Year of the Dog (19 page)

Then it was time for the main show, the tour of the plant's generator room three stories below. I didn't think to hesitate or turn back then, because my brain thought
heavy machines, a learning experience for Trusty Dog,
and so I jiggled the working leash, and, cautiously, followed along.

Once through the control room door, we stepped out into thin air onto a walkway made of narrow bolted strips of metal through which we glimpsed the deafening engines below. Proceeding, one canine and fifteen humans, with only the skinniest of railings to grab onto, down another steep open stairway to another walkway—the first of what appeared to be half a dozen descents in a room high as an airplane hangar. James, whose reckless idea this had been, led the group, chatting under the roar to the techie and the students, who, not
seeming a bit bothered, horsed around, trying to untie each other's sneakers on the narrow metal catwalk high as a suspension bridge.

At the next set of descending metal stairs, at the foot of which a skinny platform hovered in the air directly across from the humongous engines, Beulah stopped. I shook her leash the smallest bit, but she wouldn't move. I said her name, but no way she could hear me over the pounding of the famed German turbines. I began to cry. Did blind people get to cry?

Then, in slow motion, an inch at a time, she began to
back up.
My instinct was to pick her up, to pick up my valiant dog and carry her to safety. But then I thought about Mr. Haynes, and of what he would do, if he and Blind Dog were in this frightening fix, and I knew that all he
could
do was let his Companion figure it out. So I left the leash loose, the way you were supposed to, while she backed up, one cautious step at a time. When we reached our first stairway, that is, when the first ascending step brushed her coat, she turned and started up the steps, looking
up
not
down,
with me trailing behind. James, now far below, gestured toward the control room at the next landing, and shouted, “If you're okay, I'll go on down with them. I want to get some wide-angle and zoom shots for your dad.”

I nodded numbly, following along while Good Dog led us to safety.

Getting to Work

33

IT MIGHT HAVE been worry over Beulah, but most likely it was the sudden good weather that made me sick. People with pale vanilla legs and chilblains appeared all over Church Street in shorts.
Shorts. It's shorts time.
We'd had another round of late, fat-flaked flurries, but these were ignored. People, winter-blinded and slope-weary, had come to town and put on shorts. I'd washed and pressed my red hoodie and given it a spring vacation. Those who had gone to Florida had come back for Easter; those who had gone to the islands had come back for Passover. Daffodils and tulips colluded in the promise of a change of season.

And I went to the doctor.

This being common up here, where you went along through the Trojan winter without a sniffle or fever, robust, slogging along in the semi-Klondike doing lakeside jogs, and then when the air softened and grass appeared, your sinuses drained like a
fleuve.

Trying not to swallow and cause pain, sitting on the patient's white table in the holding room, I studied the thank-yous, hand-written by small people, thumb-tacked to the wall on medical notepaper promoting Celebrex, Relafen, Prozac, Tofranil, Zantac. Out in the hall, I could hear a doctor consulting about someone in trouble, of Albuterol in the
ventilator, of Heparin IV, of Pravochol, and realized that just listening I'd diagnosed the patient by reflex. Realized also that I was ready to get back where I'd be really working again, not just reading up on clinical trials and what new drugs had gone over the counter, but helping to figure out what to dispense and when to dispense it. Not to mention treating
myself
instead of sitting here out of my shoes and half out of my clothes in some clinician's office the way I hadn't been since high school. Coming to my senses, I reclothed my feet, scrambled into my t-shirt and grabbed my windbreaker, deciding that what I needed I could surely pick up for myself and not burden out-of-state Blue Cross's accountants.

It was the next week, when I could commingle and not spread germs, and late April had brought blooms to the yards on both sides of ours, that James found his family. We'd been together almost constantly since the turbine trip. We'd lie on my sofa-struggled-into-a-bed or his mat on the floor and talk about how finding lost persons was a lot of work. How you'd think there might be only two Maartens in the whole USA, but there were many. How maybe
they'd
tried but then given up on finding
him.

We'd got into some habits. He liked to sleep next to the wall; I liked to sleep on the outside. We'd be lying on our backs, touching at our shoulders, hipbones and feet, talking about his people, my dog, how little time I had left up here. And then, when we weren't together, I'd miss that a lot. We slept with our outside arms over our heads, fingers hooked. And when I slept by myself, with the warmth and noises of dreaming Beulah on her blanket on the floor, and loud party sounds from up the street, I'd wake to find I had both arms overhead, clasped together in the warm breeze coming in the open window of my front room.

The morning he made his announcement, we were sitting on the mat at his place, having waked and messed around,
then had coffee and a bowl of blueberries and strawberries. While I pulled on panties and a t-shirt, he stood and fiddled at his computer in his shorts. Then, turning, he said, “Here they are.” His voice cracking with disbelief.

I stood at his shoulder and stared at what he had on the screen and then at his face.
Owen and Lucille Maarten.
Their names, small photos, an address in New Hampshire. Two children. He, a teacher; she, a former teacher. I flung my arms around him. “You found them!”
He had parents.
He truly had parents. I squeezed him till my arms gave out.

“Looks like it.” Klieg lights on his face. “I waited to tell you till it all fit together, till I could be positive. But it's not only when they married and the names, but that this Lucille is the same age as the Lucille Freeman who had the baby.
Me.
I kind of went nuts, you know? Crazy and then half scared, changing my mind every other minute about contacting them. But then I just did it.”

“Tell me everything.” I couldn't stop staring the tiny digital images on the screen, the people who made him, the people who could have sent out a birth announcement with a little blue bow and a yellow Pooh bear.
His parents.

“I sent them a short message, telling them my name and giving my birth date. Saying I'd like to come see them if they didn't mind; I'd like to let the other shoe drop. Was that the dumbest? The shoe drop. Christ. I might as well have said, I'd like to see how the cookie crumbles. But when you get in a state like that . . . I thought: If I don't write right now I'll never do it. So I dropped my shoe. Dumbfuck.” He folded his arms around his head and grinned.

I pulled his arms down and let him bury his face on my shoulder, while I patted his back, thrilled and at the same time getting a cold stone in my stomach at the terrifying idea that maybe they wouldn't answer him. Maybe even if he did have the right people, they might have put his being born, at what
surely had been the wrong time for them, out of their minds and wanted to keep it that way.

“How about we catch the ferry at Charlotte?” He sounded like the idea had just come to him. “They're running again and there's a French place on the New York side. We could have lunch and, you know, celebrate?”

“The ferry?”

“Hey, spring, cross the ice-free lake, blue sky—.”

“A
ferry experience
for Big Dog?” I narrowed my eyes.

He laughed. “No challenges today. She can stay in the car. She can take a maiden pee in New York State.”

It was a pleasure to be a passenger on the two-lane road and not risk a wreck at the sight of the sudden spectacular view of the Adirondacks across the lake, blue in the front range, then purple, then lavender. The rolling valley a snowmelt green as we turned onto the familiar back road, passing Ten Stones Circle Road and Apple Orchard Lane with their fruit trees, horse farms, barns and fences. And on the porches and in the driveways, and out by the livestock or walking their persons: good dogs everywhere, enjoying the fine weather.

It cheered me, to go back through Charlotte now that I had got to know the town and the country store and the people who lived here and helped the Judge. And now that I believed I knew, if not really the author, at least someone who might be the author. We passed but did not stop at The Old Red Brick Store, and I felt glad to see again the artist's clock with the Woman in the Moon face and all the objects marking the hours which figured in the mysteries. And which now gave the time as half-past turtle.

Curving down the steep road past the FERRY TO N.Y. STATE sign, James turned his head, looking giddy and still somewhat in shock, and said, “You have to go with me, if they come through.
If I get to go meet them.
”

“Of course I will. You know I will. I want to meet them the
same as you do. The only thing—I have to take Beulah to the puppy trials down in Massachusetts. You know I have to be available for that, and you know I'm going to die right on the spot, lie down flat on the ground and die, if she doesn't make it. You know that.”

“We can go after,” he said “If they let me come—.”

At the water's edge, college students lashed the ferry to the dock, and we drove on with five other cars, two vans, and a truck, plus four couples on foot. As soon as we pulled away from the shore, a wind whipping down from Canada hit us full force and the ride turned choppy. James opened his backpack and produced a sweater for me and a windbreaker for him. We checked on Beulah through the car window, then stood at the front of the ferry with the spray covering us and the wind rocking us as we headed for the state where James grew up.

He had to lean in and raise his voice so I could hear over the motor noise. “Norma, the woman who raised me, had the whole story. She knew how Lucille had had to give me away, how she couldn't keep me, being married to an abusive man who wasn't my real father. Then how she married him, her lover, Owen Maarten, later. Right? Listen, Janey, do you think if they hadn't wanted me to know someday they'd have told her? Norma? Who couldn't do squat to earn a dime and didn't have much interest in raising a kid? Don't you see—
they left me a trail.
”

I saw how much he so totally wanted them to be glad to hear from him and claim him, and to make amends for leaving him outside their family all these years. And my eyes stung not just from the wind blowing the churning water on my face. They had to want him; they had to.

We drove off the ferry, up a rocky ramp, onto a neighborhood street—to discover that the French place he remembered had changed to a lakeside cafe that was called—the Vermont
influence—Lakeside Cafe. Parking the car, I led Beulah to a secluded spot by a shrub near the curb and invited her to get busy. Then, deciding the cafe looked as if it would welcome her without a vest, we walked through the bright white and blue nautical interior, which had life preservers on the walls and the rocking feeling of being on floating piers, and sat with her at an outside table on the windblown deck. Putting her on the loose leash so she could stretch her legs, we each ordered a beer, and, damp and tired, left our menus unopened.

“Here's to—them,” James toasted, lifting his bottle, his face glassy with hope.

“To them.” I clicked my bottle against his.

“The last time I was in this cafe,” he said, his voice wobbly, “in the place it used to be, anyway, I was
Jimmy Martin.
”

34

MOM CALLED WITH hurt feelings, to say she hadn't got a card, not to mention flowers, from her only daughter for Easter and her only daughter had not even asked about the annual Easter potluck lunch at First Methodist.

“Sorry,” I told her. “It's been—hectic. Mostly all I did the last month was get Beulah ready for her last Puppy Evaluation before the Training Trials.” I couldn't go into the hydro-electric ordeal. I couldn't mention anything about James's hope that he had found real parents. And I guess it was the first time, or at least noticing it was the first, that there wasn't much of anything at all I'd been doing that I could tell my folks about.

“Uh, huh,” she said, not about to spend time on my dog. “Let me tell you, since you forgot to ask, about the ambrosia I fixed, as my contribution to potluck, which in some cases, I have to say, even for church people who ought to give the occasion some care, is too much luck and not enough pot. My ambrosia, as I don't have to remind you, is a legend. I could have made twice as much and not brought home a spoon of it. Isn't that right, Talbot?”

Daddy, on the other phone, agreed. “Your mother's a legend.”

“You get that instant pistachio pudding—which is not just
on any shelf, let me tell you—the canned chunky pineapple and canned crushed pineapple, see you have different textures here, and shredded coconut, which you used to could get without sweeteners, but now you have to allow, and chopped pecans and those little marshmallows. I don't like the colored ones. You stir in Reddi-wip, and then garnish it with maraschino cherries. I didn't write you about that, honey, if you want the truth, on those nice water-color note cards you sent me, because I didn't know how to spell
maraschino.
”

Daddy chimed in, “Your mother is just saying that, the actual truth is she wanted to talk to our daughter, you, today. She had the blues, not hearing from you.”

Mom admitted it. “We don't hear from you and we don't hear from you, and people are asking about you, and if you're going to let Millie and the baby stay in that house that was yours, and what Curtis plans to do for you. And I have to say you haven't shared this information with your own mother. Plus they had Danny's christening in our very own church, now how many tongues do you think wagged over that?”