Dear Life

she didn’t seem small enough to fit under Caro’s coat. I don’t know how Caro managed to do it. Not once but twice. She hid the dog under her coat on the school bus, and then, instead of going straight to school, she took Blitzee back to our old house in town, which was less than a block away. That was where my father found the dog, on the winter porch, which was not locked, when he came home for his solitary lunch. There was great surprise that she had got there, found her way home like a dog in a story.Caro made the biggest fuss, and claimed not to have seen the dog at all that morning. But then she made the mistake of trying it again, maybe a week later, and this time, though nobody on the bus or at school suspected her, our mother did.
    I can’t remember if our father brought Blitzee back to us. I can’t imagine him in the trailer or at the door of the trailer or even on the road to it. Maybe Neal went to the house in town and picked her up. Not that that’s any easier to imagine.
    If I’ve made it sound as though Caro was unhappy or scheming all the time, that isn’t the truth. As I’ve said, she did try to make me talk about things, at night in bed, but she wasn’t constantly airing grievances. It wasn’t her nature to be sulky. She was far too keen on making a good impression. She liked people to like her; she liked to stir up the air in a room with the promise of something you could even call merriment. She thought more about that than I did.
    She was the one who most took after our mother, I think now.
    There must have been some probing about what she’d done with the dog. I think I can remember some of it.
    “I did it for a trick.”
    “Do you want to go and live with your father?”
    I believe that was asked, and I believe she said no.
    I didn’t ask her anything. What she had done didn’t seem strange to me. That’s probably how it is with younger children—nothing that the strangely powerful older child does seems out of the ordinary.
    Our mail was deposited in a tin box on a post, down by the road. My mother and I would walk there every day,unless it was particularly stormy, to see what had been left for us. We did this after I got up from my nap. Sometimes it was the only time we went outside all day. In the morning, we watched children’s television shows—or she read while I watched. (She had not given up reading for very long.) We heated up some canned soup for lunch, then I went down for my nap while she read some more. She was quite big with the baby now and it stirred around in her stomach, so that I could feel it. Its name was going to be Brandy—already was Brandy—whether it was a boy or a girl.
    One day when we were going down the lane for the mail, and were in fact not far from the box, my mother stopped and stood quite still.
    “Quiet,” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word and wasn’t even playing the shuffling game with my boots in the snow.
    “I was being quiet,” I said.
    “Shush. Turn around.”
    “But we didn’t get the mail.”
    “Never mind. Just walk.”
    Then I noticed that Blitzee, who was always with us, just behind or ahead of us, wasn’t there anymore. Another dog was, on the opposite side of the road, a few feet from the mailbox.
    My mother phoned the theater as soon as we got home and let in Blitzee, who was waiting for us. Nobody answered. She phoned the school and asked someone to tell the bus driver to drive Caro up to the door. It turned out that the driver couldn’t do that, because it had snowed since Neal last plowed the lane, but he—the driver—did watch until she got to the house. There was no wolf to be seen by that time.
    Neal was of the opinion that there never had been one. And if there had been, he said, it would have been no danger to us, weak as it was probably from hibernation.
    Caro said that wolves did not hibernate. “We learned about them in school.”
    Our mother wanted Neal to get a gun.
    “You think I’m going to get a gun and go and shoot a goddam poor mother wolf who has probably got a bunch of babies back in the bush and is just trying to protect them, the way you’re trying to protect yours?” he said quietly.
    Caro said, “Only two. They only have two at a time.”
    “Okay, okay. I’m talking to your mother.”
    “You don’t know that,” my mother said. “You don’t know if it’s got hungry cubs or anything.”
    I had never thought she’d talk to him like that.
    He said, “Easy. Easy.