Ten #2
She carried Georgia to the bathroom, put her in the tub, started the water running gently.
The dog looked confused, but not alarmed, and she thought that she could soap her up with human shampoo (there really wasn’t such a difference) and maybe file her nails with her own nail file if she softened them up first and by the time she was done they’d probably both be tired enough to sleep for several hours.
When the water touched Georgia she let out a single yelp and scrabbled at the porcelain sides of the tub.
“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, we’re just getting you clean.”
Georgia scrabbled. “Shhhh,” she said, “please,” and then remembered please in Georgian, gtkhovt .
“Gtkhovt, gtkhovt, come on girl,” and the discordant Georgian confused the dog enough that she calmed down a little bit.
Amy kept kneading her wet fur, putting well-honed canine massage techniques into practice, and the hidden grit in Georgia’s fur came off in grayish streams into the tub.
Amy felt nuts, what was she doing? but also gratified because clearly Georgia really did need a bath.
She sang quietly to the dog like she used to sing to Ferry in the bathtub. There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation.
She squirted some shampoo into her hand, rubbed it in circles on Georgia’s furry head (if she’d had her grooming clippers here she could really go to town) and the dog either enjoyed it or didn’t see the point in protesting, just sort of sat there, stopped scrabbling, and Amy wished she knew some Georgian tunes to sing—the beautiful songs they sang at the table the other night, or anything that Georgia might find familiar.
But in the absence of anything else: and school comes along just to end it.
(Which was where Ferry used to pipe up: “Mama! That’s my favorite song too!” When he was three or four. Golden hair, golden skin, golden little boy.)
She rinsed Georgia carefully. One of the nice things about European showers were the detached heads, which were perfect for rinsing dogs or small children or the spaces between your toes, and Amy hoped that she wasn’t using all the morning’s hot water (god, what if she was?) or that the gurgling of the pipes or her own off-key singing weren’t waking anyone up, but she was being quiet, right?
Singing quietly? And Georgia was being so good?
Yes, you’re being a good girl, look at you all nice and clean.
“What are you doing?”
She turned around, mortified. “I’m, um—”
“You’re giving Nesvi a bath?” Maia was wearing a bathrobe over pajama pants, her hair up in a knot on top of her head, her blond roots showing. She was wearing glasses, looked strangely teacherly.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Amy said. “Her name is Nesvi?”
“Yes,” Maia said. “It means ‘melon.’ So you decided to give her a bath? Because you couldn’t sleep?”
“We woke you up.”
“My room is right under yours,” Maia said. “I heard all of it. Even the singing.” But she didn’t look particularly annoyed—in fact, she almost seemed amused. “But you didn’t wake me up, in fact. I never sleep.”
“You’re too young for that.”
Maia shrugged, sat down on the closed toilet.
“It’s been like this for me since I was small.
Evidently it used to drive my mother crazy.
Even if she put me down for a nap when I was a baby I would just sit in my crib and watch her.
” She loosened her hair, tied it back up again on top of her head.
For a moment, with her hair down, she had looked very beautiful and young.
“Don’t you get tired?”
“Not really,” she said. “I have too much energy, I guess. Or just too much to do. No time to sleep.”
“You’re a kid,” Amy said. “What do you have to do?”
Maia laughed. “Well, school, of course. And also I have a job.”
“You do?”
“I make videos in English.”
“Oh, that’s right—your mom told me.”
“She hates it,” Maia said. “But I earn fifty lari for a five-minute video, so I’m going to keep doing it. But of course my employer could get shut down at any minute. For propaganda.”
“That could happen?”
She shrugged. “Anything could happen. I don’t know that it will happen.” She got down next to the tub with Amy, scratched Nesvi on her damp head.
“Was she dirty?”
“Filthy,” Amy said.
“Yeah, we don’t ever bathe them,” Maia said.
“Do people adopt them?” Amy said. “I’m still trying to figure out how this works.”
Maia sank down onto the bathmat, crossed her legs.
“I guess people have adopted them in the past. Those friends you met at dinner the other night?” she said.
“They brought home one of our dogs. They let her roam around though, so I don’t know if you’d say she’s really their dog.
But they feed her and they built her a doghouse in their yard, so.
They live out in the country, by the lake. ”
“I was there today,” Amy said. “Or I guess yesterday. I walked around that track there.”
“So then you saw all the dogs?”
“I did,” Amy said. She didn’t want to mention her drone, afraid she’d sound like a fool.
“People dump puppies by the lake, and the puppies become part of these packs,” Maia said.
“And then people know to leave food and stuff for them. And then the humane society will sometimes capture them for their shots. So they get their vaccines. It’s really not so terrible.
Like if you have to be a stray dog anywhere, being a stray dog by Visi Lake isn’t such a bad life. ”
“People here are pretty nice to dogs, all things considered.”
“I told you. It is easier for us to care for dogs than it is to care for one another,” Maia said. She reached out again and scratched Nesvi on the head.
Amy thought about that, about the women she worked with at the shelter; many of them were older, were alone, had struggled with different kinds of addiction or dangerous relationships.
They devoted themselves to the cats and dogs more assiduously than many parents devoted themselves to their children.
The animals were easy to love, since they were so happy with so little, and it was easy to give them what they needed, food and love.
“So why does your mom take in these guys, then, if they’re doing okay out in the wild?”
“I mean they’re not always doing okay,” Maia said.
“They have all sorts of larger animals out there by the lake. That will attack or eat puppies. Or they can get illness or injury. Nature does what nature does. One time when I was little my mom and I went to the lake, there’s a beach there, and in the sand was a dog who had clearly recently died, and my mom just lost it.
Just freaked out, started sobbing, I didn’t understand why.
I didn’t see what she was seeing. And then she marched me back to the car, and of course I was crying now too because I wanted to go to the beach, and on our way to the car there was this little dog, not much more than a puppy, and she picked it up and put it in the car with us.
She said, I’m rescuing this dog. That was our first.”
“So that’s how it started.”
“Yes,” Maia said. “And since then, I don’t know, whenever she sees a dog who needs help, or who isn’t tagged, or who looks too skinny—she just brings them home and adds them to the pack.
She spends a lot of time down there with them.
I think they make her feel calm, even though to be honest they smell like shit. ”
“So does she walk them all? How does she take care of them?”
Maia shrugged. “Sometimes, or I’ll walk a few when I can. Mostly they just go into the backyard. My grandmother and aunts feed them, or they’ll sit down there too, playing with them or just talking to them. I’d do it more but I don’t really have time.”
“How does she pay for all of their food and everything?”
“I don’t know,” Maia said. “I mean, I know your money helped a lot. Every time you sent more dollars my mom was like, the American did it again!”
Amy blinked.
“I’m sorry, is that rude? Sometimes I don’t know when I’m being rude.”
“No, no, it’s…” If she’d been Irine and some lunatic on the other side of the earth was sending her chunks of money every few days, no questions asked, she’d have been happy, too. “Maybe I should have given more, really.”
“That’s up to you,” Maia said. “I’m not asking for anything.”
Amy finished rinsing off Georgia—wait, no, her name was Nesvi—and Maia handed her a towel.
Together, they wrapped her up in a big ball and scrubbed her dry.
When they let her go, Nesvi shook wildly to get the extra water off, gave them each a sort of disgusted look, and pawed at the door. Enough was enough.
“I guess I should take her back downstairs?”
“I’ll do it,” Maia said. “I’m headed that way anyway.” But they were still both sitting on the bathroom floor, slightly damp. Gently, reflexively, Amy was patting Nesvi dry, and she felt the dog relax a bit. Her tail was wagging, her eyes half-closed.
“I think she is enjoying her massage,” Maia said.
“I can’t get over how good your English is.”
“Your Georgian would be really good too if you grew up watching Georgian movies and Georgian YouTube and Georgian TikTok.”
“You get a lot of English media?”
“Of course,” Maia said. “We have all of it. Taylor Swift, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it’s good because it helps me speak better English, and that’s what helps me make money.”
“What about Russian?”
“What about it? It’s the worst. Just—just a hideous language.” She made a face. “But my grandmother and aunts still speak it half the time. And so does my mom, which is helpful because she actually wants the Russians to come back in and take over again like it’s 1922.”
“Maia, come on.”
“You have no idea,” Maia said. “My mother wants the state in control. She wants to have a strong man making decisions and doesn’t want to look too hard at the decisions he makes. And she doesn’t want to have to do hard things for herself.”
“Maia, she raised you by herself.”
The girl grinned. “Yeah, but I made it easy.” She stood, picked up Nesvi. “Thanks for giving her a bath. She must have been pretty disgusting.”
“She was beautiful,” Amy said.
Maia rolled her eyes. “Dog people,” she said, but she was smiling, and she left Amy alone in the bathroom, on the floor, wet, a little lonely, still not tired at all.
BUT THEN, LYING in her twin bed, a strange sort of sleep did come.
It was not a peaceful rest, but an active one, dreams teetering on the border of the life she was living and a surreal life that could not be.
Roxy here with her in Tbilisi, fast asleep among the dogs downstairs, poking her head up in the crowd.
Amy, alarmed—how did Roxy become a stray?
Had Judd stopped taking care of her in her absence?
Did Judd forget to close the door behind him as he headed off to the restaurant?
And how did Roxy find her all the way here?
Oh, she must have tracked her smell. She must have known where to look.
Anyway, come on, Roxy girl, it’s time to get up now, it’s time to come home with me, I don’t know what we’re doing here anyway, there was never an Angel, there was never another dog, there was never anyone besides you.
And then the woman from the park was sitting in the strange Tbilisi kitchen, saying, I told you so, I told you so, and Amy did not disagree.