A Dog's Purpose (24 page)

“Two weeks, but . . .” Maya trailed off.

“But?” Jakob prompted.

“I’m thinking of resigning from the program,” Maya confessed in a rush. “I just can’t keep up. I didn’t realize . . . well, someone else would probably be better.”

“You can’t do that,” Jakob said. I raised my head and looked at him curiously, wondering why he was feeling angry. “You can’t keep switching handlers on a dog. Ellie is the best dog anyone has ever seen. You dump her like that, you could ruin her. Wally says the two of you have a rapport.”

I thumped my tail a little at my name and Wally’s being mentioned by Jakob, but his tone was still very stern.

“I’m just not cut out for it physically, Jakob,” Maya said. I
could feel anger stirring in her, too. “I’m not an ex-Marine; I’m just a beat cop who can barely pass the physical every year. I’ve been trying, but it is just too hard.”

“Too hard.” Jakob glared at her until Maya shrugged and looked away. Her anger turned to shame, and I went over to her to nuzzle her hand. “What about how hard it would be on Ellie? Doesn’t that matter?”

“Of course it matters.”

“You’re saying you’re not willing to work.”

“I’m saying I’m not cut out for this, Jakob! I don’t have what it takes inside.”

“What it takes. Inside.”

I could sense that Maya was grappling with the rising tide of emotion that sometimes led to a flood of tears. I wanted to comfort her and shoved my nose under her hand again. When Jakob spoke again, he wasn’t looking at Maya and his voice was quieter.

“When I was shot the first time, my shoulder was so messed up, I had to learn to use it all over again. I went to physical therapy every day, and there was this little two-pound weight on a pulley and that thing
hurt
. . . and my wife was in her final round of chemo. More than once, I wanted to give up. It was too
hard.
” Jakob turned his head and blinked at Maya. “But Susan was dying. And she never gave up, not until the very end. And if she could keep going, I knew I had to. Because it’s important. Because failure isn’t an option if success is just a matter of more effort. I know it’s difficult, Maya. Try harder.”

The same old dark pain swirled around inside Jakob like a storm, and the anger left him as if blown away by a gust of wind. He sagged in his chair, suddenly exhausted.

Somehow I knew then that I wouldn’t be staying with Jakob. He just wasn’t interested in Find anymore.

Sadness was flowing through Maya, but through it I felt a rising resolve, a strength like what came over her the day she took me running along the ocean.

“Okay. You’re right,” she told Jakob.

Jakob petted my head when we left, saying good-bye without regret. The last glimpse I had of him was as he shut the door, and he wasn’t looking at me. He and Maya had decided my fate, and it was up to me to do what they wanted.

Later Maya and I drove up into the hills. She ran until she was so tired she stumbled, and the next day, after work, we ran some more. It was gloriously fun, except that Maya often felt full of despair and pain by the end of the course.

A few evenings later, we pulled into the driveway and Maya was literally too tired to get out of the car. We sat there, sweat running from her face, with the windows open. “I’m going to fail, Ellie. I’m so sorry,” Maya said mournfully.

I could see Emmet and Stella both watching from the window—they probably didn’t even know what a car was. Tinkerbell, I assumed, had become alarmed at the sound of our approach and was cowering under something.

“Are you okay, Maya?” Al asked softly. The wind was working against me, so I hadn’t smelled his approach. I put my head out the window for him to pet.

“Oh, hi, Al.” She stood up out of the car. “Yes, I was just . . . thinking.”

“Oh. I saw you pull up in your car.”

“Yes.”

“So I came over to see if you needed any help.”

“No, no. I was just running with the dog.”

I slid out of the front seat and squatted in the yard, staring pointedly at Emmet and Stella, who looked away in disgust.

“Okay.” Al drew in a deep breath. “You’ve lost weight, Maya.”

“What?” Maya stared at him.

Al recoiled in horror. “Not that you were fat, I just noticed, in your shorts, your legs look so thin.” A gust of misery flowed off of him, and he was backing away. “I should go.”

“Thank you, Al; that was sweet,” Maya said.

He arrested his retreat and stood up straight. “In my opinion, you don’t need to exercise anymore; you are perfect the way you are.”

Maya laughed at this, and then Al laughed. I wagged my tail to show the cats at the window that I understood the joke and they didn’t.

A week or so later Maya and I did one of my favorite things, which was to go to the park with a lot of other dogs and work on the toys. At her command I crawled into the tight tube and up and down the tippy board. I climbed slowly down a ladder and demonstrated that I could sit patiently on a narrow beam two feet off the ground, all the while ignoring the other dogs.

Our Find consisted of locating a man who had dropped some old socks as he blundered off into the woods. Maya was bursting with eagerness, so I went at it full speed, even when she began to huff and sweat. I knew he was high in a tree even before I found him, because Wally had tried that on me a few times and it always affected the way the human scent drifted on the wind. Maya was a little mystified, though, that I was alerting at the base of the tree when clearly the man wasn’t standing there. I sat, patiently staring up at the grinning man, until she got it.

That night there was a big party at Mama’s house. Everyone was petting me and saying my name.

“Now that you are certified, you need to eat,” Mama told Maya.

The doorbell rang, which hardly ever happened at that house; people usually just burst in. I followed Mama to the door, and when she opened it Mama’s heart soared. It was Al, and he gave some flowers to Mama. I remembered Ethan giving Hannah flowers, and I was confused because I thought Al liked Maya, not Mama, but I’ll never really understand people when it comes to stuff like this.

The whole family grew quiet when Al stepped out into the backyard where the picnic tables were set up. Maya went over to Al and they both felt nervous as he briefly pressed his mouth to her face. Then Maya said everyone’s name and Al shook hands with the men and everyone started talking and laughing again.

Over the next several days we found and saved two children who had wandered away from their houses, plus backtracked a horse’s path to find a woman who had fallen off and hurt her leg. I remembered Flare dumping Ethan in the woods, and wondered why people even bothered to own horses, since they were obviously unreliable. If people had a dog or two and were still not satisfied, they should probably consider getting a donkey like Jasper the donkey, who at least made Grandpa laugh.

Maya and I also found an old man in the woods who was dead. I was depressed to sniff out his cold body lying in the dirt, because that wasn’t saving people, and though Maya praised me, neither one of us was much interested in playing with the stick afterward.

We went to Al’s house and he served Maya a chicken dinner and they both laughed and then ate a pizza a boy brought over. I sniffed at the chicken pieces Al put on the floor for me and ate them more out of politeness than anything, since they were so encrusted with what tasted like soot.

Later that evening I could tell she was telling him about the dead man, because her feeling of sadness was the same. Jakob and I had found a few dead people, too, but it never made him sad, the same way that finding people and saving them never really seemed to make him glad. He just did the work, not feeling much one way or the other.

When I thought about Jakob, I realized that his cold dedication to Find helped me get over my separation from Ethan—there was no time for grieving; I had too much work to do. Maya, though, was more complex, and the way she loved me made me miss my boy. Not with the same sharp, painful ache in my chest but with a wistful sadness that often came to me as I was lying down for the night and rode with me into my dreams.

One day Maya and I took a plane ride and then a chopper ride straight south. I thought about the day Jakob was taken away, and was glad I was back to being a chopper dog. She was both excited and uneasy on the flight, which wasn’t, frankly, nearly as much fun as a car ride, because the noise hurt my ears.

We landed in a place unlike any I’d ever been to before. There were lots of dogs and policemen, and the air was filled with the sound of sirens and the smell of smoke. Buildings everywhere were in a state of collapse, their roofs sometimes all the way on the ground.

Maya seemed stunned, and I pressed up against her, yawning anxiously. A man approached us; he was dirty and wore a plastic helmet. His hands, when he held them to me, smelled of ashes, blood, and clay. He shook hands with Maya.

“I’m coordinating the U.S. response in this sector; thanks for coming down.”

“I had no idea it was going to be this bad,” Maya said.

“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The El Salvadoran
government is completely overwhelmed. We’ve got more than four thousand people injured, hundreds dead—and we’re still finding folks trapped. There’ve been more than a half dozen aftershocks since January 13, some of them pretty bad. Be careful going in these places.”

Maya put me on a leash and led me through the maze of rubble. We’d come to a house and some men who were following us would check it, and then sometimes Maya would let me off the leash and I’d go in and sometimes she’d keep me on the leash and we would just Find along the outside of the house.

“This one’s not safe, Ellie. I have to keep you on a leash so you don’t go in there,” Maya told me.

One of the men was named Vernon, and he smelled like goats, reminding me of trips to town with Ethan and Grandpa. It was one of the rare times I thought of Ethan while working—doing Find meant putting all of that away and concentrating on the job.

Over the next several hours, Maya and I Found four people. They were all dead. My excitement over Find soured after the second one; by the time I came across the fourth person, a young woman lying beneath a jumble of bricks, I almost didn’t alert Maya. She sensed my mood and tried to reassure me, petting me and waving the rubber bone at me, in which I had very little interest.

“Vernon, would you do me a favor and go hide somewhere?” she asked. I lay down tiredly at her feet.

“Hide?” he asked uncertainly.

“She needs to find someone alive. Would you go hide? Like over in that house we just searched. And when she locates you, act all excited.”

“Um, yeah, okay.”

I registered Vernon’s departure without interest. “Okay, Ellie, ready? Ready to Find?”

I wearily rose to my feet. “Let’s go, Ellie!” Maya said. Her excitement seemed fake, but I trotted over to a house we’d already searched. “Find!” Ellie commanded.

I went into the house and stopped, puzzled. Though we’d all been in here already, I thought Vernon’s smell was somehow more intense. Curious, I padded to the back of the house. Yes! There was a pile of blankets in the corner, from which came a strong Vernon scent, full of sweat and heat and goats. I raced back to Maya. “Show!” she urged.

She followed me at a run, and when she peeled back the blankets Vernon leaped up, laughing.

“You found me! Good dog, Ellie!” he shouted, rolling on the blankets with me. I jumped on him and licked his face, and we played with the rubber bone for a while.

Maya and I worked all night and we Found more people, including Vernon, who became better and better at hiding—but I’d worked with Wally, so no one could fool me for very long. Everyone else Maya and I found was dead.

The sun was coming up when we came to a building from which sharp, acrid smoke still rose. I was back on the leash, my eyes watering at an intense chemical smell coming out from the collapsed concrete.

I Found a dead man lying crushed beneath a flat section of wall and alerted Maya.

“We know about him,” someone told Maya. “We can’t get him out just yet; whatever is in those barrels is toxic. Going to need a cleanup crew.”

Some metal barrels leaked a steady stream of liquid that
filled my nose with a scalding odor. I concentrated on pushing the scent away, trying to Find.

“Okay, good dog. Let’s go somewhere else, Ellie.”

There! I smelled another person and alerted, going rigid. It was a woman, and her scent was faint, riding out just behind the chemicals clogging the air.

“It’s okay, Ellie. We’re going to leave this one here. Come on,” Maya said. She tugged gently on my leash. “Come, Ellie.”

I alerted again, agitated. We couldn’t leave!

This one was alive.

“We see the victim, Ellie. We’re going to have to leave him here. Come on,” Maya said.

I understood that she wanted to leave and wondered if perhaps she thought that I was alerting because of the dead person.

“Does she want to Find me again?” Vernon asked.

I stared up at Maya, willing her to understand.