We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Damn” was all he said.

  “Probably got hit by a car,” Louisa said, shaking her head. “And those assholes didn’t have the decency to come tell us.”

  “Help me get him up in the truck,” I begged. “We can take him up to Cornell. They’ll be able to help him.” Again, I hoped madly that this was true. Argos didn’t look good, though; if we were going to help him, it would have to be now.

  “Mack…are you…I mean, do you want to put him through that?” Beau asked gently.

  “What?” I screeched. “What do you mean? We have to get him to a vet!”

  “Do you think he’ll make it to the vet?” Beau said.

  “We have to try!” I wanted to claw Beau. How could he be saying this?

  “Let’s get him in the truck,” Louisa said, making the decision without batting a lash, as usual. She gave Beau a sharply censorious glare; he merely tilted his head. “We have to try,” Louisa repeated. Beau shrugged and knelt down to help.

  “I’ll pull the truck over,” I said, already racing to my cabin for my keys. I snatched them up and flew out the door, skipping the steps and sprinting to the truck.

  In the cold air, the engine chugged in protest, and wouldn’t turn over at first. I thought seriously about weeping, but when the engine flipped, I cackled with sobbing relief. I pulled the truck across the lawn, grateful for the frost that had hardened the soil. Beau and Louisa lifted Argos into the cab as carefully as they could, and his big head nestled against my thigh.

  “We’re gonna take care of you,” I said, leaning down to plant an awkward kiss on his snout. His tail thumped again, hitting the door of the cab.

  “There’s not really space for either of us,” Louisa said, and I looked up at her in panic.

  “No, come with me!” I said. “I might need help navigating and getting him out of the truck.” Neither of these possibilities was likely, but I understood that I couldn’t face this alone: if I was going to have to say goodbye to my friend, I wanted her there with me. Louisa’s no-nonsense competence would help me feel grounded—without her, I feared I might fly entirely off the handle.

  “Okay,” she said, relenting. “I guess I can maybe squeeze in here, on the floor….” She wedged herself into the passenger-side floor space, folded into an uncomfortable pretzel. Argos’s long legs poked at her head; in different circumstances, it would have been comical. As we pulled out, I saw Chloe appear in her doorway, a white-clad ghost. Beau went to her side.

  The ride to the Cornell vet school was tense and silent. I knew perfectly well how to get there, and made each turn with a grim sense of progress. Argos whined at the beginning but soon quieted entirely. I could feel his breathing slow, and I thought maybe he was unconscious. When I glanced down at him, I noticed a few flecks of blood at the edges of his lips. I drove faster. Louisa called ahead to let them know we were coming; as the school was always open and filled with aspiring young veterinarians, whoever was on duty would be waiting at the door.

  When we reached the school, a few vet techs helped us lift Argos’s massive body, which was now disturbingly limp. I hoped that at least he wasn’t in pain. They immediately began to wheel him off to be examined and I panicked.

  “Wait!” I said. “I have to— I mean I haven’t said goodbye.” The words felt terrible, inconceivable, but I realized that I needed to smell the top of his head before they took him away. I leaned over the gurney, kissing him where I always did, on the bridge of his nose.

  “I love you, pupper,” I whispered, giving his ear a soft stroke. They took him away from me, and I sat down on the cold cement of the entrance and began to sob into my knees. It was at least two minutes before Louisa could get me back on my feet and outside for fresh air; by then, the other pet owners had begun to glance at me in alarm, and to clutch the warm bodies of their own creatures closer to them. I wailed outside and Louisa wrapped her arms around me. She was gentle, and I clung to her while she did her best to console me. Finally, she pulled her head back and held my face in her hands, looking into my blurred eyes.

  “This is life, Mack,” she said, and kissed me firmly on the lips. It surprised me so much that I stopped carrying on, and after she held me a moment longer, we walked back inside to wait in the lobby for news.

  * * *

  “He didn’t survive,” the vet was explaining. She seemed impossibly young, younger than me, maybe. “There was quite a bit of internal bleeding, and most likely what I suspect is kidney failure. You said you don’t know exactly what happened?”

  “We weren’t there,” Louisa explained. “This is how we found him. We figured it was a car.”

  “Well, I’d say that was unlikely,” she said slowly. “We can’t say for sure without an autopsy, but I’d be more inclined to think he’d been poisoned.”

  “Poisoned? With what?” I asked.

  “Again, there’s no way to know until we get the blood work and other tests back. The most common accidental poisons are antifreeze or pest control substances, like rat poison. Do you folks store anything like that where he could have gotten into it?”

  “Absolutely not,” snapped Louisa. “We don’t have anything like that at the Homestead.”

  “Maybe it could have come from a neighbor’s property,” the vet suggested. “Non–pet owners aren’t always as careful about toxic substances.” At the word “neighbor’s,” Louisa flinched.

  “We’ll get the results back in a few days. In any case, it was pretty quick and he didn’t suffer too much,” the vet added.

  “You have to say that whether or not it’s true,” I said tonelessly.

  “No, I meant that—”

  “It’s okay,” I interrupted. “It’s a nice fiction, and I appreciate it. I really want him not to have suffered.”

  “I’m so sorry. He was a lovely, healthy guy. He seemed really special.” Neither Louisa nor I responded, and the vet shifted uncomfortably. “Right, so can I just confirm the info on the microchip?”

  “He doesn’t have a microchip,” I said, frowning. “At least, not that I know of. We found him. He was…a stray.” I wanted to say “wild, brave, full of the woods,” but I didn’t have it in me.

  “Well, his previous owner must have had it inserted, then. There’s a chip with contact details right on the back of his neck. His name’s T-Rex?”

  “Ugh, that’s terrible,” Louisa said. “No, we called him Argos.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say. “Um, can I see the number?” The vet looked unsure, but then handed me the clipboard.

  “He belonged to someone named Lisa Robertson,” the vet noted. “Do you know her?”

  I looked at Louisa, who shook her head, though she wore a hooded expression. I told the vet no.

  “Well, I guess if you got him as a stray, it’s not that surprising. Maybe she was vacationing around here and T-Rex got loose.”

  “I guess.” I shrugged, finding it difficult to care. I didn’t like her calling him that. “Can I write this number down?” I asked. “I might try to get in touch with her, to let her know what happened.” Louisa watched as I copied the number into my phone, saying nothing.

  “That would be kind of you,” the vet agreed. We bumbled through more formalities: she gave us the highlights from the examination notes, mentioned that she’d found a tick on his chest, and we discussed how to deal with Argos’s body. Both Louisa and the vet seemed to think that cremation was the obvious option, but I, for some reason, balked. I wanted his body to stay at the Homestead, his bones to be in the ground near my own feet. Though Louisa clearly thought me silly, she agreed to take Argos’s body home with us after he had been “prepared.” Thankfully, there was no bill; this was fortunate, since neither Louisa nor I had thought to bring our wallets. We were told to return in a few days, to collect his corpse and the results of the autopsy, which had been offe
red gratis for “teaching purposes.” We drove back through Ithaca, over West Hill, just a few hours after we had come from the other side. It was a bright cold winter day, and Louisa held my knee as I drove.

  Chapter 23

  Argos’s death removed the emotional cushion that had allowed me to pretend all was well at the Homestead. I had let my attention slip from what was truly happening, let my gaze dawdle on the story I desired. I had watched my four friends as we’d tilled and stacked and fermented, refusing to see anything that didn’t coincide with my vision of rural perfection. It took the death of the only creature that had wholeheartedly given me all he had to make me snap open my eyelids and look around. His death could have been accidental, but in my bones I felt that it wasn’t. I was forced out of my shell, the sleepy place I had inhabited while I’d waited for everyone around me to act. Without the insulation of Argos’s cozy body, and after the trauma of his death, I realized what I had been ignoring. Something was happening around me. And I became convinced that I was the only person with the ability to change our course; if I could solve the mysteries of the past, I could save us.

  I took to lurking around Louisa’s cabin whenever I thought I could do so unnoticed. I waited in particular for her phone calls to Rudy, which offered summaries of what she had been working on. Lurking beneath the sill yet again one snowy January afternoon, I learned that the lawsuit had not been going well at all—they’d encountered an unsympathetic judge who tended to rule in the Larsons’ favor for important motions. Rudy and Louisa were generally failing to make much headway in the case. It seemed likely that it would, in fact, be thrown out soon, in the next few months, if not weeks. Louisa’s voice rose in panic.

  “Daddy, look, I get that we’re the Davids and they’re the Goliaths in this scenario, but we can’t just concede that point. If they’re able to establish that there is not necessarily a link between their groundwater and our own—which is flagrantly ridiculous, of course— No, I know the surveyors’ reports are problematic….Yes, I realize you’re aware of that. I’m just trying to be sure that we both have a handle on, you know, the stakes— No, of course you’re taking this seriously— Goddamn it, this isn’t about my mother, or about you and me! Can’t you just for one minute focus on the details of— Okay, well fine, I’m going to call the guy from the cooperative extension and see if he’d be willing to do another affidavit, or get a colleague to….Yeah, fine, call me back.” I heard an exasperated curse from inside Louisa’s cabin, followed by a more committed scream of fury. I slunk away from her window, wondering exactly what she might do if she didn’t get her way in this particular instance.

  I had put off calling Lisa Robertson, Argos’s presumed former owner. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what had happened. I had no desire to think about his death, and shied away from any memory or thought of him. Instead, I curled up in my bed and tried not to remember the feel of his warm fur as he leaned against me, the way he had of puffing his lips and emitting little explosions of air when he dreamed. The way his legs would roach upward, transforming him from poised hunting hound to endearing fool, all four paws in the air. I still slept against the wall, as though he were next to me in the bed.

  But the niggling sensation that there was something to be learned from his death bothered me, and I finally steeled myself to make the call.

  I phoned repeatedly, but no one answered. This didn’t surprise me; I never picked up calls from unrecognized numbers. Finally, I left a voicemail, hoping she would ring me back.

  When she did, I was outside turning over the compost; both my skin and the heap of rotting food scraps steamed in the cold air. We’d been running low on compost ever since we’d expanded our flock of chickens; the round, scampering poultry consumed many of the veggie scraps we would otherwise have used to create nutrients for next year’s garden. I managed to slough off my gloves in time to answer my phone, looking around myself. I didn’t especially want to be overheard, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “Hi, is this Mack?” a voice asked.

  “Yeah, hi. Lisa? Lisa Robertson?”

  “Listen, I’m not sure why you called me, but it’s a pretty shitty thing to joke about,” she said. She was audibly upset.

  “Umm,” I said. “I’m not trying to joke about anything. Maybe you misunderstood? I called about your dog?” I couldn’t bring myself to call him T-Rex.

  “Look, it’s taken me months to say goodbye and I just— Did Fennel ask you to call?”

  “Fennel? What? No, I’m…hang on, I feel like we’re not totally on the same page. Can I just explain, for a second?”

  “If this is one of her fucking manipulative tricks to get me back out there, you can tell her I’m not interested.”

  “Look, I have nothing to do with Fennel,” I said. “We’re acquaintances, but that’s not why I called.” I heard silence on the other end, and suspected she was considering. I took a deep breath and kept going.

  “Okay, so a few months ago, a dog turned up at my cabin. He didn’t have a collar, and there was nobody around, so we figured he must be a stray.”

  “Where was this? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Hector, near Mecklenburg,” I said.

  “And you’re telling me you’re not involved with the Collective?”

  “Like I said, they’re acquaintances. But no, there are just five of us here on our property. We call it the Homestead,” I added sheepishly, unsure how else to explain. “Look, we found the dog and we thought he’d been abandoned. He’d been living with us since last spring. But he was—I’m really sorry to be telling you this—but he was killed a few days ago. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but we think he might have been poisoned.”

  “Jesus. Oh fuck.” I could hear her crying, her breath huffing as she tried to catch it.

  “Was he your dog? T-Rex?”

  “I called him Rex,” she said brokenly. “He—he disappeared about a year ago.”

  “Were you living out at the Collective then?”

  “I was in the process of leaving the Collective,” she said, composing herself. “It was, well, a little messy. Fennel was pretty upset that I was going, but after everything that happened, I just couldn’t stay anymore, and she was so resentful—”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You know, that whole thing with Matthew. I’m sure everybody has moved on, because everyone always forgives him, but I just couldn’t stay anymore. Not with the way he pulls everyone’s strings, and I mean, it just got creepy.”

  “Okay, so, I’m new to this whole thing. How about you pretend I don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t know about Matthew? The rumors? I mean, I guess they’re not actually rumors in every case.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Listen, I feel weird talking about this on the phone,” Lisa said. I feared she would hang up.

  “Do you want to maybe meet for coffee?” I asked.

  She paused. Then: “I guess. I guess so. I feel sort of obligated to explain, since you’re a woman and they clearly haven’t kept to the ‘transparency agreement’ we made during my last criticism. Do you have a car?” I checked the drive. Yes, the truck was there.

  “I do. Where do you want to meet?”

  “The coffee shop in Trumansburg? Can you get there in an hour or so? I live just a few blocks away,” she said.

  I eyed the compost pile, then glanced around. I didn’t think anyone would notice me leaving.

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  * * *

  —

  Though I’d tried to clean myself up, I felt grubby as I sat in the coffee shop, waiting for Lisa. My short hair stuck up in the back, and I was wearing a Carhartt jumpsuit that was perfect for working outdoors in the winter but was uncomfortably hot inside. I sipped my coffee; it tasted
wildly bitter after months without anything nearly so tannic.

  A girl about my age came inside and looked around, scanning the faces in the café. When her eyes rested on me, she tilted her head, and I nodded mine. She came over to me.

  “You Mack?”

  “How could you tell?” I asked.

  “Your overalls. The farmer’s uniform.”

  I smiled.

  “Listen,” she said, “let’s talk outside. This town’s too small.” She glanced around the coffee shop at the other silent patrons. “If you don’t mind?”

  I readily agreed, hot as I was. “You don’t want a coffee first?” I asked.

  “I sort of lost my taste for it, after the Collective,” Lisa explained. “That, and a lot of other things.”

  We walked outside and sat on the benches there. I could hear the rush of the creek to my right; the snowmelt was coursing through the creek bed and under the bridge where we sat.

  “Sorry to make you go out of your way,” Lisa said. “I just—I feel pretty weird talking about the Collective in general, and I haven’t gotten used to phones again, even during the last year. You know how Fennel is, about the phones. She gets so pissy whenever anyone uses them, but she knows she can’t entirely forbid them.”

  “Her disapproval can be very motivating,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Even long after the fact. Anyway, thanks for coming.”

  “It’s fine. I was happy to leave the compost behind. At least for a little while.”

  Lisa laughed. “I hear you. That’s something I don’t miss. Though there are plenty of things that I do.” Her smile twisted sadly.

  “So, you were a member?” I asked.

  Lisa took a deep breath. “I joined when I was really young. I was a runaway from my family in Buffalo, and I had an aunt here in Trumansburg. Have an aunt. She let me crash with her while I was supposed to be sorting things out with my parents but…instead I met Matthew. You’ve met him?”