The Right Side

by Spencer Quinn

  “How come?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “Thought I heard one ringing in your car just a few minutes ago.”

  LeAnne glanced through the Shady Grove office window at the Honda parked outside. The dog sat in the front passenger seat, eyes straight ahead. For a moment, LeAnne couldn’t remember what she’d done with the prepaid cell phone, but then she recovered a mental image of it arcing down into a roadside ditch. “Not possible.”

  “Okeydoke,” Dot said. “We’ll put my number, but you’re gonna have to make all the arrangements.”

  “I’ll make the arrangements,” LeAnne said.

  She took the flyers, got into the car, and sat there for a minute or so, feeling a bit dizzy. The dog took no notice of her, continued gazing straight ahead in a very alert way.

  “I threw the stone at you, you stupid fuck. It had nothing to do with fetch.”

  Initial Evaluation for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Post-Military Psychosocial Adjustment:

  5. Degree and quality of social relationships:

  LeAnne pulled out of the Shady Grove lot. She drove around Bellville, stapling fliers to telephone poles, a bulletin board outside a supermarket, where the only space was beside a Missing Child poster, and another one outside the police station where the Missing Child poster thing happened again. The same missing child? LeAnne hadn’t really noticed the photo on the first one. The Missing Child poster outside the police station showed a smiling girl, eight or nine, with pigtails and a combination of baby teeth, adult teeth, and no teeth.

  LeAnne got back in the car. The dog didn’t look at her but did open her mouth wide. A yawn? Did dogs yawn? Or was it something else, some signal a dog person would know how to read?

  “Hungry, maybe?”

  The dog closed her mouth, went on gazing straight ahead. LeAnne drove back to the supermarket, bought various kinds of dog food, a dog bowl, a dog collar, a dog leash, and some food for herself. Back in cabin six they ate, LeAnne a sandwich of cold cuts and then another, when she realized how hungry she was, and the dog two bowls of kibble, a bowl of some sort of moist canned stuff, and a bone-shaped biscuit.

  “That’s got to be enough, right?”

  The dog licked the bowl a few times, then went into the bathroom and slurped the toilet dry.

  “Remind me to get you a water bowl,” LeAnne said. She lay down on the bed. “Jesus Christ, listen to me. I’ve lost my mind.” She fell asleep in seconds, woke up with a start, remembering how she’d left the bedding, all puke-stained, saw that it had been changed—meaning Dot had changed it—and went back to sleep.

  A radio played German music. LeAnne knew it was German because she kept hearing the word liebe. “Liebe” was German for love. A stream of unintelligible lyrics flowed by and then would come a liebe, and back to incomprehension. While she waited for the next liebe there was nothing to do but gaze at the wastebasket in the corner, overflowing with bloody bandages, or possibly towels, with more blood that had leaked out of the bottom of the wastebasket and pooled on the black-and-white squared floor. She would have preferred some other view, but didn’t seem able to move her head, like maybe it liked that view and had decided to overrule her.

  Meanwhile, a man was asking annoying questions.

  “How’s the pain?”

  “Huh?”

  He spoke more clearly. “How is the pain?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That we can’t do, I’m afraid. Remember the pain scale we talked about?”

  “No.”

  “With zero as no pain at all, a day at the beach, and ten as the worst, unbearable.”

  “Like crucifixion.”

  “Well, yes. Um, is that where you are?”

  “No.”

  “So where are you, one to ten?”

  “Minus.”

  “Minus?”

  “What I said.”

  “Meaning less than no pain?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  A woman interrupted. “Doctor? There’s a visitor outside. Can I show her in?”

  “What visitor?”

  “Her mother.”

  “Did you hear that, LeAnne? Your mother’s here to see you. How about we get you comfortable and—”

  “Are you crazy? Don’t let her fucking see me like this! Are you crazy? Are you crazy?”

  LeAnne rolled over, her head getting sheared in half—and there was the dog, lying on the bed beside her. The coal-black eyes were open, seemed to be watching her intently. LeAnne calmed down a little. She just lay there. So did the dog.

  “I feel so goddamn . . .” LeAnne couldn’t find the words.

  The dog went on staring at her.

  “Go get me a glass of water and some ibuprofen.” No reaction from the dog, of course. “If you could do shit like that I might change my mind.” LeAnne turned onto her back, closed her eye. The fake eye closed along with it. She wasn’t blind. You couldn’t even call her half blind, not with one eye working perfectly. Meaning not that bad, get a fucking grip. That bad was Jamie, for example, dead.

  “Better be careful,” she said. “I’ll get you killed, too.”

  Somewhere outside a phone rang and rang.

  Something felt good. It was moist and warm and nubby, kind of like a hot towelette they gave you sometimes on a long flight or at a Chinese restaurant. Except it wasn’t hot. She awoke with a start. The dog was licking the side of her face; the bad side.

  LeAnne sat up, scrambled off the bed. “What the fuck?”

  The dog opened her mouth wide, maybe doing the yawn thing again, this time a satisfied kind of yawn. Then she wriggled around a bit, like she was getting more comfortable.

  “Try that again and so help me . . .” Then came an urge that had to do with axes. “Oh, God.” Things were going on in her head that weren’t her. That was the scariest part of all this. LeAnne went into the bathroom, intending to wash off where the dog had licked, but forgot about that when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. What had become of her body? So bony, so skinny, like all her strength was gone. She hadn’t contained the damage and how could you even start regrouping until the damage was contained? Wakil Razaq Salam was still destroying her. He was dead but somehow winning, and she was losing.

  Was she a loser? Had she been a loser her whole goddamn life and not known it? Losing was unacceptable, the only exception being those times when you’d put up your very best fight. LeAnne got dressed—jeans, T-shirt, Marci’s red sneaks. “We’re going for a run,” she said. The dog jumped off the bed and trotted to the door. “You know ‘run,’ huh?” The dog rose up, got a paw on the doorknob. “Don’t even think about it. And you’re wearing the leash.”

  The dog remained in position, on her hind legs, front paw on the doorknob. LeAnne went into the kitchen, got the collar and leash off the counter, returned to the front door.

  “No bullshit about this.”

  The dog slid down from the door, trotted over, and sat in front of LeAnne.

  “Collar first,” she said, ripping off the price tag, draping the collar over the dog’s neck—so thick and strong—and buckling it underneath. She was testing the snugness when the dog suddenly leaned in and licked LeAnne’s face again; again on the bad side, meaning she didn’t see it coming.

  “Fucking hell!” LeAnne backhanded the dog across the side of her head, good and hard. “What did I tell you?”

  She felt an inner surge of adrenaline, her body readying for some sort of attack. Nothing like that happened. The dog continued to sit before LeAnne, the coal-black eyes on her but expressionless, at least as far as LeAnne could tell.

  “Okay,” LeAnne said, her voice thickening, as from a clogged throat, “we’re good then.” She clipped the leash to the collar and opened the door. The dog squeezed through first. By then LeAnne was already wishing that the dog had attacked her; well, maybe not attacked, but at least barked or growled.

  A dirt trac
k began at the end of the white crushed-stone path and continued past the end of the pond and into some woods. The dog wouldn’t walk beside LeAnne, stayed out in front as far as she could, straining on the leash. LeAnne knew there was a command for getting dogs to walk at your side, but she couldn’t think of it and didn’t really care. Why was it important? Just don’t lick my fucking face.

  The track rose up a gentle slope and from the top continued straight and level for as far as LeAnne could see, orchards of blossoming trees on both sides. A light rain started to fall, felt good on her skin. LeAnne dropped the leash. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  She started running. LeAnne was a good runner. Pole vaulters had to be fast, as she’d told those Afghan girls. Or maybe she hadn’t told them, merely had the thought. There’d been six of them. She could see every face, but not a single name would come to her. LeAnne tried to get past her frustration by picking up the pace and found she could not pick up the pace. She was huffing and puffing from practically the very first step, and also developed a stitch in her side, which she couldn’t even identify at first, never having had one. Meanwhile, no dog. LeAnne glanced back. The dog sat where LeAnne had left her.

  “Come on, for Christ sake—what’s wrong with you?”

  The dog turned in the other direction and ran off, trailing the leash.

  “Fine! Suit yourself!”

  LeAnne put her head down and kept going. She was a goddamn good runner, in fact, had once run the Soldier Half Marathon at Fort Benning in 1:42. So what was happening now? The stitch got worse; she couldn’t catch her breath, had nothing in her legs; legs that all at once gave up completely and stopped even trying. Stopped even trying? That was shameful. LeAnne dropped down on the ground and started in on push-ups, just to show her goddamn legs what her arms could do. Give me twenty-five! Give me thirty! That one counts negative! More!

  LeAnne did three push-ups, the last one unacceptable by any standard.

  She stayed where she was, lying facedown on the dirt track. The rain was falling harder. Her T-shirt clung to her bony back. She was losing, no doubt about that. She was still losing the war in Afghanistan. Maybe some politician would happen along and save her.

  Then came the warm, moist, nubbly feeling on her face. The dog was back on the scene, appearing silently from wherever she’d gone, and once again licking the bad side. This time LeAnne didn’t stop her.

  She got to her feet. Now the dog was just standing there, rain puddling around them. The leash, still connected to the dog’s collar, lay on the ground. The dog snapped it up between her teeth and came closer, swinging her head back and forth, brandishing the leash, giving orders. There was no other interpretation possible.

  “I had a drill sergeant a lot like you,” LeAnne said. She took the leash, and they continued on the long straightaway. “Except not nearly so good looking.”

  Very soon, the dog had had enough of walking side by side and bounded ahead, straining at the leash. LeAnne tried running again. The dog helped, partly by pulling her along, but after what must have been a few hundred yards—meaning much farther than her first attempt—LeAnne began to suspect there was more than that to this little resurgence. Something the dog had deep inside was making its way down the leash and sharing itself with her. How was that possible? Did life run on some sort of magic rules that she’d missed the whole time? All LeAnne knew was that strength from the dog had passed into her own legs, and although she didn’t come close to running the way she used to run—and this performance wasn’t even respectable—she was doing better. LeAnne almost reached the end of the straightaway before she had to stop. The dog didn’t get the message and, tearing the leash right from her hand, kept going.

  LeAnne bent over, hands on her knees, getting her breath back. The rain fell harder, matting down her hair, running in her eyes. Her eyes: that was funny, to think of them now as a pair. But the rain was running into her eyes, making them feel good, both of them. She straightened up, looked around for the dog, spotted her trotting through a cemetery abutting an orchard beside the track.

  “Hey! Come here.”

  The dog, maybe one hundred yards away, stopped running immediately, turned in LeAnne’s direction.

  “Come.”

  The dog didn’t move, just stood there watching her.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  LeAnne left the track and entered the cemetery, an unfenced cemetery with no clear boundaries. The dog trotted away, in an unconcerned sort of disobedience. LeAnne made her way through gravestones, old and eroded at first and then newer, a hodgepodge of shapes and sizes, some flat, some vertical, most unattended although here and there lay dried-up bouquets. A few rows ahead she spotted a small clean white stone with fresh flowers at its base. LeAnne walked over to it. The flowers were roses, pink and white, wrapped in plastic. The bouquet leaned against a round bronze marker sticking out of the ground on one side of the grave stone, with a US star in the center and around it the stamped words Iraq War Veteran. On the other side of the stone stood a small American flag, maybe two feet high, drooping in the rain.

  The name on the stone itself was Cpl. Marci Cummings. Then came Marci’s dates, an engraved rose, and this: Daughter, Mother, Patriot. She gave all.

  The dog came over from wherever she’d been, sniffed around, and began digging into the wet grass a foot or two from Marci’s stone.

  “Don’t do that,” LeAnne said, not loudly.

  The dog stopped at once, one paw still in the air.

  “I won’t hit you again,” LeAnne said. “That’s a promise.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Back in cabin six at Shady Grove, LeAnne found a steel mixing bowl in a kitchen cupboard, repurposed it as a water bowl, and set it beside the dog. The dog ignored it so completely LeAnne wasn’t even sure she’d noticed the bowl or smelled the water, which had to be one of her abilities, didn’t it?

  “Water. Nice and fresh. Drink.”

  The dog turned and moved out of the kitchen. LeAnne heard the sound of her claws tack-tack-tacking into the bedroom and beyond. Then came frantic slurps from the toilet, on and on, the franticness increasing.

  LeAnne left the cabin, checking that the door was closed firmly behind her, and walked up to the office. Dot was folding towels by a laundry basket.

  “Thanks for . . . for changing the bedding.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dot said in a matter-of-fact voice, no detectable overtones of disapproval or curiosity. “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Yeah,” LeAnne said. And then for some reason couldn’t remember what it was. That led to a strange silence. Dot kept folding towels. LeAnne picked up a whiff of fabric softener. “I’d like to buy some flowers.”

  “Flowers you can pick yourself in these parts—lots of buttercups out right now, other side of the pond.”

  “I was thinking of roses,” LeAnne said, now fully back on track.

  “Roses,” said Dot, in a tone that seemed to savor the very idea. “For roses you could try the supermarket.” She folded another towel, laid it in the basket. Her hands looked older than the rest of her, veined and liver-spotted. “Planning to stay for long? No problem if you are—it’s just that I had a customer asking about number six for the weekend.”

  “What day is it?”

  Dot’s eyes shifted toward the bad side of LeAnne’s face for some small fraction of a second. “Thursday.”

  “I guess it depends,” LeAnne said.

  “On what?”

  “On what?” LeAnne’s voice started amping itself up, but this time—maybe for the first time in a long while, she heard it herself, and amped it back down. “The dog. Any calls come in?”

  “Claiming the pooch? Not a one.”

  “Then I’ll be staying, unless you can think of some other solution.”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe you know someone who wants a dog.”

  Dot shook her head.

  LeAnne turned to leave,
paused. “Is this the kind of town where everybody knows everybody?”

  “Not really. We’re bigger than that. So maybe there could be a prospect—I’m just saying among the folks in my circle there’s none.”

  “Do you know a family named Cummings?”

  “Nope. Have you got a lead?”

  “This is something else. What about Marci Cummings? Corporal Marci Cummings?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “She’s from here,” LeAnne said.

  “A friend of yours?”

  “She died.”

  Dot stopped in mid-fold. “Was this recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait a minute.” Dot went to her desk, fished around through the wastebasket, came up with a crumpled newspaper, the local giveaway kind that was mostly about coupons. She returned to LeAnne, flipping through the pages. “Here we go, the Bellville Bell, last week’s edition.”

  LeAnne took the paper, and at the bottom of an inner page saw a blurry photo of Marci in uniform, complete with black beret, looking tough and serious. Beneath it was an article she and Dot read together, Dot on her tiptoes, peering over LeAnne’s shoulder.

  Funeral services will be held today at 11 a.m. at McCutcheon’s Funeral Home in the Woods for US Army Corporal Marci Cummings of Bellville. Corporal Cummings, 31, died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, of wounds suffered in Iraq. She was a graduate of Bellville High School, where she was the first female to ever join the wrestling team, winning numerous matches in her varsity career. Corporal Cummings is survived by her mother, Coreen, and daughter, Mia, both of Bellville.

  “The wrestling part rings a bell, now that I think on it,” Dot said. “It made a bit of a stir at the time.”

  “That sounds right,” LeAnne said.

  “I happen to know the pastor at the McCutcheon’s Funeral Home,” said Dot. “Supposing you wanted to look up the mom, for example.”

  Looking up the mom? Was that the purpose of the trip?

  1. Strengthen hip flexors.