by Sue Pethick
He leaned forward and looked into the backseat.
“But … Where’s Boomer?” he blanched. “He hasn’t—”
“No,” she said, a fresh flood of tears overwhelming her. “He got altitude sickness and he’s in the emergency clinic. I’m sorry I was speeding, but I was trying to catch my friend’s bus so he could help me get Boomer back down to sea level. I don’t think I can get there in time, though, now. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The patrolman stepped back.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to step out of your vehicle, Miss.” He grinned. “We’re going for a little ride.”
*
The thirteen sixty bus out of Holbrook was five miles from the New Mexico border when Nathan took out his laptop and started composing the last column he’d ever write. It was ironic, he thought. After a year of making bargains with the universe, pleading with Julia, and offering to do anything to recover the one thing that had given his life meaning, once it was within his grasp, he’d found that he no longer wanted it. What was the point of publicly humiliating people for the enjoyment of others? He’d told himself he was performing a public service, that the folks he shamed were deserving of their fates, but what he’d really been doing was inflicting pain in the hope that it would make his own go away. Instead of maturing, of gaining perspective and appreciating that life throws everyone a curve ball now and then, he’d stubbornly remained the smart, friendless kid who’d lost his dog and wanted everyone else to suffer for it. The problem was, being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t mean much once you’ve driven everyone else away.
He never should have accepted Julia’s assignment; he knew that now. Nathan had let the prospect of getting his column back override his own instincts. Of course Boomer was ill. What possible reason could Jennifer Westbrook have had to lie about it? Even if her agency prospered from the popularity of Boomer’s Bucket List, it would have been a negligible gain compared to the backlash once they were found out. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that Julia’s suspicions were based on her own preconceived notions about Compton/Sellwood, not the truth behind Jennifer’s claim. He’d ask her about it when he got back to work, he thought. It would give them something to talk about while he cleaned out his desk.
Giving up his column had made quitting the Trib easy, too. Without that carrot hanging in front of his face, Nathan could see how ill-suited he was to the life of a staff reporter. The time he’d spent with Jennifer and Boomer had shown him that his heart wasn’t in it anymore—hadn’t been for some time, in fact. The column he’d been so proud of might have played to all his worst traits, but it had sharpened his chops as a writer, forcing him to dig deep for the perfect turn of phrase, the just-right word, and the poetry in the otherwise mundane that were both a literary gift and the bane of tight deadlines and limited word count.
He could freelance, he thought, maybe start on the book about Boomer that Jennifer had suggested. In a pinch, he might even fix Rudy’s screenplay for him. Nathan felt as if he was standing on the precipice of a new adventure, ready to take a fateful leap. There was no turning back. He would either spread his wings and be airborne or tumble ignominiously to the rocks below. As clichéd as it was, he felt as if love had set him free.
And he’d thrown it away.
Nathan set his fingers on the keyboard. He would start with an apology, he thought. A mea culpa that would cover a multitude of sins. He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up the right words, the best ones, to say what was in his heart. As his concentration deepened, it felt as if the world itself was slowing down.
He opened his eyes. It was slowing down.
Brakes hissed as the bus changed lanes and jounced onto the shoulder. Necks craned and passengers murmured in the aisles. What had happened? Was the driver ill? Did they have a flat? Nathan looked out his window and saw the flash of blue lights. Maybe the driver had been speeding, he thought. At any rate, this problem—whatever it was—had nothing to do with him. He returned to his contemplation.
The bus came to a halt, and the doors sighed opened. From the corner of his eye, Nathan saw a patrolman walk purposefully by his window, the firm jaw, mirrored sunglasses, and fearsome shoulders more than compensating for the ridiculous hat. Even knowing this had nothing to do with him, he found himself sinking lower in his seat, like a student trying to avoid being called on in class.
The man stepped onto the bus and said a few words to the driver, who nodded his head nervously. Then he stepped into the aisle, arms akimbo, and made his announcement.
“Is Nathan Koslow on this bus?”
Nathan’s first reaction was to look around, as if some other Nathan Koslow might be sitting nearby. Then, realizing the infinitesimally small chance that it was true, he raised his hand.
“I’m Nathan Koslow,” he said, watching every other face on board turn toward him.
Questions were flying through his brain. Why was he being singled out? What had he done? Was this about the library book he hadn’t returned back in the fifth grade?
Then another person stepped onto the bus, and every other thought he had departed.
Jen?
“Grab your gear, son,” the patrolman said. “There’s a dog back in Holbrook who needs your help.”
CHAPTER 32
Their reunion was necessarily brief. After Jen explained what Boomer’s situation was, Nathan had quickly agreed to drive the two of them to California that night. Nothing was said about the argument that had precipitated their estrangement, but then sitting in the back of a patrol car wasn’t exactly conducive to having a personal conversation. When Nathan reached for Jennifer’s hand, however, she did not withdraw it. He smiled. For the time being, at least, that was good enough.
*
Jennifer gasped when she saw Boomer. He looked thinner than he had only a few hours before, and he was too weak to walk to the truck. As Nathan carried him out and placed him into the backseat, she asked Dr. Padilla about the dog’s prognosis.
“I wish I knew,” the veterinarian said. “These things are hard to predict. His oxygen saturation is good, but his heart sounds are bad—worse even than when you brought him here this morning. It may be that the altitude sickness did more damage to the heart muscle than I thought. Without more tests, however, there’s really no way to know how bad off he is and in the end, it would only make the little time he has left uncomfortable. My advice to you is the same as I’m sure Dr. Samuels’s was. Keep him comfortable, enjoy him while you can, and prepare yourself for the inevitable.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer said as they hugged. “For everything.”
“Ve con Dios,” Dr. Padilla said. Go with God.
Jennifer got into the backseat with Boomer and gently lifted his head onto her lap before putting on her seat belt.
“Hiya, Boomie. You ready to go to Cali? Play in the waves in Santa Monica like I promised?”
Boomer thumped his tail weakly and licked her hand. Jennifer took his ear and rubbed it between her fingers, feeling the silky fur, hoping they would still have time. Nathan started the engine, and she caught his eye in the rearview mirror.
“Thank you. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
“Thanks for asking me. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
He pulled the truck out onto the road and headed for the freeway entrance.
“How long will it take, do you think?” she said.
“To get to Santa Monica? About eleven hours, plus stops.”
Jennifer frowned. A lot could happen in eleven hours.
“How long ’til we’re no longer at elevation, then?”
“Dr. Padilla suggested we go through Phoenix. That’ll put us at about a thousand feet in three hours. Boomer should be feeling better by then.”
She nodded and looked out the window. They were on the freeway now, the world flying by. After riding in a patrol car, though, even seventy-five felt slow.
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry I said that stuff about Dobry.”
“Why? You were right. I think I’ve been trying to hurt everyone since I lost him. Stupid, really. Like making other people miserable was going to help me feel better.”
“Feelings aren’t logical, especially when you’re a kid.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a kid anymore.”
Jennifer sighed, looking at nothing in particular, and stroked Boomer’s head. She thought about the day she got him, an energetic bundle of golden fur with brown eyes that turned downward at the outer edges, creased in a perpetual smile. He’d been a good puppy—easy to paper train, mortified by the occasional accident, not too many shoes destroyed—but he had his faults. Heeling never made much sense to him—he was either jerking her forward or yanking her back—and even friendly cats were an abomination, fit only to be barked at or chased up trees. There were neighbors, she knew, who would not miss him.
“Did I tell you I called Sophie?” Nathan said.
She felt her stomach lurch. Sophie—the love of his life until last year.
“Oh?” she said. “When was that?”
“This morning, while I was on the bus.”
Jennifer thought of all the times her phone calls had been sent to his voice mail, how she’d been praying that he’d get off the phone, and felt her lips tighten.
“How is she?”
“Doing well. I wanted to apologize to her for the way I’d treated her. At the end, you know, I was pretty awful. She’d wanted to talk about things back then and I just pretty much checked out. It was over as far as I was concerned, but I was too much of a coward to say so. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I thought I owed her that.”
Of course he did, Jennifer thought. It was a decent thing to do. So, why was it making her unhappy?
“I suppose you two will be getting together again?”
“Yeah, I think so. Not for a few months, though. At least not until she has the baby.”
The baby?
Nathan looked back at her and grinned.
“Sophie got married six months ago. Didn’t I mention that?”
He started to laugh, and Jennifer kicked the back of his seat, careful not to disturb Boomer.
“No wonder I couldn’t get you on the phone.”
“I called my mother, too,” he said. “I wanted to ask her about Dobry.”
Jennifer sobered. “How did that go?”
“Better than I thought it would. It’d been pretty much the third rail of our relationship ever since it happened. Something you said made me think it was time for us to get past it.”
“Oh? What was that?”
“You told me she probably hadn’t wanted to give him away, either, but that she’d had no choice. I never really thought of it like that, that she might have been suffering as much as I was. I figured it was time to clear the air.”
“And did you?”
“Oh, yeah. Turns out that after we took him to the shelter, she kept bugging the landlord to let us have him, offered to babysit his kids or clean the other apartments for free when folks moved out, anything so we could get Dobry back.”
“That was nice of her. It’s too bad it didn’t work.”
Nathan shook his head.
“That’s just the thing. It did work. The problem was, when she went back to claim Dobry, he’d already been adopted by another family. She told me she’d cried for days afterward. I remember her crying, but I always thought it was because of the divorce.”
“And you never guessed?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, Nate. That’s so sad.”
“Yeah, the two of us had a good cry about it. It’s over now, though. Thanks for helping me see that I wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt.”
Jennifer swiped at a tear. “Thanks for telling me.”
He looked at her in the mirror. “You weren’t really jealous about Sophie, were you?”
She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”
“Well, don’t be. I told her my heart was taken. I said I wasn’t sure, though, if you wanted me back.”
Jennifer felt her heart warm. She smiled.
“What did she say to that?”
“She said it served me right.”
They got dinner at a Subway in Phoenix and ate in the truck. Boomer turned his nose up at the kibble Jennifer offered him, but he sat up and drank some bottled water from his bowl. She watched him with concern.
“He should be over the altitude sickness by now,” she said. “Why isn’t he eating?”
Nathan shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’s just tired.”
“Oh, Nate. What if he doesn’t get any better? What if this is it?”
“I don’t know, Jen. You’re asking me a question I don’t have the answer to.”
She nodded. “We should go.”
Back on the road now, they had six hours to go—three hundred eighty-seven miles. As the sun set, Jennifer stared at Boomer, silently urging him to hang on. He had to make it, didn’t he? He wouldn’t quit so close to the end. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. She remembered her father’s death. Sitting by the bedside, watching his chest rise and fall, slower and slower, faltering, then one more breath and then … nothing.
Everyone dies. We all do. It’s what we do with the time we have that matters.
“Nate?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do you think that all dogs go to heaven?”
“Good question. I think I feel the same way that Will Rogers did about that.”
“Which was … ?”
“He said that if there were no dogs in heaven, then when he died he wanted to go where they went.”
Another hour went by. Passing headlights that illuminated the cockpit barely penetrated into the backseat. Jennifer watched their beams slide across Nathan’s face. Did she love this man? She wanted to, but she wasn’t sure. She’d been on her own a long time, long enough for it to become a habit. Change was frightening. Not changing was frightening. How could she decide when there was no easy choice to make?
Boomer groaned and shifted on the seat.
“I think Boomer needs to take a walk,” she said.
Nathan nodded. “Want me to pull over?”
Jennifer shifted, too, and felt the pressure in her own bladder.
“No, I need to go, too. Better find a gas station.”
It was cold outside. Jennifer stepped out of the truck and gasped. After five hours with a warm dog in her lap, the temperature difference was bracing.
Nathan reached in and unbuckled Boomer’s harness.
“I’ll take him,” he said. “You go on inside.”
“Can I get you something?” she said, fighting to keep her teeth from chattering.
“Maybe a Red Bull?”
“I’ll see what they have.”
Jennifer hurried inside and found that the women’s restroom was occupied. Not surprising; she could wait. On the way out, she grabbed a couple of energy drinks and a bag of Oreos for the road. Convenience store comfort food.
As she stepped outside, she saw the two of them sitting at the far edge of the parking lot. Nathan was talking to Boomer and pointing at something in the sky. Jennifer tiptoed forward, wanting to hear what was being said, not wanting to disturb their private moment.
“See that bright star?” Nathan said. “That’s Sirius, the dog star. Pretty soon, you’re going to be up there, Boomer, running and playing with all the other dogs and looking down at us from that beautiful bright star.”
The world blurred. Jennifer placed a hand over her mouth.
Don’t make a sound. This is important.
Nathan’s voice was thick.
“Do me a favor, will you, Boomer? If you see Dobry up there, tell him that I never forgot him and I never stopped loving him. Tell him … tell him that he was the best friend I ever had.”
Jennifer smiled as the tears ran down her face. Of course she loved this man. Of course she did. How could sh
e not?
*
Boomer never got to romp in the surf at Santa Monica Pier. In spite of the medication and supplemental oxygen provided by the emergency vet clinic, his heart simply wasn’t strong enough to make it. In the early hours of the morning, on a lonely stretch of highway east of Cactus City, Boomer’s breathing became labored, the stertorous sound an undeniable harbinger of the end. Jennifer asked Nathan to pull over and join her in the backseat, where they spent Boomer’s final moments reliving the highlights of their trip, laughing and crying by turns. At the end, Dr. Samuels’s prediction of a painless death was born out. A brief tightening of limbs and a final, peaceful release of air was the only indication that Boomer was gone.
EPILOGUE
The boardwalk creaked underfoot as Jennifer and Nathan walked to the end of the Santa Monica Pier. Pacific Park was closed for the season; the Ferris wheel looked like a giant eye, bearing silent witness as they passed. A handful of fishermen sat in folding chairs, making desultory comments and drinking beers as the sun went down, their poles propped against the railings like tired sentries. Curious glances noted the strangers’ approach and quickly veered away.
Jennifer approached the railing, a shoebox in her hands. Sea foam swirled around the pilings below; the ocean was a slurry of sand and kelp and salt water. She inhaled sharply and stepped back.
“It’s a long way down.”
Nathan stepped up beside her and peered over the railing. “It is,” he said. “But not when compared to how far Boomer’s come already.”
Jennifer gently patted the box’s lid, then removed it and drew her fingers one last time through the smooth dollops of colored glass.
“Once we do this, he really will be gone.”
For a time, it had seemed as if her plan to scatter Boomer’s ashes off the pier would be impossible. Crematory ash was liable to fly up and cover everything in the surrounding area if released into the open air. Once again, though, Boomer’s notoriety had paid off.
At the suggestion of a follower on Boomer’s Bucket List, his ashes had been mixed with silica, melted down, and made into nuggets of glass that were indistinguishable from the ordinary sea glass found in every ocean in the world. The weight of the nuggets would take them to the bottom, where they would eventually erode, leaving his ashes to tumble among the waves. And if someone collected a few and took them home, well, that was okay, too, Jennifer thought. Boomer had always enjoyed making new friends.