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  For Steve and For All the Rescued Animals Who Rescue Us

  Prologue

  WINTER 1999

  One minute, La La joins a flock of geese, skating across the lake as they fly overhead, and the next, squeak, crack, she plunges into darkness. Her snowsuit inhales icy water and clings to her, weighing her down and threatening to pull her under. Though she tries to tread water, her skates are too heavy. She opens her mouth to scream, and the lake rushes down her throat. Just when she thinks she’ll drown, she sees her mother. “Mama,” she gurgles. But the woman who calls herself Mother turns and skates away. Frigid black water tugs at La La’s ankles, pours concrete into her muscles. She goes under.

  Still and cold, it’s the loneliest place she’s ever been. Too dark to see anything that might thrive there. Perfectly silent until the sharp bark of a dog cuts through the water, summoning her back. Maybe help has arrived. Remembering swim lessons her father gave her, La La gathers her strength and frog-kicks to the surface. Ten feet away, a black dog awaits her. She swims toward him, reaching the edge of the hole in the ice. Hands on the white mass, she pushes as hard as she can but can’t raise herself. She frog-kicks again, desperate to stay above water. The dog howls. Urged on by the animal and no longer alone, she presses her arms against the surface of the ice but lacks the strength to lift herself out.

  Exhausted, the cold stiffening her muscles, she waits to sink again. But this time, she doesn’t go under. The arms of her jacket have frozen to the ice. That’s all she remembers.

  Later she learns: a man and woman arrived to skate. They found the dog keeping watch, La La unconscious, attached to the ice. On her cell phone, the woman called emergency services, who rescued La La. The dog bounded into the woods before anyone could reward him. No one knew whose dog he was or where he had come from. It wasn’t until La La was being loaded into an ambulance that her mother returned. She had gone to get help, she said.

  From under warm covers the next morning, La La hears a dove coo-coo to its mate. The bird’s heart thrums with excitement. When her own pulse takes up the beat, La La doesn’t know what to make of it.

  1

  FALL 2015

  In Exam Room 4, La La rubs the silky muzzle of a Labrador retriever named Duck. A woman who looks to be in her thirties pales as she points out a lump on the Labrador’s side, but focusing on the dog, La La barely notices the owner’s anxiety. She takes a history and performs an exam. Soft and moveable, the growth is probably a harmless lipoma.

  “What do you think?” the woman says.

  La La knows better than to offer a diagnosis before the resident has seen the patient. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  With a twenty-two-gauge hypodermic needle, Dr. Mun extracts cells from the lump. Though nowhere near the tip, La La feels the prick as it goes in. The doctor shows her the cells under a microscope, then gives the owner the good news. It’s a benign fatty tumor, just as La La suspected.

  Pleased to give the dog a reprieve, La La remembers why she loves her work, even the general practice rotation, which others find dull. Her exhaustion from working twelve-hour days fades.

  Color returns to the owner’s face. “I don’t know how to thank you both.”

  “We’re glad to help,” Dr. Mun says. When La La is silent, the doctor clears her throat. She turns to La La expectantly.

  “Glad to help,” La La parrots, already thinking about her next patient.

  An hour later, La La prepares to place an IV in a border collie’s cephalic vein. The dog must have eaten peanut butter biscuits in the waiting room. They make La La’s tongue feel sticky and thick. She shaves a spot on the dog’s front leg and scrubs the site with alcohol and chlorhexidine before inserting the needle. She can hardly believe in less than a year she’ll be graduating and seeing patients of her own. When the phone in her pocket goes off, it isn’t the ringtone for her fiancé, Clem (“Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News”), or her father, Zev (“Run, Daddy, Run”), so she puts it out of her mind.

  Treating a nervous, aging poodle, La La scratches above the dog’s heart and feels a pleasurable ache in her own chest. “You’re a champ, Gordie,” she says, after drawing his blood, but the dog doesn’t look at her or otherwise seem to hear.

  She walks the poodle to the waiting room, where a man in a navy suit reaches for the leash. “He never greets me at the door anymore,” he says, his voice quavering.

  “He’s not a butler,” La La mutters.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Could be his hearing. He is an older dog.”

  In the break room, a tofu and avocado sandwich in one hand, La La finally taps the phone message. Hearing John O’Bannon’s voice, she stops chewing. O’Bannon is an attorney who represented Zev and La La in a burglary case when she was a teenager. “Sorry to tell you this,” he says. “Your dad was arrested. Bail hearing is tomorrow at ten. Why don’t you stop by this afternoon? I’m still at 329 Carson, second floor.”

  La La’s throat tightens around a lump of bread. She taps the message again. At the word “arrested,” she squeezes the sandwich, her fingers punching through the whole-grain bread. Zev can’t go to prison. He’s the only parent she has left; she can’t afford to lose him. The sandwich falls apart, avocado streaking the industrial tabletop. Gathering the pieces, she stumbles to the trash and drops them in. She e-mails Dr. Mun that a family emergency has come up and she’ll be out that afternoon. She would tell the resident in person but doesn’t trust herself to speak.

  * * *

  “They’re charging him with burglary,” O’Bannon says. The lawyer has aged. His cheeks sag. The pores on his nose are big enough to house a fly. “I’ll need a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. But it’s going to cost a lot more than that before it’s over.” Sloppy piles of official-looking papers rise on his desktop. Crime is as popular as ever.

  La La’s knee bounces. She wishes O’Bannon brought a dog to work, the kind to lay its muzzle in your lap. “What did Zev say he could give you?”

  “When he heard the DA was asking to set bail at fifty thousand dollars because a victim was in the hospital, Zev said he’d have to rely on a public defender. He can barely scrape together the seventy-five-hundred-dollar fee for the bail bondsman.”

  La La isn’t surprised. What little extra money Zev had, he gave her to help with veterinary school tuition. Though she can’t afford to pay O’Bannon, either, she hates to turn the case over to a public defender. As a teenager, she watched them in the courtroom while she waited for her own burglary case to be called. They leafed through client files as though they’d never seen them before.

  She would ask Clem for the money, but he disapproves of Zev’s occupation, and besides, what he earns as a chiropractor barely covers their bills. There was a time she would have raised the money herself, breaking into the homes of the wealthy—some people have more than they need, more than anyone should—but she promised Clem she was finished with that. La La thinks briefly of her mother. She has no idea where Elissa is or if she’d be willing to help. “Give us a few days to figure something out.”

  The lawyer drums his fingers on his lips. “I suppose that would be okay.”

  As La La gets up to leave, she sees, on O’Bannon’s desk, a studio photograph of a harried woman and three robust boys. It’s a diff
erent family than the one he used to have. Round two, she presumes. Or perhaps the boys are his stepchildren, cared for by a host of mothers and fathers.

  Growing up, La La had only Zev. Her mother disappeared when La La was eight. Four years later, La La buried a pair of white cotton underwear at the bottom of the hamper because a constellation of mysterious brown stains convinced her she had an accident. Discovering the panties, Zev said, “You’re a woman now. No need to be ashamed.” Though it was ten at night, he drove to a supermarket and bought sanitary pads. Returning home, he bleached the underwear.

  The next day, Zev arranged fruit—two lemons, an avocado, and loose purple grapes—on a table and demonstrated how a woman’s reproductive system worked. “Pretty clever design,” he said. He told La La it was one of the few things his mother had taught him in case he had a daughter. After Zev walked La La through two monthly cycles, they ate the grapes, and Zev made guacamole. “If you have cramps we can warm up a hot water bottle,” he said, while he mixed the garlic and avocado.

  La La scooped a dollop of guacamole onto a chip and opened her mouth. “Delicious uterus,” she said, after she swallowed.

  “Gourmet,” Zev said.

  When La La was thirteen, Zev accompanied her to a department store to buy her first bra. “Treat her nice,” he said to a salesclerk, slipping the woman a twenty.

  “That’s my job, sir,” the clerk said, but she stuck the folded bill down the front of her shirt and brought half a dozen bras to La La in a communal dressing room. La La faced a corner while taking off her shirt. She slipped her arms through a bra and struggled to hook the back.

  “Here, let me do that for you,” the woman said. She yanked the clasp closed, then turned La La around and tugged on the bra straps to adjust them. Her fingers were clammy. La La selected two bras just so she wouldn’t have to feel the woman’s hands on her again.

  As she rode home with her father, she kept her eyes on the department store bag in her lap. She wondered what it would have been like to shop with Elissa, instead. Her mother’s absence, familiar and heavy, squeezed the air from her lungs.

  Zev caressed the back of her head with his hand. As if reading her mind, he said, “Not many fathers get to help their girls buy their first bras.”

  La La clutched the top of the bag, trying to keep from crying. “You didn’t help me. That woman did.”

  “I guess she wasn’t your first choice.”

  “No.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” La La said.

  “It matters.”

  The bag slid off her lap. Zev took her hand, and she let him, just that once.

  Years afterward, when La La was in high school, Zev pleaded guilty to a burglary they committed together, so that the charges against La La would be dropped. Never mind that it had been La La’s fault they were caught.

  He was never exactly a candidate for father of the year, raising her to be a burglar, homeschooling her, and isolating her from other kids, but she can’t afford to think about all that now.

  The next morning, Friday, La La e-mails Dr. Mun that she’ll be out again. By mid-afternoon, a bail bondsman has pledged to pay Zev’s bail if he fails to appear in court, and Zev is back in his house. La La pulls up in her Honda and pauses before exiting the car, collecting herself. A dinged-up van with the equipment Zev needs for household rekeys and installations parks in front of the house, HONESTY LOCKSMITH splashed across the side. Between that and his illegal work, Zev eked out a living, though they had never had the kinds of possessions they saw in homes they robbed, designer goods that didn’t come from discount stores.

  Topped with a coating of Colorado snow, rosebushes line the flagstone path to the front door of the three-bedroom ranch house. Elissa had cultivated and pruned the flowers every spring, but now they grow wild. Long, barbed branches shoot out in every direction, taller than La La or her father. No longer fertilized, they nevertheless remain hardy. La La has begged Zev to trim them, has even offered to do it herself, but he won’t hear of it. What she really wants is to dig them up, fill the holes with fresh earth, and forget about them, though she knows that would be impossible. If they were gone, she would search for traces of them, stubborn tendrils winding out of the earth.

  A fresh scratch from the thorns always marks Zev’s face. In the summer, deep cuts fester yellow and green on his exposed arms and legs. He isn’t lazy. He paints the house every five years, dragging out ladder and drop cloths, mixing the same colors, maroon with white trim. But the bushes are a monument to his wife’s treachery, never to be tampered with. Like the flower box that dangles vertically from a single nail. Zev stuffed it with geraniums every Mother’s Day, when they still observed the holiday instead of ignoring it, boycotting TV and radio with their endless barrage of ads. The soil in the box has hardened to chalk.

  La La circles around to the back door, avoiding the bushes. Her childhood dog, Tiny, died seven years ago, but La La still remembers how he’d come bounding toward her. He escaped from the house and was struck by a car while she was in college in Wisconsin. As La La sat in a biology lecture, pain jabbed her spine, so sharp she passed out. She woke on the floor minutes later, her body numb. When Zev called, she was in student health services. “I got him to Dr. Bergman as fast as I could,” he said, adding after a while, “I’m sorry.” La La wouldn’t ordinarily experience the trauma of a creature a thousand miles away, but she wasn’t as attached to other animals.

  Oiled and polished, her father’s collection of locks shines on the fireplace mantel and dozens of curio shelves. Antique and state-of-the-art padlocks, dead bolts—single cylinder and double cylinder—knob locks, lever-handle locks, cam locks, mortise locks, wall-mounted locks, furniture locks, vending machine locks, jimmy-proof dead bolts, rim-latch locks, key-in-knob cylinders, Berlin-key locks, disc-tumbler locks, combination locks, and more. Zev has disassembled the locks and reassembled them. When La La was ten, he began teaching her to pick them. It was a skill they practiced infrequently when they robbed homes. Usually it was faster to pry open a door or smash a window.

  Mo, a seventeen-year-old cat with brindle fur and a flat, round face, curls up on the back of the sofa. When La La rubs the underside of the animal’s chin, her own skin tingles and her throat hums. But as Mo adjusts herself, La La’s elbows and shoulders begin to throb. “Are you giving her the tramadol?” she asks her father as he enters the room.

  Zev resents the question. He’s taken care of La La, after all. “You think I’d let her suffer?” His daughter’s stubby, efficient fingers work Mo’s joints. Her spruce-colored eyes shine, though they often seem dull when she regards people.

  He takes her puffy coat, a chill clinging to the outside and La La’s industrious scent—salty and medicinal—emanating from the inside, and he hangs it in the closet. Father and daughter settle on the couch, the beige cotton fabric pilled and threadbare. When she sits back, La La’s sneaker-clad feet barely brush the carpet.

  A fat ankle monitor pushes up the bottom of Zev’s clean blue sweatpants. The DA successfully argued for home confinement as a condition of bail. Zev stabs a padlock with a slender pick, his fingers moving nimbly over the metal.

  “What happened?” La La asks.

  “Started like a thousand other jobs,” Zev says. The lock pops open with a click, a sound that gives him pleasure and satisfaction even in the midst of his troubles. “Big house. Fresh paint. They take care of the outside, there’s good stuff on the inside. I’d seen an RV there, but it was gone, so I figured they were on vacation. But I was still careful. I rang the bell a million times.” Zev squeezes the shackle closed and goes to work on the lock again, telling La La how he jimmied the back door. “It was quiet inside. First thing I see is a painting of an old lady. She’s giving me the evil eye. Should’ve known then the place was trouble. But I was sure I was gonna get a good haul. I grabbed the silver. A block of cash from the back of the freezer. Might as well tie a bow a
round it, but I’m not complaining. I thought about leaving then, but your tuition was due. I hate for you to take out all those loans.”

  “It’s what everyone does,” La La says, but Zev ignores her.

  “I started up the stairs. Next thing I know, an old man is at the top. Guy’s yelling. He sounds drunk. Must have been hard of hearing or something to miss the bell. Something’s wrong with him. His face droops. He tries to grab the banister and falls halfway down the stairs.” Zev’s hands freeze. He stares at the lock, which remains closed, then looks up at La La, as if she can explain how things went so terribly wrong in the house.

  She would give anything to change the end of the story, which O’Bannon told her, but all she can do is listen until he comes to it.

  “I knew I should get out of there. But I couldn’t. Not without calling nine-one-one. I’m not a murderer. I just wanted to rob the guy.” He describes how he pulled out his cell phone, then remembered he removes the battery when he’s working to prevent the police from tracking him. “I called from the guy’s phone in the kitchen. Just dialed and left the phone off the hook so they wouldn’t get a recording of my voice. Then I ran.

  “Driving home, I felt good. I was glad I called. I figured the dispatcher would see the address of the house on his screen. He’d send someone and the old man would be okay.”

  Zev rests the lock and pick on the polished coffee table. “Didn’t realize until I got home that I left my phone on the guy’s counter.” He takes his head in his hands, clutching the short, gray hair.

  According to O’Bannon, the police traced the phone to Zev. Claude Thomas, the old man, had a stroke. The EMTs got him to the hospital in time to save his life, but he was in a coma, on life support. The DA was threatening to charge Zev with murder if he died.

  “I got rid of the crowbar and the silver before the police searched the house.”