30

It is Stacy’s birthday. It’s hard to fathom, but she would have turned twenty-two today. If it hadn’t happened, she would have been out of college. By now, Stacy would have had a fantastic career. She talked about becoming an archaeologist or a doctor. At ten, anything seemed possible; at thirteen, the choices were unlimited. Maybe she would have been engaged, or traveling through Europe with friends. Maybe all the things that everyone else’s child accomplishes by twenty-two would have been celebrated today. Maybe fifteen wouldn’t have marked the end of all dreams.

Buddy sits in what has become his place of choice, a corner of the kitchen where he’s out of the way and yet able to keep his eyes on her. It’s only when she’s done in the kitchen, heading off to make the bed or get the laundry together, that he settles on the couch to wait for the next event. Today, he follows her to the bedroom, sits in the doorway. Alice stuffs a tissue in the pocket of her jeans. Good dog. He’s watching her, little tipped ears cocked and listening as she breathes in one sigh after another. She sits on her bed and fights the urge to crawl back in, to draw the covers over her head and stare at the filtered light. Ed is out doing who knows what. Anything so as to not be in their house today. Anything to avoid her.

Maybe she should have arranged to work today, so that for a few hours she would have been forced to talk with people, hear the sound of voices other than those occupying her mind, reminding her of all that is lost. That’s what she should have done, but she looked at the schedule and never thought to ask for a different one. It’s hard enough on Sally to arrange the cobbled-together schedule so that everyone, part-timers and volunteers, gets what they want.

Buddy woofs softly from his place in the doorway. It’s an interrogatory woof, as if to ask her, Are we going to do anything today? He cocks his head, clearly wondering why she is sitting there. Even the dog knows that she never sits down until the last task is done. He woofs again, this time a little more insistently, a little more I need.

“Do you need to go out?”

The dog responds by standing up, shaking himself from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail. Excited by her words, he does his little two-step prance.

“Okay.” Alice lets go of the blanket she’s balled up into her fists. “Let’s go.”

You can’t drive around to get away from your thoughts. They just sink in deeper, unperturbed by the need to pay attention to the road or the scenery passing by. The radio does nothing to mask the insistent thoughts, only exacerbates them with evocative music like Fauré’s Requiem, and talk radio fades into background noise. But having Buddy sitting beside her in the minivan seems to help. He points the way with his nose. They pass the cemetery gates and he whimpers, but she doesn’t slow down. She’ll go later, deadhead the mums. It hasn’t rained, so she’ll give them a drink. Whisper “Happy birthday” under her breath. As usual, Ed won’t go with her. He thinks she is obsessed. He’s deluding himself if he thinks not seeing the grave makes one iota of difference; he can’t pretend it didn’t happen just because he doesn’t help her plant flowers.

It’s not that she even offers prayers. She just needs to have one task still connecting her to Stacy. She’s not one of those parents who talk to a gravestone, pretending their child is attending their every thought, or blame minor coincidences on an angel that was once their daughter. Alice is grounded in reality. Her child is dead.

The dog trainer Sally recommended is in Amherst. It’s a pretty day, and the ride up route 181 is pleasant and will take long enough that if she includes lunch at Panera, plus an hour or so poking around the JC Penney at the Hampshire Mall, this little jaunt will take up the hard part of this day. Alice has called ahead and the trainer has agreed to meet for an assessment. Kids have assessments; so, apparently, do dogs. Buddy will certainly assess at the top of the chart.

Alice finds the place after a couple of missed turns. Expecting a kennel, she is surprised to find a modest Cape-style house on a side street not far from the University of Massachusetts. No dogs bark as she and Buddy stand on the stoop, but there are the telltale flags arrayed around the tiny lot, signifying underground electric fencing to keep an animal in. She rings the doorbell twice. Finally, a woman comes to the door, a bundle of fluff cradled in the crook of her elbow.

“Come in. Don’t mind the mess.”

The mess seems to consist of several unoccupied dog beds and two dog crates with artistically draped scarves over the tops, as if to convert the cages into furniture. The house definitely has a thin suggestion of animal, but otherwise it is quite clean.

“Arabella. And you’re Alice?” Arabella plops the ball of fluff into one of the crates. Its secret identity revealed as a tiny dog, it curls its lip at Buddy, growls once, and then curls up for a nap, exhausted by the effort.

“Yes, Alice Parmalee, and this is Buddy.”

Arabella doesn’t bend over to acknowledge Buddy’s existence like everyone else who meets him has done. In fact, she stands quite deliberately away from him, but Alice sees that her eyes are glancing at him, assessing him.

“He’s pretty. How old?”

Alice has prepared a story. “He’s a rescue, an abandoned dog. We just adopted him, and the vet thinks he’s no more than four. He’s very smart.”

“Any behavioral problems? Biting, chewing, peeing in the house?”

“No. He’s very well behaved. Not one mistake.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“My friend Sally thought he should become a therapy dog.”

“What do you think?”

When Buddy so clearly asked her to do something today, he was being a therapy dog, but she doesn’t say that. “I think he’s perfect for that. He’s also got a lot of tricks.”

“Maybe he could become a circus dog.”

“He’s certainly that. Watch.” Alice flips her hand over, but the dog sits looking at her as if he’s never seen that hand signal before. “Buddy, you know that that means.” Alice tries again, adjusting the plane of her hand. Buddy doesn’t rise to his back legs. He just shakes his head and sneezes. “Really, he does this little spin on his back legs.” Alice tries again, and again the dog just sits there.

“Maybe he’s being shy.”

“Maybe.” If he’d been a child, she would have given him the evil eye to let him know they’d be having a little discussion in the car. But he’s a dog. There’s nothing to discuss.

“Well, here’s what I can do for you.” Arabella outlines her program for developing therapy dogs, ending her spiel with her substantial fee, the amount of which drives Alice into a noncommittal “We’ll see.” That’s a lot of money for a hobby; Ed will blow a gasket. She gets into the minivan, snaps her seat belt into place. Forget Ed; if she wants to do this, she will. Ed has no right to an opinion.

*   *   *

Ed has spent the day making up errands. He stopped by Toolie’s to see about a tune-up for the minivan. He never drives Alice’s car and it’s always last on his list of things with motors to tend to, but he thought of it this morning and pulled in to get an appointment. Afterward, he and Toolie, who has been his auto mechanic almost since the day Ed moved to Moodyville, shot the shit for a while. Then Ed lingered at Lil’s long enough that she asked him if he wanted a lunch menu. He did.

After a BLT, Ed knows that he’s out of stuff to do to keep him away from the house. The fact of his leaving Alice alone on this day doesn’t escape him, and he takes the long way home with a guilty procrastination. It’s just that this particular day, even more than the other anniversary, is the hardest on her, and his inability to make it better feels like a failing. Every time he’s tried to distract her, or reason with her, or change Alice’s focus on this day, his efforts have been met with anger and accusation and no relief for either of them. There have been years, especially the first two or three, when neither of them spoke to the other because there were only terrible words to say.

Ed knows he is avoiding the inevitable, but he takes the long way home.

The second bay of the two-car garage is empty. Ed pulls the Cutlass into its berth, shuts it off, and triggers the garage door to shut. The slow-rolling thunder of the automatic door closing behind him masks Ed’s sudden weeping.

It’s a brief jag, and Ed backhands the tears away, draws a long breath, and pushes open the car door, banging it, as he so often does, into the plastic Costco closet.

Seven years and uncounted sessions with grief counselors and well-meaning clergymen haven’t erased the questions. Nor have they provided a good answer to the big one: Why?

Alice has left him a note and a sandwich, which Ed eats, even though he’s just had a BLT at Lil’s. Their bed is unmade and strangely welcoming. Ed lies down, stretching out full length on his back, staring at the ceiling with its faded water mark from the roof leak that no one can seem to fix. Alice doesn’t know when she’ll be back. She’s got the dog and she’s going to see a trainer. Ed would scoff at the idea of turning Buddy into some kind of performing bear, but the idea has gotten Alice out of the house today, and for that he’s grateful. This dog has been good for her. After it happened, Alice became this shadow woman. Most days, he can only see her outline as she goes through the motions of day-to-day living. Somehow, having this dog in the house, with his needs and his antics, has begun to put color in the old Alice.

Now he’s the one alone in the house. Even the sad presence of his wife is preferable to the loneliness of being in the house with only his thoughts to keep him company. As pleased as he is that the dog is with Alice on this critical day, Ed wishes the dog were here, keeping him company instead.

Ed rolls off the bed and goes into Stacy’s room, which is opposite theirs. The room is filled with Stacy’s things and completely devoid of life—a stage waiting for the play to begin. No, a stage after the play has ended. They have left everything as it was, just as if Stacy has walked out of the room. It is a room clearly once the domain of an adolescent girl. The Barbies have long since been packed away in the closet, instead of scattered all over the room, to be expected when a girl enters high school. Novels and poetry line the bookshelf instead of The Baby-sitter’s Club. Plath, Woolf, and Shakespeare—typical reading for a girl in honors English. On the wall, a famous print depicting Ophelia floating down the stream, looking peaceful and untouched, her arms open and her gaze upward, singing. Stacy had brought that back from some school field trip to a museum.

Ed touches the trophy Stacy earned in the eighth grade for soccer. He turns it a little, just enough to dispel the museum-quality stasis of Alice’s rule over this room.

As he leaves the room, his foot hits something. Ed bends down to retrieve the dog’s latest stuffed toy, a faceless teddy bear. Ed can’t imagine how the dog’s toy got here.

*   *   *

Today’s go-for-a-ride took him too far from where Buddy/Mack thinks that Justine will find him. At first, he thought Alice was going to take him all the way home. They were in the car for far longer, even by a dog’s reckoning, than ever before. Which might have meant it was time to go home. When they ended up at that house with the dog smells, Buddy/Mack expected that something was going to happen. Nothing did, except Alice’s clumsy attempt to get him to perform. All he could think was that Alice had come to the wrong place to find Justine. It was a little like Saundra’s house with her pack, but the silence was unnerving. Who had dogs that didn’t welcome visitors? Finally, Alice put him back in the car and they drove home, Alice talking the whole way home, as if she was trying to convince him of something.

When they came in through the back door, Ed was there and greeted him with a long back scratch and lots of soft words spoken into his ruff. Then Ed straightened up and went to where Alice remained in the doorway. They stared at each other for a moment, long enough that Buddy/Mack got worried. They were like two stranger dogs meeting for the first time, studying each other for signs of fear or friendliness, aggression or attraction. Finally, they did something that Buddy/Mack hadn’t seen them do before: They touched.

Buddy/Mack watched with careful shepherd eyes as Alice and Ed touched and stayed close for such a long time that he felt he had to interrupt. A dog needs dinner, after all.