Listen! (9780062213358)

by Tolan, Stephanie S.

  “Collar and leash,” he says again. “You’re going to need a way to control him.”

  She doesn’t argue.

  Her father comes over to kiss the top of her head and leaves her thinking about a dog who disappears into the woods when she so much as looks at him. Even so, she feels her heart lift. She turns off the television and the light over her bed and slides down under the covers. “Coyote,” she whispers. Where is he right now? She closes her eyes and an image comes into her mind of the dog, a pale shape in the darkness, curled on the flat, smooth ground of his place by the sweet gum tree across the lake. His nose is tucked under his tail. The woods are silent around him. As he has been every night for as long as he can remember, he is alone. But tonight he is not hungry. He sighs in his sleep, and Charley imagines him dreaming of the golden retriever he plays with every day. And of the human who fed him.

  It is pitch-black when Charley wakes from the nightmare, breathing hard. For a moment she thinks she is back in the hospital. But it is too dark for that. Home, then. Her own room. She hopes she didn’t scream.

  Dad hates it when she wakes him in the night. He never knows what to do, what to say. Once, a long time ago now—back near the beginning—she thought she saw the shine of tears on his cheeks as he sat on the edge of her bed, patting her awkwardly, and she felt herself go cold all over. She needs him not to cry. Never to cry. “Only a dream,” he was saying. “Only a dream.” She knew as well as he did that there were worse things than dreams.

  When she had the nightmare in the hospital, the nurses stopped coming when she screamed, it happened so often. It wasn’t worth interrupting whatever else they were doing at that hour. She checks her alarm clock. Three eighteen, the glowing numbers say.

  She puts her hands on her belly and takes a long, slow breath, feeling her belly rise as she breathes. Then she counts to four as she lets the air out slowly, steadily. She does this again, three times, four times. It is the most useful thing Tony the physical terrorist taught her. The breathing smoothes out the sharp edges of panic whenever the nightmare comes. It works. Always. What it doesn’t do is keep the nightmare from coming back. Familiar as it is by now, every time feels like the first time. And real—absolutely real. There is no way to know it is a dream until the panic shoves her up and out of sleep.

  She is running through a huge, bright, indoor place, full of people dragging suitcases, carrying boxes or small children. It has to be an airport, but not Charlotte/Douglas. There is nothing she recognizes. It is full of carts that beep and beep to move people out of the way as they roar past. She keeps having to dodge the carts, every one full of people who glare at her as if she shouldn’t be there. Lots of them are kids from school. Amy is on one of the carts, looking the other way, holding a backpack. Charley calls out, but when the girl turns around she isn’t Amy anymore.

  Charley is looking for someone, but she doesn’t know who. She is filled with the sense that she has to, has to find this person. There is much more to the dream, things she can never remember clearly when she wakes up—a feeling of hours passing, moving in and out of rooms or stores or landscapes, trying to find the place she is supposed to be, the person she needs to meet, getting more and more desperate. It is feelings, not images, she remembers. But there is always one thing that comes with her clearly into waking. She can always remember what it was that made her scream, that woke her up.

  A spot suddenly appears in front of her in the air. It isn’t very big at first, just a black polka dot hovering in front of her. But then it starts to grow, as if a hole is opening up in the world. There is a terrible sound, a kind of roaring, shrieking sound, as the black spot gets bigger and bigger, comes closer and closer. She can see that it is infinitely deep, a swirling blackness that is somehow alive, that wants to swallow her up.

  Charley doesn’t remember the first days in the hospital, doesn’t know for sure it was this nightmare she had there right after the accident. But the nurses told her about the screaming. So it must have been. It’s the dream she’s been having for two years. It just happened more often in the hospital.

  Charley pulls the sheet up under her chin and breathes slowly, counting. Memory, she thinks, is a mysterious thing. Dreams can fade, like the way in the summer there’ll be a wet spot in the road up ahead that disappears as you get close. But until the accident, she thought real life was solid. Things that really happened were there, impossible to forget, like massive boulders that you had to work and work and work to move.

  Sarita says her father went nearly nuts the first days Charley was in the hospital, because every time Charley fell asleep it was like turning off a computer without saving. Her memory would get wiped clean. “Where am I?” she’d ask. “What happened?” Just like in the movies. And her father would have to tell her the whole story all over again. Eventually he got so tired of telling it that he wrote it down and just handed her the paper to read. With a head injury like that she was lucky, the nurses told her, to be able to read.

  That was the first week in March. A whole piece of her life, her real life, is still missing, like a faded dream. It isn’t fair, she thinks, blinking into the darkness of her room. It isn’t fair that she can’t choose what gets wiped clean. It isn’t fair that memories so clear they seem real can come crashing in on her without warning, memories that hurt so much she doesn’t want them ever, ever again.

  She kicks off the covers and sits up on the edge of the bed. The dull ache in her leg has turned into real pain. It is a long time since it has hurt this much in the night when there isn’t any weight on it. She walked too much today—yesterday now. She turns on the light, waits till her eyes adjust to the glare, grabs her walking stick, and stands up. Pain or no pain, she has to pee.

  While she is in the bathroom she takes a pain pill, hoping it will help her go back to sleep. Otherwise, she might not be able to. Most times the nightmare throws her out of sleep and leaves her stranded like a whale on a beach.

  She gets back into bed, closes her eyes, and lies very still, willing sleep to come. Memories come instead, memories from when she was little. No! She begins to count breaths again, concentrating on the feel of the air going in and out of her nostrils, on the numbers, one—two—three—four. One—two—

  Then, against the spangly dark behind her eyelids, the wild dog appears, sitting in a splash of sunlight next to a tree, ears up, dark eyes looking at her.

  —three—four—one—two—And Charley is asleep.

  6

  The Taming

  Charley marks a big red 2 on her calendar for this day, June 11. She intends to keep track of this process she has named “The Taming.” She writes the words beneath June on the calendar because she hopes it will be finished by the end of the month. That’ll be nineteen days, very nearly three weeks. She plans to use food and treats to win him over. Every single one of the Eagle Lake dogs comes willingly to get a treat, even Bo, Mrs. Jensen’s black Lab, who is eighteen years old now and has trouble hearing. Lots of the people at the lake take treats for the dogs when they go for a walk, even if they don’t have a dog themselves.

  Wild and frightened as Coyote is, Charley thinks, he is still a dog. Dogs and people go together. By the end of the month, she wants him in her room at night instead of alone in the woods. Whatever people might have done to him before, she’ll prove to him she’s different.

  After breakfast Charley forces herself to get into Sarita’s beat-up old Civic for the drive to the pet store. She still hates getting into cars, hates knowing what awful thing can happen in a car on any ordinary day on any ordinary road. The store is a huge place with whole aisles full of jewel-studded collars and stuffed squeaky toys and even boots and hats and matching jackets. A sign at the front of the store says, “The Place for Pets and Their Parents.” Parents. So stupid! This is why Charley doesn’t want Coyote to be a pet.

  Before Paul Morgan left for work, he gave Sarita the rules for this shopping trip, and she walks beside the shopping b
uggy that Charley is using like a walker, nodding or shaking her head as Charley finds things to put in it. “Dry food only!” she says when Charley stops by the brand of canned food Mrs. Davis gives Sadie. “Your father says if the dog is starving, he’ll appreciate anything he gets, and there’s no need to spend a fortune.”

  Charley sighs and moves on toward the aisle with the dry food. She tries to tell from Sarita’s expression what she thinks of giving Coyote only dry food. But Sarita’s face could be a mahogany mask, it is so still and steady. She knows the woman must have opinions of her own—she’s too tough not to—but most of the time it’s impossible to know what they are. When Sarita doesn’t agree with one of Paul Morgan’s orders, her mouth might twitch a little and something might flash in her eyes. But nothing more. She’s exactly the kind of live-in housekeeper/babysitter any father would want when he is suddenly left to raise a daughter on his own. He writes her paycheck, and she does and says whatever he wants her to. Charley pulls a ten-pound bag of food off a shelf. Sarita hasn’t said what she thinks about The Taming. Charley doesn’t even know if Sarita likes dogs.

  Charley chooses two heavy dishes, one for food and one for water. And a bag of little colored bone-shaped dog biscuits for treats. She isn’t sure what size collar to get, so she finds a lightweight nylon one that can be adjusted, and a nylon leash to go with it. She doesn’t expect to use the leash a lot. After all, Coyote will live at Eagle Lake, where nearly every dog runs free. She chooses green for collar and leash. Green, she thinks, will look good against Coyote’s red-gold coat.

  “Don’t forget the training books,” Sarita tells her when she has everything else in the buggy. “Your father expects you to do this right.”

  Choosing books takes the longest. There are plenty to choose from, but none of them seems to have what Charley needs. They’re about training, not taming. Finally she picks two, but she doesn’t expect them to be much use.

  It is afternoon now, and Charley is on the woods trail, on her way to get Sadie and Coyote. She is wearing jeans to keep the poison ivy off and hiking boots to keep her from twisting her ankle and wrenching her knee on the uneven ground. The boots aren’t working, and it is very much too hot for jeans.

  It would be better to walk earlier in the day, before it gets this hot. But the training books say dogs need routine. Her leg isn’t handling the walk today any better than it did yesterday.

  It isn’t just heat and pain that make the walk miserable this time, though. She must be the first person to come this way today. She keeps walking into lines of spiderweb strung across the trail. They are invisible until the sticky filaments are all over her bare arms, or worse, all over her face. She keeps having to wipe them off her cheeks, her forehead, her hair. Sometimes there are spiders, too—tiny black-and-white spiky, triangular spiders—that drop onto her shoulders and run down her arms. She is just thinking it might be better to walk the long way around on the road—it’s too wide for spiderwebs—when she remembers that since she has to walk the dogs on the woods trail, if she doesn’t smack into the webs on the way over, she’ll just smack into them on the way back.

  Spider stick.

  It is her mother’s voice in her head again. Of course! Her mother used spider sticks to catch webs on the trail. She showed Charley a bush called Russian olive with brittle, easy-to-break branches. Her mother would hold one in front of her as she walked, and the webs would get tangled on the leafy branch, spiders and all. A moment later Charley is walking the trail, safe from webs, peering through the silvery-backed leaves of a spider stick.

  She pushes away the memory of walking the trail with her mother and focuses on Coyote. Where is he now? She fills her mind with the image she had of him last night under his tree. “He comes and goes,” Mrs. Davis said when Charley called to get permission to keep walking Sadie around the lake every day. The image feels real, it is so clear. He is there, she thinks. He is.

  She is wearing a waist pack with supplies for The Taming—dog biscuits and a small makeup mirror. Charley is proud of coming up with this idea—the mirror will let her watch him behind her without turning and scaring him off.

  As much as her leg is hurting by the time she gets to the hill on the other side of Hawk Pond, she has only had to rest twice this time. She stops among the kudzu vines halfway up the hill, puts her little fingers in her mouth, and whistles, loud and sharp, the way her father taught her. She wants Coyote to associate the whistle with her, and her with food.

  When she gets to the top of the hill and drops the spider stick at the side of the trail, Sadie is trotting toward her on the road. Together, Sadie frisking alongside, they head for the Davises’ yard.

  Coyote is where she imagined him, ears pricked toward her. There is something incredibly alert in the way he sits, as if every cell in his body is aware of her, watching her.

  “Hi, Coyote!” she calls to him. He doesn’t so much as twitch an ear, but he has heard her. He understands about his name, she thinks, has understood since she first thought it at him. She takes a biscuit out of her waist pack. “I brought you something!”

  Before she has a chance to hold the biscuit out for Coyote to see, Sadie has jumped up and snatched it out of her hand. “No, no, no!” she yells. But Sadie has already swallowed the biscuit and is bouncing around her, yelping and sniffing at the waist pack, begging for another. Charley digs another biscuit out of the pack and throws it as far down the road as she can. Sadie dashes off to get it, and Charley turns quickly to offer the wild dog another.

  He isn’t there. His place by the tree is empty—just a patch of smooth, red dirt in the midst of the leaf litter and honeysuckle.

  Sadie is back already, begging for another biscuit. So much for the idea of luring Coyote around the lake with biscuits, Charley thinks. She’ll just have to count on his following Sadie. “Come on, dogs!” she calls. “Let’s go for a walk!”

  At the sound of the word, Sadie rushes ahead toward the beginning of the trail, the brush of her tail waving. Charley follows, willing Coyote to come along.

  At the bottom of the hill, she looks back to see if he is following, and barely catches a glimpse of him as he scoots off the trail. She’s forgotten about the mirror. When she is through the poison ivy and nearly to the spillway, she pulls out the mirror and holds it up to her left eye. Coyote, ears and tail up, is trotting down the middle of the trail.

  7

  One Week

  It has been a week. Charley, at the dining room window, chews her lip and scratches the poison ivy rash on the inside of her elbow as she watches Coyote sneak up to the bowl of food at the end of the driveway. He still refuses to eat unless she is all the way inside the house with the door closed. A whole week she’s been feeding him, and there’s been no change at all. No, she thinks. There’s been a change, all right. In the wrong dog.

  Sadie doesn’t go home anymore as soon as they get to Charley’s house. Charley can’t put Coyote’s food out while Sadie’s there, or Sadie will eat it, so she has to tie her to the railing by the side door till Coyote is finished.

  The first time she tied her, Charley took Sadie a couple of biscuits after she put Coyote’s food out for him, so Sadie wouldn’t feel left out. The dog books are right about patterns and routine. Sadie expects the tying now, and the biscuits. Every day when Coyote has eaten, Charley unties Sadie and Sadie hangs around for a while before she goes home. Hoping, Charley thinks, for more biscuits.

  Coyote, still standing as far from the food bowl as he can, stretches his head down and snatches a few mouthfuls before backing away and checking for danger. It’s almost as if he’s two different creatures—the regular dog that trots along the trail or frolics with Sadie, and the wild one, the wary and terrified one Charley is watching now. He looks exactly the way he did the very first day. His tail is down, his ears back, every muscle in his body tense and ready to run.

  She doesn’t understand why he is so frightened. It can’t be just that he’s wild. Wild anima
ls come to food. When they used to have bird feeders, the birds came right away to get the seed. And squirrels! They used to raid the feeders and wouldn’t back off even if you pounded on the windows. Her mother would—

  Charley stops the thought and pushes the memory away. The point is that even with a person a few feet away stomping and yelling at them, squirrels—fully wild creatures—are more interested in food than afraid of people.

  For Coyote it is different. Why? What could his life have been like before he came to Eagle Lake? Without Charley’s intending it, an image forms in her mind. A man is putting food at the edge of a mowed yard where the woods begin. She closes her eyes and gives herself over to the images, like watching a movie in her mind. Setting the bowl down, the man slips behind a bush a few feet away. There is a car parked on a gravel drive nearby. Another man is crouched behind the car, waiting. Coyote, nose up, materializes out of the woods. As he approaches the food, the men pounce. He is picked up and carried, struggling, to a small shed and locked inside.

  Charley shivers and opens her eyes. This really happened, she thinks. She feels it the way she felt the dog’s terror as he struggled to get free of the men holding him. No wonder Coyote’s so wary about being fed.

  All this time she’s been counting on food to win him over. The books say that dogs bond readily to the person who feeds them. Feeding Coyote is supposed to show him that she’s a friend, someone he can trust. But it’s doing the opposite. Putting that bowl out every day only proves to him that she’s dangerous, a threat. Like the Animal Control people Mrs. Davis called. No wonder the can of tuna they said would lure any dog into a trap didn’t work. Coyote understands about food and humans. Food and traps.

  Charley pulls a chair away from the dining room table and sits down by the window. There’s nothing in the dog training books that will help her solve this problem, nothing about working with a wild and terrified dog you can’t touch or even get close to, a dog you can’t collar or cage or corral.