I barked once, loudly, and the woman with the long hair settled me in her lap again. She turned to the other woman. “Wait until Thad sees what I’ve brought home.”
The woman with the hat said, “A puppy and a baby. You guys are going to be busy.”
My eyes started to close and presently I fell asleep. I dreamed of walking nose to nose through the woods with Squirrel, but later the dream became unpleasant because I could see my sister sitting all by herself on the asphalt, wondering what to do next.
5. CHARLIE
In summertime, the Elliots’ farm is a dry and dusty centerpiece in the flatlands surrounding Lindenfield. Charlie watches it grow larger, seeming to rise up out of the scorched earth, as his father steers the pickup along their lane. Sunny the Navigator sits on a sack of chicken feed in the back of the truck, facing just slightly to the left of the cab so that she can see where the truck is headed. Charlie sits next to her, his arms wrapped around her, the wind whipping his hair and drying the perspiration that trickles from his forehead.
Charlie appreciates this view of the farm and gazes at it with as much concentration as Sunny when she gazes at squirrels or people or sometimes nothing. From this distance it looks like the toy farm Charlie and RJ played with when they were little. There’s the white house with the black shutters and the porch meandering from one side around the front to the other side; the red barn with straw spilling out of the haymow; the silo; the vegetable garden; the oak tree by the house; the grove of fir trees behind the barn; the lane leading from the county road to the side of the house. When Charlie used to play with the toy farm he would set it up to resemble his own farm as closely as possible, and he always placed four figures somewhere among the wooden buildings and trees. The set had come with a mother, a father, a boy, and a girl, but Charlie had discarded the girl figure and made a second brother by cutting a picture of a boy out of the Sears catalog and gluing it to a piece of cardboard.
Mr. Elliot slows the truck and parks it in front of the house. He and Charlie’s mother climb out of the cab, stepping carefully to avoid the dust that rises around their polished shoes. Charlie can’t wait to change his clothes.
“Well,” says Charlie’s father in an exceptionally cheerful tone of voice, “summer vacation is officially here. What do you think, Charlie?”
Charlie shrugs. As far as he’s concerned, today is just another day without RJ. And now the entire summer—without RJ—yawns ahead. Charlie looks at his parents and realizes that his father is waiting for an answer. “Maybe I’ll take Sunny for a walk in the woods,” he says.
Inside the Elliots’ cool house, shades drawn to shoo away the heat, Charlie climbs the stairs to his bedroom and changes into a pair of jeans and a striped T-shirt, both purchased at the Everything Else Store. He starts for the stairs, then turns back to his room. It’s always a good idea to take a book along on one of his hikes with Sunny. He never knows when he might have a few minutes for reading. A little-known fact is that although Charlie was four years younger than RJ, he had read many more of the books in the Jackson Elementary School library than his brother had. Charlie reads, reads, reads, impressing the librarian. But somehow reading is not as noticeable as winning prizes or saving the day on the Little League field.
In the kitchen, Charlie slaps together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, wraps it in wax paper, and drops it, an apple, and Lassie Come-Home in his knapsack.
“Come on, girl!” he says, patting his knee, and Sunny, who was resting in a corner of the kitchen, leaps to her feet, wide awake in an instant.
Charlie wonders if Sunny misses RJ. It’s hard to tell with dogs.
He kicks the screen door open with his foot (his parents are not around to see this), and calls, “Sunny and I are going now!”
“Have fun,” his father says from the living room. His voice sounds strangled.
Charlie lopes across the yard in the direction of the barn, and of the fir trees that he still has trouble looking at. Sunny runs ahead, plumed tail held high. She has a coat of reddish hair with a white fringe—her feathers—on the backs of her legs, and a long, delicate nose, which RJ called her snout, but snout is far too crude a word, Charlie thinks, for such a noble nose. Maybe Sunny is a collie, maybe a shepherd of some kind; probably both, plus a few other things.
Before they reach the barn, Charlie changes his mind about their route and veers to the left, whistling for Sunny. Sunny alters her course and soon she’s running along in front of Charlie again. If they’re heading southwest, they must be going to Mr. Hanna’s.
Mr. Hanna’s property borders the Elliots’ so even though his house sits almost a mile from theirs, he’s Charlie’s neighbor. Charlie hasn’t been by in several weeks, though, and today he notices, as he and Sunny make their way across a scraggly field, that the house is badly in need of painting and that the gardens, the ones his wife once tended so carefully, are now choked with weeds.
He knocks on Mr. Hanna’s door. “Hello?” he calls. And he has to call twice more since Mr. Hanna is growing deaf.
“Charlie? Is that you?” he says at last. “Come on in.”
Charlie holds the door open for Sunny and they find Mr. Hanna in his kitchen. He’s cleaning his guns. Charlie stops just short of grimacing.
“Well, well. Charlie! And my Sunny. To what do I owe this honor?” Before Charlie can answer, Mr. Hanna puts his rifle down and says, “Oh. Was today the graduation?” He reaches for Sunny and strokes her silky ears.
Charlie nods.
“I see,” says Mr. Hanna.
“What are you doing with the guns?” asks Charlie. “It’s not hunting season.”
“Gophers,” is Mr. Hanna’s reply.
“But why do you have to shoot them?”
Mr. Hanna doesn’t answer and Charlie doesn’t know whether he didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear, but he lets the subject drop. He thinks guns should never have been invented, that hunting is wrong, and that hunting season should be outlawed—unpopular opinions around Lindenfield—but he likes Mr. Hanna.
“How’s your mother?” asks Mr. Hanna.
“Sad.”
“I suppose today was a hard day. Brought everything back, did it?”
“Yeah. We got his diploma.”
Mr. Hanna gazes out the window. “Uh-huh.”
Charlie isn’t sure how to phrase what he wants to ask. Finally, he says, “I noticed that your gardens are sort of weedy. And also that the porch could use some paint. The thing is, Dad has some extra cans of paint in the barn—left over from working at the Millers’—and he said I could have them. What I was wondering is if you need anyone to do some chores around here. I don’t have a job this summer.”
Charlie would be happy to do the work for free, but he doesn’t want to hurt Mr. Hanna’s pride.
Mr. Hanna frowns, then grins and says, “Well, you got yourself a job now, boy.” He doesn’t look at Charlie, though. Instead he gives Sunny another pat. Then he says to her, “Shake.”
Sunny obediently offers her paw.
“Show me the rest of her tricks,” says Mr. Hanna, and Charlie puts Sunny through her paces, a routine patiently taught to her by RJ.
Sit. Sit pretty. Roll over. Dance. Sing.
At the command to sing, Sunny throws her head back and howls, and Mr. Hanna laughs.
“Care to stay for lunch?” asks Mr. Hanna as Charlie is rising to his feet.
Charlie pats his knapsack. “Thanks. I got lunch in here.”
“You and Sunny off on a tromp, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When would you like to start your job?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Deal. Come at ten, bring that paint, and I’ll throw lunch into the bargain.”
Charlie and Sunny leave the field behind and enter the woods. These woods are not on the Elliots’ land, nor on Mr. Hanna’s, but Charlie knows them as well as he knows any part of his own property. He knows where the birch grove is, and the flat rock
that’s big enough to stretch out on (a good place for reading, even if it is as hard as, well, a rock), and the tiny walled-off cemetery belonging to some long-ago and forgotten family, and the twists and turns of the stream that feeds into the pond at Mr. Hanna’s.
Charlie once asked Mr. Hanna how far the stream went and Mr. Hanna suggested that he and RJ follow it, but RJ never had enough time and Charlie didn’t want to do it alone.
One of the many good things about Mr. Hanna is that he has never asked Charlie about the kite or the tree or any of the details about the afternoon RJ died. Other adults want the details, which they mostly got from Mrs. Elliot before she stopped talking about the day. At first, Mrs. Elliot was more than willing to relate what happened after the moment Charlie came yelling into the farmhouse—how she grabbed for the phone and thank goodness got the operator right away; how she tore out of the house and across the yard to the tree with the broken branches; how she saw RJ lying on the ground, the kite a few feet from his head, a gaping hole in the kite ruining Charlie’s carefully painted griffin. Mrs. Elliot’s details often trailed away at this point. She was eager to describe the phone call, the dash across the yard, the tree, the kite. But not RJ. And now she won’t mention the day at all.
Charlie strides along among the trees and he can feel his footsteps growing harder and rougher until finally he really is on a tromp. Tromp, tromp, tromp. His anger is rising, and Sunny slows her pace and looks sideways at him, her brown eyes wary.
Charlie takes a deep breath. “It’s all right, girl,” he says. He lightens his step, but his thoughts are angry. Stupid, stupid RJ, climbing a tree and going way too high. RJ believed that he could do anything, and the rest of Lindenfield shared that opinion.
“Some hero,” mutters Charlie.
Ahead Charlie sees something gleaming in the fallen leaves.
“Sunny! Stay!” he commands.
Sunny plops to the ground and sits while Charlie moves ahead. He examines the ground carefully. “Tinfoil,” he says after a moment. “Okay, Sunny. Come on.”
From time to time while hiking through the woods Charlie has come across a leg-hold trap, once with a rabbit, still alive, caught between the lethal jaws. That time Charlie had run for his father, shouting for him to come pry apart the trap, but Mr. Elliot had shot the rabbit almost instantly. “We’re not going to be able to save him,” his father had said. “And he’s suffering. Looks like he’s been here for a couple of days. He hasn’t been able to get to food or water, and he’s been attacked by something.” He shakes his head. “The trappers are supposed to check their traps once every twenty-four hours.”
Ever since, Charlie has been on the lookout for traps, especially when Sunny is with him. The few times he’s found them, he’s disabled them. What he would like to do is steal them; just lug the smaller ones home and hide them. But where? That’s the part he can’t figure out. Besides, if his father caught him stealing anything at all, Charlie would be in some kind of unimaginable trouble, and he’s not about to risk that.
“It’s okay, Sunny,” Charlie says again, and obedient Sunny rises and trots toward him, sniffing the tinfoil suspiciously as she passes it.
Sunny leads the way until she comes to the stream, the one that flows into Mr. Hanna’s pond. She looks back at Charlie as if to say, “Should we stop here?”
“Let’s have lunch,” says Charlie, dropping to the ground. He clears away some dead leaves and branches, opens his knapsack, and pulls out the sandwich, the apple, and the book. He eats the apple first, chewing thoughtfully as he watches the stream, which has a life all its own. Sunny watches the stream too. Apples are of little interest to her. But as soon as Charlie unwraps the sandwich, she abandons the stream and sits directly in front of Charlie, looking from him to the sandwich and back.
“Don’t worry,” says Charlie. “You know I always save you the last bite.” He opens his book and reads and chews and reads and chews until one bite (of a generous size) is left. This he hands to Sunny, who accepts it so gently between her jaws that Charlie recalls that this is why RJ also used to call her Kitten Lips.
“Okay, Kitten Lips?” he says now.
Sunny is working away at the peanut butter, licking her lips. Finally, Charlie offers her his fingers so she can lick those too.
Lunch over, Charlie carefully replaces the wax paper in his knapsack. These are not his woods, but even if they were he would never litter in them. He leaves the apple core behind, though. It will be a surprise treat for a deer or a raccoon.
Now Charlie settles in with Lassie Come-Home. He leans against a tree trunk, and Sunny sprawls across his feet. “My feet are already hotter than blazes!” Charlie exclaims, but he can’t bring himself to move her.
Charlie reads the afternoon away, reads until he realizes that the light is starting to fade and he checks his watch. “We’d better start for home,” he says, getting to his feet. And boy and dog lope back to the Elliots’ farm. When Charlie reaches the edge of the east field, he pauses and surveys the land. He sees no one. Everything is country serene. Which is to say that Charlie hears a pair of crows talking to each other, sees a hawk wheeling overhead, hears the wind rustling leaves and the dry stalks of tall grass, sees four deer across the field.
Charlie suspects that his father is in the barn, but has the sense not to call out to him. Instead, he peeks through the door. There is Mr. Elliot getting ready for the big job he and his men will start on Monday. He’s inventorying the cans of paint, stacking up drop cloths. The barn is quiet. Months ago Mr. Elliot stopped listening to the radio.
Charlie backs out of the barn, Sunny by his side, and crosses the yard to the house. He enters through the kitchen door. His mother has started dinner. The oven is on, and pots of vegetables from the garden are simmering on the stove. The table is set too. But where is his mother?
Charlie edges through the house. The door to his parents’ bedroom is closed, so that’s where his mother must be. He puts his ear to the door and hears nothing. He strays through the living room and stops. Something is different, but he isn’t sure what. Then he sees that RJ’s diploma now hangs over the mantelpiece, replacing nothing. Nothing was there before, and now the diploma has taken center stage.
Charlie walks back through his silent house to the kitchen to fix dinner for Sunny.
6. BONE
The next part of my tale begins with my feet. They were growing, and so was the rest of me. I knew this because Isabel and Thad kept talking about how large my feet were and how large I was getting to be in general. “Will you look at him?” said Thad one morning as he patted my back. (By this time I had been taken to the vet, and Isabel and Thad knew that I was a he, not a she.) “Those feet!” Thad exclaimed. “He really is going to be a big one.” Thad seemed pleased by this.
Isabel was the woman with the long hair and the round belly, and Thad was her husband. They were nothing like Marcy and George. When Isabel brought me home from the place called the mall and I made a puddle on her floor, she just said, “No, no,” and carried me outside. Sometime later, I made a puddle in the grass and then Isabel gave me a cookie and picked me up and cuddled me and told me I was a good girl. (This was before the trip to the vet.) It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I should make puddles and poop when I was outside the house, and that I should never make puddles and poop when I was inside the house.
That day—the day on which I was separated from my sister and taken home with Isabel—I got a lot of new things. I got two dishes, a bed, some toys, food that came in cans, a blanket, and another name: Simone. The next day, Isabel took me to the vet and after that, my name was Simon.
“The vet says he’s going to be pretty big,” Isabel told Thad that evening.
Thad looked fondly at me, but he said to Isabel, “Are you sure a baby and a puppy—a big puppy—aren’t going to be too much?”
Isabel shook her head and smiled. “This is the beauty of taking an extra-long maternity leave. The baby won’
t be born for another month and by then we’ll have Simone—I mean, Simon—all trained and everything. Plus, he’ll be a month older. It’ll be fine.”
I was sitting on the floor in my new bed. Thad reached down to pat my head, I jumped back, and he pulled his hand away, startled. “Simon’s skittish,” Thad remarked.
“You would be too, if someone had thrown you out a car window,” replied Isabel.
Thad put his hand out again, and this time I let him give me a pat.
“Anyway, the vet said he’s healthy,” said Isabel. “He just needs some training.”
The training began several days later. A woman with lots of pockets, and treats in every single one of them, came to the house and showed Isabel how to teach me to sit and stay and come and leave things behind and get down off of other things.
“My goodness!” said Isabel. “Those are a lot of commands.”
Isabel was a patient teacher, though, and we worked together for several days. Then one evening Isabel and Thad were sitting on the couch and I was lying with my feet in Thad’s lap and my head on Isabel’s leg (she didn’t have much lap left), when suddenly Isabel put her hands on her big belly and said, “Uh-oh.”
“Honey?” said Thad. “What is it?”
“I had a pain. But it’s too early for the baby.”
“It’s probably false labor,” said Thad confidently.
A few minutes later Isabel groaned. “I don’t think this is false,” she said. She let out a gasp. “I think this is it. We have to go to the hospital.”
This was followed by a big blur of excitement. Feet hurried back and forth and up and down the stairs. Doors opened and closed. Thad talked on the telephone. And then Isabel said, “What are we going to do about Simon?”
“Maybe your father can come over and take care of him. He likes Simon.”
“All right,” Isabel replied. She was puffing and holding her belly.