CHAPTER
21

NOW WHAT? EVERYTHING was changed yet not changed. It was the same but carbonated. The same but painted over with a golden glaze. A few more yards down the road, laughing without anything to laugh at …

In David’s driveway stood a gleaming blue VW Beetle.

Louise stopped short. “What?”

She looked at Chad, looked down at him. Okay, I can live with that, Chad was thinking. I’ll grow.

“No,” Louise said. “No.” Swiftly she went ahead of Chad, into the house.

“… telephone,” V was saying, in the kitchen. “People call and tell me the animal’s name, describe the problem, and I get in touch with the animal and call them back.”

“Really?” David’s voice sounded so neutral it was almost a joke. Louise walked into the kitchen. Chad followed, and David’s face lit up.

“Chad! I was afraid—” He broke off and just smiled, looking intensely relieved.

“Hello, Chad, Louise.” V wasn’t enchanted to see them. A plastic container rested on the table. Through the translucent sides Chad saw her justly famous macadamia-nut cookies. David opened the container and offered it around.

“These are the best,” Chad said.

Louise took a bite, and her eyebrows shot up. “Wow!”

Queenie sat at Chad and then lay down as if for extra emphasis. She knew these cookies, too.

Chad broke her off a corner and felt a reaction from V. He looked up, his face heating.

V’s mouth opened, as if to speak. Then she met his eyes and smiled, a tiny, scrunched-up smile that wrinkled her nose. Her freckles stood out for a moment, and she looked like a farm girl, not a psychic beauty. Oh! I like V! Chad thought.

She looked away from him quickly and said to David, “You must have work to do. I’ll go. I need to phone a client, anyway.”

David had half risen to see her to the door, but this seemed to catch him. He frowned at V. “What makes you believe you actually contact these animals?”

“Results,” V said. “I hear remarkable stories—”

“I’ll bet! But what I mean is … don’t you think you’re making it up? You can say anything you want! The animal can’t contradict you. It’s like a child playing with a doll, making up a story. Anyway, that’s what it seems like to me. Do you understand that?”

For some reason this speech, which should have made Louise glad and V angry, had the opposite effect on both. Louise flushed and frowned, and V kept smiling. “I give myself permission to believe what I see. I give myself permission to learn and improve.”

When she said things like that, Chad always wondered: What if it was true? What if V could read minds, and contact spirits, and understand dreams?

He remembered his dream about Shep, the one so real he woke up happy, though he knew Shep was dead. The strong nudge of the dog’s nose under his hand; he was sure he’d really felt that. Then Shep had bounded off joyously, never looking back. Movin’ on, was the message Chad had gotten. No regrets …

V said, “We manifest what we concentrate on. There are rules; there’s a science. You need to ask the universe questions it can answer yes to.”

David’s head jerked slightly. “Go on!”

“Classic example: A mother prays for her sick child. ‘Don’t die, don’t let her die.’ But the universe doesn’t hear negatives. It doesn’t hear ‘don’t.’ The universe hears ‘Die. Let her die.’”

David sat up straight. “By universe I take you to mean God, and I wholeheartedly reject a God who would be that small-minded. But there is evidence that the unconcious mind works the way you’ve described, and I’d like to discuss that with you. Not now, because Chad and I have work to do, but sometime. Will you leave me your phone number?”

V’s cheeks were very pink, her eyes bright. She pulled the pad of paper on the table toward her and scribbled her number.

“You’re on to something,” David said. “What you’ve made of it is unmitigated crap, but the underlying idea interests me.”

V just smiled, a peculiar, tense smile, head tilted a little. David had been pretty insulting, but V was pleased, as if everything up till then had been insulation and they’d finally touched the live wire.

Politely David followed her to the door, and Louise reached for another cookie. “These were a big mistake. Daddy hates sweet things.”

“I’ll tell her that,” Chad said.

Louise frowned. “I’m not letting Daddy get scooped up on the rebound! Especially by somebody like your aunt!”

“Taste her pot roast before you make up your mind!”

Louise’s mouth dropped open. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you? You little twerp!” Chad didn’t care so much for the “little,” but he liked the smile.

Then David was back. “Chad! I’m so sorry!” He took Chad’s hand in a quick shake.

“So you know?” Louise said. “You know what you did?”

“Oh, I know,” David said. “Chad, you told me you didn’t want to train Queenie and I … interfered. I had no right.”

Chad opened his mouth and didn’t know what to say. Was he supposed to agree?

“She’s a great dog,” David said, “and at first I just wanted to get her into better hands. Then I saw that you could be those hands—but no excuses. It’s an old temptation with me, one I thought I’d gotten over, but I’m a little off-balance right—”

“Daddy? Shh. Let Chad say something now.”

Chad said, “Uh,” and took a deep breath. “It’s all right, I guess. I mean, can I have my job back?”

“Yes! God, yes! We can get a goat, a goat would be ideal—”

“Queenie’s fine,” Chad said. Queenie, sniffing at the base of the sink for crumbs, lifted her head, and looked across the room at him. “I mean, it worked. I like her now.”

David sat down with something of a thump and closed his eyes. After a moment he said quietly, “Good.”

“She’s a great dog,” Louise said. “Chad was always going to like her someday.”

Chad didn’t think that was true. The hardness in him might never have changed. He’d held out against Queenie for months; he might have held out forever. David had reshaped him into someone who could no longer do that.

“Can you change anything?” he asked David. “I mean—”

David looked at him for a long moment. “You mean, do I use this often on my fellow human beings?”

“Yes.”

“All the time,” David said. “Not on purpose mostly. It’s who I am now. The way I look at people has changed at a basic level; the way I respond has changed. I … look for what I like. I try to make it happen again. Sometimes … I get carried away.”

“You said once this would change the world.”

“I believe it will. We focus on what annoys us and ignore everything else. In the new culture we’ll focus on positive change and be quick to help it along because that works. That creates a better life. So yes, I can change a lot. On the other hand, could I save my marriage? No.”

“You made things better,” Louise said. “You made things a lot less crazy!”

David said, “I raised a very nice daughter. That’s what I did.”

Have I changed? Chad wondered. Other than liking Queenie? Or was liking Queenie part of something bigger? It might be. The world seemed fluid to him, as if the old boundaries were not really boundaries, as if the limits and the laws were only veils. But what did that mean, really? What should he do?

David said, “You kids are being shaped every day. Adults are trying to mold you into what they like. I want you to understand that, so you can be an equal. Anyone who’s shaping you can be shaped by you.”

“Like land and water,” Louise said.

The waterfall, Chad thought, the water wearing away the stone, the stone pouring the water onto the rock below, where it dug out a pool, where the rock dammed it, where it eroded the lip of the dam. Rock and water were equals, though the water was weak and slipped away, and the rock was hard and constant.

“Enough philosophy,” David said. “Do you feel like working? If I can remember what we do next?”

“Yes.” That was exactly what he did feel like: working, letting his mind slip along the cool channels of observation and choice.

“What do you want to do with her?”

Chad didn’t know. What did you do with a dog besides hang out? “What do you need me to do?”

Louise slipped out of the room. A moment later Chad heard music come on in another part of the house. “Easy, boy!” it said to him. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

David said, “Well … I guess we could start with targeting. You can go on to almost anything from there.”

So they spent a while—twenty minutes at most—teaching Queenie to touch the end of a dowel with her nose. Of the three of them, she was the only one not rattled, not a little shy. By the end of the session Chad was already varying the reinforcement, withholding the click until she touched two or three times.

“She’s a smart dog,” David said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“She’s not bad,” Chad said. It was still a little hard for him to admit that.

Louise poked her head into the kitchen. She gave Chad a direct, clear-eyed smile. “By the way, is it all right now to give you a door?”

David gave him doors for Sky and Julia as well, and Gib brought them home in the van. “Comes a time when a guy needs a door,” he said to Chad. Chad thought they all had needed doors for a long time.

He’d imagined hanging them himself, but it turned out he didn’t know how. Gib did, almost without thinking, and when Chad’s door was a little too big, he shaved off the excess with a plane. That’s right, Chad thought. Gib had built this house. Jeep hadn’t done that. He hadn’t built anything up at the farm. House and barn had already been there.

When Gib finished with the doors, Chad showed him the gaps in the walls.

“I’d forgotten about those,” Gib said. “Real sieve up here, isn’t it?” He looked around Chad’s room, taking the measure of it and maybe of the person who’d shaped it. Chad looked at it, too; it felt as if he hadn’t seen it, his own room, in a long time. Those paintings looked young to him. He thought he could do better.

Sky put his head through the gap. His face was red and puckered, and he looked as if he were about to cry. “I don’t like my door!”

“Why not, buddy?” Gib asked.

Sky screwed his face up tighter and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. He didn’t answer.

Chad knew. That made a warm, light feeling flow out of him. Everything was like that today, golden and glowing as if the air were ginger ale. He loved his own door, as creamy blank as a piece of hot-pressed paper, but Sky had wanted a moat, a drawbridge.

“Don’t worry,” he told Sky. “You’re going to have the door of your dreams!”