Chapter 11
Michelle Donovan sat Indian style on her bottomless down comforter, silently mulling over what to do next. So far, all she had managed to put down on paper was the eraser end of a pencil to the rhythm of The Star Spangled Banner. Like her sketch pad, she was a blank slate. No ideas. The colors of her mind were failing her when she needed them most, like they always did.
There were just too many nooks to search, too many streets to comb—not to mention the alleys in-between and the miles and miles of verdant woods that wrapped the town like a womb. It was hopeless; Freddy was lost.
And it’s all my fault.
But it wasn’t all her fault. Her father was the one who fed Freddy Sunday morning before leaving for church. He was also the one who left the gate open while Michelle and her mom waited in the idling car.
Cindy had sat in the back and Michelle in the front, and through the bug-splattered windshield, Michelle witnessed the whole thing, watching absently as her father poured an avalanche of Alpo into Freddy’s food bowl, keeping her eyes glued to him as he entered the garage with the bag of dog food cradled in his arms, only to reappear in the backyard empty-handed a few seconds later to fill the water bowl.
After turning off the hose, Bert had rounded the rear of the house, unlatched the gate, walked through it, then slammed it behind him, causing a ruckus that made Freddy, along with all the other dogs on the street, bark in unison. Other than waking all of the neighborhood’s canines and, in turn, most of the neighbors, Bert’s slamming of the gate did nothing else. It certainly didn’t form an impenetrable barrier that served to keep Freddy in and all others out, which was the whole purpose of the fence and gate to begin with.
Noticing this, Michelle had opened the car door, leaned out, and yelled for him to go back and close the stupid gate. She remembered using those exact words: stupid gate. She also remembered how clumsy and forgetful her father could be when it came to simple tasks such as closing doors and making sure they stayed closed.
Prancing on his tiptoes, Bert had skulked back to the gate the way a sleuth or a spy might. Apparently, Freddy pegged him as something else—a burglar, most likely—because the Doberman flashed his teeth and began to rumble.
Bert dropped the clown act at once and resumed his normal gait. As he neared the fence, Freddy let out a couple of warning barks. Even though the gate was wide open, Freddy didn’t know enough to go around the back of the house and attack from the other side. Instead, he stayed on the side where there was only fence and barked at an intruder who was really his owner.
Then something clicked in the dog’s brain: Freddy solved the puzzle. He turned and ran around the blind side of the house. Bert ran, too. He ran to the gate (it was only a couple of steps), lifted the latch, slammed the gate against the post, and hurried back to the car. When he was safely seated behind the wheel, Freddy appeared around the corner of the house, barking maniacally.
"You see that!" Bert said, shaking his head in disbelief. "What the heck has gotten into Freddy?"
Michelle remained quiet as they sped down Magnolia Drive. She did look out her window, though. Then, for some reason, she twisted her body and peered out the rear window as well. Through the swirling gossamer of a lifting ground fog, she witnessed the gate to her backyard swing inward. It was only an inch or two, but her father had missed the damn post…again. Behind her and unseen, Freddy yelled in his own language at the fleeing sedan.
Sitting there, saying nothing, she had tried to avoid the worrisome thoughts roiling in her mind—thoughts of the inevitability of Freddy’s escape and the consequences of her silence when he eventually did. Would he hurt somebody? she wondered. A child, perhaps? But then her mind had rushed to soothe her fears by whispering of the improbability of Freddy even discovering the gate was unlatched, let alone recognizing it as a way out. Who knew how many times her father (or her mother, or even her) had left the gate open after bringing in the trash cans from the curb or watering the lawn. And nothing had happened then, had it? Freddy had never run away before, and he wasn’t going to run away now. Still, she itched to tell her father to turn the car around and go back because the doofus had tried closing the gate twice and failed both times. She refrained, though, but she didn’t know why.
And now, a day later, she sat alone in her room, trying to come up with a way to track down a dog that wasn’t hers. Bert had blamed her for Freddy’s disappearance. That he had been quick to do.
"It’s your fault!" he’d accused later that morning when they’d returned to a dogless backyard and a gate wide open enough to walk a cow through.
"Why is it my fault?" Michelle had countered. "You’re the one who left the fuckin’ gate open."
At that, Bert’s cheeks had blanched. Then his whole face had turned the color of rubies. "What have I told you about that word, missy? Don’t ever say that word around me. You hear me?"
She saluted. "Loud and clear, Cap’n."
"You’re mocking me? Listen, you better find my dog, or else…or else!!" He had composed himself then, rolling his shoulders and taking deep, slow breaths. "I want my dog back," he’d said with a little less fire and brimstone. "You should have told me the gate was open. If you saw it, why didn’t you tell me?"
His voice had cracked somewhere in the middle of that question, and Michelle remembered thinking her father was as close to crying as she was ever going to see him. When she responded with a "Because I wasn’t sure," she didn’t look him in the eyes, opting instead to gaze at the grass, because she knew the combination of looking at her father on the verge of tears while telling him a lie just might send her over the brink of cool composure and into the Land of Sob.
At that moment, she had wished for cruelty. She had wished for all of her emotions to go away. She had wished for the absence of a soul. She had wished to be just like Hector Graham.
That bastard.
"But I need him," Michelle said, doodling curly-cues and spirals onto the blank sketch pad in her lap. At first reluctantly, then frenetically, she recalled the events of the past forty-eight hours, and when a painful spasm racked her right hand and forearm, her whole arm convulsed, launching the pencil on a flight path across the room.
"What the hell," she said, looking down at the image on the page.
Dead center, surrounded by doodads and nonsensical shapes, a cartoon arrow flew high over a dense thatch of either corn or rye. Whichever grain it was, the ripe, heavy ears bowed over the stalks like pole vaulters in ascent. Since Michelle wasn’t an artist (though she considered herself one), she stared in unabashed awe at the work she had magically produced. An endorphin rush bubbled up through her belly and surfed through her blood channels; hot ice poured over her solar plexus, bathing her guts with creativity’s molten grease. Every object in the room became eerily vivid: her senses opened up, and she was noticing the dusty mineral smell of the drawing, along with the impossible whiteness of her down comforter—almost too bright to look at, feeling like a cloud beneath her, a squishy organic thing, equally capable of carrying her away or thinning out and dropping her back down to earth. She wasn’t in her room anymore, that’s for sure. What had seemed impossible only minutes ago was now possible.
Staring at the picture, she traced the arrow with the dewdrop pad of her left index finger. The point smudged, and she let out a whimper to accompany a tear already cascading down her tan cheek. What she was looking at was so inherently beautiful and yet so simple. An arrow flying over a thicket of grain. That’s all.
I can’t believe I did this, she thought as the endorphin high fizzled out like a dud bottle rocket, going wherever chemicals in the body go to get broken down and recycled.
The drawing remained, however: a reminder of a feeling that was now almost gone. While gazing at her darling, a voice spoke in the back of her mind. She barely registered it at first, but when she heard the name it said, she took notice. The voice said: This is what Rusty feels and said no more.
She looked out the w
indow at the bruised evening sky. A shiver coursed through her body.
"What?" she asked meekly.
There was no reply, because she was in her room, alone, sitting on her down comforter, cradling a sketch pad in her arms like a baby. It was her baby. Now, anyway. It hadn’t been before, but now it had life in it. It was different; it had changed. She had created something beautiful, and she had to show Rusty.
Leaning over the drawing, the tips of her hair form a dark corona around the pad and rob it of light. Giggling, Michelle envisions the unfolding of the best day of her life:
She drives over to Russell’s house tomorrow around lunchtime—because he comes home for lunch—and rings the doorbell. His mom or dad don’t answer it, because in this future, Russell opens the door and gapes at her in surprise, as he always does when she stops by unexpectedly. Then, holding the drawing up to her chest, she beams him a sly smile, and Russell’s expression of befuddlement morphs into one of awe and reverence. He steps closer—no, he slides closer—and reaches out to touch the drawing, to trace the arc of the arrow, because there is a tacit understanding between them that the arrow is not just an arrow. It’s a symbol of the invisible thread that binds all of humanity and creation together: hunter and hunted; yin and yang; male and female. And she knows Russell understands this, because as she stares into his pellucid, hazel eyes on that oversized porch, she sees the calm, all-seeing soul of the true artist. He gets things, understands connections, on a deeper level than most people. He knows (and now, so does Michelle) that only a dullard would ask "Who shot the arrow?" or "What did he shoot it at?" because those questions aren’t important. They’re never important. Only that an arrow was shot, and that it flew over the most picturesque thicket of heavy grain.
Even now, as the day winds down and Michelle’s mind ebbs back to the world of a supposed reality, a reality that really "sucks nuts," as she likes to put it, she can’t help but feel the magnetic pull of melancholia sweep over her once more, like the oppressive felt blanket that it is. She tries to fight it, but her efforts are futile; the Dog Days have their thorny claws deep inside her gray matter—so far in, they’re piercing soul. These days, her circadian rhythms are the jumbled, percussive clamor of a pair of sneakers tumbling in a dryer. She knows she won’t be able to sleep tonight, the same way she knows her dad will go ape shit when he comes home from work in thirty minutes to find the beloved family pet still missing.
I’ll ask Rusty to help me look for Freddy. He’ll do it, because he has to. I don’t know where to start. There are just too many places a dog could run off to. And that rumor Andrea Parker told me about some old lady with her face ripped off had to have been a lie, because if it were true, and a dog actually did what she said it did, then—
It really was his fault. It was never hers. He was the one who left the gate open. Twice.
Michelle’s heart raced; pearls of sweat coalesced on her temples. The pad slipped through her restless fingers and fell to the floor.
I swear to God, Rusty—I’ll never tell Hector what you did to Lola.