The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals, page 15
“What do you want?” Buddy asked when Dex opened the door. The apartment smelled of weed and popcorn. In the background, Dex could hear the soundtrack to Harry Potter.
“Wanna go on a road trip?”
“Where?”
“Western Kansas?”
Buddy scratched his chest. “This for Ariel?”
“Yes,” said Dex. “And for fun. It’ll be for fun, too.”
Buddy yawned so deeply that Dex could smell his breath. “Look, I just woke up. Let me have some juice and think for a second.”
Dex followed Buddy into the tiny kitchen, where empty pizza boxes and cans of Natural Light crowded the counter. Long ago, he’d gifted Buddy a peace lily, thinking even someone as careless as Buddy could keep it alive. Each time Dex visited, he was alarmed to find the plant in a deeper state of decline.
“So what happened?” Buddy asked. “Did she call you or something?”
“Kind of the opposite—she ignored me all last night, and then today she texted saying she’s staying longer. And I found this article online—I guess her mom runs an animal sanctuary. Why would she have kept something like that from me?”
“Huh,” Buddy said. “Animals.”
“It’s weird, right?”
Buddy opened the fridge and produced a gallon of SunnyD, which he chugged for an uncomfortable amount of time.
“Can I have some of that?” Dex asked.
“This is my juice. You can have water.” Buddy opened the dishwasher and removed a plastic cup with cartoon dinosaurs on it. After picking something hard off the rim, he filled it with water from the tap and handed it to Dex. “So when would we need to leave?”
Dex took the kiddy cup, observed something brown and feathery float to the bottom, and set it back down. “Maybe soon? Like, now?”
“Is this an overnight thing? Are we talking clean underwear?”
“I don’t know. I guess you could just drop me off. Actually, that would be best. We could have a good time driving out there, and then you could just leave me at the animal place, go on to somewhere else that’s cooler. You could even go to Colorado if you wanted—I don’t think it’s too far. You could visit some dispensaries. How’s that sound?”
“No deal. If I’m driving you there, I want a ticket to the freak show.”
“What freak show? Who said anything about a freak show?”
Buddy gave him a look. “If I can’t stay, I’m not going.”
“Fine,” Dex said, knowing he’d regret it later. But that’s what later was for: everything he didn’t want to deal with now.
“And you pay for everything.”
“Obviously.”
“Including snacks. And car beers.”
Dex stared him down. “I could purchase a few select items.”
“Even peanut butter snack?”
Of all Buddy’s annoying habits, Dex despised peanut butter snack most of all. PBS, as Buddy sometimes called it, involved a jar of peanut butter—creamy, never crunchy—whose center Buddy would carve out (eating the peanut butter along the way) so that he could fill the empty space with chocolate chips and crushed-up pretzels. When he ate it, the smacking, sucking sounds could be heard in other rooms, through closed doors, over the sound of music. The idea of enduring these noises in the close quarters of a car was enough to make Dex teary-eyed.
“Sure,” he said, “even peanut butter snack.”
“Right on. I’ve been craving chocolate.”
“Is that a yes?”
Buddy patted his belly. “Why not? Isn’t that what the underemployed are supposed to do? Travel? See the world?”
Dex reeled, remembering he had a nine o’clock at the barbershop the day after next, and a full shift at the bar later that night. A popular punk band from Fayetteville was coming to do a set. He’d been looking forward to the show, to meeting the band, whose drummer was a buddy of a buddy of his and whose father had toured with Sonic Youth when he was younger. This was why Dex loved working at the bar; he could meet one person and suddenly know six. But he was willing to give this one up.
“So we’re leaving now?” Buddy asked. “Like, now now? This present moment?”
Dex figured he could make some phone calls on the road. People owed him favors and he knew he was the kind of guy people liked to do favors for. It wouldn’t be hard. “Yeah. You ready?”
Buddy looked down at his outfit, then inspected his hands, which were covered with what looked like orange Cheeto powder. “I think I’m good to go.”
“You’re not going to bring anything? An extra shirt? A toothbrush?”
Buddy shrugged. “I’ve probably got stuff in the car. I’ll be fine.” He petted his beard, as if thinking. He then retrieved the Altoids box in which he kept his weed. From the counter, he grabbed a tattered copy of Frankenstein. “All righty. Off we go.”
* * *
Buddy drove a 1987 Volvo wagon he’d inherited from his great-aunt Caroline, a cantankerous woman who, during the early stages of dementia, used the car to frequent casinos in Oklahoma. To everyone’s surprise and confusion, Caroline dominated the blackjack tables, once bringing home $4,000 in a single night. When Buddy’s parents finally put her in a home, they found chips hidden all over her apartment—in the refrigerator, the toilet tank, her cat’s litter box. Now the car’s interior stank like cigarettes and hamburgers. Eau de Buddy. From the rearview mirror hung a pine-tree air freshener procured from some long-ago car wash, the paper sun-bleached and cracking. Buddy refused to remove it. “Everything about this car is good luck,” he explained. “How else would my aunt have won all that money? She was out of her goddamned mind.” And so the air freshener remained, as did the grocery bag of Aunt Caroline’s dirty pantyhose, which lived in the back seat next to a hair dryer and a stack of Bibles.
The problem was that Buddy couldn’t keep a consistent speed. He’d unknowingly accelerate until he saw the speedometer was nearing ninety, at which point he’d slam the brakes.
“Either you put on your cruise control or you let me drive,” Dex eventually said. He’d been nauseated for the last hour.
“Cruise control is how people die,” Buddy said. “They let the technology take over and then bam, they’re dick over tiptoes in a ditch. Haven’t you seen Blade Runner?”
“Do you mean ass over teakettle?”
“What teakettle? It’s dick over tiptoes. Think about it—it’s basic anatomy.”
Dex attempted the imagery but was overcome by another wave of nausea. This time, he emptied his stomach into an old Burger King bag. Beer, Cheerios, water.
Buddy said, “Disgusting.”
“Pull over, will you? I need to drive or I’ll just keep puking.”
“You don’t have a license.”
“What do you care?”
Buddy finally agreed, but only because he wanted to roll a joint. Soon the car was thick with smoke and Dex was at the wheel, setting the cruise control to ten, then twelve, then fifteen miles over the speed limit. This was Kansas; if a cop was out there, Dex would see it in time to slow down. According to his GPS, they would make it to St. Clare around five o’clock. If Dex hauled ass, he could probably cut twenty minutes off that time.
“Just to be clear,” Buddy said, sprinkling weed onto a rolling paper, “if we get pulled over, you’re paying the ticket.”
Annoyed, Dex eased up and set the cruise control to eighty-two. Buddy handed him the joint. He didn’t want to be high when he saw Ariel, but they were still hours away. The joint would relax him until they got there, wherever exactly there was. He’d googled St. Clare and found a few grainy pictures of a gas station, a post office. The population, just as Ariel said, was barely more than four hundred. When he searched the animal sanctuary, he was directed to a website that had a gallery of animals available for adoption—a sheep with no eyes, a half-dozen horses, and what seemed like a thousand dogs and cats—but no pictures of the sanctuary itself. When he’d clicked on the STAFF link, he was directed to a cartoon picture of a hog and the message, Oops, something went wrong! Error 404.
He’d been driving for less than an hour when he pulled behind a semi going ten miles under the speed limit. Every so often the truck would drift into the left lane and then overcorrect onto the rumble strip. HOW’S MY DRIVING? asked a plaque on the back. From the trailer hitch swung a pair of blue truck nuts. For too long, Dex tailed the truck, mesmerized by the plastic testicles. When he emerged from his hypnosis he gunned it into the left lane. Just as he was passing the truck, the highway turned. Dex hated these moments—sandwiched between a semi and a guardrail, the only option to keep accelerating until the whole thing was over with. Driving on the highway for the first time in years, he imagined the collision: he and Buddy on fire, smashed beneath the truck, truck nuts dangling above them as they bled out onto the asphalt. When Ariel learned about his death, she would piece it together and understand that he had been coming to find her. She’d feel horrible.
Perhaps sensing Dex’s panic, Buddy woke from his nap, assessed the situation, and began to shout, “You’re turning with a truck!”
“Quit it,” Dex said.
“You’re turning with a truck! It’s so precarious! Inherent risk! Turning with a truck!”
“Fuck you,” Dex said, trying to hide his fear as they came nose-to-nose with the semi.
Buddy drummed on the dashboard. “Turning with a truck! Turning with a truck!” Only once they were safely beyond the truck did he collapse into a fit of laughter.
“You do realize,” Dex said, “that this is your car? And that you’re in it?”
For a moment, Buddy seemed to genuinely consider this information. “Better speed up, asshole. There’s another truck up ahead.”
“I hate you,” Dex said.
“Liar,” he said, pinching Dex on the elbow. “You love me.”
* * *
When they first started dating, Ariel made an effort to accept all of Dex’s friends. Her dislike for Buddy, however, was immediate and unmoving. Before Buddy knew Ariel was Dex’s girlfriend, he’d hit on her, hovering too close while she was pumping a keg at a party. Is it hot in here, or is it just you? Once he discovered she was Dex’s new love interest, he was all faux respect, telling Ariel what a great guy Dex was. “He’s just so real, you know? There’s no one like him. Not a soul in the world.” And then, staring her down, “Don’t you fuck with his heart, you hear me? Don’t you dare hurt my friend.”
Over the years, Buddy had tried to win Ariel over, but her opinion of him had remained fixed. Now, as the hours passed in the car with Buddy, Dex realized the severity of his mistake. Not only was he going to show up at Ariel’s childhood home uninvited, using information he’d pilfered from her computer, but he was also going to do so with her least favorite person in tow. Was he insane? For a moment, he considered ditching Buddy—leaving him at a gas station or booting him out at a McDonald’s. But then he recalled the time he got the flu freshman year of college, how Buddy had brought him chicken soup and saltines every night for a week. How Buddy had also written an essay on the Roman Empire for Dex’s Western civilization class—the only essay for which Dex ever received a perfect score. He couldn’t ditch Buddy because Buddy would never ditch him. Those were the rules of friendship.
It seemed the only solution was to give up altogether—turn around and head back to Lawrence, wait patiently for Ariel to return home. What he should have done all along.
“You know, I’m not so sure about this,” he said, easing up on the gas.
Buddy startled from another nap. He had been snoring for the past half hour, his face smashed against the window. Asleep, he almost looked sweet. “Huh?” he said, prying his cheek from the glass. “What’d you say?”
“I said I have a bad feeling about this. Showing up at Ariel’s house.”
“You’re serious right now?”
“The more I think about it, the crazier it seems. So what if she is fucking some random guy? How’s my showing up going to make that better?”
“You come to my house in the middle of the day, ask to borrow my car, drive me three hours into the middle of nowhere, smoke my weed, and now all of a sudden you don’t want to go through with it?”
“Come on. It’s not like you were doing anything else.”
“I was watching Goblet of Fire.”
“Who cares?”
“You know what? Fuck you. You owe me twenty dollars.”
“Buddy, calm down.” He was used to Buddy’s mood swings. Usually, they meant he was hungry, thirsty, or tired. Perhaps he needed a juice.
“Fuck that. You owe me twenty dollars an hour. This is basically a job, what I’m doing for you right now. I could have been out earning money today, but instead I’m sitting here with you. Wasting my time. And we didn’t even get peanut butter snack, which makes you, in addition to everything else, a liar.”
“All right,” Dex said, deciding that, at least for the time being, it was easier to commit to the plan than deal with Buddy’s temper tantrum. “We’ll get you peanut butter snack soon—I promise.”
Buddy sat quietly for a moment. Eventually he said, “Peanut butter.”
“That’s right, we’ll pull off at the next town. Promise.”
“Snack tease,” Buddy murmured, before resting his head against the window and once again closing his eyes to the road.
Mona
On the way back to the Bright Side, pumped up on Coreen’s advice, Mona rehearsed what she would say to Ariel. We can’t undo the past, but we can try to make things better going forward. Or maybe: I don’t forgive you for leaving, but I don’t need to forgive you—you’re my daughter. I love you. All of it sounded Hallmark, but maybe that’s what she needed. Some Lifetime channel. A sprinkle of cheese. Maybe that’s the ingredient they’d been missing all along—the ability to say the squishy stuff other families had no problem tossing around. Maybe the whole problem was that Mona would never buy a mug that read, I’m a mom. What’s your superpower? Her mug would say something like, Fuck off, I’m busy, or Look at me funny and I’ll smack you.
She repeated the words until they sounded natural, genuine: I love you, I love you, I love you. And it was true, wasn’t it? She loved her daughter. Even in her moments of greatest anger, behind the flames there was always love. If anything, love was the air that stoked the blaze. She was angry at Ariel because she loved her so dearly, because Ariel had been the most important thing in Mona’s world, and knowing this, Ariel had removed herself, kicking the keystone straight from Mona’s life and turning away before she could see the structure crumble.
She was still practicing the words—I love you, Ariel—when two dogs, a min pin and a pug, shot from the grass and ran across Sanctuary Road, tongues flapping. The pug was limping, its hind leg swinging above the ground, and both dogs were coated in grime and dirt. Mona slammed the brakes and blinked a few times. It was Jazzy Jo and Honey, she was sure of it. She’d been fawning over them the past few days, preparing them for adoption: no fleas, no eye boogers, no dingleberries.
She hopped out of the truck, but by then the dogs had disappeared into the grass on the other side. “Fucking fuck,” Mona shouted to the empty road. She kicked Old Baby’s front tire, a bolt of pain shooting up her big toe and through her ankle. Old Baby stared back at her, and so she patted the truck’s wheel well. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take it out on you,” she said, realizing she sounded just like the crazy person everyone in St. Clare thought she was. But she was pissed.
There was no way for her to know it was Ariel’s fault, and yet somehow, she did.
Ariel
In high school, the boys had gone brain-dead in Joy’s presence, stumbling over their words, nervously fiddling with their hair. The years had dialed down Joy’s good looks, leaving behind the kind of pretty, rosy-cheeked cowgirl found in FarmersOnly.com commercials. She wore a navy flannel shirt and, over this, a mustard-yellow down vest. Jeans. Chunky leather belt. Strawberry-blond hair in two thin braids that ended just below her shoulders.
Joy stepped into the barn’s darkness and squinted. “Holy shit—Ariel?”
“Hey, Joy.” She felt nervous, as if they were still in high school and somebody might see them talking.
“Nobody told me you were coming back.”
“I got in late last night—I didn’t exactly warn anyone.”
“What are you doing here?”
Ariel squeezed her forehead. “God, everyone keeps asking me that. I just saw about the fire—”
“No, I mean what are you doing in the barn?”
Ariel picked at the bale of hay beneath her, not wanting to meet Joy’s eyes. “There was an accident. Some dogs got out.”
“They ran off?”
Ariel nodded. “You should probably know that it was my fault. I let a few of them go.”
“On purpose?”
“No, it was an accident. Sort of.” She finally looked up at Joy, who was eyeing her suspiciously.
“Did Gideon go after them? I couldn’t find him just now.”
“I don’t know, probably. I’m sure he did.”
“Should we see if he needs help?”
“Sure, that’s a good idea.” Ariel stood carefully, worried she might become light-headed. Motes of dust floated through the air. She was cold. And thirsty. And tired. Behind Joy, the light of the day came rushing through the barn door. There was so much to do. She was glad Joy was there, that she didn’t have to do it alone. She wondered, had Joy not appeared, how long she would have sat in the barn, thinking herself into a hole.
“You know, I saw you in a toothpaste ad a few years ago,” Ariel said, following Joy into the paddock. “I figured you were living in a city somewhere.”
“Oh God, you saw that?” Joy kept her eyes to the ground, half smiling, maybe proud or embarrassed or both.
“It was good! I mean, it was a commercial, so it was annoying, but you were good.” She felt stupid, like she was fourteen again, trying to flatter one of the popular kids.
