The Lost - J. D. Robb [48]
The key in the front door woke me. Sam! I ran to the door, heart soaring. Sam was home! Joy! Bliss! I jumped up high, trying to lick his face, tail flying, barking, spinning, not peeing, not peeing—
“Down!”
Where had he been? I could smell plastic . . . car exhaust, people . . . some chemical-l y smell, like a new carpet—
“Down! Damn it, dog.” He wasn’t as glad to see me as I was to see him. He looked tired and tense at the same time. Oh, baby, I thought, sobering fast, and followed him into the kitchen. He saw the chair, the door. “Oh, for the love of . . . How the hell did you . . .” His shoulders drooped. Mine, too. He got a beer out of the refrigerator and took it into the den.
A beer? What time was it? Clocks didn’t tell me anything anymore. Too early for a beer, though, I knew that from the sun. When had Sam started drinking during the day?
“Oh, jeez. What did you do?”
Stop! Don’t, don’t—
Too late. He didn’t even read it. He just bent over, swept up all my carefully placed crayons, along with the broken pencils and ballpoints, the torn paper and the crayon box remains. Damn it, Sam, do you know how hard I worked on that?
“Bad dog! Bad Sonoma!” He shoved the evidence under my nose. “Shame on you. Bad dog.”
Okay, okay, I get it. I lay down and put my paws over my ears. I’ve always hated criticism.
I heard the heavy, hopeless sound of Sam dropping down on the couch. A sigh. A gulp of beer. When I sneaked a glance, he was shaking his head at me. But smiling. Just a tiny bit.
I meant to be subtle, but my heart turned inside out with gladness and I pounced to him instead of slinking. I didn’t jump up next to him—I had enough self-control to stop short of that. I sat at his feet, and after a few minutes Sam put his hand on top of my head and just rested it there, heavy and trusting, and we stayed that way until it was time to go get Benny.
By week’s end, I had the run of the house. Sam decided the incident with the pencils and papers was an anomaly brought on by separation anxiety. Since then I’d behaved like Perfect Dog, and on the third night he moved my bed to the upstairs hall. No more closed kitchen doors for me. It didn’t matter, though; as soon as they were asleep, I’d sneak into Benny’s room, then Sam’s. I slept lightly, and never got caught again.
Saturday was housecleaning day. It used to be Tuesday, when the cleaning lady came, but evidently those days were over. Now it was just Sam, with Benny’s “help,” trying to bring order to a week’s worth of laissez-faire living—that’s putting it charitably. Benny’s room was beyond shoveling out; what they needed was a backhoe. How could one five-year-old boy make such a mess in only seven days?
I wasn’t completely blameless, mess creation-wise. I should have felt guilty, but it wasn’t in me anymore. And to think, I used to be such a fastidious person. “Persnickety,” Sam called me. I’d had food aversions, too; I was picky about textures, smells, certain flavors. Ha! Now I’d eat anything. Anything. If I was thirsty enough, the toilet bowl was not off-l imits. When my butt itched, I dragged it across the carpet. Dog hair everywhere? Pfft, life was too short to obsess about such trifles.
Benny and I went outside when Sam started vacuuming. What a diabolical machine; the noise alone was painful, but there was something menacing about the moves it made, that predatory back and forth. I wanted to get away from it as much as I wanted to shred it into metallic pieces.
Sam had started to build a fort for Benny last spring. When I’d seen it last, before the accident, it was a three-sided plywood lean-to abutting the oak tree at the bottom of our backyard. In the past two months, Sam had enclosed the fourth side, put in a door and a window, and painted it gray-blue with white trim. A dream playhouse and, needless to say, Benny’s favorite place. I wasn’t surprised when he headed straight for it after Sam said, “Thanks, buddy, good job,” and released him from his chores.
“Look, Sonoma. This is where I keep stuff.”
The fort was roughly