An Unexpected Grace (22 page)

L
ila opened the screen door. The only sign of Grace was the dent in the pillow, where she'd been curled up waiting for Lila. Next to it was a white ceramic water bowl and Grace's pig's ear, as good as new. She had never touched her favorite treat; all day she had worried.

Adrenaline propelled Lila to Adam's kitchen window to see whether he'd left Grace in the house. But if she'd been inside, she'd have whined to get out to Lila. Grace wasn't in the kitchen. The house was silent.

Lila hurried to the yard and searched around each tree and bush, even though she knew Grace would have come if she'd been outside. Then Lila ran to Adam's only other gate, next to the compost heap at the bottom of his property. The gate was clawed—and open. Even in her pink sock, Grace had gouged the wood and fought to disengage the latch.

Shouting “Grace! Grace!” Lila tore through the gate to the forest behind Adam's house. She ran in zigzags to check every fern, bush, and log. When she didn't find Grace, Lila hurried, panting, to the street, where the mailman was driving by. She waved and yelled, “Stop! Stop!”

He pulled over to the curb. Resting his palm on a knobby knee extending from his Bermuda shorts, he looked down at Lila from his truck's high seat, and his expression said that he'd like to offer her a Valium.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“I've lost my dog. A golden.”

“Haven't seen him.”

“Her,” Lila corrected. “Grace. She has a pink bandage on her paw. And an ID tag with my phone number.”

“I'll keep a lookout,” he promised. “You sure you're all right?”

His concern distressed Lila more. She felt as if her frenzy were spilling out of her all over the street. How could Adam have let this happen? How could she have trusted him with Grace? After he'd accused Lila of being irresponsible, he'd turned out to be the world's greatest deadbeat in the responsibility department. He'd not protected what was most precious to her.

Lila could never forgive him or the Great Spirit for allowing Grace to get lost. Lila had been right: No matter what Betsy said, the world was awful. Lila clenched her fists in fury, but anger wasn't going to help her find Grace.

Still, as Lila called and called, anger at Adam almost choked her. She walked up and down every road near his house and yelled for Grace till her throat was raspy. Lila sneaked into yards, pushed back bushes, and checked behind garbage-can enclosures and under cars. She knocked on doors and stopped strangers on the street to ask if they'd seen Grace.

Sometimes they asked if Lila needed a glass of water. Or they took her phone number and promised to call if Grace showed up. Each time someone said, “I haven't seen her,” Lila grew more frantic.

 

In case Grace had managed to hobble up the hill on her hurt paw, Lila went home to look for her. As Lila parked in front of the house, she mentally got on her knees and begged Grace to be waiting for her at the door. If Grace were able, Lila knew she'd be sitting on the doormat.

As Lila walked down the path to the house, she willed Grace to greet her with welcoming squeaks and with tail swishes exuberant enough to revive the imaginary sultan from a dead faint on the floor. Lila willed Grace to gobble down her supper and settle on her pillow for a production of
The Napping Dog
.

But all the willing in the world couldn't change the silence that was waiting on the porch. Lila could not force Grace's presence. As Lila got out her key to unlock the door, she thought the house looked as bleak as a person who'd lost her best friend. Just as Lila had.

 

Lila checked the voice mail, but no one had called to report finding Grace. Unable to think of supper, Lila stared out the kitchen window and pictured a silver cord connecting her heart to Grace's. One yank from her, and Lila would fly to her; a tug from Lila would bring Grace home. Lila went to the porch and looked out on the street just in case her tug had worked. But Grace wasn't there, and Lila's frenzy slowly quieted to desolation.

As afternoon faded to dusk, she went around the neighborhood and called Grace again, then walked down the hill toward the creek. Evening shadows darkened the forest, and fog crept over Mount Tamalpais and ushered in cold. She imagined Grace shivering and looking for a warm place to spend the night, or nosing through a garbage can for food to stop her stomach's growling. Then Lila's mental pictures grew more disturbing. She saw Grace, hit by a car and dying beside a road in dusty, sharp-edged gravel. Or captured by Marshall and beaten and starved and rechained to her tree. Or trapped in a dog dealer's van, about to be turned over to a medical research lab, where Grace would be locked in a small cage before experiments that Lila pressed her hands against her temples to keep from imagining.

 

By ten o'clock, Lila walked back to Adam's house. Though she was still angry and would never trust him again, he was the only person she could turn to. For Grace's sake, Lila had to seek his help and try her best to be civil.

Just back from giving a Milky Way lecture, he was eating a tuna sandwich at his kitchen table and listening to a CD of Dvo
ák's
New World Symphony
. Clearly, he'd assumed that Grace was home safe with Lila and their plan had worked without a hitch.

“She's lost. I can't find her,” Lila said. “I love her more than anything on earth, and you didn't keep her safe.”

Adam blanched and hurried to the back porch to see the ripped screen for himself. He grabbed a flashlight, and he and Lila rushed down to the gate by the compost heap.

As he shone the light on Grace's claw scratches in the wood, he said, “I can't believe it. She was Houdini.” He opened and closed the gate to check the latch, which was as high as his shoulder and seemed impossible for even a large dog like Grace to reach. The latch worked fine.

Shaking his head with dismay, he said, “I sure under estimated how desperate Grace would be to find you.”

“Yes, you did. I never should have left her here.”

Adam lowered the light to the ground.

He might have chosen not to respond in order to defuse Lila's distress and avoid a fight. But she was still upset. At least he'd not been too proud to admit he'd been wrong. Still, thinking of Grace searching for her while she searched for Grace hurt all the way to Lila's bone marrow.

 

Lila kept a cool distance from Adam as they designed a poster on his computer: Across the top was LOST DOG in bold, black letters. Below, REWARD in red. Adam and Lila gave their names and phone numbers, and his address for the last place Grace had been seen. A description included her pink sock and her green collar with its red ID heart.

To get a photo, Lila called Cristina from the kitchen and asked if she could e-mail the picture from her poster to find Grace a home.

“I'll do it right this minute,” Cristina said. “Oh, my God. That poor beastie.”

Cristina sounded sleepy. Lila was sorry to have wakened her, but Grace was too important.

“Adam shouldn't have suggested we leave her on the porch,” Lila said. What did she care if he heard her? He knew how she felt.

“Don't be mad at him. It's not his fault,” Cristina said. “These things happen.”

After Lila had finally let go of some buzzards of anger, a new flock had flapped into her heart. Along with guilt. Though she blamed Adam, she also blamed herself for trusting him. The buck stopped with her. Once again, something terrible could be her fault.

“You have to call me the second you know anything, good or bad, okay?” Cristina asked.

Please, don't let it be bad.
“I will,” Lila said.

“Leave food in front of the house. Grace might come back when you're not there.”

“All right.”

“Check with the Humane Society. Oh, this just breaks my heart. Of all the animals . . .”

 

After Cristina e-mailed the photo, Grace's sweet forehead frowned from Adam's computer screen. Except when Lila had left her that morning, for months Grace had not looked so troubled as she did in that picture. She'd become happy as her life had grown secure and she and Lila had learned to love each other. And now . . . just looking at Grace made Lila feel like she was being sucked into a black hole.

As the posters rolled out of Adam's printer, he pulled up a chair next to Lila at the computer and sat down. She stiffened.

He got up and leaned against the window frame across the room. “We've got lots to do,” he said, more formally than he'd spoken since they'd first met.

“I know.”

“Looking for a lost dog can be agony. You're not in control of anything. You have to be up for it.”

“I'll be up for it.”

He took the posters off his printer.

 

When Adam and Lila left his house, their flashlights' beams were fuzzy in the fog, which dripped from bay leaves and redwood fronds. The cold wind made the trees shudder and rain down more drops, so the ground was sodden just when Grace needed a warm, dry bed.

“Why can't the weather cooperate? It doesn't have to be so cold and damp,” Lila grumbled.

“Try not to think about it,” Adam said.

“I can't help thinking about it.”

“Be glad we're not looking for Grace on Triton. It's the coldest place in our solar system. Close to minus four hundred Fahrenheit.”

“That doesn't help,” Lila said. “And what if Marshall sees our posters? He'll recognize Grace.”

“Let's hope he doesn't find her before we do.”

“If he did, what would we do?”

“I don't know.”

 

When they put up poster number thirty-seven, Adam and Lila had covered the roads near their houses, so after two a.m., they moved on to Blithedale Avenue, a major thoroughfare to town. Except for occasional shafts of light from the edges of drawn curtains, all the houses were dark. They made it seem like Lila and Adam were the last of the living.

As he attached a poster to a grape-stake fence, tires hissed on wet pavement up the hill. Headlights rounded a bend, and a police car pulled up. As the drizzle-streaked window opened, a face with apple cheeks emerged, along with static from a short-wave radio.

The policeman smiled, exposing a chipped front tooth. “You guys out for a walk this late?”

“We've lost a dog.” Adam handed him a poster.

“Bummer.” The policeman turned on his car's interior light and studied Grace's photo. “You know, I might have seen her.”

“Where?” Lila asked.

“Down in Cascade Canyon. Behind the library. Early this evening. She was wandering around the creek. She must have been looking for water.”

Now in September, the creek was dry except for rare, slimy puddles. Lila's throat felt parched.

“Alarm.” The man on the short-wave sounded like his throat was parched too. “It's going off at 38 Summit.”

 

Lila wanted to run to Cascade Canyon, but Adam insisted they go back for his car so they could drive Grace home if they found her. Twenty minutes later, they were squinting into shadows by the library, which was surrounded by redwoods, salal, and ferns. Adam turned at a stop sign and drove along a different creek from the one Lila had always walked with Grace. The unfamiliarity made the woods seem extra-dark and lonely. From here, Grace wouldn't know her way home.

When Adam had driven the road's full length without a glimpse of Grace, he suggested they park and search on foot. It was too late at night to shout without waking people. But as Adam and Lila walked back toward the library, she cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered “Grace!” with hopes the wind would carry her voice into the woods.

Adam shone his flashlight into bushes, hollow tree trunks, and spaces between boulders—anyplace Grace might have sought shelter from the cold. When his light hit two bright eyes near a madrona tree's exposed root, for one glorious second Lila thought they might be Grace's. Then Lila saw rings around them.

With crushing disappointment, she asked, “Could a raccoon hurt Grace?”

“Yep.”

To Lila's recently imagined thirst, she added the pain of skin shredded by claws. “I guess I shouldn't think about raccoons, either?”

“Push them out of your mind.”

“I can't bear it.”

“I know.”

 

Lila and Adam did not find Grace in Cascade Canyon, so they went downtown and pinned posters on kiosks and bulletin boards. Around four a.m., as the sky was beginning to turn pink, Adam brought Lila home. Tired and dejected, they walked to the door.