The Animal Girl (14 page)

But it was no longer what it had been, no longer all-encompassing, as Leah had noticed only yesterday. And now she had caught the eye of another boy, Jason Clark, and was sitting in a big white flatbed truck that carried two dumpsters, a red one and a black one, which held dead animals. On the way out of Ann Arbor, Leah sat up high in the truck, above the small cars and their smaller drivers. She felt the rumble of the engine in her thighs and torso. And she felt surprised to be thinking to herself that this was it—her first real date.

“That's Category One and Two,” Jason Clark said as they barreled down 23. He was talking about the dumpsters chained to the flatbed behind them. “It's all regulated by the government, by the USDA. Category One is the classification for the small stuff—rats, mice, bats, birds, reptiles—stuff that's not protected under the Animal Welfare Act. Two is larger mammals—cats, primates, the sheep and dogs you work with. The black container is for One, the red's for Two. We keep them separate—when they're alive and when they're dead. It's all regulated. As is incineration. You can't just dump them in a landfill.”

Jason was doing, Leah guessed, what guys did to impress girls. He was telling her what he knew—the facts, the tidbits, the plain, uninteresting stuff in his head. “We pay the incinerator by volume. The university buys the right to dump fifty thousand gallons of medical waste in Detroit every year.” Jason drove the huge truck with one hand on the wheel. “Can you imagine?”

“Nope. I can't,” Leah said. The truth was she didn't want to know any more about the dead things that were their cargo. What was she to make of what she knew, anyway? She knew, for instance, that the dead sheep behind them had had their hearts removed, cut out of them and refrigerated, and the dogs had had their gallbladders destroyed. Fifty thousand gallons of medical waste per year. She knew that now. Category One and Category Two. Small animals and big animals. It added up to nothing. So why know it? “Let's not talk about this anymore.”

He nodded. “No problem.” He turned and looked at her then. “You look … better … different. I mean, you did something to yourself. You look good, really good.”

In the instant that he began to appreciate her, Jason Clark became annoying. It wasn't, it seemed, that he was unhandsome (in fact, he was handsome), nor was it that he was a showoff. It was, as near as Leah could tell, that he liked her. Now that she saw this, his sleek, equine face—the long nose and narrow cheekbones—became horsy, just right for a bit and bridal. His ears seemed cartoonishly large. His teeth stuck out too much. His arms and shoulders were too buff. He was all wrong.

Thank goodness, then, that they were arriving in Detroit, which was indeed gloomy. The incinerator was not, as Leah had assumed, on the city's edge, in the shadow of industry, of warehouses and factories, but at its center, just off Cass Street, where only a few years ago, Leah knew, crack cocaine had been bought and sold. A block of concrete supporting two smokestacks, one larger than the other, the incinerator stood just behind a strip of buildings—a diner, a pawn shop, a secondhand store, a bar called I Love Lucy, and a number of boarded-up storefronts. Down the street, a broken fire hydrant spewed torrents of water. A paper bag tumbled across the sidewalk in a gust of hot wind. Shattered glass shimmered in the street gutter. In Detroit almost everyone, it seemed to Leah, was black: the man sitting barefoot against a wall, the boy walking past him wearing sneakers that shone a perfect, unmarked blue, the nicely dressed couple who'd just stepped out of a brand-new Mercedes SUV, the old woman on the opposite side of the street, tapping along on an aluminum
cane as she walked her little dog on its leash. This fact scared Leah and made her feel something she rarely felt elsewhere: white. It was one more thing to know, one more thing she couldn't make sense of.

The incinerator was surrounded by a red brick wall, blackened by dirt and exhaust, and a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. As they turned into this odd-looking fortress, Jason said again, “Fifty thousand gallons of waste.” A black man stopped them at the entrance. Jason and he exchanged paperwork, and soon Jason was backing the truck into a port, from where a stationary crane lifted the color-coded dumpsters—Categories One and Two—and delivered them into the incinerator. Leah felt the truck lift and lighten. In a few minutes, the dumpsters were spit back out, empty now, and lowered onto the truck. “That's it,” Jason Clark said cheerfully. He was more and more annoying and made Leah appreciate Max, who despite all this grimness believed in knowledge, believed it led to something more than impressing girls, something more than a list of information to be recited.

Leah thought it was disgusting how quickly and neatly the animals had disappeared. And though neither stack of the incinerator was smoking, she rolled down her window, sniffed at the air for burnt flesh, and smelled nothing beyond the exhaust of the truck she sat in.

To enter Noelle's houses, Leah no longer had to borrow the keys. She'd had them duplicated. She had her own keys now.

A few times, she'd almost been caught. Once she'd nearly walked in on a couple making love in the shower, their clothes strewn over the master bedroom and the loud sounds of their sex echoing from the bathroom. She'd quietly backed out of the room and escaped. Another time, she'd just left a house through the back as Noelle and a client came in through the front.

Leah tested the limits of her trespassing. She not only ate meals, peed, and watched TV in these houses, but now and then spent the night.

Her favorite place for a sleepover was the Bradford house, the first house she'd entered that summer. It was fully furnished, its letterbox stuffed with mail that the neighbors would collect every few days.
There was frozen food—pizzas, burritos, Swanson dinners, chicken, steaks, hamburger meat—in a lay-down freezer in the basement. There were twelve-packs of Coke, Sprite, and root beer in the fridge, stores of toilet paper in the laundry room, clean linen and towels in the closets, even movies on DVD, including the small selection of porno films she'd discovered earlier, which she found both thrilling and tedious to watch—all those tits and cocks. Mr. and Mrs. Bradford, with their huge caches of frozen food, their full closets, their beautiful house, their adult films, and even framed pictures of their kids—a girl and boy of grade-school age—poised just so on the bedroom dresser were a mystery to Leah. Why would anybody leave such a life behind, all its trimmings, all its provisions in place? Had one of them died and the other taken the kids and fled? Had one of them left, simply walked out of the house and never turned back? Had their children been brutally murdered, kidnapped? Leah guessed it had been a tragedy. Why else would anyone leave the remnants so obviously in place, so ready for use, for a family to slip into? Everything was there—even a dresser filled with men's socks and underwear, even three different kinds of half-used mustard in the refrigerator, a coffee can of quarters, nickels, and dimes on a table in the entryway, used toothbrushes in the bathrooms. Everything was there save for life itself, the joy and anger, exhaustion and energy, the desire that was needed to do anything, anything at all: eating, fucking, getting out of bed, loving and raising kids, talking, yelling, shouting, spitting, scratching, kissing. Now all of it had been left—tables, chairs, ceilings, windows, room after room; two staircases, one leading to the basement, the other to the second floor, the master bathroom with marble sinks and a whirlpool bathtub, magazine racks filled with
National Geographics
and
New Yorkers
, all of it abandoned, frozen in place. The entire shell locked under one roof, for sale (furniture inclusive, the fact sheet had said), and, as it happened, for Leah's exclusive use, at least while it lasted.

The first time she spent the night in the Bradford house, she arrived home after work the next day, after nearly twenty hours of being away, and discovered that neither Noelle nor Franklin had noticed her absence.

On another occasion, already tucked into the Bradfords' king-sized bed and watching TV on mute, she called home and got Franklin. “Leah, is that you?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“We thought you were downstairs in your room.”

She could hear music in the background—the Beatles, of which Noelle was, of course, a fan. They were one of the easiest possible bands to like, one of the bands that everybody, no matter what their ages, adored, and so they seemed just right for Noelle's good, if conventional, taste. At the same time, Leah had to admit that Noelle's affection for the music was genuine. She had once seen Franklin and Noelle, in the kitchen, wineglasses in hand, boogying to this music, moving their hips and arms and legs. She imagined them now, even as her father talked to her, dancing, swinging an arm, kicking a leg in an awkward, middle-aged style of dance that was nonetheless joyous. They loved each other. They loved each other so much they wanted to dance together in the kitchen. “Nope,” Leah said. “I'm at a friend's house. I thought I should call and tell you I'd be staying over here tonight.”

“A friend's house,” Franklin said in a tone of surprise. “She's at a friend's house,” he said now to Noelle, as if boasting.

“I do have friends, Dad.” It stung to say this, since Leah and Franklin both knew she didn't have friends.

“Of course,” he said. “Which friend's house are you at?”

“Michelle's. I'm at Michelle's house.” Leah felt a shiver of fear and anticipation because she had just decided to confess, or at least sort of confess. “Michelle Bradford. I'm at the Bradford house.”

“Great,” he said. “Enjoy yourself, then.”

“Dad,” Leah said, irritated now. “I'm at the Bradford house.” She clenched her eyes shut and waited for her father to realize what she was saying. But he didn't. The stupid man simply hadn't heard her.

“Okay,” he said, becoming a little irritated himself.

“Don't you want the number over here?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, “yes. That might be a good idea.”

She gave it to him, and then he hung up.

The next day, instead of going home, she entered another house,
an “armed” house, as the security stickers on its front window called it. Though she knew the code and could have disarmed the security system, she sat down on the living-room carpet and waited for the cops. The alarm was deafening. Its scream and the pulsating lights of the house seemed to mark the end of everything. She thought about what to say and how to explain herself to Franklin and Noelle, the scene of anger and tears that would soon come. Outside, another beautiful, hot sunny day was in its slow, late-afternoon progression. Five minutes passed, and no cops arrived. It was a Saturday, and the neighbors were either not home or had decided to stay in their houses. Every man for himself. She could destroy the entire house, and no one would come. She could burn it to the ground, take a hammer to its walls, smash its windows. And as she sat in the middle of the empty living room, she felt sleepy, exhausted. She wanted to curl up and shut her eyes, and might have if not for the terrible electrical shrieking of the house.

After ten minutes, Leah gave up. She walked outside and had already crossed the street when the officers finally arrived. One talked into the radio while the other, a young Asian woman, came for her. She hardly knew how to be arrested, how to present herself to be “taken in,” and so she'd been about to raise her hands above her head when the cop said, “You see anybody enter that house?”

“No,” Leah said.

“Did you see anybody leave?”

Leah shook her head.

“Did you see anything?”

“Nope.” And that was that. The cop left her standing there, on the loose, and she walked down the street now, lacking the courage to turn herself in.

At the end of the summer, the lab had a barbecue and softball game, to which everyone—Leah, the security guard, Diana, Jason Clark, and people from different departments whom Leah had never met—was invited. The diamond was in a park across from Max's house, where people hung out in the backyard drinking beer and waiting
for hot dogs, chicken breasts, and hamburgers to come off the grill. It was Leah's last chance, before leaving the lab and returning to school, to impress Max, to show him who she was and what she was capable of, and to make a claim on him greater than that of a student and dullard adolescent. And so, naturally, she did nothing. She froze and felt painfully shy, holding an illegal beer, the taste of which she did not at all like, while jolly and collegial adults told jokes, conversed, drank a little too much and gossiped all around her. “What?” Jason Clark asked in mock surprise as he looked at the selection of grilled meats. “No lamb chops. Why on earth not?” Leah, Max, and Diana all laughed. Other researchers joked about the animals they worked with. Someone giggled at the gruesome thought of rabbit stew. “I sometimes dream about mice. I see nothing but mice,” a woman said and began to laugh uneasily.

Meanwhile, Leah wasn't having a good time and wasn't laughing.

Max tapped her shoulder at one point. “You seem quiet, kiddo. You all right?”

“Of course,” Leah said. “I'm fine.”

Always oblivious to fashion, Max wore shorts that were just a little too short and an old pair of leather cleats. He held a worn baseball glove in one hand and a bat in the other, and Leah saw in his soft burliness something she hadn't anticipated: the eager physicality of an athlete. “Let's go play,” he said. Then he began following the other research scientists and laboratory employees across the street to the baseball diamond when he surprised Leah again by turning around and saying, “By the way, you look great today. You really do.” It was the first time he'd noticed, and though his tone suggested nothing more than friendliness, and seemed to reflect more his good mood than anything he saw in her, Leah felt a distinct lifting of spirits. She'd taken pains that day to look her best; she wore eye makeup, lipstick, a jean skirt and white tank top, through which showed, very faintly, the red lace of her bra.