Connor offered me an apologetic glance and slunk away.
I woke up the following morning before my alarm. Long before my alarm.
I had set it for the normal time. I mean, the old normal time—just early enough to get to school. Because it was a half day, like I said. I figured I’d go run with the dogs afterward. It would be a celebration of sorts.
But I was wide awake, and it was not only earlier than I needed to wake up to get to school on time, it was earlier than I’d been getting up to run.
And it’s funny, looking back. I think about it from time to time. A thing happens, and it’s a thing big enough to save a life, and you don’t know why it happened. And you sure didn’t know it was such a big deal at the time. But, looking back, you wonder why things work out the way they do.
I tossed and turned for a couple of minutes, then gave up.
I dressed quickly in sweats and trotted downstairs. Everybody else was asleep. The kitchen was dark and quiet, and I poured a bowl of cereal without turning on any lights. While I wolfed it down, the sky began to lighten outside the window.
I set my bowl in the sink and slipped out the door. Jogged toward the entry point where I always picked up a trail into the woods. Right away I could feel my lack of sleep dragging on me. It felt like something was missing inside my gut. But I kept going.
It was just light enough to make my way over the dropped branches, around the trees.
When I came over the rise and saw the cabin, the dogs were already outside. They were not in their doghouse. Which was unusual. They were on the porch of the cabin. Fretting. That’s the word that came into my head when I saw them, and I still think it’s the best one.
The bigger dog, the boy, was pacing on the porch. Literally pacing. Padding three long strides to cover the length of the boards, then spinning on his haunches and repeating the strides in the other direction. The smaller one, who I now knew was female, was scratching at the door. And I do mean scratching. Not the way a dog scratches to tell you he needs to go out. Not a little downward swipe with one paw. I mean the way a dog scratches when her goal is to dig straight through solid oak. And as I walked closer I could see she had done some fair damage.
They both looked up when they saw me trotting down the hill. But they didn’t come to me. They just looked away again and kept doing what they were doing. That’s when I got that sick feeling in my gut, knowing something was deeply wrong.
Normally I tried to stay as far away from the cabin as possible, out of respect to whoever owned it. That morning I walked up onto the porch boards for the first time. I had to duck out of the way to keep the pacing male dog from bowling me over. He didn’t even slow his step or change direction for me.
I took a deep breath, gathered all my courage, and rapped hard on the door.
Nothing. No answer.
“Hello?” I called. “Everything okay in there?”
Silence.
I heard the birds singing in the trees, excitedly. Probably they had no idea of any trouble below them. The sun was coming up, and they were likely reacting to that welcome daily occurrence. The light, lovely sound of them was punctuated—and made ugly somehow—by the obsessive scratching.
I rapped again. Harder.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Nothing.
There was no window in the front of the cabin, so I moved around to the side. My feet crunched through pine needles as I walked up to the window. I took another deep breath and looked inside.
A woman was lying in the bed, eyes closed. On her back, as if sleeping peacefully, a patchwork quilt pulled up under her armpits. She was an older woman. Not ancient-old like my great-grandmother, but old compared to me. Mid-fifties, maybe. Her long, straight gray hair fell around her face and shoulders. It would have been a peaceful enough scene if not for the reaction of the dogs. I would have just figured she was a heavy sleeper.
I knocked on the window, braced for her to open her eyes and scream at the sight of a guy staring through her window.
She did not open her eyes.
I banged harder.
“Ma’am?” I shouted. “Are you okay? Is everything okay in there?”
No reaction.
That was when the panic of the thing really set up shop in my gut. Because I had banged hard. I’d yelled loudly. Nobody was that sound a sleeper. It struck me with a shiver that I might be shouting at a corpse.
“Ma’am!” I screamed, my volume powered by the fear rushing out of me. “Ma’am, are you okay?”
Then I stopped yelling, leaned on the windowsill, and pulled a couple of deep breaths.
She was not okay.
I took off running.
“I’ll get help!” I shouted as I ran by the pacing, scratching dogs on the porch.
They paid me no mind at all.
My parents were still asleep when I burst back through the kitchen door.
I ran straight to the phone. On the side of the refrigerator my mom had a sheet of emergency numbers held up with a magnet. She’d ripped it out of the county phone book.
I dialed the sheriff’s office with trembling hands.
“Taylor County Sheriff,” a high female voice said.
“I need to report a . . .” But I stalled there for a second or two. What exactly did I need to report? Two uneasy dogs and a woman who would not wake up? “. . . somebody who might be in trouble.”
A longish silence on the line, which I took to be this woman rolling her
