by Ellen Cooney
Or, should I explain to her that the size and strength of her angel were just right, because her body was so small now, so light?
I felt a tightening of the fingers of the hand I was holding. The teller was raising her head, about an inch or so off her pillow. Her eyes were looking toward the foot of the bed. She was blinking very rapidly. I saw that those eyes were filling with tears.
And I knew they weren’t tears because of anything being wrong. When the teller spoke again, she didn’t mention size or strong arms. She had forgotten all about me, but she seemed to feel that her chaplain had come through for her. The little angel had just grown tremendously, and suddenly developed some muscles—or it had disappeared, and the one in its place was a giant, perhaps with a head almost touching the ceiling.
“It’s so bright,” said the teller, mumbly, softly, in a tone of voice that was very matter of fact.
But when she repeated it, as her last thing to say, it came in the voice of someone being taken by surprise, like she could not believe her own eyes.
“It’s so bright!”
I sat there. I listened to the new sound of silence. I looked at the nurse who was noting the time of the departure. I didn’t know how much the nurse heard of what the teller had said, but she was glancing around, almost as if she hoped to hear some sound in the air that had not been there before.
I went out to the hall. I thought I’d go sit in another waiting room for a few minutes. But the one on this hall was being cleaned.
Then all I could think of was that I needed more coffee. I was being practical. I remembered that on the floor below, there was often good coffee in the unit kitchen. The teller’s room was near an exit.
Maybe I’ve always been a little clumsy in the aftermath of a passing, and I was only just now noticing. I realized too late I should have gone for an elevator. On the stairway, I overshot the top step, and I went into a panic, feeling myself slipping, feeling myself falling.
I didn’t see Eddie until he reached the landing I was about to crash on. He was walking up the stairs—I heard the light thumps of his paws, the little jangle of his tags.
The stairwell filled with the smell of dog. His big boxer eyes were shiny. His head was high, his ears perked up. He was coming toward me, his leash trailing behind him. He was not in a rush, not in a state of alarm.
He was calm, and why did it feel like I was falling the wrong way now? Why was I going up, not down?
How could I suddenly be falling up?
“Hang on,” the dog seemed to be telling me, with a look.
I grabbed the leash. The ceiling was collapsing—but no, wait, it wasn’t like what happened at the scene of the disaster. The roof was opening. There might have been a panel there all along, like a sunroof on a car, somehow being activated.
The loop of the leash was now around my hand. I was climbing stairs of air, toward the opening, Eddie at my heels. Then I realized I didn’t have to actually climb.
I was just rising, just floating, just rising and floating and rising, and it all seemed perfectly normal, perfectly natural, like I was anyone at all who ever went out into the last dark hour of a night, taking a dog for a walk.
Twenty
Eddie pawed at the air, as if swimming, but he seemed to be doing so in play, knowing that air isn’t water.
We were headed for the highway, at a rate of speed neither fast nor slow. I realized I did not have a say in what direction to take, any more than a feather on a breeze would, but why should that matter when you’re up in the air?
Bobo Boy’s linden! We sailed over it, the top of its crown right under my feet. Looking back, I saw a pair of nurses smoking cigarettes outside the entrance to the ER, near the sign that said “No Smoking.” One of them was glancing up, and I waved, and that was how I knew we were invisible.
There were very few vehicles on the highway. A milk delivery truck rolled by; a young man was one-handing the wheel. He was about to sip from a Dunkin’ Donuts cup of coffee. I could tell the coffee was too hot. His lips were puckered. I was looking at him in the act of blowing into the sip hole of the lid, and I felt worried for him, hoping he wouldn’t burn his tongue.
In a small Ford sedan, a woman about my age, alone, reached up to adjust her rearview mirror. She was checking her appearance. She had just put on lipstick. Why would she have done that, risking it, one hand on the wheel? Yet wearing fresh lipstick was important to her. Why was she traveling at this hour?
“I hope things go well for you,” I was trying to say, as if being a chaplain to drivers was my job now.
The amazing thing was that I did not feel amazed.
Grace, I thought, because I realized I had never known before what the word really means.
It means that suddenly there comes a moment when you are all right.
Nothing is wrong.
The simplicity felt as beautiful to me as the air around me, as my lightness, as I was air too, and so was Eddie, his head high, his tail swishing: grace in the form of a dog.
I looked down again. In the passenger’s seat of a Volvo sedan, a girl of about eleven was typing with her thumbs on her iPhone, huddled up with it, the glow a rectangular patch of light that looked odd to me, even though I owned the same phone. I couldn’t see the words the girl was texting. I couldn’t see who was driving, except that the person was a grown-up.
The girl had turned in her seat so that her back was to the driver. I had a feeling of her loneliness, a feeling that her text was like the words of a sad, deep-reaching song. Then I saw a pause in the typing. The girl was tipping back her head, peering out her window, looking upward, as if noticing a ray of moonlight or an unusually low cloud.
Her expression seemed to brighten—perhaps, for an instant, because of me and Eddie, she was not quite so all alone? It was impossible to tell.
Coming behind the Volvo was a small blue Ford. On its back seat, a white terrier was curled up, its eyes drowsily half-lidded. Spotting the dog before I did, Eddie let out call-barks, in a greeting, in a happy, friendly tone. I felt proud of him. He was a charmer! He was sociable to other dogs!
But loud as Eddie was, the terrier did not respond to him, not even to perk up its ears a little bit. It was the same as if no sounds had been made. I couldn’t tell if it bothered Eddie that he was invisible to everyone but me, and he couldn’t make contact with a member of his species, fleeting as it would have been.
He had moved out in front of me. He was letting me know he wanted me to follow him, as if he’d picked up a new scent. It seemed he was zeroing in on a set of directions, like he was tuned into a special GPS, for just dogs.
He quickened his pace, pulling me along, the same way he did before, post-pizza. There was no way for me to know how far we’d gone, or how long we’d been moving.
I was not aware of the moment when this happened, but we were not on the highway anymore. We were floating along a countryside road, full of curves. We were passing rows and rows of high, wide trees, fallow fields, stone walls of old farms, ancient looking graveyards, iron fences the color of creosote and so much darker than the night. I saw a barn in a state of collapsing and a development of brand new Colonials: mini-mansions set back from the road at the end of long driveways, where globes of solar lights had been poked into the ground, and could almost seem like gatherings of fireflies.
Once, I remembered, on a summer night when I was small and weak from some flu that was going around, my brothers came into my room and woke me. I always seemed to be hit the hardest by viruses that were minor to everyone else. That one had lasted quite awhile, and suddenly there they were, the two of them, my big brothers, ready to amaze me.
They used to drive me crazy when they’d tap their knuckles against my forehead, as if knocking on a door. They’d feel weird and uncomfortable whenever they came upon me sitting still, head bowed, or lying outside in the yard, my eyes on the sky, like I was an athlete of things that only took place inside you. I had baffled them, baffle
d them all.
“Earth to Little Pinkie,” they would say, knocking at me. “Anyone home in there?”
But that night, they were not making fun of me.
“Earth to Little Pinkie! We filled the backyard with fairies for you!”
I had believed my brothers arranged a sort of concert for me, but it was a concert of lights, not sound. I hadn’t known that the creatures outside my window were insects called fireflies.
But I never told them I didn’t believe they were fairies. In my joy, I felt they were tiny pieces of souls of happy people, blinking on and off, gloriously, thrilling me: souls that belonged somewhere else, but came out into the night to make me feel better.
I wished I could pause and tell all of that to Eddie, as if maybe, in this state, an animal and a person could actually have a conversation. I realized, though, I did not have the power to stop moving.
We had reached a section of the road where a gap was showing in a broad, thick wall of trees. Because of the way the treetops on either side seemed to bend toward each other, arch-like, the gap looked like an open entryway.
Eddie was making a turn toward the opening. There was a destination? Which he knew about, and I didn’t?
He seemed to sense my hesitation. He turned his head to look at me with his bright boxer eyes. He was showing me the tawny sheen of his fur, his smoothness, his strong chest, his muzzle, his snout, darker and blacker than the night. He was showing me his soul, in every part of himself, and he seemed to be asking, Would I please just follow his lead? Would I please just really trust him?
Twenty-one
There was a drop in my elevation. I drifted into the turn, through the gap in the trees, and found myself in a small country lane bordered by tall old maples, their branches filled with cobwebs of fog, rustling a little on a light and skittery wind. The air smelled watery. I knew for sure I’d never been here before.
A building was up ahead. As slowly as I was moving, I was getting nervous—I had no power to stop. I could only move forward.
And I realized I was alone. That dog had abandoned me?
Well probably it was my own fault. We barely knew each other!
I called to him, once, twice, three times. I didn’t want to give up trying, but my shouts were being folded into the hush of the night, the same as if they’d never been made.
The building I approached was low and solitary, with barn-board walls of pine. Its shape was like that of a train car or a trailer, sitting sideways, but that was just the front section. On either side was an added-on wing, so that the wholeness was like the letter “E,” tipped flat, without the middle line. To my left was a door above a small wooden stoop. Some sort of plaque was hanging there, but I couldn’t make it out.
The two squares of windows were curtained. Lights were on inside, dimly. I thought I detected some movement inside, like slow-motion flickers of shadows.
The curtains were thin and gauzy. It would have been easy to see through them, if not for their printed patterns. At first, the bright, colorful shapes that covered the cloth reminded me of the Teletubbies, plump and happy in their cartoon selves, waddling around in the colors of candy, or popsicles: lime, lemon, cherry, grape purple.
Teletubbies! Rolling down hills, skipping through meadows! Chattering to each other in secret baby talk about how splendid everything was, how they were splendid too! How many hours had I spent watching those videos with tiny patients? Many, many hours.
But the figures on the curtains weren’t Teletubbies. They only resembled them, in the same colors, rolling in grass, smelling a flower, bumping into each other. They were cartoons of dogs, all sorts of dogs—puppies, young dogs, old dogs, all sorts of breeds and mixes. Some were so whimsical, they did not exist for real, like the creatures of the banished poster.
And then I was inside the building, and it was a huge disappointment not to know how I got there.
My brothers used to tease me for being a little girl playing their Star Trek videos while clutching the remote so I could fast-forward to the transporter scenes. I had loved those scenes. I had hoped that someone would invent a transporter for real by the time I became a grown-up.
I never had anywhere in particular I wanted to go—I just wanted to understand how it would feel to be a pulsing, glittering, shimmering, body-shaped mass of energy and dots of light, as if what happened in a transport was that your body and soul switched places, in a marvelous, inside-out way.
I had told this to Plummy. He had felt the need to pop my bubble by rattling off every time someone dies in a transporter accident, in all the various Star Treks.
It was only a minor conversation—one I didn’t expect him to refer to again. But soon after he’d arrived in Germany, he emailed to say, if I would agree to come visit him regularly, he would get in touch with a genius engineer he went to college with, who owed him a favor. He would get the engineer to build us transporters, one hundred percent safe. Thus we could both be where we were and carry on as a couple, just take up where we’d left off, like we were supposed to.
And how had he decided on what we were supposed to do?”
“Logic,” he had told me, like he was Spock. “Me and you together make a solution to a problem that can’t be solved any other way.”
And what was the problem?
“We’re both lonely people no one else would ever want to put up with, not with how we both are, basically.”
I was not a lonely person! People could put up with me!
I would never be able to keep track of all the times I wished I had sent him away that day in the chapel on my birthday when he wanted to know if I knew of any oobs and why I looked so sad.
I had even glossed over the fact he had said he loved to call oobs oobs because it’s “boobs” without the first “b.”
To a minister in a collar he’d just met, he had said this. Like he was twelve! And I had almost laughed because he said it so seriously.
I hadn’t been sad! I was not a sad person!
“This is pretty cool,” he would have whispered, if he were beside me.
I was in a reception area. Night-lights were on, in shapes of little candles, plugged into several wall sockets. There was a counter, wooden and smooth and old, as one might find in a municipal office, or a bank or a courthouse. Beyond the counter were some desks, computers, all the usual office-type stuff.
A wall rack stuffed with brochures was near a small round table with a couple of chairs. A plastic clock with a face of Hello Kitty was ticking away, and it was dangling a plastic tail of a cat, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A large poster showed a trio of dogs sitting closely together on the steps of someone’s backyard deck: an elderly and jowly bulldog, a young brindle greyhound, and a brown-and-white Chihuahua puppy. At the top were the words “THESE 3 SISTERS BELIEVE.” At the bottom was the rest of the message: “IN ADOPTION.”
I noticed titles of brochures as I floated by the rack: A Guide to Do-It-Yourself Grooming; Worm Treatment Explained; Five Reasons Why Your Dog Might Be Chewing Your Shoes.
On the floor were linoleum tiles, worn, many-times mopped. How many feet had trod here, how many paws, how many accidental peeings and poopings?
Shabbiness, I saw. And decency.
A decency of shabbiness. That was my overall impression, especially around the area of the desks, where everything looked like it came secondhand, and would soon need replacing. But I had the feeling that the people who sat at those desks were people who would know what I was talking about if I came here in the normal way and suddenly started talking about souls and how empty it can be if you understand the fact that the one you have has been broken.
From a pair of printed statements in frames on another wall, I learned that this was a privately run place for dogs and cats who were saved by volunteers from high-kill establishments. They had twenty-four-hour staffing, but potential adopters were restricted to normal work hours. They did not encourage people who wished to surrender a
pet to use their shelter, since they were non-public and always stretched to their maximum with animals transported here, often from great distances.
“We believe,” I read, “that animals are no lesser creatures than we are. We are small and we struggle financially. We ask all visitors, whether or not you go home with one of our residents, to please make a contribution, in whatever amount is okay for you. Thanks!”
Why did I have to be invisible? Why couldn’t I reach for my wallet?
Meanwhile, on top of the counter, two large calico cats were sprawled out, one fat and one lean. They were facing away from each other, their tails touching at the tips and overlapping a little, like that was their way of feeling connected. They seemed to have no idea I was looking at them. Their breathing stayed the same: the breathing of sleepers. I began to drift closer to them, eager to see what they might do if they sensed me.
They did not react. Not one whisker even twitched a tiny bit. Maybe they were being aloof, on purpose. Maybe they were letting me know it was no big deal to them to see me, like they were saying, “We look at invisible things all the time, and frankly, we don’t think you’re interesting.”
But then I was moving again, more urgently, into a wing of the building, a sort of wide hallway. On either side were cells.
No, not cells. This was not a prison. They were cubicles. Or they were cages, but not actually cages. They were tiled inside like shower stalls and fronted by wooden frames holding panels of Plexiglas.
Inside the not-cells, all the dogs were sleepers. A few were doubled, as if they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms, but most were alone. Some were on cushions of dog beds, some on cots, like something a camper might use, but smaller. Some were curled nearly in circles, noses close to tails. Some were stretched out on their sides, back legs overshooting a cot or cushion, like someone too tall for their own mattress. A few were in a huddle of their own selves in a corner, the cushion or cot unused.