Paintings from the Cave (8 page)

She rolled in the love like a dog rolling in the grass.

She thought about how Carter would narrow his eyes when he was listening; how Mike would drag his rear left leg when he was tired; how Betty would sit straight and attentive if she was nervous. Jo remembered the differences between their different tail wags—fast and side to side when she came to get them after school or in frantic circles when they played catch. And she examined the growls and barks and howls and yips and whines they made as if she were studying a foreign language.

She imagined the warmth of them tucked next to her in sleep, saw the sun glinting in their eyes as they ran in the park, smelled that ripe-fresh-earthy-sweet-doggy smell when she’d bury her face in their fur.

Before, when she was very young, when she still noticed other people, kids at school had teased her because she never had playdates and wasn’t enrolled in after-school activities and had weird clothes and didn’t eat out of fancy lunch boxes or drink store-bought juice in foil packets with built-in straws. But she’d been with most of the same kids year after year, and once she’d
stopped responding—looking right through them as if they weren’t there—they stopped teasing. She knew they still stared, but they hid it better now that everyone was older.

One boy, though, Loren Haugen, kept taunting her. Her silence and indifference seemed to infuriate him and, unlike everyone else, he didn’t know enough to ignore her.

A few weeks earlier, when he saw her sketching the dogs in her notebook before homeroom began, he’d hooted and called her the Dog Girl. Then he’d gotten his hands on an old book about early circuses, with pictures about the sideshows: Alligator Man, the human with alligator skin; the Bearded Lady, a homely woman with long facial hair; the Marvelous Tattooed Man, every inch of him tattooed; and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, the Original Freak of Nature.

He’d thought that was hysterical, showed everyone the picture while pointing at Jo, and he shouted that name after her in the hallway.

Jo looked at Loren’s leering face, but his sneer blurred in her sight and instead she saw Mike put his head on his paws and follow her with his eyes when she moved around their room, and Betty drop her chest to the ground and stick her rump in the air as she waited for Jo to slip the leash onto her collar, and Carter nuzzle Mike’s ear and Betty’s neck as they curled up in the
shack every morning to wait for Jo to come back from school.

She smiled: Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl.

No, she thought, Jo the dogheart girl.

Even if they weren’t with her, Jo’s dogs still protected her from everything that hurt.

W
eekends, Jo took Carter, Betty and Mike into the woods to run off the leash. She liked the privacy and quiet safety she felt among the trees. The dogs had taught her to see, to look for color and shape and movement. Out in the world, she looked away from people and kept her eyes down, but in the woods she could inspect everything around her.

At first everything was just green. The woods blurred together like the faces in school did.

But then she noticed how the dogs trotted along overgrown paths she hadn’t discovered on her own. She studied how they brushed against low-hanging branches
of leafy bushes thick with shiny red berries. She scrambled to keep up as they leapt over piles of dead leaves and fallen logs in single file, waiting for her on the other side.

The green wall of the woods changed after she copied the way the dogs peered at the trees. She saw leaves the color of moss and emerald and khaki and lime and olive, brown and beige and tan and gray and silver, all glowing under the yellow- and gold- and lemon- and honey- and wheat-colored sunshine that cut through the high branches in shafts.

Mike and Carter and Betty showed Jo all the shades of color in the whole wide world on display in the small woods behind the trailer park.

They’d run off barking, dashing through the trees and splashing into the small creek nearby, before coming back to sit by Jo and share her sandwich and talk.

After a lifetime of silence, she found that she had much to say. She told them everything.

But they never talked about the Biologicals or school: Jo had nothing to say about them and she didn’t want Mike and Carter and Betty to know about ugliness.

Instead she told them about the books she read and the music she listened to on CDs at the library. They listened, watching her face, tails slowly wagging, ears twitching at the sound of her voice.

And they talked to her with their eyes and their bodies and their voices. With a limp and a soft groan, Mike
told her about the aches he felt in his hip when it was damp. Carter showed her how funny it was to put a feral cat up a tree, dancing around the trunk and barking at the hissing cat high in the branches. Betty taught Jo how important it was to always stay close together; she would circle Jo and the boys, herding them in a tight cluster as they walked.

“You talk to your dogs?”

The voice came from behind. Jo wheeled around, startled. Betty, who had wandered away without Jo’s noticing, was leading a girl toward her.

The girl was about Jo’s age, though she was short and scrawny. She had dark eyes that pointed down at the outside corners, which made her look sad. Her eyelids were a little dark too, which made her seem even sadder.

Except that she was smiling. “Do they answer?”

“Always.” Jo was surprised that she spoke to this strange girl instead of looking down and away. Immediately, she regretted talking about her dogworld.

Betty led the girl closer and they sat down next to Mike and Carter, who wiggled in happiness at this stranger’s company. Betty shifted her weight, pressing her side against the girl’s leg.

They all faced Jo, who sat, silent. This girl was so close. Jo had felt so safe in the woods, so alone and protected, that she hadn’t kept her usual eye out for anyone nearby.

“See,” the girl finally said, “this is where we have a
conversation. I say something like ‘Those are beautiful dogs,’ and you say, ‘Thanks,’ and then I say, ‘What are their names?’ and you …” She smiled and put a hand out, palm up, prompting Jo.

“Mike, Carter and Betty.”

Betty leaned over and picked up the small branch that she had been carrying all morning because she was proud of the way it hung from her mouth. She placed it on the girl’s lap.

The girl laughed. “Thank you! What a nice present—Er,” and she turned to Jo, “I don’t know which name is his.”

“Her.”

“Pardon?”

“She’s not a boy dog.”

“So it’s Betty, then. I’m Rose.”

“I’m Jo.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d introduced herself to anyone. Had she
ever
done that?

All three of the dogs were looking at Rose with gentle curiosity, and Jo could tell that the boys enjoyed being petted by her. Jo liked the way Rose traced the stick with her fingers, following each crook carefully, before setting it back down on Betty’s paws.

“So you and your dogs come to the woods to talk?” Rose asked, smiling.

“Uh-huh. Why are you here?”

“My yard backs to the trees.” Rose pointed toward the neat houses on the pretty streets. “Sometimes I just
go wandering. It’s nice”—she looked away, blinking hard for a second—“to be outside. And I like how quiet it feels in the trees, you know?”

Jo nodded.

“I don’t have dogs. My mother doesn’t like dogs. No”—Rose paused and frowned, thinking—“it’s not that she doesn’t
like
dogs, it’s just that she doesn’t
know
about them. Does that make sense?”

“It does to me.”

“She thinks they’re a lot of work and mess up the carpet and carry bugs.”

“That’s not what they’re about.”

“I bet it would be wonderful to have—no, to be with dogs.”

“It is.”

“But we move too much too; my dad is a reorganization and downsizing consultant and so we’re always going where his jobs are. I haven’t even started school here yet. Not that—Well. What does your dad do?”

My dad drinks, my dad fights, my dad tries to touch, my dad left, Jo thought. She took three, four, five breaths before answering, “No dad.”

“Oh. A mom?”

“Just the dogs.”

Rose shot her a glance but sat quietly watching Betty snuffling Jo’s ear.

“I didn’t think I’d make any friends until I started school,” Rose said, “but here you are in the woods.”

“You don’t want to be my friend.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not the kind of”—Jo almost said “dog”—“person anyone wants to be friends with.”

Jo stood and started to walk away. But the dogs stopped as Rose spoke:

“Neither am I.”

O
ne place Jo felt safe was the library.

Everything about the library was good.

It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and always dry and safe and Jo never felt the stares at the library. The Biologicals had never been there, might not have even known it existed, for all Jo knew.

She would go to check out books on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening. There was an overgrown lilac bush near the reading room windows and Mike and Carter and Betty would crawl under the lowest branches and wait. She kept glancing out the windows, checking that she could always see the dogs hidden under the bush.

Jo loved books. Not as much as her dogs, and in a
different way, but pretty close. Every Saturday and Wednesday she’d pick out three books—novels, graphic novels, picture books, poetry, history, short stories, plays, mysteries, travel guides, equipment repair manuals, stories of aliens or myths or true crime. It didn’t matter what she read.

What did matter was that when she read, she could forget how ugly her life was.

She read aloud to the dogs when they were in the woods or in her room with the dresser pushed across the door. They usually fell asleep, but even if they didn’t pay attention, reading to them made the words go inside her the way the moonlight had gone into her, so that she felt-heard-smelled the words.

The day before, when Rose had been talking, Jo had seen the color of her words. She’d felt the hope in her voice. She’d tasted the loneliness in Rose’s sentences. She understood that Rose had been trying to tell her something, with the words she used and the ones she didn’t.

Still thinking about Rose, Jo checked out her books, gathered the dogs and headed home the short way, through the woods. She wasn’t surprised to see Rose sitting on a stump near the edge of the trees.

Waiting for them.

Mike barked a happy greeting, Carter bounded over and Betty tried to make Jo hurry.

“I hoped you’d all be here today,” Rose said.

“Betty’s eyes tip up. Yours tip down.”

“They do? I didn’t know that.”

“The dogs taught me to notice things.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Dogs are better—” Jo stopped.

“Go on. What were you going to say? Better than …?”

“Better than people.” Rose nodded and Jo went on. “Humans aren’t as smart as dogs. Even though they think they are. Even people who like dogs and have them as pets don’t always understand how smart dogs are and how much they know.”