Pets and Other Deaths

Jason Herman 

When it became clear that she wasn’t coming back, he went to Whole Foods and stood in the beer aisle. Never before had he made such a calculated decision to get drunk, and every label seemed to suggest either self-conscious posturing — “Shipfaced Ale,” “Pour Decisions” — or tonal impropriety - “For Those About to Bock,” “Dry Humpkin”. Was there ever an occasion to get drunk on “Nipple Mountain”? Standing before the refrigerator, trying not to notice the limpid silhouette staring back at him in the glass, he regretted coming to Whole Foods for beer to get drunk on. In the end, he grabbed a six-pack with a skeleton on the label - “Dead Guy Ale”. The skeleton was crouching or maybe sitting with its arm folded, wearing a hat that looked papal and smiling, sort of.

After getting drunk, he took the kids camping. Not by himself, but with friends and their intact families, leaning on their structure like scaffolding. One of the women brought a store-bought birthday cake and candles for The Youngest, who was turning four. It was decorated like a watermelon, with a green rind of frosting around the edge and pink in the middle, dotted with little black seeds. All weekend they stayed out of cellphone range, and the kids swam in brown streams and turned over giant river rocks looking for bugs. When he pulled back onto the highway on Sunday afternoon, dark gray stormclouds had accumulated on the pass. Globs of rain began to pelt the windshield, and the texts started pouring in, paragraphs filled with vitriol and logistics, picking up where he and she had left off. Gusts of wind came unexpectedly and pushed the car toward the center lane and the oncoming traffic.

When they arrived home, they found the house half-emptied. Half the dishes had been taken, half the chairs around the dining room table, half the small appliances. The pictures she wanted had been pulled down, leaving empty spaces on half the walls. He imagined her white minivan in the driveway, the one they had bought together, the hatch lifted open, the back stuffed with chairs and boxes and lamps with their shades removed, their cords neatly wrapped around their bases. What good was it to have half of everything, of anything? Some things resisted half-ness, only a whole would do. The kids for example.

The cat came padding into the kitchen and sat on her haunches in front of the slider. She mewed half-heartedly, staring through the glass and out into the night. He went to the door and slid it open. The sound of the wind was a steady, distant hum, like cars on a freeway. At the back of the yard, the limbs of the fir trees swayed in the darkness. The cat took a step forward and froze on the threshold. She stood uncertain, sifting her instincts, the wind pushing the fur back from her forehead, one long gray whisker wavering.

He slid the door shut just as a cry rang out from The Youngest’s bedroom. The Oldest, who had been helping her little sister unpack from camping, came soberly into the hall.

“Dad,” she said, her eyes traveling to the empty spaces on the walls, then back to him. “You better come look at her fish.”

The fish’s name was Rainby (short for Rainbow Fish), and they buried it the next day, in the backyard, under rocks painted with polka dots and rainbows. The older two had always insisted that Rainby was a stupid name and had kept their distance, but in the end they painted rocks and knelt there in the dirt with him and The Youngest anyway.

They sprinkled a few wildflowers on the fish-sized mound, and he led them in offering their memories of Rainby (he could never remember if the fish was a she or a he). The Youngest shared how she picked him out among the stacks of fish in identical plastic containers because of the way his tail sparkled under the fluorescent lights. The Middle said that his name wasn’t so bad after all, and The Oldest watched the whole thing with her face screwed tight in a way that looked like anger but wasn’t. He tried to pray, but the words came out both too formal and too intimate, as if he had never prayed in his life. He had once known how to pray, but everything that once worked had stopped working.

When he finished, the older two stood and brushed the dirt and twigs from their knees. They hopped up onto the porch one by one and disappeared into the boredom and cool of the house. The cat drifted outside and stretched languidly, before sniffing all around the base of the mound they had raised. The Youngest tried to sit in his lap, but he was still kneeling and she slid down and onto the ground. She rolled over, plucked a blade of grass, and held her arms up to the sky, her face summer-gold.

“It’s ok, Daddy,” she said, looking up at the slender miracle of green between her fingers, “I didn’t love him that much anyway.”

The cat was named after his ex’s best friend from childhood, and of all the things that he wished she had left in the house, Piper the cat was dead last. His only experience with cats pre-Piper was house-sitting for one of his ex’s professors in college. That was an indoor cat, and during their week of housesitting he had carelessly left the door open while bringing in groceries, allowing the cat to dart outside. The two of them spent more than an hour trying to woo the cat back indoors with toys, with catfood, with threats of violence, and he vowed to never, ever own a cat.

But The Oldest had come along, and then The Middle, and they weren’t ready for a dog. With The Youngest, he got a bit of paternity leave, and that was enough of an excuse. The ex and The Oldest went out to a place in the country to pick her up, while he stayed with The Middle and the baby. They brought her home in a cardboard box with a homemade blanket at the bottom. The Oldest squeezed her so hard he thought she would snap her little cat bones.

Annoying the cat, rewarded with cries of protest from the girls, became his schtick. He would press a finger tip to the middle of the cat’s forehead and hold it there until she batted it away. He tossed it gleefully from the couch when it sat in his favorite spot. He blew in its ears to wake it up.

Piper the cat was full grown by the time things started going sideways. He came home from work to find dishes put away in the wrong cupboards. She (the ex) stayed out late, started listening to new music, bought herself expensive workout clothes. She didn’t protest when he wanted to get beers with a friend or even take a weekend for himself, leaving her alone with the girls. And then one day she was just gone. He assumed she would come back and get the cat, but she never did. Now he was single and he owned a cat named after his ex-wife’s best friend. It was not a look he liked.

After the fish came the cat he ran over. It was one of those wet winter nights when the world is all headlights and greasy windshields. He was running late to get the girls to piano lessons (back-to-back-to-back), and he was picking them up at the little house the ex was renting with her fiancé.

Out they bounded, one-by-one, and hopped into the car, each bursting with news of mommy’s house and school. He pulled the lever into drive, rolled only a few inches, and from underneath the car came a primitive, agonized howl.

The Middle, who despite her cold shoulder to the fish had always been the most partial to animals, threw open the door and crouched down to see beneath the car.

“Daddy, back up!”

He put the car in reverse and rolled back slowly.

He sent The Oldest back into the house for towels, but by the time she returned with her arms full, The Middle had already scooped the cat up into her arms.

It was an old gray sack of a thing, with loose skin around its belly and long, coarse whiskers. To his relief there was no blood, but its back legs were inert, its breathing clipped and wheezy. They wrapped it in towels, and The Middle climbed into the backseat again and cradled it in her lap. They thought it might belong to the house across the street, so he walked over and up the steep drive to the unlit entry.

He knocked half-heartedly and returned to the car. What he imagined about couples, and even his own life as half a couple had become a thing of imagination, was that there was some kind of catch-and-toss effect between them, the ball passing back-and-forth without it ever touching the ground. But with him it was all asymmetry. He saw himself as a catcher who lets a pitch in the dirt roll right through his legs, and where there should be backstop there is nothing, just more field, sloping downward and away, endless space to roll.

They drove to the veterinary hospital, The Middle whispering comfort to the dying animal the whole way.

The four of them stood around a metallic table, while the vet examined the cat under a low-hanging industrial light. She shook her head and led him out into the hall.

“She’s in a lot of pain, but we can’t put her down until the owners get here. You don’t have to stay with her if you don’t want to.”

“We’ll stay,” he said.

They sat in the waiting room, The Youngest in his lap, flipping through a stack of picture books with sticky pages. The Middle scratched her forearms.

The owner arrived at last, a woman in her seventies in a floral cardigan.

“I didn’t even know she was there,” he said. “She must have just crawled in front of the tire.”

“We’ve been telling her that was going to happen one of these days.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s an old girl. She’s had a good life.”

The vet, in a white jacket, was standing in the doorway to the operatory.

The owner looked over at the three girls, The Youngest now sitting in The Oldest’s lap, The Middle cupping her elbow with her other hand.

“You girls were so good to stay with her. Do you want to come say goodbye?”

Piper the cat was everywhere, always moving about, going from room to room, walking along the spine of the couch or on the headboards of their beds, picking a different girl’s room to sleep in every night, always in the background somewhere, rounding a corner. She was a tortoise shell, a pattern he found more interesting than the monochrome fur of other cats he knew. When he sat on the couch reading, after the girls had gone to bed, she would lie next to him and reach one paw out to lightly touch his leg. And when he got up for a drink of water or another beer (he had taken to the Dead Guy Ale), she would move over to the warm spot where he had been sitting and he would have to remove her when he returned, chastising her for knowing that this was going to happen and doing it anyway.

The Oldest said that when Piper died she was going to die, too. Once the cat got sick, and The Oldest threatened to throw herself from a cliff. Still, Piper wasn’t exactly a pet to be played with, not that the girls hadn’t tried. They dressed her up, tried taking her for walks, even gave her baths, none of which Piper appeared to enjoy. The girls needed a real pet.

His therapist had asked him, what does it feel like to imagine a life without the mom and the dad and kids, without that template? Dry was all he could think of. Dry bones. But the idea of a real pet, a dog say, was something new. It would be theirs, and it would belong to the present, not the past. There was a certain feeling he had around families with dogs. As if the circle around them were closed, unlike the opening he felt in his own family, through which everything just washed in and spilled out again. For a dog, he would have to build a fence.

He had never bought a dog and wasn’t even sure if that was the right word for it. Some people went to breeders, but that was even more alien to him, and anyway he didn’t want a designer dog. The Middle started searching as soon as he mentioned it. She planted herself in front of the computer in the kitchen, and while he was making dinner or doing dishes she would interrupt him with “Daddy, come look at this one!” and “Look how cute she is!” Over her shoulder, he watched grainy videos of dogs jumping excitedly around gravel dog runs, sniffing at camera lenses, or nosing up to sleeping cats. He learned the key criteria: housebroken or not, good with kids or not, hypoallergenic or not, leash-trained or not, mostly not.

They favorited a dog named Sweet Pea, whose listing described her as a “Smooth Collie mix.” He had never seen a Smooth Collie, but she looked a lot like the Pit Bull his neighbors once owned. He texted the number on the listing about coming out to see her the following week.

“Sweet peas had a lot of interest,” they wrote back. “The rescue doesn’t want us waiting any longer then this Friday.”

He took the day off and they drove out to see her. A young woman with a tattoo of Van Gogh’s bed on her forearm was fostering her and four cats in a mobile home next to a Catholic church. She put a pinch collar on the dog and handed him a leash.

“She loves walking in the cemetery.”

Sweet Pea led the way, and the girls took turns holding the leash, stopping to hug her neck and pose for pictures. The Middle kept asking, “Is she really, really ours?” He walked behind, silent, adopting the same posture he used when evaluating a car or a house for purchase. We are just taking her for a test drive. It was clear, though, from the joyful chatter bubbling up from the girls that there was no going back. They were going to be dog people. He glided regally behind the caravan, feeling like a patriarch.

They signed the papers and loaded her into the car. The drive home was an hour-and-a-half in traffic, and Sweet Pea panted so hard he thought she would pass out. They stopped twice for water, letting her lap it from a rinsed-out Starbucks cup.

That night, as Sweet Pea slept in her crate just outside his bedroom, he listened to the sounds of the house. The furnace firing on and off. The drip from a gutter outside his window. Unidentifiable creaks and cracks in the bones of the building. Everything felt different somehow, as if the place had been turned inside out. He remembered how it felt to bring The Oldest home from the hospital that first time. His greatest fear had been that he would set the car seat on the roof of the car, forget about it, and drive off, as if she were a cup of coffee or his phone. He felt, as he had never felt before, the dangers of driving. And when they finally got her safely home, their little apartment was transformed the moment she entered it. Everything had new meaning, from the colorful spines of the books lining the shelves to the dangers lurking beneath the kitchen sink.

The girls changed the dog’s name to Perry (this was entirely harmless, he learned from a book) and ordered a bowl and dish with a picture of a bone and her name on them. They took her for walks around the block, without the pinch collar, and invited their friends over to play with her. When he was working, she curled up at his feet under the desk.

The first time he let The Middle take her for a walk alone, she returned shaken. Sweet Pea (now Perry) had bared her teeth to another dog, and she (The Middle) had not been able to restrain her. The neighbors had scooped their little terrier into their arms and asked her where she lived.

“We’re not going to get rid of her are we?” she pleaded.

“Of course not. She just needs to get used to being around other dogs,” he reassured her. But he texted the Van Gogh tattoo:

“Sweet Pea got a little aggressive with another dog today.”

“Thats odd,” the response came back. “We never had any trouble with her.”

He noticed she had a thing with men. When his friends Dave and Diane came over, Diane knelt down and let the dog sniff her neck, but Dave hung back. Sweet Pea pulled free and backed herself up against the wall at the far end of the entryway. The standoff lasted for a minute or more, with Dave frozen and Sweet Pea shivering like a peacock and issuing a low, guttural growl. He dragged her downstairs by the collar, her toenails grasping for purchase on the tile floor, and shut her in.

But the presence of the dog inspired him anyway. He began to take on projects around the house. The aluminum windows were replaced. The dripping gutter fixed. The weather stripping he had never bothered to install on the front door was measured, cut, and fastened.

He hired Home Depot to do the windows and when the guy came out to do a final inspection, he penned Perry/Sweet Pea in the basement. They drifted from window to window, the inspector running a rubber-gloved finger along each seam. When they reached the basement, he paused with his hand on the brass doorknob. He considered putting the dog in a crate, but she had built up a reservoir of goodwill.

The inspector was not even halfway across the room when the dog latched onto him. He pulled back with a howl of pain and stood there clutching the wrist of his damaged hand with an air of utter, injurious contempt. Sweet Pea was shamed back into her crate, and the inspector rolled his glove back, revealing two purplish abrasions.

He texted the tattoo: “Ugh. She just bit a Home Depot guy. I need to return her. When can I bring her.”

“Bummer,” she sent back. “I’ll need to give her to the rescue but they are only here until tomorrow. Can you bring her today?”

“I’m on my way.”

By the time he picked the girls up at school, Sweet Pea was in the back of a truck, on her way to Houston, where (he learned) she had been plucked from some back alley.

The Middle didn’t say a word.

After that, they took a vacation. They had been at an extended family gathering in the mountains, staying at a Bavarian-themed hotel. It had all been just fine, but when they pulled out onto the highway to return home, instead of merging onto the interstate, he kept driving. The kids had absorbed themselves in a game, inventing radio ads for ridiculous products. (“Do you suffer from itchy-butt syndrome?”) Silently, and without their notice, he took them off course, logging mile after mile, winding through the mountains toward a lake resort he had visited years ago, with her, before there were kids.

He felt like a satellite that had slipped out of orbit and was hurtling through space with no fixed destination. He waited until they were almost there before telling the kids, glowing inwardly, marveling at his secret as they traced the edge of the lake. Their delight when he finally told them surprised him with its potency. He himself had authored it, had brought forth this unexpected joy. That this potential had lain there all along and it had been in his power to make it real, or not, terrified him.

They rented a room with two queen beds and ordered room service. The next day, he sat on the edge of the hot tub and watched the girls go back and forth between the cold mountain lake and the tepid pool. He captured images of each of them on his phone, dunking one another in the water, burying themselves in sand, stacking their bodies on top of one another until The Youngest came to him in tears. He could feel the moments freezing in time, slipping into the cold stream of eternity like cubes of ice.

He bought a six-pack of the skeleton beer but drank only two of them. When they packed up two days later, he left all six bottles on the table. They drove home with the windows down, The Oldest with her sunglasses on and her hand out the window, riding the wind like a wave.

That night, when they returned home, Piper was gone. This in itself was not alarming. She was an outdoor cat, and she went in and out as she pleased through a flap door he had installed next to the kitchen slider. The sound of the plastic flap thwacking shut behind her was the last thing he heard most nights. But tonight there was no sound. In the morning, the girls busied themselves gathering their things for a week at their mom’s house and didn’t register the cat’s absence before rushing out the door in a flurry of bags and backpacks.

He listened all day for the sound of the door, but it did not come. She had wandered off for a day or two before, but she always came back. He filled her dish with food, and after the third day he set the food outside, just in case. He walked to the end of the block in both directions and called her name, and he checked her favorite spot inside the canopy of the Japanese maple in the backyard. At the end of the week, she had not returned.

The night before the girls were to come home, he called The Oldest to prepare her.

“Have you even looked for her?” she asked.

“You don’t exactly go looking for a cat,” he said. “They know how to get home if they want to.”

“Did you put a sign up?”

Silence.

“Dad!” she protested. “You have to put a sign up!”

He thought about the posters he had seen stapled to telephone poles. Seeing a cat’s name and photo on paper, with listings of their various markings, had always struck him as oddly anthropomorphizing. He didn’t want to be a person who put up pictures of cats.

But the girls were coming home the next day, and he knew he had to do something. He found a photo of Piper and cropped it. The image was slightly grainy after being enlarged, and the shot was a profile, but it would have to do. He printed a stack of them and grabbed the stapler from his desk. He opened the door and called her name, then he canvassed the neighborhood, papering telephone poles until the stack was gone.

During Piper’s absence they went to the beach, to a small seaside town on the Oregon coast. He hadn’t bothered to check the weather, and it rained every day, giant thunderstorms with lightning spidering on the horizon and huge waves in which The Youngest said she could see sharks swimming and thrashing their tails. They watched from the windows of the Travelodge and took walks on the hard-packed sand when the sky cleared. No one put on a swimsuit all weekend. When the rain stopped, bonfires appeared on the beach. They bought some wood and kindling at the grocery store and dug a pit, scooping out four seats around the rim.

He lit the fire, and The Middle started to tell a ghost story she was obviously making up on the spot, about a dog lapping up blood dripping from a ceiling, and it made The Youngest cry. The Oldest told about a camping trip they had all taken in the before times. In her telling, they had driven out along a peninsula for miles and miles and pitched their tent at the very end. He had no recollection of the place she was describing, but it sounded like a magical land and he wished he could remember it that way. She said that Piper was just a kitten then, and they had left her home alone, and that she (The Oldest) had cried the whole way out along the peninsula, thinking of Piper. The Middle told them how when she had been crying on her bed because the half-emptied house made her feel so strange, like everything had been turned inside out, Piper the cat had come in and hopped up into her lap. The Youngest confessed that she used to let Piper lick her tongue.

When the fire burned down low, they threw sand on it and walked into town. The Youngest bought a seashell necklace, and The Middle bought a bag of saltwater taffy. The Oldest found a snow globe with a blue dolphin in it, and everyone got ice cream. The rain came again, in sprinkles at first and then in sheets, and they made their way toward the hotel, walking down the middle of the abandoned street. People were huddling under awnings and in doorways to wait it out, but they kept to the open and let it pour down on them. It ruined all of their ice creams except The Oldest’s, who had been careful to keep it covered, and then the rain turned to hail.

When they got to the hotel, giddy and freezing, they threw open the windows and watched it pour down on the empty street below, tiny white balls bouncing on the pavement like marbles spilling over from someone’s cupped hands. He took a handful of hail that had collected in the hood of his sweatshirt and held it in his palm until it melted, and they all sat on the bed in their wet clothes, passing The Oldest’s cup of ice cream between them until it was gone.

They buried Piper in the fall, or not really Piper but the box into which they had put her things: the pink and sparkly collar they had bought for her but couldn’t keep her from wriggling out of; a half-empty bag of cat treats; a plastic ball with a place to put catnip in the middle; a photo of her The Youngest had taken with a Polaroid camera she had won in a school raffle. The Oldest carried the box, and they each lit long, white tapers in the kitchen and processed out the slider, across the deck, down the steps, and out to the spot where they buried the dead things.

He dug a hole, careful to avoid the fish’s mound and the resting places of three hamsters that had been buried out there over the years, the popsicle-stick crosses that marked their locations long gone. When the hole was dug, each girl took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over the box. He began to fill the hole with a shovel, but The Middle remembered something and ran back into the house. She came out with Perry/Sweet Pea’s bowl and placed it next to the box, sprinkling a little dirt on it herself before he covered it up.

When the hole was filled, he drove the shovel into the ground and prayed. They held hands, forming a circle around the freshly dug up dirt, and the prayer came, slowly at first. He prayed for Piper, wherever she was, in this realm or the other. He gave thanks for her life and all the ways she had bound up their wounds, and then he found himself praying for her body, picturing it in a ditch on the side of a road, perhaps, or a trace of ashes in some shelter’s oven. And the world seemed full of bodies, under their feet and all around them, the dirt itself nothing but rotting bodies, their own bodies joining the long chain of decay. It was a morbid prayer, an ugly prayer, and the girls opened their eyes and looked at one another. But he kept going, driven by a sudden longing for all those bodies, the pets, the children, the fathers and mothers, all the dead and half-dead, to be whole again, and the prayer went up like smoke, like an incantation, like an odor of decay, until they could see its tail spiraling off into the sky.