Relentless

Remember the day we rescued her from the shelter? She stole our hearts in a minute.”
    “In an instant,” I said. “On first sight.”
    Penny blotted her left palm on her jacket, then her right, and took a firmer grip on the steering wheel. “All right, here goes.”
    I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. “Here goes.”
    To Milo in the backseat, Penny said, “Honey, Spooky, remember when we were in the trunk of the car with Lassie?”
    “That was interesting, riding in the trunk,” Milo said, “but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”
    Penny said, “I had my arm around Lassie to keep her calm.”
    “You didn’t need to do that, Mom. She’s a supercalm dog by nature.”
    “The thing is, honey, one second Lassie was cuddled with me, and the next second she was … gone.”
    The boy said, “Well, it was dark in the trunk, so you don’t know, like maybe she crawled off in a corner.”
    “The way we were crammed in that trunk, there was nowhere to crawl, Milo.”
    “Besides,” I said, “suddenly she was in the backseat of the sedan.”
    Cagey Milo said, “You saw her?”
    “She growled, and I looked back, and there she was.”
    “You’re sure that was when she was supposed to be in the trunk and not earlier?”
    “Milo,” I said. “You and your mom were in the trunk at the time. I’m not confused about the circumstances.”
    “I see,” said Milo.
    “Furthermore,” I pressed, “the next thing I know, she’s in the front seat, beside me.”
    “Maybe you asked her to come up with you.”
    In as stern a voice as we ever took with him, Penny and I simultaneously said,
“Milo.”
    “This isn’t easy,” the boy said.
    After a silence, Penny said, “We’re listening.”
    “Mom, Dad, I don’t want you to think I’m a screwup.”
    “We don’t think you’re a screwup,” I assured him.
    “Not yet maybe. But I did blow up that one thing, and now this.”
    “This what?”
    “This thing with Lassie.”
    “And the thing would be—what?”
    “Well, here’s the way it is,” Milo said. “You know I was working on the time-travel thing.”
    “Yes,” Penny said, “and you decided time travel is impossible.”
    “That was after I made the vest.”
    “What vest?” Penny asked.
    “The time vest. The time vest for Lassie. I was trying to send her one minute into the future.”
    “You were experimenting with Lassie?” Penny asked with a clear note of disapproval.
    “She loves working with me. It couldn’t hurt her.”
    “What if it accidentally sent her a
billion years
into the future and we never saw her again?”
    “Couldn’t happen. Time travel is impossible.”
    Penny said, “You didn’t know that when you pushed the button.”
    “What button?”
    “The dog time-vest button.”
    “It doesn’t have a button. It’s a sliding switch.”
    “Milo.”
    “Okay, okay, what happened was she didn’t disappear one minute into the future, instead she teleported from one side of my room to the other, so when I thought I made a time vest, I actually made a teleportation vest.”
    I opened my eyes.
    Penny blotted her hands on her jacket again.
    I cleared my throat.
    Penny said, “You haven’t used this teleportation vest yourself, have you?”
    “No. There seems to be a weight limit for teleportation. It’s a thing Lassie can do, but I’m like ten pounds too heavy.”
    “Don’t you ever try to teleport yourself anywhere,” Penny said adamantly. “Don’t you
ever
.”
    “Milo,” I said, “for God’s sake, you’ve seen Vincent Price in
The Fly.”
    “Well, that couldn’t happen in real life, only the movies,” he said defensively.
    A quibble occurred to me. “Wait a minute. When Lassie was in the trunk of the car, she wasn’t wearing any vest.”
    “Well, see, that’s the thing.”
    “That’s what thing?”
    “The funny thing I can’t figure.”
    “Milo.”
    “After Lassie teleported a few times in the vest, she like didn’t need the vest anymore to do it.”
    Penny realized that she had been pressing on the accelerator during the latter part of this conversation, and we were rocketing along the freeway at just over a hundred miles an hour. She allowed our speed to fall back to the posted limit.
    “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Lassie is now a dog who can teleport herself at will, anywhere she wants.”
    “Not anywhere,” Milo said. “There seems to be a distance limit. She can teleport across the room. Or like from the car trunk to