An Unexpected Grace (14 page)

While they waited for Bill, who Lila thought would be a helpful vet, Tony explained in clipped, harsh words that the welts were signs a too-tight chain had bored into Grace's neck. Perhaps the chain had originally fit her, but she'd grown too big for it. Or maybe someone had deliberately forced it around her neck to torture her. Whenever Grace had barked or pulled at the chain, the links had cut deeper till they were embedded in her flesh. Removing them had required surgery. “In eight years here, I've never seen a dog in this appalling condition,” Tony said.

Lila was blinking back tears when Bill arrived and kneeled in front of Grace for a closer look. “Holy shit.” His voice was a dark, bruising purple.

As he stood up, he gave Lila a look that said she should consort with worms. His gold-framed glasses were slipping down the bridge of his nose, and sweat semicircled his uniform's armpits. “I'm an animal control officer. You tell me how this dog's neck got turned to goddamn hamburger,” he demanded.

“I didn't know it was like that.”

“We hear that excuse around here a lot.” Bill exchanged a glance with Tony.

“It's the truth. Grace has been wearing the bandana since I got her. I never took it off.” Behind Lila's back came harsh murmurs from people in the reception area.

“If she's your dog, then who do you claim abused her like that?” Bill asked.

“She isn't my dog. I don't know who hurt her. I've only been taking care of her a little while.”

“You've done a rotten job.”

Lila flushed from unearned shame. “She came like that.”

“I thought you said you didn't know she was hurt.”

“I didn't.” It was hard to get out words when Lila's teeth were clamped together.

On the green linoleum floor, Grace's bandana looked like a red badge of courage pinned to army fatigues. But standing beside it, surely believing she was minutes from abandonment, Grace looked desolate. She seemed to shrink, then crumble, as if small, quivery pieces of her body were sprinkling on the floor and there'd soon be nothing left of her. Though she refused to look at Lila, Grace might as well have shouted that the tie between them was broken as far as she was concerned, and she was steeling herself for what lay ahead. She seemed to be hiding in her deepest, most shadowy recesses.

Grace had been cruelly victimized, but she'd also been brave to allow herself to trust and love Lila and to come so far. Grace's welts said more about her misery than anything Adam could have told Lila. No matter what her Crazy Aunt said, giant fissures ran through Lila's resolve to leave Grace. Lila's insides hurt for her, a courageous Anne Frank dog.

Tony handed Lila a clipboard with a printed form and a ballpoint pen and looked at her as if blood were dripping from her fangs. Clearly, he'd been trained to stay calm while getting animals away from sadists. “Fill this out. Bill can take Grace to the kennel.”

Lila could hardly think straight. Numb, she took the clipboard, and Bill threaded one end of a leash through the eye of the other to make a small noose, which he gently slipped around Grace's neck. Lila glanced at the form. After blanks for her name, address, and phone number were questions: Why was she giving up the dog? Was it current on shots? Did it have any physical problems?

Lila stopped reading. What did the questions matter when she felt like sumo wrestlers were rolling around on her heart?

“Let's go,” Bill called to Grace and started toward the swinging kennel doors.

“Wait!” Lila followed them. “I'm keeping her.”

Bill's glower might have melted Arctic ice. “You've had your chance. This dog is better off here.”

“No.” Lila would show her power. She mentally shoved her Crazy Aunt away and said to Bill, “Grace is coming with me. She's mine. I'll take good care of her.”

“We don't trust you as far as we could throw you,” Bill said.

Lila wouldn't listen. “I'll call the man who left her with me. He can explain how her neck got that way.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bill said.

“Do you have a phone book?” Lila asked Tony.

He glared at her as he got one from behind the counter.

With sweaty hands, Lila looked up Adam Spencer, and, relieved, found his number. If only he'd be honorable enough to answer.

A
s Lila drove Grace away from the Humane Society, you'd never have known she'd been trembling with distress. On the front passenger seat, she smiled and panted as a sliver of her camellia-petal tongue hung from her mouth. Lila had retied the bandana around Grace's neck to cover the scars, and her face filled with trust.
Hurrah! We're going for a ride!
her expression shouted. Grace seemed to have forgotten that Lila had almost left her at the shelter.

Lila was not so carefree as Grace, because Bill and Adam's phone conversation clung to her like harsh soap. Standing next to Bill, she'd heard Adam explain in a steady voice that he'd volunteered in the Humane Society's education department and the staff could vouch for him. He claimed he'd found Grace on the street with the chain embedded in her neck, and he'd rushed her to a vet. Adam urged Bill to let Lila keep her until Adam could bring her home. A kennel would be traumatic after all she'd been through, he said.

With words that sounded bitten off of sheet metal, Adam called Lila “irresponsible,” “insensitive,” and “that damned flake.” Lila steamed at those words, which applied to him more than her. Her Crazy Aunt had urged her to grab the phone from Bill and yell at Adam. But, for Grace's—and Lila's own—sake, she stood there, docile, waiting till they could leave together.

Now she and Grace followed a black Humvee off the exit into Mill Valley and turned down a main road to town. As they passed ranch-style homes and a shopping plaza, Grace leaned against Lila so their shoulders touched. Grace seemed like she was trying to let Lila know, as far as she was concerned, they were a team, and it was the two of them against the world. As far as Lila was concerned, maybe they could be traveling companions on a road called Healing. But she never thought she'd have a dog.

She patted Grace's shoulder. Touching her felt different now that she was Lila's, not just a dog she was sitting for Adam. Grace didn't seem as burdensome or foreign as before, and her meaty breath did not seem so offensive, either. That, Lila couldn't explain.

What mattered was that something had changed. When she and Grace got home, Lila would give her compensatory dog biscuits, take her for walk, and let her lead wherever she wanted to go. Lila would wash the covers on the dog beds. She would rub her vitamin E cream into Grace's welts and hope her skin was as forgiving as she was.

 

Pet Stop smelled of fish food, rawhide chews, and hamsters' cedar chips. A cockatiel screeched from her perch by the window. Half the overhead fluorescent lights had burned out, so the store was shadowy and the crowded aisles felt like a homeland for moles.

Grace hobbled along beside Lila while she looked for dog food, which they found at the back of the store. Piled high against the wall were kibble bags with mysterious labels for “maintenance,” “foundation,” and “premium.” Lila could relate only to the bags' rainbow of saturated colors.

Pet Stop's owner, Albert Wu, walked over and introduced himself. Dust from the bags of kitty litter he'd been stacking streaked his Hawaiian shirt and toupee, which looked like a malnourished beaver lounging on his head. When Albert smiled, his whole face crinkled and his eyes narrowed to slits. He bent down and stroked Grace's chest.

“Can I help you with anything?” he asked.

“I need kibble for her,” Lila said as Grace gave Albert a goofy, high-on-dope look.

“What's she been eating?”

“Some gravel-looking stuff my friend bought for her.”

“That doesn't give me a lot to go on.” Albert's face crinkled again, and the beaver on his head seemed to rustle.

He explained the difference between “maintenance” and “premium.” He pointed a sallow finger at the cerulean blue bag. “This one's for your average all-around dog. It flies out of here.” The index finger tapped cadmium red. “I'd go with this. It's got a higher fat content. Looks like your dog could use the extra calories.”

That was the one Lila chose. At Albert's urging, she also picked out a nylon forest-green leash with a matching collar that would dazzle against Grace's complementary reddish-gold fur, and Lila looked at the ID-tag selection, stapled to a cardboard square. Grace could have plastic or metal, shaped like a mouse, dog bone, fire hydrant, circle, or heart. Lila ordered the heart to come by mail in red metal and the smallest size, like a gnome's valentine. Printed on it in block letters would be Grace's name and Lila's phone number. Once Grace's neck healed more, she could wear the collar and tag – and the world would know she belonged to Lila.

As Grace turned her attention to the messages left by other dogs on the quarry-tile floor, Albert rang up the purchases and handed Lila a receipt for more than she'd bargained for. She wrote a check that took a hefty chomp from her account. She didn't mind, though, because she wanted to do right by Grace. Adam Spencer would have to admit that Lila was being responsible.

 

Adam called, as he did now every couple of days, when Grace and Lila were having dinner.

First thing, he asked, “How's Grace doing?”

In other words, is Grace still
there
? You haven't given her to someone? Or taken her back to the Humane Society? You're not being a negligent flake?

“She's fine,” Lila said.

“Is she eating?”

“She's gaining more weight.”

“You're not feeding her table scraps, are you?”

“No.”

“Dogs can't eat chocolate. It's poison to them.”

I didn't know.
“I know.”

“Did you walk her today?”

“I do every day.”

“Just checking.”

As usual, Lila felt like an amoeba on his microscope slide.

She never told Adam that she wouldn't give Grace back to him. Lila wanted to avoid another fight. He'd find out soon enough that Grace was hers. There was no point borrowing trouble.

 

With hopes of a reenactment of someone going postal, Lila was watching
True Crime
on TV with Grace. But the story for the night was of a rotten-toothed survivalist who had kidnapped a teenage girl. Police were combing the mountains with bloodhounds. Behind a forest of microphones, the girl's ashen-faced parents were begging people to come forward with clues. Everyone was hoping she was alive, but “rape” hung in the manhunt's air, a lurid suggestion of what they'd find.

David Carpenter had plundered a woman like that when he started down the road to become the Trailside Killer. Would Yuri Makov have raped anyone? Lila imagined him sneaking up behind her after work and gagging her with duct tape. As she kicked and clawed, he would tape her wrists together, shove her into his Nissan's trunk, and slam it closed. As he hauled her away, exhaust fumes would engulf her . . .

But Lila couldn't finish picturing this gruesome story. Yuri seemed too refined to rape anyone or get semen on his always well-pressed slacks. Shooting was surely as close as he'd wanted to get to his victims. What did that say about him?

Probably that he was standoffish and he wasn't after power over women or picking them off one by one, alone. He wanted more violence. More impact. More drama. A bigger sweep of evil to make a bigger public statement. But what had Yuri been saying when he shot everyone?

As Lila leaned back into the sofa and pondered that question, she could almost hear him scream, “I hate you. I'm better than you are. I'm going to kill myself, and you're coming with me.”

But whom did he hate? Why?

The questions unsettled her. For comfort, she reached down and patted Grace, who was lying at her feet. Before, touching Grace had taken concentrated effort. Now Lila hardly knew she was doing it.

 

In the three weeks since Lila had brought Grace back from the Humane Society, she always seemed to lean against Lila or rest her chin on her foot. Those were Grace's two favorite positions. If she couldn't touch Lila, she stayed as close as she could get. While Lila bathed, Grace curled up on the bathroom rug. When Lila slept, Grace plastered her body against the bed skirt. She seemed to have figured out that Lila was officially hers, and she'd never let her out of sight. If Lila left the house without bringing Grace along, she waited for her at the front door with a gift—a kitchen towel, a throw pillow, one of Lila's pink slippers, her sock.

Because Grace was constantly around, Lila had gotten to know more about her, such as how her fur could have been a useful teaching aid for Clairol. The fur on her face was Champagne Blonde. In the middle of her forehead was a Strawberry Blonde widow's peak, and above her ears were feathery Copper Blonde tufts. Her shoulders and chest were delicately streaked, as if highlighted with Platinum Blonde. Her tail, which looked like a geyser spewing fur, was Light Auburn, but the tip returned to Strawberry. If someone painted Grace, the subtle shades of her fur would be hard to capture.

Lila also got to know Grace's dietary preferences, which emerged as she polished off her cadmium-red bag of kibble and transformed herself into a glutton. Whenever Lila went to the kitchen, Grace cornered her and fixed her with desperate eyes that insisted she was faint and needed food. Wanting her to gain more weight, Lila obliged, and Grace became a connoisseur of snacks. Besides dog biscuits, she devoured—after barely chewing—cheese, cantaloupes, bananas, snow peas, carrots, and zucchini. She acted like she'd sell herself into slavery for toast with peanut butter.

At first Lila gave Grace the treats strictly in her bowl, but then Lila handed them to her, and she gently took the bits and slices without a tooth touching a finger. When Lila finished her yogurt, she held out the container for Grace to lick, and she was also careful not to brush Lila's skin with her tongue.

Lila admitted she'd been wrong to call Grace a savage. She could be polite. Even to bugs. She loved beetles and studied them on the deck by resting her chin on the wood so close to the beetles that her eyes crossed. Insects were her favorite hobby, next to the dreaded tennis ball.

The first week that Grace was Lila's, they had rows about the ball. Repeatedly, Grace brought it into the house, and Lila shouted a stern “
No!
” She picked up the ball with paper towels and threw it outside until, finally, Grace brought it back inside so often that Lila broke down and let her chew it in the living room.

That must not have been a large enough concession from Lila, as Grace made clear by dropping the ball at her feet in the kitchen and den. After going through rolls of paper towels, to save trees Lila caved and touched the slimy, filthy fuzz with her fingers. From there, throwing the ball to Grace was just another small step.

She caught the ball with a Venus-flytrap snap and seemed so joyful about it that Lila obliged and threw it again. The retriever in Grace shone. She was at her very best when she picked up the ball and brought it back to Lila. If you'd ever told Lila that she wouldn't recoil from dog saliva, she'd never have believed you.