considered the temptation of the open barn door. Morning light poured in from behind Gar, casting his shadow along the dry, dusty cement floor and over her. In the end she let him take her collar and lead her into the pen, which was the best she could do. Then there was the sound of the truck starting and tires on gravel. Some of the dogs barked out of habit at the noise, but Almondine was too stunned to do anything but stand in the straw and wait for the truck to return and Gar to rush back inside to get her. When she finally lay down, it was so near the door that tufts of her fur pressed through the squares of wire.
Doctor Papineau arrived that evening and dished out food and water and checked on the pups. The next morning Edgar’s father returned, but he hurried through the chores, leaving Almondine in the kennel run. That evening it was Papineau again. When the night came on, she stood in the outer kennel run listening to the spring peepers begin their cacophony and the bats flickering overhead and she looked at the frozen oculus of the moon as it rose above the trees and cast its blue radiance across the field. It was just cool enough for her breath to light up, and for a long time she stood there, panting, trying to imagine what it was that was happening. Some of the other dogs pressed through the doors of their runs and stood with her. The old stone silo loomed over them. After a while she gave up and pushed back inside and curled into a corner and set her gaze on the motionless barn doors.
Another day passed, then two more. In the morning Almondine heard the sound of the truck pulling into the yard, followed by a car. When Trudy’s voice reached her, Almondine put her paws on the pen door and joined in the barking for the first time since she had been out there. Gar came out to the barn and opened her pen. She whirled in the aisle, then bolted for the back porch steps and turned and panted over her shoulder, waiting for him to catch up.
Trudy sat in her chair in the living room, a white blanket in her arms. Doctor Papineau was on the couch, hat on his lap. Almondine approached, quivering with curiosity. She slid her muzzle carefully along Trudy’s shoulder, stopping just inches from the blanket, and she narrowed her eyes and inhaled a dozen short breaths. Faint huffing sounds emanated from the fabric and a delicate pink hand jerked out. Five fingers splayed and relaxed and so managed to express a yawn. That would have been the first time Almondine saw Edgar’s hands. In a way, that would have been the first time she saw him make a sign.
That miniature hand was so moist and pink and interesting, the temptation was almost irresistible. She pressed her nose forward another fraction of an inch.
“No licks,” Trudy whispered in her ear.
Almondine began to wag her tail, slowly at first, then faster, as if something long held motionless inside her had gained momentum enough to break free. The swing of her tail rocked her chest and shoulders like a counterweight. She withdrew her muzzle from across Trudy’s chest and licked at the air, and with that small joke she lost all reserve and she play-bowed and woofed quietly. As a result she was down-stayed, but she didn’t mind as long as she was in a place where she could watch.
Doctor Papineau sat with them for an hour or so. Their talk sounded low and serious. Somehow, Almondine concluded that they were worried about the baby, that something wasn’t right. And yet, she could see that the baby was fine: he squirmed, he breathed, he slept.
When Doctor Papineau excused himself, Edgar’s father went to the barn to do the chores properly for the first time in four days, and his mother, exhausted, looked out the windows while the infant slept. It was mid-afternoon on a spring day, brilliant, green, and cool. The house hunched quietly around them all. And then, sitting upright in her chair, Edgar’s mother fell asleep.
Almondine lay on the floor and watched, puzzling over something: as soon as Gar had opened the kennel door, she’d been sure that the house was about to reveal its secret—that now she would find the thing that was going to happen. When she’d seen the blanket and scented the baby, she’d thought maybe that was it. But it seemed to her now that wasn’t right either. Whatever the secret was, it had to do with the baby, but it wasn’t simply the fact of the baby.
While Almondine pondered this, a sound reached her ears—a whispery rasp, barely audible, even to her. At first she couldn’t make sense of it. The moment she’d walked into the room she’d heard the breaths coming from the blanket, the ones that nearly matched his mother’s breathing, and so it took her a moment to understand that in this new sound, she was hearing distress—to realize that this near-silence was the sound of him wailing. She waited for the sound to stop, but it went on and on, as quiet as the rustle of the new leaves on the apple trees.
That was what the concern had been about, she realized.
The baby had no voice. It couldn’t make a sound.
Almondine began to pant. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and as she looked on—and saw his mother continue to sleep—she finally understood: the thing that was going to happen was that her time for training was over, and now, at last, she had a job to do.
And so Almondine gathered her legs beneath her and broke her stay.
She crossed the room and paused beside the chair, and she became in that moment, and was ever after, a cautious dog, for suddenly it seemed important that she be right in this; and looking at the two of them there, one silently bawling, one slumped in graceful exhaustion, certainty unfolded in her the way morning light fills a north room. She drew her tongue along his mother’s face, just once, very deliberately, then stepped back. His mother startled awake. After a moment, she shifted the blanket and its contents and adjusted her blouse and soon enough the whispery sounds the baby had been making were replaced by other sounds Almondine recognized, equally quiet, but carrying no note of distress.
Almondine walked back to where she had been stayed. All of this had happened in the space of a moment or two, and through the pads of her feet she could feel how her body had warmed a place on the rug. She stood for a long time looking at the two of them. Then she lay down and tucked her nose under the tip of her tail and she slept.
Signs
WHAT WAS THERE TO DO WITH SUCH AN INFANT CHILD BUT worry over him? Gar and Trudy worried that he would never have a voice. His doctors worried that he didn’t cough. And Almondine simply worried whenever the boy was out of her sight, though he never was for long.
Quickly enough they discovered that no one understood a case like Edgar’s. Such children existed only in textbooks, and even those were different in a thousand particulars from this baby, whose lips worked when he wanted to nurse, whose hands paddled the air when his parents diapered him, who smelled faintly like fresh flour and tasted like the sea, who slept in their arms and woke and compared in puzzlement their faces with the ether of some distant world, silent in contentment and silent in distress.
The doctors shone their lights into him and made their guesses. But who lived with him morning and evening? Who set their alarm to check him by moonlight? Who snuck in each morning to find a wide-eyed grub peering up from the crib, skin translucent as onion paper? The doctors made their guesses, but every day Trudy and Gar saw proof of normalcy and strangeness and drew their own conclusions. And all infants need the same simple things, pup or child, squalling or mute. They clung to that certainty: for a while, at least, it didn’t matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. What mattered was that he opened his eyes every single morning. Compared to that, silence was nothing.
BY SEPTEMBER, TRUDY HAD had enough of waiting rooms and charts and tests, not to mention the expense and time away from the kennel. All summer she’d told herself to wait, that any day her baby would begin to cry and jabber like other children. Yet the question seemed increasingly dire. Some nights she could hardly sleep for wondering. And if medical science couldn’t supply an answer, there might be other ways to know. One evening
