The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater Read Free Book Online

about this key?” I asked, hearing something desperate in my voice, reaching for the littlest one she’d sifted off to the side, raising it up in the air and turning it. The key was silver, smaller than my pinkie, and it hung from a frayed red ribbon, and I said, “It’s beautiful, Mom.” She swiveled her head then, in my direction, her swivel all wrong, though, so slow we could practically hear the creak and crank of gears beneath the supposedly solid surface of her skin. And now she squinted up at me and then started shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I said, “What, Mom?” and she said, “So many keys!” and before we could stop her she, in a single motion, swept them all onto the floor, hundreds of keys falling from the table and crashing at our feet, a sea of keys, she with her face in her cupped hands now, crying softly. We all stood still, not knowing what to say, and then with one hand she started it up again, petting and then scratching her neck, digging deep in, the skin there flushed and beginning to bleed, and we all said stop it, but she wouldn’t even look at us, never mind listen.
    We gathered, then, in my oldest sister’s room while she called my father from the upstairs hall. My father came home from work, and we kids sat on the hall steps, listening to them murmur behind the closed kitchen door. Eventually my father opened the door, his face all haggard, and, as he walked up stairs, motioning for us to follow he said, “She’s agreed to go to a hospital,” and I said, “When?” and he said, “There’ll be a bed available in three days.” I didn’t quite understand that and saw in my mind a bed with wings floating aimlessly in the air, my mother’s bed, coming to us from across the sea, a trip that took some time.
    Now that Tiny was gone, or maybe now that she knew she was going away, or maybe simply because some switch had flicked in her brain—the darkness coming earlier every day now, and on the East Coast, where we lived, there was very little light in mostly gray days, a hard and bare time of the year when the burst of autumn is long gone but the snow has yet to brighten the browned-out beds where flowers still stand on their stalks, all shriveled—her outbursts ceased entirely and a different demon came over my mother, one I’d never seen before. I can’t recall who cleaned up the keys; in my memory they are there, they stay there, scattered and heaped on the dining room floor for years and years to come, but that could not be true. I know I woke up that night late, the clock clicking in my ear, the second hand sailing around its flat lit face, and I couldn’t hear her. There was something about the quality of the silence in the house that suggested danger, but despite that sense I got out of bed, magnetically pulled, it seemed, by some strings from the sky, making my way down the pitch dark hall, feeling for the switch on the sconce but then pulled forward before I could find it, suddenly the stairs beneath me, lowering me by levels, and then a line of faint light at the base of the closed kitchen door.
Do not open that door
, a voice inside my head said, but the strings on my marionette body did differently, or maybe to say they were strings is all wrong, and I’m talking about a terrible urge, the need to know, to crack the casing, to come to the red-hot heart of the matter, where scum and stink live.
Do not open that door
, I said to myself, but Lauren was layered and the commands coming from the crust of my mind had no bearing on the urges of my mantle, my core. On the surface of our land we have houses and highways, our intentions spelled out in what we’ve built, even as, beneath us, the earth has a whole other agenda, its giant plates crunching up against each other, the core licking.
    I opened the door and saw her almost clear as day in the iced light from a whole moon visible through the bay window, on the one hand just a woman