Remember the bigger truth, he thought. He’d found his boy. He knew where he was. What would he even do if he found him in there, anyway, in all that noise and crowd? And another part of his brain was whispering something else, too: The danger is not at school. The danger—that shadowy monster—is at home. He was so close, and he wanted to see his boy more than any words he ever learned could possibly express. But he hadn’t just come back to see his boy … he’d come back to help him, if he could. To save him, if he needed to. And if it came to that, he knew he’d need some soul left to do it. If he went in there now, he’d be spending his soul for nothing.
Waiting was the smart thing to do.
Even though the smart thing to do? It’s not always what the heart wants to do. Especially a strong heart.
But they waited. They crossed the street and waited under the tree that Brodie remembered, the tree that he had waited for his boy under, back when he had a beating heart and blood and breathing lungs.
Brodie settled in, there in the snow under the bare-branched winter tree. Patsy curled up on the hood of a car, parked against the curb. Tuck gave them both a look, almost started to sit down, then jogged off to investigate a cluster of garbage cans down the street.
Brodie had only a few memories of his boy. Only a handful had come back to him.
But, sitting there waiting for Aiden to come walking out the doors, they were all that he had. So Brodie closed his eyes and lived each memory, one by one, over and over, while he waited.
The park, the ball, the snow, the mud, the laughter, the hugs, the nights, the tears. Aiden standing atop the slide. Aiden’s arms, tight around him. Aiden saying good-bye. Aiden hugging hello. Aiden’s fingers, scratching at his fur. Aiden’s eyes, looking into his own. Aiden’s face, Aiden’s smell, Aiden’s voice, Aiden’s smile.
Aiden’s words: You. Me. Together. Always.
Time works different for souls without bodies. Without heartbeats or breaths to measure it, time can move in unexpected ways. For Brodie, waiting for the boy who meant everything to him, the hours of that school day could have and, yeah, maybe even should have felt endless. But Brodie, sitting there with his timeless memories, hardly noticed them pass at all. In his memories, he was with Aiden.
And being with Aiden? Well, Brodie would never get tired of that.
Tuck, though, was a different story.
The waiting was way tougher on Tuck.
Tuck circled. He barked at passing cars. He ran to the end of the road and back. He chased squirrels. He hunted fruitlessly for french fries.
“That dead dog,” Patsy growled after a few hours, “is not resting in peace.”
Brodie opened his eyes, shaking free of his memory to look at the cat.
“Yeah. I don’t think he’s the type,” Brodie said. He watched as Tuck ran circles around an old man with a cane who was walking past. “Hey, how come we can pass through people so easily, without even trying? Our first night, before we met you, Tuck passed through some people, even before he knew he could. Shouldn’t he have hit them like he hit that van door?”
“Nah. Stuff—trucks, vans, french fries—is easy. Living things are different. You can’t touch the living, dog. We’re separate from them, now. Forever. And I say good riddance.”
Brodie looked closer at Patsy.
“Why? What’s your story? You got a boy or someone you’re trying to find?”
“I don’t got no story, dog. I don’t got no boy. Or no girl, not really.” Patsy paused for a second, then lifted her lip in a quiet snarl. “I never had nobody. I just got me, and that’s all I need. Got it?”
“All right, all right. I was just asking …”
“Well, quit asking. You should shut your mouth and start paying attention anyway.”
“Paying attention to what?”
“The doors, genius. You wanna miss him?”
Brodie’s head snapped back to the school.
Kids were filing out of the doors, laughing and talking back and forth. A bell rang, and the trickle of kids became a flood. A bus rumbled up the street.
Brodie jumped to his feet.
Tuck came running back to them from where he’d been trying desperately to chew on a cat who was dozing on a front porch.
“This is it,” Brodie said, shaking with excitement.
“He’s gonna come right by here, huh?” Patsy said, rising and stretching.
“You sure?” Tuck asked, sniffing at some bushes nearby.
“Yep. He’ll be here.” Brodie was sure of it. He’d watched his boy walk up this street countless times, and then walk back home the same way. He’d walked with him on the weekends, to play in the school’s fields or shoot some baskets on the basketball hoops on the playground. This was the sidewalk he walked home on.
“Well, I hope he hurries,” Patsy said in her bored voice. “And this kid better be something special, to go through all this.”
“He is,” Brodie said. “You’ll see.” He fixed his eyes on the stampede of kids pouring out the bright red front doors of the school.
They were bundled up in coats and hats and gloves, and their breath puffed in clouds in front of their faces. They shouted at one another and sang and laughed and chased. They paraded out, crazy and chaotic, stomping noisily onto buses or into waiting cars or onto sidewalks, heading home.
Tuck’s tail was already wagging. Tuck was the kind of dog who couldn’t help but wag when he saw kids, even when they weren’t his.
“Where is he?” Tuck asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Is that him?”
“No.”
“How about him?”
“Nope.”
“Ooooh … there, running with the one glove! Is that him?”
“No, Tuck! Look, I’ll tell you when I see him, okay?”
“All right, all right.” Tuck trotted onto the sidewalk, wagging and sniffing at the kids as they passed.
Brodie scanned each face as they came out of the doors, looking eagerly from one to the next, waiting for the moment when he’d get to see his boy.
He saw big kids. Smaller kids. He saw kids with freckles on their cheeks and kids with metal shining in their mouths and kids with snot running down from their noses. He saw all kinds of kids, running happy out of that school into the cold air. But moments passed—long, waiting moments—and he didn’t see the one kid he was looking for.
His stomach clenched and twisted.
His tail fell still.
The crowd of kids thinned out to scattered handfuls. Only a few kids were coming out now, in lonely ones and twos, running to catch up with the rest.
Tuck slowed his cavorting and playing. He snuck little glances at Brodie and then, after hours of constant motion, he stood still, his tail as limp as his friend’s.
Two last kids went past them, both girls, heads held close together as they whispered excitedly in each other’s ears. The last bus roared to life and rumbled out of the parking lot.
Tuck walked quietly over. He stood beside Brodie.
“He’s not here,” Brodie said. “He should be here. I know he should be here.”
Tuck didn’t answer.
Brodie stood, lost and shaking.
That memory echoed, the dark one, the bad one. The last one.
Brodie had left. But Aiden had stayed. He’d stayed there, with the monster lumbering toward him. With clenched fists, with deadly boots. With murderous eyes.
All of Brodie’s soul was lost and scattered except for two questions:
Where was Aiden?
What had happened to his boy?
Brodie looked from the closed school doors to the backs of the last kids walking away down the sidewalk. He lowered himself to the ground and rested his chin on his paws.
“He should be here,” he said again.
“Surprise, surprise,” Patsy said from behind them. “This didn’t end well. If only someone had warned you. Oh, wait. I did.”
Tuck turned hi
s head and lifted his lip at her.
“Shut it, hairball,” he growled. “You’re not helping.” He turned back to Brodie. “Listen, buddy, just ’cause he wasn’t here don’t mean we won’t find him. Maybe he, like, threw up or something. My girl did that once, and she got to stay home all day and watch TV. Her mom even let me lie up on the couch with her. We ate popcorn, man. Popcorn. You ever had popcorn? It’s all salty and buttery and it sticks to your tongue and …”
“You’re right,” Brodie said, jumping up. “Aiden missed school all the time! He’s probably just at home. He’s got to be. Come on.”
Brodie didn’t have to think about the way home. He took off at a run, away from the school.
“You know the way?”
“Yeah, I know the way!”
Brodie led them at a run, down the street for several blocks before taking a couple of turns, first left and then right. They passed kids still walking home … Brodie and Patsy dodging side to side to slide around them, Tuck usually jumping rowdily right through them.
Brodie stopped for a minute at a corner to let Patsy catch up.
“We’re close,” he told Tuck. “We can cut down this alley.” He spun in a circle, savoring the sudden familiarity of the street and houses around him. Memories rose into his mind in bunches now: chasing a cat into that yard across the road … finding a half-eaten hot dog in the vacant lot on the corner … ducking under that tree with Aiden during a rainstorm. He was home.
When Patsy finally trotted up—not in near as much of a rush as Brodie would have liked—they started down the narrow, unpaved alley. The snow was deep off the main streets. It would have come to Brodie’s stomach in places, if they’d sunk into it. Walking on their ghostly paws, though, they stepped right along the top, leaving no footprints behind.
“It’s right up there by the end,” Brodie said, unable to stop the wag in his tail, “just past those kids playing around.”
“They ain’t playing around,” Patsy said.
“What do you mean?” Brodie asked … but then he looked closer at the kids and heard the rawness of one boy’s voice.
“Just go away!” There was a little anger in the voice … but it was mostly fear and tears and desperation. All of Brodie’s wag withered away at the sound of it.
The boy was up on the roof of a low building—a garage, Brodie’s mind told him—with his arms up over his face. Three bigger kids were on the ground beneath him. Two of them hurled snowballs up at his huddled body. These weren’t the fun, soft snowballs of Brodie’s happy memory with Aiden … they were packed tight and thrown viciously. They smacked the boy’s upheld arms with hard thuds. The boys on the ground laughed. Their coughed-out laughs were as ugly as picked scabs.
Beside Brodie, Tuck whined softly. They both slowed, their eyes on the boys.
“Ugh. People are the worst,” Patsy said, walking past them. “I’m glad I’m dead. These guys definitely look like the cat-torturing type.”
Tuck and Brodie followed her, but more slowly. They both had their eyes on the jeering, shouting boys and the prey they had trapped.
Brodie stopped in the snow.
“I wish we could help him,” Tuck said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Patsy spat, still walking on. “What’d he ever do for you? And, besides … you can’t. Those guys ain’t french fries. You can’t touch them.”
“It’s funny,” Tuck said, ignoring Patsy’s words, “how different everything is now. How I can understand stuff. Back … before, if I’d walked past this, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed how sad and scared that kid is. I’d have just seen the loud boys, heard their laughing. I’d have seen them throwing stuff and I would have wanted to play. With them. But now … now I can … see things better. Now all I can see is the sad kid, almost.”
“I know. Me, too.”
A gravel-speckled snowball rocketed up and glanced off the kid’s huddled head, knocking his hat off. It slid down the roof and onto the ground.
Tuck took a step closer.
“I mean … I wouldn’t have cared,” he said. His voice sounded small. Sad. Ashamed, even.
But Tuck? He was wrong. He had always been the kind of soul who cared. And caring doesn’t always need understanding.
“Well, you care now,” Brodie said.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Come on, fellas,” Patsy called. She was well down the alley now, her tail whipping impatiently. “We got a different boy to find, right? And it ain’t getting any lighter, either.”
She was right. The winter sun was already low in the sky. Shadows from the trees and fence posts were stretching like black fingers across the white snow.
Brodie sighed. He tried to remember what the angel had said, tried to remember the bigger truth. But he couldn’t tell, standing there watching the tears of the boy on the roof, whether the bigger truth would want him to find his own boy or help the one in front of him.
“Come on down and play,” one of the trolls called. “Come on down, Danny, or we’ll drag you down!” He started to climb up on a garbage can that was standing by the garage, probably the same one that Danny had used to get to the roof. The crying kid scooted farther up the roof. But there was no getting away.
“Come on,” Brodie said at last, turning away. “We can’t help him.”
Tuck whined and shuffled his feet. But he turned and followed Brodie.
Behind them, the cries of the boy and the laughter of his attackers grew louder. The hunt was nearing its finish. Blood was in the water.
But then, Danny said it. He didn’t shout it, or yell it. He said it.
“Leave me alone. Please.”
He didn’t even say it like he was talking to the snarling monster who was climbing up toward him. He said it softly. Like he was saying it to the clouds. Like a prayer.
There’s no way that Brodie should have heard it. He was down the alley a ways by then, and the boy said it so softly. But somehow the words got to his ear. Almost like they were carried by an angel.
Brodie stopped short.
He looked back over his shoulder.
It was the please that got him.
Because when that boy on that roof said those words, they echoed in a thousand woken memories in Brodie’s heart. Memories of his boy. His boy had said those words, those exact words. He’d said them more than once.
Leave me alone. Please.
Brodie turned.
“Oh, just don’t,” Patsy moaned.
But Brodie did.
He ran back to the garage. Tuck ran beside him.
The goon was up on the garbage can now, one gloved hand holding the edge of the roof and the other swiping at the boy. Danny had his knees up tight to his chest. His pale face was wet with tears.
Brodie charged up and leapt at the boy on the garbage can with his teeth bared and a bark in his throat.
He flew right through the boy and landed in the snow on the other side.
He spun around and tried again. Again he ended up harmlessly on the ground, with the monster still standing on the garbage can.
“You can’t touch the living!” Patsy called. “Have you listened to a word I’ve said?”
The creep stretched up on one foot and reached. His hand closed around Danny’s pant leg. Danny cried out. But the creep caught hold and began to pull him down the roof. The boys waiting on the ground cheered.
Tuck tried, but he leapt straight through the kid just like Brodie had. He barked furiously, but Patsy and Brodie were the only ones who could hear him.
Brodie whined, his eyes on the crying boy. A boy he was helpless to save. It was all too familiar.
Dark memories swirled, choking him.
Then his eyes dropped down. To the garbage can that the monster was balancing on. It teetered and rocked as the monster tugged at his victim.
Tuck was barking and growling, running in circles and still jumping through the taunting boys.
“You can’
t touch them, idiot!” Patsy hissed again. “They’re alive!”
But Brodie stepped forward, his eyes on the garbage can. It wasn’t alive.
He remembered Tuck and the french fry. He remembered landing with a thud in the backseat when they were car-hopping.
He took off, running straight at the garbage can.
He focused on his shoulder. He concentrated his whole mind, his whole soul, on his left shoulder. He put everything he had into making that shoulder real and solid, like a dream come true.
He leapt. With his eyes closed and his every thought tightened down to nothing but that one shoulder, he leapt.
With a crash he smashed into the garbage can. He felt the frozen metal connect with his shoulder, and his body jerked to a stop. He opened his eyes in time to see the can tip and tumble onto its side.
The creep hung for a moment, one hand on the roof and the other clutching the boy. And then he fell, his body twisting as his hands slipped loose. He landed with a grunt and a smash on top of the garbage can. There was a brutal thwock as his face connected with the metal rim of the can. A splash of red blood splattered onto the snow. The boy rolled off onto the ground, groaning.
Brodie backed away from him.
The boy’s friends stood back, their eyes wide.
“Dude, you okay?”
The boy moaned and sat up. Blood was smeared across his face and his nose was swollen and bent.
The boy wasn’t a monster anymore at all. He was just a kid again, bleeding in the snow.
“Oh, dang!” one of the other boys said. “Your nose is totally broken.”
The fallen monster didn’t answer. His face was white, his eyes shining. He took a jagged, choking breath. A little moan started in his throat, but he grimaced and cut it off. Then he jumped up and stomped off, his hands over his nose. His friends hurried to follow him.
Brodie watched him go, unwagging. He knew what a hurt boy trying not to cry looked like. And he didn’t like it.
He looked down at the blood, so bright and red and blaming.
On the roof above, the boy Danny was still sniffling.
But he was safe. Brodie told himself that. The boy was safe.
“Come on,” Tuck said. “Let’s go. He’ll be all right now.”
Good Dog Page 10