Creature Discomforts

ourselves to be dragged up here in the first place by some paranoid buffoon!”
    “We’re jogging,” my father responded.
    “Jogging?” Anita demanded. “Oh, please! Gabbi, if you want my advice—”
    “I’ve taken too much of your advice already,” Gabrielle snapped.
    “What we’re doing here,” said Buck, as if no one else had spoken, “is jogging Holly’s memory.”
    I looked blankly at him and shrugged my shoulders.
    “I am leaving!” Anita announced.
    “Head toward the Ladder Trail,” Buck ordered her, ‘because that’s where the rest of us are going. We’re going to set the scene, and—”
    Anita radiated scorn. “This is the corniest thing I’ve ever heard of, and I’m having no part of it. I was nowhere near here yesterday, and I can prove it. I’m leaving. Steve, let’s go!”
    “Jogging,” Steve said quietly, “strikes me as not a bad idea.” Our eyes met. He looked heartbreakingly sad. Imitating my father, Anita said, “Sir Galahad! Well, Holly Winter, there’s a little something Sir Galahad hasn’t told you yet.”
    “What would that be?” I almost whispered.
    “Aren’t you curious about how I can prove where I was yesterday?”
    “Not very,” I said.
    “You should be,” Anita said vindictively. “Because as Steve told all of you, he and I were together yesterday morning. What he didn’t tell you is that we have the marriage certificate to prove it.”
     

Chapter Twenty-nine
     
    FAINTING IS A PHYSICAL PHENOMENON that results from a lack of blood supply to the brain. One minute, you’re in full possession of consciousness. The next, you’re out cold. Why? Because, as Science in Her Wisdom used to tell us a few hundred years ago, a hard whack to the head disrupts the flow of vital fluids to the Seat of Reason. So far as I know, explanations have not improved greatly since then, probably because there’s been no public demand. For zillions of years, people have had a perfectly satisfactory understanding of what happens when you discover that your true love loves someone else. Thus was born, of course, the partnership between Homo sapiens and the genus Canis: the unspoken Till death us do part, unspoken because it goes without saying. Who exchanges rings with a dog? If love is absolutely permanent, who needs a gold band? Who needs a symbol? Dog love is never token love. It’s always the real thing.
    I have digressed. My father has a good excuse for transporting me from the scene of my swoon to a clearing near the top of the Ladder Trail. According to Buck, his original aim in dragging everyone up the little mountain toward the scene of Axelrod’s death was to reawaken my memory of the events preceding Axelrod’s fatal plunge. When I passed out for the second time, he decided that I should regain my senses in more or less the same place I’d been when I first lost them. For all I know, he thought they’d been hanging around waiting for a brain to reinhabit. I see no excuse, however, for the method he used to revive me, which consisted of upending a water bottle on my head. I had, admittedly, awakened yesterday with my face in a puddle, but Buck didn’t even know about the water and the blood. Furthermore, our companions had used their jackets, sweatshirts, and sweaters to make a soft pallet for me on the rock slab, and in applying his primitive first aid, Buck had dampened other people’s clothing. I don’t buy his crummy excuse, which is, “What did you expect? Smelling salts?”
    I shouldn’t complain, though. And it’s hard to argue with someone who turns out to have been right.
    This time, Rowdy and Kimi were there to nurse me back to sentience, which is to say that when I awoke, I was coughing up water and dog hair. As I work it out, Kimi stood above me on all fours scouring my eyelids with her maternal tongue, and Rowdy was sprawled on the ground at my head with his forelegs wrapped protectively around my skull. When Kimi finally let me see anything, I stared up into Rowdy’s toothy jaws. Not everyone would have found the sight as cozy as I did.
    Before I had the chance to orient myself, Buck started asking questions. “Is this where it happened? You left the dogs near here? Why’d you do that?”
    Gabrielle had to force him to give me a minute to recover. I’ll never forget how sweet she was. No wonder I’d been confused about Ann’s letter. This Gabbi, too, was sweet and bossy. “Leave her alone!” she ordered Buck. “Dogs, out of