Say No More (8 page)

The hum of an engine sounded in the distance. Tires whirred over asphalt. For a few seconds, I thought it was coming closer, but the sound was muffled by countless trees, their branches clattering as a gust of wind rattled them.

I sat there minutes longer, barely breathing, just listening. Another vehicle whooshed along the unseen road, then another. If I went toward the sounds, I would find people, but racing by in their cars, I wasn’t sure they would bother to stop for me and if they did, how would they ever know I belonged to Lise and that Hunter was lost?

No, I had to keep searching. No matter how long it took. So I put my nose down and cast in sweeping arcs — left, right, left, right — until I found a thin path of trampled grass. The downpour had washed away any traces of scent, but still I followed it. Down a gentle slope, across a gulley, through a patch of bramble.

Halo! This way!

There it was again. It was Cam’s voice. I swear it!

I took off blindly in the direction I thought it had come from.

In a clearing, I raised my face and looked about. The sun had bowed behind the treetops. Shadows filled my vision, black edging columns of gray along the wood’s edge. There, a man stood. He hooked an arm in the air, beckoning to me. I tried hard to focus, but the light was dim. The silhouette was familiar. It could have been Cam.

Between here and there stretched a pasture where cows had been not long ago. I could smell their waste. Piles of it. Their scent was strong, overpowering. So I let my eyes do the work, while I was still able to see. Barely.

It was nearly dark now. There wasn’t much time left. When I looked again toward the edge of the woods, the man was gone.

In a depression in the field glimmered the surface of a pond where the cows would come to drink. They had left deep hoof prints in the mud around it. My eyes followed the pond’s edge around to the other side.

My heart vaulted. I knew this place. Cam had brought me here once with Bit. We had stayed for hours while he cast his line into the water and sat with his pole propped between his knees, gazing at the sky. He said he was fishing, but he only caught two fish and those were very small, so he threw them back. A ripple at the surface caught my eye and I looked past it, up the slope —

And there, I saw him.

Hunter was sitting, hugging his knees, halfway up a hill on the far side. His head was bent, resting on his forearms. My boy!

I barked, a small bark of excitement, happy to have found Hunter, to be in a place I had been before.

Except, I didn’t know the way back from here. Cam had brought me here in his truck on the way home from Ray’s and I had fallen asleep on the seat between him and my mother.

But like I said before, what mattered was that I’d found Hunter.

I barked again, louder, more clearly. Hunter raised his head, then stood. I wasn’t sure he could see me, so I ran.

He began to run, too. Toward the pond.

As fast as my feet could fly without twisting around each other, I raced to him. My toes, as quick as lightning, clipped the ground. I plowed through the tall grass, holding my head tall, bounding high every few strides to try to catch a glimpse of him. But it was hard to see him in the failing light. His head bobbed above the reeds rimming the pond’s edge. The water was deep there. I had discovered it that time with Cam when I thought I’d go wading to snap at tadpoles. Instead, I’d found myself in water over my head. My feet had hit the murky bottom then and I’d burst upward, desperate for air. When I surfaced, I paddled my way back to Cam, who laughed at me. But as with so many things, dogs were born with the memory of how to swim. I was not so sure it was true for humans. If Hunter fell in —

So I barked my warning as I curved around the pond. Until finally Hunter saw me and turned. Barely in time.

I gathered myself in mid-stride, sprang from my haunches, and sailed at him. My feet hit his chest squarely, knocking him back, away from the water. He landed in the tall, wet grass with a soft
oomph
, me on top of him. I kept him pinned there to make sure he didn’t move just yet. Then I licked his face all over, a wet and thorough washing, rapidly lapping him from chin to forehead.

He flung his arms around me. “Halo!” he cried, his small voice breaking into sobs of relief. It was the most joyous sound I had ever heard.

Exhaustion flooded through me. I collapsed beside him. We lay like that awhile, his arms hugging my chest, my snout tucked in the crook between his neck and shoulder.

“I saw him,” Hunter whispered in my ear. “I saw Daddy.”

I did, too.

Salty tears slid down his cheeks. I licked his face clean and pressed myself closer to his shivering body.

—o00o—

I don’t remember hearing Lise and Grace tromp down the hill and come to us. I only knew that they did. I was aware of it. Yet I never looked up, never left Hunter. They were just there all of a sudden, standing over us, squealing with relief as tubes of light from Grace’s flashlight bounced around us.

Lise scooped Hunter up and crushed him to her chest. I sat at her feet, waiting for some acknowledgment of what I had done. For the longest time, she didn’t look down at me. When she finally did, it was in response to a comment Grace made.

“Do you think he followed the dog out the door?” Grace cocked her head sideways, staring at me with suspicion through her narrow glasses. She had two little yappy dogs herself — toy poodles named Henri and Sophia. I didn’t like either of them and I wasn’t sure I liked her. She spoke nonsense to them in a baby voice, fed them canned gourmet food on crystal plates, and dressed them in little coats speckled with sequins. I was from a working lineage, farm-bred Australian Shepherds, and I took immense pride in it. My kind guarded the homestead with the ferocity of lions and watched over the children like the mastiffs of the ancient Roman army. We kept predators at bay, hunted vermin, and herded bulls twenty times our size, sometimes risking our own lives in the process. We weren’t afraid to get dirty or work beyond the point of exhaustion. Warming laps, having my toenails painted, and getting carried around in a faux alligator purse, had I been small enough, would be beyond disgraceful. It would be mortifying.

“I think,” Lise began, setting Hunter on his feet, “that maybe it was the other way around.”

Scooting closer, I leaned against her leg. She stroked the top of my head. After awhile, her fingers wandered to rub the crease of my ear.

“Good girl, Halo.” Her voice was hoarse. She’d been hollering for Hunter a long, long time. “That was a very,
very
good girl.”

I leaned into her more heavily and closed my eyes. I was only doing what I was supposed to. What dog worth his kibble wouldn’t have?

And yet, I needed to hear those words from Lise. I needed them more than I needed food or sleep or water. I needed her. And Hunter.

What she didn’t know was how much they needed me.

M
y skull rattled against the cool glass of the window as we bumped down the road in Lise’s Subaru. I just realized it had only been late morning when Hunter disappeared. It was fully dark now. We’d been gone a long time. I should’ve been tired, except when Lise found us a new surge of energy had filled me. I hadn’t come down from the thrill of it yet. I’d found Hunter and Lise had found us. Everything in the world was as good as it could be again.

Only it wasn’t. I sensed it.

An exhausted Hunter was piled beneath blankets in the back seat. I peered from the storage area in the rear over the top of the seat at him. Wet hair still clung to his forehead. Mud was streaked across his cheek and at his temple was a fresh scab, the blood barely dry.

In the front, the glow of the dashboard illuminated Lise’s pale face like moonlight on still waters. She gripped the steering wheel so tightly the veins on the back of her hands bulged. Every once in awhile she’d steal a glance at Grace, but the moment Grace looked her way, Lise’s eyes would dart back to the flickering yellow line in the middle of the road.

At the edge of the tunnel of light cast by the car’s headlights, a pair of green eyes flashed, then disappeared into the darkness of the ditch. Lise jerked her arms to the left, overcorrecting, and my shoulder slammed into the wheel well with a thump. She straightened the steering wheel and glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, girl.”

Grace burned a stare into the side of Lise’s head, but Lise was purposefully ignoring her now.

“Look, I know you’re mad at me,” Grace finally blurted out, “but I still think you should have called the sheriff. Or the neighbors. They could have helped search for him. At the very least you should have given Estelle a head’s up. He was probably headed that way and —”

Lise punched the brake. The tires skidded on asphalt for a heart-clenching moment, then crunched over gravel as we slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the road. She locked her arms straight on the wheel and swiveled her head to glare at Grace. “Are you crazy? I want nothing to do with that woman. Nothing!” She shot a glance at Hunter, but there was no sign he’d been awakened. She lowered her voice to a growl. “Hunter slipped out of her house and could have died because she couldn’t watch him for one minute and you think I should —”

“Hunter left the house right under
your
nose, Lise. Does that make you a bad person?”

As suddenly as if she’d been slapped, Lise’s head snapped forward. Angry tension melted from her shoulders. Gradually, her hands slid from the steering wheel and into her lap. “It’s just that ... God, I don’t even know where to start. My life is such a mess. In more ways than one.” Her cheeks puffed with an exhaled sigh. “I didn’t just call you over to help me pack, Grace.”

Her friend shifted sideways in her seat and placed a hand on Lise’s arm. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. You know that. Hey, who rescued you on the first day of school from Tyler McRory, huh? I did. I swooped in and threatened to call his mother. He never gave you a hard time again, did he? Who taught you how to deal with Mr. Penright? I did. Told you all the magic words, like learning module and core curriculum, that would make him happy enough to stop pestering you for a few days. Yeah, that was me. And who flattened the mouse that took up residence in your desk drawer? Me, again.”

Lise cracked a smile. “Tyler McRory put it there.”

“Whatever.” Shrugging, Grace flipped her long black hair behind her shoulders. “Look, I’m just saying, if there’s something on your mind, you need to talk to someone. Looks like that someone is me. So, what is it?”

Lise reached for the gearshift. “Let’s go back to the house so I can put him to bed. I’ll tell you then.”

“Sure, honey. I’ll make some of my special Irish coffee for you to spill your guts over. I even brought a couple of dark chocolate chunk raspberry muffins with me. If you’re going to pack up memories, you need to medicate, heavily.”

“Muffins would be great, but I’ll pass on the coffee.”

“Don’t worry, girlfriend. It’s decaf.”

“No, not that. It’s the whiskey. Can’t have it.”

“Ah, see, I
knew
you were keeping secrets. Didn’t tell me you were a recovering alcoholic. And here I am offering you poison.”

“Not that, either.”

Grace’s eyes drew to slits. It took a moment before an understanding dawned on her. Her eyes slipped to Lise’s stomach. “Ohhhh.” She covered her mouth. “Does anyone know? I mean, besides me.”

“Just Estelle. It kind of slipped out.”

A beam of light bounced off the rearview mirror as a horn blasted behind us. A car had rounded the corner and swerved around us.

“I’d hug you,” Grace said, as she flipped her middle finger at the receding tail lights of the passing car, “but I think we need to get off the side of the road.”

Okay, maybe Grace was a decent person after all. She just treated her dogs like living Barbie dolls. I ate the head off one of those once. A Barbie doll, I mean, not a dog. Well, the face, at least. Hunter’s pre-school friend Olivia left it under the kitchen table, which is where I preferred to keep my own toys (except Lise insisted on collecting them at the end of every day and putting them in a basket behind the couch). So, I figured that anything I found there was now mine, a gift. Turned out it wasn’t, maybe ... I don’t know — the whole thing was confusing. Anyway, I chewed the face off — my gums had never felt so good — leaving chunks of it on the floor beneath the table. I had started nibbling on the hands when Lise pounced on me and gave me a good shake. I could only deduce that I had partaken of my gift in the wrong place. If I couldn’t destroy the evidence, then I needed to take it elsewhere so that humans wouldn’t be bothered by the mess. After that, I learned to be more discreet when I chewed on things. As far as I knew, nobody ever discovered the gouge out of the wood on the backside of the TV stand.

The rest of the ride home was quiet. Not talking was a hard thing for Grace to do, just like some dogs have a hard time not barking or whining. Or chewing. We need to express ourselves, too.

—o00o—

Bit locked her legs, her whole body stiff and unmoving in the doorway, blocking my entrance. Lise shooed her back with a foot and I scurried in, clumps of mud falling from my belly as I scrabbled forth. I was careful to avert my gaze and not look at Bit. She was a show dog by breeding. She didn’t like to get messy, although she would work in the fields when Lise needed her to. She just made a point of going wide around the puddles.

“Wait,” Lise told me. I stood over the door mat, water dripping from my chest and belly. The rain had started up again just as we’d pulled into the driveway. The moment Lise opened the back hatch, I’d sprung from it and across the soggy lawn to the back door. I wanted to empty the water bowl, then collapse over the register. Some of yesterday’s leftover chicken wings would have been a bonus for all my hard work, but I’d settle for a stale dog biscuit.

Shivering, I watched Lise go down the hallway and deposit Hunter in his bedroom.

“Don’t you dare!” Lise warned as she came down the hallway, then ducked into the laundry room.