Natalie steps from the cab of her pickup, keys jingling on the belt loop of her Carhartts. It occurs to me that in the many years we’ve been friends I’ve never seen her dressed for work, even though we live a couple neighborhoods apart in downtown Atlanta. We don’t see each other much during the week. Mostly I meet her on weekends to kayak the rivers and creeks in the mountains of North Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In her professional life, Natalie is an investigator for the district attorney’s office.
I lift my chin in appreciation for the Carhartts. “They let you wear those to work?”
She tilts a smile in my direction and allows a bit of pride to sneak into her voice. “Do you know how long it took me to find a pair of these I could wear to the office?”
She bends to unleash Vespa and Pippin, two beautiful pointers I’ve agreed to dog-sit for the day. True, the small one has a reputation for running away, and true, I’ve spent a part of my weekend tightening the gates and replacing the broken pickets. But better that than spending an afternoon chasing Nat’s hounds around the neighborhood.
My dogs greet hers with excitement, and soon they are all four tumbling around the yard. After a few moments, Nat hands me a Ziploc full of kibble, climbs behind the wheel, and heads to the office, unaware as yet of the day’s particular despair awaiting her there.
Natalie is a cop—or rather, was, before she started at the DA’s office, in the sex crimes department. I don’t know how she faces it: human beings at their worst every day. Add to that the fact that her office has lost the last seven rape cases they’ve brought to trial.
Me, I have it easy. I spend my days creating things: novels, curricula, web applications. I work upstairs, now one layer removed from the sound of canine wrestling, the quick click of toenail on hardwood, the dog door’s flap-flap-flap, plus Vespa, the little one, still whining some. She wants Natalie back.
Nat and I are friends because of our outdoor lives. I can’t count how many Class Five rivers we’ve paddled together, how many rapids we’ve negotiated, how many meals we’ve cooked over camp stoves. But it’s hard for me to understand a lot of things about her. For one, she sees the world as a treacherous place and carries a pistol in her glove box. Years ago, when I once subscribed to Match.com, she felt obliged to inform me just how many crimes were initiated on dating sites. But she somehow had the tolerance to watch Game of Thrones, a show that made me cringe. I’m also pretty sure she doesn’t vote Democratic, or maybe doesn’t vote at all. She calls herself an independent and resents the fact that Atlanta’s indictment of Donald Trump drained personnel from her department.
I try to proselytize without proselytizing, as if she won’t notice. Maybe I sneak in some talk about values, or hint about cash-strapped government programs, or, in the aftermath of the Ferguson race protests, ask about discrimination on the police force.
The day I popped the discrimination question, she pushed back, and hard. We were eating pasta at her dining room table, drinking wine (me) and craft beer (her) while her dogs and mine raced back and forth.
“Jesus Christ on a pony,” she snapped, “Do you have any idea what it feels like to choose a life of service and then be told you’re an asshole because of it?”
I took a deep breath, grabbing up way more air than I needed, then let it all out. “You don’t think there’s a problem?”
“Cops aren’t any more racist than anyone else,” she said. “Or any less.”
Behind her on the refrigerator a whiteboard counted out her monthly budget to the dollar. I wondered how much they paid her down at City Hall. And now she seemed to be answering a different question altogether. “Do you know what matters to me, Julia? I’ll tell you why I get up and go to work every day. To put away bad guys. That is what I like to do. I’m not even going to tell you the kinds of things these guys do. To kids.” Her eyes rounded with emphasis, and she held my gaze for an extra beat. “I find evidence. And it takes a lot of evidence. Way, way more than you’d ever think.”
I nodded, leaned back in my chair. I wanted to say something grateful about her service but by that point there was no way to say it without sounding fake. And then for some reason I thought of the electric chair, and the number of years it had been since Georgia used one. Of course, the only death-row inmates I know are the ones from literature, the ones afraid of being blistered by fire in the final moments of life, and I wonder if that could really happen. But I don’t Google it because I don’t really want to know. The thought is grisly enough.
Downstairs Vespa has stopped whining. In fact, all four dogs have gone quiet. I set aside my laptop and sneak down the steps to check, and there on the rug in the living room are my dogs, worn out and dead asleep. Outside the backyard is empty, and I have to pop open the kitchen window to check the side yard.
Where the gate is wide open.
This, I know, is impossible.
Unless a desperate little dog can slide a heavy deadbolt. But how, when she only weighs thirty pounds?
Unless I left the gate unlatched.
But how, when I was hammering fence pickets onto it yesterday?
The street is busy with construction crews installing storm drains, so there’s no real traffic. But my car is parked around the corner. I run.
It is March, and the street is alive with blossom and color, but no pair of pointers nosing around neighbors’ yards. A work crew is channeling traffic from alternate directions, and a man in an orange vest waves me through. I stop to roll down the window, decide it’ll go quicker if I drag out my mediocre Spanish. “Ha visto a dos perros flacos?”
The man tips back his chin and scissors his palms against one another—“Corriendo!” he blurts—and stabs his finger down the street.
I have seen these dogs run before: headlong sprints, their loose elephantine ears streaming behind them in joy. Both are magnificently proportioned hounds bred for chasing down game, their waists narrow, their chests barreled, bone and muscle rolling under their thin hides like fine machinery. The male, Pippin, is white, with big expressive eyes and gentle pink features, soft veiny ears you love to stroke.
Me, I have always owned mutts with mismatched body parts, another way that Nat and I disagree. Steer clear of floppy ears is what I say, because a floppy-eared dog is one part hound, and a hound dog is bred for just one thing, and that one thing is catching a scent and following it through to its logical conclusion, even if it takes hours. Or days. Especially Pippin, a dog who so loves the feel of forward momentum I’ve seen him many times propel himself full-tilt down a country road, oblivious to Nat’s frantic calls.
At the far end of the street another crewman holds a stop sign. When I ask about Pippin and Vespa, his brows shoot up and his eyes hold on to mine a beat too long, his voice gravid with warning. “Those dogs had somewhere to go.”
It is then that fear shimmers through me—not the fear of losing them but the fear of losing them. They’re running home, and they’ll have to cross Moreland Avenue, a five-lane corridor, green lights all the way. I know exactly the intersection they’ll try—four blocks away at Ormewood Avenue.
Seconds pass, not minutes, and I am there.
Relief buoys through me, because there is Vespa, prancing back and forth in the middle turn lane, unable to go forward, unwilling to go back. Two pedestrians are trying to steer away traffic, trying to coax her out of the road.
Then I see Pippin. Lying on the opposite side of Moreland. Inert. I park in front of a defunct grocery store and run across, where he is lying in a side street. Cars are stopped. Spectators are gathering. Though he doesn’t bear any obvious signs of injury and there is no visible blood, no one touches him. He seems to be unconscious, his breathing fast and light. I kneel and touch his head, willing him just to please be okay. He doesn’t respond.
“Careful.” Above me stands yet another man in fluorescent construction vest. “He might bite you.” The man’s face looms, young and assured, and in that moment something in the scene seems to shift, the world made crystalline, the too-clear atmosphere, the strange alkaline light that shows the capillaries on his cheek, the blond follicles glinting like grains of sand. “They do that when they’re scared.”
I stroke Pippin’s white cheek and try to think, to calculate what damage lifting him might cause. But we’re in the middle of the street and there’s no other way. The man in the vest is still talking. “Revert to instinct.” Before I can finish my thought, Pippin stops breathing.
“He’s gone,” the construction worker says, and I don’t look at him. Maybe Pippin’s gone and maybe he isn’t. I slide my hands under the dog’s shoulder and hips and lift him into my arms, cradling his muscular torso against my chest. Blood spills from his mouth. His body is warm and pliant and gentle as ever, so supple. So empty of Pippin.
Traffic on Moreland evaporates, and I carry him to the other side, where a woman with a baby papoosed against her chest opens my car door. I set him gently in the backseat. He hasn’t flinched, hasn’t whimpered. The woman turns out to be a not-so-young mom. “You get the other dog,” she says in a rush. “I’ll take this one to the animal hospital.” She waves a hand toward a strip mall a few hundred feet away. “It’s just over there.”
And she’s right: I can see the sign, can read every letter in the too-white light, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a woman with a baby strapped to her body, a baby that must weigh twenty pounds. The dog probably weighs sixty. I don’t know what kind of magic she has in mind, but for some reason I believe she can do what she says. Everything about her suggests competence.
“Do you know how to drive a Prius?” I ask.
But she’s already opening the driver’s door, settling into the seat, baby and all.
I hand her the keys and go sprinting down the street after Vespa, who’s now retreating back to my neighborhood, away from the battering traffic. She’s a smart dog, and now she’s a scared one. For some reason I trust the woman with the papoose to stay with Pippin, who may not be dead, who may need comforting, who may wake up distraught, who may need someone there to save him, someone to say, yes, do the surgery, someone with my credit card to tell the vet, yes, please save him, and I will pay. I will pay. I will pay.
Soon I will have to call Nat. Soon I will have to tell her. But now Vespa darts down a residential street, quick and canny as a deer. And that is what she looks like too, all spindly legs and fawn-colored torso, large intelligent eyes the same liver color as her hide.
An astonishing number of people have stopped to help, all of them young and earnest, all of them strangely beautiful, as if cast in a movie. A white SUV appears out of nowhere, window down, a gray-haired woman with smile lines around her mouth and eyes. “Get in,” she says. I do. The woman’s name is Amy, and she is chatting about her own experience with dogs and why she has stopped to help, but I cannot hear her because a high white singing has begun to fill my ears, a piercing whine matched by the crisp quality of the day’s light, the undulate limb of redbud, the pale float of dogwood, and there on the sidewalk is Vespa, all nervy and restive and high-stepping. Amy stops the SUV and I run out, call to her, but Vespa dances away.
And now here come all those movie-star Gen Zs, two or three or more, and they are running down the street calling Vespa’s name too. This I cannot explain. They have little bags of treats, and leashes, and they seem to know what they are doing. Later I learn that all of them have come from that same animal hospital on the corner and that I have given them the treats, and the leashes, the dog’s name too, though I cannot recall ever doing it.
Each time these young people get close to Vespa, she dances away on spooky spindly legs, and then she is gone, disappeared into backyards, a flash of white and brown in the wood. I know where she’s going—such an intelligent dog. She’s headed in the crow-fly direction of my house.
Amy drives us around by the street route and pulls into my driveway, and there is Vespa, in front of the same gate from which she escaped. I push it open and the dog flees into it, then into the house, where I close the dog door for now. My hands are trembling enough that by the time I come flying out the front door, Amy is gone, and her white SUV too, and why wouldn’t she be when I didn’t think to ask her to stay? Why wouldn’t she be when she has no way of knowing that the woman with the papoose has my car and my wallet and my friend’s dog? I begin the half-mile sprint back to the clinic. How much time has passed since I found Pippin? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Maybe, just maybe, he can be alive.
The veterinarian is dark-skinned, with straight black hair against a white lab coat, and like all the others, strangely beautiful. I’m still trying to catch my breath from the run. “Is he…dead?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “He was already gone. I called the owner.”
I can feel the architecture of my face collapse, sink into itself, the drop in my stomach too, and there is something sinister flopping around in there, like a bottom-feeding fish. The tags. Nat’s phone number must be on the tags. Maybe I say something to the vet, maybe I don’t. If I do, it’s probably “Why?” But maybe I don’t say that at all. I know exactly why. It’s her job. She’s doing her job. It’s just that it’s too soon. I’m no—
My phone rings, and I don’t have to look at the display. Nat’s voice is a wobble of fear on a high tight wire. “What’s going on?” she says. “I got the weirdest call.” And now I want to lie to her, this woman who has kayaked expert whitewater and kicked in crack-house doors, this woman who knows why and what-for she gets up every morning. I want to say, no, you’re right, it’s a mistake.
I want to hide.
Some words fall out of my mouth, but I don’t know what they are—something about the gate, something about Vespa, some other things too, all of them tiny pebbles dropping into the void.
A beat of silence. Her voice is tiny. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Why indeed. It’s true that I was trying to get Vespa safe. It’s true. But there’s more to it than that. I wanted to be able to say that Vespa was safe, because reporting two dogs gone would have been intolerable. I needed at least one accomplishment before being assessed in my failure.
“I don’t know, Nat,” I whisper. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. My boss is driving me to the parking deck.”
I can hear my own heartbeat, an underwater susurration pulsing in my ears. Everyone in the office is unbearably kind. A young man with a goatee says, “It’s not your fault. We have a name for these kinds of dogs.” He is familiar to me now, one of those young people from the Vespa chase. Under the goatee, his face is soft, like a baby’s—and then suddenly there are two of him, one to my right and one to my left.
“Escape artists,” the newer version of himself says.
“There are two of you,” I say.
“Yes,” they say in unison. The one on the other side doesn’t have the goatee.
“Are you twins?”
Again in unison: “Yes.”
I can’t think of anything else to say so I just nod.
Natalie arrives and cries onto my shoulder, and a receptionist with a brown valentine face asks, “Do you want to see him?” Now I recognize her from the Vespa chase too.
Natalie hesitates, looks at me. “Should I?”
It takes me a moment to understand why she’s asking. “Yes. You should.”
The staff have positioned him so his face is in repose, the blood from his mouth hidden by a towel. Natalie touches his head, cries again, but doesn’t stay long. I am the one who wants to linger, to scoop him into my arms, this beautiful dog, to feel again the warmth and strength of him against my chest.
“Nat, God, I’m so sorry” is all I can manage to say.
She holds my upper arms and waits for me to meet her eye. “Julia. It’s not your fault.” I can see that she means what she says, at least in this moment. But she doesn’t know the thing that I do, the thing that opens a canyon in my stomach: that I am a person who focuses too much, too much if I’m on the river, too much if I’m working, too much upon whatever thread of thought I’m unraveling. I am a head-in-the-sky person, the kind who thinks only about one thing at a time, the kind who lets her car run out of gas or locks herself out of the house, the kind who is sometimes unaware of her surroundings. I forget things, so much that I plan for it. Ask my neighbors. They all have keys to my home. And I know what I know, that if there’s a snag with logistics—any logistics—there’s a decent chance that I am the one who has forgotten to do something.
Natalie knows this too, but she pretends otherwise. She sounds very certain. “It’s not your fault.”
But that is not quite right. Absolution is a figment. In the days to come I will spend hours and nights asleep and awake apportioning blame—how much upon me, how much upon the dogs’ beasty instincts.
But it’s more than that. It’s every one of us, by virtue of existence, each of us leading our loved ones to this same place here on this high white plain where the guilty and aggrieved rely one upon the other, where every loss vibrates through each of us alike, and each of us sears the other, where love shines clear and fragile and fine-edged in this electric bright-lit light, and those who stay too long are blistered open, the breath of millions shuddering in their lungs.
But see how it stings, and see how it burns. See how it bursts into flame.
When the weekend comes, Nat and I meet around a campfire in East Tennessee with three other friends. It might be Saint Patrick’s Day. I think it is Saint Patrick’s Day. Somewhere: parades. Here: owls. Natalie has brought whiskey, and the two of us are drawn to one another, seeking the other’s nearness, though when we are there, sitting side by side and staring into the fire, there is nothing to say. I take her hand in mine, and it feels natural for a moment, but soon awkward and weird, so I let go. The others pretend not to notice. Mark sets a log on the fire, and sparks drift up like fireflies, wink out, and disappear. Martina and Mike talk of neighbors and electric fences, of bicycle trips and guitars, of black locust trees that some people call acacia, of creeks and their rapids, of a Class Five kayaker who has drowned on a local river. We didn’t know her, only that she was an expert New Zealand boater, an internationally ranked competitor, an instructor and guide, and that she drowned while paddling a route we have paddled dozens of times. She was running safety, a sweep behind her teenaged son and his friends. By the time the boys made it through the rapids and looked behind them, her capsized kayak was rushing through the cascades empty, and Maria—Mom—was gone.
Mike unpacks his guitar and begins to play. The fire dances and pops, sucks all light into itself, but there is no pleasure in it either, nor in the whiskey, nor the music, nor the owls sighing above us. From the ridgeline comes the hooligan whoop and yip of coyote. Our own dogs waken at the affront, then woof and yowl in a drunken swoon of indignation, all of them deliciously alive, even Vespa the alpha on her skinny pretty legs.
The next morning the river runs clear and crystalline, the sun glancing across the surface, the stones on the bottom outlined in blue.
Imagine this: you are floating down a stream next to your longtime friends, the current swift and flat. In the middle of the channel rises a rocky outcrop, and you take one side while your friends take the other. But soon the outcrop becomes a promontory, which becomes an island which becomes a wood, and there you are, floating in your own slipstream, your companions in theirs. You can see them through the trees, just over there, paralleling your progress, flashes of color through the leaves. Maybe you even hear snatches of conversation. If they notice the separation, their voices don’t show it. Days pass. You worry some for their safety and your own, but really, you are not quite alone. In any case the current is pulling you both in the same direction, in accordance with the same gravity. And you know or you think you know that someday this wooded territory between you must surely end, someday these separate channels must surely merge, connect, again conjoin.
Julia Franks is the author of two award-winning novels, The Say So and Over the Plain Houses.