A Dog's Purpose (15 page)

The day Mom and Ethan drove back home for school, the smell of paint from the new barn was in the air and the girl
came over and she and Ethan went down to the dock and sat with their feet in the water and talked. The girl cried, and they hugged a lot and didn’t throw sticks or do any of the things people normally do at a pond, so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. There was more hugging at the car, and then we drove away, Ethan honking.

Things were different at home. For one thing, Dad had his own room now, with a new bed in it. He shared the bathroom with Ethan, and frankly, I didn’t like to go in there after Dad had been in it. For another, when Ethan wasn’t playing football with his friends he spent a lot of time in his room talking on the phone. He said the name Hannah often during these calls.

The leaves were falling from the trees on the day Ethan took me for a car ride to a place with big silver school buses full of people, and there, coming off of one of them, was the girl! I don’t know who was more happy to see her, me or the boy—I wanted to play with her, but all he wanted to do was hug. I was so excited at this development I didn’t mind that I was automatically a backseat dog for the return trip.

“Coach says there will be scouts from U of M and Michigan State tonight, to see me, Hannah,” the boy said. I understood the word “Hannah,” of course, but I also picked up a surge of fear and excitement from the boy. From Hannah there was happiness and pride. I looked out the window to see if I could figure out what was going on but didn’t see anything unusual.

That night, I was proud to stand with Hannah while Ethan played football with his friends. I felt fairly certain she had never been to such a place as wonderful as the big yard, and I led her over to where Mom usually took me and showed Hannah where to sit.

We’d only been there a little while when Todd came walking
up. I hadn’t seen much of Todd lately, though his sister, Linda, still rode up and down the street on a bicycle all the time. “Hi, Bailey,” he said to me, really friendly, but there was still something very wrong about him and I just sniffed at his hand when he offered it to me.

“Do you know Bailey?” the girl asked. I wagged at the mention of my name.

“We’re old pals, aren’t we, boy. Good dog.”

I did not need to be called good dog by someone like Todd.

“You don’t go to school here; do you go to East?” Todd asked.

“No, I’m just visiting Ethan’s family.”

“What are you, a cousin or something?”

The people in the crowd all shouted and I jerked my head around, but there was nothing happening but more wrestling. It fooled me every time they did that.

“No, just . . . a friend.”

“So you want to party?” Todd asked her.

“Sorry?”

“Want to party? Some of us are getting together. This game’s going nowhere.”

“No, I . . . I’d better wait for Ethan.” I cocked my head at the girl. I could sense her getting anxious for some reason, and I could feel Todd’s anger building inside him like it always did.

“Ethan!” Todd turned and spat in the grass. “So are you two a couple, or what?”

“Well . . .”

“ ’Cause you should know, he’s pretty much going out with Michele Underwood.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Like, everybody knows it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So if you’re thinking, you know, him and you, that’s not, you know, that’s not going to happen.” Todd moved closer to the girl, and when she stiffened I saw that his hand was touching her shoulder. Her rising tension brought me back to my feet. Todd looked down at me and we locked eyes, and I felt the fur lifting on the back of my neck. Almost involuntarily, a low growl emerged from deep in my throat.

“Bailey!” The girl leaped to her feet. “What’s the matter?”

“Yeah, Bailey, it’s
me
, your pal.” He turned to the girl. “I’m Todd, by the way.”

“I’m Hannah.”

“Why don’t you tie up the dog and come with me? It’ll be fun.”

“Um, no, uh-uh. I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not? Come on.”

“No, I have to take care of Bailey.”

Todd shrugged. He stared at her. “Yeah. Well, whatever.”

The force of his anger was so strong I growled again, and this time the girl didn’t say anything to me about it. “Fine,” Todd said. “You ask Ethan about Michele. Okay?”

“Yes, okay.”

“You ask him.” Todd jammed his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Ethan was pretty happy and excited when he ran over to see us an hour or so later. “Michigan State, here we come. Spartans!” he shouted. I wagged and barked, and then his happiness went away.

“What’s the matter, Hannah?”

“Who is Michele?”

I put my paw on Ethan’s leg to let him know I was ready to play with the football, if he wanted.

“Michele? Who do you mean?” Ethan laughed, but the
laughter stopped after a second, as if he had run out of air. “What’s wrong?”

They walked me in circles around the big yard, talking, so intently involved in conversation they didn’t notice when I ate a half of a hot dog, some popcorn, and bits of a tuna sandwich. Before long nearly everyone else had left, but they kept walking around and around.

“I don’t know this girl,” Ethan kept saying. “Who did you talk to?”

“I don’t remember his name. He knew Bailey, though.”

I froze at my name, wondering if I was going to get in trouble for the candy wrapper I was stealthily eating.

“Everybody knows Bailey; he comes to all the games.”

I quickly swallowed, but apparently I wasn’t in trouble. After another circuit around the big yard, made uninteresting by the fact that I’d pretty much found everything edible, the boy and the girl stopped and hugged. They did that a lot. “You’re all sweaty,” the girl laughed, pushing him away.

“Want to go for a car ride, Bailey?” the boy asked.

Of course I did! We went home, and there was some more quiet talking, and they fed me and I was content to fall asleep on the living room floor while the girl and the boy wrestled silently together on the couch.

We had a new dog door now, from the back door right out into the yard, and no one ever tried to suggest I should have to sleep in the garage anymore. I was glad I broke the family of
that
habit. I went outside to relieve myself and was astonished to find a piece of meat lying in the grass by the fence.

The funny thing was, it didn’t smell right. There was a sharp tang to it, an odd, bitter odor. Even more strange, Todd’s scent was all over it.

I picked up the piece of meat and carried it to the back patio, where I dropped it, the bitter taste causing foam in my mouth. Then I sat and looked at it. It was a pretty bad flavor, but then, it was a nice hunk of meat. If I chewed it fast enough, I could probably swallow it without tasting it.

I poked the meat with my nose. Why, I wondered, did it smell so strongly of Todd?

When Mom came outside the next morning and saw me, I hung my head and tapped the patio with just the tip of my tail. For some reason, though I had done nothing wrong, I felt really guilty.

“Good morning, Bailey,” she said. Then she saw the meat. “What’s that?”

When she bent over to look more closely at the meat, I dropped onto my back for a tummy rub. I’d been staring at that piece of meat all night, it seemed, and I was exhausted and needed reassurance I had done the right thing, even if I didn’t understand why. There was just something wrong, here, and it had prevented me from taking advantage of the free meal.

“Where did this come from, Bailey?” Mom stroked my belly lightly, then reached over and picked up the meat. “Ugh,” she said.

I sat up alertly. If she was going to feed it to me, it meant it was okay. Instead, she turned away to take it into the house. I rose up on my back legs a little—now that she was removing it, I’d changed my mind; I wanted to eat it!

“Yuck, Bailey, you don’t want that, whatever it is,” Mom said. She dropped the meat into the garbage.

Hannah sat in my seat for the car ride to the giant silver school buses, and I sat alone in the car for a long time while Ethan and Hannah stood and hugged. When the boy came back to the car, he felt sad and lonely, so I put my head in his lap instead of sticking my nose out the window.

The girl came back to visit again the day after the family sat around the indoor tree and tore up papers for Merry Christmas. I was in a bad mood because Ethan gave Mom a new black and white kitten, named Felix. He had no manners whatsoever and attacked my tail when I sat down and often lunged out at me from behind the couch, batting at me with his tiny paws. When I tried to play with him, he wrapped his legs around my nose and bit me with his sharp teeth. Hannah paid way too much attention to the kitty when she first arrived, though I had known the girl longer and was obviously the favorite pet. Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.

One thing the kitten couldn’t do was go outside. The ground was coated with a thick layer of snow, and the one time Felix ventured to put a foot into the stuff he turned around and ran back into the house as if he’d been burned. So when Hannah and Ethan built a big pile of snow in the front yard and put a hat on it, I was right there with them. The boy liked to tackle me and drag me around in the white stuff, and I let him catch me
for the sheer joy of having his arms around me, the way he’d played with me every day when he was younger.

When we went sledding, Hannah sat in the back and I ran alongside the sled, barking and trying to pull the mittens off of the boy’s hands.

One afternoon the sun was out and the air was so cold and clean I could taste it all the way down my throat. All of the children from the neighborhood were there at the sledding hill, and Hannah and Ethan spent as much time pushing the younger ones as riding themselves. I soon grew tired of running up and down the slope, which was why I was at the bottom when Todd drove up.

He looked at me when he got out of the car, but he didn’t say anything to me, or reach out his hand. I kept my distance.

“Linda! Come on, time to come home!” he shouted, his breath whipping out of his mouth in a steamy cloud.

Linda was on the slope with three of her little friends, coming down in a saucer-shaped sled at about one mile an hour. Ethan and Hannah flashed past them on their sled, laughing. “I don’t want to!” Linda yelled back.

“Now! Mom says!”

Ethan and Hannah came to a halt at the bottom of the hill, tumbling out of their sled. They lay on top of each other, giggling. Todd stood and watched them.

Something in Todd came to the surface, then. Not anger, exactly, but something worse, something dark, an emotion I’d never felt from anyone before. I felt it in the way he stared at Ethan and Hannah, his face very still.

Ethan and the girl stood up, wiping snow off each other, and came over to see Todd, their arms still intertwined. They
radiated such love and joy it blinded them to the hate-filled currents emanating from Todd.

“Hey, Todd.”

“Hi.”

“This is Hannah. Hannah, this is Todd; he lives down the street.”

Hannah reached her hand out, smiling. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

Todd stiffened a little. “Actually, we already met.”

Hannah cocked her head, wiping hair out of her eyes. “We did?”

“When was that?” Ethan asked.

“At the football game,” Todd said. Then he laughed, a short bark.

Ethan was shaking his head blankly, but Hannah blinked. “Oh. Oh, right,” she said, suddenly subdued.

“What?” Ethan asked.

“I have to pick up my sister. Linda!” Todd yelled, cupping his hands. “Come home now!”

Linda detached herself from her pile of friends and trudged through the snow dejectedly.

“He’s . . . he’s the one I talked to,” Hannah told Ethan. Some worry flickered through Hannah, and I glanced at her curiously, then jerked my head at Ethan when I felt a rising anger from him.

“Wait, what? You? Todd, you were the person who told Hannah I’d been with Michele? I don’t even
know
Michele.”

“I got to go,” Todd mumbled. “Get in the car, Linda,” he told his sister.

“No, wait,” Ethan said. He reached his hand out and Todd jerked away from it.

“Ethan,” Hannah murmured, putting a mitten on his arm.

“Why would you do that, Todd? Why would you lie? What’s wrong with you, man?”

Though the conflicts and emotions boiling through Todd were hot enough to melt the snow we were standing on, he just stood there, staring back at Ethan, not saying a word.

“This is why you don’t have any friends, Todd. Why can’t you just be normal? You’re always doing stupid things like this,” Ethan said. “It’s sick.” The anger was leaving him, but I could feel how upset he still was.

“Ethan,” Hannah said more sharply.

Todd wordlessly got in his car, slamming the door. His face, when he looked back at Hannah and Ethan, was absolutely blank.

“That was mean,” Hannah said.

“Oh, you don’t know him.”

“I don’t care,” Hannah replied. “You shouldn’t have said he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Well, he doesn’t. He’s always doing stuff, like when he said this one guy stole his transistor radio. The whole thing was a lie.”