Freefall
by Marie Goyette
Winner, 2024 Fiction Contest
Maxi spots the body. Look, she says, pointing toward the ditch on the edge of Mr. Anderson’s property. But Ben doesn’t look, not at first. His eyes are trained on the road beneath his feet. Twice around the neighborhood, the woman said. The faster they’re done, the sooner she’ll let them back in the house. Ben pushed back this time. “It’s really cold,” he said. “Is it even safe for us to be out there?” The woman chuckled at this. “Just bundle up good as you can. It’s good for you, believe it or not. It’s good for all of us.”
“Look,” Maxi says again, grabbing her brother’s hand and forcing him to stop walking. “There.” She points again, and, this time, Ben looks. In the ditch, atop a mound of crusted gray snow displaced by a city plow, there’s the crumpled form of an animal. Its mottled black and gray fur is wet and matted. When Ben steps closer, he sees that it’s a dog.
“It’s not dead,” says Maxi. “It’s blinking its eyes.” She yanks hard on her brother’s arm. “Look.”
He peels Maxi’s hand from his jacket sleeve. “Stay here,” he tells her, and slides his tennis shoes over the mass of condensed snow, arms out for balance, and baby-steps his way into the ditch. He squats, positioning his body between Maxi and the dog.
“Stay there,” he tells her again, removing his gloves. Then, with a deep breath, he gingerly rolls the body. The metallic smell fills his nostrils before he sees the wound. In the glow of twilight, the blood smeared on the snow is crimson velvet. Ben prods the skin around the gash in its belly, hot to the touch. The dog emits a guttural warble. “It must’ve just happened.” He scans the landscape, eyes rolling over the ice-covered asphalt and the thicket of quaking aspens in the center of the neighborhood, their bark as white as the snow on the ground. The world is still.
“Is it okay?” Maxi asks from behind him.
He settles the dog back on the ground and strokes its fur, a carpet of tiny icicles. He scrounges for a collar around its neck, but there’s not one. “Have you seen this dog before?”
“Huh-uh.” When Ben glances over his shoulder, Maxi shakes her head for emphasis. Then she repeats her question: “Is it okay?”
Their mother is serving eighteen months in a state penitentiary after a prescription drug–fueled joyride that resulted in three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage to city property. Before it happened, around eleven at night, she woke Ben to tell him she was leaving to meet a friend. He was in charge of Maxi, she said. It was a night like any other. The shredded pitch of her voice, the savage strength with which she clutched his shoulder. How the size of her pupils made her eyes appear black. None of it struck Ben at the time as out of the ordinary, so he said, Fine, and rolled over, went back to sleep.
It was Maxi who answered the door early the next morning. The persistent ringing of the bell didn’t wake Ben, who was only jarred awake by Maxi repeatedly slapping his arm. Her voice: Ben, wake up. Ben, the police. Ben.
As he pulled himself out of bed, she said quietly, “I thought they were gonna say she’s dead.” He studied his sister’s flat affect, and wondered for a moment whether he might be dreaming. She continued: “But she’s still alive.”
Ben carries the dog in a way that Maxi can’t see his injuries. The wound oozes hot blood, saturating the front of Ben’s coat.
“We’re not supposed to come back yet,” Maxi says, jogging to keep up. “She’s not gonna let us back in.”
Ben knows she may be right, but infuses certainty into his voice and says, “She will. Or maybe she knows who he belongs to. She’ll help.”
“Doubt it,” Maxi mutters.
Ben’s hands in the dog’s fur are numb. He realizes he left his gloves, his only pair, back in the snow. The dog is heavy, close to forty pounds, and his right arm, supporting the bulk of his weight, already burns with the fatigue. But he sees the woman’s house up ahead, the porch light illuminated.
“It doesn’t have a collar,” Maxi says, looking it over. When she reaches out her gloved hand to finger the dog’s dangling paw, he flinches.
“Don’t,” Ben snaps at her.
She shrinks away from him, falling behind, and shame rises like bile in his chest. “Sorry,” he says, his tone still sharp. “Just, come on.”
Maxi runs ahead to try the front door, but it’s locked. “Don’t ring the bell,” he calls. “Just knock.” When he arrives, he eases himself down onto the top step of the stoop, letting the dog’s weight settle on his lap. Patches of ice on the frigid concrete press through his jeans and his arm is on fire from the strain, but the relief of rest is overwhelming. He pulls his hands into the cuffs of his coat. “Knock again,” he says, blowing out his breath.
The woman—her name is Suzanne, though she never invited them to call her that—has her own son, two years old. She makes Ben and Maxi go on walks when he naps. The first time, she explained it, saying, “It’s hard for people like me. People inclined to always give of themselves. It’s all I’ve ever done.” Here she looked down at them with a hard-knitted brow as if Ben and Maxi had forced upon her all her life’s choices. “You can give me the gift of solitude once a day, can’t you? I’m asking so little.”
Maxi raps again on the door. “Hello?” she calls out. “We had to come back.”
In Ben’s arms, the dog’s body jerks and then slackens. And again: a quick jolt of tension, and then release. “Shhh,” he says, massaging its flank with his fingertips. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
Beside the door, there’s a window looking into the living room. Maxi cups her hands against the glass and peeks through. “She’s coming.”
The woman whips open the door. She’s wrapped in a fleece blanket, her hair mussed. “You just left the house,” she whispers fiercely. “What did I tell you?”
Ben gathers the dog into his arms again and stands, drawing the woman’s eye.
“Sorry, it’s—” Maxi begins, but Ben interrupts her: “Look,” he says, shrugging his chin toward the animal in his arms. “He’s hurt. Do you know whose he is?”
The woman takes a juddering step back, into the house, but stretches out an arm to rest on the doorjamb, blocking the kids from entering. “You can’t bring that in here.”
“He needs help,” Ben says. “Can’t we take it somewhere?” The dog stiffens again, holding the tension in his body longer this time before releasing it.
“It’s just a mangy stray,” she says, disbelief cresting in her voice. She glances over her shoulder into the darkened house. “If he wakes up,” she whispers, eyes flared, “So help me, Jesus—”
“But what are we supposed to do with him?” Maxi asks, and Ben recognizes the hard edge of fury in her voice. Despite the doubts his sister expressed, she’d held hope the woman would help them.
“We should at least warm him up,” Ben says.
“I’m cold, too,” Maxi adds, rubbing her arms for effect. “We both are.” She looks to her brother, her eyes flitting over his exposed hands.
“Just, we should really warm up the dog,” Ben says. “Can we just come in? We’ll take him to the bathroom and get him cleaned up. We won’t make a mess.”
“Or a noise,” Maxi adds. “We’ll be so quiet.”
The woman tips back her head and emits a rumbling noise of frustration. “In twenty minutes, you two can come back inside, but not,” she says haltingly, “that animal.”
“Fine.” Ben speaks slowly to quell his anger. “Can we have a blanket at least?”
The woman stares at him for a moment before shutting the door. The deadbolt slides into place. Ben can’t help himself: Bitch, he mutters.
Right after Maxi asks, “Is she coming back?” the woman opens the door and pushes a Mickey Mouse beach towel into Maxi’s arms. Just as quickly, she’s back inside, securing the lock again.
Ben is suddenly profoundly tired. He tries to calculate how much sleep he got last night, how many times he was awoken by the toddler on the other side of the wall crying or calling for his mother, the sound of her voice reassuring him, his soft, sleepy murmurs. The number of minutes, or hours, before he finally got back to sleep.
Ben and Maxi sit on the stoop in a pool of fluorescent light. Ben drapes the towel atop the dog and gently tucks it between the dog’s belly and his own, doing his best to conceal his bloodstained coat. As he bundles the animal, he watches its face, attempting to judge its proximity to death. He knows it’s coming. That likely, no matter who they asked for help, or how quickly, the outcome would be the same. The dog whimpers softly as Ben prods the towel around its body, but all its tension seems to have melted into dead weight. It blinks slowly.
When Maxi nestles her side into Ben’s, shivering, he asks, “Is that coat warm enough?”
“It’s fine.” She rubs her hands together, blows into them.
Ben nods at her gloved hands. “Don’t lose those.”
“I won’t,” she says, leaning harder into him. “Is he gonna die soon?”
Ben knows nothing good would come from lying to her, so he nods. “Probably.”
Maxi stands suddenly, eyes alight above apple-red cheeks. “I know where we can take him.”
Ben’s and Maxi’s mother never took them to church. She’d grown up with strict Lutheran parents and when, at fourteen, she questioned the church’s teachings, her parents barred her from returning, and she happily obliged. Ben had gone once to church after spending the night with a friend. He’d liked some of the music, he remembers. And there was a girl in the back row of the choir with kinky blonde curls and dancing eyes who kept bumping shoulders with the girl beside her. She glowed like an honest-to-god angel. He thought about her for months after. But the droning congregation and razor-eyed pastor didn’t inspire religiosity in him any more than the urinal in the church bathroom.
After his friend’s mom dropped him off at home, he joked with his mother that he’d been afraid he was being recruited into a cult. In that moment, her joyous laughter, the way she threw back her head and reached out her arms to embrace him, he felt closer to God than he had at any point inside that church.
But the woman is a faithful Catholic and attends nine o’clock mass every Sunday with her husband and son, and now, with Ben and Maxi, too. And it’s become Maxi’s favorite part of the week. Their first time attending mass, Ben watched his sister listen to the priest—a gaunt six-foot-tall Nigerian man with a deep, buttery accent—with an expression of utter enchantment. She nodded along as he delivered the homily, during which he spoke of his childhood home in the village of Umu Oma. He described his neighbor, how she had a towering ube tree beside her house and would allow him and his sisters to climb the tree and search for ripe fruit, which his aunt would use to make jam to sell on the streets of Owerri. One day, he told them, he spotted the plumpest fruit he’d ever seen dangling from the highest branch. His sisters told him it was too high, but he ignored them. He just kept thinking about how much sweet jam this single fruit would produce. When he reached the top, he looked down at his sisters, chastising him from the ground, and the corrugated metal panels that formed his neighbor’s roof. The thought occurred to him: It would be very bad to fall from this height. He would land upon the metal roof. It was the first time he ever considered that he could die. But he dismissed the idea, because he was acting in service to his family. He had faith that God would allow him to reach the glorious fruit and deliver it safely to his aunt. No sooner had he plucked the fruit from its limb than the branch beneath his feet cracked and gave way. His sisters all screamed, but he wasn’t afraid. He knew God would keep him safe. He would suffer no consequences greater than not retrieving the fruit. Perhaps some scrapes and bruises, but no more. God wanted his family to thrive, and God wanted him to perform his duties with conviction and goodwill in his heart, no matter how frightening they might seem. He didn’t land on the roof. He landed on the ground, at the feet of his sisters, on a cushion of waxy green leaves. Both himself, and the ube fruit clutched in his hands, were unharmed. “Faith is a freefall,” he said into the microphone. “In order for God to save you, you must first believe that He will.”
In the car after church, Maxi whispered to Ben: I didn’t know any of that. His first instinct was to roll his eyes, and whisper back to her that the concept of God was invented by man as a means to keep people from murdering each other. But her eyes shone with new hope, and he understood that to contradict her would be to snuff out that light. The priest had planted a seed, and regardless of what Ben believed, how noxious of a weed may grow, it was not his place to dig it up and dispose of it. Me neither, he said.
St. Joseph’s is a ten-minute walk from the house. On their way, Ben tries to prepare Maxi for the possibility that the doors will be locked. She shakes her head. “The church’s doors are always open. Father said so.”
“I think that’s supposed to be a metaphor,” he says. “They won’t actually, literally be open. Or unlocked.”
“It’s both. It’s true and a metaphor,” she says with such certainty that Ben concedes that she may be right.
At Greenhill Drive, a sidewalk emerges out of the snow and leads south, toward downtown. The sidewalk is gritty with salt that crunches beneath their feet. The stability brings some relief to Ben, but because he’d been focusing on not slipping and falling on the snow-packed road, he finally perceives the deep ache of his left arm, which supports the dog’s weight. When he moves his right arm to bare more of the heft, the animal emits a proclamation of pain, the sound round and hollow like a bubble, emerging from the depths and erupting, vanishing.
“Sorry, buddy,” he whispers.
“We’re almost there,” Maxi says, and reaches for his paw protruding from beneath the towel, before retracting her hand, remembering.
When they turn onto Simon Street, the church is within view. It’s a dignified brick building with a square tower topped with a domed metal roof, a large iron cross affixed above the arched entryway. A streetlamp casts light over a small courtyard surrounding the entrance.
As they approach the building, Maxi shivers, her teeth chattering. Any other time, he would have given her his coat for a bit, just to warm up. Between his body and the dog’s, the blood has cooled. He realizes that it’s soaked through to his shirt, because the skin of his stomach is clammy as numbness sets in. If Ben could be anywhere right now, he’d be in a hot bath. That was their mother’s solution to a lot of things: physical pains like a stomachache or pulled muscle. But also other things: trouble with friends, confusing homework. If her kids were overtired, she wouldn’t suggest a nap. “Go rest in the tub,” she’d say. Ben eventually realized it was her solution when she didn’t have one. It was her own way of finding some peace for a bit. Suddenly he’s never wanted anything more than to be alone, naked in a tub of water as hot as he can stand, steam rising up and obscuring everything in sight.
As if reading his mind, Maxi says, “It’ll be warm inside.” She opens the gate to the courtyard and beckons him through. Soft light glows from the half-circle above the door. Maxi darts ahead, up the stone steps, to the large wooden door, and pulls it open. “See?”
Climbing the steps, searing pain shoots through Ben’s left arm. He makes a hushing sound--shhh—though the dog is silent. He realizes it’s been minutes since he felt the dog move. He takes some excess of the towel and spreads it over his coat as best he can, angles his body away from Maxi.
Once Maxi closes the door behind them, she sighs, “Oh, thank you, Lord,” her body slackening. Peeling off her gloves and knit hat, she says, “Doesn’t it feel amazing?”
Ben concedes that it does. The warmth begins to soak into his exposed skin. His body is racked by a deep expulsive shiver—the chill like a demon exorcised from his body. He revels in the hot blood filling his cheeks. But the pain in his arms has intensified again, as if the thaw has revealed its true nature. Through the towel, he gently prods the dog’s flank with his fingertips, and is surprised when he twitches and sighs. But he knows that if he holds the dog this way any longer, he risks his arms giving out, dropping him. “Sorry, boy,” Ben whispers as he wraps his opposite arm around his body, and eases the other, weary and tingling, out from under him.
Maxi looks at her brother. “It’s weird being the only ones here.” Then, watching Ben arrange the towel around the dog, “Is he okay?”
“He’s alive,” Ben says. Then, to shift her focus, he asks, “Do you think we’re the only ones here?” There’s a dimly lit hallway off to the right. While his eyes work to identify shapes in the darkness, Maxi approaches. When he turns back, her closeness startles him, and, without thought, he hikes the dog’s body higher onto his chest. He wonders how big the stain is now, how far it’s spread from the epicenter of where the wound meets fabric. The woman will notice the stain right away, he knows, and be angry with him. But Maxi is focused on the dog, staring into its face. With great care, she takes the dog’s paw and wraps her hands around it. “We have to do something,” she says.
The police brought the kids to their mother’s hospital room, where she was handcuffed to the bed, dozing, breathing heavily through her mouth. There was a bandage wrapped around her head and the right side of her jaw was swollen and beginning to bruise. Aside from her arms, the rest of her body was concealed by the blanket tucked tightly around her.
“Remember that she’s sustained a head injury,” one of the cops said from behind them. “She’ll heal up alright, but she might not be quite herself right now.”
Ben eyed Maxi in his periphery. Lately her emotions had been difficult to read. It came with puberty, he suspected. The realization that people judged you as harshly as you judged them. And the compulsion that resulted to conceal who you think you are.
When their mother opened her eyes and saw her children, she began to sob. She tried to reach out her arms for them, but the handcuffs restrained her. She yanked her right hand forward, as if the metal might give under her desperation, and yelped in pain when it didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking frantically from Maxi to Ben. “I didn’t understand, you know? I didn’t get it.” She wriggled in the bed to work herself into a sitting position, flinching at awakening pain. “I tried to explain it to them—you know, before?” she said and laughed, a high-pitched shriek. “I couldn’t see it. And it was right in front of my face.” Upright, she blinked at them. “But I get it now. Now I get it. And I’m really really sorry.”
The sanctuary is lit by an array of cylindrical hanging lights. In the back sits a five-tiered shelf of flickering candles.
“Somebody has to be here,” Ben whispers to Maxi. “You can’t just leave candles burning.”
But she ignores him and gestures to the front of the room. “Up there,” she says, and begins to walk down the aisle toward the looming altar, surrounded by clusters of blood-red poinsettias. In front of the altar sits a large white stone bowl: the baptismal font. Maxi waits there for Ben, staring at the surface of the holy water, iridescent beneath the play between the artificial light and the church’s many stained-glass windows. Ben knows immediately what she’s thinking.
“No,” he tells her. “For so many reasons, no.”
Maxi looks him in the face, and then calls out so loudly he flinches: “Hello?” And when he shushes her, she calls again, louder: “Hello?”
“Maxi!” Ben whisper-yells, looking over his shoulder to the entrance to the sanctuary. “Stop.”
“There’s no one here,” she says at a normal volume.
“Still,” he says, his eyes remaining on the entrance. “You can’t do this. You’re not supposed to.”
“I prayed about it. On the way here, I prayed about it.” She squares her shoulders. “And it’s okay.”
Ben works his hand under the towel and feels for the dog’s chest. He doesn’t know much about dog anatomy, but feels safe to assume its heart is in its chest, like their own. He places his palm between the dog’s front legs, flat on his chest, fur wet with blood. His withering heart strokes Ben’s hand. It’s been longer than twenty minutes. The woman will let them back in the house now. The dog won’t live much longer. He’s certain of that. “Okay,” he says.
Maxi lifts the bundled dog from his arms, her eyes slipping over his gray coat turned brown. The profound relief in his arms transcends bodily sensation and fills his soul momentarily with hope. And for as long, he thinks he understands why Maxi feels the way she does about this place.
“You got him?” Ben asks. Maxi’s slight frame is overwhelmed by the dog’s size, but she holds him steadily. She nods, and then carefully turns the dog in her arms so that its head is over the font, and rolls the towel away from his body, works it out from beneath her arm and hands it to Ben. The bleeding seems to have stopped. She reaches a hand toward the water, but falters. “What do I say?” She’s whispering again. “I want to do it right, but—what do I say?”
They’d seen a handful of baptisms since attending St. Joseph’s, but Ben, seated in the pew, warm and sleepy in his coat, had never bothered to listen to the words. “Just tell the truth, I guess.”
She nods, resolute. “God,” she says, beginning slowly. “I’m here today because my brother and I found this dog and it’s hurt. My brother thinks he’s gonna die soon, and so do I.”
Ben feels himself reaching out and placing his hands beneath the dog’s back to absorb his weight.
“I bet he never did anything bad in his life, and he didn’t deserve to be hit by a car, or whatever happened to him.” She pauses, searching. “And I’m sorry if I’m not doing this right. There’s probably a lot I don’t do right.” She emits a breath, shakes her head and continues. “But I just want to ask you to let this dog into Heaven. And I hope I can see him again someday.”
Ben glances down at the water, which appears to ripple in anticipation. Maxi moves to dip the crown of the dog’s head into the font. While Ben continues to support his weight, she ladles water into her left hand and dribbles it along the dog’s body. Softly, she says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
There are footsteps, and a voice: “What are you doing?”
Ben and Maxi turn at the same time to see the priest, Father Adeyemi, striding down the aisle, toward them. He wears black pants and a black button-down shirt, his white collar. As he approaches them, Ben says softly, “We’re sorry.”
“What are you children doing here?” He looks at Ben, taking in his crusted, discolored coat, the stained towel draped over his shoulder, and then at Maxi, and down to the dog. Before either can answer, the priest says, “Were you trying to baptize this dog?” His voice, undistorted by the microphone, is plump and visceral.
“He’s hurt,” Ben explains. “We’re sorry if this is,” he pauses, “not okay. It’s just—”
Maxi interrupts him: “We found him in the snow. He was hit by a car, we think.”
The priest bends at the waist, squints at the dog. The familiar scent of cigarettes wafts off him, and Ben is overcome with the desire to be home, in the kitchen with their mother, as she chain smokes Marlboro Reds at the table, playing gambling games on her phone. Neither the warmth of this place nor his relieved muscles are enough to soothe him.
The priest’s face softens. “I understand why you came here.”
Ben knows that he doesn’t, though, and he opens his mouth to tell him everything: that they’re in foster care; the woman they live with wouldn’t let them inside the house. They showed her the dog and its injuries and she turned them away; she forced them to stay out in the cold with the dying dog. He imagines the priest telling this story in his sermon on Sunday. He’d never use her name, Ben understands that. But the stifled gasps of disgust and the searching faces of other congregants, she would feel that. Ben imagines rising from the pew after he’s told the story and pointing at the woman, declaring, It was her. The story is about her. He wants to hurt her. Maybe years in the future, he’ll write a letter to her son and tell him of his mother’s cruelty toward the dog. Toward Maxi and himself. How she wasn’t the kind and funny woman their caseworker described her as. She was nice to you, he’d write. But that was it. But he knows he has to be an example for Maxi, who is watchful in her silence. He can hold tight to that, his restraint. He’ll explain to her later, the importance of not succumbing to basic urges. Maxi is watching him. “We didn’t know where else to go,” he says.
Father Adeyemi smiles joylessly, his eyes flitting over the font. He reaches his hand toward the water, submerges his fingers, and pulls out a thin clump of gray fur, displaying it between his thumb and forefinger. “This is one of many reasons the Church does not perform dog baptisms.”
Maxi begins to speak, but the priest holds up a hand to silence her. “This is a special dog. I can see that,” he says. “But it is a dog all the same. The Church does not baptize animals. Any animals.” He fixes his eyes on Maxi. “This animal has no soul,” he says. “Not like you and me. It is unbound by Original Sin.”
“But can’t you—” Maxi tries again, but, again, he speaks over her: “Exceptions will not be made, I’m afraid. But I will bless this creature, and pray that its passage from this world be peaceful.” The priest discards the fur and submerges his fingers once more, letting the holy water drip like rain onto the dog’s head. “Bless you, creature of God,” he says, forming the sign of the cross between the dog’s eyes. The droplets remaining on his fingers trickle off and run into the dog’s unblinking eyes. Then, gazing up at the cross affixed above the altar, he murmurs a rapid phrase in a language they don’t understand.
In the courtyard, within the far reaches of the streetlight, Ben holds the dog. Ben’s body retains the warmth bestowed by the church’s furnace, but he knows it won’t be long before the chill seeps back into their bones. He’s not certain when the dog died, but he knew he was gone on their way back through the vestibule, when Maxi passed his body to him.
Does she know? Ben wonders, as Maxi strips the towel from his shoulder and tucks it around the dog’s body. His chest, beneath his damp coat, is first to perceive the cold, even before his hands. He watches Maxi take the dog’s paw, run a thumb over the smooth, ruddy nails. Then he notices their clean edges, how they must have been clipped recently. Again, he feels for a collar, but there is none.
“We should bury him,” Maxi says, “Even if he didn’t have a soul, he deserves that.”
Ben’s eyes flicker over her, his little sister. Her expression is serene. “The ground is frozen. And there’s snow.” He gestures at the strip of white lawns beyond the fence. “Also, you know that guy can’t know.” Ben is too tired for an argument, but a force inside him can’t let this go. “Just ’cause he went to God school or whatever. He can’t know animals don’t have souls.”
“It’s called having faith.” Maxi unlatches the gate and holds it open for him.
“I have faith in things,” Ben says. He remembers the golden choir girl, his mother’s breathless laughter. The surge of relief after sinking into a steaming bathtub. The cessation of sound as his ears sink below the surface. The thawing of his problem’s hard edges. The thought he has every time: As long as I can get to this feeling, I’ll be okay.
As they walk in silence toward the house, the cold slips beneath his skin again and extends its reach to his core so that he begins to shiver uncontrollably. His quaking hands, holding the dog to his chest, feel encased in gloves of ice.
As they step off the sidewalk onto their street, Maxi says, “So what are we going to do with him?”
Ben’s teeth knock together as he considers the question. “Let’s put him back where we found him,” he says, finally. “In case somebody’s looking for him.”
In front of Mr. Anderson’s yard, Ben gestures toward the shadowed ditch. In the moonlight, he can make out a shallow indentation stained with blood like spilled black ink. “There,” he says. His hands are entirely numb. He imagines the slightest tap would shatter them.
Maxi crouches down to look into the dog’s face. “I’m sorry.” She runs a fingertip up and then down his nose. “We tried.”
“You know,” Ben says, “if the priest was wrong, maybe you saved him.” When, after a moment, she doesn’t answer, he says, “You know?”
As he angles his head to better see Maxi’s face, a large cloud passes in front of the moon and the night unfurls.
When she finally speaks, her voice is as frigid as the still air: “Keep him in the towel. That way it’s easier to see him.”
“Okay,” he says, straining his eyes to appraise her expression, but he can’t even see her face. He hefts the dog’s weight higher on his chest, gently still, and steps onto the cracked surface of the snow. He takes small sliding steps to descend the wall of the ditch.
And then, her voice, softer, closer, floats down to him, “And that way the person will know somebody tried to take care of him.”
When Ben turns toward her voice, the movement alters his balance, and his right foot flies out from beneath him, and he falls, hard, on his elbow.
Maxi gasps. “Is he okay?” And there’s nothing Ben can do to stop himself from pitching his head backward, pushing shards of snow into his ears, and letting loose a shriek of laughter.
The last time Ben and Maxi saw their mother, a month ago when their case worker drove them two hours north to the prison, she told them that she’s trying to be more honest with herself, which means being more honest with them, too. “I don’t know when I’ll get you back,” she said. As she spoke, she furiously fingered the hem of her khaki uniform sleeve. “I don’t mean in the flesh, you know? I’m talking about here.” She flattened her hand and rested it, fingers still twitching, upon her heart. “This isn’t who I am.” Her voice cracked open, and Ben couldn’t bring himself to look at her. Instead he turned to Maxi, who was already looking back at him. He crossed his eyes and flared his nostrils in a halfhearted attempt to make her smile, and when she didn’t, he dropped his eyes to the beige epoxy floor, dragged his shoe across its slick surface. “I have to believe it’s gonna happen,” their mother said. “That you’re gonna let me back in. It’s the only way I can survive in here.”
Before Ben can catch his breath, Maxi is on the ground beside him, her own head in the snow, and she’s laughing, too. The moon has reemerged and bathes them in its glow. Once he’s caught his breath, he tilts his head toward her and says with mock seriousness, “The dead dog is fine,” which sends her into another fit of laughter.
“Hey,” she says, suddenly, digging behind her back. “Look.” She pulls out one of his forgotten gloves. She feels around until she finds the other one, and then shakes the snow from them. “Put them on,” she orders. “Your fingers are probably about to fall off.” Keeping the dog secure on his chest between his upper arms, he works his fingers into the gloves. The chilled material warms quickly against his skin. He rubs his hands together, and sighs, “Oh my god, that’s so much better.”
Maxi has propped herself on her knees. “Here,” she says, reaching for the dog. “I’ll take him.”
In the moonlight, Ben watches Maxi spread the towel over the blood-crusted snow, place the dog upon it, and swaddle him like an infant. She sits back on her haunches and stares at him for a moment, then leans forward to make the sign of the cross on his head, just as Father Adeyemi had done.
“Okay, Max, let’s go.” Ben rolls onto his side, awakening pain in his shoulder. With care not to fall again, he maneuvers his feet beneath him and stands. He reaches out a hand for Maxi. “She’ll let us in now.”
“Look,” Maxi says again, grabbing her brother’s hand and forcing him to stop walking. “There.” She points again, and, this time, Ben looks. In the ditch, atop a mound of crusted gray snow displaced by a city plow, there’s the crumpled form of an animal. Its mottled black and gray fur is wet and matted. When Ben steps closer, he sees that it’s a dog.
“It’s not dead,” says Maxi. “It’s blinking its eyes.” She yanks hard on her brother’s arm. “Look.”
He peels Maxi’s hand from his jacket sleeve. “Stay here,” he tells her, and slides his tennis shoes over the mass of condensed snow, arms out for balance, and baby-steps his way into the ditch. He squats, positioning his body between Maxi and the dog.
“Stay there,” he tells her again, removing his gloves. Then, with a deep breath, he gingerly rolls the body. The metallic smell fills his nostrils before he sees the wound. In the glow of twilight, the blood smeared on the snow is crimson velvet. Ben prods the skin around the gash in its belly, hot to the touch. The dog emits a guttural warble. “It must’ve just happened.” He scans the landscape, eyes rolling over the ice-covered asphalt and the thicket of quaking aspens in the center of the neighborhood, their bark as white as the snow on the ground. The world is still.
“Is it okay?” Maxi asks from behind him.
He settles the dog back on the ground and strokes its fur, a carpet of tiny icicles. He scrounges for a collar around its neck, but there’s not one. “Have you seen this dog before?”
“Huh-uh.” When Ben glances over his shoulder, Maxi shakes her head for emphasis. Then she repeats her question: “Is it okay?”
Their mother is serving eighteen months in a state penitentiary after a prescription drug–fueled joyride that resulted in three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage to city property. Before it happened, around eleven at night, she woke Ben to tell him she was leaving to meet a friend. He was in charge of Maxi, she said. It was a night like any other. The shredded pitch of her voice, the savage strength with which she clutched his shoulder. How the size of her pupils made her eyes appear black. None of it struck Ben at the time as out of the ordinary, so he said, Fine, and rolled over, went back to sleep.
It was Maxi who answered the door early the next morning. The persistent ringing of the bell didn’t wake Ben, who was only jarred awake by Maxi repeatedly slapping his arm. Her voice: Ben, wake up. Ben, the police. Ben.
As he pulled himself out of bed, she said quietly, “I thought they were gonna say she’s dead.” He studied his sister’s flat affect, and wondered for a moment whether he might be dreaming. She continued: “But she’s still alive.”
Ben carries the dog in a way that Maxi can’t see his injuries. The wound oozes hot blood, saturating the front of Ben’s coat.
“We’re not supposed to come back yet,” Maxi says, jogging to keep up. “She’s not gonna let us back in.”
Ben knows she may be right, but infuses certainty into his voice and says, “She will. Or maybe she knows who he belongs to. She’ll help.”
“Doubt it,” Maxi mutters.
Ben’s hands in the dog’s fur are numb. He realizes he left his gloves, his only pair, back in the snow. The dog is heavy, close to forty pounds, and his right arm, supporting the bulk of his weight, already burns with the fatigue. But he sees the woman’s house up ahead, the porch light illuminated.
“It doesn’t have a collar,” Maxi says, looking it over. When she reaches out her gloved hand to finger the dog’s dangling paw, he flinches.
“Don’t,” Ben snaps at her.
She shrinks away from him, falling behind, and shame rises like bile in his chest. “Sorry,” he says, his tone still sharp. “Just, come on.”
Maxi runs ahead to try the front door, but it’s locked. “Don’t ring the bell,” he calls. “Just knock.” When he arrives, he eases himself down onto the top step of the stoop, letting the dog’s weight settle on his lap. Patches of ice on the frigid concrete press through his jeans and his arm is on fire from the strain, but the relief of rest is overwhelming. He pulls his hands into the cuffs of his coat. “Knock again,” he says, blowing out his breath.
The woman—her name is Suzanne, though she never invited them to call her that—has her own son, two years old. She makes Ben and Maxi go on walks when he naps. The first time, she explained it, saying, “It’s hard for people like me. People inclined to always give of themselves. It’s all I’ve ever done.” Here she looked down at them with a hard-knitted brow as if Ben and Maxi had forced upon her all her life’s choices. “You can give me the gift of solitude once a day, can’t you? I’m asking so little.”
Maxi raps again on the door. “Hello?” she calls out. “We had to come back.”
In Ben’s arms, the dog’s body jerks and then slackens. And again: a quick jolt of tension, and then release. “Shhh,” he says, massaging its flank with his fingertips. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
Beside the door, there’s a window looking into the living room. Maxi cups her hands against the glass and peeks through. “She’s coming.”
The woman whips open the door. She’s wrapped in a fleece blanket, her hair mussed. “You just left the house,” she whispers fiercely. “What did I tell you?”
Ben gathers the dog into his arms again and stands, drawing the woman’s eye.
“Sorry, it’s—” Maxi begins, but Ben interrupts her: “Look,” he says, shrugging his chin toward the animal in his arms. “He’s hurt. Do you know whose he is?”
The woman takes a juddering step back, into the house, but stretches out an arm to rest on the doorjamb, blocking the kids from entering. “You can’t bring that in here.”
“He needs help,” Ben says. “Can’t we take it somewhere?” The dog stiffens again, holding the tension in his body longer this time before releasing it.
“It’s just a mangy stray,” she says, disbelief cresting in her voice. She glances over her shoulder into the darkened house. “If he wakes up,” she whispers, eyes flared, “So help me, Jesus—”
“But what are we supposed to do with him?” Maxi asks, and Ben recognizes the hard edge of fury in her voice. Despite the doubts his sister expressed, she’d held hope the woman would help them.
“We should at least warm him up,” Ben says.
“I’m cold, too,” Maxi adds, rubbing her arms for effect. “We both are.” She looks to her brother, her eyes flitting over his exposed hands.
“Just, we should really warm up the dog,” Ben says. “Can we just come in? We’ll take him to the bathroom and get him cleaned up. We won’t make a mess.”
“Or a noise,” Maxi adds. “We’ll be so quiet.”
The woman tips back her head and emits a rumbling noise of frustration. “In twenty minutes, you two can come back inside, but not,” she says haltingly, “that animal.”
“Fine.” Ben speaks slowly to quell his anger. “Can we have a blanket at least?”
The woman stares at him for a moment before shutting the door. The deadbolt slides into place. Ben can’t help himself: Bitch, he mutters.
Right after Maxi asks, “Is she coming back?” the woman opens the door and pushes a Mickey Mouse beach towel into Maxi’s arms. Just as quickly, she’s back inside, securing the lock again.
Ben is suddenly profoundly tired. He tries to calculate how much sleep he got last night, how many times he was awoken by the toddler on the other side of the wall crying or calling for his mother, the sound of her voice reassuring him, his soft, sleepy murmurs. The number of minutes, or hours, before he finally got back to sleep.
Ben and Maxi sit on the stoop in a pool of fluorescent light. Ben drapes the towel atop the dog and gently tucks it between the dog’s belly and his own, doing his best to conceal his bloodstained coat. As he bundles the animal, he watches its face, attempting to judge its proximity to death. He knows it’s coming. That likely, no matter who they asked for help, or how quickly, the outcome would be the same. The dog whimpers softly as Ben prods the towel around its body, but all its tension seems to have melted into dead weight. It blinks slowly.
When Maxi nestles her side into Ben’s, shivering, he asks, “Is that coat warm enough?”
“It’s fine.” She rubs her hands together, blows into them.
Ben nods at her gloved hands. “Don’t lose those.”
“I won’t,” she says, leaning harder into him. “Is he gonna die soon?”
Ben knows nothing good would come from lying to her, so he nods. “Probably.”
Maxi stands suddenly, eyes alight above apple-red cheeks. “I know where we can take him.”
Ben’s and Maxi’s mother never took them to church. She’d grown up with strict Lutheran parents and when, at fourteen, she questioned the church’s teachings, her parents barred her from returning, and she happily obliged. Ben had gone once to church after spending the night with a friend. He’d liked some of the music, he remembers. And there was a girl in the back row of the choir with kinky blonde curls and dancing eyes who kept bumping shoulders with the girl beside her. She glowed like an honest-to-god angel. He thought about her for months after. But the droning congregation and razor-eyed pastor didn’t inspire religiosity in him any more than the urinal in the church bathroom.
After his friend’s mom dropped him off at home, he joked with his mother that he’d been afraid he was being recruited into a cult. In that moment, her joyous laughter, the way she threw back her head and reached out her arms to embrace him, he felt closer to God than he had at any point inside that church.
But the woman is a faithful Catholic and attends nine o’clock mass every Sunday with her husband and son, and now, with Ben and Maxi, too. And it’s become Maxi’s favorite part of the week. Their first time attending mass, Ben watched his sister listen to the priest—a gaunt six-foot-tall Nigerian man with a deep, buttery accent—with an expression of utter enchantment. She nodded along as he delivered the homily, during which he spoke of his childhood home in the village of Umu Oma. He described his neighbor, how she had a towering ube tree beside her house and would allow him and his sisters to climb the tree and search for ripe fruit, which his aunt would use to make jam to sell on the streets of Owerri. One day, he told them, he spotted the plumpest fruit he’d ever seen dangling from the highest branch. His sisters told him it was too high, but he ignored them. He just kept thinking about how much sweet jam this single fruit would produce. When he reached the top, he looked down at his sisters, chastising him from the ground, and the corrugated metal panels that formed his neighbor’s roof. The thought occurred to him: It would be very bad to fall from this height. He would land upon the metal roof. It was the first time he ever considered that he could die. But he dismissed the idea, because he was acting in service to his family. He had faith that God would allow him to reach the glorious fruit and deliver it safely to his aunt. No sooner had he plucked the fruit from its limb than the branch beneath his feet cracked and gave way. His sisters all screamed, but he wasn’t afraid. He knew God would keep him safe. He would suffer no consequences greater than not retrieving the fruit. Perhaps some scrapes and bruises, but no more. God wanted his family to thrive, and God wanted him to perform his duties with conviction and goodwill in his heart, no matter how frightening they might seem. He didn’t land on the roof. He landed on the ground, at the feet of his sisters, on a cushion of waxy green leaves. Both himself, and the ube fruit clutched in his hands, were unharmed. “Faith is a freefall,” he said into the microphone. “In order for God to save you, you must first believe that He will.”
In the car after church, Maxi whispered to Ben: I didn’t know any of that. His first instinct was to roll his eyes, and whisper back to her that the concept of God was invented by man as a means to keep people from murdering each other. But her eyes shone with new hope, and he understood that to contradict her would be to snuff out that light. The priest had planted a seed, and regardless of what Ben believed, how noxious of a weed may grow, it was not his place to dig it up and dispose of it. Me neither, he said.
St. Joseph’s is a ten-minute walk from the house. On their way, Ben tries to prepare Maxi for the possibility that the doors will be locked. She shakes her head. “The church’s doors are always open. Father said so.”
“I think that’s supposed to be a metaphor,” he says. “They won’t actually, literally be open. Or unlocked.”
“It’s both. It’s true and a metaphor,” she says with such certainty that Ben concedes that she may be right.
At Greenhill Drive, a sidewalk emerges out of the snow and leads south, toward downtown. The sidewalk is gritty with salt that crunches beneath their feet. The stability brings some relief to Ben, but because he’d been focusing on not slipping and falling on the snow-packed road, he finally perceives the deep ache of his left arm, which supports the dog’s weight. When he moves his right arm to bare more of the heft, the animal emits a proclamation of pain, the sound round and hollow like a bubble, emerging from the depths and erupting, vanishing.
“Sorry, buddy,” he whispers.
“We’re almost there,” Maxi says, and reaches for his paw protruding from beneath the towel, before retracting her hand, remembering.
When they turn onto Simon Street, the church is within view. It’s a dignified brick building with a square tower topped with a domed metal roof, a large iron cross affixed above the arched entryway. A streetlamp casts light over a small courtyard surrounding the entrance.
As they approach the building, Maxi shivers, her teeth chattering. Any other time, he would have given her his coat for a bit, just to warm up. Between his body and the dog’s, the blood has cooled. He realizes that it’s soaked through to his shirt, because the skin of his stomach is clammy as numbness sets in. If Ben could be anywhere right now, he’d be in a hot bath. That was their mother’s solution to a lot of things: physical pains like a stomachache or pulled muscle. But also other things: trouble with friends, confusing homework. If her kids were overtired, she wouldn’t suggest a nap. “Go rest in the tub,” she’d say. Ben eventually realized it was her solution when she didn’t have one. It was her own way of finding some peace for a bit. Suddenly he’s never wanted anything more than to be alone, naked in a tub of water as hot as he can stand, steam rising up and obscuring everything in sight.
As if reading his mind, Maxi says, “It’ll be warm inside.” She opens the gate to the courtyard and beckons him through. Soft light glows from the half-circle above the door. Maxi darts ahead, up the stone steps, to the large wooden door, and pulls it open. “See?”
Climbing the steps, searing pain shoots through Ben’s left arm. He makes a hushing sound--shhh—though the dog is silent. He realizes it’s been minutes since he felt the dog move. He takes some excess of the towel and spreads it over his coat as best he can, angles his body away from Maxi.
Once Maxi closes the door behind them, she sighs, “Oh, thank you, Lord,” her body slackening. Peeling off her gloves and knit hat, she says, “Doesn’t it feel amazing?”
Ben concedes that it does. The warmth begins to soak into his exposed skin. His body is racked by a deep expulsive shiver—the chill like a demon exorcised from his body. He revels in the hot blood filling his cheeks. But the pain in his arms has intensified again, as if the thaw has revealed its true nature. Through the towel, he gently prods the dog’s flank with his fingertips, and is surprised when he twitches and sighs. But he knows that if he holds the dog this way any longer, he risks his arms giving out, dropping him. “Sorry, boy,” Ben whispers as he wraps his opposite arm around his body, and eases the other, weary and tingling, out from under him.
Maxi looks at her brother. “It’s weird being the only ones here.” Then, watching Ben arrange the towel around the dog, “Is he okay?”
“He’s alive,” Ben says. Then, to shift her focus, he asks, “Do you think we’re the only ones here?” There’s a dimly lit hallway off to the right. While his eyes work to identify shapes in the darkness, Maxi approaches. When he turns back, her closeness startles him, and, without thought, he hikes the dog’s body higher onto his chest. He wonders how big the stain is now, how far it’s spread from the epicenter of where the wound meets fabric. The woman will notice the stain right away, he knows, and be angry with him. But Maxi is focused on the dog, staring into its face. With great care, she takes the dog’s paw and wraps her hands around it. “We have to do something,” she says.
The police brought the kids to their mother’s hospital room, where she was handcuffed to the bed, dozing, breathing heavily through her mouth. There was a bandage wrapped around her head and the right side of her jaw was swollen and beginning to bruise. Aside from her arms, the rest of her body was concealed by the blanket tucked tightly around her.
“Remember that she’s sustained a head injury,” one of the cops said from behind them. “She’ll heal up alright, but she might not be quite herself right now.”
Ben eyed Maxi in his periphery. Lately her emotions had been difficult to read. It came with puberty, he suspected. The realization that people judged you as harshly as you judged them. And the compulsion that resulted to conceal who you think you are.
When their mother opened her eyes and saw her children, she began to sob. She tried to reach out her arms for them, but the handcuffs restrained her. She yanked her right hand forward, as if the metal might give under her desperation, and yelped in pain when it didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking frantically from Maxi to Ben. “I didn’t understand, you know? I didn’t get it.” She wriggled in the bed to work herself into a sitting position, flinching at awakening pain. “I tried to explain it to them—you know, before?” she said and laughed, a high-pitched shriek. “I couldn’t see it. And it was right in front of my face.” Upright, she blinked at them. “But I get it now. Now I get it. And I’m really really sorry.”
The sanctuary is lit by an array of cylindrical hanging lights. In the back sits a five-tiered shelf of flickering candles.
“Somebody has to be here,” Ben whispers to Maxi. “You can’t just leave candles burning.”
But she ignores him and gestures to the front of the room. “Up there,” she says, and begins to walk down the aisle toward the looming altar, surrounded by clusters of blood-red poinsettias. In front of the altar sits a large white stone bowl: the baptismal font. Maxi waits there for Ben, staring at the surface of the holy water, iridescent beneath the play between the artificial light and the church’s many stained-glass windows. Ben knows immediately what she’s thinking.
“No,” he tells her. “For so many reasons, no.”
Maxi looks him in the face, and then calls out so loudly he flinches: “Hello?” And when he shushes her, she calls again, louder: “Hello?”
“Maxi!” Ben whisper-yells, looking over his shoulder to the entrance to the sanctuary. “Stop.”
“There’s no one here,” she says at a normal volume.
“Still,” he says, his eyes remaining on the entrance. “You can’t do this. You’re not supposed to.”
“I prayed about it. On the way here, I prayed about it.” She squares her shoulders. “And it’s okay.”
Ben works his hand under the towel and feels for the dog’s chest. He doesn’t know much about dog anatomy, but feels safe to assume its heart is in its chest, like their own. He places his palm between the dog’s front legs, flat on his chest, fur wet with blood. His withering heart strokes Ben’s hand. It’s been longer than twenty minutes. The woman will let them back in the house now. The dog won’t live much longer. He’s certain of that. “Okay,” he says.
Maxi lifts the bundled dog from his arms, her eyes slipping over his gray coat turned brown. The profound relief in his arms transcends bodily sensation and fills his soul momentarily with hope. And for as long, he thinks he understands why Maxi feels the way she does about this place.
“You got him?” Ben asks. Maxi’s slight frame is overwhelmed by the dog’s size, but she holds him steadily. She nods, and then carefully turns the dog in her arms so that its head is over the font, and rolls the towel away from his body, works it out from beneath her arm and hands it to Ben. The bleeding seems to have stopped. She reaches a hand toward the water, but falters. “What do I say?” She’s whispering again. “I want to do it right, but—what do I say?”
They’d seen a handful of baptisms since attending St. Joseph’s, but Ben, seated in the pew, warm and sleepy in his coat, had never bothered to listen to the words. “Just tell the truth, I guess.”
She nods, resolute. “God,” she says, beginning slowly. “I’m here today because my brother and I found this dog and it’s hurt. My brother thinks he’s gonna die soon, and so do I.”
Ben feels himself reaching out and placing his hands beneath the dog’s back to absorb his weight.
“I bet he never did anything bad in his life, and he didn’t deserve to be hit by a car, or whatever happened to him.” She pauses, searching. “And I’m sorry if I’m not doing this right. There’s probably a lot I don’t do right.” She emits a breath, shakes her head and continues. “But I just want to ask you to let this dog into Heaven. And I hope I can see him again someday.”
Ben glances down at the water, which appears to ripple in anticipation. Maxi moves to dip the crown of the dog’s head into the font. While Ben continues to support his weight, she ladles water into her left hand and dribbles it along the dog’s body. Softly, she says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
There are footsteps, and a voice: “What are you doing?”
Ben and Maxi turn at the same time to see the priest, Father Adeyemi, striding down the aisle, toward them. He wears black pants and a black button-down shirt, his white collar. As he approaches them, Ben says softly, “We’re sorry.”
“What are you children doing here?” He looks at Ben, taking in his crusted, discolored coat, the stained towel draped over his shoulder, and then at Maxi, and down to the dog. Before either can answer, the priest says, “Were you trying to baptize this dog?” His voice, undistorted by the microphone, is plump and visceral.
“He’s hurt,” Ben explains. “We’re sorry if this is,” he pauses, “not okay. It’s just—”
Maxi interrupts him: “We found him in the snow. He was hit by a car, we think.”
The priest bends at the waist, squints at the dog. The familiar scent of cigarettes wafts off him, and Ben is overcome with the desire to be home, in the kitchen with their mother, as she chain smokes Marlboro Reds at the table, playing gambling games on her phone. Neither the warmth of this place nor his relieved muscles are enough to soothe him.
The priest’s face softens. “I understand why you came here.”
Ben knows that he doesn’t, though, and he opens his mouth to tell him everything: that they’re in foster care; the woman they live with wouldn’t let them inside the house. They showed her the dog and its injuries and she turned them away; she forced them to stay out in the cold with the dying dog. He imagines the priest telling this story in his sermon on Sunday. He’d never use her name, Ben understands that. But the stifled gasps of disgust and the searching faces of other congregants, she would feel that. Ben imagines rising from the pew after he’s told the story and pointing at the woman, declaring, It was her. The story is about her. He wants to hurt her. Maybe years in the future, he’ll write a letter to her son and tell him of his mother’s cruelty toward the dog. Toward Maxi and himself. How she wasn’t the kind and funny woman their caseworker described her as. She was nice to you, he’d write. But that was it. But he knows he has to be an example for Maxi, who is watchful in her silence. He can hold tight to that, his restraint. He’ll explain to her later, the importance of not succumbing to basic urges. Maxi is watching him. “We didn’t know where else to go,” he says.
Father Adeyemi smiles joylessly, his eyes flitting over the font. He reaches his hand toward the water, submerges his fingers, and pulls out a thin clump of gray fur, displaying it between his thumb and forefinger. “This is one of many reasons the Church does not perform dog baptisms.”
Maxi begins to speak, but the priest holds up a hand to silence her. “This is a special dog. I can see that,” he says. “But it is a dog all the same. The Church does not baptize animals. Any animals.” He fixes his eyes on Maxi. “This animal has no soul,” he says. “Not like you and me. It is unbound by Original Sin.”
“But can’t you—” Maxi tries again, but, again, he speaks over her: “Exceptions will not be made, I’m afraid. But I will bless this creature, and pray that its passage from this world be peaceful.” The priest discards the fur and submerges his fingers once more, letting the holy water drip like rain onto the dog’s head. “Bless you, creature of God,” he says, forming the sign of the cross between the dog’s eyes. The droplets remaining on his fingers trickle off and run into the dog’s unblinking eyes. Then, gazing up at the cross affixed above the altar, he murmurs a rapid phrase in a language they don’t understand.
In the courtyard, within the far reaches of the streetlight, Ben holds the dog. Ben’s body retains the warmth bestowed by the church’s furnace, but he knows it won’t be long before the chill seeps back into their bones. He’s not certain when the dog died, but he knew he was gone on their way back through the vestibule, when Maxi passed his body to him.
Does she know? Ben wonders, as Maxi strips the towel from his shoulder and tucks it around the dog’s body. His chest, beneath his damp coat, is first to perceive the cold, even before his hands. He watches Maxi take the dog’s paw, run a thumb over the smooth, ruddy nails. Then he notices their clean edges, how they must have been clipped recently. Again, he feels for a collar, but there is none.
“We should bury him,” Maxi says, “Even if he didn’t have a soul, he deserves that.”
Ben’s eyes flicker over her, his little sister. Her expression is serene. “The ground is frozen. And there’s snow.” He gestures at the strip of white lawns beyond the fence. “Also, you know that guy can’t know.” Ben is too tired for an argument, but a force inside him can’t let this go. “Just ’cause he went to God school or whatever. He can’t know animals don’t have souls.”
“It’s called having faith.” Maxi unlatches the gate and holds it open for him.
“I have faith in things,” Ben says. He remembers the golden choir girl, his mother’s breathless laughter. The surge of relief after sinking into a steaming bathtub. The cessation of sound as his ears sink below the surface. The thawing of his problem’s hard edges. The thought he has every time: As long as I can get to this feeling, I’ll be okay.
As they walk in silence toward the house, the cold slips beneath his skin again and extends its reach to his core so that he begins to shiver uncontrollably. His quaking hands, holding the dog to his chest, feel encased in gloves of ice.
As they step off the sidewalk onto their street, Maxi says, “So what are we going to do with him?”
Ben’s teeth knock together as he considers the question. “Let’s put him back where we found him,” he says, finally. “In case somebody’s looking for him.”
In front of Mr. Anderson’s yard, Ben gestures toward the shadowed ditch. In the moonlight, he can make out a shallow indentation stained with blood like spilled black ink. “There,” he says. His hands are entirely numb. He imagines the slightest tap would shatter them.
Maxi crouches down to look into the dog’s face. “I’m sorry.” She runs a fingertip up and then down his nose. “We tried.”
“You know,” Ben says, “if the priest was wrong, maybe you saved him.” When, after a moment, she doesn’t answer, he says, “You know?”
As he angles his head to better see Maxi’s face, a large cloud passes in front of the moon and the night unfurls.
When she finally speaks, her voice is as frigid as the still air: “Keep him in the towel. That way it’s easier to see him.”
“Okay,” he says, straining his eyes to appraise her expression, but he can’t even see her face. He hefts the dog’s weight higher on his chest, gently still, and steps onto the cracked surface of the snow. He takes small sliding steps to descend the wall of the ditch.
And then, her voice, softer, closer, floats down to him, “And that way the person will know somebody tried to take care of him.”
When Ben turns toward her voice, the movement alters his balance, and his right foot flies out from beneath him, and he falls, hard, on his elbow.
Maxi gasps. “Is he okay?” And there’s nothing Ben can do to stop himself from pitching his head backward, pushing shards of snow into his ears, and letting loose a shriek of laughter.
The last time Ben and Maxi saw their mother, a month ago when their case worker drove them two hours north to the prison, she told them that she’s trying to be more honest with herself, which means being more honest with them, too. “I don’t know when I’ll get you back,” she said. As she spoke, she furiously fingered the hem of her khaki uniform sleeve. “I don’t mean in the flesh, you know? I’m talking about here.” She flattened her hand and rested it, fingers still twitching, upon her heart. “This isn’t who I am.” Her voice cracked open, and Ben couldn’t bring himself to look at her. Instead he turned to Maxi, who was already looking back at him. He crossed his eyes and flared his nostrils in a halfhearted attempt to make her smile, and when she didn’t, he dropped his eyes to the beige epoxy floor, dragged his shoe across its slick surface. “I have to believe it’s gonna happen,” their mother said. “That you’re gonna let me back in. It’s the only way I can survive in here.”
Before Ben can catch his breath, Maxi is on the ground beside him, her own head in the snow, and she’s laughing, too. The moon has reemerged and bathes them in its glow. Once he’s caught his breath, he tilts his head toward her and says with mock seriousness, “The dead dog is fine,” which sends her into another fit of laughter.
“Hey,” she says, suddenly, digging behind her back. “Look.” She pulls out one of his forgotten gloves. She feels around until she finds the other one, and then shakes the snow from them. “Put them on,” she orders. “Your fingers are probably about to fall off.” Keeping the dog secure on his chest between his upper arms, he works his fingers into the gloves. The chilled material warms quickly against his skin. He rubs his hands together, and sighs, “Oh my god, that’s so much better.”
Maxi has propped herself on her knees. “Here,” she says, reaching for the dog. “I’ll take him.”
In the moonlight, Ben watches Maxi spread the towel over the blood-crusted snow, place the dog upon it, and swaddle him like an infant. She sits back on her haunches and stares at him for a moment, then leans forward to make the sign of the cross on his head, just as Father Adeyemi had done.
“Okay, Max, let’s go.” Ben rolls onto his side, awakening pain in his shoulder. With care not to fall again, he maneuvers his feet beneath him and stands. He reaches out a hand for Maxi. “She’ll let us in now.”