We are sitting in the hotel’s reception area and I am listening to Adam as he makes the case for letting him keep this monstrous-looking dog in his room along with his other monstrous-looking dog. He’s explaining how this came about, the whys and wherefores. But what I can’t quite wrap my mind around is how Cody is involved in this urban tragedy. Why was Cody there? Cody has disappeared into the cabin, a Drake’s coffee cake from the breakfast-area cupboard in her hand, not a single word out of her mouth. Cody, who had said that she was baby-sitting tonight. For a teacher. She didn’t need a ride either way.
I throw up a hand. “Adam, please, stop. Stop.”
He pauses in his narrative long enough to let me get a word in edgewise.
“Tell me again why my daughter was there? In a crack house? With your dog?”
“I asked her to let him out of the car for a quick break.”
“Where were you? Why were you—”
“In the building at the fund-raiser.”
Okay, this is going to be Twenty Questions. “The fund-raiser, the one you’re here for?”
“Yes. At the Artists Collaborative.”
“Cody was baby-sitting tonight.”
The look on his face is enough to let me know that, once again, my daughter has pulled the wool over my eyes.
“Oh, Skye. She hasn’t told you, has she?”
“I guess not. Why don’t you.”
“Don’t you think she should tell you?”
“Adam, do you really think she’ll come clean with me? You once told me you had a few years of trouble with your daughter. What would you have expected from her?”
“Another lie. Probably. But I shouldn’t interfere.”
“You’re in the middle now.”
“I’m on the sidelines, but okay. All I know is that it seems pretty harmless, which makes me wonder why she’s being so, well, adolescent about it. She’s taking art lessons in exchange for doing errands at the Artists Collaborative. She was there tonight, passing hors d’oeuvres.”
“This—art lessons—this is what she’s keeping from me?” I am flummoxed, incredulous.
“I know. Kids.” He holds up his hands in a classic mime of helplessness.
I can’t help it, I laugh, but the laugh skims the border between amusement and frustration. “Why would she think I’d object to that?”
“Sometimes I think they rebel out of habit.”
“Look, I can’t throw you out tonight, so keep the dog. I have to go talk to Cody.”
“Skye, maybe this is me putting my oar in, but I think that maybe you should talk about the incident before you mention the other business. She was pretty shaken up, although she was a trouper, and thought to call nine one one even before she called me.”
I can hear the subtext: A child Cody’s age shouldn’t witness such things. And he’s right. “Is the boy going to be all right?”
“I don’t know. He was pretty far gone, but they had that Narcan with them, so he was making noise as they wheeled him away.”
“She’s going to pretend nothing happened.”
“But it did.”
With the two monstrous dogs following him at his heels, shoulder-to-shoulder in some kind of canine solidarity, Adam walks down the length of the porch to his door. He pauses, turns to give me a little nod, that notion of parental solidarity. I close my eyes, sigh, then lock the office door. As I approach our cabin behind the building, I can hear music blasting, Cody’s phone plugged into the dock, the volume spiked loud enough to bomb through the storm windows and into the night, Florence and the Machine. What kind of a fourteen-year-old is this child? Where’s the Taylor Swift? The One Direction? I trot to the door, mindful of my guests’ comfort. Cody has the volume up loud enough to crack glass. The last thing I need is to have complaints from my guests. It’s bad enough that I’ve got that damned dog here, and I live in fear of some paying customer getting knocked down or bitten, or offended by it. And, Lord help me, now there are two of them. What kind of patsy am I?
* * *
Cody sits in her room, scratching the outline of a new drawing on her sketch pad, nodding her head in time with the music blaring out of the Bose speakers attached to the wall. Mom will be in here in a minute, raging about the noise, disturbing the guests, blah, blah, blah. So predictable. Yup. There she is. Comfortingly predictable.
The music stops.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you’re taking art lessons? Why in God’s name wouldn’t you mention something like that?” Skye stands in the bedroom doorway, arms folded across her chest.
“I don’t know. Didn’t think you’d care.”
“Care?”
“It’s no big deal.”
“However, hitchhiking to North Adams, that, my darling daughter, is a big deal.”
“I take the school bus.”
“No, you don’t. The bus doesn’t go that far.”
How would her mother know the school bus routes that well?
“Close enough. I walk from the last stop.”
“I’ll drive you from now on.”
“Fine.”
“So, what happened tonight?” It’s like her mother has deflated, the angry mom becoming the concerned mom. It’s so typical: Skye starts with righteousness and then gets all mommylike.
“Some kid overdosed on something. That dog of Mr. March’s found him.”
“Sounds like you found him.”
“I was just trying to get the stupid dog back.” The boy, on his back, the stench of vomit. Her own weak-kneed reaction at recognizing that she’d been incredibly stupid to go into that place.
Being in a place she had no business being in. The sight of her father dropping to the sidewalk. She wakes in the middle of the night with the image in her mind. She dreams of it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Her mother always says this. It’s her maternal default position.
“Not really. What’s there to talk about?”
“How you feel about finding the addict.”
Cody continues with her sketch. It’s of a house, boarded up. “That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it, calling a kid an addict?”
Skye makes a little noise, that exasperated snuff she does when Cody’s called her empathy into question. “So, he was really a kid, a boy?”
“Guess so.” She really didn’t get that close. But, yeah, young. “Maybe seventeen, eighteen.”
“Cody, I’m not happy about your lying to me. But it’s a good thing you were there. You probably saved his life.”
“No biggie. The dog did all the work.” Cody adds some shading, giving the sketched house an ominous darkness. In her sketch, in the one window she’s drawn that’s not boarded up, a face emerges. Square-jawed. No eyes.
As her mother closes the door behind her, Cody flops onto her pillow. She fights the tears that burn behind her squeezed-shut lids. It was so hard not to take that gentle approval, to push it away, afraid, as always, that the moment she lets her mother back in, she’ll lose her.