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   Judith walks her daughter’s sheep dog down the steep hill that leads to the park. The big gray and white
Shetland is much stronger than Judith and tugs hard at the leash. It is an uncommonly blustery day for Los
Angeles and Judith has not dressed for the weather. She is wearing only a lightweight tan jacket over a tank
top and pajama bottoms. If she is aware of the glancing looks of momentary alarm, she imagines herself as a
woman in one of those 1940’s war movies that she so loves, walking down a London street in the dead of
winter, wearing only a flimsy coat and all the town knowing that her young pilot husband has been shot down
and that she will have to raise the child alone. She knows that people are touched when such women bear
their pain with quiet dignity. That is what she imagines she has.
                                                                     Quiet dignity.

   Judith was never a “large dog” person, as her ex-husband Gary was, and as Magdalena apparently has
become. It grates on her that Gary has been so subtle at insinuating his ideas and tastes upon their daughter.
At precisely four P.M. the park erupts with the sound of metallic clicks as seventy leashes are unclipped. It
sounds like the sudden invasion of a kind of beetle.
   Judith is frightened to let Magdalena’s dog run free. He does not know her well, and Judith has no
confidence in her ability to induce him to return. Her predicament is that she is more frightened of not doing
what everyone else does. She has a dread of being singled out, of being seen as the one who does not know.
Gary used to accuse her of laughing at jokes before the punch line because she did not want to appear stupid.
Defensive laughing is what he had called it. The thought suddenly horrifies Judith that Gary might have told
Magdalena about this and that they have laughed together at her. She has no idea what they always found to
talk about. Even when she was small, Maggie always laughed at her father’s stupid jokes. Judith suspected
there were never any jokes at all, just a game that they were playing at her expense. She had remained aloof
from their antics the way one discourages incorrigible children through lofty example.
   At the sight of all the other dogs running unfettered, Magdalena’s Shetland lurches forward yanking the
leash out of Judith’s grip. A moment later he is romping free herding everything in sight. He is Judith’s worst
nightmare, the least well-behaved, most disruptive dog in the park. He rousts peaceful dachshunds, provokes
well-tempered Golden Retrievers, terrorizes shitzus and their owners.
Judith timidly gives chase. Her body is slender but unathletic. Not that there’d be any catching him. She can
only vaguely follow his route and apologize with acute embarrassment to the most egregiously harmed. “I’m so
sorry,” she explains. “He isn’t my dog.” Her face falls into the expression that Magdalena always despised but
that Judith cannot undo.
   “Yes we know whose dog that is,” a woman says. She has a thick body and short white hair like her Lapso,
whom she holds protectively in her lap.
   “Do you know the person who owns it?” Judith asks hopefully.
   Judith wants to hear this woman talk about Magdalena. She wants to gather up everything that can be
known about her daughter and take it back inside her and never let it out. But the woman just looks away, as
though the less said about this subject the better. “Oh yes. We know who owns it,” she says to the fluff ball
cradled in the crook of her arm, “Don’t we?”
   All the dispersed groups of dogs have reformed into packs of twos and threes and fours. Magdalena’s dog is
alone in the center of the park. He looks expectantly toward the picnic table area on one side and the wide
field on the other. He bounds half-heartedly toward a tennis ball that a tan boxer is retrieving, then cowers
when the boxer’s owner rebukes him. Judith is witness to his naked desire and disappointment and looks for a
good deed she can do for someone in worse straits than hers. She is a benevolent divining rod to
misfortune.
   “If I come back after I’m dead,” Judith once had overheard Magdalena say, “I’d want everything to look as
though I had been there all along.” She can’t remember when it was that her daughter said that. Whether it was
recently or long ago. Whether Maggie had been small or grown. Memories are losing their boundaries, folding
together like butter and chocolate and flour under a low insistent flame.
   Of course it would not have been recently. It may have been when she was six, snuggled in the back seat
with her litter of friends, while Judith was high on white wine and drove that long beautiful nighttime hour back
from Disneyland. She prided herself that she had never sneaked into Maggie’s bedroom while she was out with
friends or at her father’s, never unearthed the dark ebony box she kept hidden under her stuffed animals at the
back of the closet, never jimmied open the lock and secretly read her diary. Not unless she thought it
absolutely necessary to avert a disaster. Only then did she pore over every entry, memorize her daughter’s
secret thoughts, so that she might blurt out one of these thoughts or observations as if it were her own, and
create with her daughter a moment of mystical intimacy that only the deepest cellular connection could
explain. She would have professed modesty if anyone suggested it, but she secretly believed that many of
Maggie’s friends were envious of Maggie and wished they had a mother like hers.
   The dreams began early in her second trimester. Judith would wake clutching her abdomen, sure that her
daughter had been projected from her with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck like a red knotty
bolos. They never stopped through Maggie’s childhood. Judith has seen her purple-faced in her crib, her
forehead and palms pressed into the mattress as though she were about to attempt a headstand at the moment
that the oxygen supply to her brain was suddenly terminated. She has watched the man in the overcoat with
the shaved head snatch Maggie off her tricycle and hurl her into the lake. She has seen Maggie abducted
from school by men in UPS trucks, dreamt her at the bottom of the swimming pool, eyes bleached white from
chlorine. She had seen her stumbling in from the athletic field, a hockey stick wedged into the back of her
skull. She has seen her daughter’s death in every imaginable way, except the way it occurred.
   When she was brought to the place where the two-lane road turned into the park, when she saw the green
Toyota embracing the oak tree as though it were nursing, the steering wheel protruding through the roof, when
she saw the green tarpaulin nestled on the hillock of soft grass so far from the wreckage, Judith had been
confused. How could the car have driven all that distance with no one inside?
She had not called Gary right away. “Off somewhere in Australia,” she had told whoever asked her, “or wherever
he takes his little hotties.” She had later remembered the number he had given her where he could be reached
at any time. But even after she found it she had not called him. He was always so snide and condescending,
saying that she was incapable of handling an emergency. No one has ever requested of her a phone number
where she could be reached at any time. She is not seen as a woman with aplomb. Her daughter certainly had
aplomb. And Judith has decided that she will become such a woman. Her mind goes off on a silly tangent,
making an alphabetical list of the fruits her daughter has: Magdelena has a apple. Magdalena has a banana.
Magdalena has a canteloupe. All the way down through a nectarine, orange, and finally Magdalena has a
plum.
   Judith has not broken down as people no doubt had expected she would. She has paid her daughter’s cable
bill, her electric bill, her water bill. She has made neat piles of the overdue notices stashed haphazardly under
the fishbowl, its water a sickening thick green. She has put the milk container back into the refrigerator. She
has vacuumed the living room rug and emptied the ashtrays, though she could not throw anything away and
consolidated the snuffed out butts and ashes into one large bowl. She wishes Magdelena wouldn’t smoke so
much.
   She has slept on the sofa, scrupulously not moving any of the clothes from where they had been deposited--
A leotard and workout shirt, dank with the ripe smell of woman, a tan jacket with spare change in the left side
pocket and a phone number, hardened crumbs from a muffin or cookie down in the crease of the other. And
some old credit card receipts. The sofa had been the last contested item in the divorce. Gary couldn’t have
cared less about it. He was breaking up the matched set just to be an ass.
He could never stop being a litigator and at last Judith had let him have it, as she always did. He knew how to
wear her down. Their relationship, she had told him in a moment of utter exhaustion, was like the Colorado
River creating the Grand Canyon.
   In the kitchen each morning Judith has taken from the jars on her daughter’s kitchen shelf two yellow
multiple vitamin and mineral capsules, two calcium-phosphorus, two clear gelatin vitamin E caplets, two 500
mg Vitamin C’s, her daughter’s birth control pill, and swallowed them down with stale coffee, followed by the
Prozac from her rainy day supply that she keeps in her purse.
When she had bought that sofa for the new house, everything was going to be exactly the way she was sure it
was going to be. Judith had imagined herself cuddled up on cold winter nights with Gary, remnants of Chinese
takeout dinners splayed on the coffee table, the two of them snuggled in blankets and slippers and old flannel
robes, which would always be their favorites even after money allowed them to buy new and more expensive
ones.
   It pleases her that her daughter had loved the sofa, taken it with her to her own apartment. As Judith has lay
gerrymandered around the debris-strewn sofa she has thought that her daughter has probably made love on its
smooth warm contours just as she had. She imagines Maggie’s bare skin adhering to the same places. She
wonders if there is a secret nook between the cushions where daughter’s and mother’s fluids have commingled.
She has kept the dog locked in the back porch for three days.
   Now it continues to run amok through the park, bumping into carriages, trekking mud over newspapers. Judith
wants to hide. She feels that all the other pet owners are judging her daughter’s imperfections of character
seen so clearly through this animal’s behavior. She draws her breath to scream
for the dog to come back to her, but her throat has no word to form. She does not know the dog’s name.
His trailing leash has become tethered around the base of a picnic bench, and seeing that the dog is caught.
Judith scurries to retrieve him.
   She feels like she is snow-shoeing uphill through mud. A child bends down off the bench to pick up the dog’
s leash, but the mother lifts the boy away and places him on the other side of her and looks scrupulously away
from Judith, though Judith is quite certain she is looking directly at her.
   Through his weak watery eyes and the mop of fur across his face, Magdalena’s dog sees a brown wild rabbit
dart across the top of the hill. With a surge of adrenaline the dog throws itself into motion. The collar snags
tight around his neck and yanks him back down out of the air. But his will is stronger than the metal clasp. It
snaps, and the chain falls from his neck. The liberated dog races up the hill to the line of hedges that borders
the park. Something metallic snaps inside of Judith as well.
If the dog got hurt, how could she ever explain it? “Come back here,” Judith screams. The dog bursts through
the restraining fence and the hedge. There is a screech of brakes on the other side, a horn blast, a loud dull
concussive thud. And then silence. Judith’s heart seizes up. She finds herself running. One of her sandals flies
off. She slides down on one side and flails to get up. She screams with a voice she does not recognize as her
own.
   The young man in the tan pants whom Judith had seen reading with his male friend at the corner picnic
table when she arrived now steps through the break in the hedge. Alongside him is the now docile obedient
sheep dog.
   “The guy in the Beemer hit a bush,” the man in the tan pants says to her. “He tore his bumper up pretty good.
He’ll probably want you to pay for his damage.”
Judith sits at the curb and clutches the dog to her chest like a talisman. “You bad bad girl,” she scolds. “You
gave mommy a fright.” She rocks the dog to her chest and murmurs its name, though everyone within earshot
knows that the name she repeats is a girl’s name and not the dog’s name, not the dog’s name at all.