Then I drowned.
Now Sam had to go back to a job he hated. Benny had to face first grade without a mother, and after school he had to go to Monica Carr’s house. Sam had to sell his beautiful cabin to pay the insurance bills. Everything was going to hell, and it was my fault.
I might as well lie down in the street and get hit by another car.
I would have, except just then Sam said, “Delia’s coming down tomorrow and we’re all going to Hope Springs to visit Laurie. You can come along, Pop, but you don’t have to. I know it’s hard to-”
“No, I’d like to come. Thanks, Sam. For including me. I feel bad that I haven’t gone to see her more often.”
I couldn’t remember Charlie visiting me at all. But this was great! “All” must mean the whole family-Sam would take me, too. They encouraged pets at places like Hope Springs -we were therapeutic!
My God, this was it. The answer, the key. Tomorrow would change everything. I didn’t know how-I just knew it would. All I’d wanted was my family back, and in a way, a most peculiar way, I’d gotten it. It was time to get myself back.
They didn’t take me.
It took me until the last second to figure it out, when Sam stuck his foot across my chest, said, “No, Sonoma, you stay here. Stay, girl, we’ll be back. Guard the house,” and shut the front door in my face.
Unbelievable. All my hopes, dashed in an instant. The capriciousness, the absolute tyranny of humans over dogs had never hit me before. If I hadn’t known it would make everything worse, I’d have hurled my sixty-pound body over and over against that obstinate closed door until one of us broke. Now I wouldn’t even see my sister!
But worse, much worse, I wouldn’t see myself. And after conceiving the idea, I’d only grown more certain that that was the only way out. How it would work, exactly, I had no idea-how could I, when I didn’t know how this bizarre business had started in the first place?-I just knew I had to try. To reconnect. To reclaim myself.
Which meant I had to escape.
Stratford Road, our one-block-l ong street in suburban Bethesda, was such a safe, sweet neighborhood, sometimes we didn’t even lock the doors. Sam and I used to say we ought to do something about the basement windows, which were small, old-f ashioned casements set high in the walls, grimy and cobwebby, most of them rusted shut if nothing else-but we never got around to it. I knew which one was the most vulnerable: the one in the furnace room over the fuel tank. Last spring two oil company guys had come to service the furnace, and in the process they’d opened that window to pass tools back and forth.
The hardest part was getting up on top of the fuel tank, slippery, stinky, rusty, dusty metal, four feet high, but where there’s a will there’s a way. What a godsend that the window opened outward on its hinges. All I had to do was pull the lever down with my teeth and push against the glass with my head. “All,” I say; I almost broke a tooth, and the gap I finally pushed open was so narrow, I scraped my backbone scrambling through it. But I got out. I stood on the hot driveway pavement, triumphant, and shook myself. Call me MacGyver.
Hope Springs was in Olney, technically another Washington suburb but a really faraway one, twenty miles or so up Georgia Avenue from the district line. My best bet would be to take Georgetown Road to I-2 70, get off at the Beltway, follow it to Georgia, head north. In a car, that’s probably half an hour. On foot…
Well, no point in thinking about it. Just put one paw in front of the other. Dogs can travel amazing distances-you hear that all the time-and they only have their senses to rely on. I had senses and an extremely clear and vivid mental map of Montgomery County, acquired from years of driving clients around to look at properties. Talk about a head start. I set off at a confident lope.
At the corner of York and Custer, though, I paused. A car coming down the hill honked; I scuttled over to the right, into the Givens’ side yard. Something kept me idling there instead of heading left-my route, my way out. Some nagging little thing I couldn’t identify. Not until I turned right and trotted down the sidewalk a little ways and found myself-hey, how did this happen?-in front of Monica Carr’s house.
And speak of the devil. Wouldn’t you know? Sunday was the day Gilbert, the ex-husband, got the twins, so what did Monica do on her one day off, the single childless day of the week she could’ve done anything she liked? Did she go shopping? Take a drive, go to a museum, a movie, visit friends, go on a date? No. She stayed home and perfected her already perfect front-yard perennial garden. It was all flowers, no grass-she grew an emerald green carpet of that in the backyard-and it was beautiful. I would like to say Monica’s garden was precious and too planned, or too artificially rustic, or too self-conscious and full of itself, but it was none of those. It was magazine-l ovely eleven months of the year, and in its off-month it had “winter interest.”
There she was, deadheading the rudbeckia. In khaki shorts and a sleeveless top that showed off her tan and her tight runner’s body. I sat on the sidewalk and watched her through the spokes of the wrought-i ron fence surrounding the garden, surprised when a growl, low but definite, vibrated in the back of my throat. Could I be a violent dog? How interesting. I lifted my lips and bared my teeth, ex perimenting. Whoa. Rush of aggression!
I heard the phone ring in the house before Monica did. She tossed her clippers down and ran inside, and that’s when I decided this was my chance. To do what? A dog’s strong suit isn’t planning ahead.
Simple to get in-the gate was open. Inside, nothing smelled very interesting; squirrels and chipmunks probably took one look at all the pristine gorgeousness and went next door. Monica had everything: the flowers you’d expect in late August, gaillardia, daisies, asters, salvia, cosmos, and then dozens more you had no name for, everything beautifully banked and clumped and color-coordinated, all of it lush and alive. I was drawn to a perfect side-by-side harmonization of low verbena and feathery coreopsis, deep purple and butter yellow. So simple, so lovely. I had to kill it.
The weed-f ree soil was, as you’d expect, rich and soft and loamy, and digging-I’d been a dog for almost a week now: How had the peerless, inimitable joys of digging in dirt eluded me? It was an all-encompassing feeling once you got going, once you figured out how much more efficient and satisfying it was to use all your appendages, all four feet and your snout. Thrilling, really, and so satisfying to see how high the piles of earth, stalks, stems, and flowers rose behind me, littering the brick walk, obscuring its tasteful herringbone pattern. Why stop at the verbena-coreopsis combo? Right beside it was a swath of ferns and hostas for green relief, and then came a spray of tall fountain grass-that would be a challenge. Excitement filled me. The first hosta plant came out so easily, I made the mistake of barking at it. Take that! Dead as a doornail. I started on its neighbor, one of the variegated kinds I’ve never liked anyway. And that! Die, you stupid plant, die like a-like a-
“Hey!”
Where did she come from? Monica had the phone in her hand. She stuck it to her ear, said, “I’ll call you back. There’s a dog in my yard, it-” She squinted. “ Sonoma?”
Busted.
She made a run for me-I jumped out of reach. She tried another off-balance lunge; I dodged the other way. Great fun. She looked so silly, and I was grace on four legs, shifting and feinting at the last second. Loser, I taunted, juking out of reach just before she could grab my collar. She tried stalking me next, hand out, voice coaxing. “Here, girl, it’s okay, c’mon, Sonoma, c’mon, girl.” Up yours.