Grace acted like her entire existence depended on the Bekins moving van in the next lane.
The Humane Society, a compound of concrete buildings half an hour north of Mill Valley, looked like a campus where important lessons could be learned. As Lila drove into the parking lot, a bronze sculpture of a mother bear and two cubs greeted her and Grace. Across the main building’s front wall, mosaic deer, raccoons, and rabbits marched in profile like figures on an Egyptian frieze. In the windows of a smaller building next door, cats sleeping in baskets exuded peace. Yet from somewhere inside, frantic barks and howls seemed to zigzag through the roof.
Grace must have heard them. Dispensing with her regal stance, she panted and shifted her weight from her healthy to her injured leg so the front half of her was marching in place. She frowned at the building as if she were certain that frenzied dogs were throwing themselves at kennel walls to escape incarceration—and she emphatically did not want to join them. She whimpered and pawed the back of Lila’s seat to convey this preference. Her entire demeanor urged, Please! Let’s get out of here!
Though Lila wanted to regain her power by standing up to Adam and getting free of Grace, her resistance made Lila wince. She assured herself that she’d gone extra miles to take care of Grace and find her a home, and not even Lila’s Pleaser could expect her to have done more. She didn’t need to feel bad about leaving Grace there. But she did. Very bad.
Lila turned around in her seat. Grace was huddling against the door. “Look, I’ll tell you what. If nobody adopts you in a week, I’ll come back and get you. Either way it’ll work out fine,” she said. “Lots of nice people might come along. You might find a family with kids. It could be great! You’d be a lot happier living with them than with me.”
Grace did not seem impressed. Her face looked grim.
Lila got out of the car and opened the door for her. When Lila called Grace to jump out, she planted her legs in front of her like iron stakes and dug her toenails into the upholstery. “Grace, let’s go inside.”
She sank to her stomach and stretched out her front legs in her sphinx imitation. Her anxious drool splotched the upholstery. When she gazed up at Lila, the whites below her pupils looked like beseeching commas on their backs. Please, please, don’t make me go in there.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Lila told herself as much as Grace.
Keep moving, Lila’s Crazy Aunt ordered.
As Lila nudged Grace to stand, yowls traveled from the building. Grace shrank back against the seat. Finally, she climbed out of the car and took a few leaden steps across the parking lot toward the sign that said ADOPTION CENTER, pointing to the building with the sleeping cats. But she must have thought better of coming with Lila because she turned around and limped back toward the car. Lila tugged Grace’s bandana. She tugged back.
Her tugs urged Lila to reconsider: I’ve tried my best to get along and shower you with love. I’ll do anything if you’ll keep me. All I want in the world is to be with you. Oh, please. Tug. Tug.
Lila felt like a wretch. She reminded herself that Adam had put her in this terrible position, but she still felt like a wretch. She disliked him more than ever.
Stop the sniveling, her Crazy Aunt bellowed.
As Lila forced herself to lead Grace into the building, guilt, who’d recovered from being knocked to the floor, trailed them through the door and poked Lila’s bottom with his cane. He said, “Tsk-tsk. You’re taking out your anger on an innocent dog.” He pointed out that in the last couple of weeks Lila had not minded Grace; sometimes her company had been pleasant. “If you’re truthful with yourself, you know you’ll miss her.”
Who cares about truth? Lila’s Crazy Aunt snapped.
Lila gripped her purse’s shoulder strap and herded Grace through a crowded reception area to a swarthy man with lambchop sideburns and shaggy eyebrows. He was cleaning off a counter covered with brochures. From the shoulders up, he looked like a Minotaur, but his spindly arms and legs were pure satyr. He should have been prancing on small hooves across a Greek urn.
“Hi! I’m Tony” was written on the name tag pinned to his maroon tee shirt. “Need some help?” he asked.
“I can’t keep this dog.” Lila nodded down at Grace.
Tony stepped from behind the counter to get a closer look at her, and a frown of disapproval creased his forehead. Anyone could tell he thought Grace’s poor appearance was Lila’s fault. As if to help foster that impression, Grace gave him a desperate look and slouched more dismally than she ever had.
“Her name is Grace,” Lila said.
“How long have you had her?”
“About six weeks.”
“Where’d you get her?”
As a woman passed by with a sheltie on a red leash, Lila explained that someone had left Grace with her—but she discreetly omitted Adam’s theft.
When Tony kneeled down and patted Grace’s shoulder, she panted like she was about to keel over with neediness and he was her last hope. With all her heart, Grace begged him to love and protect her since Lila had become the Judas of the Western World.
“You’re a sweet dog.” Tony stroked the feathery tufts above Grace’s ears.
“You’ll find her a good home?” Lila practically begged.
“We’ll groom her and make her available to people looking for a dog,” Tony said.
“If nobody adopts her, I’ll come and get her.”
“Sure. Lots of people say that. We never hear from them again.”
“I swear I’ll come.”
Tony didn’t answer as he fumbled with the knot on Grace’s bandana. When he pulled it off, Lila gasped, along with half the people in the room.
Around Grace’s neck was a ring of skin, speckled with gold fuzz. Clearly not long before, her neck had been shaved, and her fur was growing back—over a thick, blackish-red, perforated line that Lila could hardly bear to look at. Angry welts circled Grace’s neck, and from the red welts on Lila’s breast and arm, she knew a scar when she saw one. Grace’s neck said that something terrible had cut into her, and she’d known pain like none Lila could imagine.
Tony shrank back and shook his head like he was trying to shake off the hideous sight of those welts. He dropped Grace’s bandana to the floor. “Just a minute.” He reached for the phone on the counter and punched in a three-digit number. “Send Bill down here pronto.”
While they waited for Bill, who Lila thought would be a helpful vet, Tony explained in clipped, harsh words that the welts were signs a too-tight chain had bored into Grace’s neck. Perhaps the chain had originally fit her, but she’d grown too big for it. Or maybe someone had deliberately forced it around her neck to torture her. Whenever Grace had barked or pulled at the chain, the links had cut deeper till they were embedded in her flesh. Removing them had required surgery. “In eight years here, I’ve never seen a dog in this appalling condition,” Tony said.
Lila was blinking back tears when Bill arrived and kneeled in front of Grace for a closer look. “Holy shit.” His voice was a dark, bruising purple.
As he stood up, he gave Lila a look that said she should consort with worms. His gold-framed glasses were slipping down the bridge of his nose, and sweat semicircled his uniform’s armpits. “I’m an animal control officer. You tell me how this dog’s neck got turned to goddamn hamburger,” he demanded.
“I didn’t know it was like that.”
“We hear that excuse around here a lot.” Bill exchanged a glance with Tony.
“It’s the truth. Grace has been wearing the bandana since I got her. I never took it off.” Behind Lila’s back came harsh murmurs from people in the reception area.
“If she’s your dog, then who do you claim abused her like that?” Bill asked.
“She isn’t my dog. I don’t know who hurt her. I’ve only been taking care of her a little while.”
“You’ve done a rotten job.”
Lila flushed from unearned shame. “She came like that.”
/> “I thought you said you didn’t know she was hurt.”
“I didn’t.” It was hard to get out words when Lila’s teeth were clamped together.
On the green linoleum floor, Grace’s bandana looked like a red badge of courage pinned to army fatigues. But standing beside it, surely believing she was minutes from abandonment, Grace looked desolate. She seemed to shrink, then crumble, as if small, quivery pieces of her body were sprinkling on the floor and there’d soon be nothing left of her. Though she refused to look at Lila, Grace might as well have shouted that the tie between them was broken as far as she was concerned, and she was steeling herself for what lay ahead. She seemed to be hiding in her deepest, most shadowy recesses.
Grace had been cruelly victimized, but she’d also been brave to allow herself to trust and love Lila and to come so far. Grace’s welts said more about her misery than anything Adam could have told Lila. No matter what her Crazy Aunt said, giant fissures ran through Lila’s resolve to leave Grace. Lila’s insides hurt for her, a courageous Anne Frank dog.
Tony handed Lila a clipboard with a printed form and a ballpoint pen and looked at her as if blood were dripping from her fangs. Clearly, he’d been trained to stay calm while getting animals away from sadists. “Fill this out. Bill can take Grace to the kennel.”
Lila could hardly think straight. Numb, she took the clipboard, and Bill threaded one end of a leash through the eye of the other to make a small noose, which he gently slipped around Grace’s neck. Lila glanced at the form. After blanks for her name, address, and phone number were questions: Why was she giving up the dog? Was it current on shots? Did it have any physical problems?
Lila stopped reading. What did the questions matter when she felt like sumo wrestlers were rolling around on her heart?
“Let’s go,” Bill called to Grace and started toward the swinging kennel doors.
“Wait!” Lila followed them. “I’m keeping her.”
Bill’s glower might have melted Arctic ice. “You’ve had your chance. This dog is better off here.”
“No.” Lila would show her power. She mentally shoved her Crazy Aunt away and said to Bill, “Grace is coming with me. She’s mine. I’ll take good care of her.”
“We don’t trust you as far as we could throw you,” Bill said.
Lila wouldn’t listen. “I’ll call the man who left her with me. He can explain how her neck got that way.”
“Yeah, sure,” Bill said.
“Do you have a phone book?” Lila asked Tony.
He glared at her as he got one from behind the counter.
With sweaty hands, Lila looked up Adam Spencer, and, relieved, found his number. If only he’d be honorable enough to answer.
20
As Lila drove Grace away from the Humane Society, you’d never have known she’d been trembling with distress. On the front passenger seat, she smiled and panted as a sliver of her camellia-petal tongue hung from her mouth. Lila had retied the bandana around Grace’s neck to cover the scars, and her face filled with trust. Hurrah! We’re going for a ride! her expression shouted. Grace seemed to have forgotten that Lila had almost left her at the shelter.
Lila was not so carefree as Grace, because Bill and Adam’s phone conversation clung to her like harsh soap. Standing next to Bill, she’d heard Adam explain in a steady voice that he’d volunteered in the Humane Society’s education department and the staff could vouch for him. He claimed he’d found Grace on the street with the chain embedded in her neck, and he’d rushed her to a vet. Adam urged Bill to let Lila keep her until Adam could bring her home. A kennel would be traumatic after all she’d been through, he said.
With words that sounded bitten off of sheet metal, Adam called Lila “irresponsible,” “insensitive,” and “that damned flake.” Lila steamed at those words, which applied to him more than her. Her Crazy Aunt had urged her to grab the phone from Bill and yell at Adam. But, for Grace’s—and Lila’s own—sake, she stood there, docile, waiting till they could leave together.
Now she and Grace followed a black Humvee off the exit into Mill Valley and turned down a main road to town. As they passed ranch-style homes and a shopping plaza, Grace leaned against Lila so their shoulders touched. Grace seemed like she was trying to let Lila know, as far as she was concerned, they were a team, and it was the two of them against the world. As far as Lila was concerned, maybe they could be traveling companions on a road called Healing. But she never thought she’d have a dog.
She patted Grace’s shoulder. Touching her felt different now that she was Lila’s, not just a dog she was sitting for Adam. Grace didn’t seem as burdensome or foreign as before, and her meaty breath did not seem so offensive, either. That, Lila couldn’t explain.
What mattered was that something had changed. When she and Grace got home, Lila would give her compensatory dog biscuits, take her for walk, and let her lead wherever she wanted to go. Lila would wash the covers on the dog beds. She would rub her vitamin E cream into Grace’s welts and hope her skin was as forgiving as she was.
Pet Stop smelled of fish food, rawhide chews, and hamsters’ cedar chips. A cockatiel screeched from her perch by the window. Half the overhead fluorescent lights had burned out, so the store was shadowy and the crowded aisles felt like a homeland for moles.
Grace hobbled along beside Lila while she looked for dog food, which they found at the back of the store. Piled high against the wall were kibble bags with mysterious labels for “maintenance,” “foundation,” and “premium.” Lila could relate only to the bags’ rainbow of saturated colors.
Pet Stop’s owner, Albert Wu, walked over and introduced himself. Dust from the bags of kitty litter he’d been stacking streaked his Hawaiian shirt and toupee, which looked like a malnourished beaver lounging on his head. When Albert smiled, his whole face crinkled and his eyes narrowed to slits. He bent down and stroked Grace’s chest.
“Can I help you with anything?” he asked.
“I need kibble for her,” Lila said as Grace gave Albert a goofy, high-on-dope look.
“What’s she been eating?”
“Some gravel-looking stuff my friend bought for her.”
“That doesn’t give me a lot to go on.” Albert’s face crinkled again, and the beaver on his head seemed to rustle.
He explained the difference between “maintenance” and “premium.” He pointed a sallow finger at the cerulean blue bag. “This one’s for your average all-around dog. It flies out of here.” The index finger tapped cadmium red. “I’d go with this. It’s got a higher fat content. Looks like your dog could use the extra calories.”
That was the one Lila chose. At Albert’s urging, she also picked out a nylon forest-green leash with a matching collar that would dazzle against Grace’s complementary reddish-gold fur, and Lila looked at the ID-tag selection, stapled to a cardboard square. Grace could have plastic or metal, shaped like a mouse, dog bone, fire hydrant, circle, or heart. Lila ordered the heart to come by mail in red metal and the smallest size, like a gnome’s valentine. Printed on it in block letters would be Grace’s name and Lila’s phone number. Once Grace’s neck healed more, she could wear the collar and tag – and the world would know she belonged to Lila.
As Grace turned her attention to the messages left by other dogs on the quarry-tile floor, Albert rang up the purchases and handed Lila a receipt for more than she’d bargained for. She wrote a check that took a hefty chomp from her account. She didn’t mind, though, because she wanted to do right by Grace. Adam Spencer would have to admit that Lila was being responsible.
Adam called, as he did now every couple of days, when Grace and Lila were having dinner.
First thing, he asked, “How’s Grace doing?”
In other words, is Grace still there? You haven’t given her to someone? Or taken her back to the Humane Society? You’re not being a negligent flake?
“She’s fine,” Lila said.
“Is she eating?”
“She’s ga
ining more weight.”
“You’re not feeding her table scraps, are you?”
“No.”
“Dogs can’t eat chocolate. It’s poison to them.”
I didn’t know. “I know.”
“Did you walk her today?”
“I do every day.”
“Just checking.”
As usual, Lila felt like an amoeba on his microscope slide.
She never told Adam that she wouldn’t give Grace back to him. Lila wanted to avoid another fight. He’d find out soon enough that Grace was hers. There was no point borrowing trouble.
With hopes of a reenactment of someone going postal, Lila was watching True Crime on TV with Grace. But the story for the night was of a rotten-toothed survivalist who had kidnapped a teenage girl. Police were combing the mountains with bloodhounds. Behind a forest of microphones, the girl’s ashen-faced parents were begging people to come forward with clues. Everyone was hoping she was alive, but “rape” hung in the manhunt’s air, a lurid suggestion of what they’d find.
David Carpenter had plundered a woman like that when he started down the road to become the Trailside Killer. Would Yuri Makov have raped anyone? Lila imagined him sneaking up behind her after work and gagging her with duct tape. As she kicked and clawed, he would tape her wrists together, shove her into his Nissan’s trunk, and slam it closed. As he hauled her away, exhaust fumes would engulf her . . .
But Lila couldn’t finish picturing this gruesome story. Yuri seemed too refined to rape anyone or get semen on his always well-pressed slacks. Shooting was surely as close as he’d wanted to get to his victims. What did that say about him?
Probably that he was standoffish and he wasn’t after power over women or picking them off one by one, alone. He wanted more violence. More impact. More drama. A bigger sweep of evil to make a bigger public statement. But what had Yuri been saying when he shot everyone?
As Lila leaned back into the sofa and pondered that question, she could almost hear him scream, “I hate you. I’m better than you are. I’m going to kill myself, and you’re coming with me.”
An Unexpected Grace Page 13