The Dogs of Littlefield (20 page)

“Come back!” he shouted as his legs went numb.

— —

In high, thin voices, the
chorus was singing a song from
Rent
. Teachers wept audibly, and students held battery-powered votive candles as Mr. Anderman welcomed Hannah onto the auditorium stage. Hannah, wearing a new black dress from Urban Outfitters, holding a single white rose.
Julia was my best friend. I knew her better than anyone . . .

Another figure had appeared on the bank, a tall woman in a brown hooded parka, stumbling along behind the fence in short, high-heeled black boots.

“One of my students!” Ms. Manookian was shouting into a cell phone, her voice clear and certain like that of someone answering a simple multiple-choice question. “It's one of
my
students!”

Julia was so relieved at the sound of a familiar voice that she forgot to be surprised at the sight of Ms. Manookian on the bank above the pond. She was also relieved to be no longer alone with the strange bearded man. He was standing in water up to his knees, cursing in a language she did not understand, still trying to throw her his red scarf. Ms. Manookian continued to shout into her cell phone, giving what sounded like directions. It was fully light now. Cars had pulled into the Avalon Towers parking lot; people were getting out of them to stand by the chain-link fence. In the distance Julia heard the wailing of coyotes.

“Help!” she finally cried, looking toward Ms. Manookian. “Help!”

As if in response a fire truck and two police cars pulled up to the fence above the pond, red lights revolving.

Several firemen in black boots and fluorescent green overcoats jumped from the fire truck as two policemen in dark blue padded jackets began climbing over the fence. The first policeman across slid down the snowy slope, motioning with a hand to the man with the red scarf, while another policeman walked slowly toward Binx, holding out his fist. Binx stopped barking and wagged his tail. Now the firemen were wrestling what appeared to be an inflated yellow sled out of the back of the fire truck. It had long metal runners; they were hoisting it over the fence.

A third policeman held a gray bullhorn. He stood behind the fence looking out at Julia, his head tilted toward Ms. Manookian beside him, who was telling him something and gesturing with her long bare hands. A moment later he raised the bullhorn to his mouth.

“JULIA. STAY CALM.”

At the clear, definite sound of her name booming across the ice, she shuddered. Cold air was seeping up through her jacket, and her whole body felt numb. She looked at Ms. Manookian standing beside a policeman, firemen now climbing past them over the fence, and thought of the National Mall, as wide and flat as an airplane runway. Lined with enormous stone buildings built like tombs, filled with the most important things in the world. Natural History. Air and Space. And in the middle of it all, caught in the gravitational field between the white-domed Capitol and the granite obelisk of the Washington Monument, had stood Norman D. Mayer in his snowsuit and helmet, as lonely as an astronaut.

What had he felt as the police called his name and ordered him to surrender? Had it been like this, a strange feeling of lightness? He must have viewed the tiny swarming scene before him with a kind of pity, realizing that laws no longer applied to him, even gravity no longer applied to him; he was held by nothing in the world but himself.

She turned her head to glance back at the puppy, but it wasn't there. When she looked around again, another crack had appeared in the ice in front of her.

She took one more step backward.

“JULIA. DO NOT MOVE.”

The ice is cracking around my feet, she wanted to say, but she had lost her voice.

Ms. Manookian was speaking to the policeman with the bullhorn. He listened and nodded, holding the bullhorn away from his mouth. The man with the red scarf had thrown his scarf to the policeman on the bank, who was hauling him out of the water. Another policeman was inching down the slope carrying a blue blanket. In a few moments the two policemen had wrapped the fierce-looking bearded man in the blanket. Even from a distance Julia could see him shivering; his teeth were bared and his face had turned the color of clay. Both policemen stayed close to him, one with a hand on his shoulder. At the fence, people were calling out suggestions and comments, taking photos with their iPhones.

Julia shuddered again. The bumpy ice around her feet looked like a smashed windshield.

“JULIA. REMAIN CALM. WE HAVE CALLED YOUR PARENTS AND THEY WILL BE HERE SOON.”

Ms. Manookian waved. She cupped her hands around her mouth, crying out in a voice that sounded thin and unreliable after the bullhorn, “Don't worry! Don't worry, Julia!”

One fireman had dragged the yellow sled down the slope and was nosing it onto the ice. The other fireman was pulling on a black rubber suit.

“Don't worry!” cried Ms. Manookian.

The fireman in the black rubber suit was lying on the sled, propelling it toward her by pushing against the ice with his black-gloved hands while the other fireman played out a length of rope. From far away came the steady throb of a helicopter.

Julia looked up at the sky to see that the cloud with the fin was still there.

I hope you're satisfied, she addressed it tiredly. Then the ice cracked again.

F
or weeks Margaret had hardly left the
house. She sent Bill to the grocery store, the drugstore, on whatever errand must be run. Binx had to be walked, but she kept those walks as short as possible, heading away from the village, hurrying home again, keeping her head down, and especially in the evening doing her best not to look at anything but the sidewalk.

In the days immediately after she fell through the ice on Silsbee Pond, Julia had not wanted to be alone. It was like having her again as a young child, when she wanted to be with Margaret everywhere, followed her from room to room, clung to her hand at bedtime and begged her to stay until she fell asleep. For a while, when Julia was six or seven, she used to ask Margaret the same questions, every night:
What's the saddest thing that ever happened to you? What's your worst memory?

Margaret worried Julia must have overheard something about the years before she was born, all those losses—but unwilling to explain what she was sure Julia could not understand, she had talked about her parents, who had died within a few months of each other several years earlier. They had been elderly, both in poor health. Julia had seemed satisfied with this information. She had scarcely known her grandparents, but their deaths were logical sources of sorrow, and eventually she stopped asking her unsettling questions.

Yet now she had started again, more probingly:
Was that really the saddest you've ever been?
Yes, Margaret told her. That was the saddest I've ever been.
Are you still sad about them?

An ambulance had been waiting when she was brought off the ice; in five minutes she was at the hospital emergency room, where Margaret and Bill rushed in to find her sitting on a gurney behind a curtain, swaddled to her nose in a quilted white electric blanket, a tuft of soft brown hair sticking up on top of her head, like a damp chick hatching from an egg.

The doctors all said she was fine.
Kids are resilient.
A little shaken up, but fine.

“I want her home with me,” Margaret told Bill.

He thought Julia should go back to school after a day or two. Get back to normal. “You're going to make her think this was something more than it was,” he said. But in the end he gave in.

Margaret had spent those days with Julia listening, waiting to hear Julia's footsteps on the stairs, the sound of her moving about in her bedroom. When Julia was a baby, Margaret had been terrified she would stop breathing in her sleep and during Julia's naps would hurry to her room, sometimes two or three times, to peer in at her from the doorway. In the middle of the night she would wake even out of a deep, exhausted sleep and run down the hallway to Julia's room to check on her. Now she invented excuses to knock on Julia's door for the simple relief of seeing her cross-legged on her bed, reading a book or hanging over the laptop.

“What?”
Julia would look up. “Why do you keep coming in here?”

And they would have their usual arguments, about Julia's tone of voice, about whether she spent too much time on the computer, until Julia said something spiteful, which was the real relief, because then Margaret could retreat, flushed, angry, buoyed by hurt feelings, until the old dread seized her again.

But soon Julia wanted to go back to school. She really was fine. Her fall through the ice had become a story to be told again and again to Hannah and in answer to questions posted on her Facebook page, every day more exaggerated, less serious, requiring more exclamation points, emoticons, and double question marks.

Her explanations sounded so reasonable: she thought she'd seen a puppy. A white puppy. But it was just a lump of snow. It was early morning, the time of day when the light plays tricks on you. Why was she walking by the pond in the first place? She wanted to take Binx for a walk. He was getting fat because he didn't get long walks anymore.

Of course it was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do, all Margaret's friends agreed, but kids are so impulsive. At least now she'll never make a mistake like that again, at least she's learned a lesson about being careful. Although it was hard to tell what Julia had learned, once she went back to her iPod, to her monosyllabic replies at dinner, and to keeping her door closed.

“What did you see?” Margaret asked, again and again. “Tell me. You can tell me.”

“Nothing, okay? I thought I saw something but it was nothing. Leave me alone.”

— —

Julia had gone back to
school last week. Kids had put up signs, decorated her locker.
WELCOME BACK, JULIA!
was displayed on a computer monitor mounted on the wall in the foyer. Julia had not disclosed any of this herself. Hannah had told Naomi, who reported it to Margaret. Someone had captured her fall through the ice with an iPhone and posted it on YouTube; Julia had become a minor celebrity.

Margaret had to resist the urge to text her four or five times a day (Bill had bought Julia a cell phone, for “emergencies”), to ask how she was doing; she had to limit herself to two or three questions when Julia finally walked up the front steps in the afternoon.

How was school? Anything interesting happen today? Really,
nothing
?

It had been weeks since Margaret slept more than an hour or two, and when she did sleep her dreams were thin and restless.

Finally Naomi gave her a vial of Ambien, saying, “You've got to get some sleep.”

Naomi kept saying Margaret needed a break. A change of scene. Margaret herself had started to wonder if this might be true. Just yesterday morning as she walked Binx down Rutherford Road, the sun had come out for the first time in days and she had felt a little better. The air seemed milder than usual. Errant warm currents flowed up from the sidewalk, escaping from beneath melting banks of snow, and she had been seized by a desire to keep walking. Somewhere in the world people were sitting outside at round café tables with iron tops perforated like lace, sipping wine and wearing sunglasses. What if she drove to the airport with Julia, got them both on a plane and flew to—Florida, the Bahamas? Just got up and
went
? She heard a clatter of palmetto fronds; a balmy sea wind wafted from the east.

But then the temperature dropped and once more it began to snow.

Yesterday morning Naomi had called to ask if Margaret would drive Clarice Watkins and Hedy Fischman to tonight's book club meeting. George Wechsler was at last coming to talk about his novel. Clarice's car had a broken headlight, and Hedy never drove at night anymore. Margaret said she would have to think about it. Hedy called next: neither she nor Clarice had read George's novel, but Hedy wanted to see what all the fuss was about and Clarice had never visited a book club and was curious to see what one was like.

Margaret figured Naomi had engineered all this, so she would feel obligated to go to the book club meeting and wouldn't be able to back out at the last minute.

She said as much to Bill when he came home from work that evening, adding, “I don't really want to go.”

“For God's sake,” he said, turning away. “Get out of the house.”

Now Hedy and Clarice were sitting in her warming car while Margaret cleared off the windshield and the back windows with a scraper, snow squeaking under her boots. Snow sifted down the back of her coat collar and settled into her hair. By the rhododendrons she saw something move, but it was only the shadow of a branch in the headlights.

“Well,” she said a few minutes later, inching out of her driveway. “Here we go. Wish me luck.” Beyond the windshield wipers, the world was filled with static.