Chapter 3
Hair washed and jacket on, Sam left the house at lunchtime and found, damp with the day’s drizzle, a heap of speckled feces. She frowned down. A pile on the short path between the road and their front door. Danny Larsen was halfway up his driveway with his big blond dog, and she shouted after him, “Thanks.”
Danny turned around. The dog barked and circled his legs. “What?” he yelled back.
Sam shook her head. She turned her car keys over one finger. Not enough for their neighbors to treat them like shit; they had to leave literal piles of the stuff, too. The air stank like meat, musk, hair. A primal stink. Her throat tightened around it. Danny and the dog were making their way toward her.
“Were you talking to me?” Danny asked when he got close enough. The dog bounded back and forth on his driveway. Its plush yellow hair bounced with the movement.
Sam pointed down. “This you?”
“No.” Then he had the audacity to smile at her. “I usually use a toilet.”
“Your dog,” she said. “Is this your dog?”
For one irritating moment, she thought he might respond the same way—my dog’s not a big piece of spotted shit, my dog’s right here, see?—but he only shook his head, still smiling. “Nope.”
Did he think she was stupid? “Who else walks their dog here?” she asked. “It’s you.”
“That’s not from a dog,” he said. “A horse, maybe. It’s huge.”
She bit her cheeks to stop herself from speaking more: oh, what an expert he was, wow. Danny squinted at her. The rain beaded softly on his beard. In high school, he’d been moderately popular, a decent athlete. A kid who acted like he got along with everyone but who followed through with no one. There’d only been three hundred students in the whole school, which made it a tiny, gossipy hellhole, a bucket of crabs snapping at each other and falling over themselves. Sam had to keep her vision focused, on her sister and on graduation, in order to make it through. But there, in her peripheral vision, had been Danny Larsen, carrying his soccer and wrestling and baseball gear, chatting up their teachers, and laughing with classmates.
It infuriated her at the time. He and his pals—their whole cohort. The kids who breezed along as if nothing could ever hurt them. Danny went off to college and returned a couple years later to work for his father’s landscaping company. Then his father stepped back, and Danny took over. Now he was a proper businessman. He had a truck with the Larsen name on it, branded T-shirts, and lawn signs advertising his services. He was exactly the same as he’d always been: muscled and friendly and fake.
Sam would rather be honest and solitary than false and surrounded by admirers. She preferred that a thousand times over. Elena was the same way. Sam still couldn’t believe Danny had ever tried to date Elena. It was impossible to imagine the two of them even having a conversation.
“You have voles?” he asked. When she didn’t respond right away, because he didn’t make sense to her, he gestured toward the house. She turned to look. It didn’t clarify anything: small, shabby, and cream-colored, as usual. Weeds grew in clumps at its base.
“What?” she said.
“Something’s been digging there.”
She blinked, then, and noticed at last. The siding beside the front door was damaged. One strip of vinyl, knee-high, had peeled off entirely, and the wood below was gouged.
“Goddamn it,” she said. “How long has it been like that?” She was asking herself, really, but Danny shrugged in response.
“Have you noticed any tunnels in the lawn?” he asked. “Voles are wild diggers. They can gnaw through trees. We can help, if you want. They’re little but they’re a real pest.”
The dog’s breath was heavy. Simply the sound of it overwhelmed. Dogs and rodents and—horses, according to Danny—infesting this property, making a zoo of it, attempting to destroy the hope Sam and Elena had left. “Awesome,” she said. “Fantastic news, I’m so glad you stopped by.”
The corners of Danny’s mouth drew in. Keeping the same cordial voice, though, he said, “You called me over.”
“Right,” she said. “Well. Thanks for pointing that out.”
They both stood there. She had to get to the ferry terminal. Her shift started at three. At Sam’s feet lay the wet, coiled stool.
“How’s your mom doing?” Danny asked. “And your sister?”
“Fine. Both of them.”
“I actually don’t think I’ve seen your mom in a couple weeks. She’s okay?”
“She’s fine,” Sam said again. “She just…she’s not very mobile. She gets dizzy when she stands for too long.”
“Sorry to hear that. You all are looking for a different doctor for her? You go to Boyce right now?”
“Oh,” Sam said. “I guess. I don’t know. That’s more Elena’s idea. Mom says she likes Dr. Boyce.”
“Just in case, I gave Elena the name of the clinic my parents go to. Their specialists are in Mount Vernon. They really like it.”
Mount Vernon, a long ferry ride away. Two hours, in total, once you added the drive—they’d have to take a full day off work. All that to accompany their mother to a single appointment, where they would sit in a waiting room for ages before getting the exact same diagnoses she already had: sarcoidosis, pulmonary hypertension, interstitial lung disease. The same suggestions to enroll in clinical trials she couldn’t access. The same offerings of treatments they could barely afford, and that wouldn’t fix anything, anyway. Diuretics, digoxin, inhaled oxygen. Everything designed to distract from what their mother herself had long said was inevitable: she was going to die from this.
“Thanks,” Sam said.
The dog shoved forward against Danny’s pant leg to sniff the foul air between them. Danny stroked its soft back, held it in place. “If you ever need anything,” he added.
“We’re good.”
“But if you do,” he said. “I told your sister the same thing. We’re just down the road.”
Sam could perfectly picture him ordering the chili at one of Elena’s tables and offering his assistance. He was so annoying. And he forced her into pretense right along with him—that was one of his worst qualities, that his niceness could make Sam feel like she ought to play nice, too. “I have to get to work,” she said, “but it was good catching up with you, Danny.”
He gestured to the ground. “Want me to pick that up? I have bags.”
No, she wanted to say, get off this property, stop talking to my sister, stay away from my family’s pain. The notion of a popular kid scraping waste off their walkway was too appealing, though. She said, “That’d be great. Thanks.”
Behind them, the side of the house lay open, a line of its innards exposed.
The rain got heavier that afternoon. From the ferry, Sam watched drops track across the windows, waves slosh on the horizon. The boat swayed. She braced herself against the counter. When she had to go help a customer at the tea station, boiling water splashed on her wrist, and the customer apologized and she apologized, too, furious with herself and everyone around her. Afterward she took an apple juice from the beverage fridge to press against her burning skin.
The sun was down by the time she got home. Their woods were silhouetted against the sky. The light above their front door was on, so she could see that the pile was gone. Rain had washed the ground where it once lay, but hadn’t gotten rid of the smell entirely.
She pushed her key into the front door’s lock, trying not to let her jacket sleeve rub against the tender pink blotch on her wrist. She was moving slowly. Next to the steps, where the siding was missing, was a spot of raw wood made dark by the wet air. Parallel lines of splinters ran along it.
She eased open the lock. Inside the house was Elena’s voice and their mother’s blaring television set. That stink was all around still, smelling like stomach acid and gaping bodies, like soggy fur and an unwashed mouth. Sour and rotten. Copper and earth. “Took you long enough,” Elena called from the living room, and Sam let herself inside.