Devoted(11)
While others were too busy to notice him, he made his way down through the house, through his special door, and into the backyard.
The September morning had come. The day was warm and bright and like unto other mornings, as if nothing terrible had happened.
He howled silently, mentally howled to others in the Mysterium, that they might know his grief and share it, wherever they were and on whatever task they might be engaged.
There were only eighty-six, all golden retrievers or Labradors.
Now and then a new, young member found his or her way to others of their kind, for they could speak to one another on the Wire, a mental communication medium unique to them.
Their origin and history remained a deep mystery to them, but they sought to plumb it.
They were dogs unlike all other dogs, changed as only humankind had the power to reshape other species.
But who had done it? Where had it been done? Why?
And how had they come to be roaming a few counties in north and central California, in search of their meaning?
On the Wire, the peculiar murmur that wasn’t tinnitus increased slightly in volume.
Kipp began to suspect that the insistent sound was not coming from some new member of the Mysterium, not from another canine.
A human being. He thought it might be a young boy.
This was a new thing. Kipp had never heard such a call from a human being before.
Then again, it wasn’t really a call. The boy, if it was a boy, very likely didn’t know he was transmitting.
Kipp stood for a while, looking at the house to which he’d been brought as a puppy.
He expected to regret leaving it. But with Dorothy gone, it was just a house, no place special.
She’d been seventy-three and in good health when she brought him home. She’d expected to outlive him. Then the cancer.
He avoided leaving by the side of the house where the hearse was in the driveway. He didn’t want to see her being taken away.
The murmuring boy, if it was a boy, lived somewhere west by northwest of Lake Tahoe.
As if it were a radio, he could turn off the Wire. But then what would he do? He needed something to do.
This might be a perilous journey for a stray dog, but Kipp felt compelled to undertake it.
He wasn’t afraid of dogcatchers. He was quicker and smarter than they were.
However, the world was full of worse things than dogcatchers.
He set out at a trot, staying as best he could to backstreets and forest-service roads, to woods and meadows.
From time to time he heard himself whimpering in grief. Love was the best thing when you had it, and the most terrible thing when it was taken from you.
12
Wednesday afternoon, Megan Bookman was in her ground-floor studio, listening to a Beethoven sonata, Pathétique, while working on a painting. The big windows provided good northern light. The room smelled of turpentine and stand oil and paint, a fragrance as lovely to her as was that of roses.
She’d been painting most of her life and had been selling her work since the year she graduated college. The glorious decade with Jason and the special needs of Woody had slowed her production, but she never stopped refining her intentions and techniques.
When she lost Jason and faced the prospect of raising Woody alone, painting became the slow but sure curative for grief, as well as the means by which she gained the confidence to face the future unafraid. After a year of widowhood and long exhilarating hours in her studio, she had landed representation by a major gallery with outlets in New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
Her approach was a rejection of fashion art from Picasso to Kandinsky to Warhol, and an embrace of realism. Her subjects were from the world around her, rendered with meticulous fidelity, yet with a quirky sense of composition and a regard for the complexities of light that suggested something magical—even supernatural—about even the most mundane scenes.
This wasn’t an approach likely to win her critical acclaim in the blinkered world of critics steeped in postmodernism and all that sprang from it. Yet during the past eighteen months, there had been positive—growing—buzz about her work in the right places.
She didn’t care whether critical acclaim waxed or waned. She painted to satisfy herself. Her first life had ended with the death of Jason, and she was profoundly grateful to have discovered that there was life after life. Her art and her child were graces enough for her. Whatever else the future might bring would be a lagniappe.
Because she closely guarded her smartphone number, she also had a landline for the house. The studio extension stood on a table near her easel. When it rang, the caller’s number meant nothing to her, but she put down her brush, swiveled on the stool, and answered it.
“Hello?”
“Megan? Megan Bookman?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Lee Shacket.”
She didn’t know quite what to say, though her high spirits sank slightly. “Lee, how have you been?”
“Terrific. I’ve been terrific.” He sounded a little manic. “No complaints. None at all. How’ve you been?”
She’d dated him briefly, before she met Jason; but there was no chemistry between them, no intimacy. He was cute, earnest. He was amusing at times, in the hyperbolic style of the late comedian Robin Williams. He was hardworking, with big dreams that were charmingly naive rather than pretentious. But essentially he’d been a young man on the make, too into himself to care much about anyone else. Eventually Jason recognized enough intelligence and self-discipline in Lee’s hustle to recommend him to Dorian Purcell, and indeed Lee climbed the corporate ladder faster and far higher than Jason.