The Dogs of Christmas

by W. Bruce Cameron

  Josh made himself wait until she knocked on the door. The puppies had taken over the living room and were wrestling each other over one of the throw pillows.

  “Okay, Cody, this is it,” Josh proclaimed. Cody didn’t show any signs of hearing or caring about his name.

  “Hi! It’s good to see you! You here for Cody?” Josh asked.

  “Yes,” Kerri replied.

  He was going to kiss her, had planned to all morning, but something in her manner, something diffident, gave him pause.

  “Your friend called. The one with the little girl. For Lola. We took their application yesterday,” Kerri said. She wasn’t looking at Josh. “Hey, puppies,” Kerri greeted softly, sliding to her knees on the living-room floor. The puppies forgot about the pillow wars and piled into her.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh asked.

  Kerri looked at him. Her eyes were fearful, almost—hurt and fearful. She slowly stood, bringing a folded piece of paper out of her pocket.

  “This was on our bulletin board, but there was stuff stuck over it and I didn’t see it until Madelyn came in this morning and organized it. Oh, Josh,” Kerri said.

  She handed him the piece of paper. There was a picture of Lucy on it, along with a few words in large font:

  Dog Lost/Stolen

  “Lucy”

  Pregnant or nursing puppies.

  Call Serena.

  I love my dog.

  Reward.

  SEVENTEEN

  Josh held the homemade poster as he sank wearily down in a chair, his legs suddenly weak. Lucy, sensing something, came over to him, her nails clicking on the floor, and laid her head in his lap, looking up into his eyes. He absently stroked between her ears, staring at the poster as if it contained words he couldn’t comprehend.

  “I’m so sorry, Josh,” Kerri whispered. She stood in front of him, looking down, her eyes moist. “I know this is … a shock. How hard this is.”

  Lost. Stolen. Josh tried to picture the sort of people who would treat Lucy as some sort of weapon in the war between them. Serena had “dumped” Lucy, Ryan had claimed. Now Lucy was “stolen.”

  Who knew what had really happened? Who knew the truth, besides Lucy?

  “It says September,” Josh noted dully.

  “Sorry?”

  “See? Your fax machine put a date on it. September twenty-second. This is December thirteenth. December.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Kerri replied slowly.

  “That’s almost three months.”

  “Right, but Josh, does that matter? Lucy has a person she belongs to.”

  “And so nothing that has happened here counts for anything,” Josh responded bitterly. He stood up, Lucy tracking him with anxious eyes. To have something to do he flung another piece of wood on the fire, which snapped and spat sparks back at him.

  “Everything counts, Josh. You took in a dog and newborn puppies and did a wonderful job.”

  “Sure.”

  Kerri bit her lip. “You’re not … you’re not saying you won’t give Lucy back?”

  Josh looked away.

  “Josh?”

  “You said I would always have Lucy.”

  “Yes but I didn’t know.”

  For some reason he remembered Amanda carrying her boxes out to her car on the last day. He wouldn’t help, just watched moodily as she struggled. The feeling was the same: arbitrarily and without fair warning, a part of him was being ripped out.

  Except this time he could do something about it.

  Kerri watched his face harden and put a hand to her mouth.

  “Josh. No.”

  He still wasn’t looking in her direction. There was a long moment, and then he glanced at her because of a strange sound. She was crying.

  “Josh, you have to call her. You have to. Because if you don’t…”

  “You’ll what? You’ll do what?” he demanded, more harshly than he’d intended.

  She shook her head wildly. “I don’t know what. I just know, if you don’t, it means you’re not the man I think you are.”

  “So it’s another test?”

  “A test?”

  “You always ask me to choose between you and my dogs,” he said bitterly.

  “Oh God. Josh…”

  They stood there, and Josh went from feeling fierce to deflated. He reached down and picked up Cody—he was drained and empty enough to do this now. He held Cody nose-to-nose with Rufus, who looked up drowsily from his nap, seeming to focus with only the eye in the center of his brown spot, the other one half-lidded. “Say good-bye to Cody, Rufus.”

  Rufus, missing the significance, put his head back down. Cody struggled a little in his hands.

  “You’re going to have a good home. A happy home, Cody. They know how to take care of blind doggies there. You be a good little dog now.”

  Josh went out the front door and Kerri followed him. The gloomy day matched his mood perfectly. He watched without comment as Kerri opened her hatchback, noting that the sagging, duct-taped dog carrier now appeared to be collapsing on the right side instead of the left. Kerri took Cody from his arms and placed the warm little bundle in the carrier and shut the door. Cody sniffed the new situation curiously.

  “Right,” Kerri said. “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Neither their bodies nor their glances touched each other, and Josh didn’t watch as the Subaru turned and drove down his driveway.

  That was the ultimate weapon women wielded, wasn’t it? In the end, they could always just leave.

  The puppies woke up that afternoon, but only Rufus seemed to notice they were missing Cody. He sniffed around the house, starting with the living room, then moved down the hallway and into the bedrooms, searching for a lost little dog.

  “He’s gone, Rufus. Cody’s gone,” Josh explained, his throat tight as he said the words. Rufus, of course, didn’t understand. He picked up the little dog and rocked him in his arms, gazing mournfully down at him. Rufus stared back with what Josh felt was hurt accusation in his eyes.

  Why did it seem as if this was Josh’s pattern, repeated over and over? A breakup, a splintering of a previously inviolate relationship, with Josh left in the middle by himself to deal with the fragments.

  That night he pulled the puppies into bed with him, Lucy watching with stern disapproval. He had in mind a mournful cuddle but the little dogs were so thrilled to be able to play in the covers that Josh found himself laughing despite everything. Another thing dogs could do for people—lift the mood with their mad antics no matter what the situation.

  A conference request the next morning gave him a start. It was Suni Ohayashi, the number-two person on the Blascoe project. Suni was known for being competent, if a bit cold and businesslike.

  “Merry Christmas, Josh,” Suni greeted.

  “Merry Christmas, Suni,” Josh echoed automatically.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve been appointed project manager,” Suni advised.

  “No, I didn’t know that. So Blascoe?”

  Suni nodded. “I’m replacing Gordon Blascoe.”

  “Ah.”

  “Are you available to come back on when we gear up after New Year’s?”

  Josh smiled. “I could be,” he admitted.

  “Your report was exactly right. We need your simplicity, the way you always figure out the right thing to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good, then. See you after the first. Merry Christmas again.”

  “Same to you, Suni.”

  When they signed off he had the impulse to share the news with Kerri, but in the end didn’t try to call.

  Josh marked the holiday traditions as grimly as if they were high school homework assignments. He trudged out to joylessly buy gifts for Janice’s boys and for his mom—everyone else got cards. He stood and drank cider and impassively watched carolers sing in front of the hardware store. He ordered a gift for Kerri—he’d give it to her whether she wanted to s
ee him or not.

  Whenever he thought about Kerri, a resentful stubbornness rose up inside him. He’d given up Cody and agreed to surrender the rest of his puppies, but that wasn’t enough. She wanted Lucy, too.

  “My dog, Lucy. You are my dog,” Josh told her. She looked back with what Josh took to be an of course expression.

  Knowing he was going to lose them, Josh engaged in determined play with the puppies. He’d drag them across the floor with a towel, each of them growling. He’d roll with them on his bed, or toss a ball. Only the girls, Sophie and Lola, chased the thing—the boys seemed to feel if he’d thrown it away it must not be a toy worth playing with.

  Always, Rufus seemed subdued in these activities. He’d be tugging on the towel and then abruptly stop, wandering over to the front door to sniff under the crack, or heading back to the box to probe its corners with his muzzle. He took more naps then the other dogs, and Lucy, as if responding to some subconscious signal, started sniffing and licking Rufus, even though she’d pretty much stopped grooming the puppies when she weaned them.

  “Are you okay, Rufus? Are you sick or something?” Josh asked, holding the little guy up and peering at him. But Josh knew there was no virus. “You miss him, don’t you?” Josh whispered. “Me, too, Rufus. Me, too.” Without Cody, Rufus had lost his purpose. Same for Josh when Amanda left. “Same thing,” he told Rufus. “Exactly the same thing.”

  A week before Christmas Eve, during a white-out blizzard that made whistles out of his doorjambs and sucked air up the chimney until his coals glowed like the bowl of a pipe, his sister Janice phoned.

  “I was just thinking about our last conversation,” she informed him. “About how we need to get together more often.”

  “Yeah?” The day before the UPS man had brought out Kerri’s Christmas present—a huge cardboard box, nearly the size of an oven—and the dogs were attacking it as if there were beefsteaks inside, gnawing industriously on the corners. He had probably a hundred dollars’ worth of chew toys strewn about the living room, but since the arrival of the box the puppies were interested in nothing else.

  “Why don’t you come up for Christmas? Or New Year’s? The boys have two weeks off with no school and no hockey, thank God. We could go skiing and sledding.”

  “Sounds like fun, but I have this dog issue,” Josh demurred.

  “The puppies? Aren’t they old enough to be adopted, yet?”

  “Yes, that’s happening on the twenty-third. But the mother dog, Lucy. I think it would really confuse her to leave her here by herself or in a kennel right after giving away her pups.”

  “Oh. You’re keeping the mother?”

  “Looks that way, yeah.” Josh’s eyes strayed to the lost-dog poster, still sitting on the side table where he’d left it.

  They talked about a few more things. “I got a really nice card from Amanda,” Janice finally offered casually.

  “Oh?” He wondered if this was why his sister was really calling.

  “Do you talk to her?”

  “What did the card say?”

  “Oh, you know, Merry Christmas, but she also talked about how great Christmas morning always was at your house, how you made coffee and heated up the rolls. It was just, I don’t know. A little melancholy.”

  Josh looked over at Rufus, who, as usual, had been the first to stop in attacking the box and was lying by himself on the floor, his eyes closed.

  “Huh,” Josh grunted.

  “She said you told her that she rescued Christmas for you. What did Amanda mean by that?”

  “Oh, you know,” Josh replied uncomfortably.

  “I really don’t,” Janice pressed, something in her voice suggesting she knew she wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “Well, it was right before Christmas when you and Mom left.” Josh swallowed back the rise of painful emotions. “And so it was just Dad and me that morning. All your gifts were out, but you didn’t come. It was pretty brutal.”

  “God, I know. Dad wouldn’t let us come home. We spent that Christmas in a hotel.”

  “What do you mean?” Josh asked sharply. “‘Wouldn’t let you.’ You guys left.”

  “Well, yeah,” Janice agreed haltingly. “We left because of that huge fight. You were skiing, I think, so you didn’t see, but when they started hitting each other I got in the middle. It was really bad, Josh. But you know all this.”

  “No, I don’t. They hit each other?” Josh replied incredulously.

  “Yeah, we had to get out of there.”

  “I just remember getting dropped off by my friends from the ski trip and you were leaving.”

  “Well, but you didn’t want to come,” Janice reasoned.

  “I didn’t want you to go,” Josh replied through clenched teeth. “There’s a difference.”

  “It was awful,” Janice murmured, remembering.

  “Dad was in this silent rage after that,” Josh told her after a moment. “He wouldn’t talk to me. Except Christmas morning, after we’d opened presents, and then he tells me about Pamela, that they’re going to get married as soon as the divorce is settled.”

  “I’m so sorry, Josh. I guess I never thought about what it was like for you. I was kind of focused on myself.”

  “Christmas was ruined for me, then. Because of what happened. Until Amanda.”

  “We had good Christmases after that one,” Janice objected.

  “Not for me,” Josh retorted. “Never with the whole family. Never in a place I could call home.”

  “Josh, you were seventeen. I mean, that seems old enough—”

  “Old enough to have the family ripped apart?” Josh challenged.

  After a pause, Janice sighed. “It wasn’t … God, I know you felt like it was your job to keep us all together. But sometimes you just need to let things go.”

  His eyes were drawn to Lucy. “Right,” he said bitterly.

  “I’m really, really sorry. I know how much it affected you. I mean, I didn’t get it at the time, probably no one did, but I’ve seen how you struggle with it. I’m just … sorry. For everything.”

  “Merry Christmas, Janice.”

  She drew in a breath at this rebuff. “Okay, Merry Christmas. I love you, Josh.”

  “No, no, wait,” Josh said. “I … I love you, too, Janice. I’m sorry, too.” He gripped the phone, not trusting himself to speak.

  Janice waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, breezily suggested he plan to get up to Portland sometime soon. He managed to say he would.

  The next day, the wind gone but the snow still coming down, his new friend Matt the mechanic called to thank him for letting his family adopt Lola. “Juliet is especially excited. She can’t sleep and it’s not even Christmas Eve.”

  “It wasn’t my choice, actually,” Josh informed him. “The shelter gets to decide.”

  “They said you wanted us. I’m real grateful. You ever need a favor, you just ask.”

  “Good because, I’d … I’d like to visit. To see Lola from time to time, I mean. If that would be okay,” Josh replied, not knowing he was going to ask until he did so.

  “Of course!” Matt replied.

  Josh hung up wondering why the conversation hadn’t made him feel any better.

  Another call was from the animal shelter. Josh snatched it up when he saw the caller ID, but it was the woman named Madelyn. “Just calling to let you know we have approved homes for all of your puppies,” Madelyn chimed happily.

  Josh didn’t really know the woman but he felt a bilious resentment rise up within him. “All the rest of them,” he corrected testily.

  “Sorry?”

  “Is Kerri there?”

  Madelyn’s silent pause was as full of heavy meaning as a growl. “She asked me to make the call,” Madelyn finally informed him primly.

  “Fine. Tell her Rufus is acting depressed, okay?”

  “Rufus is depressed,” Madelyn repeated before ringing off, making it sound as if she thought Josh was an idio
t.

  Wayne called because it was snowing and he wanted to make sure Josh hadn’t “gone all Donner party.”

  “Why don’t you and Leigh come over for dinner to find out?” Josh said in a cartoon-evil voice, but his heart wasn’t in the banter. Wayne said he was headed to Leigh’s crazy parents’ house for two weeks, “so watch the TV to see if I kill somebody.”

  “Have fun.”

  “You want to come with us?”

  “Yes. Yes I do,” Josh replied.

  Wayne laughed maniacally. “Merry Christmas, Dude,” he said.

  He checked caller ID a few times a day to see if Kerri had called, even when he’d been home all day and would have heard the phone. On December 19th, Christmas less than a week away, he went into town for supplies. While he was in the store the snow stopped and the sun came out, so that the roads were slick and black next to the snowdrifts, like warm chocolate syrup drizzled on vanilla ice cream. Car tires made ripping sounds on the wet pavement, sounding to Josh like Velcro being pulled apart.

  When he got home his caller ID said he’d missed two calls, but they weren’t from Kerri. They were from Amanda.

  There were no messages.

  He didn’t know why she was calling, but the fact that she had didn’t lift his mood—if anything, he felt vague adumbrations of troubles ahead. She could still hurt him, he knew. What was she up to?

  December twentieth was clear and warm, the snow melting from the tree limbs in a solid rain or falling in huge, muffled clumps.

  You always figure out the right thing to do, Suni had told him. Really? Was that really who Josh Michaels was? I know you felt like it was your job to keep us all together, his sister said.

  Whose job was it, then? Who was going to do it if Josh didn’t?

  Josh knew he had a phone call to make, and this was the reason for the black scowl he wore. He pictured himself doing it, thinking about how it would turn out, but he really didn’t know how to forecast on such an unpredictable topic. When a man phoned a woman, no matter what the reason, he quickly lost control of the direction of the conversation. That had always been his experience, anyway.