The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (19 page)

I heard the two staffers whose names I don't know yet, Navy Blue and Dark Gray, talking about an upcoming meeting of upper-level volunteers. The subject of the meeting will be the pitties.

They didn't invite me to the meeting. It was in the dining room. A volunteer from the one pizza shop in the village arrived in his delivery car with a stack of cardboard pizza boxes. I was with Boomer, near his crate, when he came in. I had Josie with me too. She was in my lap. Every time I tried to pat her, she snapped at me.

We all paid attention when the pizzas appeared. I went down there later to see if anything was left. I found two slices of pepperoni and tore them up for Boomer and Josie. They fell in love with me for about ten minutes. Boomer drooped and went to sleep when the last bit of crust was gone. Josie licked my fingers, one by one, slowly. Then she nipped me. She was angry that I'd run out of everything but skin.

I told her
no
in a much stronger tone than the tone of a wuss. I couldn't help laughing at her. That's how cute she is. (Working on that.)

I'm never eating pizza again. Pizza is what the scum ate while we were rescuing Dapple.

When I was looking in the boxes to see what was left, a few volunteers were still there, sitting around a former ski resort table: one woman, three men. They were murmuring earnestly, somberly. I think they'd lowered their voices on account of my appearance. Except for one man, they were well up in middle age. They reminded me of deans I used to know, also professors. The one young man looked like the Romeo in a
Romeo and Juliet
I saw in a summer-theater production when I was about twelve.

I remembered him because it was the first time I fell in love. All I could do about it was go home and memorize the lines of everyone who spoke to him in that play, so I could walk around speaking to him.

I took a lot longer than I needed to, gathering the two pizza slices. I caught his eye. He smiled at me. I had a tiny moment of, oh! But his left hand was cupping his chin and I saw that he wore a wedding ring.

Note to self: interact more with the volunteers, but not that one.

Here came Shadow. Here came Tasha, overtaking him. They knew about the slices, the pepperoni, and now Alfie did too. He just showed up, tiptoe walking, looking for a spot where he could lie down and make believe he was a statue.

They were fully united. They were appalled. They accused me of playing favorites. Tasha looked at Josie as if she had the right to eat her, and Josie, in response, felt that I couldn't be trusted to protect her, so she scooted to Boomer and pressed herself against him, looking as small beside him as a chew toy.

Boomer sleepily opened his eyes. Alfie reminded everyone that greyhounds have very sharp teeth. Shadow tipped up like he was starting a howl, but he stopped himself. He remembered he'd been told a hundred times, by me and everyone else, that howling indoors is only a good idea if he's trying to save someone.

Five dogs were looking at me. It occurred to me they were upset about Hank being gone, Dapple gone too, even though they didn't get to know her. So I told them a story. I told them it was a true one. I told them how Giant George carried Dapple out of that house. I told them about the gas station and the pirate and the yellow arms that reached for her.

Then I promised I'd give them treats of human food in the very near future. Dogs don't know that word. But I do.

T
HE MOUNTAINTOP WAS
full of wind, icy and blustery. No one in her right mind would have ventured out in this, but Shadow needed a walk. He was with me on a leash. I'd felt he needed after-lunch exercise to work off his acute depression, which he was feeling for a very good reason. Also he needed some confidence. He had flunked the pop quiz Giant George gave him to see if it was time to send out his SAR applications.

If the five basic commands are fingers of a hand, Shadow was okay with three: sit, come, stay. He really had those, all aces. He'd stay put in perfect position, even if you walked away from him to another room. He'd come in a flash; it made no difference if he felt he was doing something more interesting than rushing to your side. For a sit, you didn't have to speak. A tiny pointing downward would do it. Sometimes he'd have his bum on the floor with just a lean of your chin toward your chest, unlike Tasha and Josie, who'd be standing there, unless the instructor was Louise, saying things like I'm not in the mood, or I can't hear you, or I don't want to lie down because that's what Alfie does and I don't want to turn into Alfie.

Lying down for Shadow was a finger that was on the hand, but he didn't have a clue what to do with it. Maybe he'd learned from the girls that it was uncool to act like Alfie. Maybe he had reasons of his own from all that old infinity of his, tied to his chain on the same ground he peed and pooped on. Sometimes when he lay on that ground, it was hot against his belly and penis. Sometimes it was muddy, cold, crawling with bugs—didn't anyone care what he used to lie down on? Giant George gave him three tries only. All Shadow would do with that command was say no. He was polite about it. He was completely: I would prefer not to. So that was an F on the quiz, for which I blamed myself. I thought I'd done a good job of getting him to wipe out all those memories.

The command for dropping was worse. It was F-. It was a finger of the hand that hadn't grown in. The fault was mine. All along, I was supposed to throw him tennis balls he'd find and bring back, dropping them at my feet right away, not after half an hour of keeping a ball to himself, poor boy, cherishing it, his possession, his prize, when he never had anything before but the chain he was on and the collar that held it, the choke one, digging in, a necklace beneath it of worn-away fur and infection.

Giant George should have given me a heads-up about the pop quiz. I could have made Shadow do some cramming.

The only reason he ended up having the ball in his mouth no longer was that Tasha sneaked over to him and stole it away with her teeth. She chomped it until it was crushed, and so were the spirits of Shadow. Giant George refused to throw another ball and start over. He wouldn't average Shadow's marks to low B, the minimal requirement to get through the first door of Search-and-Rescue. He was all, stop looking bummed out, Shadow, and get busy with some learning. But that's probably something to be expected in a boy his age who hasn't read
Hamlet.

We were walking on trodden snow paths with our heads low. Shadow was on a leash out in front of me, the two of us proud of ourselves for being stronger than the winds, which were trying to blow us over. I left it to him to decide when it was time to go back. When he finally did, he picked up the pace, pulling, as if he realized we were about to die if we didn't get out of this soon. He was covered in snow. His eyelids were crusted. I was so wind-lashed and freezing, I'd gone past the point of thinking I might ever be warm again.

We had to cross the road to reach the lodge. Of course there wasn't traffic. It was only a habit that made me pause and check. I'd also read an article about the danger of snowmobiles zooming like race cars in the middle of nowhere and killing cross-country skiers, people on snowshoes, normal pedestrians and dog walkers like me. I looked down the hill, peering into a landscape of crazily moving, whipped-up snow, in clouds and sheets and mini-tornadoes, and there, far below, in a momentary break in the action, which lasted about two seconds, I saw a mirage of Mrs. Auberchon, trudging upward, bent low, her head hooded, her purse on her arm.

Or maybe I should say I was hallucinating, which I felt no one should do except old-time hippies flashing back on what happened to them with mushrooms, LSD, hallucinogenic mix-and-matches. I'd heard stories in my former program that
terrified
me.

Hallucinating Mrs. Auberchon! It really shook me, same as when I thought I heard her talking in the infirmary on the day of Dapple's rescue. Yanking at me, Shadow was saying,
come!
I hurried forward, shaking my head vigorously, like a dog, as if that would take care of it. I had the feeling Mrs. Auberchon was haunting me. I felt she was trying to take up space in my brain as if I were her inn.

But after I dried off Shadow and settled him down and took a hot shower and looked up articles about people seeing mirages in lands of extreme snow, I was all right. It's not just deserts that are places for people seeing things that aren't there. Mirages are as normal in snow as in sand.

I wondered if Hank would see mirages in his desert. It felt good to pretend I could message him even this far away, wishing him wonderful visions: a steak bone, an agility course of all hurdles, me.

I was in my room with a little free time. My door wasn't locked. I heard a knocking. I thought it might be Giant George to say he was sorry he forced Shadow into that test without telling me.

But walking in was the woman on the staff I knew as Navy Blue. Agnes was her name. If she were a flower, she'd be a primrose, a pastel one, maybe pale blue, emphasis on the
prim.

She was the tallest of the four of them, and lean like a greyhound, with sharply chiseled features and a hairdo like a cap of gray that always looked as if she'd just had a clipping. “Agnes,” I was mentally writing, now that she'd introduced herself, “approximately seventy-four, crinkled around the eyes, also the mouth, where the wrinkles are clearly from age, not from laughing. Do not antagonize. Do not attempt to pat.” She had changed her outfit to ladylike jeans that were ironed—
ironed!—
with creases down the legs in perfect lines of denim corrugation. Her blouse was dense with flannel and plaidness, and tucked into the jeans precisely. She didn't need a belt; her waistline was elastic. The laces of her sensible rubber-soled shoes were exactly as long as they needed to be, and tied in perfect bows. I think she knew she didn't have to tell me to never call her Aggie, or just Ag. It was the first time I'd ever looked at a heavy flannel shirt on someone and thought of it as a blouse.

My room was in a state of almost extreme disorder, not only from clothes around everywhere in different stages of being clean, which I'd come to define by how much they smelled of dog and my sweat. By now I had kitchen privileges. Things I'd brought up from downstairs were taking up space on the carton I'd shipped my clothes in, with its holes and scars from being attacked by Tasha. This was my tabletop for boxes of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, another of jam, a tin of cookies I kept refilling by pilfering more into my pockets, a few utensils, a jar of peanut butter I'd used up but hadn't thrown away. I was always hungry, even though at meals I ate more than all the staffers put together, like I was in training to outdo Giant George. I didn't have access to a scale, but I was definitely putting on some weight, and not in a bad way. It was more like I was filling in a missing dimension of myself.

I didn't mind that meals were non-talking events. No one laid that out for me as a rule. It was more a communal habit. The ears of the staffers were tuned to the sounds of the dogs, Boomer in the front, the others in the kennels below us, Dora the Scottie in the infirmary, and the volunteers too, if any were around. Except for meetings, volunteers were never invited to the dining room. It was a zone of quiet where all noise was gentle: the tinkling of silver and glass, the sound of water poured from a pitcher, a chair creaking lightly, the crackle of a log in the fireplace, the wind far away outside, not harsh and huge but soft, as soft as a lullaby. Anyway, at mealtimes I was too hungry to do anything but eat and rush to whatever I had to do next with the dogs. If I'd stopped to consider that there were moments in every day when I was very, very peaceful, I would have made fun of myself for being such a mushy self-liar. I would have remembered that I was someone who flunked yoga after only one class, like that was something in myself I'd never actually be able to change.

To my relief, in my doorway, Agnes said nothing about the mess of my room. She didn't come all the way in. She told me she had two questions for me. She spoke to me without emotion or disapproval, from high in the air of her height.

The first question was, had Mrs. Auberchon given me the message she was meant to give me, the one that was sent to her as an email, when I was staying at the inn? She was asking about it because among the staffers there was worry and even distress, for calls were coming to the Sanctuary that were very confusing. Mostly, these incoming calls were voicemails, as the staffers had enough on their hands without rushing to the telephone every minute. There'd been emails too. Agnes recalled that the message Mrs. Auberchon was asked to relay to me had been left with her on the last day I was down there.

Flustered, I didn't wonder what she was talking about. I was too busy noticing something familiar in the way she put words together. I didn't figure out what it was until she asked the second question. Had I looked at the notes on Alfie?

She was the notes writer! And it wasn't just the pattern of her voice! She looked like her handwriting!

The notes on Alfie were on a piece of paper slipped under my door. I didn't remember when, I mean not in terms of time. Time for me at the top of the hill was something that moved about in colors of light and shadows and darkness, in the shifting, floating differences between sunlight and starlight, day clouds and night clouds. If I measured it at all, I measured it by the movement and smells of a meal being brought to the dining room, the sounds of dogs waiting for me when they arrived for class before I did, the intervals between walks and bathroom trips, barks and quiet, the feel of my body craving rest, the feel of plunging without thought in my bed down a hill of nothingness into sleep, then waking what felt like an instant later to barking, barking, barking and being hungry and
oh my God I can't be late for breakfast.

The Alfie paper had appeared before a breakfast. I knew it was about him. I'd glanced at it long enough to see his name at the top, the first word.