Chris had been in his brother’s apartment for fourteen days and he hadn’t packed a single box.
He’d told himself he was getting around to it. That was the phrase he used when his mom called, which she did every other day, always at seven in the evening, always with the same careful voice she’d been using since the funeral.
Getting around to it, Mom. Sorting through things. Taking my time. And she’d say okay, take your time, there’s no rush, and they’d both pretend that was true and hang up and Chris would sit back down on the couch and turn the TV on and watch whatever came next without changing the channel.
There was a phone charger plugged into the wall next to the couch with no phone attached to it. Chris had looked at it every day for two weeks and hadn’t unplugged it. The phone was in an evidence bag somewhere, or maybe his mother had it, or maybe it had been thrown away. He didn’t know. The charger stayed plugged in.
His brother had called twice the week before he died. Chris hadn’t picked up either time.
The first one came while he was driving and he told himself he’d call back and then he didn’t.
The second one came at night and Chris was watching something and the thought that passed through his head was just not right now, and then he set the phone face down on the arm of the couch and forgot about it.
The last text he’d sent was three weeks before the funeral. It said sounds good. He couldn’t remember what it was in response to.
The apartment was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a building that had been built in the seventies and renovated never. The carpet was the kind of brown that might have been beige once.
His brother had lived here for three years and the place still looked temporary. Chris slept on the couch. The bedroom door stayed closed.
He ate the food in the fridge. Then the freezer. Microwaved burritos and leftover Chinese that probably should have been thrown out and a bag of frozen peas that he ate with butter because his brother had butter and a pan and Chris was sitting right there.
He didn’t buy groceries. Buying groceries would mean he wasn’t visiting. Buying groceries would mean his brother wasn’t coming back to ask why Chris ate all his stuff.
On day fourteen he went outside for the first time in three days. Not for any reason. The apartment had gotten too quiet or too full or too something and he needed air that hadn’t already been breathed by someone who wasn’t alive anymore. He walked down the stairs and out the back door into the alley behind the building where the dumpsters sat.
The dog was lying against the wall about ten feet from the dumpster. Not tucked into a corner. Just lying there on the concrete, on its side, in the open. Chris stopped. His first thought was that it was dead. That was where his mind went now.
But the dog’s side moved. Shallow, slow. It was breathing.
Chris stood there for a while. He didn’t know how long. Time had gotten soft and unreliable lately. The dog was thin in a way that went past stray, past hungry, into something structural.
It was wearing a red collar that hung loose around its neck, dirty and stretched, fitted for an animal that weighed twenty pounds more than this one did.
He crouched down. The dog’s eyes opened. Not fast, not alarmed. Brown eyes, flat, with nothing behind them that Chris could read. The dog looked at him and he looked at the dog and neither of them moved.
“Hey,” Chris said.
The dog didn’t react. Didn’t wag. Didn’t flinch. Just lay there and breathed.
Chris put his hands under the dog’s body and picked it up.
It weighed nothing. That was the thing that hit him. He’d expected weight, resistance, something, but the dog was light in a way that felt wrong, as if the illness had been eating it from the inside and what was left was mostly bone and breath and loose skin that shifted when Chris adjusted his grip.
The dog didn’t struggle. Its head hung over Chris’s forearm and its legs dangled and it let itself be carried.
He went inside and up the stairs. Second floor, down the hall. He held the dog against his chest with one arm and unlocked the door with the other hand and went inside and stood in his dead brother’s apartment holding a dying animal and didn’t know what to do next.
He put the dog on the couch.
The dog lay where Chris put it. Didn’t try to stand, didn’t sniff around. Just lay on the couch and breathed and that was enough because that was all there was.
Chris went to the kitchen and filled a cereal bowl with water, one of the two his brother owned, both from a set that had probably come with four but had been winnowed down the way single men winnow dishware, through breakage and moving and not caring enough to replace what’s lost.
He set the bowl on the floor. The dog lifted its head and leaned forward and almost fell off the couch trying to reach it and Chris caught it, one hand on its chest, and slid the bowl closer. The dog drank. Slow, careful. A few laps and then it stopped and then a few more. Then it put its head down on the cushion and closed its eyes.
Chris opened a can of tuna and put it on a plate and set it next to the water. The dog didn’t look at it.
He sat down on the floor with his back against the base of the couch, legs stretched out on the brown carpet, the fibers rough and flat under his palms.
The apartment smelled stale and closed-in so he got up and cracked the living room window a few inches and sat back down. He could feel the dog breathing against his shoulder blade, shallow and steady.
The stove light was on, the one his brother always left on, the one Chris had been leaving on too because turning it off meant it was his decision now and not his brother’s habit. The phone charger glowed faintly where it was plugged in. The bedroom door was closed the way it had been closed for fourteen days.
He sat there and at some point he started crying.
It wasn’t graceful. Not the kind he’d seen in movies where a single tear runs down someone’s face while music plays. It was the ugly kind, the kind that starts in the chest and comes out through the mouth and sounds like choking.
His face got hot and his nose ran and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and made sounds he hadn’t made since he was a child, low and broken and animal.
The dog didn’t move. It lay on the couch and breathed against his back and that was all it did. It didn’t nuzzle him or lick his hand. It just existed there, warm and alive and too tired to do anything but be warm and alive. Chris sat on the floor and cried until he couldn’t anymore and then he sat there some more.
—-
He woke up on the floor at four in the morning. His neck hurt and his back hurt and the apartment was dark except for the stove light.
The dog was still on the couch. Still breathing. He reached up and put his hand on its side and felt the ribs under his fingers, each one distinct, and felt the slow rise and fall of breath. He got up and checked the water bowl. Empty. He refilled it.
Then he stood in the middle of the apartment and looked at it. Really looked at it. The shoes by the door, still paired, still pointing outward. The phone charger with nothing on the other end of it.
Chris got a box from the closet. His mother had sent over a stack of them, flattened, leaning against the wall in the hallway. He’d walked past them every day. He pulled one out and folded it into shape and set it on the kitchen table.
He started with the kitchen because the kitchen was easy. The kitchen was just stuff. Spatulas and plates and a coffee maker and the remaining cereal bowl, the one the dog wasn’t using.
He packed the drawers, the cabinets. He threw away the expired things from the fridge and put the rest in a bag. The fridge hummed louder with the door open, then went quiet when he closed it on empty shelves. He kept going.
The living room next. Books his brother never read. DVDs from a decade ago. A frame on the shelf with a photo of the two of them as kids, squinting into sun at a beach somewhere, Chris maybe nine and his brother maybe seven, both of them brown and grinning and not knowing anything yet.
Chris looked at it for a long time. He wrapped it in a t-shirt and set it on top of everything else in the box.
The dog watched him from the couch, not with interest exactly, just with eyes that were open.
He packed around the dog. Worked his way through the room in a slow circle, filling boxes, the tape gun loud in the quiet apartment each time he sealed one shut. The apartment got emptier and the boxes got fuller.
Then there was the bedroom door.
Chris stood outside it with his hand on the knob. He breathed. He opened it. It was just a room. It smelled stale and closed-up and the light coming through the window was gray and flat.
The first thing he saw was the glass of water on the nightstand. Half full, a film across the top. His brother had poured that water. Had been thirsty one night and poured himself a glass of water and set it on the nightstand and never finished it and then he was dead on the bathroom floor on a Tuesday and nobody found him until Thursday.
Chris opened the window. The air came in and it smelled like outside, like concrete and trees and the world continuing without permission. He started packing. The closet first. Then the dresser. Then the nightstand, and he picked up the glass of water and stood there holding it and then he poured it out in the bathroom sink and watched it go down the drain and set the empty glass in a box with everything else.
—-
He was taping a box shut when he heard the sound of paper sliding under the front door.
He walked over and picked it up off the floor. MISSING DOG. The words were in bold across the top. Below them was a photo of a dog standing in a yard with green grass, looking at the camera with a trust that said this was a dog that had never been let down.
Brown, medium-sized, red collar, ears that went up and folded over. Healthy. Bright. Nothing like the animal on the couch.
There was a phone number at the bottom. A name. A message that said please call if you’ve seen him, he’s sick and I’m looking for him and I just want to bring him home.
Chris picked up his phone and dialed the number. It rang four times and went to voicemail. A woman’s voice, tired past one bad night, tired from weeks of them stacked on top of each other. Just a name and a please leave a message.
“Hi,” Chris said. “My name’s Chris. I think I have your dog. He’s here with me. He’s alive.” He paused. He looked at the dog on the couch. “He’s not doing great. But he’s here. I’m at 114 Garfield, apartment 2B. The door’s open. Come whenever.”
He hung up and set the phone down and sat on the floor next to the couch. The dog shifted, barely, and put its head on his leg. A few pounds. A skull and skin and the warmth of something still alive. Chris put his hand on the dog’s neck, near the collar, and felt the dog breathe against his palm.
The apartment was half-packed around them. The bedroom door open for the first time in two weeks. The photo of them as kids wrapped in a t-shirt at the top of a box.
Chris leaned his head back against the couch. The dog’s breathing was slow and steady against his leg. Outside the window the afternoon was ending and the light was going flat and gold. He closed his eyes.
When he woke up the apartment was dark. The stove light made a small warm circle on the ceiling. The couch cushion next to him was empty. He put his hand on it. Still warm.
The living room window was still cracked from earlier but pushed wider now, and the night air was coming through, cool and quiet, and the dog was gone. Chris stood up and looked at the window and looked at the empty couch and stood there for a while in the half-packed apartment.
He sat back down on the floor. The water bowl was on its side, a small puddle on the carpet. The tuna was still untouched on the plate. The flyer sat on the kitchen counter next to the stack of boxes.
He’d call the woman back in the morning. Tell her the dog had been here but wasn’t anymore. That it had been breathing when he fell asleep. That the window was open and he was sorry.
The apartment was quiet. Chris sat on the floor with his back against the empty couch and the stove light on and he didn’t move for a long time.