The dogs went home. Reluctantly.
So did I. Also reluctantly.
It might sound trite to say I knew something important had changed in that moment. Also, it’s not entirely true. I knew something felt changed. What I did not yet know is that I had placed the first domino in a stack of events that would literally alter the world as I’d known it.
That night before bed I wrote a letter back to Roy.
I told him the truth. That the army censors had gone so hard at his letter that I still had no idea what it was he’d seen. And that if he tried to tell me again, they’d likely do the same again. But that he’d come home, given time, and that we’d go off somewhere private and I could hear about it straight from the horse’s mouth.
As I wrote those words, “You’ll come home . . . ,” I knew I was reaching. Sure, Roy might come home. He also might not. I was stating something as a given, even as I knew in my heart it was anything but.
I wondered if he’d have the same thought as he read it.
Probably. If anybody could grasp the big picture of the danger Roy was in, it was Roy.
Chapter Two
Also a Day of Big Changes
It was about two weeks later when things began to shift further.
It was the second-to-last day of school. I was about to get my life back for the summer. And the last day was a half day anyway, so I was nearly free.
I got up an hour early, as I’d done every weekday since I met the dogs, so I’d have time to run with them before school.
I had a pattern, which I followed to the letter that morning. I’d set off at a light jog down my street. Pick up a faint deer trail into the woods. It took me up to the cabin from a different direction, so that when I finally saw it, I’d be coming over a rise. Just as I crested it, I would see the back of the cabin, and that’s when I would step on the gas.
I kept to a slow pace on the street, to save my energy for the big sprint. But I was already starting to feel it—that tingly, delicious sense of anticipation you get when your brain and your gut know you’re about to do something good. Something that can actually change the crappy way you feel.
When I finally saw the rise in front of me, I could barely contain myself. The feeling ricocheted around in my stomach like a case of the shivers. I crested the rise and floored it, barreling past the cabin as fast as my legs could carry me. Of course the dogs came spilling out.
They never barked. They never whimpered in their excitement, though they were clearly excited to hear and then see me. They were always mute. Absolutely silent.
I loved that about them.
We ran.
We ran around in a big arc, so we wouldn’t have to stop at the edge of the woods. So we wouldn’t have to face the prospect of civilization. We ran past the cabin again, but on a path too far away or too heavily wooded to see it flash by.
We ran all the way across the River Road and stopped at the bank of the river. I squatted on my haunches, panting, and pulled a sandwich out of my pocket. I’d had breakfast, but I always needed more after all that running, and a sandwich was the only thing I knew to make on my own that I could put in a plastic bag and stick in my pocket.
Nobody noticed the missing food. Nobody noticed me getting up earlier. Nobody asked why I was leaving the house more than an hour too early for school. I was like a ghost in that house. Unless I was interrupting their warfare, I might as well not have existed at all.
The dogs crowded close, whacking me with their swinging tails, and I fed them each a bite of sandwich and watched the pull of the muddy water.
Then I got nervous.
They were not my dogs. I had no idea whose dogs they were. I wasn’t really supposed to have them away from their home with me. What if one of them stepped too close to the river and slid down the muddy, slippery bank? What if they darted back into the road? Cars didn’t come along it often, but when they did, their drivers almost always took the straightaway much too fast because there was no one around to notice.
“Come on,” I said to them, and they lifted their ears and turned them to face me to show they were listening. “Let’s go back.”
I looked both ways at the road. From that spot you could see just about forever in each direction. There was nobody coming, so I took a chance. I wanted to try an experiment.
I ran with them down the dirt shoulder of the road for a tenth of a mile or so. I wanted to see how much faster I could go without having to play chess with the trees. But the experiment was a bust. Maybe I went faster. Who knows? But it wasn’t fun. There was nothing to it. It was just slapping my feet down.
I missed the constant dodging. The blur of tree trunks racing past in my peripheral vision. More to the point, my brain was so disengaged that I started thinking, though after all these years I don’t claim to remember what about. I needed the absolute concentration of the on-the-fly route finding, but I hadn’t known it. It required every ounce of my concentration. It left me unable
