Dive by Stacey Donovan Page B

my empty voice. The tears dried.
    “We’ll talk about it when I get home.”
     
    We didn’t pretend with “hello” or “good-bye” anymore, so “What’s going on? Who paid for this?” is what she said when she found us later. Lucky was wrapped in the blanket, all peaceful. I was stretched out beside him, reading Shakespeare. Some bright, angry thing climbed into her eyes when she looked at him. My poor dog even tried to wag his tail. Then he howled in pain.
     
    “I am. Leave me alone.” I held his tail.
    “I’ll ignore that. That’s a lot of money for a crippled old dog.”
    “He’s not crippled,” I said. No, he’s not tripping into his grave just yet. She’s such a liar. Like I said, she states only the obvious and lies about everything else.
    “Leave me alone—don’t ignore it.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I said, get away from me! Can’t you hear me?” I tried not to yell because I didn’t want Lucky shaking again.
    Then another part of me, quiet and calm, said, “Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the crippled old dog.”
     
    She reached for me then, and I stood up. Lucky didn’t budge, but Shakespeare thudded to the floor. I hadn’t realized I was bigger than she was. “Don’t touch me. You’ll be sorry.” My hands were fists.
    “Well, that figures,” she said, as if that made any sense. But she backed away, and her shoulders slumped and she looked so small.
     
    My mother began to leave, but then she turned, her mouth twisted, like a rag being wrung dry. “I never had a dog. I found an abandoned puppy once, all alone in a cardboard box on the street, and I brought it home. It disappeared the next day.”
     
    Her voice was filled with something wild. There were branches in it. Like the ones that smashed against the living-room picture window in a bad storm, scraping and scratching. “My sister and I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “We had meat loaf for dinner that night, and it tasted bad. We didn’t know why; all we knew was that we had to eat it, every bite of it, before we were allowed to leave the table. It was dog food—I had scraped the change together myself and bought the first can.”
     
    My mother’s eyes shone like the steel-capped streetlights. The whole room seemed to glow. She crossed her arms and gripped her own shoulders with those pale hands.
    “I didn’t know until later that my mother had drowned the dog. She told me, no, she confessed to me, when she was dying. You know why? She wanted me to forgive her.”
     
    “Why?” Was that my choking voice? Were those branches in my throat?
    And then her eyes were dark. “You tell me, little girl, since you can take care of everything yourself.” I opened my mouth, which made no sound.
    “My mother said we were too poor to have a dog. But my father had just bought a new car. So you tell me why, since you’ve got all the answers.”
     
    And then she was big again. So big those words filled the room and the rest of her yanked all sense away with one choking look. I had no answers. The world vanished until I heard the ice cubes clattering into a glass in the pantry. It sounded like someone falling down a flight of stairs. I looked at the place where my mother had been standing. It was just empty space.
     
    | | | | | |
     
    I’m numb. The light changes and the car inches forward. “Yes. I thought about it.” I sound like a stranger. “Well, I should never have told you that, and I’m sorry I did.” My mother returns to silence, her eyes on the road ahead.
     
    Why? Don’t say it, my mind says. Not a word. I can barely see her face because she has one of those sleek haircuts that sweeps forward, in a supposedly carefree way, around the face. But it looks good on her, like everything else does, in that tailored, polished way she has that gives off the warmth of a stone. She’s decent-looking for someone over forty, I decide. The thought surprises me. Why shouldn’t she have told me? Wasn’t it