34. The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
34
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
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It was after midnight when a town car pulled into the campsite. The lights were on in the gatehouse because we’d called everyone, and in self-defense, the campsite people had sent an attendant to help us.
He hadn’t been able to do anything either.
The police didn’t want to hear about it.
Animal control wouldn’t even answer the phone.
I flashed the headlights of the BFT (I was warming up there) to let her driver know where we were, and then I got out of the truck to wait impatiently.
The town car had barely stopped rolling when she flew out of the back and into my arms.
“Archer, I’m so sorry. No sign of her yet?”
I shook my head, trying to hide the fact that her arrival had so relieved me that I was now crying like an asshole. I held her tight so she couldn’t see my eyes .
Her driver got out of his car. “Ma’am, do you want me to stay?”
“No,” I said, sudden determination drying my eyes. “She’ll ride with us now.” Then I thought to check with her. “That okay with you, O’Connor?”
I’d stupidly caught her eye, and she reached up and brushed wetness from my cheek with her thumb, her cupping hand blissfully warm against my face. “That’s okay with me. Let me get my bag.”
Ian and Mal emerged from the tent to say hello, and she hugged both of them. It wasn’t just me she would hug, then? I tried to snuff out my jealousy.
We sat huddled at the picnic table, mere feet away from the divot in the ground where Charlotte had lain just that afternoon. Where the hell was she? Lost, afraid, frozen, trapped somewhere, dead? How would I ever know?
“So what happened?” O’Connor asked.
“Well,” Mal said, “we’ve called ourselves hoarse. We’ve walked through the woods, but we don’t want to get lost either. Ian and I drove around the local roads looking, but there’s no sign of her.”
O’Connor pulled out her phone and took her glove off. “I wanted to ask you before I did it—shall I tell my followers to watch for her? I have fewer than a million followers in Ohio, but it still might help?”
“Do it!” I grabbed for her arm. “Ask them to help us!”
She checked with Ian and Mal, who both nodded, and then she typed on her phone. “I’m including a photo of Charlotte,” she said, her thumbs flying on the screen, “but most of my followers should know what she looks like by now. You should post on your website, too, just in case.”
“Fuck,” Ian said. “I’ll call Nicky. She’ll be so glad of some way to help.”
Within moments of O’Connor’s posts, replies began pinging in from all over the country. Most were just messages of hope and comfort, but a few followers said they’d call friends in Ohio, and a woman in Memphis said she’d told her childhood best friend to get into her car and start driving around the Toledo area. None of it was practical; all of it was soothing.
We sat outside for the entire night, sometimes ducking into the truck or the tent to warm up, but mostly waiting in the frozen air for the sun. I felt guilty every time I got warm. How would my dog get warm?
“I should have trained her,” I said at about three in the morning. “Nicky tried to tell me.”
“She told all of us,” Ian said, but I shook him off.
“She’s my responsibility. That’s my dog, and I fucked up.” Mal and Ian were smart enough to remain silent. They knew she was my dog. They knew I’d fucked up. “If she comes back?—”
“ When she comes back,” O’Connor said staunchly. She was tucked into my side, her mitten in my gloved hand.
“When she comes back,” I repeated, “we’re going to get trained. We’ll start with ‘come’ and go from there.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mal said, ducking his head into his collar. “We’ll help.”
“Yep,” Ian said.
She didn’t have a down coat. She didn’t have heavy socks. She didn’t have a way to warm up for a few minutes. If she was alive, then she was shivering. Because I hadn’t cared enough to take good care of her.
“She’s a large dog,” O’Connor said. I found that she was watching me. “She has more body heat than a small dog. She’ll be okay.”
“She’s mostly leg. You said it yourself. She doesn’t have a cold-weather coat. Remember when you said that?”
O’Connor put her head on my shoulder. “Stop thinking about it. The sun will be up in forty-five minutes, and then we’ll hike every foot of this forest to find her.”
Yes, we would. Every goddamned foot.
“Look,” Mal said. “I can see the silhouette of the trees against the sky. It won’t be long now.”
I got up to pace again. What the hell was taking the sun so fucking long?
Mal stomped his feet. We were all doing it, trying to warm them up. O’Connor checked her phone again, scrolling through the messages on our post.
Then she sat up, and my heart exploded. “What?”
“Look!” She was at my side, showing me her phone. “A farmer on Route 20 saw something large and black in his field!”
“Where’s Route 20?” I scrambled for my phone and pulled up the map.
“It was black, though,” Mal said cautiously.
“There’s barely any light to see at all. A dark gray dog would look black! Where on Route 20? It goes for miles!”
“Hang on, hang on—” O’Connor was typing. We all waited, filled with anxiety. The tension settled in my bladder. Surely if I peed, I could get rid of this frantic anxiety?
The wait was fucking endless. Behind my stress was painful exhaustion. Come on. Tell me. Tell me.
“Here!” O’Connor screamed. “Here it is! Get in the truck!”
There was no question that one of us would wait to see if Charlotte came back to the campsite by herself; we were all sure the farmer had seen my dog, and we all got into the BFT.
“Turn left out the gate, and we go until we hit Bryan Trucking, and then another left. God, this is nine miles away. Could she have gotten that far overnight? Maybe it’s not her?”
“It’s her.” My hands were ice on the steering wheel. My muscles were primed. I was ready to fight someone for my dog.
We drove and drove and drove. The sun came up. The headlights no longer made any difference. And still we drove .
I followed O’Connor’s directions silently, cursing the delay with screams that never made it out of my mouth.
More driving. The light coming up. The countryside bare and chilled.
We came around a curve.
And there she was. Charlotte.
She was curled up on the dead winter grass at the side of a long dirt road. She lifted her head when we came into view and got to her feet, her tail wagging.
I burst into tears when I got my arms around her neck, and she licked me. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, I’m so sorry.” The others arrived to cluster around Char. “Check her,” I said through my sobs. “Is she okay?”
“She’s good, aren’t you, baby?” Mal ran his hands over her torso and tail. Ian and O’Connor took turns raising her feet to check her pads. “She’s filthy, though. Did you sleep in a nest of pine needles, girl? Good girl. Good puppy!”
When I finally cleared my eyes, I saw that it didn’t matter that I was sobbing like a baby. We all were. No one could see clearly.
Without letting go of Char, I rested my forehead against O’Connor’s hair. “Tell them,” I said. “Tell them we found her. Tell them thank you.”
She turned until she found me—she happened to find my neck—and pressed a kiss onto my bare skin. “I’ll do it right now. Thank god.”
Thank god. Thank god. It resonated in my soul. It wasn’t until later that I saw the photo O’Connor posted with her message to her followers: the three members of Aftermath, arms slung around shoulders, grouped around the fourth member—filthy and bleeding from a small cut on her back foot, but alive and happy.
“Let’s find this girl a vet and make sure she’s okay,” I said, finally rising to my feet. I had the leash in my hand and clipped into her collar with an internal vow that I would never let her get lost again. “And then we find a dog trainer.”
“Then we get some breakfast,” Mal corrected me.
“And sleep for a while,” Ian added.
“And then the trainer. I’ll find one for you.” O’Connor finished her post, and I stopped the group.
“Hey—that farmer. Would he like an impromptu concert in his field? We could set up Mal’s drums in the truck bed, and Ian and I could stand on the roof of the cab?”
She laughed and promised to offer.
The vet in Montpelier bandaged Charlotte’s paw in neon-pink vet wrap and made sure she was up to date on her inoculations. We left with antibiotics and a spare roll of the wrap so we could bathe her and then rewrap the wound. Then we grabbed takeout from a diner because none of us could bear to leave Char in the truck while we ate.
The drive back to the campsite took no time at all, which was funny. It had taken several years to cross that distance on the way out.
We crowded into the tent, and no one said a word when O’Connor lay down with me. I opened my sleeping bag to cover us like a quilt, which wasn’t as warm, but with five bodies and the heater going in the three-man tent (and Charlotte wedged between O’Connor and Mal, where I could touch her with the brush of a finger), I had not a single complaint.
O’Connor tucked into my side, her head on my chest, like she’d never left. I had never before had such a restful sleep.
We woke up as the sky was darkening again, and I found that third verse was already finished and ready, along with a fourth verse.
The question was . . . should I sing it for O’Connor?