Baxter’s neck. He stretched his head up to allow more.
Then Sebastian had to go, and I said goodbye. I’m not sure he heard me.
When I hung up, Baxter looked at me, then looked around, his eyes quickly scanning the room, darting back to me. I could hear him thinking, But where is he?
“Gone,” I said. “Gone.”
Sebastian returned to Chicago a week after he left. A short trip for him. He called on the way home from the airport.
“How’s Superdog?” he said when I answered.
I looked at Baxter, who sat on the checkerboard kitchen floor, patiently waiting for me to scoop his lunch into his bowl.
“He’s super.”
“I missed him.”
“I know.”
Baxter always seemed to ground Sebastian. When we’d first gotten him, Sebastian was suddenly happier working in the home office—the office we’d outfitted just to make Sebastian feel inspired, feel as if he was back in New York, with a row of state-of-the-art TVs that showed—close-up and raw—news stations around the world. The BBC usually ran on the monitor closest to him, except for Saturdays in the fall when all the TVs bore college football, the most prominent being whichever game Iowa was playing in.
Sebastian had gone to Iowa, strictly for the writing program. Creative writing. He didn’t know then that he would stray to journalism, that it would hook him in and turn him on in a way that was different from creative writing. He suddenly knew one day in his senior year, in the middle of a seminar on fiction writers who turn to nonfiction. He didn’t want to make people up. He wanted to write about the people who were. War reporters and investigative journalists—those were the heroes, those were the people he wanted to be. After graduating he spent years living in Italy, working on a book exposing various Berlusconi scandals.
I met him a year after his first book on Italian politics was published. It was such a lively book—written in a lively voice about admittedly lively people who had a lot of sex—that it was on the bestseller lists for two weeks, enough to get him another contract. It had made him sparkle, that book deal, which had just been inked the day we met. The sparkle gave him something beyond the sexy hair, the strong jaw, the soft eyes that didn’t so much bore into yours as melt into them, and that bottom lip of his. It made him reverberate with charisma.
On the kitchen floor now, Baxter rolled over to show his belly. Rub me, please!
I bent and put my hand on his warm dog belly, using him for comfort while I broke the news to Sebastian. I told him that since he was gone, Baxter’s video was still running on news stations around the country, the web video getting nearly half a million hits.
“Christ,” he said. “That’s crazy.”
I said nothing, waiting for a nice whip of sarcasm.
He waited, too, probably for me to make some crack about his attitude, launch into the ruts of priors.
Instead, Sebastian took an audible breath. “How is he handling it?” he asked.
I looked down at Baxter again, who flipped back to a sit. He thumped his tail, then tilted his head as if he expected something, a trait I couldn’t recall him doing before. “He might be getting a bit of child star syndrome,” I said. “Possibly impatient. But otherwise he’s great.”
I put Baxy’s food on the floor and he gave my wrist a quick lick in thanks before he nose-dived into the bowl. “Nah,” I said to Sebastian. “Not really. He’s still our little guy.”
“I miss him,” he said again.
“I know,” I said again.
We chatted for a few minutes about some clients who had recently retained me again to outfit them for a wedding, about the magazine editors I’d had lunch with last week who’d promised work, about a good friend of Sebastian’s who had sold a book, about Sebastian’s family.
It would be the last normal conversation we would have for a long time. If I had known it, I might have thought to couch what I told him next. “The national news is going to run it.”
“What?” A distinctive snip to his voice that I knew meant displeasure.
“Baxter’s video.”
“What national news program?”
I wasn’t sure. I told him a producer had called.
“What was his name?”
I looked at the stack of cut up, old index cards that I used for notes in the kitchen. I read off the person’s name.
“Jesus, are you serious?” Sebastian said. “I know that guy. Does he know Baxter is my dog?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem like you’d want people to know that.”
He exhaled in a short burst, as if through clenched teeth. “I have to go.” He hung up.
Yet an hour later, he was knocking at the door of my condo.
I peered through the keyhole and saw him. This is my condo, I thought. Mine.
Of course, Sebastian knew the doorman, who had simply let him up. Still, the building staff also knew we were divorced. It annoyed me that they would give him free reign, without so much as a warning call to me, even if it was to tell me he was elevator-bound.
I glanced down at what I was wearing—yoga clothes for a class I planned to attend—gray pants, a thin, hot-pink top. I reached back and pulled my hair over one shoulder, smoothing the front and tucking the other side behind my ear. It occurred to me only as I was in the middle of the action that I was doing it because that was how Sebastian liked it.
But he definitely wasn’t in the mood to appreciate my hair.
He strode inside. “Hi.” He stopped suddenly, as if realizing in that instant he didn’t live there anymore.
“Hi?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, but it was hard.
“Where’s Baxter?”
“He’s playing at Daisy’s house.”
Sebastian looked a little blank.
“You know Daisy,” I said. “From the dog park.”
“I didn’t know they had play dates,” he said.
“Usually when one of us has to work. Maureen came and got him after we got off the phone.”
Sebastian nodded. “Well, I just wanted to tell you, in person, that I got ahold of him.”
“Who?”
“Paul.” The national
