Juice gives him the dog, and Jim talks directly to it.
“You know, Human Princess, I remember when my sister bought you,” Jim says. “She was so excited that I remember thinking, Wow, that’s real love, you know? When you get that excited by the thought of making someone else happy. So thank you for making my niece happy.”
“Dad?” Juice asks. “Your turn.”
Gary looks startled. But he comes forward. He takes the dog in his hands. He is quiet for a moment.
“Jim is right. We were very excited to bring you home to Juice,” Gary says. “We knew you’d be a great dog and you were. Thank you for keeping my daughter company all these years. Thank you for being here when—”
Then Gary pauses, looks down, as if he’s about to cry. Phoebe looks over at Lila, who is unreadable in this moment, with her head down, her hands in her lap like she’s at church—though Phoebe already knows Lila well enough to imagine what she’ll say later.
Jim pats Gary on the back. Eventually, Gary composes himself. Chokes out the final few words.
“Anyway. We really appreciate that, little fella. Rest in peace.”
Gary wraps the dog up in a napkin like it’s a soldier. Hands Human Princess to Phoebe, which makes her feel like the girl’s mother, who should have some words, too.
“Thank you,” Phoebe says to Juice’s dog, but also to Harry.
Thank you for keeping us company. Thank you for being the only witness to our marriage. Thank you for always waiting for us in the mornings outside our bedroom door, and especially that night you sat outside the shower, keeping careful watch. Because Harry always knew when something was wrong. And something was very wrong—Phoebe was ten weeks pregnant and she was bleeding. Look at the blood, she kept saying—and Matt brought her to the shower, put his hands between her legs, as if to catch it. Or maybe to just to feel it. To be a part of it. After, Harry followed them silently to the bed, and Matt curled around Phoebe, and Phoebe curled around Harry.
“I really loved you,” Phoebe says, because now that the horror of it is over, Phoebe can feel the good part—this love for her little family, the one she had and the one she never will have. It is so strong, it makes her sob momentarily in her hands. Nobody says a thing, except Juice.
“Did you like, know my dog?” Juice asks.
Phoebe laughs. They all laugh. Phoebe wipes her tears and looks up to see Gary returning her gaze, smiling.
“No,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t know your dog.”
Phoebe didn’t know the dog. Didn’t know her mother. Didn’t know her daughter. Didn’t even know if it would have been a daughter, but she imagined the girl so many times, how they would read plays aloud in the open field behind their house, because there would be an open field. Phoebe would make sure of it. They would take the girl out to the field, and teach her how to dance, how to skip. They would find frogs. They would go camping. They would tell stories at night and in the morning, too, and Phoebe would show the girl how to write the story down, bind the pages together with yarn, as her father had once showed her. She wanted to give that same feeling to her child. She wanted to teach her child how to create, how to make a lot of applesauce from scratch and harvest strawberries and when the child would fall asleep, Matt would make them strawberry cocktails and they would curl up and watch a terribly wonderful awful movie that they’d seen a million times, like Terminator or Dune or all the Austen adaptations.
This vision of her family sustained her through her entire marriage, through all five rounds of IVF. When she injected the drugs into her belly fat, she thought of the girl, her little fingers plucking the strawberries. She pictured these fingers so often, and so vividly, at a certain point, she couldn’t imagine them not existing.
But they won’t. They never will.
“Now we let her go,” Phoebe says.
“Should I just throw her in the water?” Juice asks.
“Maybe lightly toss,” Phoebe suggests.
“Goodbye, Human Princess,” Juice says, and as she holds the dead dog above the water, Phoebe thinks, Goodbye, Harry. She hears it inside her head like the final lines of Ophelia in Hamlet: Goodbye Harry. Goodbye daughter. Goodbye mother. Goodbye father. Goodbye husband. Goodbye, goodbye.
But before Juice releases the dog, Marla shouts, “You can’t actually drop it in the ocean! That’s littering.”
“It’s not littering, it’s my dog, Aunt Marla.”
“It’s plastic,” Marla says. “It’ll take millions of years to decompose.”
“Decompose?” Juice cries.
“We do ask that you keep all your belongings inside the boat,” the captain says softly.
Juice looks at Phoebe as if she is making a choice about who to be, and Phoebe makes a choice, too.
“Go ahead,” Phoebe says, because fuck it. If she is going to live, she’s going to live differently this time. “Let’s have our funeral.”
Juice drops the dog in the ocean. When it’s immediately swallowed up by the white foam of the water, Juice actually laughs a little. It’s the glee of a child who has done something she shouldn’t, and Phoebe feels it, too, which is why she waits to get scolded by someone.
But the captain doesn’t scold. He starts doing something to the sails. The others have restarted their conversations. The funeral is over. They skid along the water, while the adults return to being wedding people on a boat. They drink like nothing happened. But something did happen. Phoebe can feel it as Juice leans into her. And Gary must feel it, too, she thinks, because he looks wistful, like he knows he just watched something important happen in his daughter’s life but is not sure what to do now.
“Hey, how about some ice cream?” Lila says, coming over to be a part of it all. She hands Juice a little sandwich from the cooler.
But Juice doesn’t want it. She holds it up to the light because she’s suspicious of even that. “This isn’t really ice cream, you know.”
“What do you mean, it’s not ice cream?” Gary asks.
“These things don’t melt. It’s not real food.”
“Well, you don’t have to eat it, I guess,” Lila says. “I just thought you might be hungry.”
“Well, I’m not.”
Gary gives Lila an apologetic look, and Juice puts the ice cream sandwich down on the seat next to her. Juice opens her phone and calms herself by reading the Wikipedia page for the Cornwall Inn. Lila returns to her friends on the other side of the boat, and Gary follows his bride. Phoebe can feel Juice’s whole body relax against her as she reads aloud.
“So the hotel was built in 1844,” Juice says to Phoebe. “By a man named Albert Schuyler. He built it for his mistress.”
Gary slides his arm around Lila, and the two of them kiss.
