What a Dog Knows
Page 33
“She’s alive. She’s well. She’s been having dreams about you.”
“And I of her. But I never conjured you.”
“Funny. You’ve haunted my dreams since I was a little girl.”
There is a tingling in her palms, as if Ruby can feel Annie’s blood flowing hot in her capillaries. She pulls her hands away. “We need to have a conversation without all the psychic trappings. Like regular sisters suddenly introduced as adults.”
“You have someone waiting for you.”
“I do. And it would be good for him to meet you. If only to prove that you exist.”
“I like your familiar.” Annie reaches down and gives the Hitchhiker a pat. “I’ll close up shop; it’s time anyway. Meet you at the beer stand.”
“Okay.”
Doug gets to his feet at the sight of Ruby coming toward him. The look on his face suggests that the look on her face is troubling. And yet, now that the initial shock has died down, she feels a rising tide of excitement.
“And?” he asks.
“You’ll never guess. I have a sister. Mystic Marianna is Annie Felton.”
“And your mother?”
“I’m about to find out. Will you be willing to get us a couple of beers? My sister is closing up shop.”
“I can take the dog and go hang out in the van.”
“No. Please. Stay at least for a little while. I’d rather have you witness for yourself than have to tell you about it.”
“Okay. But I’m a fly on the wall.” As if to prove it, Doug waves away an actual fly. The picnic grounds are a mess, bees and flies and wasps are coming in for their late-afternoon forage. The joust is over. The jugglers and acrobats are taking final bows. The Bard has completed his raunchy sonnets. The storm that Ruby and Doug left behind is fast approaching from the north.
Mystic Marianna has become Annie Felton, dressed in jeans, turtleneck, and polar fleece. She’s wearing the same Uggs as Ruby has on her own feet. She has pulled her hair back into a ponytail. It may be a trick of the light, or a very good coloring job, but her hair is exactly the shade of auburn that Sabine was born with. She takes one of the beers out of Doug’s hand. “Thanks. I’m Annie.”
“Doug. Doug Cross. Ruby’s…”
“Boyfriend.” Ruby takes the other beer. She doesn’t like beer, but this unique occasion certainly calls for an adult beverage in hand.
“Boyfriend.” Doug leans over and kisses Ruby. “I’ll just be over there.” He slides down to the end of the ten-foot-long picnic table, leaving these weird sisters at the other end, face-to-face.
“He seems nice,” Annie says loudly enough for Doug to hear.
“Very. Very nice,” Ruby answers. “So, rather than me interrogating you, why don’t you fill me in on the basic facts of my life?”
“I don’t know about your life, but I do know how it started.”
“It’s a beginning.” Ruby doesn’t want embellishment, just the basic truth.
Annie sips her beer and Ruby can see that, despite her seeming calmness, Annie is nervous. “You were conceived in love. But it was a star-crossed kind of love.”
“Please, keep it simple. I know how to spin a tale, but you really don’t have to do that.”
“He was married. She was twenty, maybe a little younger. You see where I’m going with this?”
“She went to a home for unwed mothers. Estelle Williamson’s place in Niagara Falls.”
“So, you do know a little.”
“I don’t know why she never came looking for me.”
“She did.”
“I don’t believe that. I was there for fourteen years.”
“Where?”
“At the convent, in Ottawa. Outside Ottawa. No birth certificate, nothing but a custodial intake record. I was disappeared.”
“She never knew that.”
Ruby is doubtful. How could a true psychic not know where her own child was? But it seems wrongheaded to have a fight with a person she has only just met. “What did she think happened to me?”
“She was told that you were adopted. Right from birth. But in those days, adoptions were closed; she wasn’t allowed any information.”
“Do you know what it was like to be raised in an institution? To live in hope every single day that your rightful parent would come and claim you?”
Annie shakes her head. Her eyes, so like Sabine’s and her own, are filled. “She thought that you were growing up a happy little girl in a happy little home. A far better situation than that of her only other alternative.”
The alternative she herself had not pursued. Neither had Ruby sent her baby away into the hands of strangers. There had been a third choice.
The two sisters sip at their warm beers and stare at the sticky tabletop. The gathering storm will soon put an end to this conversation. Already the breeze has the surrounding pine trees dancing. A fat drop of rain lands on Ruby’s caftan. Or maybe that’s a tear. She swipes at her eyes, forgetting that she’s in full fortune-teller makeup. “Shit. Sorry.”
Annie pulls a clean tissue out of her vest pocket. Hands it to Ruby.
“What’s her name?”
“Aurora.”
There is a sense of being pinched between past and present.
Ruby takes a deep breath. “Not her fortune-teller’s name, but her real name.”
“Her real name is Pearl.”
Pearl. “And where is she now?”
Annie, Mystic Marianna, hands Ruby a card with an address penciled on it. She has been expecting this question. “This is where you will find her.”
A bubble of laughter rises in Ruby’s chest, impossible to suppress. “Of course it is.”
42
Ruby asked Doug to drive them home. He tried to keep the pleased look off his face, being graced with the privilege of driving Ruby’s beloved Westie, but she caught it. Smiled back at him. “Wow. What a day.”
“Do you want to go now? To see her?”
“No. I need to regroup. Annie says she wants to give her a little notice anyway. She’s in good health, but the shock of seeing her long-lost child might be hard on the heart. So, tomorrow.”
“Will your sister, Annie, be there?”
“I thought she would, but believe it or not, she’s a second-grade teacher; school day tomorrow.”
“I’d take it off. If you wanted me there.”
Ruby puts her hand over his. “Thank you, but I think this first meeting needs to be just us.”
The Hitchhiker settles herself into a curl on Ruby’s lap, puzzled but pleased to have Ruby in that seat instead of in the lap-forbidden driver’s seat. She makes the most of it, letting Ruby know that she likes the new relative they found. “Me too, little dog, me too.”
The yellow of the little Hobbit house is warm in the fall sunshine, more butter than lemon. Details of the decorative gingerbread trim, picked out in bright white, reveal curlicues and animal faces hidden within its pattern. The maple trees that front the yard are at the peak of their colors, even though most other foliage has faded by now. Red, gold, orange. Ruby pulls her rumbling Westfalia into the driveway of the house she has so often admired. She remembers the expression: heart beating like a trip hammer, but this is the first time she understands what that means.
The Hitchhiker is staring at her. Brown orbs reflecting her own face back to her. Ruby slides a moist palm across the dog’s domed head. Waits for the connection to kick in. She is not disappointed. “What you have been hunting for is here.”
In her mind’s eye she detects all the things that this little dog considers good: the heft of a marrow bone, the scent of meat, the feel of a soft cushion against which she can tuck herself. The satisfaction of catching a mouse even if it is actually a stuffed toy. But, most of all, Ruby detects the calming of a gentle hand stroking her back as she is now doing to the dog. She is calming now. Her heart rate is slowing. You cannot really die of getting your most fervent desire.
Last night, when sh
e called Sabine to tell her the news, Sabine had cried. Cried in happiness, Ruby knew, pleased to tears that Ruby had finally gotten the central mystery of her life resolved. A thought comes to mind, as strong as any psychic vibe: They are now four generations. Her mother, Ruby and Annie, Sabine, and now Molly.
The dog pulls away from Ruby’s hands. Stands on the passenger seat to give herself a good shake. “Go. Now.”
The woman who opens the door before Ruby can even reach for the bell is as Ruby has seen her in her dreams; as if the faceless ephemeral spirit has become corporeal. She is an older version of the rest of them, at least in height and eye color and faded-to-gray strawberry blond hair loosely knotted. No longer faceless, she is so very like Sabine or Annie or Molly down to the same little freckle decorating the corner of her mouth as it does Ruby’s.
“Hello, Pearl.”
“Hello, Ruby.”
Far from being a mystic apparition from an imagined past, this woman is very much a creature of now. No fortune-teller’s mother here, simply a woman whose own most intense desire has been fulfilled. Ruby looks into her mother’s eyes and sees her own longing fulfilled.
While the Hitchhiker watches from the open van window, the two women, mother and daughter, step into each other’s arms.
* * *
What I know is this: when human beings grow up, they do not leave behind their littermates or progenitors. It is a curious thing, this attachment they have based on the content of their blood. That my Ruby had not had her own mama close by is apparently unusual. Now that they have reunited, they are often in company with each other. I like Pearl’s little house. It has enough of a yard, especially way out back, much more than Doug’s little yard, or Boy’s. We all go for long walks. The humans keep up a steady patter of talk while I follow along or precede them so that I can make their way safe from vermin. Bunnies!
If I understood the concept of time, I would tell you how long it has been since that morning when Ruby pulled our van up to Pearl’s house. But I can only say that the seasons have gone from cool to cold to rainy to warm to hot. We have observed the weird day when children get treats by simply knocking on doors, the really nice feast people enjoy that accords even pups like me a nice dinner not involving kibble. Then the day when even the adult humans get excited about shredding paper and tossing it so that I had mouthfuls of it to shake and rend. Right now the air is redolent of fertile dirt, which is fun to bury things in, although neither Pearl nor Doug approve when I choose to bury things in their gardens.
We live with Doug now. An arrangement I am mostly all right with, although I do sometimes long for the days when it was just Ruby and me. But, well, she’s so much easier to read these days. The mystery that had kept her moving has gone away. She still jumps into the van and we go spend a day or two as we once did, meeting people and their pets, talking and solving problems. But we don’t stay away. I can trust Ruby to bring us back to our territory. And that’s what I know.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my readers opening this book in the summer of 2021, I think that it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that, as I was deep in the final weeks of completing this manuscript, the world as we knew it utterly changed. We are enduring a pandemic; a renewal of the Civil Rights movement; and economic freefall. We are experiencing a presidential race like no other in terms of consequence. As I write this on August 3, 2020, you, my reader of the summer of 2021, will know how it all ends.
What you are holding in your hands, or listening to, or scrolling through, is the result of a tremendous amount of work and I don’t mean mine. I had the easy part. The rest of those named below not only had to create a book out of my words, but they had to do it at home while quarantined. All of this, from cover to copy edits, to design, was accomplished remotely. And it felt seamless to me. It also gave me the chance to learn how to use electronic tracking. Thank you to Sallie Lotz, Alexis Neuville, Maria Vitale, Lisa Davis, Donna Noetzel, Crystal Velasquez and Young Lim. And at Macmillan, Abigail Starr, Matthew DeMazza, Samantha Edelson, Katy Robitzski, and Alyssa Keyne.
Without the team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, none of this would ever happen. Thank you Annelise, for your wise counsel, Andrea for sticking with me. Thank you also to Donald Cleary, Chris Prestia, Julianne Tinari, Michael Conroy, Sabrina Prestia, Hannah Rody-Wright, Ellen Tichler and Hannah Strouth for keeping all the bits and pieces together.
My deepest gratitude to my extraordinary editor, Jennifer Enderlin. It means the world to me to continue to have your confidence in my work.
This is a book about finding family, and I have my own family to thank for helping me give Ruby a crash course in family research. Thank you to my cousin Deborah Thayer and to my husband David for their insights and guidance into what DNA and family research can (and cannot) reveal.
Lastly, to Cora, my furry little muse.
ALSO BY SUSAN WILSON
The Dog I Loved
Two Good Dogs
The Dog Who Saved Me
A Man of His Own
The Dog Who Danced
One Good Dog
Summer Harbor
The Fortune Teller’s Daughter
Cameo Lake
Hawke’s Cove
Beauty
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUSAN WILSON is the author of twelve novels, including the bestselling One Good Dog and A Man of His Own. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Visit her at www.susanwilsonwrites.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part III
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgments
Also by Susan Wilson
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
WHAT A DOG KNOWS. Copyright © 2021 by Susan Wilson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07726-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-8922-4 (ebook)
eISB
N 9781466889224
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First Edition: 2021