The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (12 page)

I was a blank to myself in the long time of that moment before I let go of the collar.

Tasha sat. The biscuit was just a couple of inches away. She did not make a move to get it. She didn't look at me. She panted heavily. When she was finally okay again about her air, she furrowed her brow. I saw the dots above her eyes go narrow, in a terrible diminishing. I saw her bowing her head to me, her beautiful Rottweiler head. She was looking at the floor and the biscuit, and I knew she wasn't saying, I'm sorry for the jumping. I knew she was saying, you're my alpha, you've terrified me, and please, I'll do anything you want, just please don't strangle me again.

Now I was the one who couldn't breathe right. I picked up the biscuit. I held it to Tasha's mouth. She accepted it but did not look up.

“Good dog, Tasha,” I said.

Still she hung her head, sitting on her haunches, subdued. It was clear to me that, if I wanted to, I could get her through the basic commands. She'd learn them because she'd be saying to herself, what else will this human do to me if I don't obey?

“Tasha,” I whispered. “I don't want to be a fascist. I'm sorry. I need a time-out.”

She knew right away who'd be going into the crate. It felt good to see her polka dots come back to being round.

“I want you to erase the memory of what I did to you,” I said.

She looked like she was willing to think about it. She followed me to the cage. Her tail was wagging as I went down on my hands and knees and crawled in. The floor smelled like dog. Every atom of every piece of metal smelled like dog.

The cage was high enough for me to sit. I decided the best way to handle this was in a yoga position. I crossed my legs before reaching to close the door, because it's not really a time-out if the door stays open.

But here was Tasha, head-butting the door to stop it from shutting.

There wasn't enough room for both of us. Tasha's bum was sticking out, following her command to herself to lie down. Much of the front of her came into my lap, as if the true purpose of the lotus position is to better receive a Rottweiler. She let out her tongue to lick my chin, in a huge amount of slobber. I didn't tell her that her weight would cramp me in about one minute. I told her I thought she was wonderful. I told her many other adjectives that mean the same thing, and I told her I was mad at myself, not at her, although it really did suck of her to jump humans, and then I started humming to her.

It popped into my head as the right thing to do. I didn't hum an actual tune. I was just making sounds up and down. When I was sick of having no words, I sang the words of the basic commands, over and over, mixing them up so they weren't always in the same order. Then the tune became a combination of the opening of
The Simpsons,
because of talking to Shadow, and
Sesame Street,
because of the Weimaraners. She tucked into me. I patted and patted her. I had no way of knowing if this was the first time a human ever sang to her. When I interrupted myself to say again that I was sorry for what I did to her breath, she raised a paw and thumped me. Stop talking and get back to the song, she was saying.

And so I felt what it's like to be forgiven by a dog.

The time-out was over when I had to make her get off me before I was paralyzed forever from the crush of her. She followed me around for the next few hours, until we heard Shadow barking at the Jeep coming into the yard. He thought it was a stranger, because of the noise it wasn't making.

A
NEW DOG WAS
in Solitary. Mrs. Auberchon only knew a name, an age, a gender.

Alfie. Male. Age approximately three.

He was facing away from the camera, and he was absolutely still. She saw a tan coat, a thin, curled tail, long and skinny legs. The coat was smooth as suede. The body was lean, angular. He was bred to be sleek as a bullet. He was a greyhound. His silence filled her with an awful aching—only that, the silence of the dog on her screen, not the strange new quiet of the inn.

Evie was just a guest. Guests left the inn all the time. That's what guests did.

And the newly quiet Jeep was on its way up the mountain road, George at the wheel, Evie beside him, the two dogs in the back, Tasha and Shadow. They left with the windows rolled down so the dogs could stick their heads out and bark and howl. It was a victory that Shadow found his voice, but enough was enough.

“Bye, Mrs. Auberchon!” Evie had yelled.

She'd run out to the Jeep like a dog breaking into a leap, like she was Hank. Slung by one strap on her shoulder was her pack, so heavy on the night she arrived, she couldn't carry it and had to drag it. Why was it so light now? Had she left things behind? Would she be phoning Mrs. Auberchon to ask her to come up to the top with her forgotten things, like Mrs. Auberchon was her servant?

Evie. Selfish girl. Twenty-four. Why couldn't she have cared a tiny bit that maybe her innkeeper deserved a nice thank-you and a nice farewell?

Mrs. Auberchon began to look forward to finishing her session as Warden and going upstairs to find out what sort of a mess that girl had left behind. It might take the whole evening to clean up. She knew Evie had been down in the laundry room, without permission, while she was away.

“I hope you don't mind I did my laundry, Mrs. Auberchon!”

That's what she sang out in a yippy voice, when she was upstairs packing. She had Tasha and Shadow in the bunkroom with her. What damage had Tasha done? Had Shadow peed on a mattress? Mrs. Auberchon would see; she would see. She had already checked the laundry room. Evie left lint in the dryer screen, but that wasn't enough to get upset about.

Mrs. Auberchon remembered the chicken in the roasting pan, the strange spilled sugar, and how she'd imagined herself as Evie's mother, back when she thought Evie was crazy. She drew herself together. She had to do her job. Greyhound. Three. Alfie.

“Hello there, Alfie,” she said. “What's it all about?”

Turning at her greeting, he looked up. He was all tan, with a patch of white in the narrow place from between his eyes to his nose. His beauty was strange and a little unnerving. His big round eyes were empty of expression, like dark, shiny marbles. They looked too big for that triangle of a face. They looked like the eyes of a wild animal, or maybe an alien.

Where was that piece of paper from Evie's application? Mrs. Auberchon knew she'd printed it. She just couldn't remember where she'd put it. Here on the shelf? In a drawer? She found it folded in half, inside the cover of a Beatrix Potter. She had thought the little white dog, Josie, with her biting and snapping and outbursts of chaos, might go too far one day and get herself confined. Beatrix Potter had seemed the best choice for her. But her behavior was improving. Mrs. Auberchon didn't know why, although she suspected it had something to do with Evie. Not that Mrs. Auberchon was missing Evie.

“Bye, Mrs. Auberchon!”

She had raced down the stairs with her backpack. Tasha and Shadow were in a frenzy of barking and baying, and the Jeep horn was blowing, and George was calling to her to hurry, we're going up the mountain, hurry up! In Mrs. Auberchon's hand was a log. She had to put it down. She didn't need to keep the stove going, because no one would be upstairs. What had possessed her to step toward the door as Evie approached it? Still she could feel the motion of her arms going up and out in half circles. She could feel the joke—yes, the joke—of the position she'd put herself in. She never gave departing guests a hug!

There wasn't even a backward glance, and then the door closed.

“I asked you what it's all about, Alfie,” said Mrs. Auberchon, “because that's a famous song. It's an oldie. I won't sing it to you, though. What I'm going to do is read to you.”

She put on her reading glasses. The font was small. She'd pushed the whole thing together in one paragraph so she could get it all on one sheet; she hated wasting paper. She unfolded it. She read straight through, without pausing or looking up.

“If the world had no animals and I couldn't be a dog trainer, I'd become someone who talks to aliens professionally. Basically, all I've done with my life so far is read, which I feel is a good background. I mean, I've been on the receiving end of massive amounts of written communication. It's only a matter of time before I get around to doing some output. I wouldn't expect my new career to be lucrative, so I'm not talking about a goal of financial bliss. I'd have to be freelance about it. And how will I know an alien when I find one? I just will. I'd start with the reality that, from the alien's point of view, the one who's the alien is
me.
And what makes me know I can communicate, somehow, with a non-human? I just know. The real question is, would I want to communicate my experiences to other people? Or would I keep what I know a secret, just for me? I might be tempted to go with “just for me,” but it happened that, in preparing for a yoga class I ended up not taking, I read about a monk somewhere in Asia who climbed a mountain every day to have the sky really close to his head. He'd sit at the top and wait for enlightenment. Every twilight, when he passed through the village at the bottom of the mountain to return to his monastery, people stopped him to ask if he'd been lucky that day. Then one day, Buddha appeared to him. When the visit was over, down went the monk toward the village. Again came people and the question, and he shook his head, same as always, and followed his regular path to his evening tea, his bowl of rice, his bedroll. He didn't even tell his fellow monks what happened to him, and it wasn't a monastery where you took a vow of silence. After his death, it was discovered he'd written a memoir. He admitted he'd seen Buddha, and it was amazing, like coming face-to-face with an extraterrestrial, combined with the thing of being holy, but he couldn't say anything more, because (1) he was the one Buddha chose to appear to, so it wasn't anyone else's business, and (2) he didn't want to wreck his experience by putting it into mere stupid human words, and do you know what that is? That is pathetic. That is
selfish.
That's all I need to say, except that, although many people in my life have told me they think I'm selfish, I don't think I am, not absolutely totally. One thing I'm sure of is that I'd never be selfish about anything concerning an alien, or, actually, a dog.”

Having reached the end, Mrs. Auberchon paused for breath, then looked at the greyhound. He was stretched out on the floor, lying on his side, legs tucked in. His eyes were closed.

There was a movement. A tautness came over him, like an all-body spasm. His front legs became unfolded, extended, and Mrs. Auberchon saw them twitch, then sweep in small arcs against the floor. She knew what was happening. He was back on a track. He was running a race, the only thing waiting for him in his dreamland.

“It's all right,” she said softly into the microphone. “Everything that happened to you before is over. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Good dog. Sleep well. You need it. I won't be far away.”

The inn was in the hush of twilight as she made her way upstairs. She thought of the narrow mountain road, which she'd only ever seen from the bottom. The snowbanks were tall as walls—an upward tunnel with a ceiling of sky. Evie had wanted to be up in the air. She had wanted to be high. She'd been so disappointed about the gondola.

Mrs. Auberchon reminded herself to get back to the pleasure of looking forward to being angry. She pictured the bunkroom as if a tornado went through it. She was ready for smells of dog pee, of a dirty bathroom, of every leftover scent of a guest there could be.

In the doorway she gasped. The room was as clean and pristine as if no one had been there. Evie had laundered her sheets, had folded them, had left them on the edge of her bunk. Mrs. Auberchon looked at the folding and knew she couldn't do better herself.

Evie had done her towels too. There they were on the bathroom rack, smelling clean, fresh from the dryer. She had washed down the bathroom like a maid. Nothing had been left behind. The wastebasket was empty. The toilet had been scrubbed. The floor was still damp from being washed. The bar of soap on its chrome wall holder had not been used; it was as dry as a stone. The toilet brush was as clean as if newly bought. The fleecy rug by the shower stall had also been laundered. The tiles in the stall were shiny clean.

Mrs. Auberchon picked up the bed linen and went back downstairs. She put the linen away in the closet. She told herself it was wonderful that she didn't have to bother with laundry or a cleanup after a guest.

Back at her screen, she remembered for the first time that day to check her email. She found a message from the Sanctuary, hours and hours old. Before Evie left the inn, would Mrs. Auberchon speak to her about being in touch with people who expected her to be in touch with them? There'd been phone calls. It seemed she had not been in touch. Would Mrs. Auberchon take care of this? It was perfectly reasonable for people in her life to be upset about not hearing from her. But the calls were very distracting.

Mrs. Auberchon saw no need to respond. They could speak to her themselves. She checked the greyhound, all right for now in his sleep. She did a scan of the holding area and wondered how the sled pups were doing—the last time she'd looked around there, they were almost ready to leave, and blissfully at rest, with full bellies. The door stood ajar, which meant a new one was on the way. And when she switched to the infirmary, she saw a new one flat out in a post-surgery cage: a small-to-medium terrier, Scottish, with a coat the color of pepper mixed here and there with salt. The dog was deep in sedation and had no need of her, not yet.

She returned to look at sleeping Alfie, then back to Holding. The new arrival was entering on long, skittish legs, like a newborn colt, head down, and she thought it might be another greyhound. It
was
a hound, but a too skinny one, a mix of maybe three or four breeds. Large, light brown spots, cowlike, showed here and there on a creamy white coat. The too thin face was white, with a patch of the brown around one eye, in an oval that began right under the eye and extended to the forehead.