An Unexpected Grace (23 page)

“I want you to know I'm sorry,” he said. “Grace is such a gentle dog. I never dreamed she'd break out of the porch or run away.”

“I made a big mistake to leave her with you.”

“Maybe so, but we didn't know it was a mistake. We meant well. Things didn't work out the way we planned.”

“I didn't lose Grace off
my
porch.”

“Okay, I miscalculated. It was an honest mistake. I'm not perfect. That's all I can say. I'm sorry.”

Adam looked sincere, and he'd tried hard all night to find Grace. Lila couldn't continue being mad. In her heart she heard Betsy say,
The only person your anger hurts is you
.
Let it go. Accept. Move on.

“I'm sorry, too,” Lila said, not sure exactly to whom she was apologizing—Adam? Grace? Herself? “We just have to find her.”

“All we can do is try.” Adam wrapped his arms around Lila.

She melted against him.

For a long time, they stood there—with her a needy chrysalis who had found a cocoon. Unlike your average hug, though, their holding became a serious cling, as in what two people might do in a leaking boat in the middle of the Atlantic while shark fins circled them. By holding each other, Adam and Lila admitted they were miserable, and they'd have given anything to have Grace back. But even more, they said they were in this mess together—and they were there for each other. A hug can say a lot of things.

 

Even though Lila didn't expect anyone to have called about Grace in the night, she tried her voice mail again. No word of Grace. As Cristina had suggested, Lila set kibble in front of the house. In case Grace should come home in the next hour, Lila left on the floodlights, which turned the forest an inviting silver.

Exhausted but wired from stress, she climbed between her cold sheets and pulled up her blanket. As she strained to listen through the wind for Grace's whine at the door, Lila could not still her thoughts enough to sleep. Worry had set her spinning inside, like a roulette wheel before the dice named winners and losers. This was the first time she'd gone to bed without Grace in the house—and for the past two months Grace had slept on the bed next to her.

Lila ached to hear Grace's reassuring snores; her sighs, like air squeaking out of a bicycle tire; and the shuffle of her paws when she dreamed. On nights when Lila had gone to bed feeling lonely or anxious, Grace had always picked up the mood and rested her chin on Lila's arm to let her know she was safe. Now she also ached for the warmth of Grace's breath on her wrist. Any sign of Grace's presence would have brought Lila the comfort she and Adam had just tried to hug into each other. But now there was nothing. In every way, there was a loss of grace.

Finally, Lila fell into a fitful sleep. As the room filled with pale morning light, she turned over. As usual when shifting positions, she took care not to roll onto Grace. Then Lila woke enough to remember Grace was gone—and Lila's whole body felt like a gaping wound.

She opened her eyes to a day she didn't welcome. She threw back her blanket and checked the doors to see if Grace had come home. When she saw that she had not, Lila got back into bed, fidgeted, and waited till the hour was late enough for her to get up and continue the search. More worry and anxiety bored into her.

But Lila mentally shook herself to attention. In clipped words, she informed herself that no matter how many mountains she had to move—even with a demitasse spoon for a shovel and a coat hanger hook for a pick—she would move them to find Grace. Lila couldn't control the outcome, but she could do her best to search for Grace. Whatever it took, Lila would do it to bring Grace home.

S
ide by side on the Humane Society's metal stools, Adam and Lila flipped through pages of the lost-and-found notebook. Fortunately, Tony was off duty and could not glower at her, and Adam did not bring up the horrible day when she'd surrendered Grace there. He insisted that they read every listing for found dogs
and
cats. Shelters could make mistakes, he said, and animals got mixed up or misfiled.

Lila and Adam pored over each description. When they found no golden retriever, he said Grace might have gotten so dirty on the streets that she'd been registered in the book as a black Lab; checking the kennel was essential.

As soon as Lila and Adam walked through the kennel door, the smells of bleach and damp fur hit them. A cacophony of barks, which boiled down to cries of “
Help!
” made her want to put her hands over her ears. The dogs' stress seemed to bounce off the concrete walls. The air was filled with desperation.

And injustice. Behind bars on each side of a cement aisle were inmates who'd never committed a crime and were wrongfully imprisoned—like Grace when she'd been chained to a tree. Two miniature dachshunds shoved their noses through the bars of their shared kennel and yapped at Lila and Adam. A collie mix rested his front paws on his kennel door and begged with moist eyes for a home. A small biscuit-colored dog saw Lila and Adam and wagged his tail like a windshield wiper but let it droop when they did not stop. A cocker spaniel mutt chased her tail, and a lumbering yellow-eyed dog threw himself at his kennel door to reach them.

At the end of the concrete aisle was a strawberry blonde dog the size of a retriever. Though her face was turned away, her tail and haunches looked like Grace's. As Lila's heart speeded up, she grabbed Adam's hand and pulled him toward the dog.

“Grace!” Lila shouted.

The dog turned her head. Her muzzle was rectangular, like an Airedale's, and her ears pointed up instead of flapping down.

“This is so terrible,” Lila said.

“Needle in a haystack,” Adam said.

“I can't stand it.”

“You have to.”

Before they left, he filled out a lost-dog form. As Lila watched over his shoulder, she tried to blot out the memory of those kenneled dogs—and Adam's warning on their way back to the reception room:

“We have to check here every day,” he'd said. “Sometimes dogs get put down before their days of grace are over and their people have a chance to find them.”

 

When Lila and Adam got back to his Honda, he called her voice mail—but no one had tried to reach her—and then he tried his own.

“I've got a message,” he said.

As Lila leaned over to share his phone's receiver, the freeway roar a block away made it hard to listen in.

A woman with a New York accent said, “I've just seen your dog. She was pawing around a Dumpster at the Wayfarer's Market. She looked so hungry . . .”

Adam pulled back from Lila and leaned against his door to hear the rest.

When he turned off his cell phone, she asked, “Why'd you move away?”

“To protect you.”

“Was the message that awful?!”

“Nope. But it would have made you sad.”

“Sadder,” she corrected.

 

The Dumpster behind the market was as big as those you see overflowing with plywood and insulation scraps at construction sites. It was parked under a grove of redwoods beside a dry creek bed. Littering the ground were cardboard boxes, plastic bags, wadded paper towels, empty yogurt containers, and squashed aluminum cans. All a dog might have found to eat were a few rotten bananas peppered with fruit flies.

“My poor, poor Grace,” Lila moaned.

“I know you feel like we're grinding along without getting anywhere,” Adam said.

“That's exactly how I feel.”

“We'll find Grace. Don't worry.”

But Adam's face looked worried. If he'd been Grace, he would not have touched his pig's ear.

 

Across from each other at his pine kitchen table, Adam and Lila ate a gloomy, dismal lunch. The iced tea had lost its zip. Adam's homegrown alfalfa sprouts didn't crunch. The sandwich bread seemed tired, as if it had never heard of yeast.

Adam occasionally reached over and squeezed Lila's hand to buck her up, and she tried to give him a confident smile. But in their hearts they were not doing much better than their sandwich bread—until the phone rang and dangled a carrot of hope.

Adam got up and answered. “Yes, she's still missing,” he said.

He crossed his feet and rested his shoulder against the wall, and Lila got up and pressed herself against him to listen in on the conversation.

A man, who had a pleasant, neutral voice like you hear in TV ads, said he'd seen Grace dodging traffic on Miller Avenue, a main road into town. “A truck almost hit her. She looked like she didn't know to get out of the way.”

“She's not street-smart,” Adam said.

“I could tell. I tried to catch her, but she ran off.”

“What time?”

“About an hour ago.”

“What part of Miller?”

“The four-way stop sign by Maggie's Deli. A little toward Tam Market.”

“Ask about her sock,” Lila whispered to Adam.

“Was her paw wrapped in pink?” he asked.

“Not that I saw. Jesus, I hope she lasts till you can get her. She looked so scared. It was pathetic.”

The kitchen wall blocked Adam from pulling away and keeping Lila from hearing that.

 

Miller Avenue seemed like a NASCAR track whose crazed drivers breakfasted on tenpenny nails and stomped accelerators to the floor with aggressive size-sixteen feet. As tires zoomed by, Grace wouldn't have had a chance unless she'd been rumbling along in a panzer.

Adam drove up and down Miller Avenue three times, then along each side street. He parked near Maggie's Deli, and he and Lila walked for blocks and hollered for Grace. Finally, there was nothing to do but give up on that lead.

Adam asked, “What do we do now?”

“We have to keep trying.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Grace, Grace, where are you?” Lila was thinking as hard as she could with her heart.

She and Adam went to the dog park, but no golden retriever was romping on the grass. They dropped in at Pet Stop, but Albert Wu had not seen Grace. As Lila's outlook was fading from determined to glum—and Adam went to check the Dumpster again—she walked to Betsy's office in case Grace had shown up for her weekly massage.

Betsy was bent over her desk, filling out insurance forms. She got up and gave Lila a grandmotherly hug. Betsy knew her too well to miss the anguish on her face. “What's wrong?”

“I've lost Grace.”

The curve of Betsy's smiling lips straightened, and the silver dolphins hanging from her ears got as still as stone. “Don't worry. You'll find her.”

“I've looked everywhere. I'm afraid I'll never see her again.” Lila's lungs felt like they were filling up with mold.

“Oh, Lila, won't you ever learn? Your negative thoughts can create a negative reality.” Betsy reached over to her desk for a Kleenex box and handed it to Lila.

As an angel eyed her from the wall, Lila took a tissue, mopped her tears, and blew her nose. “I've never felt so helpless. I'm scared Grace is dead beside a road somewhere.”

“You can't give up your search,” Betsy said.

Lila wadded up the tissue and tossed it into the wastebasket. “Why do these awful things keep happening?”

“That's not the right question. Ask, ‘What's the meaning in this crisis? What's it trying to teach?' ” Betsy said. “Hard times can be gifts. They can force us to change and get us where we're meant to be.” At that, Betsy's silver dolphins starting going at it, diving through the air around her salt-and-pepper curls.

If idealism were measured on the Richter scale, Betsy's could have fissured Hoover Dam, Lila thought. She didn't mention that she was also feeling huffy at the Great Spirit for what was happening.

Betsy opened her desk's top drawer and shuffled through papers, then told Lila to open her hand and close her eyes. Trusting Betsy not to drop a parrot gizzard onto her palm, Lila did what she asked, and something small and hard clunked against her skin. When she opened her eyes, she was holding a dime-size, rose-quartz heart.

“You keep that close. It'll remind you that love is what's most important,” Betsy said. “The minute you find Grace, we'll set up an appointment to work on her leg again.”

As Lila reminded Betsy that Grace wore a red metal heart about the same size as the pink quartz one, Lila squeezed it till it made ridges in her palm. She wanted the quartz heart to be a sign that she would find Grace. Lila tugged at the silver cord that bound their hearts together.

 

Adam got back to the car before Lila did. He was thrumming his fingers on the steering wheel, but he seemed to be thrumming to a dirge played by a hospitalized tuba. As Lila slid onto the seat beside him, he said, “Grace wasn't at the Dumpster.”

“Betsy hasn't seen her, either.”

“I'm not surprised. We got another call. Someone just saw Grace on the frontage road to 101. She was limping south along the chain-link fence.”

Where cars swarmed like hornets.
Lila groaned. “How could she have gotten
there
?”

“I don't know.”

“Why didn't somebody catch her?”

“She found an opening in the fence and ran onto the freeway.”

Lila groaned. “It couldn't be any worse.”

“Yes, it could. Somebody could call and say a car has hit her.” Adam started his Honda and backed out of the parking spot.

Lila closed her eyes and gripped the rose-quartz heart. In her own heart, she promised the Great Spirit not to be huffy anymore. She said she'd do anything if only she and Adam did not find Grace dead. Lila would track down every negative thought in her mind and shoot it. Without complaint, she'd learn whatever the Great Spirit wanted to teach. She'd go with the flow and never try to control anything, and she'd never again say a mean word about anyone, including Yuri and Reed.

She would stop being mad at the universe and believe in its goodness, as Betsy did. Lila would forgive anybody anything. She'd throw resentment from her train and travel with only kindness in her suitcase. As a gesture of good faith, if the Great Spirit wanted, she would put red roses on Yuri Makov's grave. If Reed got married, she'd dance at his wedding. She promised.

As Adam sped toward the freeway, Lila thought that anger was an anemic toad's breath, and forgiveness was a cool strong breeze. Forgiving was easy compared to losing Grace forever.