This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about her attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from "washing" anything that would make more work for me. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things — especially things you don't want them to get into — it's what they do. It's part of being a baby critter. It's part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are incredibly creative escape artists and nosy and boy can they get into trouble. It's hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all.
And I've said she was noisy. Well, I talked to her a lot. That went back to that very first day, that awful day when I found her, when we were like both yattering from our different traumas. Well, same trauma, different angle. It's like we'd just never stopped, it's just the frenzy level had dropped some, and most of our yattering now was pretty cheerful. A little overwrought sometimes maybe but pretty cheerful.
I've told you she had learned really quickly to "talk" during pauses in a conversation — the one time she consistently broke this rule was while I was in the shower. (She'd gone on not liking to get wet.) I always left the bathroom door half open so she could follow me in if she wanted to (which she always did, but I kept hoping . . . ) and she talked to/with the shower. I could hear her — the water going whoosh whoosh whoosh and Lois going kind of woooosh whoosh waaaaaaaash wiiiiiiiiiiiish, as if she assumed the shower was either one of my noises or a major monologist, and didn't quite understand why it only made this one sort of splash-and-splatter-punctuated roaring cry.
So if there was no one else at home sometimes I sang. Now there is a noise to drive the birds from the trees and the dragons into the deepest caverns of the Bonelands. Even Lois' mimicry boggled at trying to do the dragonlet version of a shower and Jake singing. Although she did do a good hum. In fact her humming was the nearest of all her noises to any of the noises humans make. Sometimes we hummed together.
But I think I played with her more once Martha and Eleanor were in on it. Things just felt a little less harrowing. That being-on-the-same-side thing even made me feel a little more at ease with the child welfare people, and I swear child welfare people pick up the smell of fear like mean dogs do and have no clue that the fear might be of them. (Mean dogs know perfectly well that it is. We've — Smokehill I mean — only ever had maybe two mean dogs since I've been old enough to notice, and they don't last past the first snap. One of the families with kids, one of the kids ran away when Dad banned the dog, and then the rest of the family gave up and left too. More of Dad's graduate students. He doesn't have the best luck with his graduate students.)
Eleanor nearly ruined everything though by deciding to be helpful by adding corroborative testimony, like in police shows on TV. She asked the doctor if he couldn't do anything else for my eczema (his creams hadn't worked, not surprisingly, but also because I hadn't bothered to use them) because she was sure it hurt more than I admitted. Thanks, Eleanor. Maybe it worked out okay though, since the doctor knew that Eleanor was a busybody. So maybe that Eleanor pretended she knew it was eczema was corroborative testimony. (I taught her to say "corroborative testimony" and she forgave me for being ticked off that she'd opened her big mouth about it at all.)
Anyway. Lois used to lie on my feet at supper (everybody else carefully and awkwardly keeping their feet out of the way around Billy and Grace's little kitchen table, especially after she started to generalize about people and wanted to be friends with everybody she saw. Even if you were unsympathetically wearing shoes she'd put her hot, scratchy nose up your pantleg to be sociable) which was usually the four of us humans plus one dragon. Except when Dad couldn't get away or Billy was on duty or aggravating some investigators or checking what the diggers and builders were (still) doing to the caves after they'd closed down for the day (work on this had slowed down a lot since the scandal started). And then sometimes we had — Jane or Kit or Whiteoak — or Nate or Jo, who Billy'd added to the dragonsitting/Jake's Sanity Conservation rota — and people having a meal together talk (except Whiteoak of course. I learned "thank you" and "please pass the whatever" in Arkhola from having Whiteoak for dinner. Even Whiteoak wasn't going to risk being rude to Grace I think). Maybe they talk especially when they aren't completely comfortable with each other, and Dad and I hadn't been completely comfortable with each other in years, and we also weren't seeing as much of each other as we used to, so most of the time we talked a lot to cover up the silence.
(Except of course if there'd just been a big meeting about what to do about the poacher's parents — which nobody ever did tell me anything about, just by the way, until years later, when I asked Dad. He looked at me blankly for a minute and then gave a sort of hollow nonlaugh. "We didn't figure anything out, that first meeting," he said — and Dad doesn't talk in italics all the time the way I do. "We didn't figure anything out. We just sat around and moaned and shouted and tore our hair." He stared into space for a minute, frowning. "It was pretty goddamn awful.")
It was a joke for a long time when, if a silence did manage to fall, we'd hear Lois doing her peeping and burbling under the table, which got gruffer and rougher as she got older. But I think I'm the only one of us humans who noticed that it wasn't just getting gruffer and rougher, but it was starting to rise and fall in a rhythm — kind of a lot like the sound of people talking.
I thought about this for a while, kind of hoping that someone else would notice too, but if anyone did they didn't say anything to me. But dragon noises, as I say, are peculiar so probably only my ears could make anything about Lois' sound effects seem familiar.
It had been Eleanor's remark about my goofiness that had really made me think about it. Between Lois and . . . between Lois and Lois it was really easy not to think about anything but getting through every hour as it came. So up till Martha and Eleanor met Lois I suppose I had kind of been thinking about Lois almost like a funny looking dog with strange habits. Snark imitated all kinds of human things and we all just said oh, what a clown. Eleanor made me realize that while I was just as goofy about Lois as I'd been about Snark, I was goofy about her differently. Not just because she wasn't a dog. Not just because she was the first addition to my family after fifty percent of it had died. Not just because of the dreams.
So one afternoon when I'd done more schoolwork than I could stand, and it was sunny outdoors, and we were alone at the cabin, I took her out (she waddled and murmured behind me, her scaly feet and the tip of her now steadily lengthening tail making a funny little scuttling noise on the kitchen linoleum like maybe there were several baby dragons following me instead of only one) and sat down on the ground with her and said, "Hey, Lois." I said it very carefully and deliberately. "Heeeeeey" on a falling note and "Lois" as two distinct syllables, "Lo" higher and stronger and "is" dropping off and down.