Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

Meadow Wellness Center” in an earlier incarnation. The village was tiny, and virtually free of traffic, since two of the high-pass roads leading into it were closed during the winter. The one road in use—the one they’d just come down—was already velvety with snow. The whole effect was otherworldly.
    Ben pulled the car off the road across from the general store.
    “How’s that for parking karma?” he asked, grinning over the seat at Mary Ann.
    She wasn’t sure what he meant until Michael climbed from the car and began unloading their bags from the hatchback. They had apparently parked directly in front of their accommodations—a matchbox of a bungalow, probably from the forties, encircled by a charmless aluminum fence. The sight of it sent Roman into fits of ecstasy.
    “Just head on in,” Michael told her. “We’ll bring your stuff.”
    “Won’t I need a key?”
    “It should be open. They leave the key inside.”
    So she led the way into the house, passing first through an unheated mudroom with a four-foot patchwork unicorn standing sentry at another door. Beyond that, she found the main room: a relentlessly plain but serviceable space painted a serviceable shade of cream. There was a battered upright piano, a large refectory table, and a cluster of kitschy but comfortable-looking eighties furniture. Someone had clearly anticipated their arrival, because an electric wall-heater was already droning away in the corner.
    Roman shot past her into the room, touching base with other doors leading to other rooms—the bedrooms, presumably—as if systematically checking items off his arrival list. Mary Ann was charmed by his excitement, even found it a little contagious, until the dog stopped cold, hunched his back, and began heaving on the carpet.
    “Oh, baby,” she said. “Did you get carsick?”
    The dog had coughed up a few blades of grass (from his pit stop at the In-N-Out Burger, no doubt), so Mary Ann hurried off to the kitchen for a wad of paper towels. When she returned, Roman was standing uncharacteristically still in the middle of the room. A thick rope of slime, viscous as an egg white, was dangling from his shiny black lips. Hearing Mary Ann approach, he turned his head slowly and regarded her with blank-eyed bafflement, as if seeing a human being for the first time.
    Then, suddenly, he dropped to the floor, his legs stiffening grotesquely in a series of spasms, his mouth foaming, his black marble eyes showing crescents of white.
    “Oh, fuck … oh shit …” Mary Ann cried, just as the guys came staggering in with the luggage. “Something’s happened to him, Ben.”
    Ben dropped his bags and rushed to kneel by the quivering dog. “It’s okay, Roman, we’re here. That’s a good boy. That’s a very good boy.” He looked up at Michael with the sober calm of a paramedic. “Is there anything in the fridge?”
    “I doubt it. Unless maybe the last people … wait!” Michael scrambled out the front door and came back, seconds later, holding a clump of compacted snow in both hands. He dropped to the floor and pressed the snow against the base of the dog’s spine.
    Roman was still shaking violently. “Hang on, Mr. Doodle, we’re almost there.”
    Feeling useless, Mary Ann stayed out of the way as Ben and Michael cooed to the dog. When the spasms finally stopped, Roman just lay there panting. The dry air was spiked with the smells of bile and urine: the melting snow had formed a dark green continent on the light green carpet. Michael gazed up at her. “You should go to the bedroom. Close the door behind you.”
    “If there’s anything I can do …” Roman began to snarl through clenched teeth.
    “Go, Mary Ann! It’s Cujo time!”
    This was all the shorthand she needed. She bolted for the nearest door and slammed it behind her, only to watch it spring open again as Ben and Michael joined her. The dog was barking like a fiend now, just beyond the door, knocking over lamps and end tables as it thrashed about the room in a seeming fury. “He’s blind right now,” Ben explained. “He knows that he lost it somehow, but he doesn’t know what’s happened.”
    Neither did Mary Ann, of course.
    “A grand mal seizure,” Michael explained. “He’s epileptic. This is called the postictal period. We have to stay away from him until it passes.”
    She asked how long that might be.
    Michael shrugged. “Hard to call. Whenever he calms down.”
    Mary Ann felt wobbly, so she sank to