Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

with his wife of twenty-four years, admiring his panoramic view, listening to his children bicker. Instead he was on Varick Street , so absorbed in the blond at his side that he never turned and noticed his sister-in-law staring at him from across the street.
    Was she one of his models? She was all in black, of course, except for her perfect, long blond hair, which she wore loose, even on such a mild day. Didn’t it make her neck too warm? I was certainly hot under the collar.
    Not the blond. She looked cool holding his arm and smiling up at his face. Totally cool. Maybe you could do that when you had zero percent body fat, flawless skin, teeth that were probably perfectly even and actually white—but that was just a guess, because surely I wouldn’t get close enough for the bitch to bite me. She might have rabies.
    I thought about my sister and her big dimpled ass, her size-eleven feet, her mouse-brown hair. Until that moment, until seeing her husband hanging on every word of a stunning slip of a blond—or was that actually a dress she was wearing?—I’d thought of my big sister as beautiful.
    Suddenly I began to panic. My brother-in-law was turning in my direction. So I did the only thing I could.
    I grabbed Paul’s shoulders and pulled him toward me, as if he were a Chinese screen I could hide behind. I moved my arms from his shoulders to his neck, then into his wet black hair, and keeping him between me and what I was still watching across Varick Street , I whispered, “God, I feel so terrible about Lisa,” and buried my face in his neck.
    I heard his voice, so close the words reverberated on my skin, heard him say, “Poor Dog Paddle,” and when I felt him stepping back, what could I do, I had to keep him there, I lifted my face and found his lips. And then the most surprising thing occurred. Despite the fact that my only motive was to protect myself from being seen until I’d figured out what to do if I were, I found myself being kissed by a complete stranger, his long fingers in my hair, the tip of his tongue tracing my lips, a guttural sound like the one Dashiell makes when I scratch inside his ears coming from only God knew which one of us.
    Then over his shoulder I could see Ted’s arm up, waving for a cab.
    “Hold me,” I whispered, pulling him closer, so close you couldn’t slip a slip of paper between us.
    “Rachel,” he said, “Rachel.”
    A cab stopped. I watched Ted and the blond get into it. Were they lovers? I wondered as the cab moved into traffic and pulled away, heading downtown. Maybe there was another explanation.
    Yeah, right, maybe.
    That’s when I realized that something else wasn’t right. The cab was gone, but Paul was hanging on to me, breathing audibly. And something was pressing into my leg, something hard. What the hell was it, an egg roll in his pocket?
    No, I thought, not an egg roll, it felt more like a knockwurst.
    I stepped back.
    “Oh God, Rachel,” he said, his dark eyes all gooey with lust. He sure did have a way with words.
    “Look,” I said, “something just came up. I have to reschedule our lunch.”
    He turned and looked the other way, his face now more the color of rose hip tea than jasmine.
    “I’ll call you,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And like a steak left out to defrost in the same room with an untrained dog, I was gone.
    Walking home, thinking about my sister, I remembered another kiss. Well, it was sort of a kiss. That time I’d been a child, and the person I’d sort of kissed had been Lillian.
    I was too young to know how ridiculous her original idea was. We were lying on the glider on Aunt Ceil’s screened-in back porch, after a day at the beach. We were face-to-face, so close I could see the fingerprints on Lili’s glasses.
    Let’s become blood sisters, she said.
    How? I asked.
    First you have to put a match under the needle, like when Mommy takes a splinter out, she said. Then you stick your finger, and I stick mine. Then we press them together, mixing the blood, Lillian said, pressing her two pointers together to illustrate. That makes us blood sisters, forever.
    I began to cry.
    Okay, okay, she said. There’s another way. Stick out your tongue.
    Wug iz dis thaw, I asked.
    She didn’t answer. She stuck out her tongue and made the smooth tip of it touch mine.
    Forever, she said.
    Thawevah , I repeated obediently, afraid to pull in my tongue. God only knew what germs were on it, I thought. Even then.
    Could you even let your own