The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (27 page)

It was hopeless. No dogs were being trained for therapy. No dogs were coming but the pit bulls. And Mrs. Walzer compared a pug to a sausage!

What could anyone even say about that? There was nothing to be said about that. Mrs. Auberchon couldn't get mad, although she tried. It was too, too alarming. It was on a whole other level from saying she was a cake in a pan. In a way, that was understandable. But a pug was a
dog.

She walked down the lane with much more caution than usual. A heaviness had come over her. The inn had no guests. No dog was in Solitary to hear her read. No dog was in the infirmary or in Holding. In her room were several books she'd received in the mail that morning. They were not for dogs but for herself. New books for dogs had to wait. All those titles had something to do with pit bulls and fighting. She had homework to do. She didn't want to do it. When she was placing the order, with a rescue group that had an online store, she almost made the decision not to buy anything that came illustrated with photos.

But that would have meant not being prepared for what she was going to be seeing. They were turning Solitary into a private apartment for the eldest dog, who needed to be sequestered completely. The infirmary was about to be full. Holding would be full as well, and all the kennels.

She'd considered asking the staffers if she could voice-contact those dogs without seeing them on camera. She knew they'd say yes. But she didn't ask. She couldn't bear the thought of herself as a coward.

She pushed the door open with the sense that she had never in her life felt such a heaviness before. And as soon as she stepped inside, she knew someone was there.

It was instinct. She could feel an alertness taking her over, partly of fear, but mostly of curiosity, plus the skin prickles coming from her natural annoyance at anything that wasn't as it should be.

The fear part of it was the first to go. She knew how to talk to her inn. It wasn't an intruder. Well, it
was,
but not an intruder who meant to cause harm.

The lobby and the room behind the sliding door were their usual selves, empty. So were the kitchen and her own room. All was as she'd left it. She heard no sounds, not even one creaking or stirring about, but she asked herself, if I can't trust my own feel of this place, what can I trust? The answer was nothing. She didn't need to doubt. She hurried up to the bunkroom.

George!

He was asleep on a bunk in the middle of the room, curled up on his side, his Sanctuary jacket over him like a blanket. He had taken off his boots; he'd left them neatly in the vestibule. The first thing Mrs. Auberchon thought of was how strange it was to see him without a dog. She was aware of a dull thud of disappointment in her chest. She knew she'd better not let it get bigger, so she told herself she was feeling a letdown because George hadn't brought a dog. That was better than saying, “I thought my intruder would be Evie, coming back for a visit to see how I am.”

“George,” whispered Mrs. Auberchon. “Wake up. It's me. I'm here.”

He opened his eyes at once, gazing up at her in sleepy contentment, like a little boy. Maybe he'd been dreaming of his new home. Maybe, in the moment before reality set things right, he took her presence as the presence of his soon-to-be mother.

“Hi,” he said.

“I was visiting Mrs. Walzer in the hospital.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Now I'm back. Congratulations on your new family. I'm going to miss you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Of course I'll miss you. Why didn't you come down in the Jeep?”

“I felt like walking.”

“Did you come to say goodbye? I wish you'd brought Tasha. Why didn't you bring Tasha with you?”

He sat up and she saw he hadn't come to say goodbye to her. She had the feeling it had never crossed his mind to.

“Tasha's having a bath,” he said. “I think they've got four volunteers on it, all new ones, because the old ones won't. I bet they get soaked. I bet, after it's over, they'll never want to clean a big dog again. Did you know they have a pool where I'm going?”

“I didn't know that.”

“It's a good thing they do. From now on, that's where she's going. They have a deck around it, so all I have to do when she really stinks is get her up on the deck and push her in. But why I came down is, can I use your computer?”

“My computer?”

“I have to show you something.”

Mrs. Auberchon never let anyone in her room. No one but herself touched anything that was hers.

“How about a snack in the kitchen, George?”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Should I still call you George? When they sent me the news, they had your real name.”

“You can call me George.”

“I have popcorn,” said Mrs. Auberchon. “I have cocoa. It's just the stuff in envelopes you pour water in, but I'll fix it in a nice big mug for you.”

“Please,” he said. “It's really important. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't.”

She hadn't taken her coat off. She undid the buttons slowly, concentrating hard on each one so it didn't show how much he'd stung her. He was only a boy. He was only another Sanctuary rescue on the way back into the world: another one without a past to be talked about, known. He'd come to her for visits in his early days like a runaway dog. Maybe he'd forgotten that. Did the staffers ever watch movies with him, including terrifying ones, while sitting by him closely, like a grandmother? Of course they didn't! It never would have crossed their minds!

She could not say no to him. She was the Warden. He was, this moment, like a dog put into Solitary. She remembered what he was like when he was younger and new, carrying his loneliness around him like a room just his size. She never laughed at him to his face when he told her how, inside himself, he was a Great Dane. She took him seriously and agreed, patting him.

He waited impatiently while she took off her coat and boots and turned on her machine. He didn't thank her for allowing him in her room. He didn't look at the bookshelf, pointing to titles and reminding her of the ones he'd given her. He didn't mention how much he liked it when he eavesdropped on her, reading about hobbits.

She let him sit in her chair. She stood looking over his shoulder.

What appeared on her screen was a website for adoptions of Siberian huskies, and right away Mrs. Auberchon thought of the sled pups. She'd sat in that chair for hours at a time for their first few Sanctuary weeks, all of them in the infirmary. She didn't remember the details of their rescue. The details didn't matter. She remembered herself talking and talking to sick, scrawny, mewing babies, with George always somewhere close by them. She'd read them Dr. Seuss exclusively:
Yertle the Turtle,
Fox in Socks,
Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book,
Horton Hears a Who!

And then they were bigger, they were strong, they were going outdoors, and they were gone. Mrs. Auberchon had often imagined them as students in a snow-domed academy of sledding, earnestly working on their degrees, their futures bright, filled with Iditarods.

She said, “What are we doing here, George?”

“You'll see. First I have to lay out some background.”

He clicked a box that led to listings of shelters currently holding Siberians. He went to one of them and let her see the notice: “We are no longer accepting dogs due to overcrowding.” Then came another with the same thing, and another, another. What was the matter with him? He knew as well as she did that lots of shelters were overcrowded!

A new site came up. A moment later she was looking at a photo of a young male husky in a sitting position in a room with walls made of cinder blocks, painted a pretty shade of blue, like cornflowers. The linoleum floor was new-grass green. Against those colors, the dog was starkly white and black. Attached to his collar was a short length of some kind of flexible metal, which was attached to a bolt in the wall.

One eye of the dog was pale amber. The other eye was pale blue. He didn't look ill. But he didn't look healthy. He was obviously underweight. His muzzle was white, and so was most of his face, up to a meeting place on the forehead with the soft black of his head. The line where white went to black was wavy and gently jagged, like a small splash of sea foam, as if a wave was cresting lightly into a stretch of dark water.

And so the dog was implanted in Mrs. Auberchon's mind with an association of water, not of snow. She had no idea why that happened. She simply had the feeling very strongly that something about this animal was watery and rolling-waves-like. His chest was white to a curving swath of black below his neck: more foam and dark water. His legs were white. His expression was empty of emotion. He was just sitting there, giving no indication that he knew he'd be moved soon, or that he worried he might be sitting there for forever.

Why was she looking at this dog?

“Remember how I named the sled pups before they left?” George suddenly said.

She did. He wasn't supposed to name them. At the Sanctuary they were identified by numbers, per order of the training center that offered to take them. But George had given them names, not that she recalled any of them. She had stuck with the numbers.

Sense was dawning on her, as impossible as it seemed. It couldn't be. Could it?

“I just found him a little while ago,” said Giant George. “I was looking for him everywhere. This is Rocky.”

“Rocky?”

“Yeah. You forgot. I
told
you.”

“Tell me again.”

“I was watching the first
Rocky
movie when we found out how those guys needed rescue. He was the smallest when they came in. He was the runt. I should've known this would happen, but I thought he'd work out with the rest of them. He didn't. He ended up getting adopted by some guy on a vacation, on some outdoor Alaska tourist thing. But he didn't work out with the guy, either. This is the fourth place he's been since he left here. I have to get him out.”

“George,” said Mrs. Auberchon, “don't tell me you're thinking of taking a husky with you, when you already talked that family into Tasha. Even you wouldn't be so crazy.”

“I'm not thinking about taking him with me.”

“Well, you can't get him sent to the mountain. You know there's a stop on new ones. I expect that'll also go for, you know, a return.”

“I expect you're right, Mrs. Auberchon.”

Mrs. Auberchon was running out of patience. She wanted to stop looking at this dog. She felt sorry for him, and for George as well, as he was busy, she knew, blaming himself for the unfortunate turn of events.
Unfortunate turn of events,
she was saying to herself, mentally putting up distance between herself and the dog and blue walls and green floor and that attachment thing. She was worn out anyway from seeing Mrs. Walzer. She had half a mind to tell this big brooding boy hunkering in her Warden chair that sometimes, honest to God, enough was enough. Sometimes, in fact, she was
sick and tired of dogs and all their problems.
What about problems of her own? Dogs weren't the only ones with unfortunate turns of events!

George turned in the chair to look up at her.

She smiled at him. She still couldn't really believe he'd be leaving. Once, she suddenly remembered, he'd come down to the inn with a woeful little dog in a sling he'd fixed on himself across his chest from a shoulder. She recognized the sling as a throw cover she'd kept on the big armchair in the lobby. She'd been looking all over for it, and for other items the inn was missing, little things: a pillowcase, a towel, a place mat. She'd blamed it on guests, not that she could do anything about it. He'd grinned at her sweetly when she accused him of stealing from her, as if to say, why shouldn't he? She couldn't get upset, because there was the dog in her throw: a new one, a toy, young, a poodle, full of black curls except for the raw patch of skin on the chest, where the hair had come off and was far from growing back. The missing hair, Mrs. Auberchon remembered, was from self-scratching, the same spot over and over. She remembered there'd been a Sanctuary operation on a house where quite a few dogs had been kept in close quarters by the kind of people who turn up on TV sometimes for being found out as “hoarders.” The poodle was the only one of them in good enough shape to be able to keep on living.

On her front paws were tiny booties. “I'm in love with her,” George had said, plopping himself and the dog down to watch a movie.

Eventually the poodle was adopted—a fortunate turn of events. Mrs. Auberchon remembered most of all what it was like to hear the word
love
from the mouth of this boy. That's what she decided to hold on to always. Love coming out of this boy. The photo on her screen seemed to soften. She felt a little glow about the husky, like a visit now coming to an end.

“Let's turn it off and have that cocoa, George,” she said. “You'll need it for the walk back. Maybe when the pit bulls are settled in, I'll speak to them up there about bringing him, if he's still available. I'll keep tabs on him. I promise.”

“I don't want you to just keep tabs on him,” George said.

It wasn't that he was looking at her hopefully. He was looking at her as if he knew something, which he was giving her the chance of figuring out for herself.

Uh-oh, thought Mrs. Auberchon.

She was already shaking her head in a
no
when he put it to her.

“You have to take Rocky for the inn, Mrs. Auberchon,” he said. “He'll fit in. He'll be
great
here.”

“Get out of my chair, George. You know I couldn't—”

He didn't let her finish. He lifted a hand toward the screen, flat-palmed, as if he were patting the photo. “I called them,” he said. “They have a fee, or a donation, as they call it. You have to pay it before they'll do a release. But it's only, like, a couple hundred. I told them you'll get in touch with your credit card number, so, yeah, we can go have hot chocolate. You can use the phone in the kitchen. But don't ask about transport. They don't have it. We can set it up separately.”