Down Dog Diary

by Sherry Roberts

  I didn’t tell Julia: so do I.

  On the way home, I considered the coincidental events of the past weeks: a blooming cherry tree, a septuagenarian turned gymnast, and now a Southern Cruella De Vil dropped right into our laps.

  In my world, coincidence always has an agenda. As Tum used to say, “Coincidence is Spirit trying to get your attention.”

  Entering the house, distracted by my thoughts, unwrapping my two yards of scarf, I stopped.

  Someone had wrecked my place.

  Chapter 9

  I Want My Stuff Back

  BELLA!” I SHOUTED. RUSHING through the studio, I left a trail on the floor: scarf, gloves, hat, coat. Over and over, I called her name as I searched the cubbyholes where students stored their gear and Bella sometimes curled up for a nap. I squatted and rummaged through the piles of yoga mats and blocks scattered all over the foyer. I took the stairs by twos and skidded to a halt at the top.

  No way four pounds of fur could have done this: furniture was overturned, books ripped from the shelves. Drawers from the desk and the kitchen had been upended onto the floor. Cabinet doors stood open. Up to my ankles in frozen food and pillow stuffing, I yelled, “Bellarina!”

  I heard a sound. It came from the bedroom. I tiptoed to the door, which was slightly ajar. I nudged it open, then fell back into defensive mode with my fists up near my face. Nobody came rushing at me. I cautiously stepped inside and began wading through the clothes scattered everywhere.

  “Meowwwww.” I spun to the closet and opened it with care.

  “Meowwwww.” Bella sounded mad, and with good reason. Someone had trapped her in one of my green recyclable grocery bags, tied it closed with a shoelace, and flung her in the closet. I grabbed the bag, sank into a nest of clothes on the floor, and began working on the knot in the lace with trembling fingers.

  “Why are people always putting you in bags?” I grumbled. When I finally liberated Bella, I held her close and tried to calm her. I kissed the top of her head. But she was having none of it. She leaped from my arms and began pacing all around me. Her tail lashed angrily. She was a loud complainer.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to protect you,” I said.

  Now that I knew Bella was safe, reality struck. I felt weak. I leaned my arms on my knees and rubbed my face. I took a few moments to pull myself together then got up to assess the damage. The refrigerator door was open. A six-pack of beer was gone. Another glance toward the living room, and I saw my computer was no longer on the sofa. My flat screen had been ripped from the wall.

  That’s when it hit me: the diary.

  I flew to the stairs, nearly tripping over a still-pacing, still-furious Bella. I stumbled down the steps and ran to the yoga room. Bella followed, complaining all the way. There wasn’t much to search or wreck in the empty studio, but still I needed to check on the diary. I pulled the table away from the wall, fumbled with the loose bricks until I dislodged them, and reached inside the hole. My fingers touched silk, and I sighed with relief. I pulled the diary from its hiding place, leaned back against the brick wall, and clasped it to my chest.

  The diary was safe.

  I slipped off the rubber band and opened it. The smell of the sea wafted into the room.

  “What the hell?”

  “WTF, Maya?”

  Jorn and Olivia stood in the doorway.

  GABRIEL’S GARDEN DOESN’T NEED a large police force, and fingerprint specialists certainly don’t fit into the town’s budget. The officer who answered the call doubted fingerprinting would have helped anyway. There were so many fingerprints downstairs from my students it probably looked like the walls of a kindergarten craft room. As Officer Holmes scribbled in his little report book, he held out little hope of getting my electronics back. “Probably already in a Twin Cities pawn shop by now,” he said. As for the beer, he doubted it made it outside the city limits.

  “Probably kids,” the officer said, eyeing Olivia as she restacked the yoga mats and blocks. Olivia sometimes just dropped by after school. I didn’t ask too many questions about her life, and I let her do her homework in a quiet corner of the yoga studio when I didn’t have a class.

  I’d called Heart and my parents. They were upstairs with Jorn, righting furniture and putting the silverware back in its drawer. My father had arrived with a new laptop. He was already gleefully reinstalling programs and accounts, pulling information from a cloud somewhere.

  Finally, Officer Holmes left, and I sent Olivia home with a hug. I joined my family and Jorn upstairs. Evie, sitting at the table, was soothing Bella on her lap, while Heart bustled in the kitchen, making soup. Emotionally spent, I sank into one of the kitchen chairs, the diary still clutched to my chest.

  “You must feel so violated,” Heart said, stirring a large pot on the stove then turning back to the chopping board. “Vegetable soup is just what you need. It’s your favorite, right?”

  No, potato leek soup was my comfort food, but nothing was stopping Heart from creating some form of culinary comfort. Cooking calmed Heart and set her world aright. Once when we were young, I talked Heart into taking a drag from a reefer I’d liberated from one of the commune papas. I’d found her later, guilt-stricken and high, in the community kitchen, up to her twelve-year-old elbows in avocados and tomatoes. We had chips and guac for days.

  While Heart found her center in the kitchen, I found mine in chanting. I wanted nothing more than to be alone and whisper words of peace and love and gratitude, to let the repetition sink into me until it calmed my quivering insides. But I couldn’t just kick out my family. Jorn, but not my family.

  I caught Jorn studying me, and I crossed my eyes at him. “Careful,” he said, “or they’ll stay that way.”

  “Don’t you have a home?”

  “Yours is more exciting.”

  Bella rose from Evie’s lap, arched her back in a perfect Cat Pose, then leaped to the floor and walked over to the couch. She soundlessly jumped to the back of the sofa and hunkered down behind Larry’s shoulder, her tail sweeping around his neck like a scarf.

  “I’m going to install a security system in this place,” he said, not looking up from the keyboard. “There’s stuff out there that will blow your mind.”

  “Larry, we just want her to be safe, not living in a fortress,” Evie said.

  “But this stuff is so cool,” Larry said. “I’m installing a tracker on this laptop so if someone takes this one, we’ve got him.”

  “Keep it simple.” Evie gave him an indulgent but no-nonsense look.

  “I can do simple.” When Evie continued to give him The Look, he threw up his hands, frightening Bella into a backflip off the sofa. “Simple, I got it.”

  “Come and get it,” Heart sang. She began ladling soup into bowls and handing them to Jorn. He looked lost for a moment and then started placing them around the table. Evie brought out spoons and napkins. Heart pulled out a tray of warm French bread from the oven. The last time I had seen that loaf it was lying on the kitchen floor, thawing, in a puddle of other half-frozen food.

  I hate to admit it, but Heart had been right. Something warm and simple was just what I had needed. The thought of someone pawing through my things gave me the creeps, and I still wasn’t able to let the diary out of my sight. Jorn kept eyeing it but so far hadn’t mentioned it. I was mad and afraid, two emotions that do not mix well in me.

  About halfway through the meal, my phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket. It was Nico.

  “Just got an interesting offer,” he said. “As your attorney, I have to advise you of it.”

  “You’re my attorney now?”

  “Somebody’s got to have your back, kid,” Nico growled.

  “What’s the offer?”

  “One mill for the diary.”

  “Whoa. Who?”

  “An anonymous offer.”

  �
�Does this stink as much as I think it does?” I asked.

  “To high heaven.”

  I glanced at Jorn, who was leaning toward me. “Was it one of the guys who attacked you?” I asked.

  “Nope. A woman.”

  I told Nico about my house being tossed and my cat being stashed in a grocery bag.

  “Sorry about the cat,” Nico said.

  “This sort of pisses me off,” I said.

  “Understandable. So that’s a no on the mill?”

  “That’s a no,” I said.

  “Be in touch.” Nico rang off.

  Everyone at the table was looking at me. “Someone wants to buy the diary for a million bucks,” I said.

  Larry’s eyebrows lifted. Evie sat back, her calm eyes on me. Heart smiled. “Sell! What are you waiting for? Get that cursed thing out of your house and out of our lives. In fact, just give it to him.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Because Tum left it to you,” Heart said.

  “Because I’m the keeper now.”

  Heart put her spoon down with a clatter. “That damn diary is going to bring trouble down on all of us. I’ve got a family to think of, Maya.”

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, David, or Sadie.”

  “Like that is supposed to make me feel better. You can’t even keep your cat safe.”

  Evie stepped in. “Now, Heart.”

  “Don’t ‘Now, Heart’ me, Evie. Real people are breaking into real homes.”

  “We can’t choose other people’s paths for them,” Evie said.

  Heart stood. “This is not just about her. People are coming after that book. And I don’t want my family in the crossfire.” She turned from Evie to me. “They’ve already been inside your house. If that doesn’t freaking scare you . . .” She shook her head.

  Yes, it scared me, more than I would let any of them see. I watched Heart leave, listened as she grabbed her coat off the hooks by the front door and pulled on her boots. She slammed the door behind her. Then, abruptly, it opened again, and Heart’s shout came up the stairs, “Lock this damn door behind me. This isn’t Whispering Freaking Spirit.”

  Evie and Larry soon followed, going off into the night, arms around each other, heads bent in discussion. I watched them from the door for a moment then went back upstairs. I dropped onto the sofa. Jorn joined me.

  “You’re not going to write about this, are you?”

  “Two lines in the police report. Nobody reads the police report,” he assured me.

  “Everybody reads the police report.”

  We both stared at the diary lying in my lap.

  “What’s in there that’s so important?” he asked.

  I shrugged. I opened the book and caught a whiff of bubblegum.

  “A treasure map?” Jorn asked.

  I shook my head.

  “The truth about who killed Kennedy?”

  I flipped the page and the scent of smoke twisted around us.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “What?”

  “Smoke.”

  Jorn looked toward the kitchen. “I don’t smell anything.”

  I let my head drop back against the sofa. Bella leaped into my lap and curled up on the opened diary.

  Jorn cleared his throat. “I could stay the night.” I turned to look at him. He lifted his hands. “On the couch.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, although I was.

  He nodded.

  Bella and I walked him to the door. He piled on his layers then waited outside the door until he heard the dead bolt. As I climbed the stairs, I was already chanting.

  That night I slept with the diary and Bella. We all needed comfort. I fell asleep reading the diary, its words and scents winding through my dreams.

  The next morning, I chanted, meditated, and finished reading the diary. Then I replaced it in its hiding place.

  I had to keep it safe. Because now I knew its secrets.

  Chapter 10

  The Whisperings of Secrets

  IT WAS LATE MARCH, and we were entering the cherry tree’s fourth week in full bloom. Merlin’s arm was still mending, and his daughter had dismantled the trampoline. Both Merlin and his granddaughter were gloomy about that. Sitting in lotus on my bed, I studied the diary. Bella was stretched out beside me, looking twice as long as she actually was. When the phone rang, I had to dig it out from under her.

  It was Heart. “Have you sold the diary yet?”

  “No.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye. We’d had this conversation several times since the burglary a week ago. I regretted the cleansing ceremony, involving my students. The diary was full of many things I didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. It held seasonal complaints, sad entries, and frightening chronicles—of crops failing, of babies who never came, of a woman tossed from a roof when she refused to hand over the diary. Men and women had given up those they loved rather than put them in harm’s way—because of the diary. I had no idea if these things were true. Maybe they were the shamanic equivalent of old wives’ tales.

  Or maybe Heart was right. Maybe I had no business bringing this into my house, my family, my town.

  There were stories of the diary’s keepers being hunted and chased, of monasteries in snowy mountains, of fire and ice. I found a page with a bullet hole in it. A single page. How could that happen? I sniffed the page, expecting gunpowder, and smelled nail polish instead.

  Some entries were as mundane as: “Had mangos for breakfast. Yum.” One keeper wrote bad doggerel, while another argued existential theories. Propped up in my bed with the diary on my lap, I waded through everything from grocery lists to naughty limericks about the good folks from Nantucket. And with each turn of the page, new smells drifted up, surrounded me, and clung to my fingers: the soft scent of talcum powder, the musty smell of marijuana, the aroma of new leather.

  Then I came across several references that had me sitting up with interest. Different keepers in different decades in different lands. The same reference, the same phrase. In different languages. Vida eterna. Immortalité. Eternal life.

  I thumbed back and forth, rereading one section and then another, making sure I was interpreting the words correctly. As the night wore on, my spirits sank lower. There was no way to tell if what the diary said was true. But did that really matter? If someone believed it was true, believed that this book held some great secret to eternal life, that person might be willing to resort to—anything.

  It could all be nonsense, a wild goose chase that had driven men and women to extremes over the decades.

  But if it was real . . . I was in deep shit.

  The phone rang again. Heart, no doubt, trying to wear me down as she used to do when we were kids. When she wanted something, there was no stopping her.

  But this time it was Nico.

  “She raised her offer,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Five million.”

  I nearly dropped the phone. “Wow.”

  Now, I have never been a person who needed much. That whole scoffing-at-materialism thing was the air we breathed at Whispering Spirit. In our family, money was to be used to help others. And with five million, I could do a lot of good. I could vaccinate children in Africa and buy llamas for farmers in Peru.

  “Maya, you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “That’s a lot of llamas.”

  “Huh?”

  I mentioned the name of a nonprofit organization that gave livestock to Third World farmers to help them climb out of poverty.

  “Feed the world,” Nico said, “I see where you’re heading.” He began rambling about social investing and the stock market and how he could handle all the pa
perwork.

  I broke into his litany of plans for my windfall. “Do you think she offered Tum money?”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” he said.

  “Because he was the keeper.”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt the diary calling to me, whispers of responsibility twisting and looping around me.

  “Does she think you have the diary? Does she know about me?” I was already making a mental to-do list for Larry. He loved putting up firewalls.

  “Hard to say.” Nico sighed, and I heard the squeak of a chair. I imagined the big guy leaning back in an oversize leather chair, his long hair clean and tied in a ponytail, a diamond in one earlobe, his biker boots propped on the desk.

  “Could she be connected to the goons in the alley?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Screw her then.”

  “Five mill’s a lot of moolah, kid.”

  “No,” I said. “But don’t tell my sister.”

  I hung up and turned back to the diary. I pulled my new laptop across the duvet and tapped into various language dictionaries. I needed to translate more of the diary entries, clarify the French, and get a handle on the German. My Chinese was hopeless. I once asked a waiter in Beijing how he was doing and ordered horse by accident. When I sleepily dropped the diary on my nose for the second time, about 4:00 a.m., I carefully wrapped it in the scarf and stashed it back in its hiding place. Then I gave in to sleep.

  The next day, a Friday, I avoided the diary. I needed to let my thoughts settle. I held morning classes and ran errands all afternoon. Outside, the world was gloomy and overcast. There was still snow on the ground. That evening, just before bed, I went downstairs to the yoga studio, moved the table aside, and gently wiggled the bricks loose. Curious Bella joined me. She rose up on two legs and poked her head in the hole. I pushed her away with a smile and reached inside.

  The diary was gone.

  Chapter 11