Lorelei's Secret (25 page)

She gives me a moment to pull myself together. I wipe my face and blow my nose, ashamed to be behaving this way in front of a stranger.

‘Shall we go take a look,’ she says, ‘and see if this is your dog, after all?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

She leads me through a locked door into a corridor full of cages. It reminds me, sadly, of the kennels at Remo’s house. Dogs jump up on the bars of their cages, yelping and barking as we walk past. I can see that some of them are hurt, their wounds dressed with clean white bandages.

‘She’s in the second-to-last cage on the right,’ Grace says.

I quicken my steps, looking ahead, trying to see into the right cage. And then I’m in front of the cage, and there she is, my sweet Lorelei, my sweet puppy dog. She’s lying down in the back of the cage, but when she sees me, she jumps up and leaps into the air, spinning her body around in a circle. She propels herself toward me with great force, landing with her front paws propped high on the bars.

She looks me right in the face. I can see that her throat is freshly bandaged. She makes a sound, sort of an empty whistling whine, like the sound of air rushing through a hollow reed. I put my fingers through the bars, and she licks them furiously.

‘Lorelei,’ I say. ‘What a good girl! What a good girl! I’m so sorry, girl.’ I laugh as she sticks her tongue through the bars, trying to reach my face.

Grace is smiling. “I’m guessing this is the right dog,’

she says.

I smile back, feeling happier than I have in some time.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘This is the right dog.’

I take Lorelei home with me, back to our little house. I give her her dinner and check her bandages, according to the vet’s instructions. Afterward, she settles down in her favorite corner and falls into a deep sleep, her paws twitching and jerking as she dreams. I wonder if her dreams, such as they are - I suppose I’ll never know, after all - have been changed by what she’s been through.

As she lies here safe in our living room is she dreaming of men with knives, men who lock her in cages and make her throat burn like acid? Why would they do this to her, these men whose goal was to enable dogs to speak? And then, suddenly, it hits me, and I feel so sick I have to sit down. It’s because of me. I remember now that Remo

and Lucas looked at me when the police broke through the door. They knew I was responsible for leading them there, unwitting fool that I was. It was all my fault. And they couldn’t silence me, so they silenced her. Whether they meant it as a message to me - did they know they’d get caught? - or whether they simply wanted to take their revenge on her, I don’t know. But it’s my fault, just as everything seems to be my fault, and I don’t know how I’ll ever make it up to her.

Lorelei begins to make noises in her sleep, gaspy, wheezing sounds that might have been yelps at another time in her life. I kneel beside her and stroke her flank until she jerks awake and stares at me with wide, unrecognizing eyes.

‘Shh, girl,’ I say. ‘It’s okay.’ She sighs and puts her head down again, settling into a quieter sleep.

A few days later, Lorelei and I head back to the animal shelter for a follow-up visit with the vet who examined her throat. On our way out, Grace at the desk calls us over.

“I was hoping to see you guys,’ she says, coming around the counter and stooping to say hello to Lorelei. ‘The police sent over some collars they found at - well, you know, at the crime scene. One of them might be Lorelei’s. Do you want to take a look?’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’d like to get that back. She’s had it practically since she was a puppy.’

Grace retrieves a cardboard box from underneath the

desk and sets it before me.

‘You can just look through them,’ she says.

I begin to sort through the collars. There are thirty or forty of them, nylon collars, leather collars, collars sparkling with rhinestones. One of them has the name Oliver spelled out in silver dog biscuits. It seems very sad to me. All of these dogs had owners who loved them, and not all of them were as lucky as Lorelei and I were. Finally, I spot Lorelei’s thick leather collar. It’s buckled into a circle, as if it were still on her neck. I pull it out of the box.

I unbuckle the collar and turn it over. I can see that there are words written in felt-tip pen across the underside, and a sudden jolt runs through my body when I see them. It’s Lexy’s handwriting. It takes me a minute to make sense of it. What it says. What it says is this: You are my finest knight.

I feel my breath nearly stop, and I feel the world nearly stop, and I sink down to the floor and hide my face in Lorelei’s bare neck. I whisper into her fur and thank her for telling me what she’s known all along.

I look up at Grace. ‘My late wife,’ I say … “I never knew … I just never knew.’

I stay on the floor with Lorelei for a few moments more.

I hold on to her, solid and warm as a rock in the sun, until I’m ready to stand up and fasten her collar around her neck and take her home again.

When we get into the house, I go directly to my study.

I understand now, I think I do, what I’m supposed to be looking for. And there it is, and I can’t believe I never saw it before.

Mary Had a Little Lamb: Language Acquisition in

Early Childhood

I Was George Washington

Love in the Known World But That’s Not a Duck!

That’s Not Where I Left It Yesterday

What You Need to Know to Be a Game Show Contestant

I Wish I May, I Wish I Might Know Your Rhodesian Ridgeback Didn’t You Used to Be Someone? Stars of Yesterday

and Where They Are Today

I’d Rather Be Parsing: The Linguistics of Bumper

Stickers, Buttons and T-shirt Slogans Have You Never Been Mellow? The World’s Worst Music

How to Buy a Used Car Without Getting Taken

for a Ride

You’re Out! A History of Baseball

And Your Little Dog Too: Hollywood Dogs from Rin

Tin Tin to Beethoven

Cooking for Two

Gray Girls

Don’t Close Your Eyes

First Aid for Dogs and Cats

Put Me in the Zoo

Where to Stay in Northern California

A Feast for the Eyes

Thrill Rides of North America

Clay Masks from Around the World

I’m Taking My Hatchback to Hackensack and Other

Travel Games

I Had a Dream: The Civil Rights Movement and

Real Life 796 Ways to Say I Love You.’

Things I Wish I’d Known Strange but True: Aliens in Our Midst Forget About Yesterday and Make the Most of Today You’d Better Believe It! The World’s Most Famous Hoaxes and Practical Jokes

How to Be a Success While Doing What You Love

And No Pets Step on DNA More 10-Minute Recipes My Antonia A Room of One’s Own Places Id Never Dreamed Of

To Have and to Hold

The Toad Not Taken: The Linguistic Value of Puns Out of the Rat Race and into the Chips Your Fortune in Mail-Order Selling Exercises for a Healthy Heart

A Handbook of Dreams

Flesh Wounds

Papier-Mdche Arts and Crafts

Put a Lid on It: Managing Your Anger

Learn to Play Piano in Fourteen Days

The City of One

A History of the English Language

Stone Shoes and Other Fables

It’s from ‘Tarn Lin.’ It’s what the elf queen says to Tarn Lin before she releases him to the world of mortals. When she knows he is lost to her. When Lexy told me the story, I thought that these were bitter words, full of malice and spite, and perhaps for the elf queen that’s all they were.

But reading these words now, they seem to me very sad.

I see that they can also be words of kindness, words of protection. An incantation, a wish to avoid causing pain.

How often since Lexy’s death have I wished for eyes that could not cry, a heart that could not grieve?

But I see now that her wish for me came true by half.

I’ve been looking through eyes of clay all this time. And now my useless heart, my fallible heart, my heart of flesh, seems to break in two, and inside it I find the truth I suppose it has held all along. And I know at last that my Lexy killed herself.

What was Lexy like in those last two months, the months in between the time we conceived a child and the time she climbed into that tree? She was fine, that’s how it seemed to me. She was fine. The depression and lethargy that had followed our trip to New Orleans seemed to

have disappeared, and she was beginning to take interest in new projects. A local cafe with a Venetian Carnival theme had begun to display some of her masks on its

walls, and she made a few sales as a result. We spent a weekend at the beach in early September, and we walked along the ocean hand in hand. My face turned bright

red with sunburn, and we ate a pound of saltwater taffy in the car on the way home. A colleague of mine got

married, and we went to the wedding. My birthday came and went and was celebrated in all the usual ways. I spent a weekend repainting our bathroom. Lexy became interested in Chinese cooking and made special trips to buy ingredients at an Asian supermarket. It was normal, do you see? I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, because it all seemed so normal. I didn’t know the end was so near.

But somewhere in there, something happened to change everything, and I didn’t even notice. Somewhere in there, Lexy discovered she was pregnant. I remember there was one evening, maybe in mid-or late September, when she complained of feeling nauseated. And one Sunday, maybe a week later, she took a nap, which was not something she did very often. Were these the symptoms that led her to take the pregnancy test? Her periods, I think, were not very regular under the best of circumstances, but perhaps she noticed it had been a particularly long time since the last one. The question is when. How long did she live with this knowledge? How long did I live with her in that changed state without sensing that anything was different?

The only clue I have is that little corner of pink cardboard I found in the trash. Maybe I can work backward from there. Our trash is collected once a week, of course, but that little bathroom trash can has never filled up fast enough to warrant being emptied every week. I’m not sure how often we used to empty it; that task, I confess, usually fell to Lexy. I can tell you this: Since she’s been gone, I don’t think I’ve emptied that little container more than once a month. But before that, when it was the receptacle for all of her female detritus of disposable makeup sponges and cleanser-soaked cotton balls, I think it’s safe to say it would have filled up at least twice as fast. And when I went through it after her death, it was only half full. So we’re looking at one week at the outside; it’s only in the last week of her life that she knew she was pregnant. Knowing what I now know, knowing

that the week ends with Lexy climbing that tree with the intention of ending her life, I have to try to reconstruct that week.

Lexy died on a Wednesday. I’ll start with the Thursday before. She was up before me, I remember. Is that

the morning when she got up early and took the test?

It seems to me now that maybe she was a little more

animated than usual that morning, that maybe when she said good morning to me, she smiled a little longer than she normally would have. But I’m not sure. We had breakfast together and read the paper, then I showered and dressed for work.

‘What are you going to do today?’ I asked her before I left.

‘I’ve got a few Halloween orders to finish up,’ she said.

‘And this afternoon I’m going grocery shopping.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said, and kissed her. ‘Well, have a good day.’

Do you see how ordinary it all was, how boring, the

routine dailiness of that week? Try as I might, I can’t coax any more meaning out of it than I saw at the time. I went to work, I met with one of my dissertation students to discuss his progress. I worked on a grant application that, as it turned out, I would never send in. I went home, and Lexy made pasta for dinner. We watched a movie, sitting close together on the couch. It was all so normal. We read in bed, each of us lost in our own book, and I fell asleep before she did. Another day of our marriage, and I was content with it. I believe, even now I believe that Lexy was, too.

Friday night, there was a thunderstorm. We’d been

playing a word game together, a pen-and-paper game

we both enjoyed, when the lights went out. We found

candles pretty easily - for some reason, we’d received about a million decorative candleholders as wedding gifts, so we had candles everywhere - but matches proved a bit harder to find. We stumbled around clumsily, bumping into tables and calling out to each other in the dark. We’d been listening to music before the power went out, and our voices sounded strangely loud in the sudden silence. Lorelei was frantic - she was terrified of thunder and lightning and I could hear her anxious panting as I wandered around the house. Finally, I found some matches on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and we lit some candles. In the soft light, I could see Lorelei wedged into a small space between the couch and the wall. She was shaking violently and drooling with terror.

‘Oh, poor girl,’ Lexy said. She went and sat down on the floor next to the dog and began petting her and speaking to her softly. I settled myself on the floor next to Lexy, and together we tried to soothe the shuddering dog.

‘I’ve always wondered,’ Lexy said, ‘if her fear of thunderstorms has anything to do with the storm she got lost in the day I found her.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I think most dogs are afraid of the noise.’

‘Did I ever tell you,’ she said, ‘why I named her Lorelei?’

‘No. I thought you just liked the name.’

‘Well, I did. But I’d also been reading a lot of mythology right around that time, trying to come up with new ideas for masks. I was sick to death of doing Medusas and Bacchuses - would that be Bacchi?’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be Bacchi with an i. Bacchae with an ae refers to his female worshipers, as in the title of the Euripides play …’ I was being deliberately pompous.