Say Goodbye for Now

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “Coyotes are pack animals. And the dogs would have a fit if one got near. I don’t know. I leave it up to you, Pete. You’re a humane boy. Or . . . man. I’m sorry. Of course you’re a grown man now. You do what you think is best.”

  Pete sat up on the edge of his bed, looking out the window into the dark yard. Waiting. It was nearly ten o’clock. Pete knew he had to be up early to get his chores done before work, and on any other night he would have been asleep. His eyes drooped, but he refused to give in.

  The moon was fairly strong, almost directly overhead and a little better than half full. If an animal came along, he’d at least be able to see the size and shape of it. He’d at least know if it was an animal to lock out or take in.

  A few minutes later he saw a movement near the woods. Something was walking down. A dog. Dr. Lucy had been right. It was a stray dog. Big, and with enough of a coat that Pete wondered why it couldn’t keep warm on its own. But it was heading toward the shed, walking gingerly, as if stiff or sore.

  The dogs and horses had no reaction. Pete could see the horses were still asleep, standing with their heads down, or resting on each other’s backs, and the dogs were silent enough that Pete could believe they never had wakened.

  When the new animal reached the carefully latched shed, it reared up and hit the door with its front paws and the weight of its upper body. The door swung open a few inches.

  Pete jumped up and pulled on his heavy boots and his coat with the hood. He found a flashlight in the kitchen pantry and turned it on, following its beam through the cold yard.

  Be careful, he told himself silently. Desperate animals can be dangerous. Dr. Lucy had taught him that, and taught him well, so he could live here safely.

  He stood at the open door of the shed and wrapped his hand around the knob, prepared to pull it closed and hold it closed if he felt threatened. He shone the flashlight inside. On the stack of folded drop cloths curled an animal that was anything but unfamiliar or new.

  “Prince,” he breathed out loud.

  Only then did Pete realize that part of him had already known. Or at least, known it was a possibility. But it was a thought Pete had kept from himself until he saw for a fact it was true.

  Prince winced into the light and thumped his tail audibly against the cloths. Pete turned off the flashlight and waited a few moments to give his eyes a chance to adjust. Then he stepped inside, watching for any signs of the wolf-dog’s defensiveness. But Prince only thumped.

  Pete sat down in the corner, a foot or two away, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

  “Prince, what are you doing here? We haven’t seen you in ages.”

  Prince thumped, but—of course—did not otherwise explain.

  “I asked Dr. Lucy a million times why you never come around. When I was thirteen she told me she figured you must know I was okay now. That you watched out for me when you knew I was scared and in trouble, but then when you knew I was fine you went off to live alone.”

  Pete could see the steam of the wolf-dog’s breath, and just enough of the animal’s eyes to make him ache. It was all so familiar. He reached out one hand, carefully, and let the wolf-dog sniff it. Then he stroked the rough fur of Prince’s head. It was a gamble, and he knew it. If Dr. Lucy had been there, she would have warned him to go slowly. But the shed door was still standing half open, and Pete could not—would not—believe that Prince would do anything worse than to retreat. Prince did not retreat. He held still and breathed steam and allowed Pete to run his hands over his neck and back and sides.

  “You’re too thin,” Pete said, shocked by the prominence of the ribs under the wolf-dog’s thick fur. “You must not be getting enough to eat out there. You want something to eat?”

  Pete rose and turned on the flashlight. Then he made his way through the cold yard and back into the kitchen, where he opened two cans of dog food and spooned them into a mixing bowl. He carried the meal out to the shed.

  His plan had been to set it down and back away, but he immediately thought better of it.

  “No,” he said out loud. The wolf-dog cocked his head, listening to Pete’s voice. “You need to come into the house. It’s still too cold out here. I’m going to get your old bed out of the garage and put it down in the examining room. That’s a place you ought to know well enough. And you’re going to follow this food inside. That’s just the way it’s going to be. You hear me?”

  Pete prepared himself for a nightlong struggle as he spoke those words. Prepared to tempt Prince along one inch at a time, possibly without success. Instead the wolf-dog simply pulled stiffly to his feet and followed the meal into the house.

  By the time Pete had found Prince’s old bed in the garage and carried it in, Prince was done eating and had settled, sphinxlike, on the linoleum floor, licking his chops.

  Pete didn’t wake Dr. Lucy. He felt bad asking her to miss sleep, and maybe scaring her. Besides, it wasn’t really an emergency. Prince was fed, and warm, and wasn’t going anywhere until morning.

  Pete laid the big dog bed down on the floor and stretched out on one side of it, prepared to sleep. A few minutes before he drifted off, he felt Prince circle three or four times before settling on the pad beside him.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he heard Dr. Lucy say.

  Pete opened his eyes, blinking into the light, not awake enough to speak.

  “I wondered why your alarm was just ringing and ringing and you weren’t turning it off.”

  Pete sat half up, and Prince raised his head and looked at Dr. Lucy but did not tense or retreat.

  “Guess who’s been sleeping in the shed?” Pete asked, his words softened by sleepiness.

  “It crossed my mind who it might be. But I hated to get your hopes up, just in case I was wrong.”

  Pete shook off sleep as best he could and looked carefully at the wolf-dog in the strong morning light.

  “He must be sick,” he said. “He doesn’t look good.”

  “He looks okay to me.”

  “But his fur is all dull. And his face looks . . . I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Old?”

  Pete didn’t answer, because he was busy trying to sort out his impressions.

  “He’s old, honey. I’ll give him a complete exam if you like, but I had him figured at four or five when you first brought him here. So he must be something like twelve by now. At least. And that’s old for a dog.”

  “But he’s too thin. You can feel his ribs sticking out.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t hunt as well as he used to. You have to be fast to catch game in the wild.”

  “Please give him the exam and make sure he’s okay, Dr. Lucy. I’m not sure he’s okay.”

  “Fine. I will. I’ll make up a bowl of breakfast for him with some tranquilizers in it, and then we’ll see what’s what.”

  “He seems fine to me, honey,” Dr. Lucy said.

  She had Prince stretched out on his side on the table, barely conscious. Every now and then Pete could see the wolf-dog’s eyes flicker slightly.

  “This reminds me of the first day I came here,” Pete said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing. I’m going to draw some blood while we have him out. But his temperature is normal, and his heart sounds great, and his eyes are clear and good for a guy his age. We might want to test him for parasites if we can get hold of some of his stool. But mostly he’s just older, and his joints are inflamed. So he’s probably not hunting as well as he used to, and the joint inflammation makes him want to stay warm, and the lack of calories makes that harder . . .”

  “What’s joint inflammation? Why does he have that?”

  “Just a fancy way of saying arthritis, honey. We’ll all have that to one degree or another if we’re lucky enough to live so long.”

  He watched her prepare a syringe for a blood draw, but then looked away as she pushed the needle through the skin of the wolf-dog’s front leg.

  “So should I just keep him in?”
<
br />   She looked up and met Pete’s eyes. The idea he’d proposed must have seemed nonsensical to her, based on the curiosity in her face.

  “He has to go out sometime.”

  “Why? It’s good and warm in here.”

  “He has to go to the bathroom, to phrase it gently. He has to get whatever exercise he can.”

  “Oh. Right. But maybe he’ll just go again and not come back.”

  Pete waited, but she said nothing. At least, not for a time.

  “That’s another one of those areas where I won’t advise you,” she said at last. “You’re a grown man. Nearly twenty. You have the best interests of this animal at heart, and you always have. I’ve done my part, the medical part. I’m going to leave the rest of it up to you.”

  Pete stuck his head into the examining room on his way out the door to work.

  Prince was lying on his side on the dog bed. When he saw Pete he promptly sat up and looked deeply into Pete’s eyes.

  “Oh, you’re awake. Come with me.”

  Pete walked to the back door and opened it. The morning had turned nicely warm, but with a crisp feel. Pete looked back, but Prince had not followed.

  “Dr. Lucy?” he called upstairs. “I’m leaving the back door open for Prince. I figure he’s eaten here twice, so he knows where to get a meal and a warm bed if he wants them.”

  “Good call,” he heard her say.

  Then he patted his wolf-dog on the head and went off to work.

  It was nearly six before Pete got home.

  He ran into Dr. Lucy in the hallway—almost literally—as he barreled through the door.

  “What happened? Did he go?”

  “Yes, he let himself out sometime in the morning.”

  “Oh,” Pete said, trying to hide his disappointment.

  Barely half an hour later, as he was feeding the dogs in their runs, Pete turned to see Prince standing behind him, nostrils working the air for the smells of food.

  “Good to see you, boy,” Pete said, blinking back surprising tears. “I’ll make you up a bowl. Come on into the house. You’ll eat in Dr. Lucy’s examining room from now on.”

  Pete sat cross-legged on the floor watching Prince bolt down the food, and felt his chest fill with something unfamiliar. A sensation he could not recall. It felt like a confidence in things. The normally empty chest space seemed to surge with the sudden notion that losses can be restored—at least some of the time. That things can turn out, long after you had accepted that they never would.

  He wanted to share the sensation with Dr. Lucy, who seemed to need a feeling like this one, but he didn’t think he could. Partly because he could never have wrapped words around the feeling, but also because Dr. Lucy had been disappointed by the world a lot.

  If Pete was wrong, and her losses were never restored, he didn’t want to be the one to blame for foolishly raising her hopes too high.

  JUNE 1967

  SEVEN YEARS AND TEN MONTHS AFTER THE BELLS MOVED AWAY

  Chapter Thirty: Dr. Lucy

  Dr. Lucy sat drinking coffee and staring at the morning paper folded on the kitchen table. She could feel herself purposely postponing getting up and washing the breakfast dishes, which Pete had dutifully rinsed and left in the sink before trotting upstairs to get ready for work. Not for any special reason was she stalling. She just couldn’t muster much energy, and inertia was having its way.

  She rose, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and unfolded the paper. There on the front page, above the fold, was a photograph of Richard Loving with his arm around his wife, Mildred. Around her neck. Her eyes went first to the photo, then to the first line of the article.

  With little stabs like cold needles in her belly, she began to read.

  “The US Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that Virginia’s antimiscegenation statutes violate the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The decision effectively overturns the bans on interracial marriage in sixteen states.”

  Unanimously.

  That word echoed in her cloudy head before she could read on.

  “Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion for the unanimous court held that: ‘Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes . . .’”

  Dr. Lucy stopped reading and dropped the paper.

  “Loving won,” she said out loud.

  The energy that had previously evaded her coursed through her body and her brain like electricity. She grabbed up the newspaper again and ran upstairs calling Pete’s name.

  “Pete!” she shouted for the fourth time as he stepped out of the bathroom doorway.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  He towered over her, as always, his face mostly covered in shaving cream, a safety razor clutched in his right hand.

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s wonderful. Look!”

  She handed him the paper. He took it with his left hand and moved his lips as he read. Then a smile broke onto his face.

  “What’s ‘unanimous’ mean?”

  “It means every single Supreme Court justice agreed.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, smiling. Then she ducked in for an embrace.

  “Don’t get shaving cream on yourself!” he said. But he needn’t have bothered. Because her head only came up to his collarbone. “Aw,” he said, the hand still holding the paper wrapped around her back. “I knew they’d decide it right. Didn’t you?”

  She stepped back. Looked up into his face.

  “No,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really. I’m so used to the world breaking my heart, I guess I just expected it to keep on as usual. Oh! I have to call Calvin!”

  She trotted down the stairs to the kitchen and dialed his number by heart. But the phone only rang. Seven rings, then eight. Then nine. She glanced at the clock over the stove. Five minutes after seven. He should have been home. It was an hour later there, and he didn’t leave for work until 8:45. But a tenth and then an eleventh ring went by, each dropping lower into her gut, mirroring the high of the news with corresponding deep lows.

  What was a moment like this without Calvin to share it with her?

  She hung up the phone.

  A moment later Pete appeared at the bottom of the stairs, clean and shaven and combed and ready to leave for the day.

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He’s not home.”

  “Oh. Well, you’ll talk to him when he gets home from work.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s true.”

  With much effort, she reset her internal clock for five thirty and prepared to hold on to her elation in solitude until then.

  Five thirty came and went. Then six. Then seven thirty. And nine p.m. And still the phone only rang.

  “Still not getting him?” Pete asked before going to bed.

  “No. And I’m starting to get worried.”

  “About what?”

  And that was a very good question. One she did not feel prepared to answer off the top of her head. Any answer she could imagine contained information she might not have been willing to share with Pete at all, over any time frame.

  “Nothing could have happened to him,” Pete added when she didn’t answer.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because Justin would have let us know.”

  But something could have happened to both of them, she thought.

  And yes, she knew, that was possible. But it was not the most likely scenario. A deep, sickening feeling in her gut had identified the most logical cause of his sudden absence. He had heard the news, too. Of course he had. It was on the front pages, on the television news. He knew. Wherever he was, he knew.

  He must not have wanted to celebrate with her.

  Maybe he didn’t want to talk about what was next for them. Maybe he didn’t want that
anymore.

  Maybe he was even with someone else after all this time.

  “You really look worried,” Pete said. “Relax. Something came up that he had to do or something. You’ll get him in the morning, and then he’ll tell you where he’s been.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. You’re right.”

  But Pete was not right.

  In the morning, the phone still just rang. Neither Calvin nor Justin was there to tell her where they had been. To still the voices in her belly.

  The ones that were so used to having their hearts broken by the world.

  “Oh, you’re home,” she said.

  She had walked into the kitchen to find Pete standing in front of the refrigerator eating a leftover chicken drumstick. That part was not a surprise. He always came home from work famished, and he always raided the refrigerator for a snack to tide him over until dinner.

  She just hadn’t heard him come in.

  She couldn’t shake the sense that he had been slipping around quietly that day. Almost the way he did when he was avoiding her. Or avoiding something.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  She had not been able to train him to call her anything but “ma’am.” She had given up the fight years ago.

  “Have you tried to reach Justin?”

  “Justin?”

  “Yes. Justin. I think you remember who that is.”

  “Oh yes, ma’am. I remember him all right.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “Talked to him?”

  “Something’s not going quite right with this conversation, Pete. I’ve been asking you for the better part of two days if you’ve talked to Justin or if you know anything about where he is, or where his father is. At first you didn’t seem to know any more than I do, but now you’re being more than a little . . . vague.”