The Wrong Dog Read online

  “‘A Blanche,’ she’d said. What an odd thing to say. I started thinking of some excuse I could make to get away from her. But once again, I didn’t leave.” She shook her head.

  “What did you do?”

  Sophie shrugged. “I asked her to elaborate. So she did. She asked if I’d read about some of this in the paper, about Dolly, the sheep that was—’

  “‘You mean, you want to clone Blanche?’ I said astonished to hear those words coming out of my mouth.

  “‘We do,’ she said. Just like that. ‘And what’s more, we can.’”

  I turned from Sophie to look at the dogs. Dashiell was at the water bucket where he’d tanked up and then laid down on the wet earth, his big mouth open, his big tongue hanging out. Bianca was leaning on him, as if he were a cushion.

  When I looked back at Sophie, she was nodding.

  I should have gotten up then, told her I wished her luck with whatever it was she needed me to do, but that I wasn’t interested. Clearly, I should have said I wasn’t the right person for this job.

  Hell, I’d just gotten my arm out of a cast.

  I had to get my winter clothes out of mothballs, too.

  Or, at least I would have, had I bothered to put them away in the first place.

  Still, who had the time?

  Cloning? No way. If someone was cloning dogs, I didn’t want to know about it.

  That’s what I should have said.

  But I didn’t.

  What was the problem? I kept asking myself. My arm was healed, I certainly could have used the money, and, at the time, things seemed benign, not the usual scenario in my business. Most of my work comes shortly after someone’s life has been snatched away, often brutally, and always before it was time. Of course there are those who would argue with that statement, who would say that if life ends, then it is time. Is is, my former employer Frank Petrie used to say. But in this case, I disagree. When a life should end is not a decision one human being should be making about another, especially when that decision is informed by vengeance, hate, possessiveness, or greed.

  This was different.

  Or so she said.

  So I didn’t walk away. I said, “Tell me more.”

  And she did.

  Then, later, I said, “Tell me what you need me to do.”

  She told me that, too.

  We sat there so long that dozens of dogs and their owners came and went, the dogs having run around, gotten into mild squabbles and made up, and finally gotten tired enough to leave, Sophie talking all the while, me listening and changing the tape several times so that I wouldn’t miss recording anything. After a long while, even Dash and Bianca quit playing. For the last hour of our conversation, they were asleep in the space between the bench and the fence, Bianca’s head on Dash’s side as if they’d known each other forever.

  Two more times during that long afternoon, as I sat and listened, I wanted to excuse myself and leave. It was the weirdest story I’d ever heard and one, I had the feeling, I would regret, more than once in the weeks to come, having listened to. Even then, right there at the dog run, I began thinking about issues that made me really uncomfortable, that shook me to my very soul and threatened to alter everything I ever thought I knew before this conversation took place, before I met Sophie Gordon. As she talked and I listened, I told myself it would be smarter to not get involved, to just plain quit. But, like Sophie, I couldn’t walk away from it. And curiosity was only one of the reasons why.

  I’d been only seven and a half when my father died. He had gone to work that day as he always did, and come home right on time. After dinner, he’d played chess with me and listened to Lili read a story she’d written for school. Later he’d come to my room to kiss me good night. Then he’d gotten into his own bed to read before going to sleep—For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he’d taken out of the library the weekend before. When his eyes had grown tired, he’d kissed my mother and turned off the lamp. In the morning, she couldn’t wake him.

  For several weeks, the book my father had been reading lay on his nightstand, just where he’d left it, an empty envelope holding his place. When my mother finally returned it to the library, I’d cried and cried, as if the continued presence of the book on his nightstand meant death was only a temporary condition. For the longest time, nights when I refused to let myself fall asleep for fear that, like my father, I’d never wake up, I imagined my father miraculously returning, looking for his book and feeling disappointed to find he couldn’t finish what he’d started.

  So now, all these years later, even if my client is dead, and there’s no one to answer to, and no one to pay my fee, I’m doing what I was asked to do. Despite the fact that part of me doesn’t want to know the answers I’m risking my life to find out, I have trouble leaving things unfinished, even things that, God knows, I never should have started in the first place.

  CHAPTER 2

  We Know Everything We Have To Know, She Said

  “It was a good thing Smitty was leaning against my legs because, as you might imagine, I felt as if I might float away without her weight there to ground me. I was flabbergasted.”

  “But intrigued enough to stay.”

  “Yes. I was. You see, once Blanche had been diagnosed with arthritis, I was forced to face the possibility of losing her.”

  I raised a hand to interrupt, but Sophie went right on.

  “Oh, I don’t mean I was contemplating the ultimate loss. I had every reason to believe that was years away. It was the loss of her ability to help me that worried me. If the day came that she was in a lot of pain and I couldn’t help her feel better, I figured her own troubles would fill her consciousness and she would no longer be able to concentrate on me enough to warn me when a seizure was coming.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Before Blanche, I used to just black out, no matter where I was. Some epileptics get warnings, a feeling that something awful is going to happen. But I don’t. I’m not aware of anything until I wake up, sometimes bruised and banged up, sometimes with strangers around me, staring at me with a mixture of concern and…” Sophie turned away for a moment. “Revulsion,” she whispered. “Even fear, the knowledge that what they are witnessing might happen to them. You know how people are. They don’t want to hear about—.” She lifted one hand into the air. “But that was before Blanche. Now, in fact, I can avoid most seizures because she lets me know they’re coming, so I can take a pill. And if the medication doesn’t work—it doesn’t, always—because Blanche has warned me, I can almost always take myself out of harm’s way. When I wake up, instead of a bunch of strangers, there’s Blanche, lying next to me and licking my face.” She slid her fingers under her glasses to wipe her eyes. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life, Rachel. I could never put into words how much I love my dog. Nor how grateful I am to have her in my life.”

  I looked over at Dashiell for a moment, then nodded at Sophie.

  How could she have turned away from Lorna and gone home?

  How could she have said no to such a tantalizing offer?

  On the other hand, what exactly would Side by Side give her?

  I tried to remember how long ago I’d read that article in the Times, the one about the wealthy couple who had agreed to pay 2.3 million dollars to Texas A & M University, to the scientists who had promised to clone their dog, Missy, a part Border collie mutt. At first, like everyone else, I guess, I thought the whole idea was crazy, either a joke or a scam to get a ton of money from some very rich, very naive people.

  But then the Times was full of news about cloning, news that made the idea of cloning a dog not only seem plausible, but inevitable. There’d been the piece on the successful cloning of stem cells, the stuff of life. And then the disturbing piece about a human nucleus growing in a cow egg whose own nucleus had been removed, inspiring thoughts of half-human, half-animal monsters when, in fact, the cow egg was merely a cheap and easy way to harvest a ho
st for the human nucleus, which, as it grew, displaced all signs of cowness. Still, it had gotten President Clinton’s attention, and that of ethicists all over the nation. There was already a ban on using government funds for research on cloning. What else would be banned, and done anyway with private funding, was anyone’s guess.

  After this later news, I’d wondered again about the “Missyplicity Project,” as the attempt to clone the pet dog had been called. With each article in the paper about other attempts at cloning, the plan to clone Missy seemed less like science fiction and more like science.

  But what would those anonymous rich people think when they got their cloned dog? They loved their pet enough that they were willing to spend a fortune for a carbon copy of her, something, I thought, a surprising number of pet owners might do, if they had the means. But weren’t they bound to be mighty disappointed when they got what they’d paid for? No matter what they did, the clone would never be the real thing. She wouldn’t be Missy.

  With sheep, it wouldn’t matter. The scientists in Scotland were funded by a pharmaceutical company that wanted to clone sheep that were able to produce a certain drug in their milk. You could say it had to do with profits. Or you could say it was altruistic, that the company wanted enough of a supply of a necessary medication to meet the demand. Either way, no one gave a damn about what Dolly’s personality would be, if she’d have the same little quirks and endearing habits as the original, all the things that had made her separate, different, and better than any other sheep around.

  Dolly wasn’t a pet. No one shared their bed with her, loved the sound she made chewing her food, told her what was in their heart.

  That wasn’t true for Blanche. True, she was a service dog and performed an important function for her owner. But she was family, too. Who she was counted for as much as what she did.

  Was that what all this was about, I wondered as I waited to hear the rest of the story—Sophie’s disappointment, that despite the fact that Blanche had been cloned, Bianca was simply her own dog?

  And if so, what was I supposed to do about it? But I wouldn’t have the answer to that question until it had turned dark and almost everyone had taken his dog and gone home.

  “Go back to when you met Lorna,” I said. “Tell me exactly what the deal was. Tell me how they got the cells, how long it took, what they told you along the way. Tell me how you felt when they gave you Bianca. Tell me everything.”

  Sophie smiled. “Then you’ll help me?”

  I didn’t say. But when I reached out and touched her hand, we both knew what my answer to her question was likely to be.

  “Lorna said they’d need a blood sample and some cells they’d scrape from the inside of Blanche’s cheek, no big deal and far less stressful than her annual checkup. She said they wanted to clone three puppies. Three little Blanches. She said I’d get one, and the other two would go to people who needed a seizure-alert dog but didn’t have one. She asked if I’d agree to that and I nodded, too stunned to speak. Then she asked if I’d meet her the following Sunday, at a veterinary office on the corner of Horatio and Washington, at ten in the morning. I said I would. I didn’t know that part of the Village well, but Lorna said she’d be there. She’d meet me and take me in, no problem.”

  I took exception to the wording of that, but didn’t say so. “I was so happy all week. You know the feeling. It was like when I decided to get Blanche. Even before I found her, I was happy all the time just thinking about it.”

  “Did you get her from one of the schools that provide service dogs for people with disabilities?”

  “No, that’s the interesting thing. I’d never heard of seizure-alert dogs. Besides, the schools usually can provide only seizure-response dogs. I mean, that was the whole point of the cloning, wasn’t it? To reproduce an ability that can’t be taught, that’s inborn. But I just wanted a pet. I was lonely. When I wasn’t at work, I was staying in more than most people because when I went out, there was always the danger of a seizure, anywhere, at any time, with no notice at all. I thought that if I had a pet dog, I’d feel safer and better just having her with me, or knowing she was waiting for me at home.”

  “But what about at work? Weren’t you in danger of having seizures there?” I was wondering how she held a job, especially a teaching job.

  “Yes, but the amazing thing is, it’s happened only once. And that time, it wasn’t in front of my class. I think it’s because I’m so happy teaching. I love the kids and I love the work. I feel so useful and appreciated. Of course, that’s hardly scientific.”

  “But it’s your experience.”

  “It is.”

  “Go back to the puppy.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t get a puppy. I was gone too much of the day. I got in touch with a bull terrier rescue organization, because I knew I wanted a bully, I always had, ever since I can remember. And three months later, I got Blanche. She was two years old when I adopted her.”

  “Did she alert right away?”

  “No. Well, yes, but I wasn’t aware that anything unusual was happening. I didn’t get what she was doing. It wasn’t until the third time that I understood. That’s when I realized that having Blanche was going to change my life entirely.”

  She put her fingers to her lips, as if she was thinking about what to say next.

  “I didn’t realize quite how depressed I’d been, not until it was nearly over. Once I understood what she was doing and that it would give me the freedom to come and go almost like an ordinary person, I let myself see how limited my life had been before Blanche.”

  Sophie’s face had changed as she talked about Blanche. She’d even brushed her bangs away and was holding her head up higher. I heard the tape recorder stop and asked Sophie if she’d wait a moment while I turned the tape over.

  “It’s just for me,” I told her, “so I won’t forget any detail.”

  She nodded. People will say astonishing things to virtual strangers, but some clam up if you’re recording them. Not Sophie. She was so into the story by now that I’m not sure she gave any thought to the fact that I was taping.

  “Once I knew that when a seizure was coming, Blanche would let me know and I could take a pill and often ward it off, I became so euphoric, there was no stopping me. I decided I deserved the one other thing I craved besides a dog. A garden. I thought life would be perfect if only I could plant things, and if Blanche could be out of doors whenever she wanted to, even if I wasn’t feeling so well.

  “It took me nine weeks to find the new apartment, almost as long as it took to locate Blanche. It’s just a block and a half from here.” Sophie smiled proudly. “We have a small bedroom with a weird little bathroom off it, a tiny kitchen—but big enough for us—and a living room, everything facing the garden. It’s perfect for us, exactly what we need. The garden is actually bigger than the apartment, with an ivy-covered brick wall in the back. Oh, it’s just beautiful. I knew I wanted it the moment I saw it.

  “And then the agent said no dogs.

  “But by then I’d had Blanche registered as a service dog with the Department of Health and it’s not legal to deny an apartment to someone with a disability because they use a service dog, so after a couple of tense days, they told me, yes, I could move in, the apartment was mine.”

  A smooth fox terrier was trying to get involved in Dash and Bianca’s folie à deux, but they wouldn’t give her the time of day. They were too busy digging to China, as my father used to say when my sister, Lili, and I would dig at the beach. I’d have to fill in the hole before I left, but they were having much too much fun for me to stop them then.

  “So,” I said to Sophie, “when the week passed, you walked over to Horatio and Washington and met Lorna?”

  I knew that part of the Village well. It was the cusp of the meatpacking district, the favored area for the late-night parade of transvestite hookers and denizens of the popular motorcycle bar Hogs and Heifers. I’d once poked my head in there to see their famous bra c
ollection, one of them supposedly slipped off and tossed onto the rack over the bar by Julia Roberts. I’d seen the meat markets, too, carcasses hanging outside like clothes at the dry cleaners, and the new galleries and restaurants opening along Fourteenth Street, signifying a neighborhood in transition, but a vet’s office? No way. Sure, there were men in white coats, but they were butchers. Maybe the office was less obvious than the one on Washington and Perry, which had big glass windows with oversize paw prints on them and a prominent sign, or the one on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, animals painted on the side of the building, where I take Dashiell.

  “Lorna was waiting for me when I got there, smoking a cigarette and doing a little dance to keep warm. I didn’t see any sign outside, but I followed her in and in the back of the first floor there was a sign on the door that said Horatio Street Veterinary Practice on it.

  “It looked more like a doctor’s office. You know how they’re always on the ground floor.” She shrugged. “But Lorna said, ‘Here we are,’ and took out a bunch of keys and unlocked the door. So I figured it was the right place. There was no one in the waiting area. Well, there wouldn’t be. It was Sunday. And she’d already told me this was top secret. She’d stressed that.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Yes—because people are so negative about cloning. Side by Side is trying to do a world of good for people in need, but if the story got out, you can imagine the press. They’d never be able to raise another dime.”

  “I thought there was this one rich guy behind it.”

  “In the future, Rachel. Even the Seeing Eye does fundraising now. Endowments can’t last forever, not with something this expensive. They had to think ahead if they were going to be able to continue with the work, if they were going to survive.”