The notice read:
Join the TRUE PROTECTORS! Make a real difference in the lives of the city’s SMALLEST, MOST HELPLESS CITIZENS! Be a part of the REVOLUTION against malice, abandonment, so-called “mercy killing,” and overpopulation!! You will SAVE LIVES. Come see what a MEANINGFUL MISSION we are on, and meet your FELLOW CRUSADERS. The beer and coffee are on us. Drop by and check us out, YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY!
At the bottom, it gave Stan’s e-mail address and information about how to get to the falafel place. Saga had suggested to Stan that he hold the meeting in Manhattan, where more people were likely to show up, but he had barked, “I want people who are serious! Committed! No fuckin’ dilettantes need apply. Subway scares ’em off, then screw ’em.”
In his typically grumpy way, he’d muttered something about how it was finally time to “get real,” make it an organization with some kind of official recognition. “By recognition, I mean cold hard cash,” he said. “I mean, like these taxi fares are busting my balls.” They were in a cab, taking the Airedale puppies to the vet. “But to get the cash, I need the status. I need to knock the socks off those executioners in Midtown who call themselves animal lovers. Yeah, like Hitler loved kids. Did you know he gave medals to women who had lots of kids? The right kind! Not the scruffy kind!” Stan laughed his creepy laugh, all the while petting the puppies, soothing them with his pale bony hands.
Saga tried to imagine Stan raising money. This was difficult.
Perhaps people could grow into what they needed to be. Sometimes they didn’t even know what they wanted to be until it stared them in the face. For example, it was true what Michael had said: after years of claiming he couldn’t care less, Uncle Marsden was in love with the idea of being a grandfather. “Now I’ll be a bona fide patriarch,” he’d said to Saga after Denise and Michael admired the cradle. “What do you say to that, my dear?”
Patriarch. Brown, she thought: a temple of a word, a shiny red brown, like the surface of a chestnut. “You’re a natural,” she had assured him.
After that, he began to dig deep into the storage rooms on the third floor, searching for further mementos of childhood: not just Michael’s but Pansy’s, Frida’s, and his own; even Aunt Liz’s girlhood. He’d sanded and repainted a wooden rocking giraffe just before Christmas, tied a large bow around its neck to make it a gift for Denise. But when Pansy showed up first on Christmas Eve, she saw it and cried out, “That’s mine! Where did you find that?”
“Well, if you have a child one day, I’m sure Michael will be happy to hand it on to you,” Uncle Marsden told her.
“Dad! Dad, it’s mine, to save for my children first, not Michael’s!”
Uncle Marsden had been unable to convince her that she should give it up, even temporarily, and the grudging rift between them had made Christmas tense. In the three months since then, Uncle Marsden had given Saga the job of finding out which unearthed treasures belonged to which cousin.
Two weeks ago he had declared, “Time to clean all this stuff out of the attic, once and for all! And I will not be a party to any materialistic feuds. If those girls are planning on families of their own, I’m all for it—but they’d better get cracking. Time waits for no man, and Mother Nature waits for no woman!”
Now it was clear that he was preparing not just for the arrival of his grandchildren but for his own departure—and Saga’s—from the house. Perhaps she should have felt angry at him rather than at Michael, but she couldn’t.
Most of her cousins’ belongings were in boxes they’d already labeled, but Saga did have to bring down all the old books and lay them in piles on the living room floor so that Pansy and Frida could divide them up properly. This was comforting work, because it was so much like working with Fenno.
Just this past weekend, Frida had come down from Boston and filled her car with boxes. Afterward, she’d had lunch with Saga on the porch. They’d carried out mugs of chicken noodle soup and pulled quilts across their knees. It had been humid, almost warm for March; fog hovered over roads and lawns.
“How are you, Saga? I mean, really?” asked Frida.
“Pretty good, I guess,” Saga had answered.
“Do you feel like things are still improving, like you’re…”
“Getting better?”
Frida laughed nervously. It took a lot to make Frida nervous. “I hate to phrase it as if you’re sick. Obviously, you’re not sick.”
If she needed to answer that, Saga didn’t know how. So often she had felt sick, sick the way that maybe people with vertigo felt sick, like a sickness of not knowing your place, the place you were supposed to occupy in space. “The worst things don’t seem to bother me much anymore,” she told Frida. “I don’t get the headaches, I haven’t had seizures, writing’s no problem, or using…everyday things. Mostly.”
She wondered if Uncle Marsden had told Frida about her checkup the week before. Saga hadn’t been to the neurologist in six months, and he was pleased, saying that she had made unexpected progress. Though Saga could have said no, she always allowed Uncle Marsden to sit with her while she took the peculiar series of tests measuring eyesight, hearing, coordination, and memory skills. He was the one to fill out her medical history. Letting him take over made her feel more like a child, but when she looked at the forms—the fine print, the numbered questions and rows of boxes to check—she felt queasy. Uncle Marsden’s certainty was a relief. “I know it all by heart, my dear,” he’d say as he ticked off the boxes. “Easy as pie.”
Frida nodded at Saga’s good news. “I’m glad to hear it. And Dad says you get away a lot.” She said this with a smile revealing that her dad had expressed his displeasure.
“I go to the city on the train.”
“You’ve made friends there?”
Saga hesitated, but why should she keep friendships a secret? “I’ve met a Scottish man who runs a bookstore and another man who’s a therapist.”
“A psychotherapist? He’s a friend?” Frida sipped her soup. “If this is too nosy, just say, but are you seeing anyone? I mean, a therapist?”
“No. That stopped a little while after the PT stopped.” Saga braced herself for more advice. Why did people always think she wanted their advice? But Frida just stared into the fog and drank her soup in rhythmic little sips.
“Well,” she said at last, “I’ve been seeing someone for more than a year. I fought against it, but now I’m glad. I was lonelier and angrier than I wanted to know.”
“Angry?” Saga meant it more as an expression of surprise than a question. But Frida seemed happy to answer.
“Mostly at Dad, because he seems so oblivious to me.” She turned to Saga and smiled. “And for a while I was angry at him because of you. As if you’d taken our place—as if you were the one and only daughter now. His Cordelia.”
Saga’s confusion over the name must have looked like fear, because Frida leaned over and touched Saga’s knee. “Don’t worry. I’m past that. Pansy can’t stop being angry about it, but she’s angry about everything these days. You might not know this, but that nice guy she brought with her for Thanksgiving and Christmas broke up with her last month.”
“Oh,” said Saga. “That’s sad.”
Frida nodded. “Sometimes I’m just as glad I never get asked out these days. I seem to have reached the end of my shelf life. Maybe I’ve been too passive, assuming my brains and my sense of humor would hook some passing suitor.” She peered into her mug. She spooned up noodles from the bottom and ate them with a satisfied look.
Saga said, “You haven’t given up, I hope.”
Frida shrugged. “I have a crush on my therapist, and sometimes that seems like enough. But Pansy’s still out there fighting the good fight. She’s paid to join some fancy matchmaking service. I think she has a date this week.”
Saga nodded. She didn’t want to talk about Pansy’s love life. Pansy was prettier than Frida by far, but if Saga had been a man, she’d have gone for Frida over Pansy any day.
“What about you, Saga?”
“Me?” The quilt slipped from Saga’s knees.
“Any guys in the city? How about the guy with the bookstore?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Not like that.” She couldn’t help thinking of Fenno, how she’d missed understanding that he was gay.
“Wouldn’t you like to go out with somebody other than Dad?”
Saga laughed. “Maybe there’s a fancy matchmaking service for halfwits.”
“You’re not a half-wit.”
“I’m not a full-wit, that’s for sure.”
Frida looked as if she were measuring Saga with her eyes. Saga looked away. The fog was clearing. She could see Commodore Perry’s front porch. The commodore was sleeping in his giant basket.
“Saga, do you think you hold on to the half-wit thing? Have you made it a habit, a pair of comfy old shoes? I saw you in the kitchen just now, making our lunch. You didn’t consult your labels once.”
Saga continued to watch the fog lift—or drift, really, as if retreating. Fog didn’t really lift; it backed away. Out of nowhere came an image of Japanese girls bowing as they tiptoed backward. So sorry, so sorry, so sorry.
“Saga, did I offend you?”
She looked at Frida. “Michael didn’t put you up to this talk, did he?”
Now Frida was the offended one. “Saga, everything around here isn’t about Michael, though it may seem like that right now, now that he’s flaunting his reproductive vigor, like some kind of sports car. Vroom, vroom, twins!”
Saga laughed. “He’s taking me out for lunch, you know.”
Frida was quiet for a minute, then spoke cautiously. “Michael is a good man, and I admire him, even though I don’t like to think about what he does for a living. Pansy would kill me if she knew I’d told you this, but he cosigned the mortgage for her condo, and he’s even tried to fix her up with a couple of guys from his firm.”
This was when Uncle Marsden came around the corner of the house and sprang up the stairs, carrying a pair of shovels. “Girls!” he exclaimed, smiling. He held out the shovels, one in each hand. “Girls, I am putting you to work!” He had a replanting project. Though it was barely spring, he’d become a sort of garden dervish that week. He seemed bent on moving shrubs around, front to back, shade to sun, from one corner of the porch to another.
That heart-to-heart with Frida was the first time Saga could recall, since her coming to live there, when one of her cousins had really wanted to talk to her and also to listen. It meant something. It was an omen, not necessarily good—because now she could not remain outside the circle.
That was when she’d known that no matter how much Frida cared about her, or even Uncle Marsden, there would be trouble ahead.
Well, she thought after her lunch with Michael, after putting up her last notice, here it is. The question was, could she face it?
Saga checked her watch. It was four o’clock. She was on Horatio Street, not far from the bookshop. It would be open for another three hours, but Saga did not feel like seeing Fenno, whose kindness would encourage her to confess all the rage and panic she felt. Lately, she was surprised at how much she found herself telling Fenno in the pockets of time when they were alone together.
Not that he hadn’t told her a lot about his own life. The evening she had gone up to his apartment for dinner, he had shown her photographs of his family in Europe—they looked like a happy clan: happily married, happily overrun by children, happily overworked in their privileged jobs—and Saga had seen, or guessed, one of the things that made her want so badly to be with Fenno. Inside himself, just like her, he was basically alone. People surrounded him, and people loved him, but he had accepted in their midst the role of the Lonely One.
This was something she could only guess. Fenno had spoken with great affection about his Scottish home and his relatives, and then he’d asked about Saga’s family. So she had told him about Uncle Marsden and her cousins—she could speak about them lovingly, too, if she was fair—and she’d told him about her accident, how her dad died of cancer right before it, her mother of a stroke just a couple years after. It turned out that Fenno’s parents and hers had died of almost exactly the same causes, though his mother was the one who went first, with the cancer. They had a lot to empathize about, a lot more in common than Saga might have hoped.
It was while he cooked the curried shrimp, at the stove, that he told her he was gay. “Not that I’ve ever been a success at making a good match,” he’d said while his back was to her, while the shrimp sizzled in the pan with the garlic. He’d pretended to find this funny.
“But you fall in love,” Saga heard herself say, “don’t you?”
He had turned around for a minute, looking surprised. (Why did she have to be so blunt?) He didn’t tell her it wasn’t her business, though. He cooked for a minute or so without answering, and then he said softly, “Of course I do.”
She had not gone so far as to ask if he was in love with anyone right then.
Fenno was more her friend now than he had been before her embarrassing, gushing confession in the store that day. But still, she wanted to think in private about all the things Michael had told her. If she were to stop by the bookshop now, Fenno would see that she was unhappy, and he would ask why, and she would tell.
When she found a phone booth on Hudson, she called Stan.
“Come out and help me bathe some kittens,” he said without any small talk. “All hell is breaking loose.”
With his griping and his bossing around, Stan would leave her no time for self-pity. The animals, he might say—homeless, discarded, starved, bitten, diseased—now they had problems.
Saga could still taste the garlic from lunch as she walked from the subway. She hoped Stan wouldn’t smell her breath and make some nasty comment. But when she turned onto his block, she knew there’d be little time for idle comments. Sonya’s van was in the driveway, and the house was like a big jukebox, broadcasting the sound of ten dogs barking.
“Jesus, Story Girl, get yourself in here. I’ve got a howler on my hands.”
Once Stan let her in, Saga could discern the sound of one dog howling its heart out, that baying-at-the-moon persistence, which had worked up every other dog and even a couple of the cats. Stan explained that Sonya was going to take the loudmouth to her place for the night, after she dropped off another dog she had to take back to its owner; in the meantime she had begun helping him with a flea bath. Saga could hear, through all the ruckus, the pitiful bleating of kittens.
The bathroom on the first floor was given over to caring for the animals. The shelves in the medicine chest and the back of the toilet were crowded with flea and tick shampoos, gauze pads, tubes of ointment, vials of eyedrops, and pills from the charitable vet. Hanging on a rack, along with towels, were leashes, harnesses, collars, and a muzzle. A tattered poster of the cartoon dog Snowy faced the toilet.
“Hey,” said Sonya when Saga looked into the bathroom. “Don’t slip on the floor. These guys are ninjas.” She’d taken off her shirt. Saga tried not to stare at Sonya’s black spiderweb bra and the snake tattoos coiling around her arms.
“Hi,” said Saga. “Can I help?”
Stan pushed past her and reached out to Sonya, who handed him a kitten bundled in a washcloth. He didn’t seem to notice or care that Sonya was shirtless. Stan held the kitten up to his face and spoke to it sweetly, stroking its wet little head. He sat on the toilet and gave it a gentle rubdown. “Get me that plastic laundry basket by the back door,” he told Saga.
The howler had taken a break, but now he was at it again.
“Christ!” Stan exclaimed. “It’s a good thing my neighbors are too psychotic to get the cops’ attention!”
Saga finally asked, “Do you want me to take over for Sonya?”
“We’ve got a system going here,” said Sonya. She gave a second kitten to Stan. The first was nestled in a towel lining the laundry basket.
Sonya turned to Saga. “Listen
. Do me a favor. There’s this dog in the van out there, I think he probably needs a walk. He’s a cream puff. Can you do that for me? Take him around the block, and by the time you get back, I can take the werewolf too. You got a crate for that monster?” she said to Stan.
“He’s not a monster,” said Stan. “He’s just being expressive. Probably has a lot of legitimate gripes.”
The “cream puff” sat in the passenger seat, his nose to the crack Sonya had left above the window. When Saga opened the door and the light went on inside the van, she laughed. “I know you,” she said. “You’re…” She couldn’t quite remember his name, but she knew this dog from that restaurant near Fenno’s store.
He licked her hand. “Hello, you,” she said. He wore a wide leather collar with metal studs; Saga twisted it around, to read his tags. Sure enough, next to his rabies tag was a big silver heart engraved The Bruce, with the name of his owner (Walter, yes, the one who gave the party the night of the storm) and a phone number. “Good to see you, The Bruce!” she said. Though he showed no interest in escaping, she held him by the collar with one hand and reached past him to take his leash off the seat.
As she fumbled with the fastener on the leash, Saga realized that something was stuck to the fingers of her left hand. Green chewing gum. “Disgusting!” She stopped to fish for a tissue in her pocket. She came up with an unfamiliar fine blue handkerchief. She stared at both the gum and the handkerchief in confusion. She remembered now that Michael had given her the handkerchief at lunch. But the gum, where had that come from?
She looked down at The Bruce, who stood on the sidewalk, waiting patiently. More of the gum stuck out from beneath his collar. With the unpleasant wad of gum, once she managed to pull it free, came a folded slip of paper, about the size of a fortune from a Chinese restaurant cookie. It, too, must have been stuck on the underside of the collar.