"Is this Sophy Chase?"
"It is."
"Hi, I'm Bree Solomon." It was a breathy, high-voiced girl-I couldn't tell if she was twelve or twenty-who sounded as if she was talking from inside a tunnel. "I'm an intern at the Swansea Humane Society. Someone told me you're looking for your dog?"
I was too stunned to speak. And when I did say yes, I must have whispered.
"Can you hear me? I'm on a cell phone. In a car."
"I can hear you fine." But I could tell that she did not have good news. If she had, she would have given it to me by now. People do. They call and say, I had a car accident, but don't worry, I'm fine. "How did you know about my dog?"
"My roommate Danis, Danis Judd, she works at the newspaper? She said you came in yesterday and took out an ad about a missing dog? This one turned up. Danis got me your number."
She stopped talking, which confirmed my suspicions. I considered hanging up before she mustered the nerve to tell me. If I hung up, I could do what everyone else had done: write off the dog as a witness, a clue, a piece of evidence, a piece of my heart.
"He might not be your dog," Bree said. "It's kind of hard to tell. Can you still hear me?"
"Yeah." There was a lot of time between what I said and what she said, like a satellite delay, because she didn't want to come right out and tell me the truth.
"Some people found him on the beach late yesterday. They called us."
"What beach?"
"A private beach on the ocean side of the island."
"You don't mean he was walking down the beach, do you?" He wasn't a beach kind of dog. Short legs, couldn't swim. Will had found him at the island shelter and told me he was persuaded to bring him home because of his droopy hound-dog eyes. You wanted someone to take care of, he said, and this little fellow sure needs a hand. Will's presumption infuriated me, and his sentimentality, though by that time, a year before, when I had decided to quit trying to get pregnant, I was easily infuriated-but so lonely that I did not do the right thing and return the poor creature to the shelter, where he might have been taken to a more stable home than ours.
"No," Bree said finally. "He was washed up. Beached. That's why it's hard to tell. But from what Danis said-from the photograph she described-"
"You hear about beached whales, but I've never heard of a beached dog. Does that mean he was on a boat and fell overboard?"
"I'm only an intern, only been working for like ten days, and there was this coincidence with my roommate, so I-"
"Where is he now?"
"At the Humane Society on Old Settlers Road. There's this little morgue."
Jesus.
"Yeah, I know, it's really terrible when your dog dies. I'm like totally sorry."
I smiled when she said that, the way her kind words and college-kid delivery bore so little relation to what was going on. I was totally sorry, too. "Thanks," I said.
"It might help to identify the body, you know, so you can work on closure. And if it's not your dog, then it won't be so bad. Someone will be in our office till six o'clock tonight. Tomorrow they'll take him to the mainland to be cremated, unless you want to like bury him in your backyard or something."
"I'll get there before six." But I would have to wait for Henderson; I could not face this on my own.
When I hung up, I tried to call Daniel, who had turned on his answering machine. Then I called my friend Annabelle, whose message said she was in East Hampton for the weekend and gave a phone number so fast that I got only the first three digits. I started to call her machine again when I felt something swirling beneath my left breast, a sudden, fluttery sensation. Maybe just gas, but when it passed, I understood I had to see the dog now, without delay, and if Henderson wasn't back in five minutes, I would go without him. I had to see the dog's body, because I had not seen my husband's body; and I had to see the dog's body now, because it might not be Henry after all, and if it wasn't, I had to keep looking for him.
Had he been left on the beach and tried to swim, gotten caught at high tide? Had Will given him to someone with a boat, such an unseaworthy dog, and had he fallen overboard? Or had Will done something sinister to Henry as a way to punish me for not taking him to New York?
I flipped on the TV for company, for distraction, and started to change my clothes. There was a Sunday news show about the election, an analysis of a candidate's gaffe during the past week that had cost him a few popularity points with women and blacks between thirty and forty-five years old. I idly pressed the channel changer on the remote and saw a tagline flashing in the corner of the screen- BREAKING NEWS -and a balding, smartly suited baby boomer at a Marriott podium, a crop of microphones, like the butt of a porcupine, jutting into his face: "The main thing my client wants to convey to the media and the public at this juncture is that her interests are better served with this change in representation."
The next shot was an alabaster-skinned newscaster with a shoe-polish-black bouffant bobbing her head as she read from the teleprompter: "That was an impromptu press conference with attorney Rodney Burns, who has just been hired by Greta Kohl, the former nanny accused of shaking the Back Bay Baby to death. Until just a few hours ago, Ms. Kohl's attorney was man-about-town Evan Lambert. After revelations in this morning's Herald concerning Lambert's youthful mistress and his wife's alleged affair with this same woman when she was a student at Harvard, Kohl decided she would fare better in court with a lawyer whose private life wasn't as newsworthy. Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, in seclusion at their Swansea summer compound, are not answering questions. And the official word from Harvard on the matter? 'No comment.' We'll be bringing you developments on this story throughout the day. In the meantime, residents of the Boston area are bracing for the arrival of Wanda the Baby Whale at the city's aquarium tomorrow morning. We'll bring you live coverage of the historic convoy leading her into Boston Harbor…"
How clever: to juxtapose the Lamberts and Wanda the Whale. Two feel-good stories back to back. We're supposed to feel good that the privileged in their summer compounds can lose their privileges, or at least not enjoy them as much as they used to. And feel good that we can see a wild creature in captivity and forget that it isn't free. Neither, at the moment, were Evan and Mavis. I could picture helicopters circling over their house and TV news trucks competing for parking spaces that didn't exist on the narrow blacktop that led to their property. It hadn't been my choice to leave their house, but as I looked around the motel room for a piece of paper on which to write Henderson a note, I was grateful to be gone from there.
I wrote, "The dog is dead, long live the dog. Should be back by one. Favorite novel with dog as narrator? The Call of the Wild," and left it for Henderson at the front desk.
As I made the turn onto Old Settlers Road, I thought of Evan's girlfriend in the chicken coop. Another captive. There was no public sign of her yet, and this pleased me, made me feel a bit triumphant, not because of my role in concealing her, but because it reminded me that not everything that can go wrong does go wrong, as much as my own life, and Evan's and Mavis's, seemed to be steering a hard course in another direction. Vicki, after all, was fine. Henderson had found someone to spend the night with, and much of the morning. The sun was shining, and there, right there on the side of the road, was a flower stand, a homemade wooden table covered with painted tins of lupine and cream-colored roses. For a few minutes on that sun-drenched road, I believed that God might be working her magic. I can't describe it except to say that I experienced an almost physical lifting of the blanket of agony that had been dropped over me three days before. It was a moment of respite, a moment when my mind filled with everything in my life there was to rejoice in.