A Dog's Purpose (33 page)

Which they did. An hour or so later, Ethan’s car pulled into the driveway. I jumped up from where I had Carly pinned to the grass and ran over to him. Hannah was sitting on the stoop, and she stood uncertainly as Ethan got out of the car. “Buddy, what in the world are you doing here?” he asked. “Get in the car.”

I bounded into the front seat. Carly put her paws up on the car door, straining to smell me through the window as if we hadn’t been nose-to-nose for the past four hours.

“Carly, get down!” Hannah said sharply. Carly dropped.

“Oh, it’s okay. Hi there, Hannah.”

“Hi, Ethan.” They stared at each other a minute, and then Hannah laughed. Awkwardly they hugged, their faces coming together briefly.

“I have no idea how this happened,” the boy said.

“Well, your dog was in the park. My daughter Rachel goes there every afternoon—she’s a week overdue, and the doctor
wants her to spend a little time on her feet every day. She’d do jumping jacks, if it would help.” Hannah felt nervous to me, but it was nothing like what was happening to Ethan—his heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in his breath. The emotions coming off him were strong and confusing.

“That’s what I don’t understand. I wasn’t in town. Buddy must have gone all that way by himself. I have no idea what would make him do such a thing.”

“Well,” Hannah said.

They stood there looking at each other. “Would you like to come in?” she finally asked.

“Oh no, no. I need to get back.”

“Okay then.”

There was more standing. Carly yawned, sitting down to scratch herself, oblivious to the tension between the two people.

“I was going to call you, when I heard about . . . Matthew. I’m sorry for your loss,” Ethan said.

“Thank you,” Hannah replied. “That was fifteen years ago, Ethan. Long time.”

“I didn’t realize it had been so long.”

“Yes.”

“So are you visiting, for the baby?”

“Oh no, I live here now.”

“You do?” Ethan seemed startled by something, but, as I looked around, I saw nothing surprising except that a squirrel had come down out of the trees and was digging around in the grass a few houses down. Carly was looking the wrong way, I noted with disgust.

“I moved back two years ago next month. Rachel and her husband are staying with me while they finish adding a room to their place for the baby.”

“Oh.”

“They’d better hurry,” Hannah said with a laugh. “She’s . . . big.”

They both laughed. This time, when the laughter stopped, something like sadness came off of Hannah. Ethan’s fear bled away, and he, too, seemed overtaken with an odd gloom.

“Well, it was nice to see you, Ethan.”

“It was great to see you, too, Hannah.”

“Okay. Bye.”

She turned to go back into her house. Ethan came around the front of the car. His mood was angry and scared and sad and conflicted. Carly still didn’t see the squirrel. The girl was on the top step. Ethan opened the car door. “Hannah!” he called.

She turned. Ethan took a deep, shuddering breath. “I wonder if you’d like to come over for dinner sometime. Might be fun for you; you haven’t been to the Farm in a long time. I, uh, put in a garden. Tomatoes . . .” His voice trailed off.

“You cook now, Ethan?”

“Well. I heat things up, pretty well.”

They both laughed, and the sadness lifted from them as if it had never been there.

After that day, I saw Hannah and Carly a lot. They came to the Farm to play more and more frequently, which was fine by me. Carly understood that the Farm was my territory, something she could hardly fail to recognize, since I’d lifted my leg on every tree on the place. I was the Top Dog, and she didn’t try to challenge me, though she was irritatingly oblivious to the benefits that the natural order bestowed upon our admittedly small pack. Mostly, she just acted like we were playmates and nothing more.

She was, I concluded, just not very bright. Carly seemed to think that she could catch the ducks if she just crept up on them slowly enough, which was an exercise in pure stupidity. I would watch in utter disgust as she would slink through the grass, her belly in the dirt, moving just inches at a time, while all the while
the mother duck watched her with an unblinking eye. Then a quick lunge, a huge splash, and the ducks would be airborne for a few feet, landing just ahead of Carly in the pond. She’d swim for about fifteen minutes, working so hard her body would nearly be lifted out of the water, and would bark in frustration whenever she felt she was within biting distance and the ducks flapped their wings and jumped through the air a few feet out ahead. When Carly finally gave up, the ducks would determinedly swim after her, quacking, and sometimes Carly would spin around and head back out, thinking she had the ducks fooled. I had no patience with any of it.

Ethan and I occasionally went to Carly’s house, too, but this wasn’t as fun, as all there was to do was play in the backyard.

The next summer, dozens of people assembled at the Farm, sitting in folding chairs to watch me perform a trick I’d first perfected with Maya and Al, which was to walk between the chairs at a slow, dignified pace, this time up to where Ethan had built some raised wooden steps so everyone could see me. He untied something from my back, and he and Hannah talked and kissed and everyone laughed and applauded at me.

After that, Hannah lived with us on the Farm. The place was transformed so that it was almost like Maya’s mama’s house, with people arriving for visits all the time. Ethan brought home a couple more horses to join Troy in the yard, smaller ones, and the children who came to visit loved to ride them, even though, in my opinion, horses are unreliable creatures who will leave you stranded in the forest at the first sign of a snake.

Carly’s owner, Rachel, soon showed up with a tiny baby named Chase, a little boy who loved to climb on me and grab my fur and giggle. I lay still when this happened, just as I had when Maya and I did school. I was a good dog; everyone said so.

Hannah had three daughters, and each of them had children, too, so that at any given time I might have more playmates than I could count.

When there were no visitors, Ethan and Hannah often sat out on the front porch, holding hands while the evening air turned cool. I lay at their feet, sighing with contentment. The pain in my boy was gone, replaced by a serene, uplifting happiness. The children who came to visit called him Granddaddy, and each one made his heart soar when they did so. Hannah called him “my love” and darling as well as just plain Ethan.

About the only thing involved with the new arrangement that was less than perfect was the fact that when Hannah started sleeping with Ethan I was summarily dismissed from the bed. At first I assumed this was a mistake—there was, after all, plenty of room for me between them, which was where I preferred to lie. But Ethan ordered me off onto the floor, even though there was nothing wrong with the bed upstairs and the girl could just as easily sleep there. In fact, after I performed my trick in the yard for all the people to see, Ethan had beds put in all the upstairs rooms, even Grandma’s sewing room, but apparently none of them were good enough for Hannah.

Just to test it, though, every single night I put my paws on the bed and slowly raised myself up like Carly inching through the weeds toward the ducks. And every night Ethan and Hannah would laugh.

“No, Buddy, you get down,” Ethan would say.

“You can’t blame him for trying,” Hannah often replied.

When the snow fell, Hannah and Ethan would put a blanket over themselves and sit and talk in front of the fire. When it was Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas, the house would be so full of people I often felt in danger of being stepped on, and
I could have my pick of beds where the children were delighted to have me sleep with them. My favorite child was Rachel’s boy, Chase, who reminded me a little of Ethan, the way he hugged me and loved me. When Chase stopped trying to walk on all fours like a dog and started running on two legs, he liked to explore the Farm with me while Carly fruitlessly hunted ducks.

I was a good dog. I had fulfilled my purpose. Lessons I had learned from being feral had taught me how to escape and how to hide from people when it was necessary, scavenging for food from trash containers. Being with Ethan had taught me love and had taught me my most important purpose, which was taking care of my boy. Jakob and Maya had taught me Find, Show, and, most important of all, how to save people, and it was all of these things, everything I had learned as a dog, that had led me to find Ethan and Hannah and to bring them both together. I understood it now, why I had lived so many times. I had to learn a lot of important skills and lessons, so that when the time came I could rescue Ethan, not from the pond but from the sinking despair of his own life.

The boy and I still walked around the Farm in the evenings, usually with Hannah, but not always. I craved the alone time with Ethan, when he would talk to me, his gait slow and careful on the uneven path. “What a great time we all had this week; didn’t you have fun, Buddy?” Sometimes he used his cane to smack the ball down the driveway and I would joyously tear after it, chewing it a little before dropping it at his feet for another whack.

“You’re such a great dog, Buddy, I don’t know what I would do without you,” Ethan said on one such evening. He took a deep breath, turning to survey the Farm, waving at a picnic table full of children, who waved back.

“Hi, Granddaddy!” they shouted.

His sheer enjoyment, his love of life, made me bark with delight. He turned back to me, laughing.

“Ready for another one, Buddy?” he asked me, raising his cane to hit the ball again.

Chase wasn’t the last baby to join the family; they just kept coming. Chase was about the age Ethan had been when I first met him when his mother, Rachel, brought home a little girl they variously called the Surprise, the Last One for Sure, and Kearsten. As usual, they held the baby down for me to sniff, and as usual, I tried to be appreciative—I never knew what they expected from me under these circumstances.

“Let’s go play ball, Buddy!” Chase suggested. Now
that
I could respond to!

One beautiful spring day I was home alone with Ethan, napping drowsily while he read a book in the warm sunlight streaming through the picture window. Hannah had just left in the car, and, at that particular moment, our home was uncharacteristically empty of visiting family members. Suddenly my eyes snapped open. I turned and looked at Ethan, who met my gaze curiously. “What did you hear, Buddy?” he asked me. “Did a car pull up?”

There was something wrong with the boy; I could sense it. With a slight whimper, I got to my feet. Anxiety washed through me. He’d gone back to his book but laughed in surprise when I put my paws on the couch, as if to climb on top of him. “Whoa, Buddy, what are you doing?”

The sense of impending disaster increased. I barked helplessly.

“Are you okay? Do you need to go out?” He gestured toward the dog door, then pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Whew. Little dizzy, there.”

I sat. He blinked, looking off into the distance. “Tell you what, old boy, let’s you and me go back and take a nap.” He got to his feet, swaying unsteadily. Panting nervously, I followed him back to the bedroom. He sat on the bed and groaned. “Oh,” he said.

Something tore inside of his head; I could feel it. He sank back, sucking in a deep breath. I jumped on top of the bed, but he didn’t say anything, just stared at me, glassy-eyed.

There was nothing for me to do. I nuzzled his slack hand, fearfully conscious of the strange forces loose inside him. His breathing was shallow, shuddering.

After an hour, he stirred. Something was still really wrong with him, but I could feel him gathering his resources, struggling to break free of whatever gripped him the way I had once struggled to find the surface of the cold water from the storm drain, when I had the little boy Geoffrey in my teeth.

“Oh,” Ethan panted. “Oh. Hannah.”

More time passed. I whined softly, feeling the fight continue within him. Then his eyes opened. At first they were unfocused, confused, and then they lit upon me, widening.

“Why, hello, Bailey,” he shocked me by saying. “How have you been? I’ve missed you, dog.” His hand groped for my fur. “Good dog, Bailey,” he said.

It wasn’t a mistake. Somehow, he knew. These magnificent creatures, with their complex minds, were capable of so much more than a dog, and the sure conviction coming from him now let me know that he had put it all together. He was looking at me and seeing Bailey.

“How about the day of the go-karts, eh, Bailey? We sure did show them, that day. We sure did.”

I wanted to let him know that
yes
, I was Bailey, I was his one
and only dog, and that I understood that whatever was happening inside him was letting him see me as I truly was. It dawned on me how I might do this, and in a flash I was off the bed and down the hall. I reached up and grabbed the knob to the closet just the way my first mother had taught me, and the old mechanism turned easily in my mouth, the door popping open. I nosed it aside and dove into the pile of musty things at the bottom, tossing aside boots and umbrellas until I had it in my mouth: the flip.