And a few months later—how fast he’d grown!—I took him out for a walk and he pulled and tugged and broke loose. That morning in Monlith, his leash simply snapped and he was gone, crushing through the thin crust of snow down the hill and over the freeway.
It felt like only yesterday, I thought then, over a year later, walking home through the birches in Levant with the note, my heart beating hard. What would I have done without Charlie? How close had I come to losing him that day in Monlith? I had run after him, of course, but couldn’t bring myself to step over the sharp metal guardrail that he had leapt over so effortlessly. Even at that early hour, with just a car or two passing slowly on the ice, it seemed too dangerous to step foot on the freeway blacktop. I’ve never been one to break any rules. It was not out of a sense of civic duty or pride or moral certitude, but it was the way I was raised. In fact, the only time I’d ever been admonished was in kindergarten. I stepped out of line on the way down to the music room, and the teacher raised her voice. “Vesta, where are you going? You think you are so special to wander off alone like a queen?” I never forgave myself. And my mother was very keen on discipline. I was never beaten or restrained. But there was always order, and when I behaved as though there weren’t, I was corrected.
And anyway, I could have slipped on the ice. I could have been struck by a car. Would it have been worth the risk? Oh, it would have, it would have, if it meant otherwise losing my dear, sweet dog. But I couldn’t budge, stuck there behind the guardrail watching Charlie’s tail flouncing away. He disappeared down the embankment on the other side of the freeway, where there was a frozen marsh. I was much too frightened to even scream or shut my eyes or breathe. When I tried to whistle, my mouth wouldn’t work. It was like a nightmare, when the hatchet man is coming for you and you want to scream, but you can’t. All I could do was wave to the few cars driving by with my little red gloves, like a fool, tears beading at the corners of my eyes from both the cold wind and my terror.
But then Charlie returned. He came scuttling back at full speed across the ice, catching a stretch of complete stillness on the freeway, thank heavens. He carried the dead bird—a meadowlark—softly between his fangs and laid it at my feet and sat next to it. “Good boy,” I said, embarrassed by my unruly emotions even in front of my own dog. I dried my tears and embraced him and held his neck in my arms and kissed his head. His breath in the cold was like a steam engine, his heart thumping. Oh, how I loved him. How much life there was rumbling in that furry thing just astounded me.
Since then, I’d taught Charlie to fetch sticks and neon yellow tennis balls that turned brown and soggy with saliva, then gray and cracked, rolling under the front seat of the car, where I’d forget them. “This is a retriever, some bastard combination of Labrador and Weimaraner,” the vet in Monlith had told me. That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths.
I whistled, and Charlie came, a crumbling red shard of rotten wood poking out from his soft lips. I put the leash on him. “Just in case,” I told him. He eyed me querulously, but didn’t pull. I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself.
It wasn’t me.
Who was this me? I wondered. It seemed unlikely that a woman would abandon a dead body in the woods, so I felt I could safely presume that the writer of the note, this me, this character, the I of the story, must be male. He seemed very sure of himself, indeed. Nobody will ever know who killed her. And how could he know that? And why would he bother to say it? Was it some kind of macho taunt? I know something you don’t know. Men could be like that. But was murder an appropriate occasion to be so boastful? Magda was dead. That was no laughing matter. Nobody will ever know who killed her. What a silly way to ward off suspicion. How arrogant to think people are all so gullible. I wasn’t. We were not all idiots. We weren’t all lemmings, sheep, fools, like Walter always said all people were. If anybody knew who killed Magda, it was the “I.” Where was Magda now? Clearly I had been with her dead body while the note was being written. And so, what had become of her? Who had run off with her body? Had it been the killer? Had the killer come back for Magda after he, I, whatever, had written and laid down that note?
My note, I felt it was. And it was mine. I possessed it now, tried not to crinkle it in the warmth of my heavy down coat.
I’d need a name for this me, the writer of the note. At first I thought I’d need a name as just a placeholder, something lacking in personality so as not to describe the me too particularly, a name like the anonymous printed penmanship. It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody. But there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank. My husband’s name, Walter, was one of my favorite names. Charlie was a good name for a dog, I thought. When we were feeling regal, I’d call him Charles. He did look regal sometimes, his ears perked up and eyes cast downward, like a king on his throne. But he was too good natured to be truly kingly. He wasn’t a snobbish dog. He was no poodle or setter or spaniel. I’d wanted a manly breed, and when I’d gone into the kennel in Monlith, there he’d been. “Abandoned,” they told me. “Discovered two months ago in a black duffel bag on the banks of the river. Barely three weeks old. The only one of the litter to survive.” I spent a minute piecing that together. What horror! And then, what a miracle! From then on, I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-colored pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine. Charlie. Can you imagine abandoning such dear little creatures?
“Who would do something like that?”
“Times are tough,” the woman told me.
I filled out the requisite forms, paid one hundred dollars for medical testing and vaccines, and signed a promise to get Charlie neutered, which I never did. I also didn’t tell them that I’d be moving east, across seven states, all the way to Levant mere months later. These dog pounds, they need assurances. They want it in writing that a person will care for the animal and raise it in the right way. I promised not to abuse it or breed it, or let it run wild in the streets, as though a signature, a mere scribble on paper, could seal fate in place. I didn’t want to neuter my dog. That seemed inhumane. But I signed my name on the contract, heart racing at this, one of very few deceptions I’ve ever enacted knowingly, blushing, trembling even at the thought that I’d be found out. “What kind of sick person doesn’t neuter their mutt? What kind of perverse . . .” Naive, actually, to think that a mere signature was so binding. It’s just a little ink on paper, just a scribble, my name. They couldn’t come after me, drag me back to Monlith, simply because I’d moved a pen around.