“Oops,” Pete said. “Just one problem. Now we have to figure out how to close the door.”
Pete jumped down into the run, startling the wolf-dog. They both stood frozen a moment, Prince with his head down in a surprisingly defensive position.
It occurred to Dr. Lucy that this might be the first time boy and wolf-dog had stood face to face, both fully able to move closer together, or to evade. Pete seemed to be realizing it, too.
“It’s okay, boy. It’s only me. Pete. You know, the guy who saved you. I’m just going to close the door so you can’t get out. Not like we’re trying to keep you captive or anything, but just until you can run fast like before. We don’t want the coyotes to get you.”
Pete reached back and closed the gate of the kennel run as far as it would go before hanging up on the cage. But it left far too small a space to allow a wolf-dog to escape. Dr. Lucy and Justin lifted the cage and pulled it away and Pete closed and latched the gate with himself still inside.
“Be careful coming out,” Dr. Lucy said. “Don’t let him squeeze through with you.”
“I think I’m going to stay and keep him company for a while,” Pete said.
“Okay. Watch yourself, though. He’s feeling a little defensive.”
“I’ll just sit in the corner and let him come to me. If he even wants to.”
Before she could answer, she heard the phone ring inside the house.
“Okay, out of there for now,” she said to Pete.
“Why?”
“Because I have to go get the phone. Sit with him just outside the fence.”
His shoulders sagged more dramatically than necessary, but he did as he was told. And still the phone was ringing.
She muttered to herself as she walked inside to answer it. She had gone months at a time, maybe even a year at a stretch, without her phone ringing. And here Pete had called last night. And now . . . who this was and what they wanted from her she could not imagine.
As she let herself back into the house, irritated by the continued ringing, she noticed that Justin was following closely at her heels.
She stormed into the kitchen and grabbed up the phone.
“Yes?” she said, barely attempting to hide her inconvenience.
“It’s me. Calvin.”
She hadn’t needed to be told. She had recognized Calvin’s voice immediately. And she knew, from his tone, from the very situation of his calling, that he had nothing casual or happy to say.
“Calvin, what’s wrong?”
“I have to talk fast,” he said, “because I have no idea how long they’ll let me use the phone. I have to ask you a huge favor. I wish I didn’t have to ask, but I need you to do it. I have no other plan. Nothing to fall back on. It’s so important.”
“Calvin, what is it? What’s happened?”
“I need you to take care of Justin. I need to ask you to keep him for a time.”
“Well, of course. We already agreed to that.”
“No,” he said, and the gravity of the message began to settle. “A longer time.”
“Oh. How long?”
“I don’t know yet. I have an arraignment this morning. I suppose a judge will settle that. Thirty days, maybe. I’d hate to think they could saddle me with more than that.”
“You’ve been arrested?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“On what charge?”
“Aggravated assault.”
Dr. Lucy became suddenly aware of Justin’s stare. He was standing not two feet from her left hip, gazing up into her face. He knew this was his father on the phone. He knew all was not well.
“Did you . . . ?”
She never finished the sentence. She had intended to say, “Did you assault anyone?” But she chose not to ask that in front of his son.
“No,” Calvin said. “I absolutely did not. I was assaulted by two men at the plant. All I did was try to defend myself. But they told a different story and, well, here I am.”
“Are you all right? Were you hurt?”
“A little bruised up, but I’ll be fine.”
“I could—” she began.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me speak. This is very important. What you can do for me is to hold on to Justin and keep him safe. I know you’ll want to help in other ways. I know you’ll want to come down here. Bring me things I need, or get me a lawyer. And it’s really important that you know this now.” His voice dropped to a near whisper. “If you make it clear that there’s a connection between us, any clearer than it already is, our situation has nowhere to go but down.”
“I understand,” she said.
She did understand. Mentally. But her inability to move forward into any kind of helpful action on his behalf tangled up in her gut, winding back on itself and causing a jam of emotion that felt something like heartburn.
Still, he had said what she could do to help him. Best to stay calm and move in that direction.
“Justin can be here as long as he needs to be. We’ll be fine.”
In a strange, disconnected thought, it occurred to her that having the boy here for thirty days or more would solve the problem of picking him up in the morning. They would stay home together. Stay off the streets. No comings and goings. No one would need to know.
Calvin’s voice knocked her back into the moment.
“Thank you,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me. If I didn’t know he was safe with you . . . well, I can’t imagine it. I don’t even want to try. May I speak to him?”
“Of course. He’s right here.”
She handed the phone to the wide-eyed boy. He regarded it with some caution, as if it were a snake. Or a half-wild wolf-dog. But after a brief hesitation he did reach out and take the receiver from her.
She could hear nothing of Calvin’s end of the conversation. In fact, she could hear nothing. Justin didn’t speak for the longest time. Just listened, and nodded. And began to cry quietly.
“Sorry, Dad,” he said at last. “I nodded, but I know you can’t hear that. I just wasn’t thinking. Yeah, I know she will. Do you need to talk to the doctor again?”
She reached out for the phone, but Justin did not hand it to her.
“Love you, too, Dad,” he said quickly. “’Bye.”
He looked up into her face with wide, wet eyes and handed her back the receiver.
“Sorry, Dr. Lucy,” he said. “He couldn’t talk anymore. That was all the time they let him have.”
She hung up the phone and they stood a moment, not quite looking at each other, neither moving. Dr. Lucy could feel the weight of their emotions, and she suspected their emotions were a good match. But it was all so sudden and unprocessed inside her that it was hard even to pin down what she was feeling. She only knew it wasn’t good.
“Well,” she said, putting one hand on Justin’s shoulder, “I guess it’s just you and me for a while.”
“And Pete,” Justin added quickly.
“Right,” she said. “And Pete.”
Then, unsure of what else she could do, she walked around the kitchen for a few minutes, putting away breakfast dishes and thinking about all the days she would not see Calvin, not even a faraway image of him standing under a streetlight waving. It was so unexpected, both his sudden absence and the fact that his sudden absence should matter so much to her and feel so entirely impossible to digest.
She wondered if he had minimized the report of his injuries so as not to upset her.
She busied herself finding spots in the cupboard for the spoon rest and the salt and pepper shakers—items she generally allowed to live out on the counters. It felt good to put herself to some use. In fact, she found it hard to stop.
Until she looked over at Justin.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, his torso wrapped in his own arms. He wasn’t crying anymore. He just looked completely disconnected from himself and his surroundings and more than a little bit lost.
She rushed to him,
fell to her knees, and wrapped him in an embrace, which he returned. She could feel the clean gauze of the fresh dressing she had applied to his head wound that morning. It brushed against her cheek.
“I wish I could explain the world to you,” she said. “I wish I could tell you why things like this happen when we all know they’re not supposed to. But the truth of the matter is, frankly . . . I don’t understand it myself.”
A light silence. Yes, it had a lightness to it, which seemed unexpected.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I mostly just needed the hug.”
So they stayed with the hug for a while.
Chapter Eighteen: Pete
Pete ran into the house, already shouting out his question.
“Dr. Lucy, do you have a bed for Prince? Because he doesn’t want to lie down on that . . .”
Before he could even finish the second sentence he picked up the change in mood. Something must have happened while he was sitting near Prince’s kennel run. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes, but everything felt different.
Both the doctor and Justin looked as though they had been crying. And nobody so much as glanced up at Pete or even tried to answer his question. The three of them just stood in the middle of this dark cloud that hung around the inside of the house, feeling the weight of it. Or at least Pete was feeling the weight.
“What happened?” Pete asked when he couldn’t bear the silence.
Dr. Lucy pulled her back up poker-straight and hurried out of the room, as if she couldn’t bring herself to hear what would come next.
“My dad got arrested,” Justin said without meeting Pete’s eyes.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“For what?”
“For nothing. It was a bad deal.”
Silence. A lot of it. A big, long, painful stretch.
“When’s he coming back?” Pete asked.
“We don’t know yet.”
“Did the doctor say you could stay here?”
“Yeah.”
A big feeling welled up inside Pete. Big and annoying. He would almost have been tempted to call it jealousy, but he didn’t really begrudge Justin staying here. He just desperately wanted the same thing for himself.
Envy might have been a better word.
Dr. Lucy stuck her head back through the doorway.
“There’s a whole stack of dog beds in boxes in the garage,” she said. “Some are older than others, so try to find one that’s in better shape. They’re all clean.”
Pete was standing in the garage—just standing and looking and noting the differences between the doctor’s garage and his own—when Justin stuck his head in.
“Oh, hi,” Pete said.
“Can’t find the dog beds?”
“I sort of haven’t started trying yet. I was just looking at all this and thinking it looked weird to me. And between that and the thing with your dad, I guess it just knocked the dog beds right out of my head.”
Justin walked into the middle of the garage and stood next to Pete. Together they looked around. Looked at the neatly stacked cardboard cartons, each sealed with tape and labeled with a marking pen so you could tell at a glance what they contained. And the way she had them stacked on wooden pallets so nothing would get ruined if the garage flooded a few inches in a heavy rain.
“I’m not sure what’s weird about it,” Justin said. “It’s really neat.”
“Right. That’s exactly what I mean. When my dad throws stuff out in the garage he just . . . throws it out there. If it gets dusty or wet or moldy it just does. I guess the way he does it is weird and the way the doctor does it is right, but I’ve always only seen it his way, so this takes some getting used to.”
“There are the dog beds,” Justin said. “Right in that corner.”
He pointed to a stack of cartons, each labeled with the words “dog beds.” Actually, Pete had seen the stack already. But somehow he had not registered the words. His mind had been somewhere else entirely.
“I wish I could trade places with you,” he said to Justin.
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“I guess I mean I wish they’d arrest my dad and let yours go. I’d like it if my dad was away for a long time and I got to stay at the doctor’s and not go home. I know you don’t like it. That’s because you have a good dad. That’s why I wish we could trade.”
Justin did not reply. Neither said anything for an awkward length of time. So Pete moved off in the direction of the dog bed cartons and began to pull boxes down off the stack.
“These are all too small,” he said to no one in particular as he plowed through the first box.
Pete realized he had no tape to reseal the boxes. And obviously the doctor liked her boxes stored just so.
“Justin, will you go inside and ask Dr. Lucy for some tape so I can tape these back up again?”
“Sure,” Justin said, and ducked out of the garage.
Pete pulled down a second carton and immediately hit pay dirt. It was a padded bed a good five or six inches thick, and so big it had to be folded in half just to fit into the carton. In fact, it was apparently the only bed that would fit in the box, because it was in there alone. It had a zip-off cover in a dark hunter green, and the fabric felt soft like flannel.
“Oh, you’re going to love this,” he said out loud. Even though the wolf-dog was, of course, much too far away to hear.
Pete sat in the kennel run, the hard concrete of its floor hurting the scabs on his backside. He patted the bed he had placed by his right hip. Still Prince just stood, awkwardly, balanced on three legs and with his head down.
Pete sighed deeply.
He moved the bed farther away, as far as his arm would reach, and the wolf-dog hobbled over and sniffed it. He stepped onto it, circled twice, and carefully settled with his muzzle facing Pete. He kept his eyes open, watching. Aware.
“That’s too bad,” Pete said. “I wish you didn’t feel that way. I thought we were better friends by now.” Pete noted that tears were a possibility, and worked hard not to let them have their way. “I’m not sure why you liked me better when you were in the cage.”
Justin’s voice startled him.
“I taped up that first box and put it back on the stack.”
“Thanks,” Pete said.
Pete had his back to the yard, leaned up against the chain link. He didn’t look around, but a moment later he felt Justin settle with his back to the fence on the other side. It felt almost as though he could feel the pressure of Justin’s back against his own, but Pete figured it was probably just plain fence reacting to his friend’s weight.
For a time no one spoke.
Then Justin said, “You going to sit with him all day?”
“No. I wish I could. But I have to go home.”
He watched the wolf-dog’s face as he spoke. Looked into his golden eyes. Pete felt his love for Prince like an empty space in his chest. An achy sensation, now that he was less sure his feelings were returned.
“Why? It’s not very late.”
“But yesterday my dad tried to get me to tell him where I’ve been going. And I wouldn’t say. And for some reason he let it go by. But if I keep being gone all day, day after day, it’ll come up again. I just know it will. I don’t dare push my luck with him.”
Another long silence. Pete realized he could feel Justin’s breathing in a slight movement of the fence against his back. It felt comforting to him. Like the opposite of being in his life all alone.
Pete surprised himself by speaking. He hadn’t felt any words coming.
“Remember when you said my dad was really tough? And I said I didn’t think he was? That I thought he was just like everybody else’s dad?”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “I remember.”
“Now I think you were right. I think he’s really tough. I guess before that, he was the only dad I knew. Well, no. Not really. I know other dads but I did
n’t know how they were to live with. I guess I know Jack’s dad best, and he’s not so different from mine, except he’s worse. In some ways, anyway. Because he changes into somebody else entirely when he gets drunk, and there’s really no guessing what he’s going to do. So I guess I thought that’s just how all dads were. But now that I know your dad, I think I got a bum deal. And I think you’re really lucky.”
A long silence. Pete wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. God knows it wouldn’t have been the first time.
“Not right now I’m not very lucky.”
“No, right,” Pete said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to act like I forgot about that or like it’s not a big deal. But he’ll be back. So in general you’re lucky.”
“Yeah, I guess. I do think I have a good dad. But other than that I wouldn’t say I feel lucky most days.”
“I’m sorry,” Pete said, gently easing to his feet and dusting off the seat of his shorts. “I guess I can’t say anything right today. I’ll just go tell the doctor goodbye.”
“Don’t leave on my account.”
“No. I’m not. I’m just having a bad day. I guess we all are. That thing with your dad, and Prince hardly seems to want to trust me, and I’m worried about what’ll happen when I get home. I’m always worried about what’ll happen when I get home.”
“I guess I do feel a little lucky,” Justin said. “I mean, compared to that.”
Pete was less than a mile from home when Boomer Leggett caught up with him. He was just thinking how close he was to being done with the long walk, and how happy he’d be to get inside and sit down, and how maybe he should have taken the doctor up on her offer to drive him. But it was broad daylight, and he didn’t want anybody knowing where he’d been going. He didn’t want to get her into trouble.
Then Pete felt Boomer like a tingling at his back—actually felt him before the tow truck pulled level with Pete and stopped. And then when it did, and Pete saw it at the corner of his eye, he thought, Oh, so that’s what that weird feeling was. He had never had an experience like that one, never known something before it was right and proper to know it, but he couldn’t take much time to explore the strangeness of that moment because it all happened too fast.
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