Here to Stay (11 page)

“Martha,” Sissy said. “I just bred her to Samson, you know that black-and-tan male of Gerard’s that’s out of Weather Station. That may be a little late for you if there’s a birthday involved…” Sissy almost hoped he would reject that possibility of buying one of her puppies. The thought of two experienced handlers like Clark and Berkeley showing one of her puppies weighed against fear of Elijah looking at Clark, seeing a resemblance between her ex and Ezra. But that worry was really just silly.

“Oh, you know, Sissy,” Clark said warmly. “She wants her pick, and she’d prefer to wait and get the puppy she really wants. I don’t know Samson, but I’ll see if Berkeley does.”

“I have photos of him and Martha if you’d like me to put them in the mail to you.”

“That would be great.”

Sissy reached for a pen and pad on the bedside table. Elijah said, “Want me to get the information?”

Sissy shook her head.

A moment later, when she’d hung up, she said, “That was Clark. He and his wife are interested in one of our puppies.”

Elijah did not point out that they had no puppies on the ground. He’d heard enough to gather the rest of the conversation.

He looked at Kennedy sleeping beside Sissy. He should not upset the new mother. This stopped him from saying, “Ever planning to tell him Ezra is his son?”

The devil was, Ezra looked like Clark. Surely Clark might spot the resemblance. Elijah remembered the one dog show where he’d seen Clark examining the children with interest. Had Clark seen a resemblance then?

Don’t say it,
he cautioned himself.
Not now.
There would be time later. Martha’s puppies, if the breeding had been successful, wouldn’t be born for weeks. Plenty of time for him to query the wisdom of bringing Clark around their house and their family.

Or, alternately, to suggest that it was only fair to tell him that Ezra was his natural son.

Elijah supposed that was part of what bothered him about Sissy’s apparent take on the situation. She seemed
undisturbed by Ezra’s never knowing his biological father—and by Clark’s never knowing his son.

I can’t bring it up now,
he counseled himself again, nearly exploding with the need to do so.

Instead, he said, “Can I get you something?” He saw her big empty juice bottle, which she used for a water glass when she was nursing, and he picked it up. “More water, anyway.”

July 3, 1979

E
LIJAH HAD SPENT
the last year treating Sissy as though nothing was different between them. In fact, nothing was. Ezra had always been Clark Treffinger-Hart’s biological son. Now Elijah knew about it; that was the only change.

His tradition had been to give Sissy a dog-related present every anniversary, usually something silly that concealed something romantic. Last year, devastated by what he’d discovered after Ezra’s snakebite, he’d had trouble summoning the energy and had settled on some fourteen-karat gold earrings shaped like German shepherds.

This year had been even harder. He still loved Sissy, but their relationship now felt unreal to him. She was lying to him about Ezra; he was lying to her about knowing about Ezra.

Anyhow, why give someone a dog gift when they had the real thing, these incredibly beautiful animals that surpassed humans in their ability to love and, most of all, to forgive. People said animals had no free will, but Elijah remembered warning Bonnie, a sable female who liked to knock over puppies, that if she did it again she’d
have a time-out. As one of the puppies had walked past her, Bonnie had looked at the puppy, then at Elijah. Quite deliberately, she’d knocked the puppy over. Then, before he could more than take one step toward her, she’d headed straight into her crate for time-out. No free will? Right.

This year, for their anniversary, he’d asked a local artist whom Sissy admired to paint Teddy’s portrait. Teddy was thirteen, with gray on his muzzle, and Sissy loved him profoundly. Elijah, on the pretense of taking the dog to the park to “work on obedience” and “observe him,” had brought Teddy to sit for the painter. Now, as dinnertime approached and he waited for Sissy to return from a tennis match with Allie Morgan, her childhood friend whose family’s cabin was two houses down, it occurred to him that he’d gone to the trouble with Teddy to prove to himself that he loved Sissy exactly as he always had.

And he recognized, too, that it wasn’t true at all.

But when she came in, when she unwrapped the present that had taken such time and money and trouble and turned to him with shining eyes, he saw that she saw nothing different in him, nothing different between them. So he supposed it had been worth it for that.

September 10, 1979

E
LIJAH STOOD
in a farmyard less than a quarter mile from the gas station where he had first met Lucky, decades before. It was Vincent Cory’s farmyard. Police and Humane Society workers hurried about, working, talking. Photographers from two newspapers and a tele
vision camera crew had arrived. Elijah wore a suit jacket, his tie loose, and a pair of Wellies he kept in the trunk of his car for such occasions. He could not bring the filth of this place back to his home, his kennels, especially not to Martha’s new litter. He crouched beside the body of a pit bull bitch, worn out by multiple breedings, emaciated, now fed upon by insects, then got up and walked away, heading for one of the outbuildings where Vince Cory had been raising toy breeds.

Here, the brood bitches had had the worst time. Toys didn’t birth easily at the best of times. Elijah was numb, numb to what he saw around him. He’d become numb from overexposure to such things. Then there was the fact that Eddy awoke and cried from 1:00 a.m. till 5:00 a.m. every night. Sissy nursed her, and then Elijah walked with her, singing to her, talking to her, telling her he wished he could understand what she needed to stop crying.

And now, within, oh, ten minutes, he could look forward to some member of the press asking if didn’t he breed dogs in his backyard? How could he justify doing that while there were so many unwanted dogs in the world?

And he would give the same answers again. He would say that he and Sissy were not “backyard breeders,” that their dogs’ hips and elbows, temperament and more, were thoroughly tested before they were bred. Furthermore, his dogs were also pets, members of the family. They slept inside with their masters. Genesis German shepherd dogs had been featured in
The German Shepherd Quarterly,
and so on.

But weren’t there enough dogs in the world already? the reporters would persist.

Sometimes, Elijah wanted to shout that no, there weren’t, there were just too many rotten people. He’d juggled his career and the kennels for, well, really just for six years or so, and it had become more of an issue as time wore on. None of these people would have trouble with any of the neglected or abused animals he’d rescued over the years becoming his pet, but start raising dogs who will never be abused and people screamed, “Hypocrite!”

Ten minutes later, he answered those same questions. “Actually, we do spay and neuter our animals that we don’t want to breed. Now, are there more questions about what we’ve discovered here?”

“Mr. Workman, do you think there are more puppy mills in our area?”

“We hope not. The Humane Society is remaining vigilant in investigating suspected puppy mills and making sure they’re closed down and the people responsible brought to justice. We invite the public to call us if they note any suspicious activity that might suggest the existence of a puppy mill.”

“Mr. Workman,” asked the television journalist. “Is it true the puppy mill owner in this case was also involved in illegal dogfights?”

“We’re looking into that. And
all
staged dogfights are illegal.” He thought of his uncle Silas, who had died two years before. Elijah had found homes for Silas’s dogs, fostering them at his own place rather than letting them be put down.

When Elijah returned to his car, he changed shoes and threw the Wellingtons in the trunk again, moving
Sissy’s tennis racket. She had recently begun playing tennis at the country club. She was not a member; Elijah could not afford it.

Elijah noticed that the people she was seeing the most were those she’d been friends with when they were in high school, and their social network revolved around the country club. He thought of that as he returned home that evening and found Sissy sitting on the deck with Eddy and their neighbor Allie Morgan.

Walking out onto the deck, Elijah found Sissy laughing hard at something Allie had said.

He sat down with them, and Ezra came out of the house and climbed into his lap. Sissy said to Allie, “And what are they going to do about that?” continuing a conversation about Allie’s brother, Jay, and his wife.

“Well, they’re going to take him to a specialist. It’s the only way to find out what’s wrong.”

Elijah said, “What’s this?”

“My brother’s son. He has—I guess you’d call them behavioral problems. He doesn’t like to be around people. He gets very upset when things don’t go his way.”

That sounded a bit familiar to Elijah. “Does he do all right in school?”

Allie rolled her eyes. “How could he? I mean, grade school is largely about learning to get along with others, and he simply can’t deal with that.”

Elijah gave Sissy a meaningful look. He had a feeling though, that Gene’s problems—or the decision about whether
he
should see a specialist—might be taken out of their hands by the school.

Sissy determinedly avoided his gaze. She insisted Gene was just “a difficult child.” That was putting things
mildly, though she was sometimes obviously hurt by Gene’s lack of affection.

Sissy changed the subject, asking him, “How was work?”

Elijah made a slight face. “Puppy mill bust.”

“You showered—”

“At work,” Elijah finished, not appreciating her tone. He knew better than she the diseases rampant at puppy mills, and that the lives of Martha’s puppies depended upon not becoming infected.

“Where was it?” Sissy asked in a slightly more conciliatory tone.

“Vince Cory’s, believe it or not.”

“I believe it,” she answered. “I bet he’s been matching dogs, too.” She also remembered that Elijah’s first dog, Lucky, had been a victim of Vince Cory’s cruelty.

“If so, the details will probably come out,” Elijah admitted, taking off his tie, which Ezra then proceeded to try to put on. Ezra, who Sissy undoubtedly still believed she was passing off as Elijah’s son. That lie was so destructive he couldn’t contemplate it. What he cared about these days was Gene. What to do about Gene.

He counted Sissy, Eddy, Ezra, two German shepherds and Belle lounging on the deck. Whiteout had passed away that summer, and Elijah still missed him. Belle sniffed him out and lay at his feet. “Where’s Gene?” he asked Sissy.

“His room,” she said, “probably reading.”

As though Gene was just your average slightly bookish kid.

Which he was not.

S
ISSY LAY ON THE BED
nursing Eddy when Elijah came in and lay beside her in his sweatpants and a Humane Society T-shirt, still looking lean and hard. But also, she saw him as her deeply traditional husband, and sometimes she found that side of him limiting.

Sissy gazed into his brown eyes.
I’m still so in love with you,
she thought. And he was a good husband. But so damned aloof, as though he’d put up a wall between them. She’d never come up with a good reason for his distance from her. She’d wondered if it was just his grief over her father’s death, but the timing wasn’t quite right.

As Eddy dropped off to sleep, Sissy moved the infant onto her stomach and readjusted her nursing bra. “Elijah, can you tell me what’s wrong?”

“I’m thinking about Gene. He needs to see someone.”

“He’s not that strange!” Sissy immediately exclaimed. “He just—I don’t know. He’s different. He’s smart.”

Yes. An I.Q. test at school had put him at 155. But his teachers still had questions about him.

And Elijah thought of his son, pictured his strange mechanical gait, heard his flat voice, a voice without inflection. “I’ve wondered if it could be a kind of autism.”

Sissy stared at him. “Autistic people don’t talk, Elijah. Not like Gene.”

“Some of them do. Some have good language skills. Sissy, he knows how many numbers are in the phone book. Not just how many phone numbers—the total number of digits. And think about his thing with arachnids.”

Sissy shuddered slightly. She shared Ezra’s distaste for scorpions, but Gene seemed to like spiders and, especially, scorpions to the exclusion of everything else, reading way beyond his grade level, memoriz
ing their Latin names. He captured both spiders and scorpions, kept them in jars in his room, captured insects for them. He talked about them incessantly. Nonetheless…“What about it? He’s bright. And he likes dogs, too.”

“No,” Elijah said. “He trusts dogs.” The kennel had become Gene’s favorite hiding place when he was upset. Besides Martha, his favorite of the dogs was Oak, who seemed to regard him as a son or nephew, a puppy. But Elijah had noticed that, though Gene felt safe with the dogs, his interest was not of the passionate kind he felt for scorpions. “And, Sissy, he doesn’t have normal reactions to other people’s feelings. When you get mad at him, sometimes he doesn’t even notice.”

Sissy blinked. “What does all this mean?”

“It means—I don’t know. I don’t know what they can do, but he’s going to need special help. We should deal with this sooner rather than later.”

“Elijah, I don’t think he’s handicapped, and I don’t want you taking him to someone who’s going to say he is!”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to say that. But we need to take him to the doctors and find out just what he needs.”

“Fine,” Sissy said.

Elijah reached toward her, touched her hair, tried not to think of the differences between Ezra and Gene, about the fact that Gene was of his blood and Ezra was not.