Creature Discomforts

there was nothing new about it! But at the time, instead of feeling appropriately relieved to discover that the core of my being was intact, I fell prey to mental hypochondria: Ridiculous though it now seems, a lifelong sign of God’s grace seemed to represent the unhappy effect of a brain injury. Also, I was frightened. And preoccupied with arsenic.
    All this is to excuse my inability to give an entirely reliable and coherent account of the evening. If you’ve ever looked in a looking glass at yourself looking in a looking glass and so forth forever and ever, you won’t require my apology. Instead of reflections of reflections of reflections, of course, I have recollections of recollections of recollections. Memory: It’s all done with mirrors.
    Remarkably enough, I remember why I decided to accept Gabrielle’s invitation. The reason was fear. Was I in real danger? If so, my best course must be to carry on as usual, to the extent that I could guess what usual was. If I holed up in the guest cottage, I was certain to make no progress. Only by venturing out did I have a chance of discovering what it was that frightened me. Furthermore, the persistent fear evidently disinterred my buried knowledge of predators and prey. If I screamed, ran, flailed around, and revealed my injuries, I’d mark myself as an easy victim. Flight invited attack. The alternative to flight was fight. But fight what? Or whom? What was the conflict? And which side was I on? I might not know whose human side I was on, but the dogs, miraculously, my dogs, were as strong as I was weak. I was on their side, and they would stay at mine. I dismissed the worrisome thought that despite the presence of the dogs, something terrible had happened to me today. My fall, I told myself, had been an accident. I could have been running from something. I could just have tripped.
    I made myself as presentable as I could. The scratches on my face and the bruises on my right hand were impossible to disguise, but a pair of almost-new jeans, a long-sleeved blouse, and a purple fleece pullover covered the remainder of the damage. As the dogs and I walked along the well-worn road, I decided that the best camouflage for my mental bruising would be pleasant, neutral silence. “We’ll keep our eyes and ears open,” I told Kimi and Rowdy, “and our mouths shut.” The resolution should have sounded familiar. It embodied the advice I was always giving myself and other people about how to avoid trouble in the sometimes gossipy and always hypersensitive atmosphere of a dog show. My memory of the context had, however, vanished. I’d also forgotten that having sworn not to utter a word, I always ended up chattering at least as much as everyone else at a show.
    According to the map Gabrielle Beamon had sketched on the sheet of directions, the dirt road that ran past the guest cottage soon ended at her house, which sat on a small peninsula that jutted into what she had marked as Frenchman Bay. As the map had promised, we quickly reached Gabrielle’s house, a sprawling three-story version of the yellow clapboard guest cottage. Like the cottage, it had green shutters and trim. The road ended at a wide parking area at the back of the house. Five or six SUVs were parked there. The doors of a two-car garage were closed. Gabrielle’s white Volvo had been pulled onto the rough lawn near the back door of the house. What I noticed now was that each of the Volvo’s headlights had its own tiny windshield wiper. Headlight wiper? That’s understated luxury for you: a minor feature no one needs and most people can’t even name. There was nothing flashy about the house, either. It probably had its original kitchen, old baths, and a mere ten or fifteen other rooms. Location, location! Prime. On Mount Desert Island. Smack on Frenchman Bay. On how many totally private acres? With how many zillion feet of deep-water frontage? Abutting conservation land, too: the Beamon Reservation.
    “This lady,” I said under my breath to the dogs, “is a class act.” It was a stupid thing to say. I mean, Rowdy and Kimi were the ultimate class act. The misfit was...
    “Holly! Oh, wonderful! You have brought the dogs.” Gabrielle sailed out the back door. She wore old jeans and boating shoes. The source of the nautical effect was a loose off-white muslin blouse trimmed with a few unobtrusive ruffles. At first glance, I mistook the ruffles for something they were not, namely, lace. Old lace. As in