I like to think I helped set her straight there. If you can find a way to make a living doing what you love, welcome to the elite group of the most blessed people in the world. I’m in that group-I started back at Shannon & Lewis full-time in January. Sam’s in that group-he quit the hated actuary job in February, and now he’s doing magic gigs almost every weekend. Why shouldn’t Monica be in that group? I’m glad she took my advice and enrolled in photography courses at the Maryland Institute at night. We keep the twins.
I think of that spiderweb picture she took on the log. Bet it was great. Too bad it’s lying at the bottom of the Patuxent.
The Shenandoah is bright blue today, reflecting the June sky. “Say, pard,” Sam calls over to Benny, “wanna head up to the bunkhouse and rustle some grub for the old lady?”
Who could resist such an invitation. “What’ll we make?” Benny asks, splashing over to our chairs. He’s grown an inch since school ended, I swear. In two months he’ll be seven. I want to slow time down, make this summer last forever. Benny at six is too precious to lose, so I hold on tight.
“How ’bout a side o’ beef, a mess o’ beans, and a hank o’ jerky?” I say. Benny’s in his cowboy phase; it’s between spaceman and what I predict will be all soccer all the time.
He puts his arms around me, getting my shirt soaked. This is a good hug, though, spontaneous and fun. For a while last year, Benny’s hugs were needy and clingy and he was my too-constant companion. I’d wake at night with a feeling of being watched, open my eyes, and see Benny’s, two inches away. “Hi,” he’d say, stare until I said “Hi” back, and go back to bed.
We let it go, didn’t take him to a psychiatrist or anything. I let him have all of his mother that he wanted, every last second I could spare, all my attention and all my love-sometimes I thought I’d go nuts-and after a while he quit shadowing me. Of course, now I miss him.
“Or we could just heat up a boot.” Sam bends down to kiss me. “Got any ol’ boots, pard?”
“Just you, Hopalong.”
“Sure you don’t want to come on up to the ranch and help out? Me and Ben, we got a hankerin’ fer yer grits.”
“Why does that sound-”
“Can we just make some sandwiches?” Benny says with adult impatience. Sam and I look at each other and sigh. We feel bad. Nothing shoots Benny out of a phase faster than our embrace of it.
“So you’re okay?” Sam asks, sliding his fingers through my hair. Thank goodness the question is only rhetorical, but it took many weekends to get to this point-leaving Mom by herself in the river. After I woke up I went through a long period of dizziness, completely gone now, and a shorter period of “confusion.” I’d say something strange, something only Sonoma could know, for example, then get in trouble backtracking.
Like the night I told Benny, “Don’t feed her that; she can’t handle rich food,” as he was about to smuggle the rest of his dessert to Sonoma under the table.
“Yes, she can.”
“No, she can’t. Remember that time she threw up all over the dining room after…” Oops. “No, wait, that was some other dog.”
“What dog?” Sam asked, interested. “Because Sonoma did that-”
“No, no, some other dog. Hettie’s dog, she told me about her once. She has a big-”
“Nuh-uh, Hettie has cats.”
“Not Hettie. Did I say Hettie? Carla, the other one, she’s got some big dog who threw up in the-”
“When did she tell you this?”
“Well, not when I was asleep, obviously, ha-ha!”
“So-”
“Afterward, I guess, I mean, when else? Unless it wasn’t Carla-wait, no, it was Mrs. Speakman, the lady across from Monica. She’s got a German shepherd, Trudi, she threw up in the dining room. After she ate a-pie. She ate a pie off the-kitchen window, like in a story, and-Who wants coffee? Sam? I mean, Sam, do you want coffee?”
I wanted to tell them the truth. A dozen times I started to tell them, or at least Sam, but I’d listen to the sentence about to come out of my mouth and have second thoughts. “You’ll never guess where I really was all that time you thought I was in a coma.” Or “I know you guys think you hit Sonoma that day on Georgetown Road, but guess what, you really hit me!”
Let’s face it, even Benny wouldn’t believe me. Even if I told Sam everything that happened, things only he and the dog could possibly know, he’d find a way to rationalize it. So would I-who wouldn’t? “Oh, you’re just remembering something I told you while you were sleeping,” he’d say. He’d find an excuse, the way we do with people who’ve seen ghosts or UFOs or religious miracles. Whatever they say, somehow we always find a way to explain it.
Besides, sometimes I think it couldn’t have happened; it must’ve been a dream. People do not come back as dogs. I can’t even prove it anymore, because Benny gave me back the hoarded treasures that were going to be my ace in the hole, the secret I couldn’t have known because no one knew it except him and Sonoma. But I wasn’t fast enough. The day I came home from Hope Springs, Benny piled my coffee mug, mouse pad, and earrings on the bed. “Look, Mommy. I was saving them for you.” After I had a good cry, we had a long snuggle.
“Come up soon,” Sam says, and I say, “I will, five more minutes,” as he and Benny gather their stuff and start for the cabin. Sonoma used to follow Benny everywhere, I happen to know, when she wasn’t following Sam everywhere, but now she sticks with me. She’s my dog. Benny’s feelings weren’t hurt-he took it as a matter of course. Sam, too. The only one who had a problem with her instant devotion was me.
She splashes over and sits next to me, her rump in the water, chin on the arm of my lawn chair. “Hey, babe,” I say, gently squeezing one thick, silky ear. She’s smaller than I thought. Smaller than I felt, rather. She comes to just above my knee, perfect stroking height as she winds gracefully by. She has soft, soulful, light brown eyes. She likes to cross her legs in front when she lies down, very ladylike. We have the same color hair, tawny reddish tan, but hers is straighter. I admire her trim waistline. When I take her to the ball field in the park and let her off the leash (illegally), she chases the low-fl ying barn swallows until she’s so tired her tongue hangs out. I could watch her run forever.
Now she puts her paw on my lap for me to shake, which I do, but it’s never enough. She switches paws, I shake that one, she switches back. It’s almost a tic. “What do you want, honey?” She never answers, but sometimes I think it’s to put her arms around me. Just get closer.
She scared me at first. I was, of course, ecstatic when I heard she hadn’t drowned, but when they brought me home and the first thing she did was leap up beside me on the bed and gaze deeply into my eyes, I was, frankly, weirded out. “Who are you?” I whispered-when we were alone. “Are you me? Nod your head for yes.”
Nothing.
Since then I’ve tried lots of other ways to communicate (“Blink your eyes.” “Lift one paw.” “Wag your tail.” “Bark twice.”), but nothing’s worked. Either I haven’t found the key yet, which seems increasingly unlikely, or Sonoma is simply a dog (“simply”; not “just”). A delightful, handsome, intelligent, affectionate dog, yes, but nothing more, no one hidden or trapped inside trying to get out. Apparently.
So I don’t know what happened to me. Sometimes I imagine all dogs are, from time to time, secretly people, and there’s this global conspiracy to keep it under wraps so those of us who’ve experienced it aren’t carted off to asylums. Other times I think, well, why just dogs? Why not cats, too? Or birds? Squirrels, whales, hedgehogs? Maybe there’s constant species body-swapping going on, but nobody talks about it except in children’s books and science fiction.