The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (20 page)

It had to be around somewhere. Again I answered yes. I had read the notes on Alfie. Of course I had!

Agnes didn't leave my room as much as she stiffened up her back even straighter and withdrew in her no-noise shoes, quietly closing my door. I found the piece of paper after nearly giving up. I'd forgotten I had placed it on the tabletop of my carton. It had slipped between a cardboard side and the wall.

“Alfie,” I read.

 

Male, neutered. Greyhound. Age most likely three. Weight: fifty-eight pounds. Was taken with several other racing dogs from highly unethical persons, under Sanctuary guidance. Due to secrecy of the operation, and to protect the rescuers, location must never be revealed. After veterinary attention, a breed rescue group assumed responsibility for fostering and basic training. They were able to place the other dogs in homes. Ultimately they arranged to have Alfie transported here, due to findings of extreme alienation, complicated by his failure or refusal to learn habits of domestication, which make adoption an outlook not to be considered.

 

And then I read this: “Evie, please come to the dining room. I have a question of great importance concerning phone calls and messages. I am eager to have my question answered.”

Following the notes and message was a signature: “Agnes.”

I knew there was a jail in another part of the lodge, along with the infirmary and a holding area for new ones and sequesters. I hadn't seen it. I hadn't ventured out of my own little orbit, not even to visit the kennels or snoop around the office or find the living quarters of the staffers and Giant George. I liked my own neighborhood: a hall of only one occupied room, mine. I liked my routines of class and dogs and the dining room. Was there a jail I didn't know about, for trainees?

I pictured myself opening my window and being transformed to a bird, a paper airplane, snowflakes, anything that could join the wind and disappear. Where was my
phone?

I found it in a bureau drawer. My plan was to text Giant George for help and advice, throwing myself at his mercy, his inner hobbit. He'd hold it over me, but it might be worth it, I was thinking.

Something stopped me. I remembered that I was older than he was. I was
educated.
I was a Rottweiler like Tasha!

I returned the phone to the drawer. Mentally I went back in time to the moment before Agnes showed up. I'd been about to go online to find out about Scottish terriers—I still hadn't remembered anything about them from the breed book. I was nagging myself about getting around to Dora.

So that's what I did, making notes to myself very firmly, in a memorization way I knew would be permanent. I was totally focused.

Outer coat that's resistant to water, I memorized, plus a soft, short undercoat. Alert, good watchdog. Independent. Small, strong. Natural charm, which alternates with
don't fuck with me
(my words, not from a breed chart). Stubborn. Bold. Hunter of hole dwellers: foxes, weasels, badgers, Scottish Highland pests of all kinds. Sturdy. Adorable. Expert at competition, winner of best in shows all over the place, very often, lots and lots of prizes. An American president who had one was Franklin D. Roosevelt. His Scottie received more mail than he did. Can be prone to vanity, airs of superiority, feelings of grandeur. Takes stubbornness to extremes when sensing a situation requires it. After swearing a vow of loyalty, will never break it. Has a heart twice the size of its body. Many owners enjoy naming them Scottish names: Dundee, Thane, Duncan, Laird, Abby for Aberdeen. Stoic like an old-time, well, Stoic. Does not have a brain function to recognize size, especially concerning self. Fearless.

Then I wondered if the wallpaper Dora ate in that city apartment had been loose on the wall to begin with, or if she'd had to claw it first. I wondered if the vet who operated on her would tell me what he saw while doing her surgery, if I were to ask him. I wondered why a dog who was genetically incapable of knowing she was little was lying around acting tiny and weak like a quitter.

Then I smelled mealtime, and I jumped up to rush for the dining room to waylay Agnes and tell her I was sorry. I knew I had to do it without offering any sort of excuse. I had to do it as if presenting a fact. And I had to say, not so much in words, but with everything I was, “Okay, so I'm willing
to
let you teach me.
” Or maybe, “change me.” Or maybe they are the same thing.

I wasn't being suddenly practical, like if I didn't respond to her the right way, I wouldn't get food. Agnes had written something else, in a PS after her signature. I had tried very hard to ignore it. “PS, Evie,” she'd written. “In case you haven't discovered this yet, dogs don't tell lies.”

A
MENDS
,
MAKING
.
A dog who has a conscience can work at erasing a trainer's memory of poor behavior. This includes acts of aggression, destruction, disobedience, et cetera. The dog can offer the human a signal of let's let bygones be bygones.

A nice sit, followed by a raised paw held out like a bid for a handshake, can take care of it. So can a quick, polite, gracious lick on whatever skin of a human a dog is able to easily reach. There is also the traditional method of hanging one's head, tail down, muscles slack to the point of almost melting. Or a dog can choose to go for a big, dramatic gesture and drop to the floor and roll over, belly exposed like something someone could take advantage of, and bite into.

Conscience.
A type of dog who might lose or be robbed of a conscience, which all dogs are born with (I think), is a racing greyhound. Or maybe not lose or be robbed of. Maybe it has to grow, or be grown, or established, like
trust.
And maybe that never happens for greyhounds.

It's good for me to take a moment here to compare myself with Alfie, who's never once looked sorry for his puddles and piles of shit indoors, not even when everyone is telling him in all sorts of ways that what he's doing is
bad bad bad bad bad.

“Let's get to work on rehabilitating your conscience, Alfie.”

I must have said this to him already five hundred times. But I'm not giving up on him, even though not doing so feels like trying to raise the dead. I don't think he's, say, a sociopath or something.

Forgiveness.
Tall Agnes is not a primrose. She's not even a flower. She is a terrier, maybe with an undercoat of softness, maybe not.

This is her idea of forgiveness? Smile at me, and tell me she has an assignment for me? I'm in front of her like a belly-exposed dog saying I'm sorry for lying, and I'm going to be, from now on, the most perfect student anyone ever had, and she's not talking about lying or teaching, or even about whatever she was talking about in my room when she was talking to me about messages?

She wants me to write a set of notes for the staffers? On
myself?

I did a little pushback, very reasonably. I didn't give it away how Giant George brought up Sherlock Holmes and his drug of choice on the day we rescued Dapple. I only said I sort of suspected they had notes on me already. I didn't get into my awareness that they'd put together notes on me from information I hadn't disclosed, and never mind that I had no idea how they acquired it. I could not have been more polite or respectful when I asked, if they had background stuff on me, please could I see what they'd come up with?

You'd think I was one of the dogs, asking that question. I received a big no on it, not that she actually said “no.” She just looked at me like, do what I'm inviting you to do, Evie, and it's definitely not open to discussion.

Obedience
(which I'm getting sick of thinking about). Another word for it could be
surrender,
in a good way, somehow.

Rehabilitation.
How does a trainer of abused rescued dogs know for sure when the rehab is over? It's not like quitting something because you went too far with it, like a pendulum getting stuck at the extreme of a swing, and it looks for a while like maybe it will never come back. Or maybe they're the same thing, sort of. Maybe the rehab never stops. Maybe it's another infinite, another pi.

Alfie is anti-rehab. Everyone has to step over him to enter the dining room. He's been hanging around in the hall. Today he was so still, I bent down to his level to make sure he was breathing. He didn't want me in his face, but he didn't show me his teeth. I'm calling that a gain. I told him that if I were a member of his family, I'd automatically think his problems were mine too.

He looked at me like, what problems? He was telling me, Evie, the only problem here is
you.

Rejection.
I just found out that Giant George went on Skype with Josie to show her to a potential adopter, a woman who doesn't have kids and is too old to have a baby. It went well until Giant George made the mistake of putting his hands on her ears so he could tip up her head, as she was clueless about looking into a camera. She was sitting on his lap. She must have panicked about getting blocked from the little hearing she has. She nicked Giant George on the chin, like a shaving cut. Unfortunately it bled.

Relapses.
They happen. As dumb as this sounds, anytime you take two steps forward, it will probably mean taking one step back. It's not just Josie. Tasha forgot for a moment about not using her size as a way to be a thug. I saw her head over to Shadow, and I knew right away she was about to do a territory thing with him. She wanted to lie down in the exact spot he was in, fast asleep, in a patch of sunlight. I couldn't get to her in time to grab her. She was about to plop herself on top of him. With the mood Shadow's been in, he might have taken that as an act of war. I didn't panic. I did a quick, sincere call to the almost-thug, stopping her with the magic word of “Treat!”

So a relapse can be only an urge, which is then avoided in reality.

Truth.
The truth is, every day now, there are moments when I am very, very peaceful. Sometimes it's due to the face of a quiet, solemn dog, or the sky outside my window, or a mealtime in the dining room, or a staffer walking by me and saying hi in a way that makes me realize how all my life, until now, I'd never learned a good way of offering someone a hello. Sometimes it's from a discovery I made on my own in my room, or in a moment of watching staffers pat the dogs, or speak to them, and it occurs to me that
teach
isn't something they feel they should try to do. I don't think they even consider it a verb like any normal verb. It's more that, wherever they are, there it is. It's something they just
are.

Sometimes, the peacefulness happens to me all by itself, out of nowhere, for absolutely no reason.

M
RS. AUBERCHON WAS
stunned by the condition of the lodge.

All these years, she'd never thought about an outerness to the interiors she visited so freely in the bubble of her computer connections, for that was how she thought of it now: a bubble. In one awful moment, as the hilltop wind was swirling and blasting her, and her body was telling her she'd been crazy to make the walk from the inn, she came face-to-face with a reality that nearly made her cry.

But it was too cold for tears. Instead, she was mad at herself for being as simple-minded as a child. All those hours of all those words, all those streams of her voice, all those sentences of all those books, were gathered together in the place in herself where she was the Warden. The magic of it disappeared. The special purity she loved and depended on became a weak and faltering thing, like what happens to clean air in a room where a window's been opened, and grit and bad vapors rush in.

She wished she could blink and look again and see that it was all as she'd pictured it, based on photos on the Sanctuary's website and in their mailings, although lately their newsletters and brochures were so infrequent, there were almost none at all. They hadn't updated their site in something like six years, she realized. Maybe longer.

They were aging. They were old. They couldn't keep up. Time, Mrs. Auberchon saw, as she approached the front steps, wasn't leaving them alone, like it did in the land of make-believe. The walls of the lodge had a sag to them below darkened timber eaves that looked brittle and tired and fragile. The stonework needed a mason, the wooden exterior a carpenter and a painter, the roof a whole company of roofers. Parts of the steps were crumbly or worn away. Above Mrs. Auberchon's head, the wildly flapping Sanctuary banner took a pause between wind gusts, and she saw that it was faded and frayed at the edges, bearing its dog of white stars regretfully, like a burden too heavy to hold.

Shabby was what everything was—not derelict, not an eyesore, not a few ticks of a clock away from being hopeless. Those things would have made it easier to take, somehow. Shabby was only sad. She was an
innkeeper.
That's what they made her before they also made her Warden. That's what they offered her when they took her in. Oh, they'd told her, don't worry, you've been a housewife; you'll see that the job will be more of the same, cleaning and laundry and cooking and managing, sort of multiplied, with more people.

It made her crazy that her inn needed work, but it was only a little, in the back, the back porch and its roof, minor really: not shabby, not sad.

No one had told her. She could not believe they'd spent all that money on luxury dog treats when it could have been spent on
structural rehab.
Why didn't she let herself have that vodka? Why did she have to go and pour it down that drain? Her bones would be warm, her blood would be pumping smoothly, no muscles would be cramped and aching. Her eyes would be filmed with boozy fuzziness, and so what if the first thing anyone did at the Sanctuary was come over to her to catch scent of her breath, of course pretending only to greet her: Mrs. Auberchon at the top of the mountain!