“Our girl knows something more than you do, John.” She laughed, and the ring of it had been nice to hear. During those last stages of her illness, Millie had rarely laughed. Sheila, delighted to have pleased her people, had hopped from the pool and rolled her dripping body ecstatically on the grass. She chased a squealing David around the yard, soaking him so thoroughly when she pinned him down to lick him that John had to carry both boy and dog inside wrapped in towels.
After that John took the advice of his current law clerk, a mad-for-gadgets legal student named Louise who loved the idea of his computerized pet and had done some breed research of her own.
“You should take her to Ipson’s Lake,” Louise had said. “Throw something into the water and tell her to bring it back. She’ll go ape, Judge. Spaniels are practically as in love with the water as retrievers.” It seemed to be true. John and David, carrying thermoses, sandwiches, and binoculars in canvas backpacks, could never keep up with Sheila as she ran down the bumpy dirt trail to the lake. Every Saturday morning Sheila waited by the door, whining. In the car, she pressed her nose to the window, waiting to spring out. And as soon as the door opened, she was off, shooting toward the trail, returning to dance around John, then running ahead again. When they were close enough to smell the water, she took off in earnest and they always heard the splash well before they could see her narrow, elegant head bobbing on the surface of the water.
Ipson’s Lake wasn’t a true lake at all, but a flooded quarry that had once belonged to the Ipson Brick Factory, now collapsing quietly in the rural weeds a half mile to the north. The water was surprisingly clean. In the summer, when John and David brought their swimsuits, they sometimes found the quarry populated by other families or by sunbathing teenagers, who rose on their elbows to glance at them over mirrored sunglasses before slipping back down to the towels they had laid across the sandy bank.
But because they came early, they were usually alone. John liked it best that way. He enjoyed the opportunity to be in a place where no one knew him, where relative strangers wouldn’t ask for an opinion on awkward personal matters or tell yet another lame judicial joke for his benefit. It was a relief to have a few hours to let go of all the office pressures—trials, pretrials, motion hearings, draft after draft of judicial opinion—and of his concerns about Millie. Sometimes, during the week, his chest would constrict at the thought of her absence. He couldn’t picture a house where the paperback books didn’t all have spines broken by Millie’s one-handed reading, where the pillows she was constantly fluffing didn’t smell of her orange-scented skin cream. His fear of her oncoming death grew so all-encompassing that he found it hard to breathe, and had to clutch the arm of his chair or the collar of his own robe until the feeling passed.
At those moments he was convinced he could not go on without her, but it was the weekend hours at Ipson’s Lake that gave him the strength to think maybe he could. He and his son would peel the Saran Wrap from their sandwiches and roll it into balls, dirty side in, the way David’s kindergarten teacher had taught him. They stuffed the balls into the front pockets of their backpacks and drank the noodle soup in their canteens. Then, while David hunted for rocks and snail shells fascinating enough to take home to his mother, John would find a comfortable place to sit, feet pressed into the warm sand, and watch Sheila swim.
Paddling there, the dog filled up the anxious, empty parts of him. All the circles and rectangles of her body drew away from each other and then came back together in long, muscular movements. Her vitality was electrifying. It was complete. John couldn’t help but draw comparisons. On the shore there was David, blood and bone, scrambling about happy and alive. In the water there was Sheila, riveted seams and contained electric current, but just as active, just as happy. And at home there was his wife, dying by degrees. There was no escaping the irony of it all—computerized Sheila’s undeniable life and organic Millie’s inescapable decline.
After his conversation with David, John was too restless for any of the activities he normally indulged in before lunch. Crossword puzzles, morning talk shows, bird-watching, and web-surfing . . . they were all too tame, too cheerful. He had become such a harmless old man. When, he wondered, had he stopped participating in the world and begun merely observing it? In the courtroom, of course, he had always needed to hold himself impartial, apart, but his rulings meant something. They were like the stones David had always loved to throw into Ipson’s Lake: they rippled out into the world and changed it, if only slightly. Now he was subject to someone else’s ruling, and the dread was like a lead sinker attached to his heart.
“Come on, old girl. Let’s go throw tennies.” Sheila scrambled to her feet, and he grabbed the mesh bag of tennis balls hanging from the door of the hall closet. Anyone who entered his house would think he owned a pack of dogs—rubber bones in the cabinets, squeaky toys in Millie’s old knitting basket, dog blankets bunched up at the foot of the couch, tennis balls on the door. John didn’t believe in hiding his things from visitors. The house was clean and mostly orderly, so why pretend he didn’t like a little clutter?
The front yard was surprisingly bright after his morning indoors. A group of sparrows, startled from the hanging birdbath, took off in a flapping brown cloud and set the bowl swinging like a censer.
“Go get it, Sheila!” John threw a tennis ball off toward the pines that shielded his white clapboard house from Neil’s. His neighbor used to bring his twin eight-year-old girls over to play with Sheila, but hadn’t since Ginger Creek.
“It’s not Sheila,” Neil explained one afternoon when the two men ran into each other at the hardware store. “Jill and Katie are crazy about her. But I’m their father. I have to look out for their best interests. If I let them play with Sheila, how can I keep them away from other computerized animals, maybe ones that haven’t been kept up the way yours has?”
Sheila came back with the ball tucked proudly between her enameled teeth. “Good girl.” John threw again, this time into the tall grass between the house and the unpaved road. “Take me to it,” he said, and followed her out to where the mowed lawn ended. Neil’s words ran through his head while he watched her furry body step here and there, picking through the fallen brush in search of the tennis ball. He realized, sadly, that he was out of options. To men like Neil, Sheila wasn’t real. She was a memento, perhaps a dangerous memento, and she was something to be destroyed. An object as unfeeling as a car. Easy to destroy.
John had known from the very first minute, running his hand down the dog’s spine, feeling the fine fur roll silkily under his hand, that she was perfect. Her beautiful lines; her strong, straight head; the way her face was cut like bread, into wedges of brown on a background of white and dotted with crumbs of freckles—all of these things informed her rightness, her perfectness. He had had the sudden thought that she stood exactly as tall as the radiator whose humming had lulled him to sleep in his childhood home. When he stroked her, her tail swung back and forth in arcs that mirrored a half grin. She was a dog with dignity and personality, too noble for the discount computer warehouse.
“Never going to find another model as nice as this at sale price.” Just moments after John and David had walked into the store, a bearded salesman had hustled them out of the depressing main showroom—an industrial-beige box full of cellular devices, computer parts, and office electronics—and into a small alcove. The room was decorated like a den. John knew that the atmosphere here was supposed to sell him on the homeyness, the Americana of the whole idea. It was supposed to be sumptuous, but by the look of things, it had inherited the furnishings of a cheap model home. Surfaces were laminated particleboard; books were leather shells bereft of pages. The fireplace that David dropped to his knees to crawl into was only a front and left the boy bewildered. “I’ve seen units not nearly as nice as this one go for five figures at Circuit World,” the salesman said.
John had wanted the salesman to leave them, allow him and his son time to discover the dog in the
ir own way, but the man was determined to pursue the aggressive sale. He began to recite durability figures and processing speeds. When John laid his fingers against the dog’s cool nose, the salesman watched him touch the leathery nostrils and said “cooling fan.”
“She’s pretty.” John glanced down. David, hardly tall enough to reach the dog where she stood on display, had abandoned the false fireplace in order to press himself up against the laminated wood of her pedestal. He stood, petting one of her slim back paws with a tender intensity he rarely exhibited. “What kind of dog is she, Dad?”
“This here is an A-plus approximation of a Brittany spaniel,” the salesman said. He was answering David but looking at John, a habit John had found distasteful in his son’s youth and intolerable once he began to grow old and people’s rudeness had reversed. Now clerks and cashiers were just as likely to respond to David as to John when the two of them were together and the elder man was speaking.
“Is she real?” his son asked. John remembered how David had looked up at him, waiting for some kind of reassurance. He remembered, too, how the salesman had jumped in before he could reply.
“Real as your phone and your television!” The salesman slapped the dog’s haunch with a veracity that made John want to strangle him. Yes, he had felt a kinship with the patient animal almost immediately. He liked the way she didn’t shrink from them after the blow, but didn’t react with irritation either. She was like a well-rooted tree in a storm. Whatever went on around her and whatever acted upon her, John was sure she would function with consistent affection. He had to admit that the husband and father in him were attracted to that.
The salesman had started to tell him how safe the dog was, how closely programmed to breed specifics, but John ignored him the way he was learning to ignore foolish and overly garrulous attorneys who came before him in his new position on the circuit court bench.
“Yes,” he had said to David, answering the important question, “computers make her work, but she’s real. Do you think Mom will like her?”
“Maybe she can make Mom better.”
“Maybe so.” Looking into the dog’s mournful amber eyes, John had felt sure that this was true. “Maybe if Mom feels better that will help her to get well.”
“I like her. She doesn’t make me sneeze. Let’s take her home, Dad.”
And, as if she understood what had been said, the dog crouched down and licked the top of David’s head once, twice. Later, John slid the receipt of his payment for her into a drawer with a wedding photo and one of David’s baby pictures. That receipt was still there, pressed between loved faces, proof of the best purchase he ever made.
John sat at the table with the telephone in his hand. He stared at it. Looked away. Looked at it again. Sheila was on the floor beside him, snoozing. He looked away. He hadn’t felt such helpless anger since Millie died. Then, she had been the betrayer. Now he would be. And either way, it amounted to his being left behind.
Richard didn’t pick up until the fourth ring.
“Jackson County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Richard Nett.”
“It’s John.”
There was a long sigh. “Shit, John. I didn’t think you were going to call. Thought you were going to make me hunt you down.”
Like some kind of criminal.
“And I thought it might make sense to talk some more about this.”
“John—”
“I’ve never put myself above the law, Richard. You know that. I’ve got no more and no fewer rights than any other citizen in this county. But I also happen to know I’m one of the only people affected by this ruling, and it’s wrong. It’s wrong, Richard.”
“What am I supposed to do?” His old friend’s voice was tired. “I’ve known that ridiculous mutt of yours longer than I’ve known my own kids. I’m sick about this. But the law is the law. You want me to start making exceptions every time I don’t agree with what comes down the pipes?”
“It’s such a small exception,” John said quietly.
“You don’t mean that.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Look. I’ll do everything I can to make it as gentle as possible. I’m not a monster. You can sit right there with her, even hold her if you want. The officers will leave the room as soon as you tell them to. Sheila won’t feel a thing. She won’t even know what’s happening.”
“What if I don’t bring her? What if I don’t goddamn bring her?”
“Then I’ll come and get her,” Richard said. “And you’ll be off your position as visiting judge and off your state pension. Please. Don’t break my fucking heart.”
John was forever amazed by the things people did for love—love of other people, of drugs, of money, of the rush. How many divorces, how many criminal trials, how many long and impassioned disputes had he sat through in the course of his career? How many times had elated plaintiffs pumped his hand? Grateful defendants? How often had he been shielded by his officers from those who were hurt and believed he was the one who had wronged them? John could scarcely remember. In fact, as he climbed the stairs, favoring his bad hip, he could recall only fleeting impressions of his entire working life, which, like every other aspect of his youth, now seemed to have passed so quickly.
It wasn’t Richard’s fault that he had forced the tough decision. The law was larger than two men, and contained its own currents they had become caught up in. David would be angry and unhappy, but he was an adult, and would understand. John was proud of the man his son had become.
Upstairs, John sat for a long time on the bed he had shared with Millie, stroking Sheila’s warm head. The mattress had been replaced years ago, but the old wooden frame was the same. Same old scratches, same old squeaks. His wife had died, but he had never been able to write her out of their home. Her clothes and shoes were gone, but nothing else. He had given away only the simple, the practical. He couldn’t part with the rest. He supposed that was his greatest struggle, parting with things.
“But not you,” he told the spaniel. “Don’t you worry.”
He flipped on the light in the master bathroom and pulled the cleaning supplies out from under the sink. He tugged on the yellow rubber gloves and began to scrub the freestanding bathtub with abrasive orange cleaner. The slight ring around the bottom disappeared quickly, and he snapped the gloves into the trash can, packed the various chemicals back into their cupboard. In the bright bathroom light, the porcelain was so white, it was almost blue. Rinsing the tub with a gallon jug of hot water, John felt like an old prospector who had carved a bed out of Yukon ice. He put in the stopper and let the warm water run.
While the tub was filling, he sloughed off his athletic clothes and stood in front of the armoire, debating. His clothes were so familiar. There they hung, pressed, stable, comforting as old friends. He fingered the cuff of a shirt he had worn to court countless times. The fabric was just a shade darker than ivory, a color that had flattered him before his dark hair went gray. Though he had chosen it himself, it looked just like something Millie might have purchased for him.
He slid the shirt off its hanger and buttoned it around his throat. He added a navy suit coat and matching blue slacks. Around his neck went one of the silk ties David had given him last Christmas, his hands dreaming themselves through the Windsor knot. Out of the bureau came the silver cuff links Millie had given him for their fifth anniversary. That was the year David was born, and John remembered giving her a locket with his baby picture glued inside. He shined and slid on his oxfords.
The tub was full. John turned the tap and watched the water settle, doing his best to clear his mind. He tried to steel himself for what had to be done. Three deep breaths. One. Two. Now. If he didn’t do it now, they would take her from him.
“Here, Sheila,” he called, making his voice as cheerful as he could. When the dog was in front of him, he took the wedge of her face between his palms and stared into those marvelous amber eyes. “Don’t worry,” he told her again. As
soon as he spoke, her tail began to swing slowly back and forth. “I promise this won’t hurt, old girl.”
And then his knobby fingers broke apart two of the plastic brackets holding closed the lynchpin of her sternum and pried open a few inches of the dog’s feathered breast. Inside was a nest of wires and circuits John had seen only when Sheila had been subject to her annual preventative service. Somewhere behind the humming voltage of the electronics and cooling apparatus was his sweet dog’s mechanical heart. Even now, dust was beginning to settle inside its delicate mechanisms.
Sheila whined. “Steady,” John said. He straightened up, adjusted his tie, and took one last look in the mirror. Staring back at him was an old man, older than any John knew. He bent down and took all thirty-three pounds of Sheila in his arms. The dog was comfortingly solid. Lifting from his knees, John hefted her as high as he could. Carefully, he placed one foot into the tub. He could feel the heat of her processor against his chest, a warm, whirring pulse close to his heart. He thought he might be crying. Sheila let out another uncertain whine, tried to turn and meet his eye as he put his other foot in the water.
“One more swim,” John said. The room around him had grown so bright. “One more time, Sheila.”
And he sat.
About the Author
REBECCA ADAMS WRIGHT is a former Zell Fellow and a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan and has won both the Leonard and Eileen Newman Writing Prize and a late-night Emily Dickinson poetry challenge. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and her nonfiction in Children’s Literature in Education. Her story collection The Thing About Great White Sharks will be published by Little A in February 2015. Rebecca lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her husband and daughter.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 20
