Read Online Gaits of Heaven by Susan Conant - Free Book Online

in here,” Wyeth said.
    “Eumie is very sick,” Ted told him. “I need to call an ambulance.”
    “She’s dead,” Caprice corrected. “Look at her elbow. That’s rigor mortis.” Seconds earlier, Caprice had been wailing. Now she was coldly clinical.
    “Dummkopf,” he said. “She’s overdone her meds.”
    Heading for the door, Wyeth said, “If she’s dead, so what? Selfish bitch. Good riddance. I’m going back to sleep.”
    The fundamental indecency of the entire scene hit me all at once. I had the power to restore decency to only one aspect of it: I could remove the dog from what was certainly a deathbed. Pulling a slip collar and leash from my pocket, I edged to the foot of the bed, where Dolfo had turned onto his back and was scent rolling in a fashion that might have been cute in a different setting but was now revolting. On the verge of gagging, I summoned the reflexes built up over a lifetime and soon had Dolfo restrained, off the bed, and out in the hall, where Caprice and Ted had moved to continue their quarrel.
    “Her trauma history,” Ted said. “The underlying suicidality! I warned her and warned her about mixing her meds. She must’ve stumbled to the bathroom and grabbed something from the medicine cabinet.”
    “My mother was not suicidal,” Caprice insisted.
    “I didn’t say she—”
    “Yes, you did.”
    “I did not. And there’s no reason to assume she’s beyond help. Why are we wasting time? I’m calling an ambulance.”
    By then, Dolfo and I had reached the bottom of the stairs. I’d survived Dolfo’s descent by clinging to the banister and considered myself lucky not to need the ambulance I’d already called and that Ted was unnecessarily summoning on his cell phone. Pausing to get both hands on Dolfo’s lead, I heard a door bang in the upper hallway. Once again, Wyeth began to holler at Caprice. It seemed to me that when the police arrived, they’d be justified in assuming that the emergency consisted of the kind of domestic disturbance that cops hate. My cop friend and next-door neighbor, Kevin Dennehy, for example, was practically phobic about the sight of a domestic partner armed with a cast-iron frying pan, mainly because he was convinced that the weapon was inevitably going to be smashed down on his own head.
    What drove me out of the Brainard-Greens’ house wasn’t a sense of vulnerability to physical violence. Rather, the physical and emotional atmosphere of the place felt so toxic that I simply had to escape from the urine-scented air, the angry voices, and the ugly sense of contamination. I took the nearest exit, which was the front door and, by reining in Dolfo and forcing him to remain at my left side, managed to make it safely down the steps and reach the sidewalk, where I was surprised and relieved to see someone I knew and liked, a woman named Barbara Leibowitz. Barbara and her husband, George McBane, had taken their dog, Portia, through the beginners’ course at the club the previous fall, and Steve and I had sat with them at a fund-raising dinner for the MSPCA a few months earlier. Although Barbara and George were both psychiatrists, they had a tendency remarkable in the helping professions to talk about matters other than mental health. Barbara was a tall, striking woman with brown-black skin and black hair in elaborate cornrows. Leibowitz was, she’d told me, the name of her adoptive parents, who were white, and she’d kept it when she’d married George, all of whose grandparents had been born in Ireland. Maybe I should mention that this isn’t a story about Barbara’s search for her roots. I don’t know what they were or whether she had any interest in them. The interest of hers I knew about was animal welfare. Besides attending MSPCA events, she helped organize them and was known as a generous supporter of animal welfare groups. Her dog, Portia, who was with her in front of the Greens’ house, had come from the MSPCA shelter in Jamaica Plain.