He’s making sure I’m not dangerous, I realized. Making sure I won’t hurt Benny. Good; I’d do the same. I turned my head and licked Benny’s face very gently, for Sam’s benefit. Play with us! I thought, but he was already heading for the kitchen, mumbling about dinner.
“Hey, dog. Hey, girl. You like it here, don’t you?” Benny patted me on top of the head, pat pat pat, making me blink. I yawned in agreement. “Want to see my room?”
We ran upstairs.
Fabulous room, I thought, and then, Good Lord, where is the cleaning lady? But so many things to smell and taste and roll around in, toys and clothes and food, a smorgasbord for the senses.
Except sight. Strangest thing, but it was like seeing sepia in blue instead of brown. I couldn’t see red, and everything was muted, like the loveliest twilight. Except blue. With flashes of yellow. Hard to describe, but I liked it. I found it very… calming.
Benny showed me his dinosaur floor puzzle and his new Batmobile that lit up, made sounds, and shot out a weapon. He showed me all his dump trucks and bulldozers. I heard about his best friend, Mo, his second-best friend, Jenny; first grade was starting soon; Dad built him the coolest playhouse in the backyard; wait’ll I saw it. He had a new bike; he could write the whole alphabet and count to “a billion.” He had two loose teeth. “And my dad can throw his voice.” Music to my ears, every word, even when my attention wandered. “And my mom’s in the hospital” grabbed it back.
I worked my nose out of an old tennis shoe and joined Benny on top of the unmade bed.
“She fell in the river and hurt her head and she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t drown but now she’s got a coma. It’s like sleeping a really long, long time and not waking up.”
I nudged him with my head until it was under his arm. We sat like that awhile.
“Dad says she’ll wake up. He promised. We do prayers at night. We go look at her. He pretends like she can hear and reads stuff to her.” He flopped down on his back. “She can’t move or anything.”
He stretched his arms up and played with his fingers. Dear, stubby, dirty, little-boy fingers. “She worked a lot, but we used to ride bikes. And run and stuff. We played games. She talked a lot. Spaghetti!” He bolted up and scrambled off the bed.
I’d been smelling it, too. “He makes it all the time,” Benny said, “but it’s good.” His mood changed again and he stood still in his wreck of a room, staring into space. He’d grown in two months, or maybe it was all the curly hair making him look taller. But it was his face that broke my heart. Not as round, the bones more prominent. And this new silence. How many times I’d wished he would put a cork in it, my nonstop talker, my sweet If-I -think-i t-I – must-say-i t son.
“Benny!” I said. “Bruf!”
“Let’s eat,” he said, and we ran down to dinner.
“How about Gumball?”
“Gumball!” Hysterical laughter.
“Or… Falafel?”
Benny blew milk out of his nose.
“Easy,” Sam said, chuckling, handing him his napkin. “Hey, I know. She sticks to you-we could call her Velcro.”
Another laugh attack. “Or Glue!” Benny drummed his feet against his chair.
Under the table, I was having mixed feelings. On one hand, it was nice to be the center of attention, plus every now and then Benny dropped a piece of French bread on the floor; much better than Purina Dog Chow. But on the other hand, these name suggestions were ridiculous. Benny’s were worse than Sam’s-Jezebel, Caramba, Muffin, Baloney. Be serious! I wanted to tell them. I don’t want to go through life called Hairy-et.
Benny got sidetracked and started telling Sam about school supplies he needed for the first day of first grade, which crayons, what kind of colored pencils. I’d been looking forward to that shopping trip since spring. Now I wouldn’t even get to take him to school. Soon, though, the conversation swerved back to what to name the dog.
“Blunderbuss,” Benny snorted, swaying in his seat, overcome with his cleverness. “Blinderbluss. Bladdabladda. Bliddablidda. Bliddabladdabliddabl-”
“Hey, I have an idea,” Sam said seriously. About time he settled Benny down. If he got revved up this close to bedtime, he couldn’t fall asleep for hours. “How about if we call her Sonoma?”
Sonoma. I crawled out from under the table. That’s not bad.
“ Sonoma?” Benny said. “Why?”
“Because that’s where we were when we hit her. Georgetown and Sonoma Road.”
They looked at me. I looked at them. “ Sonoma,” they said together. “Do you like it?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” said Benny.
Me, too.
Good thing they didn’t hit me on Roosevelt.
“One more, Daddy, please? Just one more, I promise.”
That’s what he said after the last story. This was new behavior; Benny was a pretty good sleeper, rarely had histrionics at bedtime, would often drift off in the middle of the first chapter. From my spot at the bottom of the bed, I could see he was exhausted, hear it in his croaky voice.
Sam sighed. “Hey, buddy,” he said gently, closing the book. “We talked about this before, remember? What we said?”
“Yeah.”
“What did we say?”
“I can go to sleep.”
“You can go to sleep… and what?”
“Wake up.”
“That’s right.”
“Not like Mom.”
Oh, no.
“Right. You can let yourself fall asleep, and in the morning you’ll wake up-what?”
“Bigger, better, and stronger.”
“That’s right. Brand-new day.” He gave Benny a soft kiss on the forehead. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. You sleep tight, Benster. Love you.”
“Love you. Can Sonoma stay with me?”
“Nope.” Sam stood up and slapped his thigh-my cue to leave. I considered my options. Jumped off the bed.
“Leave the light on, okay? And the door open!”
“Don’t I always?”
That ritual was familiar to me: hall light on, bedroom door ajar; Benny was afraid of the dark. Afraid of falling asleep because he might not wake up? That killed me. I wanted to cry, but all that came out was a high, whining sound in the back of my throat as I followed Sam down the steps. He thought it meant I had to go to the bathroom, and took me outside.
The red nylon leash not only annoyed me-where did he think I was going to go?-it also made it harder to do my business in private. Silly, maybe, but I was not going to squat in front of my husband. I managed by sidling around a gap in the Hortons’ privet hedge next door, out of view. A particularly good spot because it was between two streetlights and therefore dark, or as dark as our suburban Bethesda neighborhood ever got.
How wonderful to be back, even under these, the most peculiar circumstances imaginable. I was feeling a kind of excitement that went beyond the fact that I was home again. The smells! I could even see better than usual, which was odd, considering that in daylight I saw slightly less well. Maybe it was because I had such big pupils. Whatever-everything was incredibly sharp and interesting and I could not get enough of the smells. Feral, musky, smoky, dusty-my vocabulary would run out before I could name them all. Anyway, it didn’t matter if I was sniffing a “squirrel”; I could only concentrate on that spicy-dirty smell, the essence of “squirrel.” I could flare my nostrils, inhale, and taste it on the roof of my mouth, the back of my tongue, all the way down my throat and into my vitals. And it was fascinating.
The phone was ringing when we got home.
“Hi, Delia,” Sam said, and I skidded to a stop on my way to the kitchen for a drink of water. My sister! “We went this afternoon, yeah. Well… not much change, I guess. No. Although sometimes I swear she can hear me.”
Sam carried the phone to the living room sofa and sat down. “Right. I know… Right.”
These long pauses while Delia talked were driving me crazy. What’s she saying? I jumped up next to Sam-who reacted as if I’d thrown up on him, leaping to his feet, sweeping me to the floor one-handed. Sheesh.