The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (13 page)

Three of them! She would have to eat supper in her room, something light, a can of soup. She didn't care what she ate.

She went back to her email and deleted the Sanctuary's message so she wouldn't be tempted to read it again and wonder about it. She hoped that removing it from her computer would be the same as removing it from her mind. Then she listened to what it was like without Evie overhead, Evie coming down the stairs, Evie running water through the pipes. She told herself how good it was to be here, alone in this quiet, doing her job, in her own private Solitary, just the way she wanted it, just the way she liked it.

I
T WAS ALMOST
night when I arrived at the top of the mountain.

The stone and timber lodge looked older than it did in the photos I'd stared at so hopefully. But there it was, solid and broad, three stories tall, with a wide front porch and a background of pines, hemlocks, oaks, birches. All around in the dusk were sprays of powdery, swirling, windy snow.

Tasha and Shadow leaped out of the Jeep before Giant George got hold of their leashes. He ran after them as they tore around to the back, to the door leading into the kennels. They knew what time it was: dinnertime.

On the path to the lodge, I paused to look up at the Sanctuary's banner, flapping and dipping as the cold wind rose and fell.

I didn't mind being left to climb the wide stone steps to the front door alone. I knew from Giant George that I'd be greeted by a staffer who'd show me my room and bring me to supper, where I'd meet everyone I was about to be with for the rest of the winter and well into spring.

I'd expected to be nervous. The stonework and rough-hewn logs of the lodge should have made it intimidating, but the opposite was true. The chimneys on either side were like bookends pressed up to the walls. The smell of their smoke, scattered by wind like the snow, was woody and rich and warm. Nothing was harsh or lonely about this place. The front steps were lit by round solar bulbs on slender rods poking up from the snow along the risers. The lights in the windows had the mellow glow of candlelight, and for a few moments I was enchanted, as if I'd entered a Christmas card or a carol.

Then the nervousness kicked in. Playing back to me was the voice on Mrs. Auberchon's answering machine. I thought about how strange it was that I didn't know anything about who was running the Sanctuary, or who was there. Their website gave no information in terms of names or photos of people. There were only the photos of the happy, healthy dogs, plus a long page of testimonials from people who had gone through training, and what jobs they'd secured later, and how their lives had been changed for the better, for the best.

I had loved that page. Those statements had the feel of something true. They were signed with nicknames, or first names and a last initial, and a place they were from, such as “Buzzy the Big-Dog Whisperer in Wisconsin,” “Julie A., Topeka,” “Mrs. L., proud to be a K-9 kindergarten lady in Delaware.” I remembered what it was like to want to be one of them. But what about the person the voice belonged to?

I felt it was the voice of an alpha. The Sanctuary was based on positive reinforcement, but what about the one at the top? How long would it take her to disapprove of me and wish I'd never been accepted? Did this alpha get reports on me from Mrs. Auberchon and Giant George, none of which put me in a positive light? Would I be back at the inn for another baking day, with an ear to the kitchen, agreeing with everything being said about me, all of it negative?

I gulped mountain air. All the questions I'd planned to ask Giant George on the way up had disappeared from my mind. It was too wonderful to be moving. My head was still throbbing from the rush of the ascent, because of course I'd gone up with my window open—up along the road that was an almost vertical tunnel, with walls of snow and a ceiling of sky. Did it make up for not getting a ride in a gondola, which I knew from the photo wasn't glassed-in, but open? It did. I had stepped on the snow at the top of the mountain with the feeling that I'd arrived in the car of a roller coaster, up, up, up.

Now was the plunge. I had nowhere else to go. I pushed open the front door and stepped inside. No one was there to meet me.

It was a wide, open room filled with dog cages of different sizes, and dog beds, and stacked storage bins, lots of them, same as in the training room at the inn, but on a much grander scale. The floor was made of pine boards, and in the big area away from the bins and beds and cages it was covered by a huge mat of thin, tough-looking rubber, in a chessboard pattern of squares in all the primary colors, but mostly greens and yellows.

I called out a hello, and another, with question marks at the ends.

There was a movement in a corner. One of the cages, door open, had an occupant. This cage was different from the others. It had a large, round cushion and, on the side, hanging from little hooks, a laminated pinewood sign with a name that someone carved into it in balloonish letters painted in a tawny shade of gold. The name was Boomer. What I'd thought was a heaped-up fleecy blanket or rug, thrown onto the cushion, was a dog, stirring, rising.

He was a golden retriever, old, old, old, coming toward me on legs that were obviously arthritic. His muzzle was gray and white, and his tongue was unfurled, like a damp little banner he carried in front of himself. His coat was thick and healthy, and curly here and there, in combinations of tawny and yellow. The flaps of his ears were dark gold velvet. He was large in a lionlike way, and a little overweight. His mane was white and flowing. At his other end, his plush, feathery tail was going back and forth gently, swishing, almost in slow motion. But maybe in his own mind he was swinging it as vigorously as a puppy.

Boomer. Welcome to the mountain, he was saying.

On duty as he was, he allowed me to scruff my fingers behind his ears. Then he opened his jaws and soft-mouthed my wrist, tugging at me to follow him. I shouldered my pack and obeyed.

The staircase to the second floor was down a hallway off that huge front room. I hadn't known how weary I was until I had to wait behind Boomer as he climbed up ahead of me. At every step, he had to pause to catch his breath, then look back to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to.

I was ready for another bunkroom, but here was a corridor of old, highly polished, knotty-pine doors, three on each side. One door was open, in the middle.

Lamplight gleamed out with a friendly warmth, and Boomer took up a position in the hall, a few feet away, facing it. I knew I was meant to leave my things and follow the dog back downstairs, but it seemed a good idea to try out the bed, just for a second, to see how it felt. It was a twin: narrow, sturdy, a good mattress.

Boomer came in. He seemed concerned. I told him not to worry.

The air was unusually heavy, I thought, as if that's why my eyes were closing. I was aware of comfort, in a small space that didn't bother me for being so narrow. I saw pale blue walls, a bronze lamp with a yellow shade on a square wood table, timber rafters over my head with white lanes of ceiling between them, and a big window where the drapes were undrawn. Darkness pressed up outside the glass. I heard the wind, whistling faintly, light as breath. I noticed, too, on the floor beside the table, the cardboard packing box of the rest of my clothes. So it had arrived. The tape was still in place, but it was looking beat up, as if it had been kicked and mangled—then I saw the rips, the bite marks.

Tasha, I was saying to myself, I hope that wasn't you. But I knew it was.

I tumbled into sleep with my jacket and boots still on, and woke by being licked on the hand by Boomer.

He was too arthritic to get up onto the bed. When I opened my eyes, he was impatient about pulling at me. I felt I'd slept a whole night, but it was only a nap, a short one. I was glad about that. It meant I wouldn't be late by much for my first supper on the mountain and the warm welcome from humans I felt I deserved.

Down we went, slowly, across that open front area toward the back. But halfway down the hall to the dining room, Boomer caught the food smells ahead. He decided to take himself off duty. He went into denial about his bad joints and oldness and extra weight. He hurried away from me almost in a prance, head high, nose up, as if he hoped to find a place at a Sanctuary table, set for him without silverware.

I was counting on him to stick with me. I didn't think it was too much to ask for. Golden retrievers, I'd read in the breed book,
are profoundly responsible and selfless. Their greatest instincts are for human approval and love.

I came to a halt. I felt frozen, like I was getting hypothermia without being cold or outdoors. This was not the first time I wasn't okay with myself because of someone I thought would stand by me and then he didn't.

They had warned me about this sort of thing in my former program. I'd been warned, “Evie, back in the day, when you were so busy with your D of C, you totally didn't tune in to, like, reality, which sooner or later in some form is going to catch up with you, somehow, especially if a big-deal thing took place.”

D of C
means “drug of choice.” It hadn't sounded like something I should worry about. I understood the point of, oh, I might have feelings about things retroactively, because you can't have feelings while you're deep in a relationship with your drug of choice. You can only have feelings the choice will let you have.

And what feelings will the choice let you have?

The choice will only let you have feelings about the choice, plain and simple, like it's your
alpha.

And all along I hadn't worried. I listened to the warning and said, “Do I look like someone who'd be afraid of having feelings?” I even looked forward to having some, like flashbacks of things I didn't get to experience the first time around. So I wasn't prepared at all for this freeze.

He had promised he'd stand by me. It was: program, great. It was: pass the first stage and then the principal person gets to visit all the time, completely unrestricted.

He had graduated before I did. He was a year ahead of me. He went off to graduate school, and then I did too. That was the plan. Same place, different planets.

I hated graduate school. I knew I needed not to be there practically my first day. But both our planets were always having parties, not that I'm saying I became more involved with my D of C because of parties. I became more involved because I didn't want to go to sleep. I didn't want to go to sleep because all that would happen was waking up to wonder even harder why everyone else liked something I hated, and what was I going to do when I
dropped out
to wander around in my life like a stray,
not that I'd put it to myself that way at the time. In my former life, I never compared anything to dogs.

I was glad they let you have a principal person and it was him.

And then it wasn't. But he stayed on my intake form. They wouldn't let you cross out your principal unless you gave them a new name. They wouldn't let you fill in that blank with “Myself.”

I looked at where I was. Evie, I was saying to myself. This is now.

The walls on the way to the Sanctuary dining room were pale with old paint, like cream that's gone by. I saw different-tone squares and rectangles where pictures used to hang. Of course they would have been photos of long-ago skiers, of this place as a resort, and the gondola too. I thought of people passing this way toward dinner, in sexy after-ski outfits, probably coming from a cocktail hour, smelling of liquor, wool, leather, perfume and cologne, pleasure, desire, calm nerves, jumpy nerves, plus liniment for where they'd fallen and it hurt.

It felt good to look at blank spaces and fill them in.

He said he was sorry he never came. This was in a letter. He'd said he was embarrassed about how he kept planning to, but then something would always come up he couldn't get away from, because that was how it was in the field of chemical engineering, with labs and things. He was so busy, he'd given up parties. He said he wished he could be there for me. I'd probably be amazed, he said, if I had any idea how awful he felt about not being able to get away. I didn't know it was a breakup letter until after I'd memorized it and played it back to myself maybe one hundred times.

This wasn't the program I was in when I found the Sanctuary website. This was the one I was in near our graduate school. The number of minutes it took to drive there from the chemistry planet was twenty-one. I had checked it on a map, back when I was looking out windows over the parking lot and saying to myself, he must be stuck in traffic.

My real program came after the letter and also after I went back to graduate school to see if I'd been wrong about it, which I wasn't. I didn't see him again. He hadn't lied about no longer going to parties.

I'm not going to call him Made Me Happy again. He only made me happy for a little while. Also in the letter, he told me he was never going to stop being sorry, ever. He said that, for the rest of his life, whenever he was in his car with the radio on scan, which was his favorite way to listen to the radio while driving, he would hit Play if that song “Stand By Me” came on, so he could really rub it in with himself how, when it came to me, he didn't.

That was when I started to unfreeze in the hallway. I'd started thinking about “Stand By Me.” I started hearing it in my head. It's a good song. But rub it in with? With a tune on a radio in a car?

That is pathetic. That is shallow. That is selfish. That is the act of a
coward.
And his poetry
sucked,
except for the seventeen syllables about me.

I was okay. I remembered how he wanted me to write a haiku. I had promised I would. I remembered I wanted to be someone who keeps promises. I'd never said in the promise that it would be about him, which of course was what he'd meant. This
freed
me. I thought about how good it might feel someday to be taken over by the craving to write a haiku. Probably it would have to be about a dog. Probably I wouldn't be able to write just one, once I got going.