However, another avenue may have opened, if you would consider it. An unexpected result of my visit has been the opportunity to acquire one of these pups for my own family. We have named him Ouji, which means, roughly translated, “Prince.” He is a fine specimen. At four months of age, he lacks the sagacity of Hachiko, but that is to be expected. At times he is a terror to us, but I believe the day will come when I shall thank you for bringing us together. I see in him some of the character I remember in Lucky so many years ago, and though it might be my imagination, I may have caught a glimmer of what I saw in Hachiko’s gaze on the train platform.
The opportunity I suggest is this. In the next twelve months I expect to end my assignment here in Japan and return to my home. I have already announced my intention to resign. Life in the diplomatic corps has been good, but I cannot deny my midwestern roots. In the spring my wife, son, and I will board a ship bound for San Francisco, and by fall we should be settled in Chicago again. Ouji will be about eighteen months old then, and if you should want to come and meet him, you would be welcome. If you are interested, and he is suitable, I don’t think he would object to siring a litter for you. I’ve already put the question to him, but he was busy demolishing a corner of my briefcase and did not answer.
I apologize for failing to plead your case with Ogasawa-san; however, I owe you a debt of gratitude for inspiring my visit to Hachiko. It is a moment that may well have changed my life. You see, my decision to come home was finalized during the long walk beside Hachiko as he made his way through the streets of Tokyo. I cannot justify the feeling, but it seemed possible-indeed, likely-that a third presence accompanied us, someone whom only Hachiko could see. And in that moment, I understood that I had been too long away from home.
Before I close, I must voice one final thought. I cannot believe you thought any plan to ship an unaccompanied pup via freightliner and rail would have worked. I have half entertained the notion that you manipulated me from afar into adopting a sire for your project. If that is the case, then you are a genius, sir, and we could use your kind in the diplomatic corps.
Yours,
Charles Adwin
Senior Secretary
United States Ambassador to Japan
Edgar leaned back, letter in hand. He didn’t have to puzzle over its significance. His father had been pointing him toward something like evidence, though not of anything Claude had done.
I am no dream, his father had been saying. It’s happened before.
A Way to Know for Sure
T HE METRONOME OF THE KENNEL TICKED AWAY, SUNRISE AND sunset. A new litter was arranged, a late-summer whelping expected. Four dogs from the oldest litter were placed over the next two weeks, entailing a frantic burst of finish training, evaluation, and paperwork. Doctor Papineau found a reason to drop in whenever the adoptive owners arrived, exuding what seemed to Edgar an increasingly proprietary air. And Edgar found himself drawn between opposed desires: To wait and watch or to run away. To tell his mother what he suspected or to fling himself at Claude. Days, his head rang with fatigue. Nights, he dropped onto the bed and lay for hours as his gaze jittered across the ceiling. Summer storms drew him like a moth to a porch light and he walked aimlessly through the rain, coring his interior with second thoughts, treble thoughts. The strangest kind of curse had been laid upon him: knowledge without hope of evidence. He felt haunted not so much by his father’s figure as by his father’s memories, poured into him that night only to be lost again. Nothing he did could recall them. There-was that a memory of his own or a shred of his father’s? Or had his ceaseless inward scrutiny manufactured phantoms that were no one’s recollections at all? His mind seemed capable of twisting back along any slithery line of thought, reflecting its own desires like a bead of mercury jiggling before a mirror, recalling anything he wanted, true or false. Whenever the rain stopped he was left disappointed and angry-angry most of all at his father and then aghast at himself for it.
And despite his mother’s declaration, Claude did not come to stay all at once. There was never a clear boundary, never a decisive moment to which Edgar could object. If Claude spent the afternoon working in the kennel, he would leave before evening came. The next day he might not show up at all, or might stop by long after dark to leave a bottle of wine while the Impala idled in the driveway, some companion waiting in the passenger seat, features underlit by the dashboard while the radio played. And his mother following Claude to his car.
Sit tight, Edgar told himself. Just wait.
That meant sitting at the dinner table and watching Claude slice and chew and swallow and smile while Edgar’s heart vibrated like a hummingbird in his chest. It meant sitting in the living room afterward, pretending indifference. Mornings, it meant looking at the soap shavings scattered about the porch, and the cakes become turtles frozen in the act of hatching-altogether too much like Edgar himself, caught and unable to move as days lapped and receded. It meant, worst of all, being obliged to help Claude in the kennel, where, despite his resolve, Edgar too often replied to Claude in slashing, incomprehensible torrents of sign. But when he could stay calm and watch, he saw not one Claude but many: the quiet one, the jovial one, the confidential one, the one who sat silent in a group. When people came to visit, he watched Claude steer them outside to walk through the apple orchard or into the field or up the road. Anyplace quiet, private. There would be talk and laughter. A gesture of surprise. A head nodded in agreement.
None of which told Edgar what he needed to know. In the end he was certain of only one thing: Claude kept coming back. Whatever Claude wanted, whatever he had done-no matter how nonchalant he acted-he had to keep coming back.
THE WHITE PATCH HAD SPREAD, or so it seemed. A lone dandelion, as bleached and colorless as the grass around it, sprouted in the center, mop half-open. Edgar plucked the albino thing and pressed the scentless mass to his nose. When Almondine began to investigate the spot, he shooed her back and rolled the wheelbarrow over, spade rattling in the bed.
His mother emerged from the depths of the barn and stood watching.
“What are you doing?”
He dug the point of the spade into the white patch.
Does that look normal to you?
“What?”
This right here. This spot.
She looked at the patches of dead grass scattered around the lawn, all withered from the dogs’ urine, then back at Edgar with an unhappy expression. When he looked up again she was gone. He dug out a hole until it was below the dandelion’s taproot and carted the dirt into the field by the hazels. He filled the hole with quicklime from the bags stacked by the rear barn doors and poured a bucket of water over it all and watched the quicklime slake. When he’d finished, he filled a coffee can with the same chalky powder and walked to the hazels and salted down the dirt.
DUSK. BATS WHICKERED THROUGH the corona of insects around the yard light. The dogs’ attention spans were long now and they began to show rare, unnameable talents, which Edgar cultivated for hours in lieu of being in the house. There were long recalls in the field, Baboo and Tinder bounding through lime-colored hay from some far zenith. Finch and Opal, learning to untie simple knots. When asked to clear a leash tangled around her feet, Essay would crouch and leap, avoiding in one adroit move the laborious process of stepping out of the loops. In the mow, he sat the dogs in a circle and knotted a treat into a rag and tethered it to one of the fly lines threaded through a pulley in the rafters. He released a dog by name. If any other dog moved, the treat flew into the air and all the dogs grumbled. When he ran out of ways to proof them, he stood in the doorway of the barn and looked at Claude’s Impala and listened to the music playing through the living room windows, waiting for the lights there to go out.