He didn’t even want the dog. He was adamant about that, as he was about most things. Once Victor made up his mind, there was no changing it. But I suppose the glimmering smile and batting eyelashes from his six year old daughter could push the stubbornness aside. Or it was just the whining that finally sent him over the edge. Probably the latter.
Maybe it even made him proud, that for a brief moment he could make Charlotte so effortlessly happy.
He wanted a male dog, something that could bark and howl and protect his daughter from the inevitable dangers outside her bedroom door. Something that would make his friends admire instead of pity him. Something fierce enough to justify the price. Something to show off. A husky.
But Charlotte’s blue eyes gravitated right toward the Shih Tzu at the front of the shop, his nutmeg nose crinkling at the sight of her tiny little body and her curly brown hair. His tongue graced her palm and she giggled with delight.
“Please, Daddy, please!” she squealed, drawing out the last syllable for emphasis.
It was one of the only times he actually caved.
“Fine,” he said, in a voice that scratched like sandpaper. Gruff. Unrelenting. Painful, even.
“I’ll call her Poppy!” she declared.
Like the flowers that bloomed outside her bedroom window every spring.
“But this dog is a boy,” he corrected her.
It didn’t matter; Charlotte never had a thing for arbitrary rules.
Wrinkled hands trembled, twitching, as they tried desperately to place the cup on the countertop. Long legs stumbled, navy loafers beating against the hardwood floor like a drum, decibels ricocheting off the kitchen walls. A technicolor mosaic swirled across the ceiling, the line between fact and fiction blurring like the whoosh of a subway car. The air was infused with a rancid blend of Hennessy and cigarette smoke. The pungent stench of carpet stains could practically be tasted from the bedroom across the hall where Charlotte sat, whimpering, waiting for the storm to pass. She cried herself to sleep.
He never tucked her into bed.
During these moments, her father’s face was almost always flushed in a sea of crimson, a redness that painted his cheeks like the watercolor canvases above her bed frame. The words that fell from his mouth stung like the wasp she encountered that one time on the playground, but the swelling from these wounds never quite went down.
Clanging pots and pans were the soundtrack to her childhood. But broken promises were just as familiar, repeating in her head like soulful lullabies.
“This time he’ll stop,” she’d say. “This time he’ll get better. This time he’ll actually try.”
“This time he’ll pick me up from school. This time he’ll drive me to the father-daughter dance. And while we’re there he’ll take my hand. He’ll put my shoes on top of his and we’ll waltz together. And then he’ll spin me around until we’re dizzy.”
Those were the dreams that swirled around her subconscious as she drifted off to sleep, clutching Poppy’s paw in one hand and her ragged blanket in the other.
Every night she’d sneak Poppy into her room, their faces sharing the same few inches of silk pillowcase. She’d talk to her for hours, sharing hopes and wishes and welcoming her into this great, big, fantastical world—one that could only be created by an imaginative six year old named Charlotte. Poppy was her best friend, and no one else’s. While her father disappeared, she tucked them both into bed—shutting the door to the outside world.
But suddenly six sails into sixteen and the door becomes squeaky and unhinged and far less protective. The world she made for herself, and for Poppy, crumbled to the floor like the dampened remains of a summer sand castle. Victor never delivered on his promises and Charlotte’s own resentment manifested as detachment.
“I promise, honey,” he’d say in the mornings before she left for school.
“I know, Dad,” she replied, with a crooked smile and blue eyes that could see the truth.
Poppy nuzzled up against her leg, her nutmeg nose tickling her skin, begging her to stay.
“I wish I could, Poppy.”
Tugging on Charlotte’s skirt with her tiny teeth, Poppy tried to keep her in. To shield her from the outside. She was the protector Victor had hoped for after all.
But the danger loomed inside the house. Charlotte knew that much. There wasn’t a door in the world strong enough to lock it away, even if she used to imagine that there was.
The passage of time was marked by the changes Poppy exhibited. Her skin was mottled and dry. Her fur was coarse and heavy. She struggled with the stairs in the garden, her paws scraping the cement as they clawed their way up. She couldn’t run anymore.
And as Charlotte drove away, as she immersed herself in a world far outside their home, Poppy was forced to find a new and unlikely companion. She spent slow afternoons with Victor, reluctantly at first, with his tattered clothes and empty bottles and briefcases full of crumpled pages. She tried her best to resist, to sit at the far end of the hallway pretending not to hear the subtle sweetness in his voice.
“Poppy, come on!” he’d whisper in between desperate pleas.
“Poppy, I’m sorry.”
“I love you.”
“Dance with me.”
He took her paw in his hand and played Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The two waltzed for hours, tired eyes melting into each other—forming one giant puddle.
She’d chomp on the newspaper after his early morning read. He’d save the remnants of his scone for her, placing the crumbs in her bowl as the sun rose. He’d take her out for walks after the rain, skipping in the grass as the flowers started to bloom.
“You forgive me, right Poppy?”
She couldn’t respond, of course, at least in words he understood, so he took her silence as exoneration. She’d lick his palm and he’d giggle in delight.
So Victor tucked Poppy into bed, wrapping ragged blankets around her shivering limbs.
His daughter didn’t often make it home for the nighttime routine, for her dog’s warm embrace under the chilly covers.
But when she did, she watched from the staircase in the garden.