All The Things We Didn’t Say

He put on the rental station wagon’s turn signal, and we pulled down a street paralleling a river. To our right were closedup shops, an empty diner called Mister Donut, a crumbling church with ESUS SAVES on the marquee, a Knights of Columbus.

Beyond an industrial-looking, algae-green bridge was a hill lined with the kinds of trees I used to draw when I was little: long, narrow triangles, with tiny sticks as the trunks.

My father pointed to the hill. ‘We used to pitch our Christmas trees over that.’ He swung his finger toward the steel bridge. ‘And that’s where that movie was shot.’

‘What movie?’

‘I don’t know. The…the movie. The one with…with the ghost in it. I can’t remember the name. Didn’t we go to see it?’

He nodded toward a ramshackle house across the hill. ‘That’s where the Crosses live. We used to sneak over and jump on his trampoline. Once, he came out with a rifle and shot at us.’

‘Did he have any kids?’ I asked.

‘Nope. Hated kids.’

‘Then what was he doing with a trampoline?’

My father paused, then slapped the steering wheel. ‘You know, I have no idea. Maybe he was in the circus?’

Dear Claire. Guess what my dad had for lunch today? Scrapple. Wanna know what it is? Pig-shoulder pudding.

Suddenly, my father pulled over. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

At first, I thought he was talking to me. But he was gazing at a wet, dazed-looking dog on the riverbank. It wasn’t wearing a collar and had a big piece of fur missing from its side.

Other cars swished past, uninterested. Even here, I worried about them looking. My father turned the car off and stepped out. I shifted, uncomfortable. ‘Dad…’

He held up his hand. ‘I just want to see if I know her.’

‘How could you know her?’

‘All the dogs here, they mate with one another. Chances are I’ll know her.’

Steven, who’d been sleeping against the front passengerside window, rubbed his eyes and stretched. ‘Where are we?’

‘We’re here,’ I whispered. ‘I think.’

Steven looked around. The dead Mister Donut, a gas station that looked like it had weathered a recent dust storm. Two boys rolled out from behind a pick-up truck, carrying sixty-four-ounce cups of soda. They both had spiky blond hair and gapped, yellow teeth.

My father found the thin red leash and the packet of liver treats he always kept in his knapsack. When he opened the car door, the heat wrapped around us like mummification bandages. Prepare for record temperatures this week, the weather reporters had been declaring the whole drive. We’d been able to keep the signal for NPR for a while, but in the western part of the state we’d found nothing but country stations, which my father detested more than Lite FM. He had a whole stack of Jazz CDs to muddle him-and us, by default-through.

My father walked carefully toward the dog. It glanced at him out of the corner of its eye, the pink edge of its tongue darting in and out of its mouth. When my dad reached out, the dog ducked away. ‘Come here,’ my father whispered. ‘It’s okay.’ He crouched and put the treat on the ground. The dog sniffed the air. When my father made a sudden move, the dog backed away again. It was a dance until the dog ate the treat, trusted my dad enough to come close, and my dad placed his hand on the scruff of the dog’s neck. The dog flailed, but my father put one hand on its neck and the other on its belly and it began to calm down. He looped the leash around its neck, walked it to our car and stuffed it in the very back of the station wagon, next to our luggage.

Before he shut the hatchback, my father peered carefully into the dog’s face. ‘Do you know it?’ I called.

‘Yep, I know her,’ he answered. ‘I know her parents, anyway. Or her grandparents. Or, I guess it would be greatgrandparents. But whatever. She’s a Smitty dog.’

I was afraid to ask what a Smitty dog was, for fear it would launch another tale about roadkill or throwing a manhole cover through a car window or sledding down the hill on cardboard boxes, because no one could find the sleds. That was all my father had been talking about the whole second half of this drive.

The dog curled into a ball, whimpering. The car smelled suddenly like wet fur and the chemical that dogs give out when they are afraid. Steven stretched, his t-shirt taut against his chest. ‘Are we going to keep her?’

My father didn’t answer, but I knew what the answer was: of course we were going to keep her. We had three other dogs in a Brooklyn kennel: Fiona, an Irish terrier, Wesley, a cock-eared Doberman my father had coaxed to him just like he had with this Smitty dog, and Skip, a Beagle who had shown up at our stoop a few months ago just as we were walking out the door, as if it knew we were the people dogs came to when they had nowhere else to go. When my mother left, the apartment was too big for three of us. Now, whenever I entered a room, a dog was there. Whenever I used the bathroom, I found a dog sitting on the bathmat, drooling. If I opened the door to go into our building’s hall, a dog tried to come. For a while, we tried to keep things nice, but with three dogs, it was hard. Finally, we just stopped trying altogether.

‘So, do you remember any of this?’ my father asked. ‘Hasn’t changed a bit. I can’t believe it.’

He navigated over a roller-coaster sized bump. We’d been driving down the same gravel road for about five minutes. The road was uneven, with big pits and puddles, and there were spots where the gravel was strewn out over the shoulder, indicating a spin-out. ‘Last time you were here…I don’t know.’ My father scratched his head. ‘You were three? Four? It was Christmas.’

‘Maybe.’ I squinted, pretending like I was trying to remember, but this just looked like a gravel road. A squirrel in a tree eyed us suspiciously as we passed.

‘We were only here for a little while, then it started snowing.’ He picked at the side of his thumbnail. He was nervous, I realized. ‘There’s the creek,’ he added, pointing. ‘It’s clean enough to swim in.’

‘Since when do you say creek like crick?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t say crick.’

‘Yes, you did.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Well, so what if I did?’

I glanced at him, then crossed my arms over my chest. ‘I don’t think I could swim in a creek. Or a crick. And besides, won’t we have, like, funeral stuff to do?’

‘Yeah, but you’re missing out if you don’t try it,’ he said. ‘It’s much nicer than swimming in a pool. And Samantha’s about your age. You can swim together.’

‘I didn’t bring my suit.’

Finally, we turned into the driveway of a low-slung house. There were a lot of weeds in the front yard and a very, very old blue pickup truck in the driveway. Off to the left was a white-shingled shed; in front of it was a red, three-wheeled lawnmower, lying on its side. The house had a large, faded wrap-around porch strewn with all sorts of junk-an old television, another lawnmower, a couple of white plastic porch chairs, a dog bed and a fifty-pound bag of dog food, rabidly torn open from the center. There was a dog on the porch, too, eating straight from the hole in the bag. I heard the crick out back, rushing. It could never be clean enough to swim in. My stomach started to hurt.

Dear Claire. Actually, a picture would have said way more than words.

A girl was sitting on the porch swing. She had long brown hair, and her old jeans hung loosely on her hips. She narrowed her eyes when she saw us but made no effort to get up. ‘We can’t see the body until after three,’ she shouted. ‘Just so you know.’

My father opened his door and climbed out. ‘You remember Samantha, don’t you, Summer? She’s Skip’s sister’s kid’s kid. Your second cousin.’

‘My name isn’t Samantha anymore.’ The girl didn’t move. ‘It’s Sword now.’

‘Ah. Well. Hello, Sword.’ My father, surprisingly, didn’t miss a beat.

Samantha-Sword-snorted. My father told me on the way here that Samantha’s parents died in a fire nine months ago, and she’d been living here with my now-dead grandmother. Stella, my great-aunt, lived here too, having moved from her own house into this one when my grandmother’s health began to decline. This, at least, was what Stella told us on the phone a few months ago, when she suggested that my father come see my grandmother before she passed. But my father didn’t. This was the first time he’d been back here in years.

My father took a few steps away from the car, squinting into the backyard. ‘Where’s the boat?’

‘Ruth sold it,’ Samantha yelled, starting to swing.

He frowned. ‘When?’

‘I don’t know. When I came here, it was gone. She said she sold it to spite you.’ Samantha smiled greedily. I expected her teeth to be gnarled, yellow, overlapping, but they were beautifully straight and white.

My father ran his hand through his hair. ‘Huh.’