Dog Out of Water

by Lisa Plantico Carlsson

Abbie sat very still, hands folded in her lap. She opened and shut her eyes with deliberate blinks, as though trying to transform the cup of blue liquid that sat before her in its Fred Flinstone jelly glass. The rim of blue just met Fred's dark hair, and she watched the dark patch bob there like a drowning carcass. Blue. Bright blue. The faint smell of chlorine hung around the glass.

"Did you take it from the Liesner's pool?" Abbie's full lips trembled as she asked her question, and she slid her tongue across them, wetting the corners. Her eyes remained fastened on the jelly glass.

"The--? Abigail Dahl! How could you say such a disgusting thing?" Emily Dahl snatched the glass from the table and threw the contents into the sink. She then stood in the middle of the kitchen, the empty cup dangling from her right hand, "Berry Blue Kool-Aid, Abigail. Berry Blue." Her voice sounded tired. The indirect light from outside cast a gray pallor upon her powdered cheeks. Emily moved over to her daughter, seemed about to say something, then abruptly set the glass on the table and walked out of the room. A minute drop of blue trickled past Fred's hand. Abbie continued blinking her eyes until the small bead rolled past his foot, and slid under the polished curve at the base of the cup.

They stopped calling her Abbie after she drowned the neighbor's Chihuahua. It was purely by accident, but no one ever believed her. She was found sopping wet next to the Liesner's pool, the small brown form of the dog clutched to her corduroy jumper. When they asked her about it, she only dropped the bundle so it fell like a bloated rat onto the grass. She offered no tears; perhaps that was where she made her gravest mistake. After that, her name was Abigail. As in, "Abigail, it's time you took some responsibility around the house." As in, "Life is for growing up, Abigail." So she grew up. Grew up with the term "murderer" nipped with tiny Chihuahua bites upon her heart. She was not free.

Years later, when the Jordans' two-year-old fell into the same swimming pool, Abbie thought of the Chihuahua and lived in fear that somehow she would be connected to the tragedy. She became obsessed with water. On rainy days, when the sky hung heavy with clouds of steel wool, she'd run outside, the screen door slamming shut behind her. Her feet sinking in the wet grass, she'd crouch in the charged air and watch earthworms writhe in pools of muddy soup. Their pink-gray forms twisted in slow convulsions until the brown sucked them under. Abbie was fascinated by the way so yielding a substance as water could swallow solid, pulsing forms of life. It gave her a reverence for liquids that was unnerving to observers.

During the summer, clad in nothing but a fuschia bathing suit and flip-flops, Abbie would walk the mile to the public pool. The gravel on the side of the road crunched under her feet and left a whitish residue between her toes that she rinsed off in the cool water once she arrived. She never let the fluid lap over more than her ankles. Sitting on the bumpy gray surface of the ledge, she sat for hours watching the tender flesh of her toes turn purple and wrinkle in the chlorinated water. She told the other kids she didn't know how to swim, and remained unmoved before their splashes and tugs at her feet, waiting for the shrill whistle of the lifeguard to warn them away.

Sometimes children tossed rings high in the air, then dove deep into the blue to interrupt the slow roll of the plastic tube's descent to the bottom of the pool. Now and again a child would miss, and Abbie always stared in fascinated horror at the dark contortions the blanket of water made of the toy. Brave souls would clamor to the deep end to gulp mouthfuls of air and plunge after the escaped rings, but sometimes the pressure and depth of the water was too much, and another game would be found. Abbie's gaze alone stayed focused, her eyes resting relentlessly on the break in blue, the small lump of color that didn't belong there.

A month into the summer, someone clued Emily Dahl into her daughter's poolside habits, and Abbie's independence was reined sharply in. It wasn't normal for her to be so preoccupied, her mother said. They never mentined the water. Abbie was simply self-absorbed; she needed more interaction with friends.

At home, kept away from the pool, Abbie abandoned the showers she'd taken since she was six, and began to enjoy baths once more. She loved the hollow, empty sound of her head beneath the liquid, loved the quiet rush the water made as it crept into her ears and tickled her hairline before submerging her entire head. The bathtub was painted in a dusty rose color: when Abbie opened her eyes underwater, its embryonic depths comforted her. She'd shift her face close to the drain, sometimes running her tongue over the tiny holes on the silver disc. She'd heard stories of children getting their hair snagged on drains and drowning, and her heart always thumped oddly as she watched her own dark strands float like seaweed around the metal. She'd rise up quickly to breathe, waiting for the resistance--the pull back down--that never came. She stayed in the bath until her mother began to knock, then she'd lift herself out with wrinkled hands and press her burning eyes against one of her mother's fluffy bath towels.

At last Emily Dahl thought of a "cure" for her daughter's isolation. She came home one day with a puppy--a skinny, furless sausage of a dachshund. Abbie looked at the squirming dog as it wiggled its entire body in excitement as she drew near. She looked at it and saw the thrashing shape of the Chihuahua, its choking head bobbing up and down like a seal after she'd thrown it in the Liesner's pool to see if it could swim. She flinched before the shrill barks her new friend made, hearing in each sound the imagined shrieks of a toddler come too close to an enticing sheet of blue.

She herself went before that smooth blue rectangle. Stared into its depths, casually tipped a toe into its aquamarine coolness. The liquid realm wooed her and she wanted to feel the water surround her again with its once-familiar cool clutch. Grabbing the puppy like a sack of potatoes, she held her face away from its frantic licks and began to descend the concrete stairs at the far end of the pool. The first step brought water creeping into her sneakers, creating a heavy resistance as she lifted her foot for the next. The second left her standing up to her thighs in blue. The water was icy, and seemed to sink into her bones. She thought the liquid must be seeping into each of the million pores on her legs, raised as they were in goose bumps. The third stair, then the fourth. Holding the wiggling body above her head, Abbie walked on the floor of the pool with steps made clumsy by her shoes and clothes. When the water reached her chin, she brought the dog once more to her chest. Upon contact with the wet, the dachshund began to claw Abbie's shoulder in terror, trying to pull free from the heavy blue weight around it. Its piercing shrieks filled the Liesner's backyard.

"Shush." Abbie gave it a light smack on the nose, and began to look around her. A few golden leaves had fallen into the pool, and they swayed with the ripples Abbie and her dog were creating. Up and down, they rode the surface of each wave, strong in their placid acceptance of each new rush of movement. Abbie turned her eyes to the creature bound in her arms, and slowly she lifted the puppy to the top of the blue liquid. Her hands cradling his belly, she supported him, helping him glide through the fluid membrane. Like a length of wood tossed into a pond, the dachshund dipped down on one side, then on the other, before finally finding a place of balance for his long form. With tentative pats of his legs, he used the water to buoy himself, and Abbie withdrew her hand in amazed delight.

"Abigail Dahl!" Henry Liesner was running across his yard toward the two lumps breaking the stillness of his pool. Her name, shouted from his lips, was an accusation. Abbie paled and glanced with panic at the swimming dog. No floundering Chihuahua met her eye, no child turning as blue as the chlorine that fought him. Only the hot dog shape of her new friend, happily paddling across the clear expanse. The dachshund reached the cement stairs at the same time as Henry Liesner.

"What the hell's going on here?" The owner of the pool's face was closed and unyielding.

Abbie's puppy pulled himself out of the water, shook himself, and wagged his tail in excitement as the young girl reluctantly followed.

"I was teaching him how to swim," she explained, dark ropes of hair hiding her eyes.

"Like you taught--" Henry Liesner stopped himself, and a moment of awkward silence followed.

Drippings from her shorts and t-shirt surrounded Abbie with a puddle on the concrete. She watched the stain spread, afraid to look at her neighbor.

Like you taught...

A whimper, and her dachshund nudged against her ankles. The fragment of a golden leaf clung to his snout, and Abbie knelt to pick it off.

"I've never taught anyone to swim," she said in a quiet voice. "Until now."