When we sat in that quiet dining room in the early afternoon, the sun coming in through the westward-facing windows, I felt safe enough to talk about the work I had done that morning at my desk or even the struggle I’d put up with nothing to show for it. Owen was the only person in my life then who knew about my writing.
My parents, who lived in Pleasanton, in Northern California, would call dutifully every Sunday night and, from time to time, carefully raise the question of what I was planning on doing with my life. It was my mother who would always preface her inquiry with “I know the first few years after graduation are for figuring out what you want to do,” and then my father, on the extension, would jump in and remind me of how expensive my UCLA education had been. There was no way I could ameliorate the fact that their college-educated daughter was spending her days taking dogs for a walk and picking up poop without telling them about the writing. And I wasn’t ready to do that. My father, who was a scientist and worked at the neighboring Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory doing something with national defense contracts that he couldn’t ever completely explain to us, would have dismissed a literary career as a pipe dream. My mother, who had spent her career as a middle-school counselor in the Alameda County School System, would have worried about the amount of rejection I would have to suffer.
But with Owen, the words rushed out of my mouth. “I had a good morning!” I would say as we sat down. And he would put the two mugs of coffee on the table, sit down across from me, and say, “Tell me,” as if he hadn’t anywhere else to be or anything else to do. “Tell me everything”—as if my progress made him personally happy, as if he had a stake in it. And so I would. I have never had a traditional mentor in my life, but those early afternoons with Owen were as close as I ever got.
That’s where things rested for months. I walked Bandit five days a week. Owen and I had our midday coffee in his dining room when he was home. He listened eagerly and because I was so hungry to share my early morning secret, I was the one who talked and talked. Over those months I learned very little about his life until late one Thursday night, after midnight, when my phone rang, startling me awake. Owen sounded frantic.
“Bandit’s gone” were his first words. I wasn’t fully awake. I didn’t quite understand.
“Gone where?”
“I just got home and he’s not here and the backyard gate is open.”
“I’m sure I didn’t—” I started to say.
“No, of course not,” he cut me off, “I didn’t mean to imply. I just picked up the phone without thinking.” I heard him take a deep breath and then another. “I woke you,” he said, sounding only minimally calmer. “I’m sorry, Anna. What can you do? Please, go back to sleep.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
WHEN I PULLED UP TO OWEN’S HOUSE, the kitchen and dining room lights were blazing. I could see him pacing as I let myself in through the back door.
“I walked the streets calling him but it’s dark and he’s black and …” He sat down at the table. “Nothing.”
“Has he done this before? Gotten out?”
“Never.”
“Let’s try again. We’ll take the car. You drive and I’ll look — we can cover more area that way.”
Slowly Owen drove the dark streets of his neighborhood. The streetlights were dim and far apart, yielding only modest pools of amber light here and there. Most of the small houses were dark by now as well. It was close to one in the morning.
“Try the dog park,” I said, and Owen turned left and then left again and there was the shuttered gate of the park, padlocked for the night.
We got out of the car and walked the perimeter, calling the dog’s name into the empty air. He would have come if he had heard us. I knew that. He wasn’t there.
“I’m so sorry,” Owen said.
I shook my head.
“This is my problem and I woke you up. I don’t know what I thought.…”
We were back at his car, our eyes still searching the blackness with the hope of somehow seeing a large black dog come loping out of the gloom toward us.
“I love this dog, too,” I told him, and it was true. This furry, ill-trained, exuberant dog had gathered in a piece of my heart. I put my hand on Owen’s arm and he took my hand in his without looking at me.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s gone for good,” he said. “I didn’t want him, that’s the truth, and I certainly didn’t want to love him, but here we are.”
“Let’s drive the streets again.”
And we did, only this time Owen drove with one hand and held my hand with his other. I scanned the sidewalks and front yards for a hint of motion, any motion, and called Bandit’s name as Owen inched the car down street after street. And then, when we were very close to his house, I saw a man — he seemed quite young, maybe early twenties — standing under one of the streetlights, his long blond hair bright against the darkness. Bandit sat by his side, calmly, a leash attached to his collar. It looked like they were waiting to be found.
Owen was looking to his left, his eyes scanning the opposite side of the street, so he didn’t see the man smile and then spread his arms out as if to say, Here I am. His blond hair fell over his shoulders and shimmered in the light. He looked like an angel.
“Owen, look!”
I was watching the man and Bandit, so I didn’t see Owen’s face when he saw the pair, but I felt the car jolt to a stop and heard him swear, “Of all the fucking idiotic—”
The blond man ambled over to Owen’s window and looked in. His eyes did a swift sweep of me before smiling at Owen.
“I found your dog,” he said.
“None of this is the least bit amusing, you know.”
The man shrugged and then grinned. He was beautiful. He knew he was beautiful.
“Put the dog in the car,” Owen said without a trace of civility in his voice.
The man opened the back door and Bandit happily leapt in, but the man wasn’t done. He kept his hand on Owen’s door through the open window.
“Very nice, Owen,” he said, looking at me.
“Go home, Tony.” And the man stepped back, raised his hands in surrender.
For the two blocks it took to get Bandit home, Owen said nothing and his eyes never left the road. I watched his profile, waiting for him to speak, willing him to explain — who was this Tony? — but I said nothing. I remember feeling, as we drove home, that Owen’s anger put up an impenetrable shield. It’s what I told myself at the time.
BOTH OF US STOOD IN OWEN’S KITCHEN and watched Bandit drink from his water bowl as if he had just returned from a forced march through the Sahara — loud slurping noises and water spraying half the laundry room floor.
“I really thought he was gone,” Owen said.
We stood close together. I nodded. I was afraid of that, too. “Did that man, that Tony, find him, do you think?”
“No,” Owen said, “he took him.”
“And broke into your house,” I suddenly knew.
“Yes.”
“Not the best friend to have.”
Owen turned and looked at me then. He took my hand again. “I’m trying, Anna,” he said and then put his other hand on the side of my face.
When he leaned in to kiss me, the certainty leapt up within me that I had been waiting since the day I met him to move into his arms, to feel his body against mine. We stood in the brightly lit kitchen kissing softly until Owen turned off the light and led me into his bedroom, the one that contained a single bed. That night it was all that we needed.
Feeling Owen’s naked body against mine was a revelation. There was none of the awkwardness of the first time, that fumbling discovery of a new body that feels, at first, like a foreign country. Not with Owen. Our bodies knew each other — that’s the only way I can describe it. Touching Owen, moving with Owen, looking up into his face — it felt like coming home.