Good Karma

by Christina Kelly

  Standing on the front porch, she felt complete. Full, as if she had just topped off her tank at a gas station. She wasn’t hungry and she wasn’t afraid. She just wanted some sort of acknowledgment of why she was there. The ghostly being had beckoned her forward, after all, but then had just as quickly disappeared.

  She put her face up to the window and looked in to see a ceiling fan circling slowly in the center of the living room. Then her eyes focused on a narrow sofa, an Oriental rug, a few large cardboard boxes. There was no redhead knitting on the couch, no Great Dane curled at her feet. No evidence that this was anything but an ordinary, if gray, afternoon and an ordinary house.

  Then the rain came harder and the wind stronger. Water assaulted her from the side, spraying across the porch. She could feel it seeping into her plastic flip-flops and between her toes. For a brief moment she imagined Cecil B. DeMille perched on the roof, operating a rain machine in some sort of movie extravaganza.

  There was nothing left to do but knock. She was tentative at first, tapping her knuckles on the door in three short bursts. But she remembered Fred Wolfe was older; she had heard it in his weathered voice when he had called her, as if he’d been eating crackers all day. And so she rapped harder, slapping the door with an open hand. No answer. Then in a desperate attempt to have the world open up to her she began pounding the door with her fist. “Come out, come out wherever you are!” she shouted maniacally.

  If Ida Blue hadn’t been so preoccupied she might have heard the slamming of a car door. If she had turned around, she would have seen the man jogging toward her across the stone path, an oversize golf umbrella protecting him from the downpour. Just as timing is everything in all things dangerous, whether tightrope walking or bullfighting, she might have turned before he reached the wooden stairs. Before he startled her half to death by shouting “Hello!” over the thudding rain.

  The suddenness of his greeting pulled her off balance. Her surprise was so violent, she spun around faster than she needed or expected to. Before she knew it, her body had tilted off center, and she tried to put her foot down to catch herself. It skated off the slippery painted porch boards so she attempted to steady herself with her other leg, but that one too flew out beneath her, as if her legs weren’t hers at all. They just skated off the wet surface and propelled her sideways over the porch railing. Before she knew it she was falling through the air, arms outstretched to protect her face from the leafy azaleas. She fell downward toward the earth while her legs flew skyward.

  “Ma’am?!”

  Stuck upside down in the shrub, Ida Blue felt her sundress bunched somewhere by her upper thighs. The rain pelted the stairs like a troupe of tiny tap dancers.

  “Ma’am?” he repeated. “Are you all right?” It was not the aged voice she’d heard on the phone. This wasn’t Fred Wolfe.

  With the umbrella as cover, the man stepped off the stairs and over to her. His work boots were smeared with dirt, his laces loosely tied in a double knot. If she’d been a smaller woman, she might have been able to wriggle free, to jump up out of the bush like a jack-in-the-box springing up into the world, but the weight of her body held her in place. “Help” was all she could think to say.

  “Give me your hand.” And so she pushed her fists through the branches, felt the rounded leaves scratch the skin along her plump forearms. The man’s feet were set firmly, tug-of-war style, left foot settled in front of right. “On three,” he instructed. “One . . . two—” And then he pulled. She fell out of the bush sideways and onto the grass. Mud seeped into her dress and a flip-flop disappeared somewhere in the shrubbery. It took her a moment to find her way to a standing position and under his umbrella.

  “Are you okay?” Concern crowded his voice.

  She looked up at the man, about her age and with bushy red hair. “I guess.”

  He took her elbow and led her out of the rain and up to the covered porch. It looked as if the storm would stop as suddenly as it had started. “That was quite a fall,” he said, then plucked out a knot of leaves from her hair.

  He reminded her of the Gumby doll she’d had as a child, a plastic figure with a square head and long, gangly arms. The word SECURITY was embroidered on the right chest of his green uniform, and underneath that a metal tag read RUSTY.

  “Mr. Wolfe isn’t home yet, is he?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t think so.”

  “He just reported some missing dogs.”

  She nodded, thinking of his Great Dane.

  He looked serious. “Have you seen them?”

  “Not lately.” She’d seen the ghostly woman, of course.

  “Well, he seemed pretty worried. Pretty insistent. Thought I’d swing by to take a look.”

  “Maybe I can help.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m a pet psychic.” She said it so quickly and confidently it surprised her. She’d never said it to someone in person. Someone who wasn’t on a telephone. She said it like it was something that was an intrinsic part of her, the same way she would have said she was farsighted or left-handed. “I’m a pet psychic,” she repeated. “My name is Ida Blue.”

  He looked at her quizzically, his eyes narrowing, and scanned her muddy dress. “Okay. So you’re a pet psychic, but what are you doing here?”

  “Just checking in. He’s my neighbor, and elderly.” It wasn’t a lie.

  “That’s sure kind of you. But why were you pounding on his door and pressing your face into his window?”

  I was getting full, she thought. Maybe under different circumstances she would have felt guilty snooping around Fred’s house, as if she’d been caught stealing Funyuns from the supermarket, but she just felt satisfied. “I was concerned.”

  “Well, you should go on home and get yourself cleaned up,” he suggested, as if she had anywhere else more important to go. “This storm has probably caused some damage, so I’ll need to get back to my rounds.” Rusty turned, furled umbrella in his left hand, and ambled down the stairs. Before he got to his hybrid patrol car, he turned. “Sure was nice to meet you, Miss Ida.”

  The rain had stopped.

  IDA BLUE WAS so focused on her feeling of fullness she barely remembered driving the short distance home. All she knew was satiety, as if she had been the only one at an all-you-can-eat buffet. So when she pulled into her driveway she was disappointed to see that in her haste to drive to Fred Wolfe’s house she’d forgotten to close the garage door. But she’d been so distracted, hell-bent on tapping the connection, she wasn’t surprised.

  After parking, she got out of the car and placed her feet on the cement. Her striped dress was now stained brown and green, but she didn’t care, because she felt something. An instinct. A feeling that she was not alone anymore. This is what intuition is, she thought. An incredible gut sense of knowing something without seeing it. Like the blind faith that pressing a gas pedal will move a car forward or that a parachute will open in a free fall.

  And that’s when she saw them. Behind an old pile of tag sale towels and comforters lay two dogs. A small dog with brindle-colored damp fur settled against the broad chest of a Great Dane. Both were sound asleep.

  chapter 22

  By the time Fred and Catherine walked back to the parking lot, the steady downpour had become water dripping from an old faucet.

  The first thing Fred did when he unlocked his car was reach inside to find his phone in the center console. When Danielle had last visited, she’d programmed in the numbers she thought he’d need now that he was alone. Savannah Fire and Rescue. State Police. Seven Oaks Security. At the time he thought she was being melodramatic, but at the moment he felt grateful.

  He didn’t think calling security would bring the dogs home, but the guards were the eyes and ears of the community. So he explained to the gum-snapping woman who answered the phone that the long-standing dog park regulation of unlocking the back gate only for mowing had been breached. That two dogs had escaped and were in danger, roaming the wi
lds of Seven Oaks. The woman took his information with no more sense of alarm than if he’d reported a bottle of spilled milk in aisle six.

  Truth be told, as he stood in the parking lot with Catherine beside him, he tried to sound a little more dramatic than he felt. “A Boston terrier and a Great Dane! There’s no telling what harm they could get into!” He really wasn’t worried, but his companion was clearly upset, as she kept bringing her hands to her face, resting her slender fingers in the dip of her temple. He wanted to give her confidence in him and in the process of trusting a stranger.

  When he clicked the phone off he tried to console Catherine, exaggerating his conversation: “They said they’ll do everything in their power to find them.”

  “Well, we should do something, too.” She furrowed her brow. “Would you drive? Then I can keep my eyes peeled.”

  Fred opened his passenger door, and she climbed in. After starting the engine, he cleared the wet windshield with the wipers on low. The thwap-thwap-thwap reminded him of Sequoia’s wagging tail. He pulled out onto the main road while Catherine rolled down her window to get a better view of the street and the dense forest that lined the sidewalks.

  “Karma is a follower,” Catherine said abruptly, apropos of nothing. “He’s not the sort of dog that takes off. I’m sure he’s just following Sequoia. Just along for the ride.” She laughed nervously. “But the thing is, he won’t know how to get home. We haven’t even been here that long. I kept promising him we’d go on these long walks and all I’ve done for him in the past three months is throw that stupid ball in the backyard.”

  Fred remained silent, focusing on the road. After all, what could he offer but platitudes? He’d been given a lifetime of them when Lissa died, and they hadn’t helped. I know exactly how you feel and Everything happens for a reason.

  “Where would they have gone?” Catherine said, more to herself than to him. “How will they survive?”

  She was acting as if it would be days or weeks until the dogs were found, but Fred figured it would just be an hour or two. Sequoia had more common sense than most people he knew. She seemed to understand the rules of time and the nuances of human character. She knew enough to avoid a snake and steer clear of an alligator. She never walked in the road and wouldn’t get near the lagoon. Fred thought she was probably enjoying the expedition with her new terrier friend, even if the walk home would be a little much for her old legs. “Don’t worry. Sequoia will know how to get back to the house,” he said confidently. “We live nearby, on Jolly Badger.”

  Catherine shook her head and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” He was glad she was lightening a bit, distracted at least for a moment from her lost dog.

  “Just thinking of street names. I used to tell Ralph I felt like I always lived on Wit’s End or Wild Goose Chase or Backseat Drive.”

  He and Lissa had done the same thing years ago. We joked we had a place on Lover’s Lane, he thought of saying, but saw Catherine’s hands clenched in her lap.

  “Lately it’s been more like Divorce Court,” Catherine added wistfully. “Sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “TMI.” She waited but he didn’t say anything. “Too much information,” she added.

  He felt a little sorry for her. Over the years he’d seen his share of friends, some married fifty years, go through troubling times and fall in and out of love. He and Lissa had had their challenges, especially early on, but he was glad they never reached a breaking point.

  I said I was sorry. I’m trying to make things right, Fred.

  He heard Lissa but ignored her this time.

  From Seven Oaks Way he took a left onto Pelican Retreat. It was the road the dogs would have come out onto if they’d followed the trail directly from the park. Fred drove slowly, not wanting to miss the wisp of a tail, and realized he hadn’t driven someone in his car for months, at least since Lissa had died. When his daughter came and they’d visited hospice, she always insisted on taking the wheel, confident now that he was in his midseventies he might crash into a double-parked UPS truck at any moment or suddenly confuse a red traffic signal for a green one.

  “Is that too much for you?” He put his hand out in front of Catherine to feel the air blowing through the vents. Even though the window was down, he needed the circulation to prevent the windows from fogging in the damp afternoon.

  “No, no. It’s fine,” she said. Then, “You are a very kind man.”

  When she turned back to her sentry at the window, Fred unconsciously looked at her well-proportioned legs and thighs. He wondered if she might have been a runner at one point or perhaps just liked to dance.

  Fred pressed the knob to the radio and a Dean Martin song came on, one he used to sing in his car when he was driving to work. He knew it by heart: With soft words, I whispered your name . . . But that was as close as I came.

  Fred wondered if Catherine knew the song. Perhaps she’d danced to it in high school with an older beau. How old was she? In her early sixties? He was probably at least ten years her senior. He imagined a young version of himself, holding her tightly and swaying back and forth to the music. “Sequoia has always been spooked by thunder . . .” Fred’s voice trailed off as he forgot the point he was making. It had something to do with finding them, but instead he thought of how during storms Sequoia would jump up on their king-size bed and cower between Lissa and him, burying her large square head under her paws and her paws under the pillow.

  Catherine filled the empty space of their conversation. “At least my husband will be happy. He never liked Karma anyway.”

  Fred was going to make a joke. He never met anyone who didn’t like dogs or Dean Martin songs or old movies, but she spoke again before he could.

  “I mean it’s not like I’m one of those crazy women who treat their dog like their child but . . .” And then she started to cry.

  In all the years of their marriage, Fred remembered Lissa breaking down only a handful of times. When she had miscarried shortly after their wedding. When Danielle had walked down the aisle and then, three years later and shortly after Tommy’s birth, when their daughter’s husband had a change of heart and requested a divorce. Fred hadn’t known what to do then, and he didn’t know what to do now. Hoping to comfort Catherine, Fred patted her left knee. Perhaps if he’d taken a moment to consider the gesture he might have stopped, but as he touched her skin, he felt heat inside him, the awakening of a long-silent longing.

  Since he usually kept a spare tissue packet in the driver’s side door he reached for it, his eyes still on the road, but all he found was a hammer-like tool to cut a seat belt and smash a window if he were submerged in water. He held the LifeGuard aloft. “What do you think? My daughter gave it to me for my seventy-third birthday. I asked for a book on the Civil War but she got me this.” What Danielle had said was: You never know when you might careen off that bridge and into the water. “On the brighter side, I might have a spare handkerchief in that jacket of mine.”

  Catherine put her hands into the jacket and felt around until she pulled out a business card. She squinted at the small lettering. “You know Audrey Cunningham?”

  Fred looked at the embossed green of the Seven Oaks logo and the postage-size photo of a blond woman. “Pardon?”

  She read the card aloud. “Audrey Cunningham. Realtor. One phone call does it all.”

  He thought for a moment. “I think I may have met her once or twice at the dog park over the years, but when news of a widower gets around, Realtors come a-calling. As if it’s a crime for an old man to live alone in a three-bedroom house.”

  “Audrey Cunningham,” Catherine repeated, a hardness in her voice.

  “I found it in my mailbox. You know, your wife of fifty years dies and everyone has ideas for you.” He was thinking of Danielle: Why don’t you just move closer to us? Have you considered assisted living? Why don’t I just take the silverware now? It’s not like you’ll be having a lot of dinner parties.

/>   Catherine nodded. “It’s hard to move. Hard to change.”

  Fred checked the rearview mirror but there was no one behind them, and he realized they hadn’t passed another car since they’d left the dog park. The storm had pushed everyone inside. If he hadn’t known better, he might have imagined they were alone on the island.

  Fred was glad Catherine had stopped crying, had somehow pulled herself together. He appreciated her sensitivity but didn’t want her to worry. He knew it would work out. He could feel it. And he didn’t want her to be sad, because he was enjoying the feeling that he and Catherine were on a road trip somewhere. A man and woman in a car with a common quest. Like Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn in a white roadster in Two for the Road. Maybe the dogs just needed some time to explore too, an excuse for an adventure.

  Fred thought of the many real estate agents’ cards and sympathy notes that had flooded his mailbox in the six months since Lissa’s death. “Everyone talks about downsizing but it always makes me think of that old science fiction movie.”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “You know the one.” He said it like they’d watched it together years ago. Like they used to share buttered popcorn at Saturday matinees. Like Catherine had always been a part of his life. “With Raquel Welch in the submarine.”

  “The Fantastic Voyage?”

  “Exactly. Like when we all reach sixty and it’s time to downsize we should all be zapped with a ray gun.”

  She laughed, and the sound filled the car with life.

  “Let’s stop,” she said suddenly. “We must have circled back to near where we began, no?”

  He pulled the car onto a grassy patch and shut off the engine. The storm was over and Fred saw breaks in the clouds. Catherine got out, folded the business card in half, and put it back in the pocket of his windbreaker. She moved to the shoulder’s edge. “Karma! Sequoia!” Catherine shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth.