The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (28 page)

“Stop!” cried Mrs. Auberchon. “If I wanted a dog for the inn, I'd already have one! I don't want a dog!”

“I figured you'd say that,” he said calmly. “So now it's out of the way. I just have to ask you one more thing.”

“What!” cried Mrs. Auberchon.

“If you don't feel like living with a Rocky, I'll understand. But pick something that's right for him. Don't change his name to George. You'll want to. You'll totally, totally want to, after I'm gone.”

A
GAIN A SUMMONS
from Phyllis. But this time I wasn't meeting with her in the dining room. Boomer led me through the kitchen and up a flight of stairs to a hallway similar to mine, not that I was calling my part of the Sanctuary “mine.” I was just calling it a place where I'd sort of grown used to living.

Behind the kitchen was the room that belonged to Giant George. The door had always been closed before, but I knew it was his. This was the only place where the air smelled like a guy. I'd picked up whiffs of him often on my trips to the kitchen. He wasn't there now. I only looked inside long enough to see that it was somewhere someone was moving out of. I was working on having a positive attitude about his new non-Sanctuary life, as in, yay for him and also Tasha. But so far I was only at: this sucks.

Then there I was, at the living quarters of the staffers. It was silent up here, but not stuffy, not unwelcoming. All the doors were shut except one at the front of the hall. Boomer dropped to a sprawl in front of it and immediately lidded his old eyes for a nap. I had to step over him.

I found myself in sort of an office, centered by a table exactly like the ones in the dining room, with four chairs around it. Phyllis looked up at me and gestured for me to sit beside her. She smiled as if she knew the first thing I'd think of was the possibility of facing all four of them at once, and I'd be standing there by myself, getting judged for I didn't know what exactly—but of course, whatever it was for, it wouldn't make me look good.

“It's just the two of us,” she said.

She was dressed in a new sweatsuit, deep maroon, with a pale blue turtleneck underneath. I picked up the scent of a catalog order, fresh from being opened. I liked the feeling of having something personal in common with her, even if it was only the fact that we both bought clothes without going into a store.

The room was a small one, made smaller by one whole wall being lined with filing cabinets, metal gray, looking ancient. They must have once been filled with ski-lodge data. She saw me looking at them, then at the maps tacked onto the opposite wall, half a dozen of them: the United States divided into six parts. Each was dotted with pushpins, mostly silver ones. Here and there the several red ones really stood out.

“Red means a rescue that didn't go well,” she said in a quiet way. “The files are all about dogs. Years and years of them. But you must know I didn't send for you to talk about our maps and files.”

A long silence now took place. Understandably, I almost didn't want to know why she'd sent for me. I figured out that whatever it was, I wasn't going to like it. I looked at the way her face was so worn, so heavily lined. She wasn't the eldest of the staffers, just the most wrinkled. I wondered if a dog, licking human skin, would be able to tell the difference between wrinkles and smoothness, like the difference between a soft cotton chew toy and a corduroy one. I had noticed Tasha with a new stuffed animal of the thickest corduroy that probably ever existed, and for the first time, she wasn't interested in tearing it apart. She only mouthed it lightly and seemed to cherish it, although the toy was in the shape of a cat. Dogs respect tough, wrinkled outer layers, and I've totally learned to do the same, I was thinking. But that was only to postpone the effect on me of “rescue that didn't go well.” All along, I'd taken it for granted that every rescue operation worked out like a movie or television show loaded with suspense and danger, but in the end, everyone is cheering. I saw that I couldn't base all rescues on my own experience getting Dapple. I remembered the operation that took place remotely on my first Sanctuary night. I remembered Giant George in the shadows of my room, when I thought he was planning to sneak into bed with me, and he was telling me no one got shot—that is, no one got shot with a bullet that actually hit.

I had to admire Phyllis for being patient with me. Technically she wasn't one of my teachers, but I was getting the sense that she was actually a type of
mega-teacher,
which you could also call “alpha teacher,” using
alpha
in its positive, Dora-like way, not that I'm saying Phyllis was queenly, or that she had the personality of a diva. She was letting the silence that had fallen between us grow as deep and wide as I needed it to. She was letting me make my own decision about learning something I couldn't have discovered on my own. It's not as if you can do an Internet search on “attempted rescues of dogs that ended badly.” If I wanted to continue believing it was all happy outcomes, and never mind the red pushpins, I could do so, and she wouldn't judge me badly, she was saying to me, without coming right out and saying so.

Well, that's a mega for you. That's teaching taking place in silence—just like what happened when the other three staffers silently looked at Shadow to see if he'd decide to follow a command to lie down. He never did. I totally, totally didn't have to know about unhappy outcomes.

I said to Phyllis, “When rescues don't go well, what happens?”

She didn't look at me as if mentally patting me for making the right choice. She just answered the question.

“Sometimes, weapons are involved.”

“Like with the guns the night the pitties were taken?”

“Yes. Sometimes owners of dogs who need to be taken interrupt an operation, as carefully planned as it was. To the owners, the rescuers aren't rescuers. They're intruders. They're lawbreakers, coming to their property to rob them. In many states, of course, it's not a serious crime to be abusive to animals.”

“But it's a serious crime to save them?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone in the Network ever go to prison, like in the cases with the red pins?”

“No prison. We have excellent lawyers.”

“Did anyone ever get shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone who shot at a rescuer ever get arrested?”

“No.”

“Did any rescuer ever
die?
”

She shook her head, then said, “Not yet.” She didn't sound dramatic about it. She simply stated it matter-of-factly.

I said, “Do new people keep joining the Network, even though they know that?”

“Yes.”

“When Sanctuary trainees finish their programs, do they automatically get into the Network, or do you have to apply?”

“You can get into it automatically,” she said.

I paused to let that sink in. I noticed she hadn't said something like, “Everyone can get in automatically except for you, Evie.” My pausing was due to the reality of having never before in my life imagined myself as a person with a profession, or a
calling,
in which someone might be aiming a gun in my direction, and the someone, to begin with, was a known, very guilty abuser of dogs.

Maybe Phyllis was mind-reading me. Or maybe she felt she'd grown to know me pretty well.

“You don't have to do the high-risk rescues as a Network person,” she said. “Those are in the same league as things a SWAT team would handle, say, in a regular police department, not that our rescuers are ever armed. But you get the idea. You can basically be a trainer who helps out with transports, if you like.”

At that, I was, oh my God she just said I can be a trainer. Oh my God I actually have a future. Oh my God she really said
I can be a trainer.
I wished Boomer would wake up so he could sense what this meant, and maybe give me a paw like he was congratulating me. On he slept, unaware. But I didn't let on to Phyllis that inside myself I was massively sighing with relief, and I was also feeling the thing that was called, in my former program,
validation,
which happened when a counselor suddenly said to you one day, in front of a group, without warning, “I validate your commitment to staying off drugs, because I truly believe you'll make it,” and everyone clapped and did Homer Simpson–type cries of whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo! I was never the person receiving the validation thing—but then, I'd left before I was meant to. I'd left on
a crazy impulse for a crazy new thing I didn't know anything about, which was as bad as getting into another drug,
probably a worse one.

I remembered that people who'd been validated often compared it to being in a karate class, or some other martial art, and one day you're surprised to find out you're being graduated to a higher level of belt.

They had that right. And I thought, red, and looked again at the pins on the map.

“I just also want to know,” I said to Phyllis, “do the red pins mean that someone needs to go back and try again? Like, send the SWAT team back in?”

She smiled at me. “You're an optimist,” she said.

No one had ever called me that before! I was willing to think of more questions to keep the momentum of
wonderful things to say to Evie
going, but Phyllis was clicking into a different manner, businesslike, the same way I'd noticed the change in dogs as they come out of sniffs or tussles with one another and settle down to something serious, like chewing on a plastic bone, or ripping apart some toy.

She was dachshund-like again, yet I didn't feel I was about to be chewed or ripped apart or metaphorically pursued as prey. I'd noticed the absence of tea. There weren't mugs with the heads of dachshunds. There wasn't a box of Kleenex. Nothing was on the table but a single sheet of paper, folded in half.

She unfolded it and showed it to me. On it was a number, written as words. The number was forty-two. Was it supposed to have a Sanctuary meaning I didn't know about? Was it something I should have known about but didn't? Maybe it was the number of dogs at the moment in situations they needed to be taken from soon. Maybe there'd be pushpins going onto the maps to indicate rescues waiting to happen. I thought that was an excellent guess.

“Evie,” she said, “forty-two is the number of times people in your life you haven't stayed in touch with got in touch with us instead. To tell you the truth, it became a problem.”

Oh
no.
I hadn't seen that coming. I turned to look at Boomer. This time I felt I might be able to message him to come in and stand beside me, so I could hold on to his fur. Or maybe I'd get lucky and he'd be having ESP with me in a dream, and he'd figure out on his own that I needed him. But he was still too deeply asleep.

Then I realized that one thing I knew for sure about this staffer was that she wasn't careless with words. She was a very meticulous person with how she said things. She hadn't said forty-two was the number of times
so far.
She hadn't said “it
is
a problem.”

So she was talking about something that somehow had been resolved. It seemed to me there wasn't anything else to be said about it. I made a move to get up and go back downstairs to the dogs. I was planning ahead to how I'd just say no to peeking into Giant George's room again. I couldn't believe he was leaving. With
Tasha.

And Phyllis stopped me from getting away, before I was even up on my feet. She closed her hand over mine, not roughly, but firmly. She was playing the part of a good trainer—a mega one, in fact. She was preventing bad behavior before it happened.

“We're sure you have a good reason for everything you do,” she said. “We decided we'd be able to help. It took a little ingenuity, but we want you to know we're taking care of it.”

“Taking care of it?”

“Yes. That's what we do. After all, we're sisters.”

I
hated
that. I just hated it when women go around saying to other women we're all sisters. I could see where it was useful in, like, maybe the nineteen-seventies and even sixties, in a completely political way. I took a poli sci course on American feminism when I needed credits in things that weren't in my major. I loved it. For example, not that I cared about basketball, I was extremely burned up when I found out that girls playing basketball in the old days could only go half-court, unless you were a
rover.
And girls playing softball, which also I didn't care about, used to wear white, ironed blouses, and they only played seven innings and couldn't steal or overrun a base; you had to step on it ladylike or you'd be out. Rovers and ironed blouses and overstepping were the slogan words of that class, from the first day. Everyone in it was female. The professor was just a little older than we were. She was also a coach of rugby. That was why we started with sports. She even brought in a side saddle so we could see what it was like for women who weren't allowed to have the back of a horse between their legs. When she said to us, “We're all sisters,”
she
had a reason.

I was willing and glad to call myself a student of Phyllis in all her mega-self, but I was drawing the line at calling us sisters.

Suddenly, someone was in the doorway: Giant George, preppie-looking, in a button-down shirt and khakis. He appeared to have spent at least an hour on personal grooming. He gave off such strong smells of after-shave and deodorant, Boomer started twitching his nose, like he was smelling some stranger in a dream.

“Here it is,” Giant George told Phyllis. “You didn't break it. It just needed a charge.”

I recognized her iPad. He set it down on the table.

“Can I stay for a minute?”

“Thank you, Eric, but no,” said Phyllis.

“But I have to say bye to Evie. She's been avoiding me, and here she is.”