One Good Dog

by Susan Wilson

  Adam hurries to unlock his door.

  Chance sits in the middle of the living room, the squashed throw pillows on the futon clear evidence that the new dog bed is a waste of money. At the sight of Ariel, the dog’s tail ticks back and forth, his jaw drops open, and his banner tongue rolls out. His eyes squint; he stands and shakes. Then sits again. As with every stranger, the dog is cautious.

  “Jesus, Dad. What the f… hell is that?”

  “My dog.”

  “A pit bull? You have a pit bull?” She is laughing, though, laughing and patting her knees to beckon the dog to her. “Is this the same dog you had before?”

  “The same.”

  “How come you still have him?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  Chance lumbers over to Ariel, tail still swinging. Ariel reaches out a tentative hand, allowing the dog to sniff the back of it before reaching under his chin to scratch. Adam wonders where she’s learned this approach to strange dogs. He certainly never taught her that. Never knew it himself. There is so much he doesn’t know about this young woman. He wasn’t there for the first time the tooth fairy made an appearance. He was in Hong Kong the evening of her first junior high orchestra performance. Even long after she was a toddler, she was asleep most nights before he made it home. He, like the rest of his cohorts, brayed about the quality time they had with their children. The family ski vacations in Aspen; the once-a-year tennis lessons together. Surely that made up for the absences. The preoccupations.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Chance.”

  “Interesting.” Ariel moves her scratching fingers up and over the dog’s head, down his spine, which gets him to wriggling. “Whose idea was that?”

  “Gina.”

  Once again, the tension shows in the tightening of her jaw muscles.

  “She owns the shop across the street, fancy pet supplies and tropical fish. I bought the dog bed from her.” His voice sounds dismissive even to his own ears.

  Ariel visibly relaxes again, as if a shop owner isn’t someone she imagines her father being interested in. She stands up to remove her coat, looks around the apartment, drops the coat on the futon, and goes to find refreshment in the mostly-empty fridge.

  Adam doesn’t know how he’ll entertain his daughter for the next twenty-four hours.

  Adam’s meat loaf isn’t quite as tasty as Rafe’s, although he’s followed the recipe exactly. His mashed potatoes are acceptable, and he’s cheated with a can of gravy. The salad, however, is very good. Ariel not only hasn’t turned her nose up at the plebeian menu; she’s helped herself to a second, albeit thin, slice of meat loaf.

  “So, Dad?”

  “Ariel?” Here it comes, some request he is going to have to deny. A new pair of shoes, a better school. Diamond earrings. He’ll let her down with an airy promise of some future acquisition.

  “I got invited to a party for tonight.”

  “Are you saying you want to go back home tonight?” He is disappointed; this is probably a request he can’t deny, but why didn’t she say something earlier?

  “No. It’s at MIT. A guy I know—”

  “No. Absolutely not. Whatever put that idea in your head?” Adam picks up their plates and drops them into the sink. He bought ice cream for dessert. He sprang for sprinkles, remembering that Ariel always asked for sprinkles on her cones. “I’ve got Ben and Jerry’s. Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia?”

  “Dad, I promised that I’d go. It’s all right. I know the people—”

  “No. So, Chunky or Cherry?” Maybe if he talks loudly enough, this ridiculous fantasy of his sixteen-year-old daughter attending an MIT frat party will dissipate like a puff of smoke. He tries not to think that the entire day of good behavior, of cheerful conversation, of her even doing her math homework at this table was all smoke and mirrors, a buttering up of the old man.

  “But Dad, everyone will be there, all my friends. If I don’t show up, they’ll be on my case for a week. I got them invitations to this party and they’re all gonna meet me. It’s totally safe.”

  The dog sequesters himself beneath the table. Not even the tip of his tail extends beyond the perimeter. He rests his nose on his paws, but his eyes are darting beneath mobile eyebrows.

  Ariel is banging around the small room, her voice petulant, then wheedling. Adam’s voice moves from rock-solid to cracking with anger. “No girl of sixteen who’s invited to a frat party can expect it’s safe. Besides, what kind of college man invites jailbait—”

  “Mom said I could go.”

  Ariel must take him for an idiot. “Yeah. And I’m about to be crowned king of England. Try something more believable.”

  “I can’t believe that you’re not letting me go. You always said connections are important.”

  “No. Now that is something your mother would say.” Adam yanks the faucet on full and is hit in the face with a backwash of hot water. He drops the pans in, squirts in some dishwashing liquid, and starts scrubbing furiously. The sound of the running water drowns out Ariel’s voice. He shuts off the tap. Ariel hasn’t taken a breath.

  “Courtney’s going to be there. It’s her cousin’s friend’s party.”

  Courtney Bevins. Daughter of the man who took Adam’s place at Dynamic. His former protégé. The one who convinced Wannamaker that the takeover shouldn’t be launched. Oh yeah, Adam’s figured that out.

  “Courtney and her parents are no friends of mine.”

  “Mom likes them.”

  “Even at your tender age, I’m sure you can see how that loyalty is offensive to me.” Adam is quiet now. Ariel is quiet. His pulse is starting to normalize. Episode over; let’s move on.

  “Dad?”

  He turns away from the sink to look at his daughter. She is in her coat, her ruinously expensive handbag—not a knockoff, the real deal which her mother insisted she should have, slung over her shoulder. She’s changed out of her jeans and is wearing a tight little skirt, knee-high boots with heels he can’t imagine anyone walking in. The little lambskin jacket is open, revealing a low turquoise top that fits like a leotard and accents a cleavage he is shocked to see.

  She looks at him with a defiance he might find admirable were it not aimed at him. The set of her jaw, the way she tosses her hair out of her eyes with a shake, the way her lips are parted, all serve to remind Adam of what lies in wait for her at a house full of inebriated postadolescent, horny young men. “I’m going, Dad, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Ariel, don’t you dare.”

  “You don’t have custody of me. I’m going. I hate you.”

  “Don’t you talk back to me, young lady.”

  Ariel wrenches the doorknob, loses control of the door, which bangs hard into the wall.

  “Don’t you walk away from me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Has she actually said that, or is he hearing an echo from the past? The phantom pain that has tormented Adam less in the past few months bears down now on his chest like a vise.

  The door slams.

  From beneath the kitchen table, Chance peeks out, but he stays under its cagelike protection.

  Adam is frozen in midstep. Dishwater trickles down his wrists under his sleeves. He must stop her, but at the same time he thinks that if she has a few minutes to stand out in the street, where very few cabs travel and where it’s a mile to the nearest T stop, she’ll be back.

  His father did nothing to stop his sister. He stayed in the kitchen. Muttering epithets to himself He sat back down at the table, opened his paper.

  Then he thinks of how she’s dressed and imagines who else might stop to pick her up. The dog comes out from under the table, gives Adam a wide berth but keeps his eyes on him. Adam bends over, pressing his wet hands into his sides. Stein has told him to remember to breathe, remember to swallow when the anger comes upon him. One deep breath. Another. Then he can go follow her. The dog sniffs at the overnight case Ari
el has brought with her, looks at Adam. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay.” He is still bent over, eyes closed, gasping for breath like he does when he and Chance circumnavigate the pond at speed.

  Chance’s nose meets Adam’s nose. Startled, Adam stands upright.

  And then it strikes him. Maybe his father couldn’t pursue Veronica because Adam would have been left alone in the apartment. It isn’t epithets he’s recalling; it’s prayer. He was the reason Veronica got away. There was no one else there to watch over a little boy. His father didn’t let her go; maybe he was simply helpless to stop her.

  Adam isn’t helpless and Ariel’s not getting away. Adam grabs his keys and cell phone and slams out the door. He hears Chance bark once as he runs down the front stairs.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Except that they didn’t bite each other, this confrontation between my man and his pup was as vicious as any fight in the pit I’d ever seen. Whew. I stayed beneath the cage of the table, my head down low, my ears flat against my head, my eyes on the combatants. Snap and snarl. Woohee.

  I watched their legs as they danced around the room, using their voices as weapons. Then the young one banged out the door. He panted, not like victor or vanquished, but like a dog pulled to the sidelines to catch his breath before going in for the kill. I was proud of him and touched his face to let him know he had a partner in the ring.

  After he left, I stood for a long time, inhaling the scent of their heated bodies. The room was very quiet, so quiet that I could hear him calling way down on the street. I scratched at the door. Eventually I discerned the sound of a car, its voice as familiar to me as the sound of the man’s voice. Then I was left to the ordinary silence of the place. I wandered over to my water bowl, lapped a little, nosed my empty dinner bowl, tried to upend the garbage can with its lovely promise of leftovers, but it was wedged in tight between the counter and the wall and had a diabolically clever top on it, which, so far, had resisted my attempts to open it.

  Then I jumped onto the futon, pushed the pillows into a more snug nest, and curled up to await their return. Which turned out to be a very long time, even by dog standards.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  In the two minutes it took to follow Ariel out into the street, Adam has lost her, as if she has been absorbed into the evening. The sidewalk is empty, and he cannot believe that she could move so fast on those heels. Or that it had taken him longer than he thought to get himself down the stairs and out. He waits, listening to the pounding of his heart in his chest, trying to decide which direction she might have gone. She doesn’t know the neighborhood, doesn’t know the area, can’t possibly have known in what direction to turn to get to the subway. But he does, and heads that way now, jogging, saving himself for a full run once he spots her.

  Reaching the station, Adam swipes his Charlie Card and darts toward the inbound platform. Lots of dark coats and short skirts. Not so many blond girls. Then he spots the back of a blonde leaning against a stanchion. Although she is inches shorter than Ariel even without the boots, he tries to convince himself that it is she; that this recent awareness of her mature height is a delusion. Surely she is still small enough to fit in his lap. He makes himself quiet his breathing, moves toward the figure slowly, casually, hopefully. But, of course, it’s not Ariel.

  Ariel has either gotten lucky and found a cab or had already planned on meeting friends with a car. He goes to fetch his Lexus and make his way to Cambridge. He’ll find Ariel if he has to knock on every dorm door, walk into every frat house. There is no way he’s going to lose her. He keeps calling her cell phone, his finger on the speed dial. He knows she’ll just keep letting it go to voice mail, but he wants her to know he’s coming, that his phone is in his hand.

  Even as he sails down Memorial Drive too fast, Adam thinks about the frat parties he’s been to and realizes something that Ariel, in her high school rebellion, doesn’t know. No frat party starts this early. The best start at nearly midnight, not at seven-thirty. So, where will she go? Who will be with her? Maybe he has time to find her and get her home. He begins to relax. Sterling probably has the cell number of that wretched Courtney or one of Ariel’s other friends. As a last resort he’ll make that call. Right now he has a plan.

  Adam pulls into the Trader Joe’s parking lot, gives Ariel’s phone another try. When it automatically goes to voice mail, he wishes that he’d added text messaging to his cell-phone package, six cents per message be damned. No answer. “Ariel, I want you to meet me at the student center. I won’t embarrass you in front of your friends, but I’ll take them home, too, if they want. No questions, no consequences.”

  He believes that, at heart, Ariel is sensible and will come.

  This is not the student center of Adam’s experience. This is a mall, and instantly he realizes that amid the food venues, bookstore, game room, he might wander all night and never find Ariel if he’s not specific about location. He thumbs Ariel’s number once again. “I’m in the first-floor seating area. Watching the Mass Ave entrance.”

  In the student center, Adam feels like a voyeur, or, at the very least, a middle-aged man sitting in a place that makes him suspect. Everyone else looks young, and those who aren’t young look appropriately professorial, a little bleary, books tucked under arms, top-loader briefcases in hand. None of them looks like a deranged father on the hunt for a truculent daughter. Adam has swallowed enough coffee to stay awake all night and he’s not sure how long he can sit here like a homeless man, observing every girl who walks by in her tight little skirt and her skinny tank top, before a campus cop comes over and strikes up a conversation.

  None of them is Ariel. He really thought that she’d be here. That she’d listened to his message. Maybe he’s left too many, all with the same invocation to call him, so that she never bothered to listen to the last one with orders to meet him here. Or never listened to any of them.

  Adam had been to enough U Mass frat parties to know the damage the young can do to themselves with the heady freedom of supervisionless living. He had seen couches tossed over balconies and set on fire; had witnessed the dumping of an alcohol-poisoned girl at the door of the local hospital. It wasn’t that long ago that a student died right here from that. It’s a quick progression to thinking about date-rape drugs. His daughter and the sexual predators lurking around every corner. These thoughts send ribbons of anguish through him and his hands shake as if he’s been drinking all night. Ariel is his responsibility and he’s lost her. The time on his cell phone screen reads 12:30. The student center seems less now like a concourse of activity than a midnight bus station, those still around bent over books or asleep on the couches, satchels and backpacks making up rough pillows or footstools.

  He dare not take his eyes off the door. He dare not give up hope. He dare not wait here any longer.

  The first student Adam approaches is a big African-American guy wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with Greek letters he can’t identify. He carries a laptop case over one shoulder and has a weary look, as if he’s been awake for days and can’t wait to fall into bed. He is plodding toward the exit, shoulders hunched and head down, a bull-shaped man who does not look particularly approachable. He looks a bit like the punks who stopped Adam on the street to ask about Chance—his big sweatshirt, his crisp white athletic shoes. If it wasn’t for the Greek letters on his chest, Adam would have looked for someone else.

  “Can I talk with you a moment?”

  The kid stops, altogether surprised to find Adam blocking his way. “I guess.” He straightens up, imposing in his height and bulk. He is not hostile, just annoyed. He could brush Adam away with one hand and he knows it. Instead, he waits to hear what Adam has to say.

  “I’m trying to find my daughter. She’s at some frat party and I have to find her. She’s seriously underage.” The young man looks at him with some genuine concern and Adam feels that ribbon of anxiety tickle. He is right to be afraid for Ariel.

  “Hard to say. There’s alway
s something going on. Might even be in Back Bay. Lots of Greeks over there. Are you sure it’s at a frat?”

  Adam feels the hopelessness of finding Ariel in this city of students.

  “But, hey, lemme give a couple of friends a call.”

  Adam is amazed that the kid’s massive thumb is so dextrous, but within a moment he’s chatting up someone. “Hey, dawg, yeah, man, look, anything going on at your house?”

  The kid looks Adam in the eye and shakes his head, thanks his friend, and snaps his phone shut. “My buddy says there might be something going on at TDC on Memorial.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Hey, wait, man. What are you going to do?”

  “Crash a party.”

  “Good luck.” The big kid in the Alpha Psi Alpha sweatshirt sets his cap on his head, careful to twist it into a fashionable tilt, and heads out the exit.

  Adam follows, gets his bearings, and heads off at a jog toward the frat house. The late-night air chills him. He pulls the collar of his coat up higher, regrets that he hadn’t taken his scarf out of the car, where it lies on the front seat. Clumps of students bump past him as he goes along the street, oblivious to the solitary man making his way through the Saturday-night crowd. He wants to ask if he’s going in the right direction, whether he is getting any closer, but none of these students so much as glance at him. They are safe in their numbers and unconcerned with a harried-looking middle-aged man in a too-light jacket, a man who is trying hard not to be frantic.

  The young men who stop him at the door are polite about his request to look for his daughter, and one offers to scout around for him. He will not stay, as told, at the bottom of the stairs, but forges on ahead with his chaperone, looking into every room they pass, despite the guy’s assurances that no very young woman would be allowed in on a night for “over twenty-ones.” Adam bites his tongue, not mentioning that he doesn’t believe that rule for one minute. “She’s very mature-looking; she can fool anyone.”