Before the dogs, she had loved dressing. Beginning at age ten she insisted
on hanging every item of clothing in her closet, feeling that drawers were
for children. She clipped her underwear and socks, hung her thin cotton
bras and pajamas, savoring the clean metallic screech of the hangers as she
searched for a sweater or a skirt, plucking each item like a piece of
fruit. Now, to cover the bite marks, she wears the same three, long sleeved
shirts, light as tissue for the late-summer heat.

The bites are overlapping circles on her upper left arm, the perfect
imprint of the dog’s splayed open mouth. The skin is beginning to stiffen,
hardening to the color of a pale peach. She prefers this to the
deep red lines that had roped around her arm, a yellowing pucker around the
edges as if she were poisoned. She thinks of them as scars even though the
stitches were removed just three weeks before. She does her best not to
touch them — stopping at her elbow in the shower, crossing her arms by
holding onto her shoulders. She knows they are permanent, and even though
her mother sometimes calls them a cut or a scrape, she does not want to
pretend otherwise.

Downstairs, there are several balloons looped around the back of one of the
kitchen chairs. One was tied too loosely and has ascended higher than the
others, kissing the ceiling. Her mother turns to the sound of her feet. She
gestures towards the balloons, a hard smile on her face.

“It’s Anna, the birthday girl! Well, you don’t look a day over twelve,” her
mother says.

“That’s because I’m not a day over twelve,” she says, gifting her with the
same response she has said since she was seven.

Her mother serves slices of supermarket coffee cake, heavy and yeasted with
bright pools of jelly. She lists what needs to be done for the party:
cleaning the house, buying frozen pizzas and ice cream, renting a video.
Her mother examines her fingernails as she speaks, gently chipping off her
red polish. Anna finishes her coffee cake, having spooned the jelly onto
her plate. She drinks from her glass of orange juice, a line dribbling down
her chin.

They do not mention him, and have not since she returned from the island.
After the dog and the day in the hospital he flew home with her, but her
mother wouldn’t let him in the house. He said he would be staying south, in
Sarasota, and left a phone number. She heard them talking on the front
steps through her bedroom window, though the only word she could make out
was mistake, said so frequently it began to separate into barks.
It reminded her of when they lived together in the house in Marietta, their
voices carrying through the airless, humid rooms, the backyard thick with
mosquitos.

“You’re going to be seeing a lot of the girls for the first time this
summer, are you sure you don’t want to wear anything else? That jean
dress?” her mother asks, turning to Anna as she brushes the table clean of
red shards.

“It doesn’t have sleeves,” Anna says.

Her mother apologizes too quickly, barely letting Anna finish her sentence,
and begins to clear the dishes. Later, the girls will play a game with the
sinking balloons, popping them upwards with their fingertips. Anna will
think of her mother then, unable to let anything sink to the floor.
***
When Anna cleans, she is overwhelmed by the amount of hair that has fallen
from her head. She finds long, ash-blond strands in nests behind doors,
strewn across couch cushions, stuck to the side of the toilet bowl. When
she finishes she often opens the garbage can to stare at the accumulation
of it, unable to fathom that her body could grow and regrow in such
abundance.

She is vacuuming the carpet in the living room, her mother having gone out
on errands. She occasionally shuts off the vacuum, certain that she hears
the phone ringing. He always calls on her birthday, and she has decided she
will pick up, tell him he should leave both of them alone, and then pull
the phone jack from the wall.

When her father first told her he was going to live in Thailand, she had
not even conceived of the country. It was odd in its unknowability, how
distant it felt from Douglasville. When he finally convinced Anna’s mother
to let her visit, half a year after he moved, she told everyone at school
she was going to California.

What everyone wants to do, what everyone dreams of doing when they’re
seventy, I’m doing now,

he said to her on their first day on the island, sitting at a hotel
restaurant open to the air and the mosquitoes. He had a new tattoo of a
whale skeleton on his forearm.

They spent their days at the beach, moving their towels in concert with the
sun. He was living in a small, one-room cabana, and she slept on a cot by
the door. Their neighbors were young, careless Australians and freckled
Europeans who drank lager on their small wooden porch. She felt as if no
one in the entire country smiled at her except for the occasional Thai
woman. They would sit with one another around plastic restaurant tables,
laughing and drinking milky tea. All of the other tourists were sullen and
distracted in the heat, busy with their children or spouses. Her mother,
resistant to the trip, made Anna phone every day, even though the calls
would sometimes wake her in the middle of the night.

Some days he would disappear for hours to meet with other ex-pats, leaving
her a handful of pastel-colored bills. He said he was going to open an
Italian restaurant, that tourists would flock to it, desperate for a
reprieve from curry and papaya salad. In her time alone she would walk down
the town’s single road, sometimes stopping in the pharmacy to buy odd
flavors of potato chips. A teenage boy worked there who spoke perfect
English. He would ask Anna how her day was, though she was too embarrassed
to say anything, only smiling and nodding. She would eat the chips on her
father’s bed, liking their sweet tang, smearing the pages of her books with
their bright red coating. She never dared to venture into the nearby
jungle, and after having been asked where her parents were by a large
German woman, avoided the beach when alone.

She and her father did not talk much — he did not know what to ask her
beyond a brief quiz about school and her mother, and she was not used to
making conversation with a forty-year-old man. At night they would watch
the English language channel on his box of a television, a documentary on
the River Kwai, or a mother caring for her son with Down syndrome. He would
fall asleep instantly, and she would lie awake, her body convinced it was
morning.

The one thing they did talk about was the dogs. The animals would lie on
the road side, their bellies shuddering, and whinny outside the island’s
restaurants. One day some of them ran into the surf, rolling on the beach
afterwards, their fur thick with sand. He laughed at them, giving them pet
names: Rolf, Queeto, Jumps. She threw bits of egg to them, tossed them
sticks that they would chew like bones. You’re making friends here
, he said one day on the beach, when one of them laid a tangle of kelp at
her feet.

She tucks the vacuum back into the hall closet, bunching her hair in a fist
to prove that there is enough of it, that it is still thick as wheat. The
refrigerator hums its one low note, but the house is otherwise silent.

***

Anna sits drawing eyeballs in the kitchen, filling the empty pages of an
old school notebook. The house is clean and paper plates and cups are
stacked neatly on the countertop. Her mother is in a towel, pulling
bedsheets from the dryer. She is incapable of performing a single act, her
chores, her meals, her showers, always overlapping.

“Sometimes when you’re doing laundry it’s hard not to think about the fact
that you’ll have to wash everything again in two weeks, and again and again
and again,” her mother says, slamming the dryer shut. “How are you doing?”
she asks Anna, lifting empty ice trays from the freezer and turning on the
faucet. Anna can see a flush of freckles across her upper back. Her skin is
always redder after a shower, the water set to nearly boiling.

“Fine,” Anna says. The eye she is drawing has no lids and no eyelashes.
They’ve all fallen out.

Her mother looks at Anna as she turns off the water, staring at Anna’s long
sleeves. The night Anna came home she woke to her mother lying next to her,
touching the wounds with her fingertips. Now, Anna only lets her see the
stitches at doctor visits, and has made her swear she’ll tell no one about
them outside of Anna’s uncle in North Carolina. She does not want to be a
spectacle, fearing conversations in school hallways and bathrooms. Last
spring, there was a looping news story in which a three-year-old boy had
been bitten on the cheek and chin by a German Shepherd. His bottom lip was
split in two, like the top of a heart.

“Did anyone call while I was out?”

“No. Nope. No one.”

Her mother looks at the clock, picking at her bottom lip. Anna knows she is
thinking about him, just as she does when they pass the farm over by the
school, or eat at a restaurant serving fried catfish, or hear a Lyle Lovett
song on the radio. She will look off to the side, pressing her mouth to her
shoulder, or she will run her pointer finger along her eyebrow. If it’s
particularly painful, she will turn to the ceiling.

“You know, we have one last check-up tomorrow to see how you’re healing,
then no more doctor visits for months.”

Anna nods, running her pen along the spine of her notebook.

“I’m going to go put on some clothes — the girls will be here in about an
hour?” her mother says, her voice tilting upwards at the end, though it is
not a question.

“I’ll be ready.”

At the end of her first week in Thailand, several days before Anna would be
flown home, a woman had joined them at dinner. Her father told Anna they
were old friends, though he hadn’t lived in Thailand for more than five
months. The woman’s tank top was low enough that Anna could see where her
breasts dipped and turned from one another. She sucked on ice cubes and
told Anna she did not have to use chopsticks, that those were only left out
for tourists. Her people were not from Thailand, but from the water — gypsies, her father said, the woman brushing him away like a gnat.
The woman told Anna that amongst her people, to marry a man must build a
boat, every part with his own hands. He must walk into the forest without
his brothers, and not fear ghosts or animals. He must present his bride
with silver bracelets and great stretches of fabric as wide as a sail. Only
then can they sleep together, on the boat he has built, tethered loosely to
the shore.

It’s not that complicated in America
, her father said, winking at the woman. Anna excused herself and sat by
the fish pond, picking leaves off a fern, knowing she could tell her mother
none of this.

***

Before the dogs, Anna always felt the house was best when filled with
others. Each room is bare — the living room has one couch and one side
table, a stand for the TV, a solitary lamp bowing against an empty wall.
The kitchen is just a table and chairs, a clipped bag of flour on the
counter, her mother’s room a collection of laundry baskets and a boxspring.
But with the girls its emptiness feels purposeful, vast carpets for them to
cartwheel on, to splay across like starfish.

One by one, each girl is dropped off by fathers idling in the street, by
mothers kissing the sides of their heads. They pile their backpacks and
pillows in the corner, a heap of pilling cotton and pastel vinyl. They talk
over one another. They argue. They try to make the others laugh while
eating pizza, pushing out their top lips to make the crust rest under their
nose like a mustache. Anna does her best to act as one of them, but feels
pinpricks of uneasiness, pulling her shirtsleeves down over her fingers.

“How are you wearing long sleeves?” one of the girls, Simone, asks Anna,
rolling her t-shirt up over her belly, sticky with sweat.

“I’m not hot,” Anna says, though sweat stains are budding beneath her
armpits. An unusual moment of silence follows, the girls picking at crumbs
or refolding their legs. Her mother comes in from the porch, asking them
all to stack their plates, and they are back in motion, taking bets on
which boys will have grown taller by September. The phone rings, but it is
Thalia’s mother, saying she can’t come because of a nosebleed.

Anna has not been with them all together since her return, ignoring
invitations to swimming pools and any house with a dog. She had gone to the
movies with Sara, watched television at Kate’s, but did not tell either
what happened. They asked about California and she talked about pale
beaches, watching television in a hotel room, eating ice cream that tasted
just so slightly different, as if it was made with thinner milk or thicker
sugar. They asked about her father and she talked about how he was going to
open a restaurant, that she had toured kitchens with rows of gleaming
stoves.

At a young age, after he had left, she learned how rarely people noticed
when you withheld. You say enough, make a joke, ask a question. Dogs are just like people, he said one day, slowly peeling an
orange with his thumb. The dogs had found a colony of weaver ants and were
moving in all directions, lapping up sand with their tongues.

***

Anna unrolls stretches of toilet paper, piling it on the water-stained lip
of the sink. She lifts up her shirt and wipes down her stomach and lower
back, her armpits. The cotton is damp and mealy, but she knows changing
would just invite more questions. She turns on the faucet and tilts her
head into the sink’s basin, gulping the lukewarm water.

There is a knock at the door, rattling the cheap frame. Anna turns off the
sink, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

“I’ve been listening and I know you’re not peeing or anything. What are you
doing?” the voice asks. It is Sara, Sara who had been her closest friend in
fourth grade, who always wanted to speak on the phone even though she had
nothing in particular to say, carrying the phone from the bedroom to the
kitchen to the worn stretch of carpet in front of her family’s television
set.

“Nothing. I’ll be out in a second, okay?”

“Okay,” Sara says, but she does not move. Anna hears her feet shifting on
the wooden floor.

“Just come in,” Anna says, opening the door to the hallway, where Sara
stands like a bored soldier. Sara sits on the toilet, her long legs folded
beneath her. Anna digs beneath the sink for deodorant, finding nothing but
half melted candles and packs of dry sponges.

“I know why you’re hiding in here and why you won’t wear tank tops,” Sara
whispers, leaning close. “And I don’t understand why you won’t just talk
about it.”

“You know?” Anna asks, pulling her head from the darkness of the cabinet.
She feels her heartbeat directly beneath her arm’s puffed, scarred skin.

“My mother told me before you came over — she said it happened near some
beach, and that you were found by these Germans? I kept waiting for you to
say something, and then I felt like I wasn’t supposed to ask.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“No, I promised I wouldn’t,” Sara says, pulling at the roll of toilet
paper. Anna sits on the floor, feeling the cold tile with her hands.

“I don’t want anyone to know, because it’s nothing, and if I talked about
it that would make it seem like something.”

“If it’s nothing I don’t know why you wouldn’t just tell me,” Sara says,
rolling the toilet paper into her lap, folding it back and forth like
muslin. Anna is quiet, and it is difficult to tell if Sara will say
anything more — this was true when they spoke on the phone, long
conversations she would drift away from like a boat, only to insist they
keep talking when Anna tried to hang up. Beneath her fingers, Anna feels
skeins of hair, several threads dry against the floor. She looks across the
bathroom, the light catching more strands by the door hinges and the waste
basket. She brings her hands to the nape of her neck, slowly burying them
into the hair at the base of her skull, feeling for bare patches of skin.

“Let’s just go back in, I think your mom’s getting the cake ready,” Sara
says, throwing the toilet paper in the trash. Anna nods, and rises.

When she returns to the living room the lights are shut off. Her mother
emerges from the kitchen, her face softened by the glow of candles. There
is a half-moon of sweat from her hairline to her ear. She looks older than
him, somehow, though her face is clean and unlined.

“Haaa —” she begins, and the girls follow, circling Anna in a tight arc,
some earnestly trying to sing, others hitting notes higher than the
ceiling. Her mother takes measured steps towards her, not looking up from
the plate. All of them are smiling hungrily at the cake, and she can’t help
but notice their small, wet teeth.

***

The plates have been licked clean and the presents opened, an impersonal
collection of hair clips and nail-polish. Her mother had collected the
wrapping paper in a bright jumble, pushing it into the bin so fiercely that
Anna thought the kitchen tile would sink. Afterwards, she told them she was
going to her bedroom, and to knock if they needed anything. Anna knows she
will fall asleep with a book on her chest, waking in the morning to find
sunlight diffusing the glow of her bedside lamp.

Sara has disappeared into the others, even though Anna occasionally
searches her out, trying to tell whether she still has questions, whether
she will tell. It is dark, nearing eleven, and they have turned to games.
Some want to play truth or dare, others want to pull out the board games
stacked under the kitchen sink. One suggests light-as-a-feather,
stiff-as-a-board, and everything else is forgotten.

Kate gets chosen first, and they all gather around. Anna sits by her feet,
noticing a pale bubbled blister on her toe. Other girls sit by Anna’s side,
bare shoulders up against her cotton night shirt. Kate folds her arms into
her chest, and they all reach one hand into the middle, palms overlapping
palms, loosely pressing them together before they begin. Anna loops two
fingers beneath Kate’s calf, feeling muscle beneath a soft layer of skin.
The chant begins, and they slowly raise Kate an inch above the ground
before they all burst, laughing as she’s dropped back onto the carpet.

They cycle through the other girls, turning like a pack towards the next
one, until finally Anna realizes no one is looking at her. No one meets her
eyes, instead resting their chins on each other’s shoulders, jokingly
shoving one another away, looping another girls’ hair through their small,
delicate fingers. But she remains apart, untouched.

“Just me left?” she says, though she immediately wishes she hadn’t.

“Do you want to pick where everyone is going to sleep?” one says, and the
rest rise, scattering towards their duffles.

She realizes that of course, they all know. Sara had discovered it, and
then it spread like a small flame through dry grass. They don’t want to
touch her, not wanting to feel the hard, raised stitches beneath their
fingers, fearing she will split open. For a moment she thinks she may cry,
but soon realizes all she feels is a numb acceptance. It was foolish to
expect anything else — to expect girls not to talk to girls, mothers not to
call mothers. It was foolish to imagine her father would call, or that a
stray dog wouldn’t bite.

They unroll their sleeping bags in uneven, overlapping angles. They pore
over year books, taking pens to certain girls’ teeth and eyebrows. Soon
they put on a movie, several drifting off, bathed in the cool blue light of
the television. Eventually the room settles into darkness, two or three of
them laughing and telling each other to whisper in turn. Anna pretends to
be asleep.

The night before it happened, she and her father had gone to the south side
of the island to eat at a restaurant he proclaimed the best in Thailand.
Unlike other places they had gone, the restaurant was populated by mostly
Thai people, young men and women drinking beer in tall glasses, their faces
lit by the white light of their phones. The food was too spicy for Anna to
swallow, leaving her tongue hot and tingling. She was only able to stomach
the ice cream they served from a gallon tub. When they left the sky was a
deep ink, and she realized they would have to ride his motorbike around the
roping, unlit roads in the dark. She didn’t want to voice her fear, so
simply pressed the side of her face to his back, locking her hands around
his belly. The motorbike sputtered and wrenched forward, the front light
unsteady, flickering like a firefly in the dark.

At night the island was all dense, shadowy jungle, existing only in
outline, as if from a story book. She could not see what was ahead or what
was behind, and at first imagined panthers leaping from the ferns, men
eight feet tall stalking out from the trees, arms as thin as vines. But as
they continued she began to find the darkness soothing, the hum of the
motorbike reminding her of the car he owned when she was a small child.
When they drove home at night she used to lie in the backseat, eyes turned
to the sky, trying to guess how close they were to home by the number of
turns they took, the shape of the trees. When they got home, he would pick
her up as if she had fallen asleep. Here, she thought, it is the same sky,
her same father. And then the fear lifted like a ghost.

***

Anna walks over and between them, some of the girls curled into one
another, others with their arms stretched along the carpet, as if reaching
for something. In the kitchen, she lifts the telephone off the countertop,
unspooling the jack. She opens the screen door and closes it behind her,
sitting against the house’s warm brick, the base of the telephone between
her legs. She won’t wait for him to call any longer. She wants to tell him
that he cannot hurt her anymore, that the scars are healing and hardening.

The neighbors’ lights are on, illuminating the silhouette of the thorn tree
in Anna’s backyard, a tree her mother said Anna was old enough for them to
keep. If you were younger, I’d be worried you’d crash into its branches,
she said. Last summer, Anna decided she would pop each thorn off from the
bark, but found that they did not come off so easily, her thumb soon furred
with splinters.

She turns and looks back to the kitchen, the living room. The girls appear
to her as if on another plane, their sleeping forms as uniform and distant
as a mountain range.

As she picks up the phone, she finds he is already on the other end of the
line, as if conjured. Her mother’s voice answers his, and she holds her
breath, covering the bottom of the receiver with her hand. “I’m staying
with Jim’s uncle. He smokes all the time, and everything smells like smoke.
The couch I sleep on smells like smoke, and has parakeet droppings all over
it. But it’s a place to stay, not costing me much,” he says, and pauses.

She thinks for a moment that he can hear her, and perhaps he can, but they
continue speaking. She can tell he is outside, cars passing by him in
clipped roars. She imagines him standing in front of a small house, a thick
bristled palm tree by its door. They talk about Sarasota, about both being
unable to sleep. Her mother says she has been staying in bed until
midnight, and then walks through the house, circling each room, eventually
lying on the carpet next to Anna’s bed. She tells him when she rises she
often expects to find him sitting at the kitchen table, or wiping the
mirror clean in the bathroom. Not him, exactly, but a version of him,
displaced in time. Older, perhaps, with a shimmer of silver in his hair.

Though she has not told her mother, Anna has been dreaming of the dogs.
Certain nights, they are padding down the narrow, dimly lit streets of her
neighborhood. She can see them from a great height, and knows they are
coming for her, that they will jump through her window, pull the covers
back from her bed. She wakes up when they are in the garden, the dirt soft
beneath their feet, and finds loose strands of hair on her pillow, more and
more falling from her head. Other nights, they are all lying together in a
pile on the beach, tired but happy, their warm fur bristling against her
belly and back.

Her mother is crying. Not great sobs, but speaking in the measured way she
does when her lips are wet. Anna can picture her in her bedroom, sitting on
the edge of her mattress, the same position Anna found her in when he left
for the first time, six years ago. He is saying it was his fault, that he
is entirely to blame.

The morning it happened, Anna left just like others before it, choosing a
dress she was nearly too tall for, slipping on her sandals, now
well-grooved with her heels and toes. She ate a melon bread from the
convenience store, wrapped in plastic and light as cotton, and decided to
go into the jungle. She did not know what it meant to go down that road,
the one with the fern as large as a calf, its leaves brushed with fuchsia.
She did not understand what it meant to no longer fear the unmarked green
of the island, to not fear the dog that followed. She doesn’t know what it
means to no longer fear what he will not give her, to not fear the girls
asleep on the carpet, their breathing deep and heavy as ocean water.

“It was both of our faults,” her mother is saying, again and again.

Though they continue to speak, Anna decides not to listen. She gently puts
the phone back on the receiver and takes off her shirt, her polyester
training bra almost silver in the moonlight. In the dark she cannot truly
see the scars, their shape laced with shadow, and so she runs her fingers
past her armpit, feeling a part of her arm she has not touched since she
was in another country, following the arc of where the dog bit her, no
longer finding blood or teeth or bone, only skin.