a finger in her mouth, her tongue peeping out like a little cat. Her tongue looked strange, too pale, but if she used a filter, one arm covering her nipples, she might look eighteen.
The men loved the photo. But then they wanted more.
Are you shaved?
Oh ya, she said. She was not.
How many dicks have you seen.
Um, she would type. 2. Is that weird?
Have you ever had a boyfriend?
No, she typed. I wisshhhhhh!
Amazing how this ate up the afternoon, four hours passing without Thora looking up from the screen. She had missed two texts from James.
If she had better friends, she would have told them about what she was doing. Or if James was a different kind of person. Because wasnât it sort of funny? She had an entire run of photos of herself on her phone now: bending over, the seat of her underwear pulled tightly across her ass, pictures of her face from the nose down, a nipple between her fingers. They all wanted a pussy shot: she found one off the internet to use. She sent the same photo every time, so gradually she began to believe this bare pink pussy was her own pussy, and in fact began to feel proud of just how perfect this pussy â her pussy! â was.
She had never been the focus of so much attention. So many men trying to coax or trick her into giving them what they wanted. And that was the part she liked best, the knowing/unknowing â it wasnât possible to summon artificially, role play wouldnât do it. It had to be real.
She only hated them when they got mean: when she told them she had to go, and they typed back, furious.
Are u fucking serious just help me cum pls
Pls
Im so hard
Bitch
When Thora got bored of talking to the same men, she started signing in under different names. Usually under James45. Sometimes DaddyXO. She talked with the men, pretended she was a man, too, and they sent her photos of teens in bikinis at public pools and she sent them photos of herself.
Such a whore, she typed. Little teen whore.
Mmmm fuck, a man typed back. Love those teen tits.
It seemed obvious that the photos of her were not photos of a teenager, but no matter. Their wish that the tits belonged to a teenager was so strong that it created an alternate reality. She had never been so excited: seeing herself as these men did, some unformed idiot who needed to be fucked. Her sheets smelled like sweat, all the curtains drawn. She didnât eat for whole days.
âYouâre so wet,â James said one night, surprised, when she put his hand in her underwear. But then they had sex the way they always did, James coming on her stomach, his body jerking in a series
of convulsions, as though he were being riddled with bullets at the O.K. Corral.
It had all seemed funny except that, truly, she would rather do this than anything else: run the usual errands that kept things in motion, see James, have dinner with him. It was like having a calling, finally, the way she had once imagined she might. A life organized around a higher goal. While James slept, his back turned to her and the covers kicked off, she typed furtively on her phone to men who sent photos of dicks, sometimes tiny squibs of flesh between massively fat thighs, sometimes overlarge penises with the porn watermark visible in the corner.
Wow, she always typed. I donât know if it will fit.
That was not the reason she had ended up at the Center, exactly, the chats, but it hadnât helped.
There was a hike in the morning, before the temperatures got unbearable. On the drive to the trailhead, Melanie had turned the radio to a Christian talk station Thora mistook for NPR until they said âresurrectionâ one too many times.
Thora scrambled around the boulders, up through the dust and the sage. She drank lukewarm water; Melanie passed out protein bars. Last session, someone kept mashing these into coils and leaving them in the urinals, or so said Ally, a veteran of the program. It was a real problem, fake shit being essentially as difficult to clean as real shit. Was there a lesson there?
By the time they got back, G. had already arrived.
No one had known he was coming. He looked, if anything, exactly like the person in the newspaper photos â froggish, squashed, well fed. For all five seasons of his show, he had been clean-shaven, ruddy in his apron and concert T-shirts, big moony face damp with steam from whatever was cooking on the stove. Now heâd grown stubble, white, extending beyond his jawline to his neck and cheeks, giving his face the semblance of a shape. He wore a baseball hat and the same baggy clothes as the rest of them â sweatshirts, pants with soft waists. Their days were considered difficult enough that whatever energy they may have once expended on buttons and zippers was now worth diverting elsewhere.
Men and women were kept separate except for lunch, which most people ate in their rooms anyway. G., surprisingly, chose to eat at a shaded picnic table by the pool, close enough for Thora and Ally to study his froggy face for signs of evil, watch him pick at a sweet potato drowned in soy sauce. Did he eat the sweet potato in a particularly evil way?
The staff allowed them their benzos and SSRIs as long as their home doctors kept the prescriptions current. Things like this made it hard to believe that the people who worked there actually thought they were helping anyone. Ally and Thora sometimes swapped meds for fun; Thora took one dose of Allyâs Lexapro and went into what felt like a light mania, pedaling the stationary bike for a solid hour, then eating ravenously, spilling salsa verde on her robe. The night that G. arrived, Ally took someoneâs Ambien but stayed awake, filling out her Dialectic Behavioral Workbook.
What are three concrete changes you can make in order to improve your life?
She showed Thora her answers the next morning, written in loopy Ambien scrawl:
1. Buy puffy white sneakers
2. Double pierce my ears
3. Fuck G.
Addled as sheâd been on a sedative-hypnotic, Ally brought up a good point: who was G. gonna fuck first?
G. was assigned Robert as his sober coach, tiny Robert who told everyone with pride that he had built the woodfired pizza oven at the Center with his bare hands. âWith the same clay the Mayans used,â he said. No one asked any follow-up questions. Robert wore flip-flops, which seemed at odds with his desire for everyone to call him Coach.
Robert was appalled by their lives, in an exciting way â heâd worked for the government before, for institutions, so people having money the way people like them had money seemed to him like a cosmic joke. He tried to engage one of the business guys in an earnest debate about fracking, tried to explain the problems with a possible Bloomberg presidency. Thora would hear his voice from across the pool: âI can see where youâre coming from, man, but have you ever considered ââ
Robert stayed close to G.âs side, murmuring into his ear quietly enough so no one could make out what he was saying, though of course Thora and Ally tried their best, filled in the blanks, imagined all manner of foul behavior turned into a narrative, spun into a story of good and evil.
During that afternoonâs phone hours, Thora called James. The phone room in the main building was busy, so she made the call in Robertâs office, an adobe outbuilding on a concrete slab. Out front, there were half-barrels on the porch where Robert was growing gray stalks of kale; a wind chime made of abalone shells hung from the eaves. His white dog was pregnant: she lurched heavily on her chain, then circled back to sit in the shade.
Thoraâs cheek was sweating where the phone was pressed to her ear.
âDoes anyone even speak to him?â James asked. âMonster,â he said, under his breath. Though Thora could sense it, too â James was excited. They all were. Thora had read every disgusting thing G. had done: every hot-tub dick graze, the Fleshlight in the green room, drugged-up gropes of cowering PAs in sensible flats. With his presence, the communal mood heightened a few degrees. The only other resident who conjured any frisson was a baseball player whoâd been caught jacking off in an afternoon showing of Despicable Me 3, but that was nothing compared to G. Thora and Ally tracked G.âs every choice and activity, took any opportunity to smile at him or sit near him at meals. G. drank cucumber and kale juice in the morning. G. took Pilates from a private instructor in town. G. was trying to avoid nightshades after his food sensitivity test. G. appeared, to Thoraâs eye anyway, to have gone down a pants size.
âHe keeps to himself,â Thora said. âWeâre all just trying to do our best here.â
There was a silence. She assumed they were both thinking of G.
âWell,â James said. âIâm proud of you. Really.â
Thora was on Focalin. Or had been, until they found out she had been snorting it off Jamesâs iPad, the iPad he loaded with podcasts about political crimes and interviews with precocious teens starting businesses. Sheâd tried listening to one of them once, one of Jamesâs beloved podcasts: when had life become so dull, an extended social-studies class where you were supposed to summon interest in the workings of corporations, the minutiae of historical events, spend your free time cramming for a test that didnât exist?
Everyone was suddenly trying, so very hard, to learn things.
Group was kept separate by gender, and was supposedly confidential, another of the ârulesâ that turned out to be nothing more than a half-hearted suggestion: Russell told Ally and Thora everything from menâs group when the three of them drank mugs of weedy chamomile out on the South Veranda.
âHe cries almost every time,â Russell said. Ally knew Russell from her last stay here, a year ago.
âNo,â Thora said.
âTruly. He doesnât get into it. But just says heâs here to learn. He knocked over my water bottle and apologized. Like, almost with tears in his eyes.â
Ally leaned back on her elbows. âProbably fake tears.â
âRobert doesnât even make him go into detail. Which is not exactly fair.â
But G. didnât need to go into details, didnât need to unspool all the stories for the rest of them: they already knew everything. When Ally was asleep, Thora sometimes rubbed herself against her palm, imagining the bulk of G.âs body behind her, that belly, formidable from years of public gastronomy, slapping against her back. It only worked if she imagined G. believed he was taking something from her.
âHave you talked to him outside of group?â
âNah,â Russell said. âBut guess what?â He was almost gleeful. âI have a UTI. My deekâ â he pronounced it like that â âhurts,â Russell said.
âI donât believe you,â Ally said. âGuys donât get UTIs.â
âOh, itâs for certain,â he said. âThe doctors were surprised, too.â Russell was proud in his insistence: blessed by rarity. His dick was like no other dick. And he did have a UTI. Thora had never heard of this happening before, but thatâs the way the spring had been going.
The next night, Ally was reading her doll-maker book. Occasionally she pressed a hand to her heart, overcome. Russell had brought Thora a magazine from town, but sheâd seen it already. A page of various celebrities with cellulite blurring their thighs. A different celebrity recording everything she ate in a day. Like all of them, around 3 p.m. the celebrity ate a handful of almonds as a snack. A cut-up bell pepper with hummus. Living that way seemed to require skills that Thora lacked. The ability to take your own life seriously, believing that you were a solid enough entity to require maintenance, as if any of it would add up to something.
She looked up from the magazine when there was movement on the sill.
âShit,â Thora said, âgross.â
Ally glanced up from her book. Together they considered the moth on the sill, the dry feathery beast. It must have got in through the open window. The moth was sleeping, at least, its wings folded in prayerful repose. âWhat should we do about it?â
âJust try to shoo it out the window?â Thora said. Ally put down her book.
âWant to see something?â Ally said, unzipping her little pink purse, flicking her vial of insulin expertly. âWe did this at diabetes camp once. No bubbles,â she said, âthat part is important.â She got up on her knees, shuffling to the sill. âAre you watching?â
Thora rolled her eyes. âYes.â
Ally grasped the moth firmly between her fingers. It barely moved.
âWatch.â
With impeccable swiftness, Thora injected the fat moth body with her insulin â the moth vibrated a little, awake now.
âWhat the fuck,â Thora said. The moth spread its wings before starting to fly around the room, crazily.
They both shrieked. The moth slammed into the wall and dropped dead. Ally, inexplicably, started laughing.
âSick,â she said.
Ally and Thora were G.âs most likely targets, the only ones in his preferred demographic. Most of the women at the Center were older â burned-out executives, plastic-surgery recoveries, legit addicts who forestalled reality a little longer by wasting some soft money here on what amounted to a very expensive hotel stay. Thora studied herself in the bathroom mirror, picking the dead skin from her chapped lips. Would G. find her attractive? Ally was younger than Thora, which, historically, would have been a plus for G., but diabetes kept her pale, and her hair had gone a little green from the chlorine, her brows furring out without her tweezers.
Before lunch, Thora changed into a tight tank top, yoga pants that had a perverse seam in the crotch. She let her hair down at the picnic table, idly brushed it with her fingers over one shoulder. Ally was on some tear about how her father always told her she was beautiful and never smart, and wasnât that sort of fucked up? Thora wasnât paying attention: she was watching G., deep in conversation with Robert. Heâd barely touched his stone fruit caprese salad.
G.âs daughter was definitely staying nearby. There were sightings. Russell had seen her on one of his excursions to town: Russell was desperate for mushrooms, trying to cadge some off the men with sunburned necks who rode BMX bikes along the main street, their bicycles evidence of suspended licenses from DUIs.
Later, Thora watched G. across the pool reading Robertâs self-published book on accountability, pausing to balance it on his T-shirt-covered belly. Thora rubbed aloe sunscreen on her legs, slowly. Swimsuits werenât actually allowed by the pool except during gender-restricted swim hours â but no staff seemed to notice. But had G. noticed? Was G. going to come over? No, he was reaching for a pen, he was underlining something. When he got up, it was only to refill his water bottle, do a little yogic stretch, clasping his arms behind his back, straining his belly tight. In the last two days, he had started wearing a bracelet made of wooden beads around one wrist.
âVery spiritual,â Russell said.
Robertâs dog had finally had her puppies: six squirming, mostly silent creatures with slitty eyes and little hamster claws. Robert plugged in a heating pad, nestled it among blankets in a cardboard box, though it was April, eighty degrees on Easter.
Robert set up the box in the common room. Thora assumed the puppies were meant to teach everyone about fragility, about caretaking. Ally held one to her chest, stroking it with a single finger.
âTiny,â Ally cooed. âLook at their little noses.â
Thora held one, too. âSo cute,â she said, unconvincingly. When one of the puppies took a shit in the box, the mom ate it.
At check-in, Melanie asked if Thora was aware that she was wearing exercise clothes outside the gym area. She asked if Thora was aware that the dress code asks us not to expose our shoulders. Melanie asked Thora to
Scan her body,
Assess her feelings,
Locate the discomfort.
What were her feelings? Mostly Thora felt drowsy â there in the carpeted room, the sun coming through the big windows.
Melanie wanted to talk about Thoraâs mood journal.
âIf we can start to notice a pattern,â Melanie said, âyouâll be able to have a little more control.â
There were dozens of plants behind Melanie, their glossy heart-shaped leaves twisting across the sill. Someone had to water them. Every week. The thought of anything needing regular care and upkeep suddenly made Thora even more tired. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Melanieâs cell phone rang.
âI can show you how to turn off the ringer,â Thora said, when Melanieâs phone rang for the third time. Did her voice sound as hateful as she felt? Melanie didnât respond. Melanie was looking at her with concern.
âIâll consider these questions in my journal,â Thora said, finally.
Melanie both cared about Thora and did not really care â Thora saw Melanieâs face toggle between these two absolutely true things.
After breakfast, Russell, Ally and Thora saw G. and Robert leave for town. The huevos rancheros had solidified on Thoraâs plate, the beans now mortar. Sheâd eaten the fruit, enough to avoid a talk with Melanie, and Russell would likely finish the rest anyway. G.âs baseball cap was pulled low, his gait shuffly from his sandals. He paused to apply lip balm from a plastic sphere. No one knew why G. went into town so often, though maybe it was just to see his daughter. G. was working on a screenplay, they heard, or a memoir. Russell claimed to have shown him how to download Final Draft.
âBut why is he allowed to have a laptop?â Ally said. âIf he tries to rape us, can we borrow his laptop?â
âDo we think heâs going to jail?â Russell said.
Thora had read more about G. in the Business Center, the computers signed in for thirty-minute web sessions. Their servers blocked porn sites, so it was never busy.
âNot likely,â she said, with authority.
âItâs pretty old stuff, mostly,â Ally said.
âStill.â
âNot all of it,â Thora said. âThat one girl was basically a few months ago. At the Super Bowl thing.â
âBut didnât she just say he tried?â
Russell stared darkly at his plate. âThatâs just as bad.â
Ally and Thora glanced at each other but stayed silent.
G. put himself in charge of the puppies, or maybe Robert did; at any rate, all of a sudden there was G., squatting by the box in the common area, spooning cottage cheese into a bowl. Up until then G. had only seemed to interact with Robert, but now people were reporting conversations, G. chatting away with whoever came by to look at the puppies.
It was the first time Thora had encountered him mostly alone: there was a man playing solitaire at one of the tables, Blue Planet silently on the TV, but other than him and G., the common room was empty. Thora dropped her shoulders, ran her tongue along her top teeth.
âCute,â Thora said, squatting to G.âs level. âPuppies.â
âTheir eyes still wonât open for another week or so,â G. said. He glanced up at her; Thora strained to detect some sinister ripple in his look, but it was too brief.
âIs it okay to hold one?â Thora asked.
âIs it okay, Mama?â G. said, directing the question at the big dog panting away. Bizarre. Thora kept a mild smile on her face while G. scratched the dogâs chin energetically. âSure,â G. said, still looking at the dog. âJust let her see that you have it. That you arenât taking it away from her.â
Thora settled onto her knees, aware of how close she was to G. He had definitely lost weight, but his face was still recognizable: the soggy skin around his eyes, the coarse stubble, thick ears. His hands were immaculate, he wore no wedding ring. His wife â a former manager in G.âs restaurant group â had, obviously, initiated divorce proceedings.
Thora reached into the box, going for the closest puppy. It was warm, mottled with brown, the size of a burrito. She held it with two hands, knowing G. was probably watching her.
âThatâs the fattest one,â G. said. âThough theyâre all pretty healthy. No runts.â
The puppyâs heart was racing, its head rearing around. Thora tried to hold the puppy gently. âWow,â she said. âImagine their tiny little hearts in there.â
It was something Ally had said about the puppies; G. murmured thoughtfully in response.
When Thora introduced herself, she looked straight into his eyes, smiling. âIâm Thora.â
âIâm Gââ he said, not smiling back, though he didnât seem unfriendly. Thora told herself he was likely being careful. She glanced at the man playing solitaire to see if he was watching them. He wasnât. G. scooted the bowl of cottage cheese closer to the dog. She didnât respond. Thora placed the puppy back with the others, its little claws skittering on the cardboard.
âEat, Mama,â G. said. The dog was lying there, panting.
âIs she okay?â
âJust tired.â G. spooned a little cottage cheese out with his finger. The dog licked it, finally, and G. brightened. âThere you go, Mama,â he said, âeasy.â
Thora stayed kneeling like this was all very fascinating. And maybe there was a weird thrill in watching the puppies nurse, the pure creaturely fact of it.
âSheâs been hiding the puppies,â he said. âRobert found one in the couch cushions yesterday.â
Thora had heard this story already but acted like she hadnât.
âThe couch cushions?â
âI guess itâs âcause sheâs trying to protect them, you know? Good thing no one sat on the pup.â
âYeah.â Thora stayed quiet for a little longer but he didnât speak again. She got up.
âNice to meet you,â she said. She cocked her head slightly, her shoulders back, readying herself for his gaze.
âYou too,â he said. He didnât look up.
It rained the next day, a rare steady rain. The air went a bit blue: Thora closed all the windows in their room. The staff was taking a few of the vans into town, for anyone who wanted to go to the mall.
âWanna come with? We can see a movie?â Ally said. âOr maybe we can get my ears pierced?â
âSorry,â Thora said. âIâm just gonna hang here.â
Ally seemed suddenly lonesome, girlish, her fingers grazing her earlobes. âWeâre gonna go to the bakery. You want me to bring you back a cookie?â
âIâm good,â Thora said.
Thora wanted Ally to leave, but when she finally did, Thora felt guilty. Thora took an apple to their room, ate it all the way to its meager center, and spat the seeds on the floor.
Thora hadnât seen G. leave with the others, but he wasnât in the common room, either. There was a girl Thora knew from group, knitting on the couch. She nodded, Thora nodded back. The puppies were mostly asleep. So was the dog. Ally said the dog had been carrying the puppies around in her mouth, her jaw closed on their necks. Thora picked up one of the pups â it barely made a sound. A little chirp, like a bird.
Thora put the puppy in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. She kept both her hands in there, too, feeling its aliveness. She got wet from the rain, walking from the common room to the residences, her sweatshirt darkening. But she kept the pup dry. The halls were empty. She let the puppy go on Allyâs bed. It was blind, squirming at nothing, against nothing. It couldnât go anywhere, could barely wriggle forward.
Thora petted the puppy with one finger. It was nice to be in here: the rain on the windows, the hallways quiet, and this animal, like a little soul that had wriggled loose from a body. If there were such things as souls, wouldnât they be blind mewling creatures about the size of a burrito?
She didnât know how much time passed. Maybe he knocked on the door, first, but Thora didnât hear. And there G. was, standing in the doorway, in his baseball hat, his polo shirt. His face was agitated. When he saw the puppy on the bed, his shoulders dropped.
âFuck,â G. said. âWe were really worried.â
Thora sat up, crossing her legs. He had sought her out.
âYeah,â she said, âsorry. I mean, the puppyâs fine, though.â
G. took off his cap to run his fingers through his shanky hair, flashes of bare scalp catching the light.
âThey really shouldnât be away from their mother.â His voice cracked. Was he about to cry? âSheâs freaking out.â
âI thought it was okay. I didnât know,â Thora said. âIâm sorry.â
âIs she okay?â
Thora looked at the squirming animal.
âDid you think,â Thora said, âI would hurt it?â
âIt just shouldnât be on the bed like that, she might fall off.â
She had arranged herself so, if he wanted, he could look at her body, consider it, but it was clear he wasnât even clocking Thora. She let the silence grow.
It took Thora a moment to register his expression: he wasnât interested in her. Was he disgusted with her? As if she was the bad one! Didnât he know that Thora knew every awful thing he had done? Every darkness that hid in his heart had been exposed.
He moved to pick up the puppy. Thora held it to her chest.
âYouâre not supposed to be in the womenâs dorm,â Thora said. Her voice was cold.
At the tone of her voice, G. stopped, suddenly, his hands flopping at his sides.
âI was just,â G. said. âThe girl told me you took the puppy and the dog was just, you know, really freaking.â
âYou should not fucking be in here.â
After Robert arrived, furious to find G. in the womenâs dorm, G. had been classified as a more serious case and shuffled to an all-menâs program in New Mexico. Thora recounted the story at dinner, Ally slowly chewing at her bottom lip.
âMy heart was beating so hard. I was actuallyâ â Thora lowered her voice â âterrified.â
âPoor girl,â Russell said. âYou shouldnât have to deal with this.â
âI mean,â Ally said, âheâs doing this stuff even here?â
âHe shouldnât have come into your room.â
âI honestly donât know,â Thora said, âwhat he would have done if Robert hadnât shown up.â
Russell massaged Thoraâs shoulder, Ally leaning against her.
âWeâre just glad,â Ally said, âthat youâre okay.â
Their faces were concerned, their voices soothing, but, Thora noticed, their eyes were bright.
That summer, Thora â returned to her home, returned to her life â finally read the book about the doll maker in World War II: Ally had been right. It was a great book. Thora cried when the doll makerâs daughter found the carved birdhouse in the attic, proof that her Nazi lover remembered her after all. Thora read the last scene aloud to herself, the green buzz of June beyond the windows of the house, the house where she lived with her husband, and there was something in the book that made being a different sort of person seem possible. It was a book about people, how people should help each other, and really, wasnât that what life was about? Werenât people basically good?
She resolved not to go on the chat room.
She resolved to brush her teeth before James got home. The feeling lasted for a little while. Then James was late for dinner, and there, in the dining room, the sky outside going dark, whatever she had felt earlier was already slipping away, already gone.
James was looking at her.
âWhat?â Thora said. âDid you say something?â
James shook his head, shrugged. He had a sty making its angry way to the surface, swelling his eyelid unpleasantly.
They watched the news in bed, James holding a warm tea bag to his eye. G. had declared bankruptcy. G. had avoided criminal charges but was due to appear in court for a scheduling conference for the first civil case the next week. There was footage of him, harried, exiting a car, a benzodiazepine smile on his face.
James put the tea bag on the nightstand. His eye looked just as red, only now the surrounding area was damp, too, the skin puckered by heat and moisture.
His hand crept toward his swollen eye, then paused in midair. She saw his desire to do something, to scratch his infected eye, then saw him understand that he should not do the thing, saw him remember that he had been told, expressly, not to touch his eye. And for James, that was enough â he did not do the thing he wanted to do, his hand dropping back to the blanket. Instead, James blinked hard, blinked deliberately. He smiled at her, a tear dripping from the eye he offered to her for inspection.
âAny better?â
Artwork © Elisabeth McBrien, California Afternoon, 2017, New York Academy of Art
The post A/S/L appeared first on Granta.
