THE ANIMAL GIRL by John Fulton

I

The summer job Leah was interviewing for at the University biomedical laboratory did not exactly require her to kill anything, but it did involve the deaths of animals, several of them every week. Franklin, Leah’s father, who had been a research doctor and was now an administrator at the University of Michigan medical school, had gotten her the interview. It was part of his recent campaign to jolt her out of her slump, to revive, educate and edify Leah, who at seventeen was friendless, had no direction, no interests, was homebound out of choice and very much in the way of her father and his new girlfriend, Noelle.
Leah was unpleasant to be around and she knew it. Franklin was too in love and too happy. Only three years ago, her mother, Margaret, or Maggie, as everyone had called her, had died and left Leah and Franklin devastated. And now Leah wasn’t ready for her father to be happy again. How weird and stomach-turning it was to see him emerge in the mornings from his room, still in his pajamas with a smile on his face, a full smile above his thick beard – all that bushy facial hair that he’d grown in the last years because he’d been too grief-stricken to trim it. And now he was smiling, too often and too obviously. He’d been nagging at her to make more of a social effort, to go out with people her own age. “Boys aren’t against the rules, you know,” he said. “You’re allowed to be interested in them.”
She’d shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. Once, she had let him have it. “I don’t need to fall in love, okay? Maybe you do. But I don’t.” He’d backed off and left her alone.
So when he asked her to consider the job, she said no. “Please, Leah. You already have an interview. It’s a chance for you to learn about science, to see what’s going on, to get some exposure.”
“I’m not interested in science. I’m not interested in exposure.”
Franklin slumped over in his chair. He was a large man, six-foot-three, with big bones and a soft midsection, and seeing his thick, ungainly body fall in disappointment, seeing his hands, large as bowls, beseechingly laid out on the table, had its effect on Leah. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go. Then I’ll say no.”
“Thank you,” Franklin said.
Leah showed up at the interview looking as she usually did: dumpy in her overlarge Levis and white T-shirt. The laboratories were subterranean, windowless, a labyrinth of narrow hallways with exposed water pipes running the lengths of the low ceilings and long fluorescent-tube lighting that coated everything in a naked whiteness. The close, unnatural odors of chemicals hung in the air, despite the respiratory whirl of the ventilation system. Max, an old colleague of her father, was the researcher she’d be working with. He kept his office dark: two desk lamps and the bluish glow of his computer screen gave the space a cave-like dimness. The air was a complex mix of smells: tennis shoes, coffee, and microwave popcorn. “The last time I saw you, you were this high.” He put his hand out at waist level and laughed. Leah remembered him, too: the picnics years ago at his yellow house and his then-young wife.
He started by explaining that his work involved animal experimentation. “I want to be frank with you,” Max began. “We’ve had a lot of people quit this job after a few days. It’s not for everyone.”
“Oh,” Leah said. She hadn’t expected to be discouraged, to be warned away.
“I wish I could tell you that you’d be doing a lot of science. But I’m afraid you won’t be. Of course, I’ll be happy to tell you all about what we’re up to here. But your job would be taking care of and feeding the animals.”
He had big fleshy lips and fulsome eyelids that made him look both morose and jolly. Leah liked his thick sideburns and unruly hair. She had immediately sensed something in Max, something both depressive and good-natured, that she liked, that she wanted to be around, and that suddenly made this job more appealing to her. “That’s all right,” she said. “I like animals. Working with animals will be great.”
Max smiled sadly. “The animals will die,” he said. “So if you like them . . . ”
“They’re dying for science, right? I won’t give them names or anything.” Leah had just noticed two anatomical diagrams, one of a human and the other of what seemed to be a small cow, hanging on Max’s wall; and looking over them, she was struck by the crammed complexity of innards – vessels, organs, layers of muscle, fat, and skin – and felt a visceral unease at knowing that she too was made of this mess. And then, on the wall opposite his desk, Leah saw something she hadn’t expected in a scientist’s office: a poster of Clifford Brown, eyes closed, blasting his trumpet as curls of cigarette smoke rose between the valve casings. “I’m into jazz, too,” she said. “It wasn’t fair he had to die so young. If he’d lived, we wouldn’t have to settle for that terrible amplified funk Miles started playing at the end of his life. He would have been too embarrassed to play music like that with Clifford around to hear it. Clifford would have kept him honest.”
Max grinned and put a hand thoughtfully to his fleshy cheek. Leah was trying to figure out what she liked about this bearish man who couldn’t have been much younger than her father and who wore an old yellow T-shirt, untucked, beneath his lab coat and a pair of frayed Adidas with brand-new, super-white laces that clashed with the dirty off-white of the old leather. “Maybe so,” he said.
“Is that a baby cow?” Leah asked, pointing to the anatomical poster.
He shook his head. “That’s a sheep. We work with sheep and dogs. The sheep seem to bother people less than the dogs, for obvious reasons. Our animals don’t stay with us longer than a week. You won’t be involved with the elimination and disposal. We have somebody else to do that. You’ll be responsible for feeding them, cleaning out their cages, and doing pre-op.” Leah didn’t know what pre-op was and she wasn’t going to ask. “You won’t have to be in the lab during any procedures, if you’d rather not see them.” He paused then, seeming to give Leah some time to think. “You’re sure the job won’t bother you?”
“Will the animals just die sometimes?” she asked, trying to sound as clinical as he and failing. “When the bigger experiments are performed, I mean.”
“I’m afraid they always die. That happens to be the nature of our work.”
Leah took in a deep breath before she said, “It won’t bother me.”

The morning Leah was to start her new job, Noelle and her father ambushed her with her favorite meal – strawberry crepes and fresh whipped cream – and Leah knew that they had some difficult news for her. They had already showered and dressed. Noelle, who was in real estate, wore Franklin’s apron, which said King of the Kitchen on it, over her gray suit. She poured the batter while Leah’s father stood in sunlight slicing strawberries and humming. The table was set, the orange juice in glasses. The aroma of brewing coffee mixed with the warm pancake air of the kitchen. “What’s happening?” Leah asked. “Something’s up. You’re going to tell me something.”
“Why don’t you sit down, Leah,” Franklin said. He’d just had his hair and beard trimmed, and his neatness and good grooming made him look more and more like he belonged to this woman.
Leah didn’t sit down. “I’ve got my first day of work. I can’t eat.”
“Your father told me. Congratulations,” Noelle said. She really was a sweet woman, and Leah was at times disgusted with herself for disliking her. “What exactly will you be doing?”
“I’m an executioner. I’ll be killing animals.” This answer silenced Noelle so completely that Leah felt compelled to take it back. “I’m working at a lab where they do experiments. I’ll be feeding and cleaning up after the animals they use. Sheep and dogs.”
Noelle placed a plate of stacked crepes on the table and Franklin followed her with bowls of strawberries and whipped cream. “So,” Leah said, “I suppose you two are getting married. That’s the news, I bet.”
Standing behind his chair, Franklin’s face turned a deep red. Leah couldn’t remember ever seeing her father blush, though she had seen him weep, his eyes raw and beaten, until he could cry no more. “Not quite,” he said.
“So what’s the good news? Why are you bribing me with strawberry crepes?”
Franklin all at once was nervous and started playing with his fork. “Noelle and I have been talking about the possibility of her moving in with us.”
“The possibility,” Leah said. “Are you asking me?”
“How about sitting down and eating a crepe, Leah,” Franklin said.
When she didn’t sit down, he turned to Noelle, who’d taken her apron off and looked powerful and businesslike in her gray suit. “No,” she said. “We just thought we should let you know.”
“Great. That’s great. Congratulations.” Leah felt her throat catch and the tears rise to her eyes, despite her best effort to hold them off. “I’m being a baby. I’m sorry for being a baby,” she said. And then she rushed out the front door.

On Leah’s first day, they gave a sheep a heart attack, though Max and Diana, Max’s graduate student, called it a minor infarction, which Leah gathered was not quite the same as a heart attack. Leah was afraid she might relate to the animal, care for it; and so midway through her workday, when she stood next to the sedated sheep and watched it jolt and begin to die on the operating table, she was proud of herself for feeling so little. It was a large animal, after all, so obviously alive, stinking with aliveness, with barnyard odors that permeated the laboratory. “Why are we doing this?” she asked, a question that Max, absorbed in the careful killing of the animal, did not seem to hear. She didn’t ask again, though she did want there to be a good reason for destroying this creature, which she and Max had had to force down every inch of the hall between its pen and the operating room. From the moment Leah had sheared the wool from its left foreleg, where Max would insert the lethal device, an inflatable catheter, the sheep had seemed to guess its fate. The sound it made as they pushed it down the hallway was not unlike a child crying, though there was something purely animal and stupid in it. This beast wasn’t smart enough to care about, she told herself. Halfway down the hall, it stopped, eyes athwart and glaring fixedly at nothing. Leah felt the warmth on her leg before she looked down and saw that it had shit on her. Then it pissed, the linoleum floor becoming slick as ice with the warm flow of urine. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Max said. “They weren’t supposed to feed or water it last night.” Evidently, the person for whom Leah was taking over had been incompetent.
When they finally got into the operating room, Diana, a beautiful if slightly heavy woman, whose neat, made-up face seemed out of sync with this place and the jumbo syringe in her hand, administered the anesthetic. It took the three of them to lift the animal, now docile and drowsy, onto the table. Once the sheep was completely out, they began to kill it in a very slow and complicated way. Max inserted the catheter along with a microscopic camera, which relayed a black-and-white image of the sheep’s artery and the pathway of the catheter onto a computer screen fixed to the wall. Max studied the screen as he worked the catheter carefully through the artery and into the animal’s heart. “Bingo,” he said. “We’re in.” Leah knew what would come next. They would inflate the catheter and induce a heart attack. But before they did, Max, who evidently thought Leah was a wimp, said, “You don’t have to stay, Leah. This isn’t part of your job.”
“I’d like to watch, if that’s all right.” Max nodded and Leah stayed, though in truth she wanted to leave and would have if some part of her didn’t wonder what it would be like to watch something die. Besides, she liked being near Max, especially when he worked. Max was almost as large as Leah’s father, but his lumbering body became focused and alert as he directed the catheter. He kept his eyes on the echocardiogram and the computer screen at the same time, seeing a great deal where Leah saw only a whirl of meaningless gray images. Max put his hand on the animal’s heaving side for a moment, as if to prepare it, then took his hand away and pressed the button that would kill it. And almost immediately Leah was impressed by her performance, by her indifference when the animal suffered a heart attack on the table beneath her, its body jolting, its legs kicking so suddenly that Leah stepped back from the table and watched its sleeping struggle wane, now only its rear legs paddling a little, then becoming still again. “It can’t feel anything, by the way,” Max said. “It’s completely out.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Leah said, unable to suppress a tone of excitement. “Is it dead yet?”
Max was leaning forward, his eyes still on the screen, when Leah was tempted to touch him. With the large animal dying beneath her, this impulse seemed all the more wrong. Nonetheless, she felt it. Diana had her back to them, watching a printout of the ECG. And so Leah did it; she touched his shoulder, put her hand there, as if momentarily balancing herself against him. The simple presence of him, his solidity, his body heat, was astonishing to her, and she left her hand on his shoulder as long as she dared before lifting it again. He made no sign of noticing and Leah was thrilled and suddenly nervous. “Nope,” he said. “We don’t want to kill it. Not right away. That’s not the point. We’re giving it a minor heart attack in order to cause an infarction. In order to kill some of its cardiac tissue. We use the balloon to simulate a thrombosis – a blockage of the vessel – long enough to cause necrosis. To kill or damage the tissue. Then we deflate the balloon and measure the capacity of the damaged heart. How long can he live on this heart and how much of the tissue in the affected area is necrotic? How much is still healthy? How much is damaged but capable of healing? He might live for hours or even days. He might even experience a full recovery. He might not die at all, in which case we’ll have to do that part for him.”
“Why?” Leah asked.
“We need his heart, I’m afraid,” Max said. “After all this is done, we remove it and study the extent of tissue damage.”
Later, in Max’s office, after they’d left the sheep on the table with an IV dripping glucose slowly into its body and a partially dead heart keeping it alive for now, Max and Leah ate their sack lunches together. Max had put on a Charlie Parker CD and they listened to the high-velocity riffs of Bird’s solo to Now’s the Time while Max ate his tuna fish sandwich and told her more about the experiment: how the sheep heart is similar enough to the human heart to be helpful as a model, how minor heart attacks in humans are much more common than major ones, and therefore very important to understand, how they’d be inducing thousands of heart attacks of varying severity, involving different parts of the cardiac muscle in an attempt to be “comprehensive.” And, finally, in a later stage of the study, how they’d be testing different strategies of emergency treatment, designed to minimize the area of necrosis. Max became animated, spoke with his hands, and forgot about his lunch as he spoke. “A patient with a history of heart disease comes to the ER complaining of chest pain. He’s most likely suffering a minor heart attack. So what should the physician do first and how quickly does he have to do it in order to reduce permanent damage? What’s the likely window of time the physician has to make his decision? And what are his – ”
“Or her,” Leah interrupted.
Max nodded and smiled. “Or her,” he said. “What are her best options for treatment? Hopefully, our work will suggest some answers.”
Before they finished their discussion, Max took out a plastic model of a sheep heart from a deep drawer in his desk and started to disassemble it and lay its parts – the auricles and ventricles – on the desk next to his half-eaten sandwich in order to show Leah where thromboses typically occur and the different areas that would be affected by infarction and what they might learn about the tissue damage resulting from heart attacks. While he talked, Leah watched him, took him in: his chubby, unshaven cheeks, his thick, ruffled hair, the circles of sweat that had begun to form in the pits of his lab coat while he’d been working, laboring really, to induce the heart attack just at the right time and in the right way; and again something about him – big, sloppy, soft-bodied Max, who had whole wheat crumbs in his moustache and who cared passionately about things that were a mystery and just a little boring to Leah – kept pulling at her. “Necrosis,” she said, repeating the word he had just been using. “That means death in Latin, doesn’t it? I’m taking Latin right now.”
“Actually, it’s Greek,” he said.
And then, maybe to arrest his obsessive focus on science, maybe to prevent what might become a lengthy and unwanted lecture on a Greek word, maybe just to change the subject, maybe to shock him, to show him she wasn’t just his high-school helper, his inquisitive animal keeper, maybe to get his attention, maybe for no reason at all, she said, “My mother died of cancer. Three years ago. Really quickly.” Leah almost snapped her fingers to show him how quickly it had happened. “It only took her two months to die.” In fact, Leah was, without quite knowing why, lying; her mother had died in three months.
Max put down the plastic pieces of the heart and folded his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I heard something about that. I heard it was awfully tough on your father, too.” He smiled as he had when he’d warned her in the interview that the job may not be for her. A heavy, soft, sympathetic smile. And because his lips were chapped, there was an element of pain to it. “As I remember, she was a very nice woman.”
“I don’t know why I told you that. I shouldn’t have,” Leah said because now he was paying too much attention to her. She wanted to return to the sheep heart, to minor heart attacks and infarctions. “This work doesn’t bother me. Seeing that animal dying was just fine.”
Max nodded and seemed, for a moment, slightly awkward before he said, “That’s good.”
“What about you?”
“What about me what?”
Somehow Leah felt that she’d just earned the right to ask the question now. “Why don’t you have pictures of your wife out? Your family? I remember you had a wife.”
“Oh,” he said. He took a big bite of his sandwich and chewed for a while. “Sharon, you mean.” He shook his head and looked a little annoyed. “That’s a bit personal.” But then he answered her: “That didn’t work so well. Sharon went her own way a few years back. She’s remarried. I’m good at science, but not . . . ”
“You’d be a good dad,” Leah said, hoping to cheer him up. But that statement was evidently too personal as well, and he let her know by looking at his watch and announcing the end of their lunch hour.
On the way back to what she thought of as her animal basement, she passed through the operating room, where the sheep lay on its fat side, heaving with life, and again she stood over it for a moment, asking herself what she felt, which was, to be truthful, a little more than nothing – an oh-well, an it’s-too-bad, a what-can-be-done? kind of feeling.
She spent the rest of her day with the animals in her windowless room down the hall. It had a blankness that she found quieting and relieving – off-white walls, a rectangular block of fluorescent lights on the ceiling, a concrete floor with a drain at its center, and a large tublike industrial sink in the far corner, next to which bags of feed – dog food and grain – were stacked. The one anomaly, and the thing she liked most, was a large clerk’s desk, which she tried to budge. It was as heavy and unmovable as a boulder, and made her animal basement feel oddly like an actual office, a place where things were to be written and thought about. The animals stayed at the back of her narrow room in cages, their floors covered with blond wood chips that gave off a fresh earthy odor tinted with urine and animal heat. There were a dozen cages, though on that first day she had only three animals (now only two, since one of these was dying slowly in the room down the hall). She had one sheep and one dog, a boy dog, she could see when she bent down to look at its underside. Each animal had its own folder. Filed in the left desk drawer under two categories, Dogs and Sheep, the folders contained the age of the animal in months, its gender, its color, weight, and height, and an identity number; the dogs had three digits and the sheep had four. The dog she had that day was 013, an unlucky number. It wagged its tail and looked up at Leah with an oddly human and expressive gaze that said something like, “Hi, there.”
“You’re going to die,” she said to it. But 013 just kept wagging its tail. Leah stuck her fingers through the grate of the cage and the silly animal licked them.

The beginning of that summer had been wet and cold. A colorless arctic gray began and ended each day until the first week of July when the heat came all at once, only a few days after Noelle’s arrival, in a burst of sun and humidity that was almost tropical. And this shift in seasons somehow gave Noelle more power and presence, as if she’d been there a very long time, through the short days of winter, through the gradually lengthening days of spring, and then into summer. She came with her dishes and her shiny pots and pans, so much more numerous and better than the odd assemblage of dull stuff Leah’s mother, never much of a cook, had used for years, all of which Franklin put into boxes now and stored in the basement. She came with her fancy olive oils, fancy French and Italian cheeses, and a spice rack for which Franklin, who had never been a handyman, nonetheless got out his tools – a balance, a power drill, and plaster screws. Finally, after drilling three sets of unnecessary holes, he attached it to the wall and Noelle clapped for him. Noelle loved to cook, and judging from Franklin’s praise, Leah guessed she did so expertly, which was all the more reason to avoid the dinner table, Noelle’s dinner table, made of cherrywood and caressed with lemon oil at least once a week, and, yet again, so much better than the rustic, square table that Leah’s family had once used and that also ended up in the basement. And so she avoided Noelle and Franklin at the dinner hour, at all hours, really. She was busy, she told them. She had to work. Or she felt a little sick and remained in her room listening to Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, early Miles. Or she did the one thing that she could do: she practiced her clarinet, working through major and minor scales, through exercises, and even flat-footedly improvising to a Jamey Aebersold CD turned up loud on her stereo. Even though she listened to jazz, she couldn’t play it. She couldn’t swing. She was stiff, right on the beat, her every note brittle and staid against the laidback drums and piano on the practice recording. Only once did Noelle and Franklin insist and force her to join them for a dinner of broiled salmon, dill potatoes, asparagus, and a sauce in a very hot dish, which Leah put down in the middle of the table, where it marred the wood. It had been an accident; she hadn’t meant to, she falsely argued. Noelle actually screamed. “You did that on purpose! She did that on purpose, Franklin!” Leah worked herself into tears, denying this accusation, and Franklin looked powerless, seated at the table and trapped between two angry women. Unbelievably, Noelle came down to Leah’s room and apologized later, and for the shortest moment Leah felt guilty for her lie, though not guilty enough to do more than remove the headphones of her Walkman, hear Noelle out, and then, without conviction, say that she too was sorry for having gotten upset, when, in fact, she was wondering why Noelle had to be so damn conciliatory, so damn sweet and determined to get along. It made Leah feel all the more petty, childish, and, something she hadn’t anticipated, helpless.
Noelle was athletic, too. And so she came with her bright, souped-up mountain bike, her tennis rackets (the second one she’d bought for Franklin as a present), even her otherworldly scuba gear – a tank, face mask, and flippers. She was a healthy, attractive woman with a small waist and noticeable boobs, more noticeable than Leah’s mother’s, though her mother’s face, soft and expressive, had been far more beautiful than Noelle’s, which was pretty, but too lean, too harshly featured. Nonetheless, Noelle had inspired Franklin to buy his own mountain bike and spend every other weekend cycling with her through different areas of Northern Michigan. They invited Leah along on every trip and Leah always gave them the same answer: maybe next time.
But what bothered Leah much more than Noelle was what was happening to Franklin. He was changing. It wasn’t just that he was no longer sad. He was becoming another person, someone she didn’t know and maybe couldn’t know. It wasn’t just that he trimmed his beard and scheduled regular haircuts, that he dressed nicely, even on weekends, that he played tennis, hiked, cycled, took beginning scuba lessons at the Y, none of which the old sedentary Franklin, the man who’d been seemingly happy and in love with her mother, had done. And it wasn’t just the fact that he’d slimmed up and gotten in shape, which Leah first noticed the very day Noelle moved in and Franklin, a little muscular in a tank top and shorts, his belly, if still there, more compact and shaped, carried in box after box of her stuff. It wasn’t just that he was rarely home, only in the mornings and later evenings, always occupied, off doing something new, even at his age, forty-seven, and even though he had a grumpy daughter at home.
It was all these things together that bothered Leah, and she let her father know it one afternoon, not long after she had damaged Noelle’s table and offered only her indifferent apology. He’d come down to her room prepared to accuse her of something. Leah saw it in his nervousness, the way he announced his intention – “We need to talk,” he said – then took a book off her shelf and began flipping through its pages without looking at it because he hated conflict so much that he needed to distract himself when he saw it coming. At least, thank God, this had not changed. “I want to say a few things. Just a few things. And then I want a promise from you.”
Franklin was wearing a button-up plaid shirt and new penny loafers. Leah knew that he had gotten these clothes with Noelle. Noelle liked plaid, she liked button-up shirts, and didn’t much care for middle-aged men who were in the habit of wearing T-shirts and jeans all the time. “You’re different,” Leah said. “Totally different.”
“Not really,” he said. “I’m just happy.”
She smelled something astringent and good on him, and knew at once that this too had been Noelle’s influence. “You’re wearing cologne.”
“So,” he said.
“So you’re different.”
“I’m going to do the talking, Leah.” And even in his ability now to stand up to her, to say what he had just said calmly and with enough force to make Leah’s chest constrict and her stomach feel woozy, he was not the same.
“I’m not different,” Leah said. She was sitting on the carpeted floor, her legs akimbo, the headphones of her Walkman resting on her neck, while Franklin stood against her dresser, still playing with the book. “I haven’t changed at all. Not one bit.” And she hadn’t. She was the same girl she’d been three years ago, when her mother had died of breast cancer, had died so quickly it almost seemed that she’d wanted it, that she’d turned over in bed one day, seen the darkness, and chosen it. Never mind the fact that she’d been happy, that she’d enjoyed being a third-grade teacher, enjoyed walking the five minutes down Washington Street every day to her school, enjoyed going grocery shopping where, to Leah’s embarrassment, she’d hum in the aisles, and enjoyed pulling into the driveway afterwards when, without fail and to Leah’s annoyance, she’d always intone, “Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.” How simple and quick and irrefutable it had been: within weeks of learning of her illness, she was gone forever and had left Leah and Franklin alone and despairing. And Leah still was despairing while Franklin was not, while Franklin was leaving her behind – dumpy, sullen, unattractive Leah, all things she wanted to be, all things she cultivated by wearing the same pair of frayed, oversized Levis, the same extra-large white T-shirt for days in a row until they became a loose, unclean second skin, by not wearing makeup or perfume, by letting her long flat hair remain long and flat, by staying locked inside even in July, when summer had finally come, by saying rudely, bitterly, “It’s okay. I like being a cave creature,” every time Noelle asked her to come out and do something.
Her father put the book down and seemed about to speak. “She’s going to ask you to shave your beard next,” Leah said. “I know she is.”
“Leah,” Franklin said.
“Please don’t do it.”
“Please stop being a brat,” he said with an anger that took her by surprise. Franklin never got angry, never raised his voice to her. And now he continued in an over-rehearsed, almost mechanical manner, though Leah still heard the most uncharacteristic, barely repressed frustration in his voice, more evidence that he had betrayed her and become someone else. “I came down here to tell you that I am tired of seeing you hurt Noelle every day. I love Noelle. You need to understand that. And so it makes me . . . ” He struggled to come out with the word. “Mad, angry to see her get hurt.”
“You hate me.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Leah put her headphones on and pressed play and Franklin came over and removed them from her ears. “I love you,” he said as the music continued to issue from the earphones around her neck. “And for your information, I still love your mother. But she’s . . . ”
“I know,” Leah said.
“We know this is difficult for you. It would be difficult for anyone. We understand that. I’d like you to see a therapist.”
“That’s her idea.”
“That’s our idea, and it’s a good idea. I think it could really help you.”
“No.”
“It could help you, Leah. It could make you feel better.”
“You mean,” Leah said, “that it could make you feel better.”
“Yes,” Franklin said. “It might. It just might.”
“No.”
Franklin nodded and looked down at his new shoes, and remained silent for so long that Leah had to say something. “She’s got nicer boobs than Mom had. I hate her for that.” She hated other things about Noelle, too. She hated the fact that Noelle was more beautiful than Leah herself: thinner in the waist and bigger in the boobs with a fine, small face that was prettier than Leah wanted to admit. And Leah hated the fact that she had more than a few times imagined them together: Noelle, athletic, strong in the hips, on top of Franklin, then Franklin, a little buff, as Leah knew he was now from seeing him the other day in a tank top, Franklin turning her over, Franklin made unrecognizable by sexual frenzy, Franklin having her any way he wanted, on top, sideways, from behind.
“I’d rather not know that,” Franklin said.
“I have to tell someone.”
“How about a therapist?”
“Stop asking me that. And please . . . please don’t shave your beard off.” And because Franklin was clearly more upset now than he’d been since entering her room, Leah said, “I am a brat. I know I’m a brat. I don’t want to be.” And, in the abstract, she didn’t. But she also knew that she would more than likely continue to be one.
“I want you to promise me something,” Franklin said.
“Maybe.”
Franklin gave her a look then, a look that she had seen from him only a few times in her life, a look that would not stand for defiance. “I want you to promise me that you will treat Noelle better. You will treat her with respect.”
“Okay,” she said. But he didn’t leave her room until she said the words he wanted to hear. “I promise.”

II

Max had been right about the dogs. They were the real challenge, the hardest to watch die. They were mutts and came in all sorts and sizes: small and large, long- and short-haired, spotted, mottled, fat and far too skinny, long-nosed, pug-nosed, beautiful and ugly. And as soon as they arrived and settled in their cages, they immediately treated Leah like a mother, a good and caring master. They whimpered and whined, they licked at the thin bars of their cages and at her hands and fingers. And when she brought them food, they dove into their bowls, wagging their tails, wagging their entire bodies, until the food and the activity of eating calmed them. Afterwards, when she took the dishes away, they leapt on her, they squealed and yipped and looked into her eyes with something like recognition, something that nearly approached gratitude, though it was more than gratitude. It took Leah some time to put a word to that particular look, that recognition, and when the word came to her, she was certain the dogs felt it: trust. As soon as they stepped into her cage, they gave themselves completely over to Leah. The sheep, on the other hand, were indifferent. They hardly made eye contact and remained in their animal world, a stinky dark void without language, without sensations beyond fear and hunger. But the dogs invaded the human realm, leapt over and into Leah’s world readily and with the assumption that they belonged there, that their home was with Leah. They trusted her. And what bothered Leah more than the dogs’ eventual fate was how terribly misplaced this trust was. “Stupid, stupid dogs,” she told them several times a day, and they didn’t hear her. They continued to depend on her wholly for everything and to seem more than happy to do so.
Unlike the sheep, they didn’t resist the short trip from the cages to the operating room. They always competed to be the first out of the cage, lunging towards freedom and towards Leah, who delivered a dog to the operating room at least every other day. Leah never chose the animal. There were three to a cage. If she had more than three dogs, she always chose the cage closest to the front of the room, where the most senior dogs, those who had been at the lab longest, stayed. The first out of the cage was the dog she would deliver. And in this way, they seemed to choose themselves. To make things worse, they enjoyed the brief trip down the hallway, licking Leah’s ankles, diving for her shoelaces, rearing up with excitement. Max usually made this trip with Leah, a rubber ball in hand. At first sign of any apprehension in the animal, he’d let the ball go and the dog would dive for it, focus entirely on the toy and forget everything else.
Leah didn’t stay for the operations. Max had already told her more than she’d wanted to know. They were needed to test the utility of a new laser scalpel that might eventually be used on humans for common gallbladder operations. Their gallbladders were cut open, sewn up, and then the whole dog was disposed of. The scalpel cauterized vessels, staunching bleeding, as soon as it cut into the flesh. And for certain tissues, such as the gallbladder, this sort of surgical instrument, if it worked, could be very useful. “And how do you know if it works?” Leah asked one afternoon when Max had stopped by her animal basement.
As usual, Max looked sleepy, as if he’d just woken from a nap, his hair tousled, in need of a comb, and his large, drowsy body filling Leah with the urge to grab hold and hug him. “You use it.”
“Why on dogs?” Leah asked.
“They’re similar enough to us and they’re affordable.”
“So you cut a few dogs up and you see if it works or not. Then you’re done.”
“I’m afraid we need more than a few dogs. We need a few hundred if we want a statistically significant sample.”
“Okay,” Leah said. “So why not let them recover?” Leah was sitting at her big, perplexing clerk’s desk and listening to the light rock station turned down low on the radio. She’d tried to listen to the jazz station, but the sounds of horns – saxophones, trumpets, trombones – made her dogs (she had five of them in the cages) howl in a forlorn, heart-aching way. But harmless old rock songs like Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree and Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head didn’t seem to bother the dogs.
“That would be too expensive,” Max said. “Too expensive and too painful for them.”
“Don’t you think they’d rather live than be spared pain?”
“I’m not sure what they’d prefer,” Max said. “I’m not sure they have preferences. They’re dogs. We’re humans.”
“I know that,” Leah said, irritated by his insistence on playing the role of the teacher with her. All the same, Leah knew exactly what the dogs “preferred.” She saw it in their every gesture, every bark, howl and scream. They preferred to live. “We’re killing them so that we humans can piss more easily.”
Max laughed a little. “You’re mistaking the gallbladder with the urinary bladder. The gallbladder secretes gall.”
“Whatever,” Leah said. “We’re killing them so that we can secrete gall.”
“Not exactly,” Max said. “We’re killing them for knowledge – to learn and know more.”
“And it’s worth it?” Leah asked.
“I think so. Eventually. In the long run. Yes.” And then he added, “These dogs aren’t pets, you know. They’re not even strays. They’re bred for the lab. No one has trained them. They’ve never lived in a home.”
Leah nodded thoughtfully, though she wasn’t completely honest when she said, “I guess I agree.”
And for some stupid reason, Max had to ruin their little discussion of science and morality by repeating once again his cautionary note to her. “It’s not a good idea to befriend them, Leah.”
“No duh,” she said. And then she asked him an odd question that had been on her mind for some time and that seemed both wrong and necessary to ask. “How much do they cost?”
“Not much,” Max said. “They’ve been donated to us. The transportation, the food, and your services are our main costs.”
Leah was surprised to learn that she was part of these costs. All the same, she wanted a figure, something she could picture and think about. “Ten bucks? Twenty bucks?” she asked.
“More or less,” Max said.
It was to teach Max a lesson that Leah befriended a dog the next day. It was a medium-sized, long-haired mutt, its white coat spattered with muddy brown spots. He’d been delivered that morning with two other dogs, and Leah had spotted him immediately. He was the calm one, serene almost, amid his barking companions, who would probably spend the next hour jumping and howling at their cage until they discovered that it would not budge. He looked at her in the same moment she looked at him. And when she walked up to him, his companions becoming more frenzied even as he remained calm, she could not help saying, “Sit, boy.” Amazingly, the dog sat. “Lie down,” she said, and he obeyed. But what made her most excited was when she said next, “Roll over” and he did absolutely nothing. That was what decided it: he would be hers for the day.
As soon as he sauntered out of the cage and calmly plopped himself beside her desk, she sensed that she’d made a mistake. She liked him – liked him a lot – but she didn’t want to like him. He edged himself closer until he was beneath her chair and was resting his head on her shoes. He licked the rubber toe of her shoe, then closed his eyes, snorted, and all at once fell asleep. Leah didn’t move for nearly an hour, trying not to disturb him. When she did, he followed her everywhere, as if terrified that she might leave him. He wanted to be close. He was at her side as she watered and fed the sheep, as she swept their cages and replaced the wood shavings, and then he trailed her back to her desk. He was hungry for her fingers, licking them, chewing on them gently whenever they came near. She tried to stop herself from touching him, but he looked at her with a wide dopey gaze that pulled her in. She wanted to get him back into his cage, get him away from her, but somehow she couldn’t make herself do it.
When Max came by that morning to say hi, the dog was still lying at her feet. “What’s he doing out?” Max was angry, and this made Leah angry in turn.
“He’s my friend,” she said. Max shook his head and seemed too upset to speak. “His name is Ten Bucks.” She hadn’t intended to name the dog, and as soon as she’d said those words the dog leapt to its feet, seeming to recognize its name, and once again Leah felt that she was wrong. She was making a mistake. And yet she couldn’t stop herself. “Watch,” she said. And then she made him sit and lie down. “You said these dogs aren’t trained. But he is. Somebody trained him.”
“You’re playing with him, Leah. He’s not to be played with. He’s here for a specific reason. He’s to be fed. He’s to be treated with respect. But he is not a pet. He is the subject of an experiment.”
“I know,” Leah said.
“He belongs to the lab. We can’t let you have him.”
“I don’t want him,” Leah said. She felt something go cold in her. She felt something reckless and compulsive, something she’d felt too often lately, something that made her want to strike quickly and do damage before she could reflect enough to stop herself. Max didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand her the least bit. “We need a dog this afternoon, don’t we?” Leah said. Max nodded. “We can use Ten Bucks. It’s fine with me.” She looked down at the dog, who was again licking her shoe with that unbearable gaze of affection and dependence trained on her. It angered her. At that moment, everything did.
“Don’t call him that, Leah.” She thought she saw Max squirm, inwardly shiver. Leah herself felt woozy, off-kilter. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. But she wouldn’t. Not in a million years. “Put him back in his cage now.”
She called the dog to the cage, opened it, and he readily – too damn readily – complied, though once she closed and latched the door, he looked at her from the other side with muted injury, with a few simple questions: Why? What next?
Max crossed his arms. “I take it you’re protesting what we do here. I take it you’re not willing to work by our rules. Perhaps you don’t really want to be at the lab with us.”
“No,” Leah said. “That’s not it. I want to be at the lab.” And she did. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the summer without her job at the lab. “I want to be here,” she said again.
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point is,” Leah said, “that I’m not a baby. I don’t fall in love with dogs and sheep. I can handle it. It doesn’t bother me. What you do here doesn’t bother me.”
Max looked down at his old tennis shoes and seemed to consider Leah’s words. From the back of the room, a sheep bleated. The radio began to play an old Chicago tune with a horn section that made the dogs begin to howl and yip so loudly that Leah had to turn the music off. “Okay,” Max finally said. “You can take it. I get your point. That doesn’t mean that you can play with these animals. They’re not toys, Leah.”
Leah put her head down. “Okay,” she said.
“The dogs stay in their cages.”
She nodded and Max left her basement.
When he returned that afternoon and asked Leah to bring a dog, something terrible, if not altogether unexpected, happened. Ten Bucks – a name she could not take away, could not now disassociate from him – stepped out of the cage first. She had no one to blame but herself. She’d made herself his master and caretaker, he’d accepted, and now here he was, wagging his tail and wanting – she saw this in his eyes – to be her dog. And so he volunteered himself. And when Leah pushed him back into his cage, into safety, the dog lunged forward again and was free. Had Max not been at the door waiting for them, had he not said, in his very concerned way, “Are you sure you don’t want to start with one of the others?” Leah might have saved him, at least for a few more days.
“He’s got to go eventually, doesn’t he?” Leah asked.
She put Ten Bucks on a leash, though it wasn’t necessary. He heeled perfectly, his head at her knee all the way down the hall. As usual, Max held the rubber ball and was ready to play with the dog as soon as he saw it become fearful. But Ten Bucks wasn’t aware of any danger. It was dumbfounding: the trust of this creature, the strange, boundless faith it placed in Leah, of all people, and in Max and now in Diana, a complete stranger, at the sight of whom Ten Bucks wagged his tail and sat on his haunches. So happy to meet you, the dog was saying with his eyes, his open slack mouth, and his whole excited body. Max easily lifted him to the table, cradling the dog in his arms. Most dogs were frightened of the electric razor and Leah and Max had to hold them down. Not this dog. He licked Max’s palm as Diana stripped his shoulder of hair and exposed a bony pinkish swath of hide. “He’s a sweet one,” Max said.
“He sure is.” Diana was cooing at him, speaking in a baby voice, which irritated Leah. Once shaved, her dog had lost a subtle measure of dignity, seeming partially naked and skinnier than Leah had guessed, and cooing at him did nothing to compensate for this fact.
“I’ve got a vein,” Diana said, and she sunk the needle into his shoulder. Ten Bucks yelped once when the needle went in, but was quickly distracted by the ball that Max now let him mouth. At this point, Leah usually left the room. But because she had made things difficult that day and because she wanted more than anything to leave now, she felt compelled, obligated to stay.
The dog made no protest until the sedation began to take hold and he whimpered. He gazed up at them with a look Leah could not place at first, and then she saw that it was fear. A great deal of fear at whatever force was overtaking him. Max seemed to sense Leah’s need for an explanation. “It’s not feeling any pain. It’s just a little scary for the animal when the drug begins to take effect.”
“I know,” Leah said, though of course she didn’t know.
“Such a good boy.” Diana was still speaking in that baby voice.
“Please don’t talk to him like that,” Leah said, knowing right away that she’d overstepped her bounds. And so she quickly added in a very quiet voice, “I’m sorry.”
Diana gave her a cool look, but soon returned to her work.
Before Max began to cut, he made Leah wear the same turquoise-blue medical mask over her nose and mouth that Max and Diana wore. What followed was quietly mortifying to watch, though surprisingly bearable. Leah could handle it. She could take it. Ten Bucks was out, his head thrown back on the table, his eyes closed, and his tongue dangling from his mouth. With his laser scalpel, Max sliced through the soft, white belly of Ten Bucks, making his incision to the left of the dog’s penis. He worked quickly. Following each rapid cut, Leah took in the odor of burnt flesh and something else, something she hadn’t experienced before: the earthy, sulfuric scent of the animal’s open body, its hot and unpleasant insides exposed to the air. Max described the anatomy as he worked, but Leah could see only a scarlet chaos of blood and flesh. She nodded. She uttered variations of the affirmative – Yeah, uh-huh, I see – to everything Max said, even though what she felt was a typical, girlish disgust. She wanted to throw up, turn away, faint even.
When it was over and they had deposited Ten Bucks into a large, yellow bag labeled Medical Waste and Diana had rolled the bag on a cart into another room, Max looked at Leah with concern. “How was that?” he asked.
“That was interesting. I’ve never seen a gallbladder before,” Leah said. And Max seemed pleased by her answer.

That evening, Leah allowed herself to be coaxed to the dinner table. She wanted to appease her father, to show him she’d listened to his request of the other day. She was also a little spooked and on edge that evening, and felt relieved to escape the isolation of her room and have the company and noise of other people. She couldn’t stop thinking about that dog, about the way Ten Bucks had responded to her roll over command by doing absolutely nothing. By sitting there and looking expectantly, its eyes expressing a terrible eagerness to please. And so Leah found herself at the table hoping that she’d be distracted by conversation, by company and good food.
Noelle, who’d changed out of her business suit, looked great in a floral sundress that showed off her toned shoulders and her small waist, a dress that most women in their late forties could never have worn. And Noelle was aware of it, too. She was proud of her body, too proud, Leah thought. Nearly every day, Franklin would tell her how great she looked. In fact, he did so now. “You look great,” he said. And those words turned on her smile as if Franklin had just flipped a switch. And yet, as beautiful as Noelle was, she was nervous. She was always nervous around Leah. Dumpy, slovenly, seventeen-year-old Leah who shouldn’t have given this woman a moment’s pause made her clumsy and cautious. And when Leah sensed Noelle’s vulnerability, she became all the more hostile. At the moment, for instance, Noelle was watching Leah carefully without seeming to do so. She watched as Leah took a serving of wild rice and a serving of coq au vin – chicken with red burgundy sauce, Noelle had just explained to Leah – and finally a serving of broccoli raab. “With butter and lemon,” Noelle said, even though Leah hadn’t asked. Noelle watched as Leah took a taste of each, and Leah knew exactly what Noelle wanted from her and she usually wouldn’t have given it. But tonight Leah did. Tonight, she looked up at Noelle and told her her food was delicious, as, in fact, it was. “Even the green stuff tastes good,” Leah said.
And though she’d meant it, she saw her father look up at her suspiciously. After all, she’d never freely offered a compliment to Noelle.
“I really do,” Leah said. “I like it.”
“Thank you,” Noelle finally said.
A long silence followed in which the bare sounds of clattering knives and forks, of chewing, swallowing, and drinking could be heard too loudly. No doubt to put an end to the crude sounds, Noelle asked Leah what she’d done at work that day. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Leah said. Franklin gave her that look again. “I don’t. I’m not just saying that to be a jerk.” Suddenly, everything was going wrong, despite the fact that Leah wanted it to go right for once. There was no conversation. Everyone felt awkward and looked down at their plates. And so Leah told them the truth. “I demeaned an animal,” she said. “I demeaned it and then I killed it.”
“That will do,” Franklin said, raising his voice.
“I did,” Leah said. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Okay,” Franklin said. He clearly didn’t believe that she was being honest. “Maybe we could discuss something else.”
“I like Noelle’s food. I like it a lot,” Leah said again. But she was irritated now and couldn’t hide it. Noelle smiled, but no one said anything for a while. Because it was clear to Leah that the dinner was ruined, she decided to shut up and let Noelle and Franklin carry on their own conversation about a closing that Noel had just completed that day. And Leah would have remained silent and that evening would have come to a usual and dull end had Noelle not turned to Leah at the end of dinner with a question. “What do you think your father would look like without his beard?”
Leah had known this was coming. That’s all she could think. She had known it and had even warned her father. Noelle had asked the same questions about his clothes, his hair, his shoes, and had, with this kind of rhetorical innocence, changed him completely. “I like his beard. I like it a lot,” Leah said too insistently.
“I do too,” Noelle said, though she was staring at Franklin now, studying him, imagining him without it, seeing him exactly as she wanted him to be.
“He’s not shaving it!” Leah hadn’t meant to yell, but it was already too late. Franklin was upset. She saw it in his face and heard it in his voice.
“I’m not?” he asked her. “Are you sure of that?” He seemed to think that what he was about to do was funny, was a simple joke. He put his cloth napkin on the table, excused himself, and headed down the hallway to the bathroom. By the time Leah got there, he was facing himself in the mirror and holding a pair of shearing scissors. Already, gobs of thick, brown beard were falling into the sink. The scissors made a crisp, resolute click and snap. “Daddy,” Leah complained. He shut the door and locked it. Leah felt her chest tightening and the tears rising, but she pushed them back. She banged on the door. “Don’t do it,” she said. But he didn’t respond, and so she charged down to her room, slammed the door behind her, and stayed there until she could no longer bear the silence, the cramped aloneness of it. Upstairs, Franklin was still locked in the bathroom and Noelle had not moved from her place at the table. Leah sat back down and said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Finally Noelle said in a voice that was far too sweet, “That was unexpected.”
Bitch, Leah thought. And then, without looking at Noelle, she said it with a dull, unenthusiastic tone that made the word all the more brutish. “Bitch.”
When Leah looked up, she saw that word working its effect on Noelle. She saw the shock in Noelle’s face, a frozen moment of hurt. Noelle struck Leah then. Not hard, though hard enough for the unexpected blow to sting. Like a girl half her age, she began screaming. “Noelle hit me! She hit me!”
Franklin came out of the bathroom, one of Noelle’s peach-hued towels draped over his shoulder. The evening sun was still out and he stepped into a spot of it in the hallway as if to show himself more clearly. His beard was entirely gone and a few bright curls of shaving cream remained at the edges of his face. His brooding scruffiness was gone. His shadowy, deep-set eyes were gone. He seemed to have lost half his age, half his weight. His jaw was surprisingly strong and handsome. A moody graveness had left him. He almost seemed to float as he traveled down the hall and into the clean whiteness of the kitchen. Leah’s father had been replaced by a strange, younger-looking man. “She hit me,” Leah said again, though without much volume or conviction.
Noelle stood behind her chair at the table, wringing her hands, looking stunned and uncertain. “I’m sorry. I . . . ”
Leah felt a flash of sympathy for her, which, thankfully, was replaced by resentment as soon as Leah’s strange father looked at her. “What happened? What did you do?”
“Me?” Leah said. “I didn’t hit anyone.”
“Yes, you.”
There was exhaustion and frustration in his voice, and Leah couldn’t stand there and hear it. She bolted out the front door, slamming it behind her. She knew exactly what she would do now. She stood out in her front yard beneath the huge maple, its branches fluttering in the light summer breeze. It was quiet, far too quiet. A few leaves fell. She kicked at the air. She was going to run away, head West, for California, for the beaches and docks, for the deserts and mountains. Or she’d head East, for the big cities, for the ocean and cramped busy streets, for the restaurants, the bars and clubs with lights and loud music. She was going to leave behind this flat, boring, desolate place, this place of burnt-out industrial cities, of big trees and grass and rain, of one gray featureless day after another, of small towns and churches and endless pancake houses, this bland middle of nowhere, this middle of everything she hated. She felt that she should be crying, bawling her eyes out, but she wasn’t and somehow couldn’t find the energy for an all-out emotional fit. All at once, she realized that she couldn’t run away. She was too old to run away. She didn’t even want to run away. She could care less about the West or East or anywhere else. Next year, she’d have to leave, go off to college, which she was hardly looking forward to. What Leah wanted most was to stay home, to sit down in her room, unbothered, lock the door, and remain there forever.

Because Leah had no friends and needed to go somewhere that evening, she headed to Max’s. Max lived on the other side of Stadium Street, about a twenty-minute walk through parks and quiet neighborhoods. She hadn’t been there for years, since her mother’s death, though the house was the same: a simple, yellow, two-story Midwestern Victorian, two windows facing the street downstairs and one sullen window upstairs. A dingy, white picket fence separated the front yard from the sidewalk. Max was out in front, mowing the grass with a push mower. It was mid-evening. The sun edged low on the horizon, just above a dark, cumulous storm cloud, from which Leah saw lightning flash. But the sun still had heat in it and the first raindrops were lukewarm and tiny. “Hey,” Leah said.
Max wore a floppy straw hat that made him look more folksy than scientific and the same T-shirt that said Take the Pepsi Challenge (it must have been twenty years old) and blue scrubs he’d worn at the lab all day. On his feet, as always, were his scruffy tennis shoes, now grass-stained. He greeted her with far more friendliness than she’d expected, waving, then inviting her in. How strange it was to see Max pop his shoes off, the laces still tied, in the linoleum entryway. The sight of him in his white socks felt all at once homey and intimate to Leah, who stepped out of her flip-flops and onto the cool floor with her bare feet. Max was a neat freak with absolutely no taste in furniture or interior design. In the living room, Leah walked over an orange shag carpet, then sat in an old, if perfectly preserved, Lay-Z-Boy, a wooden paddle at its side. Leah gave it a tug, laying herself out flat beneath what she saw now was a textured ceiling, bumpy with plaster. His house was stuck in the Seventies. He no doubt owned a water bed. It probably hadn’t been altered since Max and Sharon, his ex-wife, had moved in thirty years ago.
He came out of the kitchen holding a bottle of beer, obviously for himself, and offered Leah a soda pop. “How about a beer for me, too,” Leah said, though she didn’t care for the taste of beer.
“That’s not going to get me in trouble with Franklin, is it?”
“No,” Leah said. “Franklin is pretty cool with that.” And, in fact, he was cool with it; he allowed Leah to have an occasional glass of wine with dinner, in the belief that parents should teach children to drink responsibly.
Max returned with a beer for her, and when he sat down on the couch, Leah noticed something outright grim: two spots of black on Max’s scrubs. “Is that blood?” Leah asked.
Max looked down at his pant leg. “I’d guess so.”
“From the dog?”
Max nodded.
“Oh,” Leah said. Outside the rain was coming down harder now, thumping against the roof, even as the deep orange of twilight poured in through the windows. “I came to apologize for my antics today. For naming the dog and everything.”
Max finished taking a swig of beer. “Apology accepted.”
“It was an insult to the animal’s dignity,” Leah continued.
“I’m glad that you see that it was problematic.”
Leah took a large swig of her bitter, unpleasant-tasting beverage. “It didn’t really hurt him, though, did it? As far as he was concerned, I just let him out of the cage and gave him companionship.”
“I see,” Max said. “So you did it for him. You did it to make him more comfortable.”
Leah heard the accusation in Max’s statement. “All right,” she said. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. Now I’m going to shut up.”
But she couldn’t shut up. She was no good at shutting up these days. She gave him a critical look-over. “You’re a terrible dresser,” she said. “My dad used to be a terrible dresser, before he met his new girlfriend. Before he fell in love. It was because he was depressive. I bet you’re depressive. I bet you take Prozac or something.”
Max chuckled. “Really? You think so?”
She hadn’t expected her words to bounce off him, and the fact that he remained untouched by her sudden honesty made her want to find his soft spots, his vulnerabilities. “I do. I think you’re brokenhearted.” Leah took another long drink of beer and tried to look mean as she did so. “I think you never got over your wife leaving you. You never even tried to date other women, did you? My dad did. It only took him two years, two stupid years, and then he was crazy in love. I wish he’d been more like you.”
Max put his drink down and Leah could see that she’d gotten to him this time. He was glaring at her. “Maybe I need to ask you to leave now.”
“I’m sorry,” Leah said. “I can be a jerk sometimes.”
He looked at her and nodded. “Yes, I’d say you can. You want to make trouble, Leah. Part of me wants to fire you from the lab right now. Before you do something. I almost did it this afternoon.”
“I won’t make trouble. Not in the lab. I promise. I’m interested in science,” she added.
He shook his head. “I’m not so sure you are.”
“I am. And I like the animals.”
Max sat back, sank into the couch and seemed, for now, satisfied. He was a softy. “I’m a terrible dresser, too,” she admitted now. “I know I am. I don’t know if I’m depressive. But I know that I don’t look so good.”
“Nonsense,” Max said. “You look fine.”
“I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me to look this way.” She gazed down at her black high-top sneakers. No other girl at her high school dared to wear such unattractive shoes, and Leah couldn’t help but be a little proud of their ugliness. When she looked up again, Max was smiling at her. It was a smile of affection and good will, and it made her say something she hadn’t intended to say. “I sort of have a crush on you. I think about you a lot. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Hum,” Max said. He looked out the window, where the rain had really started to come down now. He smiled. He thought it was cute. He laughed. “You’ll get over it, I’m sure.” And then he stood up. “I’ve got to make myself a little dinner. You hungry?”
Because she’d already had dinner, she sat and watched Max eat an odd assortment of food – microwaved hot dogs with mustard, some reheated rice and green beans. He ate hungrily, cutting the hot dogs up, slathering them with mustard, and washing each bite down with beer. It felt good to be with him. It felt good just to sit there and watch him eat while it rained outside. Later, Max lent her an umbrella, and during her walk home in the drizzling dark, she thought about them sitting together. She thought about Max, who had no one, no wife and no children. And she thought about how she’d discovered his soft spot that night. He was brokenhearted, sad, and Leah was thrilled to know so much about him.

III

The next morning, Leah’s father met her in the kitchen, dressed in his work suit, and surprised her with an offer. “How about breakfast?” he said. Outside, the morning sun was so bright that Leah had to squint as they walked up Washington Street where the noise of traffic mixed oddly with a racket of birdsong.
“I thought you were going to punish me now,” she said once they’d been seated at the Broken Egg and Leah’s orange juice and Franklin’s coffee had been delivered.
Her father nodded. “Yes, I suppose I’m going to.” But at the moment he seemed to be stalling. “Noelle told me you two had a talk last night. She told me that you both apologized.” Leah nodded. In fact, they had apologized, though their interaction had been brief and uncomfortable. “I know Noelle is sorry. She wishes she hadn’t slapped you. I also wish she hadn’t. She shouldn’t have.”
“It’s my fault, too,” Leah said. “I’m sorry for calling her that.” And Leah remembered then how sorry she had felt as soon as the word had come out of her mouth; she’d been sorry right up until her father had blamed her for everything, after which she’d been furious.
Franklin put a hand to his bare face. “My prank with the beard didn’t help things any, did it? I blew my top. I have to admit I did it to provoke you. Unfortunately it worked.” He laughed now and profiled his face for her. “How do you like it?”
“It’s strange,” Leah said. “You don’t look like you.”
“You’re changing, too, you know.” He smiled at her. “You look more and more like your mother, to tell you the truth.”
This comment together with her father’s gaze – he was studying her, admiring her – made Leah blush. She grabbed the saltshaker and squeezed it. “You still think about her?” Leah asked.
“Of course, I think about her. You’re just as pretty. Maybe even more.” He folded his arms then, still looking at her, still smiling. “I wonder,” he said, “if you haven’t caught the eyes of a few boys. I bet you have.”
Leah shrugged. She didn’t much want to revisit the boy issue. “I keep telling you that I’m not interested in that right now. Besides, I’m not exactly a babe, am I?” She looked down at herself – her T-shirt and loose jeans. “At least, I don’t try to be. I don’t want to be.”
“I think you are. Of course, it might not hurt to try a little harder.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Leah said sharply.
Franklin put his hands up in concession. “Okay.”
She looked at him with a sideways glance. “I bet you forgot what next weekend is?” He stared into the air, trying to remember. “It’s Mom’s birthday,” she said accusingly. “You forgot it.”
“Leah.” There was a warning in his voice, and the last thing she wanted was to fight now.
“We should do something together, the way we used to,” she said.
Over the past two years, Franklin and Leah had spent her mother’s birthdays distracting themselves. Last year, just a few weeks before Franklin met Noelle, they had spent the afternoon and evening in the cinema multiplex, walking out of one movie and into another, filling up on popcorn and Cokes, and not leaving until midnight, after which Leah fell asleep on the couch listening to Franklin weep behind his closed bedroom door. The house had been a mess then, dishes stacked in the sink, the floors dirty, their beds unmade, and unfolded clothes from the dryer piled over the living room chairs. Without Margaret, Franklin and Leah, both bad cooks and natural slobs, had been helpless. Margaret used to institute weekly cleanups or “dustups,” as she’d called them, rallying everyone from bed on Saturdays and cheerfully commanding them, stupidly calling them the troops, putting brooms and mops in their hands, turning her favorite music up high on the stereo, Johnny Cash or the Beatles, so that Leah could remember crouching around the toilet with a sponge of ammonia to Here Comes the Sun while her mother, wiping the surfaces clean, swayed in the kitchen. How this memory could seem pleasant to Leah now baffled her. At the time, she’d resented the chore, resented the interruption of her Saturday morning sleep, and even found the post-cleanup family breakfast of pancakes or eggs and bacon boring. Now she’d give anything to be scrubbing that toilet again while her mother danced in the other room.
“Sure,” Franklin said cautiously, “we’ll do something together.”
After the food came and they ate, Franklin moved his plate aside. Leah knew her punishment was coming by the way he sat up stiffly. When he spoke now, she could hear that he’d rehearsed his little speech. “It’s fairly obvious that you’d rather not make a family with me and Noelle. Not right now, anyway. We both hoped we could persuade you and we still hope things change soon. In the meantime, we’ve decided to stop trying to force you into our lives. We won’t ask you to eat with us. We won’t ask you to go to movies with us. We’re happy to let you have your space. If you’d like to do something with us, we’d love the company. We’d love your company. But we only want you along if you want to be there. In other words, we want you to make the decision to spend time with us. We can’t do that for you.”
Franklin placed both hands firmly on the table and let out a long breath as he waited for her response. She felt something very much like the oh-well, the what-can-be done? feelings she’d experienced after seeing the first sheep begin to die in the lab: a slight undercurrent of sadness that she could easily hold down and contain. “Okay,” she finally said.
But Leah did not expect to feel their absence as keenly as she did over the next days. Nor did she expect them to keep their word, to ignore her, to stop extending invitations, which she could turn down again and again. They were busy people. When not working, they played. They cooked long, involved dinners, during which Leah made a point of not leaving her room. They spent weekends at bed-and-breakfasts on the coast of Lake Michigan. They attended concerts and theatre. Of course, she had not spent much more time with them in the past. What was new and what she noticed now was their lack of interest in her. They too easily got on without her while Leah had very little to do. She had only the lab and Max now, and in some ways she hardly had these. As for the lab, Leah was not interested in science. As for Max, he was not too terribly interested in Leah, save as his student and as an upset young person for whom he might do some good. She had her clarinet and her interest in jazz music, though again she did not really have these either. She could stand to play her clarinet no more than an hour each day before the endless scales and dexterity exercises along with her own boundless mediocrity drove her crazy. As for jazz, she could live without it. In fact, the interest was not really her own. She’d picked it up from the first and only guy she’d slept with – an eighteen-year-old drummer named Larry, who’d lived across the street from her three years ago, and with whom she’d slept far too soon after her mother’s death. She’d been fifteen then and Larry, who was, Leah could tell, a little bored with her, had taught her to like jazz. They had exhaustive sex, in every possible position, for two weeks, after which he’d put his possessions in a duffel bag the size of a human body and left for college.
In short, Leah had, when she really thought about it, nothing.
Nonetheless, she liked her work at the lab, where she had become more accustomed to the fate of the dogs. By the middle of July, she’d seen scores of them die. While most of them wagged their tails all the way to the table, a few of them fought so viciously it took both Leah and Max to hold them down as Diana administered the anesthesia. Weirdly, inappropriately, the fighters were the easiest to help kill. Their struggle somehow made the experience more bearable. Leah always chose to stay in the operating room. She stayed because she would rather have left, and her compulsion to avoid this spectacle made her feel equally compelled to do the opposite. At the same time, she had begun to feel that she was more than a spectator, that she was, perhaps, a witness. She saw something that neither Max nor Diana, to whom each dog was a necessary sacrifice, a means to a justifiable end, could see. She was watching the animals die without the least bit of certainty that it was worth it. She saw waste and death where they saw anatomy and potential improvements in common gallbladder procedures. And her ability to accept and endure this vision was, as far as Leah could make out, her one accomplishment that summer.

IV

It was at the boring, hot beginning of August that Leah began to visit the houses that Noelle was trying to sell. These were large, beautiful houses in the nicer areas of Ann Arbor – Burns Park and the Old West Side, where Leah’s own house was located – green areas with nicely mowed lawns and big shady maples spreading their branches over both sides of the street. Noelle kept the keys to the houses she planned to show the next day in separate envelopes, each labeled with an address, on her bedside table. On a sunny evening, when Franklin and Noelle had, as usual, gone out, Leah decided to do the same. Why should she remain home when no one else did? And so she borrowed the keys to a few houses that were a short walk away.
At the first home, on Green Street, Leah read the name of the realtor on the For Sale sign out front – Noelle Jones. From a plastic folder tacked to the post, Leah took a fact sheet with Noelle’s photograph, which captured well, Leah thought, her pleasantness and her highly competent and neat prettiness. This was Noelle’s territory, her home, or at least one of them, and as Leah turned the key, opened the heavy front door, and set foot on the rich yellow shimmer of wood floors, she was acutely and thrillingly aware of being the intruder, the outsider, the one who could wreck and ruin the careful balance and order of a world to which she had no right of entrance. It was Leah’s. All of it. And when she latched the door behind her and heard the cool and resolute slip and lock of door to jamb, she felt wonderfully transgressive.
This first house she entered happened to be, as most of the houses she would visit over the next days and weeks were not, completely furnished. Without fear, she switched the lights on and walked from room to room. French doors with beveled glass separated the dining room from the living room, where she turned on the stereo, pressed play, and was happy to hear Freddie Hubbard blasting out Night in Tunisia, to which she did a brief dance down the hallway. She didn’t care if she got caught. Let it happen. Let someone find her and stop her. She took a highball glass from the wet bar, poured herself a bit of brown liquid from a bottle that reeked of adulthood and poison, and felt deflated when she found it undrinkably bad. She lunged onto the king-sized bed in the master bedroom and bounced. She opened the closet, ran her hands over blouses, skirts, dresses, many of them freshly dry-cleaned and wrapped in plastic. Oddly, there were no shoes, but Leah did find a small collection of adult films in a shoe box – Deep Throat Three, Cock Till You Drop, and Analbolic Annabelle. She pissed in the toilet and left the bathroom without flushing. She peeked her head into the children’s rooms, one done in blue and the other in pink, as if checking up on the kiddies. She turned on the giant-screen TV and watched a full twenty minutes of Friends. No one came. No one knocked on the door or burst in to stop her. Perhaps the owners had already moved and left behind furniture and clothing, for which they would later come back. Or perhaps the owners were still living here and were out for the evening. In any case, Leah was suddenly bored. And so she conducted what Max might have called an experiment. She took a vase from the entryway table and dropped it, watching it shatter and feeling almost nothing. A slight tinge of guilt, a shiver of pettiness and irrelevancy. She hardly knew what she’d expected, but she’d wanted more. She cleaned it up, turned all but a few lights off, left out the shot glass to make a simple statement – “I was here,” she wanted it to say, “and had a taste of the porridge.”
The second house she visited was empty, and its complete vacancy seemed to watch her and follow her as she invaded each room, opened every door, every cupboard and closet only to find more emptiness, which somehow entered her as easily as she had entered that house, and left her feeling spooked and agitated, especially when she discovered in an unguarded instant someone else at the end of the dark hall, clearly odious, staring at Leah, poised as if to attack, and clearly, as she saw in the next instant, herself in a full-length mirror. Even once she had locked the front door and turned the corner at the end of the street, Leah couldn’t shake the surprise of that odd ambush and the spookiness of that place.
As soon as she opened the door to the next house, she heard a measured, unsettling beeping. Because it sounded like a microwave, she hurried into the kitchen only to see the blank face of a convection oven, eerily silent and giving her the time – 7:38, it said – in green digits. When she discovered the code on a slip of paper in her envelope, the alarm had already begun screaming. Every light seemed to be flashing and the electric pulsating howl seemed to come from the house itself, the walls, ceilings, stairs, planks, boards, the slow liquid of the windows, the plaster, the wiring hidden beneath it, the electricity that flowed through that wiring. But she didn’t feel the thrill, the vigor, the good and vital urgency of panic and danger until she began running, until she fled down the hall, out the entryway, leapt through the front door without closing it, and began her sprint towards home. She was a criminal now. She’d broken the law, intruded, invaded, trespassed. Behind her, she still heard the wail of that house, more distant, but no less real, no less accusatory and affirming of her badness. She sprinted one, two, then three blocks, right past the city police department on Huron Street, where a cop car just then pulled out, its lights flashing and siren whirring, and she hoped it was heading to that house to apprehend the criminal who was already long gone. How good it felt to have escaped, to still be fleeing, how good the burn in her legs and lungs, how good – so suddenly and remarkably good – everything had become, everything still was, until she reached her front porch, unlocked the door, then locked it behind her, and found her own home as strange, empty, and quiet as any she had seen that night.

Leah had not given up on Max – on catching his eye, on showing him she was more than his student, his disturbed young charity case. And so she did the obvious: she decided to stop being willfully ugly. She dispensed with the baggy boys’ jeans and the extra-large T-shirts, which, untucked, reached nearly to her knees and took on a floppy, pajama-like appearance. Franklin too eagerly gave her some cash when Leah told him she needed new clothes. “Of course,” he said with an enthusiasm and a smile that stung her, that made her feel that she had lost a struggle they’d been engaged in for some time.
In less than an hour at the mall, Leah reoutfitted herself with khaki pants, a few blouses, colored T-shirts, a few sundresses and skirts, all of which fit her. In the mirror at J Crew, she discovered that she was not at all bad looking. Her hips and thighs were fuller than she might have liked, but her breasts were prominent and shapely, where before, in her frumpy drapes, they had appeared fat and matronly. So surprised was she by her body that it did not seem at all hers. She recognized it, though. It was her mother’s. Franklin had been right – she did resemble her mother. Thighs, hips, breasts. All her mother’s. Her mother’s, that is, before she’d had Leah, before she’d put on what she’d called an extra layer over her hips and tummy. “You don’t get rid of that,” she’d told Leah. “That’s from you. That’s what I got for bringing you into the world.” It had never been an easy body to have, too pronounced and curvaceous. In the Fifties, it would have been fashionable. But not now. And Leah’s mother had always treated it as an adversary, glaring at it, keeping an eye on it in the mirror, struggling with diets, losing ten pounds in a few months and gaining it all back in a few weeks. In the end, it betrayed her. She lost one breast and, in a matter of weeks, the pounds fell away. The bones surfaced in her face, her arms and legs. In her overly cheerful manner, she tried to be funny about it. “I finally lost that weight, didn’t I?” But Leah and Franklin couldn’t laugh, and in the final month her mother was frightened. She was afraid to be alone and needed constant company. “Tell me something, anything. Let’s talk,” she’d say. And when they ran out of things to talk about, Leah read Gone With the Wind, her mother’s favorite novel, out loud to her three times. “Scarlet is such a beautiful little bitch, isn’t she?” her mother said one day, interrupting Leah’s reading. Leah had never heard her mother swear before. She’d been a sweet woman, someone who almost never showed anger, who became quiet when annoyed. “I swore,” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “It felt good to swear. I’m going to swear some more, if you don’t mind.” Leah put the book in her lap. In fact, she’d rather not have heard her mother say these words. It was late on a cloudy afternoon and white, sunless light fell in through the window. “Goddamn it,” she said experimentally. “Shit, shit,” she said again. “Bastard, goddamn bastard.” Her voice had turned angry now, angrier than Leah had ever heard it. “Fuck, goddamn fuck shit!” Her mother sat up, closed her eyes, and put a hand firmly over her mouth. When she took her hand away, she breathed in deeply. She was crying. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said, her voice warm again, recognizable. “Please read some more.”
Now, standing in front of the mirror at J Crew, Leah felt a tug of the old grief, the force of which had pulled her under and kept her there for years. But it was only a tug and it didn’t persist as Leah continued to look at herself, and as the blond salesgirl, who must have been Leah’s age, stood behind Leah, smiled in the mirror, and said, in her bright voice, “That’s so cute. I think it’s you. I really think it’s you.” Seeing herself, a pretty, if not quite sexy, young woman, Leah understood that she was no longer mercilessly sad, that she no longer had access to the torrent of loss and rage that had been her absent mother. That had been replaced now by a distant ache, a suppressible grief. And so Leah put her mother out of her mind, faked a smile, and handed over her father’s money.
On the way home, driving past strip malls and the vast parking lots surrounding them, she realized that she had let her mother’s birthday pass last weekend. She had forgotten it, done nothing to mark it. Leah was suddenly agitated, uncomfortable. Where had that storm of feeling gone? And when? How had she failed to notice its departure? Her grief had simply faded. And yet the world had not changed because of it. She noted the remarkable plainness of everything – the street lamps, the produce market on the corner, the train tracks and the brown, desiccated weeds growing out beneath them. And when she arrived home, she found Noelle as irritatingly nice and accommodating as ever. Noelle asked to see all her purchases and praised each one, praised Leah’s taste. “You look darling,” she said as soon as Leah stepped in the front door. Leah smiled, even as she inwardly cringed. How could she believe this woman? How could she think that Noelle was anything but quietly contemptuous of the dumpy-looking teenage girl who had, for months now, been equally contemptuous of her?
In fact, Leah was sabotaging Noelle. Over the past week, Leah had been the source of numerous client complaints about Noelle’s irresponsible treatment of their properties. Leah had left lights on, front doors ajar, dirty drinking glasses out on the counter. She’d even heated a frozen pizza in a microwave, left half the pizza uneaten on the dining room table and neglected to clean any of the dishes she’d used. Noelle was perplexed, worried, and, of course, certain of her innocence. She denied everything and, for now, her realty company and most of her clients remained patient, if also suspicious.
The next day at the lab went poorly. First of all, no one noticed Leah’s transformation: her jeans that fit, her bright-red T-shirt and her bright-red tennis shoes, her lipstick and her hint of eyeliner. Max said nothing as he helped her push one more nervous sheep down the hallway. She wanted to bring it up somehow. Do you notice anything different? But how could she as she squared off with the backside of a farm animal and pushed until exhausted? Nor could she compete with the video graph of the catheter and with Max’s intense focus on the ECG after he’d administered another infarction.
Later that afternoon someone finally noticed her: Jason Clark, the guy who dropped the animals off and took their remains away. Leah had always thought of him as the mortician, the undertaker of the lab, and she shrank from him when he approached her that day, smiling at her in a way he hadn’t before and putting his hand out to introduce himself for the first time. “Jason,” he said. “I’m the Sanitary Technician. I’m the guy who brings the animals here alive and takes them back . . .” He’d been about to say dead, but then seemed to realize that he couldn’t. Not as part of a flirtation, anyway. “You know,” he said.
His silence on this point made Leah respect him more. “I’m Leah. I’m the animal girl,” she said, because she couldn’t come up with anything better to call herself. “I feed and take care of the animals.”
He must have been eighteen or nineteen. He was tan and muscular, wore a Pirates baseball cap backwards, and an expensive pair of sunglasses. He’d seemed to Leah like a perfect jackass – one of those cool guys – before this afternoon, when he first noticed her.
And in the awkward silence that followed their introduction, Leah asked Jason something she had not, until now, wanted to know. “Where do the animals go? What happens to them?”
“They go to the incinerator in Detroit.”
“Incinerator?”
“A big oven. They burn them there. Dust to dust, you know.”
Leah nodded. She knew almost nothing about Detroit, although it was only forty-five minutes east of Ann Arbor. Every time she’d been there, its endless blocks of burnt-out, empty buildings and gray cityscape had frightened her. It seemed like the appropriate place for the animals to go and be discarded, thrown away. And so Leah was surprised when Jason Clark asked her if she wanted to drive with him to the incinerator that afternoon and she actually took him up on his offer. “It’s a bit gloomy there,” he warned her. “But you’re welcome to come, if you want.”
Gloom. For some reason, Leah was drawn to it and wanted to know about it. And because there were no procedures scheduled for that afternoon, Leah cleaned her cages, fed and watered the animals a few hours early, and then met Jason Clark in his large white truck out back.
This trip to the incinerator was the closest Leah had ever come to a real date. With Larry, her across-the-street neighbor, it had really just been fucking, fucking and casual companionship. She’d go over there in the morning, hang out, talk about jazz, listen to him practice, bang on his drum set, before they eventually got around to doing it in his soundproof practice room in the basement – one, two, sometimes even three times in one day. They’d been active enough for Leah, only ten days after her mother’s death, to suffer her first urinary tract infection. At the time, her house had been full of mourners, friends and relatives, her mother’s brothers, Tommy and Eric, both of Leah’s grandmothers and her one living grandfather. It was crowded – always someone locked in the bathroom, either pissing, shitting, or weeping, though mostly weeping. They’d tell stories about her mother, start laughing, laughing hard, too hard – it wasn’t that damn funny, Leah knew – until everyone was crying. Tommy and Eric had already gotten into a shouting match about which one of them had convinced Leah’s mother at the age of five to press her finger against the red-hot coil of a stovetop burner. And every fight had to end in apologies, repetitive and too intensely honest. Leah’s grandmother cried more than anyone. Every minute of every day, she let you know how unfair it was. Why should she, at the age of seventy, be alive and well and her forty-two-year-old daughter be dead? Why? It was more than a constant irritation. More than too much family in too little space. It was hysteria. It made Leah want to scream.
From this insanity, mild-mannered, sweet and horny Larry, with his long, narrow face, his beaked nose and dazzling hazel eyes, was her only release. She woke every day around eleven, showered, and went over to Larry’s for more fucking, though, in truth, mostly they’d just talked and listened to music together, music Leah had never heard before: Miles, Art Tatum, Coltrane, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billy Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, Coleman Hawkins. She’d liked the music more than anything else, more than Larry’s company, more even than the fucking. She liked it despite the fact that she heard the same emotion in just about everything Larry played for her: anger, laidback, just-behind-the-beat, dark-and-seething, pounding, blasting, soft, tender, sad, bluesy, fast-and-slow, loving, passionate, ecstatic anger. In every beautiful note, she heard it. While Larry commented on the phrasing, this or that solo, the allusions, the staccato style of Sonny Rollins, the hypersonic energy of Dizzy Gillespie, Leah was in awe at how much raw anger this music could convey. How could it possibly hold so much of that one emotion? In song after song, musician after musician, in all volumes and tempos and tonal colors. Anger, rage, fury. How beautiful that music was, more beautiful than Leah could remember anything ever being.
Larry was nice about it. He kept saying it was his fault that Leah’s crotch hurt, which struck Leah as sweet, if somehow cowardly and unfair to her. She wanted it to be her fault. She wanted to feel the burden, the shame. Both of them were sexual dolts and had no idea what could be wrong with her. They assumed it was a venereal disease, never mind the fact that neither of them had had sex before. Leah found the physical pain a relief, real and undeniable. She sat at home crying and everyone around her thought she was thinking of her mother, when, in fact, she could think of nothing else than the pain in her crotch. Her pussy. Larry wanted to drive her to Planned Parenthood, but Leah refused. She took the city bus. She sat hunched over while her crotch pounded, while she felt the constant, burning urge to pee and yet could not. In the clinic, surrounded by pamphlets on AIDS, gonorrhea, herpes, and genital warts, Leah felt that she was being punished. She had fucked too much and indiscriminately, not more than a week after her mother had died. She was being punished and the simplicity and rightness of it was satisfying. And then, after taking the prescribed antibiotics, the pain left, as did her relatives and Larry. She was suddenly alone. No longer a virgin, though not diseased, not doomed. And when the grief came, it was more forceful than she had expected. Leah saw quite clearly that it would never leave. It would always be with her. It would always crush her.
But, in fact, it was no longer what it had been, no longer crushing, as Leah had noticed only yesterday. And now she had caught the eye of another boy, Jason Clark, and was sitting in a big white flatbed truck that carried two dumpsters, a red one and a black one, which held dead animals. On the way out of Ann Arbor, Leah sat up high in the truck, above the small cars and their smaller drivers. She felt the rumble of the truck’s engine in her thighs and torso. And she felt surprised to be thinking to herself that this was it – her first real date.
“That’s Category One and Two,” Jason Clark said as they barreled down 23 in the direction of Detroit. He was talking about the dumpsters chained to the flatbed behind them. “It’s all regulated by the government, by the USDA. Category One is the classification for the small stuff – rats, mice, bats, birds, reptiles – stuff that’s not protected under the Animal Welfare Act. Two is larger mammals – cats, primates, the sheep and dogs you work with. The black container is for One, the red’s for Two. We keep them separate – when they’re alive and when they’re dead. It’s all regulated. As is incineration. You can’t just dump them in a landfill.”
Jason was doing, Leah guessed, what guys did to impress women. He was telling her what he knew – the facts, the tidbits, the plain, uninteresting stuff in his head. “We pay the incinerator by volume. The University buys the right to dump 50,000 gallons of medical waste in Detroit every year.” Jason drove the huge truck with one hand on the wheel. “Can you imagine?”
“Nope. I can’t,” Leah said. The truth was, she didn’t really want to know any more about the dead things that were their cargo. What was she to make of what she knew, anyway? She knew, for instance, that the dead sheep behind them had had their hearts removed, cut out of them and refrigerated, and the dogs had had their gallbladders destroyed. Fifty thousand gallons of medical waste per year. She knew that now. Category One and Category Two. Small animals and big animals. So what? It added up to nothing. So why know it? “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”
He nodded. “No problem.” He turned and looked at her then. “You look . . . better . . . different. I mean, you did something to yourself. You look good, really good.”
In the instant that he began to appreciate her, Jason Clark became annoying. It wasn’t, it seemed, that he was unhandsome (in fact, he was handsome), nor was it that he was a showoff. It was, as near as Leah could tell, that he liked her. And now that she saw this, his sleek, equine face – the long nose and narrow cheekbones – became the face of an ass, a donkey. His ears seemed cartoonishly large. His teeth stuck out too much. His arms and shoulders were too buff. He was all wrong.
Thank goodness, then, that they were arriving in Detroit, which was, indeed, gloomy. The incinerator was not, as Leah had assumed, on the edge of the city, in the shadow of industry, of warehouses and factories, but at its center, just off Cass Street, where only a few years ago, Leah knew, crack cocaine had been bought and sold. A block of concrete supporting two smokestacks, one larger than the other, the incinerator stood just behind a strip of buildings – a diner, a pawnshop, a secondhand store, a bar called I Love Lucy, and a number of boarded-up storefronts. Down the street, a broken fire hydrant spewed torrents of water. A paper bag tumbled across the sidewalk in a gust of hot wind. Shattered glass shimmered in the street gutter. In Detroit almost everyone, it seemed to Leah, was black: the man sitting barefoot against a wall, the boy walking past him wearing sneakers that shone a perfect, unmarked blue, the nicely dressed couple who’d just stepped out of a brand-new Mercedes SUV, the old woman on the opposite side of the street, walking with a little dog on a leash and an aluminum cane. And this fact scared Leah and made her feel something she rarely felt elsewhere: white. It was one more thing to know, one more thing she couldn’t make sense of.
The incinerator was surrounded by a red brick wall, blackened by dirt and exhaust, and a high, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. As they turned into this odd-looking fortress, Jason said again, “Fifty thousand gallons of waste.” A black man stopped them at the entrance. Jason and he exchanged paperwork, and soon Jason was backing the truck into a port, from where a stationary crane lifted the color-coded dumpsters – Categories One and Two – and delivered them into the incinerator. Leah felt the truck lift and lighten. In a few minutes, the dumpsters were spit back out, empty now, and lowered onto the truck. “That’s it,” Jason Clark said cheerfully. He was more and more annoying and made Leah appreciate Max, who, despite all this grimness, believed in knowledge, believed it led to something more than impressing girls, something more than a list of information to be recited.
Leah thought it was disgusting how quickly and neatly the animals had disappeared. And though neither stack of the incinerator was smoking, she rolled down her window, sniffed at the air for burnt flesh, and smelled nothing beyond the exhaust of the truck she sat in.

To enter Noelle’s houses, Leah no longer had to borrow the keys. She’d had them duplicated. She had her own keys now.
A few times, she’d almost been caught trespassing. Once, she’d nearly walked in on a couple making love in the shower, their clothes strewn over the master bedroom and the loud sounds of their sex echoing from the bathroom. She’d quietly backed out of the room and escaped. Another time, she’d just left a house through the back as Noelle and a client came in through the front.
Leah tested the limits of her trespassing. She not only ate meals, peed, and watched TV in these houses, but now and then spent the night.
Her favorite place for a sleepover was the Bradford house. It was the first house she’d entered that summer. It was fully furnished, its mailbox stuffed with mail that the neighbors would collect every few days. There was frozen food – pizzas, burritos, Swanson dinners, chicken, steaks, hamburger meat – in a lay-down freezer in the basement. There were twelve-packs of Coke, Sprite, and root beer in the fridge, stores of toilet paper in the laundry room, clean linen and towels in the closets, even movies on DVD, including the small selection of porno films she’d discovered earlier and which she found both thrilling and boring to watch – all those tits and cocks. Mr. and Mrs. Bradford, with their huge stores of frozen food, their full closets, their beautiful house, their adult films, and even the framed pictures of their kids – a girl and boy of grade-school age – poised just so on the bedroom dresser, were a mystery to Leah. Why would anybody leave such a life behind, all its trimmings, all its provisions in place? Had one of them died and the other taken the kids and fled? Had one of them left, simply walked out of the house and never turned back? Had their children been brutally murdered, kidnapped? Leah guessed it had been a tragedy. Why else would anyone leave the remnants so obviously in place, so ready for use, for a family to slip into? Everything was there – even a dresser filled with men’s socks and underwear, even three different kinds of half-used mustard in the refrigerator, a coffee can of quarters, nickels, and dimes on a table in the entryway, used toothbrushes in the bathrooms. Everything was there save for life itself, the animating, enlivening part of it, the joy and anger, exhaustion and energy, the desire that was needed to do anything, anything at all: eating, fucking, getting out of bed, loving and raising kids, talking, yelling, shouting, spitting, scratching, kissing. And now all of it had been left – tables, chairs, ceilings, windows, room after room, two staircases, one leading to the basement, the other to the second floor, the master bathroom with marble sinks and a whirlpool bathtub, magazine racks filled with National Geographics and New Yorkers, all of it abandoned, frozen in place. The entire shell locked under one roof, for sale (furniture inclusive, the fact sheet had said), and, as it so happened, for Leah’s exclusive use, at least while it lasted.
The first time she’d spent the night in the Bradford house, she arrived home after work the next day, after nearly twenty hours of being away, and discovered that neither Noelle nor Franklin had noticed her absence.
On another occasion, already tucked into the Bradford’s king-sized bed and watching TV on mute, she called home and got Franklin. “Leah, is that you?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“We thought you were downstairs in your room.”
She could hear music in the background – the Beatles, of which Noelle was a fan. Leah had once seen Franklin and Noelle, in the kitchen, wine glasses in hand, boogying to this music, moving their hips and arms and legs. She imagined them now, even as her father talked to her, dancing, swinging an arm, kicking a leg in an awkward, middle-aged style of dance that was nonetheless joyous. They loved each other. They loved each other so much they wanted to dance together in the kitchen. “Nope,” Leah said. “I’m at a friend’s house. I thought I should call and tell you I’d be staying over here tonight.”
“A friend’s house,” Franklin said in a tone of surprise. “She’s at a friend’s house,” he said now to Noelle, as if boasting.
“I do have friends, Dad.” It stung to say this, since Leah and Franklin both knew she didn’t have friends.
“Of course,” he said. “Which friend’s house are you at?”
“Michelle’s. I’m at Michelle’s house.” Leah felt a shiver of fear and anticipation because she had just decided to confess, or at least sort of confess. “Michelle Bradford. I’m at the Bradford house.”
“Great,” he said. “Enjoy yourself, then.”
“Dad,” Leah said, irritated now. “I’m at the Bradford house.” She clenched her eyes shut and waited for her father to realize what she was saying. But he didn’t. The stupid man simply hadn’t heard her.
“Okay,” he said, becoming a little irritated himself.
“Don’t you want the number over here?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, “yes. That might be a good idea.”
She gave it to him and then he hung up.
The next day, instead of going home, she entered another house, an “armed” house, as the security stickers on its front window called it, a house that had an alarm. Though she knew the code and could have disarmed the security system, she sat down on the living room carpet and waited for the cops. The alarm was deafening. Its scream and the pulsating lights of the house seemed to mark the end of everything. She thought about what to say and how to explain herself to Franklin and Noelle, the scene of anger and tears that would soon come. Outside, another beautiful, hot sunny day was in its slow, late-afternoon progression. Five minutes passed and no cops arrived. It was a Saturday, and the neighbors were either not home or had decided to stay in their houses. Every man for himself. She could destroy the entire house and no one would come. She could burn it to the ground, take a hammer to its walls, smash its windows. And as she sat in the middle of the empty living room, she felt sleepy, exhausted. She wanted to curl up and shut her eyes, and might have if not for the terrible racket that house made.
After ten minutes, Leah gave up. She walked outside and had already crossed the street when the police officers finally arrived. One talked into the radio while the other, a young Asian woman, came for her. She hardly knew how to be arrested, how to present herself to be “taken in,” and so she’d been about to raise her hands above her head when the cop said, “You see anybody enter that house?”
“No,” Leah said.
“Did you see anybody leave?”
Leah shook her head.
“Did you see anything?”
“Nope.” And that was that. The cop left her standing there, on the loose. Of course, she could have turned herself in, but she’d clearly lacked the courage when her moment came. What she needed was quite simple: she needed to be caught, to be found out. But everything and everyone, it seemed, was ignoring her, was turning away in silence. This silence felt like a provocation to Leah, like a challenge of some sort, to which she would have to eventually respond. And because the houses she had been visiting now for weeks seemed to be haunted, possessed by this silence, seemed to hold hours, days, years, lifetimes that made no noise at all, Leah stopped visiting them.

V

At the end of the summer, the lab had a barbecue and softball game, to which everyone – Leah, the security guard, Diana, Jason Clark, and people from different departments whom Leah had never met – was invited. The softball diamond was in a park across from Max’s house, where people hung out in the backyard drinking beer and waiting for hot dogs, chicken breasts, and hamburgers to come off the grill. It was Leah’s last chance, before leaving the lab and returning to school, to impress Max, to show him who she was and what she was capable of, and to make a claim on him greater than that of a student and dullard adolescent. And so, naturally, she did nothing. She froze and felt painfully shy, holding on to an illegal beer, the taste of which she did not at all like, while jolly and collegial adults told jokes, conversed, drank a little too much and gossiped all around her. “What?” Jason Clark asked in mock surprise as he looked at the selection of grilled meats. “No lamb chops. Why on earth not?” And Leah, Max, and Diana all laughed a little. Other researchers from the lab joked about the animals they worked with. Someone giggled at the gruesome thought of rabbit stew. “I sometimes dream about mice. I see nothing but mice,” a woman said and began to laugh uneasily. This undignified behavior surprised Leah, though it seemed natural enough for these people to want to turn their grim work into humor.
Why couldn’t Leah laugh? Why couldn’t she have a good time, too?
Max tapped her on the shoulder at one point. “You seem quiet, kiddo. You all right?”
“Of course,” Leah said. “I’m fine.”
Max, always a little oblivious to fashion, wore shorts that were just a little too short and an old pair of leather cleats. He held a worn baseball glove in one hand and a bat in the other, and Leah saw in his soft burliness something she hadn’t anticipated: the eager physicality of an athlete. “Let’s go play,” he said. And then he’d begun following the other research scientists and laboratory employees across the street to the baseball diamond when he surprised Leah again by turning around and saying, “By the way, you look great today. You really do.” It was the first time he’d noticed, and though his tone suggested nothing more than friendliness, and seemed to reflect more his good mood than anything he saw in her, Leah felt a distinct lifting of spirits. In fact, she’d taken pains that day to look her best; she wore eye makeup, lipstick, a jean skirt and white tank top, through which showed, very faintly, the red lace of her bra.
And because she had taken extra care in her appearance and felt that it could easily crumble, that she could lose all her elegance in one wild swing of a bat, she refrained from playing and stood behind the high chain-link fence at the back of the diamond and watched. It was a mild day in late August with a light breeze, a seamless blue sky, and a full, if not quite hot, sun, a day in which the chill of autumn, still distant, could nonetheless be felt. The great maples that bordered the park lifted endless pale-green leaves that shimmered in the light. Tree cotton whirled through the air. In the distance, Leah heard a siren, but it was faint compared to the urgent calls from the infield of “Hey, batter. Hey, batter, batter, batter.”
Leah was surprised by the competitiveness of these scientists. They wanted to win, none of them more than Max, who turned out to be a powerhouse. When he stepped up to the plate, the outfielders covered the far distance. And though Diana threw a fierce underhand pitch, winding up and throwing strike after strike, she couldn’t keep her boss from hitting a three-base grounder and a home run in the first inning. Max ran like a tank, not fast but with an almost scary momentum and force, his entire body leaning forward. After the first hour of play, he was drenched and his T-shirt was heavy with sweat. And even though Max hit another homer with the bases full in the final inning, and jogged over each base with the confident swagger and ease of the victor, his team finally lost, overpowered by Jason Clark and a skinny pale research scientist with long braided hippie hair, who, despite his stick-like frame, matched Max in power and competitiveness. And as much as he wanted to win, Max didn’t seem to mind losing, shook hands, and said, “Next year. There’s always next year.”
Leah never would have guessed at this happy, vigorous, physical side of Max had she not seen it. And now that she had, now that she knew more about him, she was thrilled. He kept surprising her. She wished it wasn’t true, but it evidently was: she loved him. She loved him despite – or even because of – something else she’d discovered about halfway through the game that afternoon when she’d gone in to use the bathroom in Max’s empty house. She couldn’t resist searching his medicine cabinet and was saddened to see that her guess had been right. He did take Prozac. He was a depressive. And she’d been stupid to hurl her reckless guess at him a few weeks ago, to say something so intentionally hurtful. Nonetheless, after she’d made this discovery, she searched for more secrets. Having invaded several homes that summer, she knew right where to look, right where people kept the things they wanted no one else to see. She could hear the distant noise of the game still in progress – the cheers and the boos – as she sifted through Max’s closet, looked through a few boxes and bags, and found nothing more than dozens of pairs of old sneakers of the sort he wore every day, photos of him and his ex-wife on various vacations, shoehorns, and bottles of athlete’s foot powder.
Just before giving up and leaving his room, she bent down and saw the box under his bed, which was not, she was surprised to discover, a water bed. He’d hardly hidden the stuff. He had no one to hide it from. The two magazines showed typical stuff – women with fake boobs engorging themselves on cocks and men with multiple women climbing over them and serving them in every conceivable manner. There was a bottle of lubricant called Sex Silk and a well-worn paperback entitled Stories of Eden: Real Erotica Written by Women. Leah was angry at first, jealous. She might have thought he was a creep had she not already known him and had she not seen that some married couples kept this sort of thing stashed away. And so her jealousy was tinged with curiosity and sympathy. He was needy, vulnerable. He wasn’t just a scientist, a careful and brilliant man. He wanted what most men wanted. He wanted women and didn’t have them. He wanted sex and didn’t get it. He no doubt wanted companionship. And unlike the married couples who – or so Leah imagined – used this stuff together, Max had to look at it alone, locked in his house, and this sad thought made Leah want him more.
She stayed late that night, after everyone else had left, helping clear the plastic cups and empty beer bottles from the porch while Max scrubbed grill utensils and silverware in the sink, soap suds sticking to his hairy forearms. Kind of Blue played on the stereo, a sliver of bright moon hovered in the corner of the kitchen window, and Leah hummed to the music as she wiped down the kitchen counters and put a few dishes away. As she worked she felt that she and Max made something like a family, something that felt comfortable and maybe even permanent.
Afterwards, they sat on the couch in the living room, where Max offered her a second beer – “As long as you think Franklin won’t mind,” he told her – and she took it, even though she had no intention of drinking it. Max sat back into the puffy couch and smiled at her. “You’ve changed your look, haven’t you?”
He’d now noticed her for the second time that day, and Leah felt things begin to shift between them, begin to feel different, slightly uncomfortable and tense in a good way. “A little,” she said.
“I noticed that Jason Clark has taken an interest. He tries hard whenever you’re around.” Max was smiling. He thought it was amusing, this romantic tension between two young people in his lab.
“I could care less about Jason Clark.”
“Poor Jason,” Max said, with far too much sympathy. And then, in the dim puddle of light cast by a dinky side-table lamp, Max reached over, leaning in close towards Leah, so close that Leah almost lifted her face to his, almost presented herself to him, just when he clinked his beer with hers and ruined everything by sitting back into the couch and saying, “We’re going to miss you. I have no idea how we’re going to replace you at the lab. Thanks for your good work this summer.” And that was it: goodbye with a simple clink of beer bottles. A quick, friendly so-long.
“I think Jason Clark is an asshole,” Leah said, unable to suppress the tremor of something like tears and rage that made Max sit up then. “And I like you. I still like you a lot.”
“I like you, too,” Max said.
“Don’t say that.” She grabbed his arm, unsuspectingly draped across the couch, then his shoulder, gripping onto his cotton sweatshirt, and pulled him towards her with more force than she’d thought herself capable. Their lips did not meet so much as collide, and when she kissed him she felt both teeth and mouth and smelled the surprising salty warmth of his body.
“No, Leah.” He started to push her away, but then recoiled when he realized that his hands were on her breasts. He relented then, and for a moment that Leah might have imagined, he started to kiss her, really kiss her, before he dug his fingers into her shoulders and threw her back against the couch.
“Stop that. Jesus.”
“Let’s just kiss.”
“Leah,” he said, half shouting now. “I don’t want to kiss you.” And then, obviously out of awkwardness and completely without humor, he began to laugh and shake his head.
Why did he have to laugh? Any other response would have been better. “You do want to kiss,” Leah said. “I know all about what you want. I looked under your bed. I saw the stuff you have there, the stuff you get off to.”
“Leah,” he said.
“You’re depressed, too. I looked in your medicine cabinet. I was right about you being depressed. You’re perverted and depressed.”
“Jesus, kid,” he said. For a moment, he put his head down, and Leah saw something in him that she hadn’t seen before now. The loose neckline of his sweatshirt had been pulled down over his shoulder, where Leah’s fingernails had left three red trails, and half his belly, surprisingly soft and full, was showing. In this disheveled state, he was vulnerable and childish. Leah thought that he might start crying. But he didn’t. He was blushing. He was ashamed and humiliated. And as if just then realizing what Leah had seen, he straightened his sweatshirt and covered himself. “That’s private, Leah. That is my . . . ” He looked at her now and, in a voice that was neither loud nor angry, in a voice that left Leah feeling utterly irrelevant, he said, “Get out of my house now.” And when she didn’t move, he said in that same calm voice, “Now. I mean it.”

The next day, Leah knew she couldn’t go in to work. Nor could she stay at home, lest Franklin and Noelle suspect that she’d once again done something wrong. So she left her house in the morning and loitered around town. She sat on the corner of State and North University where the dispossessed teenagers and homeless adults, most of them vaguely insane or very drunk, hung out, asking for money or playing old instruments, guitars or harmonicas, badly. A kid who wore a ripped T-shirt and something that looked like a dog collar kept asking her for a cigarette and she kept saying she didn’t smoke, until he started to freak her out and she left. She had a coffee at the Starbucks on Liberty Street, where she couldn’t help overhearing a woman two tables away talking on her cell phone about the sex she’d been having with someone she’d just met. “It was a wonderful oral experience.” She actually said that, whispered it, with Leah sitting right in front of her. To get through the afternoon, Leah perused the used bookstores on Liberty Street. She found herself picking up book after book, but not really looking at them, not even reading their titles. What was she doing? Why was she even in this place?
She had eight keys to eight different homes in her pocket. But when she walked into the quiet, green neighborhoods and faced these houses, she couldn’t enter them. Each house confronted her with its vacancy, its quietness. When she stood in front of the Bradford house, where she was surprised to see a Sale Pending sticker over the sign, she wanted a child, a little girl to rush out the front door, leap onto the lawn, and begin jumping rope over the grass. A little girl to dispossess it of emptiness. And a man pulling weeds in the front yard, a dog in the backyard barking, a neighbor crossing the grass to get to the front door and knock on it. And so she was all the more surprised to see that someone was, in fact, home. Through the glare of sunlight on the kitchen window, Leah could see the arms and torso of a woman standing above the sink. Leah glanced behind her, saw that no one was looking, and slowly approached. The woman wore a simple white blouse, and as Leah came closer she heard the woman humming a childish, frivolous song. She was happy, and this thought made Leah smile, made Leah step closer until she saw that the woman was Noelle. She was looking down, wiping the counter, or maybe cleaning a dish, with a nonchalance, a girlish, simple pleasure in her face that surprised Leah, that made Leah pause. She didn’t know this woman, the one who stood at this sink and hummed this random song. She didn’t know her at all, had never known her. Leah stepped forward, stepped directly in front of the window, not more than a few feet away. Had Noelle glanced up then, she would have looked directly at Leah. What would Leah have said? “Hi.” Or: “I saw you in the window. I was just passing by.” Or, for the umpteenth time, “I’m sorry for being a brat.” Or: “I was just thinking how beautiful and happy you look.” That last one – that’s what she would have said, what her best self would have said. But without so much as glancing up, Noelle turned and walked out of the kitchen. It was a sudden turn, unexpected, just like another slap across the face.

On her way back home that afternoon, Leah passed the city police department. What she did next, she hadn’t planned to do. It simply occurred to her when she saw three uniformed cops exit from a side door. She did not give herself time to reflect, to imagine what might happen, to foresee the consequences – a word Franklin might have used – of her actions. She simply did it. She walked in the side door she’d seen the cops come out of and found her way to a thick glass window, obviously bulletproof, where an officer sat hunched over a microphone. He was reading something that was out of Leah’s view. On the glass just above eye level a plastic sign read, Pay fines here. When he finally looked up at her, Leah had just begun to sense the words she would use. She spoke through a microphone on her side of the glass and could hear her voice amplified on his side. “To whom,” she said, “do I talk about having been raped?” The archaic construction of that sentence came right out of her Latin III class, in which, last semester, she’d received a B-, her lowest grade ever.
The cop looked up, but didn’t seem to understand. “Excuse me,” he said.
“I’ve been raped,” she said this time.
“I just do traffic tickets.” For a moment he looked helpless in the face of what Leah had just said. But then he was on the phone, and shortly after he’d hung up, a young woman dressed in plain clothes appeared, escorted Leah down a brightly lit hallway and into an office that reminded her very much of the principal’s office at her high school. An American flag stood in the corner and a few framed diplomas hung on the wall.
“You’ve been sexually assaulted?” the woman asked her. Beneath a short haircut, her face was square and solid. And though her simple gray slacks made her appear mannish, her face expressed a great deal of sympathy when Leah nodded. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Are you hurt?” Leah couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked her this question, and she liked hearing it now. “Do you need to see a doctor?”
“I don’t think so,” Leah said.
The door opened then and a balding man poked his head in. “You got a minute?” he asked, and the woman gave him a severe look that made her colleague immediately retreat, closing the door behind him.
“I’m seventeen,” Leah blurted out. This seemed necessary to say, though she hardly knew why and realized then that she was on the verge of panicking, that she was visibly trembling; her arms, her legs, her hands wouldn’t stay still.
“It’s all right,” the woman said. “You’re all right now.” She offered Leah a cup of water and Leah took it and drank it down. “We should call your parents. I’m sure they’d like to know you’re safe.”
Leah shook her head. “You can’t call my mom. She’s dead.”
It was a relief to have said this and a relief to see the woman nod. “Okay,” the cop said, expressing less sympathy than simple acknowledgement. It was, after all, simply so. It had happened. It was one more thing to know and not question. And this remedial gesture, this “okay” left Leah feeling calmer. “How about your father? Could we call him?”
Leah nodded and soon the woman officer had reached him at work. “Your daughter is here in my office, Mr. Mitchell. She’s just told me that she’s been sexually assaulted.” How easily – as if it were simple information – the woman had said this sentence. And now, reassuringly and repeatedly, she was saying, “She’s safe, Mr. Mitchell. She’s right here with me. She’ll stay here until you arrive.”
After the lady cop hung up, Leah told her story about how Max had raped her: first the picnic and softball game, the departure of all the guests but Leah, the cleaning up afterwards, the beers he had given her, the conversation on the couch about how sorry he was to see her go, followed by him reaching over and kissing her, and then the struggle Leah had lost. Leah was struck by how easily she began to lie, and by how, without contempt for Max, without much feeling at all for Max, she continued to lie. The woman nodded. She said, “I see. I understand.” She gave every possible sign of listening and taking it all in, and this encouraged Leah and kept her talking. There were more difficult questions, questions Leah hadn’t expected and didn’t want to hear. “Did he penetrate you, Leah? Did he ejaculate inside you?”
Leah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Okay,” the woman said gently. “You’ll need to see a doctor.”
“Not now,” Leah said.
“The sooner the better.”
“But not immediately. Not this minute.”
“No,” the officer said. “Not right now, but soon.”

It was not until her father arrived that Leah wanted to take back everything she had said and realized that she could not – not with the woman officer sitting across from her. Franklin was oddly shy when he entered the room and saw her. He wore a suit and floral-pattern necktie that Noelle had recently given him. “Leah,” he said. She looked up at him. His beardless face, thin and clean and odd, still surprised her. And how strange and unexpected it was to see him in the middle of a workday. There was something – not quite pain – in his face as he looked at her. As if he were trying to see the ruin and suffering she’d undergone. As if he were trying to imagine what had happened to her. He hesitated before touching her, placing a hand too carefully on her shoulder.
“I’m okay, Daddy,” she said. It was unbearable, looking out at the nightmare she was creating. And so she closed her eyes then and she heard Franklin make a sound, a brief sigh, a sign that he, too, couldn’t bear this scene. His hand left her shoulder. Leah opened her eyes.
“My God,” he said. And though he was usually calm, mild, slow to react and feel things, he became suddenly fidgety, nervous. He thrust his hands in his pockets and paced. He looked frightened now. He looked impulsive and uncertain. “What do we do?” he asked the officer. “What next?”
She said something about a doctor, about filing criminal charges that Leah couldn’t listen to. “I need to leave now,” Leah said. “I need to go home. Please. Now.”
Soon Leah was following her father down the hallway and out of the station, knowing that she’d have to return later that afternoon, though she wasn’t thinking about that. She just wanted to move, get out and away, forestall and put everything behind her. Acceleration and velocity. That’s what she needed now.
But the world outside the police station was slow. It seethed with humidity and a dull, fleshy layer of mid-afternoon sun. Franklin’s forehead broke out with sweat as soon as they hit the air. The green on the trees seemed unctuous, seemed to weigh them down and sadden them. There was no breeze, no motion. As they crossed the street, Leah felt the sticky asphalt burn through her soles and bake her ankles. And everywhere she looked, Leah saw terror thinly veiled. A small, shirtless boy on the other side of the street, his chin smeared with something like ice cream, held on to a bike and quietly sobbed. Where were his parents, his brothers and sisters, his friends? A large truck backing out of a driveway, its bed filled with layers of ripped up sod, made that insistent bleating sound that was supposed to warn pedestrians away. Franklin was walking too fast across the street, and even though no cars were in sight, Leah felt the threat of being hit, crushed in a moment too sudden to anticipate. Before getting in her father’s car, she looked for the truck. It was gone. Suddenly nowhere. As was the child. Gone. Snatched up. Stolen. “I’m sorry,” Franklin was saying. Everything was wrong. It wasn’t just what Leah had done. It was everything. Inside the car, the heat became viscous, as if the air would gather and begin to boil. The leather seats stuck to Leah’s legs, sucking on the backs of her thighs. Her skin – her face, her arms, her chest – stung with sweat. “Daddy,” she said.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. And then: “I’m sorry. So sorry. I can’t believe Max would do this. I can’t believe anyone would. He’s a little funny, a little lonely. But that’s all I thought he was.”
Leah’s window came down. Air rushed in. One tree, then another and another passed by. They were driving. “But you’re okay, aren’t you? You’re fine. You’re safe. I can see that. Thank God. Anything could have happened. We just need to go home now.” But home was just down the street from the station and they had already passed it. He looked at either side of the street. “We drove right by our house, didn’t we? We’ll have to turn around. We’ll go home and rest. And then we’ll see what has to be done.” He let out a sigh. “Bad things. First your mother and now this. We were okay before. We survived. We’ll be okay again.”
“Daddy,” Leah said.
He didn’t look at her. He just kept driving.
“I lied,” she said.
He was trying to find a place to turn around, his eyes searching the road, attempting to focus, to concentrate.
“I made it up.” She wanted him to stop the car now and listen, but he didn’t. “Max didn’t rape me. Nobody did. Max didn’t even touch me. He didn’t do anything. I made it up. I did it because I hate people. I hate everyone. I did it because I’m bad.”
He slowed down now. He stopped, pulled the keys out of the ignition, let his head drop to the steering wheel, and began to sob, at first quietly and then more loudly. This was him. The man she recognized as her father: small, hurt, weak, overcome by grief. Not happy, not vigorous, not in love. He lifted a fist, the keys clenched in his fingers. “Daddy,” Leah said.
He stepped out of the car then and, without shutting his door, began to walk. They were on the edge of a park, and when Leah walked after him, he left the sidewalk and started moving faster over the grass. “Daddy,” Leah said again. He began to jog and so did Leah. And then, his suit tail flapping behind him, he was running. Leah ran after him, but he was fast and thin, in better shape than ever. He lengthened his stride, leaned forward, and broke into a sprint, losing a black leather shoe in the grass. Leah ran until her lungs burnt. And then she stopped and watched her father run over a hill and disappear on the other side.

When Leah arrived home with her father’s shoe, a police car was parked at the curb. Inside, Franklin stood in the entryway. “Here’s your shoe.” Leah held it up. That shoe, the largeness of it, the empty clunky presence of it in her hand as she had walked through the park, then around and around the same block, wanting somehow never to go home, never to face her father again, haunted her, reminded her of the times as a little girl that she’d put on his buckskin house slippers and been consumed up to her ankles by animal hide as she tromped through the house, imagining and visualizing his gargantuan strangeness, the simple mystery of his size in comparison to hers, all the while overjoyed by the fact that this alien giant was hers, all hers. And now he wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even look at it. Leah put the shoe down. His necktie was undone and his face showed an exhaustion that Leah had not seen since her mother’s death. Two cops sat at the kitchen table, obviously waiting for her. “They’re going to arrest you,” Franklin said. “I called them.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll need to use handcuffs,” one of the cops said.
Franklin was looking at Leah when he said, “I’d like to request that you do use them.”
She turned around and put her hands out behind her. “I don’t mind,” she said. The younger cop, a boy with a crew cut, who seemed only a few years older than Leah, stood up and began taking the cuffs from their container at his waist. With her head down, she could see where the bulky, black metal pistol sat in its holster on the boy’s hip. “You have a gun,” she said. And then she began to cry.
Still holding the handcuffs, the boy looked over at Franklin. “All right,” Franklin said. “I guess she doesn’t need those.” The boy put them away.
Leah truly did not know how to be arrested. It was awkward and humiliating. The young cop, who was no doubt new to his work and seemed nervous, gripped her arm too tightly while the other read her rights. Her father said and did nothing. From the curb outside, Leah looked back at him, but the front door was already shut and he was nowhere in sight. “Thank you,” she sobbed when the boy lowered her carefully into the backseat, making sure her head did not hit the car. It wasn’t right. She wasn’t right. Criminals didn’t say thank you. At the station, the cops gently – too gently – searched her with a metal detector, took her mug shot, then left her in her own private cell that nonetheless had real bars and a door which slid heavily into place. Later she would hear both from her father and Jason Clark how four uniformed cops had gone into the lab and compelled Max to accompany them to the station for questioning. They’d visited him at his workplace without warning because such visits intimidated criminals and because, Franklin explained, intimidation often led to confessions. In front of Jason, Diana, and others, the cops told Max he was suspected of criminal activity. They offered no more explanation, and Max was too terrified to ask for more. “You should have seen his face,” Jason Clark would later tell her. “He couldn’t speak. He just followed them. He got into a car and they drove him off.”
But in her cell Leah wasn’t thinking of Max. She was too terrified to think of Max. It wasn’t the handcuffs, the Miranda rights, the body search, or even the mug shot that scared her. It was the numbing aloneness of incarceration, the lack of detail, the simple repetition of bars, the orphaned bareness of the single toilet in the corner of her cell, the bland whiteness of the concrete wall at her back, the drain – not unlike the drain in her animal basement – in the concrete floor, the weird echo of someone whistling somewhere down the corridor of cages. She’d expected the place to be teeming with prisoners, with bad men and women. But across from her and next to her, the cells lay vacant. There were no sounds of talk, of laughter. No screams, no sighs, no grunting. She half expected to hear her dogs and sheep, and she thought of them now, thought of them in the basement of the lab, in their cages as she was now in hers. She wanted some sign of them: a bark, the bleat of a stupid sheep. But she heard only the weird whistling and her own unsettling breathing, heavy and too fast and snotty because she couldn’t stop crying. She felt the thud of her heart too close to her chest. She wanted someone – her father, Noelle, even a criminal, a real criminal – to be in the cage across from her. She hated the aloneness – the walls and bars and the empty pallid light of that place.
Finally, Leah heard someone’s footsteps approaching. It was the woman cop who had questioned her. She was gruff and unkind and disgusted with Leah. “I’d like to know why the hell you did that,” she said. “You had me convinced. You really did.”
Leah shook her head. “I hate people,” Leah said. But she’d already said that and it didn’t seem completely true. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m stupid.”
“You are,” the cop said. “Stupid.”
And then she left Leah alone again. At some point she fell asleep, and woke when her cell door opened, and a cop took her to her father. Franklin was in his white shirt and suit pants, and seemed diminished without his jacket and tie. His face did not greet her. It told her nothing. When she embraced him, he did not receive her for a few terrible moments. And then she felt his arms lift and hold her.

That night Leah and her father said very little. They sat down at the kitchen table without Noelle present. “I have two things to tell you,” Franklin said. “I called Max up. I apologized for you. He doesn’t want to see you. He doesn’t want you near his house. He doesn’t want you near the lab.” Franklin paused and Leah nodded. “The other thing is this: I can’t forgive you quite yet. I don’t understand you, Leah. I’d even say I’m afraid of you. I don’t know when I’ll be able to forgive you. I just know I can’t tell you that it’s all right. It’s not all right. It won’t be all right for some time.”
Leah nodded again and Franklin stood up and left her at the table.

VI

That season ended with rain. Day after day of rain, preceded and followed by a mist that rose in sheets from the grass and trees and left the sky white and featureless. At times, thunder would accompany the storms, and black weather would roll across the lush flatness. But mostly the rain was a quiet, constant drizzle, and the days were blank and colorless with it. Leah stayed inside and waited, though for what she wasn’t sure. Perhaps for the weather to pass. Perhaps for her final year of high school to commence and for what seemed like an endless stampede of stupid classes, inane teachers, and even more inane classmates to end forever so that finally – thank God – something else could begin. College. University. And without anticipating it, Leah felt something like optimism: she entertained the thought that these future four years might be better than the years before. How, after all, could they possibly be worse?
And as she waited, as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, as she read one silly paperback mystery after another, as she walked down the hallway to piss, as she napped and woke in the middle of another white rainy day, she felt it distinctly. A weight in her chest that needed somehow to be relieved. She wasn’t exactly sorry. It was more than that, since she knew that apologies would fix nothing. It was remorse. And the demands of remorse, she was now discovering, were nearly as impossible as those of grief. She wanted simply to undo what she had done. She saw her father bent over in the front seat of his car and willed him to sit upright, willed his sobs, his fear and shock to be undone. All of it needed somehow to be erased in a series of simple reverse gestures.

She saw Max looking up at the cops in his office, his face blue from the glow of the computer screen and all his scientific intensity, his interest, his passion for knowledge arrested by fear and humiliation. And again, she willed the cops to return from Max’s office, walk back first, toe to heel, down the hallway, up the stairs, and out the lab until their car doors had closed them off from what they’d long ago done, until their patrol car drove off in a backwards mimicry of all that had happened, of which every event, every action, even the smallest of them, Leah saw now, was done and would not be undone.
The demands of remorse were impossible. Nonetheless, Leah gained some relief when she stood before the district juvenile court, which was no more than a small office with two chairs, one for Leah and one for Franklin, facing the judge’s desk. “Have you gained any insights into your actions, and do you wish to share them with the court?” The judge was a thin, middle-aged woman with elegantly graying hair, a judge’s hammer and gavel at one end of her desk and a fancy aluminum travel mug at the other. She wore a black gown, though a fringe of white blouse showed at the garment’s loose neckline. Leah recognized this woman. She’d seen her going in and out of the shops at Kerrytown, she’d seen her in the cafes on Main Street. It seemed that Ann Arbor was so small that a criminal could not escape her accusers. And no doubt this woman, the Honorable Mary Shreve, recognized her, too, and this fact put Leah to shame. “I’m not sure,” Leah said. But when she saw the judge’s face respond with disapproval, Leah was afraid and began to speak of her mother’s death, of her changing home situation, and again of her ignorance. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I do now. I wish I’d never done it.”
“You’re sorry, then?” the judge asked.
“I am,” Leah said, and she was relieved to say so, especially knowing that Franklin, who sat stiffly beside her, had heard those words.
Leah was charged with making false accusations, with intentionally deceiving an officer of the law. As a first-time juvenile offender, she was sentenced to eight hundred hours of community service, which she planned to complete at a nearby homeless shelter. Giving to others for something that she’d taken away. It seemed too simple, too cliché to work, but perhaps it would. Perhaps it would reform her.
Leah did not like Noelle any more than she ever had. She wished it were otherwise. She wished she could see in her some of what her father did. And when Franklin announced to Leah that they planned to marry in the fall, she acted jubilant. She hugged him. She lied and told him she was happy. She waited until she could lock her bedroom door behind her to cry, to beat her pillows with fists – to act like the brat she still was on occasion.
Twice she tried to see Max. She waited for him to exit the lab one afternoon, standing across the street because from this distance, she figured, she would not go near, or at least too near, the lab, as she had promised Franklin. But when Max exited, he saw her waiting, turned around, and retreated into the building. For several days, she wandered into Max’s neighborhood. When she saw him on a Saturday morning mowing his lawn with what appeared to be a new gasoline mower, she stood across from his yellow house and waved at him. He refused to acknowledge her as he mowed the yard in neat rows. She said it anyway. She shouted it over the roar of the mower. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” She yelled the words repeatedly until she was sure he had heard them. And when he still did not acknowledge her, she walked away.
He hated her. He hated and feared her, and the injury she had done him was irreparable.
Finally, she confessed to Franklin. She told him she’d broken into Noelle’s houses. She’d tried to sabotage Noelle. She’d committed minor acts of vandalism. And once again, she saw her father close his eyes and put his head down. “If you chase her away from me now,” he said, “if you take her out of my life – ”
And because Leah could not hear what he might have said next, she interrupted him. “I’m done. I finished with that weeks ago. Never again.”
“Okay,” Franklin said. “We’re not going to tell her. I want you to promise me that you won’t tell her.”
Leah promised, though part of her was tempted to do otherwise. Part of her still wanted to hurt Noelle. And in the wake of this impulse, Leah realized that she had something else to confess. “I no longer cry over her. Mom, I mean. I can’t even picture her that well. I guess she’s been gone too long. I can’t hear her voice. Not exactly. Not the way it was. I can’t hear the way she used to laugh. Thinking about her dead, gone, used to be so unbearable. Now I don’t think about it so much. And when I do, I can make myself think about something else.” Leah shook her head. “I actually forgot her birthday a few weeks ago. We were supposed to do something, remember?” Franklin nodded. “But I forgot. I let it go. It feels wrong. It feels like she’s getting farther and farther away.”
Franklin nodded. “I know,” he said. “I know what you mean.”
In the last week of summer, Leah discovered that she wanted less than ever to be alone. Though she still shied away from the dinner table, she ate with Franklin and Noelle a few times a week. And to guard against loneliness, she got to know Jason Clark, the only person who would still be her friend. In truth, he wanted more than friendship. He wanted to get laid while Leah wanted to hear about the lab – the dogs, the sheep, and Max. “Max is Max, you know,” Jason Clark said when Leah asked repeatedly how he was. Jason wasn’t nearly as bad as Leah had assumed. She even kind of liked him. They made out sometimes and she was surprised by his adeptness, his tender, fine kisses. Jason talked about the books he was reading, most recently a chronicle and history of salt. “The staff of life,” he said. “It was the currency, the most precious substance in the ancient world. They traded slaves, tracts of land for a few pounds of it.” He loved facts. He thought they meant something, and Leah was both amazed and bored by his hoarding and reciting of them. She made him listen to jazz. She struggled through a few Mozart etudes on her clarinet for him. “Cool,” he said. But he wanted more than jazz and kisses, and sometimes, when they were making out, she had to push his hand away from her breasts. “You’re in love with Max,” he said once, discouraged. “You’re stuck on him.”
Leah shrugged. “Maybe so.” But she told him it was kissing or nothing, and she was glad when Jason decided that he would settle for kissing.
Franklin and Noelle were married in the backyard of Leah’s childhood home on a sunny afternoon in late September. Noelle chose a dress for Leah to wear, and though she didn’t care for the Victorian sleeves and its particular shade of pink, she wore it. And when she cried at the end of the service, Leah did so quietly and with a smile so that the small group of attending friends might think she was happy. And maybe she was. Just slightly happy, if not about the marriage, then about her departed grief, about her remorse, which was going to be, in the end, bearable, about the simple fact that she regretted having hurt people, and no longer wanted to do so.
And yet, she was still uncertain, still puzzled, still frustrated by how little she knew. A few days before the wedding, Leah had dreamt of Ten Bucks in his cage, wagging his tail. That desk was there, behind her. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head was playing, and Leah had wanted to change the channel but she couldn’t find the radio. Slabs of flesh lay in the industrial sink. The stink of chemicals was in the air. But there was Ten Bucks in his cage. And while the other dogs yipped and leapt all around him, he remained calm and focused on her. He sat when Leah commanded it. Then he lay down. How real he seemed. He’d been restored to her. Her good dog. This time, she knew, she wouldn’t have to lead him down the hall. And she knew, too, that anything could be restored: the lab, Max, her father. And she’d been so satisfied, so happy. Nothing seemed doubtful or small about that happiness. And then that dog rolled over. She hadn’t even asked him to. “You can’t do that,” Leah told him. She woke up, angry, still feeling the authenticity and nearness of Ten Bucks, as if he had just sat at her bedside, just looked at her with that open, needy gaze, just nibbled at her fingers.

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John Fulton is the author of Retribution, which won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award for the best first collection of short stories published in 2001, and the novel More Than Enough (Picador), which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors Award. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been short-listed for the O. Henry Award.