Blindsided

by Karis Walsh

  “I’ll do it,” she said to Lenae as her face was bathed in doggy kisses.

  Chapter Eight

  Cara ran through her house, tossing articles of clothing over her shoulder and dumping them in whatever closet she reached first. She stacked books and loose papers along the walls of her living room and shoved an armload of expensive film gear into the pantry, silently praying that nothing had broken in the process and that none of her hastily formed stacks would collapse. She did a quick walk-through from her front door to the living room and into the guest bathroom, to be certain nothing would be in the way of Lenae and Baxter’s path as they moved around her house. She moved her coffee table closer to the couch—within easy reach for Lenae—and shoved her old recliner away a few feet to make a path wide enough for a person and a large retriever walking side-by-side.

  Once she was finished with her haphazard cleaning, she collapsed on her chair for a few minutes’ rest before Lenae arrived. She didn’t even have approval for getting a puppy yet, and she was already feeling the strain of yet another obligation. Her morning had been filled with meetings—a production meeting for her show and a staff meeting for her seminar at Evergreen. Both had required hours of preparation and had resulted in more hours of work to be done. She simply didn’t have time to have Lenae scrutinizing her life and home. She had let her emotions get in the way of sound decision-making, succumbing to Pickwick’s charms and the foolish desire to impress Lenae. Now her life was going to be turned upside down—pending Lenae’s approval, of course—and her dad would believe she should be indebted to him for advancing her career.

  Although she had spontaneously volunteered to puppy walk, Lenae hadn’t been easy to convince. She had insisted Cara go through the whole process, from application to home visit, before they could go forward with the project. Cara didn’t mind the formality of the procedure—after all, her decision had been more about Lenae’s center and Pickwick than about the news segment—but she had a feeling Lenae would be even more vigilant with her than with a normal applicant. Cara was used to people assuming she was as two-dimensional as her television persona, but she still resented it.

  “Yuk,” Cara said as she pulled herself out of the comfortable chair when she heard a knock on the door. Home was private. A place where she could be herself, with no cameras or need to perform. Now her dad’s expectations for her career and Lenae’s stringent requirements for the role of puppy walker were invading her space. She opened the door, expecting to need all her acting skills to get through the interview, but her genuine pleasure at the sight of Lenae and Baxter was almost as disturbing as her dread of the visit had been.

  “Hi, Lenae,” she said, stepping back and holding the door wide open. “Hey, Baxter. Come on in. Let me take your jacket, Lenae. Can I get you some coffee?”

  Cara paused in her chattering long enough to inhale deeply as she hung Lenae’s coat near the door. Chanel and the dusty smell of fresh rain. A few gold hairs clung to the denim, and Cara hoped they belonged to Baxter and not some other woman. None of her business. She cleared her throat and led Baxter and Lenae into her living room.

  “Coffee would be nice, thank you,” Lenae said. She sat on the couch and Baxter immediately lay down over her feet. “It’s chillier than I expected today.”

  Cara poured two mugs and brought them into the room. She took part in the idle chitchat about the drizzly weather and how Lenae took her coffee—black and sweet—while most of her thoughts were concentrated on the unfamiliar experience of having guests in her home. She had been paying attention to the visual aspects of her house during her frantic cleanup just prior to Lenae’s visit, but now she felt her senses expand. She heard the background whirr of the heater and the occasional car outside. The smell of damp dog combined with coffee and Lenae’s subtle perfume somehow warmed her house more than the heater did. Cara itched to slide her hands over Lenae’s jeans, the same rough denim as her jacket, and over the silky material of her gray shirt. Cara’s world seemed to broaden when she was around Lenae.

  “This is a quiet neighborhood,” Lenae said.

  Quiet was relative. Cara heard every creak inside the house and every movement on the street outside. “The street is safe for kids and pets, plus I have a fenced yard. It’s tiny, but puppy proof.”

  Lenae felt for the table in front of her. Cara had placed a coaster within easy reach, and Lenae set her mug on it. She didn’t like going into other people’s unfamiliar homes where she was out of her element and exposed if anything had been carelessly left in her way, but she had discovered how important it was to get a sense of the homes where her puppies and dogs would live. No matter how much a person cleaned, they couldn’t erase the atmosphere of their house. Lenae might not trust her instincts in most situations anymore, but she was confident in her ability to feel a household’s kindness or lack of it.

  “Can you give me a tour?” she asked. Normally she’d stay put when on a home visit, but she was interested in getting to know the rest of Cara’s home. For reasons entirely too personal for comfort. Cara was an enigma. Lenae had formed assumptions about her, based on her reported looks and her career, but the house didn’t support them. Lenae felt its coldness…no, not coldness. Emptiness. She had been expecting to sense the echoed memory of wild parties, but Cara seemed almost nervous, as if she was unaccustomed to having visitors.

  “Of course.”

  Lenae stood up. She heard a clunk—Cara’s mug hitting the table?—and the rustling sounds of her getting out of her seat, and she expected Cara to grab her arm like most people did in similar situations.

  “Right this way,” Cara said instead, moving away from Lenae and letting Baxter do his job. Lenae followed with relief.

  “This is the guest bathroom. It’s tastefully furnished in blues and greens, with a seashell motif. Thanks to my mother who apparently didn’t approve of the roll of paper towels I had in there instead of guest towels when she first visited. And down here is a spare room that I use as an office. You and Baxter are free to explore in there if you want, but I might have to send a search party in to find you. The floor is covered with old textbooks and cameras.”

  “We’ll just appreciate it from the doorway.” Lenae laughed as Baxter stood in front of her legs as if blocking her way into the room. “Baxter doesn’t want me to go in.”

  “Smart dog,” Cara said. “He knows his limitations. I haven’t ventured in there since last semester. I’ll keep this door closed if Pickwick comes here.”

  “Good idea,” Lenae agreed. She had been determined to fully vet Cara before she gave her a puppy, but she could already imagine him there with Cara. Crowding out the loneliness she sensed within the walls.

  “Now we’ll go back through the living room,” Cara said. Baxter eagerly followed her on the short walk to the now-familiar room. “Please keep your arms and legs on the path at all times. I cleared enough space for you and Baxter to walk, but that means everything from the floor is now piled along the walls.”

  Lenae tentatively put her hand out to her side and felt an uneven and wobbly stack of thick books. She heard Cara’s snort of laughter.

  “Were you always this way? If someone says Don’t touch that, do you have to touch it? You must have been a handful for your parents.”

  Lenae smiled. “I’m too curious for my own good, sometimes.” Her mother had never wanted her to feel she was at a disadvantage, but even so, Lenae knew she had tried her mom’s patience with her relentless need to be independent. She was here to learn about Cara, though, not to talk about herself. Unfortunately, she liked what she was learning, far too much. Cara could easily have lied and said her house was perfectly cleaned and organized, but she was willing to laugh at herself and admit to the truth.

  Lenae wanted to linger when they came to Cara’s bedroom. She wanted to ask about the color scheme and to feel the sheets and pillows that Cara slept on each night. She was getting too involved for her own good, and she needed to distance hersel
f from the growing attraction she felt to Cara—not just to the tangible qualities of voice and scent and energy, but now to her polite respect for Lenae’s space, her honesty, and her self-deprecating humor.

  Once they were back in the living room, Lenae pulled out a packet of information from her bag. “Let’s talk about your responsibilities now,” she said, giving up all pretense of screening Cara and burying her own reaction to the home visit under a load of detailed and objective information. She managed to talk without pause, and without emotion, engulfing them both in a cloud of data until it was time for her and Baxter to go.

  *

  Cara dropped into her recliner again after Lenae left. She raised the footrest and settled back in the chair, trying to ignore the pages strewn across her coffee table, full of information about feeding Pickwick and cleaning his ears and trimming his nails. She was surprised Lenae hadn’t explained how to dial the phone in case of an emergency. But she seemed to have passed the test since Lenae had set a time for Des to come and inspect her house before Pickwick was delivered to her. She jabbed at the stack of information with her foot. This new job was going to be a lot of work, but she had liked having a dog around the house today.

  She had liked having Lenae here, too, when she was smiling and friendly. But just like before, as quickly as flipping off a radio, Lenae had changed from friendly and open to detached and severely businesslike. Cara had a feeling the first was the real person, but she couldn’t get that Lenae to settle down and stay for long. Cara smiled. She wanted the poised Lenae to break into out-of-tune singing again. She had a year ahead with Lenae and Pickwick—maybe she’d get to hear another song.

  Chapter Nine

  Cara turned off Highway 101 and wound through the tall firs on her way to Evergreen State College. Pickwick sat next to her on the passenger seat and gnawed on the seat-belt buckle. Cara gently pushed his nose away and offered him a chew toy instead, but before she could get her hand back on the steering wheel, he was back to work on the plastic buckle. Cara sighed and added How to stop him from chewing on inappropriate items? to her growing list of questions for her first puppy-walking class with Lenae. She had been told the basics—teach general good manners and commands like sit and stay—but she wasn’t sure how to instill positive habits in Pickwick or, more importantly, how to discourage the negative ones.

  At least Pickwick had been welcomed at the college without hesitation. Although Cara had followed a formal educational path, from a double major in communications and drama at the University of Washington to her graduate degree from Columbia, she reveled in the nontraditional collaborative and interdisciplinary approach at Evergreen. Students were encouraged to design their own curriculum, drawing on diverse fields of study, and most classes were team taught. This term, Cara was leading a seminar called Rooted in Place. Along with professors from the media arts, sociology, and cultural studies departments, she had planned a course of study that explored cultural and familial roots and influences. The class would culminate in a student-made film about the particular stories of each person in the seminar. This was the first course she had created—from inception to reading list to syllabus—and she was anxious to meet her students and get started on the project she had been planning for months.

  Cara waggled the chew toy at Pickwick again, hoping to deter him from the buckle, but he wasn’t interested in the squeaky duck. She tossed it in the backseat as she drove to the lower parking lot and stopped in a corner spot. She wasn’t sure whether having Pickwick along and facing the certain excitement he’d bring to the class would help on her first day as team leader or not, but he would be her partner for the next year or more. Everywhere she went, he would go.

  How the hell had she ended up puppy walking? Did she really volunteer for something so important merely in a knee-jerk reaction to Lenae’s assumptions about her? Her entire response to Lenae, from the physical to the emotional, was complex.

  She sighed. At least Des had been helpful. He had crawled around the floor of her small house, claiming he was trying to get a puppy’s-eye view of the place. He had pointed out everything Pickwick might chew on or grab or mangle. Cara had thought he was being overly paranoid until she accidentally left her two-hundred-dollar running shoes on the floor of her bedroom. Pickwick had made sure they would never run again, and Cara had learned not to leave anything in what Des had called puppy space, until Pickwick was older.

  Cara snapped the leash on Pickwick’s collar, straightened his navy blue guide-dog-in-training cape, and got out of the car. Luckily, he wasn’t supposed to walk at heel since he’d eventually be expected to walk in front of his handler. Cara didn’t think she’d ever have been able to teach him to heel. He darted from bush to tree to person, often tangling her in his leash as he zigged and zagged. He greeted everyone, whether they looked like a dog person or not, and he seemed able to win over the crankiest people. Cara now automatically added an extra half-hour to every outing since she had to stop frequently to answer questions about Pickwick or to wait while he was adored by his numerous fans. It was bound to get worse once they started filming the news segments, and the pair of them became recognizable.

  Cara made her way across campus at Pickwick speed. For as much as the pup ran and darted around, he didn’t make much forward progress at all. She had brought him with her once before, when she had needed to find a reference book in the library, and he seemed to love the campus as much as she did. It was dog friendly, with plenty of grassy spaces and greenery. The college seemed to be growing out of the forest around it. On her first visit, Cara had thought the stark buildings out of place, with their plain gray-and-red concrete and sharp angles. Less organic than the natural wood and softer shapes she had expected. But the low-lying squares and rectangles, molded as if part of the earth and hiding among ferns and fallen oak trees, soon grew on her. They were something ancient and modern at the same time. A hidden civilization, with innovative attitudes.

  Cara waited while Pickwick peed on an industrial-looking metal sculpture, then led him into the communications building. He trotted along the rust-colored carpet, stopping to sniff something every few yards, only to return to her side and look up at her with his tongue lolling out of his mouth and a happy expression on his face. She couldn’t help but smile back at him. The first few days of puppy guardianship had been hectic and overwhelming as she’d figured out how to coexist with a dog that seemed at least half beaver. She had been annoyed by her dad’s smug attitude as he congratulated himself on talking her and Lenae into following his scheme. But Cara could admit the truth: her motivation had nothing to do with her own publicity and everything to do with a desire to promote Lenae’s center. And, okay, she was irritated by Lenae’s insinuation that she didn’t have the integrity needed to do the job well.

  But aside from all the vexations, she had already grown accustomed to Pickwick’s presence in her life. She had woken up with a start the first evening when Pickwick jumped on her bed. Instead of insisting he go back to the soft cushion she had placed on the floor by her bedside, she had let him spin in a circle a few times before he curled in a ball at her side. The rhythm of puppy snores had soothed her into a deep sleep. The house was warmer with another being inside it. Pickwick didn’t care how she looked or who her family was—he just seemed to adore her without reservation or ulterior motive.

  Cara spent some time Pickwick proofing her office before she gathered her notes and books and set off down the hallway to one of the small seminar rooms. When she had last checked, twelve students had signed up for the course. She got to her assigned room fifteen minutes early, and she settled Pickwick on his favorite blanket with some food and water before she opened her briefcase and pulled out her notes and syllabi.

  The students filed in soon after. They noticed Pickwick immediately, of course, since he insisted on greeting each one, but Cara waited until the entire class had assembled before she explained why he was in class with her.

  “Welcome
to Rooted in Place,” she said as she handed a syllabus and reading list to each student. She had hoped to see a familiar face or two in the room, but she hadn’t had any of these kids in previous classes. “I’m Cara Bradley, but more important, this is Pickwick. I’m puppy walking him for the McIntyre Training Center, and he’ll be with me for the next year or more. If any of you have questions about the program, I’m glad to either answer them or refer you to Lenae McIntyre. She’s always looking for willing volunteers.”

  Cara said the last sentence with a creepy expression, while rubbing her hands together as if Lenae was really looking for victims, not volunteers. She got the laugh she wanted from the gesture, and the subsequent relaxation in her presence. A few of the students asked about the guide-dog training and she answered as well as she could, given her limited experience.

  “I have my first puppy-walking class tomorrow night because I need training even more than Pickwick does. I’ll share what I learn with you each week. Any more questions about guide dogs before we start class?”

  One student raised her hand and, at Cara’s nod, asked, “It’d be fun to help, but I couldn’t commit to a whole year of volunteering since I graduate soon. Is there anything I can do while I’m still here?”

  Cara ran quickly through the alphabet before she remembered the girl’s name. “I appreciate the offer, Nancy. I’m sure there’d be a way for you to help the center, but I’ll check with Lenae to get some suggestions.”

  Another question on her growing list of them. Cara had conflicting feelings about seeing Lenae again. Lenae was attractive, but there was more appeal to her than looks. She was intelligent and dedicated, but she seemed to assume Cara was neither of those things. Cara didn’t need to prove herself to anyone, so why did she care what Lenae thought of her? At least Pickwick gave her a way to be around Lenae without getting too personal, and without examining her own feelings too much. She’d have her hands full with his training and with all the information she needed to get from Lenae. Cara picked up Pickwick, who had jumped into her chair, and took her fountain pen out of his mouth before setting him on the floor and starting class.