Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

explain?”
    Sophie nodded and then looked toward the part of the run where Bianca and Dashiell were rolling around, both grinning and in dead earnest, the way bull and terrier dogs love to play.
    “She told me she’d called The School for the Deaf because Side by Side was looking for service dogs with gifts, you know, an inborn ability to do something.”
    “As opposed to dogs that are trained to help with a disability,” I said.
    “Exactly. She said she thought she’d find dogs like that there, dogs who knew to inform their deaf owners when someone was knocking at the door, the phone was ringing, or the alarm clock was going off. She told them Side by Side was doing a survey, some public-service thing, tracking how the owners had discovered their dogs’ abilities. And whoever she spoke with told her that only a few of the kids used dogs, but that hearing-alert dogs are trained at special schools and that not every dog, but a great number of dogs, particularly lively ones, could be trained to do the work. It was a matter of education, not a matter of talent, as it were.
    “So she said she thanked the woman and was about to hang up when the woman told her that one of the teachers, meaning me, had a seizure-alert dog, that seizure response could be taught to a variety of dogs but that no one had yet figured out a way to teach seizure alert. Once someone began to seizure, you could get the dog to stay with them until it was over, no problem. But as far as alerting prior to the onset of a seizure, either a dog knew when one was coming and warned his owner or he didn’t.
    “She said she’d gotten all excited and said that that was just what they needed for their survey and could she talk to me, and that the woman she’d spoken to said no, that I was teaching, but that she would give me Loma’s name and number and I could call if I wanted to. It would be up to me. But then Loma said, ‘That was a lie.’ ”
    “What was?” I asked her.
    “That’s exactly what I asked. ‘About the survey,’ she said. ‘The real thing we’re doing, it’s top secret and we don’t want it to get around.’
    “That’s when I got that funny feeling again. But what she told me then, well. You see, Blanche was nine at the time, and she had some arthritis in her elbows. ‘Crepitus,’ the vet called it. What it meant was that on rainy days, and when it was cold, she limped pretty badly.”
    Sophie stopped and pulled a wad of tissues out of her coat pocket and blew her nose. She wore her long red hair loose, the bangs so long they covered her eyebrows, touching the frames of those small, round glasses. She looked across the run at Bianca and began shaking her head.
    “Is she ... ?”
    “Blanche? Oh, no. She’s right here.”
    That’s when I realized that Sophie’s coat wasn’t bunched up. It had been spread out under and over her old dog, to keep her warm.
    “She’s eleven and a half,” Sophie said, dropping her voice to a whisper as she peeled back a corner of the coat and showed me a glimpse of her sleeping bull terrier before carefully covering her face again. “All this running around is much too much for her, but Bianca can’t get through the day without serious exercise. On workdays, it’s worse, because Blanche is with me at school, so I have a dog walker who brings Bianca here for an hour or two of roughhousing. Without that, she’d keep annoying Blanche when we got home, trying to get her to play. Well, she still does, but not as much.”
    Dash and Bianca were standing up now, face-to-face, paws on each other’s shoulders, all but breathing fire at each other. When their front feet hit the dirt, Bianca took off, Dash in hot pursuit, his tongue lolling out to the side. I thought I might have to hose him down before the afternoon was over.
    “So what did Loma tell you next?”
    “Well, it got pretty amazing. She said that the founder of Side by Side was after a dog like Blanche. She turned slightly away then so that she wouldn’t blow smoke right in my face. Smitty sneezed again, I remember, and I was thinking about how bad it would be for a seizure-alert dog to be around cigarette smoke. No one’s one hundred percent positive, but it’s thought they work on scent, you know, from chemical changes in the brain, that that’s how they can tell trouble’s coming.”
    I nodded.
    “Then Loma asked me how old Blanche was. The longer we talked, the more businesslike and less nervous she