Protecting Marie (17 page)

Nothing.

Smiling, she called Dinner's name in a sweet singsong voice, picturing her fast asleep on her afghan near the fireplace. When Fanny entered the living room, Dinner was nowhere to be seen. And neither was the afghan.

The missing afghan was what caused her to panic. As part of her morning routine, she had brought the afghan down before she had left for school. She knew she had done this, as surely as she knew her name. If Henry had taken Dinner for a walk (which he rarely did), the afghan would still be there. Automatically, Fanny flew through the house room by room, shouting for Dinner and trying to convince herself to calm down, that there was nothing to worry about.

The house was unbearably empty.

Only one other time in her life had Fanny
been alone in the house and felt it so. Approximately five years earlier, on a rainy spring afternoon, she had been taking a bath. Her parents had been in the living room, reading. Henry's music—something classical—was playing on the stereo. It streamed in through the floor and walls to Fanny, where she lay in the tub, up to her chin in silky water, encircled by lemony bubbles. Rain tapped against the roof. When she was done with her bath, she toweled off, dressed, and went down to be with her parents. “I'm back,” she said, hopping off the last step joyfully. But no one was there. The music still played—strings, she remembered, snapping, mounting. Her parents' books were strewn across the sofa as if the people reading them had left in a hurry, or worse, had been snatched away, and Fanny knew that the world had ended. She checked the house from top to bottom before she sat in a corner and burst into tears. She hugged her knees and swayed back and forth.

In a matter of minutes, the screen door slammed and they were standing above her.
“What's wrong? What happened? Why are you crying?” they asked, crouching down to her, Henry's knees cracking.

“I didn't know . . . what happened to you,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “I thought something . . .
bad
happened.” She sniffled. “Or you left . . . me.”

Ellen hugged Fanny. “There, there,” she soothed. “I realized that the rain had stopped, and through the window I felt the sun creeping back,” she said. “I wanted to see if there was a rainbow, so we went out to the corner, sweetie. We were just standing on the corner and only for a few minutes. If you hurry, it might still be there,” Ellen said, motioning with her hand.

Relief rushed through Fanny like a storm. She caught her breath. And the three of them scurried out to see the rainbow. Fanny stared at it until her eyes hurt, until the rainbow was gone.

“Next time we step outside for
any
reason,” said Henry, “we'll check with you first, your majesty.”

She knew that he was trying to make a joke because his voice was light and he squeezed her hand as he said it, but his words made her feel ashamed of how she had acted, and she pulled her hand away.

Now, shaking her head, Fanny realized how frivolous the rainbow incident seemed. She tried to breathe the way her mother had taught her. Yoga breathing. Slow and deep. She decided to call her mother at work to see if she knew anything of Henry and Dinner's whereabouts. As she reached for the telephone, Fanny noticed a note and a magnet lying beneath the kitchen table. They had fallen from the refrigerator, she guessed. She picked the note up, turned it in her hand. The note said:

When Fanny read this, the only thing she
could think of was Stuart Walker's comment, early on New Year's Day: “. . . if you can't handle
this
dog, give me a call. I'd take her in a heartbeat.”

Was the afghan missing because Henry had taken Dinner to Stuart's house for good? Had Dinner been in Henry's studio, messing things up, interfering with his work?

Fanny ran to the coat hooks in the front hall; Dinner's leash was gone. She ran to the back hall; Dinner's food and water dishes were missing. She opened the cupboard; the box of dog biscuits was no longer there, and neither was the plastic pouch of rawhide bones.

Now Fanny felt real panic. She took the steps two at a time, up to the second floor, and spun around the corner. The house was so dry she received a shock when she switched on the light for the narrow flight of stairs that led up to Henry's attic studio. “Ouch,” she whispered. She hadn't been in his studio since before Christmas, since the night of his birthday party when she looked for him there.

With great hesitancy, she opened the door. It creaked and creaked. Without even stepping into the studio she could see charcoal dog prints running chaotically across the floor. Some were clearly defined, others were smudgy black moons. And wedged between the wall and one of the legs of the cart on which Henry piled his tubes of paint was Dinner's squeaky rubber snowman toy.

Fanny tiptoed to the snowman and disengaged it. She had been looking for it for days—under her bed, in her closet, out in the yard. Checking here had never crossed her mind. She turned abruptly to leave, and as she did, she was confronted with the painting on her father's easel.

The painting was large for Henry—four feet by three feet. It was currently in a grisaille stage, an underpainting in shades of gray, waiting to be glazed with color. The composition was crowded, vases and bowls and jars bleeding off the panel in every direction. Fanny recognized some of the vessels; they were the ones she had given Henry for
Christmas. But what stopped her and stunned her was a quick, feathery rendering of a dog that covered about a quarter of the panel. It was incongruous with the rest of the panel, an afterthought. But there was no question about it. Surely it was Dinner. Henry had captured her perfectly—the way she tended to lie with her front paw curved oddly, sticking out like a number seven. The lines that described her body were ashen and washy. The rendering of Dinner, in itself, would have been fine, but the mark of a thick, black X had been made over her, blotting her out, canceling her.

X.

It was as if Henry had planned it all as a game, a hunt, similar to the wonderful birthday hunts he had orchestrated when Fanny was a child. She'd follow simple clues from room to room, ending at the linen closet or the laundry room, which would be filled with presents and balloons and candy. Once, the mysterious directions led to the guest room, which was decorated in a circus motif and jammed with whispering friends anticipating the mo
ment to shout “Happy Birthday!” and throw confetti. Her cake was as big as a bed pillow that year and shaped like a lion.

Those hunts were joyful and exciting; this was a cruel joke.

The big black X said it all so simply: Henry had gotten rid of Dinner.

Fanny squinched into the corner and started to cry. And then she said the words out loud, words that she had thought before but never spoken, even when Henry had told her that Nellie had to go: “I hate him.”

A
fter she had composed herself enough so that her voice wasn't shaking, Fanny called her mother at work. “Do you know anything about Dad going to Stuart Walker's house?” she asked.

“No,” said Ellen. “He didn't mention it to me this morning. He was in his studio when I left. I heard him humming behind the closed door, so maybe, just maybe, he's gotten over this block.”

Fanny was using the stationary phone in the kitchen. She wove the cord through her fingers, then poked her pinkie through the coils. “Where was Dinner?”

“This morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Following me around, as usual, while I
was getting dressed. She was lying on her afghan when I left. Why?”

“Dunno.”

“Fanny, you sound funny. Are you all right?”

Sniffle.

“Fanny,” said Ellen, “are you crying?”

“Kind of.”

“What's wrong?”

As clearly and slowly as she could, Fanny told her mother what she had discovered when she had arrived home from school.

“Did you call Stuart?” asked Ellen, her voice steady.

“I thought I'd call you first. I thought maybe you'd know something.”

“Sit tight,” said Ellen. “I'll call Stuart and then I'll call you right back. And don't worry. Bye.”

They hung up. And in the silence that followed, the day's events fleshed themselves out in Fanny's mind: Henry had been painting, happily, until Dinner entered his studio. Dinner distracted him. Her tail swept charcoal
dust throughout the room and knocked things over. She pranced and dodged about, wanting to play, inviting Henry to join her, pressing her squeaky rubber snowman toy with her paw. Henry's impatience mounted until he reached the point . . .

The telephone rang. Fanny answered it before the first ring was completed. “Mom?”

“The answering machine is on,” said Ellen. “I left a message for your father to call home.”

Fanny sighed. “What am I going to do? I know he took her away.” If she wasn't careful, she was going to cry again. She closed her eyes and willed herself to be stoic.

“He wouldn't do that,” Ellen told her solemnly.

“He did it before.”

Now it was Ellen who sighed. “That was different,” she said, but her voice wasn't nearly as steady as it had been. “I've got one phone call to make for work, and then I'll be right home. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don't worry,” Ellen reassured her. “We'll
wait together.”

A car door slammed and Fanny ran to the window.

Empty street.

A dog bayed far, far away and Fanny opened the front door.

The wind?

Fanny sat by the phone, anticipating its ringing. She even lifted the receiver off its cradle once.

Only the dial tone.

Why was it, Fanny wondered, that lately she was always waiting for her father? Waiting for him to come to his party. Waiting for him to return after he had disappeared. Waiting for him to approve of her Christmas gift. Waiting for him to get on with his painting. Waiting for him to overcome a bad mood. Waiting for the world to fall into place around him. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Because she didn't know where else to go, Fanny shuffled to her room. She tried to review the facts a thousand different ways—
changing this, changing that—but she always arrived at the same conclusion: Dinner is gone.

The days were lengthening and the sunlight that brightened Fanny's room had a different quality to it than even a few days earlier. As a means of comfort, a need for the familiar, Fanny opened her file cabinet and surveyed her possessions. The light caught the bottle of dragées and the glint it made caught Fanny's eye. She picked up the bottle and read the list of ingredients. Sugar, cornstarch, gelatin, acetic acid, and silver. She figured that it was the silver that made them nonedible. She poured some of the silvery beads into her hand. They rolled into the creases of her palm, and Fanny held them there until some of the silver rubbed off onto her skin.

The idea to crush them between her fingers struck her, and she tried it, with no success. The hard little balls shot out from between her fingers and ricocheted around the room. Finally, and with great effort, she was able to pulverize a bunch of them with her boot on the
floor. Squatting, she contemplated the result—a tiny pile of dust, like sugar or snow.

Thinking of “The Snow Queen,” Fanny pretended that the dust was magic. If she ate the dust, it would prick her heart and force her into a frozen sleep. And wouldn't her father be sorry then?

Ever so slowly, Fanny licked her finger, stuck it into the pile, then put her finger into her mouth. The powder tasted faintly sweet, almost like nothing. Fanny blew the rest of the powder away, and she replaced the bottle of dragées in the file cabinet.

She removed Marie when she fitted the dragées back into the drawer. Marie. Flimsy, handmade paper doll. The hours and hours of fretting over her survival seemed like such a waste of time to Fanny. The tissue paper that was wrapped around her fell away. Fanny tenderly bounced the doll in her hand. And then suddenly, as if by doing it she would somehow increase the chances of a miracle for Dinner, Fanny tore Marie's arms and legs from her body and wadded them. Without
pause, she ripped the body into the smallest pieces she could and threw the whole tattered mess into the wastebasket.