The Caretaker
Sheldon Lee Compton
It was snowing the day Adam died. The mountain was covered in ice and his Mustang couldn’t hold the road. Calla got a call about five minutes after she got home. It was her dad.
“Adam had a wreck,” he said.
“Okay. Man oh man this is like three times he’s wrecked. Is he okay?”
“Adam’s dead, baby.”
“Why did you just say that?” Calla asked. “Why would you say that?” Then she screamed into the phone. “Why would you say that?”
“I’ll come get you.”
A day passed.
A second day passed.
The funeral. The conversations. People who came because they always came to funerals because it was a social gathering for them. The terrible people.
Adam had six dogs when he died. No particular breeds. There was an old one, a quiet, sad puppy, and four strays he took in over the last year. Calla picked them up. She took them home, where she and Adam once lived. Now the seven of them lived there. She didn’t know any of their names.
The shit on the carpet. The struggle to feed them without fights starting. The constant howling and barking.
A week passed.
A month passed.
It peppered a winter rain the night the first one died, the sad puppy. Calla hadn’t named them. Wasn’t going to. She gathered up the others and put them on the back porch. Then she put the puppy in a box and carried it to the top of the hill behind the house. It was a long walk, so Calla stopped three times and put the box down and breathed steadily. The rain had somehow stirred up a creek scent of crawdads, rust, and mud. She closed her eyes and breathed it deeply. It was nice to smell summer in the winter.
At the top of the hill, Calla took very little time picking a spot to bury it. Once she did, she put the box down and went about the business of digging a hole. Had Adam meant to take close care of this one? Had he taken it to the vet for shots? He had been one of few people she knew who actually took his pets to the vet. Everybody she knew did the best they could by them and then that was it. By comparison it made all the rest of the world seem cruel.
Out of breath, bone-cold, and soaked, she stumbled her way down the hill, the toes of her shoes digging into the ice collecting up and down blades of grass. Sleet and then the gathering ice was one thing, but she wished for snow on nights like this, with flakes large enough for her to see the crystallization, the faintest hint of dendrites in prisms and branches.
There was a fast, sharp howl behind her. Calla half-expected to turn and see the sad, little puppy covered in dirt, panting and smiling up at her. Loyal even after an attempted murder by live burial. But there was nothing behind her except the overgrown backroad nestled against the hillside and the path she cut walking through it and back. Even in the dark, she could see that.
She wanted to calm herself. Sucking in a lungful of cold air made her feel better. The night was the type of clear and clean, yes, that was the thing, clean, only a certain kind of winter day can become. Stars bright within a sky oblivion-dark, that gorgeous contrast. Air crisp, a very minimum of sounds (other than the one she was definitely imagining). All of it a balm to her, just as she knew it would be if she took the time to slow down her mind and take it in. Even Adam’s death, a textbook winter tragedy, had not diminished her appreciation of winter nights, and never would; she knew this and was happy for it. When she felt her heart actually slowed down, she went back inside the house.
The living room had become cold while she was gone. Calla tore the plastic from a bundle of Lowe’s firewood and, after a couple of minutes breaking long matches trying, she got a decent blaze going. The chimney hadn’t been used for several winters and smoke plumed into the living room at a slow pace. It was a weak draft, but she didn’t exactly know what could be done about it, so she waited. While she waited for the room to hopefully clear, she made her way around the house.
The two of them had only lived here for six months, but the house had been in Adam’s family much longer than that. How far back she wasn’t sure; she only knew that an uncle lived in it in the early 90s. Then, after his uncle died, Adam moved in. That was around the time Adam dropped out of college. By the time Calla came along, he had lived there long enough to have fixed most of the disrepair. What he didn’t fix, he didn’t think mattered, until she moved in. They painted, rewired, and built on a cat porch of all things on the back of the house. She kicked an old blanket crumpled beside his bed and smiled. Adam had roundly disliked cats but put up with them because of her. Now Calla was here with his dogs. Not a cat in sight. There was a joke in there somewhere.
The bed was unmade, left in the suspension of shock like the rest of the house. His two customary pillows were in the right places — one at the head of the bed and one in about the middle, where he would have had it tucked between his knees. Right at that moment, she saw him clearly in her mind, the same as he looked when she watched him sleep from beside him, turned away from her onto his side, legs pulled up as far as he could get them, his back expanding and relaxing as if his entire body breathed as one full unit, as if his lungs were only a small part of the magic in process.
The sound of her own crying was so unexpected it actually startled her. Stop that, she told herself. Stop it! There were things she was forgetting, as a person did after a loved one, or one they used to love, died. Death can breed selective memory. In the silence broken only by her whimpering, Calla was willingly letting go of the screams, the broken windows, the locks busted from the doors, the insults, the vintage fits of anger. For balance, she fixed those difficult memories directly in line with the good. There was something about this she felt was important for her own preservation. Adam was not a saint, and, when he died, she had not loved him. The truth was only the truth, not a letter to be worn.
When the living room smoke had settled, the room quickly became warm and Calla settled in with a blanket she’d brought with her, sleepier than she realized. The dogs seemed tired, too. They lay about the living room breathing deeply, rolling their bloodshot eyes.
All except one.
The oldest dog, a male that Calla could only assume was some kind of hound, lay by itself directly in front of the fireplace, not on guard and not exactly relaxed either.
Calla crossed her arms from her place deep in her old couch. “What?”
The hound raised its head and tipped its ears at the sound of her voice but then dropped back into place. He fixed his gaze on Calla and she began to feel more or less, as crazy as it seemed, strongly considered.
“What?” She said again.
This time the hound slowly stood up and walked to the front door. Now it was becoming more clear, almost cliche. The old dog wanted to know where the pup went. It was straight Disney, Calla thought.
“Listen,” she said. “It is cold out there.” She pointed with a little force out the window. “And it is warm in here.” She pulled the blanket up to her chin.
The hound didn’t move.
Was this really happening? Calla thought. Did this old geezer of a dog want her to, what, take him out? Take him to the puppy’s pitiful cold dark grave?
“What is happening?” she said to all the dogs. She wouldn’t have been surprised at that moment if they had all turned into cartoons and burst out in song to start dressing her in a blue gown. She rubbed her face. She really was sleepy.
And so she went to sleep, and dreamed of Disney characters and sick puppies. She dreamed of Adam. Adam, Adam, Adam. She woke up crying, and wasn’t at all surprised. She had burrowed into the couch while sleeping and now she stared at the ceiling, the one long crack in the plaster they had always planned to fix but I had no idea how. It became a running joke. If Adam said he would take the garbage down to the bin she would say, yeah and you’re going to fix the crack. She promised to do the laundry and he’d say, oh yeah, fix the crack while you’re at it. Seeing the cracked plaster now took her breath. It seemed the weight of every moment she and Adam had spent together collected into one atomic spot large enough to laser-slash her heart.
The old dog barked with such crispness Calla sat straight up on the couch, as if a latch spring had been tripped. Her hair waved a little around her head, not a part of the stop in motion for that couple of seconds. The old hound barked again. Much louder. And then another and another. By this point, the other dogs had huddled into one corner of the room. It was right then that Calla realized the others were afraid of the hound. Once she noticed it, she couldn’t figure out she hadn’t seen it before. The hound was a goddamn bully, and she hated a bully.
It stood again, tensed its entire body, and howled out into the room. This time she gave an abrupt squeal and then hiccupped, and hiccupped again. When she had composed herself, she said, “Okay, you motherfucker. Okay.”
The old dog walked two feet and sniffed, another two feet and sniffed. It squatted and pissed extremely close to the deck foundation. Calla was sure it was trying to get a stream onto the deck. Dogs, she knew, wanted to piss and shit on the world for as long as they could. Loyalty was a balancing act. But she was going to take this fucking dog to that little grave on the backroad. It made no sense, but that’s what she was going to do. Walking behind and letting it lead her uphill. It never occurred to her that the old dog couldn’t have had any idea where he was going. Somewhere beneath the surface of her thoughts she knew it was the scent the old dog followed, pushing forward while the scent of the puppy was still that of the actual puppy and not of the death slowly beginning to surround it. The old dog could have followed either, but it was the puppy alive that gave him an extra kick in his step and he bounded ahead of Calla so far she nearly lost sight of his brown tail flipping back and forth into the whiteness everything was becoming.
She didn’t run to catch up. Some part of her, a part she felt might have been mixed up and inseparable from her grief for a person she lost before she lost them forever, didn’t care if the old hound ran off. She couldn’t imagine Adam’s favorite of his dogs was this bully. It was a certainty in her thoughts that Adam had taken this one in as his very last in a gesture of common mercy. It wouldn’t have surprised her at all that the hound’s owner had left them to die on top of Abner Mountain, a common spot for pet owners to take their animals either dying or unwanted. Adam would have been driving across Abner and seen this old bastard of a dog and stopped, hauled it into his vehicle, and brought it home to terrorize his other adopted strays.
But it didn’t matter how the hound had gotten here, it was here. And now it was far out in front of Calla, far enough that it had to have made it to the sad puppy’s grave. When she made it to where the backroad leveled off to the wide opening, she saw the old dog digging up the grave.
She ran and felt her guts knotting up as she got closer and could see more of what the old dog was doing. It had quickly made it down to where she had laid the puppy. She yelled as loudly as she could but the old dog chewed the puppy in half and then began clawing the two parts with enough anger and force that by the time Calla got to it there was no puppy, only blood and flesh and bones.
No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t catch her breath. She gulped air and pushed it out, gulped and pushed, over and over while the hound sat back on its haunches and watched her, its nose and mouth clotted with blood, its eyes dark and absent. By the time she realized she couldn’t stop breathing so hard and so fast, her fingers were already drawing together like morning glories after sunset. Without knowing exactly what, she knew something was seriously wrong so she turned and ran down the backroad, trying to make it to the porch. As she ran, her lips started to close into a whistling shape, as if she was drawing a drink through a straw. It wasn’t until she fell the first time that she saw the hound had been following her.
A crazy thought entered her mind.
Don’t be ignorant, she thought. And then kept thinking it and kept thinking it and kept thinking it until somehow while thinking this crazy thought, the thought that a sad, old, basically harmless hound dog might attack and eat her, she realized her lips had relaxed. Her fingers, too, had stopped cramping. Soon, her breathing returned to a normal rhythm.
Intensely relieved, Calla slipped to the porch and sat with her legs crossed. Her breathing slowed enough that she could even hear the spatting of light rain along the gutters, and then another sound. At the edge of the porch was the hound, of course. Panting, staring. The blood that had clotted its maw was gone. It had a big stupid grin topped with eyes no longer vacant but thrilled. It was so absolutely goofy, that against her will she felt her heart soften. There was a glorious moment when her spirit swayed out from her and touched some part of the old hound, but then a spear of light showed her vividly and assuredly that the blood wasn’t entirely gone from around the dog’s mouth. That had only been her eyes wishfully thinking. There was less blood, but the sickening truth she understood now was that the old hound had licked it away.
There was nothing to do but stand and gradually step through the front door, which she did, breathing ever so slightly through her nose and never looking away. The hound watched her with that goofy, sloshy expression. To think there was anything menacing about it would have been hard to entertain. But there was no question in her mind, she would ask her dad to take it off first thing in the morning.
That night she lay on the couch and stared at the crack in the ceiling until she was sleepy enough to close her eyes. I’ll fix that in the morning. For sure I’ll fix it right up in the morning, she thought and grinned a little, right before she thought of nothing else.
But in the morning, the crack was still there but the old hound wasn’t. What ice had been hanging on last night had already melted away, replaced with an inch of mud that Calla plodded through all around the property. The sad puppy’s destroyed body still lay strewn around its little grave. Although her calves ached from lugging around her muddy boots, she fetched a shovel and dug the grave again and put to rest again what was left of him.
Inside, she started a fire, watched the flames for a few minutes, and then went out to search the property a second time. In all, she would cover the property two more times before nightfall. She called her dad the next morning and asked if he thought Adam’s parents might consider selling her the house.
“What?”
“Would you ask them for me?” she asked. “I can afford it if they will. Maybe not cash outright. I might need to break it up into four or five payments, say over a year or something—”
“Calla, honey, you’re all worked up from staying there the last few days. Think it over for a bit and see if you still think you’d like to have me ask and I’ll talk to Mike.”
No matter how much she ever wanted to contradict her dad, it was hard for her to do, partly because she loved him so much, but also because he always made a lot of logical sense, and was so respectful in his advice. She waited two weeks, never having felt any differently, and asked her dad again. Mike, maybe still reeling from his son’s death, turned down the offer. She never actually found out why.
The next year was the loneliest of her life. After Mike turned down her offer, she and her dad had a major argument. She had developed a negligent dependency on pain pills and confessed to him. She relied on his level-headed logic to prevail once again, and he had made a good effort before beginning to resent her. It was hardly his fault in truth; he was a carpenter, not a substance abuse counselor, but still she hadn’t counted on the blowup that resulted. There was a lot said, more than should have been, and it was said in the most hurtful ways possible. The fallout was that Calla hadn’t visited, called, or had any contact at all with her dad in ten months, and there seemed to be no end in sight.
Her life became a combination of feeling a kind of long-distance resentment from her dad, guilt for her own part of all of it, and addiction, with room for little else. The only reprieve came from her employment. Just when it seemed she might lose her job due to absenteeism, poor performance as a result, and a general lack of interest in traveling much farther than her front porch, she and millions of others were sent home to work remotely. COVID made the world smaller at a time when her world had already become as small as she thought it could.
Working from home, she was able to take pills from morning until night. When her original prescription stopped being enough, she crushed and snorted to see if that would do her. It all got completely away from her finally and ended in an overdose before she was able to get free of it. Once this happened, the loneliness she had been numbing herself to settled in on her like the snowstorm all those years ago, with her in the little cave that was her home waiting for an end.
And Calla kept thinking that something would turn around, that there would be redemption, reconciliation, some path out of despair, but nothing ever happened. Inspired one spring day, she remembered Adam’s dogs, but couldn’t bring herself to go to Mike and ask about them, let alone ask to take them for her own, and that was if they were at all still around. The idea became one more thing to twist away at her mind. What was gut-wrenching in May was still gut-wrenching in October; the post-apocalyptic aloneness just stayed and stayed and stayed. Her cave gave way to the snowstorm. Her anguish grew so acute, she truly knew that her life would soon be over. These would be her last days, rent asunder by a suffering heart.
But she kept a secret hope that something good might happen.
A week passed.
A month passed.
Years kept on passing.
Sheldon Lee Compton
It was snowing the day Adam died. The mountain was covered in ice and his Mustang couldn’t hold the road. Calla got a call about five minutes after she got home. It was her dad.
“Adam had a wreck,” he said.
“Okay. Man oh man this is like three times he’s wrecked. Is he okay?”
“Adam’s dead, baby.”
“Why did you just say that?” Calla asked. “Why would you say that?” Then she screamed into the phone. “Why would you say that?”
“I’ll come get you.”
A day passed.
A second day passed.
The funeral. The conversations. People who came because they always came to funerals because it was a social gathering for them. The terrible people.
Adam had six dogs when he died. No particular breeds. There was an old one, a quiet, sad puppy, and four strays he took in over the last year. Calla picked them up. She took them home, where she and Adam once lived. Now the seven of them lived there. She didn’t know any of their names.
The shit on the carpet. The struggle to feed them without fights starting. The constant howling and barking.
A week passed.
A month passed.
It peppered a winter rain the night the first one died, the sad puppy. Calla hadn’t named them. Wasn’t going to. She gathered up the others and put them on the back porch. Then she put the puppy in a box and carried it to the top of the hill behind the house. It was a long walk, so Calla stopped three times and put the box down and breathed steadily. The rain had somehow stirred up a creek scent of crawdads, rust, and mud. She closed her eyes and breathed it deeply. It was nice to smell summer in the winter.
At the top of the hill, Calla took very little time picking a spot to bury it. Once she did, she put the box down and went about the business of digging a hole. Had Adam meant to take close care of this one? Had he taken it to the vet for shots? He had been one of few people she knew who actually took his pets to the vet. Everybody she knew did the best they could by them and then that was it. By comparison it made all the rest of the world seem cruel.
Out of breath, bone-cold, and soaked, she stumbled her way down the hill, the toes of her shoes digging into the ice collecting up and down blades of grass. Sleet and then the gathering ice was one thing, but she wished for snow on nights like this, with flakes large enough for her to see the crystallization, the faintest hint of dendrites in prisms and branches.
There was a fast, sharp howl behind her. Calla half-expected to turn and see the sad, little puppy covered in dirt, panting and smiling up at her. Loyal even after an attempted murder by live burial. But there was nothing behind her except the overgrown backroad nestled against the hillside and the path she cut walking through it and back. Even in the dark, she could see that.
She wanted to calm herself. Sucking in a lungful of cold air made her feel better. The night was the type of clear and clean, yes, that was the thing, clean, only a certain kind of winter day can become. Stars bright within a sky oblivion-dark, that gorgeous contrast. Air crisp, a very minimum of sounds (other than the one she was definitely imagining). All of it a balm to her, just as she knew it would be if she took the time to slow down her mind and take it in. Even Adam’s death, a textbook winter tragedy, had not diminished her appreciation of winter nights, and never would; she knew this and was happy for it. When she felt her heart actually slowed down, she went back inside the house.
The living room had become cold while she was gone. Calla tore the plastic from a bundle of Lowe’s firewood and, after a couple of minutes breaking long matches trying, she got a decent blaze going. The chimney hadn’t been used for several winters and smoke plumed into the living room at a slow pace. It was a weak draft, but she didn’t exactly know what could be done about it, so she waited. While she waited for the room to hopefully clear, she made her way around the house.
The two of them had only lived here for six months, but the house had been in Adam’s family much longer than that. How far back she wasn’t sure; she only knew that an uncle lived in it in the early 90s. Then, after his uncle died, Adam moved in. That was around the time Adam dropped out of college. By the time Calla came along, he had lived there long enough to have fixed most of the disrepair. What he didn’t fix, he didn’t think mattered, until she moved in. They painted, rewired, and built on a cat porch of all things on the back of the house. She kicked an old blanket crumpled beside his bed and smiled. Adam had roundly disliked cats but put up with them because of her. Now Calla was here with his dogs. Not a cat in sight. There was a joke in there somewhere.
The bed was unmade, left in the suspension of shock like the rest of the house. His two customary pillows were in the right places — one at the head of the bed and one in about the middle, where he would have had it tucked between his knees. Right at that moment, she saw him clearly in her mind, the same as he looked when she watched him sleep from beside him, turned away from her onto his side, legs pulled up as far as he could get them, his back expanding and relaxing as if his entire body breathed as one full unit, as if his lungs were only a small part of the magic in process.
The sound of her own crying was so unexpected it actually startled her. Stop that, she told herself. Stop it! There were things she was forgetting, as a person did after a loved one, or one they used to love, died. Death can breed selective memory. In the silence broken only by her whimpering, Calla was willingly letting go of the screams, the broken windows, the locks busted from the doors, the insults, the vintage fits of anger. For balance, she fixed those difficult memories directly in line with the good. There was something about this she felt was important for her own preservation. Adam was not a saint, and, when he died, she had not loved him. The truth was only the truth, not a letter to be worn.
When the living room smoke had settled, the room quickly became warm and Calla settled in with a blanket she’d brought with her, sleepier than she realized. The dogs seemed tired, too. They lay about the living room breathing deeply, rolling their bloodshot eyes.
All except one.
The oldest dog, a male that Calla could only assume was some kind of hound, lay by itself directly in front of the fireplace, not on guard and not exactly relaxed either.
Calla crossed her arms from her place deep in her old couch. “What?”
The hound raised its head and tipped its ears at the sound of her voice but then dropped back into place. He fixed his gaze on Calla and she began to feel more or less, as crazy as it seemed, strongly considered.
“What?” She said again.
This time the hound slowly stood up and walked to the front door. Now it was becoming more clear, almost cliche. The old dog wanted to know where the pup went. It was straight Disney, Calla thought.
“Listen,” she said. “It is cold out there.” She pointed with a little force out the window. “And it is warm in here.” She pulled the blanket up to her chin.
The hound didn’t move.
Was this really happening? Calla thought. Did this old geezer of a dog want her to, what, take him out? Take him to the puppy’s pitiful cold dark grave?
“What is happening?” she said to all the dogs. She wouldn’t have been surprised at that moment if they had all turned into cartoons and burst out in song to start dressing her in a blue gown. She rubbed her face. She really was sleepy.
And so she went to sleep, and dreamed of Disney characters and sick puppies. She dreamed of Adam. Adam, Adam, Adam. She woke up crying, and wasn’t at all surprised. She had burrowed into the couch while sleeping and now she stared at the ceiling, the one long crack in the plaster they had always planned to fix but I had no idea how. It became a running joke. If Adam said he would take the garbage down to the bin she would say, yeah and you’re going to fix the crack. She promised to do the laundry and he’d say, oh yeah, fix the crack while you’re at it. Seeing the cracked plaster now took her breath. It seemed the weight of every moment she and Adam had spent together collected into one atomic spot large enough to laser-slash her heart.
The old dog barked with such crispness Calla sat straight up on the couch, as if a latch spring had been tripped. Her hair waved a little around her head, not a part of the stop in motion for that couple of seconds. The old hound barked again. Much louder. And then another and another. By this point, the other dogs had huddled into one corner of the room. It was right then that Calla realized the others were afraid of the hound. Once she noticed it, she couldn’t figure out she hadn’t seen it before. The hound was a goddamn bully, and she hated a bully.
It stood again, tensed its entire body, and howled out into the room. This time she gave an abrupt squeal and then hiccupped, and hiccupped again. When she had composed herself, she said, “Okay, you motherfucker. Okay.”
The old dog walked two feet and sniffed, another two feet and sniffed. It squatted and pissed extremely close to the deck foundation. Calla was sure it was trying to get a stream onto the deck. Dogs, she knew, wanted to piss and shit on the world for as long as they could. Loyalty was a balancing act. But she was going to take this fucking dog to that little grave on the backroad. It made no sense, but that’s what she was going to do. Walking behind and letting it lead her uphill. It never occurred to her that the old dog couldn’t have had any idea where he was going. Somewhere beneath the surface of her thoughts she knew it was the scent the old dog followed, pushing forward while the scent of the puppy was still that of the actual puppy and not of the death slowly beginning to surround it. The old dog could have followed either, but it was the puppy alive that gave him an extra kick in his step and he bounded ahead of Calla so far she nearly lost sight of his brown tail flipping back and forth into the whiteness everything was becoming.
She didn’t run to catch up. Some part of her, a part she felt might have been mixed up and inseparable from her grief for a person she lost before she lost them forever, didn’t care if the old hound ran off. She couldn’t imagine Adam’s favorite of his dogs was this bully. It was a certainty in her thoughts that Adam had taken this one in as his very last in a gesture of common mercy. It wouldn’t have surprised her at all that the hound’s owner had left them to die on top of Abner Mountain, a common spot for pet owners to take their animals either dying or unwanted. Adam would have been driving across Abner and seen this old bastard of a dog and stopped, hauled it into his vehicle, and brought it home to terrorize his other adopted strays.
But it didn’t matter how the hound had gotten here, it was here. And now it was far out in front of Calla, far enough that it had to have made it to the sad puppy’s grave. When she made it to where the backroad leveled off to the wide opening, she saw the old dog digging up the grave.
She ran and felt her guts knotting up as she got closer and could see more of what the old dog was doing. It had quickly made it down to where she had laid the puppy. She yelled as loudly as she could but the old dog chewed the puppy in half and then began clawing the two parts with enough anger and force that by the time Calla got to it there was no puppy, only blood and flesh and bones.
No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t catch her breath. She gulped air and pushed it out, gulped and pushed, over and over while the hound sat back on its haunches and watched her, its nose and mouth clotted with blood, its eyes dark and absent. By the time she realized she couldn’t stop breathing so hard and so fast, her fingers were already drawing together like morning glories after sunset. Without knowing exactly what, she knew something was seriously wrong so she turned and ran down the backroad, trying to make it to the porch. As she ran, her lips started to close into a whistling shape, as if she was drawing a drink through a straw. It wasn’t until she fell the first time that she saw the hound had been following her.
A crazy thought entered her mind.
Don’t be ignorant, she thought. And then kept thinking it and kept thinking it and kept thinking it until somehow while thinking this crazy thought, the thought that a sad, old, basically harmless hound dog might attack and eat her, she realized her lips had relaxed. Her fingers, too, had stopped cramping. Soon, her breathing returned to a normal rhythm.
Intensely relieved, Calla slipped to the porch and sat with her legs crossed. Her breathing slowed enough that she could even hear the spatting of light rain along the gutters, and then another sound. At the edge of the porch was the hound, of course. Panting, staring. The blood that had clotted its maw was gone. It had a big stupid grin topped with eyes no longer vacant but thrilled. It was so absolutely goofy, that against her will she felt her heart soften. There was a glorious moment when her spirit swayed out from her and touched some part of the old hound, but then a spear of light showed her vividly and assuredly that the blood wasn’t entirely gone from around the dog’s mouth. That had only been her eyes wishfully thinking. There was less blood, but the sickening truth she understood now was that the old hound had licked it away.
There was nothing to do but stand and gradually step through the front door, which she did, breathing ever so slightly through her nose and never looking away. The hound watched her with that goofy, sloshy expression. To think there was anything menacing about it would have been hard to entertain. But there was no question in her mind, she would ask her dad to take it off first thing in the morning.
That night she lay on the couch and stared at the crack in the ceiling until she was sleepy enough to close her eyes. I’ll fix that in the morning. For sure I’ll fix it right up in the morning, she thought and grinned a little, right before she thought of nothing else.
But in the morning, the crack was still there but the old hound wasn’t. What ice had been hanging on last night had already melted away, replaced with an inch of mud that Calla plodded through all around the property. The sad puppy’s destroyed body still lay strewn around its little grave. Although her calves ached from lugging around her muddy boots, she fetched a shovel and dug the grave again and put to rest again what was left of him.
Inside, she started a fire, watched the flames for a few minutes, and then went out to search the property a second time. In all, she would cover the property two more times before nightfall. She called her dad the next morning and asked if he thought Adam’s parents might consider selling her the house.
“What?”
“Would you ask them for me?” she asked. “I can afford it if they will. Maybe not cash outright. I might need to break it up into four or five payments, say over a year or something—”
“Calla, honey, you’re all worked up from staying there the last few days. Think it over for a bit and see if you still think you’d like to have me ask and I’ll talk to Mike.”
No matter how much she ever wanted to contradict her dad, it was hard for her to do, partly because she loved him so much, but also because he always made a lot of logical sense, and was so respectful in his advice. She waited two weeks, never having felt any differently, and asked her dad again. Mike, maybe still reeling from his son’s death, turned down the offer. She never actually found out why.
The next year was the loneliest of her life. After Mike turned down her offer, she and her dad had a major argument. She had developed a negligent dependency on pain pills and confessed to him. She relied on his level-headed logic to prevail once again, and he had made a good effort before beginning to resent her. It was hardly his fault in truth; he was a carpenter, not a substance abuse counselor, but still she hadn’t counted on the blowup that resulted. There was a lot said, more than should have been, and it was said in the most hurtful ways possible. The fallout was that Calla hadn’t visited, called, or had any contact at all with her dad in ten months, and there seemed to be no end in sight.
Her life became a combination of feeling a kind of long-distance resentment from her dad, guilt for her own part of all of it, and addiction, with room for little else. The only reprieve came from her employment. Just when it seemed she might lose her job due to absenteeism, poor performance as a result, and a general lack of interest in traveling much farther than her front porch, she and millions of others were sent home to work remotely. COVID made the world smaller at a time when her world had already become as small as she thought it could.
Working from home, she was able to take pills from morning until night. When her original prescription stopped being enough, she crushed and snorted to see if that would do her. It all got completely away from her finally and ended in an overdose before she was able to get free of it. Once this happened, the loneliness she had been numbing herself to settled in on her like the snowstorm all those years ago, with her in the little cave that was her home waiting for an end.
And Calla kept thinking that something would turn around, that there would be redemption, reconciliation, some path out of despair, but nothing ever happened. Inspired one spring day, she remembered Adam’s dogs, but couldn’t bring herself to go to Mike and ask about them, let alone ask to take them for her own, and that was if they were at all still around. The idea became one more thing to twist away at her mind. What was gut-wrenching in May was still gut-wrenching in October; the post-apocalyptic aloneness just stayed and stayed and stayed. Her cave gave way to the snowstorm. Her anguish grew so acute, she truly knew that her life would soon be over. These would be her last days, rent asunder by a suffering heart.
But she kept a secret hope that something good might happen.
A week passed.
A month passed.
Years kept on passing.