by J. D. Robb
“Benny!” I said. “Bruf!”
“Let’s eat,” he said, and we ran down to dinner.
“How about Gumball?”
“Gumball!” Hysterical laughter.
“Or . . . Falafel?”
Benny blew milk out of his nose.
“Easy,” Sam said, chuckling, handing him his napkin. “Hey, I know. She sticks to you—we could call her Velcro.”
Another laugh attack. “Or Glue!” Benny drummed his feet against his chair.
Under the table, I was having mixed feelings. On one hand, it was nice to be the center of attention, plus every now and then Benny dropped a piece of French bread on the floor; much better than Purina Dog Chow. But on the other hand, these name suggestions were ridiculous. Benny’s were worse than Sam’s—Jezebel, Caramba, Muffin, Baloney. Be serious! I wanted to tell them. I don’t want to go through life called Hairy-et.
Benny got sidetracked and started telling Sam about school supplies he needed for the first day of first grade, which crayons, what kind of colored pencils. I’d been looking forward to that shopping trip since spring. Now I wouldn’t even get to take him to school. Soon, though, the conversation swerved back to what to name the dog.
“Blunderbuss,” Benny snorted, swaying in his seat, overcome with his cleverness. “Blinderbluss. Bladdabladda. Bliddablidda. Bliddabladdabliddabl—”
“Hey, I have an idea,” Sam said seriously. About time he settled Benny down. If he got revved up this close to bedtime, he couldn’t fall asleep for hours. “How about if we call her Sonoma?”
Sonoma. I crawled out from under the table. That’s not bad.
“Sonoma?” Benny said. “Why?”
“Because that’s where we were when we hit her. Georgetown and Sonoma Road.”
They looked at me. I looked at them. “Sonoma,” they said together. “Do you like it?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” said Benny.
Me, too.
Good thing they didn’t hit me on Roosevelt.
“One more, Daddy, please? Just one more, I promise.”
That’s what he said after the last story. This was new behavior; Benny was a pretty good sleeper, rarely had histrionics at bedtime, would often drift off in the middle of the first chapter. From my spot at the bottom of the bed, I could see he was exhausted, hear it in his croaky voice.
Sam sighed. “Hey, buddy,” he said gently, closing the book. “We talked about this before, remember? What we said?”
“Yeah.”
“What did we say?”
“I can go to sleep.”
“You can go to sleep . . . and what?”
“Wake up.”
“That’s right.”
“Not like Mom.”
Oh, no.
“Right. You can let yourself fall asleep, and in the morning you’ll wake up—what?”
“Bigger, better, and stronger.”
“That’s right. Brand-new day.” He gave Benny a soft kiss on the forehead. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. You sleep tight, Benster. Love you.”
“Love you. Can Sonoma stay with me?”
“Nope.” Sam stood up and slapped his thigh—my cue to leave. I considered my options. Jumped off the bed.
“Leave the light on, okay? And the door open!”
“Don’t I always?”
That ritual was familiar to me: hall light on, bedroom door ajar; Benny was afraid of the dark. Afraid of falling asleep because he might not wake up? That killed me. I wanted to cry, but all that came out was a high, whining sound in the back of my throat as I followed Sam down the steps. He thought it meant I had to go to the bathroom, and took me outside.
The red nylon leash not only annoyed me—where did he think I was going to go?—it also made it harder to do my business in private. Silly, maybe, but I was not going to squat in front of my husband. I managed by sidling around a gap in the Hortons’ privet hedge next door, out of view. A particularly good spot because it was between two streetlights and therefore dark, or as dark as our suburban Bethesda neighborhood ever got.
How wonderful to be back, even under these, the most peculiar circumstances imaginable. I was feeling a kind of excitement that went beyond the fact that I was home again. The smells! I could even see better than usual, which was odd, considering that in daylight I saw slightly less well. Maybe it was because I had such big pupils. Whatever—everything was incredibly sharp and interesting and I could not get enough of the smells. Feral, musky, smoky, dusty—my vocabulary would run out before I could name them all. Anyway, it didn’t matter if I was sniffing a “squirrel”; I could only concentrate on that spicy-dirty smell, the essence of “squirrel.” I could flare my nostrils, inhale, and taste it on the roof of my mouth, the back of my tongue, all the way down my throat and into my vitals. And it was fascinating.
The phone was ringing when we got home.
“Hi, Delia,” Sam said, and I skidded to a stop on my way to the kitchen for a drink of water. My sister! “We went this afternoon, yeah. Well . . . not much change, I guess. No. Although sometimes I swear she can hear me.”
Sam carried the phone to the living room sofa and sat down. “Right. I know . . . Right.”
These long pauses while Delia talked were driving me crazy. What’s she saying? I jumped up next to Sam—who reacted as if I’d thrown up on him, leaping to his feet, sweeping me to the floor one-handed. Sheesh.
“Well, we just keep hoping. No change on the scale, the nurse said today. They call it the Glasgow Coma Scale. It evaluates . . . Right. So nothing new there, apparently, which you can look at . . . Right, exactly.”
More silence on Sam’s end. Frustration! I put my hands—I mean my front paws—on the arm of the sofa and slowly, slowly raised myself. He had the phone to his other ear, though; I could hear Delia’s voice but not her words.
“I played it for her today. Well . . .” He laughed. “Not, uh, not to the naked eye. I’m sure, though, deep inside she was boogying.”
Delia’s mix tape. I remembered now; I’d heard snatches of it, but thought I was dreaming. Our favorites from high school—“Love Shack,” “Vogue,” “Losing My Religion.” Sweet Delia.
She lives in Philadelphia with her growing family. She must’ve visited me in the hospital and rehab, and yet I couldn’t quite remember it. So much of that time passed in a dream state, some gray twilight zone between being and not being. I saw myself as if from a great height, and the connection between the two me’s would be strong one moment, tenuous as a paper-clip chain the next.
“Hey, that would be great. Sure, either weekend is fine. Whichever’s better for you guys. You can always stay here, you know. Plenty of room; it’s just . . . the two of us. Well, whatever’s easier. That’s fine.”
More talk on her end. When was she coming?
“I’m okay. You know. Yeah. Well, that, too. I’ve put the cabin on the market.”
What? Oh, no.
“Yeah, it’s a terrible time, but I couldn’t see a choice. The bills . . . you can’t believe. Insurance, sure, but not enough. Nowhere near. Thanks. Thanks, but we’re okay.”
Oh, Sam. Not the cabin. And not now, right after we bought it. You’ll lose all the closing costs, the mortgage fee—thank goodness there was no prepayment penalty—and you’ll have to pay them again, the buyer’s and the seller’s closing costs. Oh, this was terrible.
“I’m looking now. I’ve already started,” Sam was saying. Looking for what? “Tomorrow, in fact, I’ve got a . . . Yeah. Oh, something will turn up. Um, he’s all right, basically. No, I don’t tell him that. No, I keep it . . . Right, very hopeful. But the longer this goes on, the less chance . . .” Sam rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “He starts school in three weeks, so that’s . . . Yeah. A good distraction. Oh, he’d love that, thanks, Delia. And how are you? And Jerry and the kids . . . ?”
More frustrating pauses. I padded around the room, unable to settle, until Sam hung up. Then I
sat at his feet, the perfect dog. Minutes passed before he even saw me. “I forgot to tell her about you.”
I noticed.
Half smiling, he put his hand under my chin. I turned my head and pressed my cheek into his palm. With my eyes closed, it felt as if I were absorbing his sadness, taking it into a place in myself where it couldn’t hurt him as much. Was this what dogs did? And what I gave back, what I exchanged his sadness for, was simply love.
He took his hand away and stared. His eyes were alert, puzzled.
Sam. Sam, it’s me, Laurie. I put a paw on his knee, not letting him look away. Do you see me? Help me. Rescue me. For an instant, I swear he knew.
But then time moved, “reality” returned, and he laughed—uneasily—and gave a tug on my ear. “Come on, Sonoma. Bedtime.”
In the kitchen? I couldn’t believe it. He wanted me to lie down on the brand-n ew, corduroy-covered dog bed he’d bought on the way home from the vet’s that still smelled of the plastic wrap it came in. Pew. He gave me a few per functory pats and stood up. So did I. We went through that a few times—“No, lie down, lie down. That’s it. Good girl”—until I gave up. And then, then, he turned out the light and closed the swinging kitchen door. Didn’t even leave a radio on for me.
I waited for about half an hour, listening to Sam upstairs in the bathroom, then the creaks and cracks of the house settling, the next-door neighbor smoking his last cigarette on his screen porch, the occasional car purring by. I even heard Sam turn his bedside lamp off—amazing. He’s a good sleeper and he conks out fast; I waited ten more minutes. Then I nosed the door open and escaped.
Treading quickly on the rugs, carefully on the hardwood so my toenails wouldn’t clack. New instincts were kicking in. I felt like a huntress.
That earthy, humid, little-boy smell in Benny’s room was stronger than ever, as if it had been fermenting in the dark. Bath time must be in the morning under Sam’s regime. I went to the source, creeping onto my son’s low bed with such grace and precision, he never stirred. As usual, he’d thrown his covers off. He lay on his stomach, arms flung out as if he were flying. The soft, quick sound of his breathing kept time with my heartbeat. I wanted to taste him, lick all the skin his hiked-up pjs exposed, but settled for discreet snuffling, deep, silent inhales of his calves, his feet, the delicious back of his neck. I settled myself along the length of his leg, touching as much of him with as much of me as possible. And guarded him.
Time passed—I didn’t know how much. The numbers on Benny’s Spider-M an clock ran together; I couldn’t make sense of them. Sometime deep in the night, I gave him a last nose caress and crept out of his room.
Into Sam’s. Where the smells were much subtler but equally intriguing. More so, in their way. Our bed was higher than Benny’s. I put my front paws on the foot of the mattress and cautiously raised myself so I could see Sam. For a long time I just watched him, asleep on his back, one arm over his eyes. The sheet covered half of his bare chest; under it he’d have on his running shorts—his summer pajamas. In the light from the streetlamp his skin looked hard and bluish pale, like marble. God, I’d missed him. I missed him right now. Quiet as a ninja, I got all four feet on the bed and curled up on my wide, empty side of it in the smallest ball I could manage. And fell into the second-deepest sleep of my life.
I’m sealed in icy water, trying not to breathe. If I breathe, I’ll die. Darkness is closing in. I can see only through a narrowing tunnel. I flail my limbs, knowing it’s useless, unwise, but the fear is too strong. Help me! (Did this happen? Is it real?) When I can’t bear it any longer, my mouth opens and I suck in—water. Panic devours me. I scream, but there’s no sound because there’s no breath. I have one last clear thought: This is so stupid. The last emotion is fury—I kick, I punch, I push—
“What the hell?”
I wake up.
Back to the kitchen. I didn’t protest. Bad dog, caught in the act. Sam was so groggy, I couldn’t tell if he was mad or amused because his new dog had kicked him awake. Except for “What the hell?” he had nothing to say. But he made his point when, after closing the kitchen door on me, he pulled a dining room chair in front of it.
I see now that there was still a part of me that believed this whole thing was a hallucination. It died a tragic death when Sam dragged that chair in front of the door. This isn’t funny anymore, I thought. I have got to get out of this. The fact that I had no idea what “this” was didn’t daunt me. I had spent my first and last day as a dog. Tomorrow: liberation.
I figured out where we were going on our walk when we got to the bottom of York Lane and turned right on Custer Road. Monica Carr’s house. Benny and her twins were the same age, and they played well together. When I had been working (which was most of the time) and Sam had had something urgent to do (which was not very often), Monica was good about taking Benny, even on short notice. Monica was pretty good about everything, truthfully. I would hate to think that’s why I had never much liked her.
“Morning!” she called from the doorway of the renovated two-story brick colonial she got to keep in the divorce, waving, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “My goodness, who’s that?” Me, she meant. Benny dropped Sam’s hand and ran toward her, already launched on a complicated explanation of the origins of his new dog. “Ethan, Justin, Benny’s here!” Monica called back into the house. And then she squatted down in her skintight biking shorts and put her arms around Benny and kissed him, and he stopped talking long enough to hug her back.
What? What?
Ethan and Justin were adorable, two blond-haired angels with mischievous senses of humor and hilarious laughs. When they saw me, they fell all over me, thrilled and fearless. What fun children were! Human toys. Benny started the Sonoma saga over again for their benefit. Ethan and Justin always made me soften toward Monica; she must be doing something right, I’d think, usually after some less charitable assessment. But the truth was, Monica did almost everything right, and I was just never saintly enough to find that endearing.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Their tones, Sam’s and Monica’s, pulled me up short. I stopped roughhousing with the boys and moved closer on my leash.
“How have you been, Sam?” Such sympathy she put in the simple question; it sounded like a caress. An extra caress, to go with the solicitous hand she had on his arm. “How are you holding up?” She tossed her head to shake the glossy black bangs out of her eyes. She smelled of delicate sweat, if there was such a thing, and also of cinnamon, yeast, something fruity . . . Raisin muffins, that was it. From scratch, of course, probably very high in fiber, and she’d made them either before or after her five-m ile morning jog. What time was it, eight? “Have you got a minute to come in? I have a coffee cake ready to come out of the oven.”
Coffee cake, same thing. Sam said he wished he could, but he was in a bit of a hurry, didn’t want to be late for his appointment. No, no, she agreed, it wouldn’t do to be late for that. What appointment? Nobody told me anything.
Monica offered to keep me as well as Benny, but Sam said no, thanks; that was nice of her, but Benny would be enough for her to handle. All three boys groaned their disappointment. I felt let down, too; I’d been looking forward to some time alone with Sam, but if he was going out anyway, I’d much rather have stayed at Monica’s with Benny. So much for what I wanted, though. “It’s a dog’s life”—I was never sure if that meant you had it hard or you had it easy. But it’s neither. It means you’re a slave, with no rights, no privileges. Why don’t dogs rise up and rebel? Instead they love us—that’s all they do. It’s a mystery.
I couldn’t believe it when Sam shut me out of the bathroom while he took his shower. Something else I’d been looking forward to was seeing him naked, although I hadn’t quite realized it until the opportunity was snatched away. At least he came out in his shorts, all clean skin and wet hair, smelling of soap, shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste. And at least he let me watch him get dressed. Ten years a
go, when we were first married, he had lots of suits, and he wore them to his job as an actuary in a large downtown insurance company. These days he was down to one suit and a few sport coats, and he rarely wore any of them. No need when his main job was to take care of Benny and his other job called for a tux.
He pulled on a T-shirt, then stepped into the pants of his dark blue suit and zipped up. Light blue shirt next (I assumed; it looked gray to me), followed by his navy paisley tie. His best black belt. What was this “appointment” he needed to get dressed up for? He combed a side part in his longish, streaky-blond hair, and that was a tip-off that wherever he was going, it had nothing to do with magic. Milo Marvelle wore his hair straight back from his handsome forehead, accentuating his sharp, dramatic features. Sam Summer was a good-l ooking man, but Milo Marvelle was a Master of Mystery.
He kept glancing at his watch. When he was nervous, he had a habit of pursing his lips and blowing air in and out of his cheeks. He stowed his wallet, change, comb, and handkerchief in various pockets, then took a long, scowling look at himself in the mirror over the bureau. “Million bucks,” I wanted so much to tell him. It was what we said to each other whenever we dressed up for something special. “Honey, you look like a million bucks.” Sam inhaled deeply, said, “Okay,” into the mirror, a one-word pep talk, and went out.
He closed me up in the kitchen again. “Just until we’re sure she’s housebroken,” he’d explained last night to Benny. What, I hadn’t proven myself yet? What did I have to do? Explode? “Be good,” he said, ruffling the hair behind my ear. You, too. I licked his wrist. Good luck. Drive carefully. I had the stupid dining room chair out of the way and the door open before I heard his car start.
I’d never noticed before, but there wasn’t a comfortable chair in my living room. Not one. I’d gone for modern when we bought the house, pleased with the new sleekness of leather, metal, and glass. Modern was sophisticated; modern meant professional, in control, and on the way up. Maybe so, but where do you sprawl out? No wonder Sam and Benny liked the den best (or the “away room” as we say in real estate). I used to keep the door to the den closed when we had company, as if hiding a mad relative. Now it was where I went after sampling all the slippery leather sectionals and the scary Eames recliner in the living room. The den even smelled better. Like people.