Ridgeline: Part Eighteen: What She Carries

Fragments.

Scott's face in the hospital hallway — not the 6:30 face, not the flat emptied face of a man who'd driven a truck for twelve hours. A different face. A face she'd never seen and couldn't have pictured and didn't want to see again. He came through the curtain and his mouth was working and no words were coming out and his hands reached for her and the hands were shaking and the face was the face she hadn't been able to imagine on the trail and now that she could see it she understood why the imagination had failed. The face wasn't one expression. It was several, running simultaneously — the muscles trying to produce a response to information the brain couldn't organize into a single category.

He held her hand. The left one — the swollen one, the one she couldn't feel. He held it the way you hold something that might break. She let him hold it. She couldn't feel it.

Stitches. Nineteen in the forearm. The doctor pulling the thread through the wound edges while Dana watched from a distance that wasn't physical — the needle going in, the thread following, the skin closing, the procedure happening to a body that was hers and wasn't hers and the watching was the same watching from the ranger's voice, the same lag, the words and the actions arriving from somewhere far away. Eight stitches in the ribs. She felt those. The local anesthetic had difficulty finding the tissue — the area too swollen, too damaged, the needle having to search for the right depth. She held Bree while they stitched her ribs. She'd refused to put Bree down. The nurses had looked at each other and let her hold the baby and stitched around the holding.

The police interview. Two officers. The older one asked the questions — when, where, describe the man, describe the weapon, how did you get to the trail, was anyone with you. The younger one wrote. The older one's face maintained the professional neutral throughout — the expression of a person trained to hear these things without reacting. But at one point — when Dana described the sawhorses, the closed trail, the Facebook post — the older officer's pen paused. Not stopped. Paused. A half-second where the pen wasn't moving and the face wasn't neutral and the expression underneath the neutral was the expression of a person who knows the system was supposed to prevent this and the system didn't prevent this and the knowing is a professional burden the officer will carry out of the room and into the car and home.

The pen moved again. The face recovered. The questions continued.

The news report. She saw it from the hospital bed — the television mounted on the wall, the volume low, the remote on the tray table. The segment was ninety seconds. It ran between coverage of the protests downtown and the daily COVID numbers — the death toll, the curve, the governor's press conference. Ninety seconds.

A man had been found dead on a trail in Lakemont. Apparent bear attack. The man was identified as Keith Burklow, 38, of Kernersville. A woman and her infant daughter had also been found on the trail, both hospitalized with injuries consistent with an assault. The woman's dog had been recovered from the scene and transported to the county animal shelter.

Keith Burklow. The name was ordinary. A name from a phone book, from a mailbox, from a church directory in a town twenty minutes up Route 68. The name of a man who lived in a house and drove a car and went to a hardware store and bought a cord. The ordinariness of the name was the last thing the television gave her before the segment ended and the anchor moved to the COVID numbers and the death toll ticker ran along the bottom of the screen.

The woman's dog. They'd said the dog was hers. It wasn't hers. It was a stray — abandoned, starving, running on ghost-memory and a thrum in its chest. They didn't know that. They saw a woman and a dog and drew the line between them and the line they drew was simpler than the line that existed.

The shelter was on the county road past the Food Lion where she'd seen the patrol car. She drove the Civic. Scott had wanted to drive. She'd said no. The Civic smelled the same — the car seat in the back, the Pine-Sol from the floor mats, the Palm Sunday cross hanging from the mirror, dried to brown lace. The cross swayed when she turned into the lot.

The building was cinderblock. The smell inside was bleach and fur and the undertone of animals in small spaces. A woman at the desk asked her name and checked a list and led her down a hallway with kennels on both sides, the dogs in the kennels barking and pressing against the wire, the sound building as they walked, the woman talking — explaining the injuries, the treatment, the medications, the prognosis — and Dana heard the words the way she'd heard the ranger's words, from a distance that wasn't physical.

The kennel at the end. The last one on the left.

The dog was lying on a blanket. The cone — the plastic Elizabethan collar — was around its neck, the edges scratched where the dog had tried to reach its own flank. The left side was bandaged from shoulder to hip, the white gauze bright against the brindle. The missing ear was covered with a patch of surgical tape. The muzzle scar was the same. The body was the same body that had been on her legs in the gray light — but smaller still, the weight loss visible in the shoulders and the hips, the bones showing through the coat the way the ribs had shown through on the trail.

Dana crouched.

The dog lifted its head. The remaining ear rotated — forward, toward the wire, toward the crouch. The nose worked the air. Dana could see the nostrils flaring, the rapid intake, the scent-processing that she'd felt against her palm in the dark when the dog pressed its nose into her hand. The nose found her before the eye did. The scent arriving before the sight, the way it had on the trail, the way it always would.

The tail moved. Not a wag — the tail didn't wag, the muscles too damaged or too depleted for the full gesture. A lift. A partial rise from the blanket, the tail coming up an inch and holding, the ghost of the greeting-sequence that the dog's body remembered from the inside-place and from the before-time and from whatever the dog had been before the night. The lift held for two seconds and the tail settled and the ghost was gone and the nose moved toward the wire.

Dana put her hand against the kennel door.

The dog's nose pressed against her fingers through the wire. The same pressure from the trail — the warm, wet contact, the nose reading the skin, the breath against her knuckles. She could feel the dog's exhalation through the mesh, hot, steady, the same breath that had vibrated against her spine for hours in the dark.

The dog flinched.

The shoulders bunching. The weight shifting. The body compressing around its center — the same gesture from the first time the dog had stepped onto the trail and Dana had stood up and the dog had pulled back. The flinch. The first gesture. And then: the hold. The flinch peaking and not continuing, the body stopping its contraction, the nose staying against her fingers through the wire, the contact maintained, the flinch resolving into presence.

Flinch and hold. The first gesture she'd witnessed. The last.

She signed the papers at the front desk. The woman asked what she wanted to name it. Dana said she didn't know yet. The woman wrote "Mercer" on the intake form — Dana's last name — and a dash where the dog's name would go.

Weeks later.

The porch. The apartment was the same apartment — the same walls, the same kitchen, the same bedroom where the crib stood next to the bed Dana shared with Scott. But the porch was different because Dana was different and the porch was where the different version of her sat in the evenings when the light went long..

The dog lay against her leg. Scarred — the left flank a topography of healed tissue, the fur growing back in patches around the ridges where the claws had gone deepest. Limping — the rear leg functional but permanent, the limp a condition the vet said would not resolve. One-eared — the left side of the skull smooth where the surgery had cleaned and closed what the trail had opened. The cone was gone. The bandages were gone. The dog was what the dog was going to be from now on.

It flinched in its sleep. The shoulders bunching against her calf, the body compressing and releasing, the flinch a reflex the sleeping brain ran without the waking brain's permission. Dana put her hand on its side. "Easy, Roscoe." The flinch eased. The body settled deeper against her leg.

Bree was in her arms. Four months and three weeks. The blue had left the lips, the fingertips, the earlobes. The color was back — the pink of circulation, the flush of a body getting what it needs. Bree's hand was wrapped around Dana's index finger, the grip strong, the fingers working, all five of them.

Scott was inside. Making dinner. She could hear him through the screen door — the cabinet closing, the faucet running, the sound of a man doing a thing he'd done a thousand times in a kitchen he'd stood in a thousand times. He hadn't asked about the trail. He hadn't asked about leaving. She hadn't told him. The confession she'd made to a dog in the dark was still in the dark, absorbed, carried. The departure she'd been practicing had not been cancelled. It had been set down.

The dog's remaining ear flicked. A sound from the tree line — a rustle, a branch, something moving in the brush at the edge of the yard. The ear rotated toward the sound. Tracked it. The body tensed for a half-second against Dana's leg, the muscles firing the old program, the hackles starting to rise along the spine. Then: dismissal. The ear settled. The hackles flattened. The body pressed deeper against her calf and the breathing slowed and the eye — the one facing Dana — closed.

Bree's hand tightened on her finger. The grip automatic, the reflex of a body that holds what it's given. Dana held the finger still and let the grip tighten and sat on the porch with her daughter in her arms and the dog against her leg and the trail visible through the trees and the knowing — not the scars but the knowing — of what the night contained, of what she was capable of carrying, of what the world contains, of the thought she was carrying when the knife found her.

The light went long across the grass and turned gold. The dog breathed against her leg.

She sat with what she carried. In her mind, the trail was right there.  

~End~