For several minutes I sat quietly, braiding strands of grass like hair, and let him carry on. When the barking turned to grumbling, I took out what was left of my ham sandwich, broke off a piece and fed it to him carefully, keeping my fingers out of reach and avoiding his filmy eye. He devoured it with grunts and wet snorts, slapping his nose with his wide pink tongue. A bite at a time I fed him all I had, followed by a few leftover chips I was saving for an after-school snack.
He ate it all, thinking he’d made a friend.
That night, after my mother and Nana went to bed, I snuck into the laundry room and found Nana’s rat poison. I mixed it with a gob of peanut butter, made a sandwich and stowed it in my backpack.
I thought about the sandwich all day. Several times when the teacher spoke to me I didn’t hear her, and during the morning’s math test I thought I would be sick and had to run without permission to the girls’ room, where I stayed until the teacher came to get me.
At lunch I took the sandwich out and looked at it. Sniffed it. Turned it over in my hands.
“You should eat that,” Danny called from across the cafeteria. “Maybe you’ll get fat. Maybe you’ll get boobs like your mom.” And then, “Would take a lot of sandwiches, though.”
The boys hooted and carried on, chanting. Eat it, eat it. I didn’t look up. Just kept turning the sandwich over in my hands. Eat it, eat it, eat it.
After school I walked alone to the Kukals’ house and sat down at the far end of Schultzie’s pen. This time the dog didn’t bark as much. He put his muzzle through the pen and flapped his tongue at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I rolled up the sandwich and stuffed it through the chain-link fence.
The poison didn’t take effect immediately the way I thought it would. At first the horrible old mutt rolled his eyes almost comically, nipped and growled at his stomach as though he was angry at whatever was happening inside him. He was so ridiculous about it that I began to smile, with the beginnings of a sort of relieved remorse bubbling in my chest. The stupid dog was too tough and mean to die. This was a lame attempt on my part. I’d let it go and find some other way to get even with Danny Kukal.
But then Schultzie began to cry. The comical expression on his face became a grimace, freakishly exaggerated with the whites of his eyes unnaturally wide. He limped in circles, tearing at the skin of his flanks, stretching it, letting go, biting again, drawing blood. He flopped to the ground like a fish, stiffly one way, then the other, crying. Crying. At last his body flexed so far sideways that it stuck that way. He didn’t roll then, he simply lay there, strangling, a string of sandwich-flecked foam oozing out the side of his mouth.
The filmy eye rolled back and locked on me, and the life dimmed from him like a flame sinking into wax.
I walked into the woods, sat down on a stump and rocked forward and back, one arm clamped around my stomach, the heel of my hand shoved into my mouth. My teeth dug small blue trenches into my skin, then drew blood.
My mother came in that night and said she’d heard the Kukal’s dog had been poisoned.
“Poor old guy,” she said. “How could someone do a thing like that? They’ve had that dog since he was a puppy. I remember when they brought him home from the pound.”
Nana was in her chair, watching TV and working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up slowly, looked right at me, and winked.
* * *
The gray house sits like a stump in the grass at the end of a long suburban street on the south side of the island, slightly apart from its neighbors and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence and a tangle of weed-choked shrubs. The miniblinds in the front window are dented; the tumble of bricks in the side yard has not been moved. The house looks the same today as it did when my mother and I moved in a dozen years ago.
In the park across the street, I sit alone in a rubber swing, rocking idly forward and back, forward and back, an exhausted pendulum.
Sometimes I leave the park and walk through the neighborhood, past the small elementary school where Danny and his friends used to torment me, past the salon where my mom and I once got the two most awful haircuts, to the corner where the ice cream shop used to be. Ice cream was our Saturday ritual after my soccer practice. My mom liked to get a scoop of butterscotch and one of bubble gum, which seemed like an odd combination to me. But she always laughed and gnawed on the rock-hard nuggets of gum and said, “Don’t judge.” And she would dot the tip of my nose with ice cream and kiss it clean.
The ice cream shop was bought by Starbucks a few years ago, its pink candy-striped awnings replaced with ubiquitous green. On rainy days, I go inside and sit at the window with a caramel macchiato, which tastes a little like butterscotch if you try hard enough.
Sometimes, when no one’s home, I go up to the gray house and peek in the windows. The blinds are always closed. There is nothing to see. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
The house didn’t feel so sinister when my mother lived there. True, it broke our hearts to leave Nana’s trailer after she died, but my mom had a new boyfriend who had invited us to live with him.
“I need the help, Alice,” she said. “If we stay here, I’ll have to go off-island to get a second job. And who will be with you?”
“I can stay by myself.”
“You’re nine. What if something happened?”
“I could go to Sarah’s...”
“Sarah’s mom hates me,” she said.
“But—”
She sat down on my bed. Her factory uniform was rumpled, name badge askew. The freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out so clearly against her pale skin that they looked as if they’d been stamped on, one by one.
“Trust me. This is going to work out, I promise. There’s a school right down the street, and Ray has a good job. You like him, right?”
Wrong, I thought. I didn’t like him at all. He was ugly and big, with hard, rough hands and a laugh so loud it hurt my ears. He left tracks in the toilet and distressing smells in the air.
“Sure,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
We moved in with Ray the next week.
A Honda pulls up now at the gray house, and behind it a small U-Haul truck, which ambles past, angling, then reverses and backs slowly into the driveway. The door opens and a man climbs out. He zips up his jacket and waits in the driveway.
A woman gets out of the car, then two young girls. They line up along the fence, looking at the house. The older girl says something to her mother, receives a kiss on the top of her head. She takes her sister’s hand and the two of them cross the street to the park where I sit watching, while the man in the driveway opens the moving van and starts to unload it.
As the girls get closer, the younger one, a mop-headed bundle of about three, makes a beeline for the swings, careening forward on stubby legs with her sister in tow.
“Sissy, swing me,” she says. Her voice is a bell, chiming in the stillness.
The bucket seat is a stretch for the older girl,
