He follows her all the way to her apartment building, and waits patiently while she unlocks the front door. She steps in, but he stays outside the threshold.
“Come on,” she says, “you have to follow me. You have to follow me all the way in.” He stays where he is, staring past her, she thinks, down the long hallway that stretches past the mailboxes.
“Federico,” she says, and at this he follows. She lets the door swing shut behind them and leads him up the stairs to her apartment. He moves up alongside her as they climb the stairs. She scratches his neck and imagines that they are long-estranged friends reunited, slightly dazed in the revisiting of old habits.
By the time they get inside the apartment, Federico seems comfortable and quickly begins sniffing the floor, walls, and furniture, barely containing his excitement. He disappears down the brief hallway to her bedroom, tail wagging.
“I know,” she says, “I know.”
Satisfied with his inspection, the dog rushes back to her, panting. He is so comically huge, he makes her already small apartment look doll sized. She rubs his cheeks with both hands and he melts, his eyes closing as he lowers himself to the carpet. Iris follows, curling up against him.
“I know,” she says, “I know,” and his fur is so soft. She lays her head on his back and hears the bellow of his colossal heartbeat. He outweighs her by at least thirty pounds and smells like dirt, as though he sprouted and grew in a garden she never knew was there, just waiting to be found.
She closes her eyes and breathes him in, falling asleep amid visions of black soil and cool, wet grass, the great magnet at the earth’s center locking it all in place. As she falls further into sleep, the magnet tightens. Instead of locking the earth in place, it is sucking everything back to its center with a grinding force that builds. Lying prone, she can feel her ribs as they loosen and pull apart from her skeleton. The ground begins to shake, and she feels her veins untangle as every part of her prepares to go under.
Iris wakes with a start to find herself splayed out face down on the carpet, Federico stretched out over her legs, pinning her. Her legs are numb below the knee. She panics.
“Federico! Get off!”
The dog casually stands up and Iris flips over onto her back and lurches her top half up like a spring as the blood returns to her legs in sharply tingling waves. She hugs her legs to her body and moans, “Owowowowow.”
“We’d better call your family, Federico,” she moans. “They must be worried sick.” The dog cowers as though he has done something wrong. Iris punches her calves and squints against the cave-like darkness of her living room.
When her legs have recovered, she stands up, switches on the light and heads for the kitchen phone. She calls the dog to her and consults his tag while she dials. While it is ringing, she glances at the clock on the stove and is shocked to see that it is 8:15 already. The phone continues to ring, and she is frazzled, disoriented, still. Federico lays his head on her left foot with the weight of a bowling ball. The call goes to voicemail and Iris hangs up.
“Oh no,” she says aloud, and Federico lifts his head up at her. She looks back at him, his black nose twitching.
“I bet you’re hungry,” she sighs.
She fills a bowl with cereal, no milk, and another with water.
“Here,” she says, placing the bowls on the floor, “that’s almost like kibble, right?”
While he drinks the water with gusto, splashing it all over the kitchen floor, she picks up the phone and hits redial. This time, a woman answers after three rings.
“Hello?”
“Hello? Are you missing a Federico?”
“You found him?! Where are you? I’ll be right there— is he okay?” the woman on the other end can barely get one sentence out before she interrupts herself. She sounds like she is halfway out the door already, lumbering toward a car.
“I’m at 1404 Kenmore— Kenmore and Lexington?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No? No, I’m not kidding.”
“That’s a good six miles from here. I didn’t even put up flyers that far out.”
“Oh, well he’s okay. He’s fine.”
“Hang on— I’ll be right there.”
Iris hangs up and looks at Federico sitting in front of her, wagging his tail across the kitchen floor, both bowls depleted behind him in a torrent of gnashes and licks. She thinks he looks proud.
“Oh god,” she yawns. She steps into the bathroom and turns on the light. Her face is a mess of red indents from the carpet. She stares into the mirror and gives her cheeks a few light slaps while opening and shutting her eyes to wake up. The dog licks her elbow and she lets him do it. She brushes her hair and feels lopsided, one arm dry, the other coated in Federico’s sticky slobber and the musky fog of his breath.
About thirty minutes later, the kitchen phone rings and it is Federico’s owner downstairs. Iris buzzes her in.
She opens the door to a tall older woman with ruddy skin and frizzy gray hair pulled into a long ponytail. Despite the warm weather, she wears a yellow raincoat. She must be outdoorsy, Iris thinks. Federico runs to the door and the woman sinks to her knees and embraces him while he buries his snout between her neck and shoulder.
“Rico! Rico, it’s you!”
“How long has he been missing?” Iris asks.
The woman looks up at her, arms still wrapped around the dog. “It’s been over three weeks.”
“Jesus.”
“He seems to have done well for himself,” the woman says, feeling his sides. She pulls a leash and harness out of the zippered pocket of her raincoat and pushes it gently over the dog’s head. He instinctively steps through the leg openings. “Lord knows how,” she sighs, rising to her feet. Her smile looks as though it might crack her skin.
“Listen,” the woman says, still in the hallway, Federico now at her side. Iris wonders if she should invite her in, but it seems too late for that. “I can’t thank you enough for calling. We figured we’d probably never see him again.”
It hits Iris then that she will never see him again. Nor will she ever see this woman again. How many others fall into this category, she wonders. How many faces of strangers are stored in her memory— how many faces she’ll never have the opportunity to recall? There is so much slippage, so many faces, voices, thoughts stored within but inaccessible, lost in the folds. She wants to tell the woman that she almost didn’t call. That maybe she would have kept him with her always. He would sit under her desk at work, his tail jutting out to trip her boss. She would lay out laundry on his back, feed him hamburgers. But it wouldn’t be true. None of that ever occurred to her. She watches the woman’s hands worrying the leash.
“Well, thanks again, really. God bless.” She turns down the hall, Federico trotting beside her.
“Wait!” Iris shouts, too loud.
The woman and the dog both turn.
“How did he get out?”
“Oh. He dug his way out. I found the tunnel going right under the fence when I got home.”
“Okay,” Iris nods, not sure why she asked. She watches the dog’s face. Come back, she thinks. You can stay forever if you just come back. He stares back at her, mouth wide, then buries his face into his owner’s jacket.
“Don’t know why he bothered,” the woman continues. “He could’ve jumped clean over it if he’d wanted to, tall as he is. Some kind of instinct, I guess.”
“I was just curious,” she says, still looking at him and not her.
“Well, goodnight,” she says, “we’d better go home. Right, Rico?”
“Yeah, goodnight,” Iris says, leaning against the door. As she closes it behind her, she hears the woman murmuring softly to the dog, but she can’t make out the words.