Silas: A Supernatural Thriller (6 page)

She
was a young African-American girl, her kinky-curly hair tied up in two bobbing pigtails. She sat on the opposite side of the fence next to her father while their dog, a medium-sized collie, joined the canine fray. I waved at them, welcoming them to the park, and they waved back. When my attention returned to the pack, I realized that one of the dogs had stopped moving.

It was Silas.

He stood stiff as a board outside the circle of his frolicking friends, staring at the little girl with his front leg raised as if he’d been frozen mid-gallop. I watched his head tilt to the side before he walked, slowly, toward her. When he arrived at her side he sat down and panted. I went over to the father and daughter and introduced myself. The little girl knelt down and petted Silas, who responded by leaning in and sniffing her before incessantly licking her nose and face. The girl giggled, which soon became a full-on laugh, while her father tossed a stick with their dog, glancing behind him every so often and smiling. I swore I saw tears in his eyes.

For the rest of our time at the park that day, Silas’s eyes were intent on the girl, as if the other dogs didn’t exist. It was a painfully innocent vision, and for the first time I considered how it might feel to watch this dog, my Silas, playing with
our
children, should Wendy and I ever have any. I sighed at the thought, knowing the idea would surely vanish with the stress of the coming work week. But it felt good to indulge, at least for a moment. I was still aware of it when we left the park an hour later and went home, and I realized that I’d been so lost in my own thoughts that I never asked the little girl’s name.
There’s always next time
.

Two weeks later I saw the girl’s picture in the morning newspaper, above her obituary. The dedication said her name was Colleen Miller, and that she’d died from complications stemming from a brain tumor. She was an only child.

I mourned for the father, who seemed like such a nice man. How difficult a loss that terrible must have been for both he and his wife. My spirits plummeted. It was strange; I’d only met them once, and yet I felt like I knew them. Little Colleen’s death
meant something
to me, something more than I wanted it to. My stomach wrenched as my brain recited a laundry list of things she would never again do. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Wendy approached me, cup of coffee in hand, and touched my shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I pointed at little Colleen’s picture and broke down. Wendy held me tight, squeezing my head between her arms, pressing my face to her breasts. It comforted me a little, but I couldn’t stop crying. It kept running through my head how much of a coincidence it had been that I’d seen the little girl alive at all. I wished I hadn’t. My heart, now healed, felt broken, and my momentary desire for children disappeared, floating away like a dandelion seed on a gust of sadness.

From the other room, Silas howled.

9

Days, weeks, and even months can fly by rather quickly when you’re not paying attention, and sometimes it happens even faster when you are.

Before I could blink the leaves had changed colors and we were setting logs in the fireplace at night to fend off the autumn cold. We’d nestle on the couch and watch television while Silas dozed at our feet. We made a game of watching him, anticipating the next time he would start dreaming. His legs thrashed whenever this happened, and we guessed at what he might be fantasizing about. Was he chasing a stick in the backyard? Heading for the woods in search of lost treasure? Playing with his new buddies Max and Fiona at the park, which had become a weekly tradition? There’s no way we could ever know for sure, of course, but we had fun with it. Wendy would whisper, “Mommy, Daddy, look what I found!” and I’d reply, “A stick!” (In the adolescent, somewhat Hispanic accent I gave him, it ended up sounding like
aye
steek
.
)

Business at
The Spinning Wheel
grew exponentially with each passing day. Word of mouth spread like wildfire and before long the demand for Wendy’s pottery forced her to hire a young apprentice to help her around the house. Evenings were filled with the sound of the radio blaring in the basement, usually followed by the rush of gas through the pipes as they fired up the kiln. We didn’t see each other too much, even though we were in the same house. She ran herself ragged, but when she collapsed in bed each night, exhausted beyond belief, there was a twinkle of delight in her eyes. Sure, it was hard work, but she
enjoyed doing it.
I was proud of her. She’d done the impossible and lived up to her dream.

On Sunday, five days before Christmas, with the store pulling in upwards of four grand a week, Wendy looked me dead in the eye and made a proclamation that rocked my world.

“Kenny,” she said, “I want you to quit your job.”

“Huh?” I replied, flabbergasted.

“I want you to quit your job.”

“Why?”

“I need help at the store. I want you to manage it. It’s too much for me, but I’m not sure how long this surge is gonna last, so I don’t want to hire some stranger that I might not be able to commit to.”

I was floored. I wanted to say yes right away, but the part of my brain ruled by logic told me to ask questions. So I did.

“What about insurance? What happens if we stop making money?”

“We can get private insurance. That’s no problem. There’re tons of plans available for small business owners.” It was so odd hearing how nonchalantly she said this, considering how adamant she’d been about the evils of the single-payer system in her youth. “And as for the money aspect…well, if business falls off, you can always find another job. It’s not like you’re the vice-president of your company or anything.”

That comment stung. “It’s not that easy,” I said, a bit of sadness in my voice.

“Sure it is,” she said.

I nodded. “Fine. Say I do this. What’s my job entail?”

She grinned. “Running the shop. Keeping track of inventory. Obtaining supplies. Dealing with the customers. You know, management stuff. I’ll take care of everything else. And plus, there’s a good amount of down time during the day up front. It’ll give you a chance to start writing again. Not only that, but just think about
this
– we’re going to be seeing each other every day, all day! That’s something you want, right?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?” There was a suggestion of hurt in her eyes.

“It’s all kinda sudden, you know? Believe me, I’m stunned right now – in a good way. But you need to give me a little time to think about this.”

She nodded and said, “I understand. Didn’t want to put you on the spot or anything. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Like I said, I just need a little time.”

Silas nudged my knee below the table. I picked a slice of roast beef out of my sandwich and held it beneath the tablecloth. He plucked it from my fingers, swallowing the meat whole, and licked the leftover juice from my fingertips. It tickled. I laughed.

Wendy grinned at my amusement. Her head lolled to the side. “So you’ll think about it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

She stood up, brought her empty plate to the sink, rinsed it off, stuck it in the dishwasher, and then walked back over to me and planted a kiss on my forehead.

“I love you,” she said.

I kissed her back. “I love you too.”

When she left the room I clicked on the radio and bobbed my head to an old rockabilly tune until the disk jockey came on to tell his audience about a missing young girl from
Enfield
. I quickly turned it off, not wanting to think about those types of horrors.
 
I didn’t have children, so it didn’t concern me. I preferred to bask in the glory of my newfound hope, for despite what I’d told Wendy, I knew
I was going to take her up on her offer. There would be time to worry about the things that went on outside my own head later. There always was.

The next day I quit my job. It was my Christmas present to both of us.

10

Managing
The Spinning Wheel
proved a much more difficult undertaking than I initially thought. The “down time” Wendy promised wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as she’d stated, either. Mostly my days consisted of dashing from one side of the shop to the other, taking custom orders for some, going over the catalog with others, and trying to explain the processes by which a piece was created (a subject I knew next to nothing about) with almost everyone. I also had more annoyingly mundane tasks such as tallying sales numbers, calling about late payments, and daily trips to FedEx.

Wendy was there each day as she promised, of course, mostly working in the rear workshop with her apprentice. She’d said we would see each other more often, but it ended up being me up front and her out back, day in and day out. Just like at home, we rarely laid eyes on each other until quitting time, and even
those
moments were filled with distractions.

Through all of this, the business continued to grow. Galleries wanted a piece of her new designs. So did the upper-
crusties
, folks with cash to spend from
Greenwich
to
Stamford
. By the time February came around Wendy had to hire five extra hands just to keep the place in shape. We made money by the truckload, enough to buy all new furniture for the house and replace the modest cars that had served us well for years with a new Jaguar for Wendy and a Subaru Forester for me.

This was all nice and all, but the fourteen-hour workdays were starting to wear on me. I felt beaten, and I wasn’t the only one.

Silas was the one who suffered most from our success. I could read it in his movements. His tail wagged like a metronome on crack the minute we walked through the door. He’d linger about by our feet, a constant tripping hazard, following our heels in a pathetically needy manner. I tried my best to give him what he wanted, be that rubbing the nape of his neck or gently kneading the flesh between his hind legs and stomach, but I knew it wasn’t enough. He would hide beneath the kitchen table during our late suppers, awaiting the traditional scraps of food we dropped for him. Finally he ended up curled on the floor in the living room, equidistant between Wendy and me, as if moving too far in either direction would be a show of disrespect. My heart dropped when I noticed how depressed he looked, how lonely. I imagined what he did for the fifteen hours a day we were gone. In these contemplations, I regretted my dad’s outlook that dogs were loveable but inherently stupid creatures. I could see the sadness in his beautiful hazel eyes. He
missed us.
This was a being that loved and cared for me as much as any human I’d ever met, if not more so. He deserved happiness, too.

Our trips to the dog park became few and far between, as much due to winter’s snow and ice as our schedule. Even as the coldness melted away in March, the one-year anniversary of his arrival at our home, we still didn’t pay as much attention to him as we should have.

We might not have paid attention to his needs, but that didn’t mean I stopped noticing how fast he grew. He’d gotten so big that when he stood on his hind legs he could drape his paws over my shoulders and lick my face. When I brought him to the vet at the end of the month I watched in awe as the scale kept climbing up and up. The number on the LCD display finally stopped at eighty-seven pounds. My jaw dropped open.

No wonder
my legs went numb when he slept on them.

“That’s a big boy you got there,” said the vet.

Silas raised one eyebrow and barked. I shook my head and laughed.

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