Devoted(58)
He didn’t turn it off now, because the boy’s cry of emotional pain and desperation was a signal to home onto.
Giving directions to Ben Hawkins could be accomplished without words because the man was smart enough to believe in the impossible when evidence showed him it was possible, after all.
Sad to say, not all human beings were that open-minded.
Some believed the most ridiculous things without a shred of evidence, but wouldn’t believe a truth even when it stuck its fingers in their eyes. So to speak.
Anyway, when they came to an intersection, Ben pointed and asked, “That way?”
If he pointed the right way, Kipp barked once enthusiastically.
If he pointed the wrong way, Kipp whined with disapproval.
As always, there was much he would have liked to say if he’d had the physical apparatus necessary for speech.
He would have said, You’re a really good driver.
He would have said, Faster, faster, though Ben already exceeded the speed limit, aware that this was urgent business, whatever else it might be.
Given speech, Kipp would have asked a thousand questions about Ben Hawkins’s life, what kind of books he wrote, whether he’d read Dickens, whether he believed those physicists were right who said there were parallel universes perhaps infinite in number.
Dorothy had been fascinated by quantum mechanics and string theory and all that.
She had a way of making you interested in what fascinated her.
This was a theory of Kipp’s: There are parallel universes, and when we die, we go on living in other realities.
Dorothy was lost here, but not lost everywhere.
He took comfort in that.
He wouldn’t go so far as to say that Heaven was a parallel universe where everyone lived forever. He wasn’t a theologian.
From Olympic Village, they went north on State Route 89 and then west on Interstate 80.
They left I-80 for State Route 20, still heading west.
If he were just an ordinary dog, he would as often as possible ride with his head out the passenger-door window.
But he understood the danger of flying debris causing serious eye damage.
Sometimes, being a supersmart dog was less fun than being an ordinary dog.
Maybe not just sometimes. Maybe a lot of the time.
Dorothy would let him ride with his head out the window, but then she would drive only very slowly. Not so much fun.
Thus far he had assumed that others on the Wire heard the boy, but suddenly he wondered at their lack of comment.
He sent, Do you hear the boy on the Wire? He screams and he cries.
The answers came quickly from all points of the night. No one else heard the boy. They were excited to think that a human being might ever be on the Wire.
He wondered why they didn’t hear the boy. Life was full of things to wonder about.
When Kipp growled to warn of an upcoming change of direction, his companion said, “Go right?”
Kipp barked, Yes.
Just then the Bellagram about Vulcan in La Jolla flared in his mind, the news bright with Bella’s joy.
Bella was right. Something was happening out there. Something monumental.
And somehow the boy must be as much a part of it as was Vulcan and Bella and Kipp and all the smart dogs who had thus far believed themselves to be strangers in a world that had spawned them for no certain purpose and set them loose to live outside of nature in perpetual longing for answers that never came.
63
After carrying Woody from the bathroom to his bed, Megan had pulled on her jeans and crewneck just as the police arrived.
She was reluctant to leave Woody, who appeared to be entirely detached from reality, traumatized and withdrawn into a world of his own. This was not the first time he had traveled afar like this, of course, but she sensed a new quality to his withdrawal this time. She prayed it wasn’t despair.
She had gone to the head of the stairs to call down to the arriving officers, but refused to descend to the ground floor, instead insisting the deputies come to her.
As she told the first officers her story, she rolled Woody’s desk chair beside the bed and sat in it and held one of his hands, gently opening his clenched fingers and ceaselessly stroking them, with the hope of relaxing him.
She strove to remain calm, to recount events without letting the anxiety that possessed her be evident in her recitation, for fear the boy would understand that her sense of safety had been forever stolen from her by Lee Shacket. Woody needed her to be a rock on which he could stand, not a sea of dread in which he might drown.
As the men listened to her, they examined the door lock that had been damaged by gunfire and explored the room without touching anything. With their solemn expressions and deadpan stares, they seemed to regard her with suspicion, which perhaps their experience and training required of them. Nevertheless, she found it difficult to conceal her exasperation that they were not urgently seeking Lee Shacket wherever he had fled into the night, assuming he had fled and wasn’t nearby, waiting for them to investigate and leave.
She supposed that her quiet recounting of this mad and violent encounter might have made them wonder about her veracity. Where was the residue of terror that should still leave her agitated? Where was her anger at the violation of her home?
Of course they were coiled deep inside her, as tight as the internal windings of a golf ball, so that they wouldn’t be conveyed to her son. Being the parent of a developmentally disabled child who was unable to express his emotions but felt them deeply, a child who had no defense mechanisms to cope with fear, Megan needed at all times to consider how her expressed feelings affected him. He had been so traumatized by Shacket that he’d retreated into a stillness that she found disturbing if not itself frightening, and she dared say nothing in a tone that might wind tighter the clock spring of Woody’s terror.