These Dreams of You

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Soon Zan realizes that, for the four-year-old, the substance of communication is beside the point. “It’s like she’s afraid,” Viv says, “that with the first break in a connection, everything and everyone around her will vanish.” Sheba kneads her fingers into Viv’s body like a kitten, expanding and contracting its claws. She presses herself into her mother as though to meld herself physically.

Before Sheba came home from Ethiopia, Zan and Viv worried that the shy little orphan girl would be traumatized by the family dog Piranha, a demented mix of jack terrier and chihuahua called a jackahuahua. Named as a puppy by Parker, Piranha so terrorizes the neighborhood — attacking other dogs, chasing neighbors’ cars, holding UPS men hostage on their trucks — that an electric fence has been installed around the yard and the dog has been fitted with an electric collar, this in spite of Zan’s doubts that Piranha can be restrained by any mere voltage once used to execute Soviet spies. “He’s a sociopath,” Zan scoffs to Viv, “an electric fence? That dog?” pointing at the animal. Piranha’s head jerks up expectantly; he’s practically vibrating. “Sniper fire wouldn’t stop this dog.”

“Aren’t all animals sociopaths?” says Viv.

“Maybe I mean psychopath.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I think one doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and the other knows but doesn’t care.”

“Which is Piranha?”

“Which is Piranha? His name is Piranha. Oh, he knows.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Viv says. “Piranha fish know it’s wrong to eat people?”

“He knows,” Zan assures her, “and he doesn’t care.” When Viv left for Africa to go get Sheba, figuring out what to do about Piranha was one of Zan’s tasks back home. The canyon’s local dog expert, mistress of all breeds and their mutations, told him flatly, “You’re going to have to get rid of that dog — he’ll terrorize the poor child.” From Ethiopia, Viv wrote in an email, She’s so sweet I’m afraid the dog will terrify her.