You Are Here(52)
Once they’d walked for a few minutes, Peter cupped his hands around his mouth and called out for the dog again, but Emma lightly touched his arm.
“Let’s listen,” she said. A few squirrels ran circles around a tree branch, and the birds continued their lively chorus, but the world was otherwise still. Peter was working himself up to a sarcastic comment about Emma’s usefulness in this second round of the search when they heard a low-pitched cry, followed by a familiar whine.
Emma set off at a run without even looking at him, careening straight off the path and weaving through the trees at a pace that Peter could hardly match. When he finally caught up to her, she was already bent over the dog, who was lying on his side and panting hard, his eyes wild with panic.
“What happened?” Peter said, skidding to his knees beside Emma, who was cradling the dog’s one front paw in her hand. She spoke to him in a low voice, pressing his head gently to the ground to keep him from thrashing about. Peter moved over and took her place so that she had both hands free to examine the paw, and the dog whined again before resting his head near Peter’s sneaker with a look of resignation.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” Emma said, still speaking in the same soft tone. “He cut the pad on something. See here?”
Peter craned his neck and saw that the bottom of the paw was sliced open almost entirely, a clean cut that had turned the white tufts of fur a pinkish red. Any other dog might have limped away, but without use of either of his front legs, he hadn’t been able to move. Peter watched as Emma yanked off her Roanoke sweatshirt and used it to dab at the blood, all the while using her free hand to stroke the trembling dog’s soft ears.
“He’ll be fine, I think,” she said, her mouth set in a straight line, her face as serious as he’d ever seen it. She pressed the sweatshirt against the bottom of his foot, then pulled the elastic band from her ponytail—her hair falling to her shoulders—to fasten the bulky makeshift bandage. “But we’ll need to get him to a vet.”
“Right,” Peter said, looking down at the dog, who must have weighed at least one hundred pounds. He rose to his feet and pushed up his sleeves. “No problem.”
Emma looked up from the dog and had the presence of mind to smile. “You can’t carry him, you idiot,” she said, jerking her head in the other direction. He hadn’t noticed before that just about fifty yards away the road curved in among the trees, the pavement nearly hidden by the thick brush. “Go get the car, Hercules. And then we’ll figure it out from there.”
She turned her attention back to the dog, her head bent with an expression of genuine worry, of fear and urgency and alarm, but also a hint of certainty, the rarest kind of assurance. It was a look he’d never seen from her before, confident as she was, and though he knew it was important to get moving, and though he knew there was no time for this kind of thing, he stood there for a moment anyway, just watching her.
He couldn’t help it.
Chapter twenty-one
Emma sat with the dog in the backseat, holding his paw at an awkward angle to keep it elevated while he squirmed beside her, his eyes following hers as she spoke to him. It was hard to know what she was even saying, but the words kept coming all the same, bits of poetry she must have picked up from her dad, the words to a song her mom used to sing. She talked and she talked and she talked, and she was grateful to Peter for not interrupting her—even when he climbed back into the car after stopping at a gas station for directions to the nearest animal hospital—because there was a certain momentum to the whole thing, and she was afraid of what might happen if it broke.
The dog still made a series of pitiful cries now and then, but he had calmed down somewhat once he was lying down. Emma suspected the problem wasn’t so much the cut—though that certainly wasn’t good either—but the discovery that he didn’t have enough good feet left to walk on. And so she continued to rub his ears, stroke his face, run a hand along his fleecy white belly. And all the while, Peter continued to drive.
When it seemed that the dog was resting easily enough, she checked his bandage again, then looked at Peter in the rearview mirror. “Any idea if we’re close?”
“Should be, yeah.” He flicked his eyes up to meet hers. “You’re doing great with him.”
Emma nodded. “I think he’s more scared than hurt.”
“Still,” he said. “You’re keeping him calm.”
They were silent after that, and Emma watched the rise and fall of the dog’s rib cage, the tremble of a sigh going through him.
“I used to want to be a vet,” she said after a moment, so softly that she wasn’t sure Peter even heard her until he glanced up again.
“Not anymore?”
“I’m not any good at science.”
“It takes a lot more than science to be a good vet,” he said. “It takes passion and hard work and common sense …”
“It’s okay, Peter,” she said. “I know what I am, and I know what I’m not.”
“But you don’t,” he insisted. “How could you? We’re only sixteen.”
“Almost seventeen.”
He smiled. “All that stuff can be learned,” he said. “What you’re doing now, that’s instinct. And it counts for a lot.”