Paintings from the Cave (9 page)

“What do they know?”

“How to see, smell, run. They can do all those things better than humans.” Jo took a breath. “They feel more too. Dogs know how to love better than people.”

Both girls watched Mike settle his chin on one of Rose’s feet and close his eyes. Carter, lifting his front paws, rested them on Rose’s lap and stared into her face, and Betty rolled onto her back, presenting her tummy for Jo to scratch. Jo peeked up from Betty and saw Rose smiling at her.

“I bet they’re good listeners, too,” Rose said. “I like the way they watch you when you talk, and look back and forth between us when we speak.”

“Dogs hear things we can’t. Sometimes I believe they can hear me think.”

“Do you really think so?” Rose sounded worried. “Can they do that with everyone?”

“I’m sure they can.”

“Oh.” Rose stared at her shoe, pushed a small rock back and forth with her foot. A sharp beep from her wristwatch startled everyone. The dogs jumped up. “I have to get home now.” Rose headed into the bushes toward her house. “I’ll see you another time.”

She stopped, ran back and kissed each dog on the nose before smiling at Jo and turning to leave.

Jo watched the dogs watching Rose disappear, their eyes pinched and worried, all three of them panting and uneasy as the sound of her moving through the underbrush faded away.

Really bad things froze time, Jo knew, or worse—time even seemed to go backwards, so that you would live and relive painful moments over and over.…

But time went fast when she was talking with Rose.

So, bad things made time go slowly and good things made time go fast.

“Rose is a good thing,” she told the dogs, who were still staring into the woods after Rose. “But you already know that.”

A
s if they’d agreed to, Jo and Rose met in the woods late the next morning, a sunny Sunday, greeting each other with shy smiles. They walked silently through the trees, listening to the crunch of leaves beneath their feet and catching glimpses of the dogs in the brush as they chased each other before circling back to the girls. The quiet was full and warm and Jo felt a rightness in the day and in the way her steps matched Rose’s.

“I brought a picnic lunch.” Rose poked her backpack. “Well, my mother packed it. There’s enough for us all.”

“Here.” Jo pulled a plastic bag out of her backpack and thrust it into Rose’s hands. “I brought something too.”

Earlier that morning, as Jo was taking the dogs out, she’d seen Her drop a wad of cash outside the car as She lurched home. Jo had pocketed the cash and headed to the pet store to get some canned dog food, a special treat. While she was there, she had seen something she knew would be perfect for Rose.

Rose reached into the bag and pulled out a baseball cap with a picture of a Border collie that looked like Betty. The cap said
DOGS RULE
. She looked up at Jo and beamed.

“Put it on.”

Rose slipped the cap on. It came down over her ears, so Jo gently removed it, adjusted the strap, and set it back. “Perfect.”

“Yeah, it is. You know that? It’s absolutely perfect.”

“Dogs always are.”

“It’s the best present I’ve ever gotten,” Rose said.

It was the only gift Jo had ever given anyone.

They sat, turning their faces up to the sun and breathing in the yellow warmth together.

“Is it hard to understand your dogs?” Rose asked.

“If you don’t know each one well, it probably is.”

“Can you help me know them like you do?” Rose took off her cap and studied the picture of the Border collie.

“I think so.”

“What do I do?”

“You have to learn how to see them.”

Rose laughed. “That’s not hard; they’re right in front of me.”

“No. Really see them, how they are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Close your eyes to see better.” Rose smiled, and so did Jo. “Close them tight.”

Rose closed her eyes and Jo noticed again how dark and smudgy Rose’s eyelids were compared to the paleness of her cheeks. Jo wanted to reach out and touch her. She raised a hand, but pulled back. Mike, who had been watching, put his paw on Rose’s leg.

“Now tell me how the dogs look, what you see when you think of them.”

“One is black-and-white and one is brown and one is almost all white.…”

“More.”

“Um … Mike is the small mutt, Carter is the brown one, and Betty is the black-and-white Border collie.”

“And?”

“Betty has one ear that sticks up and the other flops down, but wait, no, it’s more like it goes straight out. The little guy, Mike, has a lower jaw that kind of juts out so that he looks like he might bite. And Carter, the brown one, has a triangular-shaped head with a flat top. Oh! And Betty has a bump that sticks up in the middle
of her head. And Carter has gray hairs around his muzzle like a beard, and Mike’s toenails are different colors, some are brown and some are white …”

She went on as memory fed on memory and the speckled light shone down through the tree branches, bathing Rose’s face in soft green from the leaves.

Jo said, “Open your eyes. Touch the tops of their noses now. Run your hand back toward their eyes. When you do that they know you love them and want to know them. Now tell me how their fur feels, how each dog feels different from the other.”

“Their ears are softer than the rest of their fur,” Rose said. “Their noses are cold and wet and I think it tickles them when I touch their whiskers. My fingers go
bump-bump
along their ribs and I can feel how the sides of their chests dip into the tucks of their flanks just in front of their legs. They all have four toenails on their back feet, and four together but one higher up on their front paws.”

Rose pictured more details about the dogs as her hands roamed their fur. “Mike lowers his right shoulder and whines when he wants your attention. Carter has short or long tail wags, depending on whether or not he can see you. Betty is the loudest; she has rumbly growls and quick barks and grunty sighs and low howls, depending on what she’s trying to tell you.”

Rose talked until the sun started down, and Jo sat
with her eyes closed, seeing what Rose was imagining. They breathed together, the girls and the dogs. Jo wondered if all of their hearts were beating in time too.

When at last Rose stopped talking and opened her eyes, the dogs were lying between the girls, their backs against Jo, touching her legs but looking at Rose, listening.

Hearing her.

Knowing
her.

Loving her
.

“
I
have leukemia.”

Rose’s words turned everything dark. They were walking near the edge of the woods toward Rose’s house in the late afternoon after she’d seen the dogs with her memory.

“I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry it came out so sudden.” Rose talked very fast. “It’s hard to say. For the longest time I thought if I didn’t say anything, it would just go away.”

No, Jo thought. What she just said, that ugly word, doesn’t exist, isn’t true.

“I’m going to have to go in again, soon, for more treatments. I just wanted you to know.”

Jo matched the words in her mind to the pace of
their footsteps, slow and halting. No … she’s a friend … to the dogs … and so my friend too. My first friend … my only friend … she can’t … no … this was a good day … the best day … my only right and perfect day ever, and now …

She remembered then how carefully Mike and Carter and Betty studied Rose and how she had seen but not seen Rose’s dry lips and bony hands and pale skin and skinny shoulder blades poking through her sweatshirt, and the dark smudges underneath her eyes. She remembered how gently they leaned when they rested against Rose and how sad their eyes were when they watched her.

“I already knew,” she said.

“You did?”

“My dogs knew the first day. They’ve been trying to tell me. I didn’t understand, though. I didn’t want to.”

Rose stopped walking. “How could they know?”

“They understand things people can’t, because they see you. And they saw something they didn’t like.”

“I’m going to be fine, though.” Rose lifted her chin and made her voice hard. “That’s what everyone says. There’s nothing to worry about, and in a few months this will all be behind me, and I just have to keep my spirits up until then.”

Carter looked back at Rose. Mike sighed and sat on the path. Betty sneezed and shook her head once, hard.

Jo could tell that Rose was lying, just like the dogs
could. The only thing she didn’t know was whether Rose knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

There was nothing to say and so Jo was quiet as they stood together in the twilight. Once again, Jo wanted to touch Rose, the way she touched Mike when he trembled during a thunderstorm. But she’d never reached out to any person before. It took her three tries, lifting her hand and pulling it back, before she finally slipped her hand into Rose’s.

Rose squeezed back. And held on tight.

R
ose didn’t come to the woods the next day. Or the next or the next or the next. Jo stopped counting the nexts, but the dogs lifted their noses to the sky, trying to catch Rose’s scent, every time they went into the woods.

Jo moved through those endless days the way she had lived before the dogs came, frozen, stiff and hollow. The dogs snapped at each other with sharp growls and quickly bared teeth. They didn’t run ahead of her the way they usually did as they moved through the trees, but they walked on either side and just in front, almost touching her.

Jo wondered if she’d imagined Rose. Had she made up someone to talk to, conjured someone who tried to see the dogs the same way she did? Invented a friend?
But then she saw Mike nosing around the stump where Rose had sat that second day. Carter dug at the spot where they’d all sat together the first day. Betty kept running back to the place where they’d eaten sandwiches together. And Jo knew.

Rose had been real.

Jo walked slowly,
Rose
,
Rose
,
Rose
thumping through her mind with each step. The dogs quickened their pace, though, and she had to trot to keep up with them.

They led her deep into the woods and then stopped next to the small stream. They sat in a line and watched the slow current tumble and roll the shallow waters. Jo didn’t sit next to them as she normally would, but instead paced along the water’s edge.

Rose. Rose. Rose.

No. No. No.

She felt like hitting something, like breaking something. She shuddered, thinking how like the Biologicals that idea was. She looked to the dogs. For once they weren’t watching her every move. All three dogs had their eyes fixed on the flat, broad rock that loomed above the waterline in the center of the creek, listening to the water splash on the sides.

The boulder was beautiful—gray speckles and green flecks and streaks of icy white quartz. The rock glistened where the water hit the sides and made it wet.

Jo thought it might be magic, something she could touch and wish upon, like in a fairy story. She waded
into the stream, stood in the water up to her knees and laid her hand flat against the rock. Rose. Rose. Rose.