The Mysteries by Marisa Silver

Author:Marisa Silver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

22

It is the last day in August, the day Julian and Jean have chosen to put up the puppies for adoption. The arrival of what has been much anticipated is an excitement that supersedes the event itself. Miggy wakes at dawn, pleads with her parents to get out of bed, get dressed, and make breakfast. Their slowness to do any of these things causes her almost physical pain. Her impatience makes her feel she’s already missed what hasn’t even begun.

Celeste drops off Ellen, who will ride to the store with the Brennemans and meet the new owners. While Julian and Jean line the back of the station wagon with newspapers, the girls sit on the grass. Susie lies beside them, licking herself vigorously between her back legs. Miggy has already decided to spend her earnings on the miniature combination safe she saw on the back page of a Little Dot comic book. Ellen has decided on a set of paints. She already imagines the circles of pure color arranged in two rows, the delicate brush in its trough. She will remember to wash the brush before switching colors so they won’t all turn into the same shade of muddy brown.

Julian heads into the house and returns with four puppies, each attached to a rope lead. Tiger will stay in the pen until they return from the store. The dogs jump and pull and get tangled in the ropes. Each time Julian and Jean settle them in the station wagon, one of them leaps off the tailgate. With every escape, Miggy and Ellen send up a cheer, the drama of the runaway puppies even more wonderful than a safe and some paints. When Jean and Julian finally succeed in loading all the dogs into the car, Susie lifts her head and lets out a small moan.

In a moment of astonished clarity, Miggy realizes that Susie is about to lose nearly every one of her children.

She does not cry. She does not complain. Instead, she grows calm, almost relaxed in the certainty of a fixed and unimpeachable idea. For the first time in her life, she understands that her parents are people distinct from her, and that, although she has always imagined she is the center around which they orbit, she has been terribly wrong. There is a tall, thin man with hairy arms, whose Adam’s apple is an outcropping off of which Miggy sometimes imagines miniature Alpinists falling, their final screams of desperation swallowed up by a white abyss. There is a woman wearing a peasant dress, standing in a perfect turnout, her muscular calves kissing. Mommy and Daddy, she says to herself. But the words that were once part of what she meant when she said the word me now make little sense. Both of these people are strangers, intent on getting rid of Susie’s family. Do they have anything to do with her at all?

“Let’s go, girls,” Jean says. “Get in the car.”

Ellen stands, brushes the grass off the back of her shorts, and walks over to the station wagon.

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