Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [81]
“Cooper, don’t worry. It’s just me.” She knew he’d recognize her scent as well as her voice. She dropped into the yard.
“Cooper?”
Her eyes adjusted to the combination of night and filtered light from a streetlight in the next block. The yard was rectangular and unadorned by anything except several trees and a shed tucked into one corner and doghouse close to the house. She saw the reflection of light coming from sliding glass doors leading to the kitchen. As she approached the plastic, igloo-shaped doghouse, she was swallowed by the total absence of life in the yard. Above the doghouse was the dog lead that ran from a wire strung from the house to one of the trees. A wooden pallet had been placed in front of the doghouse to keep the dog off the ground.
Rocky knelt near the pallet and bent over, sniffing the wood. She smelled his damp wonder, the oil from his skin, and saw the one stick that he had managed to find in the scrupulously groomed yard. It was either a newly acquired stick, or Cooper had been too sad to properly gnaw the stick to tiny bits.
She repeated to herself, “I am not coming home without Cooper.” If he wasn’t in the house, what would she do? She was surprised at how easy it was to decide to break into their house. She went through no moral dilemma, no painstaking choice, just a flicker of concern about possible alarm systems that the Townsends might have installed. This was her moment of redemption for the crime of letting Cooper go and alarms and glass were incidental.
She tried the sliding glass doors. Locked. She had read about how easy it was to break into the average sliding glass doors, but she couldn’t remember the exact method. She tried several aluminum cased windows, and unless she was willing to cut through the tight aluminum screening to get to the inside window, she was roadblocked. She wasn’t opposed to slitting the screens, but she had nothing sharp enough with her to do the job. She looked at the door leading into the back of the garage and pictured the knob turning effortlessly in her palm, going into the garage, into the house. She willed it so.
The knob did not turn. Why couldn’t they be forgetful like she was, why couldn’t they walk out of their house this one time without locking the house down like the inner sanctums of the Pentagon? It was a simple door with paned glass on the top half. Rocky took off her jacket and wrapped it around her fist, and without pausing, she smashed the pane nearest the handle. The shattered glass sent a muffled sharpness into the air; the glass had hit something thick and absorbent, like a doormat. She shook her jacket and put her hand through the opening until she felt the simple doorknob lock and opened the door. She crunched over the broken glass, noted that the sedan that Jan and Ed had driven to Peak’s Island was gone, and went directly to the door leading into the kitchen, which was unlocked, and she walked into their house. This time she didn’t care. She spoke firmly, “Cooper, come here boy.” She went into every room in case he had been shut in, or stuck in a crate. But she knew he wasn’t there, any dog would have barked by now. She saw no evidence of dog food, no water dish. Everything from Rocky’s ribs down began to crumble. They had gotten rid of him. They wouldn’t have given him to someone else. They would have had him put down. How much could Jan hate her dead daughter? Everything from her ribs up began to constrict and twist.
She walked out the front door. A light across the street went on, and she saw a face look out into the darkness from a front door, peering uselessly from the ocean of light in their house. Rocky got in her car, and as she drove back to Maine, she realized this is what it felt like to lose everything. She had lost Bob and her life was a continual spiral of losing everyone. Rocky did not think she could face Melissa, but when she ultimately did, she would tell the girl that she had been right; Rocky should never have come to Peak’s Island.
The small bit of New Hampshire that