Despite Mosley’s assertions that folks in the Berkshires don’t care about a little snow, no one has shown up at the Wednesday Open Studio. Even the usual artists are missing. Kieran alone has been hard at work today on his installation. The array of carrots and celery sticks, puddled Brie, and soldiered crackers have been invaded only by the four of them, Mosley, Kieran, Adam, and the girl, who has been slipping brie and crackers to the dogs. Adam checks his watch. The only sound in the building besides Kieran’s blowtorch is the sizzle of sleet banging against the enormous factory windows. A scrim of snow is stuck to them, slowly eating up the available light. It’s time to go.
“Cody, do you want a ride home? I’m leaving in a minute and I can swing by the hotel and drop you off.”
“I think Mosley wants me to stay.” She’s got a box of cling wrap in her hands. “And clean up.”
Mosley has been standing by the factory door, his hangdog gaze on the nearly empty parking lot. At his name, he turns back toward Adam and Cody. “Yeah. I’ll take her home.”
Cody looks vindicated and, frankly, Adam is relieved. If he’s going to get home in this weather, a side trip isn’t going to make it any easier.
“Okay, then.” Adam snaps his fingers and the dogs bound over to him. The foster dog wiggles, his head bobbing up and down so much, it’s hard to find the clip on his collar. Adam swears that Chance rolls his eyes at this performance. He’s certainly going to make someone a nice pet, if only he can get the dog into a proper rescue.
The temperature has dropped and the snow has been transformed from genuine flakes into tiny stinging ice needles that are blown into Adam’s face as he emerges from the building. He ducks, grabbing his scarf to protect his face. The snow isn’t much deeper, but the cold has turned the early wet stuff into a treacherous ice field beneath the new layer. He slips, starts to go down, and lets go of the leash to catch himself before face-planting in the snow. Chance remains by his side, licking Adam’s cheek in commiseration, but the other dog takes advantage of the situation and is across the footbridge in a flash, heading right for the crack house.
“Get back here you!” Adam knows that shouting at a dog is a recipe for failure, but impulse rules over sense. “Jeez. Chance. Go get him.” Adam has no reason to believe that Chance can accomplish a Lassie-quality task, but he says it anyway. “Go on. Go get him.”
* * *
I was embarrassed, as much as a dog can be embarrassed on behalf of another. The ingrate, I thought. He should be here beside Adam, as I am. I didn’t quite understand Adam’s command, but the two words I did understand, go and get, were enough to have me racing after my companion, with the idea—well, with no idea at all what I was expected to do. I caught up with him at the closed door of the place where we had taken him into our pack. He was putting on quite a show, I must say, what with the yapping and scratching against the door, the wild-eyed, plaintive yammering. Stop! I barked at him. Enough! I finally head-butted him to get him out of his fixed attack on the door. The snow around the perimeter was undisturbed except by us. There was no one inside or outside that place, only the rats that burrowed into the interior walls, revealed only by their minuscule squeaks and the sound of their claws scrabbling against the plaster and horsehair. It made me crave to bite their little heads off.
At heart, I understood what my friend was doing. This was the last place he’d seen his person; therefore, the pull to return to it was completely understandable to me. I have been separated from Adam—and returned to an old and evil use. All I could think of when that happened was getting back to him, to our life together. Fortunately for me, Adam chose my life over my death and we were never separated again. In this case, I wasn’t sure if my friend’s person was redeemable. He resembled more closely the youths who had misused me almost to death. I’ve known this phenomenon before, the sick attachment of a dog for a bad human, loyal in spite of that human’s cruelty. It is one of the flaws of our species, our bad judgment.
I could hear Adam’s voice stretched over the muffling sound of the wind, ordering us to return. The snow was obscuring him from us; even his scent was pushed away by the strengthening wind. But I knew he was there and calling. If I were deaf and nose-blind, I would know that he would stand there in the storm, wanting me by him. Adam and I have spent a great many hours establishing two things. One, that I obey him. And, two, that he expects and rewards obedience. So I snapped at the foster dog: Now!
The truth is, I no longer cared if the foster dog followed me. He clearly had his own desires, desires that opposed my own. I left him there, sad to see him go, but unwilling to jeopardize my covenant with my person.
* * *
Adam leaves the Jetta running while he traipses across the footbridge to the crack house. Chance had come back, and if a dog could talk, he was pretty voluble about the other dog’s stubborn failure to return. Adam hopes to sweet-talk the dog back into his possession, or, failing that, snatch the leash still attached to his collar. The dog can’t get into the sealed building, so he most likely will be standing outside, incapable of figuring out what to do on his own.
But the dog isn’t there. The footprints pressed into the snow lead around to the back of the house, and vanish as the wind gusts fill them. Chance sniffs around but, lacking a tracking dog’s initiative, soon tires of the game and makes it clear he wants to get back into the warm car. Adam’s knee hurts from his fall, and the sheer unpleasantness of being out in this storm wars with his conscience regarding the dog. The light, already muted by the storm, is fading fast and he has no idea where to begin to look for the wayward animal. “Well, Chance, this is a fine mess.”
Chance shakes himself and pointedly aims his nose in the direction of the car.
“I guess we regroup and hope for the best.” He can’t go home now. Adam simply can’t leave the dog loose like this, up against the weather and the evil things that can befall a dog like him.
Adam’s first call is to the animal-control officer in the area, whose phone immediately goes to a full voice-mail box. In his experience, the local police don’t respond well to 911 calls about missing dogs, so Adam lets go of that idea.
His second call is to Skye. “Skye. It’s Adam. I’m at the AC and I’m throwing myself on your mercy.”
“Oh. Good. Look, do you mind bringing Cody back with you? I told her I was coming, but something came up.”
“I offered. She wouldn’t budge, and Mosley says he’ll drop her off.”
“I’d rather you did.”
“Does that mean you’ll put me up?”
“Yes. And your dog, too.” She laughs. “Or do you still have two?”
“Only one at the moment. The other dog bolted just now and I can’t find him.” The wipers can hardly keep up with the snow, and the windshield is outlined in a scalloped fringe of it. Adam walks around, knocking the snow off the roof and the back of the car, while Chance is burrowed into his backseat bed, enjoying the blast of warmth from the jacked-up heater. “Look, I’m going to take a quick drive around to look for that dog before I head to the hotel, so don’t be worried if we’re not there soon.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Probably not, but I have to try.”
Adam leaves the car running with Chance in it. He calls and whistles again, claps his hands together, wishing desperately that he’d given the dog a name and stuck to it. No answer. “Oh, Gina, I’ve really screwed it up.” It’s not the first time he’s spoken to her out loud, as if she’s in the next seat, or the next room. “Help me get him back.” Not praying, exactly. But there is a faith to his desire that his wife will hear him and provide some small miracle to prove to him that she’s still there in some way.
He listens, straining his human ears to hear the sound of a dog. Nothing.
* * *
Inside the AC, there’s no sign of Cody or Mosley. Kieran is wiping down his tools, shrugs when Adam asks where they are.
“I don’t know. Downstairs, maybe?” He carefully sets his welding mask over a stand, giving the thing a sculptural pose. “Mose has a studio down there. Past the restrooms.”
The hallway is narrow and reminds Adam of the basement of the parochial school he attended while with the last foster family of his youth. Low ceiling, painted concrete walls, cracked linoleum tiles on the floor, and lighted only by the inadequate illumination of the flickering overhead fluorescent fixtures, none of which has the full complement of tubes. He can picture the factory workers here, hanging their jackets in these metal lockers, punching time cards in the Simplex punch clock still affixed to the wall. The notice boards are filled now with outdated local information—Tomato Fest, Blue Grass Fest—but, back in the day, would likely have notified workers of union meetings or layoffs. Layoffs, strikes. A loss of a job meant a loss of a home, those ramshackle duplexes across the river standing testament to the hold a company had on its people.
Adam makes his way down the corridor, past the restrooms, the locker room, the break room. His lug-soled boots squeak against the tiles, and he’s aware that he’s leaving a trail of wet footprints as he works his way through the labyrinth of pipes and locked closet doors stenciled with arcane abbreviations—Mech Room, Furn Room—toward a spill of light at the end of the hall.
* * *
“Just lift your chin a little. No, a little to the left.” Mosley takes his finger and lifts her chin with it. Steps back to assess his work, steps up and touches the drape he’s had her put on toga-fashion. He fixes some flaw in the way the folds cover her shoulder. It’s an accident, for sure, how the back of his hand, his knuckles, lightly graze her breast under the sheet. Of course he didn’t mean to; after all, her flat little boob barely humps up the material. How’s he supposed to know where it is? Still, the accidental touch sends a flush of embarrassment to her already-flushed cheeks. He’s got the lamps on her and they feel like a hot summer day. Beyond the light, Mosley sits tailor-fashion on top of an old metal desk, his sketchbook in his lap. “Beautiful. Stay just like that.”
“Can I see it when you’re done?”
“No. This is just a sketch, a study. You know, like what we’ve been working on. You have to make preliminary sketches before committing an idea to a permanent medium.”
“So, why can’t you show it to me?”
Mosley doesn’t answer, and the only sound in the room is the scritch-scritch of his charcoal against the paper. He bends over his work, his pretty mouth screwed up into a study of artistic concentration. Cody begins to relax into the pose and he snaps, “Sit up!”
A slight breeze touches her bare back, cooler air pushed into the small room by a cold, wet Adam March.