by Len Vlahos
The two grew up together, forming one of the special bonds that can only be forged between man—or in this case, little girl—and dog. As soon as she was old enough, Jackie joined Jared and Trebuchet on their daily walks, her father letting her hold the leash, the dog knowing when to moderate the force of his pull.
There was a soft knock on the door.
Jackie muttered a barely audible, “It’s open,” and Megan poked her head in. Jackie looked at her sister, seeing immediately the fear in her eyes, but didn’t say a word.
Megan came all the way into the room, closed the door behind her, and sat down next to Jackie. Where Jackie’s hands were motionless, Megan’s couldn’t stop moving.
For her part, Megan had always felt something between jealousy and relief that Jackie and Trebuchet shared such a special relationship. Jealousy because the dog hadn’t chosen her, and relief because she didn’t think she could handle the responsibility of that kind of devotion.
“Weird,” she would say when she saw the dog sitting outside Jackie’s door in the morning, waiting patiently for her to wake up. Megan understood enough about Jackie and Trebuchet’s relationship to want to shield her sister from the scene in her father’s office. But there was no way around the truth.
“Someone—broke into the house,” Megan stammered, look-ing for the right words. She looked confused; all the color was gone from her face.
“What happened?” Jackie’s voice was flat, defeated. She took a long breath before asking, “Is it Daddy?”
“It’s Trey,” Megan said.
***
After Trebuchet had been taken away, after Sherman Kingsborough had been carted off to jail, after all the other people had finally left Jared’s office, he and Deirdre were alone.
“What the hell just happened?” he asked her, truly confused.
“You don’t remember?” Deirdre asked, alarmed.
“No, D, I remember, but what I’m remembering can’t be real.”
“It’s real, Jare.”
“Sherman Kingsborough, the boy billionaire, broke into our house to kill our dog?”
“No, honey, Sherman Kingsborough, the boy billionaire, broke into our house to kill you. He missed.”
Jared didn’t know what to say.
“The police say he was the guy on eBay who sent you that message, the one wanting to know how fit you were,” she added.
“Huh,” was the best Jared could muster.
“How’s your head?”
“It’s got a brain tumor.”
Deirdre looked at him sideways.
“I’m kidding. Sorry. It feels better now that everyone is gone. The doctor says stress makes it worse.”
Deirdre took Jared’s hand. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you make a joke in weeks.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So what now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The director said they’re going to take the show off the air for a couple of days.”
“Where are the girls?”
“In Jackie’s room.”
“Did they see any of this?”
“Megan did.”
Jared nodded. He stood up but lost his balance and immediately fell over.
“Whoa,” Deirdre said, catching him and helping him onto the futon. “Jare?”
“I’m okay. I think I just need to rest.” He lay back on the futon, letting his head sink into the cushion, his eyes closing.
Deirdre turned to go.
“D?” he said, his eyes still closed.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
***
As a general rule, Hazel Huck kept to herself at school. Her closest friends, from the math club, the chess club, and Advanced Placement European History, could be more accurately described as friendly acquaintances. She went to school. She went to class. But she lived in Azeroth.
“I’m sorry, Hazel, about that man.” Paula Lake was a nice girl with bad acne, bad breath, and no social graces. She more or less vomited the words at Hazel as they passed in the hall between sixth and seventh periods.
Hazel didn’t know what she was talking about, but since Paula was so often the butt of someone else’s joke, Hazel simply nodded politely and smiled.
“I know how hard you tried to raise money to save his life. I play a level twenty mage, and I saw the ‘Save Jared’ T-shirts all over the place. Once I heard it was you, I wanted to talk to you.”
This has something to do with Jared Stone? Hazel thought. “Thanks,” she said. “We did our best, but it probably turned out okay. The television network has a lot of money. I’m sure they’ll take care of him.”
“Don’t you know?” Paula asked.
“Know what?”
“Oh, wow.” Paula snorted. She then recounted the events of the preceding night, talking so fast that Hazel could barely keep up.
It took Hazel a beat to process it all. The news hit her like a slap in the face. Given her love of dogs, the part about Trebuchet was particularly hard to hear. She thanked Paula, closed her locker, and left school. Thirty minutes later, she was logging in to Azeroth.
***
Sister Benedict was up with the sun. She went through her normal morning routine, using the toilet, brushing her teeth, combing her hair, dressing. She had taken a bath the night before and now felt clean, scrubbed, and ready for battle.
Her novices, sensing from the Sister the importance of the day’s events, were assembled in the convent’s central courtyard early, shifting nervously; some of the younger women whisper-ing and giggling. They were mostly under twenty-three years old, and given that they had eschewed the trappings of larger society, they were, as a group, socially younger than their years. They resembled a gaggle of conservatively dressed Catholic high school girls as much as they did pious Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration.
Sister Benedict strode into the morning sun like Patton, her posture so perfectly perpendicular to the ground that she seemed to glide more than walk.
It’s a beautiful day, she thought to herself, and she was right. In typical Portland fashion, the weather did exactly what it wasn’t predicted to do. The forecast had called for a cool rain, but the system had blown through without producing any precipitation, leaving a deep blue sky with cottony clouds and a light wind.
“All right, girls,” she called in her most authoritative voice. “What are we going to do today?”
“Save a life,” they answered in unison, their enthusiasm and sincerity barely evident.
“Come now,” Sister Benedict answered. “What are we going to do today?”
“Save a life,” the novices answered again, this time with more gusto.
“Right. Now line up.”
The dutiful girls fell into a single line organized by height, shortest in front, tallest in back, as if they were the Von Trapp children meeting Maria for the first time. The young nuns stood with ramrod-straight posture, trying to emulate their leader’s bearing. And then they waited.
Sister Benedict looked at her watch, a heavy, ugly, utilitarian thing that made her wrist look more masculine than normal, which is to say, very masculine. The bus she had arranged to transport them to the Stones’ house was running late. This made her seethe.
“Timeliness, girls,” she said, addressing those closest to her, “is next to cleanliness, and we know what that’s next to, don’t we?”
“Godliness,” a few of them answered halfheartedly. Sister Benedict shook her head and walked off. The morning wasn’t unraveling in the glorious way she had imagined.
She went back into the convent to call the bus driver, a devout man who owned his own limo company and often provided the sisters with pro bono transportation.
“Mr. Jenkins,” Sister Benedict practically spat into the phone, “while I understand that your willingness to provide the bus is an act of charity and generosity,
it does not excuse your being more than fifteen minutes late.”
“Oh, Sister,” Mr. Jenkins responded. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Mr. Stone, his entire street is cordoned off.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s all over the news. Someone broke into Mr. Stone’s house and killed his dog. His television show is suspended indefinitely.”
***
On hearing the news of Trebuchet’s murder, Jackie was motionless. Megan told her everything she saw and heard, but it was too much for Jackie to process.
“Are you okay?” Megan’s voice was so timid, it was barely audible. She had expected her big sister to cry or scream, to do something. Instead, Jackie sat there, still as a tree on a windless night. More than anything, this frightened Megan.
“I don’t know” was the only answer Jackie could find.
“I’m scared, Jax.”
Jackie looked up and saw her sister for what she was: a thirteen-year-old girl whose life was coming apart just as quickly as her own. It triggered a protective response in Jackie that harkened back to their preschool days.
“I know, Meg, I am, too.”
“What’s going to happen now? And what’s going to happen to Daddy?” Jackie knew that she and Megan would turn back into their submissive and dominant selves in the morning, but for now she needed to be there for her little sister.
“I’m sorry, Meg,” Jackie answered, taking Megan’s hand and looking her in the eye, “but Daddy is … Daddy is …”
Megan nodded. “I know,” she whispered, “but how soon?”
“I don’t know.” Jackie paused for a long moment. She thought about how much her father had changed. Not just the forgetfulness, but his physical appearance, too. He had lost so much weight, and his skin had an almost gray quality to it. He was starting to look like a ghost. “Soon, I think.”
The sisters stayed there for a long time talking about everything that had happened and was happening in their lives until they both fell asleep in Jackie’s bed.
Jackie had strange dreams of medieval warriors killing dragons, with the dragons transforming into black Labs, their chests pierced by glowing, flaming swords. When she woke up, light was sneaking through the slits in the venetian blinds, making a television test pattern across her comforter.
Megan was gone. Probably downstairs with her parents. Jackie knew she should go to them, to see how her father was, to find out what was going on, but she wasn’t ready.
She reached for her phone and opened Facebook. She was immediately confronted by an image of Trebuchet lying in a pool of blood in her father’s office, with Jared out of focus behind the dog, palms pressed against his temples. The photo was posted by one of the entertainment blogs Jackie followed.
She screamed and dropped the phone.
“Jax?” her father asked a moment later from the other side of the door. “Are you okay? Can I come in?”
Jackie wasn’t ready to see her dad. She cleared her throat, ready to make an excuse, but it was too late; Jared opened the door and let himself in.
“Hi, Snowflake,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Jackie loved that her father still called her Snowflake. The nickname had started on a family ski trip in the Cascades when she was six years old.
“But I’ll fall and get hurt,” she had told her parents as her mother strapped on the big, clunky boots. She was terrified of getting on skis.
“Who’s going to get hurt more, you or the snowflakes, Snowflake?” her father had answered. Jackie giggled, so Jared said it again, and she giggled some more. She still didn’t want to get on the skis, but her father kept calling her Snowflake, wearing down her resistance until eventually she threw in the towel and gave the skis a try.
“Daddy,” Jackie said now, the morning after what had happened with Trebuchet, “we shouldn’t.” She motioned to the cameras.
Jared looked at his hands, like he was studying the intri- cate lines on his palms, like he was waiting for them to say something.
The silence underscored a tension that had been building between father and daughter, the first in the entire history of Jackie’s life. She wanted to collapse in his arms, bury her head in his chest, and tell him everything. She wanted to tell him how much she hated the television show and Ethan Overbee; tell him about Max and about how she and Megan had actually talked all night; tell him how sorry she was about Trebuchet. Most of all, she wanted to tell him how sad she was that he had cancer, and how scared that made her feel.
But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not with them watching.
“Just because there are cameras here, honey,” her father said as if reading her mind, “doesn’t mean that we can’t talk.” Jackie wanted to believe him, more than anything she wanted to believe him. “The TV show and the, the …”
Jackie wasn’t sure if her father couldn’t bring himself to say the word, or if he couldn’t remember it. “Cancer,” she finished. “The cancer.”
“Yes, the cancer. Those things don’t mean that we’re still not Snowflake and Daddy-Man—”
“Ready to save the universe,” Jackie said in sync with Jared. It was another private joke between the two.
Her father smiled at her, and that was all it took. Jackie melted into his arms and hugged him like she would never let go. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself clutching her father. Then her brain framed it in a television screen. She let go. The presence of the cameras was overpowering.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, about everything. But I don’t want them watching us.” She kept her eyes on her father.
He seemed confused for a minute before letting out a big breath of air. “Yeah, you’re right.” Jared looked up at the camera in Jackie’s bedroom and patted her knee. “Come down whenever you’re ready. I’ll make you breakfast.” Jackie grabbed her father’s arm and kissed him on the cheek.
***
Glio watched as Jared and six-year-old Jackie played superheroes. He could see in the construction of the memory some small sense of regret that Jared and Deirdre were raising only female children, and a small sense of guilt that Jared, in his desire for a son, had made Jackie something of a tomboy. But the feeling was fleeting, ephemeral, like the barest hint of piano buried deep in the mix of some overproduced pop song.
Jared and Jackie had taken all the pillows and cushions off the living room sofa, a two-piece sectional with chocolate-colored suede, and built a fort. Jared had used blankets to create a roof and was squirming on his belly in and out of the makeshift structure, following Jackie’s lead.
Glio could hear Megan in the other room; she was talking to an imaginary friend, a princess of some sort. The sound triggered a secondary and different pang of guilt in Jared, that he wasn’t paying enough attention to his younger daughter. Glio was amazed as he watched his host file the feeling away for future reference, as if he were putting a folder in a drawer, knowing that he should revisit it later but not giving it enough importance to remember to do so.
“What do we do now, Snowflake?” Jared asked.
“We have to stop the bad guys,” Jackie whispered. “They’re right outside the fort. They goed away but came back when we came in here.”
“They went away,” Jared corrected.
“They went away but came back!” Glio saw how awestruck Jared was at the complexity and fervor of his daughter’s imagination. It was his first real hint at the enormity of the loss the Stone family was facing. But as Jared had filed away his own guilt, so, too, did Glio.
“So we’re superheroes?” Jared asked, fully engrossed in the game.
“Yeah, we’re superheroes!” Jackie whispered with gusto.
“What are our names?”
“You’re, you’re, you’re Daddy-Man!” Glio was infused with a rush of oxytocin. It was a wonderful feeling that made him want more.
“I love it,” Jared whispered. “But who are you? Jackie- Girl?”
�
�No, silly,” she answered. “I’m Snowflake! S-N-O-W-F-L-A-K-E.” Jackie had just learned to spell the word, and for the past two days had been doing so every time she said it aloud. For Glio, another massive hit of oxytocin.
Glio understood that this was one of Jared’s most treasured memories. Each time his host recalled it, the memory would fill his host with feelings of joy, warmth, and stability. Glio felt almost guilty as he absorbed every frame of it into his growing mass.
***
Ethan Overbee stared in disbelief as the chairman of the ATN board of directors dressed him down. Thaddeus St. Claire sat to the chairman’s left, shaking his bowed head in sorrow, feeling the pain of his protégé’s failure.
The goddam fraud, Ethan thought to himself. We’re supposed to believe he had nothing to do with this?
ATN was getting roughed up by the media in the wake of the public relations debacle that was the murder of Jared Stone’s dog, and the board was taking it out on Ethan.
“We put our neck out there on this one, Overbee,” the chairman said, “and the jackals are sharpening their fangs. How the hell did that man get into Mr. Stone’s house? Where was security?”
“That wasn’t just any man, Roger.” Ethan was the only employee at the network to call the chairman by his first name. Everyone else called him Mr. Stern, or just “sir.” Ethan felt it was important to establish himself as an equal early on in their relationship, and Roger Stern, fifty-seven, ulcer-prone, overweight, and perpetually dour (known to most of his underlings as Jabba the Stern), had tolerated it. “It was Sherman Kingsborough. Think of the publicity.”
“Think of the publicity?” The chairman was incredulous.
“When we go back on the air tomorrow night, every person in America will tune in. Life and Death will be the highest rated show in the history of—”
“We’re not going to be on the air tomorrow night, Ethan.” Thad St. Claire’s voice was gentle but firm, decisive.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Thad’s right,” Stern added. “We need to take a few days, let the family grieve the loss of their dog, let America catch its breath. I heard from three different CEOs today that they don’t want their spots aired until the furor dies down.”