Last Things (22 page)

My father got up and fixed himself a drink. He gathered the letters from the table and put them in the basket by the door.

“Maybe she came to get her mail while we were gone,” I said.

My father looked away. “Maybe,” he said.

The next morning, my father got out the lawn mower and worked on the grass. He weeded the garden and planted new seeds. I sat on the porch and watched him work.

“Would you like to give me a hand, Grace?” he asked.

“No thank you,” I said. I went inside and called Edgar’s house again. Already I had called five times, but there was no answer. He must be on vacation, my father said.

I went across the street to spy on the blind girl. All the curtains were drawn and the car was gone. I hid in the bushes for a while, waiting for someone to come home, but no one did.

I decided to walk over to Edgar’s house. I didn’t expect him to be there, but when I rang the bell, he answered the door. He was dressed all in white and his hair was cut very close to his head.

“Edgar, you’re home!” I said. He didn’t say anything, but he let me in. He took me to the kitchen and gave me cookies and milk. I told him about the new house in Connecticut and Foxface and my week as
the question girl. Also about the star I had tried to buy for my mother. Edgar nodded, but he didn’t say a word.

I looked at him. His face was smooth and blank. “Why aren’t you talking?” I asked.

Edgar reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. He handed it to me. The card said:

Please be advised that I have taken a vow of silence. All necessary communications will be conducted by paper and pen
.

“When did you start?” I asked him.

“January 2, 1986,”
he wrote on a pad.

I calculated this in my head. I thought this must be the longest anyone had ever played the silence game. “How come?” I asked.

Edgar shrugged.

“How come?” I asked again.

He took out a piece of paper and scribbled something on it. “
Your mother said not a word until she returns
.”

I looked at the note. “My father says she’s not going to,” I told him.

Edgar closed his eyes. I asked him what he did with all the time he saved by not talking.

He went into the living room and brought back a book.
An Introduction to the Meditative Arts
, it was called. I opened it to a picture of a man in a turban twisting himself into knots.
We pass through boredom into fascination
, the caption read.

“Can you do that?” I asked him.

Edgar nodded. He sat cross-legged on the floor. Then he flipped himself over and stood on his head. He stayed that way for a long time, much longer than I would have asked him to. I sat on the couch and watched his face turn red. His eyes were wide open, but he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. I tried to be fascinated, but mostly I was bored. After a while, I tapped him on the foot. “I want to go home,” I said.

Edgar rolled over into a somersault. He went to his mother’s purse and got out her keys. He had his driver’s license now, he wrote, but his parents wouldn’t let him have his own car until he started speaking to them again.

In the car, Edgar gave me the book on meditative arts, even though I hadn’t asked for it. When I got home, I tried to do what the man in the turban did, but whenever I stood on one foot, I fell over right away. There were hundreds of poses in the book, each one with a different name. There was Downward Dog and Warrior and Triangle and Snake. Last of all was one called Corpse, where you lay on the ground like a dead man.
Guard that you do not become attached to the things of this world
, the book said.

A few days later, a spotted dog appeared at our door. She had sad eyes and a lame paw. When I tried to pet her, she shied away, but that afternoon she came back and licked my hand. From then on, every time I opened the door, she was waiting for me. The only
time she growled was when I went inside. Then she would scratch the screen and whine until I opened it again. Sometimes we played ball in the yard. She couldn’t run very fast because of her hurt leg. When my father saw her limping, he came over and examined her paw. She gave it to him without complaint, as if she were having her fortune read. She had a thorn in it, my father said. I brought him the tweezers and he took it out. Later I saw her testing it out gingerly on the grass. I waited awhile, then threw the ball again; this time she ran so fast her spots were a blur. Would you like to keep her, my father asked. Yes, I said.

I named her Laika, after the first dog in space. I knew that she had come to me from far away. Sometimes, at night, I worried that she might run away again. She kicked her legs and whimpered in the dark room as if she were being chased. When she did this, I woke her up and petted her until she was quiet again. Her tail thumped out her thanks on the floor even after she had fallen asleep. I liked to sleep with her paws around me, breathing in her biscuit breath.

Laika knew three games: fetch, hide-and-seek, and rescue dog. Rescue dog was best in the snow, but we made do with just grass. I was the famous mountaineer climbing the mountain without oxygen. She was a St. Bernard that no blizzard could scare. At the top of the compost heap, I planted my flag. Then I began the treacherous descent, buffeted by winds. Laika waited in the garden, chewing grass. She had a thermos tied to
her collar that I’d fixed there before. Sometimes she got bored waiting and tried to chew it off. Halfway down the mountain, I had a terrible fall. “Mon Dieu!” I yelled. “Rescue dog!” I had read a book called
They Lived on Human Flesh
about what happened to people lost in the mountains. Laika ran over and licked my face. I played dead. She licked my arms and legs too. There were some apple peels and coffee grounds on my shoes and I could feel her nibbling them. I drank the lemonade she brought me, happy to be saved.

Laika brought deer bones back from the woods and hid them behind the shed. She thought I didn’t know where she kept them, but when she wasn’t looking, I poked around in them. So far, Laika had found eleven bones. Soon she’d have enough for a whole deer, I thought.

In the woods, Laika was as quiet as a cat. She could sneak up on squirrels until it was almost too late for them to get away. One squirrel she almost caught, but at the last minute it ran up a tree. Laika never forgot about that tree. Every time we went to the woods, she would go to it and sit patiently, waiting for that squirrel. Weeks later, she still remembered.

She had a funny idea about time, I thought. An hour or a day or a week were all the same. She didn’t think the squirrel might have run away when she wasn’t there. Instead, she thought he was waiting for her too. My father said that Laika believed in circular time, which meant that everything that had ever happened would happen again. And so one day when she was walking through the woods she’d see the gray
squirrel again, waiting in his patch of sun. He hadn’t heard her yet, but in a moment he would and the old chase would begin. He’d race up the tree, Laika at his heels, and they’d both stare at each other until I called her away.

Was time a circle for people too, I wondered. If so, that meant my mother would drive her car into the lake a thousand times and each time would feel like new.

Laika wouldn’t come for my father. Only for me. It seemed she’d forgotten about his help with her paw. When he petted her, she’d stare at him calmly, as if to say, I think we’ve met, but as soon as he stopped she’d walk away. Finally, he let her be. “She’s your dog now, Grace,” he said. And so she was. I fed her and walked her each morning and night. At night, she slept on the end of my bed and kept the darkness away.

Most days, we went to the lake. I told her about the monster who lived there, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d swim out to retrieve the sticks I threw, then bring them back and drop them at my feet. Once I threw a stone instead and she paddled around and around in circles looking for it until I called her in. She was tired when she swam back. She lay on the beach, panting. I buried my face in her wet coat. She smelled like rain and dirt and fur. I’ll never trick you again, I promised, and she licked my hand.

Sometimes I tried to get Laika to go inside the doghouse out back, but she was smart enough to see the lock and run away. What had the dog done who had
lived in that house, I asked my father, but he didn’t know.

Laika ran off sometimes, but she always came back. Once I went out looking for her and saw her in her secret life. She was at the junkyard, running around with the wild dogs. She found a chicken bone in the grass and ran up to the top of the hill. The other dogs followed her. She snarled and growled when they came for her bone. One got too close and she bit him on the tail. He whimpered loudly and slunk away. Laika’s ears were sleek against her head and her teeth were bared. She fought the other dogs until they ran away. I called her name, but she pretended not to hear. The next day, I went back and found her sleeping in an old tire. When she saw me, she wagged her tail and ran to me as if to say, At last, I’m found!

Once Laika came, I wasn’t lonely for my mother anymore. I knew that she had come back to me, wearing a different skin. Was Laika magic, I wondered, examining her pink belly and smooth paws. And she said without speaking,
No more magic than water into ice
.

For the Fourth of July, Foxface invited us to visit her at the Cape. She had rented a house on the beach that was much too big for her, she said. Don’t worry, you can bring Laika, my father told me.

I didn’t want to go and sulked through the long drive. When we got there, I saw that the house was an
ordinary one, no bigger than ours. Foxface told my father she had rented the house from a family who left each summer because they needed the money. They had a daughter just my age, she said. It was a shame we couldn’t play together. There was a picture of the girl on the mantel. She had buck teeth and brown hair in a braid. I took Laika into the kitchen and gave her some water. Then I put my things in the girl’s room. She had a canopy bed and pictures of horses all over the wall. Under her pillow, I found a note that said,
Whoever you are, I hate you
. There was another taped to the radio.
Don’t touch anything in my room!!!
it said.
This is not your radio!!!!!
I put the note back under the pillow and went into the hall. Laika followed me. My father’s car keys were on the table. I took them and went outside with the dog. I could hear my father talking to Foxface on the beach. “I dare you,” she was saying in a lazy voice. “I dare you just to try.” Laika and I wandered around the backyard. It was three hours until the fireworks, but there was nothing to do.

I got in the car with Laika and turned on the radio. The top one hundred songs were being counted down. Someone had called in to dedicate a song to a deaf girl who had taught him the meaning of the word “love.” She couldn’t talk, he said, but her hands told more than words could say. The deaf girl’s song was slow and pretty and it seemed a shame she’d never hear it. When the song was over, Laika whined. I saw Foxface, standing on top of a sand dune with my father behind her, laughing. They spotted me and
waved. My father came over and knocked on the window. “Where are you two going?” he asked. “You weren’t going to leave us behind, I hope.” He gave Laika a piece of driftwood to chew. “Come for a walk with us,” he said. “Unless you were planning to steal the car?” He held out his hand for the keys. I had an idea that someday I’d be driving down a road somewhere and someone on the radio would start talking to me.

On the way back from the Cape, my father and I stopped at a little hotel on the beach. There was a sign at the desk that said “No Dogs Allowed. No Kidding!” but we snuck Laika in anyway. My father carried her up the stairs with his hand over her muzzle just in case she made noise.

In the hotel room, I unpacked everything and ignored my father, who was going on and on about the pool and the Jacuzzi and the free buffet. I wasn’t speaking to him anymore, but still he was speaking to me. The only thing I’d said since we left that morning was “Watch out!” when he almost hit a car in the street.

I could hear the shower going in the next room. There was a door connecting the two rooms, but it was locked. I turned on the TV.

My father stood in the doorway and smiled at me. “Have you banished me forever, Grace? Will you never speak a word?” He sat on the bed and took off his shoes.

Someone walked by and Laika barked. “Shh,” I said.

“At least she likes you,” my father told the dog. He went in the bathroom to change into his swimming trunks. I looked around the room. There was a Bible in the dresser and a bowl of fruit on the table. There were eighty-seven channels on the TV. I flipped through them. People cooking. Someone building a house. A man with a parrot. A car going up in flames.

Laika sighed. She was tired and wanted me to stop walking around. Wherever I went, she had to go. I lay down on the bed and waited for her to fall asleep. It didn’t take long. As soon as she did, I got up and looked out the window. There was purple sky as far as I could see. I started to close the blinds, then stopped. There were dead flies all over the windowsill. I thought of my mother and the bathtub drain. Laika stirred. If she woke up and saw the flies, she would get scared and bark, I knew. I went to the dresser and got out a piece of paper. I brushed all the flies onto it and threw them away.

Laika woke up and came over to see what I was doing. She poked her nose into the trash can and dragged the paper out. I felt a little sick, thinking of how scared she would be. I tried to take the paper away, but she was too quick. She put it on the floor and ate the flies all at once. And that was how I learned that Laika was a dog and not my mother’s star of destiny.