Stay (ARC)
Page 3
could carry me. Of course the dogs came spilling out.
They never barked. They never whimpered in their
excitement, though they were clearly excited to hear and
then see me. They were always mute. Absolutely silent.
I loved that about them.
We ran.
We ran around in a big arc, so we wouldn’t have to
stop at the edge of the woods. So we wouldn’t have to
face the prospect of civilization. We ran past the cabin
again, but on a path too far away or too heavily wooded
to see it flash by.
We ran all the way across the River Road and stopped
at the bank of the river. I squatted on my haunches,
panting, and pulled a sandwich out of my pocket. I’d
had breakfast, but I always needed more after all that
running, and a sandwich was the only thing I knew to
make on my own that I could put in a plastic bag and
stick in my pocket.
Nobody noticed the missing food. Nobody noticed
me getting up earlier. Nobody asked why I was leaving
the house more than an hour too early for school. I was
like a ghost in that house. Unless I was interrupting their
warfare, I might as well not have existed at all.
The dogs crowded close, whacking me with their
swinging tails, and I fed them each a bite of sandwich
and watched the pull of the muddy water.
Then I got nervous.
They were not my dogs. I had no idea whose dogs
they were. I wasn’t really supposed to have them away
from their home with me. What if one of them stepped
too close to the river and slid down the muddy, slippery
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bank? What if they darted back into the road? Cars didn’t
come along it often, but when they did, their drivers al-
most always took the straightaway much too fast because
there was no one around to notice.
“Come on,” I said to them, and they lifted their ears
and turned them to face me to show they were listening.
“Let’s go back.”
I looked both ways at the road. From that spot you
could see just about forever in each direction. There was
nobody coming, so I took a chance. I wanted to try an
experiment.
I ran with them down the dirt shoulder of the road
for a tenth of a mile or so. I wanted to see how much
faster I could go without having to play chess with the
trees. But the experiment was a bust. Maybe I went faster.
Who knows? But it wasn’t fun. There was nothing to it.
It was just slapping my feet down.
I missed the constant dodging. The blur of tree trunks
racing past in my peripheral vision. More to the point, my
brain was so disengaged that I started thinking, though
after all these years I don’t claim to remember what about.
I needed the absolute concentration of the on-the-fly
route finding, but I hadn’t known it. It required every
ounce of my concentration. It left me unable to entertain
any thoughts.
“Come on,” I said to the dogs. “We’re turning around.”
I’m sure they had no idea what that meant. But I
stopped and turned, and that they understood.
Just then something caught my eye.
I was jogging along past the graveyard. I’d run by it
once, but I must’ve been looking away. What made me
look, made me stop my feet, was a spray of bright yellow
flowers. What kind of flowers, I don’t know. I wasn’t good
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
with that, and I’m still not. But they were the kind that
bloomed in long stalks.
Now, at face value, there was nothing so strange about
it. Just two things made me wonder, and drew me in closer.
One, nobody had died in this town for a really long
time. Maybe six or seven years, with the exception of old
Mr. Walker, whose body was shipped back to Michigan
to be buried with his family. Granted, you can still miss
a family member six or seven years later. You can still be
thinking of them and want to go visit their grave. But
then there was the other odd thing. Those same flowers
had been laid on two graves. And the graves were much
too far apart to be members of the same family.
I walked through the gate, the dogs wagging behind
me. Up to the first grave.
The stone read, “Wanda Jean Paulston, November
10, 1945–December 18, 1952.”
Only seven years old. That must have been a heart-
break for the family. Part of me wondered why I hadn’t
heard about it. But people don’t like to tell their kids about stuff like that. Besides, it all happened before I was born.
I walked to the second grave. It said, “Frederick Peter
Smith, April 11, 1946–December 18, 1952.”
I stood a minute processing it in my brain. Both died
young. Both died on the same day. Somebody missed
them both.
But it seemed like a mystery that I didn’t have the clues
to solve, and not a very pressing one at that. So they had
a mutual friend. So what?
Besides, I’d been in a hurry to get the dogs home.
“Come on,” I said to them. “We’re going.”
And they both gave me this look like it was about time.
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We sprinted back to the approximate spot where we’d
burst out of the woods, and we burst back in. I ran them
home. For every second of those few glorious minutes, I
thought about nothing at all.
* * *
I was in the hallway opening my locker when Connor
came up behind me and said what he said.
“You’re trying out for track, right?”
I turned around and shot him what I’m sure was a
confused look.
“School lets out tomorrow.”
“Right. That’s why I was thinking you shouldn’t wait.”
He was trying to be helpful. I know that now, and
I might even have known it at the time. But he wasn’t
making any sense.
“But … what’s the point? I’ll just try out in the fall.”
I wouldn’t. I already knew I didn’t want to. I wanted
to run in the woods, not on a flat track. I wanted to run
with those dogs, not guys my age, most of whom I didn’t
much like or trust.
“Oh,” Connor said. He sounded disappointed. “Coach
Haskell might ask you to try out before fall.”
“Why would he do that? How would he even know
I’m interested in running these days?”
“You told me you loved running,” he said. “I was
talking to Coach. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” I said. But it was a lie. I lied to keep from
hurting his feelings. It was dawning on me that I was
likely to try out for the team to keep from hurting his
feelings as well.
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
I opened my mouth to say something more, but I
was saved from a reply by Libby Weller. She walked by
in a huge plaid A-line skirt that swung well below her
knees. A short-sleeved sweater. She p
urposely caught my
eye and paused.
“Lucas,” she said. “Heard anything from your brother?”
I was always nervous around Libby. Always had been.
“Um … no.”
She nodded vaguely and walked on. Then I was forced
to look up into Connor’s questioning face.
“If I’d told her I heard from him,” I said, “the next
question she’d’ve asked is ‘How is he?’ I just didn’t want
to get into that whole thing.”
He nodded his understanding. I pulled my math book
out of my locker and slammed it shut, and we walked
down the hall together. In silence at first.
Then Connor said, “I really think she likes you.”
He’d said it before. On many occasions. I hadn’t bought
it any of the previous times, and I still wasn’t buying it.
Thing is, Libby was a very pretty girl. As in, out-of-my-
league pretty. And if I believed Connor, it would be a long
way down if he was wrong. And I figured he was wrong.
“I don’t think so,” I said, as I always did. Then I added
something that had been true all along but had not yet
been spoken. “I think it’s just the thing with her brother.”
Libby’s brother Darren had come home from the war a
few weeks earlier missing his right leg from the calf down.
I mean, did Connor really not notice that Libby always
asked how Roy was and never asked anything about me?
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
I opened my mouth to say more, but never got there.
Instead I looked up to see my path down the hallway
blocked by the enormous Coach Haskell. He was about
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six five with shoulders like a mountain, standing spraddle-
legged in sweatpants and a school T-shirt. He had his arms
crossed over the whistle hanging around his neck. He
was trying to catch my eye and I was trying to prevent it.
I made a move to duck around him. But of course it
was not to be.
“Painter,” he bellowed.
I stopped.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tomorrow at eleven. You’re trying out for track.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if I just tried out in the fall?”
“I need to know who I can count on next semester.
So be there and don’t let me down.”
Connor offered me an apologetic glance and slunk
away.
* * *
I woke up the following morning before my alarm. Long
before my alarm.
I had set it for the normal time. I mean, the old normal
time—just early enough to get to school. Because it was
a half day, like I said. I figured I’d go run with the dogs
afterward. It would be a celebration of sorts.
But I was wide awake, and it was not only earlier
than I needed to wake up to get to school on time, it was
earlier than I’d been getting up to run.
And it’s funny, looking back. I think about it from
time to time. A thing happens, and it’s a thing big enough
to save a life, and you don’t know why it happened. And
you sure didn’t know it was such a big deal at the time.
But, looking back, you wonder why things work out the
way they do.
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
I tossed and turned for a couple of minutes, then
gave up.
I dressed quickly in sweats and trotted downstairs.
Everybody else was asleep. The kitchen was dark and
quiet, and I poured a bowl of cereal without turning
on any lights. While I wolfed it down, the sky began to
lighten outside the window.
I set my bowl in the sink and slipped out the door.
Jogged toward the entry point where I always picked up
a trail into the woods. Right away I could feel my lack of
sleep dragging on me. It felt like something was missing
inside my gut. But I kept going.
It was just light enough to make my way over the
dropped branches, around the trees.
When I came over the rise and saw the cabin, the dogs
were already outside. They were not in their doghouse.
Which was unusual. They were on the porch of the cabin.
Fretting. That’s the word that came into my head when
I saw them, and I still think it’s the best one.
The bigger dog, the boy, was pacing on the porch.
Literally pacing. Padding three long strides to cover the
length of the boards, then spinning on his haunches and re-
peating the strides in the other direction. The smaller one, who I now knew was female, was scratching at the door.
And I do mean scratching. Not the way a dog scratches to
tell you he needs to go out. Not a little downward swipe
with one paw. I mean the way a dog scratches when her
goal is to dig straight through solid oak. And as I walked
closer I could see she had done some fair damage.
They both looked up when they saw me trotting
down the hill. But they didn’t come to me. They just
looked away again and kept doing what they were doing.
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That’s when I got that sick feeling in my gut, knowing
something was deeply wrong.
Normally I tried to stay as far away from the cabin as
possible, out of respect to whoever owned it. That morn-
ing I walked up onto the porch boards for the first time. I
had to duck out of the way to keep the pacing male dog
from bowling me over. He didn’t even slow his step or
change direction for me.
I took a deep breath, gathered all my courage, and
rapped hard on the door.
Nothing. No answer.
“Hello?” I called. “Everything okay in there?”
Silence.
I heard the birds singing in the trees, excitedly.
Probably they had no idea of any trouble below them.
The sun was coming up, and they were likely reacting to
that welcome daily occurrence. The light, lovely sound
of them was punctuated—and made ugly somehow—by
the obsessive scratching.
I rapped again. Harder.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Nothing.
There was no window in the front of the cabin, so
I moved around to the side. My feet crunched through
pine needles as I walked up to the window. I took another
deep breath and looked inside.
A woman was lying in the bed, eyes closed. On her
back, as if sleeping peacefully, a patchwork quilt pulled
up under her armpits. She was an older woman. Not
ancient-old like my great-grandmother, but old compared
to me. Mid-fifties, maybe. Her long, straight gray hair
fell around her face and shoulders. It would have been a
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
peaceful enough scene if not for the reaction of the dogs.
I would have just figured she was a heavy sleeper.
I knocked on the window, braced for her to open
her eyes and scream at the sight of a guy staring through
her window.
She did not open her eyes.
I banged harder.
“Ma’am?” I shouted. “Are you okay? Is everything
No reaction.
That was when the panic of the thing really set up
shop in my gut. Because I had banged hard. I’d yelled loudly. Nobody was that sound a sleeper. It struck me with a shiver that I might be shouting at a corpse.
“Ma’am!” I screamed, my volume powered by the fear
rushing out of me. “Ma’am, are you okay?”
Then I stopped yelling, leaned on the windowsill, and
pulled a couple of deep breaths.
She was not okay.
I took off running.
“I’ll get help!” I shouted as I ran by the pacing, scratch-
ing dogs on the porch.
They paid me no mind at all.
* * *
My parents were still asleep when I burst back through
the kitchen door.
I ran straight to the phone. On the side of the re-
frigerator my mom had a sheet of emergency numbers
held up with a magnet. She’d ripped it out of the county
phone book.
I dialed the sheriff’s office with trembling hands.
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“Taylor County Sheriff,” a high female voice said.
“I need to report a…” But I stalled there for a second
or two. What exactly did I need to report? Two uneasy
dogs and a woman who would not wake up? “…somebody
who might be in trouble.”
A longish silence on the line, which I took to be this
woman rolling her eyes at my stupidity. But it turned out
she was transferring me. After a click on the line I heard
a bored-sounding male voice.
“Deputy Warren,” the voice said. “Who do I have
on the phone?”
“Lucas Painter. From over on Deerskill Lane.”
“And what kinda trouble we talkin’ here, son?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s this lady. She’s by
herself in the middle of nowhere. And she’s in bed like
she’s asleep, but nothing wakes her up. Nothing.”
“Maybe she’s just a heavy sleeper,” Warren said, still
apparently bored.
“I banged on her window like crazy. Nobody could
sleep through the noise I was making. And her dogs are
all upset. One of them is trying to dig through the door
to get in to her.”
A silence on the line. Then I heard him sigh. Maybe
because we had just crossed the border into his believing
he might need to get up and do something.
“Okay, gimme her address. I’ll go look in on her.
Check her welfare.”
“I don’t have an address.”