Listen! (9780062213358)

by Tolan, Stephanie S.

  In the mornings when she wakes up, Coyote has gone, and she finds him lying out at the end of the driveway when she goes outside. Then, on Day Sixty of The Taming, Charley opens her eyes to see him lying there still, the sun through the blinds making stripes on his golden fur. He raises his head to look at her. “Good morning,” she says, and slowly sits up. He stays where he is, his tail thumping lightly on the floor. Gingerly, careful not to make any sudden moves, Charley slips out of bed onto her knees and reaches to pet him. He rolls over onto his side and lets her rub his chest. The connection Charley feels this time is like a steady vibration up through her arm and into her heart. This is more than a step forward, she thinks. Something very big has changed between them.

  She tells Sarita about this when she goes upstairs, and is surprised to find herself blinking back tears.

  Charley lets the morning walks become longer. The air is filled, these August days, with the thrum of cicadas, the chirp of crickets and katydids. She finds that she is listening with her eyes, her nose, her skin, as well as her ears. One day she feels a fly walking on her arm and watches as it stops and rubs its front feet together, then cleans its head, its iridescent blue-green body gleaming in the sun. She moves her arm, and it flies away. It was just an ordinary fly. If she could have gotten a picture of it in that moment before it flew, she wonders, would anyone else see how beautiful it was?

  On August 9, the sixty-first day of The Taming, when they get around the shallow end of the lake and are heading home, Mrs. Davis and Jeremy and Bethanne are in the water by the swim raft, the kids in life jackets, Mrs. Davis on an inflatable chair with a glass of wine in the cup holder. Sadie is with them, splashing and barking. Charley watches the dog climb the ladder to the swim raft and jump off. No one has thrown something for her to retrieve. She just does it by herself.

  Jeremy and Bethanne call to Charley to join them in the water. “Betcha you can’t jump as far off the raft as I can,” Jeremy says.

  “I don’t have my suit on,” she tells them.

  “And how long could it take to remedy that?” Mrs. Davis says, directing a splash at Charley’s canoe. The spray of water feels marvelously cool.

  “Come on!” Bethanne calls. “Go get your suit on and come in and play with us.”

  Thinking about the feel of the water on her skin, Charley paddles across to her own dock, ties up the canoe, and goes inside to change. When she tells Sarita that she’s going into the water, Sarita says she will come out and sit on the dock to watch.

  “Some lifeguard you’ll be,” Charley says. “Scared of turtles and snakes.”

  “Then you’d better not need rescuing!” Sarita calls as Charley heads down the hall to her room.

  When she gets back out to the dock, Coyote is sitting on the shore across the lake, watching Sadie leap off the swim raft, swim around it, and climb back up. “Insane,” Charley imagines him saying, “retrievers are insane!”

  Sarita comes down with a large glass of lemonade and a lawn chair and settles herself on the dock. Charley paddles the canoe out to the swim raft, ties it up, and climbs out.

  “Eeewwww!” Jeremy says from the water when he sees the scar on her leg. “Did they have to cut your leg open to fix it?”

  “It’s a battle wound,” Charley says. “My bone was sticking right out of my leg there, and they had to push it back in!”

  “Gross!” Bethanne says. “Is that true?”

  “It is,” Charley says. It occurs to her that nothing that might be lurking in the water of Eagle Lake could possibly be worse than what she’s been through. “Look out below!” she yells, and jumps into the water.

  A new pattern is set that day. Walk, lunch, rest, boat walk, swim, dinner. Waiting and watching from the shore until everyone has finished swimming, Coyote is getting more and more used to being around humans.

  Another change in Coyote has to do with Charley’s father. Instead of hiding in the trees when Paul Morgan comes home, the dog has taken to going down the road to meet the car when he hears it coming, tail waving in welcome. He circles the car as it moves down the driveway and stays close when it stops, waiting for the door to open. He doesn’t come close enough to be touched, but it’s a greeting, nevertheless. Charley convinces her father to keep dog biscuits in the car and toss him one when he gets out, to encourage this behavior.

  “He’ll only like me for the biscuits,” her father complains.

  “Biscuits first, friendship after,” Charley tells him. “One step at a time.”

  A week before school is due to start, Mr. Heyward sees Charley and Coyote when they are walking near the mailboxes. “You’ve done a good job,” he tells her. “He looks like a different animal.”

  “He is,” she says. “He is.”

  23

  Gone

  Coyote is not in the studio when Charley wakes up the next morning. When she goes outside later, the driveway and the road are empty. Coyote is not waiting for her in his usual place. She swallows past a sudden sharpness in her throat. It’s no big deal, she assures herself. He’s probably just off in the woods. She whistles once, then again. He doesn’t come. Maybe, she thinks, he has gone up to visit with Jasmine and Bernie.

  She whistles several more times as she walks up the road. The two German shepherds are in their pen. Bernie barks a greeting. Coyote is nowhere to be seen. Now she is feeling a chill in the center of herself, somewhere under her rib cage.

  She goes back into the house, where her father is finishing his breakfast and Sarita is washing out the pan she used to fry bacon.

  “He’s probably off chasing something in the woods,” her father says when she tells them. “He’ll be back.”

  Sarita puts the pan into the dish drainer and dries her hands before she says anything. “Soon as he’s hungry, that dog’ll be back fussing at you to bring him some liver. Don’t worry yourself.”

  Charley hates the casual tone they take. But she does her best to believe them. She goes to her room, sits on her bed, and closes her eyes to visualize the truth of where he is and what he’s doing. In the first moments it seems to be a good idea. She feels him weaving his way through the woods, heading toward the sound of dogs barking. Charley has come to know the voices, the distinctive bark of most of the Eagle Lake dogs. This barking sounds like none of them. These dogs must be from one of the developments. As she thinks this, a road appears in her imagination, directly in front of Coyote, cars flying past. She feels him pause for a moment at the edge of the road, listening to the barking from the other side. Then a squirrel scurries down a nearby tree and runs toward the road. Coyote starts after it, and Charley hurriedly opens her eyes. She doesn’t want to see a car coming, hear the squeal of brakes, the thump of a collision. Could this vision be true? Or worse, could the very act of seeing make it true?

  As the morning drags by, she checks the windows every few minutes to see if he’s back. Every so often Charley goes outside to whistle for him. She whistles so loud and so often that Sadie finally comes, and she gives her a biscuit and apologizes for not playing with her. When she goes inside, Sadie stays, lying on the porch so that every time Charley comes to see if Coyote is back her heart jolts when she sees the red-gold form against the sliding doors. Finally she decides to walk Sadie home. Maybe Coyote will find them and join them on the trail.

  Everything about the walk this time is wrong. Spiderwebs seem purposely placed to miss the spider stick, catching her bare arms with their sticky filaments. The honking of the goose family grates on her ears, and the usually cheerful chatter call of a kingfisher sounds suddenly harsh and discordant. Even the smell of the lake seems wrong, fishy and unpleasant.

  In one place, where the trail drops sharply as it curves around a tree, she grabs the tree for support and puts her hand directly on a thick, hairy poison ivy vine that runs up the trunk. Stupid! The poison ivy has been growing on that tree all summer. She knows to use the sapling on the other side of the trail for support instead, but she’s been w
orrying about where Coyote could have gone instead of paying attention.

  Sadie, on the other hand, seems totally unconcerned. She trots this way and that, rushing ahead after a squirrel, coming back to check that Charley’s still there, going into the water, shaking and rolling in the leaves to dry herself. Unreasonably, Charley is angry at the dog for being so cheerful when something might have happened to her friend, angry even that Sadie is the one who is here with her when she should be walking with Coyote instead.

  Mrs. Davis is outside, weeding the small patch of flowers she has planted along the road where the sun reaches. “I haven’t seen him,” she says when Charley asks. “But that dog knows these woods better than any of us. He’s off on some errand of his own, and he’ll be back when he’s ready. Thanks for bringing Sadie around.”

  Charley decides to walk home the long way on the road. She can tell anyone she sees to keep a lookout for Coyote, to call her if they see him. But nobody else is out. She is across the dam and halfway up the road to her house before she sees Mrs. Jensen walking toward her with Bo, her old black dog, moving slowly and steadily along behind, stopping to sniff, stopping to lift his leg unsteadily to pee. “Where’s your buddy?” Mrs. Jensen asks Charley.

  “I haven’t seen him since last night. He hasn’t come for his walk or his snacks or anything!”

  “Now don’t you worry yourself.” Mrs. Jensen pats Charley’s arm. Bo moves slowly forward, his tail wagging gently, and puts his white muzzle against Charley’s hand. Eighteen years old, Bo is the oldest dog Charley has ever heard of. She pats his head. Like Tree, she thinks, Bo is a survivor.

  “Bo used to roam, you know,” Mrs. Jensen says. “Used to scare me silly when he’d just up and disappear. He’d be gone for a couple of days sometimes, and then, ’bout the time I was thinking we’d lost him for good, he’d come wandering back, grinning and wagging his tail like he’d been on vacation at the shore. Never did know what he was up to. Don’t you go fussing yourself about that wild dog of yours, Sweetie. He’s just off for a jaunt somewhere.”

  It is Mrs. Jensen’s comforting words that get Charley through the rest of the day. He’ll be back for dinner, she tells herself. He’ll be back.

  At Sarita’s urging, she goes swimming with the Davises, taking a swim noodle from the dock box so she can just float, letting the water wash over and around her as she listens to Jeremy and Bethanne dare each other to try greater and greater feats of bravery. “Watch me!” they call to their mother on her inflatable chair as they leap off the raft or put their faces in the water or take hold of Sadie’s tail and let her pull them after her through the water. Mrs. Davis raises her glass of wine and toasts their every trick.

  “Watch me, watch me!” The words, the whoops and giggles and splashes, take Charley back to summer evenings with her mother and father. She used to show off for them the way the Davis kids are doing now, and then climb, shivering and blue fingered, onto the raft and wrap herself in a towel to get warm before going in again. Her mother, who swam the length of the lake first thing every morning from May to October, never seemed to get cold. She could stay in the water until the fireflies were out.

  Charley closes her eyes and feels the lap of the water, cool against her chin. Memories fill her mind—full-moon nights when the sun would go down behind the hills at the shallow end of the lake just a little while before the golden globe of the moon rose over the hills down toward the dam. The three of them would sit on the raft, the canoe tied the way it is this moment, watching the moon spill a pathway of silver onto the water. She can hear her parents’ voices, the sound of her father laughing. The plane crash, Charley thinks, didn’t just take her mother from her. It took her father, that man laughing on the swim dock in the moonlight, too.

  A dog begins to bark, and Charley opens her eyes with a start. It is not Coyote’s bark. Mrs. Sutcliff, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, an orange swim noodle sticking into the air on either side, is swimming down the lake toward them. Her chocolate Lab, Boone, is swimming in front of her, barking at Sadie, who is splashing toward him now, her tail flinging water as she goes. Charley glances at the empty place onshore where Coyote ought to be. The chill settles into the space beneath her ribs again.

  Coyote does not show up for his meal. Her father and Sarita try to reassure her at dinner. “Just think how long he went without eating before,” her father says. His words don’t help. Nearly starving should have made Coyote more focused than other dogs on where and when he’s fed.

  A couple of days, Charley reminds herself as she turns on the porch and ramp lights when it gets dark. Mrs. Jensen said Bo would be gone a couple of days sometimes. But when she goes out at bedtime with liver in her hand, it is as if the darkness, loud with the sounds of cicadas and crickets and frogs, and the occasional muttering of the geese from the water, has been emptied of all life.

  24

  Four Days

  Charley is running along a twilight road between towering trees, chasing a figure she can barely make out ahead of her. The faster she runs, the smaller it gets, moving beyond her, dwindling into the distance. The world darkens around her. She slows then, her footsteps pounding in her ears like a drum changing rhythm. It is no use. She cannot catch up. The figure has disappeared now. She stops, doubles over, and tries to get her breath. When she straightens up again, she sees that she is at the edge of a lake, a silvery path stretching across it under the moon. She remembers this path. It will take her home. She steps out onto the water, moving one foot, then the other, walking on the glittering light. She is straining her eyes into the distance, trying to see the other shore, the lights of her house, when the black spot appears against the sheen of moonlight. Her bones turn to ice. Already the spot is growing, swallowing light, closing in.

  It is the fourth day, and Charley is walking the sewer line trail. Each day since Coyote disappeared, she has wakened after a fitful night punctuated with a new version of her old nightmare, to begin another day of emptiness, another day of walking and whistling and waiting. On the second day she put a notice in the message boxes, asking anyone who sees Coyote to call her. No one has. She and Sarita have driven up and down the county road and through all the housing developments out beyond Eagle Lake, moving up one curving street and down another, asking everyone they encounter if they have seen a golden dog with a green collar. No one has seen him.

  Every morning she has written the day’s number on her calendar—64, 65, 66. She refuses to let herself think that The Taming could be over. But today, when she put the red 67 in the square for Friday, August 15, she felt the way she felt all those years ago when her father insisted that there were no elves or fairies in the woods. What she wants to believe more than anything in the world is slipping away even as she holds on with every scrap of determination she can muster.

  It is a gray day, dark clouds threatening rain, the air hot and heavy and still. She has walked from her house to Crazy Sherman’s and back, and has started up toward Dixie Trace. Her waist pack is full of liver and biscuits just in case. She will walk every trail she knows before she goes back to eat whatever Sarita makes for lunch. She will go to every place she and Coyote have ever been together, every place he has ever returned to her after a ramble, to get his treats. She will whistle and call for him. And she will be careful not to let her imagination loose.

  On the second day she tried a different sort of imagining, keeping careful control of the images, picturing only what she wanted to be true—Coyote in the Eagle Lake woods, heading home, a bone he had stolen from a yard in one of the developments between his teeth. But she couldn’t hold the image against the thought of roads, of cars and trucks, and a new one—a pack of dogs defending their territory, surrounding him, barking, snarling, growling. Whatever guided her visions before, when she relaxed and let her mind play, now it was fear that took over, making the images, the sensations. She dares not trust herself to try again.

  Since then she has done her best to keep he
r mind focused as completely as possible on the certainty that wherever he is, Coyote is a survivor. Like Bo. Like Tree.

  Now, as she moves along the trail, Charley realizes that in the weeks she and Coyote have walked here, the natural world has changed, without her thinking about it, almost without her noticing. Gingerly she takes hold of a blackberry cane, its thorns pricking her fingers, to move it out of her way. It snaps back, catches on her jeans, piercing through to her leg. The brambles are still growing, narrowing the trail, but the berries are long gone. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and thistles are blooming, now, head high in some places. Even on a day like this one, threatening rain, the world seems drier, the greens less green, and here and there a red leaf signals that autumn is on its way. Nothing stays the same, Charley thinks. Everything goes away.

  Looking at the goldenrod, growing so thickly, so bright and tall, she finds she can’t remember what this trail looked like before it bloomed. Is this why her mother chose photography? Was she trying to catch it all before it went away? Her mother is not here to answer. Will never answer.

  Charley stops as if she has run into a wall. What if Coyote doesn’t come back? What if the image of the road, the cars, was real, and there is nothing left of him now but a body among the weeds, a reason for the vultures that circle overhead to tilt their wings and drop down to the pavement? She never thought, in all these sixty-seven days, to take a picture of him. How could she—Charley Morgan, daughter of Colleen Morgan, nature photographer—not once think to go to her mother’s studio, dig through the boxes, find a camera, and take a picture? If he is gone, there will be nothing to show that Coyote ever lived. Nothing—nothing at all—to show for day after day of the effort to tame him, day after day of their growing connection.

  Ahead Charley sees the wild rosebush that marks the way into the Pine Grove. She pushes past it, makes her way through the young pines, and scrambles up the hill. The Pine Grove has changed only a little since the day she found it, she sees. The moss seems taller, the lichens thicker, and a dead branch, with a pair of gray pinecones still attached, lies across the place where the fairy rings grow. She is not comforted. However small, it is change. Charley sinks to the ground, stretches her legs out in front of her, leans against a tree. She tries to settle herself, to breathe slowly, to focus her attention on a bit of moss, an ant, the thrum of cicadas. But she cannot seem to get her breath.