Twenty-two
Entering the dark kitchen, Grady whispered reassurances to the agitated wolfhound.
At the French door, peering out, Merlin stopped barking but began whining as though other dogs were at play in the yard and he was eager to romp with them.
Grady leaned over the table, squinting through the window at which he had earlier sat sentinel. His eyes were by now so dark-adapted that he saw the two creatures at once.
One of them sat as a dog might sit in the chair that Grady had occupied in the late afternoon, when Merlin had chased coveys of scents around the yard. The other sat on the marble-topped table on which Grady had earlier stacked three reference books about the fauna of the mountains.
Because the two had their backs to the house, Grady couldn’t see their eyes. Their impossible, inexplicable eyes.
The meadow had been more than a place. The meadow had been a moment. A moment and a motion, a pivot point and a lever, where and when his life had changed, and not just his life, much more than his life, maybe everything.
He thought of his mother at another window much like this, after the death of his father, the window through which she saw her past and her future.
This was a night of windows, upstairs and down, north, east, south, west, past and present and future. He went to the door where Merlin waited, and the door was in fact a window with nine panes.
On the porch, the animals continued to face out toward the yard, toward the night and the mountains and the moon.
They had to be aware of Grady’s presence, if only because of Merlin’s barking earlier and his eager entreaties now. Yet they didn’t look toward him.
Grady switched on the kitchen and porch lights.
Beside him, Merlin stopped whining and began to pant excitedly. The wolfhound appeared to be neither afraid nor aggressive. His wagging tail slapped, slapped, slapped against the wall.
Grady hesitated with his hand on the doorknob.
He thought of the shimmering light as he had moved through the piney woods toward the meadow.
He wondered who earlier turned on the lights in his workshop, and then in the garage. Who opened the workshop doors, raised the garage roll-up?
Hesitating with his hand on the knob, he rapped knuckles against one of the panes of the door.
The mysterious animals sat motionless on the chair and on the table, declining to reveal their eyes.
He thought of Marcus Pipp, who had given him the name Iguana, who had died violently, killed by the senator. He didn’t know why he should think of Marcus now, in this amazing moment, except that he had thought of him often over the past ten years.
Once more he raised his knuckles to the glass, but he didn’t rap the pane. He wanted to see their eyes, wanted very much to see them, but he did not rap.
He took a deep breath.
He opened the door of nine windows, and where the door had been was a threshold, and where the threshold had been was a porch floor underfoot.
The animals turned to look at him and at the suddenly shy dog.