Two Good Dogs Page 10

  He doesn’t let her pass. “What’s going on?”

  “Mr. March’s dog found a guy OD’d in one of those houses across the river.”

  “Jesus. OD’d? Bad.” Mosley gives her a droopy smile. “So, where’s my phone?” Quick as anything, he has her forearm in his hand. “Go get it back from him.”

  “I just have to pee, please.”

  “And you didn’t help clean up.” He has this weird expression on his face, like he’s saying one thing and meaning another. “Bad girl. You’re not living up to our deal.”

  “I gotta go. Really. Please.” Cody yanks her arm back, runs for the stairs.

  In the rest room, she locks the stall door and sits, the relief in the rush of urine bringing tears to her eyes. She’d nearly wet her pants out there. She’d been anticipating that someone might challenge as she chased the dog into the house, some creepy denizen, but she’d never expected to find what she did. In the first second, she didn’t realize what the dark shape against the wall was, and then in a stomach-sickening lurch, it resolved into human form and she did.

  At least, this time, it wasn’t someone she knew. This time, the collapsed doll of a human being might survive. Not like her father.

  Cody lingers in the rest room long enough that she’s pretty sure Mosley will have wandered away. She hears Mr. March’s voice calling her; he’s probably wondering what the heck happened to her.

  “I’m coming.”

  Cody pulls herself together, washes her hands, then washes them again. She’s okay now. She zips up her coat and goes up the iron stairs at a trot.

  CHAPTER 11

  We are sitting in the hotel’s reception area and I am listening to Adam as he makes the case for letting him keep this monstrous-looking dog in his room along with his other monstrous-looking dog. He’s explaining how this came about, the whys and wherefores. But what I can’t quite wrap my mind around is how Cody is involved in this urban tragedy. Why was Cody there? Cody has disappeared into the cabin, a Drake’s coffee cake from the breakfast-area cupboard in her hand, not a single word out of her mouth. Cody, who had said that she was baby-sitting tonight. For a teacher. She didn’t need a ride either way.

  I throw up a hand. “Adam, please, stop. Stop.”

  He pauses in his narrative long enough to let me get a word in edgewise.

  “Tell me again why my daughter was there? In a crack house? With your dog?”

  “I asked her to let him out of the car for a quick break.”

  “Where were you? Why were you—”

  “In the building at the fund-raiser.”

  Okay, this is going to be Twenty Questions. “The fund-raiser, the one you’re here for?”

  “Yes. At the Artists Collaborative.”

  “Cody was baby-sitting tonight.”

  The look on his face is enough to let me know that, once again, my daughter has pulled the wool over my eyes.

  “Oh, Skye. She hasn’t told you, has she?”

  “I guess not. Why don’t you.”

  “Don’t you think she should tell you?”

  “Adam, do you really think she’ll come clean with me? You once told me you had a few years of trouble with your daughter. What would you have expected from her?”

  “Another lie. Probably. But I shouldn’t interfere.”

  “You’re in the middle now.”

  “I’m on the sidelines, but okay. All I know is that it seems pretty harmless, which makes me wonder why she’s being so, well, adolescent about it. She’s taking art lessons in exchange for doing errands at the Artists Collaborative. She was there tonight, passing hors d’oeuvres.”

  “This—art lessons—this is what she’s keeping from me?” I am flummoxed, incredulous.

  “I know. Kids.” He holds up his hands in a classic mime of helplessness.

  I can’t help it, I laugh, but the laugh skims the border between amusement and frustration. “Why would she think I’d object to that?”

  “Sometimes I think they rebel out of habit.”

  “Look, I can’t throw you out tonight, so keep the dog. I have to go talk to Cody.”

  “Skye, maybe this is me putting my oar in, but I think that maybe you should talk about the incident before you mention the other business. She was pretty shaken up, although she was a trouper, and thought to call nine one one even before she called me.”

  I can hear the subtext: A child Cody’s age shouldn’t witness such things. And he’s right. “Is the boy going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know. He was pretty far gone, but they had that Narcan with them, so he was making noise as they wheeled him away.”

  “She’s going to pretend nothing happened.”

  “But it did.”

  With the two monstrous dogs following him at his heels, shoulder-to-shoulder in some kind of canine solidarity, Adam walks down the length of the porch to his door. He pauses, turns to give me a little nod, that notion of parental solidarity. I close my eyes, sigh, then lock the office door. As I approach our cabin behind the building, I can hear music blasting, Cody’s phone plugged into the dock, the volume spiked loud enough to bomb through the storm windows and into the night, Florence and the Machine. What kind of a fourteen-year-old is this child? Where’s the Taylor Swift? The One Direction? I trot to the door, mindful of my guests’ comfort. Cody has the volume up loud enough to crack glass. The last thing I need is to have complaints from my guests. It’s bad enough that I’ve got that damned dog here, and I live in fear of some paying customer getting knocked down or bitten, or offended by it. And, Lord help me, now there are two of them. What kind of patsy am I?

  * * *

  Cody sits in her room, scratching the outline of a new drawing on her sketch pad, nodding her head in time with the music blaring out of the Bose speakers attached to the wall. Mom will be in here in a minute, raging about the noise, disturbing the guests, blah, blah, blah. So predictable. Yup. There she is. Comfortingly predictable.

  The music stops.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re taking art lessons? Why in God’s name wouldn’t you mention something like that?” Skye stands in the bedroom doorway, arms folded across her chest.

  “I don’t know. Didn’t think you’d care.”

  “Care?”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “However, hitchhiking to North Adams, that, my darling daughter, is a big deal.”

  “I take the school bus.”

  “No, you don’t. The bus doesn’t go that far.”

  How would her mother know the school bus routes that well?

  “Close enough. I walk from the last stop.”

  “I’ll drive you from now on.”

  “Fine.”

  “So, what happened tonight?” It’s like her mother has deflated, the angry mom becoming the concerned mom. It’s so typical: Skye starts with righteousness and then gets all mommylike.

  “Some kid overdosed on something. That dog of Mr. March’s found him.”

  “Sounds like you found him.”

  “I was just trying to get the stupid dog back.” The boy, on his back, the stench of vomit. Her own weak-kneed reaction at recognizing that she’d been incredibly stupid to go into that place.

  Being in a place she had no business being in. The sight of her father dropping to the sidewalk. She wakes in the middle of the night with the image in her mind. She dreams of it.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Her mother always says this. It’s her maternal default position.

  “Not really. What’s there to talk about?”

  “How you feel about finding the addict.”

  Cody continues with her sketch. It’s of a house, boarded up. “That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it, calling a kid an addict?”

  Skye makes a little noise, that exasperated snuff she does when Cody’s called her empathy into question. “So, he was really a kid, a boy?”

  “Guess so.” She really didn’t get that close. But, yeah, yo
ung. “Maybe seventeen, eighteen.”

  “Cody, I’m not happy about your lying to me. But it’s a good thing you were there. You probably saved his life.”

  “No biggie. The dog did all the work.” Cody adds some shading, giving the sketched house an ominous darkness. In her sketch, in the one window she’s drawn that’s not boarded up, a face emerges. Square-jawed. No eyes.

  As her mother closes the door behind her, Cody flops onto her pillow. She fights the tears that burn behind her squeezed-shut lids. It was so hard not to take that gentle approval, to push it away, afraid, as always, that the moment she lets her mother back in, she’ll lose her.

  CHAPTER 12

  I love hanging out with this guy. He’s one of those laid-back fellas that love to just laze around, maybe have a session with the chew toys, then catch a few z’s. He is shy enough that, so far, he takes my every suggestion without trying to modify the plan. For instance, if I say it’s time for a pee break, he’s right there, following me, respectfully covering my spots. He doesn’t forge out ahead, but waits for me to decide which quadrant of the backyard we should investigate first. I’m a good-enough host that I invite him to share my beds. The one in the living room is large enough for both of us to lie back-to-back, and it’s nice to have the comfort of a warm spine snuggled up to mine. The one in the bedroom is a little tighter, and after a bit I toss him out. He goes willingly, finding another bed to flop into. I don’t mind sharing Adam, either. Mostly because I know that I’m the chief dog. I’m the guy who accompanies him everywhere he goes, and my pal here is second chair. He’s good for an Adam sandwich, me on one side, him on the other of our man while he stares at that noisy, flickering space on the wall. Adam sometimes complains that we take up all the space, but he’s just joking.

  My friend has no permanent name, so he’s called by a number of things: Buddy, Pal, Bub. I get a little confused sometimes because I’ve been called all of those endearments at one time or another, although Adam maintains Bud exclusively for me. A distinction, I know, but one that is important to me. I want to always be his Bud. We’ve seen a lot together. My new friend respects that, and that’s why he’s such a joy. This guy, Buddy-Pal-Bub, has breached my natural reserve. It’s like we were once littermates, now reunited. And, have I mentioned that he’s got this great sense of humor? Really funny guy. Loves the fake crush-your-paw-in-my-mouth trick. Hilarious with a stolen towel. Oh my. We do have fun!

  * * *

  The snow is forecast to begin in the afternoon, so school is dismissed early. It’s expected to be a considerable storm, as it’s already dumped a foot and a half in New York State and is grinding its way toward them at a slow, moisture-gathering pace. Cody, for once in concert with her otherwise-alienated fellows, is overjoyed and planning to get herself to North Adams before her mother finds out they’ve been dismissed. She’s promised to help out with the first Open Studio at the AC, and she doesn’t want her mother getting in the way of that.

  The school bus will go right past the LakeView today without stopping to drop off the lone student living there. She’ll be on the Route 3 bus, get off at the last stop, and then hike in the last two miles. She just knows that she’ll beat the storm, at least as far as the AC. She’ll get out of there before it gets really bad—even she doesn’t want to be on the road at that hairpin turn in a snowstorm. She’ll ask Mosley to drive her home in his Subaru, which she thinks has four-wheel drive. Skye hasn’t met Mosley yet, mostly because Cody won’t let her into the AC when she drops her off, and Cody always makes sure that she’s standing outside when Skye comes to pick her up after her lessons. Air quote around that word: lessons. Sometimes the modeling takes up all the available time Mosley can give her.

  Cody slips her sketchbook into her backpack, makes sure that she’s got her charcoals. Mosley has moved her away from pencil. She feels like she’s making progress. He’s using charcoal to sketch her, too. He didn’t have any chores for her on Saturday, instead setting her up in one of the little-used rooms in the basement of the building, down the hall from the bathrooms. He had a chair and a table, and first he had her sitting in the chair. Prim. Proper. Knees together like a Victorian. Then he started experimenting with her position; that’s what he called it, “experimenting.” Trying to find the inner Cody. “Show me your real self. Don’t be a prop.” He put a hand width between her jean-clad knees. Taking her glasses off, he tipped her head to the side, making her hold that position until she thought she’d never be able to straighten her neck again. He draped a handful of her hair across her left eye, calling it “à la Veronica Lake.” Cody had no idea what that meant, but she didn’t ask. Mosley prefers her to be quiet. She could hear the sounds of feet upstairs, the Saturday artists, those with full-time jobs who never came to the AC on weekdays, the sound of tables being moved, chairs scraping the floor. Because she wasn’t wearing her glasses, Mosley blurred into a blob of dark colors, only his pale white arms showing against the dark backdrop of the wall.

  It’s started to snow by the time she gets off the bus. Usually, it’s only the two girls who get off here, discounting the boy who follows them at a distance of five paces, and who, she happens to have finally figured out, is little brother to one of them, an eighth grader. Some days they appear not to notice her, but other afternoons they take great delight in making sure she knows that they are paying attention. Today, one of them turns around as Cody descends the bus steps.

  “What are you doing?”

  “How’s that any of your business?”

  “You spying on us?”

  “Yeah. Right. Like you’re interesting.”

  “Then why are you following us?”

  Cody shifts her backpack up to her shoulders. “You wish.”

  “You gay or something?”

  “That’s original.”

  “You have a boy’s name.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Taylor is a girl’s name. You know, like Taylor Swift.”

  “Right.” Cody has no interest in pursuing the subject of naming conventions in the twenty-first century. Everybody’s name is weird. “Gotta go.”

  “Not so fast.” The other girl, Tyler, steps up to her. The bus has gone, leaving a black track against the new-fallen snow. It’s begun to snow in earnest and Cody wants to get walking before it’s too slippery. “So, you and Smelly Mellie are like BFFs now, right?”

  “No.” Cody and Black Molly may sit at the same lunch table on occasion, but neither one speaks. Their conversations are held elsewhere.

  “Yeah you are. So, she’s the bull dyke, you must be the fem.”

  Cody is lost. These girls are nuts.

  “You know.” She makes a kissy noise.

  Cody actually laughs out loud. “That is so bent.”

  “Maybe you are, too. Bent, I mean.”

  Cody can see the younger brother out of the corner of her eye. He looks uncomfortable, but not enough to put a stop to his sister, whichever one she is. He sees her looking at him and skulks off down a driveway. The two girls take one step closer to Cody. She’s as tall as the other girls, but they look bigger, bulked up partly by the puffy down coats they wear, and partly because they stand on legs honed by miles of field hockey or soccer practices.

  “I’m just going to ignore that.” Cody does a quick about-face and strides off down the road. Not unexpectedly, she gets clocked with two snowballs. It hurts enough that she’s pretty sure one of them has a rock in it. The blow brings tears to her eyes, but she doesn’t turn around, just doggedly continues down the road toward town. Another snowball hits her shoulder. She keeps walking. Then another rock-filled snowball gets her right between the shoulders and she starts to run. She hates that she’s crying. She hates that she’s already trying to figure out how to avoid being seen with Black Molly.

  Cody scrambles to keep her balance as the roadside steepens. These are the wrong boots for this weather. She’s concentrating so hard on getting away as fast as she can witho
ut falling that she’s oblivious to the slowing down of a car, its quiet engine inaudible against the sound of her own crying. When the nose of a black car draws parallel to her, she jumps to the side of the road, heart pounding against the idea that this is his black car. That her father’s killer has found her.

  “Cody?”

  The hot tears that have gone from anger to fear don’t stop when she sees that it’s only Mr. March with his two dogs, and now they are infused with a sick relief. The relief squares itself against the earlier anger, and what Cody wants at this moment is to sic those two square-mouthed dogs sitting in the backseat on those girls. Show them she’s not without friends. Watch those dogs rip those puffy coats to shreds, the fake down floating into the air to mix with the snowflakes.

  “Hop in.”

  Cody takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes with the edge of her sleeve, hoping that Mr. March won’t detect that she’s been crying. But he’s a smart guy, notices right away the melting snow on her back.

  “That didn’t look like playful fun.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You want me to go back and say something?”

  Cody rubs the moisture off her glasses, puts them back on. “No.”

  “Are you angry with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will petting one of these dogs help?”

  Cody feels a little smile tweak the corner of her mouth. “Maybe.”

  “Okay. Chance, head’s up.”

  Chance pops his blocky head between their seats and gives Cody a smooch.

  “Guaranteed to brighten your day.”

  “So, are you taking the dog back to his owner?”

  “Oh, Cody. No. That’s not an option.”

  * * *

  It’s really not an option. In Adam’s opinion, this dog’s been fought. That means, if he’s returned to his crack-addict owner, he’ll most likely be tossed into the ring again. He guesses that the boy funds his recreational habit with the dog. Adam isn’t unfamiliar with the phenomenon. Poor dog. As Adam likes to think, Not on my watch. He should try to explain it to Cody, who has gone all sullen on him, keeping her face to the window, ignoring Chance’s repeated efforts to jolly her, but he doesn’t have the strength.