The Dog Year (5 page)

L
ucy blinked at the dead phone and creaked to an upright-seated position. The neighbor's husky whined and then barked a hello to the night. A car door slammed. She began to make the move to a standing position, but instead she rested her head against the wall and sighed.

She was still sitting in that position when Charlie found her, the reliable old wall holding her up, the oak door to her bedroom keeping her safely out of danger.

“Luce. What's going on?”

Lucy lifted her eyes. The concern on her brother's face confirmed the inappropriateness of taking a nap outside your hospital storage–room-slash-bedroom. Lucy tried for innocent. “What?” she said.

Bending down, he grasped her arm and hauled her to a standing position. “What happened?”

“I lost my job.”

“No you didn't. Come on.”

“Okay, not lost, exactly. Just . . . postponed.”

Just then, Charlie's partner, Phong, walked in the front door and moved quickly to help. Lucy brushed them both off. “I'm fine, you two. Can't a woman be a little foggy after a nap?”

“Luce.”

“I'm just having a little pity party before the cops come. Look, I have chocolate.” She snorted an almost drunk-sounding laugh and held up an empty plastic bag.

“Look, I took some stuff from the hospital and they're all up in arms about it. They want me to go to a treatment center for behavioral medicine.”

Phong said, “Behavioral medicine. What the heck is that?”

“Impulse control. They think I'm a klepto.”

“That's ridiculous,” Charles said. “Seriously, Lucy. That's ridiculous. Right?”

“As it turns out, not so ridiculous.” She paused. “Can we just not do this now?”

Charles hugged her in response. “Luce, we love you. You can tell us anything.”

She hesitated. “It looks bad, Charlie. I know it does.” She touched the top of the door frame and the silver key blinked in the light of the hall. Positioning the key, she bit her lip, slid back the bolt to her bedroom door, and pressed her face into the opening. Charles and Phong peered inside. Scattered across the room were teetering piles of white and blue-green hospital supplies. Bloated IV bags and neatly sealed packages holding items made of plastic or stainless steel: syringes, tweezers, scissors, and sterile sutures. An unorganized collection, but a big one: all good soldiers awaiting orders.

“You took all of
that
from the hospital?”

Phong placed his hand on Charlie's arm.

Charles lowered his voice. “Lucy?”

“Yeah. I did. Looking at it like this, I can't believe myself how much stuff is in here.”

“But why? Hospital supplies? What does it mean?”

The flush started at her collarbones and rapidly moved north. “If I'd stayed conscious that day, if I'd had the right equipment, I could have saved him, Charlie.” She caught sight of one of Richard's tennis shoes turned on its side. The unmade bed from that morning, eight months ago; his running pants tossed and crumpled on the floor. The lump in her chest pushed her out of the room, and she pulled the door shut.

Charles took hold of his sister's seemingly boneless hand. When they were kids, he remembered, he used to walk on Lucy's right, a chubby, feminine, suspected gay boy, while a pretty neighbor girl took her left. Bullies would throw snowballs and shout out nicknames: the Pretty, the Ugly, and the Nasty
.

“No, Lucy. You couldn't have saved anyone.”

She lifted her eyes to her brother and spoke in the voice of a little girl who'd lost everything. “That's all I've got, Charlie. I can't explain it.”

Charles hugged her again, resting his chin on her head, as he whispered to Phong, “You go get our toothbrushes, jammies, and a huge bag of bridge mix. The Brach's kind, not that low-grade generic crap that has nothing but creams. We're having a sleepover.”

With a watery smile Lucy said, “Yeah, Phong, get your own candy. This stockpile is for the rest of my life in the slammer.”

*   *   *

Charles and Lucy sat together on the couch while Phong reclined nearby, a quiet witness to sibling symbiosis. When Richard was alive, the four of them used to play games sitting across from each other, guessing each other's hints. Phong and Lucy were always paired as teammates, which reduced Lucy's otherwise unfair advantage of being either her husband's soul mate or her brother's DNA mate. Their favorite game was one they'd invented of misheard popular song lyrics, the goal being to correct the mistaken lyric and identify the artist who sang it, or wrote it. Stewart from frozen foods would have been either amazing at the game or hopeless; Lucy couldn't decide. Lucy's “Lost and Raving” was solved as “Constant Craving” by k.d. lang for six points. Richard's “I'll never leave your pizza burnin'”
easily racked up points when decoded as The Rolling Stones' “I'll Never Be Your Beast of Burden.” They'd laugh and search their memories for embarrassing lip-synching moments in their lives.

But this night would not play out with laughs and snorts. It would be the kind of evening no one could have predicted only a year ago, but had been predetermined the day Richard died.

Lucy worked a long piece of dental floss into her teeth. “Why'd you come tonight, Charlie?”

Charles said, “You always answer the phone ‘Peterman,' like you're in the ER, ready for action. Today you just said ‘Hello,' like you were eight years old. Plus when you called earlier you invoked the chocolate SOS.”

Lucy sighed. “Now that the jig is up, I wonder how far I could go into a life of crime: drug trafficking, grand theft auto, aggravated assault.” A brief smile skittered across her face, revealing a chunk of chocolate still stuck to her incisor. “Aggravation comes so easily to me. Assault is surely just around the corner at the Bitch and Battery Bar and Grill, where two-for-one specials are always available—because every night is ladies' night.”

“You're not a bitch, Lucy,” said Phong.

“Well, maybe not, but I stood up a perfectly nice man wanting only to serve me a double portion of lasagna. And I raged at my boss after getting caught stealing. Worse yet, the only gnawing in my chest about this whole thing is that I feel generally embarrassed and angry but not guilty.”

“A man?” said her brother with interest.

“Don't get excited, Super Tramp, he might be a little special needs. But still, I should call him. I may be depressed, but I'm not usually unkind.”

Phong said, “I give you permission to call him in the morning.”

“Thanks, Phong.” She heaved a frustrated sigh. “I'm so pissed at Stanley. I just want to do my own thing.”

Charles shot Lucy an incredulous look. “Since when is stealing your thing? Are they pressing charges?”

“I don't mean
that
thing. I mean the other thing: surgery. And no, it's worse: in my opinion therapy is worse than jail time.”

Charles said, “It's about time.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I've been trying to get you to see a grief counselor for months. Plus, you know this isn't the first time you stole something and got caught.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I don't remember Maine?” Charles turned to Phong to fill him in. “It was years ago, when we were kids. Our folks rented this tiny cottage on a beach, and we had total freedom. We biked everywhere and must have captured the entire population of starfish while we were there. We'd bike to Wiersibicki's Five and Dime. You could get real penny candy there.”

“Whatever, Charles.” Lucy looked at Phong and said, “I stole a root beer barrel and a Pixy Stix.”

“I hate Pixy Stix,” said Phong.

“God, me, too. What was I thinking? The woman working behind the counter made me empty my Barney Rubble change purse right in front, at the cash register. Her nametag read,
MY NAME IS GLADYS. I'M HERE TO HELP
!
She told me to get out of her store or she'd call the cops.” Wistfully, Lucy said, “Someone finally did, Gladys.”

“She never looked glad-anything,” Charles said.

“After that, I never dared going back into that shop again.”

To Phong, Charles said, “I had to buy her candy from then on.” Then he turned back to his sister. “What set you off back then?”

“Who knows? Mean girls. My weird hair.” Lucy picked some caramel out of her teeth. “When you were a kid,” she asked Phong, “did you go on vacation?”

“I was on the boat then. Not much candy there, but lots of theft.”

Lucy sat up. “Right, the boat. Coming over from Vietnam. Of course. God, Phong, you must think I'm really a spoiled brat.”

Charles said, “Nothing like a straight shot of perspective, huh?”

Phong smiled. “A hard childhood doesn't outrank a tough adulthood. Chocolate would have been good on the boat, though.”

Charles reached for Phong's hand and gave him a supportive squeeze. They had the kind of love that all the big blockbuster movies advertised. Across a crowded chicken barbecue on the Fourth of July three years ago, Charles had seen Phong request a double scoop of vanilla ice cream on his homemade apple pie. The grandmotherly woman serving up the ice cream said, “You're too thin.” To the clerk next to her she said, “Margo, give this man a free scoop.” Then eyeing Phong again, she said, “I suppose it's all that rice you eat. No nutrition. Like eating snow.” Instead of impatience or insult, Phong smiled and said to the woman, “You have the loveliest blue eyes. Looks like you could use another volunteer in this chow line.” Charles watched Phong finish his pie, put on an apron that read,
DROP YOUR PANTS, I'M A NURSE,
and for the next hour and a half proceed to sling pie between his new friends, who he'd learned were named Hazel and Margo, the suppliers of the free scoop. Next to a game of beer ball, in the shade of a makeshift dugout, Charles watched the three of them and fell in love with the diminutive Phong. After the pie ran out, Charles approached and asked the two older women if Phong was free to go and find some shade. As Hazel took the apron from Phong she said, “Your English is really good, kiddo.” To Margo she whispered, “I wonder if he was one of those adopted kids.”

Hazel shook her head knowingly. “No, they only get rid of the girls.”

Now Charles glanced at Phong and said to Lucy, “It's possible that life is just about trading compulsions. Maybe the key to success is finding the one that doesn't kill you or land you in jail.”

The three of them sat there in the quiet night, listening privately to their own obsessive thoughts. Charles yawned and said, “Mom used to steal, too.”

Lucy and Phong turned their heads in a move that would have been the envy of two high school girls in synchronized swim practice.

“Mom use to steal?” Lucy said, incredulous. “No kidding.”

“I don't know how much or how often. Obviously nothing like this,” he said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder to Lucy's bedroom. “But sometimes, I'd be shopping with her and she'd admire something. You know, like a Christmas pin or some lip gloss. Later I'd see her wearing it. And I knew we hadn't bought it. I always emptied the cart and bagged the stuff.”

Their mother had never played by the rules, and for a gay boy who loved to write computer code and a girl who'd declared at the age of ten that she wanted to be a nun who interpreted for the deaf, that was a good thing. When Lucy waltzed around the house with a white turtleneck hanging from her head, signing the lyrics to “You've Got a Friend,” her mother enrolled her in College for Kids and challenged her to sign what she learned. After signing
brain
, a finger to the temple, and
paralysis
, a move that looked like one of Michael Jackson's in the “Thriller” video, Lucy was hooked. Learning sign language and physiology was too slow for quick-thinking girl-Lucy so she cut loose from the signs, both for communication and communion, and went to medical school instead of church.

“You're lucky, Luscious,” her mother would say. “You will always be more than your good looks.” God bless her mother's blindness to her daughter's physical shortcomings. “Girls will compete on footing that you will always command—the level ground of the mind,” she told Lucy. But Lucy was more interested in watching her mother paint a thin, perfect line on her eyelid, finishing with a flourish that floated up like a cat's tail. She watched her mother wrestle herself into a bra that cupped her breasts like the fluted foam packaging of the Asian pears in the grocery. She listened to her mother bemoan the ravages of aging, childbirth, and menopause. Her mother's behavior contradicted her words, and her father's gazes confirmed them. Beauty was important.

Sitting on the couch now with her brother, Lucy considered this new information, that her mother had engaged in petty theft, and said, “Well it's true then: The fruit doesn't fall far from the nut.”

“I think that in our family, I'm the fruit and you're the nut. Mom was probably just bored.”

“You think my propensity for stealing is genetic?”

“Well, if it is, then Mom's the link. You didn't get it from Dad. Remember when he got audited? The IRS ended up owing him.”

Theodore Peterman, Lucy and Charles's father, lived every day of his life at the intersection of Atticus Finch from
To Kill a Mockingbird
and George Bailey from
It's a Wonderful Life
. He shoveled his neighbor's sidewalks in the winter, mowed beyond his lot line in the summer, and overtipped every harried waitress or bellboy he ever came in contact with. Where their mother worked the angles, their father operated as straight as an airport runway, and when the IRS cut him a check for $12.43, he framed it and mounted it on the family photo wall, next to school pictures and family portraits. Twelve dollars and forty-three cents, glorified in a glass-covered dime-store frame. “Benjamin Franklin would approve,” he said, nailing it in place.