“Tender” by Sarah LaBrie

The girl is going to be late for school and Melora is going to be late for work, but Melora’s daughter is always late for school and Melora is always late for work. Melora sits in the kitchen and watches her daughter through the window. Above the girl’s head, clouds hang in the sky like pieces of torn-up tissue. A frost crept over the city last night, turning the pecan tree and the dead rosebushes that line the back fence to glass. When winter comes to Houston it is always a surprise. 

If the frost hadn’t come during the night, if the puppies had not been born and then frozen, if someone, if Melora, had thought to bring the girl dog into the house, nothing about the morning would have been out of the ordinary. The mutt is named Midnight, and the Schnauzer is named Sister. The dogs belong to the girl, are meant to be her responsibility. Right now Midnight is nowhere, probably in the garage, and Sister is lining her dead puppies up in the yard. The girl is kneeling over them, making a sound Melora can’t hear. 

Melora is out of her depth. She leans against the window and lets the whole house, for a minute, hold her. This house her mother bought and that Melora and her daughter aren’t big enough to fill, even with all the furniture Melora’s mother also paid for, crowded into the various rooms.

If Melora could have anything right now it would be sleep. Last night was not the first night the dogs have kept her awake with their barking. Twice now the neighbors have called the police. But what can the police do? The police cannot arrest dogs. And in this thought Melora finds some solace. It’s not as if they could have kept the puppies, had they lived. A death like this is more humane than the death they would’ve come to at the shelter, she tells herself. At least Melora’s daughter did not have time to grow attached. One less thing Melora has to feel guilty for.

The daughter in the backyard kneels over the line of puppies. For a minute, she seems to be praying. Who taught her that? Where could she possibly have learned to pray? At school? What can she think it will do? But then Melora sees that, no, she is placing the corpses in a dirty white plastic bowl Melora once used for gardening. After all three bodies are inside, she covers the bowl with a blanket and carries it to where the trash cans sit by the side of the house. A minute later, she is back in view. When the girl looks up and tries to meet her eyes through the window set in the back door, Melora looks away. 

The girl comes in and retrieves her backpack from its spot near the door, ready for school in her white ironed uniform and plaid skirt, brown knees pebbled and red from kneeling. She heads for the front door and climbs into the car. Neither of them says anything on the drive from their neighborhood of Third Ward to River Oaks, the houses growing bigger and the lawns growing greener the closer they get to the school.

Melora’s daughter in the rearview mirror is a little brown figure, stark and lonely, disappearing into the white limestone building that houses St. Joseph’s first through fifth grades. Mrs. Bellingham, manning the carpool lane, waves at Melora, angling her head down into the truck. Mrs. Bellingham is white, of course, like every other teacher at St. Joseph’s, and her dark lipstick has dried in such a way that her mouth looks lined with blood. “A reminder, Melora,” Mrs. Bellingham says. “We do ask that all parents drop off and pick their children up on time.” 

For the past few days, Melora has arrived to pick up the girl later and later, she knows. It is not her fault. She teaches nights at the nursing college and works full days at the hospital. She falls asleep sometimes in the afternoon. She leaves her phone on silent so she can sleep. This is not a crime. So why is Mrs. Bellingham looking at her like she has committed one? Mrs. Bellingham probably has a rich husband. Mrs. Bellingham probably doesn’t have to teach at all. She tries to imagine what, exactly, Mrs. Bellingham is thinking and she wonders what she would have said if she had seen the puppies, frozen and lying in a line on the concrete of the driveway. She imagines Mrs. Bellingham yelling at her, and—in a wild, hallucinatory flash—the girl, standing beside her, laughing, or yelling too. She raises the automatic window fast enough that Mrs. Bellingham has to yank her head out of the car and step back awkwardly onto the sidewalk, letting out a little coo. Melora accelerates down the carpool lane, and out through the iron gates, back onto the street.

At the hospital, Melora visits each of her patients, adjusting medication and cleaning bedpans until she gets to Mr. Lowery, the old man who reminds her of her father, or what her father might have become if he had not died when Melora was fourteen. He tells Melora she looks beautiful and asks her how she is doing and for one wavery moment, Melora almost tells him, but then a spray of canned laughter interrupts and Melora has to reach over Mr. Lowery to mute the television and be a nurse again.

Mr. Lowery has a pressure sore on his ankle that widens each day, a pit some invisible force works at, diligently digging every night. The skin around it sags like the peel of a rotting fruit. There is nothing the doctors can do that won’t damage Mr. Lowery further. Mr. Lowery jokes that he is going to die and when the nurses tell him of course he’s not, he says of course I am, and so are you. Never get old, he says to Melora every time he sees her. Not if you can help it. And Melora, every time, says that she will try.

Even though the fan is on, the whole room smells like shit. Melora will have to clean him up after she flips him over, and Melora is so tired. She can feel the tiredness like a line of scummy water rising, climbing up behind her face and pooling in the hollows of her skull. She wishes she could describe this feeling to Mr. Lowery. She wishes Mr. Lowery were the one taking care of her, that she could lie down in the bed and sleep, her whole life someone else’s problem. This too, is something she wishes she could say to Mr. Lowery.

Instead, on the table beside Mr. Lowery’s bed, Melora has set out wipes, a clean diaper, a pair of latex gloves and an IV full of sodium chloride for flushing out the sore. “Mr. Lowery,” Melora says, “this won’t take but a minute. You know the drill. I’m just going to try to make you a little more comfortable.” 

Mr. Lowery doesn’t move. Melora waits and waits and her silence is like another person in the room with them. “Didn’t they tell you?” says Mr. Lowery finally. “I’m not to be turned anymore. I requested specifically not to be turned. No more for me. You go on and get out of here now. You don’t worry about me.” He looks, Melora thinks, guilty, like he knows he is doing something that will hurt her.

She knows this is written on his chart. That he no longer wants to be turned. His face has swollen to the size of a dinner plate, mostly, she thinks, because of the hospital food. His bottom lip hangs down open, pink and wet, almost to his chin. It can’t be comfortable, she thinks, to be inside that body. She wants to tell him she understands, how sometimes, even to her, the prospect of not dying seems worse than the prospect of dying. Instead, Melora talks about infections, about compassion for the patient with whom Mr. Lowery shares his room, a wrinkled old raisin of a man who barely makes a shape beneath his sheets. Melora talks about insurance, about how the hospital might not even get reimbursed for his care if he passes like that, about how then his daughter will have to pay even more. 

“The doctors can’t fix me,” Mr. Lowery says, straining to keep the wobble out. “I been independent my whole life. I went to war for this country. If you think I’m going to get my daughter up here to take care of me, get her to spend all my pension and all her money on a drooling, pissy old man, well, you’d be wrong. Not in this life.”

“My father died in the hospital when I was nineteen, and I just can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t known we did everything we could,” Melora says calmly. The truth is Melora’s father killed himself five years earlier, and no one seems to know why. Except maybe Melora’s mother who, if she does know, isn’t talking. “What about your grandkids,” Melora says. “How would your daughter feel if she knew we let you rot to death here? That you could have been saved and we didn’t? Don’t you think she would feel abandoned? Don’t you think she would wonder why?”

Mr. Lowery has closed up into himself like Melora’s daughter does sometimes in a way that makes Melora see red. Melora says “fine,” out loud, and now she is the one acting like a ten-year-old, on the verge of stamping her foot on the hospital floor. She takes Mr. Lowery by the shoulders and her hands sink into the old man’s soft flesh, like trying to lift up a big plastic bag of water. Underneath the fabric of his gown, his skin is thick and rubbery and smells like something sweet left outside too long in the sun. For a second Melora imagines lifting the bed up high and tipping it down so Mr. Lowery’s body slides to the floor. She pages for a volunteer. Mr. Lowery sits there, looking out at her through his twinkly eyes. 

The volunteer who answers Melora’s page is beefy and red-faced and too enthusiastic, a college kid built like a mailbox, building out his resume for med school applications. “Here,” Melora says, “you take the legs and I’ll get the shoulders.” Beefy grunts. Mr. Lowery starts to make a little sound, an injured animal’s keening cry and Melora lets him drop. He lands on top of both her hands, and she can feel the bones there crunch together through her skin. The pain flows so deep she forgets, for a minute, to breathe in through her mouth. His smell rushes up and layers itself over her face like a wet towel. The kid looks at her, uncertain. She spots a fresh patch of acne under one cheekbone, darkening his otherwise perfect skin and mentally readjusts her estimate of his age. Not a college student. A high school volunteer. She sighs. He looks at her with scared eyes.

“Can you please take hold of his legs?” Melora says. “I can’t do this by myself.” The boy grunts and bends over to grab the naked blue thighs. Melora reaches down again, beneath Mr. Lowery’s arms. The two lift together. When Melora straightens, she feels something snap in her back like a rubber band. 

“Oot.”

“What is it?” The boy looks at her, his face filled with a concern that makes her angry. What does he think he can do for her?

“Nothing.” The pain is screaming, electric purple. Melora can taste it like a hot penny on her tongue. She brushes a hand up against the base of her spine and holds it there, waits to be able to move again. Mr. Lowery has to be flipped if he is to be changed, but Melora is having trouble not just falling right down onto the tile, on her knees.

“Look.” Melora steadies herself against the wall and points to the medical equipment at the edge of the bed. “I need you to help me. See those wipes down there? Pick them up. Now come over here and”—she stops. She should not be doing this. She should page downstairs and have them send somebody else. But she can’t leave Mr. Lowery here like this, swimming on his back in his own filth. But Melora, Melora knows, is the only one he trusts.

“Now pull up his hospital gown and pull down his underwear. Yes. Like that. And push the sheets up.” Beefy looks at Melora like she is crazy. “I don’t want to hear it,” Melora says. “Please just do what I say.”

Melora tells him how to clean Mr. Lowery and nobody is more surprised than Melora when the boy does everything exactly the way he is told. He unfolds the diaper and lifts up Mr. Lowery’s legs, stretched and mottled as an elephant’s hide, then slides the cloth up carefully, as if Mr. Lowery were his own infant. He is skilled with his hands, as if he has done this before.

“Good job,” Melora grants. She pats down the tape on one side and then the other. “Other nurses work you this hard?”

“My uncle,” the boy says. “Before he died. Not old, but. Not so different. Got pieces of himself blown off in Iraq and lost his mind. When I have to do something hard, I just think about how I wish the doctors had taken care of him.”

“Oh,” Melora says, ashamed. Melora looks down at Mr. Lowery. She hasn’t thought about that. About what he was like before. The kid is putting all the tools back where they belong now, laying the instruments down neatly on the discard tray. Melora tries to push herself up and off the wall and the pain starts again, a train motoring up and down her spine. The boy sees her face and walks over to Melora’s side of the bed, lets her lean against his shoulder until she can stand up. He leads Melora along the wall and onto the short sofa near the window that looks out over the parking lot. Melora can hear the whine of the television even though the sound is off. She plops down on the plastic cushion. The pain is hot, heavy stones, swinging around in her sacrum. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he says. “Lie down.”

Melora puts her face down into the smell of rubber and bleach. He stands up over her and soon she feels his thumbs digging into the skin on her back, pushing the muscles around. She closes her eyes. His thumbs work their way into her flesh. The stones slowly break into little pieces and color makes its way back into the world. Melora starts to breathe again. He works the skin with his palms, massaging over the bone. Melora allows herself to sigh again, this time with relief and sadness because she can’t think of the last time anybody did anything like this for her. 

Behind her, Melora hears the door open and close. “What’s this?” a woman’s voice says. The voice sounds tired. “Who is that? Melora? What in the hell are you doing?” Melora keeps her eyes closed for one second longer, opens them then to see Mr. Lowery, silent, eyes focused on the ceiling, hand wrapped tightly around the aid button on the side of his hospital bed.

After her shift, in the nightless office space in the basement of the nursing college where Melora grades her students’ midterms, the fluorescent light is so bright it seems to be screaming. The midterm Melora gave was open book. A copy of the question sheet was distributed one week in advance of the test. And yet: One girl has still circled all the answers on her Scantron in green pen. Another used her answer key to spell out the word BICTH. No points even, Melora decides, for creativity.

Melora sets the sheaf of Scantron sheets down and wonders how many of her students are high at any given moment. It worries her, sometimes, that girls can wind up like this, that her own daughter may end up like this, carefree and dumb, riddled with the misguided belief that someone will always be there, that the world is just waiting to catch her. For Melora’s daughter, the reckoning will be worse. Her friends at school are those the world, more often than not, does catch. Melora isn’t sure if her daughter understands this yet. So far it has not been enough just to tell her. It has never been enough just to tell Melora’s daughter anything. 

Melora’s daughter never even asked for a dog, Melora remembers then. Both dogs are Melora’s mother’s fault, gifts she gave her to try to remedy the girl’s apparent, unceasing, sourceless unhappiness. Of course bigger than the problem of the dogs is the problem of the private school, another thing Melora’s mother pays for. If the girl is strange, it has, Melora knows, something to do with the plaid uniform skirt, the field trips to Big Bend, the country club tea parties and birthdays at fancy hotels. After all, rich people are crazy. They have to be. How else could they justify having so much when so many other people had nothing? All Melora wants is for her daughter to have a different kind of life, or to expect life more, to be prepared for life in a way Melora, herself, has not been. 

Melora reaches down into her bag for her vibrating cell phone. A text on the screen from her mother says she picked the girl up after school and dropped her off safely at home. The second she finishes reading this text, the phone rings, and later, Melora can’t help but wonder if maybe she hadn’t answered, none of what happened after would have happened. The voice on the other end is the same voice in the doorway, her supervisor. She wonders if Melora has a minute, and then sounds as if she wishes Melora had said no. “Listen,” says the voice. “I just wanted to warn you before you come in tomorrow. I think it’s only fair. There’s been a request put in for you, for a transfer.” A transfer, Melora knows, is the next step up from being fired. A temporary hold wherein she will be shuffled out of the hospital where she works now until a different one can be convinced to file the paperwork it would take to hire her.

It isn’t only the incident with the volunteer, the voice assures her. And it’s not that she is late more often than she is not. The problem is Mr. Lowery. He specifically requested not to be turned, and in turning him, she has violated patient rights. The hospital could be sued now. Melora, herself, could be sued. The supervisor is going to do everything she can to stop that from happening. But for now, it is probably best for her to stay away. Mr. Lowery has threatened to call the media. His daughter is a news anchor, and she would be more than willing to do a story. Melora has a sudden flash then, a white woman with broad teeth and wide red hair, bosomy and thick. Her last name isn’t Lowery, but it was once, Melora remembers, years ago, when they were both younger. The voice is telling Melora not to worry, that they’ll keep it under wraps, that no one is accusing her of anything, but she lets loose a muttered curse and hangs up the phone.

Melora drives back to the house with the tests half graded on the seat beside her, surprised to find her daughter sitting on the steps that lead up to the house, forlorn and gray. She couldn’t have been dropped off more than half an hour ago. Melora swallows a familiar feeling that she refuses to call hatred. Why must the girl look so pitiful? Like she’s constantly feeling sorry for herself? In her hand the girl is holding a pink note that flaps in the wind when she stands up and approaches the car. She hands it to Melora.

The note, penned in her daughter’s tidy script, is sincere and eerily adult in its self-conscious frustration at the author’s inability to say exactly what she means. It’s a written apology, explaining that the girl had a bad day at school, was upset about the dead puppies, and so, in frustration, threw a rock at recess, hard enough to break the window of a classroom overlooking the playground. No one was inside. But, as part of her punishment, she was asked to write this note, which she must bring back to school tomorrow, signed by her mother. In the note she also offers to work to pay for the window’s repair, a cost which she appears to think will be astronomical. The girl’s expression as Melora looks up from reading the note is round and scared, and, on any other day Melora might have laughed. Today, she almost does.

A note from the school accompanying the letter informs her that her daughter will be subject to a one-day in-home suspension the following day. If Melora doesn’t go to work tomorrow, if, instead, she stays at home to take care of the girl, she will surely be fired. If she loses her job, she will no longer be able to afford to care for the dogs anyway, one more thing she’ll have to ask her mother for money for. One more thing to add to the long list of things since Melora got pregnant her sophomore year, the year her mother drove up along the coast to move her out of the rental she shared with the boyfriend who had agreed to marry her and done nothing after that but play game after game of pick-up basketball.

Melora stares at the girl on the steps then raises her eyes to the sky, which is crowded, with clouds the color of Mr. Lowery’s scar. She can’t stop thinking about breathing and thinking about breathing is making it hard to breathe. The evening feels mottled and sharp. Melora tells her daughter to gather the two surviving dogs up in the backyard, and to put them in the truck—the Land Cruiser, also purchased by Melora’s mother—which Melora has left unlocked. She opens the gate and the dogs bound down the driveway and hurl themselves into the car. The four of them—Melora, the girl, Midnight, and Sister—pull down the long driveway and out onto the street. The houses neatly arranged around them seem slanted, the whole world listing to the left. Melora switches on the radio and pushes it off again. Beside her, the girl turns to face the door.

“What?” Melora snaps. But the girl doesn’t respond.

Melora pulls over, miles later, into the vast, empty parking lot of an enormous shopping center anchored by a PetCo and a decrepit Marshall’s. Melora tells her daughter to open the door. The girl obeys and the dogs leap out and onto the concrete, chasing each other in circles, enlivened by the new air. Melora can see her daughter waver on the edge of following. The girl looks back at her mother. Melora stares straight ahead. The girl stays put. The dogs circle the car as Melora’s mother backs up, and give chase as she drives out of the parking lot. On the way to the feeder road, she can see the white dog, Midnight, loping along in the rearview mirror, intent, as if he is taking part in some new kind of game. By the time she reaches the highway, she can’t see either of the dogs anymore. 

Melora remembers learning once that everything with weight, even human bodies, exudes some measure of gravity. She remembers this because she can feel her daughter sliding away from her in the passenger seat, whatever force held the two of them together dissipating until it is nearly gone. Back at home, before bed, Melora bends her daughter over the side of the bathtub and strikes her several times with a belt wrapped around her hand. The girl, who has been silent up to this point, makes a noise then and looks back over her shoulder. Melora expects the gaze to be filled with a snake-like hatred. But the look the girl gives Melora doesn’t have any anger in it. Something in her daughter is tightening up. Receding. And Melora feels, for the first time that day, that finally, she has done something right.