Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

sister’s tongue touch yours nowadays? Probably not. Not if her husband was maybe running around doing God knows what with God knows whom.
    The bitch wore black, a short, slinky thing that went in and out wherever she did. Her hair was long and straight, shimmering where the light hit it, moving as gracefully as seaweed in the ocean. I hated her on sight.
    But what could I do about this? Tell my sister? Mightn’t she simply kill the messenger?
    Not tell her? Then what?
    Confront my brother-in-law? And say what? Who was I supposed to be, the sex police?
    Was this even what it appeared to be? And if it was, mightn’t it blow over without Lili getting hurt?
    Without Lili getting hurt, I thought. How could she not get hurt, even if the thing was a one-night-stand? Doesn’t infidelity, even the briefest sort, always damage a relationship? Even if Lillian never found out, wouldn’t the very fact of it change everything? Forever.

10

Something Was Different

    WHEN I GOT home, I made two urgent phone calls. Then I sat in the garden with Dashiell until it was time to see Avi .
    As soon as I opened the downstairs door to Bank Street T’ai Chi, Dash knew something was different. His nose dipped down to the floor in front of him and soaked up information unavailable to mere humans. His head pulled up. It appeared he was looking up the stairs, but it wasn’t his eyes that were working so hard. His nostrils flared as he tuned in on the scent cone hanging thickly in the air. Whoever had recently passed this way interested Dashiell greatly. He turned as if to ask if my hands had fallen off or my feet were nailed to the ground, and he whined. I unhooked his leash and watched him disappear.
    A moment later, they were both standing on the landing, looking down at me. He, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the dog world, a can-do machine, was all muscle. Except for the black patch over his right eye and the black freckles on his skin that show through his short, smooth coat, Dashiell is white. He has a broad head with great fill in his cheeks, a jaw so strong he can hoist his own weight, a chest as hot and powerful as a blast furnace, and a heart so elastic you’d think his dam was Mother Teresa.
    She reminded me of Lisa’s mother, refined where Dashiell was crude, decked out where he was no-frills, feminine where he was clearly one of the guys, champagne to Dashiell’s beer.
    The bitch wore black, a double coat of medium length, thick, lush fur, the splash of white at her front like a bib of pearls. Her feet were white, too, as if she had delicately dipped them in gesso. Her tail was tossed majestically over her back, the white tip resting lightly on her flank. A symbol of good health in the breed’s native country, she radiated her own vigor. She stood above me, her head cocked to the side, her brow wrinkled, her intelligent brown eyes alive with light I loved heron sight
    I looked at Dashiell. He had fallen hard and fast for the Akita , too. His eyes were absent of all intelligence. He had moved, lock, stock, and rawhide, into pheromone city.
    As if on a signal from each other, the dogs turned, taking the stairs at a speed I couldn’t even aspire to, and disappeared. I climbed to the fifth floor at my usual pitiful, human pace. Because Lisa never took the elevator.
    “She’s called Ch’an ,” Avi said. At the sound of her name, the Akita turned and looked at him. She was large for a bitch, probably about eighty-five pounds. “Outside,” he said, waving his arm toward the windows, “they call her Charlie. But of course Lisa did not name her Charlie Chan.”
    “You mean she gave a Japanese dog a Chinese name?” Ch’an , I had read recently, was the Chinese term for Zen, or meditation.
    Avi’s eyebrows went up. “You’ve been studying. You are so like Lisa.”
    “It’s just that I’m walking in her shoes, trying to understand her life so that I might, one day, understand her death.” Avi winced. “I love the t’ai chi, Avi , but I don’t know much more about Lisa now than I did the day I met you, certainly nothing that would explain in the slightest what happened.”
    “In China ,” he said, “if one wants to study t’ai chi, seriously study it, the way Lisa did, it is necessary to be accepted by a master. You cannot go to a school, pay your money, and be taught t’ai chi, the way you can here. Every family guards its secrets,” he said. “They will not teach just anyone.”
    “I—“
    He raised his