Somebody named Officer A. Alzone. The police had called her?
“This is the Park County Sheriff’s Office,” the message simply said. “We’re wondering if you can give us a call immediately. Again, this is Officer A. Alzone.”
What, what, what, what, what? Oh god, she’d been caught breaking into the house. Or stealing a dog. Already? But that didn’t make sense!
She had all her stuff in her car. She should just go. Except that she’d wanted to wipe down countertops—to erase fingerprints as well as be polite—and do a once-over on the house. Although the police didn’t have her fingerprints; she’d never been arrested for anything, had she? Just that one time in college for underage drinking, but they hadn’t taken her prints.
And she was a bit tipsy!
And also, how had she been caught? Who had seen her?
The darkness felt stunning, the trees and sky being nearly indistinguishable. The cold felt stunning; she was shivering badly now. The dog’s injuries felt stunning. The phone call was stunning. Her slowness seemed stunning. She was sitting in the car in the dark, shaking even though she’d turned on the heat, when the phone rang, startling her so much that she yelped. She looked down. The same number: the sheriff. Oh no oh no oh no, and she started to cry and thought Just fucking do it, face the music, and answered before she could back out.
“This is Ammalie,” she sniffled. She put the phone down and on speaker.
“Ammalie Brinks?”
“Yes.”
The woman on the other end of the phone sighed. “We’ve been trying to reach you—”
“I’m sorry. I’ll leave right now. Can you tell the cabin’s owner—also, the dog, well, it’s hard to explain, but the dog—there’s a guy, a guy who I think is bad—”
“Were you on Kenosha Pass yesterday?” the woman interrupted her, briskly, and clearly annoyed. “Your vehicle is a gray Subaru, Illinois license plate RME909?”
“Um, yes.” Ammalie squinted hard at the dog, as if that might squeeze out the confusion in her brain. She touched the greenstone and brass key on her necklace and then reached out to push her hand into the dog’s fluffy neck fur. The dog whimpered, and then three gunshots sounded from far away. “Yes. It’s me. I’m Ammalie Brinks and I’m so sorry—”
“There was a series of car break-ins, including one that—”
“Uh, there’s somebody shooting and I found a dog—and wait, my phone, wait, what?”
“Car break-ins, including one that went badly—”
But more gunshots had Ammalie pressing the gas, U-turning on the dirt road so fast that rocks spun, and she gunned it. The phone lost the signal of its own accord. She drove back to the cabin, car bumping mightily on gravel ruts. It seemed crazy to drive back toward the danger, but at least there she could lock the doors. Now she felt furious and strong. It was her goddamn house—kind of. And she deserved to feel safe there. And who the hell hurts a dog? She wanted to strangle whoever it was. Lock the door, lock the door, lock the door. Safe, safe, safe.
—
She pulled into the area at the back of the house, walked the dog in, locked the door, cleaned off the paws quickly by the light of her headlamp. When she let go of the collar, the dog walked inside, but slowly, head drooping, not trotting as a dog normally would. Ammalie moved fast, putting down bowls of water and leftover rice with slices of turkey, which is all she had. The dog gobbled and drank and then lay down right there, by the food, and closed its eyes, and so she ran and found it a thick blanket, the hard floor not looking comfortable at all, and coaxed the dog onto it. The pup put her head between her paws and closed her eyes, as if that was all there was to be done.
Ammalie gathered a knife, a baseball bat she’d seen in a closet, and her pepper spray. She also had her car keys at the ready, not only to drive off if need be, but so that she could press the red alert button on them—her car had been made the first year they were available and she always figured that an annoyingly honking car would be a good alarm; someone might eventually come see what it was about. She also had her phone on, next to her, and set to Wi-Fi calling, so that she could call 911 if need be, though that, of course, would lead to other problems.
She sat on the kitchen floor beside the dog and stroked her neck and gently touched the cut on the head, trying to calm herself. It was painful to see, the soft fur streaked with blood, but she could tell the bleeding was stopping. Ammalie ran her hands over the dog’s ribs and legs and watched the dog’s reaction—no wincing, no pulling away.
“Horrible people are out there,” she said to the dog, who thumped its tail on the floor. “I’m so sorry.”
She bit at her fingernails and then picked at the skin around them. So, the police were coming. Surely they could ping her cell phone or triangulate it or whatever it was called, and they were coming.
Well, fine. She had her story ready to go. She’d make sure the dog went to a shelter. Surely she’d be arrested and fined or whatever, and she’d call Mari, who would call Maximo’s brother, who was a lawyer, and Maximo himself was a paralegal, and in the end, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Who would really put a middle-aged grieving possibly-crazy woman in jail for very long for simply staying a few nights in a house?
The Panics were coming. She had to do something repetitive and calming or her fingernails would soon be shreds. In the Before Days, she would have counted tip money, lining up bills, or perhaps opened a drawer and straightened the items, or, if at work, wrapped the silverware in cloth napkins. She needed to touch things. Line them up. Make sense of them. So she looked around the room and her eyes settled on the small first aid kit she’d used to bandage her hand, and then the other two larger ones she’d brought in and set by the door so they wouldn’t freeze.
Her Holy Trinity of first aid kits, each with its own specialty.
My god, yes, that’s what she needed. Safety. Preparedness. Tangible help. She laid them out on the floor by the window, where moonlight was streaming in, and put the lanterns and headlamps nearby, and then unpacked each one, lining up its items outside the container, and the dog walked over and joined her, curling up near her thigh.
“Car camping enthusiasts should be jailed. But so should first aid kit makers,” she said to the dog, if only because talking felt calming. “All of them, everywhere. They should be jailed for offering a false sense of security, by offering items that are almost of no value. For example, now. Your cut head. Nothing in a stupid premade, store-bought first aid kit would be all that useful. No Band-Aid would be of any help. What one really needs is gauze, a lot of gauze, not some stupid package with one wimpy piece of gauze.” She held up the enormous package of gauze she’d put together herself and showed it to the dog. “What one really needs is a long bandage to wrap around the head, possibly in a couple of directions, depending on the length and location of the cut, because heads are round and hairy or furry, depending on the creature, and Band-Aids won’t stick. You see what I’m saying?”
The dog thumped her tail.
“Why do we live in a world where first aid kits are so inadequate?”
The tail thumped.
“Why do we live in such a world at all?” Her voice was so distraught that it worried even her, so she went for something calmer. “Do border collies have tails? Or are you…an Aussie? Or a mutt? I don’t know much about dogs.”
The dog thumped her tail even more.
“What do you want to be named?”
The dog cocked her head and then put it back between her paws.
“Stupid, stupid little Band-Aids, sure, you might want a few butterfly Band-Aids, especially if your forehead would scar, like mine did after my accident at Avogadro’s Number—that’s the restaurant where I waitressed—but seriously, if you were out in a forest and got hurt, literally the last thing you would care about is a paper-cut-size Band-Aid. Like, I bet ninety-nine percent of the tiny Band-Aids are never used by anyone, anywhere, at any point in time. Except for perhaps children, but only because they like to stick them everywhere, but that’s because they are being used as stickers.” While she talked, she lined up the items, first one way, then another. “All first aid kit makers should be sued for stupidity. But of course, what I really mean is that all dog abusers should be sued and jailed and perhaps swiped off the face of the planet, though very few people are brave enough to say that and mean it. I mean it. Rapists and child abusers and animal abusers. Gone. I’m sorry someone did this to you.”
She put ointment on the small round scars—some were healed and some were pink and new, and while she wasn’t sure what they were, she was sure they were sore and painful. Then she ran her fingers across the dog again, feeling for broken bones or other injuries, and remembered that once upon a time she’d wanted to be a nurse, which is what her mother had been. Too late for that now. She’d be dead of old age before she got through school.
“My emergency kits are the most perfectly organized and complete kits known to humankind. I have three of them, each unique. Here’s what you need, what every car should have.” As she listed each item, she picked it up and showed the dog, and then leaned down to put a checkmark on a list she’d made for each container:
Water bottle: You need a way to carry it.
