Dogs

  Let them take him. He’d done all he could. If they had a warrant, they’d come in. If they didn’t, they’d go away.

  He heard the doorknob turn.

  » 73

  Jess sat by Cami Johnson’s hospital bed. Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the floor. Cami was still in a semi-coma, but the doctor had told him that it would end soon. The other dog-bite victims, the ones infected earlier than Cami, had already woken up. Unlike the dogs, the infected humans didn’t die. Although God alone knew what was going on in their brains.

  Jess put his hands flat on his knees and stared at the clumsy homemade bandage, the bitten nails. How was he going to tell Cami about Billy?

  How was Jess himself going to manage without Billy, his only real friend?

  “Don’t nap too long, Billy.”

  “Catch you later, dude."

  When Cami woke up, Jess was going to need the right words. He didn’t have them, not for her and not for himself. The only sentence that kept coming to his mind, over and over, was completely selfish, not concerned with Billy at all. Or maybe it was.

  I need to change my life.

  On the hospital bed, Cami stirred and her eyelids fluttered like blue-veined butterflies.

  » 74

  “She’s alive! She’s alive!”

  “Allen, be careful! Your foot—Allen, do you hear me?”

  “Susie’s alive!”

  Amy Levy smiled wearily. It had been worth it, then, after all—all those phone calls and all that fake blustering. “This is Mrs. Peter Levy, my husband is an attorney with Dalton, Arendt, Carruthers, and Levy, and I’m calling to find out—” Yes, worth it, to see Allen’s face like that.

  Peter had called, finally, from D.C. He professed concern for his wife and son in what was practically a war zone, but it was too little concern too lately professed. Probably he was at his little tart’s place. Anger and outrage and fear for the future boiled through Amy, but for this moment she pushed them all aside to savor Allen’s joy.

  He shouted, “When can we see her? When can we have Susie back?”

  “We don’t know that yet, honey. I told you.”

  “But you could make more calls and make them tell you!”

  “Allen—”

  “Susie’s alive!”

  APRIL

  » 75

  Jess stood on the porch of the Cape Cod and took a deep breath. In the twilight, porch lights were coming on along Farley Street but Tessa’s light, he noted, had burned out. Leaves from last autumn littered corners of her porch, but tulips bloomed in the front yard. Feeling like a manipulative fool, Jess nonetheless unlatched the cage at his feet, lifted the wiggling little dog into his arms, and rang the doorbell.

  “Minette! Oh, Minette!”

  The poodle, barking frantically, leapt from him to Tessa. Tessa hugged her and turned away—to hide tears? This was an unexpected side of her. Uninvited, Jess stepped inside. “I thought I’d bring her myself. The dogs are all being released today.”

  “Thank you.” She turned back—no tears after all. He admitted disappointment. Still, she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a beer?”

  “Beer would be great.”

  She led him through the living room to the kitchen. No more cardboard boxes and, given the state of neglect outside, the rooms looked quite nice in an exotic, non-cozy sort of way. Straight curtains of some rough brown material, a gorgeous Oriental rug that looked wickedly expensive, one sofa and one chair with straight, low lines. Smaller rugs hung on the white walls. Instead of a coffee table she had a wide copper tray on a tripod, its intricate design inlaid with what looked like gold. The tray was surrounded by bright floor cushions. Despite the TV and a bookcase, this was definitely not your usual Tyler décor, which ran to plaid sofas and wreaths of dried flowers.

  The kitchen was more familiar: American coffee pot on the counter, notes and cartoons stuck on the refrigerator with magnets, a package of Doritos open on the table. Jess glanced at the empty dog dishes on the floor.

  “I never did put them away,” Tessa confessed. She filled the bowls with kibble and water but Minette wouldn’t leave her lap. As she and Jess sat at the table with their beers, the tiny dog pressed into Tessa as if trying to burrow into her belly.

  “I heard you went back to work at the FBI,” Jess said.

  She paused with the beer halfway to her mouth. “How did you hear that?”

  He smiled. “It’s a small town. People talk all the time. You leave the house every morning before seven dressed in a dark pantsuit, you head toward D.C., you come home after eight at night. That’s all it takes.”

  “Jesus Christ, federal intelligence should only be that good.” She grinned at him over the edge of her beer glass and his heart skipped a beat.

  “So are you at the FBI again?”

  “Yes. I discovered I’m not the type to sit around Tyler and bake cookies.”

  Like there could ever have been any doubt. “So you’re moving back to D.C.?”

  “No. I like Tyler. Despite the gossips.”

  “Long commute.”

  “I can manage,” she said stiffly. Somehow this had become a verbal contest, not at all what Jess intended. He held out his glass. “Can I have another beer?”

  “Sure.” She got him one from the fridge, and he noted the way her trim ass moved in her tight jeans. She was fitter than he was, richer, better educated, probably smarter, and certainly a better shot. But she was the only woman who’d stirred him at all since Elizabeth walked out. He pressed on.

  “Your husband was Arabic, wasn’t he?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that?”

  “You asked me once if I read Arabic, and Agent Maddox got really interested when I told him that. Also, you have all those things in the living room…Look, I don’t know what happened with you during the dog plague, why you took my truck and disappeared, or where you went after that, or…anything. And I don’t care. I was just asking to make conversation.”

  She nodded. Her eyes lost that hard look and hope sprouted in him. He said, “Tessa, would you have dinner with me?”

  She took a long time to answer. “Yes, my late husband was Arabic. His name was Salah. He was killed five months ago by a drunk driver. I loved him very much.”

  The hope withered.

  “Tessa—”

  “Don’t, Jess. Please…don’t.” She hesitated, weighing something in her mind, and apparently decided on honesty. Although he had no doubt she was capable of elaborate, perfectly delivered lies if she so chose.

  “You don’t want to get involved with me, Jess. Apart from the fact that my husband has been dead for only five months…Christ, there is no ‘apart’ from that. Not for me. How can I explain it so you…Since Salah’s death, every day has been like striding along the street and all of a sudden you step in a pothole and go down. Again and again. Sometimes it’s just a little stumble and it’s relatively easy to get up without much pain. Other times it’s pure torture. But it keeps happening, over and over, and you get so you half expect the ground to not hold under your feet. The damn ground isn’t trustworthy any more. Yet there’s no place else to walk.”

  She stared into her beer, stroking Minette with one hand. “And there’s something else, too. During the dog-plague investigation, for reasons I won’t go into, I came to doubt everybody. I doubted my boss and the Bureau. I doubted my sister-in-law overseas. I even doubted—briefly but it happened—my dead husband. Do you understand—I doubted Salah. I can’t trust my own judgment in personal matters, and I don’t want anyone else trusting it, either. I don’t want the responsibility. Can you understand that?”

  He could. All at once, he saw why she’d returned to work in D.C. It wasn’t because she was bored baking cookies in Tyler. It was because she needed impersonal work, twelve-hour days of it, to protect her against feeling and emotion. That was also the reason she was staying in Tyler. Her friends, her old life of emotional connections, was
in D.C.

  Jess spoke, and it felt like an enormous risk, a lot more dangerous than rounding up infected dogs. “I know something about relying on work to blunt pain. I know because…well, I did the same thing after my wife walked out on me. It didn’t work so well.”

  She looked up from Minette. “You were married?”

  “Yes, until Elizabeth left with my best friend. Besides Billy, I mean. I thought my life was over except for my job. I went on thinking that for a real long time. But now I know better.”

  “How?”

  It seemed a genuine question, not mere chatter. Jess tried to give a genuine answer. “Billy. Billy’s death. I need to…” Christ, it was hard to find the right words! “…to connect again.”

  “Starting with me?”

  “I like you, Tessa.”

  She looked away, and Jess knew how much of an ass he’d made of himself. So he said, as lightly as he could manage, “I talked to Joe Latkin this afternoon, when the dog release was okayed.”

  “Oh?” Her tone held relief at the change of subject. “What did he say about a vaccine or a cure?”

  “They’re working on it. He told me—” Jess concentrated, retrieving Latkin’s exact words “—that the CDC has finished sequencing the plague virus. He said that it’s very similar to both the 1918 Spanish influenza and to avian flu, with alterations in just…let me see…in thirty-eight of the virus’s 4,400 amino acids. He said for the already infected, the CDC’s best shot was drugs to slow down viral replication, based partly on the antibodies of a dog with natural immunity. While also…let me think… oh yeah, while also managing the virus as it mutates. He also said that we’re charmed that the transmission vector was dog bites, and not airborne like the 1918 epidemic. ”

  “’Charmed’?” Tessa said. She tried to smile. “That was Latkin’s word?”

  “Yes.”

  “The virus is still in the saliva of the people who were bitten. And in their brains.”

  “Yes,” Jess said. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She walked him to the door. He managed to avoid looking at her. As he left he said, “See you around, Tessa.”

  “Wait. Jess…I would like to have dinner with you.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes met his straight on. “But just dinner. It’s still too soon for me to…just dinner. Are there any good restaurants in Tyler?”

  “No. But we can drive to Frederick. On Saturday?”

  “Okay.”

  A cool breeze stirred the dead leaves on the porch. It ruffled Tessa’s dark hair as she stood on tiptoe and kissed him briefly on the cheek. Warmth surged through him.

  At the curb he looked back, but she’d already gone inside. However, he saw Minette at the window, barking silently behind the glass, wagging her negligible tail with sheer pleasure at being alive and being home.

  » 76

  “What if she’s not there?” Allen said anxiously.

  “She’s there,” said the young man in the white coat. He smiled down at Allen with that look grown-ups got when they saw him on crutches. It was a sappy look but good for getting things, if you answered right. Today Allen didn’t care how he answered. He was too excited.

  “Which building? Which one?”

  “That brick one over there, behind the big tree.”

  “Allen,” his mother said, “slow down, you’re still not used to your crutches. Allen, do you hear me?”

  Allen didn’t want to slow down. As fast as he could, he swung himself along the path that wound among the CDC buildings. It was warmer here in Atlanta than at home, and the grass was lots greener, but he didn’t care about that, either.

  “Sometimes I can’t do a thing with him,” Mrs. Levy apologized.

  “Well… kids,” said the attendant, who was all of twenty-two.

  “Since his father left, that bastard…never mind, I’m sorry.” She fumbled in her purse for a tissue, still walking rapidly to keep up with Allen, while the attendant looked delicately away.

  Allen burst through the doors of the building. It smelled wonderful, of dogs and cats and maybe even something exciting like monkeys. He’d read on-line that the CDC had monkeys. But today not even a monkey could deter him.

  “This way,” the attendant said. “Down this elevator.”

  An elevator, another corridor—Allen was moving so fast his crutches almost slipped on the slick floor—and another door, and then there she was!

  “Susie!” He hurled himself to the floor.

  The attendant opened the cage and Susie ran out, nearly knocking Allen over. Her tail wagged non-stop and she barked and whined and climbed clumsily all over him.

  “Allen, watch your leg, do you hear me?”

  “She’s got on a muzzle! Why does she got on a muzzle! Take it off!”

  “I’m sorry but I can’t,” the young man said. “She’s still infected, you know. If she bit you—”

  “She would never bite me!”

  “I’m sorry,” the attendant said in a tone that said he wasn’t budging. Allen scowled at him but after a second he forgot the muzzle. He was with Susie again! A long plane ride and the night in the hotel and listening to his mother cry when she thought Allen was asleep…it was all horrible but here was Susie, and she was safe and whole.

  “Susie,” he crooned as she pressed into him, uttering little yelps of joy. “Susie, Susie…”

  The attendant looked mistily down at them. “I had a dog when I was a child.”

  Allen’s mother didn’t answer.

  “A boy and his dog. Such a simple, easy relationship. Nothing but pure love, no messy human complications.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Amy Levy said.

  JULY

  EPILOGUE:

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  It happened so fast that only one person actually saw it. The little boy squatted in the sandbox, digging with a red plastic shovel. His mother sat two feet away on a park bench, talking with the mother of the baby in the carriage and the mother of the little girl driving everybody crazy by demanding that the adults dance with her, and screaming at the top of her lungs if they didn’t.

  “Dance! Dance with me!”

  “Not just now, darling, Mama’s tired.”

  “Dance!”

  “Later.”

  The child let out an ear-stabbing yowl that made the other two women jump. They exchanged covert, disapproving looks. What an obnoxious kid!

  Wearily the girl’s mother got up to dance with her beside the park bench.

  The dog came out of nowhere, a bouncy red-gold Labrador retriever that dashed up to the boy in the sandbox and leapt onto his lap. The two year-old screamed and did something, and the dog howled and snapped. The boy’s mother snatched him up just as the dog owner, a young man in dirty khaki shorts and scraggly blond beard, sauntered up.

  “Your dog is supposed to be on a leash!” the mother screamed, frantically jiggling her son in her arms.

  “Hey, chill, Garcia never bites,” the man said. Languidly he took a leash from his pocket and fastened it on the dog, who stood trembling at his feet, his broad tail tucked between his legs. “Hey, Garcia, it’s all right, boy…wow, he’s really upset.”

  "He’s upset,” said the mother of the dancing girl. “We should report you to the police!”

  “Whatever,” said the young man, leading his dog away.

  “We should report him!”

  “Well, maybe,” said third woman, who was the group’s peacemaker, “but Labs are pretty peaceful dogs. We always had them when I was growing up. He didn’t bite Robbie, did he?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Robbie’s mother said. The child had stopped crying and was clambering to return to the sandbox. There were no rips in his Oshkosh overalls or little red T-shirt, nor any punctures on his chubby hands.

  His mother hugged him tight. No, she wasn’t going to say anything… she wasn’t. She and Bob had lost so man
y of their old friends, from fear or pity or something. It was so unfair because they were doing everything right: checking in with the CDC every three months, keeping all those charts and records of Robbie’s health. Giving Robbie the experimental drugs. Since their move to Philly, she’d been really lonely until she met these two women in the park. Sarah, the mother of the infant, might even become a real friend. And although it was true that lately Robbie had been biting everything in sight—toys, spoons, his babysitter, the cat—she hadn’t actually seen him bite the Labrador. Chances were, he hadn’t. She didn’t want to throw away these precious mornings in the park—nobody knew how hard it was to raise a child without the companionship of other women!—for an accident that most likely hadn’t even happened. After all, she deserved a life, too.

  “Dance!” demanded the little girl.

  Robbie’s mother set him back down in the sandbox. Such a happy baby, usually. And the scar under his shirt was fading more every day. She was very lucky. When you think of all the children that hadn’t survived the dog bites…

  “Dance!” shrieked the little monster in the pink sundress. “Now!”

  The red-gold lab whimpered on its leash. The young man didn’t notice. He had left the park and was ambling toward the supermarket, whistling tunelessly. Garcia trotted obediently beside him, the teeth marks hidden by the thick, red-gold fur on his tail. They reached the curb and disappeared into the crowd on the city street.

  AFTERWORD: PLAGUES AND E-PUBS

  Sometimes the book you read is not the book the author wrote.

  Dogs went through changes as I wrote it, because every book does. Some of these were my own revisions, some were suggested by my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, who had some of the best eyes in the business. Finally, when Ralph and I were both happy with the book, we offered it to my publisher. Who turned it down.

  “I like this,” he told me privately. “It’s exciting and fast-paced. But I can’t publish it. The content would offend dog lovers too much.”