I'd Give Anything(9)
What I mostly remember about the place is how ours it was. The headstones small and rectangular, like molars, rising just above the grass line; the oaks and maples, huge and breathing all around; the imperturbable Meeting House standing quietly by. Trevor and I would sprawl on the grass where the graves were gathered like friends and look up at the sky or into the thick crochet-work of branches. We didn’t always talk. Often, we would just lie there, letting our anger dissipate into the trees or be carried away by the looping whine of a distant siren. We listened to the city, which was all around but felt far away, all the while knowing that if we did want to talk, in that place, we could say anything, voice thoughts we would never have spoken anywhere else and that we would never, in the outside world, mention again. Later, in high school, when I was assigned the book A Separate Peace, the title sent my mind straight to that graveyard. It was our island, our snow globe, our tiny piece of peace. After Trevor had his final apocalyptic fight with our mother and left our house, I never went back there. That little bit of preciousness got lost along with everything else—the tiniest, innermost grief in my Russian nesting doll of grief—and I believed I would spend the rest of my life missing it.
And then, six months ago, on a very early May morning, not long after we’d gotten Dobbsy and Walt, I discovered the dog park. I’d known it was there, of course, a big green splotch in the middle of a woodsy city park not a mile from our house, but I discovered it all the same. When I stepped out of my car and stood on the dewy grass, under a sky of pink and gas-flame blue and floating gold, surrounded by a snowfall-quality hush, I felt like Henry Hudson, blinking at the dazzle of the bay. I recognized where I was: in a completely new world and also home. On that first day, a Tuesday, there were just two other early risers, a very short, not-thin woman and a very tall, thin man. Mag and Daniel. Owners of Dinah the Lab and Mose the golden, respectively. Within a week of mornings, we were friends, our dogs were friends, and the dog park was my new—our new, although probably they’d never had an old one—Quaker burial ground.
Which is maybe why, fewer than forty-eight hours after Harris knocked the legs out from under our family life, when Daniel smiled and said, “Hey, we missed you yesterday morning,” I blurted out, “Harris got fired,” and I put my hands over my face and started to cry, audibly. So audibly that, in an instant, Dobbsy and Walt were loping across the grass—and if you think that tiny short-legged dogs can’t lope, you’re wrong—to rest their front paws on my shins, one dog per shin, and Mag’s muscular arm was gripping my quaking shoulders.
“Ugh,” said Mag. “Fired?”
“Spectacularly,” I said, bitterly. “A big, splashy fireworks firing. With a scandal and attempted bribery and God knows what else.”
“Shit,” said Mag.
“And there was a thing,” I wailed, “with a girl!”
“Shit again,” said Mag.
“Not sex. At least, not sex yet, but a thing, a fixation-type thing, and she was way too young.” Even there, in the dog park, I wasn’t ready to say just how young.
Still crying, I dropped my hands from my face, wiped them on my jeans, and looked bleakly from Mag to Daniel.
“And I have to tell Avery.”
“Aw, shit, shit, shit,” said Mag.
Daniel didn’t say a word but walked over to me on his very long legs, bent down, picked up Walt, and put him into my arms. Walt stared at me with the kindest concern I’d ever seen on anyone’s face and then began to rub the side of his head against my cheek. Standing there with the warm weight of Walt, with his silky fur buffing my skin and his adorable skull bumping against my cheekbone, I felt the anger and shame and sadness seep away, just a little. I sighed and sat down cross-legged on the prickly fall grass so that Dobbsy and Walt could settle into the nest my legs made. After a few seconds, Daniel sat, too, a fairly complicated procedure, like a music stand folding up, and then Mag plopped down between us.
“If Harris got into some kind of compromising situation with a girl, when he is married to gorgeous, funny you, he’s colossally dumb, as damn dumb as dirt,” said Mag. “Right, Daniel?”
“As damn dumb as damn dirt,” agreed Daniel.
I laughed and rubbed my eyes. “Thanks.”
I thought for a moment and then said, “Is it weird that that’s not the worst part? The betrayal?”
There was a silence before Daniel said, “Well, no. It makes sense that telling Avery would be the worst part. Georgia is only twelve, not a teenager yet, but if I screwed up like that, especially if her friends found out—and you know I’m not even married, so she wouldn’t have to come to terms with the adultery stuff—well, it would be . . .” He made a face like a person who had just witnessed something horrible, like a murder or a train wreck, but then caught my eye and said, “Not—that bad?”
“Nice catch,” I said.
He gave me a rueful half smile. “I’m sorry. Tween angst is new territory for me. I guess I’m pretty spooked by it. I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
“No, you were right. It’ll be awful.”
“Okay, but is the betrayal the second worst thing?” asked Mag, eyeing me.
I considered again and shook my head.
“Third?” asked Mag. “Because Sara and I have only been married a couple of years, but if she had a thing with a girl at work? It would definitely be top three. Hell, it would be number one, but, then, we don’t have kids.”