A Dog's Purpose

{ FOURTEEN }

When Mom came outside the next morning and saw me, I hung my head and tapped the patio with just the tip of my tail. For some reason, though I had done nothing wrong, I felt really guilty.

“Good morning, Bailey,” she said. Then she saw the meat. “What’s that?”

When she bent over to look more closely at the meat, I dropped onto my back for a tummy rub. I’d been staring at that piece of meat all night, it seemed, and I was exhausted and needed reassurance I had done the right thing, even if I didn’t understand why. There was just something wrong, here, and it had prevented me from taking advantage of the free meal.

“Where did this come from, Bailey?” Mom stroked my belly lightly, then reached over and picked up the meat. “Ugh,” she said.

I sat up alertly. If she was going to feed it to me, it meant it was okay. Instead, she turned away to take it into the house. I rose up on my back legs a little—now that she was removing it, I’d changed my mind; I wanted to eat it!

“Yuck, Bailey, you don’t want that, whatever it is,” Mom said. She dropped the meat into the garbage.

Hannah sat in my seat for the car ride to the giant silver school buses, and I sat alone in the car for a long time while Ethan and Hannah stood and hugged. When the boy came back to the car, he felt sad and lonely, so I put my head in his lap instead of sticking my nose out the window.

The girl came back to visit again the day after the family sat around the indoor tree and tore up papers for Merry Christmas. I was in a bad mood because Ethan gave Mom a new black and white kitten, named Felix. He had no manners whatsoever and attacked my tail when I sat down and often lunged out at me from behind the couch, batting at me with his tiny paws. When I tried to play with him, he wrapped his legs around my nose and bit me with his sharp teeth. Hannah paid way too much attention to the kitty when she first arrived, though I had known the girl longer and was obviously the favorite pet. Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.

One thing the kitten couldn’t do was go outside. The ground was coated with a thick layer of snow, and the one time Felix ventured to put a foot into the stuff he turned around and ran back into the house as if he’d been burned. So when Hannah and Ethan built a big pile of snow in the front yard and put a hat on it, I was right there with them. The boy liked to tackle me and drag me around in the white stuff, and I let him catch me for the sheer joy of having his arms around me, the way he’d played with me every day when he was younger.

When we went sledding, Hannah sat in the back and I ran alongside the sled, barking and trying to pull the mittens off of the boy’s hands.

One afternoon the sun was out and the air was so cold and clean I could taste it all the way down my throat. All of the children from the neighborhood were there at the sledding hill, and Hannah and Ethan spent as much time pushing the younger ones as riding themselves. I soon grew tired of running up and down the slope, which was why I was at the bottom when Todd drove up.

He looked at me when he got out of the car, but he didn’t say anything to me, or reach out his hand. I kept my distance.

“Linda! Come on, time to come home!” he shouted, his breath whipping out of his mouth in a steamy cloud.

Linda was on the slope with three of her little friends, coming down in a saucer-shaped sled at about one mile an hour. Ethan and Hannah flashed past them on their sled, laughing. “I don’t want to!” Linda yelled back.

“Now! Mom says!”

Ethan and Hannah came to a halt at the bottom of the hill, tumbling out of their sled. They lay on top of each other, giggling. Todd stood and watched them.

Something in Todd came to the surface, then. Not anger, exactly, but something worse, something dark, an emotion I’d never felt from anyone before. I felt it in the way he stared at Ethan and Hannah, his face very still.

Ethan and the girl stood up, wiping snow off each other, and came over to see Todd, their arms still intertwined. They radiated such love and joy it blinded them to the hate-filled currents emanating from Todd.

“Hey, Todd.”

“Hi.”

“This is Hannah. Hannah, this is Todd; he lives down the street.”

Hannah reached her hand out, smiling. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

Todd stiffened a little. “Actually, we already met.”

Hannah cocked her head, wiping hair out of her eyes. “We did?”

“When was that?” Ethan asked.

“At the football game,” Todd said. Then he laughed, a short bark.

Ethan was shaking his head blankly, but Hannah blinked. “Oh. Oh, right,” she said, suddenly subdued.

“What?” Ethan asked.

“I have to pick up my sister. Linda!” Todd yelled, cupping his hands. “Come home now!”

Linda detached herself from her pile of friends and trudged through the snow dejectedly.

“He’s . . . he’s the one I talked to,” Hannah told Ethan. Some worry flickered through Hannah, and I glanced at her curiously, then jerked my head at Ethan when I felt a rising anger from him.

“Wait, what? You? Todd, you were the person who told Hannah I’d been with Michele? I don’t even know Michele.”

“I got to go,” Todd mumbled. “Get in the car, Linda,” he told his sister.

“No, wait,” Ethan said. He reached his hand out and Todd jerked away from it.

“Ethan,” Hannah murmured, putting a mitten on his arm.

“Why would you do that, Todd? Why would you lie? What’s wrong with you, man?”

Though the conflicts and emotions boiling through Todd were hot enough to melt the snow we were standing on, he just stood there, staring back at Ethan, not saying a word.

“This is why you don’t have any friends, Todd. Why can’t you just be normal? You’re always doing stupid things like this,” Ethan said. “It’s sick.” The anger was leaving him, but I could feel how upset he still was.

“Ethan,” Hannah said more sharply.

Todd wordlessly got in his car, slamming the door. His face, when he looked back at Hannah and Ethan, was absolutely blank.

“That was mean,” Hannah said.

“Oh, you don’t know him.”

“I don’t care,” Hannah replied. “You shouldn’t have said he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Well, he doesn’t. He’s always doing stuff, like when he said this one guy stole his transistor radio. The whole thing was a lie.”

“He’s not . . . there’s something different about him, right? Like is he in special education?”

“Oh no, he’s really smart. That’s not it. He’s just Todd, that’s all. He’s always been twisted, you know? We used to be friends, when we were kids. But he had all these weird ideas for what was fun, like throwing eggs at the preschoolers when they were waiting for the van to summer school. I told him I didn’t want to do it—his own sister was one of the kids; I mean, come on—and so he just stomped on the carton of eggs he’d brought over. Made a mess in my driveway that I had to hose off before my dad got home. Bailey liked that part, though.”

I wagged at my name, glad to think we might be talking about me, now.

“I’ll bet he did,” Hannah laughed, reaching down and petting me.

A few days after Hannah left, the snow came down and the wind blew so hard that we stayed inside all day, sitting in front of the heater. (At least, that is what I did.) That night I slept under the covers on Ethan’s bed, and stayed there even when I got so hot I panted, just because it was so wonderful to be pressed up against him like when I was a puppy.

The next morning the snow finally stopped and Ethan and I went outside and dug for hours in the driveway. Running in that deep, heavy snow was tough going, and I would leap ahead for only a few feet before needing to stop and rest.

The moon came out right after dinner, so bright that I could see really well, and the air was thick with the fragrance of fire-place smoke. Ethan was tired and went to bed early, but I went out the dog door and stood in the yard, my nose to the faint breeze, galvanized by the exotic light and crisp night air.

When I discovered that the snow had drifted in a huge pile against the fence, I was delighted to climb right up to the top of the mound and drop over the other side. It was a perfect night for an adventure. I went over to Chelsea’s house to see if Duchess was available, but there was no sign other than a fairly recent patch of urine-soaked snow. I thoughtfully lifted my leg on the area so she’d know I was thinking of her.

Normally when I went for a little nighttime exploration, I ventured along the creek. It reminded me of hunting with Sister and Fast when I was a wild puppy, and the smells were always exciting. Now, though, I was forced to stick to the plowed roads, turning up driveways that were clear to sniff at the cracks between garage doors and the pavement. Some people had already dragged their indoor trees outside, though at Ethan’s house it still stood in the front window, with objects and lights hanging from it for Felix to attack. When I came across the indoor trees lying in the plowed driveways, I marked them with my scent, and it was this, the seemingly endless procession of trees to tag, that kept me out so late. If it hadn’t been for the scent of yet another misplaced tree luring me onward, I would have returned back home and maybe would have arrived in time to prevent what happened.

Finally I was caught square in the headlights of a passing car, and it slowed for a minute, and the smell of it reminded me of Mom’s car whenever she and Ethan came looking for me when I’d been out too long on an adventure, and I felt a quick stab of guilt. I lowered my head and trotted back home.

Turning up the shoveled sidewalk, I was struck by several things at once, all of them wrong.

The front door was open, and the aroma of home was wafting out in great gusts, propelled into the frosty night air by the force of the furnace. Riding on the currents of that air was a chemical smell both sharp and familiar—I smelled it whenever we went for a car ride and stopped at the place where Ethan liked to stand by the back of the car with a thick black hose. And backing out of the house was someone I initially thought was the boy. Not until he turned to shake some more chemical-laden liquid into the front bushes did I pick up his scent.

It was Todd. He took three steps back and pulled out some paper from his pocket and lit it, the fire flickering against his stony blank face. When he tossed the burning papers into the bushes, a blue flame popped up, making an audible noise.

Todd didn’t see me; he was watching the fire. And I never barked, I never growled, I just ran up that sidewalk in silent fury. I leaped for him as if I had been taking down men my whole life, and surging through me was a sense of power, as if I were leading a pack.

Any reluctance I might have felt to attack a human being was overridden by the sense that whatever Todd was doing, it was causing harm to the boy and to the family I was there to protect. There was no stronger purpose than that.

Todd yelled and fell and kicked at my face. I took the foot that the kicking offered, biting into it and holding on while Todd screamed. His pants ripped, his shoe came off, and I tasted blood. He struck at me with his fists, but I kept my grip on his ankle, shaking my head, feeling the flesh tear some more. I was in a fury, completely oblivious to the fact that my mouth was filled with the unique flavor of human skin and blood.

A sudden piercing noise distracted me, and Todd managed to work his foot loose as I turned to look at the house. The indoor tree was totally aflame, and thick, acrid smoke was pouring out the front door and up into the night. The electronic shriek was painfully high and loud, and I instinctively backed away from it.

Todd stood and limped away as fast as he could, and I registered his retreat out of the corner of my eye, no longer caring. I sounded my own alarm, barking, trying to draw attention to the flames, which were spreading quickly through the house and were curling upstairs toward the boy’s room.

I ran around the back of the house but was frustrated to discover that the pile of snow that had assisted me on my escape was on the wrong side of the fence. While I stood there barking, the patio door slid open and Dad and Mom stumbled into view. Mom was coughing.

“Ethan!” she screamed.

Black smoke was coming out the patio door. Mom and Dad ran to the gate, and I met them there. They shoved past me, running through the snow to the front of the house. They stood looking up at the dark window to Ethan’s room.

“Ethan!” they shouted. “Ethan!”

I broke from them and raced around to the now open back gate. I darted through it. Felix was outside on the patio, huddled under a picnic bench, and she yowled at me, but I didn’t stop. I squeezed through the patio door, my eyes and nose filled with smoke. Unable to see, I staggered toward the stairs.

The sound of the flames was as loud as the wind when we went for a car ride with the windows down. The smoke was suffocating, but it was the heat that beat me back. The intensity of the fire burned my nose and ears, and in frustration I lowered my head and ran out the back door, the cold air instantly salving my pain.

Mom and Dad were still yelling. Lights had come on across the street and in the house next door, and I could see one of the neighbors looking out his window, talking on the phone.

There was still no sign of the boy.

“Ethan!” Mom and Dad yelled. “Ethan!”