Peter wanted the dog back. He dreaded telling his daughters. He should sue the fucking dog-walking service—yes, he would. The increasing speed of his car as it hurtled down the first open stretch of the Saw Mill Parkway energized the prospect of the great sum of money he’d win in judgment against the pricks at the doggie dot-com. The thought of revenge and physical speed proved an intoxicating combination, flooding him with an expiatory pleasure he hadn’t experienced in months.
The absence of Alice’s mournful, fidgety presence in the passenger seat freed his mind to drift. Peter had done his best to distract her from the dog, although he hadn’t been able to convince her to leave the city for the weekend. She’d chosen to stay, to search for Maebelle and attend a pet-related meeting of some sort. He hoped he’d managed to conceal his relief that she’d chosen not to come. He’d done his best to make a show of his desire for her company just as he’d made an effort to be sympathetic in the present crisis.
How bored he was of Alice’s singular preoccupation. She’d been a wreck—doing nothing but search since the dog walker somehow had allowed Maebelle to slip out of her collar during a group walk and then, of all brainless things, allowed her to disappear down Riverside Drive Park amid the nepeta, drooping bleeding heart branches, and ragged, overblown irises. What kind of half-wit did that? The dog’s legs were all of four inches long. How fast could she possibly get away? The only grace he could identify in the situation was that he hadn’t been the one holding the other end of the leash.
Alice joked that she’d replaced the children with the dog. More like replaced their lost years of babyhood with the dog, Peter thought. Somehow she’d managed to further infantilize an inherently dependent toy of a beast. He liked the dog—even loved it, whatever that meant—but in the end it was a not overly bright mammal they’d chosen to coddle under their roof, treating it as if it were a small, precious human. Sure, his cool attachment was roughed up by Maebelle’s undeniable cuteness, a cuteness that both irritated and charmed him. A Dachshund-Chihuahua mutt, she had a compelling presence, some portion of which was due to big, soft eyes outlined in black. The liquid intelligence of these slightly protruding orbs framed a black gumdrop nose on a background of trim, tan fur.
He would have liked the dog better if he could have reconciled his disdainful jealousy. As it was, he suspected his response to the dog’s presence indicated some unresolved unpleasantness about himself. But damn it. The thing was continually on Alice—sleeping curled up in her bed, on her lap, trailing her around the apartment. Wildly annoyed by the constant kissing and petting, he didn’t dare acknowledge the deficiency her connection to the dog signaled. In fact, he would have been concerned for her psychological state if he hadn’t been quite so put off by the indignity of her puerile preoccupation.
The likelihood of finding the dog diminished every day. People stole dogs—especially exceptionally cute dogs—just as they stole money, jewelry, or whatever else they could grab. Without an owner, a dog was an object, as anonymous and desirable as crisp hundred-dollar bills blowing down the sidewalk. If only Maebelle were ugly or vicious or not quite so greedy for food—she’d practically inhale even a cheap treat out of a stranger’s hand. When he’d foolishly made this point to Alice, all she could manage was an enraged, That’s bullshit! What a mistake—did he never learn? If only he could practice what he knew. For a psychiatrist he could be surprisingly tactless.
On the first evening he’d helped distribute flyers. You couldn’t walk a one-mile radius around their apartment without seeing three dozen of the things.
If someone had her, they’d have seen the posters and decided to keep her anyway; the longer a thief kept her the more attached they’d become and the more unforgivable and suspicious it would be to return her. Alice must know this. She must be despairing. He thought about turning the car around to be with her—but didn’t.
The wine finally whittling at the burr of her thoughts, Alice read descriptions and assessed fabric content before selecting her size. Partial to leafy green and navy blue, cautious of dressing as a lamb when she knew she was close to mutton and yet not ready for Eileen Fisher–baggy old lady, her fifty-one years compounded the shopping challenge her considerable height posed. Even if she wasn’t actually buying, the clothes must potentially fit if the process were to give her any satisfaction. The virtual acquisition required less than possession but more than pure abstraction. The clothes and shoes and bags must be plausible purchases were she to decide to purchase them—always a possibility. But not even wine, an empty apartment, the tiresome BBC drama of Brexit unpardonably mixed with the devastating news of another Ebola outbreak overlain with repeated clicks of not-quite-complete acquisition could keep her from thinking about the dog.
How reckless it would be to pay a ransom, even with proof of life. After all, Alice thought, what is a reward for the return of a lost dog but an offering to pay a ransom. Sure, it was an extra inducement to give back a dog someone had found and then decided to keep. What it wasn’t was a way to motivate people to search for the dog. As tempted as she was by the possibility that it would speed Maebelle’s return, Alice feared her engagement in the shadowy economy. Paying a reward would complicate the happy ending she hoped for, clouding the reunion with the moral responsibility for motivating future abductors.
Her very ability to offer the reward when others could not inflamed her well-developed sense of existential hypocrisy, of how claustrophobically fucked the world had become. This claustrophobic feeling, since the girls left in the fall, had driven her to fill her waking moments with work, a realm in which she could apply facts gleaned from her research to arrive at conclusions that would advance knowledge. Knowledge. That seemed to be the one remaining absolute good in her world. The rest was too messy, awful, and complicated to order or contain.
Although Peter had made it clear he thought the ransom a waste of money—although one that he believed would ultimately not be spent and therefore not a waste at all—they could afford the $2,000. (But was it enough?) Peter had been hauling in a steady stream of patients for more than twenty years now, cramming them into neat forty-five-minute blocks from 7 AMto 6 PM five days a week. At the current rate of $400 an hour, minus the office rent and malpractice insurance, the take was enough to keep them comfortably afloat. Still, they were not above the woes and sorrows of their intellectual working class as they spent all they had on their European cheese, organic Icelandic yogurt, grass-fed meat, plus mortgage, maintenance, and college tuition. They didn’t even have a country house. Anywhere else they would have been flat rich; in New York City, they got by.
Alice dreamed she had her own money. What a humiliation it was not to contribute to their household income—sometimes she wished she’d never stayed home with the girls or that she’d been more aggressive in keeping up in her field. She’d been burdened by juggling their money even if she didn’t make any of it—Peter refused to log in to their bank accounts just as he refused to discuss bills, savings, or budgets. Even if she could afford the Gucci black leather open-toe heels with their playful silver horse-bit buckle or the Dolce & Gabbana ankle-boot stilettos in camel eel skin she’d added to her basket, where would she wear them? She’d lost track of herself entirely in becoming a thing she’d never dreamed she’d be. As much as the girls were everything to her, it was a dubious title she’d earned: mother. Worse, she’d traded without realizing she was making a lousy bargain. She’d never even know what she’d traded for.
She could have farmed the girls out—practically everyone in New York had a nanny. But she’d chosen not to. Sure, she’d completed her dissertation, she had her PhD—the girls were still infants then—but her progress had slowed as the reality of securing a position in her field grew more remote. Over the years she’d written articles and won a few small grants,