Cub kicks at my bedroom doorway, but doesn’t move one toe past it into my room. He never does. “I told my mom about your granddad goin’ to the hospital. She sent over a casserole for your dinner. Chicken and green beans, I think. It’s on the counter. I told her you still hadn’t touched the lasagna she sent over after your mom…” He catches himself, and rams his toe into the doorjamb. “Anyway, I told her you already had plenty of food in your freezer, but she still wanted me to bring over that dish.”
“Tell her thanks, again.”
Cub hesitates, and sucks in a big breath. “My dad says you should come talk to him. I think he’s right, Dill.”
“Tell the minister thanks anyway.”
Cub kicks harder at the doorway. “I, uh, didn’t see Lyon’s truck in the driveway.”
“He hasn’t come home from the hospital.” My insides go quivery. I turn away from Cub, and glide Mom’s opened bottle of gardenia perfume under my nose to bring her back for a moment.
“Dill, you got to admit that G.D. hasn’t been looking good. Maybe the doctors will help this time.”
I glance at the more than twenty postcards I’ve spread over my bedroom floor, notes sent by G.D. from all the different places he’d visited during his years of zigzagging over the country.
Cub clears his throat. “Not everyone dies when they go to the hospital. My mom has been there lots.”
“Pushing out babies is different.” I inhale gardenia again, almost dumping what remains of the perfume when the telephone rings suddenly.
Cub hops back, out of my way, as I jump up from the floor (after securing the top on the perfume bottle) and bolt through the doorway, heading for the kitchen. “Hello?”
“Dill, it’s your dad.”
Lyon hasn’t called himself dad since the morning he told me that Mom was gone.
“I’m still at the hospital.” His voice is steady, unreadable.
No matter how hard I imagine stuffing the anger with Lyon’s name on it inside the jar deep inside me and sealing the lid tight, the fury still seeps out and foams up.
“I’m coming to get you.” He doesn’t leave an inch for argument. “You need to be here.”
The receiver clatters onto the kitchen floor. I grab the twine leash and collar from the counter, and slip it over Dead End’s head. He jumps up from his bed, sensing my urgency. He doesn’t even have time to sneeze as I run for the back door, abandoning Cub and his mother’s casserole.
A second before I launch myself and the dog out of the house, I hear Cub scramble for the phone. “Hello? Mr. MacGregor? It’s me, Sir. Cub.”
* * *
Twenty minutes might have passed before the barn door creaks open and late afternoon sunlight fills the place. Blinking, I pause from trying to knot and tie fresh bailing twine into a makeshift collar and leash. I squint at Cub’s dark, scrawny form. Beside me, Dead End pants and smiles, thumping his tail.
“Knew you’d be out here with him.” Cub pulls the barn door closed. And then he crinkles his forehead at the mess in my hands. “What are you trying to do there?”
“Make a stronger collar and leash for this dog.”
When Cub takes the twine from me, I return to stroking Dead End’s head. “He knows something’s wrong,” I say. “He hasn’t been sniffing for food, hasn’t even checked my pockets for cookies.” My voice wavers. Another fat tear plops onto the yellow fur.
Cub shifts from foot to foot, working his magic on the string. “That dog sure has turned everything upside down around here.”
“Lyon turned everything upside down.” By taking Mom to the hospital, I don’t add.
“You got to stop blaming him,” Cub tells me. “It’s not his fault your mom got sick. It’s not his fault she…”
“I told him not to take her to the hospital,” I spit, cutting Cub off.
“The hospital isn’t what happened to her, Dill.” Cub sighs, smart enough to let the subject drop. “Dill, Lyon wants you to…”
“I know what he wants,” I snap, interrupting Cub again. Dead End stops panting, and looks up at me with his head tipped to one side. “I’m not going to that stupid hospital.” I sniff, and wipe at my eyes.
Cub’s hands pause from looping and knotting as he squints at me. “Dill, you should be with Lyon and your granddad. That’s what your mom would want.”
I stiffen.
“G.D. would tell you to face this head-on.” Cub stares at me without blinking. “It’s time you did that.” He hands me the new bailing twine collar and leash, double knotted in places. Dead End stops panting. His tail drops, goes limp.
Cub stops kicking at the floor. “You can’t bring a dog to the hospital, Dill.”
I drag the back of my hand under my nose. “I’m not. I’m taking care of him the way G.D asked me to. I’ve got a plan.”
Cub looks confused, like he can’t decide between being excited or scared about this.
“I’m going to bring this dog to my room for the night and then sneak him off to the stable early tomorrow morning, before dawn. If we hide in the back of the horse trailer, we can catch a ride with Jerry Smoothers when he goes to Ohio.” I slip the twine collar over Dead End’s head. “I’m sorry,” I whisper to him. “It’s only for a while.” The pooch sneezes, of course, and then he shakes with everything he has.
I stroke his face, looking into his chocolate eyes. “It isn’t safe for you here anymore with everyone thinking that you’re a sheep killer.” I start toward the door, the twine leash wrapped around my wrist.
“After you get Dead End inside,” Cub says, “we’ll go to the hospital together.”
* * *
An hour later, Donny pulls his rattling hunk of a pickup truck up to the front of the big county hospital. “I’ll meet you two in the parking lot,” he says, giving me a droopy, sympathetic look.
“Thanks for the ride,” Cub says. Then his hand tugs on my wrist. “Come on, Dill. Room five hundred and twenty-four.”
He pulls me up the sidewalk and through the front doors, apparently clueless that my feet feel as heavy as cinder blocks. All tucked in and brushed off (and as stubborn as ever), he drags me through the carpeted reception area, into wide, bleach-clean hallways soaked in white light. My hands shake and my insides quiver as images of Mom, lying in a bed, force themselves into my head. To fight these off, I try to picture her humming and digging in her garden with Dead End smiling and panting beside her.
Cub herds me into an elevator. My knees go weak when he hits a button and the machinery hums. One by one, numbers light over the door at each floor as a bell chime spells out NO … TURNING … BACK … NOW, a word at a clang.
When the number five lights, the elevator stops and the doors slide open, letting in the smells of rubbing alcohol and antiseptic. I push my wrist to my face, but the hospital smells overpower Mom’s gardenia scent. In the hallways and rooms that I can see, fragile patients in hospital-gown uniforms look tired of facing life head-on.
Cub gives me a gentle push, then a harder one, guiding me, making me step into another white-lighted hall. “Room five hundred and twenty-four.”
“I, I can’t,” I squeak.
Nurses move like robots, crisscrossing the corridors between the rooms and a station in the center of the floor. One nurse steers a woman in a wheelchair past us. This patient has Mom’s pale, drawn face. The hopelessness that comes at the end shows in her dull eyes and quiet lips.
To ease a rising panic, I picture Mom brushing Dead End from nose to tail while whispering sweet words into his ears. I see her taking him with her to do the grocery shopping and banking. He would go almost everywhere that she went, sitting shotgun in her old Jeep. But these cheerful images don’t last. The sterile hospital air smothers them in the same way that it snuffs out her gardenia perfume.
Cub nudges me. Too worn out to fight him off, I keep moving, and focus on the shiny floor and the light glistening on chrome wheelchairs parked along the wall. I’d have concentrated on bedpans to keep from seeing any more patients looking the way Mom had looked in this place.
As Cub slows, a nurse steps out from a room in front of us. She looks at someone behind Cub and me. “No more visitors for him,” she says in a soft voice, shaking her head in a way that seems too final.
My heart stops.
“Okay,” a female from behind us answers. “Is his son still with him?”
I look up at the numbers over the door. 524.
“Miss, that’s a private room.…”
Lyon sits beside the hospital bed, his elbows on the edge of the mattress, his hands folded and his head down. G.D. lies as still as a statue. His frail body, almost lost beneath the blankets, looks like a shell without its snail. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown. His face has lost the pain-pinched expression.
“Mom.” The word, no more than a whimper, squeezes itself from my strangled throat without my permission.
Lyon whips around. He blinks his red, wet eyes, and then drags his big mitt of a hand over his drawn face. “Dill.” His voice shakes and his lips tremble. “The doctors and nurses made him comfortable. He’s been suffering at home. He…”
I back off from his words until my shoulders slam into the wall beside the door. Then, turning, I throw myself out of the room and run down the hall, back the way Cub and I had come.
Cub and the nurses become brief blurs in the white-lighted tunnel of this corridor.
“Dill, wait!”
Lyon’s voice makes me run harder. I throw myself into a stairwell and then fly over the steps. When I get to the main floor, I sprint across the lobby and out of the hospital.