‘“Get him off me, get him off me.”’

‘Exactly. I don’t need to tell you that my dad was mortified. He made it up to MacDougall, and we never talked about it.’

‘Only MacDougall’s secretly traumatized.’

‘Never does come back to my house. Always an excuse, a scheduling conflict, so that whenever we hang out it has to be at his place. But his face darkens over at any mention of my dad, and I can tell he’s getting real introspective and troubled. Stuck in a thought rut. Like the memory of my house—like my house itself—is something to avoid.’

‘The shame of it.’

‘The scene of some crime. Years later, we’re in high school, I finally ask him—you know, “Doogie, what’s the deal with dogs?”’

‘He’s still afraid of them?’

‘I mean he’s not bursting into tears anymore, no. He’s got a little more grip on himself, and he’s even more or less a normal kid, by this point. But if we’re in the neighborhood, someone’s walking their dog, he’ll still freeze in this kind of barely disguised terror until the dog’s gone. Trying to pass it off like he’s checking the time or tying his shoes, but you watch his eyes, he’s always got one eye on the dog. Not blinking. Pulse jackhammering in his throat. Which one day I finally ask him, like—what, were you bitten as a kid? Is there some root to all this? No, he says, nothing like that. Not that he can remember. And I say come on, there has to be something—you have to have suffered some traumatic childhood bite, right? Maybe even in infancy. Like a repressed snap or nip or snarl. Anything. No, no, he’s quite sure. He even asked his parents, and they couldn’t remember anything. It really was an irrational phobia, causeless, just something he was born with.’

‘Bitten in a past life maybe.’

‘Sure, maybe he was the kid my dad killed. But I say to him, basically, tell me what it is you’re afraid of. Walk me through your worst case. Say we’re in the neighborhood, a lady with a dog comes by, you freeze—what is passing through your head?’

‘What does he say?’