Chapter 13
Okay,” Wylie said, looking around at all of us. “Everyone have flashlights?”
We were all standing by the gate at the end of the driveway. We’d been driven there in golf carts, since time was of the essence here and nobody had twenty minutes to hike down it. When Wylie hadn’t been able to find Andy anywhere in the house, he’d come to ask us about it—which was when Montana realized that she’d accidentally left the door ajar when she went to get Priya for Fishbowl.
Everyone had fanned out across the yard, and when Connor saw a gap in the hedge on the border of the Sanders house, he realized that Andy was probably running around somewhere in the neighborhood. This was when all the searching had taken on a new, more serious level, as Kendrick handed out flashlights and Wylie assigned people roles. We would all take a different area of the neighborhood and search by foot in teams of two. Kendrick and Bella would search by golf cart—faster, but not so fast you couldn’t spot a small dog. We needed to try and find Andy as soon as possible—before he wandered too far to be able to find his way home again, and before he could possibly run into a coyote.
So we’d gathered up the search party. Chloe and Paula stayed behind—so they could watch the sleeping kids, and also so there would be someone there in case Andy found his way back.
“We’ve got them,” Connor said, holding up his flashlight. The happy, joking group from the couch was gone—everyone standing around the base of the driveway was serious, their faces grave and worried.
“Great,” Wylie said, nodding. “Let’s check in with each other in thirty minutes, if we haven’t found him by then. Hopefully he hasn’t gotten far.”
Kendrick pointed a clicker at the huge black WS gates and they started to swing slowly outward. We all walked through, and as we did, it hit me that this was the first time I was going through them—I’d flown here, as crazy as that still seemed to me. So since I hadn’t seen this road—or the rest of the neighborhood, except from the sky—I didn’t know what I’d be walking out into.
But it was just a dark street—there wasn’t a line painted down it, or many streetlights that I could see. There didn’t even seem to be a house across from Wylie’s, just a wall of hedges.
The second we’d made it out to the street, people started to organize themselves into pairs, mostly the couples—Montana and Priya, Kenya and Doug, Sydney and Connor. It wasn’t until I saw Wylie clap Wallace on the shoulder that I realized it left me and Russell to pair up. I knew this wasn’t a crazy assumption for everyone to have made—that Russell and I would want to be paired up. After all, I’d arrived with him, had been introduced as his friend—he was the only reason that I was even there. And frankly, everyone was probably too worried about the missing dog to give this much thought at all.
Russell seemed to realize this at the same moment that I did, turning his head as everyone else dispersed, flashlight beams bright against the blue-black night.
The golf carts pulled out of the driveway, each turning a different direction, and a second later, they were gone.
“You can go back to the house,” Russell said, nodding at the gates. They were starting to close, with the W and the S coming closer together—but slowly, taking their time. “I didn’t… I mean, I can go on my own.”
“No, I want to help.” And I did—even if that meant having to walk around with Russell.
“Okay,” Russell said. The flashlight beams of his family were fading as they started to cover more ground, getting farther away from us. If you squinted, it was almost like we were back in Jesse—when it felt like we were the only two people on Earth. When it felt like we had all the time in the world.
“Which way?”
Russell pointed, and we started walking. “This is a gated neighborhood. So hopefully he’s just on the street, or in someone’s yard, and hasn’t made it onto the main roads.”
I nodded, pressing my lips together as I swung my flashlight beam over the hedges. I was determined not to speak first. Sometimes we’d hear faint calls of “Andy!” but aside from that, it was just Russell and me, walking along without speaking.
But after a few minutes of silent walking—and no dog in sight—my curiosity got the better of me. “So are these other houses… like your dad’s?”
“I guess,” Russell said, glancing over at me. “Why?”
“I was just wondering why we hadn’t—you know—seen any.” There would occasionally be a house I could see, set way back from the road. But mostly it was just fences or high hedges or gates.
“Oh. Yeah, they’re all pretty big. And people around here really like their privacy.”
I turned my flashlight to the left side of the road, and Russell took the right. “Andy!”
“Andy!” Russell called. We both stopped, listening. I was straining my ears for the sound of a small terrier barreling toward us, but when nothing came, we started moving again.
“He does this a lot,” Russell said, after we’d been walking in silence for a while.
“Runs away?”
“Yeah. My dad rescued him a few months ago, and Andy’s been trying to escape ever since. He’s brought trainers in, specialists, dog behavioralists—nobody can seem to get him to stop. Tidbit never goes anywhere, so my dad wasn’t prepared for this.”
I nodded—it was almost impossible to imagine Tidbit running away. Or running, period.
“And usually he doesn’t do this more than once a day. But I guess he saw his chance.”
“Has he ever come back on his own? When he’s run away before?”
“No. We’ve always found him. And he always seems really happy to see us, and thrilled to be back home again. It’s almost like he wants his freedom, but then gets turned around and can’t find his way back.”
“It seems like he’s got a pretty good setup at your dad’s. You wouldn’t think he’d want to run away from all that.”
“I guess if someone wants to leave, you can’t convince them otherwise. Even if they’re running away from something pretty great. Anyway, after three escape attempts, my dad changed the dog’s name.”
“To Andy?” Russell nodded. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, his full name is Andy Dog-fresne.”
It took me a moment, but then it clicked into place. “From The Shawshank Redemption?” I asked, and he nodded again. “My dad would love that. It’s his favorite movie.”
“My dad’s, too.”
“Really?”
“I think it’s every dad’s favorite movie.”
“I know, I just…”
“He is just a dad,” Russell said quietly after a few moments, like he’d understood what I’d been thinking. “I mean, despite…” He made a vague gesture, like it could encompass all of it—the modern art, the Grammys, the helicopter, the mansion. He sighed. “I know it can be a lot.”
“Is that why?” I stopped walking and turned to him, lowering my flashlight so it made a small circle of light on the pavement. Russell stopped too.
“Why—what?”
“Why you lied to me.” I could hear the hurt running through my voice like a crack. “Why you didn’t tell me about him, or who you really were, or any of it.”
Russell let out a shaky breath and looked down at the ground. “I think at first I just wanted… to not have to go into all of it. To not have to be Wylie Sanders’s son, just for a little bit. When people find out, they look at you different, even if they don’t mean to. And then when I thought you might—like me—” He glanced up for a second, meeting my eye before looking away again. “I was worried that if you found out, it might change things.”
“It wouldn’t have.”
“But it did.”
“Yeah, because you’d been lying to me about it! If you’d just told me from the beginning—”
“You think it would have been the same?” Russell raised his eyebrows at me. “Really?”
I opened my mouth to reply yes, absolutely, but then stopped. If I’d known the cute boy at the bus station was the son of a rock star, it would have changed things. I would have been dazzled by it. And it would have made everything a little more about his dad, and a little less about him. “Well—I certainly wouldn’t have talked about your dad so much, if I’d known.”
“I actually liked hearing you talk about the music. What you really thought. Most people don’t tell me things like that. At least not to my face.”
“Just behind your back?”
Russell laughed at that, and I felt myself fighting a laugh of my own as I tried to sort out what I was feeling. I had been so angry with him. And it wasn’t like that had all gone away. It was more like a burn that had faded to a dull ache—you can still feel the pulse of it, you still know it’s there, but it’s no longer the only thing you can think about.
Russell looked at me, right in my eyes, and took a deep breath. “I really am sorry, Darcy. About the phone—about not telling you the truth. About lying. About all of it.”
I nodded, finally letting myself take this in. I knew that he meant it. And most of all, I finally got that Russell not telling me the truth really wasn’t about me at all. It was about him.
And also, it’s what you were doing too, Didi pointed out.
I wasn’t about to tell Russell it was okay—because I didn’t think it was. But I wasn’t going to keep being mad at him about it, holding on to this, doing what I always did—deciding something once and never changing my mind. “I know you’re sorry,” I finally said. “Thank you for saying it.”
“Okay.” Russell gave me a half smile and I gave him a nod back. It felt like a beginning—like the first piece of a rope bridge across the canyon that divided us.
“Okay.” I started walking again and lifted my flashlight, sweeping it across the road.
“Do you think we could—start over?”
I shook my head. Even though I understood a little better now where Russell was coming from, I couldn’t just forget everything that had come before. “I don’t think so. I—” I stopped short. I’d just seen something run past my flashlight beam—a brown-and-white blur. “Did you see that?”
Russell nodded. “Andy!”
We started to run, sprinting across the road, both of us yelling for the dog who seemed to be gaining more ground than I would have thought possible in such a short time.
“ANDY!” Russell bellowed, the loudest I’d yet heard him. It seemed to work—Andy stopped in the middle of the road and looked back at us. He was still probably ten feet away, but he was there—the dog that everyone was looking for, just a few steps away, in the flesh. In the fur? Either way, he was there—not eaten by a coyote, not halfway to Reno—within our grasp.
Andy’s tail was wagging, and he started to walk across the road toward us. “Good boy,” Russell said, and I could hear the relief in his voice, exactly the same as I was currently feeling. “C’mere. I’ve got you.” Andy was trotting toward Russell—just as headlights swept across the road, followed by a car barreling down it.
Russell darted toward the dog, but I stayed frozen in my spot on the other side. I closed my eyes tight, my heart hammering hard as I braced myself for the worst—a squeal of brakes, a frightened doggy yelp, blood on the asphalt.
“Darcy?” I opened my eyes—the car was gone, and so was Andy.
“Is he…?”
“It’s okay,” Russell said, starting to run, gesturing for me to follow. “He ran out of the way in time—I don’t want to lose him again.”
“Right.” I was suddenly embarrassed by the way that I’d reacted when things had gotten scary. I hadn’t helped or even been brave enough to watch—I’d just closed my eyes and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.
I dashed across the road, and then started sprinting full-out, trying to catch up with Russell, hoping I hadn’t just cost us precious time.
“There,” Russell said, sounding out of breath as we approached the gates of a mansion. They were open slightly—it didn’t look like this was intentional, more like they hadn’t latched properly—and I saw Andy run through and tear across the pristine lawn.
“Are we allowed to do this?” I asked as Russell squeezed through the gap in the gates and I took a step closer to follow. “Is it trespassing?”
“I think that it’s okay in certain circumstances. In emergencies. Right?”
I wasn’t sure about this—but I followed him through the gates. I was doing my best to look for the dog, but I was honestly distracted by the house in front of me. It made Wylie’s house—which up until now was the biggest house I’d ever seen—look puny. There were a number of white marble statues placed across the lawn, but nothing as singular and striking as the balloon dog. “Who lives here?”
“Um. Well. You know Wyoming?”
“Yes?”
“This guy owns most of it.”
“What?”
“There!” Russell pointed across the lawn, and I saw Andy sniffing around a particularly large white marble statue—it looked almost like it was a copy of a Rodin. And then I realized a moment later, my stomach plunging, that it probably was a Rodin. “I’m going to grab him,” Russell said, pocketing his flashlight as he started to edge to the other side of the statue. “Keep him distracted.”
“Okay,” I said, even as I was internally screaming How?!
“Great.”
“Andy,” I called softly. The dog didn’t look up, just continued sniffing, and I wondered if I’d been too quiet. I shot a glance at the house. I was all too aware that we were standing on someone else’s private property. And I was sure, with a house this large, there were certainly cameras everywhere, possibly filming us right now. I saw Russell, crouching a little, come around the back of the statue.
Just as he did this, Andy’s sniffing seemed to grow more focused, and I got a bad feeling. But I was too far away to stop him, and so was Russell, and as I watched in horror, the dog lifted his leg against the white marble. “No! Andy!” I hissed, but I was too far away—and too late—to stop what was already happening.
A second later, probably because there was a dog peeing on a Rodin—lights snapped on all over the property, making everything daylight-bright. Russell and I froze—even the dog seemed to freeze.
Russell reached out and grabbed him, and we both ran for the gate, which was slowly starting to close. If it shut before we could get through, we would be trapped in here and have to explain for the second time tonight why we were trespassing. Russell gestured for me to go through first, and he followed with the dog a second later, just as the gate closed behind us with a solid thunk.
Russell tucked Andy under his arm like a football, and without needing to discuss it first, we both started running. We didn’t stop until we’d been running for a good five minutes. When we finally did slow down, my mouth was dry and I had a stitch in my side—but I was pretty sure that nobody was giving chase.
“Think we’re okay?” I glanced behind us. I’d been following Russell’s lead as he ducked down little winding side streets, so I was just hoping he knew how to get back home.
“Yeah, I think we’re in the clear.”
We slowed down, both of us out of breath. Andy didn’t seem disappointed that his adventure was over—his tail wagged joyfully as he stretched up to lick Russell’s face enthusiastically. “That was not a good boy,” Russell said, lifting up the dog, but he was smiling at him. “You can’t run off like that! I was so worried!” Andy’s tail wagged even harder, and Russell laughed.
He held out Andy to me. “Do you mind? I want to text the family thread and let everyone know we’ve found him.”
“Sure.” I dropped the flashlight into the pocket of the sweatpants and took a step closer. I reached out for the dog, making sure to wrap my finger around his collar—blue stripes, a gold engraved disc hanging from it. I rubbed my hand over Andy’s back, even as I made sure I had a firm grip on his collar. “I’ve got my eye on you,” I assured the terrier. He just snuggled closer, his warm doggy breath on my neck.
“Great,” Russell said as he looked down at his phone, which was buzzing and lighting up with texts. “Everyone knows and is heading back to the house.”
“Are they all so happy?”
“Yeah.” Then he frowned at his phone. “Well, except Wallace and Connor. It seems they had a bet on who would find Andy first and Connor is not happy he lost. Apparently, his money was on Montana.” His phone buzzed again. “If we want to drop a pin, Kendrick or Bella will come pick us up. Or we could walk—it’s probably about ten minutes.”
“I don’t mind walking. Unless you—”
“Walking is great,” he said with a smile. He pocketed his phone and gestured toward the dog. “Want me to—?”
“I’m okay. I might give him to you in a little bit.”
“Sounds good. We’re heading this way.”
I looked at Russell over the dog and gave him a tentative smile. “In that case—lead on.”