The Lost

Before

I have a strange story to tell.

Too bad there’s no one to tell it to. No real way to tell it, and by now, no compelling reason to, either. Still. I feel the need to get it off my chest. Already it’s beginning to blur at the edges, fray in my mind like a dream in the morning. If I’m going to tell it at all, I’d better tell it quickly.

That’s what I’ll do, then: I’ll tell the story to myself.

Where to begin? With my childhood? When I married Sam and we had Benny? When I landed the broker job at Shanahan & Lewis? But those were all normal stages, unremarkable. They followed acceptable patterns; they were to be expected.

Better to begin when things started to go off track. Faster, more interesting. Well, that’s easy-that would be the day I drowned. The first time.

Such a nice day, too. Early June, late afternoon, our first full weekend at Sam’s cabin on the river. Our cabin, but I thought of it as Sam’s-he was the one who’d found it, dreamed of restoring it, and generally yearned for it, until I surprised him on his thirty-eighth birthday and bought it for him. Us. It needed an enormous amount of work, but it was habitable, barely, and even though it wasn’t my idea of paradise, I had to admit it did look charming that afternoon, with the windows blazing orange, the low sun casting tree shadows on the rough planks and the dirty white chinking. We were watching it from aluminum lawn chairs in the fast-m oving shallows of the Shenandoah, Benny sprawled across my lap, half asleep after the long day. “To you,” I toasted Sam with a last sip of wine. “To your project for the next ten or twenty years.”

“To us,” Sam toasted back with his beer, and I hoped that didn’t mean he thought I was going to help with the renovation. I liked the idea of him and Benny spending weekends here being handymen together while Mom stayed in town and did her job. Which was to bring home the bacon.

Sam had looked handsome the night before in his magic-act tuxedo, but he looked even better now in faded cutoffs and a holey tee. Mmm, all that tan skin and soft blond hair. I was looking forward to later, after we put Benny to bed. Our first time in the new cabin.

“But mostly to you, Laurie,” he said, “for being brilliant.”

“Thank you,” I said with mock modesty. Mock, yes. Last night I’d received the Shanahan & Lewis Mega Deal Maker of the Year award, and this morning Ronnie Lewis had promoted me to senior portfolio manager. You could say I was riding high. You could say I was proud of myself-except, of course, pride goeth before a fall, and what happened next just makes that too ridiculously literal.

Full of myself, then. I was pret-ty damn full of myself.

“Looks like somebody’s ready for bed.”

I thought Sam meant me and he’d been reading my mind, a skill he only pretends to have in his magic act. But then Benny squirmed on my lap and muttered that he wasn’t sleepy. “Mom,” he said clearly, out of the blue, “can we get a dog?”

Does that mean anything? Or my refusal-does that mean anything? I said, “No, honey, we can’t,” without hesitation, because it was completely out of the question. No way could we get a dog; we were all too busy, and besides, I had allergies.

But now I wonder. It was the last thing my sweet, five-year-old son asked me.

Then again, the last thing Sam asked me was to bring in my chair, and I didn’t come back as a chaise longue.

My cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer.”

I checked the screen. “I have to. It’s Ronnie.”

Sam made a face, one I’d seen (and ignored) many times before, and started to get up, stretching his long arms over his head, splashing his bare feet in the water. “Okay, pal,” he told Benny, and they reached for each other. He stuck his folded chair under one arm, hitched Benny onto his hip with the other. “What’s this? You’re drinking now?” With both arms full, somehow he’d plucked his empty beer can from behind Benny’s ear.

And Benny snickered obligingly, always glad to be the dupe. Daddy’s best audience.

“Hi, Ron,” I said at the same time Sam said to me, for a joke, “Don’t forget your chair.” I smiled, watching him pick his way through the rippling, ankle-deep river toward shore. Then Ron mentioned the new Potomac Aerie development and I stopped watching. That was my last look at my family: Sam setting Benny down on terra firma and letting him run ahead, up the weedy path to the cabin. I got caught up in a preliminary design meeting coming up, the feasibility study, finance and development applications.

Something else I wish I could go back and redo.

Ron’s a talker; our conversation went on for a good fifteen minutes. More or less-it’s about now that things begin to blur. I remember deciding not to bother putting on my water sandals to make the twenty-yard trek to the riverbank. I remember standing up and folding my chair. I must’ve had my sandals, empty wineglass, and cell phone in one hand, chair in the other. Why didn’t I put the phone in my pocket? My lifeline, my keystone, my-words fail me. The beating heart of my professional life. Why didn’t I put it in my pocket?

I didn’t, and it flipped out of my hand like a live fish.

I guess I lunged for it. Don’t remember, but that’s what I would have done. I probably threw everything else up in the air first, shoes, chair, glass. Who knows? If I’d been carrying Benny, I might’ve thrown him up in the air, too.

Okay, no.

I have one last tactile memory, quite vivid and distinct: the instant-l ong but somehow-f orever feel of my foot sliding across a slick, slimy rock. After that, zero.

During

For how long? Two months, I’ve heard since, but that’s not right. It was zero, literally nothing, for a time, but then-a week later? three weeks? five?-rips began to show in the matte black curtain, like the difference between a thick blindfold and a thin one. No, that’s not right, either, because the first sense I got back was hearing, not seeing. So-the difference between a set of Bose headphones and Benny’s flannel earmuffs.

Sound instead of silence. Such a blessing, like being saved. Word fragments at first. You know how, when you close your book, turn out the light, and prepare to go to sleep, bits of the author’s syntax and rhythm float around in your mind for a while before you drop off? But if you ever wake up enough to concentrate on one of the bits you’re remembering, it turns out to be nonsense? Like that.

Bits of music, too, jumbled, unrecognizable, like when you spin a radio dial too fast. And voices. Strangers’, and then, mercifully, Sam’s. That was the moment I began to heal. Or hope, which is the same thing. I didn’t always know what he was saying, especially in the beginning when he might as well have been speaking Italian, but it didn’t matter. Just his voice. A rope to the drowning woman.

Touch came next. The unutterable comfort of it. Skin on sentient skin, and it didn’t matter whose then, just the nearly unbearable relief of not being alone anymore. To the nurses and aides and rehab people it must’ve felt like massaging a corpse, but I couldn’t get enough bending, stroking, manipulating. I even liked it when they put drops in my eyes. Sam used to rub lotion into my hands and I’d drift off into something like nirvana…

Sight was last. “She can open her eyes,” somebody mar veled, and I remember feeling a surge of childlike pride, like a toddler praised for uttering her first complete sentence. It was narrow sight, just the thing I was looking at, everything else wavy as old glass.

The problem was, nobody knew any of this but me. And not that I was chugging along on all cylinders-it wasn’t like in a movie when some guy gets injected with a drug that paralyzes his body but his brain still works fine. My brain was spongy, plagued with craters and holes, like the moon. But I progressed, is the point, and no one knew it except me. I couldn’t tell them. The frustration! In hospitals they’re big on asking you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. If they’d asked me to rate my loneliness, I’d have said a hundred and fifty.

Then came the day when I thought I might break through, finally jab a big enough hole in the veil to stick my head through and yell, “Look! It’s me!”

That didn’t happen, but something else did. The sort of thing that, shall we say, inspires incredulity. Ha-ha! I love understatement. Also the sort of thing that could get one returned to Neurology for evaluation if one were to reveal it to just anybody.

Another reason not to tell this story to anyone but myself.

“We’ll have to bring her back inside now. BP’s up. A little too much stimulation, I’m afraid.”

God, how I hated those words. They meant my family was about to leave me. The worst thing about being in a coma isn’t the inability to speak, move, eat, make yourself understood-none of that. It’s being left alone.

Benny was fidgeting at the foot of my geri-bed-a soft reclining chair I loved, because now they could wheel me outside for a few minutes on nice days, all my tubes and lines still attached to the beeping machines inside. Benny was out of my line of sight down there, but occasionally some part of his dear, jerky body would bump against my blanketed legs, and each time the careless touch would fill me with a warm, melting love. “She’s skinny” was all he’d had to say to me today, and “Her hair’s too long.” When the nurse spoke, he jumped off the end of the chair like a racer who’d just been waiting for the starter gun. I could feel his heart lighten. I could feel mine sink.

“Let me do that.” Sam’s voice. A pull on the chair, and the precious blue sky began to swivel out of sight. A bump as we crossed the threshold, and there we were, back in the room, the dreaded room. My gray prison.

“She seemed better today.” Sam had that desperate, hope-against-h ope animation in his voice he used in front of Benny. I hated it. “I think there’s been real progress.”

The nurse that day was Hettie, my favorite. Very gentle hands, and she never over-enunciated like some of them, as if their patients were not only comatose but also idiots. “Well, no actual change, though, not on the test scale. But no, I know what you mean, she was pretty alert today,” Hettie added quickly, kindly. “Tracking movements with her eyes sometimes-”

“She looked right into my eyes.” My husband loomed over me, moving his head until we were gaze to gaze. He looked so tired, his eyes so sad. Don’t go, I begged him. Stay with me. “She can’t be completely unconscious if she can open her eyes. Right?”

“There are so many degrees of consciousness,” Hettie started saying, and something about metabolic versus anatomic comas, every case is different, you have to balance hope with practicality-I gave up trying to follow. Too hard. I was a mummy, encased in gauze. If I could get out one feral grunt, raise one scary, wrapped arm… but everything was so exhausting. I only had the strength to look back into Sam’s eyes.

He put his cheek next to mine. Oh. Oh. The scent of him. He whispered that he loved me. Was I crying? If I could cry-he’d know. I stared hard, hard, at the lock of his hair that tickled my face, concentrating, wide-eyed.

Dry -ey ed.

“See ya, babe,” he murmured. “Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay. See you soon, sweetheart.”

I had no sense of time. Soon. It was the same to me as later. Or never.

“Benny? Come say bye to your mom. Ben? Come on, guy. Hey, Benny-! ”

Sam disappeared.

If I couldn’t cry now, I never would. What’s the point of trying to get well if your son is afraid of you? You might as well be dead. As dead as I must look to Benny in this stupid chair, these stupid pipes and lines filling and draining me, keeping me in this ugly gray twilight jail I couldn’t break free of, couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t smash my way out of-

“There you go, buddy. Give Mommy a kiss.”

Oh, Sam, don’t make him. He had his arms around Benny’s waist, holding him up, pressing him toward me. Poor Benny! His face looked blotchy with distress. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“It’s okay, it’s just Mom. Come on, pal.”

Don’t, Sam. Oh, but I wanted it, too. If Benny would look at me, really look, I believed I could make it happen-the miracle. Look, darling. It’s Mommy. Please, honey, open your eyes. He had to see me; otherwise I would truly be nothing. I would disappear. Benny, look at me, see me! Open your eyes!

That’s when it happened.

What happened? At first, a period of pure nothing. So pure, if my brain had been working, I’d have thought I had disappeared. But there wasn’t any “me” anymore, no one to think thoughts. No time, no space, and not even darkness this time. Sound, maybe, a low-pitched hum, a comforting whir or drone… but then again, maybe not. That would presuppose someone had ears to hear it, and I’m saying I was not there. Laurie Summer: gone.

“Daddy, is she dead? Please don’t die. Is she dead?”

Benny! His beautiful, wide-open brown eyes were looking into mine. “I’m not dead,” I tried to tell him, but nothing came out but a sort of… yip. But I could move my legs! It hurt, but they moved, and they… they…

They were covered with hair?

“Careful, don’t touch her. She’s hurt, she might bite you.”

I might what? Crouched over me, Sam had a pitying but distracted look on his face. This was not how I had pictured our miraculous reunion.

“We have to take her to the doctor, Daddy. We have to fix her up.”

God, not more doctors. Where were we? My ears ached; everything was so loud. And the smell was amazing. Smells, rather, millions of them, all strong and incredibly interesting. Cars were whipping by-that’s what was making all the noise. Why were we outside, in the street? A familiar-l ooking street, too. Weren’t we on Old Georgetown Road? In Bethesda?

“Come on, buddy, back in the car. It’s dangerous out here.”

Sam and Benny got up and left me in the road.

A lot of bad things had happened to me lately, very bad things, but I can say without hesitation that that was the worst.

Then Sam came back. Happiness! Joy! He was carrying the smelly flannel blanket we kept in the back of the car to set plants on, or wet bathing suits, anything messy or unsavory, to protect the upholstery.

He wrapped me in the blanket and lifted me up with a grunt and put me in the backseat.

I had an inkling now, a sense, like glimpsing something from the corner of your eye that reveals everything but is too outlandish to credit. Maybe I should’ve figured it out sooner-the evidence was pretty much everywhere-but let’s not forget I wasn’t in my right mind. I had been in a near-drowning-i nduced coma for eight weeks. Then, too, if this was a cross-species metamorphosis, it made sense that my normally sharp, analytical mind was already being blunted by something softer and more accepting. I’m saying my retriever instincts were kicking in.

Sam started the car and pulled out into traffic. Benny, buckled up in front, craned around to look at me. His mop of chestnut curls needed cutting. I wanted to lick him all over his freckled face. Here we were, all together again. The family. “Sam, Benny, Sam, Benny!” I said, overwhelmed with the wonder of it. It came out “Arr! Urra! Arr! Urra!”

Another clue.

The car smelled wonderful, like Sam and Benny multiplied by a hundred. And lots of other things, especially McDonald’s, that fabulous greasy-h amburger smell.

The ride was short. As soon as Sam parked, Benny unbuckled himself, shoved open the car door, and ran off. “Wait-” Sam called, halfhearted. He sighed, then hauled me out very gently and carried me toward a low brick building. Inside, the predominant smell was panic.

Benny was already jumping up and down in front of a counter, yelling, “We hit a dog! We hit a dog!”

Dog.

I was a dog.

As I said, the clues were abundant, but it wasn’t until Benny said the actual word that the truth hit. I started to shake.

Nothing like a vet’s exam on a cold metal table to knock the nonsense out of you. I credit it with shortening considerably what would otherwise have been a long and tedious period of No, it’s impossible! How can this be? I don’t believe it! Is this a dream? Et cetera, et cetera. I’m not saying I accepted what seemed to have happened to me in half an hour. But there’s just something about having your temperature taken rectally that really wakes you up to reality.

Blood was drawn. X-rays were taken. I was poked, prodded, listened to, felt, and, in the end, the doctor, who smelled like tick poison, said what I could only partially agree with.

“It’s a miracle.”

“Nothing wrong with her?” Sam asked.

“Nothing serious. Bruises, mostly, and the scrapes you can see. But no broken bones or internal injuries, and that’s pretty amazing if you were going as fast as you say.”

“Can we keep her?”

“I was going the speed limit.”

“And to hit her head-on and throw her as far as you did-that’s just amazing.”

“Can we keep her?”

“She must belong to somebody,” Sam said. “What kind of dog is she?”

“No collar,” said the vet, “no ID. Hmm… some sort of Lab-golden mix is my guess. And maybe something else smaller-she only weighs about sixty pounds. I’d say she’s four or five years old.”

This was helpful. All I’d seen of myself so far was my feet, basically. Good to know what I was. A big, middle-aged mutt.

“So can we keep her?”

“She must belong to someone,” Sam tried again. “I’m sure somebody’s-”

“No, Daddy, they’ll put her in the pound, then they’ll put her to sleep! They’ll kill her!”

That’s right. I read a story to Benny last spring about a dog with no collar who gets taken to the pound and is almost euthanized before a little boy comes in and saves him. You tell him, baby.

“They won’t kill her,” Sam said, putting his hand on top of Benny’s head. “Um, what does happen here, Doctor? Do you put up flyers or something, keep the dog until she’s claimed-”

“We don’t have the facilities for that, unfortunately. No, she’ll go to the humane rescue and they’ll keep her there. As long as they can.”

“Then they’ll kill her!” Benny wriggled away from Sam and ran to me. I was still on the metal table-he had to stand on tiptoes to put his arms around my neck. “Please can we keep her? Please?”

“Benny, you know your mother never wanted…” Sam trailed off, looking pained.

Benny took the words out of my mouth. “But Dad-she’s not here.”

I don’t know why I was worried. My heart was pounding, I was trembling uncontrollably, I had more saliva in my mouth than I could swallow. “The pound” was no abstract concept; I knew what would probably happen to me there. But that wasn’t what I was afraid of. Abandonment was.

It’s me, Sam! It’s Laurie!

Everything hurt-miracle or not, get thrown twenty feet in the air by a car, believe me, everything hurts-but when Benny let go of my neck, I gathered all four slipping, sliding paws under me and made a lunge for Sam.

Who has good reflexes. He stepped aside in shock.

The vet’s were even better, luckily. He caught me-otherwise I’d have flown into the wall. “Whoa,” he said without surprise, and calmly set me on the floor. “Looks like this one really wants to go home with you.”

Sam never had a chance, I see now, but at the time it felt like touch and go. I had sense enough to hold still, not jump on him again, and let Benny wind his arms around me. What we must have looked like, cheek to cheek, four brown eyes yearning up at him. “Pleeeease, Daddy?” Beel zebub could not have resisted that plea. I echoed it with a warbly, “Arroooo?”

The vet laughed.

Sam put his hands on top of his head. “All right, all right, all right. But she’s going to have to be spayed.”

Home!

My house, oh, my house. I couldn’t get enough of it. My muscles still ached, but I ran into every room; I sniffed everything; I peed in the foyer-

My God!

Nobody saw. Oh, thank goodness, they didn’t see, and on the dark part of the Oriental it didn’t even show. It was just a little pee, anyway, only a drop, really. From the excitement.

Behave, I thought, letting Benny catch me. We wrestled on the rug in the living room-“Gently,” Sam kept saying-and it was pure bliss, utter contentment. As myself, I’d have been in a lot of pain from the accident, but as a dog I couldn’t stay focused on my body long enough to care. There wasn’t a thought in my head. Whenever Benny laughed, I wagged my tail-or rather, my tail wagged, a completely involuntary response, like crying when somebody else cries. We lay on our backs, panting and grinning up at Sam, whose cautious look slowly faded and turned into a smile.

He’s making sure I’m not dangerous, I realized. Making sure I won’t hurt Benny. Good; I’d do the same. I turned my head and licked Benny’s face very gently, for Sam’s benefit. Play with us! I thought, but he was already heading for the kitchen, mumbling about dinner.

“Hey, dog. Hey, girl. You like it here, don’t you?” Benny patted me on top of the head, pat pat pat, making me blink. I yawned in agreement. “Want to see my room?”

We ran upstairs.

Fabulous room, I thought, and then, Good Lord, where is the cleaning lady? But so many things to smell and taste and roll around in, toys and clothes and food, a smorgasbord for the senses.

Except sight. Strangest thing, but it was like seeing sepia in blue instead of brown. I couldn’t see red, and everything was muted, like the loveliest twilight. Except blue. With flashes of yellow. Hard to describe, but I liked it. I found it very… calming.

Benny showed me his dinosaur floor puzzle and his new Batmobile that lit up, made sounds, and shot out a weapon. He showed me all his dump trucks and bulldozers. I heard about his best friend, Mo, his second-best friend, Jenny; first grade was starting soon; Dad built him the coolest playhouse in the backyard; wait’ll I saw it. He had a new bike; he could write the whole alphabet and count to “a billion.” He had two loose teeth. “And my dad can throw his voice.” Music to my ears, every word, even when my attention wandered. “And my mom’s in the hospital” grabbed it back.

I worked my nose out of an old tennis shoe and joined Benny on top of the unmade bed.

“She fell in the river and hurt her head and she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t drown but now she’s got a coma. It’s like sleeping a really long, long time and not waking up.”

I nudged him with my head until it was under his arm. We sat like that awhile.

“Dad says she’ll wake up. He promised. We do prayers at night. We go look at her. He pretends like she can hear and reads stuff to her.” He flopped down on his back. “She can’t move or anything.”

He stretched his arms up and played with his fingers. Dear, stubby, dirty, little-boy fingers. “She worked a lot, but we used to ride bikes. And run and stuff. We played games. She talked a lot. Spaghetti!” He bolted up and scrambled off the bed.

I’d been smelling it, too. “He makes it all the time,” Benny said, “but it’s good.” His mood changed again and he stood still in his wreck of a room, staring into space. He’d grown in two months, or maybe it was all the curly hair making him look taller. But it was his face that broke my heart. Not as round, the bones more prominent. And this new silence. How many times I’d wished he would put a cork in it, my nonstop talker, my sweet If-I -think-i t-I – must-say-i t son.

“Benny!” I said. “Bruf!”

“Let’s eat,” he said, and we ran down to dinner.

“How about Gumball?”

“Gumball!” Hysterical laughter.

“Or… Falafel?”

Benny blew milk out of his nose.

“Easy,” Sam said, chuckling, handing him his napkin. “Hey, I know. She sticks to you-we could call her Velcro.”

Another laugh attack. “Or Glue!” Benny drummed his feet against his chair.

Under the table, I was having mixed feelings. On one hand, it was nice to be the center of attention, plus every now and then Benny dropped a piece of French bread on the floor; much better than Purina Dog Chow. But on the other hand, these name suggestions were ridiculous. Benny’s were worse than Sam’s-Jezebel, Caramba, Muffin, Baloney. Be serious! I wanted to tell them. I don’t want to go through life called Hairy-et.

Benny got sidetracked and started telling Sam about school supplies he needed for the first day of first grade, which crayons, what kind of colored pencils. I’d been looking forward to that shopping trip since spring. Now I wouldn’t even get to take him to school. Soon, though, the conversation swerved back to what to name the dog.

“Blunderbuss,” Benny snorted, swaying in his seat, overcome with his cleverness. “Blinderbluss. Bladdabladda. Bliddablidda. Bliddabladdabliddabl-”

“Hey, I have an idea,” Sam said seriously. About time he settled Benny down. If he got revved up this close to bedtime, he couldn’t fall asleep for hours. “How about if we call her Sonoma?”

Sonoma. I crawled out from under the table. That’s not bad.

“ Sonoma?” Benny said. “Why?”

“Because that’s where we were when we hit her. Georgetown and Sonoma Road.”

They looked at me. I looked at them. “ Sonoma,” they said together. “Do you like it?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” said Benny.

Me, too.

Good thing they didn’t hit me on Roosevelt.

“One more, Daddy, please? Just one more, I promise.”

That’s what he said after the last story. This was new behavior; Benny was a pretty good sleeper, rarely had histrionics at bedtime, would often drift off in the middle of the first chapter. From my spot at the bottom of the bed, I could see he was exhausted, hear it in his croaky voice.

Sam sighed. “Hey, buddy,” he said gently, closing the book. “We talked about this before, remember? What we said?”

“Yeah.”

“What did we say?”

“I can go to sleep.”

“You can go to sleep… and what?”

“Wake up.”

“That’s right.”

“Not like Mom.”

Oh, no.

“Right. You can let yourself fall asleep, and in the morning you’ll wake up-what?”

“Bigger, better, and stronger.”

“That’s right. Brand-new day.” He gave Benny a soft kiss on the forehead. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. You sleep tight, Benster. Love you.”

“Love you. Can Sonoma stay with me?”

“Nope.” Sam stood up and slapped his thigh-my cue to leave. I considered my options. Jumped off the bed.

“Leave the light on, okay? And the door open!”

“Don’t I always?”

That ritual was familiar to me: hall light on, bedroom door ajar; Benny was afraid of the dark. Afraid of falling asleep because he might not wake up? That killed me. I wanted to cry, but all that came out was a high, whining sound in the back of my throat as I followed Sam down the steps. He thought it meant I had to go to the bathroom, and took me outside.

The red nylon leash not only annoyed me-where did he think I was going to go?-it also made it harder to do my business in private. Silly, maybe, but I was not going to squat in front of my husband. I managed by sidling around a gap in the Hortons’ privet hedge next door, out of view. A particularly good spot because it was between two streetlights and therefore dark, or as dark as our suburban Bethesda neighborhood ever got.

How wonderful to be back, even under these, the most peculiar circumstances imaginable. I was feeling a kind of excitement that went beyond the fact that I was home again. The smells! I could even see better than usual, which was odd, considering that in daylight I saw slightly less well. Maybe it was because I had such big pupils. Whatever-everything was incredibly sharp and interesting and I could not get enough of the smells. Feral, musky, smoky, dusty-my vocabulary would run out before I could name them all. Anyway, it didn’t matter if I was sniffing a “squirrel”; I could only concentrate on that spicy-dirty smell, the essence of “squirrel.” I could flare my nostrils, inhale, and taste it on the roof of my mouth, the back of my tongue, all the way down my throat and into my vitals. And it was fascinating.

The phone was ringing when we got home.

“Hi, Delia,” Sam said, and I skidded to a stop on my way to the kitchen for a drink of water. My sister! “We went this afternoon, yeah. Well… not much change, I guess. No. Although sometimes I swear she can hear me.”

Sam carried the phone to the living room sofa and sat down. “Right. I know… Right.”

These long pauses while Delia talked were driving me crazy. What’s she saying? I jumped up next to Sam-who reacted as if I’d thrown up on him, leaping to his feet, sweeping me to the floor one-handed. Sheesh.

“Well, we just keep hoping. No change on the scale, the nurse said today. They call it the Glasgow Coma Scale. It evaluates… Right. So nothing new there, apparently, which you can look at… Right, exactly.”

More silence on Sam’s end. Frustration! I put my hands-I mean my front paws-on the arm of the sofa and slowly, slowly raised myself. He had the phone to his other ear, though; I could hear Delia’s voice but not her words.

“I played it for her today. Well…” He laughed. “Not, uh, not to the naked eye. I’m sure, though, deep inside she was boogying.”

Delia’s mix tape. I remembered now; I’d heard snatches of it, but thought I was dreaming. Our favorites from high school-“Love Shack,” “Vogue,” “Losing My Religion.” Sweet Delia.

She lives in Philadelphia with her growing family. She must’ve visited me in the hospital and rehab, and yet I couldn’t quite remember it. So much of that time passed in a dream state, some gray twilight zone between being and not being. I saw myself as if from a great height, and the connection between the two me’s would be strong one moment, tenuous as a paper-clip chain the next.

“Hey, that would be great. Sure, either weekend is fine. Whichever’s better for you guys. You can always stay here, you know. Plenty of room; it’s just… the two of us. Well, whatever’s easier. That’s fine.”

More talk on her end. When was she coming?

“I’m okay. You know. Yeah. Well, that, too. I’ve put the cabin on the market.”

What? Oh, no.

“Yeah, it’s a terrible time, but I couldn’t see a choice. The bills… you can’t believe. Insurance, sure, but not enough. Nowhere near. Thanks. Thanks, but we’re okay.”

Oh, Sam. Not the cabin. And not now, right after we bought it. You’ll lose all the closing costs, the mortgage fee-thank goodness there was no prepayment penalty-and you’ll have to pay them again, the buyer’s and the seller’s closing costs. Oh, this was terrible.

“I’m looking now. I’ve already started,” Sam was saying. Looking for what? “Tomorrow, in fact, I’ve got a… Yeah. Oh, something will turn up. Um, he’s all right, basically. No, I don’t tell him that. No, I keep it… Right, very hopeful. But the longer this goes on, the less chance…” Sam rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “He starts school in three weeks, so that’s… Yeah. A good distraction. Oh, he’d love that, thanks, Delia. And how are you? And Jerry and the kids…?”

More frustrating pauses. I padded around the room, unable to settle, until Sam hung up. Then I sat at his feet, the perfect dog. Minutes passed before he even saw me. “I forgot to tell her about you.”

I noticed.

Half smiling, he put his hand under my chin. I turned my head and pressed my cheek into his palm. With my eyes closed, it felt as if I were absorbing his sadness, taking it into a place in myself where it couldn’t hurt him as much. Was this what dogs did? And what I gave back, what I exchanged his sadness for, was simply love.

He took his hand away and stared. His eyes were alert, puzzled.

Sam. Sam, it’s me, Laurie. I put a paw on his knee, not letting him look away. Do you see me? Help me. Rescue me. For an instant, I swear he knew.

But then time moved, “reality” returned, and he laughed-uneasily-and gave a tug on my ear. “Come on, Sonoma. Bedtime.”

In the kitchen? I couldn’t believe it. He wanted me to lie down on the brand-n ew, corduroy-covered dog bed he’d bought on the way home from the vet’s that still smelled of the plastic wrap it came in. Pew. He gave me a few per functory pats and stood up. So did I. We went through that a few times-“No, lie down, lie down. That’s it. Good girl”-until I gave up. And then, then, he turned out the light and closed the swinging kitchen door. Didn’t even leave a radio on for me.

I waited for about half an hour, listening to Sam upstairs in the bathroom, then the creaks and cracks of the house settling, the next-door neighbor smoking his last cigarette on his screen porch, the occasional car purring by. I even heard Sam turn his bedside lamp off-amazing. He’s a good sleeper and he conks out fast; I waited ten more minutes. Then I nosed the door open and escaped.

Treading quickly on the rugs, carefully on the hardwood so my toenails wouldn’t clack. New instincts were kicking in. I felt like a huntress.

That earthy, humid, little-boy smell in Benny’s room was stronger than ever, as if it had been fermenting in the dark. Bath time must be in the morning under Sam’s regime. I went to the source, creeping onto my son’s low bed with such grace and precision, he never stirred. As usual, he’d thrown his covers off. He lay on his stomach, arms flung out as if he were flying. The soft, quick sound of his breathing kept time with my heartbeat. I wanted to taste him, lick all the skin his hiked-up pjs exposed, but settled for discreet snuffling, deep, silent inhales of his calves, his feet, the delicious back of his neck. I settled myself along the length of his leg, touching as much of him with as much of me as possible. And guarded him.

Time passed-I didn’t know how much. The numbers on Benny’s Spider-M an clock ran together; I couldn’t make sense of them. Sometime deep in the night, I gave him a last nose caress and crept out of his room.

Into Sam’s. Where the smells were much subtler but equally intriguing. More so, in their way. Our bed was higher than Benny’s. I put my front paws on the foot of the mattress and cautiously raised myself so I could see Sam. For a long time I just watched him, asleep on his back, one arm over his eyes. The sheet covered half of his bare chest; under it he’d have on his running shorts-his summer pajamas. In the light from the streetlamp his skin looked hard and bluish pale, like marble. God, I’d missed him. I missed him right now. Quiet as a ninja, I got all four feet on the bed and curled up on my wide, empty side of it in the smallest ball I could manage. And fell into the second-deepest sleep of my life.

I’m sealed in icy water, trying not to breathe. If I breathe, I’ll die. Darkness is closing in. I can see only through a narrowing tunnel. I flail my limbs, knowing it’s useless, unwise, but the fear is too strong. Help me! (Did this happen? Is it real?) When I can’t bear it any longer, my mouth opens and I suck in-water. Panic devours me. I scream, but there’s no sound because there’s no breath. I have one last clear thought: This is so stupid. The last emotion is fury-I kick, I punch, I push-

“What the hell?”

I wake up.

Back to the kitchen. I didn’t protest. Bad dog, caught in the act. Sam was so groggy, I couldn’t tell if he was mad or amused because his new dog had kicked him awake. Except for “What the hell?” he had nothing to say. But he made his point when, after closing the kitchen door on me, he pulled a dining room chair in front of it.

I see now that there was still a part of me that believed this whole thing was a hallucination. It died a tragic death when Sam dragged that chair in front of the door. This isn’t funny anymore, I thought. I have got to get out of this. The fact that I had no idea what “this” was didn’t daunt me. I had spent my first and last day as a dog. Tomorrow: liberation.

I figured out where we were going on our walk when we got to the bottom of York Lane and turned right on Custer Road. Monica Carr’s house. Benny and her twins were the same age, and they played well together. When I had been working (which was most of the time) and Sam had had something urgent to do (which was not very often), Monica was good about taking Benny, even on short notice. Monica was pretty good about everything, truthfully. I would hate to think that’s why I had never much liked her.

“Morning!” she called from the doorway of the renovated two-story brick colonial she got to keep in the divorce, waving, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “My goodness, who’s that?” Me, she meant. Benny dropped Sam’s hand and ran toward her, already launched on a complicated explanation of the origins of his new dog. “Ethan, Justin, Benny’s here!” Monica called back into the house. And then she squatted down in her skintight biking shorts and put her arms around Benny and kissed him, and he stopped talking long enough to hug her back.

What? What?

Ethan and Justin were adorable, two blond-haired angels with mischievous senses of humor and hilarious laughs. When they saw me, they fell all over me, thrilled and fearless. What fun children were! Human toys. Benny started the Sonoma saga over again for their benefit. Ethan and Justin always made me soften toward Monica; she must be doing something right, I’d think, usually after some less charitable assessment. But the truth was, Monica did almost everything right, and I was just never saintly enough to find that endearing.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Their tones, Sam’s and Monica’s, pulled me up short. I stopped roughhousing with the boys and moved closer on my leash.

“How have you been, Sam?” Such sympathy she put in the simple question; it sounded like a caress. An extra caress, to go with the solicitous hand she had on his arm. “How are you holding up?” She tossed her head to shake the glossy black bangs out of her eyes. She smelled of delicate sweat, if there was such a thing, and also of cinnamon, yeast, something fruity… Raisin muffins, that was it. From scratch, of course, probably very high in fiber, and she’d made them either before or after her five-m ile morning jog. What time was it, eight? “Have you got a minute to come in? I have a coffee cake ready to come out of the oven.”

Coffee cake, same thing. Sam said he wished he could, but he was in a bit of a hurry, didn’t want to be late for his appointment. No, no, she agreed, it wouldn’t do to be late for that. What appointment? Nobody told me anything.

Monica offered to keep me as well as Benny, but Sam said no, thanks; that was nice of her, but Benny would be enough for her to handle. All three boys groaned their disappointment. I felt let down, too; I’d been looking forward to some time alone with Sam, but if he was going out anyway, I’d much rather have stayed at Monica’s with Benny. So much for what I wanted, though. “It’s a dog’s life”-I was never sure if that meant you had it hard or you had it easy. But it’s neither. It means you’re a slave, with no rights, no privileges. Why don’t dogs rise up and rebel? Instead they love us-that’s all they do. It’s a mystery.

I couldn’t believe it when Sam shut me out of the bathroom while he took his shower. Something else I’d been looking forward to was seeing him naked, although I hadn’t quite realized it until the opportunity was snatched away. At least he came out in his shorts, all clean skin and wet hair, smelling of soap, shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste. And at least he let me watch him get dressed. Ten years ago, when we were first married, he had lots of suits, and he wore them to his job as an actuary in a large downtown insurance company. These days he was down to one suit and a few sport coats, and he rarely wore any of them. No need when his main job was to take care of Benny and his other job called for a tux.

He pulled on a T-shirt, then stepped into the pants of his dark blue suit and zipped up. Light blue shirt next (I assumed; it looked gray to me), followed by his navy paisley tie. His best black belt. What was this “appointment” he needed to get dressed up for? He combed a side part in his longish, streaky-blond hair, and that was a tip-off that wherever he was going, it had nothing to do with magic. Milo Marvelle wore his hair straight back from his handsome forehead, accentuating his sharp, dramatic features. Sam Summer was a good-l ooking man, but Milo Marvelle was a Master of Mystery.

He kept glancing at his watch. When he was nervous, he had a habit of pursing his lips and blowing air in and out of his cheeks. He stowed his wallet, change, comb, and handkerchief in various pockets, then took a long, scowling look at himself in the mirror over the bureau. “Million bucks,” I wanted so much to tell him. It was what we said to each other whenever we dressed up for something special. “Honey, you look like a million bucks.” Sam inhaled deeply, said, “Okay,” into the mirror, a one-word pep talk, and went out.

He closed me up in the kitchen again. “Just until we’re sure she’s housebroken,” he’d explained last night to Benny. What, I hadn’t proven myself yet? What did I have to do? Explode? “Be good,” he said, ruffling the hair behind my ear. You, too. I licked his wrist. Good luck. Drive carefully. I had the stupid dining room chair out of the way and the door open before I heard his car start.

I’d never noticed before, but there wasn’t a comfortable chair in my living room. Not one. I’d gone for modern when we bought the house, pleased with the new sleekness of leather, metal, and glass. Modern was sophisticated; modern meant professional, in control, and on the way up. Maybe so, but where do you sprawl out? No wonder Sam and Benny liked the den best (or the “away room” as we say in real estate). I used to keep the door to the den closed when we had company, as if hiding a mad relative. Now it was where I went after sampling all the slippery leather sectionals and the scary Eames recliner in the living room. The den even smelled better. Like people.

Over in the corner, my computer was humming. In sleep mode, but it was on, which was a relief; the button that activated it was in back, flush with the monitor, and I wasn’t sure I could’ve punched it in with my nose. All I had to do was press the space bar and… voila. The blue screen.

Now what? How could I write a message to Sam? First thing, get myself settled in the office chair so I could reach the keys. That took more time than I’d expected, owing to the fact that the chair revolved and sat on castors. I reminded myself of a seal balancing on a beach ball. But that was nothing compared to trying to get the computer into word-processing mode. I fell on the floor an embarrassing number of times, and failed in the end anyway because I simply could not push the mouse up to Word and keep it there while left-clicking with my chin.

Even if I had been able to, how would I have typed letters? My feet were too big. And my tongue-I’d noticed this already-was really clumsy and inefficient; it wouldn’t go sideways, couldn’t point or flatten; all it could do was go in and out, in and out.

Discouraged, I jumped off the chair and onto the sofa. Sam’s sofa; I’d never liked it, but that was because I hadn’t known how great the nubby fabric would be for scratching the sides of my face. And the top of my nose, between my eyes, those places I couldn’t reach very well myself. I curled up in the patch of sunshine coming through the window, resting my chin on the sofa arm. So I could think better.

The phone woke me. Charlie, Sam’s father, left a message on the machine saying he’d be over Saturday night about eight thirty, if that was okay, in time to say good night to Benny.

Maybe I could write a message to Sam in longhand. Of course! Getting the legal pad off the desk was simple; I just swiped it sideways with my nose. Ditto the cup full of ballpoints and pencils. Too bad there was writing on the top sheet of the legal pad. I couldn’t tell what it said; my eyes wouldn’t focus that close. Well, whatever it was, I had something much more important to write. Using tongue, teeth, and my bottom lip, I tore that page off and spit it on the floor in pieces.

I won’t recount how many times I tried to click on a ballpoint pen, just that I was unsuccessful. There were three pencils, and the first two broke in half in my mouth. I got the last one clamped between my molars, no easy feat since I only had about two-thirds the number of teeth I used to have. Now, what to write? Words were out of the question, I’d realized a pencil and a half ago. A symbol, then. A heart.

Crap, crap, crap. I couldn’t control the pressure. I pierced a hole in the paper with the pencil, and in the end all I got was a trembly rhomboid with drool on it.

I needed bigger media. Think. If I were the kind of woman who kept a lot of throw pillows on the furniture-someone like Monica Carr, say-I could spell something out with them on the floor. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t.

Upstairs, I finally found a box of crayons in the rubble of Benny’s room. No sense figuring a way to use them up here; I could write the Gettysburg Address on the wall in finger paints and no one would notice for days. Back to the den.

Like the tongue, a dog’s toes extend and retract. That’s it. I gave up trying to write something with Benny’s crayons and concentrated instead on arranging them in some kind of shape. My initials! If I could make LS out of crayons, wouldn’t that tell Sam something?

I had to eat part of the box to get the crayons out, but that was okay. Cardboard had a pleasant woody taste; I wouldn’t have minded eating the whole thing, actually. How many crayons were in this box? Eight, ten, something like that; precise counting was no longer one of my strong suits. I nosed two crayons into an L, but that looked random, meaningless. Two on a side, that was better, a big L. Good. Now for the S.

It’s hard to make curves with straight edges. I kept getting a 5 when I wasn’t getting a swastika. (I could just hear Sam: “You’re Hitler? I know-Eva Braun!”) I did the best I could until hunger distracted me. That cardboard, it was like an hors d’oeuvre. I trotted into the kitchen.

Sam had served a mix of canned and dry dog food last night-surprisingly tasty-but today it was just a bowl of kibble. Boring but not bad, and the crunch was satisfying. I ate the whole thing.

I was sitting in the hall, scratching an itch under my collar, when a noise on the front porch brought me to full alert. Footsteps. I gave a low, warning bark, but it sounded self-conscious, rehearsed. Like what I was supposed to do. Then the screen door squealed open. Bark! That felt better. A cascade of envelopes and magazines pushed through the slot in the door. Bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark!

I used to like the postman, a nice guy named Brian, but now I hated him. What fun! Barking was so invigorating, pure self-expression, like singing at the top of your lungs. I kept it up till Brian was barely a memory; then I went back to the den and took a nap.

The key in the front door woke me. Sam! I ran to the door, heart soaring. Sam was home! Joy! Bliss! I jumped up high, trying to lick his face, tail flying, barking, spinning, not peeing, not peeing-

“Down!”

Where had he been? I could smell plastic… car exhaust, people… some chemical-l y smell, like a new carpet-

“Down! Damn it, dog.” He wasn’t as glad to see me as I was to see him. He looked tired and tense at the same time. Oh, baby, I thought, sobering fast, and followed him into the kitchen. He saw the chair, the door. “Oh, for the love of… How the hell did you…” His shoulders drooped. Mine, too. He got a beer out of the refrigerator and took it into the den.

A beer? What time was it? Clocks didn’t tell me anything anymore. Too early for a beer, though, I knew that from the sun. When had Sam started drinking during the day?

“Oh, jeez. What did you do?”

Stop! Don’t, don’t-

Too late. He didn’t even read it. He just bent over, swept up all my carefully placed crayons, along with the broken pencils and ballpoints, the torn paper and the crayon box remains. Damn it, Sam, do you know how hard I worked on that?

“Bad dog! Bad Sonoma!” He shoved the evidence under my nose. “Shame on you. Bad dog.”

Okay, okay, I get it. I lay down and put my paws over my ears. I’ve always hated criticism.

I heard the heavy, hopeless sound of Sam dropping down on the couch. A sigh. A gulp of beer. When I sneaked a glance, he was shaking his head at me. But smiling. Just a tiny bit.

I meant to be subtle, but my heart turned inside out with gladness and I pounced to him instead of slinking. I didn’t jump up next to him-I had enough self-control to stop short of that. I sat at his feet, and after a few minutes Sam put his hand on top of my head and just rested it there, heavy and trusting, and we stayed that way until it was time to go get Benny.

By week’s end, I had the run of the house. Sam decided the incident with the pencils and papers was an anomaly brought on by separation anxiety. Since then I’d behaved like Perfect Dog, and on the third night he moved my bed to the upstairs hall. No more closed kitchen doors for me. It didn’t matter, though; as soon as they were asleep, I’d sneak into Benny’s room, then Sam’s. I slept lightly, and never got caught again.

Saturday was housecleaning day. It used to be Tuesday, when the cleaning lady came, but evidently those days were over. Now it was just Sam, with Benny’s “help,” trying to bring order to a week’s worth of laissez-faire living-that’s putting it charitably. Benny’s room was beyond shoveling out; what they needed was a backhoe. How could one five-year-old boy make such a mess in only seven days?

I wasn’t completely blameless, mess creation-wise. I should have felt guilty, but it wasn’t in me anymore. And to think, I used to be such a fastidious person. “Persnickety,” Sam called me. I’d had food aversions, too; I was picky about textures, smells, certain flavors. Ha! Now I’d eat anything. Anything. If I was thirsty enough, the toilet bowl was not off-l imits. When my butt itched, I dragged it across the carpet. Dog hair everywhere? Pfft, life was too short to obsess about such trifles.

Benny and I went outside when Sam started vacuuming. What a diabolical machine; the noise alone was painful, but there was something menacing about the moves it made, that predatory back and forth. I wanted to get away from it as much as I wanted to shred it into metallic pieces.

Sam had started to build a fort for Benny last spring. When I’d seen it last, before the accident, it was a three-sided plywood lean-to abutting the oak tree at the bottom of our backyard. In the past two months, Sam had enclosed the fourth side, put in a door and a window, and painted it gray-blue with white trim. A dream playhouse and, needless to say, Benny’s favorite place. I wasn’t surprised when he headed straight for it after Sam said, “Thanks, buddy, good job,” and released him from his chores.

“Look, Sonoma. This is where I keep stuff.”

The fort was roughly a five-f oot cube, smelling of wood and earth. Benny opened a plastic chest in a corner of the cube and showed me his toys. “Brontosaurus puzzle. See, look. I can do it fast.” Indeed; he had the dinosaur assembled in about one minute. “Then it goes back in this egg, see?” He took it apart and put it away in its plastic cup. “I got a preying mantis one in my room, but it goes back in a box, not an egg. Look at this.” He showed me his plastic bulldozer and his magic deck of cards. His special marble, his lion mask.

“Okay, now,” he said in a different voice, bending into the toy box and pulling out a smaller one, metal: an old cookie tin. I went closer.

He whispered, “See this, Sonoma?” He held out an item I didn’t recognize at first. “My mom owned it. It’s a secret. I took it out of her car. It’s for coffee, you put coffee in and then you drink it when you’re driving. Going to your job in your car, and it won’t spill.” He demonstrated how to drink from my old coffee cup.

“It says the name of her job right here.” SHANAHAN & LEWIS REALTORS. “She went every day. They sell houses to people. She got rewards because she was good. She was the best.”

Well. I was, but I didn’t know Benny knew it. I felt proud, but also as if I might’ve been caught doing something slightly embarrassing. Bragging.

“This is her mouse pad.” He was whispering again. He did that adorable thing he did with his face when he was thinking hard: He scowled and pursed his mouth and wrinkled his nose. I knew exactly what he was thinking: How do I explain a mouse pad to my dog? In the end he decided not to bother. “It has a picture of us Dad took, me and Mom, then he had it put on this thing. It’s us sledding down York Lane. I was a little boy. I couldn’t go on my own yet. This is Mom and this is me.”

I loved that picture. Benny, three years old, sat in front of me on the sled, both of us red-f aced from the cold and laughing like loons. He had on his silver snowsuit, the same outfit he’d worn at Christmastime that year to sit on Santa’s lap. Outgrown long ago.

He held the mouse pad photo closer to my face. “It looks like we have the same color hair, but we don’t.” No, we did-he’d forgotten. His hair had darkened in the past two years, and mine stayed the same. He’d just forgotten.

The mouse pad went back in the box; out came something wrapped in a piece of cloth. Something special, I could tell by the way he held it.

“Look,” he said, and opened the last treasure.

Earrings. Cheap metal hearts with MOM engraved on each one-he and Sam had bought them last Mother’s Day at a kiosk in the mall. “She liked them a lot. She said they were beautiful. When she wakes up, I’m giving them to her again. As soon as she wakes up.” I leaned my weight against him; he put his arm around my neck. “I told Dad, and he said she might not remember. That I gave ’em to her before, but I think she will. Don’t you?”

He wasn’t crying, but I licked his cheek. I know she will.

I’d always liked Sam’s father, even though he was as unlike his only son as could be. Where Sam was a quiet man, unassuming and kind, often reserved around strangers, Charlie was the kind of guy the phrase “good time” was invented for. He sold insurance before he retired a few years ago, and I used to like to imagine what a nice surprise people were in for who invited him over to discuss premiums on their whole life. What I hadn’t known was how much fun he was if you happened to be a dog.

Pretend-growling was great fun, too, sort of like constant gargling. Charlie played tug-of-war with me and my toy pheasant almost as long as I wanted. Almost. We played in the kitchen until he dragged me out of the house by his half of the toy and collapsed on the front porch step. I let him pry my mouth open, hoping he would heave the bird out into the dark front yard. He did; then he did it again, and then again, but not enough. He tired out-they always do. I could’ve retrieved that pheasant all night.

Sam came out with a couple of beers, handed one to his father. “Hot,” he said. “We can sit inside if you’d rather. Cooler in the air-conditioning.”

“Not me, I like it. The dog days. Benny go to sleep?”

“Finally.”

“Seems to me like he’s doing pretty well.”

“You cheer him up, Pop. I think he’s too quiet.”

“You were like that.” Charlie took a sip of beer and then belched a few times, softly. He still had a full head of sandy hair, but he was going soft and round in all the places Sam was hard and angular. “Quiet kid, you were. Always figured that’s why you took up magic.”

“But Benny’s a talker.”

“That’s for sure. Nonstop. But he’ll be okay. He will be, Sam.”

“Sure, I know.”

“Hey, getting that dog was a great idea.”

“Well…”

Well, what?

“No leash-you’re not worried she’ll run off?”

“No way. She sticks to us like a shadow.”

“What about when you and Benny are gone all day? Him in school, you at work?”

I stopped sniffing around in the grass and trotted over. What work? Sam had work?

“She’s housebroken,” Sam said.

“Yeah, but cooped up in the house all day, that’s no life for a big dog.”

I thought of myself as medium.

“I’d take her for you myself, but they’ve got a weight limit on pets.” Charlie lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring. But what a sweet offer. I nuzzled his hand in gratitude.

“I’m more worried about Benny than the dog.” Sam set his beer on the step and pulled out the deck of cards he always kept in his pocket. “I hate it that I won’t be here when he gets home from school.”

“So what’ll you do?”

“There’s a neighbor who’s offered to keep him. She’s got two boys his age, so it should work out.”

Monica? “Mupf?”

“Hush, not now,” Sam said, thinking I wanted to play.

“Well, that’s good. Yeah, that sounds like it’ll work out all right. Kids adjust,” Charlie started saying. “When they’re little, they can adapt to almost anything…” So on and so on. I quit listening. Monica Carr was going to take my child after school every day? Why? Where was Sam going to be?

“Queen of spades.”

“So tell me about your new job,” Charlie said, pulling a random card from the flared deck Sam held out to him. “Queen of spades,” he confirmed without surprise, and handed it back.

“It’s not what I wanted. I was hoping for something part-time, but that was a dead end. There’s been a lot of downsizing and merging since I got out of the field. I had to take what I could get. Two of clubs.”

Charlie picked a card and nodded. “Two of clubs. But you hate this job.”

“No, Pop. Don’t say that.” He gave a weak laugh and concentrated on his overhand shuffle. “Anyway, it’s irrelevant. I have to make some money.”

“I was real sorry to hear about the cabin.”

Sam nodded, shrugged.

“I know you had high hopes,” Charlie said gently. “Spend more time with Laurie and all.”

Really? I tried to read Sam’s face in the dimness. That wasn’t why he’d wanted the cabin. Was it?

Charlie patted his knee. When I came over, he started ruffling my ears and blowing into my face. I wagged my tail, ready for a game. “Kinda ironic,” he said.

“How so?”

“Laurie always wanted you to go back to work.”

I wheeled away, out of Charlie’s reach. That’s not true. Even if it was, Charlie never knew it. Sam never knew it-because I never said it. Not out loud. I looked at Sam, waiting for him to deny it.

“Laurie…” he said and stopped.

Yes? What?

“She thought she was marrying an actuary. It’s not her fault she ended up with a part-time magician.”

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie sat up straight. “Well, the way I remember it, you didn’t think you were marrying-”

“Hey, now, Pop.”

“-a type-A workaholic go-getter who-”

“Pop.”›

“-lived for making dough and setting sales records. Okay, okay. Sorry. But if she was disappointed in you, I say that went two ways.”

Charlie! I thought you loved me!

Oh, this was so unfair. I slunk farther out into the yard, beyond the circle of the porch light. If only I could disappear. I found a patch of dusty-smelling ivy and burrowed down in it.

What was wrong with liking your job? I was not a workaholic. Charlie was right about one thing-when I met Sam he was working in one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, climbing the actuary ladder, taking the competency exams, passing with freakish ease. A math geek. As it turned out, he hated math, but I didn’t know that. But it didn’t matter! We were glad to switch gender roles, especially when my salary tripled and quadrupled during the real estate boom. When it went bust-okay, that was when I might have said something to Sam. Not nagging, though; more pointing out the obvious. Tactfully. Lovingly and supportively.

Then I got the O Street property in Georgetown and sold it to a Chinese businessman who paid the asking price in cash. Huge commission, Mega Deal Maker of the Year, promotion-Sam’s cabin on the river. In the worst housing market slump in recent history, I was invincible.

Then I drowned.

Now Sam had to go back to a job he hated. Benny had to face first grade without a mother, and after school he had to go to Monica Carr’s house. Sam had to sell his beautiful cabin to pay the insurance bills. Everything was going to hell, and it was my fault.

I might as well lie down in the street and get hit by another car.

I would have, except just then Sam said, “Delia’s coming down tomorrow and we’re all going to Hope Springs to visit Laurie. You can come along, Pop, but you don’t have to. I know it’s hard to-”

“No, I’d like to come. Thanks, Sam. For including me. I feel bad that I haven’t gone to see her more often.”

I couldn’t remember Charlie visiting me at all. But this was great! “All” must mean the whole family-Sam would take me, too. They encouraged pets at places like Hope Springs -we were therapeutic!

My God, this was it. The answer, the key. Tomorrow would change everything. I didn’t know how-I just knew it would. All I’d wanted was my family back, and in a way, a most peculiar way, I’d gotten it. It was time to get myself back.

They didn’t take me.

It took me until the last second to figure it out, when Sam stuck his foot across my chest, said, “No, Sonoma, you stay here. Stay, girl, we’ll be back. Guard the house,” and shut the front door in my face.

Unbelievable. All my hopes, dashed in an instant. The capriciousness, the absolute tyranny of humans over dogs had never hit me before. If I hadn’t known it would make everything worse, I’d have hurled my sixty-pound body over and over against that obstinate closed door until one of us broke. Now I wouldn’t even see my sister!

But worse, much worse, I wouldn’t see myself. And after conceiving the idea, I’d only grown more certain that that was the only way out. How it would work, exactly, I had no idea-how could I, when I didn’t know how this bizarre business had started in the first place?-I just knew I had to try. To reconnect. To reclaim myself.

Which meant I had to escape.

Stratford Road, our one-block-l ong street in suburban Bethesda, was such a safe, sweet neighborhood, sometimes we didn’t even lock the doors. Sam and I used to say we ought to do something about the basement windows, which were small, old-f ashioned casements set high in the walls, grimy and cobwebby, most of them rusted shut if nothing else-but we never got around to it. I knew which one was the most vulnerable: the one in the furnace room over the fuel tank. Last spring two oil company guys had come to service the furnace, and in the process they’d opened that window to pass tools back and forth.

The hardest part was getting up on top of the fuel tank, slippery, stinky, rusty, dusty metal, four feet high, but where there’s a will there’s a way. What a godsend that the window opened outward on its hinges. All I had to do was pull the lever down with my teeth and push against the glass with my head. “All,” I say; I almost broke a tooth, and the gap I finally pushed open was so narrow, I scraped my backbone scrambling through it. But I got out. I stood on the hot driveway pavement, triumphant, and shook myself. Call me MacGyver.

Hope Springs was in Olney, technically another Washington suburb but a really faraway one, twenty miles or so up Georgia Avenue from the district line. My best bet would be to take Georgetown Road to I-2 70, get off at the Beltway, follow it to Georgia, head north. In a car, that’s probably half an hour. On foot…

Well, no point in thinking about it. Just put one paw in front of the other. Dogs can travel amazing distances-you hear that all the time-and they only have their senses to rely on. I had senses and an extremely clear and vivid mental map of Montgomery County, acquired from years of driving clients around to look at properties. Talk about a head start. I set off at a confident lope.

At the corner of York and Custer, though, I paused. A car coming down the hill honked; I scuttled over to the right, into the Givens’ side yard. Something kept me idling there instead of heading left-my route, my way out. Some nagging little thing I couldn’t identify. Not until I turned right and trotted down the sidewalk a little ways and found myself-hey, how did this happen?-in front of Monica Carr’s house.

And speak of the devil. Wouldn’t you know? Sunday was the day Gilbert, the ex-husband, got the twins, so what did Monica do on her one day off, the single childless day of the week she could’ve done anything she liked? Did she go shopping? Take a drive, go to a museum, a movie, visit friends, go on a date? No. She stayed home and perfected her already perfect front-yard perennial garden. It was all flowers, no grass-she grew an emerald green carpet of that in the backyard-and it was beautiful. I would like to say Monica’s garden was precious and too planned, or too artificially rustic, or too self-conscious and full of itself, but it was none of those. It was magazine-l ovely eleven months of the year, and in its off-month it had “winter interest.”

There she was, deadheading the rudbeckia. In khaki shorts and a sleeveless top that showed off her tan and her tight runner’s body. I sat on the sidewalk and watched her through the spokes of the wrought-i ron fence surrounding the garden, surprised when a growl, low but definite, vibrated in the back of my throat. Could I be a violent dog? How interesting. I lifted my lips and bared my teeth, ex perimenting. Whoa. Rush of aggression!

I heard the phone ring in the house before Monica did. She tossed her clippers down and ran inside, and that’s when I decided this was my chance. To do what? A dog’s strong suit isn’t planning ahead.

Simple to get in-the gate was open. Inside, nothing smelled very interesting; squirrels and chipmunks probably took one look at all the pristine gorgeousness and went next door. Monica had everything: the flowers you’d expect in late August, gaillardia, daisies, asters, salvia, cosmos, and then dozens more you had no name for, everything beautifully banked and clumped and color-coordinated, all of it lush and alive. I was drawn to a perfect side-by-side harmonization of low verbena and feathery coreopsis, deep purple and butter yellow. So simple, so lovely. I had to kill it.

The weed-f ree soil was, as you’d expect, rich and soft and loamy, and digging-I’d been a dog for almost a week now: How had the peerless, inimitable joys of digging in dirt eluded me? It was an all-encompassing feeling once you got going, once you figured out how much more efficient and satisfying it was to use all your appendages, all four feet and your snout. Thrilling, really, and so satisfying to see how high the piles of earth, stalks, stems, and flowers rose behind me, littering the brick walk, obscuring its tasteful herringbone pattern. Why stop at the verbena-coreopsis combo? Right beside it was a swath of ferns and hostas for green relief, and then came a spray of tall fountain grass-that would be a challenge. Excitement filled me. The first hosta plant came out so easily, I made the mistake of barking at it. Take that! Dead as a doornail. I started on its neighbor, one of the variegated kinds I’ve never liked anyway. And that! Die, you stupid plant, die like a-like a-

“Hey!”

Where did she come from? Monica had the phone in her hand. She stuck it to her ear, said, “I’ll call you back. There’s a dog in my yard, it-” She squinted. “ Sonoma?”

Busted.

She made a run for me-I jumped out of reach. She tried another off-balance lunge; I dodged the other way. Great fun. She looked so silly, and I was grace on four legs, shifting and feinting at the last second. Loser, I taunted, juking out of reach just before she could grab my collar. She tried stalking me next, hand out, voice coaxing. “Here, girl, it’s okay, c’mon, Sonoma, c’mon, girl.” Up yours.

We circled each other around the debris on the sidewalk. Then-too late-I saw that she’d gotten between me and the gate. A second later, she reached back and slammed it shut.

Trapped.

Screw you, I’ll jump over the fence. Watch this.

But it was four feet high, and it had arrow-shaped uprights, sharp arrow-shaped uprights, between each iron post. I pictured myself half inside, half out, impaled in the middle.

Okay, you got me, I told Monica, and lay down on the hot brick walk. Now what are you going to do with me?

She put me in the bathroom. I don’t know why I let her. Exhaustion, partly, but also the growing suspicion that I wasn’t a violent dog at all, that growling was my whole arsenal, after which I had nothing. Well, barking, and some fast footwork, but that was it. I even kept an eye on Monica’s calf while she guided me into the house, imagining my teeth sinking into its tan firmness-her shriek of pain-the taste of blood. But I couldn’t do it. What was I, a vampire? No, I was a retriever.

“Sam? It’s Monica.” She was out in the kitchen, but I could hear her plainly through the closed bathroom door. “I just tried you at home, but I guess you’re… Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I won’t keep you; I just wanted you to know Sonoma ’s here. Sonoma. No, here. Well, I guess she got out.” Light laughter.

I waited for the ax to fall.

“I have no idea; maybe you left a… Oh, she’s fine, none the worse for wear. I don’t know. I know, it’s so… No problem, I’m here all day, just pick her up whenever you… Sure, that’s fine. Okay, Sam, we’ll-You’re welcome, see you soon. Oh, please, don’t give it a thought. Bye-bye.”

She brought me a bowl of water. She brought me half a piece of toast with peanut butter. After an hour, she let me out.

Oh, such transparent manipulation. I wasn’t fooled for a second. I snooped around the house awhile, then lay down on the comfy couch in the living room, dirty paws and all. What are you going to do about it? She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in a cute, exasperated way. Uncharmed, I curled into a ball and took a nap.

When I woke up, she was all sweet-smelling in clean clothes and fresh makeup, running a feather duster over the furniture. A feather duster. I rest my case. One whole living room wall was covered with framed photographs, mostly of the twins. She was a photographer, too? She looked at her watch just as the doorbell rang. I jumped off the couch.

Benny! Sam! Benny! Sam! Joyful squeaking, ecstatic circling. They smelled like Hope Springs, but also like Delia. And pizza! I sat when Sam said, “Sit,” though, and didn’t shove my nose in his crotch, and I didn’t lick Benny on the mouth, another no-n o. It probably made no sense to be on best behavior now, but it was the only defense I had. I’d figured it out in the bathroom: Monica hadn’t told Sam on the phone about my adventures in the garden because she didn’t want to upset him while he was visiting his comatose wife. She’d tell him now, though.

But it was Sam, not Monica, who said, “Benny, why don’t you take Sonoma out to the car? Monica and I have to talk about something.”

“Okay,” Benny chirped, and patted his thigh for me to come, the way his dad did. “Come on, Sonoma!”

I didn’t want to go. Instinct told me it would be better to be there when Monica lowered the boom. On the other hand, prompt, willing obedience was all I had left, so I trotted outside after Benny.

A neat, empty rectangle of sour-smelling mulch had replaced the massacred flowers and hosta, and the brick walk had been swept clean, neat as one of Monica’s countertops. Nice of her to tidy up the scene of the crime, I thought sullenly. She probably had OCD.

I wanted to hear all about the visit to Hope Springs. How was I? What was my prognosis this week? Did Benny cry? Was he sad? But for once my son was in a quiet mood. We sat in the backseat of the car with the door open for a breeze. Hot as it was, Benny didn’t mind when I sidled close and rested my cheek on his chest. Blub-blub went his heart, the best sound. Love filled me up. How wonderful to be back with my family again.

But what was taking Sam and Monica so long? I didn’t like the look of them, standing too close in the doorway, talking in earnest voices too low to hear. Although at one point Monica clapped her hands at some comment of Sam’s and said distinctly, “Oh, that would be great.” What would? Having me put to sleep?

At last Sam turned and started toward the car. Well, this was it. The moment of truth. I searched his face for anger, indignation, but he was smiling, no doubt savoring some bon mot of Monica’s. Who, just then, thought of something else she must say to him and jogged out to the car, too.

“Oh, Sam, don’t forget the, um…” Suddenly she was tongue-tied. Sam finished buckling Benny’s seat belt, backed out, and closed the door. “The, um, you know.” She made a gesture with her hands, but Sam moved and his body blocked her. I couldn’t decipher it.

“I won’t,” he said.

“Don’t forget what?” alert Benny asked through the open window.

“Don’t forget… to tell me how Sonoma got out,” Monica said, clearly improvising. She reached in to ruffle Benny’s hair. “Pretty smart dog you got there.”

“She is really, really smart,” he agreed.

Monica looked at me and lifted one eyebrow. She wasn’t trying to communicate-sending ironic signals to a dog was the last thing on her mind. But to me, that private, raised brow was as good as a wink.

She hadn’t ratted on me.

Well, great. Just great. What was I supposed to do, thank her? And for a second, actual gratitude welled up in my retriever heart. I yawned at her. I grinned. I licked my lips.

Then I got a grip on myself. What naïveté. How could I fall for such a slick trick? I wasn’t one of those dogs you could smack around and then give a bone to and everything was hunky-dory. Forgive and forget-that’s what dogs do, but I was still Laurie. If I wanted to keep my family, I had to hang on to what I knew: Monica Carr was not my friend.

“I wonder why she came over to your house,” Sam said, settling in behind the wheel. “Although I’m glad she did-she could’ve gotten run over on Wilson Lane.”

“Maybe she’s in heat,” Monica suggested. “You should think about having her spayed.”

“I’m going to. I’ve just been too busy. I’ll call and make an appointment tomorrow.”

“Ah-r oooooo!” Oh, noooooo!

Monica thought that was a riot. “Ha ha ha! It’s like she heard you!”

At home, somebody had stuffed a large white envelope through the mail slot in the door. I got a whiff of a familiar smell, and just before Sam snatched it up, I recognized the preprinted logo in the return address: S &L. Of course-the familiar smell was Ron, my boss at Shanahan & Lewis. Funny, until now I hadn’t even known Ron had a smell.

Normally I’d have gone with Benny when he ran upstairs to his room, but something about Sam, a new dejection I could sense even though he didn’t say a word, didn’t even sigh, made me want to stay with him. When he went into the den, I followed.

He was pulling paper-clipped pages out of the envelope when his eye caught the blink of the answering machine light. He tossed the papers on the couch and punched the button.

Ron’s voice. “Hey, Sam, it’s Ronnie. Sorry I missed you this afternoon. I should’ve called first, but you were right on my way home, so I took a chance and stopped by. Anyway, good news-we got a bid on the cabin. As you can see from the offer there, it’s not the asking price, but it’s close. It’s no insult. So you think about it and let me know. We can go up ten or fifteen percent with our counter, I’m thinking. This guy’s a lobbyist. He lives in D.C., wants the cabin for hunting on weekends with clients. He says he’d hire someone for the rehab, wouldn’t do it himself-not the way you would have, and that’s a shame, but… Anyway, he seems like a pretty sure thing, no, uh, financial liabilities or anything like that, obviously. So, you’ve got the bid and the deposit check there, so now you think about it and just let me know. Hope you’re keeping well, you and Benny. We’re thinking about you. Everybody in the office-well, we just miss her like hell. Okay, talk to you soon.”

What a mensch. At the end, Ronnie’s voice wavered a tiny bit, and that put a lump in my throat, too. Sam dropped down in the desk chair and put his head in his hand. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to. Whatever had happened today at Hope Springs, which couldn’t have been good, this just made it worse. Sam’s beautiful cabin, going to some rich guy who wanted to use it as a base for shooting our deer, our birds.

I put my head on his knee. Sam. I nudged his elbow so he had to uncover his face and look at me. Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry. He gave me a twisted smile of affection, absent-minded at first but gradually focusing. “You,” he said-and my heart stopped. Did he see me? Did he know me? Sam. He leaned closer, stared harder. “How the hell did you get out?”

They say you don’t know what you have until you lose it. I found out in that moment that that includes the ability to cry.

Sam gave my head a pat and stood up slowly, his shoulders slumped. “Hungry?” he said, and headed for the kitchen to start dinner.

I followed a few minutes later. Not quite as hungry as I had been.

“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”

We were in my favorite place, at my favorite time of day: on the couch after dinner, when Sam read the paper and Benny got to watch TV for half an hour if anything suitable was on. Tonight was Sunday, so it was The Simpsons. Which may or may not have been suitable, but since I didn’t have a vote anymore, I tried not to make judgments. I just enjoyed.

Funny, when I was myself, I usually grabbed this interval between dinner and Benny’s bedtime to get some work done, phone clients, schedule appointments, do a little paperwork. I’d thought of it as Sam’s time with Benny. Which didn’t make much sense, I saw now, since Sam had Benny all day while I went to work.

I wasn’t technically allowed on the couch, but I had perfected the art of the stealthy creep, the discreet, painfully slow advance whose key element is patience. It almost always worked, and sometimes, when he noticed it in progress, it even made Sam laugh. Tonight I’d been especially successful by ending up between him and Benny, not curled in the smallest ball I could make on Benny’s far side, for invisibility. Ahh. This was the life. Everybody touching. Fidgety Benny on one side, warm, steady Sam on the other.

Sam let a lot of time go by without answering Benny’s question. Something in the newspaper seemed to have him enthralled. Did he think Benny would forget? What a dreamer.

“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”

Sam put the paper down. “Spay. It’s an operation they perform on a girl dog so she can’t have any babies. Any puppies.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why can’t she have any puppies?”

“Because they fix her so she can’t. They tie things up in her stomach. No puppies can come out. Say, how many more days till your birthday?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“But Sonoma would make good puppies. She’d make great puppies. How did she get out?” Benny veered, dropping the puppy question. “How’d she get out of the house?”

“I guess she got out while we were leaving this morning. That’s all I can figure-she slipped out the door and we didn’t notice. We’ll have to be more careful from now on.”

Sam had checked every window and door in the house-I went with him. He found the open casement window over the oil tank and closed it, but not once did it cross his mind that it might’ve been my escape route. No dog could be that clever or that dexterous, he was thinking. I felt so proud.

Back to puppies. “What if Sonoma got so many puppies inside her stomach and they couldn’t come out and she exploded! She could blow up. She could-pwow!”

“No, that wouldn’t happen. Are you getting excited? The big six is next Sunday.”

“Why not?”

“Because it just wouldn’t. They tie things up so she doesn’t even make puppies.”

Whoa, edging over into dangerous territory there. I perked up my ears.

But for a change, Benny missed a grown-up reference and went back to “Why?”

“Because… it’s better to have just one dog than six or seven dogs.”

“Why? No, it isn’t.”

“Because six or seven dogs would be too hard to take care of.”

“I would take care of them!”

“So we have to fix Sonoma so she’s our one and only dog, our main dog. She gets all the love and attention.” Oh, very nice. But then Sam went too far. “Like an only child.”

“Like me?”

“Right.”

“But I don’t want to be an only child!”

Sam blanched, but I don’t know who that hurt worse, him or me. “It’s different for dogs,” he tried. “ Sonoma will be happiest with just us. She’ll have a good life, a much better life, if she’s our one and only dog.”

“How old will she get?”

“I don’t know. Pretty old, though. We hope.”

“Will she die?”

“Someday. A long time from now, we hope.”

My son put a very gentle hand on my neck. Sam rubbed my back softly. At least talk of my eventual demise had gotten them off the puppy subject. I imagined Sam’s relief.

I lay my head on his thigh. We used to talk about having another child. We both wanted one, and then… I don’t know what happened. He’d bring it up every once in a while, and I’d stall. “Oh, I can’t take off work right now to have a baby, the market’s too good” or “the market’s too bad.” I’d say, “Don’t you like things the way they are right now? I’m only thirty-two,” or thirty-three, or thirty-f our. Well, now I’m thirty-fi ve (five in dog years). What would I say to Sam if he brought up the baby question today? My reasons always sounded sensible, but maybe I was just being selfish. I knew it was there, but I never let myself feel Sam’s disappointment. And now it was so much clearer-as if I could see him through his skin. Or as if I’d taken myself out of the picture, so I could see Sam in perfect focus. Unbiased. My motives and ambitions and vanities no longer in the way.

This must be how dogs saw us all the time.

What had I been thinking? Of course I wanted more children! I loved babies. In a flash-this was very peculiar, and powerful for the instant it lasted-I pictured myself lying on my side, nursing six or seven at the same time. Not nearly as disturbing an image as it might’ve been, and it cleared my head.

Getting myself back was more vital than ever now, and it had to be soon. Soon, before Sam made an appointment with the vet.

After he put Benny to bed, Sam went into the den and called Ronnie Lewis.

“I’m looking at the bid, Ron, and I think we should take it.”

I knew it! He’s so naïve about money. He’s a dreamer, not a schemer. Fine, I love that about him-but Sam, for Pete’s sake, don’t take the first offer!

Ron told him the same thing.

“I know, Ron, but I don’t want the hassle. I can’t deal with it right now. Let’s just take it and get it over with. I’ve thought about it, and that’s what I want to do.”

Ronnie talked for a while.

“Okay, that all sounds fine. One thing, Ron-you said there was a check with this stuff? Hand money?” He fanned out the envelope and papers in front of him on the desk. “Um, well, no, I’ve looked and it’s not here.” Ron’s voice got higher; I could almost hear his words. I didn’t need to, of course; I could easily imagine them. “No, I’ve looked,” Sam said again. “Well, I guess, I don’t know; maybe it got-maybe you… Nope, not here. Yeah, I guess you’d better call him and see if… Okay. I’m here. I’ll sit tight.”

Sam hung up. I felt his eyes on me, and pretended to be asleep.

May I just say, escaping through a high basement window is child’s play compared to sliding a check out of a paper clip on a three-page stapled document without disarranging the papers or leaving any drool. Eating the check was even harder because for some reason it tasted like gasoline. But a dog does what she has to do.

I felt bad for Ron. You couldn’t lose a ten-thousand-dollar deposit check without seriously queering the deal, even if the buyer was reasonable, and this one didn’t sound like he was. How did I know? Instinct and experience. Luckily Ron was the boss, so at least no one could fire him.

He called back faster than I expected. Spoke very softly; I couldn’t hear a thing. Sam kept apologizing, trying to make him feel better. “Geez, I’m sorry. I don’t know how it could’ve happened. So even though he could put a stop-payment on it, he doesn’t…? Honest to God, it’s not here. I’ve looked several times, gone through the whole… Well, hell, it’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it, seriously. It’s okay, we’ll just start over. Forget it, Ron, I mean it. It’s just one of those things. It’s a mystery.”

Maybe it was my guilty conscience, but after he hung up I thought Sam looked at me strangely. Suspiciously. I thunked my tail and grinned at him. We had a staring contest, Sam’s gaze squinted and searching, mine blinky sleepy and innocent. I won.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, standing up. “Want to go for a walk?”

Outside, I noticed a new spring in his step, a lightness on his end of the leash. It wouldn’t last forever-Ron Lewis was too good a salesman-but for the time being, there would be one less thing for Sam to feel sad about. Because of me.

Good dog.

In the week that followed, escape was the last thing on my mind. Instead I was a model of courtesy and decorum. I sat, lay down, and shook on command, I came when called, and at all open doors I halted, ostentatiously waiting for an invitation to proceed. Butter would not melt in my mouth. By Sunday, Sam’s trust had rebounded so completely, without a second thought he granted me the thing I wanted most: permission to attend Benny’s birthday party. Free, untied, walking around in the yard just like another guest. Only furry and better behaved.

The afternoon was perfect. Good thing, because eight sugar-saturated six-year-olds stuck in our small living room on a rainy day would’ve been a disaster. (We learned that last year, on Benny’s fifth birthday.) The theme was crazy hats-everybody had to wear a crazy hat, and sweet Benny’s was the red and white striped stovepipe from Dr. Seuss. He looked adorably goofy. He was-and I was not one bit prejudiced-absolutely the cutest, most adorable child at the party. But strangely-I liked them, of course, but I’d never been indiscriminately wild about other people’s children-strangely, on this day I found myself in love with all of them. I can say I’ve never had as much fun in my life as I did running and chasing and romping and playing with Benny and his friends. I loved being mauled, tackled, yanked on, ridden. It was as if we were all six. Or all dogs. I don’t know, but I’ve never felt such a sheer blending of-of creatures, just species-l ess beings intent on nothing but delight.

Lunch at the picnic table was a judicious mix of healthy foods disguised as junk and junk, and the games afterward were fun but also thoughtful and creative, the kind you read about in parenting magazines but never quite pull off in real life. Sam deserved some of the credit, but it was clear to me who the real brain behind this party was. Not that it took a genius to figure it out. Monica had arrived an hour early with bags of tasteful party decorations and a homemade-what else?-three-l ayer yellow cake with chocolate ganache and toffee chips spelling out BENNY. Sam set the table, and Brian Kimmel’s mother stayed to help out with the present-opening, but at my son’s sixth birthday party Monica Carr was obviously the co-host. And official photographer.

“Boys and girls! May I have your attention? Let’s come to order, people!” That didn’t work, so she picked up the whistle around her neck and blew it. “Everybody, we need to take our seats at the table again! So the show can begin!”

The show? Ah, so that’s what that curtain thing was-I thought it was for some new educational game. It was a circular, upright contraption, like a very small shower enclosure, surrounded by a colorful patterned curtain made from a sheet. Was Sam in there? I couldn’t smell him, but my senses were overloaded. He’d disappeared into the house a few minutes ago, so I really should’ve known.

Hmm. Was this a good idea? Benny wasn’t five anymore. What if, instead of making him proud, his magician father embarrassed him? And Sam always said magic was 10 percent technique, 90 percent presentation-how was he going to present himself as anything other than the neighborhood guy most of these children had known all their lives? How could he make magic out of what he’d always been to them: Benny’s dad?

Monica was the emcee. After she got everybody settled, a magic trick in itself, she launched into a rousing introduction to whip up excitement, winding up with, “And now… I present to you… the amazing… the incredible… The Great Sambini!”

She pulled the curtain back with a flourish to reveal-nothing. She gasped, looked horrified, tried it again. “The Great… Sambini!” Nothing. Third time’s the charm, and I had to admit she had the kids going by now-worried but not too worried. “The Great… Sambini!”

A puff of smoke, and Sam appeared-from behind a second colorful patterned sheet, I assumed, but the effect was too fast to see. Out he strode, coughing, waving his hands at the smoke. He didn’t look like himself. He’d moussed his hair into alarming tufts and spikes that shot out all over, making him look beyond eccentric, possibly insane. He wore turquoise and gold striped pants and a gold vest, high-top sneakers, a polka-dot tie. One shirttail hung out under the vest, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses kept slipping down his nose. Okay, he was a sort of wizard nerd, but the image didn’t gel. He was still Sam, until he started talking.

“Mmm, good afternoon, ladies and germs,” came out in a nasal, adenoidal drone, followed by more coughing and silly noises like “Bleh! Haw. Brak.” “Allergies,” he explained, pulling a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and waving it at the smoke. “I mmunderstand it’s somebody’s birthday? Who would that beee? Who is the birthday mmperson today?” he wondered in the tenor nerd voice, nervous and sweet, a sound I’d never heard come from his mouth before.

“Me.” Benny raised his hand, grinning, blushing.

“Me? No, oh, no, mine’s in April, I’m almost sure.”

“No!” said Benny, laughing with the others. “It’s my birthday.”

“Oh, you. Well, I knew that-I am, mmm, the Great Sambini! Now, don’t tell me-your name is mmm…”

“Benny!” the kids shouted.

“No, no, starts with a Q. Mmm, I mean J, starts with a J. It’s… Joaquin?”

“No, Benny!”

“No, no, that’s not it. Don’t tell me; the Great Sambini knows all. Mmm, your name is…” He pressed his fist to his forehead. “Montague.”

“No,” they shouted, “it’s Benny!” giggling but spell-bound. Like me, they knew it was Sam, and yet it wasn’t Sam. It didn’t hurt that while he talked he kept making wild efforts to get rid of the scarf, but it seemed to be glued first to one hand, then to the other.

“Benny? Really? Mmm, if you say so. Happy birthday, Benny. How does it feel to be thirty-n ine?”

“Six.”

“Six!” The Great Sambini went closer, squinting at Benny through the horn-rims. “Here, hold this.” Benny took one end of the scarf, and when Sam backed up, a dozen more came with him, like a string of yellow sausages between their two hands. “Hey,” Sam exclaimed, “how’d you do that?”

“You did it!” the children shouted.

“I did it? Oh, I seriously doubt that. Here, I’ll, mmm, take those.” He reeled the silks back, stuffing them into one closed hand and opening it to discover, in more apparent amazement, they were gone. “Why, you, you scarf thief,” he blustered. “Luckily the Great Sambini knows where you hid them. Aha!” Little Justin Carr jumped in delight when Sam yanked another long parade of scarves out of his ear. “Thieves and pickpockets, mmm, tsk tsk tsk, what are they teaching our young people these days?” He kept stuffing scarves into his pants pocket-but of course, the more he stuffed, the longer the string grew. “Quit it,” he ordered Justin. “Quit that, I say,” which cracked the kids up. His fussbudgety irritation tickled them, and they loved being in on the joke that his incompetence was feigned. They knew they were, literally, in good hands.

Sam made more scarves appear and disappear, multiply and divide, he made a blue and white scarf turn into a blue and white striped scarf, on and on, and somehow each trick was a conspiracy against him. The kids were doing them, not the Great Sambini, who was getting more and more steamed. Suddenly his aggravated face cleared. “No wonder! Of course!” He slapped his forehead. “I forgot my magic hat! Can’t do a thing without it.”

Out came a flat red disc from an inside pocket. He took a deep breath. “Magic air,” he peeped in a squeaky voice, then blew on the disc. It inflated into a red felt homburg. Which fell off his spiky-h aired head as soon as he stuck it on. Much hilarious hat schtick ensued, Chaplin-i nspired, and tricks with a wand-cane I’d never seen him do before.

In fact, this whole act was new to me. Sam had done gigs at trade shows, adult parties, once a cruise ship, where he appeared variously as Sam Summer, Magician; Milo Marvelle, Master of Mystery; The Prodigious Presto, Prince of Prestidigitation (“but you can just call me Your Excellency”). I’d seen bits and pieces of all of them, and occasionally the whole act in front of a live audience. And I never really got it. Magic was silly, wasn’t it? Because there’s no such thing. Not that Sam wasn’t good. Prospero the Prince of Magic was smooth, suave, sexy, confident, everything you could want in a magician-if you wanted a magician. I never had.

Now I was starting to get it. He hadn’t picked the persona of a blowhard or a clown or a doofus for these kids. He was more of a disgruntled Peter Pan, a grown-up child as enchanted, under the aggravation, with the wonderful things he could do as they were. As the act went on even his face changed, lost years, lost strain, and his body seemed to grow suppler and more agile. As a result, eight six-year-olds became rapt and obedient, no jeering or mouthing off, not a single wise guy. Just laughter and wonderment.

I couldn’t laugh, but I could wag my tail when Sam botched the coin vanish, and especially the disappearing egg. The kids laughed so hard, Kayla Logan fell out of her seat. I stopped wagging, though, when Sam pulled two yard-l ong pieces of cord from a pocket and announced he needed two volunteers for his final and extremely difficult trick, Magic Handcuffs.

He picked Allen Hansen and Ethan Carr, Justin’s twin. “Watch carefully! Don’t blink!” he instructed as he tied knots with the cords around four little wrists, stringing the cords together in the process so that, when he finished, Allen’s rope hung in a loose loop around Ethan’s.

“Are you stuck? Try to get away from each other. Nope, they’re stuck. But! Mmm. If they’ve got magic, mmm, mojo, they will miraculously break free! We’ll give them one minute! You have one minute to get free. You can do anything but you cannot untie the knots. Ready? One minute, starting… now. Go!”

They started out self-consciously, testing the ropes with tentative moves like putting their arms around each other from the back, the front. But frustration, crowd laughter, and Sam’s constant countdown-“Thirty more seconds! Twenty-fi ve! Twenty-f our!”-soon had them in a heap on the ground, thrashing and wrestling like kittens, arms and legs tangled. Allen lost a shoe. Everybody thought it was a riot, everybody but me. I knew where this was heading.

“Time!”

Spent, the boys lay flat in the grass, red-f aced and still giggling, while Sam undid the knots around their wrists.

“Too bad, nice try, but now I, the Great Sambini, shall demonstrate, before your wondering eyes, the mystery of Magic Handcuffs. For this difficult trick I will need a mmm partner. A magic partner, it goes without mmm saying. Anyone?” All hands shot up. Sam covered his eyes and pointed to, surprise, surprise, Monica. “Monica the Marvelous!”

“Me?” Such pretty modesty. The kids weren’t even disappointed at not being chosen. They loved Mrs. Carr. And they sensed this trick, the Great Sambini’s last, required an assistant in the know.

It certainly did. Sam had never asked outright, but once or twice, years ago, he’d hinted that he would love it if I’d assist him in his act. Of course I’d said no. Without a second thought. How absurd. Ridiculous and unthinkable, like asking him to hold a real estate closing for me. Still, just for fun, sometimes he enlisted me to help with tricks that needed two people, tricks he couldn’t do onstage-no assistant-but that he just liked and wanted to try out. Like Magic Handcuffs.

So I knew how to do it. You let people from the audience tie the knots, as many or as complicated as they want-just not too tight. “Don’t cut off my blood!” you say (if you’re the assistant), because it’s vital that one wrist rope have a little slack in it. Just a little. So the magician can slip his cord under it and then over the top of your hand. Ta-da, you’re free.

The rest is acting. Overacting, as you both writhe and wrestle and struggle and contort, accomplishing the magic part on the ground and out of view-underneath yourselves, ideally. So it’s like Twister, only more intimate. The one or two times Sam talked me into trying it with him, we enjoyed it very much. Very much.

No way was he going to play Magic Handcuffs with Monica Carr.

Maybe if she’d had on more clothes, not a sleeveless sundress and strappy sandals. Maybe if she hadn’t looked so cute, or smelled so sweet. Maybe if she’d been a little less perfect. Maybe if she was in this country on a visa about to run out. Then I might’ve behaved myself.

Eager volunteers got one of Monica’s wrists tied before I made my move. I was still trying to be good. But my best intentions were undermined by the persistent vision of Sam and Monica locked in an indecent embrace. And then when it hit me-my God!-they must have practiced this trick before, I lost all restraint.

Rowrrr!

Not all restraint; I didn’t bite anybody. But I was in the grip of the most primitive anger I’d ever felt, and Monica wasn’t the only target. Sam infuriated me, too. I wanted to, but I didn’t bite them, only because of the proximity of so many children. One stray fang-it didn’t bear thinking about. I jumped between Sam and Monica and did everything else, though-I growled, threatened, herded, head-butted. Monica I body-slammed to the ground on her behind.

Sam couldn’t believe his eyes. “ Sonoma!” he kept shouting, lunging time after time for my collar. “What the hell? No! Sonoma, no!” He still had one end of his rope in his hand. I let him get close, closer-then I sprang, snatched the rope in my teeth, and whirled away.

Now what? Another damn fenced yard, the bane of my life. I ran around and around the perimeter pursued by two adults and eight children. When it looked like they had me cornered, I dashed into Benny’s playhouse. Hide the rope, hide the rope. Where? In his toy chest?

Too late, no time. I hadn’t escaped. I was trapped. At least the trick was ruined-the Great Sambini could hardly start over after all this mayhem. I’d broken the spell. Mission accomplished.

“Great party, Sam.”

“It was. Goes without saying, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Oh, sure you could’ve. Wow, the magic show was fantastic.”

“Until it went to hell.” Sam and Monica made the same disgusted face as they glanced through the kitchen door at me. Benny and the twins were upstairs playing with Benny’s new rainbow-making machine; Sam and Monica were finishing the cleanup. I was trying for a low profile in the safest place I could think of: under the dining room table.

“What do you think set her off?” Sam took a handful of washed glasses from Monica and set them on the top cabinet shelf-too high for her to reach.

“I can’t imagine.”

Did he hear the same note in her voice I did? Was it my imagination, or did Monica just send me a look? No, ridiculous; she didn’t know anything. She couldn’t. Except that I didn’t like her-that had to be pretty clear by now.

“I had no idea you were so good,” she told Sam. “I should have. I mean, you do it professionally-”

“Did.”

“But I just never realized. You’d never say, and from what I’ve always gathered from Laurie…”

“What?”

“Nothing, I just-assumed it was more of a hobby, is all. But, Sam, you’re good. Really good.”

Oh, shut up. She wasn’t flattering him, though; she meant it. And Sam beamed with pleasure. So unfair-I wanted to say it to him. I wanted to make him smile and blush and look tickled.

Why hadn’t I ever told Sam he was good?

They finished in the kitchen and moved past me-I watched their legs-into the hall. “Ustin and Jethan!” Monica called; a family joke. “Time to go home!”

Sam started thanking her again. She cut him off to ask, “How are you doing, Sam? I haven’t had a chance with all the birthday business to really talk to you, not in days.”

Days, big deal.

“We’re all right,” Sam said. “We’re fine. Day at a time.”

“But you. How are you doing?”

He hadn’t combed out his Great Sambini hair yet. Back-lit in the open door, he looked like a punk angel. “Starting the new job will be good,” he said, with no enthusiasm. “Get my mind off things.”

“Is anything new with Laurie?” Monica asked gently. Speaking of things.

“Not really. We’ll go see her tomorrow night. I usually take Benny on Sundays, but…”

Since it was his birthday, he got a reprieve. I put my paws over my eyes, wishing I could disappear. Cease to exist. Think how much better off everybody would be.

When I looked up, Monica had her hand on Sam’s arm, rubbing it in a comforting way while her melty eyes shone with sympathy. Instantly I was on my feet, snarling, slinking forward, low to the ground like a wolf.

Who knows what might’ve happened if Benny and the twins hadn’t come bouncing down the steps just then, quar reling and overstimulated, minutes away from a meltdown. Everybody’s attention shifted to them, including mine. Good thing, because at that moment Monica’s pert little butt had never looked more, how shall I say, toothsome.

I was allowed to go, too, when everyone went outside to the car-Monica had driven over instead of walking. Piling the twins and the birthday paraphernalia in took a while. When it was done, she cupped the back of Benny’s head and kissed his forehead. “Happy birthday, mister.”

He reached his arms around her waist-she squatted down in front of him. “Tell Monica-” Sam began, but Benny didn’t need reminding. “Thank you,” he said, and she said, “You are so welcome,” and pulled him into a close hug. I took two steps toward them, stiff-l egged, hair standing on end. My mouth watered.

Monica patted Benny’s shoulders and started to sit back on her heels, but he hung on. He hung on. I saw his tight-shut eyes, his wrinkled lips. The need and the blank satisfaction on his face.

I could’ve eaten a whole family-I could’ve mauled a playground full of children. God! I wanted something between my teeth to grind and shake until it was dead. But I couldn’t lift a paw to interrupt a few seconds of happiness for Benny, even if it came in the arms of my mortal enemy.

I walked around to the side of the house and threw up.

After that, things went downhill.

The day after the party, Benny started first grade and Sam started his new job. Sam dropped Benny off at school on his way to work, and in the afternoons Monica kept Benny at her house until Sam picked him up. I never met Benny’s teacher. I never saw his classroom. Sam dropped the first week’s lunch menu on the floor and I made out “teriyaki beef bites” and “café burger with baked beans” before he picked it up. In the evenings, I might hear a precious tidbit about a new friend of Benny’s, a confusing assignment, a funny thing that happened that day. But he told Sam all the good stuff as soon as he saw him; by the time they came home, all I got was leftovers.

As for Sam’s job, he never mentioned it.

A day lasted a year. I know why dogs sleep so much-there’s nothing else to do. The highlight for me was when Mr. Horton, the next-door neighbor, came over at noon to let me out in the backyard for ten minutes. Sam had told him to be sure to change my water and leave me a raw-hide chewy, but more often than not Mr. Horton, who was ninety, forgot.

The only way I had ever found out anything important, meaning grown-up, was by listening to Sam’s side of telephone conversations, especially with my sister, Delia. Now that he worked every day in an office, those occasions had petered out. One night, though, Ronnie Lewis called and I got to hear the bad news: He had another buyer for the cabin.

He thought the offer was too low and wanted Sam to counter. I held my breath while they argued, Sam saying no, let’s take it, Ron trying to talk him out of it. Are you crazy? I wanted so badly to say to my husband. I never heard actual figures, but I didn’t need to. Even in this lousy market, only a putz would take the first offer. But that wasn’t even the point. Sam, hold out! Don’t sell! When would it end? How many dreams was he going to have to give up for my sake?

But the following Sunday afternoon: a miracle. It happened so fast-one minute I was sulking under the piano, preparing myself for the weekly Hope Springs abandonment; the next Sam was snapping my leash on and saying, “C’mon, girl, wanna go for a ride? Wanna go in the car?” They were taking me with them!

Such a beautiful day. The last day of August but clear and blue for a change, not muggy, even a taste of fall in the air. It filled me with new hope, the kind I hadn’t felt in so long, it made me euphoric. Sam kept telling me to settle, settle, but it was impossible not to dash from one backseat window to the other, taking in deep gulps of air and watching the world fly past.

And yet, the closer we got, the calmer I grew. Or if not calmer, more thoughtful. I still had no plan, no real idea of what I would do once I saw myself-rejoined myself. It didn’t seem necessary; some strange faith told me it would just happen. Whatever needed to happen would happen. Whatever force or mutation or reality glitch that had changed me into Sonoma would, just as suddenly and inexplicably, turn me back into Laurie. Because, if nothing else, the universe was still an orderly place-so I had always believed-and it liked balance. Weird anomalies eventually got fixed. Yin and yang. Today was the day I got to do my part to set things right.

Poor Benny. He slumped in his seat, as excited about visiting Mom as he’d be about visiting the pediatrician. Less so. Sam had made him bring along one of his books from school, to show me how well he could read. It’ll be okay, I told Benny, nuzzling the salty-sweet back of his neck. Except for dog feet (mine, anyway), nothing smelled better than Benny’s hair. I licked his ear, which got a laugh out of him. Don’t worry, baby. Mommy’s coming home. He rubbed my muzzle and kissed me on the nose.

So this was Hope Springs from the outside. Pretty. A long, winding drive through woods to a sprawling complex of old, new, and middle-aged buildings. HOPE SPRINGS NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER one sign read; another, HOPE SPRINGS ASSISTED LIVING. A multipurpose place, then; something for everybody. Everybody who was infirm. But it was pretty, I had to admit, and clean and quiet, well tended, all you could ask for. It must be costing Sam a fortune.

He parked in a shady spot in one of the enormous parking lots.

“We don’t have to stay long,” Benny mumbled, fiddling with his seat belt. “I’m hungry.”

“You just ate.”

“My stomach hurts. I don’t feel good. I have a condition.”

“Ben.”

“I have a disease, Daddy. I’m not well.”

Sam scowled. Then sighed. Then ruffled Benny’s hair. “Okay, pal, we won’t stay long.”

Well, wait, now.

“You can tell Mom all about your birthday party-how’s that? They’ll probably have her outside today. If you like, you can play around by the lily pond-”

“Okay!”

“After you talk to her and tell her you love her and everything.”

“Okay.” He slumped again. Not for much longer, sweetheart, I told him as he opened his door and slammed it. Sam got out and slammed his door. I waited by mine, tail up, shuddering with anticipation.

“Be good,” Sam said through the four-i nch crack in my window. “We’ll be back. Be a good girl.”

What? What was this? Incredulous, I watched Sam and Benny walk up a wide, yew-bordered path to a low brick building with glass doors. And disappear inside.

No. No. I howled it, but nobody heard. I raged until my throat hurt, but nobody cared. What had I been thinking? The universe was not an orderly place. Ghastly miscarriages of justice were allowed to persist, and no wise hand balanced horrible, unnatural inequities. I was lost.

I never thought things could get worse.

“Hi, yes, I’d like to make an appointment to have my dog spayed.”

Behind Sam’s chair, I choked on a piece of empty cottage cheese carton from the garbage.

“Tuesday? Is that as soon as you can do it? Right, the holiday weekend… Okay, next Tuesday, then. Eight a.m., that’s fine.”

I ran around the chair, put my paws on his knees. No! I shook my head so hard, I hit myself in the eye with an ear. He kept talking-I started barking. No! No!

He laughed. “Yeah, that’s Sonoma,” he said into the phone. “I know. It’s like she heard us.”

The days that followed were peculiar. I would lie at the top of the stairs at night, guarding the house, and think, Well, another day gone and I didn’t run away. I could have: the basement window was still unlocked. Home alone every day, there was nothing to stop me from making a break for it. But I didn’t go. The human world was falling apart around me. Running away and reconnecting-somehow-with the real me was my only chance, but I stayed.

Why? The chances of actually making it were tiny-that was one thing. The time Sam let me go with them to Hope Springs had opened my eyes to what would really be involved, the distance, the danger, cars going sixty-fi ve miles an hour. It might take weeks, not days. I was scared.

Also, it’s hard to describe how seductive being a dog is. How tempting it was to give up. Forget who I used to be and sink into this new self, a self whose boundaries seemed to be nothing but love. To give love and get love-that was what my needs were narrowing down to. I could feel it intensifying every day. Friendship, sweetness, play, companionship-with the exception of evil Monica, that was all I cared about. Going, going, almost gone were any feelings about justice, fairness, tit for tat-and never mind anger, disappointment, umbrage, pride, ego, disapproval. Jealousy-I still had that. I wanted all the love my loved ones had. And that was a failing, but one I knew I’d never overcome. It came too naturally.

And it’s just so damn nice to be a dog. I can’t overstate the pleasures of sinking into a light doze about five times an hour. Drifting off… waking up… drifting off… dreaming… waking up… You fall into a pattern of sleeping and waking that, over time, averages out to almost constant half-asleepness (or half-awakeness) and it’s very… nice.

Another example, just a small thing, but-the game of sock. Tug-of-war, I should say, but Sam and Benny called it “sock,” as in “Want to play sock? Sonoma! Get the sock!” I tried to remind myself that tennis was the best game-Tennis, Laurie! You’re good at it, remember? Tennis is the best!-but it was hard. And face it: I got so much more joy out of sock than I ever got out of tennis.

Anyway, I didn’t leave. The days drifted by in a pleasant haze, long periods of comfortable idleness punctuated by bursts of extreme excitement-They’re home!-and profound contentment. I worried, and sometimes I had bad dreams, but time passed and it became increasingly clearer that the dog side of me was winning.

On Thursday, the principal at Benny’s school left a message on the machine that he’d been in a fight. She was sending a note home with him. She wanted to talk to Sam about it as soon as possible.

Benny in a fight? Impossible. What kind of fight? Was he hurt? No, or she’d have said, or there would’ve been something in her voice besides calm professionalism. I paced instead of napping the rest of the afternoon.

Mr. Horton came over twice to let me out, the second time in late afternoon, five or six, something like that. An amazing number of people talk out loud to dogs-you can’t believe the things they’ll say-but Mr. Horton wasn’t one of them. Where’s Sam? Where’s Benny? Why are they so late? I asked him with my best supplicant face, but all I got was the usual, “Come on, dog,” and, “Get busy.”

It was getting dark when the car pulled up. Of course the engine didn’t sound any different, and of course the doors slamming were just doors slamming-but I knew before I heard Sam and Benny’s slow, draggy footsteps that something was wrong. My sixth sense. And as soon as I smelled them, I knew what it was. Me. The scent of Hope Springs was all over them.

Sam let Benny have a glass of milk in the kitchen. I thought they’d talk, but they didn’t. How was I? Worse-I must be. Or exactly the same; that would be just as bad. So this mutual dejection that hung in the air like smoke from a grease fire was only because they’d seen me. That was all. No change. Just another soul-eroding visit to Laurie.

Benny dawdled over his milk, but didn’t argue when Sam told him to go up and get ready for bed, it was late. I usually went with Benny at those times, because of the intimacy. My little boy was never more my little boy than when he was getting into his wonderful-smelling pjs or peeing in the toilet (and on the floor) or standing at the sink on tiptoe to brush his teeth. But now I stayed with Sam, followed him when he went into the den. I wanted to see his reaction to the principal’s message.

He played it twice. His face was turned away, but everything else about him answered my question. This was the first he’d heard.

His feet on the stairs sounded like doom to me; I could imagine what they sounded like to Benny. I wanted to trip Sam, block him at the door, do something to protect Benny-but the instinct to confront him was just as strong. Sam and I went into our son’s room side by side.

He was sitting on his bed, working a puzzle. He didn’t look up, even when Sam sat next to him. “Ben.”

No answer. Intense scrutiny of puzzle.

“Is there something you have to tell me?”

Head shake.

“Benny.”

Silence.

“Is there something you have to show me?”

Long pause, then Benny got out of bed, found his book bag on the floor, rummaged through it for about an hour, withdrew a sealed envelope. Handed it to Sam wordlessly and got back in bed.

Sam looked at the envelope for a while before opening it. Not to prolong the suspense, just to put things off a few seconds longer. I sympathized.

Leaning in, I tried to read over his shoulder, but the type was too small. The letter wasn’t very long, one or two paragraphs, signed in ink. Sam sighed when he folded it and put it back in the envelope. “Okay. Tell me about this.”

Wordless and sullen, Benny clacked wooden puzzle pieces together hard.

“We’ve never talked about fighting before, not much, you and me. Were you angry at this boy, this-Doug? It’s okay to get mad at people, you know that. It’s what you do about-”

“He’s a poop head. He’s a dummy. He’s-” Benny looked up from the puzzle, right into Sam’s eyes. “He’s an asshole.”

“Hey, now-”

“He is.”

“Why?”

Benny wouldn’t answer.

“What did he do? Did he hit you first? That’s-”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“I hit him.”

“Okay. Why? Did he say something?”

“He said-he said-” Tears welled and spilled over. “He s-said…”

“What did he say?” Very gently, Sam folded Benny in his arms. I sidled close, leaning my flank against both of them.

“He said Mommy…”

“What?”

“Is a…”

“What?’

“Vegetable.”

I made a choking sound, the closest to a sob I could come. They didn’t hear me; Benny was crying and Sam was crooning consolation. They were a tangle of arms and pressed-together faces, and all I could do was shove my snout into the places I could find skin.

“All right, listen. That kid was wrong.” He lifted Benny’s chin so he could look at him. “And you were right-he’s an asshole.”

“I know.” Benny wiped his slimy face on the sheet. “I told you.”

“But we don’t use that word, right? Well, except us, you and me. On rare occasions. We can say it to each other, but nobody else. How about that?”

“Okay.” A smile broke through. How cool to have a secret dirty word with Dad. I wasn’t sure I approved.

“And we don’t hit people when they say stupid things. Because they’re allowed to, it’s not against the law. People can be as stupid as they want, and we just ignore them. We can say, ‘You’re wrong,’ or maybe, ‘You’re an idiot,’ but that’s it. We don’t hit ’em, we just ignore ’em. Right?”

“Okay.” But then Benny’s face crumpled again. “Is she?” he asked in a small voice, head down, playing with a button on Sam’s shirt. “Is Mommy a…”

“No, Ben, no. She’s not.”

“But she just lies there.”

“She’s asleep.”

“But what if she never gets up?”

“She will.”

“But what if she doesn’t? What if she stays like that forever? I wish she would come home! Why can’t she wake up? Why!”

“I think she will.” He took Benny’s shoulders before the tears could start again. “I really think she will, but it might take some more time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. But we’re her family, you and me-”

“And Aunt Delia.”

“And Aunt Delia, and all we can do is keep thinking about her, and praying for her, and going to see her, and telling her we love her. Because she can’t help it-you know she’d come back if she could, right? You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She’s trying, but it’s very hard. She wants to be with us as much as we want her to be. We just have to keep waiting. And hoping, and not losing faith. And meanwhile, we’ve got each other.”

“I know.”

“You know.” Sam hugged him for a long time. “We’ll be okay,” he whispered over and over, until Benny’s body finally began to sag from sleepiness. “You and me, pal. We’ll be okay.”

So I knew what I had to do. And not tomorrow: tonight. No more stalling. I felt as if I’d woken up from an em barrassingly long nap. Why had I waited so long? Laziness, denial, cowardice-some retriever I’d been. But no more. Tonight I would begin the journey back. To myself. If I didn’t make it-and all the obstacles between me and Hope Springs had never looked so daunting-at least I’d have taken the chance. At least I’d have tried to put my family back together.

I stayed with Benny after he fell asleep, stretched out alongside him, my head on his shoulder. The sound of his heart and the rhythm of his breathing came right inside me, merged with my heart and breath. It was difficult to leave him, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t want to wake him, so I didn’t kiss him good-bye. I put my warm nose in the hollow of his throat and breathed him in.

Downstairs, it was dead quiet. I found Sam by smell-on the sofa in the den, grasping something, looking down at it in his lap. I didn’t want to, but it was time to say good-bye to him, too.

When I jumped up next to him, he barely noticed, and his “Down” was so halfhearted, we both ignored it.

My picture. That was what he was holding.

Oh, Sam. Don’t be sad.

And then I saw something I’d never seen before. Sam crying.

It was worse than anything. I licked his cheek, and when he turned his face away I howled. Softly; more of a whine, a really tragic sound. It got his attention. He did something he never had before: He put both arms around me and buried his face in my neck.

And I raised up on my back legs and embraced him back. It was… divine. We’d never been so close, not since I changed. I’d have stayed there all night, but too soon Sam pulled himself together and pushed me away.

Incomplete again, bereft, I watched him dig a ratty Kleenex from his pocket and scrub his face. His crooked smile was the saddest thing I ever saw. He rarely talked to me, but now he said, “Funny dog. You’re a funny old dog. What’s up with you?” So many times I’d tried to answer that. Now I just shook my head. When he petted me, I closed my eyes and reveled in it, although my heart was cracking. Bye, Sam. Don’t worry anymore. I’m going to fix it. I love you so much.

The phone rang.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Monica.”

I almost left then. What would have happened if I had? I’ve often wondered.

“We got back about an hour ago, hour and a half. Fine. I mean, you know, it was the same. No, no change.”

Blah blah. I didn’t want to hear this.

“Listen-Benny didn’t say anything to you about a fight, did he? At school? When he was over there this afternoon, he didn’t… I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t have known myself if… No, he’s okay; he’s fine. Some kid named Doug. Apparently he said something-”

Don’t tell her! Don’t you dare tell her!

“Kid stuff, nothing really… Yeah. I know. Right, I’m sure he’s bottling up a lot of anger and frustration… Right. Right.”

Right, right. Shut up, Monica, nobody wants to hear your amateur child psychology.

Finally she got to the point. “A picnic?” Sam said, brightening a bit. “Sounds good, we’re free all weekend. Which is better for you? Sunday, then, fewer people than on Labor Day, yeah. Good. Sonoma, too? Great, she’ll love it.”

Thanks for thinking of me.

“Okay, you bring that. I can do-Right, drinks, snacks…”

More blah blah about the portable grill, whose cooler was bigger, did they want lemonade or pop or both. I made myself not imagine it, not romping around with Benny and the twins in some beautiful woodsy, meadowy place, some sylvan spot alive with squirrels and chipmunks, maybe a lake or a stream. Have a great time. Without me. In a negative way, self-pity is very motivating. So long. I slunk toward the door.

“ Patuxent Hills Park? No, we’ve never been there. Sounds good.”

Patuxent Hills Park? Patuxent Hills Park? I sold a house near there, in Brookville, south a little ways on Route 97. The park is only a mile from Hope Springs! As the crow flies-as the dog walks, it’s probably two. Two miles! Through woods and rural lanes and sleepy, high-end housing developments. With sidewalks!

Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. I collapsed at Sam’s feet-my knees were too weak to hold me up. Gratitude turned my bones to jelly. I rolled over and showed him my belly.

All I had to do was wait till Sunday. Reunion day.

DOGS MUST BE LEASHED AT ALL TIMES

Why couldn’t things ever be easy? No alcoholic beverages, no dumping, no loud music, we close at sundown-I could live with those, but LEASHED AT ALL TIMES was going to be a problem.

So was mud, although not for me. The sun was peeping out between clouds now, but it had rained every day since Thursday and the park was saturated, even the picnic tables under the wooden pavilions. They could’ve postponed until tomorrow-I was afraid they would-but the kids were so wound up, they’d have exploded if the grownups had canceled. Sam said a little rain never hurt anybody, and here we were.

The first order of business, after claiming one of the many empty tables and setting up all the picnic stuff, was a walk. This was my chance-except the person on the other end of the leash was Sam, not Benny or one of the twins. Or best, Monica, whom I’d have had zero guilt about bolting from, preferably with violence. Sam was another story. He was strong, for one thing, but also-this is hard to explain-as pack leader he was someone I had a hard time disobeying. Believe it or not. I’d always thought of us as equals, or if one of us was a tiny bit ascendant, it was me. Not true as man and dog. Sam was alpha.

The river was narrow here, really more of a stream, and swollen from all the rain. This little park fit in an inlet the river made on its way northwest, bisecting two counties. A main trail to the left and a rougher, secondary one to the right followed the water’s twists and turns. We took the main one because it was wider and not as mushy, but even so, sometimes we had to detour into the woods around puddles or stretches of mud. I wanted to run ahead with the children, but I was stuck with Sam and Monica. Plod, plod, stop and look at this, plod some more, shout at the kids to quit doing something or other, plod, plod, stop and look at that. Absolutely no fun at all. Once we ran into two guys coming the other way, and I had to sit down to avoid the rude attentions of their irritating male Shih Tzu. Sometimes, frankly, I didn’t mind that sort of thing, but today was not one of those times.

A moment came when I thought I had a chance.

“Look!” Monica said, stopping, pointing up. “See it? A redheaded woodpecker.”

“Where?”

“Right there. Three, four-five branches up, left side, that maple tree.”

Sam knew birds; they’d become his hobby when we bought the cabin. “I think that’s a red-bellied woodpecker.”

“But it’s got a red head.”

“It’s got a red crown. A redheaded woodpecker’s head is completely red.”

“But where’s its red belly?”

“It’s hard to see; you have to be closer.” His hand went slack during this fascinating conversation, his attention focused completely on the bird. I let the leash go loose to soften him up even more, then gathered my feet under me and leapt.

And almost pulled Sam’s arm out of the socket.

“Hey!”

I’d almost strangled myself, too, but I had the wit to go into a bedlam of barking, pretending I’d seen something incredibly exciting, a rabbit, a deer, an elephant. When Sam told me to cool it, calm down, I obeyed instantly. “Good girl,” he had to admit.

“She is,” Monica agreed, surprised.

“I really think she’s starting to get it.”

Escape-wise, lunchtime was a bust because Sam looped the leash around one leg of the picnic table. Nothing to do but lie down and be good, and munch on tidbits Benny and the twins let fall from time to time.

Sam asked Monica if Benny could stay late at her house on Thursday, and I learned something I didn’t know. “We’re moving up the closing on the cabin,” Sam said. “Guy decided to pay cash, so there’s no reason to wait.”

“Oh,” Monica said. “Well.” And then, when the kids were talking, she said, “I’m sorry,” just loud enough for Sam (and me) to hear.

“No, it’s good. Really. The money’s coming just in the nick.”

Well, didn’t that just tie it. Another reason, as if there weren’t enough already, to act fast. What else could possibly go wrong in the human world?

After lunch, Sam did his disappearing saltshaker trick. I always knew it had to end up in his lap somehow, but I could never figure out how. A new perspective changes everything.

“Have you been doing any magic shows lately?” Monica asked, cutting big pieces of layer cake for everybody. Homemade, naturally. What a perfect family we must have looked like to everybody else in the park. Mom, Dad, three kids, the faithful dog.

“No, no.” I recognized Sam’s fake-careless voice. “That’s all… I don’t do that anymore. No time.”

“Ah,” Monica said softly. “Too bad. But I guess with the new job and all…”

“Right.”

“Do you still…” Hate it, she was going to say. But she changed it to “Is it getting any better?” even though Benny wasn’t listening-too busy comparing his loose tooth to Ethan’s.

“It’s a job. I’m in no position to complain.”

“You don’t complain.”

“It’s just… well, you know.”

“It is what it is.”

So profound.

But a little later, I wondered if maybe Benny had been paying attention, at least to his father’s tone of voice- upbeat but tight, a world of discontent just beneath the surface. Because Benny pulled on Sam’s sleeve, interrupting something Monica was saying, and told him about troodon dinosaurs. “The male sits on the eggs and guards the nest, Dad. I read about it. He’s the mom. She goes out and does stuff and he stays and makes the nest safe and keeps the babies warm.”

All Sam said was, “How about that,” but he put his arm around Benny’s waist and pressed him close.

Oh, Benny. Light of my life.

Monica decreed the grass was now dry enough to play games on, so that was what the boys did, with Sam. I got to stay where I was and watch Monica clean up.

Desperation was creeping in. How in the world was I going to pull this off? To be this close and still fail-I couldn’t think about it. Maybe if I…

“What, Sonoma? Do you have to go? Do you have to do business?”

Bingo. It was partly the high whine, partly the soulful-eyes thing. They never let me down.

“I’m taking Sonoma for a walk,” Monica called over to Sam, who waved and went back to swinging the kids around in a game of statue.

She picked the secondary trail this time, the one that wound east, under a cement bridge and around a bend-out of sight. Perfect, perfect. Nobody was here; the path was too narrow and boggy for hikers today, and too close to the clattering river. That sound and the smell of wet earth filled my head, intoxicating. Sunlight made blue crystals on the damp tree leaves. Everything was beautiful, but lost on me. I’d remember it later-or not.

Monica went at an excruciatingly slow pace when she wasn’t stopped dead, admiring nature. She’d brought along an expensive-l ooking camera. She halted on the bank to snap a picture of dappled light on water. Was this my chance? I would only get one. If I failed, she’d be on guard from then on. I preferred nonviolence, but only as a first resort. I would fight if I had to.

I braced. Don’t make me have to hurt you.

She had the leash looped around her wrist, though. Better to wait till it was loose in her hand. Then I could just snap it and run.

“Come on, Sonoma. Don’t you have to pee? I do,” she said, laughing, and I hoped she would, right then and there. Talk about a distraction. But no, too much of a lady. We slogged on.

A thick pine tree had snapped at the base and half fallen in the river, years ago from the look of it. “How pretty,” Monica said, turning the camera on again. It did look picturesque, the sparse, rain-dark branches stretched out over churning water. She took a few shots. Then, “Oh, look, Sonoma, a spiderweb. See it?”

I saw it, in the crotch of a dead branch at the end of the tree, just before it dipped into the river. It would’ve been invisible if it hadn’t been shiny with drying raindrops. Yes, very pretty. Why don’t you go out there and take a picture of it?

And that’s exactly what she did.

What a moron. Are you crazy? I thought, before I recollected myself. Be that stupid; go farther out there with a camera in one hand, a dog leash in the other, the racing brown river beneath you. Please, after you.

But she was so athletic and surefooted, she never even tottered. And she wasn’t stupid enough to go to the end, only halfway, with me about four feet away, the length of the leash, just one long leap to shore. The expensive camera had a telephoto lens. I heard it whir into action, watched Monica sight her spiderweb picture, one-handed, through the LCD. I started to shake. From anticipation, I thought, but then I realized-I was the one who was scared. The chopping sound of the river, the potent smell of water, and the humid air were the last good memories I had of my human self. What came next was all a nightmare. I hated rivers.

Still one-h anded, Monica snapped off a couple of shots, then tilted the camera ninety degrees for a vertical. Now or never. I dug my toenails into the bark and jerked my head, my whole body, to the side as hard as I could.

She yelped as the leash flew out of her hand, and I spun and leapt to the bank.

A splash, hard to hear over the chop. I looked back. Oh, for the love of-

Monica lay flat out in the water, gripping a branch in one hand, camera high in the other, trying to keep it above the drink. Let it go, you idiot-but I saw myself in another river, leaping cartoonishly after a slippery cell phone, and I knew she wouldn’t.

The current was strong enough that her feet were bobbing at the top behind her. I didn’t know I was barking until I had to stop to hear what she was yelling. “Help! I can’t swim!” She gave an angry wail and dropped the camera-so she could grab for the branch with that hand, too. Crack. The branch broke and the water took her.

It was supposed to be the other way around, but in that moment my life passed before my eyes. I saw it all in fine detail, a Technicolor highlight film, the ups and downs of Laurie Summer’s life. Glimpsed as a whole like that, I could see it came up short in an important department, the very one Sonoma the dog excelled in. The love-and-beloved department. The only one that mattered to her, and really the only one that mattered-I saw it in this extreme instant with perfect clarity-period.

No point jumping in the water here-I’d catch Monica faster if I ran. Mud flew behind my feet as I tore along the bank, dodging rocks, trees, bushes, brush. Monica sailed downriver like a kayak, her dark head bobbing in and out of sight. I caught up when she slammed into a tangle of wood and debris swirling in the middle of the stream. She flailed for a branch, but her grip slipped. I made a running jump from an outcrop of bank and landed in the same roaring surge that took her down again.

Rocks! One sheared my side; another cracked me in the forehead. I recognized the pain more than felt it. The current flipped me over; I swallowed water. Over the tumult, I heard shouting, a man’s voice. Sam’s? Had he heard me barking? Monica saw me for the first time and reached out-to save herself or me, I’ll never know. She missed, but we flailed side by side long enough so that I could snatch up the shoulder of her blouse in my teeth. We smacked violently into something hard and stationary. Another fallen tree, anchored to shore. Grab it, I told her, but she was too dazed; she just hung there between me and the tree, limp.

Yes, it was Sam; I recognized his voice yelling her name. All that was keeping me afloat was the force of the water battering me against Monica. Grab something, I begged her, shaking the glob of wet cotton in my mouth. It was hard to breathe. I shook her again. Her eyes stayed closed, but she reached out for the log and hung on.

Now I could spit out the cloth and get a breath. Sam was forty feet away, sprinting for us along the muddy bank. “Hang on!” he kept shouting. Except I couldn’t-no hands. Monica began to cough and retch, reviving. The one paw I could keep on the tree trunk suddenly felt it vibrate. Sam was trying to walk on it, arms out for balance. He slipped and fell to his knees. But he kept coming at a crawl.

At the last, he stretched out full length, slapped his hand over Monica’s hand, and she was safe.

I couldn’t hold on to anything anymore. I slipped under the log, resurfaced on the other side. The drag of the current felt like heavy, coaxing hands pulling me down. I fought the temptation to let go as long as I could. Good-bye. Good-bye. It wasn’t so much sad as inevitable. The last I saw of Sam, he had one arm around Monica, the other stretched out to me. This is so stupid was my final thought the first time this happened to me. This time it was I love you so much.

Same sky, different trees. Where was I? This upward view looked familiar, painfully so, but when I turned my head to the side, I didn’t recognize anything. Scattered benches, tidy walks, trimmed hedges. Brick building. Institutional neatness.

Wait a minute.

“What did she say?” asked a tense female voice behind me.

A different tense female voice answered. “I think she said-I think she said-‘I love you.’ ”

That voice I recognized. “Hettie?” I asked in a croak.

The nurse loomed over me, gaping, the whites of her eyes eclipsing the irises. “Laurie?”

I nodded. “I do love you, but”-I had to clear my throat-“ I was thinking of Sam. Would you call him? On his cell-he’s not home.”

The other woman must be an aide; her name tag read “ Victoria.” She and Hettie grabbed each other’s hands and started to cry. So of course I did, too.

Hettie pulled herself together first. “Yes, call,” she told Victoria. “Call the husband. And go get Dr. Lazenby. And Dr. Pei. Hurry!”

Not much time for reflection after that. Nursing homes for the incurably comatose don’t experience miracle awakenings very often, I guess. For mine, Hope Springs went quietly wild. Doctors and nurses surrounded me, then aides, staff, social workers, custodians, even other patients-you’d think there would be a protocol for times like this, rare though they might be. But nobody seemed to be in charge, and everybody was so happy. Dr. Lazenby himself wheeled me back into my room, so then the crowd had to disperse. “Keep talking,” he told me, passing a file or something up and down the soles of my feet. “How do you feel? What’s your full name?”

“Laura Claire Marie O’Dunne. Summer. I feel… awake. Where’s Sam? And Benny? Did you call?”

“On their way.” He peered into my right eye with a lighted scope. “Count backward from twenty, please.”

In a lull in the excitement, I had a little cry myself. “It’s natural,” Hettie assured me. “Strong emotion can very often follow a prolonged period of semi- or unconsciousness. It’s relief, confusion, the stress-or nothing at all. You just go ahead and cry.”

Such a nice woman. I did love her. But I wasn’t weeping from relief or stress or confusion; I was weeping for Sonoma.

She gave up her life for me. That was how it felt, although in another sense you could say I gave up my life for me. Some sort of better me. And Monica was almost irrelevant, just a vehicle, you could also say-but then again, trying to save her was the very thing that had restored me to myself, that act. Wasn’t it?

So confusing. Hettie might be right-these tears were just from stress.

No, they were for Sonoma. When she drowned, I lost the best of myself. But I would spend the rest of my life trying to find her again. In me.

Sam saw me before I saw him. Hettie was raising the bed and punching up the pillows when I heard a sound and looked behind her. He stood in the doorway with his arms held out a little from his sides, knees flexed. His face looked tender and dumbstruck, his body poised as if to fly.

“Hey,” said Hettie with a huge smile. “Well, I’ll just finish this up later, won’t I?” I bet she was Sam’s favorite nurse, too. “They’re getting set up to do a lot of tests, so this visit will have to be quick. Plenty of time later, though. Plenty of time.”

She hugged Sam on her way out, but I’m not sure he noticed. He didn’t seem to be able to move. Even when I held out my hand, he only came a step closer. It took my voice to uproot him.

“It’s me, Sam. I’m back. I’ve come back to you.”

Then I had him, tight in my arms, holding me, warm and breathing and alive. My Sam. Both of us laughing, crying, saying, “Thank God,” and “I love you,” and “I missed you,” and things that made sense only to us. We started to kiss everywhere, as if welcoming each other back in pieces. Then we rested, just holding on and breathing together. Then we kissed again.

“Benny?” I said, and Sam said, “He’s here.” And there he was, shy as a fawn, holding Hettie’s hand in the door. But unlike his dad, he came to me on his own.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, comically matter-of-fact; I thought he might shake hands. But something, maybe my tears and gluey-voiced “Oh, Benny!” cracked his bashful shell, and he landed beside me in a bound, all arms and nuzzling head and sharp shoulders. Just under my joy and the intense need to hold him closer, tighter, an odd thought drifted: I can’t smell him. Even when I buried my nose in his hair, I couldn’t completely get that smoky-sweet scent I loved so much. Oh, well. I had Benny.

“You woke up! I knew you would. Daddy said and said, and at first I thought you might not, but then I knew you would.”

“That was clever of you.”

“What were you doing? What were you thinking?”

“Umm…”

“Where were you? Did you know when I was here? I came a lot.”

“I did know. Sometimes, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t wake up until now?”

“Not till now.”

“Because it was hard.”

“It was so hard.”

“And your head hurt.”

“Well, at first. But then it didn’t, and I was just sleeping.”

“Could you hear us talking? We did. We talked all the time. Dad… Dad, mostly. Sometimes, Mommy.” He mumbled this against my neck. “Sometimes… I just played.”

“Oh, but that’s okay-I always knew you were here. I wanted you to just play.”

Exactly the right thing to say, because Benny heaved the deepest sigh and laid his head on my chest, his relief heavy as a winter blanket.

Sam was kissing my hand, each of my fingers. “You’re still wet,” I noticed, patting his damp sleeve. His lifted brows told me he thought that was an odd sentence construction. That was the moment it first hit me: I have a strange story to tell. And this probably wasn’t the time to tell it.

“That’s because we’ve had a bit of an adventure,” Sam began. “We-”

“We went on a picnic and Monica almost drowned! But Dad got her in time and she’s okay, and she’s in the lounge with Justin and Ethan. They came with us, but they have to go back and get all our stuff because it’s still there, because we didn’t pick anything up. We just ran! Daddy speeded.”

Sam and I smiled at each other, and I felt the world shift a fraction. Go back to normal. I was definitely home.

I stroked Benny’s dear, bumpy back, comforting him. Lovely for him to get his mom back, sure, but how terribly, terribly sad to lose his dog. “We’ll get another one, sweetheart,” was on the tip of my tongue when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “Mom! We got a dog!”

“Oh, baby, I’m so-”

“She’s a girl- Sonoma -she’s really good, and smart, she can shake hands and open doors and everything. We ran over her! But then we saved her and now she’s ours. You’ll like her, Mom, she’s really, really good.”

I looked at Sam in alarm. Didn’t Benny know?

Sam made a wry face. “Well, I don’t know how good she is, but she’s definitely our dog. She’s out in the car. Maybe they’ll let you see her later, tomorrow or-”

“ Sonoma ’s in the car? Sonoma is here?”

“Yeah.” Sam looked at me strangely again. “She’s a mess right now, though, been in the river, got some scrapes and bruises-”

“Monica said she saved her! Monica said she jumped in and got her by the shirt! Then she almost drowned, but she ended up on a rock and now she’s okay except a bump on her head. Monica said we should take her to the vet.”

“Don’t spay her,” I said. In case I wasn’t home by Tuesday.

They both looked at me strangely.

“I mean, if you were going to, you know. Just hold off till we talk about it, is all. ’Kay?”

“Sure,” said Sam. He looked bewildered. “No problem.”

“So we can keep her?” Benny asked in a very soft voice, also garbled because of the two fingers he had in his mouth. As if he didn’t really want me to hear. As if no answer would equal permission.

The fact that he was worried at all just killed me. “Hey, are you kidding? Of course we can keep her. She’s our dog.”

At least.

I couldn’t wait to meet her.

After

“Crap!” Sam makes a graceful grab for his jack of spades, but the river is too swift. The card floats away before he can catch it.

“I was wondering when that would happen,” I rouse myself to say. He’s been doing flawless fancy shuffling for five minutes straight. Something had to give.

“You said crap.”

“I was provoked.”

“Crap, crap, crap, crap-”

“Benny. Stifle.”

My son cackles and goes back to pitching a rubber ball to Sonoma in the shallows. Underhand lobs, up high and right into her mouth. Being in the river was supposed to add a new layer of difficulty, but they perfected this game a long time ago.

So here we are, back where we started. Looking at us, if you didn’t know, you’d think we were the same Summer family as before, just a year older and with a dog. You’d be right, except for all the ways in which you’d be wrong.

“What time are they coming tomorrow?” Sam asks, stashing his deck of cards in his pocket.

“Two-i sh. Which means two on the dot,” I say in the middle of a wide-m outhed yawn. Time for my nap. I love naps.

That’s a difference-old Laurie would’ve suspected some horrible health crisis if she’d ever wanted anything so pointless and wasteful as a nap.

Another difference is my friendship with Miss Punctuality: Monica Carr. She and the twins are coming down to the cabin for the afternoon tomorrow. Sam will take the boys fishing or hiking while Monica and I sit in chairs in the river-like now-and talk and talk, and then we’ll all go in and eat whatever delicious but healthful meal she’s prepared ahead and brought down with her. I won’t feel an ounce of resentment. I’ll notice all the ways in which she’s a better mother, friend, and general human being than I am, but instead of feeling cynical or superior, I’ll just be grateful. That she likes me as much as I like her.

She’ll probably bring her new camera and take lots of pictures. She never told old Laurie her secret ambition was to be a nature photographer-Why would she? I wouldn’t have been interested anyway-but she was afraid to try. What if she wasn’t any good? she worried. What if it took too much time away from Justin and Ethan? What if it was impractical or, horrors, selfish?

I like to think I helped set her straight there. If you can find a way to make a living doing what you love, welcome to the elite group of the most blessed people in the world. I’m in that group-I started back at Shannon & Lewis full-time in January. Sam’s in that group-he quit the hated actuary job in February, and now he’s doing magic gigs almost every weekend. Why shouldn’t Monica be in that group? I’m glad she took my advice and enrolled in photography courses at the Maryland Institute at night. We keep the twins.

I think of that spiderweb picture she took on the log. Bet it was great. Too bad it’s lying at the bottom of the Patuxent.

The Shenandoah is bright blue today, reflecting the June sky. “Say, pard,” Sam calls over to Benny, “wanna head up to the bunkhouse and rustle some grub for the old lady?”

Who could resist such an invitation. “What’ll we make?” Benny asks, splashing over to our chairs. He’s grown an inch since school ended, I swear. In two months he’ll be seven. I want to slow time down, make this summer last forever. Benny at six is too precious to lose, so I hold on tight.

“How ’bout a side o’ beef, a mess o’ beans, and a hank o’ jerky?” I say. Benny’s in his cowboy phase; it’s between spaceman and what I predict will be all soccer all the time.

He puts his arms around me, getting my shirt soaked. This is a good hug, though, spontaneous and fun. For a while last year, Benny’s hugs were needy and clingy and he was my too-constant companion. I’d wake at night with a feeling of being watched, open my eyes, and see Benny’s, two inches away. “Hi,” he’d say, stare until I said “Hi” back, and go back to bed.

We let it go, didn’t take him to a psychiatrist or anything. I let him have all of his mother that he wanted, every last second I could spare, all my attention and all my love-sometimes I thought I’d go nuts-and after a while he quit shadowing me. Of course, now I miss him.

“Or we could just heat up a boot.” Sam bends down to kiss me. “Got any ol’ boots, pard?”

“Just you, Hopalong.”

“Sure you don’t want to come on up to the ranch and help out? Me and Ben, we got a hankerin’ fer yer grits.”

“Why does that sound-”

“Can we just make some sandwiches?” Benny says with adult impatience. Sam and I look at each other and sigh. We feel bad. Nothing shoots Benny out of a phase faster than our embrace of it.

“So you’re okay?” Sam asks, sliding his fingers through my hair. Thank goodness the question is only rhetorical, but it took many weekends to get to this point-leaving Mom by herself in the river. After I woke up I went through a long period of dizziness, completely gone now, and a shorter period of “confusion.” I’d say something strange, something only Sonoma could know, for example, then get in trouble backtracking.

Like the night I told Benny, “Don’t feed her that; she can’t handle rich food,” as he was about to smuggle the rest of his dessert to Sonoma under the table.

“Yes, she can.”

“No, she can’t. Remember that time she threw up all over the dining room after…” Oops. “No, wait, that was some other dog.”

“What dog?” Sam asked, interested. “Because Sonoma did that-”

“No, no, some other dog. Hettie’s dog, she told me about her once. She has a big-”

“Nuh-uh, Hettie has cats.”

“Not Hettie. Did I say Hettie? Carla, the other one, she’s got some big dog who threw up in the-”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Well, not when I was asleep, obviously, ha-ha!”

“So-”

“Afterward, I guess, I mean, when else? Unless it wasn’t Carla-wait, no, it was Mrs. Speakman, the lady across from Monica. She’s got a German shepherd, Trudi, she threw up in the dining room. After she ate a-pie. She ate a pie off the-kitchen window, like in a story, and-Who wants coffee? Sam? I mean, Sam, do you want coffee?”

I wanted to tell them the truth. A dozen times I started to tell them, or at least Sam, but I’d listen to the sentence about to come out of my mouth and have second thoughts. “You’ll never guess where I really was all that time you thought I was in a coma.” Or “I know you guys think you hit Sonoma that day on Georgetown Road, but guess what, you really hit me!”

Let’s face it, even Benny wouldn’t believe me. Even if I told Sam everything that happened, things only he and the dog could possibly know, he’d find a way to rationalize it. So would I-who wouldn’t? “Oh, you’re just remembering something I told you while you were sleeping,” he’d say. He’d find an excuse, the way we do with people who’ve seen ghosts or UFOs or religious miracles. Whatever they say, somehow we always find a way to explain it.

Besides, sometimes I think it couldn’t have happened; it must’ve been a dream. People do not come back as dogs. I can’t even prove it anymore, because Benny gave me back the hoarded treasures that were going to be my ace in the hole, the secret I couldn’t have known because no one knew it except him and Sonoma. But I wasn’t fast enough. The day I came home from Hope Springs, Benny piled my coffee mug, mouse pad, and earrings on the bed. “Look, Mommy. I was saving them for you.” After I had a good cry, we had a long snuggle.

“Come up soon,” Sam says, and I say, “I will, five more minutes,” as he and Benny gather their stuff and start for the cabin. Sonoma used to follow Benny everywhere, I happen to know, when she wasn’t following Sam everywhere, but now she sticks with me. She’s my dog. Benny’s feelings weren’t hurt-he took it as a matter of course. Sam, too. The only one who had a problem with her instant devotion was me.

She splashes over and sits next to me, her rump in the water, chin on the arm of my lawn chair. “Hey, babe,” I say, gently squeezing one thick, silky ear. She’s smaller than I thought. Smaller than I felt, rather. She comes to just above my knee, perfect stroking height as she winds gracefully by. She has soft, soulful, light brown eyes. She likes to cross her legs in front when she lies down, very ladylike. We have the same color hair, tawny reddish tan, but hers is straighter. I admire her trim waistline. When I take her to the ball field in the park and let her off the leash (illegally), she chases the low-fl ying barn swallows until she’s so tired her tongue hangs out. I could watch her run forever.

Now she puts her paw on my lap for me to shake, which I do, but it’s never enough. She switches paws, I shake that one, she switches back. It’s almost a tic. “What do you want, honey?” She never answers, but sometimes I think it’s to put her arms around me. Just get closer.

She scared me at first. I was, of course, ecstatic when I heard she hadn’t drowned, but when they brought me home and the first thing she did was leap up beside me on the bed and gaze deeply into my eyes, I was, frankly, weirded out. “Who are you?” I whispered-when we were alone. “Are you me? Nod your head for yes.”

Nothing.

Since then I’ve tried lots of other ways to communicate (“Blink your eyes.” “Lift one paw.” “Wag your tail.” “Bark twice.”), but nothing’s worked. Either I haven’t found the key yet, which seems increasingly unlikely, or Sonoma is simply a dog (“simply”; not “just”). A delightful, handsome, intelligent, affectionate dog, yes, but nothing more, no one hidden or trapped inside trying to get out. Apparently.

So I don’t know what happened to me. Sometimes I imagine all dogs are, from time to time, secretly people, and there’s this global conspiracy to keep it under wraps so those of us who’ve experienced it aren’t carted off to asylums. Other times I think, well, why just dogs? Why not cats, too? Or birds? Squirrels, whales, hedgehogs? Maybe there’s constant species body-swapping going on, but nobody talks about it except in children’s books and science fiction.

Other times, I’m pretty sure I dreamed the whole thing.

One thing is true: Being a dog changed me. I’ve become a pack animal. Family’s everything-Sam and Benny not only complete me; in some bone-deep way they are me. And not just them. The whole concept of family stretches out farther, farther, planets around the sun. It includes all my friends, Delia and her family, Charlie, and Monica, Ronnie Lewis, neighbors, the community, anybody I love, even Mr. Horton-we’re all a pack. With my little, immediate pack, Sam and Benny, I still have a faint but undeniable urge to roll around on the floor, but with the secondary and tertiary members, I mostly just want to have constant goodwill and cooperation. Which, believe it or not, works out well in the real estate business. Ronnie says I’m better than I used to be and, in all modesty, that’s saying something. It turns out that honesty, reliability, transparency, and kindness not only make good retrievers; they make good house sellers, too. News to me. I thought my profession was dog-eat-dog.

“Shall we go in?”

Sonoma backs up in the water, tail wagging. She loves transitions, anything new. I was the same way. I fold my chair, tuck my phone in my pocket, the real estate contract I was reading under my arm. Put on my water sandals. It’s such a pretty day. Maybe we’ll go on a hike this afternoon-Shenandoah National Park is our backyard. “Ready?” Sonoma and I set off across the rocky shallows, and of course I’m extra alert, setting each foot down with care, wary of slipperiness. We reach the shore without mishap.

Sometimes I try to catch her off guard.

“Who saved Monica, Sonoma? Hmm? Who saved her, girl, you or me?”

Her ears twitch at her name and my questioning tone. She looks at me in happy blankness.

We start the climb to the cabin. I think of another trick.

“Hey, Sonoma! How would you like to be spayed? Huh? Do you wanna be spayed?”

I can’t believe my eyes! Her tail sags-her ears flatten.

“No?” My heart skips a beat or two. “You don’t want to be spayed?”

She shakes her head so violently, her ears sound like cards shuffling.

“Okay,” I say, shaky-voiced. “Okay, then. Don’t worry; we won’t.”

Now what? Did that just happen?

“I’m actually having the same dilemma,” I tell her as we proceed up the path. “Not getting spayed-getting pregnant. Sam and I, we’re talking about it. He’s for it, but, you know, trying to sound neutral. What do you think?”

But she’s through communicating. She’s got her nose buried in something stinky on the ferny wood floor. When she finishes smelling it, she pees on it.

So I am left, once again, to imagine what my dog thinks. It’s not as satisfying as knowing for sure, but since she’s the best of me I can never go far wrong-in ethical quandaries, tough decisions, tricky situations. I just ask myself, “What would Sonoma do?”