Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog (6 page)

McKenna took a deep breath, recalling that day in February when her social worker, Mrs. Gaspé, got careless with McKenna’s case file.

McKenna had opened the manila folder and read the report—the report that said that McKenna’s birth mother had abandoned her when she was an infant. That the woman who McKenna thought was her real mother—Pamela Skye—was killed in an auto accident when she was two.

Miss Gustie interrupted McKenna’s troubled thoughts. “I understand that you’re from up around Lennox Island.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, are you, or aren’t you?”

“I’m—I—”

McKenna didn’t know where she was from. Or whom she belonged to.

Miss Gustie’s eyes softened as she scratched behind Pup’s ears. Miss Gustie had eyes like Annie Pike—the only foster mother McKenna had ever loved.

She’d better be careful. If not, she might spill the truth.

“Where I’m from is where I am. I walk alone.”

Miss Gustie seemed troubled by McKenna’s remark. The creases on her forehead deepened.

“Nobody in this world walks alone.” She paused. “And if they do, they don’t like it. Sometimes, McKenna, it means they don’t like themselves.”

Did she like herself? What difference did it make?

“Well, I’ve got to get back to work,” McKenna said.

The dog had buried his sweet face into the folds of Miss Gustie’s heather blue sweater.

“Nice dog,” murmured McKenna wistfully. “A person could get real attached to a nice little dog like that.”

One afternoon, in spite of the soothing sunshine, Nigel Stump was in particularly low spirits. Parked on a sandstone rock, he was trying to figure out why he didn’t feel like hanging out with the cat pack.

Ever since he’d scored the silver charm, the cats had been acting strange, especially Briar and Flint.

The pack had planned to eat some newborn chicks they’d picked off in a nearby coop. When Nigel announced that he wasn’t hungry, and he was going to the beach, Flint said in a syrupy tone of voice, “Stumpy-Boy, if you see that mean old outsider fox, you tell him to scram now, you hear?”

Nigel should’ve been elated. They’d listened to Nigel’s concerns, hadn’t they? Axel had announced the Scram Plan, hadn’t he?

Nigel jumped off the rock. Unsteadily, he paced back and forth across the sand.

Was Nigel only imagining their disdain? He had to know.

Nigel crept back to the Pitiful Place. He peered through a hole that another animal—most likely a rat—had chewed in the boards on the wharf side.

Inside, the five cats circled a pile of yellow-feathered carcasses, as if warming themselves by a slow-burning fire.

“That Stump! What a hoot!” Flint spit out a mouthful of feathers. “I can’t get over it!”

With an ugly chuckle, Leftie mimicked Nigel. “Skunks are invading our village! Skunks are invading our shores!”

“We have a problem!”

“The village of Victoria has a problem!”

“The whole of Prince Edward Island has a problem!”

Nigel cringed at the mocking chorus of laughter.

“And what’s with the big words?” asked Flint. “Stump thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us. It’s starting to get on my nerves.”

“Cut him a break, would ya? The guy’s a cripple,” said Axel.

“Axel, fess up,” Leftie challenged. “You felt sorry for him. That’s why you took him in.”

“Maybe,” Axel conceded. “But Stump’s a good night watchman. Any of you want the job? If so, I’ll get rid of him.”

“I know I feel a lot better now that we’ve got the Scram Plan,” said Tate sarcastically.

“Yeah, me, too,” Briar sneered.

The cats’ laughter felt like raw wind whipping across Nigel’s ears.

Until today, Nigel thought that he’d never been more miserable than when Ben Rafferty’s trap snapped shut on his left front paw. Nigel could still hear the sound of steel meeting steel, crunching, crushing his bones. In order to escape, he’d had to chew off his leg; if he hadn’t, Nigel probably would’ve died right there in the trap.

Three-legged but free, Nigel laid low, licking his ragged wound. Once it healed, he was too ashamed to go back to his mother and their human family. So when Axel invited Nigel to hole up with the cats, Nigel felt like a big man. Nigel had been an only kitten. He sensed a brotherhood, a camaraderie unlike anything he’d ever known.

Now, at this moment, perhaps another cat—a cat with more self-respect—would have walked away. But Nigel Stump was not that cat.

No, he’d learned his lesson. From now on, he’d keep his mouth shut and do what he was told.

Acting as if he didn’t have a care in the world, Nigel slipped back into the Pitiful Place. Out of the corner of his eye, Nigel saw Briar wink at Flint.

Nigel sprang up to the fireplace mantle. He curled
his black-and-white body around the saucer on which the silver heart was displayed. As his so-called friends licked yellow down off their paws, anxiety crawled up, down, and across Nigel’s skin like a party of ants.

One still evening at twilight, McKenna brought her knees to her chest. For more than an hour, she’d been trapped in the corner of her shed.

Above the silence, frogs croaked, an owl hooted, and flocks of crows chattered in the budding trees. Her stomach growled.

Earlier, she’d come in out of the steady rain, swept, and sponged down the floorboards. She’d stirred a pail of whitewash and with a big brush, hurriedly slopped on the lime solution. McKenna had started at the doorway, where the light was strongest, and worked her way backward.

Think before you act, think before you act.
… Isn’t that what her social worker was always telling her to do? If she couldn’t paint a stupid floor without painting herself into a corner, how was she ever going to make it all the way to Toronto?

Maybe she should give up, phone Mrs. Gaspé—and let her come haul McKenna away to some “school” for “girls like her.”

McKenna’s rolled sleeping bag was hanging on the doorknob. Where was she going to sleep? No way was she walking into Jeannie Cody’s kitchen with whitewashed feet to ask for a bed, or the couch.

The woman didn’t like McKenna. McKenna didn’t know why. Lately, at mealtimes, McKenna dished up a plate of food and ate by herself at the picnic table.

McKenna rubbed the spot between her eyebrows where her headaches always took hold. Beneath the floor, she heard the now-familiar sound of her friend, the fox, burrowing a tunnel.

Sometimes, McKenna imagined that her birth mother was dead, but had come back to this earth—not as a spirit, but as a fox. Why else would a wild animal shadow McKenna her entire life?

With a long stretch, McKenna reached for a multicolored cloth pouch, suspended from a peg under the porthole window. She dug inside for Bun-Bun, a dirty gray and tailless toy she’d carried with her for as long as she could remember.

Deep inside his stuffing, the tiny music box still worked. McKenna wound the key. She chewed the inside of her cheek and bit her lips. By the time the
cradle song finished, a few tears had escaped. These she wiped away with her sleeve.

Then she dug out a black, leather-bound book with a broken binding. The pages were water-damaged; the cover curled at the corners. When she was about seven, McKenna discovered it inside a broken-down desk in Annie Pike’s attic. When McKenna showed it to her foster mother, Annie didn’t recognize the boy’s name engraved on its cover.

“It’s a Bible,” Annie had said with a smile. “Finders, keepers.”

Behind Annie’s back, McKenna took Mr. Pike’s pocketknife and scratched off the boy’s gold-lettered name.

To this day, she never knew why the Pike family couldn’t take her along when they moved to Toronto. But McKenna had quickly learned that foster kids don’t get answers to those kinds of questions.

Fingering the Bible’s scar, McKenna recalled the moment when she’d discovered a piece of paper between two pages of the Psalms.

Enchanted Candles—
written in faded, delicate penmanship—was centered at the top of the parchment paper. At the bottom, a sentence was starred:
This recipe makes 13 pillar candles.

Often, she’d searched the recipe for hidden meaning, but found none. By the time she turned twelve,
McKenna was convinced that it was her destiny to create these candles. She’d started collecting the ingredients, now in baby food jars on the shelf above her.

McKenna struck a match and traced the words on the paper, whispering the list of ingredients she’d long since memorized.

To melted paraffin, add:

One tablespoon of white sand from the North Shore

Two tablespoons of red earth from the South Shore

A strand of bark from a silver birch tree

Scrapings from the opalescence of three blue mussel shells

Thirteen dried purple lupine blossoms

A sprig of fireweed at peak color

One snail’s shell, crushed

One sand dollar, finely ground

It was kind of spooky—it was like the
Enchanted Candles
recipe had known that she would travel from the North Shore to Victoria, on the South Shore, even before she did.

She had yet to find a sand dollar. Not that it would be easy, but finding “mermaid’s money” was the least of McKenna’s worries. There had to be more to making candles than melting wax, but what?

McKenna had no clue.

McKenna dug deeper into the pouch, feeling for
the silver chain she’d found on the beach. After feeling her way past a half-broken dreamcatcher, the wrinkled red envelope with Annie’s address in the corner, a tube of lip balm, a pack of gum, and a wallet, she found the chain. She’d tried the bracelet on her wrist, but the chain was too long—around her neck, too short. An ankle bracelet, maybe?

McKenna took off her socks. She wound the silver links around her left ankle—perfect! With a string of leather from the dreamcatcher, she tied the two end-links together.

Later, surrounded by darkness, McKenna leaned against the wall, cradling her neck with her sweatshirt. Hoping to fall asleep, she recited the names of months, like Annie had taught her—in the Old Way.

She began with April, when she’d run away:
Egg hatching time… frog croaking time … leaves are budding time… animal fur thickens time … ripening time… mate calling time….

McKenna drummed her thigh, trying to remember October, but couldn’t. Hungry and frustrated, she covered her face with her hands.

Big Bart told her that whitewash dried quickly. McKenna sure hoped he was right because she had to open her shop soon. As nice as the South Shore was, she couldn’t hang around Victoria-by-the-Sea forever. Just like Miss Gustie’s dog, someone might come looking for
her
one of these days.

One evening in late May, the sky above Prince Edward Island was deep lavender with fleeting wisps of silver clouds. In the west, the sun lingered, and then, like a strawberry red ball slipping out of a child’s hand, dropped out of sight.

Tango was lying on a braided rug next to a clay pot in which a thick-stemmed geranium grew. Through a canopy of crimson petals, Augusta smiled down on him. The deep folds of skin on Augusta’s face reminded Tango of a Shar-Pei that he’d once longed to meet.

“Here, Pup, I have something for you.”

A tiny scarf with a teensy red pattern dangled from Augusta’s fingers. The fringed scarf was woven out of dark green wool.

“See the pattern? Those are little lobsters.”

Luckily, the kind doctor had just given Tango a
warm, sudsy bath. He offered Augusta a bottle of tearless shampoo. “Be sure to get him dry behind the ears,” he cautioned.

Augusta cupped Tango’s belly, easing him into a standing position. “Let’s see how this looks.”

Augusta wrapped the scarf around his neck and knotted it, not too loose and not too tight. The fringe whispered across his chest.

Tango licked Augusta’s fingertips in appreciation.

Sadly, no matter how kind Augusta was, as May turned to June, Tango was unable to shed his longing for the past. Love, loyalty, and regret hung on his heart like heavy ornaments hooked on the lowest branch of a Christmas tree.

A string of “if-onlys” tangled his thoughts: If only Marcellina hadn’t given Diego a sailboat. If only Diego’s sailboat hadn’t been rocked by giant waves in a vicious sea. If only Tango hadn’t lost his silver heart.

He worried, too. Had Marcellina and Diego survived the wicked storm?

One fitful night, Tango dreamed that his sister Esperanza was gazing out of a window near the top of a red and white striped lighthouse.

Tan-go… Tan-go…
Esperanza called in a voice both mysterious and inviting. Keeping time with the
blinking beam of light, she chanted,
Without hope… without hope… nothing is… nothing is….

Tango awoke with a start. His skin tingled. Esperanza was trying to tell him something. But what? He had to know!

Tango bolted to the mud room and pushed—headfirst—through the small swinging door once used, Augusta said, by her mother’s cats. He scurried across Augusta’s moonlit backyard, squeezed under a loose picket in the fence, and sprinted past McKenna’s shed. Boldly, he headed toward the Victoria lighthouse—identical, Tango realized, to the candy cane striped structure in his dream.