“That doesn’t help our situation, son.”
“Sorry. I don’t think there is one. She lives out in the
middle of the woods. There’s no street. So how can there
be an address?”
“Middle of the woods, you say?”
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
“Yes, sir.”
“Log cabin? Tin roof?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. I know it. That’s Zoe Dinsmore’s place. I
figured it must be. If we have more than one lady living
all by herself out in the middle of those woods, it’s news
to me. Okay, son. I’ll go see what’s what with her.”
And he hung up the phone.
I looked up to see my mother leaning in the kitchen
doorway, watching me with sleepy eyes.
“Everything okay?” she asked. But not like she really
wanted to get too deeply into things.
“Yeah. Fine. I was just on my way to school.”
“In sweats?” she asked, looking down at the lower
parts of me.
“Oh. No. I was going to go change first.”
I ran upstairs and did that.
* * *
When I got out onto the track for my 11:00 a.m. tryout,
there were two other guys there. Juniors, I think. So,
older. I didn’t really know them. I mean, I’d seen them.
But why would juniors want to be anywhere near a mere
freshman like me?
We took our places with one of them on either side of
me, which felt vaguely intimidating. There were starting
blocks in place, and I’d never used them before. They
looked simple enough, but a guy isn’t born knowing how
to brace his body to push off against a thing like that.
Looking back, I know I should have asked. But I was
too embarrassed.
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One of the guys, the one on my left, was staring
straight ahead down the track, perfectly focused. All ser-
ious intensity. The other guy was watching me struggle
with the blocks and my starting position, snickering.
The coach made short work of that. He stepped up
from behind us and whacked Snicker Boy on the back of
the head with the flat of his open hand.
“Ow!” the guy said, and rubbed the spot where he’d
been struck.
“Stop acting like you’re better than everybody else,
and show him how to use the blocks.”
So I took a quick lesson while the coach loomed over
us to be sure there would be no more trouble. I could
actually see the great shadow of him falling over us the
whole time. My mind kept straying back to the lady in
the cabin, as it had all morning, but I had to push the
image away just long enough to do my run and do it right.
We lined up, ready to go, but then the coach came
around and adjusted my position some.
He stepped back and raised his starter’s pistol. Fired it.
The guys on either side of me launched down the track.
I stumbled badly.
I was a good twenty feet behind them, but I knew I could
find more inside myself. It was just a matter of wanting it, I think, for me. I had to want it so badly that I just did it, whether I was really able to do it or not. Sounds weird, but that’s how it felt. And I wanted it that day. Enough. Not
because I liked the way I felt running on a track. Not because I wanted a place on the team. Because the guys who were
beating me would still be snickering when they beat me, if
they beat me, but just on the inside where Coach couldn’t
see or hear it. Which meant nobody could stop them.
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
As I came around the bend I pulled close enough to
reach my hand out to where I needed to be. I mean, I
could’ve. I’m not saying I did.
I barely made up the distance coming down the final
stretch, running almost completely on heart.
I could see the tape coming up, and my chest was not
the closest to it, so I put on an extra surge. I passed Focus Guy, who had lost a step, pulled an inch or two ahead of
Snicker Boy, and hit the tape.
Then I slowed and stopped, and leaned on my knees,
panting.
“Okay, Painter,” Coach Haskell said. He had crossed
the infield and was standing beside us at the finish line,
staring at his stopwatch. “You’re on the team.”
I straightened up and looked him right in the face. “I
don’t want to be on the team,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself say it out loud. I tended to bow to authority
at that age. But Connor was nowhere around to hurt.
And I think it had not yet dawned on me that my tryout
would be anything but a blessed flop.
“Too bad,” he said. “Because you already are.”
I shook my head and said no more about it. I knew it
wouldn’t do any good. At least I had the whole summer
to figure a way to wriggle out.
“How long you been training?” Coach added.
“Training? I’m not sure I really train. I just go out
and run.”
This time both boys sneered at me. They were standing
behind the coach’s back, breathing hard. They laughed at
me as though I had just said the stupidest thing imagin-
able. But they were smart enough to do it silently.
“How in the Sam Hill do you think a runner trains,”
Coach bellowed, “if it’s not by going out and running?”
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“Oh,” I said. “Okay. About two weeks, then.”
Three mouths dropped open. The two boys shook
their heads and turned away from me, shuffling off to-
ward the locker room. Focus Guy shot me a dirty look
over his shoulder.
Coach and I just stood a moment, staring at each other.
“Did those other guys not make the team?” I asked,
hoping to understand what I had done to offend them.
“Those other guys have been on the team for more
than a year,” he said. “You just beat my two best guys.
On a couple of weeks of training.”
“Oh,” I said.
My dream of wriggling out of the commitment more
or less abandoned me in that moment.
* * *
I ran back to the cabin the minute school let out, my
stomach jangling from my track experience and lack of
sleep, but more from the general awfulness of my morn-
ing. And the not knowing. The not knowing how awful
things might have turned out to be while I was gone.
The dogs were lying on the porch, listless. They tapped
their tails on the boards when they saw me but didn’t
bother getting up.
The door was ajar. I could see about a three-inch gap,
through which I could look in at the unmade bed on the
other side of the single room.
I stepped up and knocked, just to be sure there was
nobody there.
Nothing.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
I looked at the dogs and they looked back. Their eyes
told me that my morning had been a damned picnic
compared to theirs.
I wondered if they had eaten.
I
walked around the property for a few minutes.
Taking stock. There was an old-fashioned well that worked
on a hand pump. A tiny building that I realized with a
shudder must be an outhouse. A shed that I was hoping
might contain dog food, but which—when I cautiously
opened the door—only contained tools and such. There
was an aluminum water bucket against the side of the
doghouse, its handle secured on a hook so the dogs
couldn’t upend it. It was less than half full. They each
had a plastic food dish in front, but both bowls were
dead empty.
I carried the bucket over to the well and hung the
handle on the pump nozzle, and cranked until it filled
up with water. It wasn’t easy. I was out of breath by the
time I was done. I figured that middle-aged lady must
have arms like a wrestler and the stamina of a mule.
I secured the bucket back into place and decided the
dog food must be inside the cabin.
I rapped on the door again, just to be safe, then pushed
the door partway open and peered in. It wasn’t much for
a person to call home. A woodstove right in the middle
for heat. An ancient cookstove, a porcelain sink standing
free. Nothing much in the way of counters. A little half
refrigerator like the kind people put in their travel trailers or fallout shelters.
There was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard that looked like
a pantry, so I walked to it and opened the door. I found
canned soup, and rice, and spaghetti, and tins of pork and
beans. And a fifty-pound sack of dog kibble.
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The dog food had a saucepan inside to be used as a
scoop, so I figured that was more or less what each dog
was supposed to eat. I filled the pan. Carried it out and
poured it into a bowl. Repeated.
The dogs paid no attention to the food, and very little
attention to me. They were caught up in full-on mourn-
ing. It was written all over their faces.
As I left, I tried to shut the door behind me. But its
lock had been broken, and part of the door frame molding
that held it had been torn away. It gave me a little shiver, because I realized the sheriff’s guys had literally broken
down the door to get the lady out of here.
I found a dish towel hanging over the oven handle
of the cookstove. I folded it up and used it to wedge the
door shut.
I looked at the dogs and their full bowls of food and
realized I’d have to come back before sundown to see if
they’d eaten. If not, I’d have to take up the food over-
night. Otherwise it would attract raccoons and heaven
only knows what other variety of wildlife, and the last
thing I wanted was the dogs fighting it out with raccoons.
They could be vicious little beggars.
The dogs looked back at me with eyes that said, “Can
you believe how bad this is? Have you ever seen a day
this awful in your life?”
“I’ll come back,” I said. “You won’t go hungry.”
They turned their eyes away and set their chins down
on their paws, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they
were disappointed in me. Because they couldn’t seem to
make me grasp that food was not the problem.
I walked home. I did not run.
* * *
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
When I got home, my mom was not there. She’d left a
note on the table that said, “Gone grocery shopping. Eat
cookies.”
Under the note was a small dessert plate with six
chocolate chip cookies covered in plastic wrap. I shoved
one into my mouth whole and dialed the sheriff’s office
again while I chewed and swallowed.
“Taylor County Sheriff,” the same high voice said.
“Hi. It’s Lucas Painter. Can I please talk to Deputy
Warren again?”
“Hold please,” she chirped in a singsong voice.
Then Warren was on the line. Just like that. With
hardly any pause.
“What can I do for ya, son?”
“I just wondered how she was. Is she okay?”
“Not so okay,” he said. “No.”
“What happened to her?”
“Overdose. Prescription meds.”
“You mean, like … accidentally?”
“Son, I have no idea,” he said, in a voice sharp enough
to close off that area of questioning. “But I will tell you this. You did a damn good thing to call it in. She’d gone
over into a coma, and if you hadn’t found her, I can’t say
I’d like her chances much. You probably saved her life.
Or … well, what I mean is, if she survives, it’s because
of you. So tell me something. How exactly did you hap-
pen to be out there in the middle of nowhere to notice?”
“Oh,” I said. “I was going there to see those dogs. I
really like those dogs.”
“Folks won’t get you a dog of your own?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, if you like ’em so much, you might want to
go by and see they got food and water.”
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“I already did.”
A long silence on the line. Then I asked the obvious
question. Even though I already knew he didn’t have my
answer.
“Is she gonna be okay?”
“Son, I may be many things, but one thing I’m not is
a doctor. You’ll have to call over to the County General
Hospital for information like that.”
“I forgot her name already.”
“Zoe Dinsmore is who she is.”
It was a strange sentence, and he said it in a strange
way. As though being Zoe Dinsmore were truly note-
worthy in some way, and the way did not sound good.
There was subtext. But I could not imagine how to dive
into it. There seemed to be no entry point.
I thanked him and hung up the phone. Then I got
the number for County General, and called, and got
exactly nowhere. They wouldn’t tell me a thing about
her condition because I wasn’t family to Zoe Dinsmore.
I wondered if anybody was.
* * *
I had to run back out there at sunset, lock up the uneaten
dog food in the shed, then go back to my life not knowing.
I had to go to bed that night not knowing.
I thought it would be a wonderful thing to have
saved somebody’s life. Something I could feel good about.
Something even most grown-ups couldn’t say.
But I didn’t know if I had saved a life or not. For that,
the person you tried to save has to survive.
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CHAPTER THREE
Any Family
I was out at the cabin again at dawn, putting down kibble
that I knew the dogs wouldn’t eat.
They were lying on the porch, heads down but eyes
open, as if they had no choice but to feel every terrible
thing. I guess they didn’t have a choice. They were dogs.
I was a human boy with a variety of methods to avoid
the emotions I didn’t care to feel. Yet those options seemed to fail me in that moment.
I found myself lying on the porch beside
them, sharing
their sense of despair. I wondered what would happen to
them if the lady never came back.
I would have taken them home with me in a heart-
beat if my parents would’ve allowed it, but I knew they
never would. Maybe they could keep living out here in
their doghouse, and I could come out and feed them and
care for them and run with them. But I couldn’t shake
the sense that I would come out one day and find that
someone had swept them away. Animal control, or some
member of the lady’s family. Which made me wonder
again if the lady had any family.
I picked up my head and looked the female dog in the
eye. She tilted her head slightly without lifting her chin
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off the porch boards, her signal that she didn’t understand
what I wanted.
I pushed to my feet against the boards and took off
running. Just four or five long strides. Then I stopped and
looked back over my shoulder at her. She allowed me to
catch her eye, then carefully averted her gaze.
I walked back and sat on the edge of the porch and
stroked her silky ears.
“Worth a try, I guess,” I said.
I patted the boy dog on the head and he sighed.
I wanted to tell them something encouraging. That
she’d come home. That they’d be okay. But I couldn’t
bring myself to lie to them. So I had nothing.
* * *
My mom was in the kitchen when I got home. Doing
up a few dishes. Probably the ones from the breakfast
she undoubtedly would have made for my father before
sending him off to work. I was surprised that any dishes
had survived that much time around my parents. Or,
anyway, that was the dark joke I told myself in my head.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked me, sounding only
half-interested.
She was wearing a faded flower-print apron. Her
hair had been pinned up but was now trailing down in
a number of places.
“I like to go out and run in the morning.”
“Since when?”
“Couple weeks now.”
“Why haven’t I noticed?”
Good question, I thought. Why haven’t you?
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
“Probably because I went right off to school afterward.”
“Oh. Right. Have you had breakfast?”
“I could eat,” I said, to avoid telling her that I had
scarfed down a ton of cereal but I still wanted more food.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll make you some eggs.”
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