Lost & Found (10 page)

The dog still caught old wisps of her scent, once at the food store, again on a beach chair stacked near a restaurant, and when he did, the pain of first loss rose up in him. He knew, in the place where scent traveled through neuron, leaping over synapse to the perfect place in his brain, that she was dead. The smell of death was given to all dogs and it was carried back throughout time from the very first death when dogs came in from the bush to join humans.

It was a primordial scent that announced the end of one human, a different smell than the death of another dog. Once dogs joined the packs of humans, this smell was unlike all others. He knew she was dead, the one he had joined with, slept near, awaited, greeted, licked, cajoled into play, soothed through bad times, lowered her heart rate, her breath, sighed deeply to her to signal that it was time to go to sleep. And she in turn had loved him, remembered him, delighted him with food, thrilled him with car trips where he hung his great black head out the car window, and together they had been majestic.

She was gone. He had failed her, failed to protect her, and
save her. An unspeakable tear had ripped through them. His powerful nose tortured him in moments when a thread of her scent caught him off guard and made him halt in his tracks.

The new human who had saved him, and he knew that without her he would have perished, needed extra watching at night. By day he kept a leisurely vigil between her and the door, between her and unknown people. Her thin substance blew in and out of rooms, houses and cars as if she was the alpha one, and he let her. When she slept, her attempt at alpha nature evaporated and her terror began. He smelled it the first night, even groggy from his own surgery, his own disaster. He sensed the alarm, the hunt. Her body restless in sleep, carried traces of an ancient hunter, tracking senselessly, flailing about, sending off waves of scented pain to him.

He had tried to follow humans before into their dreamscapes and the road was treacherous. Following them meant abandoning his watch here, leaving the house unattended, and it was not wise to do so for long. Humans heard nearly nothing while they slept. And they smelled even less. He had experimented many times, walking right up to them in their slumber, holding his nose right up to theirs and still they slept.

To join them in dreaming was a drastic measure, but he feared for this human. He did not want to lose another. He waited until her breathing deepened, then grew quiet. He smelled her sleeping. He crept on her bed, careful to adjust his bulk to not wake her, although any dog would have roused long ago. He lowered his weight and pushed one paw toward her, touching lightly at her back and closed his eyes, chancing that he could find her in their dreams.

He fell through the waking and let himself wash away, perilously so. There, there she was, rushing through houses, opening any door, searching. A wave of acrid smoke caught him, with a flavor of desperation. She would be willing to do anything to find the one she hunted. Here is what he needed to know, she tracked a dead one. Now he understood. This was where she spent her nights. Only sickness will result from this journey of hers. He followed her all night, not needing to hide himself because she had eyes for nothing but her precious dead one. He left her weeping in the dust and could finally stay no more. He pulled himself out of the dream, back to his furred body, next to her in bed. He rose from the bed, walked to her side and whined in alarm until she opened her eyes.

Once she was awake, he urged her outside. The fresh air was a relief to him, blowing all her dream horrors away. They made their way to the beach, and each day, he urged her along a bit more, going farther every day.

She could not afford to trust Rocky. The woman was rude and chaotic and she seemed to peer directly through Melissa’s skin, into the abandoned quarry of her stomach. Yet when Rocky had asked if Melissa wanted a job walking Lloyd after school, she thought only of the chance to be with the black dog. Cross-country season was over. She could skip some of her workouts at the Y until Lloyd was fully recovered or until Rocky located his real owner. Right now, he needed Melissa. They had agreed that Melissa could take Lloyd for a walk every day if Rocky was not home by five. Once she had agreed and it looked like Rocky really had not seen her at the club, she was relieved that her efforts at extinguishing a momentary flaw had been successful. Let Rocky work out at the club, Melissa didn’t care.

After school she hopped the ferry back to the island and walked the mile from the ferry to Rocky’s house. She knocked to make sure that Rocky was out, even though the truck was gone. She found the key under the mat and let herself in, calling to Lloyd as she entered.

“Hey, Lloyd, it’s me, just me.” He greeted her with the un
abashed joy that only a full-sized black Lab can offer. Direct, caressing, embarrassing, nose, lips, teeth, tail, and the snap of black claws on the linoleum. “Touch me, touch me!” signaled the dog as he offered his head, the scruff of his neck, and the favorite spot above his tail. “I have missed you more than anything, and now you have returned and I adore you,” his body and dark brown eyes intoned to her.

Melissa let him out for the quick pee. She stood in the doorway, her thin hands rubbing the painted edges of the frame. He bounded back into the house, knowing that Melissa was, on this day, the bearer of food. She closed the door and it was just the two of them, which is how Melissa liked it. She sighed and for the first time that day, relaxed the barest fraction.

She opened the closet where a full-sized plastic garbage can held his fifty-pound bag of dog food. Rocky must have brought this from the mainland. Melissa scooped out three cups. Rocky had insisted that dry food was enough, but several times a week Melissa brought a can of wet food and Lloyd was guaranteed to do an appreciative dance at those times, bounding from one side to another for a few steps.

“Not tonight, sorry,” she said.

He was a lay-down eater. That’s what Rocky called him. He lay down with the dish between his front paws and dipped his head into the dish, eating his food in a surprisingly delicate manner, one kibble at a time. Melissa liked this part the best. She scooted near him, pressing her back against the wall, exhaling stale air of her restricted day as he ate with sureness and innocence. She marveled at this.

Melissa had eaten an apple at school, half for breakfast and half for lunch. She was so hungry that part of her thought
of nothing else. By afternoon her head hurt and her thinking was jagged and filled with holes.

“You are so good, Lloyd. Everything about you is good.”

He paused and lifted his ears as he listened to her, thumping his black tail twice at the sound of one of his favorite words.

Watching Lloyd eat was fascinating, as if there was nothing more amazing than seeing his sharp teeth crack open the fat kibbles, his long tongue guiding each one in, and finally delivering it to his throat. In between kibbles, the dog looked over at Melissa, and she thought she saw his eyebrows knit together.

He stopped eating; a few kibbles remained. He looked at the girl, and she saw her image reflected in the light of his eyes, a strange glint from the kitchen light giving her the opportunity to see her hair pulled tight, her eyes looked larger and not unlike a puppy. Lloyd stood, wagged his tail with encouragement, burped as best he could to welcome her and sat back on his haunches.

Her brain was rumpled, but her body read all the messages from Lloyd and slowly she reached forward, moving to her hands and knees until the dish was within reach. With her butt pushed up and her head down to the floor, she peered into the dog dish, and saw three kibbles amid the slick of saliva and Lloyd’s oily scent. She looked back at the dog. She took his soft-mouthed smile as a sign. She put her face into the dish and opened her lips around one kibble, and tasted the sweet grain and meats. She scraped her teeth against it and she remembered a hundred flavors that had been lost for months. She softened each kibble in her mouth and swallowed.

Rocky brought a weekly report into Isaiah’s office. It was an accounting of dead animals removed from roadways, animals taken to the mainland, calls about lost cats, and calls requesting her help with troublesome animals. She also added, although Isaiah had said her level of detail was not necessary, an accounting of her walks on the shore, of sea gull carcasses, and of unusual high tides that ate a new inch out of the cove.

“You’re not responsible for the work of the ocean,” he said when he read one of her reports for the first time. “I know I mentioned that you could keep track of beach erosion, but I forgot that you would be such a scientist.”

“I think there should be an accounting of it, of the changes. Someone should know that a gull died.”

He put the report on his oil-stained desk, then he reached into a box beneath his desk and extracted a folder and put the report in it. He wrote on the manila folder with a ballpoint pen, “Life as recorded by the Animal Control Warden.”

“Agreed. Write down everything happening on our fair island,” he said.

And she did. After the dog came along, she added in his recovery and his speedy rehabilitation. She added in brief notes about her archery practice. One week she wrote, “Five hours archery, no change.” The next week she recorded, “Moved up to the twenty-five-pound bow. Now it is hard all over again.”

Rocky had just stopped by with the latest report. Isaiah read the report, nodded with approval and said, “I haven’t asked you because you told me not to back in October. But is this helping you in any way, pretending to be who you are not? Is this all constructed so you don’t have to talk about your husband? People handle death in all sorts of ways. I’ve seen some whoppers; people will try the never talking about it method, and on a rare occasion, it works. I can’t say why, but it’s not the way for most.”

He had both of his hands wrapped around a blue coffee mug that said, “Mutual Life.” Rocky still had her coat on and her nose stung from the cold wind that pummeled the island. She weighed her choices. There was something about the hiss of the woodstove and the way a jet of steam rose out of the dented aluminum pot of water on the stove and the way the black dog suddenly gave one deep-throated bark from her truck.

“Let me get the dog if we’re going to talk awhile. He gets worried that I’ll get into trouble if I’m gone too long.”

Since the dog had come into her life, Rocky had been thinking more about bodies, about how everyone might live in bodies but only like a prom dress or a tuxedo, a costume for the play. She had watched Lloyd struggle with his injury, fight to survive, endure the worst loneliness and despair, just to keep living in his black-furred body that had miraculously
healed. But his body had changed. His limp was integrated into a slightly altered body. Lloyd had a new life and a modified body.

Her body had changed also. First, after Bob’s death, she had stopped caring about her body; exactly the opposite reaction of the dog. She’d lost interest in sustaining her lonely shell of a body. But somewhere between the dog and archery she had slid back into her arms and legs, wrapped her torso around her heart and lungs, and started making, and eating, grilled cheese sandwiches.

Rocky and Isaiah talked for hours, until his wife called and said where in the world are you at this hour, and he told her. Then they talked more and Rocky told Isaiah everything about Bob, about the way he could put his hand on the small of her back and warm her entire spine, and how he had two free spay-and-neuter clinics every year that just about killed him, and how they talked about having kids and had not ruled out the idea but they both knew it was starting to get late. She told him about tossing Bob’s ashes in the deep fryer at the local restaurant. She stopped and asked him if he had ever in all his years as a minister ever heard of anyone doing that and didn’t he think that she was crazy for doing that.

He rubbed his knuckles with his thumb. “Yes, you were crazy to do that. We often go crazy with death. I hope you didn’t keep throwing things into that poor man’s deep fryer, did you?”

“No, just that once. Nothing else,” she said.

“Go on, then. Tell me what happened next,” he said.

And she did. Lloyd was asleep by her feet. Sometimes his feet danced in dream, running, and she saw his muscles contract in his haunches.

“So now you’re here and you’ve just about worn out the usefulness of pretending that you’re someone else, someone who you must have thought would be less touched by life. Someone who should have been able to save her husband. How’s it working?”

“You sound like the talk show therapists,” she said, pulling her head back in surprise.

“Maybe I should try that career. Me by the woodstove, or better yet, on the porch in my rocker, giving out advice. Let’s make it a call-in show. So how is it working, Rocky?”

They were in the hours of early morning where most pretenses fall away. Dawn was still several hours down the road. The wind had picked up and rattled ill-fitting windows in Isaiah’s office.

“I liked being someone else, or thinking I was someone else. But I never was anyone else. I was still essentially me in a different costume. Do you think that’s what being dead is like? Do you think we shed the body and the essential us continues?”

She prayed that he would say yes, that in fact Bob might just be sitting there with them, listening in on the whole discussion, that he would always be with her. And she would believe anything that Isaiah would say, because this moment was filled with truth and they both knew it. If he told her that Bob was an angel, she would buy it. Anything, just say it.

“I think you’ve gone a long way into the land of the dead. Let the dead ones answer some of their own questions. What is it like to be alive? That’s the question,” he said.