A Dog's Purpose

{ THIRTY-ONE }

There was a sadness in the boy, a deep hurt that was new to him and far more substantial than the pain that had settled in his leg.

“It’s just me living here; I don’t know who you’re looking for,” Ethan told me as I examined every corner of the house. “I always meant to get married—came close to it a couple of times, in fact—but it never seemed to work out. Lived with a woman in Chicago for a few years, even.” The boy stood and stared sightlessly out the window, and the sadness in him increased. “John Lennon said that life’s what happens when you’re making other plans. I guess that sums it up, pretty much.” I went over to him and sat, lifting a paw to press against his thigh. He dropped his gaze down to me, and I wagged. “Well, hey, Buddy, let’s get you a collar.”

We went upstairs to his bedroom, and he pulled a box down off a shelf. “Let’s see. Okay, here it is.”

A jangle sounded from the box as Ethan lifted a collar out of the box and shook it. The noise was so familiar I shivered. As Bailey, I had made that same jangling sound whenever I had moved. “This used to belong to my other dog, a long, long time ago. Bailey.”

I wagged at the name. He showed it to me and I sniffed it, picking up the ever so faint scent of another dog. Me, I realized. I was smelling me—it was a very odd sensation.

He shook the collar a few times. “Now that was a good dog, that Bailey,” he said. He sat for a moment, lost in thought, and then looked at me. When he spoke, his voice was rough, and I felt a surge of strong emotions come from him—sadness and love and regret and mourning. “I guess maybe we’d better get you your own collar, Buddy. It wouldn’t be right to make you try to live up to this one. Bailey . . . Bailey was a pretty special dog.”

I was tense when the car ride the next day led us into town—I did not want to go back to the cage, in the place with all the barking dogs. But it turned out we were just picking up bags of food and a stiff collar for my neck, to which Ethan affixed some jingling tags when we got home.

“It says: ‘My name is Buddy. I belong to Ethan Montgomery,’ ” he told me, holding one of the tags in his hand. I wagged my tail.

After several such trips to town, I learned to relax my guard—it no longer felt as though Ethan were going to abandon me. I stopped haunting his side and took to wandering around on my own, stretching my territory out to include all of the Farm, paying special attention to the mailbox and additional places by the road where other male dogs had been.

The pond was still there, and there was still a flock of stupid ducks living on its banks. For all I knew, they were the very same ducks—it hardly mattered; they acted the same when they saw me, jumping into the water in alarm and then swimming back to look at me. I knew there was no point in chasing them, but I did so anyway, just for the sheer joy of it.

Ethan spent most of his day on his knees in a big, moist plot of ground behind the house, and I learned that he did not want me lifting my leg in that area. He talked to me while he played with the dirt, so I listened, wagging when I heard my name.

“Soon we’ll be going to the farmers’ market on Sundays; now, that’s a fun time. My tomatoes fetch a pretty price,” he said.

One afternoon I got bored with the digging in the dirt game and wandered into the barn. The mysterious black cat was long gone—there was no scent of her left anywhere, and I felt a little disappointed, somehow. She was the only cat I’d ever met whom I enjoyed knowing.

No, that wasn’t really true. Though I’d mostly found it irritating, Tinkerbell’s unabashed affection for me had ultimately been gratifying.

In the back of the barn I found a pile of old blankets, molding and rotting. When I pushed my nose into them and breathed deep, though, I could very faintly pick up a familiar, comforting smell. Grandpa. This was where we used to come to do our chores together.

“It’s good for me, to get out, take walks,” Ethan told me. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to get a dog before. I need the exercise.” Some evenings we’d circle the farm on a well-worn path that smelled of Troy the whole way, and others we’d stroll down the road in one direction or the other. I always felt something from the boy when we passed Hannah’s place, though he never stopped or went up to the house to see her. I wondered why I could no longer smell her, and remembered Carly, in the dog park, positively covered in Hannah’s scent.

One such evening, as we passed Hannah’s house, I was struck by something that hadn’t before occurred to me: the pain I could feel burrowed deep inside the boy was very similar to what I had sensed inside Jakob, long ago. There was a lonely grief, the sense of having said good-bye to something.

Sometimes the mood lifted completely, though. Ethan loved to take his cane and smack it against a ball in the yard, sending it flying down the driveway for me to pursue and return. We played this game often, and I would have worn the pads off my feet to keep him so happy. When I caught the ball on a high bounce, snagging it out of the air like a piece of meat dropped through a fence, he would laugh in delight.

Other times, though, the dark swirl of sadness would overtake him. “I never thought my life would turn out this way,” he said to me one afternoon, his voice hoarse. I nuzzled him, trying to cheer him up. “All by myself, no one to share my days with. Made a lot of money, but after a while the job didn’t give me much pleasure, so I more or less quit, and that didn’t give me any pleasure, either.” I ran and got a ball and spat it into his lap, but he turned his face away, ignoring it, his pain so sharp it made me want to yelp. “Aw, Buddy, things just don’t always go as planned.” He sighed. I dug my nose after the ball, shoving it up between his legs, and finally was rewarded with a weak toss, which I pounced upon. His heart wasn’t in it. “Good dog, Buddy,” he said absently. “I guess I don’t feel like playing right now.”

I was frustrated. I had been a good dog, I had done Find, and I was back with the boy. But he wasn’t happy, not the way most people were at the end of Find, when Jakob or Maya and the others would give them blankets and food and reunite them with their families.

That’s when it occurred to me that my purpose in this world had never been just to Find; it had been to save. Tracking down the boy was just part of the equation.

When I lived with Jakob, he harbored this same dark feeling inside. But when I saw him later, when Maya and I were doing school, he had a family—a child and a mate. And then he was happy, happy the same way that Ethan used to be when he and Hannah sat on the front porch and giggled with each other.

For Ethan to be rescued, he needed to have a family. He needed a woman and to have a baby with her. Then he would be happy.

The next morning, while Ethan worked the dirt, I trotted down the driveway and out onto the road. Though the goat ranch was gone, I’d learned new scent markers on my car rides, so that finding my way into town was as easy as touring the back acres of the Farm. Once in town I quickly located the dog park, though I was disappointed Carly was nowhere around. I wrestled with some dogs in the yard, no longer afraid of being spotted by people—I was Ethan’s dog, now, I was a good dog, I had a collar, and my name was Buddy.

Late that afternoon, Carly came bounding up to me, thrilled to see that I was back in the park. As we played I luxuriated in Hannah’s scent, fresh and strong throughout Carly’s fur.

“Well, hello, doggy, I haven’t seen you in a while. You sure look handsome,” the woman on the bench said. “Glad they started feeding you!” She felt tired, and when she stood after just half an hour she pressed her hands into her back. “Whew. I am so ready,” she breathed. She began making her way slowly down the sidewalk, Carly coursing back and forth in front of her. I stuck with Carly, the two of us sending several squirrels scattering in terror.

When after two blocks the woman turned up a walk and opened the door to a house, I knew better than to follow Carly inside. I settled down on the stoop after the women shut the door, content to wait. I’d played this game before.

A few hours later, a car swung into the driveway and a woman with white hair slid out of the front seat. I trotted down the steps to meet her. “Well, hello there, dog, are you here to play with Carly?” she greeted me, putting out a friendly hand.

I knew the voice before I smelled her: Hannah. My tail wagging, I rolled around at her feet, begging for her hands to touch me, and they did. The door to the house opened.

“Hi, Mom. He followed me home from the dog park,” the woman said, standing in the doorway. Carly bounded out and tackled me. I shouldered her away; I wanted the girl’s attentions right now.

“Well, where do you live, huh, boy?” Hannah’s hands fumbled for my collar, so I sat. Carly shoved her face in the way. “Look out, Carly,” Hannah said, pushing Carly’s head to the side. “ ‘My name is Buddy,’ ” Hannah said slowly, holding my tag.

I wagged.

“ ‘I belong to’—Oh my.”

“What is it, Mom?”

“ ‘Ethan Montgomery.’ ”

“Who?”

Hannah stood. “Ethan Montgomery. He’s a man . . . he’s a man I used to know, a long time ago. Back when I was growing up.”

“Like an old boyfriend, that kind of man?”

“Yes, well, sort of like that, yes.” Hannah laughed softly. “My, um, first boyfriend.”

“Your first? Oh really. And this is his dog?”

“His name is Buddy.” I wagged. Carly chewed on my face.

“Well, what should we do?” the woman asked from the doorway.

“Do? Oh, I guess we should call him. He lives out near the old place, just down the road from there. You sure are a long way from home, Buddy.”

I’d had enough of Carly, who didn’t seem to grasp the whole situation here and was busy trying to climb on top of me. I snarled at her and she sat down, her ears back, then jumped on me again. Some dogs are just too happy for their own good.

I had utter faith that Hannah would take me back to the boy and that when Ethan saw her the girl would no longer be lost to him. It was complicated, but I was doing a sort of Find/Show, only it would be up to the two of them to put it all together.

Which they did. An hour or so later, Ethan’s car pulled into the driveway. I jumped up from where I had Carly pinned to the grass and ran over to him. Hannah was sitting on the stoop, and she stood uncertainly as Ethan got out of the car. “Buddy, what in the world are you doing here?” he asked. “Get in the car.”

I bounded into the front seat. Carly put her paws up on the car door, straining to smell me through the window as if we hadn’t been nose-to-nose for the past four hours.

“Carly, get down!” Hannah said sharply. Carly dropped.

“Oh, it’s okay. Hi there, Hannah.”

“Hi, Ethan.” They stared at each other a minute, and then Hannah laughed. Awkwardly they hugged, their faces coming together briefly.

“I have no idea how this happened,” the boy said.

“Well, your dog was in the park. My daughter Rachel goes there every afternoon—she’s a week overdue, and the doctor wants her to spend a little time on her feet every day. She’d do jumping jacks, if it would help.” Hannah felt nervous to me, but it was nothing like what was happening to Ethan—his heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in his breath. The emotions coming off him were strong and confusing.

“That’s what I don’t understand. I wasn’t in town. Buddy must have gone all that way by himself. I have no idea what would make him do such a thing.”

“Well,” Hannah said.

They stood there looking at each other. “Would you like to come in?” she finally asked.

“Oh no, no. I need to get back.”

“Okay then.”

There was more standing. Carly yawned, sitting down to scratch herself, oblivious to the tension between the two people.

“I was going to call you, when I heard about . . . Matthew. I’m sorry for your loss,” Ethan said.

“Thank you,” Hannah replied. “That was fifteen years ago, Ethan. Long time.”

“I didn’t realize it had been so long.”

“Yes.”

“So are you visiting, for the baby?”

“Oh no, I live here now.”

“You do?” Ethan seemed startled by something, but, as I looked around, I saw nothing surprising except that a squirrel had come down out of the trees and was digging around in the grass a few houses down. Carly was looking the wrong way, I noted with disgust.

“I moved back two years ago next month. Rachel and her husband are staying with me while they finish adding a room to their place for the baby.”

“Oh.”

“They’d better hurry,” Hannah said with a laugh. “She’s . . . big.”

They both laughed. This time, when the laughter stopped, something like sadness came off of Hannah. Ethan’s fear bled away, and he, too, seemed overtaken with an odd gloom.

“Well, it was nice to see you, Ethan.”

“It was great to see you, too, Hannah.”

“Okay. Bye.”

She turned to go back into her house. Ethan came around the front of the car. His mood was angry and scared and sad and conflicted. Carly still didn’t see the squirrel. The girl was on the top step. Ethan opened the car door. “Hannah!” he called.

She turned. Ethan took a deep, shuddering breath. “I wonder if you’d like to come over for dinner sometime. Might be fun for you; you haven’t been to the Farm in a long time. I, uh, put in a garden. Tomatoes . . .” His voice trailed off.

“You cook now, Ethan?”

“Well. I heat things up, pretty well.”

They both laughed, and the sadness lifted from them as if it had never been there.