“So you know Benjamin Blackman?” the woman said, closing the file and looking at the two of them.
“Yes,” her mother responded. She didn’t sound particularly happy about it though. “He was the one who suggested we come to see you.”
“Mr. Blackman?” Gracie asked.
She was surprised to hear his name spoken here, so far away from school. Her mother hadn’t mentioned anything about him. Gracie felt even more embarrassed of her nakedness then, as if Mr. Blackman might somehow see her.
The nurse nodded back at her. “Yes,” she said, “Mr. Blackman.”
“He’s my friend at school,” Gracie said.
Her mother looked surprised at that.
Gracie knew her mother didn’t like Mr. Blackman at all. She’d known that for a long time already, but she suspected that her mother would change her mind once she got to know him better.
“He’s very nice,” Gracie said, to underscore the point. “We make puzzles together sometimes,” she reported. “And once he let me wear his hat.”
Her mother didn’t look impressed.
Gracie didn’t say a word more; she wasn’t usually so chatty.
“I think he’s nice too,” the woman added, nodding her head in agreement.
Gracie didn’t like to see her mother in the minority, but it was clear that she’d been outvoted where Mr. Blackman was concerned.
“Gracie?” the woman said, calling her back to business then. “Can you skip around the room for me, please?”
Of course I can, she thought.
She kept quiet though; she didn’t like to brag. It was a good start, she suspected, that the woman in white liked Mr. Blackman, but that didn’t guarantee she’d be nice to her.
Gracie began skipping around the room, in just her underpants. She tried to do it as nicely as she could—lifting her feet high, the way they taught her to at school. She tried keeping the woman in sight, but she lost her for half of every skipping turn.
“That’s fine,” the woman said, once she’d made two complete laps around the room.
Gracie knew it wasn’t a compliment, just a sign that she could stop her skipping. She was breathing hard.
“Can you come over here, please?” the woman asked.
She placed a chilly metal disc onto Gracie’s naked chest. The disc connected to a black cord that snaked up around the woman’s neck. She placed the earpieces into her ears.
“Do you know what I listen to with this?” she asked.
“My heart,” Gracie replied. She looked down at the floor when she spoke, then back up at the woman.
“That’s right,” the woman told her, nearly smiling then.
Gracie studied the woman’s chubby cheeks, the light-colored fuzz that sprouted all around them. She watched her squinting eyes. They seemed to look right past her as she listened to her heart. Gracie didn’t mind at all.
“That’s fine,” the woman said, pulling the pieces from her ears and looping them around her neck again.
Gracie looked at her mother, hovering behind the woman in white. She watched her open the file folder that the woman was reading earlier. She looked a little sneaky about it.
“Can you step up on the scale for me?” the woman asked.
Gracie knew to be ashamed right away.
She wished she could go back to her skipping, but she knew she didn’t have any choice in the matter. She walked to the scale and stepped right up, her white socks looking extra bright against the black metal tray she stood on. She watched her feet spread out wide.
Gracie liked shoes; they kept her feet in place.
The woman slid a chunky black weight across a silver bar, then inched a smaller one forward—tap, tap, tap—until she’d settled them both into little notches. The weights were staring Gracie in the eye. She wished this part would be over.
“That’s fine,” the woman said.
Gracie stepped off the scale quickly.
Her mother was turning pages in the folder still, scowling as she went.
At least she didn’t see how much I weigh, Gracie thought. She felt grateful for that.
The woman turned around and caught her mother with the file. “That’s not for you,” she said angrily, snatching the folder from the table. She closed it roughly and huffed out a breath.
Her mother was in trouble.
“That’s crazy!” her mother shouted back.
She was just as angry as the woman in white. “Where does Blackman get off,” she said, “making accusations like that?”
My Mr. Blackman? Gracie wondered. She didn’t make a peep.
“Why don’t we discuss this outside?” the woman said calmly.
Gracie wasn’t sure what to make of this development. She knew it couldn’t be good—nothing so hidden ever was. She knew better than to ask.
“Why would he say such a thing?” her mother asked. She was very upset.
“You can get dressed now, Gracie,” the woman said, giving her shoulder a gentle nudge.
It looked like she was getting away without a shot.
She pulled her T-shirt and sweater back on as fast as she could. She felt almost safe again with her arms covered up. She pulled her pants on too, just in case.
“We came here for help,” her mother said, only slightly less agitated than before. “Not for abuse.”
Gracie couldn’t understand what had gone so wrong.
It wasn’t her weight, at least; her mother hadn’t seemed to notice that. Did she want her to have a shot? Gracie wondered.
She knew to keep quiet. It was the only way she learned anything: by disappearing and listening in.
“Why don’t you come with me?” the woman said to her mother. “We can go to my office.”
Her mother nodded.
“Will you wait for us here?” the woman asked, smiling at Gracie at last.
I knew it! she thought.
Gracie smiled back at the woman and nodded her head. She had nothing to fear from the woman in white.
Her mother left the room without another word.
I hope she doesn’t need a shot, Gracie thought—though she knew by then that a shot couldn’t sour her mother’s mood much more than it already was.
BY ONE O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, AND TWO small puddles of urine later, Cassy was settled into a conference room at her mother’s offices. Russet was sitting in her lap, his furry chin resting on the arm of her swivel chair. Cassy combed her fingers through the soft crown at the top of his head.
She’d be happy to sit like this for a very long time.
There was a knock at the door, and the puppy sat up tall.
The two of them—dog and girl alike—stared, wide-eyed, at the homely stranger who was ushered in, summoned there from God-knows-where by her mother’s trusty lieutenant, Ruth—a middle-aged woman of deep complaint, with a busy career and not much else to occupy her time.
“This is Pete Peters,” Ruth said by way of introduction, wrinkling her nose at the silly name. “He’s supposed to be the best dog trainer in town.” It was no compliment though, not the way Ruth said it, with all her skepticism seeping out.
And right in front of him too, Cassy thought.
Ruth closed the door behind her as she left.
To Pete’s credit, he acted as if he hadn’t heard a thing. He let the rudeness roll right off. It may have been what made him the best. That, she thought, and his poor, poor face—which only a dog could love. It was deeply pitted with acne scars, and topped off with a massive nose. His skin seemed to be stretched a little tighter than it ought to be.
Maybe it’s the scarring? Cassy wondered.
It looked painful to her, in any event.
Pete shook her hand firmly and nodded pleasantly.
He was about her age, she decided—somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-six. Cassy liked to keep track.
“So who do we have here?” Pete asked, smiling brightly and crouching down low, homing in on the puppy in Cassy’s
lap.
She offered the dog up gingerly, as if he were made of spun sugar—her thumbs and forefingers wrapped lightly around his middle, those little legs dangling down. Cassy was afraid of hurting him.
“Let me show you how to pick him up,” Pete said, sounding genial.
He held the dog’s stomach firmly in one hand, and let its bottom rest in the palm of the other. “He’s more comfortable like this,” Pete said, matter-of-fact, and smiling still.
Cassy had to admit, the dog looked happier with him. Maybe this wasn’t going to work out after all?
“So what’s his name?” Pete asked, handing the dog back to her.
Cassy was surprised.
She’d assumed that her failure to hold the dog properly would mean a suspension, for the time being anyway, of any further dog-holding privileges.
Pete wasn’t her mother, she supposed.
“He’s called Russet,” she said, smiling back at him—holding the puppy correctly this time.
“Rusty,” Pete called, in a lively voice, having misheard her, apparently.
But Cassy preferred that name, in fact—less precious, she thought—and the little dog did too, snapping his head up when Pete called it out.
“Look,” he said. “Rusty knows his name.”
“And he’s only had it since the morning,” Cassy replied. She was only too happy to join into the fantasy of her dog’s prodigious intelligence.
“He’s a poodle,” he asked her, “right?”
“I think so,” Cassy replied, nodding her head hopefully. In truth, she hadn’t the faintest idea.
Pete gazed back at her, his brow furrowed quizzically.
Cassy felt chastened again.
“Well, of course it’s a poodle,” she said, tilting her head and smiling back, as if she’d been making a little joke. Most people would know what kind of dog they have, she supposed.
Pete walked back toward the swivel chair.
Cassy felt a flash of fear.
Was he going to take the dog away from her again, just because she hadn’t known its breed? She held its soft body a little tighter.
Pete leaned in and scratched the puppy beneath its furry shoulders. “Hey, little poodle,” he sang, his voice so calm and low.
Rusty responded immediately: stretching his front legs long and sliding them forward on Cassy’s thighs, reaching his skinny bottom straight up into the air.
“Look!” she said. “It’s Downward Dog!”
Her puppy knew yoga, it turned out.
“Where do you think the name came from?” Pete asked with a grin.
They were like a little family almost, she thought—a doting mommy and daddy, a pretty baby boy. Cassy looked all around the conference room as if to shake herself awake. She marveled at the persistence of such ludicrous fantasies in the face of her own family life, not to mention the three thousand photos of Emma on the wall, a persistent reminder if ever there was one.
The conference room they were sitting in was her favorite one, by far: just two walls of glass, with crisp white Sheetrock on either side. It was barely twelve feet square, only room enough for a wooden table and four conference chairs, the obligatory pictures of her mother on the wall—all in matching frames, of course. The room looked onto the executive suite on one side, and the great outdoors on the other, a quiet side street on the Upper East Side.
Her mother’s operation took up an entire limestone mansion.
Through the outer pane of glass, Cassy looked down to the street. She admired the pretty town houses across the way.
Still, most people complained about this conference room. Like sitting in a fishbowl, they said, with its wall of windows right onto the hallway. It was the last to be booked generally, but it was always Cassy’s very first choice, nestled between her own small office and her mother’s Winter Palace, right next door.
That’s probably another reason people don’t like it, she thought: the proximity to Emma’s lair.
Cassy hadn’t seen her mother all day. She’d been looking for her too.
Her mother was the reason she’d dressed up that morning. All in dove gray, from head to toe, a chic silk blouse that was just right for her coloring—a sea of pale neutral to set off her shiny brown hair.
She knew her mother would approve.
Cassy wanted to make it up to her for the fracas she’d caused the night before: her rudeness at the table, and the pall she’d cast. She wouldn’t skate away scot-free, of course. There’d be consequences to pay for ruining her mother’s dinner. So she dressed herself up as nicely as she could, and came into the office not so terribly late, ready to fulfill her duties as head of the Emma Sutton Charitable Foundation.
Cassy heard a knock at the door.
She straightened her collar right away, preparing herself for her mother’s gaze, but it was only Ruth again, with a tray in her arms: a pitcher of coffee and a plate of those anise biscuits that Cassy liked so much.
It was another reason she liked this conference room so well: her mother’s fawning underlings. Emma might not give her the time of day, but her employees sure as hell did, swarming all around her like a hive full of bees, buzzing in and out, attentive to her every need.
Ruth set the tray on the conference table.
“Everything okay?” she asked. She sounded just as skeptical as before.
Cassy nodded. She thanked her too.
“Want to get down to work?” Pete asked.
Cassy wouldn’t have minded a coffee and a few of those anise biscuits first. “Sure,” she said as she watched Pete unzip his silvery backpack and pull all manner of strange equipment out. He looked like a magician with a pair of mourning doves and twelve long feet of fluttering chiffon. There was a brown leather strap with a shiny brass buckle, and a matching leash with a topstitched loop; a tangled web of black nylon straps; and a ziplock bag filled to the gills with what looked—to Cassy anyway—like dried-up pieces of poo, brown and wafery thin.
Rusty perked up at the sight of it.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Beef lung,” Pete told her, very matter-of-fact.
“The lung of an actual cow?” she asked.
Cassy had never imagined such a thing.
“Air dried,” he told her—just one of several preparations. “Do you mind?” he asked, extending the bag toward her.
Cassy backed away slightly. She didn’t know precisely what he intended to do with those lung bits, but she nodded her head anyway.
Pete broke a small triangle from a larger piece of lung. Then he crouched down to Rusty, who gobbled it fast.
Cassy could hear it crackling in his mouth.
Like potato chips, she thought.
“You’re hungry,” Pete said, “aren’t you, boy?”—ruffling the top of Rusty’s head. The dog stared back at him intently. It was obvious to Cassy that the little thing was desperate for more.
“So what have you been feeding him?” Pete asked.
Cassy felt a flash of panic. She’d shared a slice of toast with him that morning, and a little bit of cheese. She knew that couldn’t be the right answer though, so she settled on vagueness instead. “I didn’t have any dog food at the apartment,” she told him. “So I fed him what was in the fridge.”
She looked up at Pete to survey the damage, but she didn’t see any on his homely face.
“Was I wrong?” she asked, bracing for the worst.
“Of course not,” Pete said. “Dogs have lived on table scraps for hundreds of years.”
Cassy felt a wave of relief as she watched him break off a much larger piece of lung and hold it out to the dog.
She appreciated his tact.
“There’s a great pet store just a block or two away,” he said. “We can get everything you need there.”
Cassy began to get the picture: Pete wasn’t going to criticize her for being a lousy pet owner—no matter how lousy she turned out to be.
Not to my face anyway, she
thought.
Cassy rarely trusted a generous impulse, especially one directed toward herself. He probably keeps more clients this way, she thought, rolling her eyes as if she’d seen straight through him.
She watched Pete fasten a collar around the dog’s skinny neck, and the collar, in turn, to a leather leash. “We should practice walking on lead,” he said, “before we head down to the street.”
She nodded back at him.
He made a show of lacing the leash around his long fingers.
She could tell that she was meant to be studying his method for later use. He has beautiful hands, she thought—at least. She peeked up again at his scarred face.
“Let’s go, Rusty,” he called, a little singsong in his voice, as if they were headed to the candy store. Pete began to walk around the conference table, and the little dog went willingly at first, only balking after a few steps more and looking up at Pete—a little aggrieved, it seemed to her.
The trainer flicked the leash gently, but Rusty refused to take another step. The dog sat decidedly down.
Pete flicked the leash again—to no avail.
“We’ll try later,” he said, bending down to unclip the leash from Rusty’s collar.
The puppy ran straight to Cassy the moment he was free.
She smiled at the odd little gait, that funny, hopping run—every step nearly as high as it was long. She felt proud of the puppy’s return to her too.
“Look,” she said, taking the dog onto her lap again. “Rusty loves me.”
“That’s not love,” Pete replied. “That’s just running away from the leash.”
Cassy supposed he had a point.
“Believe me,” he told her, with confidence to spare, “after two or three weeks of treating him right, that’s when you’ll really begin to love Rusty, and that’s when he’ll be loving you back.”
Cassy felt her stomach lurch. Still, she looked at the trainer as if she weren’t impressed, as if she already knew how the whole world worked.
AFTER THEY LEFT THE FREE CLINIC, TINA BROUGHT Gracie back to school. She’d planned on a full day off for both of them, but she was too upset by what she’d read in Gracie’s file. She needed to address the charge right away.
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