by Susan Conant
"Sure. I thought I'd ask you how we do this. My next-door neighbor's a cop. He's a friend of mine. This is his case. He's a little, uh, conservative, but he's a good guy. He's a lot better than most. I can go to him, or you can. It'll be better if you do."
"Of course." He didn't look frightened, threatened, angry, defeated, or anything else except something it took me a second to name: proud. "Give me a week. For Kelly."
"A day." That time, I didn't sound shrill.
"Twenty-four hours."
I gave him Kevin Dennehy's name. He promised to write it all out, arrange things, and show up at Kevin's desk. When I left, we shook hands.
Anatomy is destiny? He took it like a man. A woman? A strong woman? A human being. He took it like a human being, maybe too much so. I walked out of his office and along the brick path. I'd confronted him, yet I had an anticlimactic sense that something had failed to happen. As I was about to get into the Bronco, Kelly Baker came running down her front walk. She must have come home while I was talking to Joel. I didn't want to see her.
"Holly, wait a second! I've had these in the freezer for you for a week."
She'd tossed on a parka, but it wasn't zipped. Her gloved hands held a small package wrapped in aluminum foil.
"They're those petits pains au chocolat you liked. I was making some, and I saved these for you."
After what I'd just done to her life, how could I accept? But how could I refuse without telling her what I'd just done?
"Thank you," I said feebly.
I took the package and got into the car, but as I was about to pull away from the curb, I heard her calling my name and banging on the passenger-side window. I reached over and opened the door, and she tucked her head in.
"You do know not to keep those where the dogs can get them?"
I nodded. "Yeah. Anyway, nobody'd feed your cooking to a dog. But thanks for the reminder."
Chocolate toxicosis. The February issues of Dog's Life, DOGworld, Dog Fancy, and The American Kennel Gazette always tell their readers not to share Valentine chocolate with dogs, but sometimes people are careless or forget, and, of course, a few people don't subscribe. Cocoa and chocolate both contain something called theobromine that's poisonous to dogs. Dogs vary a lot in their sensitivity, but a really small amount of chocolate can kill a very sensitive dog. And there's no antidote.
21
As I drove home, I wondered about Joel's compliance. He'd taken it like a human being, it had seemed to me. Did I trust him? Almost. Did he trust me?
Or maybe I simply wanted to run away.
Owls Head, Maine, where I grew up and where my father still lives, is only about four hours from Cambridge if you drive fast and don't take a break, which is to say that it takes me a minimum of five hours. I don't have a Dogs on Board sign plastered to my car, but that's how I drive, and although Rowdy has always been an exemplary traveler, never carsick, he'd always needed to stop at least once on the way. But it's an easy drive, I hadn't seen Buck for a while, and he and Kimi hadn't met each other yet.
Before I let myself into my own place, I dashed up the back stairs, banged on Rita's door, told her I was going to take off, and asked her to bring in the milk and the paper while I was gone. She'll even feed dogs if you beg, but don't bother asking her to walk a malamute. Ever since she sprained her wrist when Rowdy bolted after a cat, she won't.
If there's one best thing about having dogs, it's coming home to them. While you're gone, a person may get into a bad mood, have second thoughts about you, start some project you'll only interrupt, or enjoy being alone. A dog is always thrilled to see you. When I unlocked the kitchen door, Rowdy went into the ritual he'd always saved for occasions when I'd been gone for a long time, that is, more than half an hour. He didn't, of course, jump up. I won't allow a dog to jump. He rose to his full height, placed his big feet on my shoulders, and scoured my face with his tongue. It's impossible to have a malamute and a dirty face. I'd already had some success in teaching Kimi that it's bad manners to jump on people, but I hadn't quite made the point that running around a person and jumping up on her back counts, too. That's what she did. After all, she was jealous of the attention Rowdy was getting, and she was my dog, too, and I was happy to see them cooperating in anything, even if they were squishing the chocolate croissants that weren't shaped like crescents.
"Enough!" I said. I shook the dogs off and put the little aluminum-foil package on top of the refrigerator, where they couldn't get it and where I wouldn't forget it when I left for Maine. I wasn't at all worried about the croissants, of course. Kelly had been on the way out the front door within a minute of the time I'd left Joel's office. Joel couldn't possibly have tampered with them even if he'd wanted to. He wouldn't have had time.
Intelligent dogs can sense the human intention to go somewhere, and they're always determined not to be left home. Kimi and Rowdy pranced and sashayed around as I called my father, who answered on the third ring. There was yapping in the background.
"What's that?" I asked. Wolf dog hybrids do not yap.
"What?" he asked.
"The barking."
"What barking?" He wasn't kidding. He doesn't notice yapping and howling any more than most people notice the sound of their own hearts beating.
"There is a dog barking," I shouted. "I can't hear you very well. Are you in the barn?" The barn hadn't been one for a long time. It has indoor dog pens that open onto the outdoor runs, a maternity ward with whelping boxes, a grooming area with a sunken tub so you don't ruin your back bathing the dogs, and a training area with jumps that let you work in comfort all through the winter. My mother did most of the renovation herself. When Cambridge people say things like "We redid the kitchen" or "We built the deck," all they mean is that they spent money, but Marissa did the work on the barn with her own hands. I miss her a lot.
"Why are you shouting?" Buck said.
The dog finally stopped.
"What kind of dog is that?" I asked.
"A terrier cross."
"With?" Crosses are Buck's specialty. Hybrids. But a wolf terrier?
"God knows." When Buck says that about a dog, he means it literally. The books kept by the angels do not, in his view, so much record human good and bad deeds as keep track of canine matings and bloodlines. Buck plans to spend eternity in a shining heavenly library of celestial stud books. The library will, of course, admit angelic dogs. "She's a nice little bitch," he added. He uses exactly the same words to refer to me.
"I'd like to meet her. You want company?"
"Fine," he said, "but the house is a little full at the moment."
"Has someone got my room?"
"A boxer," he said. Someone else might have thought he meant a pugilist. I knew better.
"I don't mind, but Rowdy might have some objections, and Kimi definitely will. Move him out. You haven't even seen Kimi yet."
He'd heard all about her, of course, and he'd been relieved that I was starting to recover my mental health. He was still worried about me, though. Like Faith Barlow, he has doubts about anyone who owns fewer than six or eight dogs. He might not have evicted the boxer from my room if I'd threatened to show up dogless, but for Kimi and Rowdy, he agreed.
After I fed the dogs and washed and packed their bowls, I tossed a lot of polypropylene, wool, and denim into a suitcase for myself. I was in the bathroom packing my toothbrush, toothpaste, and a few cosmetics when I heard noise in the kitchen, a loud thump, then a scraping sound.
Dedicated food thievery is a hard problem to eradicate. Most sensible dog owners find it easier to prevent the problem than to cure it. Our wastebaskets have lids. On the lids, we pile additional deterrents. We close doors. We put temptation out of reach. The one thing Rowdy had had consistent success in filching was the sugar bowl, which I kept leaving out on the table instead of remembering to stash in a cupboard. He could pick it up, carry it to one of his dens, and lick it clean without making a sound, and he'd never once even put a chip in it. Wi
th some effort, I could have cured him, but I hadn't made the effort. All I'd done was have him checked for diabetes, but he wasn't diabetic, just predatory. When times got tough for the Inuit who gave us the original malamutes, the people themselves were starving, and the dogs had to fend for themselves. If malamutes hadn't been predators, they'd have starved to death a millennium ago. When Rowdy made off with food, I understood, and, as Rita always says, to understand all is to forgive all. She told me that Madame de Staël said that, but I'll bet she didn't repeat it as often as Rita does. Anyway, I assumed that one of the dogs—probably Kimi—had again knocked the spray bottle of water and the coffee can of pennies off the wastebasket lid and was rummaging in the trash. Then I remembered that I'd emptied the wastebasket.
Both of their black noses were buried in the torn aluminum foil. Like a pretty wolf pair enjoying a romantic dinner for two over a caribou carcass, they weren't even fighting over the frozen chocolate croissants. You don't believe in obedience training? Listen.
I walked up to Rowdy. "Rowdy, drop it. Leave it." My voice was quiet, low, and firm. I took his collar in my hand and tugged, just to remind him. He opened his jaws, and a hunk of pastry dropped to the floor. I backed him up a foot or two and said, "Good boy. Rowdy, sit." I put my left hand in front of him with my palm just in front of his face. "Stay."
I had no way to tell my barely Pre-Novice Kimi to stop eating, nothing to offer her that could tempt her away in the next second, no liver in my pockets, no time to raid the refrigerator. I knew she might bite me, but there was no time to run for the leather gauntlets I keep for emergencies. In a second, I was standing over her, one hand grabbing her collar, the other locked over and around her muzzle, my fingers digging hard, forcing her jaws open, forcing her to release her grip on the food. Her jaws began to loosen, and I used both hands to pry them open and shake her head until the chocolate mass fell out and hit the floor with a splat. I got both hands around her collar and jerked her away before she could snatch it up again. She didn't understand, or if she did, she hadn't read Madame de Staël. With one quick twist of her head, she did what any sensible predator does to a creature stealing its prey: She bit me, and not on my sweater-padded arm or wrist, either. Right on the hand. Rather, right in the hand, a quick, clean slash deep into the flesh between the thumb and first finger. If you've never been bitten by a dog, you might imagine that it feels as if you'd been cut with a knife or jabbed with a nail, but a serious bite feels more as if you've been slammed with a baseball bat. The physical pain is intense, but the emotional pain is worse. It hasn't happened to me often, but each time, I've cried. The impossible has transpired. Oh, God. Yes. A dog will bite me. It was my fault, of course. I should have approached her from the front or side, and I should have kept talking. As it was, she hadn't had a chance to know whose hand she was biting. I even forgave her. I still had my feelings hurt. But I didn't let her go.
The blood flowed all over my hand and dripped down onto Kimi, where some of it sank into the dense coat of gray around her neck and some of it stained her ears. She fought me all the way across the kitchen to her crate, but I shoved her in and locked the mesh door. Then I bled and throbbed my way back to Rowdy, who, I would like to point out, hadn't broken his long sit. Maybe I should have trusted him, but I didn't dare to take the chance. I took his collar in my good hand. "Okay," I told him. "Good boy." Never forget to praise your dog, Marissa taught me. Never. Then I guided him gently across the red-spattered floor, assured him that everything was going to be all right, and shut him in my bedroom.
I talked to Kimi while I stood at the kitchen sink, held the wound under the faucet, and let the hot water flow into it. Rowdy might have understood words, but since Kimi hadn't moved beyond tone of voice, I indulged myself. My voice, though, was calm and soft. "You little fiend," I said lovingly. "This hurts like all hell. You are a damned little monster, aren't you? And if you haven't slashed a tendon, I'm really, really lucky."
After watery red had flowed over the white enamel for a while, I turned off the faucet, put a thick pad of paper towels under my hand, and groped in the cabinet above the sink for a bottle of Betadine left over from some distant veterinary injury, an abscess in the leg of one of the cats, it seemed to me. In back of a compendium of eye ointments, ear drops, heartworm medicine, cotton balls, gauze pads, swabs, rubbing alcohol, and powdered calcium supplements, all pharmaceutical artifacts of dogs and cats I'd owned, I located the bottle. When I held the bleeding hand over the sink again and upended the bottle over the bite, the pain wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Then I piled on some of the gauze pads, added a layer of paper towels, phoned Steve, got his answering service, and insisted that I had an emergency. The operator let me ring through to him.
"It's me," I said. "Both of the dogs ate chocolate. It was my fault. I left the stuff on top of the refrigerator, and Kimi must've climbed onto the counter. Rowdy's never done it before. I think she was the one. Can you get here? Or do you need me to bring them in?"
He hears this kind of thing all the time, of course, and he never panics. He asked how much they'd eaten and whether they were acting nervous, salivating, or vomiting. They weren't. The torn foil was still lying on the floor, thick with crumbs, chocolate, and blood. I didn't even know how many croissants there'd been to begin with, but not many. Two? Three? Nothing was left except foil, crumbs, and the remains they'd had in their mouths.
"It was chocolate croissants," I said. "Maybe one each? But I don't know how much chocolate there was in them." I'd stayed calm with the dogs, but I was starting to sound scared.
"So not much," he said. "Maybe an ounce. First of all, the chances are good that nothing will happen. Some dogs aren't very sensitive to it. And these are big dogs. That's on their side. Chances are you won't even notice anything's wrong. I'm coming over, anyway, and we'll keep an eye on them, but nothing bad is going to happen."
"I trust you," I said. "Just get here fast, would you?"
By the time he arrived, I'd arranged what I thought was a near-professional bandage on the hand, I'd cleaned up most of the mess, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor with Rowdy and telling him not to worry. Kimi was still in her crate. Steve insisted on undoing the bandage, and then we had a fight about M.D.'s. He wanted me to go to the emergency room. I won. He rebandaged my hand.
When he finished with me, he checked on Kimi again. She was asleep. We couldn't wake her up.
22
"How much did she swallow? How much was it that actually went down?" Steve always talks slowly and calmly, never more so than in a crisis. His face registers nothing except concern and intelligence, but his eyes turn from blue-green to sea-green.
"I told you. I'm not sure. Not all that much. She couldn't have. Rowdy got some, and the package was small to begin with. I didn't open it, but there couldn't have been more than a few."
"Let me see what's left."
"It's outside in the trash. I took it out to the barrels."
"I'm going to want you to get it. Wrap whatever you can find in a plastic bag. I've got to take her with me. I should've had you bring them in."
With her head at the door of her big tan polypropylene crate, Kimi looked no more than sound asleep, deeply asleep, but her breathing was beginning to sound slow and heavy, at least to me. Or maybe I was listening harder than usual.
"Tie Rowdy up or shut him in the bedroom," Steve added. "We don't need his help right now."
By the time I'd put Rowdy in my room and returned to the kitchen, Steve had eased Kimi out of the crate, and she was lying on the floor, stretched out, not curled up, as if she found herself dead weight.
"Get the doors for me," Steve said. "I'll take her as she is. She's not going to run off anywhere for a while."
After years of hoisting hefty dogs onto exam tables, he'd developed not only muscles but technique as well, and he'd somehow avoided ruining his back. Kimi's seventy-five pounds didn't strain him, and he didn't rush. I opened the back doors, ran down the stair
s, and slid open the door on the side of his van. He followed, lowered Kimi gently onto the carpet in back of the driver's seat, and covered her with an old blanket that belonged to India, his shepherd. He sprinkles the van with Nilodor and vacuums it, but it still smelled of dogs and old blankets, even on that cold night.
"Don't wait for me," I said. "I'll be there right after you. I'll just get Rowdy."
"Get him there fast," Steve said, and added, "Whatever's doing this, it isn't chocolate."
Before I went back indoors, I took the lid off a trash can and retrieved the plastic bag containing, among other things, the aluminum foil and half-gnawed globs that the dogs had unwillingly dropped. When I emptied the bag onto the kitchen floor, coffee grounds, eggshells, sodden sheets of paper, wet tea bags, half a moldy cantaloupe, and something that may once have been cheese tumbled out with the foil and pastry. The whole mess smelled like a finger down my throat, and my stomach felt as if I'd eaten three or four large servings of candied yams, but I sorted out the remains that Steve wanted and sealed them in another bag.
Afraid to see what might have happened to Rowdy, I dreaded opening the bedroom door, and when I did open it, my heart started to pound. Rowdy was curled up under the bay window.
"Rowdy, let's go!" I said. "Let's go ride in the car."
He'd understood those words for quite a while, and his usual response to them was to perk up his ears, bounce, twist, and zoom for the door. That night, he opened his eyes, shook his big head a little, and then rested it solemnly on his forepaws. Sadness is a common expression in some dogs, but not in Rowdy or any other malamute. He'd have made a bloodhound look overjoyed.
"Time to wake up," I said brightly. "You've got no choice."
When I held his collar with my good hand and dragged him to his feet, he wagged slowly all over, but not with his usual vigor, and I had to march him into the kitchen. The sight of his leash meant nothing to him, but, outside, the open tailgate of the Bronco did. He tried to jump in, but the energy was missing, and I gave him a boost. I had to use both hands to lift him. The injured one felt as if it would explode. To keep him awake on the drive to Steve's clinic, I never stopped talking, and I used all his favorite words, especially his own name. "Rowdy, watch me. Watch me, boy. Good boy. Let's go. Rowdy, go for a ride? Go for a walk? Rowdy, wake up." But when I parked the car and opened the tailgate, he was asleep.