They were silent. The little faces at the back of the bus watched them. The boy took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it in the tray.
“Yes you are.”
They followed the bus through town and for another mile beyond that before Grant turned into the woods down a narrow drive where the snow lay brilliant and trackless between the pines, a small one-story house at the end of the drive, cornflower blue with darker blue shutters and a bloodred door. Grant made a space for the Chevy on what might have been the lawn so as not to block either of the Subaru wagons parked before the house, and when he opened his door the dog forgot about her injury and tried to stand and he placed his hand on her skull and said, “You stay here. Both of you.”
He shut the door and the dog began to wheeze in distress for what she couldn’t see, and the boy spoke to her. “He’s walking up to the house. He’s knocking on the door. Someone’s at the window. The door opens. It’s a woman. Dark curly hair. It’s the woman from the diner, that waitress, I forget her name. She looks out and waves . . . I wave back. He steps inside and the door closes. Maria is her name. Maria Valente.”
The red door opened again and Grant returned to the Chevy and got the dog halfway into his arms and the boy came around to collect the remaining half, and when they were free of the truck Grant said to put her down but hold her up, and the dog looked around in confusion until he told her to do her business, at which signal and without the appearance of another thought she lowered her haunches and released a long hissing stream into the snow.
They carried her into the house and placed her on the bed of blankets Maria had prepared on the tiled entrance, and Maria squatted to stroke her head. Then she stood again and all three looked down at the dog. They were still standing there when the girl arrived from somewhere in the house, sock-footed and carrying a large backpack in one hand and a cell phone in the other. With the barest of glances at the two men she dropped the pack and sat on her heels before the bandaged dog and began to pet her.
“What happened to her?”
The dog sniffed at the girl’s bare knee. Licked it.
“We’re not sure,” Grant said. “She might’ve got herself kicked.”
“By what?” She looked up—she looked from Grant to the boy, and back. She seemed about to say something else but didn’t say it. She turned to the dog again, stroking her ears.
“Poor Lola,” said the girl, “poor Lo.”
The boy looked at his father, then at the girl again. “You know this dog?”
She glanced up, her brow furrowed, as though there must be something wrong with him. “Of course I know her.”
“She goes over there some Saturdays,” Maria explained. “To help with those horses.”
They were all silent but the girl, who went on soothing the dog with her hands and her voice.
Grant said he’d come by later with food for the dog and to take her out, and Maria handed him the key and he slipped it into his pocket. He said he’d find someone who could take the dog in for a longer time but she told him not to worry about that, that they would see how this went, and the girl said with finality, “We’ll take care of her.”
Maria went to the kitchen to find a water bowl, and the girl stood and with a tug at her skirt turned and put her dark eyes on the boy. “I’m Carmen.”
“I know.” He said his name and the girl said, “I know. I just didn’t think you knew mine.”
“You were in my history class,” he said.
“Briefly,” she said. “A brief history.”
At their feet the dog showed her old fangs in a great yawn.
The girl checked her phone, then turned and opened a closet door and withdrew a red woolen jacket and got into it. She dipped her white-socked feet into suede boots of a plush, primitive style, and bent once more to rub the dog’s ears. She hoisted the pack from the floor and called, “I’m outta here, Mom,” and Maria called back, “Okay, tesoro. Be careful on the snow, I love you.”
“Love you too.”
She gave Grant and the boy her smile, and then she stepped around the dog and opened the red door and for a bright instant as the morning sun found her she blazed in a red pirouette and was gone.
WHEN HE AWOKE AGAIN the room was sun-swamped and hot and he lay staring at the large yellow blister directly overhead. Empty smooth eggshell of plaster shaped by a leakage long since moved on to some other course or else hunted down and stopped at its source. He listened for the sound again, the dog or the ghost of the dog restored to her foxhole beneath the floorboards. But when the sound came again it came distinctly through the pine door. Through the two pine doors shut to each other across the narrow hall.
He got up and opened one door, waited, and carefully opened the other.
This room on the western side would not see daylight until the afternoon and his father lay on the bed in the chill gloom, facing him. The blanket drawn over his ribs but his shoulder and arm exposed, bare and white, the arm hooked over a pillow as a child holds a stuffed animal. As a man holds a wife. When he spoke he seemed to be speaking to the boy, his voice as plain and clear as if he were asking the time. But his eyes, or the eye that was visible, was shut. The face slack.
“What?” said the boy.
“Where is she,” said the sleeping man.
“Where’s who?” He took a step forward and the cold floor cracked and he stood still.
“Where is she,” said his father, and he looked more closely. The curvature of eyelid trembling and rolling with the restless ball it held.
He drew the blanket up over the bare shoulder.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s safe.”
He got into his jeans and T-shirt and stepped onto the porch barefooted and stood where there was no snow and lit the cigarette and sucked in the smoke and leaned against the post and blew the smoke out. Almost at once, across the way, an answering white cloud sallied from the porch of the house. He brought his cigarette to his lips and squinted. The old man would sit there in his rocker in the mornings with his hands clamped around a smoking mug. But the old man did not have brown hair hooked behind his ears and he did not leave the house T-shirted and barefooted even on the warmest of days and he did not smoke.
The two smokers regarded each other across the way. They took another drag each, exhaled, and as the smoke tattered away in the cold the young man on the far porch raised his cigarette in a mannered way—princely, pontifical—
and lowered it again.
The boy raised his in answer.