THE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING I managed to make it home one evening before dark. Opening the front door, I found Greta kneeling before the living room fireplace wrestling the heavy end of an oak log into the grate. She still wore her suit set from work and I could see the little trail of rubbish tracked in from the side door. She had just gotten home. I knew the mess of bark and pine straw would disappear as soon as she could lay hands on a broom. Household litter always offended her.

She was too preoccupied to hear me come in. I slipped up behind her, opened my mouth over her ear lobe and bit down softly. She turned her head over her shoulder and kissed me.

"Wasn't expecting you home for hours."

Her voice was thick and wavering from her bout with the firewood, but I knew she was pleased to see me.

"I'm playing hooky."

Mellie must have heard us because she appeared on the landing, swinging from the big rail and trundling down the steps. She wrapped her pink arms around my waist and planted a smooch on my belt buckle.

"Hi, Daddy."

"Hi, Pollywog. How was daycare?"

"Good. I painted a picture of Mommy and Bennie and me and you. Wanna see?"

"Sure thing."

She began to charge off.

"Mellie, hun. Don't forget to bring your coat down as well. You and Daddy can take Bennie for a long walk while I make dinner."

"Okay."

She thundered out of sight, the whole room booming from her hard child steps. Greta pinched a long match from the box on the mantle.

"What's the occasion?" she asked.

She referred to my premature appearance. For the past two months I had been designing an apartment building downtown at Bay and Bloor. It was one of those modern marvels of engineering intended to attract wealthy jetsetters to Toronto for part-time living. Because I was the juniormost member of the architecture firm on the project, I was regularly kept late while my colleagues knocked off early for drinks on Queen Street. With the project wearing on, Greta's frustration had been steadily mounting.

"We had some design problems with the electrical system. It was too much to get into this week so Mister Collier let me go early."

"Good of him to treat you like a human for once."

She struck the match and touched the little flame to the kindling. As soon as it took the fire snapped cheerily, summoning our big black Labrador Benedict from his nap in the next room. I reached down and scratched him behind the ears. He licked my wrist in appreciation. Greta had once been hesitant about bringing a dog into the house. She was proud of our hardwood floors and worried what would become of them once we brought Bennie in from a romp in the mud. I convinced her it would be good for Mellie to have a pet. It would teach her responsible caretaking.

"Baked ziti, would that be alright?"

"Scrumptious."

"Okay, take your time then. I don't feel like killing myself to have everything ready."

Mellie came back wrapped up in her red coat and white scarf. She called it her peppermint-candy outfit. In her hand she held her fingerpainting, a tableau of our family standing beside a house made of wooden sticks, our faces a scramble of vivid yellow and orange, our eyes made by the quick gouges of fingernails.

"It's very bright. I like the way you centered us in the picture."

"Daddy! That's funny."

"Why's that?"

"Mommy always says," and here she began a nasal mimicry of Greta, " 'That's so pretty, Mellie, that's just so pretty.' " She resumed her normal tone, "But you always find something different to say."

"Is that wrong?"

"No, it's just funny, Daddy!"

Greta shook her head and smiled.

"Give your mom a kiss."

"Mu-wah!"

"Okay, squirt. Let's go."

She latched the leash clasp to Bennie's collar and handed me the looped end.

Outside it was brisk but not yet cold. The golden leaves lay like coins along the sidewalk, beaten out of the trees by a hard rain that morning. Many of the puddles had already dried up from the steady north wind. However, whenever we found the smallest reservoir of stormwater Mellie contrived to steer us towards it and leapt in with both booted feet.

"Bullseye!"

Bennie wolfed. I snapped his leash in reprimand and we walked on.

"Do you really like my picture, Daddy?"

"Of course I do. It was very pretty. Just like Mommie said. Don't you think?"

"Uh-huh. Prettyprettypretty!"

She made a little hop each time she said the word.

"Wanna play Architect, Daddy?"

"Absolutely."

This was our occasional game. I pointed to a house or an aspect of it and she supplied me with its proper name. Even at four and a half she would never confuse a dormer for a cupola or a Tudor for a Cape Cod. She once told me she imagined each of the homes like faces and learned their individual characters. When she understood that, she would always know the right word. It was the same way, she said, she learned the names of everyone at the family reunion the past summer. The personality first, and then the word other people made up to capture it. In both cases, the incentive of chocolate seemed to have been a great help.

When it began to grow dark I turned down Wychwood Road so we could let Bennie off leash at the dog park to run off whatever housebound idleness he still harbored. The park was a semi-enclosed space that had once housed the repair facilities for the city's streetcars. A gentrification movement a few years earlier had resulted in the city's decision to convert the abandoned area into something more picturesque, some quiet space of greenery amid the the urban gridwork of noisy thoroughfares. The only sign now of the park's former function was a pair of vestigial streetcar tracks that curled from the center of the road and stopped dead at the sidewalk.

Mutts and purebreds circled and gamboled in the protected confines of the park while their owners chatted with one another off to the side. I led Bennie a few steps in off the sidewalk and depressed the swinging latch on his silver collar ring. He snapped his head back at me in gratitude before plunging into the hurricane of sociable barks and mock growls. Mellie swung her arms out to the side and began turning in slow, elliptical circles while she made raspberry fart sounds with her lips. This was the secret propulsion of her imaginary airplane. I watched her for a minute, and seeing she had no intention of coming in for a landing any time soon, I decided to take a seat on one of the empty benches.

One old German Shepherd I knew to be named Chief was cast down beneath a small Cyprus tree. His belly was curved in and his bronze eyes watched me sleepily. His owner, a middle-aged woman with short mousy hair and a round face that looked like dough that hadn't quite set, waved shyly and walked over.

"I see he's as energetic as ever," I said.

She laughed.

"He's a decathlete."

Chief winked at me and lumbered to his feet, stretching arthritic limbs. You could see the years on him in the way he moved. He rolled his tongue over my fist and then bumped his head against it to coerce a pat.

"As anti-social as ever."

"Call him Howard Hughes."

Mellie buzzed over and ran her fingers lightly down Chief's bristles. He relished the attention.

I looked for Bennie. He was caught up in the larger running group of dogs, oblivious to Chief's intrusion in our small circle. We talked with the lady for a few minutes. She asked Mellie about preschool and the art projects she did during the day. She was an art teacher and she said she looked forward to when she could have such a lovely little girl as Mellie in her class. They would paint beautiful pictures together and share them with me.

Chief circled around the bench and lifted his leg to mark the bench leg. His owner uttered a half-hearted chide that Chief answered with a subdued bark.

That was what drew Bennie's attention. The seemingly harmless canine reply to idle correction. I have spent so much time since trying to remember if there was another sound in the simple reaction, the expression of autonomy that exists as a need even within the dimmest animal mind. Perhaps I missed some concealed note of menace threatening to ignite a secreted charge in the dog's heart. Some clear threat that stirred Bennie's protective instincts. But despite my search for disguised instability, there was truly nothing more than the surface, the quotidian, in Chief's bark. It was completely unremarkable. A casually uttered noun.

Bennie caught Chief with a full-chested blow in the older dog's vulnerable rear haunch. The kinetic force of his top speed and eighty muscular pounds struck the shepherd like a living cannon ball, bowling him stunned to the ground. For a moment we all thought that was it. A little too rough of a jostle by an overexcited animal. But as Chief struggled to his feet, Bennie whipped his strong body back and sunk his bared teeth behind Chief's neck. I shot my arm out for Bennie's collar but missed as the dogs whirled away in a locked pirouette. There was screaming. I chased after the pair yelling at Bennie to stop. My voice made a little sound that seemed far away even in my own ears.

Bennie and Chief fought and snarled with such speed and ferocity that it was hard to distinguish one from the other. The spins and rolls were continuous. Blood and fur slung free. Time avalanched.

Everyone in the park summoned their dogs to their sides with sharp calls. Some were leaving while a few stood at the periphery and watched. One dog would yelp when a close attack slipped past the other's defense, but each new hurt only propelled greater wrath. I could do nothing but watch as Chief and Bennie continued to gouge at one another with their teeth and toss their large bodies, two matching pieces in an engine of hate.

Only when exhaustion began to creep in did the combatants briefly release their hold on each other. Chief staggered back, his right back leg slightly buckling from some injury, old or new. The hair along his spine was taut and high and his eyes looked like bullet holes. He circled out, trying to gain distance from Bennie without turning his back to him. I took a few steps forward, holding the leash high in my right hand while I held my left out as a guard against any sudden turn.

As I neared I could see the rhythmic pumping of the dogs' breathing, their bodies like a pair of bellows working at a small, hungry flame. They clashed together suddenly. More guttural howls and clawed mud. Bennie's eyes caught me in a momentary insane glare, his teeth set and dripping. He rose high off the beaten animal, pushing back with his great, strong hind legs so that the entire length of his body was stretched full. I knew it was my only chance to separate them. I stepped forward and snap-kicked him square in the breast, the force of the blow lifting him clear off the ground, whirling him like a helicopter blade.

"Bennie!" Mellie cried.

She appeared from nowhere. Perhaps she had been just a few steps behind me the entire time, but I had been too preoccupied with the dogs to notice. She streaked toward him, her arms flung out to her side, no longer the wings of an airplane, but something broken and desperate. I believe I remember yelling for her to stop. Perhaps there were other voices too, maybe even as urgent as mine, but when I think back it's all just a muddied wash of her running legs and reaching arms.

His teeth just disappeared into her face. He snapped his strong neck to the side, wrenching Mellie's small body like an afterthought. I was running after them. I was trying to reach out and pull her back to me, but she seemed so far away, and she seemed to recede farther the more I tried to save her.


THE SURGERIES, the doctors explained, would have to build upon one another. It was not merely a matter of molding the surface back to its former shape. The entire substructure of Mellie's face had been wrecked. Bones were missing. Her nose was gone. Even with the most specialized procedures, there was no way to make her look like a little girl again. Our only goal was to return functionality in order to avoid further medical complications. Her breathing was the worst. When she slept hot breath poured out of her face like an opened oven.

We often had to cross over to the States to get the best doctors. Doing so ran up towering medical bills. Greta and I considered mortgaging the house, but eventually we decided to sell when I learned of a job opening with a smaller firm in Windsor. It was far cheaper than living in Toronto and was directly across the river from Detroit, which meant our drives to the clinics and hospitals would be shorter.

When it was time for Mellie to begin school, Greta decided to quit her job at the university and homeschool. She said she was tired of the long commute and threw her energy into decorating the spare bedroom of our rented bungalow with cutout giraffes, hippos and bears and a paper border of the alphabet stuck on the wall at eye level. She carried out the preparations with touching resolve. Each decoration was mindfully applied. She encouraged Mellie to help her with the room, to paste things on the bulletin board, but when she did Mellie would spread glue on the back of a single cartoon character and then leave it on the table to dry before wandering off to her bedroom, letting the glue solidify so that the decoration couldn't be placed on the board and had to be thrown away.

We tried to encourage her to remove her veil when she was alone with us at home. The psychiatrist said it would help her recover a sense of security within the family unit that might eventually ease personal identity anxieties as she grew older. When she refused, Greta suggested we all wear face coverings when we were together. She thought this might make Mellie feel more comfortable, but instead she cried.

Greta stayed up late at night reading as much as she could about cognitive development in elementary school-aged children. Often, she fell asleep on the couch in the livingroom with the reading lamp still burning. I would try to coax her to bed, but whenever I woke her she would say that she would be another minute. When half an hour would pass I would turn off the bedroom lights and try to sleep alone as best as I could.

One afternoon I came home early from work to surprise Greta. My mother had taken Mellie that week to the family cottage not far from Ottawa. It was in March and Greta's birthday was only a couple of weeks away. I had thought of driving her back up to Toronto for a special dinner at her favorite French restaurant. It was a lovely little place, all snug with dark tile and a cheerful fireplace. The waiters were tall, sociable men that were fond of doting on beautiful women. And Greta was so, so beautiful.

As soon as I closed the front door I realized something was wrong. I had grown used to the casual disorder in our household. So different from Greta's historical commitment to precision. I'd written off the lapse in housekeeping as a result of Greta spending so much time in the house. It was a work space for her now, all of those hours alone teaching Mellie. Perhaps it was easier for me to see it as something commonplace and harmless. Some gentle explanation for the terrible truth beneath.

This day, however, everything was different. There was not an atom out of place. The pine floors smelled of sharp disinfectant. The windows were streakless, as transparent as the lens of a home camcorder. The china was arranged in the hutch, rim to rim to rim.

I walked slowly down the hall and stood outside our closed bedroom door. The interior light slipped from the bottom of the door. A compressed filament at my feet. I closed my eyes, imagining myself coping with the bloody suicide scene on the other side of the door. Would I shed sanity like an old skin, raving and smashing whatever came to hand? With my world overturned so completely, could I find the inner strength to serve out the sentence of my life, maybe even managing to find solace in the hard fact of my fatherhood? So selfishly my thoughts ran. A fool standing there in the dark, imagining himself as the single subject of universal grief.

She sat at the foot of our bed, staring at me in the doorway, flanked by a set of matched luggage I hadn't seen her pack since our vacation to Europe years earlier. The cases were hard, neutrally-toned plastic that suggested something vaguely institutional and permanent. She did not say anything when I crossed to the corner and sat in a highbacked reading chair, trying not to look directly at her. I could just make out the first two lines of a handwritten note she had left on the small end table on my side of the bed. There was something about apologies and regret, but nothing really that answered my questions.

"How long have you been sitting there," I asked.

"A long time. Trying to decide."

"Decide?"

"Yes."

"What's to decide?"

"Everything."

She placed her hand on the the metal seam of the luggage, her fingers long and arched, as if she could gage the weight of the object by the merest touch.

"Will you do something for me," she asked.

"Yes."

"Drive me to the pound."

"The pound?"

"Yes. I want to adopt a dog. A puppy, I think."

"Are you sure?"

"No. But I want to see if I can do it."

"What about Mellie?"

"She's not here."

"But she will be."

"This isn't about Mellie. Besides, she won't care. She likes animals. She misses Bennie."

It was the first time since the day at the dog park she had mentioned him by name. The authorities had arrived within minutes of the mauling. A few hours later he had been destroyed. I had told Mellie that Bennie was taken to a special place where they kept dogs that misbehaved. She had begged to have him come back, but I explained to her that you couldn't trust an animal once it had turned, even if you loved him very much.

After Greta unpacked her bags, we drove downtown to the animal shelter. Being midweek, the place was practically empty. The attendant, a sad-faced young woman wearing a baseball cap, showed us to the kennels. When we entered, the room racketed with barks and howls bouncing off the empty concrete walls and linoleum floor. Greta stood before each cage and studied the dogs for nearly a minute before she would move on to the next. I gave her the space her mood seemed to demand.

"I think this is the one," she said.

It was a small, tan dachshund. His fur was the color of mulched leaves.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, let's take him home."


MELLIE WAS INDIFFERENT TO THE NEW DOG. When she came back from her grandmother's she bent over to pat him once on the head before disappearing into her bedroom. Greta tried to bring him into her and speak in funny voices as if it were the dog itself that was trying to communicate with her, a kind of pleading ventriloquism act, but it only made Mellie draw further into herself. Greta took the little dog in her arms and held him close to her breast, talking to him in low whispers as she went back to our bedroom and shut the door.

I was charged with potty training. Despite his small stature, the little dog exercised a disproportionate degree of stubbornness. He refused correction. Whenever he pissed on the floor, he would look up with the most pleased expression on his snout, tail merrily wagging. I tried a harsh tone at first. Later, I resorted to a resounding whack with a tightly rolled newspaper, but no matter what method of discipline I employed, he continued emptying his bladder with blithe disregard for household sanitation. Once, when I had finally had it and thought Mellie and Greta were in the other side of the house together, I picked up his little sausage body between my two hands and began to close them around his midsection until he began to struggle and squirm. His whine was guttural and grew more desperate as I tightened the circle between my touching thumbs and index fingers. I put my face right up against his nose and said, "How do you like that you little bastard?" When it looked like his eyes were about to pop out of his head I set him back on the floor and let him toddle off. I realized then that Mellie had come down the hall on the way to the kitchen, perhaps to get a glass of milk, and had seen what I'd done. She simply looked at me, curiously dead-eyed. She had not cried out or asked me why I had tried to hurt him. She had merely stood by silently and watched. I remember asking her how her studies were going, some light conversation that stuck high in my throat. She said nothing. She just walked past and opened the refrigerator.

After supper I put the little dog on his leash and walked him around the block. Though he was an indoor dog and I thought he didn't have that much energy to burn off, I wanted to get out of the house and I figured it couldn't hurt to take him along. It was cold and the low clouds looked like snow, but I hadn't made a point of watching the weather forecast that afternoon. Some yuppie friends I used to have in Toronto would already have their dogs in sweaters by this time of year. I looked down at the dachshund to see if he shivered. He seemed fine, though it was hard to tell with him in motion.

There was a little park on the way back. Not really a dog park because there was a jungle gym and a big sandbox for the kids there, but people in the neighborhood often brought their dogs around and let them off their leashes to frolic. No other animals were there at the time so I decided to give him a chance for some extra exercise. As soon as he heard the little click of the release, he dashed up the slope on his bandy legs, a quarterhorse in miniature. After reaching the top he whirled about and came careering back toward me, a great tonguey smile on his face. He yapped at me once, and when I didn't move, hopped up and slapped my shin. I jumped and took a few running steps. He leapt after me and pursued, his little paws like muffled thunder on the turf.

We ran in small circles, both of us making dizzy turns against one another's maneuvers, speaking through our bodies. The little dog was singing. His arrival in our house had never been real to me. Now, dancing with him on the grass, I sensed something beautiful in him, some springy durability that I had mistaken for dishevelment. His nature had asserted itself despite my weeks of indifference. Here, I realized, was a little creature with a fine heart.

After a breathy recovery, I slipped the leash back on his collar and we began to walk back home. Before we could reach the sidewalk, however, a voice in the park detained us.

"Excuse me, sir?"

It was a child's voice. A girl's.

I turned to see who spoke to us. She was no more than seven or eight, jewel-eyed with the lovely dark face of autumn. Her mother, a woman who looked too young to have a child this age, stood a few steps behind her, gently smiling with crossed, supervisory arms.

"May I pet your dog?"

"Ah, ah, ah," her mother warned. "What else do you ask?"

The little girl squinted her eyes and scrunched her lips while she searched her mental rulebook.

"Oh, sorry. Is your dog friendly?"

"Yes, he's very friendly."

"May I pet him please?"

"Yes."

She placed her small hand along the little dog's back, moving her fingers carefully along his flanks and spine, making sure not to ruffle his fur. She made little cooing sounds that caused the dog to close his eyes receptively.

"What's his name?"

"Mellie's Boy."

"Mellie's Boy? That's a funny name."

"He's my daughter's dog."

"Oh, she's lucky."

"Clara, come on, we need to get home to Daddy," her mother said.

"Okay. Bye Mellie's Boy."

"What do you say, Clara?"

"Oh. Thank you, sir!"

They exited on the other side of the park. I walked around with the dog a minute, pretending I didn't notice which way they went. After I had no reason to stay I started back. But the more I tried to put the picture of the little girl's face out of my mind, the more it came back to me. I wanted to forget it, and with each step I took on the concrete I drove my heel down hard until I could feel the pain racing up from my sole, into the bones of my feet, even as far as my hip. I wanted the physical pain to overtake the picture of the child's face in my mind, but instead it intensified with each step and I could visualize her more clearly as she aged, gaining the dimensions of mature beauty. I saw a thousand possibilities of who she would become splitting apart in my mind, fracturing and joining in various portraits. Each of them a strange and frightening kind of perfect.


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