One Good Dog (31 page)

“Did he never imagine that I might have wondered about him? About what happened to Veronica? I’ve only just found out that she was killed. Why didn’t anyone tell me that?”

Bea shakes her head. “People weren’t so—what’s the word nowadays? Up front with kids. Some things weren’t meant for little pitchers’ ears. They believed that ignorance was bliss. I’m sorry. If I’d been around then, well, it would have been different. I’m sorry you never knew that the poor girl was run down like a dog in the street.”

A dog in the street.

“I have to go.”

Bea nods. “He hasn’t got long now. It would be a wonderful thing if you’d …” She puts her hand back over her mouth, unable to say the words.

“Forgive him.”

Adam lets himself out of the house.

Adam sits in his car, which still smells faintly of Chance. A leash is on the floor on the passenger side. He hopes that Bea
March isn’t looking out the window, seeing him still sitting there as he waits for his heartbeat to level off, waits for the shaking in his hands to subside. His phone is in the console, and he picks it up out of habit, checking to see if anyone has called while he was in the house. Two missed calls. He goes to voice mail.

The first is Ariel, calling again to see if he’s found Chance. As if she wouldn’t be the first call he’d make once he does. If he does. In her message he hears a faded optimism that someone will spot Chance, that miracles do occur. The only good to have come out of Chance’s disappearance, besides Gina, is that Ariel has found her way back to being his daughter.

The second message is brief.

“Mr. March, this is Dr. Gil at the shelter. I think we may have your dog.”

The expression “emotionally overwrought” comes to mind as Adam copes with the juxtaposition of his strained reunion with his father and the joy of getting Chance back. In one hour, he has been emotionally flayed alive. Every feeling has come into play, but right now he is enjoying the pounding heartbeat of hope. If Chance is back, then things will be all right. That bugger, how could he disappear like this for so long? He’ll take him right over to Gina. Get him some new chew toys. This is ridiculous thinking. He’s a grown man. Why is he weeping with relief over a dog?

There is one parking space left near the shelter and Adam pulls in, drops quarters on the sidewalk in an effort to feed the meter, and bursts through the shelter doors, trotting to the reception area. “I’m here for my dog.”

The receptionist looks a little puzzled.

“The dog Dr. Gil called me about. The brindled dog, half an ear?”

“Oh. Right. Let me get the doctor.”

The scrubs are green today, the Crocs lime-colored. Gil’s ponytail is slightly askew. “March, okay, man. Here’s the thing.”

Gil goes on to describe the dog: mauled, crushed bones, loss of blood. Found in an alley, dumped. Except for the fact that Adam had been pestering the shelter for ten days, Gil would have euthanized the animal immediately. The half ear was the only resemblance to Adam’s description, and it was then that Gil remembered him, remembered the unorthodox adoption and put two and two together. “I’m asking that you not be alarmed. And that you make the right choice.”

Adam hasn’t said a word. He’s listened to the doctor and begun to pray that this poor battered animal isn’t Chance. He wants to call Gina. To have her opinion. To have her hand on his shoulder.

“All right.”

The swinging door leads to the hallway of doors. This time, the vet takes Adam through one that leads to the infirmary. The walls are stacked on two sides with cages, one up and one down. Some are small and contain small sleeping animals; others are occupied by silent creatures looking like science experiments with bandages and tubes. Other cages are doubled for larger animals, and all but one are empty. Gil leads Adam to the cage and squats. “Hey, boy.”

Adam kneels beside the cage, fingers looped through the wire mesh. Inside is a brindled hulk. White gauze interrupts the brown striping. The hulk’s head is swathed, one foreleg is
splinted right down to the end of the paw, making it look like a prizefighter’s hand wrapped for the glove. It lies with its back toward the front of the cage, so Adam cannot see its eyes. Nothing moves. Adam looks at the veterinarian. “Is it too late?”

“He’s been given a little happy juice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Something to make him rest. Not too much. Not until you say so.”

“Can I have a minute?”

“Take as long as you want.” Gil rises to his feet, presses a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “As long as you want. I’ll be in my office when you’re ready.”

Adam unlatches the door, reaches in and strokes Chance along his shoulder, between the lines of gauze continents. “Hey, buddy. It’s me.” Adam doesn’t feel self-conscious whispering to the recumbent dog. His knees hurt a little against the tile floor, so he sits, leans in awkwardly, and rests his scarred cheek against the dog’s side. He can hear Chance’s heartbeat. “You wouldn’t believe who I met today. My father. My absent father. He’s as banged up as you are, but from the inside out. He’s dying, too, and there’s no one who will put him out of his misery. Are you miserable? Do you want to die? Do you want me to do it? To say ‘Do it’? I’ve missed you. The place is pretty empty without you, except that now Gina is there. Oh Chance, where have you been? How did you get into such trouble?”

Adam feels the dog stirring under his sore cheek. He lifts his head and two sets of brown eyes meet. A tail thumps against the cage floor.
Thump. Thump. Thump.

Rroorr.
Chance puts his head down and is still.

Bea has filled in some gaps in his father’s life, things that have helped to move the old man from contemptible to comprehensible in Adam’s mind. A man with a high school education and few prospects; a suddenly single dad with no living relatives; a man who had grieved for a wife lost to cancer. Circumstances that had made his father seem an angry man, a man whose temper lost him his teenage daughter, lost him his son.

It’s too hard for John to talk, so Adam does. One day, he brought pictures of Ariel to show his father. Now he has brought her to meet the grandfather she never knew she had. They don’t stay long, he and Ariel, and at the end Adam feels washed out, drained of the substance that has been keeping him upright for years. Most of his life has been spent in defiance of his upbringing. He sits with the fragile shape that was once his powerful and angry father and understands that he is just like him. But Adam knows that he has been given a chance, a chance to regain the happiness lost by his own actions. Maybe not regain what he once believed constituted
happiness, but to appreciate a simpler, more profound contentment with what has become his life.

Judge Frank Johnson stares at Adam’s face for a moment longer than is polite. “Bob told me what happened. Tough.”

Reflexively, Adam touches his cheek, touching the groove that is still carmine. Gina insists vitamin E will soften the scar. “It’s all right.”

“He also told me that you’ve done well.” The judge motions toward a side chair. “Sit.”

This time, Adam is confident that his sentence is complete, that his term of community service has been served, and he is no longer nervous that the judge will tack on more time. As long as he doesn’t ask if Adam has learned a lesson. That would be too paternal for Adam’s taste. And yet he isn’t embarrassed to admit that, yes, he has learned something. Adam takes a seat, runs his slightly sweaty hands against his legs. “Frankly, it’s turned out to be a very good thing.”

The judge slides his Buddy Holly glasses to his forehead. “You’ve taken on grant searches. Are you going to keep doing that?”

“I am. I’ve found a couple of foundations that award funds to purchase needed equipment, like a new computer, and one whose grant will allow us to bring in a visiting nurse once a month.”

Johnson sits back, squeezes his chin with one hand. He nods slowly. “Good. Case dismissed.”

And just like that, Adam March is a free man.

Adam is startled awake by his cell phone playing the overture to Rossini’s
Barber of Seville.
He answers the phone, then leaves his bed to go to his father’s house.

Adam and Ariel stand in the cemetery, arms linked, the first real chill of fall nipping at their ungloved hands. “She was my age.”

“Yes. And just as rebellious.”

Ariel shoves him a little, her shoulder against his arm. “Not quite. I haven’t run away lately, but I will if Mom marries that a-hole Troy.”

“She has a right to be happy.”

“Can I come live with you?”

“Yes. But not out of anger. You have to come live with me because I’m your favorite.”

“Okay.”

They have just buried his father. The rest of the mourners have already gone back to Bea’s house for refreshments—her son, Carl, and his wife and kids, the neighbors, friends from church. Adam and Ariel have hung behind so that he can tell her what happened to Veronica. And more about her grandfather, who has been in her life only briefly and is now gone. It was painful to see his father’s eyes light up at the sight of this girl who resembles the long dead Veronica so completely that she is a gift.

“Why did she run away?”

“I don’t know. I asked my father, mostly because I wanted to blame him, but he didn’t know, either. She was looking for a better life.” Adam squeezes Ariel’s hand. “I always thought that she was running away from me, from having to take care
of a little brother when she was just a young woman, ready to start her own life. Wanting freedom and fun, not be a housekeeper and surrogate mother.”

“That’s so cheesy. I’d never do that.”

“You’ve never been responsible for a little brother.”

They are quiet for a moment, both lost in their own thoughts.

“I’ve been thinking about taking a year off between high school and college and doing City Year.”

Adam slides his arm around her shoulders, surprised that she comes up to his shoulder. “That would be fine with me.”

“Mom’s flipping out.”

Adam smiles at the image. “You have to do what you feel is right for you.”

“It does feel right. I’ve been listening to you talk about Fort Street and it got me to thinking. You went back even though you didn’t need to anymore.”

“It’s a lot nicer volunteering than being ordered to do good works.” Once his face no longer pulsed with every movement, the hole in his days was deep, and he’d missed the structure. He’d gone back a few weeks ago. With a second consulting job, he is finally able to make ends meet, and that is enough. Jupe, medicated, more Charles than Jupiter now, has apologized to Adam. Strings were pulled and he is living in a halfway house nearby but still takes a noontime meal at the center. He wants Adam to go with him to the animal shelter to find a new companion.

Ariel pulls the sleeves of her cashmere sweater down over her hands. “I’m cold. Let’s get out of here. Do we have to stay long at Bea’s?”

“You don’t. Just come through and have a nibble. I’ll make your excuses.”

Adam and Ariel link hands and walk to his Lexus. Despite their flawed history, Adam is deeply saddened by his father’s passing. These last few weeks have been hard and yet the sweetest that he has known. Reconciliation. Renewed affection. Recovery. A new love.

Gina, wanting Adam and Ariel to have some private time, waits for them in the car.

And in the backseat, boxy chin resting on the open window, Chance waits for them, too.

I walk with the swagger of a champion, but I know that is only because I limp. My foreleg aches on cold mornings, a reminder of the long weeks in which it was splinted, the miserable days of wearing that ridiculous plastic cone over my head. There were moments when I was crazed, mad to chew that splint off and lick the multiple wounds along my chest and on my belly that itched and ached simultaneously. My man scratched them for me, allowed me a brief respite of coneless sleeping when he was around. He gave me canned food to accommodate my sore mouth. He fed me bits of cheese that he pretended didn’t contain sharp-tasting pills. He carried me downstairs to do my business, and carried me back up.

They say that a dog cannot know about its own death because it doesn’t really know about its own existence, but I can tell you that simply isn’t so. I knew that I was headed for oblivion as I lay drugged in that hospital cage. One cage is much like another, the one in the cellar or the one in the shelter. They both restrict and protect. The one in the cellar had been a
prison, but the one in the shelter a haven. I was waiting for the moment when I could let go of life. It isn’t something you can do at will; you have to be patient. I’d had a good run. Adventure, travel, a little romance. A good man. As I lay there, I realized that I wasn’t just waiting for my end, but for him.

As I lay dying, I thought about him, about how I knew his kind said “Adam” when he was called. That he depended on me to keep him happy. I lay facing my death, and if dogs can wish, I wished that he would come to me, to be there as I let go of life.