“Yeah, well … make sure nobody gets bit.” Montrel turned the headlamp off.
Inside the room, Shay led the dog to her bedside and said, “Lie down.”
The dog looked at her with curiosity, but made no move to lie down. “Sit,” she said. “Sit.” Nothing.
She sat on the bed herself, and the dog sat down, still watching. “Try lying down,” Emily said.
Shay put a pillow against the head of the bed and lay down, and what followed was a several-minute stare-down before the dog simply dropped onto his belly. His sharp yellow eye looked away from her and took in the surroundings, and his erect ears were cocked to catch any unexpected noise.
“Wait—I got something this boy is gonna love,” Emily said, and she darted into the outer room, dug through a chest full of junk, and came up with an old porcelain dog bowl that said DOG. She found a bottle of water by the bed, filled the bowl, and shoved it toward the dog.
The dog ignored it.
“Now what?” Shay asked.
Emily didn’t know. They sat without talking, and finally Emily said, “Screw this, I need a shower.” She gathered up her beauty supplies and headed out. With Emily gone and the room suddenly silent, Shay could hear the dog’s breathing, like he had emphysema or something. She looked up, feeling his eye on her like a burden.
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well,” she said.
The dog maintained his hard stare. Shay wasn’t ready to let go of first impressions, but now that they were alone, she considered him more closely: wolfish, but in reality, not nearly as large as a wolf, maybe eighty pounds. And not entirely gray, either: white socks on his front paws, a white shield on his chest, a Y of black like Magic Marker over either eye and down his nose. Shay suspected he was a German shepherd mix, or something crossed with one of those smiley-faced sled dogs, though this dog, when he wasn’t baring his teeth with ferocity, had a face so brooding it felt almost human.
“You got another name?” she asked quietly. “Is X okay?”
Still staring …
“Yeah, it’s no fun being an unknown value,” she said. The dog didn’t react; apparently he didn’t know algebra.
She stood up and stretched her sore arms and back, rolled some noisy cracks out of her neck. She hadn’t noticed his tail in much detail, either, and stepped around to see that it was long enough to curl around his hips and tipped with white fur.
“Ever felt happy enough to wag that thing?” she asked him quietly.
The dog dropped his chin on his white paws and let out a sigh, like he was thinking. After a while, he closed his eye, and Shay, dropping back on the bed, just let him be.
Later that night, after she’d showered, and when she was sure Emily was asleep, Shay looked at the thumb drives. She picked through them for the one that had the numeral 1 written on the side in silver ink. She plugged it into her laptop. The first thing that popped up was a password box, subdivided into small squares for letters or numbers or symbols, with instructions that said:
You always had a problem managing the rook ISH.
Answer:
Beneath the box was a warning:
After three unsuccessful tries, the drive will be destroyed.
A problem managing the rook ISH? Ever since they got their first laptops, Odin had loved sending his sister messages that took a password to unlock. A password generated from a kooky-sounding clue. It was a hedge against any of their foster parents reading their emails, and Odin, non-neurotypical guy that he was, had concocted some real brain twisters.
Shay counted thirty-four squares and groaned. A problem with the rook ISH? She didn’t have days to work out a puzzle—her brother was in trouble.
Shay lay down on the bed to think about possibilities. She guessed that rook might refer to chess—they’d both belonged to a junior high chess club—but what the heck did ISH stand for? They’d never really played that much chess together anyway, so what problem with a rook was he …
She crossed into sleep, without even a minute or two of fighting it. After the whales and Odin and the dog, biology simply called time.
Much later, she woke to a quiet slurping sound. She could hear Emily snoring lightly on the other side of the nightstand.
She sat up to locate the dog and the noise stopped. It took a moment for her eyes to focus, but then she saw him in the glow of the night-light, his tongue poked through the wire muzzle; he’d been lapping from the bowl, and now was looking at her with an expression Shay recognized as pure guilt. She’d lived with foster parents who made you feel guilty about eating their groceries, and that’s how X looked.
Shay slipped out of bed and approached the dog cautiously, whispering so as not to wake her roommate. “It’s okay, boy. You can have as much water as you want. It’s free.”
He had to be hungry too. She’d have to spend time trolling the Internet for advice on feeding a dog since she’d never had one. Emily kept an assortment of snacks in the closet, but gummy bears or Cocoa Puffs probably weren’t wise food choices for a dog any more than they were for a human. Peanut butter—she still had some left, and some saltines.
As Shay uncrinkled the wax bag, Emily stirred, mumbled something that sounded like “Will you take a quarter?” and fell back into sleep. Meanwhile, the dog went down with a thunk, seemingly out of gas, though he was rapt when Shay started buttering crackers with a plastic knife.
“Here, these are for you,” she said, and placed a pile by his nose.
The dog stared at her, unmoving. She stared back at him for a while, then remembered what Odin had said on the beach, that the dog only ever seemed to eat and drink when he was left alone.
Shay climbed back into bed and pretended to go to sleep. Even fake-snored a bit. After a few minutes, she peeked with one eye and saw that the food was uneaten and he was watching her.
At five o’clock, she woke to find the dog still watching her. Every last bit of the crackers and peanut butter was gone.
It was a start, she thought. “You need a walk?”
The dog had no trouble walking down the stairs. They went out the back through the kitchen; the breakfast crew came on at five-thirty. Shay found a brick to block the self-locking door that led to the loading dock, and then led the dog around the parking lot until he pooped.
Going back up was another problem.
X made the first two steps up the loading dock, but then fell back on his haunches and looked at her as if to say, I’m just too tired.
She hadn’t had much experience with dogs and didn’t quite know what to do. She gave his leash a tug and tried pleading, and he stood and made the last three steps. The freight elevator was generally considered to be off-limits to everyone but people going to Twist’s loft, but she had little choice: the dog could hardly walk by the time they got to the stairs, and was too heavy for her to carry up four flights.
She called the elevator and then urged him inside, where he flopped to the floor, and they rode up to five. From there, it took two minutes to walk ten rooms down the hall; she whispered, “X, come on, come on. People are getting up …”
When X got back in the bedroom, he lay down and closed his eye. Shay watched him for a moment as Emily quietly snored in the other bed. Everybody was asleep—and Shay lay back down and, a minute later, was gone as well.
By eight, they were all up again. Emily was dressed and out the door; there was an estate sale of a Star Trek set designer rumored to have kept one of everything, from a pair of Spock’s ears to one of Captain Kirk’s many identical command chairs.
Shay, meanwhile, needed to get to a supermarket and see about buying actual dog food. Maybe he just needed some better nutrition? Hope against hope. He was awake and alert, but wasn’t yet standing. She left him some more peanut butter crackers.
It would be X’s first time alone in the room, and she wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t be destroyed when she came back. She decided to pen him inside the bedroom.
“Don’t chew the legs off
the bed,” she said as she closed the door.
The supermarket was a twenty-minute walk. Shay used the time to work on the thumb drive’s password. Supposedly, the files on the drive were filled with horrible and inhumane things being done to animals, but Shay’s only interest in discovering the password was to learn who had forced her brother into the van. If Odin didn’t surface again soon—either directly or through Rachel—she saw no choice but to contact West. And/or the police.
An hour later, back at the hotel with a twenty-pound sack of organic dog food recommended by a clerk, she unlocked the door to her room and found X sitting on the other side.
“Hey! How’d you get out of the bedroom?”
Shay called out for Emily, but Emily hadn’t returned. She walked back to the bedroom, half expecting the door to be knocked off its hinges. It was merely open, as if the dog had pushed it open just enough to let himself out.
“Weird,” she said to herself. “Guess I didn’t shut it tight.”
With the dog watching her, Shay filled another one of Emily’s pottery bowls with too much food, and freshened his water.
“All right,” she said. “You didn’t trash the place, so I’m not going to lock you up. But be good. I’ve gotta go to work.”
He watched her all the way out the door.
Shay mixed paint, washed brushes, and bagged up disposable rags that Twist used by the hundreds. “Today,” he said, “I’m going to show you how to stretch and prep canvases. There’s only one acceptable way to do this—”
“Your way,” Shay said.
“I was going to say perfectly, but now that I think about it, those are the same thing,” Twist said.
He showed her how to do it; it wasn’t rocket science, but like ironing the seams straight in a pair of pants, it was trickier than it looked. She spent four hours at it—in the first hour, she got ninety-five percent of it; another three percent in the next hour; one percent in the third hour; and in the fourth hour, she felt like she was going backward.
“You’re doing fine,” Twist assured her. “Stretching canvas is a pain in the ass, and I will be happy to unload it on you. Next we talk about how to apply a ground. People call it gesso, but it’s not, it’s an acrylic dispersion …”
When the morning’s work was done, she went back to the room to check on the dog. Emily was there, and they talked about Shay’s new job, and Emily said, “I’d bet my truck he’s training you to be his assistant.”
“He is not,” said Shay, embarrassed at the teacher’s-pet tone in Emily’s voice. But now she was curious. “Has he ever had one?”
Emily put a finger on one cheek, which she did when she was miming that a thought process was going on, then said, “Not for a long time. He had this one girl who left right after I got here, almost two years ago.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“She went to Harvard,” Emily said.
“Seriously?” Shay said, impressed.
“No. Sorry. I don’t know. She moved in with her boyfriend, I think. I mean, some of us do eventually check out.”
X watched them talk, but still wouldn’t take any food or water. Emily went back out the door on another mission, and Shay spent an hour trying to crack the password code. Nothing worked. She didn’t need to grind on it, she thought, she needed to contemplate it.
Restless, she walked out to a Starbucks and went online to Facebook, and found nothing. Where was he? Where could he be? Rachel said she would call when there was news, but could Odin even find her again?
Still restless but feeling that the computer wouldn’t help, she drifted back to the hotel. She didn’t want to sit alone with a sick dog, and so took the elevator back to Twist’s studio. The steel outer door to the studio was half open, classical music with a lot of anxious violins coming from the other side. Shay knocked and then pushed through.
Twist was working on one of his smaller landscapes and turned, frowning, as she walked in. “Why are you back here?”
“I owe you six hours.”
“Huh,” he said, not pleased. “One thing: work, but don’t talk. Can you do that?”
“I dunno. I could try.”
He led her to the far wall, where three huge canvases, big as billboards, had been leaning for the last week.
“We’ll be putting on three coats of gesso, the same stuff you were putting on the small canvases, with a light sanding in between,” he said. “When I say we, I mean you.”
The first two coats would be white, the last coat a steel gray. “I’ll show you how to mix that when we get there. Right now, we focus on the white stuff.”
He opened the first pail, and she found the gesso had the consistency of a runny pudding. “I like to add a little water,” he said. “Maybe a few teaspoons per quart. It’s ready when it dribbles off your spoon like cream,” he said, demonstrating. “Voilà.”
He handed her a house-painting brush and nodded at an aluminum ladder that could get someone onto a second-story roof. “You’ll need that eventually, but we start right in the middle and brush out to the sides and the top and the bottom.”
The plan was for Shay to lay the first coat on all three canvases. The next time she came, she’d give each canvas a light sanding and repeat the painting process on her own until the job was finished. “Got it? Now paint; don’t talk.”
“Can I ask you one thing?”
“Just one.”
“How’d you get them in here?”
“We made them in here,” he said. “Fifty yards of raw Belgian linen, two staple guns—one will always jam—and stretcher frames made to my exact specifications by Dum, who is good with a chop saw.”
“But how …”
“Ah-ah. Only one question. Now shut up.”
Shay said, “This isn’t a question, it’s a statement: If you don’t let me ask one more question, I’ll be mumbling all afternoon.”
Twist looked at her for a long moment, not in a funny way, then asked, “Do you ever lose?”
“No. Now, how are you going to get them out?”
He pointed at the skylight. “That opens. We lift them up there with a block and tackle, and lower them down the side of the building. When I say we, I mean other people. Guys who move pianos.”
“Ah. No more questions. Sir.” The sir was as insolent as if she’d said dumb-ass.
With occasional monitoring from Twist, Shay started putting down the first coat on the first canvas. He gave her a few tips, then let her go, moving to a drawing table at the far end of the room. She got into the painting, into the rhythm of it, and began thinking about the whole Odin/dog problem. She didn’t see Twist step back toward her until he said, “Hey, Shay. Don’t have to work it that much. Just get it on, smooth as you can. You don’t have to force it.”
“Right,” said Shay, almost surprised to see she’d been painting at all. Freaky, how a part of the mind can run on autopilot while some other part wanders off into the past or future.
She put her focus back on her brushstrokes, left to right.
“Shay!”
Emily plowed through the studio door, her complexion drained white as the gesso. Twist was at the drawing table and looked up. Shay, working through her third can, knew it had to be about the dog.
“Problem,” Emily said, and pulled Shay in close for confidentiality, though whispering wasn’t her strong suit.
“The dog just had a seizure.”
Shay sagged. Odin hadn’t said anything about seizures. X was getting worse. “Is he all right?”
“Unclear. It lasted about a minute, then I texted Cruz to come watch him so I could come get you.”
White paint splattered on her cheeks and in her hair, Shay put down the stirring spoon and called over to Twist. “I have to quit.”
“It’s only been a couple hours.”
“So I still owe you four.”
Twist shrugged. “Go.”
They ran down the stairs, and when Shay burst into the room, she found Cruz
crouched next to the dog, who was lying on his right side breathing spasmodically. “He had another one,” Cruz said.
The dog lay dazed between the beds, his long, pale tongue hanging out the left side of his wire muzzle, drool pooling on the floor.
“Ohmigod,” Shay said. “What happened?”
“Don’t know. He got up after Emily left. He started pacing, and I thought he was looking good. Then, all of a sudden, he falls on the ground and he starts, like, running, and kicking.… It was so loud, the way he was kicking his legs and banging his head, and then, just like that, he was done.”
The dog’s glassy eye had yet to focus on Shay or anything else. She bent down to him, set a gentle hand on his shoulder, and said, “Hey, buddy, are you okay?”
The dog didn’t look at her, didn’t seem aware of any of the people around him.
“We need to get him to a vet,” Cruz said.
“No,” Shay snapped.
Cruz and Emily exchanged a look. “Something’s really wrong with him,” Cruz persisted.
“I can’t do it, okay? He’s microchipped. My brother thinks the abusers he rescued him from will get him back if he’s scanned. He said vets always scan new patients, so no—”
The dog’s hind legs thumped against the floor and his head started to twitch. Shay fell back on her hands to get out of the way as his body exploded in a new round of violence.
This time, it didn’t stop for nearly two minutes. Shay crawled back over and spoke gently to the dazed animal, and he seemed to be trying to focus on her, seemed to know that she was trying to help.
“We’ve got to do something,” Emily said. “He’s dying.”
“Stay with him,” Shay said, and sprang to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”
Shay reentered Twist’s studio, scared but determined. She walked up to him, shook a finger at him. “I broke one of your rules. You want to be a hard-ass, I’ll be out of here tonight. But right now, I need your help, and with all this political stuff you’ve had me doing, you owe me.”
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