Bellweather Rhapsody (17 page)

Minnie’s brain shut down whenever she found herself wondering what the woman in the wedding dress had meant to do to her when she called Minnie closer to pick up her glove. When she called
Little girl. Little girl.

She was twenty-five, fat, living with her parents, sleeping in the same bed, in the same room, surrounded by the same posters as when she had been that little girl: three orange kittens piled into a white wicker basket. And when she was a slightly older little girl, a little girl who’d learned how to vaccinate herself against the horrors in her dreams: the original theatrical poster for George Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead
. Stacks and stacks of old issues of
Cinefantastique
. There were stuffed animals piled on her dresser, grayed with dust, and a towering bookshelf packed with every book Stephen King ever wrote. She was not happy, exactly, but not unhappy either. Mostly what she felt was safe, enclosed, a girl who’d opted to be locked high in a tower surrounded by a forest of deadly brambles, who would turn away any attempt at rescue with a curt
Not interested, get the hell out of my brambles
and a threatening wave with a roaring chain saw.

Enter Auggie.

The Graveses never had a family pet. And though Minnie improved after first holding the neighbors’ rabbit, and her parents, giddy with relief, offered to adopt a rabbit, a cat, or a dog, Minnie had said no. She loved creatures, loved her power over them and their power over her, but the responsibility of ownership was unfathomable. The thought of her animal—her own animal—getting sick, being hurt, or dying was more frightening than anything she could imagine, scarier than balloons popping and being left alone in the dark combined.

Auggie showed up in August, the month from which he took his name, the dog days, hot and still, the air in their small lakeside town heavy and oppressive as a soaked blanket. Minnie was reading on the front porch, swinging lazily in the hammock her father had installed for his retirement but never used. Something caught her attention: a tiny, tinkling noise, the sound of dog tags jangling on a collar.

She set her book on her chest and peered into the distance. A dog was walking down the middle of the empty street.

The Graveses lived in a refurbished turn-of-the-century house on the main road of their small (and obnoxiously quaint—every summer weekend there was a festival named after a fruit) town in rural New York. They hardly had any traffic, but still, any traffic to be had was had on this street. The dog didn’t seem to care. He might have been a mutt, but he was mostly Corgi, low to the ground with a proud little chest, Creamsicle coloring, and big fox-like ears, with a bright pink tongue that lolled happily from side to side as he took in his surroundings.

She frowned. She didn’t recognize him, but the fact that he had tags meant he belonged to someone who was likely missing him, and wouldn’t want him splattered in the middle of the road.

She had just turned to call the local shelter when another sound caught her: the low puttering chug of a semi. When there was a backup on the Thruway, tractor-trailers roared down her street as if it were their own personal highway. She couldn’t see it yet, but it was coming.

“Hey, dog,” she called from the porch. “Hey, dog, get out of the road!”

The dog, oblivious, continued to trot down the double yellow line.

Minnie pulled her T-shirt away from her sticky skin. “Dog!” she shouted. “Dog, c’mere! Hey!” The semi was getting closer. She stepped down off the porch and grabbed a twig from the front lawn. She whipped the stick across the street into the Hatchers’ yard on the other side.

The dog stopped and tilted his head in the direction the stick had flown. Then he sat down in the middle of the road and looked straight at Minnie.

She could see the truck now, barreling up the street from the left. Maybe sixty, seventy yards away, closing the distance.

“Dog!” Minnie yelled. She clapped. “Get out of the damn road, jackass.”

The dog pulled his tongue back into his mouth. He closed his eyes and lifted a hind leg to scratch behind his foxy ear.

Was he sick? Why the hell wasn’t he getting out of the way? Minnie bit her lip. Her hands were clammy. There wasn’t any foam around the dog’s mouth, he wasn’t charging, he wasn’t attacking—

The truck was close. About thirty yards now, not far at all, but it wasn’t blowing its horn. The driver hadn’t noticed yet, hadn’t seen there was something in the road, small but moving. Something alive.

“Dog!” Minnie was shouting now. Her throat was sore. “Move your goddamned ass!”

The dog shook his head, tags jangling and ears flapping cheerfully.

Minnie had two choices. She could stand on the edge of her lawn and watch as the dog was struck and killed. Or she could run into traffic and save his life.

Later she would describe to her mother how the dog had smiled at her, how his tongue rolled out and the black edges of his mouth pulled back in a friendly grin. What she didn’t tell her mother was that, in the heartbeat before she ran into the road, she found herself unable to recall the last time a stranger had smiled at her, easily, like a friend she didn’t know yet. It was funny to remember so clearly what was on her mind when so many other things were happening all at once—the truck’s air horn finally blowing, Minnie flying out in front of the semi with a speed and grace that belied her earthly heft. She scooped the dog to her chest and launched herself across the other half of the street, turning in midair so that she didn’t crush him, landing on her back and sliding across the damp grass of the Hatchers’ yard.

The semi, horn blaring angrily, roared past without stopping. A snap of air rushing behind the truck ruffled Minnie’s bangs.

She closed her eyes. Everything hurt. She had broken something. She had broken everything. All for a stupid dog who was probably rabid, who would be sinking his pointed white teeth into the fat of her neck in three, two, one—

The dog’s tongue was everywhere on her face, licking her nose, her eyelids, her cheeks, her chin, her ears, licking excitedly, joyfully. Minnie laughed and the dog licked and licked. He followed her back across the street, empty of all traffic now, and climbed the steps of the Graveses’ front porch as though he, too, were simply going home. His tags identified him as up-to-date with his vaccinations but contained no other information. No name, no phone number, no address.

“You’re nobody’s dog,” she said, pulling gently on his silky ears. He made a friendly noise in his throat, not quite a bark, and pushed his nose against her hand.

“What are you going to do with him?” her father asked at dinner. “Do you want to keep him?”

Minnie shrugged. She hadn’t yet told her parents exactly how she and the dog had been introduced. It surprised her how happy their little adventure made her feel. She couldn’t believe she’d done it. “He must have a home. I guess try to find it for him.”

“I think you should just keep him,” he said, and finished off his beer.

In the end, after canvassing all the shelters and pet stores in the area, after posting
Found Dog
flyers across town and several towns over, Minnie did keep him. She named him August, Auggie for short, though it was sort of pointless to call him anything, since it took little time for Minnie to realize Auggie was completely deaf. She called him, instead, by opening food—his tub of kibble, a jar of peanut butter. He always came.

When she thought about Auggie getting sick, getting hurt and dying, a cold hand closed around her heart, but then she remembered saving his life. He was already a dead dog walking. The life he had now, with her, was
because
of her. He was a deaf canine soul, entirely in her hands, and he began to change her.

His care forced her to go to places she would never have approached, like the dog park across town, where people shocked her by not only engaging in friendly conversation but remembering her name, her dog’s name, and the content of those friendly conversations upon later meetings. Strangers stopped them on their walks around the neighborhood. Auggie’s vet appointments, grooming, and food were expensive. So Minnie got a job at the library, which had been supporting her voracious reading habit since middle school, and started freelancing with the local paper as a movie critic.

Six months after adopting Auggie, Minnie moved out of her parents’ house and into a small apartment three blocks from the library. She went home to walk Auggie on her lunch breaks. At night she made them both dinner, they watched a scary movie, and then they went to sleep. Something began to stir inside, given breath and life by each tiny declaration of independence. Minnie found herself wanting. Desiring. Needing more than what she already had—more people in her life, friends. She began to daydream, to imagine other futures for herself. Living in a city, working at a university library, reviewing movies for a real paper. Meeting friends for coffee, going to the movies, dancing with someone interesting, someone with a comprehensive knowledge of the early films of Brian De Palma. What she imagined for herself was, given the scope of human possibility, tame; but to imagine it all actually happening to her was revolutionary. For the first time in her adult life she began to think of herself as unhappy. She was thrilled to realize simply admitting that she was unsatisfied, that she wanted more, didn’t make her sad. It made her hopeful.

There was just one thing she had to do.

Minnie Graves needed to go back.

That’s what all horror heroines did: they went back to the beginning. They returned to face the monsters head-on and defeat them for good. Ripley (albeit under duress) did it in
Aliens.
Nancy came back for the third
Nightmare on Elm Street.
Hell, Jason did it in
Friday the 13th, Part 2
—he returned to the place where he nearly died, where his mother was killed.

Not that Minnie Graves was Jason Voorhees; she wasn’t going back to
become
the monster. In most horror movies, there is one girl, virtuous and tough, who makes the best of horrific circumstances by taking a stand. Minnie was that girl. The girl who survives. And it was time she started living.

She planned her vacation carefully. She asked the library for four days off around the middle weekend of November. She bought Auggie a red harness and stitched a big white cross on his back. “Well,” she said to him, scratching between his friendly, broken ears, “one of us is handicapped.”

On Thursday morning, the thirteenth of November, Jennifer and Theo’s fifteenth anniversary, Minnie Graves tossed a suitcase she borrowed from her mother into the back of her parents’ Lumina. She’d told her parents the library was sending her to a conference out of state. Telling them where she was actually going and why was both none of their business and too much their business. Her mother would never, ever have let her go back to the Bellweather alone.

She wasn’t alone, though; she had Auggie. He climbed in the front seat.

“You’ll be safer in the back,” she said.

Auggie licked a spot on the dashboard that might have been a dried drip of Diet Coke.

“Yeah, I like you riding shotgun too,” Minnie said, and backed out of the driveway.

The trip was uneventful. They ate lunch at a rest area. They stopped again, once they were off the Thruway and into the countryside, for Auggie to pee. When the Bellweather first came into view, Minnie felt nothing at all. It looked smaller than she remembered, even older, and much, much busier—full of kids, high schoolers with trombones and flutes and folders of sheet music. This weekend, her great homecoming, was also some sort of high school musicians’ conference. Even without his working-dog camouflage, no one would have noticed Auggie in the tumult.

Minnie checked in. She got out food and water for Auggie and lay down on the bed in room 407, fully clothed, sneakers still on. She was here. She was back. She was ready, really ready, to face her past. Ready to defeat it.

She had been lying to herself all day.

She was terrified.

Minnie has been swimming in dread for about sixteen hours. Dread flavored the meatloaf (too salty) she ordered from room service. Dread gushed from the showerhead when she washed up before bed. That she hasn’t bolted in terror from the hotel, running in a straight line out the door for miles across the countryside until her heart exploded and she fell down dead, is a miracle, because that’s what Minnie’s dread has been urging her to do, every second of every minute she’s been back.

Minnie’s dread put yesterday’s clothes back on, put her feet in sneakers, and walked those feet into the elevator on Friday morning. It made her press L and almost made her step out into the bright morning light of the lobby. But it was Minnie’s will that stopped her from going any farther. Auggie was still asleep at the foot of the bed. He is the one thing her dread has absolutely no power over. She will always go back for him. He will keep her here in the hotel, and keep her honest. When Minnie’s dread said
Get out,
Minnie’s will, for Auggie’s sake, said
Make me.
And here in the elevator, will and dread cancel each other out.

Which is why she’s still here—in elevator limbo, Minnie gets a break from being two things at the same time, each hell-bent on consuming the other. The car stops on three and two and opens on the lobby. The woman with the red pumps and the white hair and everyone else get out. Minnie stays inside and goes back up.

She sighs, closes her eyes, and leans back against the mirrored wall as the car rises. She wonders if, when she opens her eyes, she will be greeted by the reflection of herself at the age of twelve in that heinous bridesmaid’s dress, her past reflected again and again, to infinity, forever. Because she’s in elevator limbo, this isn’t horrifying but merely intellectually interesting. Maybe she’s always been in this hotel. Maybe she left part of herself behind, the way Cinderella left her shoe, and she only has to find it to be whole again.

The doors open on ten and so do Minnie’s eyes. A handsome boy—closer to a man, he must be twenty-one, twenty-two—with dark hair and tanned skin steps on. He is
Tiger Beat
material, impossibly, boyishly cute. He nods at her.