Cannonball: a Halloween Story
“I’m sure I would’ve dismissed it as nothing but a weird dream. I opened my eyes, and I saw a figure standing past the foot of my bed, as if he’d just walked into the room from the hallway. All I could see was an outline, but for some reason I got the sense it was somebody I knew. That’s why I didn’t feel scared, not at first. It was only after I stared for a long time that I started to get freaked out, because whoever it was just stood there, like he was staring right back at me, only I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t see any of his other facial features either. Finally, I was awake enough to say, ‘What’s up?’ –I know, stupid right? But I opened my mouth, and that’s what came out.”
Nearly all of us had heard Chris’s story before. For six years now, our group of friends has been taking turns hosting these Halloween parties, and each year we gather around a fire—indoors this year—to share our experiences of the eerily unexplained. What made this year’s party different for me was that it was the first time my mom attended. I wondered what she, a grandmother, would make of all these twenty-somethings indulging in such frivolity. I couldn’t resist stealing glances at her as I listened to each of the stories, even though she remained perfectly silent as we each stood next to Cindy’s fireplace in turn, holding forth on our life’s most mysterious moments.
“Now, here’s the freaky part,” Chris went on in his typical supercharged fashion, his hands ablur. “The guy didn’t turn and walk out of the room. No, he backed through the door into the hallway. And there was no bouncing or swaying to indicate he was taking steps. It was like he was on wheels or something. I kept blinking, trying to clear my eyes. Then he passed through the door and was outside the room, out of sight. By now, I was more awake and was like, ‘Hey!’ as I climbed out of bed and rushed out to the hallway. Well, you probably already guessed. I looked all over the house—nothing. There wasn’t a soul there but me.”
“There wasn’t a body there but yours anyway,” Cindy said, daintily lifting her hand to cover her mouth between bouncing shoulders.
“It was disturbing as hell, mostly because I’ve never had any dreams at all like that, before or since. I probably still would’ve forgotten the whole thing after a few years if it hadn’t been for the phone call I got—literally the second after I gave up searching the house and sat down on the couch. It was my sister Jen. Some dude had started freaking out after a Tinder date and wouldn’t let her out of his car. I found out later she’d gotten in just to talk to the guy, but then he started the engine and began driving toward his house. As soon as I hit the button to answer the call, I hear her screaming, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car! I want out right now. Stop the car!’ Next, I hear the dude demanding to know who she called. ‘It’s my brother,’ she says. ‘He’s on his way right now.’ That was a lie of course, since I had no clue where she was yet. ‘Chris, if the line goes dead, call the police right away and tell them where I am.’
“The dude apparently fell for it, or else he realized my sister was going to be too much trouble. For whatever reason, he stopped the car. By the time she was stepping out onto the side of the road, I was already pulling out of my driveway.”
Chris paused, puffing out his chest. A good-looking, fastidiously groomed, dark-bearded man with a slight build, he evinced, beneath his habitual smart-ass attitude, an undercurrent of earnestness that made his story all too believable.
“Okay, so you’ve all got it down to coincidence, right?” he said. “I had a weird dream, and then my sister calls because she needs picked up after a date gone awry. Here’s the kicker: no sooner had I pulled back into my lane after stopping to pick her up than we see this asshole barreling down the road, heading right for us. I jerked the wheel to the right and swerved over onto the shoulder, but he still almost hit us. I mean, I was pissed. Jen had to talk me out of turning around and going after the guy. She ended up calling the police after all and telling them what happened. I expected them to come out to the house and interview us or something, but they didn’t do a damn thing. It was kind of an unsettling education in how useless the police are to women frightened of creepy assholes.”
“And what woman isn’t?” Cindy chimed in again.
“Now, here’s the thing. If I hadn’t been awake to get that call from her, I might’ve been another four or five minutes getting to where she was. She would’ve still been walking on the side of the road when that psycho came back. Because of whatever the hell that was that walked—or floated—into my room earlier that night, I was there just in time to save her.”
Everyone in the room fell silent. I was left pondering how each year’s sharing of stories, which is meant to be fun, almost invariably turns solemn. I glanced at my mom again. She’d been listening intently. Now, she was looking down at nothing. I realized, with a modicum of stupefaction, I didn’t know much of anything about her beliefs when it came to the supernatural. She’s been a Christian her whole life, as far as I know, but even in that realm I could only describe her views generically. You always take your parents’ lives and beliefs for granted, I guess, gathering bits and pieces as the years go by, seldom considering how incomplete your grasp of their stories probably is.
Finally, Chris added a postscript. “Now, I’m not saying it was an angel or a ghost or anything. But I know one thing: it wasn’t a coincidence.”
I looked around at everyone’s faces, amazed by the amount of time passing without anyone making a joke. When I looked back at Mom, though, I saw the faintest suggestion of amusement. Was she quietly laughing at us for taking Chris’s melodrama so seriously?
“Okay,” Mike, who’d been sitting quietly nursing his whiskey sour through most of the storytelling, said at last. “Can anyone top that one?”
We all knew each other’s stories from the years prior. Still, it was fun to get together and rehearse them as part of our group’s holiday ritual. I’m sure we would’ve all gladly listened as Maddy told us her story about the guy with glowing eyes she once saw crouching beside a country road—as if he were eating something he’d just killed—or as Tom recounted the incident when he was surrounded by whispering shadows while on a darkened forest trail, looking for his lost keys by the light of his smart phone. Chris, however, must’ve seen the same smirk on my mom’s face as I did.
“What about you Mrs. Caldwell?” he asked. “Have you ever had any encounters with the unexplained?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said with perfect equipoise. “If you go deep enough, you can say pretty much everything is unexplained.”
“So, you’re not a believer?” Cindy asked. “I don’t go in for any of the usual UFO or haunted house nonsense, either, but I have experienced some things that made me wonder. Haven’t you ever had something happen to you that made you think, even for a second—I don’t know—like some unseen force was involved?”
I slid into my old habit of looking at my mom as an older, wiser version of myself, despite all my adolescent and early adult thrashings to free myself from her influence. Maybe it was the confusion that comes from a couple failed relationships and the onrushing peril of my thirties, but of late I’d been wanting to hear more of what my mom had to say about things practical and transcendent alike. She scrunched her eyes, her cheeks etched by decades of ready smiles into a mask of hard-won wisdom—or something. Pushing her still-slim body back into the couch, she gathered her thoughts. We really do look alike, I thought, though I’m not sure I’d want my life to in any way recapitulate hers. But should that be the measure of what a woman has to say?
“I know that as us ladies get older, we’re supposed to get more attuned to that sort of thing: burning sage to cleanse your house of evil spirits, seances, spirituality—all that spooky stuff that everyone finds so thrilling. That story you told—your name is Chris?—it did remind me of something that happened years and years ago. More than anything else, though, I feel the need to tell you, that ‘unseen force’ you’re talking about, it’s not what you think it is.”
“So you actually know what it is? Like—you’ve seen it or heard it?”
“Oh, yes. So have you. It’s not anything from beyond the grave or anything hiding beneath the fabric of nature. It’s something in your mind that insists on fitting the chaos of life into a pattern—or, more specifically, a story.”
“Ah, so you’re an unbeliever. Do you think stories like the one Chris just told are random coincidences that we make too much of? Because Chris seems pretty convinced it was something else entirely.”
“More than convinced. You’d have a very hard time convincing me it was a chance occurrence.”
“I’ve had quite a few dreams at this point in my life. Some of them, most of them, have been pretty forgettable. A few of them I remember years later. You said you’ve never had a dream like the one you described before or after the night your sister got into trouble. But, before that, you said you probably would’ve forgotten the dream had it not been for what happened afterward. My question is, how many similar dreams did you in fact forget, simply because nothing happened later to bookmark them as significant?”
Chris squinted, either thinking hard or exaggeratingly conveying his disbelief.
Mom went on, “Memory is a tricky thing, you see, because what you remember is always tied up with what you find meaningful. So, when you examine your life looking for turning points and revelations, it’s easy to pull details from their context. It’s easy to fudge them—or even invent them.”
“Are you saying I made up that my dream saved my sister’s life?” Chris asked, more amused than insulted.
“It sounds like the scene on the road would be difficult to hallucinate. But how close was the guy to hitting you two really? You were angry, you were frightened, and it was the middle of the night. Is it so hard to believe you could’ve remembered it—or even experienced it in the moment—as more dangerous than it actually was? For that matter, is it impossible that, knowing the significance of what happened later, you started to recall the details of your dream differently? I mean, I don’t know about you, but my dreams are pretty murky, pretty open to interpretation. They’re less like movies and more like Rorschach inkblot tests. Then there’s the timing.”
While Chris had been telling his story, I remembered thinking I’d never heard the detail about how close in time his arrival on the scene to save his sister was to when the guy came back and forced them off the road. As my mom questioned how sure he could be about the precise sequence of incidents that occurred so long ago, I looked to see his expression go rigid, as though he were effortfully concealing his embarrassment. Maybe he really had simply added this part to make the story more compelling, not even realizing he was doing it.
Knowing Chris would be eager to defend his account, I jumped in to redirect the conversation. “Mom, you said Chris’s story reminded you of something that happened. Did you have a prophetic dream? If you did, how can you say it’s all about misremembering and fudging details?”
“‘A prophetic dream’? Well, I would’ve never called it anything so grandiose.”
“But you had a dream that tipped you off to something that was going to happen in your waking life?”
“Not exactly. I had a weird dream that ended up seeming significant.”
“What was it?”
“Do you remember our dog Kea? You were only about six when she died.”
Kea was a husky-malamute mix, and one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known. Some of my earliest memories are of her chasing me around our backyard. In those memories, she was enormous, all soft black and white fur, with ghostly light blue eyes. She had these tendrils of white sprouting down from the otherwise black fur around her ears, and they had tiny striations, as though someone had crimped them. Like all huskies, she was independent—stubborn—but all my mom ever had to do was whisper and that dog would obey. Though “obey” isn’t the right word; it was like they had a rapport. Twenty-three years on, I can still see the heartbreak in my mom’s eyes as she watched Kea get frail with age. My mom loved that dog. She disappeared for a few days when Kea died. Even at six and seven years old, I recognized how devastated she was. It was over a year before she stopped tearing up whenever she talked about her, and she couldn’t seem to help talking about her.
“How could I forget Kea? I thought us kids were going to end up in an orphanage after she died. You were so depressed. We loved her too. I couldn’t stand the thought of her lying in the ground—I remember wanting to dig her up. To this day, I think about her from time to time. She was such a huge presence in my childhood.”
“I don’t know if I ever told you this, but Kea wasn’t really my dog originally. Well, she was, but I bought her for my boyfriend at the time, a man I lived with for four years, a man I loved and thought I was going to marry.”
“You never told me any of this! That means you broke up with this guy just a year or two before you started dating Dad.”
“I’ll get to that.”
“Hold the phone. Who was this guy?”
“He was Kea’s dad,” Mom said laughing coyly. “The way he used to look at that dog—it drove me crazy for a long time. Eventually, I came to realize that’s just how he was. He formed these insanely strong bonds, not with everybody obviously, but with the people he got close with—and the animals he got close with too.”
“You lived with him for four years? What happened? Is he still around?”
“No, he died a year and five months before I started dating your dad, although I’d known your dad for a long time already by then.”
“You were in love with a man who died right before you got together with Dad—and you never told us about him? How did he die?”
“Some kids were trying to save their dog after it fell through the ice on a lake he walked Kea around all the time. One of them ended up falling through the ice himself. Jim got both the dog and the kid out—apparently with some help from Kea—but he got severe frostbite, and then he got a really bad infection. The doctors kept saying he would be fine, but the antibiotics just wouldn’t work. Then he got pneumonia. They think that’s what killed him.”
“Mom, how come you never told us about this guy before?”
“Do a lot of mothers tell their daughters about their dating histories?”
“Oh, come on, Mom. This was right before you started dating Dad—and you didn’t just break up with him. The guy died.”
“Well, maybe it was just something I felt I needed to move on from, not resurrect through retelling, you know? Haven’t you ever gone through something like that, something you need to recover from but never really felt comfortable talking about?”
This was when Chris butted in. “It sounds like you two have a lot to talk about, but I’m curious about the dream you were about to tell us about.”
“Oh yeah, that.”
“Yeah, come on, Mrs. Caldwell. Tell us about the dream.”
“I had the dream about eight months after Jim died. After the funeral, Kea went to live with my mom and dad. She was home with me that particular night, though, because they were on this big road trip Dad had been planning for years. It was Kea’s first time back in a long time, but she went right to her old spot by the front door. She seemed a little sad from the moment my parents dropped her off, and, really, I just wasn’t paying all that much attention to her. At one point, I was sitting on the couch, doing some work, when Kea started whimpering in her sleep, as if she were having a nightmare, and then she jolted awake. I called over to her, ‘What’s wrong girl? Did you have a bad dream?’ She looked at me, got up, and started walking around the front hallway, as if she were looking for something. ‘It’s okay Kea,’ I said, ‘I miss him too.’”
“So the dream you’re talking about—it was the dog’s dream?”
“Not exactly. I only thought about Kea waking up and searching around later. It’s like I was saying, what happened next made my memory of the dog’s behavior seem more significant. Otherwise, I probably would’ve never remembered it at all.”
“What happened next?”
“That’s where my dream comes in. It was late at night or early in the morning. I’d been asleep for a long time. The image of Kea appears in my mind; only, it’s not really an image. I’m partially looking down at Kea as she sleeps in her spot by the door, partially inside Kea’s own mind. I don’t know if any of you ever have dreams like that. I’ve had some others, but it’s usually another person’s perspective I step into. I can’t remember it ever being a dog’s.”
“Ha! So you and the dog shared a dream?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if my dream was anything like what Kea had been dreaming, but in my own dream I was sharing the dream with her.”
“Okay,” Chris said, “your dream is definitely much weirder than mine.”
“What did you and the dog dream then?” I asked.
“It wasn’t anything earthshattering. It was just Jim’s voice saying, ‘That’s a good girl, Kea.’ It was in a whisper, like he used when he was saying goodnight to her.” Here, Mom went quiet, staring down at her feet. “He had this way of saying it, like he was talking to a baby. Not sing-songy, but ever so gentle. Sometimes, he’d leave off the t-h-a, so it sounded more like, ‘Suh good girl, Kea.’”
She paused again for two deep breaths.
“I should probably explain that for the first two years or so after we got Kea, I couldn’t stand her. Jim became obsessed with her the moment we brought her home, and he spent so much time playing with her, training her, walking her—it drove me crazy. For one thing, she was my second husky, and the first I’d trained using a prong collar. I’d learned that the first thing you have to do to get a dog to behave is let them know you’re in charge, that you’re the alpha. And my other husky was a great dog, so I knew those methods worked.
“Jim assured me all that ‘dominance training stuff’ was nonsense. He thought it was immoral to deliberately inflict pain on a conscious being in an effort to change its behavior. By his lights, you don’t have to establish dominance to get a dog to listen to you and behave. You just have to have a mutual understanding based on trust and wanting the best for each other. I’d let him go on and on, and just think to myself, ‘I’ll watch you figure it out for yourself when your methods go completely wrong.’ The infuriating part of it was they didn’t go wrong—at least not in any obvious way. His methods just took so much time. It was like he adopted a special-needs kid. I’d want to go out for an evening or take a trip somewhere, and it was always, ‘We can’t leave Kea for that long.’ So we’d stay in. For a while, I really felt like that damn dog was ruining my life.
“At night, when she finally stopped following him around and harassing him, she’d lay down behind the front door of our old house, and before he went upstairs he’d say goodnight to her like I described. It always annoyed me because he treated her like his baby. ‘Daddy loves you, you’re such a good girl, I’m so proud of you,’ and on and on. I just wanted to shout, ‘It’s a damn dog you idiot!’ And, if I’m being honest now, I think that was a big part of why when we moved into that house, I insisted he train her to recognize the upstairs as off-limits, which he did, grudgingly.
“Anyway, in the dream, I was half looking down at Kea as she lay there, half in her head as she dreamt hearing Jim’s whisper. The weird part was I had this dream the same night I’d seen her jolt awake—it was like the dream was showing me what had startled her, why she’d gotten up and looked around so frantically. Now I was jolting awake from my own dream, breaking into sobs, and rushing down the stairs to check on Kea. She licked the tears off my face and lay her head in my lap as I cried.”
“My God, it sounds like a really rough time for both of you.”
“You have no idea. I guess I should fill in the rest of the context for you. After Jim died, not surprisingly, Kea started having some pretty serious behavior issues. It started with my grandpa’s couch getting chewed all to hell. That alone was enough for me to want to rehome her. Then she started digging like crazy in the backyard. At one point, she even managed to dig under the fence. Lucky for her, the neighbors she ran to had seen Jim walking her a billion times, so they knew right where she lived. I was actually disappointed when they showed up at the door. That’s when I got online and started looking for a new ‘forever home’ for her. But my parents told me to wait and see how I felt after a few months. My compromise idea was for them to take her for a few months, and then I’d decide whether I wanted her back.
“Meanwhile, you could say I was having some behavior issues of my own. I don’t need to go into it, I’m sure. Suffice to say, no matter what I did, all I could think about was never seeing Jim again. For months, I was subject to waves of intense emotional pain. I kept obsessing over all the ways I’d been a terrible girlfriend to him, and I’d never be able to tell him I was sorry. That’s a big part of why I gave Kea to my parents instead of just getting rid of her. He loved that fucking dog so much, there was no way.
“After about seven months, though, the intense pain gave way, mostly, to numbness, a bone-deep numbness that was close enough to death I wondered every day what the point was of waking up in the morning. On occasion, the feeling would come back, but what was the point to all that suffering if the best I could get back to was this zombie-like state of near oblivion? You’re old enough to understand what can happen to you as a woman when you’re in a state like that. After sleepwalking through life for day upon day, week upon week, month upon month, I started getting desperate to shock myself out of it.
“That’s how I ended up at a bar downtown—which one doesn’t matter—hanging on a guy, whose name doesn’t matter. He was the most attractive, charismatic guy on the premises, funny as all get-out, and he was just all-around fun. Was he a good person? I didn’t care in the least.”
“You went home with him?” I said, unable to conceal my horror.
“No, I took him home with me. Now, I’m not judging anyone, but I think you know I was never the type to go in for one-night stands. This was only the second I’d ever had—and the first was the beginning of my relationship with Jim, so I don’t even think that meets the definition.”
“Wait! You slept with this Jim guy on the first date?”
“Oh yeah. I wish you could’ve met him. He was the type who could put you at ease even if your clothes were on fire.”
“It sounds like your clothes were on fire,” Cindy said giggling some more—until I turned my gaze on her, silencing her in an instant.
“When you two are done, I’d like to hear what this all has to do with your mom’s dream about the dog.”
“Well, as you can imagine, I had no idea what I was doing or what I even wanted to happen. When we got to the house, I offered him a drink, but he was impatient to get to the next stage—if you know what I mean. I kept pushing him back and stepping away, trying to stall, realizing now that it was too late that I wanted nothing to do with what I’d led him to expect. In the bar, he’d been so smooth, such a talker, you know. Now, he was, shall we say, straight to the point.”
“Let me guess,” Chris interjected. “This is when the dog shows up to scare Squidward away.”
“Kea scare a guy away?” Mom said. “If you’d ever met her, you’d see how funny that notion is. Oh, I suppose I have seen her get her hackles up on a few occasions, and Jim told me about a couple others. Most likely, her intervening would take the form of pinches with her incisors—husky pinches, we used to call them—or a good goosing in the behind. She just wasn’t an aggressive dog.”
“Mom, Kea used to growl and flash her teeth whenever Dad raised his voice at you.”
“That was much later, dear.”
I held back telling her about the time Kea inserted herself between me and some older kids who were heckling and intimidating me, even as I marveled at how vivid the memory was. Mom was mostly right about her not being aggressive, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t protective. What I was really interested in just then, though, was whether my mother ended up going through with her second one-night stand.
She began again, “No, as far as I knew, Kea was asleep behind the door already. It was late after all, and though she usually greeted me whenever I got home, she seemingly felt no obligation to do so every time. So what did I do? Mostly, I just wanted to stall, so the brilliant idea that sprang to mind was to say we should go upstairs. He fancied that idea, so up we went.
“Once we were on my bed, he shifted gears and slowed down again, which was exactly what I’d hoped he would do, though I still dreaded what would come next, what I already regretted setting in motion. At the same time, I felt too guilty for leading him on to call a halt to the proceedings. I think all us girls have been in this particular pickle at one time or another.”
“You didn’t go through with it, did you?” I couldn’t help blurting out.
“Honestly, I may have. I was drunk. I was heartbroken—although that word doesn’t even begin to capture it. Then in walks Kea. You have to understand how strange this was. Not since before the house was finished had she ever been upstairs. Now here she was, five years later, just waltzing in as if it was her nightly custom. I took the opportunity to put the smooching on pause, saying, ‘Kea, what are you doing up here?’ I started to sit up but was roughly pushed back down. And that’s when things got scary.”
“Mom?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, hun. This was all so long ago. Let’s just say the most flashy, bold, and charismatic guys don’t always turn out to be the best human beings. It was a mistake I wouldn’t have made at any other juncture in my life. But that night I made it.”
“He forced himself on you?” Chris asked, his earnest, heroic self stepping in to relieve the ornery, smart-ass version.
“He pushed me back down and began unbuttoning my jeans. It took me a few moments longer than it should have to find the air and initiative I needed to tell him to stop, and then to demand that he stop. No matter how loud I got, though, he didn’t seem to mind. His only response was to put his hand over my mouth. What did bother him, though, was that Kea was just sitting there beside the bed, staring at him.
“‘What’s with your fucking dog?’ he said, all nonchalant, as if he hadn’t noticed at all how scared I was. I turned my own head to look as he sat up, saying, ‘Shoo!’ I thought the brief halt to the proceedings was a good opportunity and told him I’d take her outside. But he just said, ‘Fuck that,’ and started screaming at her to get out. Finally, he started climbing off the bed, bringing his arm up like he was going to swat her, and that sent her scrambling into the corner on the other side of the room. I figured this was my chance, that if I made it downstairs I could find some way to dissuade him from pushing matters any further. So I jumped out of bed and dashed through the doorway into the hall.
“It’s hard to describe what I was feeling then. I’d just made this colossal blunder, you know. It didn’t seem like I should be in any real danger, and I kept thinking at any moment the guy would bust up laughing. I think running down the hall I must’ve had a grin on my face, like it was all so ridiculous. But then I felt his body collide against mine from behind. He hit me so hard it knocked the wind out of me, and I fell hard on my knees. He rode me to the ground—I think I was even laughing at that point, though not for very long.
“After a moment, when I realized it wasn’t a joke, I found myself pinned face-down on the carpet. The panic finally kicked in. I tried to scream, but I didn’t have any air in my lungs. The whole time I kept thinking he was about to let me up and start laughing like it was just a big prank. Then I felt his hand snaking its way around my waist to start trying to undo my jeans again. I kept trying to lift myself up, but he would shove my face into the carpet every time I managed to lift my head. I actually had rug burns on my face later.”
“Good lord!” Chris exploded. “Please tell me the dog eventually came to save you.”
“Oh yes, she did. But not the way you’d think. First, I started trying to call her. I couldn’t put much volume into it, but I did my best. When I heard her tags clinking together, the guy did too, and he turned to look at her. The asshole laughed, saying, ‘What’s that dog going to do?’ I could just see her out of the corner of my eye, and sure enough she was just sitting there, her tongue lolling out like she was excited about something, but with what looked like a smile on her face. She definitely wasn’t angry, definitely not trying to intimidate.
“Desperate now, I gathered all my strength to try and roll the guy off my back. I almost pulled it off, but then he picked up a lamp we’d knocked over, wrapped the cord around my neck, and told me to shut up and hold still. Somehow, I’d managed to drag us both close to the top of the stairs. I kept thinking my only chance now would be for both of us to tumble down the stairs together. Maybe then he’d get hurt while I avoided injury, you know. Or we’d both get hurt and I could avoid something else, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, he had the cord tight enough around my neck that the more I struggled the darker it started going around the edges of my vision. Sure I was about to pass out, I put everything I had into one last buck to send us rolling over the edge of the top stair.
“It didn’t work out anything like that. I did upset his balance for just an instant, but I couldn’t quite topple him over. As I twisted my body with the last of my strength, I felt his weight beginning to shift back to center. I coughed and whimpered, certain all was lost. But then I hear the tags clinking again. And here came Kea running from the bedroom doorway at full speed. The guy either didn’t hear it or was too busy trying to pin me back down, because when she ran past him, nudging him sideways—just the direction I needed him to move—he was caught completely unawares. I gave another push with my leg and my arm, and he started to lean farther and farther, until I was finally out from under him, rolling over, and pushing him with both hands down the stairs.
“I didn’t see much of his fall, but I heard him thudding down and landing at the bottom of the stairs. It was a sound that told me pretty unequivocally I wouldn’t have to do any more fighting with him. Still dizzy myself, I slowly got to my feet and looked down the stairs to see him writhing and bleeding all over the tile. Before going down the stairs to get my phone, I turned to see if Kea was alright. She was standing on the loft, staring into the corner. ‘Kea, what’s wrong girl?’ I said, whispering for some reason. She turned to flash those blue eyes at me for a second but then went back to staring into the corner.
“My first call was to your uncle, who lived just three minutes away. My next call was to your grandma.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Let’s just say in our family we already knew the police weren’t of much use in situations like this. So we took care of it on our own.”
“What the hell did you do?”
“A woman has her secrets. The important thing is that I never had any trouble from the asshole again—and I seriously doubt any other woman did either.”
“Wait, so the dog just ran past the guy you were wrestling with on the ground? Why didn’t she attack him?”
“Well, I can think of two possible answers. The most likely one is that she thought we were playing, so she did sort of a flyby. Like I said, she’d been acting weird for a long time—she wasn’t even supposed to be upstairs. She may have just been confused.”
“What’s the second possible answer?”
Mom cast her eyes downward, smiling. “Cannonball husky,” she said looking back up, her eyes welling.
“Cannonball husky?” I said, verging on tears myself, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.
“The first time we brought Kea home, it was New Year’s Eve. That’s when she met your grandma, who we always said was her grandma too. When Jim and I came back from the party we went to, your grandparents came back to see the new dog. Kea was so excited Jim had to hold her back, but when he let go she went flying at Grandma—an eight-week old bundle of fluff. Grandma squatted down to catch her, but Kea knocked her back into the cupboard beneath the sink in our kitchen. We all howled with laughter. That was the beginning of the game she would play where she ran full-force at someone—almost always Jim—and tried to knock him down.
“Jim said when she was about eight months old, he tried to take her for a run in the woods he loved. She was all over the place though, pulling ahead, stopping to sniff, wanting to go everywhere but forward on the trail. At one point, she pulled him off balance and he tripped over a tree root, losing his grip on the leash as he fell. He said he sat up, surrounded by brush, and Kea was nowhere to be seen. ‘She could have disappeared without any effort if she’d wanted to,’ he said. Instead, after a few tense moments, here she comes crashing through the leaves like a cannonball. He laughed and laughed as she rolled around in the dirt with him. That’s when he started calling her cannonball husky.
“I personally only saw it once more, when she got loose at your grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, which would have been when she was just over a year old. Your uncle unchained her to wipe off her paws before letting her in the house—because he had a lab and didn’t understand huskies don’t come when called—and she was off. Jim came out as I leashed my other husky to try to find her and lure her back. We step outside the back door and here she comes running full speed between the houses and down by the pond. I took my dog down to get her while Jim circled around some other houses in case she turned back.
“God, Kea’s face. She was having so much fun. I didn’t think she’d ever stop running, and I was afraid it was only a matter of time before she found her way out to the road. Sure enough, when I got down by the pond, she took off back toward all the houses, right toward where Jim was coming to head her off. Now, she could have easily just run past him, but instead she stopped when she saw him. I was coming up behind her with my dog now, and I saw her kind of hesitate so she could lock eyes with Jim. Then she just bolted right toward him. He got this half grin on his face and squatted down. I was so sure she was going to veer off and run past him and he was going to have to dive after her. But she bowled right into him. It looked like she about knocked him over. When I got there, he was laughing and laughing—and then he whispered something in her ear. Trudging up to them, I was relieved and irritated both at once, because I knew your grandpa would pitch a fit when we brought the dog back with muddy paws.
“I ended up snapping at Jim about how idiotic it was that he insisted on bringing that damn dog everywhere we went. Of course she would get out, what with all those people coming and going. It was just dumb luck she hadn’t run straight for a road and gotten killed. Jim took it in silence, as he often did, either trying to ignore me or working out the implications of my anger—I never knew which.”
She went silent herself now, remembering.
After a moment, Chris asked, “You think Kea was doing the cannonball husky thing when she knocked that asshole off of you?”
“It’s hard to say all this time later. At the time, though, I was pretty convinced. You have to keep in mind I wasn’t exactly in a good position to see what she was doing. All I know for sure is that she came running right for the guy, and if she hadn’t… Well, we found out later the guy had hit his head in an accident a few months earlier; today, they’d probably call it a traumatic brain injury. He was on a bunch of medication. And he also told us he’d snorted a bunch of cocaine that night.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“Oh, we took care of it, believe me. You have to understand how horrible the official legal process can be for a woman in cases like this.”
“But, Mom, that son of a bitch needed to go to prison.”
“Well, instead, he got a second severe blow to the head. What he really needed was to be in a hospital—or an institution. At any rate, getting the law involved isn’t the only option to take care of situations like these. But, like I said, an old woman is allowed some secrets.”
I felt like pressing her, but before I could say anything else, Chris was asking, “When exactly was this attempted assault—I mean, in relation to the weird dream you and Kea shared?”
“It was the next night.”
“Wait, you have this dream, and then the dog mysteriously shows up upstairs for the first time, and then she ends up saving you from some dude who’s jacked up on who-knows-what—and you still don’t believe there could be otherworldly beings watching out for you?”
“‘Could be’ is a different question. Of course, there could be. The real question is how likely is it? You’re focusing on these one-off incidents in our lives. You went to save your sister because you had a dream. Think about, though, how many examples of things like that do you know of? If you live 70 years, how many nights is that for you to dream? Over twenty-five thousand, right? Now, if only one incident occurred every day in your life, that would be the same number. In reality, probably two or three things happen to you every day. What would really be implausible is each of us living a few decades and never experiencing coincidences that strike us as bizarre, or architected, or whatever.”
“Wow. That’s so… mechanistic.”
“Aren’t you trying to be mechanistic when you reason that unlikely coincidences imply ‘otherworldly beings’? The world really does operate on mechanistic principles. That’s what makes it possible for humans to invent machines that fly and medicines that cure diseases. I think what really bothers most people isn’t that explanations need to be mechanistic to be valid. No, what really bothers them is that mechanistic answers fail to offer up any answers to the question of meaning. The significance of your experience with being visited in a dream and saving your sister is that you were meant to be there for her. And that would mean that some invisible person or cosmic force is watching over you and your sister—because you both have meaning. You both have some value to the universe. Of course, we all have a powerful desire to believe that about ourselves, and that desire makes us read significance into the paltriest of evidence, like these prophetic dreams and such.”
“Let’s say you’re right. Don’t you have that same longing for meaning and significance?”
“Oh yes, I absolutely do. That’s why I’ve enjoyed sharing my story about Kea with you all so much. And I suppose it would be wonderfully reassuring to believe some angels in the sky watch over and guide me because they think I’m great or because they know of some plan for how I’m going to make the world a better place. When you think about it, though, isn’t all that just a big distraction?”
“How could that be a distraction? A distraction from what?”
“Aren’t the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people in your life more important than any beings slipping between dimensions? You believe this figure in your dream tipped you off about your sister needing help. Maybe he did. Maybe he was a part of your own psyche that simply figured out something was wrong before the rest of you did. Maybe it was merely a coincidence—you roll the dice enough times you’re bound to get snake eyes eventually. To me, none of that is as interesting as the fact that you were ready to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to go help your sister, or that you were so glad to be able to save her that you’re still telling the story to this day.”
“You told us your story too. What’s the interesting part of that, if not the possibility that it meant someone was watching out for you?”
“Someone was watching out for me, just like Chris was watching out for his sister. It’s us. We take care of each other. And that’s what’s so beautiful about us humans.”
“And dogs too.”
“Yeah, and dogs too.” She turned to look at me now. “During what turned out to be our last argument over Kea before all the trouble with his infection, Jim had said to me, ‘Yeah, I spend way too much time trying to make the dog happy. I’ve put my heart and soul into raising her, and no investment pays bigger dividends than putting your heart and soul into someone you love.’ Skeptical, I was like, ‘Yeah, and what dividends are you getting from her now?’ He said, ‘Oh, you’ll get them too—when you have kids.’
“I didn’t think much of it. He was just being cheesy. Maybe I didn’t like that he said, ‘when you have kids,’ not when we have them. Really, it was only much later when I thought about it at all. Kea gave us some headaches after your oldest sister was born, because for a while there was no way we could give her the attention she was used to. It wasn’t long, though, before she became the most devoted babysitter you all ever had.”
“I remember whenever we had nightmares or got scared at night, you would bring in the dog to sleep in our room. You used to tell us that evil spirits hated dogs, so as long as Kea was around they’d stay away. I really believed you for the longest time.”
“Ha ha. After a year or two, she would go to bed every night with you girls first, wait until you were asleep, and then come back to my room and lay in her spot by my bed. She knew when you all would wake up every morning too, and so she’d leave my room and go back to yours. I don’t think any of you ever realized she hadn’t been in there all night. I told you dogs like her keep evil spirits away because it’s true—in the only sense that really matters.”
[Continue to the sequel: Jax.]
