Deborah

by Lynn Steger Strong

She whistles and waits too long for the first clanging of his tags against his collar, the rustle of him through the palms behind the house. The tags aren't relevant where they live now, where they’ve just moved, but she keeps them on for nights like this, for daytime too, when she lets him out and then has to go and look for him; when the two-year-old lets him out because she’s just that week learned to open the door, and they keep forgetting that they have to keep it locked. 

She waits, but still she doesn’t hear the dog. She wears shorts, the flap down for nursing tank top she’s been wearing for what feels like years. It’s December but it’s Florida and it’s warm. She slips her flip-flops on before she walks out front to whistle, calls his name again; a bark far away that could be his. 

There are no cars out this late on their street, but down the block, just past the expanse of grass and parking lot, the dermatologist’s and dentist’s, that sit across from them, is a major street; she sees lights now, one car, dark blue and big, another, minutes later, the lights and then the whooshing past. 

She would have heard him, she thinks, if one of the cars had hit him. He would have squealed. She would have felt it, below her neck and through her shoulders, somewhere above her abdomen. When they first got him, he quivered in the closet anytime she wasn’t home and he couldn’t curl into her chest. 

She steps out onto the gravel driveway. The house is small, two bedrooms, a concrete block that has been, by her husband and his father, newly painted blue. She’s not sure which way to search now that she’s out here. She hears the desperation in her voice as she calls his name again. Usually, he comes back every ten minutes to check in, to jump up and lick her face. She likes the look of him when he does this—worn out, grateful—all the nights that he comes back. 

In a whole other life, she was a swimmer, NCAA Division One, nearly Olympic. She had turned out, though, to not be good enough. It was shocking, more than a little bit embarrassing, to realize how quickly she was then lumped in with everybody else who liked to swim. 

She’d kept it up though, six days a week, nearly the same rigor. She’d kept it up, until the children came, and she had stopped. For years, she’d printed out workouts from old emails sent by her coaches. It was the only part of everyday that she knew what to do. 

When they first moved here, her husband’s mother offered to watch the children for an hour so that she might go to the local YMCA to get back in it. One of the perks her mother-in-law had trumpeted on the various phone calls they had when deciding to move down was the constant warmth. 

You can swim outside all year, she’d said. 

She wasn’t sure how to explain to her husband’s mother that she liked the suffocating nature of the indoor pool, the artificial heat, oppressive chlorine smell, the echoes of errant voices and people’s feet flipping, slapping the wall and taking off; she’d liked leaving the pool at 6 a.m. in winter, careless, hair still wet and turned to ice on her walk home. 

Going to the Y had been so much sadder than remembering what it felt like to swim but not to be swimming, to face instead, up close, the insufficient fact of her body as it was: thinner than she’d ever been, without the muscles that she’d hidden under too big shirts and sweaters all those years she swam and lifted weights. Her sister-in-law, younger than her and pear-shaped, who seems always to have with her a large plastic tub of precut pineapple to eat instead of lunch, comments too often on her thinness, looks at her too long when her shirt is off to nurse. The sister-in-law has grabbed hold of her wrists with her whole hand more than once. 

She finds the sight of most foods sickening. The baby nurses all night, and she hardly sleeps. When her husband or his mother force food on her she swallows it as quickly as she can to ensure she won’t throw up.

The pool though, all those lumpy older people crawling back and forth against the lane lines, the fast lane and the slow lane and the teenagers shrieking in the deep end, the various contortions she made to not run into the twenty-something boys she had to pass. She’d wanted never to go back. 

She stands still and listens for the dog’s tags. They have coco plums set in a row in front of the house—her husband waters them every morning though they seem to always look the same—and sometimes the dog gets caught. She walks toward the one dense enough that he might be hidden inside, calls his name again, but he’s not there. 

Every time she does this, not putting his leash on, opening the door so he can run, she’s reminded that she shouldn’t, that he could get hit, or might get lost; that the guy four blocks away who has two rusted boats on cinder blocks in his front yard also keeps a shotgun in plain view on his back porch. 

Her husband only vaguely knows she does this. He’s caught her a couple times. The baby’s woken up to nurse, and he’s come to look for her, found her out here, calling for the dog. He’s going to get hit, he’d said. She’d taken the baby as she reached for her. He’d gone back to bed. 

When she got home from the hospital this afternoon, he’d hugged her quietly and she’d been grateful, not wanting him to say out loud how scared he’d been in front of the children, if he’d been scared, not wanting him to say he’d known nothing was wrong if he had not. 

He once told her a story of a dog his family had when he was younger: eight, he said, maybe ten. The dog was hit—a lab, always labs for them; one of the reasons he claims not to like this dog is how very clearly not a lab he is; he’s a mutt, some terrier maybe, maybe a little pug; he’s smaller than a lab, and she thinks, smarter, but he’s not, her husband says, quite dog enough. The day his dog got hit: His dad had loaded the lab, dying now, groaning and growling with legs sitting at odd angles, foamy wet white chunks falling from his mouth, into the back of his pickup truck, driven all of them, her husband, his sobbing baby sister, around the neighborhood, headed, he said, toward the vet. 

He’d never intended, though, her husband’s father, to bring the dog to the vet. The damage had been extreme, obviously irreparable; they wouldn’t have been able to afford whatever futile lifesaving efforts might ensue. But he’d driven them in order that they think that he was acting, doing something in the way that parents, dads specifically, were meant to do. Her husband, though, he told her, had known, had been old enough without his parents knowing, that they weren’t going anywhere but in circles till the dog was dead. 

She whistles again, nothing. She walks down the street. There are other dogs, other yards he's not supposed to go into. A pit mix four blocks away attacked one of the other neighbors’ shih tzu and the owners posted signs and called the cops. The pit mix, Deborah—her name was on the flyer—accompanied by a black-and-white photo, clearly taken from far away. The poster was a warning, DANGEROUS, it said, in all caps on the top. The two-year-old had pointed at it, asking about it, and she’d told her they were for someone looking for a dog they’d lost. Deborah’s left out in her backyard most days and she walks past her each day on her walk with the children, to prove somehow that she is not on the side of the people with the shih tzu, in order to not be in the house all day while her husband is at work and has their only car. 

She walks by the concrete block duplex and tries to catch the eye of Deborah’s owner as she sits smoking in the single wire lawn chair that she has set out in the front yard. The duplex is a shade of pink she didn’t know existed until they moved here, faded by wear and too much sun but somehow still bright. She’s large, Deborah’s owner, maybe forty, maybe sixty, sits out every day it doesn’t rain with her feet up on a metal stool. The children wave to her because they’re children and like waving. Once every couple days, Deborah’s owner waves back. The children wave at cars, too, which are the only other things they pass in this town where the sidewalks are nearly always empty. Sometimes she sees people crane their necks as they drive by to look at them. 

She should have brought her phone, she thinks, except her cotton sleep shorts have no pockets. She is trying not to become frantic. She tries to call to the dog without the calling sounding like a wail. She’s angry with him for not coming. She feels closer to him most days than any of the people in their house. They’ve had him almost exactly as long as she and her husband have been married, so much longer than either of their children, even longer since they’ve lived in this strange place. 

It’s where he’s from, this tiny Southern Florida town. They moved to be close to his family, though she can’t say what close to his family was meant to give. She continues to feel viscerally uncomfortable at the prospect of the mother of her husband or her husband’s sister showing up, as they do quite often, uninvited, at their house. She has a family, but not like he has family. Her parents flew in once for three days after the baby was born and stayed at a hotel. 

She fingers the plastic band around her wrist, pulls at it till it rips. Her name is printed on it, the time, 8:17 a.m., she entered the emergency room today. She’d gone because she’d felt light-headed, nauseous. She’d fallen over, hands splat on the linoleum, as the two-year-old called to her from the other room. They had no doctor. Her husband typed her symptoms into a site online and a red box popped up that said, go to the ER. 

Once, after a swim meet—she did long distances, 5,000 meters—she’d fallen over, getting up out of the pool. Another girl grabbed her as she’d fallen and led her to the bleachers, stood with her as she sat, hands on her knees, looking straight ahead. For weeks after that she’d felt a twinge on the right side of her brain and thought maybe she was dying, aneurysm. She was swimming six miles a day and thought also she might just need to eat more food. 

All the windows she passes are dark, though it’s not quite eleven-thirty. There are Christmas lights on every other house, brightly colored, covering carports, overhangs, and scraggled bushes, a full array of blow-up animals, a Santa waterskiing behind a boat driven by reindeer, a merry-go-round with beavers and otters dressed in red and green. She watches the helium-infused animals go round and round in circles, feels dizzy momentarily; she crumples the band, fists it in her hand as she calls to the dog again.

Two blocks from their house she sees lights on through the window, the man who keeps rows of fish tanks in his front room. She peers in to catch a glimpse of flitting tails and all that water, glowing, iridescent. She should turn back, she thinks. Her husband could be waiting for her at the house. The baby could be up again. 

The baby refused the bottle the entire seven hours she was at the hospital and nursed close to an hour the moment she walked in the door. 

Her mother-in-law drove her. They called her after the computer told them to go to the hospital, not wanting to scare the children with the trip. She’d thought the whole time, sitting in the front seat, silent, that maybe she was Sick in a way that would feel shocking, jarring in the way she’d hoped marriage and children would turn out to be. 

Her mother-in-law left to help her husband, then came and brought her breast pump. This was the first time she’d been away from the six-month-old since she was born and her breasts ached and got hard. She pumped to empty. They had no room for her, the nurses saying Mondays were notoriously busy, people deciding finally after the not-quite-counting days of the weekend that they should, in fact, go in to get whatever they thought needed to be checked checked. She sat out in the hall on a bed on wheels, her mother-in-law standing next to her, talking on and on about nothing, as she held the plastic horns up to her breasts. 

People either looked away or looked more closely. A volunteer arrived, a man, eighty-something, in a pink vest and a button that identified his status as auxiliary helper; he offered to bring her a screen for privacy. She’d already finished by then though; she thanked him, loosening the plastic horns and bare before him, his eyes full on her, wiping herself, unconcernedly, pulling down her shirt. 

She watched the nurses, light blue matching scrubs and shoes so solid she thought of asking where they’d come from. They walked brusquely past her, hands on one another’s elbows as they bustled back and forth behind the large desk that sat across from her bed in the hall. 

When she came back to the house, hours later, all that milk she pumped was turned and chunky in the warm rejected bottles that her husband had left out close to the window, in the sun—they’ve not yet remembered to buy curtains. The baby squealed at her, having never before this been left unsated by her breasts, baby clamping hard on her areola, teeth taking hold and pulling, grunting, desperate for any extra drops. 

She wishes she had at least a T-shirt on over her tank top. It’s warm, but it’s not the sort of hot that it was weeks ago. She crosses her arms, walks another block.  She rubs along the Band-Aids on her arm where they took blood. 

Once, when she walked past Deborah’s owner, the two-year-old, who talks less than she thinks two-year-olds should be talking, who used to talk more when they lived up north. She worries that she might be experiencing some sort of sustained trauma, having been separated from the only life she’s known until now; she thinks also some days that there’s nothing wrong at all. But that day the two-year-old called out to Deborah’s owner the only two words she’s been saying lately. She says them all day, over and over, pointing all around her; often, it feels like the only words she hears.The two-year-old called out, what’s that, toward Deborah’s owner, pointing. She had reddened, feeling awful. A person, she whispered. A woman, she said, angry, and then felt bad for getting mad. 

What’s that? The two-year-old called out a second time. 

She wanted to go over to the woman and to tell her she was sorry. To bring the child, holding her up by the top of her arm like she knows she’s not supposed to but does sometimes when she is angry at her or just tired, to force her to tell the woman she was sorry too. But “sorry” and “I” were both words the child stopped saying. She wondered if it wasn’t worse to call attention to it, if maybe she’d only imagined that Deborah’s owner seemed to flinch and fold in on herself. 

Instead, she pushed the stroller. The baby was asleep and she put her head through the stroller’s flap and told the two-year-old to be quiet so her sister could rest. 

At the hospital, she lay in total silence, as they ran her brain under a scan. Two nurses had lowered her, hands careful on her shoulders, back flat on the bed. 

In college, they had a trainer hired only to care for the school’s athletes: Tuesdays and every other Thursday he would come and rub her down. He was short, compact, his hands too big for his body. He paid extra attention to her neck and shoulders, kneaded his thumbs deep into the backs of her calves. So stiff, he’d say, in unidentifiably accented English. Too stiff, he’d say, and then, sometimes, he’d laugh.

They took blood sample after sample after the brain scan. They put one of the samples in a solution that was meant to grow bacteria if she had a kind of infection that they said they were not actually concerned about. The nurse left that vial, in the culture, the weird gelatinous brown and red and translucent liquid next to her on a ledge, in the hall.   

The doctor came up to her hours after that. It might have been hours, though there were no windows near her and without a baby, without her hunger and her napping, her needing and the looking always at her phone to see how much time was still left before she or the toddler could be put to sleep again, she lost track of how else one might track time, whether even it could pass. The doctor came and had her touch her fingers to her nose and then her lips. He had her stand on one foot like maybe she was drunk. 

In the room adjacent to her space in the hall was another woman, gravelly voiced and loud enough that people in rooms farther down the hall must also have had to hear her as she talked. Nearly everyone must have heard her as she yelled. She’d come in, the woman said, because her sister told her that she had to, because she hadn’t eaten in three weeks. 

She wanted to run into the room to tell the woman that she should have just eaten, that her sister was a shitty sister, that instead of telling her to come here, she should have just brought her food. She did not want to see her though, did not want to get any closer to this woman than she was already. She did everything she could both not to listen and to accidentally overhear. 

The woman was in her fifties, knew her birthday, the day and year. Still, though, she had not known how to feed herself. She had, she told the doctors when they asked her, no symptoms besides this. 

The doctor told her, after the scans came, after she watched him, sitting on her bed in the hall—the door to the room in which he sat was open and she’d watched—he ate a bagel, wiping the cream cheese off his face onto his hands and then his pants, as he stared at pictures of her brain on a large black-lit screen. He’d sat back just before he finished, chewing, sipping coffee. He’d wiped his hands once more on his pants.

Once, years after college, a man had taken hold of her arm as she walked from the pool to the shower. You go so hard, he said. Every day, he said. He eyed her shoulders, kept hold of her arm. She’d begun to demure, reddened, was about to thank him. It’s just a pool, he said, and laughed.  

The doctor told her she was fine, then, still smelling of garlic and cream cheese, his face big, his skin worn and red. Perfect, he kept saying about her brain scans, about her blood work, with no proof to show that this was true. She wanted to ask him for the scans or a copy of the blood work, for him to read out loud for her the counts. But the way he looked, the way he stood an inch too close to her, she saw clearly that she was meant to understand she need not worry herself with the how or why of her perfection, even as her hands still shook, her vision still felt crooked, blurred. 

There is no feeling in her abdomen, no tightening in her chest. It’s more violent; louder. She hears screeching tires, a bark and then a yelp. She runs before she stops to consider what might be there when she gets there. Legs splayed. Splayed legs. Blood around the mouth. She thinks briefly again of the hospital, how every time a bed rolled by she half-hoped it would hold something somehow irrevocably tragic, something for which she could be unmitigatedly sad. Instead, though, she’d seen kids coughing into hands and elbows, old people who looked dignified, exhausted, redeemably frail. 

She understood then, searching for tragedy, and sad all of a sudden to be clear of it, that this move south had been her last-ditch try for jarring herself out of being whoever it was she was, whatever she had always been. All that talk about the Florida sun and getting back to swimming, she’d thought, somehow, she’d liquify, and be re-formed as someone else. She hadn’t thought, of course, she’d turned to liquid; she’d thought maybe her husband’s family, all that wanting, loving, giving, she’d thought somehow she’d settle finally, into being something more like them. 

She thinks now that if the two-year-old was still using words, even she would know, would say out loud, how dumb this hope had been.

She has the dog up in her arms before she looks at him, before she realizes that it isn’t him. This dog is twice the size of her dog, heavier than the two-year-old: pit mix, female, Deborah, too close to dead to seem too hurt. She feels the sense memory of those years swimming. Her shoulders and her biceps tense in a not unsatisfying way. 

Deborah quivers, warm and heavy as she holds her. She nestles her into her chest, her right breast begins to leak small drops of milk. She walks five blocks talking to her. Deborah, she says. It’s okay, she says, again, again, again, it’s okay, she says. She sings to her because this is what she does, who she is now. The song is not quite sensical, half of something from My Fair Lady, which she’s never seen; rock-a-bye baby right up until she realizes for the zillionth time the awful way it ends. 

She walks straight to her owner’s duplex. She almost wishes Deborah would die before they get there. Deborah whimpers, her eyes are wet and black and loll back in her head. 

There is no doorbell and she knocks with her elbow. Her back and triceps ache. Just before the door opens she realizes that she might have reason to feel fear. The smells inside the house are weed and cigarettes, cooped up, unclean air.

What the . . . the woman says, then reaches for and holds Deborah in her arms. Her skin is soft and papery, her smell ripe and wet. The dog squeals once, loudly, louder than it seems she has the strength for. She thinks it’s pain then wonders briefly if it’s joy. 

She got hit, she tells the woman. I didn’t. I knew that she was yours. 

The woman is quiet, concentrated on holding Deborah, nuzzling her face briefly in her neck.

Baby, the woman says once and then again. Fuck, she says, and nuzzles her as she brings her farther into the house. 

She follows them though she hasn’t been invited. 

You see the car? the woman says. 

I . . . she stops. It was already gone. 

The woman hands the dog back to her. Deborah cries out, fear now, it sounds like, leaving her owner’s arms. The woman—grey sweatpants, rubber flip-flops, thick, pale skin—disappears quickly into another room. 

She looks down at the dog and rubs a cheek against her. Milk comes now from both her breasts. 

Outside, the woman says. 

She’s never seen a gun up close before this—it’s a handgun—larger somehow, heavy-looking. She thinks briefly that she might hand Deborah to her owner, ask to hold the heavy metal in her hands instead. 

The woman’s fingers, fat and white, sit steady just below the trigger. She keeps her eyes on Deborah. There are two dog beds next to the couch and in the kitchen, an ashtray, a plate and beer bottle on the table in the living room; the TV’s on but quiet. 

The back door is glass and slides open to a slab of concrete. The yard beyond is dead weeds and dirt, the chain-link fence. 

Put her down, the woman says. 

Another whimper, so much quieter this time. A sound so small she’s not sure of the source.  

Deborah’s owner’s face contorts, and she kneels toward her. She leans her face into her. The dog’s breath is heavy, labored; her owner’s shoulders heave and fold. She listens as the sounds both of them make begin to overlap. 

Deborah’s owner stands again and looks, briefly, away from Deborah. She starts maybe to say one thing, then stops to reconsider. 

Stay back, Deborah’s owner says instead. 

She keeps her eyes focused on Deborah’s foot, the toenails, the twitch of leg, the gun’s cock. Deborah’s owner’s back stays straight and her hands don’t shake as she stares at her, watches her limbs harden upon impact, then go limp, walks back toward the house.

On her walk home, she’s less cold as Deborah’s owner has given her a thick, long-sleeved shirt that’s much too large. They stood outside together, looking at Deborah, until she had a flash in her brain of the two-year-old, running out the unlocked door to look for her. 

She walks quickly, not running. 

At home, the dog sits panting, worn out, waiting by the still-closed door. 

Inside the whole place is soundless and both the children are still sleeping. She watches them, their breathing, listens as the dog laps at his water bowl. You had me so scared, she whispers, as he climbs onto her lap and she sits, eyes open, looking out. 

Published June 28th, 2020