by Garth Stein
“Please, Denny. We have to face the reality of it. The doctor said six to eight months. He was quite definite.”
Trish pulled away from him and steadied herself, sniffed in her tears. “My baby,” she whispered.
“Zoë is just a child,” Maxwell continued. “This is valuable time—the only time she has to spend with Eve. I can’t imagine—I can’t believe for a second—that you would possibly object.”
“You’re such a caring person,” Trish added.
I could see that Denny was stuck. He had agreed to have Eve stay with Maxwell and Trish, and now they wanted Zoë, too. If he objected, he would be keeping a mother and a daughter apart. If he accepted their proposal, he would be pushed away. He would become an outsider in his own family.
“I understand what you’re saying—,” Denny said.
“We knew you would,” Trish interrupted.
“But I’ll have to talk to Zoë about it to see what she wants.”
Trish and Maxwell looked at each other uneasily. “You can’t seriously consider asking a little girl what she wants,” Maxwell snorted. “She’s five, for heaven’s sake! She can’t—”
“I’ll talk to Zoë to see what she wants,” Denny repeated firmly.
After dinner, he took Zoë into the backyard, and they sat together on the terrace steps. “Mommy would like it if you stayed here with her and Grandma and Grandpa,” he said. “What do you think about that?”
She turned it over in her head.
“What do you think about it?” she asked.
“Well,” Denny said, “I think maybe it’s the best thing. Mommy has missed you so much, and she wants to spend more time with you. It would just be for a little while. Until she’s better and can come home.”
“Oh,” Zoë said. “I still get to take the bus to school?”
“Well,” Denny said, thinking. “Probably not. Not for a while. Grandma or Grandpa will drive you to school and pick you up, I think. When Mommy feels better, you both will come home, then you can take the bus again.”
“Oh,” said Zoë.
“I’ll come and visit every day,” Denny said. “And we’ll spend weekends together, and sometimes you’ll stay with me, too. But Mommy really wants you with her.”
Zoë nodded somberly.
“Grandma and Grandpa really want me, too,” she said.
Denny was clearly upset, but he was hiding it in a way that I thought little kids didn’t understand. But Zoë was very smart, like her father. Even at five years old, she understood.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said. “I know you won’t leave me here forever.”
He smiled at her and took her little-kid hand and held it in his own and kissed her on the forehead.
“I promise I will never do that,” he said. It was agreed then that she would stay.
As the night wound down, I found Denny sitting in the stuffed chair next to Eve’s bed, nervously tapping his hand against his leg.
“Denny, please—”
There was something about the tone of her voice, something pleading in her eyes, that made him stop. “Please go home,” she said. He scratched the back of his neck and looked down. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Like what?” said Denny.
“Look at me,” she said. “My head is shaved. My face looks old. My breath smells bad. I’m ugly—”
“I don’t care what you look like,” he said. “I see who you really are.”
“I care what I look like,” she said, trying to muster her old Eve smile. “When I look at you, I see my reflection in your eyes. I don’t want to be ugly in front of you.”
Denny turned away as if to shield his eyes from her.
“I’ll pack Zoë’s things and come back in the morning,” he said, finally, without turning around.
“Thank you, Denny,” Eve said, relieved. He kissed Eve good night, tucked Zoë into bed, and then he left. I was surprised when he left me with Eve. I hadn’t realized I was part of the package.
The house grew quiet and dark, Zoë in bed, Maxwell and Trish in their room with their TV blinking under the door. Eve was settled into her bed in the living room with the nurse sitting in a dark corner playing a page of her word-search book, in which she circled the hidden messages. I lay next to Eve’s bed.
Later, Eve was asleep and the nurse nudged me with her foot. I lifted my head and she held a finger to her lips and told me to be a good dog and follow her, which I did. She led me through the kitchen, through the laundry room to the back of the house, and she opened the door that led to the garage.
“In you go,” she said. “We don’t want you disturbing Mrs. Swift during the night.”
I looked at her, puzzled. Disturb Eve? Why would I do that?
She took my hesitation as rebellion; she snatched my collar and gave it a jerk. She shoved me into the dark garage and closed the door. I heard her slippers tread away, back into the house.
I was not afraid. All I knew was how dark it was in the garage.
It wasn’t too cold, and it wasn’t overly unpleasant, if you don’t mind a concrete floor and the smell of engine oil in an absolutely pitch-black room. I’m sure there were no rats, as Maxwell kept a clean garage for his valuable cars. But I had never slept in a garage before. I restlessly bided my time.
Hours into my nightmare, the garage door opened, and Eve was there in her nightgown, silhouetted by the night-light in the kitchen.
“Enzo?” she questioned.
I said nothing, but I emerged from the darkness, relieved to see her again.
“Come with me.”
She led me back to the living room and she took a cushion from the sofa and placed it next to her bed. She told me to lie on it, and I did. Then she climbed into the bed and pulled up the sheets to her neck.
“I need you with me,” she said. “Don’t go away again.”
But I hadn’t gone away! I had been kidnapped!
I could feel the sleep pressing down on her.
“I need you with me,” she said. “I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid.”
It’s okay, I said. I’m here. She rolled to the edge of the bed and looked down at me, her eyes glazed.
“Get me through tonight,” she said. “That’s all I need. Protect me. Don’t let it happen tonight. Enzo, please. You’re the only one who can help.”
I will, I said.
“You’re the only one. Don’t worry about that nurse; I sent her home.” I looked over to the corner, and the crinkly old woman was gone. “I don’t need her,” she said. “Only you can protect me. Please. Don’t let it happen tonight.”
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I stood guard, waiting for the demon to show his face. The demon was coming for Eve, but he would have to get past me first, and I was ready. I noted every sound, every creak, every change in the air. By standing or shifting my weight, I silently made it clear to the demon that he would have to contend with me if he intended to take Eve.
The demon stayed away. In the morning, the others awoke and cared for Eve, and I was able to relinquish my guard duties and sleep.
“What a lazy dog,” I heard Maxwell mutter as he passed me.
And then I felt Eve’s hand on my neck, stroking.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
For the first few weeks of our new arrangement Denny and I lived in our house, while Eve and Zoë lived with the Twins. Denny visited them every single evening after work, while I stayed home alone. By Halloween, Denny’s pace had slowed, and by Thanksgiving, he visited them only twice during the week. Whenever he came home from the Twins’ house, he reported to me how good Eve looked and how much better she was getting and that she would be coming home soon. But I saw her, too, on the weekends, when he would take me to visit, and I knew. She wasn’t getting better, and she wouldn’t be coming home any time soon.
At times that winter, all the extra driving around to make sure Zoë was where
she was supposed to be at the correct time was very confusing to me. And I wasn’t the only one confused, I assure you. For while Zoë was sleeping with the Twins and Eve, they often called upon Denny to shuttle her to and from soccer practice or ballet or birthday parties. Sometimes, Denny would receive a reminder call before the pick-up time. Sometimes, he received the reminder call after the scheduled pick-up time, and that was never good. He would leap to his feet, throw on his jacket, and run out of the house at full speed, only to return later, scratching his head. “I’m sure they told me five o’clock,” he would say. “I could have sworn they said five.”
I know that sometimes his tardiness was due to his forgetfulness, as he was always very tired and sad, but it was also because of the extra hours he was working to make up for all the time he had to take off in order to attend to Eve.
One incident in particular drew the ire of Maxwell and Trish above all others. Denny was supposed to pick up Zoë from her ballet class, which was taught at a dance studio located in a strip mall near Coal Creek, which, as you can imagine by its name, was not a particularly scenic place. That evening, Denny’s car decided to stop working. He called Maxwell and Trish many times to alert them to his predicament, but, alas, he could not reach them. Denny grew more and more frantic as the hour grew late. Finally, he called an Orange Taxi, which was able to come to our house immediately, and together we drove across the lake to retrieve Zoë. I went too, at the insistence of the driver, who was particularly fond of dogs, though he didn’t own one himself due to the allergic disposition of his wife.
We arrived at the dance studio over an hour late, and when we got there, Zoë was sitting on the pavement outside of the building with an older man. Both of them wore jackets that were too light for the weather.
“The teacher had to leave,” the man said. “I’m the custodian. I told her I’d wait.”
Denny thanked the man, and as we three returned to the taxi, a dark SUV squealed into the parking lot. Trish jumped out of the car and ran toward us.
“I got a call from another parent who drove by and saw Zoë sitting out on the curb,” she snapped at Denny. “Oh, you poor dear, you’re absolutely freezing!”
She wrapped her own coat around Zoë, enveloping her, and she guided Zoë to the waiting car, where she helped her into her booster seat in the back.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she hissed at Denny after the car door had closed.
“My car broke down,” he said. “I tried to call.”
“Well, you didn’t try hard enough, did you? She is a little girl, Denny. She should not be left to sit in a dark, cold parking lot with a janitor! You should be ashamed!”
“My car—”
“Then you should get yourself a new one. I don’t know what’s less dependable, your car or you. I am finished asking you to help with Zoë. Finished.”
She climbed back into her very large car and drove away quickly; we returned to our taxi and went home.
This incident affected Denny very much, not because it wounded his pride, but because it interfered with his relationship with Zoë. You see, Denny missed Eve tremendously, but he missed Zoë even more. I could see it most on those days when he kept Zoë overnight and we got to walk her to her bus stop. On those mornings, our house seemed filled with electricity so that neither Denny nor I needed the alarm clock to wake. Instead we waited anxiously in the darkness until the hour came to rouse Zoë. We didn’t want to miss a single minute we could spend with her.
On those mornings, Denny was a different person altogether. The way he so lovingly packed her sack lunches, often writing a note on a piece of notepaper, a thought or a joke he hoped she would find at lunch and might make her smile. The way he took such care with her peanut butter and banana sandwiches, slicing the banana so that each slice was exactly the same thickness. (I got to eat the extra banana on those occasions, which I enjoyed. I love bananas almost as much as I love pancakes, my favorite food.)
I knew it was never Denny’s intent to be late to pick up Zoë. But, as on a race track, the reasons why matter less than the facts at hand. And, really, Trish was right: a little girl should not sit in a cold, dark parking lot for an hour with a janitor. Even Denny would admit that.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In February, the black pit of winter, we went on a trip to north-central Washington, to an area called the Methow Valley. It is important for United States citizens to celebrate the birthdays of their greatest presidents, so all the schools were closed for a week; Denny, Zoë, and I went to a cabin in the snowy mountains to celebrate. The cabin was owned by a relative of Eve’s whom I had never met. It was quite cold, too cold for me, though on the warmer afternoons I enjoyed running in the snow. I much preferred to lie by the baseboard heater and let the others do their exercises—skiing and snowshoeing and all of that. Eve, who was too weak to travel, and her parents were not there. But many others were, all of whom were relatives of some kind or another. We were only there, I overheard, because Eve had thought it was very important for Zoë to spend time with these people, since she, Eve, someone said, would die very soon.
I didn’t like that whole line of reasoning. First, that Eve would be dying soon. And second, that Zoë needed to spend time with people she had never met because Eve would soon die. They might have been perfectly pleasant people, in their puffy pants and fleece vests and sweaters that smelled of sweat. I don’t know. But I wondered why they had waited for Eve’s illness to make themselves available for companionship.
There were a great many of them, and I had no idea who was connected to whom. They were all cousins, I understood, but there were certain generational gaps that were confusing to me, and some of the people were without parents but were with uncles and aunts instead, and some might have just been friends. Zoë and Denny kept mostly to themselves, but they still participated in certain group events like horseback riding in the snow, sledding, and snowshoeing. The group meals were convivial, and though I was determined to remain aloof, one of the cousins was always willing to slip me a treat at mealtime. And no one ever kicked me out from under the very large dining table where I lingered during dinner even though I was breaking my own personal code; a certain sense of lawlessness pervaded the house, what with children staying awake late into the night and adults sleeping at all hours of the day like dogs. Why shouldn’t I have partaken in the debauchery?
Conflicted though I was, each night something special happened that I liked very much. Outside the house—which had many identical rooms, each with many identical beds to house the multitude—was a stone patio with a large hearth. Apparently in the summer months, it was used for outdoor cooking, but it was used in the winter as well. I didn’t care for the stones, which were very cold and were sprinkled with salt pellets that hurt when they got wedged between my pads, but I loved the hearth. Fire! Crackling and hot it blazed in the evenings after dinner, and they all gathered, bundled in their great coats, and one had a guitar and gloves without fingertips and he played music while they all sang. It was well below freezing, but I had my place next to the hearth. And the stars we could see! Billions of them, because the night was so intensely dark, and the sounds in the distance, the snap of a snow-burdened tree branch giving way to the wind. The barking of coyotes, my brethren, calling each other to the hunt. And when the cold overpowered the heat from the hearth, we all shuffled into the house and into our separate rooms, our fur and jackets smelling of smoke and pine sap and flaming marshmallows.
As the end of the week drew near, everyone had settled into their routines: certain cousins went skiing, others to the snowmobile park, and so on. Denny and Zoë preferred to go on leisurely snowshoe walks together, and they always took me. They had purchased little dog booties for me at the local lodge, and though I felt them unbecoming for a durable dog such as myself, I appreciated that they protected my paws from freezing or getting cut from the rough snow and frozen branches that lay hidden underneath.
&nbs
p; On the final day of our stay, we went for a special walk at a place called Sun Mountain, which we drove to in Denny’s car. It was a bit far and tricky to find; some of the cousins drew a map for Denny. But it was supposed to be a spectacular and glorious walk with tremendous views all around the valley.
We began our walk easily enough, finding the small parking lot, bundling up, strapping on our shoes, and heading off along a low trail. The area was quite remote and didn’t seem to have been traveled recently, and so our isolation was somewhat idyllic. Eventually, the path began a switchback pattern and climbed a low mountain, leveled off, and then began a switchback again. Higher and higher we climbed, and yet, since we were in a thick forest and entirely surrounded by trees, we had little sense of our altitude. Up and up we climbed; deeper and deeper into the woods we delved, until we were quite exhausted.
“We should be getting close,” Denny said to us, but he seemed unsure.
“I’m tired,” Zoë complained.
“Let’s just get to the top of the mountain,” Denny urged. And so we continued on.
When we finally reached the mountaintop, it was all that Denny had hoped for. The view was stunning, as we could stand in one spot and turn completely around to see the entire Methow Valley spread out below us. But there was little time for enjoyment: in the distance, we could see very dark clouds forming, growing, blotting out more and more of the sky as we watched; and Zoë was crying softly, her face etched with pain.
“What’s wrong, Honey?” Denny asked.
“My toes won’t move,” she said.
“Sure they will,” he said. “Just wiggle them.”
But when we looked down at her feet, Denny and I realized the problem: Zoë wasn’t wearing her insulated boots. She was wearing her normal street shoes. She had forgotten to change her shoes when we left the car.
Denny became very quiet, and I knew he was thinking of all the terrible possibilities: frozen toes, frostbite, chilblains. And he was likely probing his own mind for wilderness survival tips he had picked up along his life’s journey. Suddenly, he swooped Zoë into his arms and headed off down the hill.