On my way out, I peeked into the garden. Jackson and Charlotte were there, sitting at the same table, both working intensely. I held the door open for Dashiell and let him lead the way.
It’s awkward figuring out what to say when you don’t expect a response. Working with Emily once, I thought I could sing a song, tell her my troubles, or read from the telephone book for all the good any of it would do me.
But every once in a while, she seemed to understand what I was saying. She’d follow some simple instructions or respond appropriately to what I had asked, her actions, not her words, serving as her answer. When I’d asked if she’d hug me good-bye, and to my astonishment, she did, it filled me with the belief that just because I couldn’t understand someone, that didn’t mean that nothing was going on there.
Just as the nurse had told me about Venus.
And just as I’d always felt about dogs, that there is far more consciousness, interpretation, and decision making going on there than most humans assume.
Jackson was doing what Jackson did, dipping his fingers in the green paint, then moving his hands in slow, graceful, swirly patterns over the paper. As I watched from the doorway, I saw that when he finished with the green, he waited for it to dry. While it did, he dipped his fingers into a cup of water and wiped them carefully on a paper towel, as if he were cleaning his brush between colors.
Charlotte wasn’t sharing materials with Jackson. She was using colored pencils, which she kept close to her and absolutely square with the tabletop. Still, I’d never seen either of them sit near each other, or anyone else for that matter. Had experiencing the trauma of seeing Venus get hit made them bond in their own inscrutable way?
I walked closer and took the seat next to Jackson. Neither of them looked up. Jackson’s paper had swirls of green on it, the color of the leaves in the garden right after it rained. Now he dipped his fingers in a second color, a bright red, the color of a kid’s wagon, or oxygenated blood. The green had dripped freely, running off his fingers in thin streams. He must have watered it down to speed it up. But the red paint was as thick as pudding, dropping rather than dripping off his fingers, forming clumps and thick lines across the page, pooling in one place where he held his hand still instead of moving it.
I looked across at Charlotte’s pad, her head bent so low it was inches from the paper, making it difficult for me to see what she was drawing.
I reached my hand across the table, but not so far that I’d be touching hers.
“That looks pretty,” I said. “May I see it?”
Charlotte’s pencil kept moving in a way that made me think she was coloring something in, leaving dense color in one small space. And she was. A moment later, she lifted her head, giving all her concentration to resharpening her pencil. It, too, was red. For a few seconds, like Charlotte, I gave all my attention to the curls of wood coming out of the side of the sharpener, light brown with a red rim, one long piece, reminding me of the way my mother peeled an apple. I used to think it was magic, the way the curling skin got longer and longer as the flesh of the apple was revealed, naked and pale, in the palm of her hand. Then she’d quarter it and hand me a piece, but it was that curl I always wanted, the part I didn’t understand.
I pulled Charlotte’s pad closer and turned it around. When I saw what she had drawn, I felt my breath catch up in my throat. This time it was a picture of a puli standing over an uneven circle of red, colored so densely and for so long that the artist had lost the point on her pencil. Pretty indeed. “Is that Lady?” I asked her.
I heard the sound before Charlotte began to move, a deep moan, loud enough to startle me. But it didn’t seem to upset Jackson. Jackson, hell, he’d heard it all and worse. He just kept dipping and dripping as Charlotte balled her hands into fists and began to pound her chest, the sound she made, a sound of grief, getting louder all the time.
I looked around for Dashiell, thinking maybe he could help. But he wasn’t near the table. Then I saw him. He was at the far end of the yard, where Jackson had buried the bookend. He wasn’t digging though. He was standing there wagging his tail in a way that meant he wanted permission to dig, permission he knew would be difficult, if not impossible, to come by.
I whistled him over, moving around the table to where Charlotte sat. Going against what I’d always been told, I put my arms around Charlotte and pulled her close, but this time, it didn’t work. She pulled away and, her back to me, kept punching herself in the chest.
When Dashiell came, he laid his head on her lap as if he were dropping a sack of potatoes that had suddenly become too heavy to hold. He sighed, too, the sound of the Hindenburg losing air. This was a dog who did nothing in a small way.
In a moment Charlotte stopped hitting herself. Her arms stayed bent, as if she were about to punch Dashiell, her hands clenched tight. Then the moaning stopped, but she didn’t reach out for Dashiell. Nor did she go back to her drawing, even when I put the pad back the right way, just as she had had it.
Sitting quietly next to her, I looked back at her drawing, the black lines going every which way, the puli’s cords not orderly like the cords of a show dog but snarled up against each other and sticking out in all directions.
Except one.
One was way too long. It hung down to the ground, then snaked along to the right of the dog.
Of course. It wasn’t a cord. It was a leash.
And just like that, I knew what had happened to Lady.