The Lost - J. D. Robb [47]
Discouraged, I jumped off the chair and onto the sofa. Sam’s sofa; I’d never liked it, but that was because I hadn’t known how great the nubby fabric would be for scratching the sides of my face. And the top of my nose, between my eyes, those places I couldn’t reach very well myself. I curled up in the patch of sunshine coming through the window, resting my chin on the sofa arm. So I could think better.
The phone woke me. Charlie, Sam’s father, left a message on the machine saying he’d be over Saturday night about eight thirty, if that was okay, in time to say good night to Benny.
Maybe I could write a message to Sam in longhand. Of course! Getting the legal pad off the desk was simple; I just swiped it sideways with my nose. Ditto the cup full of ballpoints and pencils. Too bad there was writing on the top sheet of the legal pad. I couldn’t tell what it said; my eyes wouldn’t focus that close. Well, whatever it was, I had something much more important to write. Using tongue, teeth, and my bottom lip, I tore that page off and spit it on the floor in pieces.
I won’t recount how many times I tried to click on a ballpoint pen, just that I was unsuccessful. There were three pencils, and the first two broke in half in my mouth. I got the last one clamped between my molars, no easy feat since I only had about two-thirds the number of teeth I used to have. Now, what to write? Words were out of the question, I’d realized a pencil and a half ago. A symbol, then. A heart.
Crap, crap, crap. I couldn’t control the pressure. I pierced a hole in the paper with the pencil, and in the end all I got was a trembly rhomboid with drool on it.
I needed bigger media. Think. If I were the kind of woman who kept a lot of throw pillows on the furniture—someone like Monica Carr, say—I could spell something out with them on the floor. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t.
Upstairs, I finally found a box of crayons in the rubble of Benny’s room. No sense figuring a way to use them up here; I could write the Gettysburg Address on the wall in finger paints and no one would notice for days. Back to the den.
Like the tongue, a dog’s toes extend and retract. That’s it. I gave up trying to write something with Benny’s crayons and concentrated instead on arranging them in some kind of shape. My initials! If I could make LS out of crayons, wouldn’t that tell Sam something?
I had to eat part of the box to get the crayons out, but that was okay. Cardboard had a pleasant woody taste; I wouldn’t have minded eating the whole thing, actually. How many crayons were in this box? Eight, ten, something like that; precise counting was no longer one of my strong suits. I nosed two crayons into an L, but that looked random, meaningless. Two on a side, that was better, a big L. Good. Now for the S.
It’s hard to make curves with straight edges. I kept getting a 5 when I wasn’t getting a swastika. (I could just hear Sam: “You’re Hitler? I know—Eva Braun!”) I did the best I could until hunger distracted me. That cardboard, it was like an hors d’oeuvre. I trotted into the kitchen.
Sam had served a mix of canned and dry dog food last night—surprisingly tasty—but today it was just a bowl of kibble. Boring but not bad, and the crunch was satisfying. I ate the whole thing.
I was sitting in the hall, scratching an itch under my collar, when a noise on the front porch brought me to full alert. Footsteps. I gave a low, warning bark, but it sounded self-conscious, rehearsed. Like what I was supposed to do. Then the screen door squealed open. Bark! That felt better. A cascade of envelopes and magazines pushed through the slot in the door. Bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark!
I used to like the postman, a nice guy named Brian, but now I hated him. What fun! Barking was so invigorating, pure self-expression, like singing at the top of your lungs. I kept it up till Brian was barely a memory; then I went