The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (29 page)

My back went up at that, like he was picking a fight. “I have not been avoiding you,” I told him.

“You have.”

“I have not. But fine, I'll say it. Goodbye. Goodbye and have a great new life.”

“I
will,
” he said. He looked like he was ready to say something else I didn't feel like hearing. I waved to him in a handkerchief flutter of my fingers, so traditional with girls. In my feminism class, we'd also studied social gestures.

“You'd better keep in touch with me,” he said. “In case you're wondering what I'll do, if you don't, I'll never talk to Tasha about you. I'll never show her pictures of you. Rottweilers don't have that big of a brain. She'll forget you.”

I was very mature about not raising my voice. I wasn't doing a reactionary thing about Tasha. I was thinking of Boomer, glad to be asleep. I didn't want to startle him. I asked, extremely calmly, “What pictures?”

Giant George grinned at me with the whole of his squeaky-clean face. He really looked innocent when he said, “Oh, you know. I have some stuff of you.”

I wanted to kick him. I wanted to scream at him while kicking him. Of course I'd realized what he was talking about. Those little videos. Every one of which made me look like an idiot. Every one of which he'd promised to delete.

Validating myself into a whole new level of professionalism and decorum, I did not lose my temper. I didn't even tell him under my breath he was an asshole. His grin turned bigger, more toothy, as if his face were a pumpkin someone just carved.

“If you keep in touch with me, Evie, I swear I'll never post them anywhere. If you don't believe me, keep checking YouTube. I'll never show them to anyone but Tasha, and she already knows what you're like.”

Zip it,
Evie, and keep it that way, I was telling myself.

And he backed out fast and stepped over Boomer and ran off, charging down the stairs in a noisy, huge way, like a Newfie.

Meanwhile Phyllis had tuned us out completely. She had something going on with her iPad. When she had it ready for me to look at, I saw a box of a graph, color-coded. It was the type with bars, or maybe I should call them columns, on a background of horizontal lines. There were four. The colors were yellow, green, orange, blue. At the top of the graph was my name and the word “Messages.” At the bottom was an explanation. Yellow was for “Members of Family.” Green was for “Persons Connected with Prior Place of Residence.” Orange was for “Friends from College, etc.” Blue was for “Gentleman Calling Himself Her Boyfriend.”

Yellow was the highest. Green was pretty close to it. Orange was kind of tiny. Blue was way bigger than orange, and a little over half of green. I started trying to do the arithmetic to figure out how the number of forty-two played out here. But it wasn't a chart of calls coming into the Sanctuary about me. It was a chart of messages that were given as responses. They were
outgoing
ones.

It took Phyllis a lot of explanation and patience to make me understand what they'd done. She could have saved herself time if she'd simply started with the fact of Evie, believe it or not, we've got your back. But it had to be staffer talk. She didn't ask me if I wanted to see anything they'd already sent out about me. I would have said no. I kept interrupting the explanation with little bursts of questions such as, are you kidding me? She found it funny. They didn't kid.

Eventually I understood that they—well, Phyllis, for she was the prime mover behind it—had gathered phone numbers and email addresses of “everyone from your past we just couldn't allow to keep contacting us, asking for you, Evie.”

The first outgoing piece of information, she told me, was a statement made to seem official, like a description of a Sanctuary policy. This statement was offered with an apology, as in, “We deeply apologize for the worry and stress we caused by neglecting to tell Evie, before her arrival here, of our policy concerning trainees and communication with outsiders. It's a rule that may seem unnecessary and perhaps harsh; however, trainees greatly benefit. Our trainees are encouraged to be in contact with family and friends only in cases of emergency. I assure you, Evie has been, in every way, emergency-free. If you would like, some of us on the staff would be happy to update you with news of Evie as she makes her way through our program.”

The policy statement was the ingenuity part.

“You mean you lied,” I said.

She didn't feel it was lying. She felt it was
taking care.
I wasn't surprised to learn that Agnes, the notes writer, handled email reports on me. She had also written the statement. Louise and Margaret divided the phone calls. Phyllis kept the tallies and ran the graph. It was the same type of graph she liked to make as a handy visual aid for things about dogs and the volunteers. She really enjoyed it, she said. She liked to feel that things were in good shape.

So they had my back. But I saw a flaw in the arrangement. What if someone felt like making a trip? A trip, say, to here?

I said, “What if someone says they want to come and see me?”

“Are you interested in having visitors?”

“I'm not.”

She pointed to the blue bar. “What about this one?”

“That one especially,” I said. “And please take off the word gentleman. Also take off boyfriend. Don't ask. Okay?”

“What should we call him?”

I didn't want them to call him anything. “I want you to stop with him,” I said. “Tell him Evie sends her best wishes for a long and prosperous life, one she doesn't want to ever hear about again.”

“In that case, I suppose I'd better handle him myself.”

“Thanks.”

“We'd already thought of the question of visitors, actually. I forgot to mention it. It's in the statement.”

“Did you say you have a rule against anyone coming up here who's not a dog or a dog person?”

“We didn't put it quite like that,” she said, smiling. “We said we're cloistered. Naturally, we'd expect people to understand what that means.”

More ingenuity! Cloistered! I was speechless with admiration for the very idea. I
loved
that. I couldn't think of a thing to say without gushing about it. So I didn't say anything. I figured it was more of “taking care.” Then I sat there giggling like a child, imagining how that went over.

“I wonder,” I finally said, “if anyone asked you if I became, you know, religious or something.”

She bowed and raised her head in a yes, keeping up her seriousness. “There were several, shall we say, eyebrows raised. But we sent out assurances we're very liberal, and your involvement here is only as a trainee.”

“Like your religion is dogs,” I said, keeping it real.

“Something like that, yes. Now I have two questions for you. The first is, except for the gentleman, that is, the blue one, would you like us to continue with this, and if you do, would you like to be copied from now on with the emails?”

I nodded, then shook my head.

“Evie,” she said, “wouldn't you like to know about things being said about you?”

“I wouldn't,” I said. “Was that the second question?”

“It wasn't. This isn't either, but how long have you ignored your messages from home?”

“First you have to tell me what you mean by home.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Kind of since I arrived here,” I said.

“That's what we thought. You don't have to explain. This isn't the second question, but do you feel you trust us?”

I didn't hesitate. I didn't even think about it. Maybe it had something to do with validation and saying I have a future. I'd entered that room as tense and nervous as Hank, before he started jumping, even though I didn't have his fear of being hit in a physical way, and I didn't have his problem of obsessive pacing. I was actually beginning to feel as comfortable in my own skin as Boomer was, wearing all his fur.

I said, “I can trust you. Even Agnes, who's probably writing about me like I've got four legs and a tail.”

Phyllis didn't laugh at that. “The outgoing messages about you are brief,” she said. “They're news items. Simple information only.”

“Like saying I'm quiet at mealtimes? Like, I can follow rules?”

“Not in those words exactly,” she said.

Then it was my turn to point to a column. I pointed to the green one. I said, “I know you know what my prior place of residence was.”

“And I,” she said, “know you know that.”

“I'm guessing people who know told you things, and you didn't, like, do some kind of a background check on me. Am I right?”

“You are.”

“Okay then. What's the second question?”

She turned off the iPad. But she was still all business.

“Evie,” she said, “what are you going to do about getting through to that greyhound?”

The truth was, I didn't know. But I didn't get the chance to admit it. Suddenly, below, the dogs started barking, all of them at once. Boomer woke up and immediately let out a deep woof, as if he already knew what was happening. Then came the alarm of Shadow's howl. Phyllis stood up. She looked at her watch and
oh my God the pitties are here.

T
HE VILLAGE VET
still reminded me of the smooth-faced older guy in the English countryside of James Herriot. He could have waited in the infirmary for the new arrivals, but he positioned himself in the yard at the top of a little slope, where he could see them as they came off the transport. He wore an orange down vest over his doctorly lab coat, so he looked like he was playing a double part, not only as the chief attending medical guy but as a traffic manager or school-zone crossing guard. On either side of him were the two leading volunteers, Romeo and Juliet, in dark, funeral-type coats. They looked grim and pale, as if they were actors who hadn't put their makeup and costumes on, and didn't want to, even though it was show time.

Also with them were two very young veterinary assistants, trying not to look cold, for they were only in their white coats, so new they were whiter than the snow. These two were students, a boy and a girl. I could tell by their expressions I was not the only one who was witnessing a delivery such as this one for the first time. I was at the windows with Alfie, Boomer, Josie, Shadow.

My job was to watch them like their nanny, keep them quiet. I knew they'd be anxious and agitated, so I grabbed a jar of peanut butter from the kitchen. One thing I'd learned was that there's nothing in the world like peanut butter when it comes to inviting dogs to do what you want them to. I was also using it as a training aid to get Josie to quit snapping. It was sort of starting to work.

If you want a dog to stop biting your fingers, stick them in peanut butter. This can be called, in the language of dog training, “not biting the hand that's Skippied.” Or it can be Peter Pan or a health-food brand, or a generic one. Whatever you have.

I had the jar nearby, on top of one of the crates. The dogs knew it was there. They didn't care. I didn't need it. After the outbursts of barking and howling when the truck first appeared, they were stricken, each of them as an individual, then together as a group, with a need to enter a zone of silence. The hush that came over them was almost an actual thing I could see and touch. It was the presence of something solemn coming up to their surfaces, taking them over. Somehow they knew what their job was, without being told, not that you can say to dogs, “Even though I'm keeping you indoors, I want you to be the honor guard for this event.”

Alfie was tall enough to rest his chin on a windowsill. I dragged over a crate and put Josie on top of it. I dragged over another one and did the same with Dora. I didn't want Boomer up on his back legs, so I brought in two chairs from the dining room, placed them seat-to-seat, like a bench, and helped him get up on it, which wasn't easy. I didn't mind the burning strain of every lower-back muscle in my body. I'd forgotten to shift my own weight to my legs, as is necessary in moving anyone who feels bigger than you. As for Shadow, he was okay standing up, paws on a sill.

Soon the window glass fogged with breath of dogs. I used the sleeve of the sweatshirt I was wearing to keep wiping the fog away.

In the road behind the truck were Giant George and Tasha. He had her on a short leash. They were the outdoors contingent of our honor guard. I knew Giant George had wanted to help with the delivery. He'd been told instead to stay off to the side. His job was to make himself and Tasha ready for their departure. Now and then, Tasha looked over to the windows. I could tell, from the look on her face when she turned back to Giant George, that she had figured out she was his dog now.

He held her leash at a slack. She stood beside him somberly, at perfect attention. I was never going to see her again. Maybe, I was thinking, inside her, like an extra bodily organ, like a tiny secondary heart, beating and pumping, there was a part of me.

I wished the staffers were outdoors to see how she was behaving. It would have given them their one bright moment. They were inside, below, as the internal reception committee.

This was an all-volunteer operation. When the unloading began, the vet and his students would join them, and so would Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's coat wasn't buttoned. The wind blew at the flaps, revealing a Sanctuary volunteer's work smock. I was sure Romeo wore one too. So I'd been wrong to think they'd just stand around and let everyone respect them for being up-ups who were paying the bill for all this.

The line of volunteers went from the side of the truck to the back. Their formation was that of an old-time fire brigade. They were so bundled up, it was impossible to tell which were men and which were women. All of them wore long, heavy gloves. Not winter gloves, but protective ones. Some wore aprons over their jackets, like the kind you'd see on welders or in an X-ray department.