Year of the Dog (21 page)

I'd rented a place back home—sight unseen since naturally I knew the area—equidistant from my former home now inhabited by Baby Danny Prentice and his parents, and Mom and Daddy's house. The realtor said certainly, since it was a single-family dwelling, I could have a pet, but that would require a larger property deposit since it had been their experience that pets tended to depreciate the value of a rental. I didn't intend to jinx in any way a single thing about the Companion Dog Trials by socking down a guarantee on a place that didn't allow dogs.

I told James that no matter what happened with Beulah, of course I'd go with him to see Lucille and Owen, which is what
we'd been calling the couple, his natural parents, anything else seeming too familiar and too hopeful for him to say. And I guess I was truly as thrilled as he was about making the trip, and the possibility that he'd end up with a real family. And as terrified. Because he had to work with his kids and couldn't go with me to the Trials, he'd printed out pages of detailed roadmaps of Massachusetts, and given me the exit number of two places with both coffee and public bathrooms, since the state of Vermont did not allow any commercial signs on the highway. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd got a card from the Companions giving us the route, the exit number, and street directions from there, in case we'd set our hearts on watching our good dogs run through the trials.

I'd read the Companion Dog Trials Information Guide until I got cold chills just looking at the gray cover. It warned:
Sometimes a dog will do well with its person present but will not have enough confidence to do well when its person is absent.
Confidence. That was the key word. Confidence in the face of loud noises and strange objects and scary people and heavy traffic and other dogs. Confidence on country roads with no sidewalks and on crowded city streets and public buses, trains and escalators.
The confident dog responds well to different handlers. (S)he accepts kennel life.
Kennel! I started leaving her part of every day in her crate, but that wasn't the same as being all the time enclosed in a metal cage while she learned to be a true companion dog. How could she stand it? How could I stand even thinking about it? Here she could follow me into the kitchen while we conversed. She could lie at my feet when I was reading, or flop on her blanket by the window when it was bedtime. And always get a nighttime body rub and full-body hug from me, and always hear my voice telling her
good girl, good dog, beautiful Big Dog Beulah.

I imagined the new regime, the trainer shouting into the
kennel at dawn: “Up you canines and make it snappy, dry food on the quarter hour, no snuffling around or griping, look alert and ready to work, today we're teaching you how not to run your sightless persons into mailboxes and telephone poles.”

The night before the screening, I had sweat running down my armpits and into my socks and the trots and sick-stomach syndrome. I cried and then gave Beulah and me the Maximally Miscegenic shower and ate my bowl of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia on the floor while she ate her nibble of kibble. Finally falling asleep in my bathrobe, my head nestled between her paws.

The Companions were taking the dogs (four from our group) to the trials in the van without us, which meant I'd go down alone, and, if Beulah failed the drill, I'd come back alone and pick her up at the Puppy Social location. I'd made a motel reservation in Massachusetts, thinking I'd like to have the night there with her, if she didn't make it, and there to blubber till morning if she did. And then cancelled it. If she didn't qualify, she'd have to go home in the van that brought her; if she did, she'd stay. So whatever happened, I'd do the trip in a day, leaving before seven in the morning, getting home after nine at night. Heartsick, either way it went.

I was a wreck, trying to drive the speed limit on the highway, and pulled over into a rest area, to have a nervous pee and, on impulse buy an ice-cold Coke, probably the first ever since I got my period at thirteen. Caffeine, sugar, calories with each bubbly swallow. I might also have dug the coins out of my beat-up quilted cow-purse for a double-almond Hershey, if one had been available, and found even thinking of the milk-chocolate a boost.

The directions were good, and I turned in at the Companion Dog Kennels forty-five minutes ahead of the start of the trials. There were already Companions there as well as
trainers and instructors. The women in kennel t-shirts had a sort of tenseness about them—small wonder, considering how hard they worked to get a couple dozen dogs a year ready to be matched up, half of them anyway, the lucky half, with some blind person with whom they made a good fit in personality, energy, and living situations.

One other person from our Puppy Social was there, and though I hadn't warmed to him before, had thought him arrogant and cocky, of course I now greeted him like my next of kin. For one thing, I didn't know anyone else who had a dog in the trials. For another, I knew he wouldn't be here, all the way down at this kennel in western Mass., if his gut wasn't also turning like a butter churn.

“I'm going nuts,” I told him.

“I want to keep him and I don't, you know?” He looked a mess.

“I know.”

“You want a Coke?”

“You bet. My mouth's dry as the Sahara.” I located a grateful glance. “My name's Janey. I'm Beulah's person.” I gave him a clammy hand to shake, having forgotten his name if I ever heard it. You could remember the dogs—his huge golden lab trying to hump every puppy in sight—but not the people.

“Vic,” he said. “V, same as Vijay. How about that?”

By the time they were to start, we'd stoked up on our colas and the chocolate-chip cookies set out for the crowd, and said hellos to Betty and the other Companions from home who had brought our dogs down in the van. We waved to Patsy and Deirdre, the pair who had conducted our Puppy Evaluations, which felt like greeting Algebra teachers who'd just given you a grade of C for the second straight semester. I spotted Naomi, the curious black lab, and Tory, though not his person, the nice woman who'd had to watch him fail to climb the stairs and not quite snap to attention when he heard his name.
Rhonda, the one who puddled, and Sherry, the shy one, had dropped out.

“You think they're all in the kennels now?” I asked, as we decided it was time to get out of sight: a requirement for those who had dogs under consideration. If we gave
any
signal or let ourselves be seen or smelled, then the dogs would immediately be cut from consideration.

Vic blew his nose and we hunkered down behind a hedge along the open field where the judging would take place. “Vijay doesn't like being cooped up,” he said, looking stricken.

When the handlers brought them out onto the field, I bent double. “I'm going to be sick.”

“Naw,” he said, “that won't help.”

“I'm going to walk around the parking lot, then.”

“I'll wave when they start.”

If I didn't lose count, I trotted past my car forty-two times before I heard what sounded like dogs and saw Vic, a husky guy with a lot of gut, semaphore his hands back and forth.

Joining him in our hidden location, I saw what looked like two dozen dogs gathered on the edge of the field, all at attention, each on a leash. At first I couldn't see Beulah and then I did, in the middle of the group, looking around (
Where is my person
?), but standing straight in her working vest. I couldn't tell if she recognized her Puppy Social playmates, and I spotted Vijay but couldn't find Naomi or Tory. There were at least three golden retrievers who looked so much like Edgar, poor Edgar, who would have been a star if not for his windpipe. Not your fault, your ancestors.

After about six dogs had been tested, I started clawing at Vic's shirt, which had got wringing wet. He said he was out of here after Vijay's turn, going to go down the road and get a six-pack and come back for the verdict. But in fact he didn't leave, and Vijay did great: confident, in control, when they
opened the umbrella in his face, he charged right at it. When someone in a Halloween fright suit with wild white hair and fangs leapt out at him, he stood his ground. Waiting with the crowd of dogs, he hadn't jumped a single one. I still wouldn't have called him lovable—I could see he thought he was Top Dog, but that counted for a lot. I squeezed Vic's arm while his lab was out there, and by the end he had tears covering his jowly red face. “
Good boy,
” he growled, wiping his eyes with his sopping shirtsleeve.

Naomi came next, and when they brought out a giant inflated cat she went right over to it and poked its nose. She sniffed the groin of the scary person in the white wig, and seemed her old nosy, cheerful self, even giving a little tail-wag, though I didn't know if that was okay or not. But when they walked her up and down, snapped her to attention, then had her stay while they walked the length of the field away from her, her attention didn't hold.
What's going on here
? she seemed to say.
What's that over there? What do I smell
? And I understood why her person hadn't been able to watch.

Then, after two other dogs, they called, “Beulah.” The eleventh dog. Things got dead quiet in my head, and my eyes faded in and out so that I kept forgetting to breathe. They made awful noises—banging two pans together, first on one side of her head and then on the other. And I imagined I could see her think:
My person is banging the dumpsters.
And then they led her up a flight of open stairs to the top of a wooden viewing tower and down again, and she did them as easily as our steps at home—heading down to do her business, not minding the guys upstairs. And every time they said her name, “Beulah,” she attended, and she did all her commands just right. But in between their instructions, I could see her turn her head sometimes ever so slightly (
Where is my person? Where is my person?
), and I could see small signs of worry ruff her coat. Vic rubbed the back of my neck with his huge sweaty
hand as we peered through the hedge at my good dog.

And then, suddenly, while she walked briskly alongside her instructor, they snapped the large black umbrella open in her face. Slowly, ever so slowly—exactly the way she'd done at the hydro-electric plant—she began to back up with the handler at her side, never taking her eyes from the unexpected object,
moving her person away from danger.

“Oh, Beulah,” I whispered, sinking to my knees in relief and hope, “Oh, Baby, that's the way.”

37

WE'D SET THE time for mid-afternoon, so that if they didn't feed us anything, if the woman met us at the door and whispered, “I'm going to tell him you're my cousin's stepson,” and we were back on the road in eleven minutes, there would still be daylight for the trip back home.

“You called her?” I asked, as we turned south at the Hanover Inn onto a state road. It wasn't really a question.

“I told you all that.” He had both hands on the wheel, concentrating like he was driving the Indy 500, not another car in sight. He'd worn a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled, and jeans. Long-lost son clothes.

“Tell me again.” I wasn't too calm myself.

“I called her, Lucille, after I got her email. I told her I'd been born to Lucille Freeman, and gave her my birth date, which I'd done when I wrote. She asked me, ‘What name do you go by?” ' And I told her Maarten. ‘All right,' she said, and asked if I had a pen so she could give me directions to their house.”

I had nerves, wanting this for him in the worst way, but scared of the reception we might get. How could people let you go, and go on about their lives as if you'd never happened? I'd worn my pale southern tee over cropped pants, and my armpits were as damp as if I was back at another puppy
trial, and I guess I was, in a way.

“That was Dartmouth back there, where I didn't go.”

I laughed. “I didn't either.”

“I mean, you know, I thought about it—.”

Fifteen miles down the two-lane road, he turned left on a street with a large brick corner house that had a FOR SALE sign in the yard. He checked his notes. “Six blocks from here on the right, it says.” He slowed the car to a crawl, creeping through intersections. As we got closer, he rubbed the top of his head, as if to make sure it was still there. “It's the next block,” he said. “Whoa. I don't know anything to say but ‘Hey, I'm your kid.' That's going to freak them out.”

“They know that, James. Don't they?”

“I guess, yeah. Hell, I don't know.” He stopped the car at a yellow house, studied the page of directions one more time. “This is it.” He stared at me in panic. “
Janey.
”

“What?”

“If I freeze up, help me out.”

“Sure,” I promised, not having any more idea than he what to say.

The woman who opened the door, small, neat, her brown hair graying, studied us a minute, then showed us in. “So you are James,” she said, making a small smile. “Yes, I can see that.”

“This is . . .” He turned, almost bumping into me.

“I'm Janey Daniels.” I held out my hand.

“A southern voice?” she asked.

“I'm from Carolina, South Carolina.”

“All right,” she said. She seemed quite reserved, quite contained, as if she did not expect things to be easy. “Come into the kitchen. I would like to tell you some of it before Owen comes home. Will you wait for refreshments? Do you need a bathroom?”

“We're okay,” James said, and I nodded.

She waved us onto kitchen chairs in a sunny room with windows looking out on a backyard with three bird feeders. She stood, wearing a neat shirtwaist dress, pressing her palms together. “I had a youthful marriage to an abusive man. All right? Owen and I met; we were both teachers at that time. Not here, not in this state.” She glanced at James. “You know that.”