by Linzi Glass
“I grew up on a farm just outside of Savannah, Georgia. Lotsa goats an’ chickens an’ horses as well as dogs an’ cats roamin’ around. I loved it there.” She sighed. “But then when I was ten, everythin’ changed. Papa lost the farm and we moved to New Orleans. The only thing he did all day was play cards an’ smoke three packs of cigarettes.”
“How did you get money for food and clothes?” I asked.
“Mama cleaned rich people’s houses for a while, but then a massive heart attack killed Papa and Mama used the life insurance money to open the kinda store she’d always wanted.”
Rayleen told me about her mother’s homeopathic cures and the herb shop she opened on Bourbon Street. They lived above it, and in the morning Rayleen would have to step over men who had passed out on the sidewalk from drinking all night so she could get to the bus to school.
“Wow. That sounds so different,” I said.
“Oh, it certainly was that. I discovered my ever-lastin’ need to rescue animals around then. I took in the stray, skinny cats and an occasional dog from the streets. My mama didn’t mind much. She was always mixing something and giving a cure to someone. Busy, busy always an’ not mindin’ me much.”
“Sounds like my mom.” I stretched out long on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. It was painted deep turquoise, the color of a Caribbean sea.
“She’s doing the best that she knows how, sweet pea. And she loves you. You need to know that.”
“She loves her career more.”
Rayleen was quiet for a minute and then spoke.
“I have a feeling lots is about to change with your mama.”
The candles flickered and the monks chanted.
“That would be nice.” I sighed.
That night Rayleen and I talked about a hundred different things while the candles burned lower and lower and the incense dissolved into ashes.
“What’s school like?” she asked.
“Good mostly, but one of my best friends and I are kinda drifting apart.”
Rayleen stroked the top of Alfie’s head. He had fallen asleep beside her.
“That happens, sweet pea. Sometimes we just need a break from someone, and then when we get back together, it’s all good as new again.”
“Well, I’ve made a new friend, a boy.”
She took a long sip of tea and smiled. “What’s his name?”
I told her all about Ashton and his soon-to-be wicked stepmother. Rayleen predicted that Stephanie wouldn’t be in his life much longer and that Ashton didn’t need to worry about Buster and Bullwinkle.
“He loves dogs, too,” I said.
“I like him already,” Rayleen said. “Bring him to the shelter sometime.”
“I will.”
It was so easy to talk to Rayleen. Thoughts and feelings and words poured out of me like the sweet agave she had stirred into my tea. Just as I heard my dad’s Range Rover come to a crunching stop outside, I told Rayleen that I really wanted to help the shelter dogs.
“I want to figure out a way to get them out of the shelter and into homes where they can sleep on warm doggy beds and get kisses and hugs and lots of walks and food every day from owners who will love them for the rest of their lives.”
Rayleen sat still and quiet and closed her eyes. “You’ll find a way.” A smile formed on her lips. “I know you will.”
She opened her eyes and stood up and came over to my cushion and held my hand in hers.
“Synchronicity, sweet pea. Synchronicity.” She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the forehead just as my dad knocked on the front door.
Later that night when I got home I looked up the word “synchronicity,” since it had never been a vocab word and I didn’t have a clue what it meant.
Synchronicity: the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality.
Chapter Fifteen
“She sounds weird,” Ashton said as we walked door to door dropping off flyers that read LOST DOG! REWARD!!
“She’s different. Not weird. And you should like her already since she thinks your dad’s fiancée will be out of your life soon.”
“Yeah, right.” Ashton threw a baseball up in the air and caught it in his mitt. He had come straight from practice and was still in his uniform. “She’s got a contractor and the architect over today. Wants to tear down and change everything in the house. Ugh! I just wish my dad was in town.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Shooting a movie. Where else?”
“Cool.”
“Not really. He’s gone all the time directing the sequel of the sequel of whatever.”
“My mom’s gone a ton, too, and my dad even more. I wish they had normal jobs sometimes.”
“Like what?” Ashton asked.
“A doctor, an accountant, a hairdresser, I dunno. Just something that lets them come home every day at normal hours.”
“At least your mom comes home at all. Mine’s MIA.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and really meant it.
I was trying hard to keep up with Ashton. I was wearing a dress, something I didn’t often do, and now I wished I was in more comfortable leggings instead. My feet were still blistered, so going door to door was painful but necessary.
My mother had raised an eyebrow when I’d come down for breakfast earlier. She and my dad were sipping coffee and eating low carb, no trans fat muffins under the shaded cabana by the pool.
“What’s the occasion?” she had asked.
My dad had The Washington Post up over his face but lowered it. He looked me up and down and smiled.
“Very beautiful. My little girl’s all grown up.” He patted for me to sit beside him.
“Ashton Adams is coming over.” I tried to sound as “no-big-deal” casual as possible.
“Another rehearsal?” my mom asked.
“No. He’s helping me find Danny.”
“That’s very nice of him.” My mother winked at my dad. They gave each other stupid, wiggly smiles that were hard to miss.
“Stop! He loves dogs, too, that’s all.” I didn’t need to be teased about anything this morning. I was nervous enough as it was.
After that, the newsparents dropped the whole Ashton subject and we had a reasonably pleasant breakfast together, except for the giant glaring hole under the center of the table—a black and white dog who would normally be begging for scraps at our feet.
When we were just about out of flyers, I asked Ashton if he’d mind if we stopped off at one more house that was just a few blocks over. I had been getting these weird feelings in my gut about Martha, the old woman who had found Danny’s collar, and I wanted to make sure she was okay. We walked over to Marguerita Avenue to Martha’s white-shuttered house.
The first thing I noticed as we went up her driveway was that the rows of yellow daffodils that led up to her front door were wilted and dying, and the front garden looked like it hadn’t been watered in a while. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer so I knocked again. Still nothing.
“The ol’ lady’s not here. Let’s go.” Ashton turned and started heading down the driveway, tossing his baseball in the air as he walked.
I got this weird, fluttery tightness in my stomach. I knew I couldn’t leave. I tried the door handle and it opened with ease.
“I got in. Come back!” I shouted.
“C’mon, Bree, we’re wasting time. I still wanna go online and post Danny’s picture on Craigslist.”
But I knew something was wrong. I stepped over the threshold into Martha’s house.
The first thing that struck me was how dark it was inside. All the shades were drawn and there was a damp, moldy smell in the house. I remembered how sparkly clean and neat everything had been the last time I was here, but now the place was a mess.
“Martha,” I called. “Martha, it’s me, Bree, the girl with the lost dog.”
A strange croaking noise came out of a bedroom. I walked quickly to the door and opened it. Martha lay, small and deathly white, in her bed. She tried to raise a withered hand, but it fell helplessly back to her side.
“Martha! What happened to you!” I went quickly to her just as I heard Ashton yell from the other room.
“Oh my God! This place reeks!”
Martha’s eyes were hollow and scared looking, like a small animal caught in a trap. She tried to speak, but her mouth was dry and cracked at the corners.
“Call nine one one!” I shouted to Ashton.
I took Martha’s hand in mine. “It’s okay. You’re not alone anymore. Help is on its way.” Words came out of me that I’d only seen on a TV medical crisis show. She curled her frail fingers around mine like a claw and held on tight. A parched cry came out of her. I could see the tears without liquid form in her eyes. She was beyond dehydrated, just like her garden.
Ashton stood in the doorway of Martha’s bedroom. He spoke quickly to the 911 operator on his cell phone.
“She’s very old and looks very bad. We found her…yes. What’s the address, Bree?” I didn’t know the house number, so he ran outside to get it.
In less than two minutes we heard the sirens blaring. The Santa Monica Fire Department and an ambulance arrived and they instantly went into high gear. I stayed with Martha the whole time, while Ashton answered their questions. “Is she her granddaughter?” I heard one paramedic ask as they watched the way Martha clung to me.
“No, just a neighbor,” Ashton told them.
I watched as the team put an oxygen mask on Martha and took her blood pressure and started IV fluids through one of the small purple veins in her arm, and thought how strange it was that in just a week I had been called someone’s daughter and granddaughter when neither was true. Still, Rayleen and Martha somehow felt like family to me.
They wheeled Martha out of her house on a gurney.
“Can I go with her in the ambulance?” I asked one of the paramedics, but he said it wasn’t possible since I was under age and there was no adult other than Martha present.
“I’ll be by to see you as soon as you come home. Promise,” I told her as her fluttering, paper-thin eyelids closed and they hoisted her into the ambulance.
As they got ready to leave, the same paramedic turned to us and said that Martha had probably been alone in the house for days and had definitely not eaten or had anything to drink for more than forty-eight hours.
“If you hadn’t come over to her house, she might not have made it through the night. You did a good deed, young lady, young man.” The firefighter patted my shoulder and shook Ashton’s hand, which he took out of his glove.
“How’d you know something was wrong?” Ashton asked as we walked back to my house.
“Just a hunch,” I said. It was the same thing Rayleen had said about my dad’s book. “Just a hunch.”
We were both quiet for a while. The incident with Martha had really shaken me up, and I guessed it had affected Ashton, too. I started thinking about how lonely Martha was now that her husband was gone and how nice it would be for her to have a companion, a friend, someone who cared about her and that she could care about. She needed company, someone to snuggle on the couch and watch TV with and to talk to while she ate dinner.
Thoughts of Danny suddenly flashed through my brain. Love, comfort, friendship, and belonging. Images of the shelter dogs, sad and unloved, followed.
I grabbed Ashton’s arm. “I’ve got it!” I said excitedly.
“Got what?” Ashton looked at me confused.
“A dog! That’s what Martha needs. A shelter dog!”
“A what?” Ashton and I stood at the gates of my house. I pulled him down to sit in the same spot on the curb where I had waited for Danny to come back. I needed to explain everything to him. The shelter and all the abandoned animals that might get euthanized any day. The words tumbled out of me so fast, in one long, disjointed sentence that never seemed to end, but Ashton kept his eyes intently focused on me the whole time.
“Martha,” I said, finally catching my breath, “should adopt a shelter dog.”
“What about all the rest that are left?” Ashton said with a serious look on his face.
“I know. And there are so many.”
“There’s got to be a way to save them,” Ashton said.
“It’s about finding people who could really benefit from having a dog in their lives. Maybe they don’t even realize it….”
“And maybe they just don’t know how many dogs really need homes,” Ashton added.
“Well, if I can try to match Martha with a dog, why can’t I match other people with other dogs?”
“Sure, why not?” Ashton grinned.
“I’m going to ask Rayleen and Steve if I can put on an adoption day at the shelter and invite everyone I know—”
“And people you don’t know,” Ashton said excitedly. “Advertise the event online: emails, websites, blogs, whatever you can to get them to come.”
“Dogs for people and people for dogs.” I stood up and smiled. “Rayleen said I’d figure out a way. And I have!”
“Now you’ve just got to get the shelter guy to agree to let you do it,” Ashton said as we walked up the front steps.
Ashton stayed over until almost dinnertime. We took my laptop down to the living room and Ashton took charge and posted pictures of Danny and information about him on websites that dealt with everything from lost dogs to lost shoelaces. When he was done, we talked nonstop about how to make the adoption day a big success. Ashton was really excited about it and said to count him in. I wasn’t surprised. Dog lovers stuck together, didn’t they?
When his driver picked him up, I waved good-bye and I felt a fuzzy, warm feeling inside as they drove away. Ashton wasn’t anything like I thought he was, now that I was getting to know him better. My dad always said you should never take things at face value and you always have to dig deep to find out what the real story is and what is the truth.
I called Lulu and I filled her in on all the events of the day.
“I can’t believe Ashton just left. Wow!” she said.
“He’s helping me find Danny.”
Lulu let out one of her famous loud whistles. I had to laugh.
She promised she’d come and help me put up flyers and canvass the neighborhood the next day. I knew she had a million extracurricular activities, so I really appreciated her wanting to help.
“That’s what best friends are for, right?” she said.
I told her all about the adoption day idea that I still hadn’t discussed with Rayleen or New Hope Steve.
“If it happens, I’m there with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”
“How about dog bones instead of cherries?” I said.
“Even better,” Lulu replied.
Chapter Sixteen
Over the next few days we got about twenty emails and calls from people who thought they had found Danny, some as far away as Bakersfield and San Diego. But after talking to each of them, it turned out they weren’t Danny, but other lost dogs. I took down their numbers and gave them to Rayleen, who was now up to fifteen dogs at her house. She was up and down the freeway every day, picking up the “Danny dogs” from all over. Some near, some far.
“Your Danny boy is doing good work, even though he’s not around. He’s savin’ other dogs who are lost, stray, or dumped!” I knew Rayleen would find them all homes if she couldn’t find their owners, and that none of the new rescues would land at the shelter. But with every call or email my hopes soared, then plummeted. I asked the people who contacted me to email pictures of the dog they had found. My heart raced every time I went to my in-box, sure that this would be the one. Then I’d click on the attachment only to see the face of a dog that was adorable but not mine.
The longer Danny was gone, the greater my fear became tha
t I would never find him.
“Have faith, sweet pea. What does your heart tell you, not your frightened brain?” Rayleen said as we drove to the shelter after school so I could talk to Steve, the New Hope coordinator.
I closed my eyes and tried to make my brain stop for a second. I pictured Danny, then felt him in my heart. Only then did Danny become a beat inside me, clear and strong. I opened my eyes.
“He’s alive,” I said softly to Rayleen.
“See, that’s called trustin’ your intuition not your mind.” She tapped the side of her head. “Thoughts can be big troublemakers.” She laughed. “Listen to Elvis the King. ‘We can’t go on together with suspicious minds,’ she sang along with her car stereo.
While I was at the shelter, I saw Officer Reyes sitting at his desk eating his lunch alone. When I made my way toward him, he smiled and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“Care for a bean burrito?” he asked.
“No, but thanks anyway.” There was something I wanted to ask him that I had been thinking about since I first saw how he was when Neptune came in.
I cleared my throat. “Officer Reyes, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but after a while, are the dogs and cats that come in here just a blur to you?”
Officer Reyes looked at me and nodded. “I’m afraid so, young lady.”
“I understand,” I said, then proceeded to tell him all about my adoption day idea.
“I am happy to hear it. I hope you get the okay to do it,” he said.
“Can I make a deal with you?” I said.
“What’s that?” He shuffled through some papers on his overcrowded desk.
“If I get all the red listed dogs saved at my adoption day, will you try to start looking at the animals again as they come in?”
He paused and held my gaze. “You are a sassy but very smart young lady,” he said. “Okay, deal.” He held his rough, calloused hand out toward me. We shook. Now I really had to make sure that I got the approval for the event, since getting Officer Reyes to care about the animals again and not treat them like inventory would be really great.