The Dogs of Christmas Read online

  Lucy’s eyes were white-rimmed and her tongue hung from her mouth.

  The woman finally stopped reacting to Josh’s reactions and focused on Lucy, and her expression changed. “Let’s get her back and let Dr. Becker have a look,” she decided.

  Dr. Becker was such a nice, calm, affable guy that Josh wanted to punch him. In Josh’s opinion, everyone in the pet hospital should be wailing in terror. The vet’s hands were gentle as they examined Lucy, who lay shivering on the table. “Was there a discharge?” he asked, looking at the wet fur on her legs.

  “Yes, sir. On the floor,” Josh replied.

  “What color was it, did you notice?”

  “Color?” Josh frowned, trying to remember, wishing everyone would stop talking and do … do something for poor Lucy. “I don’t know. Green?”

  “Green?” Dr. Becker glanced at him sharply, his blue eyes narrow behind his glasses. “You sure?”

  “I … I don’t know, I didn’t really…”

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine. You seem pretty upset,” Dr. Becker observed.

  “Hell yes, I’m upset! Who wouldn’t be upset?” Josh shouted.

  “That’s okay, I understand. I’m just thinking that if I’m going to do what I’m going to do, maybe you should wait up front, would that be good with you? We may have a breech, here.” Dr. Becker snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, nodding at his receptionist, who had magically appeared the moment Josh raised his voice.

  “Why don’t you come with me,” she suggested in quiet, this-is-how-we-calm-mental-patients tones.

  Seeing the gloves made Josh want to vomit, for some reason. He stumbled willingly after the woman. She pointed to a waiting area, but Josh couldn’t imagine sitting there and reading Bark magazine, not just yet. He needed some air.

  “Um, I left my truck door open,” Josh told her. He pointed outside. “Okay if I…?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  Josh pushed through the office door and walked on weak legs out to his truck. For the first time, he noticed that the air was much colder than it had been even just a few hours before—the clean taste of it on his tongue was sharp, his breath a gust of steam. He shut his door and then leaned against his vehicle, willing his heart rate to slow down. Dogs had puppies all the time. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any dogs. Lucy was fine now, she was going to be fine. They were at the vet. Everything was okay.

  He just couldn’t shake the image of Lucy licking his hand in the front seat on their way in.

  After half an hour of forcing himself to be calm, he returned to the office and the woman looked up with a sympathetic smile.

  “Is it going to snow?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s weird. Really cold and humid.”

  “The temperature has been dropping all morning,” she replied.

  Yes, that’s just what he wanted to talk about, the temperature.

  “Dr. Becker’s the best there is,” she reassured, seeming to understand his mood. “Your dog will be fine.”

  She’s not my dog, Josh didn’t say.

  FOUR

  Over the next hour, Josh’s assessment of the woman behind the counter evolved from “sergeant major in the marines” to “kindly aunt.” Every time he glanced up at her she smiled at him in compassion. Almost anyone would be a little stern with a stranger trying to kick the door in, he reasoned, and Josh certainly hadn’t been friendly toward her.

  “When will we know something?” Josh asked her. She never got impatient with him asking his variations of this question.

  “I’m sure Dr. Becker will be out as soon as he can,” she assured him.

  A woman came in with a cat in a soft-sided carrier. She sat far away from Josh in the waiting room. “I’m sorry, Dr. Becker’s running late, we had an emergency this morning,” the woman behind the counter told the woman with the cat.

  The cat woman turned and stared appraisingly at Josh.

  “Sorry,” he apologized. She glanced away.

  The hallway door opened and Josh leaped to his feet as if there had just been an explosion. “Hey there, Josh. Why don’t you come on back,” Dr. Becker suggested. Something in his voice made Josh seek out the sympathetic eyes of the woman behind the counter before he followed Dr. Becker down the hall and into an office.

  “Lucy’s fine,” Dr. Becker reassured. “Come sit down.”

  It wasn’t an examining room; they were in a small space with a desk and two chairs. Pictures of a couple of children and what looked to be five hundred pets adorned the bookshelf behind the vet as he eased himself into his chair. “She’s sedated right now, but I’ll let you go back and see her in a minute.”

  Josh held himself very still. He was noticing the care with which the vet was avoiding mentioning the puppies, and felt a sense of foreboding. Dr. Becker read something in Josh’s expression and nodded.

  “I’m afraid the pups were all stillborn.”

  “I see.” Josh inhaled and exhaled, truthfully not knowing how he felt. His concern, he realized, was Lucy—the puppies had always been an abstraction. Even now, he was mostly just anxious for Lucy. How would she react when, after all the pain and the panic, she had no babies to take home with her? “Do you know, I mean, what happened?”

  Dr. Becker was watching Josh’s face. “I have to ask, what have you been feeding your dog?”

  “Feeding? Oh, um…” Josh realized he needed to explain how he’d happened to possess Lucy, and did so quickly. The vet’s expression softened as he told the story.

  “Well, it’s certainly been an interesting couple of days for you, hasn’t it?” Dr. Becker remarked dryly. “I don’t know this Ryan person, and Lucy’s never been here before. She’s not microchipped; we checked that. So her diet?”

  “I bought this dog food that’s supposed to be really good, Nature’s Variety, but she’s only been on it since I got her. I’ve been mixing it in with the food Ryan left me.”

  “Ah. Well, lots of things can contribute to fetal death, but poor nutrition is always the first place I look. The stuff your neighbor gave you comes in a fancy bag and frankly if you dumped out the contents and just fed your dog the bag, she’d be better off. I know what it says about the nutritional content, but if you were to take a pair of leather work boots, add a quart of crankcase oil, and toss in a big flake of straw, you could grind it all up and the nutritional analysis would show a reasonable level of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, none of it digestible. That’s essentially what Lucy’s been eating. Throw it away—the food you bought is excellent and will help her heal more quickly.”

  Josh pictured poor Lucy choking down the crap Ryan had been giving her and moved easily from there to a fantasy where he went over to Ryan’s house and beat the man on the head. He took in a deep breath. “All right.” He nodded.

  Dr. Becker ran through how to take care of Lucy, and Josh listened carefully. “Keep her as quiet as possible for a week. Don’t let her run around outside—leash only. She’ll probably have discharge from her vaginal tract for up to three to four weeks. It should look like old blood, not bright red, and any greenish discharge may mean a retained placenta, so call me immediately. She may come into milk, you’ll see it seeping from her teats—call me if that happens. Understood? Give her a small amount of water when she goes home, and after a half hour if she hasn’t gotten sick, offer her a small amount of food. Her diet can return to normal after twelve hours. Any vomiting or lack of appetite, call me.”

  With effort, Josh unclenched his fists, which he’d knotted with his rising tension. I’m not up for this. I’m going to fail. “I don’t know,” Josh murmured.

  The vet raised his eyebrows. “Which part? Just call me if you have problems.”

  “I’ve just never…” Josh shrugged.

  “You’ll do fine. Let’s go see your dog.”

  Lucy was sleeping in a large cage in the back. When Josh poked his fingers in through the cage, she opened one wet, unfocused eye.

 
“I’m sorry about the puppies,” the woman behind the counter told him when he returned to his seat. The woman with the cat was gone.

  “Yeah, well,” Josh replied.

  “Lucy might act a little depressed for a while. Sometimes it helps to give them a stuffed toy or two to carry around and sleep with,” she counseled, glancing over her shoulder as if she was saying something she wasn’t supposed to.

  “Oh. Got it.”

  “Is it snowing?”

  “Not yet,” Josh answered, peering out the window.

  “October third,” she muttered. “It was seventy degrees on Friday! Guess this means a white Christmas, anyway. Are you from here?”

  “Yeah, I grew up in Evergreen,” Josh told her.

  “Crazy weather. We moved from Detroit, this is our first fall. I knew it would be cold but I had no idea it was going to change so quickly.”

  “Well, but this is really unusual, and anyway, it will warm up again. It snows and melts, snows and melts—we could get a foot on Christmas Eve and have it melt the next day. Even in February, the sun comes out all the time.”

  “The sun?” Her eyes, accustomed to the gray skies of a Michigan winter, were disbelieving.

  Clearly the woman expected Josh to lead Lucy out to the truck, but after paying the bill Josh picked the dog up and held her to him, her fur brushing his face, as he carried her and laid her on the front seat. “Poor Lucy,” he whispered softly. She went right back to sleep.

  Josh started the truck and let it idle, the heater blowing cold air on high. He rubbed his hands together—man, it was cold!

  A light, misting rain started to fall, some of it frozen into tiny seeds of ice that bounced off his windshield. He switched on his lights, and then turned on his wipers, which smeared the water into a sheet instead of wiping it away.

  “Ice storm,” Josh noted out loud. He switched the blower to the defroster and waited impatiently for the air to melt away the ice, a battle the truck lost for a good three minutes before the wipers finally worked. The hood, when he could see it clearly, was covered with a clear, dimpled glaze.

  He dropped it into four-wheel drive and crept onto the road.

  In Colorado, you can tell who has lived in the mountains for a while and who has just moved in—the newcomers are in the ditch. Josh kept his speed at twenty miles an hour and shook his head at people thundering past at fifty-five. Just because four-wheel drive allowed you to drive forward more reliably didn’t mean you could stop any sooner than anyone else. The sky up ahead was lit with the crazily tilted headlights of vehicles that had slid off the pavement, as if someone were staging a Hollywood premiere.

  It was actually easier going on the dirt road—his knobby tires bit through the ice down to the dirt underneath. Lucy raised her head when he stopped in the wide area at the top of his driveway. In the beams from the headlights he could see that some of the rain was struggling to turn into snow, and that the aspens, many spangled with golden leaves, were bending under the weight of the frozen water glassing their limbs.

  He opened his car door and Lucy sat up—it wasn’t easy for her. Josh stepped out and nearly went down—you could play hockey in his driveway. Lucy’s door cracked like breaking wood when he opened it, ice fragments falling to the ground.

  “Can you do this yourself? It’s just that I’m worried I’ll fall if I carry you,” Josh explained to the dog.

  Lucy gingerly stepped down, sniffing. Josh carefully picked his way across the ice rink that was his front yard. Lucy’s claws were fully extended as she followed him up the steps.

  The front door to his house was wide open—he mentally replayed the last time he was here, when messing with the door had seemed too much trouble. Inside, it was cold. His floorboard heat was ticking and banging like mad but was totally ineffective against the gusts of winter air that had been blasting into the house all day.

  Josh pulled Lucy’s bedding out of the bedroom and set it up near the hearth. The fire only took about five minutes to start, the kindling dry from sitting inside all summer.

  “It’ll warm up, you want a blanket?” he asked Lucy awkwardly. He could see his breath inside his own house. She wagged her tail, a double thump, then stretched out with a sigh on the pillow. She did seem depressed. Would she want one of the chew toys, or was that stupid? He didn’t have anything that even remotely looked as if it could serve as a substitute for a puppy. He’d go to town and get some stuffed animals tomorrow. Would that really work, though, to line up a bunch of fake dogs as if they were nursing, try to fool Lucy into believing she’d delivered live young after all?

  Josh couldn’t imagine what the poor dog was thinking. Just forty-eight hours ago she’d been living with Ryan, whose care boarded on criminally negligent. Feeding a pregnant animal that awful crap! Then she was dumped here with a man who’d never owned a dog before and didn’t know anything about taking care of one, and within a few hours she went into painful labor and now didn’t have any puppies to show for it. Josh knelt on the bedding and stroked her head. “You’ll be okay, Lucy. Promise.” The words tasted thin and hollow in his mouth. How did he know she’d be okay? She hadn’t been okay so far.

  Oddly, when it occurred to Josh to leave another message for Ryan, he stayed the impulse, though he couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. He just didn’t want to call him.

  The wood box on the hearth wasn’t really all that full—restocking it was a winter chore, and with October barely begun he wasn’t ready to declare it winter just yet. The woodpile was out by the truck. Josh could either go out there now or face dealing with wet logs for his fire in the morning. He glanced over at the sleeping dog. Would she feel abandoned if he left her to resupply the wood box? His throat tightened a little at the thought. He pictured her raising her head to watch him leave, supposing that he was walking out on her forever. Like Serena, or Ryan.

  But he did need to get firewood. With it this cold in the house the baseboard heat wouldn’t be able to do the trick on its own. He was leaving but he was coming back, that was the difference. Sighing, he flipped on the spotlight. The night became a swirling swarm of ice and snow and rain—he could barely even see the woodpile.

  Josh struggled into a heavy waterproof coat. Lucy heard the noise and looked at him questioningly. “You wait right here, Lucy. I won’t be long. I promise I’m not deserting you. Honest.”

  The stairs had some snow on them but were no less treacherous than when they’d been black ice. Josh slid over to the woodpile, laughing at his lack of sure footing. He grabbed up an armload of small logs and, not laughing now, worked his way back up to his front door, glancing at his pickup as he did so.

  He saw, but didn’t register, the box. There was a cardboard box in the pickup bed, a box he hadn’t put there.

  Once safely indoors he dropped his burden with a heavy bang. “Whew!” he said. The logs were all coated on one side with a thin layer of ice. He put his hands up to the fire, which was just starting to push back against the cold a little. Otherwise, it was still freezing in the house. “You cold? You okay? Do you hurt?”

  Lucy’s expression suggested she’d be better off without all the annoying questions, but Josh couldn’t help himself. He needed reassurance that he wasn’t doing further damage to this poor animal.

  The fire was beginning to crack and pop. Josh jabbed at it with his fire poker because that’s what he always did. “You hungry, Lucy? Oh wait, just water for now.” Josh, on the other hand, was suddenly starving. He went over to the front floodlights, intending to shut them off and then head into the kitchen to fix himself something to eat, but then he paused, frowning.

  That box.

  What was that box? In the spotlights, it looked to be about twice the size of the microwave oven in which Josh would heat dinner. And was that something written on the side?

  He bent forward, squinting. Someone had used a black marker to draw a few crude letters on the cardboard. The curtain of rain and snow mostly obscured h
is vision, but then a gust of wind would wipe it away long enough for him to eventually make out what it said.

  4 THE VET

  For the vet? Josh’s truck had been parked right out in front of Dr. Becker’s office. Had some lazy delivery person decided it was the vet’s truck?

  Josh wondered when it had been put there. Had the box been there when he went out to shut his truck door? No, he was absolutely sure it had not. Whoever stuck it in the back of his truck must have done so after that.

  Much as he didn’t want to go back out in the elements, Josh was just too curious to wait until morning. He checked on Lucy, who had resumed sleeping, then tromped back outside and picked his way to the truck. The box seemed to weigh no more than ten pounds, and was heavier in the bottom. The cardboard sides were glistening with an icy coating.

  Josh made his way back to his house and shut the door. Lucy’s tail thumped. “Let’s just see what we’ve got here, Lucy.”

  He carried the box over next to the fire and set it on the floor, turning on the lamp next to his chair. The lid of the box resisted opening—it was literally frozen shut. He banged at it a little, finally breaking it loose, and leaned over to peer inside.

  At first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, and then, when it came to him what he was looking at, Josh gasped in horror.

  Lying huddled at the bottom of the box were five small, mottled bodies. Puppies. They were newborn puppies, motionless, pressed together in a tight pile.

  “My God,” Josh breathed.

  And then, just like that, the lights went out.

  FIVE

  With the electricity gone, the only light in the house was the flickering yellow glow from the fireplace. The bottom of the box was deep in shadow, its contents barely visible. Could he be mistaken?

  Josh reached inside and gingerly touched one of the furry little lumps. It was cold under his fingers. He sucked in his breath. This was just too much, too much to bear that someone would dump a litter of tiny puppies in a box in this weather, leave them to freeze to death in Josh’s truck. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing?