Gaits of Heaven

probably have slept it off, and no one would’ve known. But what he did was go to Peter’s office. Someone found him there, on the front porch.”
    “Leah,” I said. “Leah found him. She didn’t know who it was, but it must’ve been Wyeth.”
    “What a weird coincidence.”
    “Not really. Peter York’s office must be right near here.”
    “It is.”
    “She’d taken Kimi for an early run, and she was on her way back when she saw someone curled up on a porch. She stopped to see whether he was okay, and when she couldn’t get him to wake up, she called an ambulance.”
    “He’s at Mount Auburn. This really was a gesture. To kill yourself with Valium, you have to take it with alcohol, maybe, or something else, and then fall asleep with your face in a pillow and suffocate. But the meaning of the suicide gesture is very serious, of course. Anyway, this is a heads-up. First of all, let Caprice know. And you need to be aware that Peter is knocking himself out to avoid having this boy hospitalized long term. I've been on the phone with Frank Farmer.”
    “I haven’t seen Frank for a few months,” I said. “The last time I saw him, one of his dogs went Best of Breed at—“
    “This is not about dog shows!”
    “I know that.”
    “Look, I have a patient any minute. Frank has agreed to meet with everyone on Thursday evening. This’ll be at Ted Green’s. Seven o’clock. You and Caprice will need to be there.”
    My Thursday evenings are sacred to dog training, but I knew better than to say so and, in fact, didn’t even want to say so. “We’ll be there,” I said. “Both of us. But Rita, there’s just one thing you might—”
    “My patient’s here. I’ve got to go. I’ll be at the meeting, too. Frank has roped me in. Holly, I’ve really got to go.” What I didn’t have a chance to say concerned Frank Farmer—well, not so much Frank himself as his basenjis. The basenji is, in my opinion, a short-haired, pint-sized African malamute, which is to say, a breed with a wild streak, intelligent, alert, energetic, and, as is said euphemistically, challenging to train for the obedience ring. Few handlers rise to the challenge of showing basenjis in obedience, and it’s probably an indication of the splendid state of Frank’s mental health that he was not among those few. He had shown dogs for ages, but strictly in conformation, where dogs are not judged on the extent to which they obey their handlers’ commands, which in the case of basenjis as well as Shiba Inus, for example, and, indeed, Alaskan malamutes, tends to be not at all. Furthermore, in saying that Frank showed his basenjis, I do not mean that he handled them himself in the breed ring; he used professional handlers. And it was a good thing, too, because his dogs never listened to a single word Frank said and, in their daily lives with Frank, were always flying around all over his house and bouncing off people. They didn’t bark. Basenjis don’t, or not exactly. But they sure can yodel. And Frank’s did. They were, however, perfectly beautiful and won a lot, deservedly so, and also had excellent temperaments, so Frank didn’t care how wild they were, and they were, after all, his dogs. Anyway, what I didn’t have a chance to mention to Rita was that although Frank was a legendary clinician, a genius with human beings, he was not, according to my own observations, any kind of expert in bringing a pack of wild creatures to heel. Rita would have dismissed my remarks anyway, and as it turned out, the point I’d have tried to make didn’t matter at all.
    But I am leaping ahead of myself. It wasn’t yet Thursday, the day of the great meeting of the Brainard-Green network, but Wednesday, when it was still being planned. I intended to tell Caprice about the meeting, but when she returned home at two in the afternoon, she already knew about it. After doing her tutoring, she’d kept an appointment with her therapist, Missy Zinn, who was planning to attend and who considered it vital that Caprice be there.
    “I hate the whole idea,” Caprice said. “I hate it!”
    For someone whose mother had just died, Caprice had, I thought, been peculiarly self-contained. When my own mother died, I cried for days. For weeks afterward, waves of grief would roll over me, and I’d again be in tears. My father had been in no condition to help me. As always, I had turned to our dogs, who needed me as much as I needed them. The joy and energy had gone