Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [69]
If Melissa had known, she would have taken the dog, she would have broken into Rocky’s house, slid like a shadow through a slit in the door, through a mouse hole, down the chimney, and taken the dog, Cooper, and hidden him away. Even on this island, there were hiding places. She and Cooper could have lived in the dense bittersweet jungle, or the barn at the old Hamilton place, deserted since early fall, or she could have taken the ferry to Portland and gone to her father’s house. Would he have understood? She had not tested him with anything important, anything that came from the dark, empty tangle of her foodless center, and like the guerrilla fighter that she was, she wondered if he was friend or foe, enemy or comrade, and she didn’t know if he could be trusted. Could she show up on his doorstep and say, “This black dog is Cooper and I eat four kibbles from his dog dish and he is teaching me to eat again and when I am ready to scream in terror at the food sliding down my throat into my stomach, this dog presses his head into my palm.”
When she got in from running along the labyrinth of trails, her mother was on the phone in the kitchen and looked up at Melissa with dark eyes.
“That was Rocky. She told me about the dog. I’m sorry he’s gone,” said her mother. And for the first time in nearly a year, Melissa let her mother wrap her arms around her.
Chapter 24
Cooper was stunned by his exile. There had not been one minute with the woman, the one who had saved him, that he had doubted her. And then she sent him away. The First One was gone. Liz, Liz. He knew the sound of her name. He had known of her death, felt it, but the waves of death scent in the old house had confirmed it. That was where she had died, in the house where they had lived together. There had been a human death and it was the First One, Liz, the one he had known since leaving the litter, the one who had urged him on, trusted him, loved him beyond all others. She had been tremulous at times, speeding up like a storm, making her unaware of simple things, and he had learned to sniff the change before it came and he increased his vigilance then and would refuse to leave her side. He knew that he held some power to calm her, even as her illness raged.
A good life, a very good life, is finding one person who knows you, who shares the joy in chest rubbing, the pleasure of eating, of running damp and happy in the heavy dew of morning, of sitting with you while you chew with abandon on a fresh stick. But it is more than that, it is a look in the eyes of the human, and the smell, the thousands of smells that they offer. A good life is finding one such human. And he had found two.
The death scent was old but unmistakable. He had run around the house three times in the ancient way of saying goodbye that he had not known before that moment, but which came to him out of the merging with all the canines before him who had come in from the wild to be with humans. Three times around the site of death, barking a heralding cry to let the other side hear of their coming. She was no more.
Now the New One, the woman who was a tracker in her dreams, had changed course. She had been another miracle; she had found him when he was broken and feverish. She also needed watching and as soon as he was able, he took up his post with her. He dreamt with her, nudged her awake when her dreaming went badly, and he had been calmed by her touch as well. She offered a new rhythm, older than his Liz, without the perilous spirals of energy that kept Liz from sleeping for days and days. And the look, he could hardly believe the New One had the look that canines seek, or at least those who have their wits about them.
He had settled into his new life with the New One. And then suddenly, she let two people, the man and the woman, take him.