He watched her grip her glass. She was going to turn him down again, and if she did, then that was that. He’d just phone her someday to ask how she was doing with her canine partner.
“I know it’s always bothered you that Dortman took off before you could nail him,” she said, “but I owe you so much, including letting me get iced tea for you without asking if you can help or doing it for me, like my mother and my friends always do.”
“I’m not here because I feel guilty about Dortman, Alexis, and I’m not here to make sure you’re keeping your door chain on or your new phone number unlisted. But if you don’t have the time…”
“But I do,” she said, getting up. “A walk outside sounds great. I’ve never had a dog, Blair. Can you tell me more about the ones you’ve seen people working with?”
He was so excited he felt like a kid again. She got her shoes and jacket, and though he wanted to help her into it, he let her do it alone. But he did take her hand and put it in the crook of his arm as they stepped outside together.
On her third day at the Independence Guide Dog School, Alexis was more keyed up than ever. After three days of general orientation and basic instruction about working with a guide dog, the students would meet their dogs today.
“Now, just let me review a few things,” their instructor, Andy Curtis, told them in their classroom. “You’ve all come a long way since you arrived, but today you need to begin to bond with your partners before we can go on to make the two of you a great working pair. But keep in mind, even after this month of intensive training, you have not arrived. Training’s an ongoing, lifelong thing with these dogs. It can take up to six months or more to become a good team. And, remember, the dogs are not only going to be your work companions when in harness, but your pets when they are out of harness. Today, you begin to build on that lifetime relationship with these dogs—their working lifetime, at least.”
It sounded like a marriage, Alexis thought, a good one. But she was still nervous about making a commitment to a dog. Sure, she was ready to meet her partner, and she trusted the great job the staff at the school had done to prepare her, yet she was still scared.
So far this week, she had been surprised to learn how much work was required to exercise and groom a dog. Why, cats pretty much groomed themselves. And the dog would need periodic awards and praise for things well done, unlike cats, who were quite independent. But this had to work; she just had to bond with this dog. She knew her dog would be female—they all were—and she’d asked Andy if the partnerships sometimes didn’t work out. He’d shaken his head and said, “It rarely happens.” That worried her, too.
In the coming weeks, one trainer would work with six students. Quickly, Alexis reviewed the commands the dogs would already know: sit, stand, stay, heel, forward, backward, steady and hup up, meaning to speed up. Other commands would be optional, depending on the needs of the dog owner.
When Andy dismissed them, the students went to their private rooms down a long hall to await delivery of their dogs, which had been carefully matched with their new owners for size, strength and speed. Alexis had held on to a metal and leather harness connected to her instructor, then to a “demo-dog,” so she could get the feel of it, all the while being observed for her pace and stride. She had also answered numerous questions about the area where she lived, her activities and lifestyle. She’d admitted she had felt like a recluse but was hoping the dog would help her get her freedom back. All she’d been told was that her dog was a twenty-two-inch-high, sixty-pound chocolate Labrador retriever named Sterling.
Alexis now sat on the floor with her back against her small bed in the room where so many other blind people must have waited to meet their dogs. Andy had suggested sitting on the floor because the dogs had learned not to leap up on furniture, and their initial exuberance could knock someone over. Her heart was pounding as hard as it did whenever Blair Ryan showed up in her life.
Alexis thought about all the help and support Blair had given her, even during the short walk they’d taken just five days ago. “Tree growing in the sidewalk at ten o’clock,” he’d said as he’d steered her around the block. “Rough concrete coming, we’re going to turn right in about four more steps.” In a way, she thought, she would use the same sort of verbal commands and the dog’s physical moves to help her maneuver.
She jumped at a knock on the door—no, it must be the one next door. The dogs were here.
Alexis felt bad that some of the people in her class had been blind from birth and would never really know what a Labrador retriever looked like. She felt blessed she’d seen Labs—yellow, black and chocolate—and knew how regal, how alert they were with those big, kind eyes. Chocolate for a color sounded warm and safe. Chocolate was also her favorite comfort food, and surely this dog would be a comfort.
Another knock, louder. She gripped her hands together in her lap. Yes, it was her door. She heard it open and felt the cooler breeze from the hall, then heard the dog’s toenails on the tile floor.
“Alexis, here’s your new partner, Sterling,” Andy said. “And she’s very excited to meet you.”
That was all. She heard Andy drop the leash, then close the door. A solid, warm body covered in sleek fur pressed against her and a wet tongue licked her chin. Two big paws rested on her shoulders. Sterling’s collar jingled; she was panting, and her tail thump-thumped against Alexis’s knees.
Alexis patted her head and stroked her strong back and her muscular neck. She scratched Sterling behind her ears and, finally, found her voice.
“Sterling, Sterling, good girl, good girl! We’re going to be best friends, work together, walk outside together…”
That was all she could manage before she hugged Sterling hard.
With their puppies under the table at their feet in the noisy, crowded prison cafeteria, the Puppies Behind Bars trainers sat down to eat lunch at the same table. Corky nestled tight against her legs, which Tina liked, though it was best that the puppies eventually learned to lie quietly and patiently, not touching legs or feet while their human partners sat at the table.
At first there was little chatter but the usual complaints about the food, which was downed fast enough. Tina kept her eyes on her plate because they were still red and swollen. She’d been a real wreck since the day of Mama’s funeral. It was probably harder not being there than if she could have gone. The prison rules allowed her to go, but the expense for a guard would have come from Tina’s family, and she was too worried there wasn’t even enough money for a proper funeral. Besides, if she’d seen her kids, she could never have left them again. She was scared she’d have done something screwy and gotten herself even more time in here. Thinking about her little Larry and Sandy staying with strangers was even worse. Showing emotions in here was a sign of weakness, but since she’d started in the PBB program, she felt she could at least let loose a little with this bunch of inmates without being ridiculed or preyed upon. The puppies kind of softened everybody up.
“Man, that’s really something, us teaching these dogs foreign phrases,” Shawanna said. Like Tina, she was a veteran of the previous PBB program. She too had trained a guide dog last time. “Only foreign language I ever spoke was lotsa cursing and street slang. It’s really neat to feel trusted. One year you’re on the level with pond scum and the next you’re helping out blind folks or preparing dogs to find explosives to save lives.”
“I’d hate to think about Corky leaving the country, though,” Tina put in. “But there’s so much need here for EDCs that odds are our dogs will probably be somewhere nearby.”
“I heard dogs have over a hundred million sniffing cells while people only have about five million,” Lou Ann put in from farther down the table. She was new to the program, but it seemed to be helping her a lot already. She was pretty smart but had got in trouble for her big mouth at first. Still, being part of a team effort had made other people more tolerant of her.
“But I have to tell you, Tina,” she went on,
“some of the dogs so far have ended up working with cops in South Africa, Italy and the Far East. Hell, that’s places I’ll never see. PBB dogs worked at the pope’s funeral and the Democratic and Republican national conventions. And one screens the mayor of New York’s jet, as well as planes at the big airports.”
“Wow, talk about that old telephone company ad, ‘Reach out and touch someone,’” Karla mumbled, her mouth full. Karla had been over two hundred pounds when she first got here, but she’d been dropping some weight since she’d started exercising with her puppy, Brady.
Tina moved her foot closer to Corky’s warmth. Even if she could get past mourning Mama and worrying about her kids, she’d still be worried about giving up Corky to a world of danger.
“Pretty funny, huh?” Shawanna said. “Here I was doing my best a coupla years ago to outsmart the cops, and now we’re helping them outsmart the bad guys.”
Panicked, his heart thudding, Blair Ryan sat straight up in bed. His sheet and blanket were wrapped like tight bandages around him. It was pitch-black. For a minute he couldn’t recall where he was. He’d been falling, tumbling into blackness…Kabul? Hiding from the Taliban in the mountains? No, no, he was in his apartment at home.
Sweating, he strained to listen. Maybe a car had backfired to wake him. Or else he’d been dreaming about tank or gunfire.
Blair put his head in his hands. Please, dear God, not memories of those days. He’d never get back to sleep tonight. Jagged pieces of those nightmares floated through his sleep-sodden brain.
Or was he dreaming about Alexis, about what happened to her? He’d reached her right after the emergency squad did—seeing her crumpled like a doll at the bottom of the steps. Had Dortman been hiding there in the dark somewhere, watching, enjoying what he’d done?
Bits of the dream he’d just awakened from came back to him. Alexis had died. She was holding his hand, telling him that she needed a dog to be able to run away from cancer, but now it was too late. When he’d held her hand, her hair had turned lighter, and her face became Kate’s.
He muttered an oath, ripped off the cocoon of covers and got out of bed. He hadn’t dreamed of losing his sister for the longest time. She’d been eight years younger than him, and he’d felt he was her protector as well as her big brother. Although he knew you couldn’t fight cancer with fists or even guns, he sometimes felt he’d failed her. How he’d love it if Kate were around. He could teach her things, show her things. He’d like her to meet Alexis.
He padded to the window and peered through the vertical blinds. His bedroom overlooked carports and more apartments. The late-April moon was half-full, throwing gray shadows. Was Len Dortman out there somewhere, harming other women, as Alexis feared? Did he know what he’d done to the woman he’d been obsessed with, or did he think he’d killed her and fled a murder charge? It wasn’t the M.O. of an obsessive-compulsive like that to just move on.
Blair shook his head to clear it. Though he was still sweating, he felt chilled. Standing at the window, legs spread, his fists thrust under his armpits, he wished he could hold Alexis in the moonlight, in the sunlight, anytime or place—protect her and yet help her regain her independence. He hoped Dortman was gone for good, although a part of him couldn’t help but wish he could get his hands on the guy—just once.
CHAPTER THREE
With Sterling guiding her, Alexis walked with grace and confidence again, not afraid to stride out, not fearful that she’d take a tumble over some object she couldn’t see. The dog had even pulled her back from a pothole in the street—at least that’s what Andy had called out to her to explain Sterling’s sudden detour.
She held the leash between the index and middle fingers of her right hand and the harness handle with her left. At first it had felt strange to trust her movements to an animal, but after a week of practice she felt as if she had wings—or at least steady feet again.
“Don’t let her set the pace, Alexis!” Andy called from behind her. “Remember, you’re the alpha dog here, not her.”
Alexis nodded and smiled. In one of the classes, they’d discussed dog psychology. Dogs were inherently pack animals and needed to know where they came in the pecking order of power, so to speak. She’d been surprised to learn that a dog as beautifully mannered and trained as Sterling would test whoever was in charge, but the two of them struck a better balance every day. And, though dealing with a dog for the first time in her life had taken getting used to, she already appreciated and admired Sterling.
The Lab led her into the obstacle course that was the adventure of the day, as the students called these excursions. Yesterday they had walked down a busy street and tomorrow would begin practice in crossing streets. The students and their dogs had worked this course, which was set up in part of a parking lot, earlier in the week, but the obstacles had been rearranged.
And that made Alexis realize that trying to fix the pattern of the barriers in her mind had been foolish. That, and banging her shins into what felt like a tall, plastic garbage can.
“Ow!” she cried, inadvertently jerking on Sterling’s leash. “It’s okay, good dog,” she added quickly. After all, the dog had tried to lead her around the obstacle.
“Alexis,” Andy called out, “the point is to trust your seeing partner. Did you feel Sterling try to take you farther left to avoid that garbage can?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “Mea culpa. I guess I was trying to guide her.”
“Trust, trust and more trust,” he said, his voice coming closer as he approached. “Let Sterling make those key decisions. It’s what she’s been trained to do—wants to do.”
“Right. Sorry.” Alexis knew she needed Andy’s help, but it was making her nervous that he kept following them, watching them. It reminded her of the way she’d felt those weeks Len Dortman trailed her—both the times she knew he was watching her and the times she only feared he was. But she was not going to let that get to her, absolutely not.
“Go ahead, Alexis,” Andy encouraged her. “As my high-school football coach used to tell us, the most important play is the next play, not the one where you just fumbled. These dogs have been taught ‘intelligent disobedience,’ remember?”
She did remember. Guide dogs were taught to obey commands unless they saw a problem or danger, such as an approaching car that their partner did not hear. Even if the dog had been told “forward,” the animal would disobey if she sensed or saw a threat.
“Forward, Sterling. Good girl, forward.”
Alexis allowed the dog more leeway now, walking with her, not fighting her, trying to feel her moves through the harness. Ha, like dancing with a partner who knew how to lead, she thought, then thrust from her mind the memory of Blair asking her to dinner and dancing. She had to focus on this and not let her thoughts wander. Sterling was concentrating, and she must, too.
But the dog seemed to have led her into a dead end. Sterling stopped and turned them both one hundred eighty degrees around in a small space.
“Is this a maze?” Alexis called to Andy.
“Only if you don’t follow your partner’s lead. And this might be a good time to decide if you want to teach Sterling the additional command of ‘find the way,’” he suggested, coming closer again. “It’s different from ‘forward.’ When you’re in a tight or crowded place without a straight-ahead path or exit, it’s a useful command—up to you.”
Alexis nodded. “I have a very smart partner here. Yes, I’ll teach her that. Especially because I believe that I—we—are in another dead end,” she announced as the stalwart dog pivoted them again.
“Find the way, Sterling,” Alexis commanded in the calm, clear voice she was learning to use with the Lab when she was working. She used softer tones when Sterling was out of harness, when she played with her or groomed her, or when they just relaxed together. “Find the way.”
And Sterling did.
Tina lifted an armful of soiled prison uniforms into the big washer, set the controls and turned it on. N
othing happened. But it had just been working a minute ago.
Then she saw she had not completely closed the door. She slammed it, automatically glancing down to where Corky should be. But this was the weekend the puppies were gone to host families on the outside, a part of the program that happened as often as twice a week. All of the prisons raising dogs for the blind offered “Puppies by the Hour” to outsiders who wished to puppy-sit and play with the dogs. This helped to socialize the dogs, letting them ride in a car, live in a house, be around kids.
Kids…
Tina sniffed and blew her nose before she went back to sorting piles of dirty towels. Besides missing her kids so bad, she was still mourning Mama. Whether she wanted the memories or not, scenes from her childhood had been rotating through her mind like the clothes going around in the washer…
Happy times, mostly. There’d been a bad fallout when she’d married Hank. Mama had seen he was rotten to the core even then, but Tina had had to find out the hard way. “You oughta be more like your sister Vanessa, trying to make something of herself!” Mama had scolded. But Vanessa took off and didn’t look back. Still, Tina was sure Vanessa would be heartbroken if she knew Mama had passed on and her sister’s kids were more or less orphans.
Tina had also been real antsy waiting to hear whether her kids were going to be placed in foster homes or stay with children’s services in the city. She was torn about that. She’d like them to have a family, but what if they then realized what losers their own parents were? What if Larry and Sandy decided they hated her when each day she knew just how much she loved them and how badly she’d hurt—damaged them.
She threw a ripped-up towel in the recycle bin, then leaned her elbows on the counter and propped up her head with her hands. But she looked up as a new inmate, Lupe, noisily rolled another huge hamper of soiled uniforms into the steamy room.
More Than Words: Stories of Strength Page 15