Listen! (9780062213358) (14 page)

Charley points to the clock on the DVD player. “Nine forty-two. I'm going to take Coyote a bedtime snack.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Somewhere close,” she says.

Outside the rain has dwindled to a heavy mist. The lights of the city, reflected by the clouds, give the gravel road a tone of pale gray against the deep shadows of the woods. She whistles and calls for Coyote. “I've got a biscuit. A big one!” Then she stands very still and listens. Distant thunder growls. Water drips from the trees.

She calls Coyote again, mentions the biscuit again. Nothing. She whistles two more times and is about to whistle again when she hears movement among the trees. She calls again. In a few moments a shape, pale in the darkness, materializes out of the trees. Coyote moves across the road and stands a few feet away, his tail waving. He has come when she called. Out of the woods. At night! “Good dog! I brought you a bedtime snack.” She holds out the biscuit and says, “Sit,” as she always does with Sadie.

He stands for a moment, looking up at her, and then, to her complete astonishment, he sits. She gives him the biscuit. He crunches down on it and pieces fall to the ground. He swallows the first bit, then stands up to get the others, picking them up from the road one at a time. When he has gotten the last crumbs, he doesn't immediately bolt back to the woods. Slowly and gently, Charley reaches to pat him on the head. He allows her to do this, his tail moving slightly.

Charley has an idea, suddenly. So radical is this idea that she stands for a moment, trying to decide whether it's even possible. Yes. It is. “Stick around,” she says to Coyote. “I'm going to get you some liver.”

She turns and hurries back to the house, leaving Coyote at the edge of the road. Inside, she piles a handful of liver pieces onto a saucer. Then she changes into her sleep T-shirt and gathers sheets, a light blanket, and a pillow from the linen closet. “I'm trying an experiment,” she tells her father as she heads for the stairs, the saucer of liver balanced on the pile of linens in her arms. “Sarita,” she calls as she starts down, holding the railing and moving carefully to keep from dropping anything. “Is it okay if I come through your room?”

“Sure. What's up?” Sarita is in bed, reading.

“I'm going to spend the night in Mom's studio.”

Sarita puts down her book. “You're going to what?”

“I'll explain tomorrow. Is it okay if I use your bathroom in the night?”

“Of course.”

At the closed door of her mother's studio, Charley stops for a moment. Can she do this? Yes, she decides. Yes. It's the only way.

She turns on the light at the wall switch, closes the door behind her, and goes to the daybed under the farthest window. Setting down the liver, she dumps the linens on the floor and begins moving the boxes from the bed to the worktable, putting them on the floor underneath it. When she has spread the sheets and blankets on the bed and settled the pillow in place, she surveys the room, trying to see it through Coyote's eyes. Too bright. Charley turns on the desk lamp and switches off the overhead lights. Better.

Then she opens the outside door and the screen, slides the metal disk in place to keep the screen door propped open, and steps, barefoot, outside under the roof overhang. It is raining again, and lightning brightens the sky intermittently as thunder rumbles closer. The woods of the empty lot next door are dark against the sky.

“Coyote!” she calls up toward the road. “Coyote,
liver
!” She puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles, once, twice. Then she gets the liver and stands, watching and listening. “Liver! Come get some liver.”

After a moment Charley hears, over the sound of the rain, the light jingle of the tag on Coyote's collar. He appears in the spill of soft light from the door, his ears down, rain dripping from his nose. “Liver,” she says, holding a piece out to him. He looks at the house, his shoulders hunched, and then slowly, cautiously, moves forward and takes it from her fingers.

Charley backs through the open door and holds out another piece. “More,” she says to him. “Come in and get it.”

He stands in the rain and begins to whine. “It's okay. You can come in. It's dry in here.”

Coyote whines again, but doesn't come. Charley is trying to decide whether to go back and give him another piece of liver outside, when lightning flashes blue-white, and thunder cracks. Coyote scuttles in through the door, snatches the liver from her hand, swallows, and then stands, shivering and looking around the dim, shadowy room. Charley discovers she is holding her breath. Coyote is inside the house. She is afraid to move, afraid he'll realize what he's done and scuttle back into the rain.

Lightning flashes again, and thunder follows almost immediately. The rain is pouring now. Coyote looks from Charley to the open door. She offers him another piece of liver, and he takes it. Still, she barely dares to breathe. She wants to go close the doors and keep him inside, dry and safe. But she knows what a closed door means to him, knows he would feel trapped, the way he was in that shed. She stands, watching, as he checks out the room, his eyes darting back to the open door again and again. “I won't close it,” she tells him. “You can stay in or go out, whatever you want. If you want some more liver, you should sit.”

He looks up at her and then sits. Piece by piece Charley gives him the rest of the liver. When he has finished it, she holds her empty hands up to him. “All gone,” she says.

After a moment Coyote lies down, facing the open door, his chin on his outstretched paws. “Good boy,” Charley says. Moving slowly and carefully, she goes to the desk lamp and switches it off. Darkness closes in, so that now what little light there is comes from the sky outside. The rain continues steadily. Coyote stays where he is. Lightning flashes again, and she can see his form outlined against the open doorway. The thunder comes a moment later. The storm, Charley thinks, is moving away.

Slowly, so that she doesn't startle him, Charley gets into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin. The studio may get a little wet and a little buggy with the door open all night, she thinks. But Coyote is in the house.

Thank you, she thinks to the storm. If it hadn't been for the thunder and lightning, she doesn't know if this idea would have worked. But it did. It did. Two steps forward today, she thinks. This second step is such a big one she wants to shout in triumph. Coyote is
in the house
.

C
harley wakes up twice during the night. Both times it is still raining. Both times she can make out Coyote's form lying on the floor, head toward the open door. The second time he is stretched out on his side, his tail out behind him, a picture of relaxation. It is too warm and muggy in the room to keep the blanket on. Charley drops it onto the floor and Coyote raises his head at the sound, looks at her for a moment, and then lies down again, with a deep sigh that seems to Charley to be a sigh of pure contentment. It is the most wonderful sound Charley has ever heard.

When she wakes again, the rain has stopped and weak sunlight is filtering through the trees of the lot next door, the wet leaves glittering like diamonds as they move in the morning breeze. Coyote is gone.

It's okay, Charley thought. He spent the night. And he knows now that he can do that and leave whenever he needs to. Someday, she is sure, she'll be able to invite him in and then close the door behind him. She'll be able to bring him in upstairs and he'll sleep in her room, at the foot of her bed. But for now this will do. For now she will sleep in the studio and let him come and go as he wants. She lies for a moment, looking at her mother's photographs on the walls. This is the Eagle Lake her mother saw, the Eagle Lake Charley is coming to know so well.

After breakfast, after the walk with Coyote, clouds move in again and it begins to rain. Coyote settles into his spot behind the boxwoods and Charley, with nothing else to do, takes her laptop to the breakfast table and turns it on. She checks her e-mail and watches the list of messages scroll onto the screen. There is the usual collection of spam and a few forwarded jokes from her friends.

The last message is from someone she doesn't know: “Skiguy5.” And there's an attachment. She is about to delete it when she notices that the subject line says, “Hey, Charley!” Whoever it is, he knows her name. She clicks the symbol at the bottom of her screen to be sure her virus scan is on and opens the message.

Charley sits for a long moment, staring at the computer screen. “No matter what you think.” She would have deleted this message if she had known who it was from. “How's your leg?” Charley realizes she hardly ever thinks about her leg these days. And she isn't mad at Amy anymore. But friends? So much has changed that she isn't sure what she feels now. Two more weeks. How can summer be over so soon?

She clicks on the JPEG attachment, and the photo appears on her screen. It's a picture of a tennis court with a silvery lake showing beyond it and pine-tree-covered mountains rising in the distance, but it's weirdly off center. So far to the left that she's almost out of the picture entirely, a girl she doesn't recognize is swinging a blurry racket. If this is supposed to be a picture of that girl, it's a waste. Charley is about to close it down when she notices that the figure sitting on a bench on the right, also almost out of the picture, is Becky Sue Lindner. She is dressed in a tennis outfit, holding a racket in one hand and picking her nose with the other. In spite of herself, Charley laughs out loud.

T
ime is suddenly getting away from her. With only two weeks until she will have to go to school, Charley decides she needs to spend more of every day with Coyote. Partly it's because the more they're together, the faster The Taming will go, and partly because she is already feeling how hard it will be to leave him for most of every day when school starts.

Charley has moved some of her things into the studio and sleeps there every night. Coyote spends the night with her most of the time. It gets humid and buggy with the screen door propped open, but whenever she tries to close it, he scurries out and won't come back. Charley's father says she can't just leave the door open indefinitely or the dampness could ruin everything in the studio, but she reminds him that she leaves it closed all day. “After a while he'll get used to being inside,” she assures him, “and then I'll be able to close it.”

In the mornings when she wakes up, Coyote has gone, and she finds him lying out at the end of the driveway when she goes outside. Then, on Day Sixty of The Taming, Charley opens her eyes to see him lying there still, the sun through the blinds making stripes on his golden fur. He raises his head to look at her. “Good morning,” she says, and slowly sits up. He stays where he is, his tail thumping lightly on the floor. Gingerly, careful not to make any sudden moves, Charley slips out of bed onto her knees and reaches to pet him. He rolls over onto his side and lets her rub his chest. The connection Charley feels this time is like a steady vibration up through her arm and into her heart. This is more than a step forward, she thinks. Something very big has changed between them.

She tells Sarita about this when she goes upstairs, and is surprised to find herself blinking back tears.

Charley lets the morning walks become longer. The air is filled, these August days, with the thrum of cicadas, the chirp of crickets and katydids. She finds that she is listening with her eyes, her nose, her skin, as well as her ears. One day she feels a fly walking on her arm and watches as it stops and rubs its front feet together, then cleans its head, its iridescent blue-green body gleaming in the sun. She moves her arm, and it flies away. It was just an ordinary fly. If she could have gotten a picture of it in that moment before it flew, she wonders, would anyone else see how beautiful it was?

On August 9, the sixty-first day of The Taming, when they get around the shallow end of the lake and are heading home, Mrs. Davis and Jeremy and Bethanne are in the water by the swim raft, the kids in life jackets, Mrs. Davis on an inflatable chair with a glass of wine in the cup holder. Sadie is with them, splashing and barking. Charley watches the dog climb the ladder to the swim raft and jump off. No one has thrown something for her to retrieve. She just does it by herself.