The Best Gift by Wendy Markham
“Good. That’s a good sign,” she tells the dog.
He looks at her, apparently thinking, Yeah? How so?
“It’s easier to think positive thoughts when your head isn’t in the toilet—though I can only speak for myself.”
She pulls on her robe and belts it loosely over her rounded-again belly, where a sudden thumping sensation gives her pause.
Whoa! The baby is kicking.
Smiling in delight, Clara stands absolutely still, her hand resting against her womb.
“Hey, little one,” she calls softly. “I can’t wait to meet you.”
And I know your Daddy can’t, either, she adds silently, wherever he is.
In the bathroom, Clara checks to see whether Drew’s toothbrush and shaver have miraculously reappeared beside the sink.
“Just because they’re gone,” she tells Dickens, “doesn’t mean the worst.”
Dickens looks at her, then casually slurps from the toilet bowl.
“Hey!” Clara grabs his collar. “What did I just tell you about putting your head in—”
She breaks off, looking at the silver dog tag resting against her hand.
An address is engraved on it—and it’s not this one.
“Okay . . . so why does this say you live at 9 Sequoia Way?”
Dickens tries to squirm out of her grasp.
Remembering how he dive-bombed his way in the door yesterday—was it yesterday?—she wonders whether perhaps he is a stray after all. A stray, and an opportunist.
“Did you wander in off the street?” she asks, releasing his collar. “Is your owner out looking for you? Or am I your owner? Is this where we’re moving? Are you Dickens, or not?”
He sure looks like the puppy she knew three years ago. Acts like him, too, she notes, grabbing him as he aims his head for the toilet bowl again.
And he did stay put at the bottom of the stairs when she first called him, as if he knew the rules of the house.
Knew them—and followed them.
“Maybe you’re not you,” Clara tells him. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
A half hour later, wearing an oversized sweater and pair of maternity jeans that looked like they’d be more comfortable than they are, Clara opens the front door and spots a newspaper lying on the step.
Stooping with some effort, thanks to her belly, she retrieves it and glances at the date.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012.
It’s a weekday.
Maybe Drew already left for work. The market opens early on the East Coast.
Maybe, maybe, please, God, maybe.
She tosses the paper through the open door to the house for later. No time to look at it now. She’s a woman on a mission.
With Dickens beside her, she locks the front door and heads across the driveway to the unfamiliar car. Climbing into the driver’s seat, she notices that it smells brand-new. The dog settles himself in the passenger’s seat with the air of someone who knows the drill. Either he’s Dickens, or he’s an imposter making himself right at home.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” she tells him, and starts the car with a set of keys she found in a purse that also contained her wallet.
Not the wallet she had three years ago, but a similar one. It contains the usual credit cards, some cash, and her familiar California driver’s license, not yet expired.
No cell phone—but that’s not necessarily unusual. She’s never been very good at keeping track of it. She did dial the number to see if she could hear it ringing somewhere in the house, but was met with silence on this end and an automated voice message on the other: The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message.
She opted not to, considering that the person she was trying to reach was herself.
Now, she enters the Sequoia Way address into the sleek GPS device on the dashboard. It would have taken a few minutes for the destination to pop up on the 2009 GPS, but it appears instantaneously on this one.
“Technology marches on,” Clara informs Dickens, who presumably couldn’t care less. He’s just gazing out the window, looking for all the world as though he’s out for a leisurely Sunday drive.
After consulting the map and noting that Sequoia Way appears to be a winding street on the northeast end of San Florentina, Clara shifts the car into gear and heads down the driveway onto the main road.
“I just hope we don’t find out that you’re someone else’s dog,” she tells Dickens, “because I kind of like having you around, you know?”
She glances over at him and is gratified to see that he does, indeed, seem to know.
Maybe, she thinks hopefully as she begins the drive toward town, the dog tag is brand-new and 9 Sequoia Way is about to become the Beckers’ new address.
A boxwood Christmas wreath is affixed to the mailbox at the foot of the neighboring driveway. Through a bank of fog and evergreens, Clara catches a reassuring glimpse of the Tucker home intact on the hillside above.
For a split second, she considers stopping there. Surely, her next-door neighbors would be aware of the current status of the Becker family—and probably even the reason they’re moving out of their dream house.
Then again, what if the Tuckers aren’t even living there anymore? A lot can happen in three years. They could have moved away.
And even if they’re still here, Clara barely knows them in the present/past. Is she really going to knock on their door and ask them where her husband and child are? Is she really prepared to hear a potentially disturbing answer from virtual strangers?
As she winds her way along the narrow two-lane highway high above the sea, she notes that everything looks pretty much the same as it did three years ago. Everything she can see, anyway, amid the billowing early morning mist. Which isn’t much more than trees, boulders, and blue-gray water.
Still, she’s reassured by the familiarity of her surroundings. . . .
Until she rounds the final curve in the road and suddenly, nothing is familiar. Nothing at all.
A traffic light appears out of nowhere, glowing red in the fog. Clara slams on the brakes. The through street has become a dead end, blocked by a massive construction zone beyond plywood and chain-link fencing.
She consults the GPS and turns right. San Florentina’s main artery has apparently been rerouted around a maze of excavations, new foundations, and half-built structures. The once-charming town square is cluttered with trucks and bulldozers; orange signs, barrels, Dumpsters; stacks of planking and pipe and cinder blocks.
Dazed, Clara takes in the foreign landscape as she drives, passing vacant lots where buildings used to be and buildings where there were open spaces. Unpaved streets trail off to nowhere like phantom limbs.
Gone are the gazebo and fountain, the diagonal parking spots, the storefronts with awnings and hand-painted signs. The sturdy brick library and the local savings and loan have vanished, replaced by a rutted parking lot.
Clara pulls into a space there and turns off the car, shaken.
She should have known.
She did know: San Florentina was demolished in the earthquake. She heard all about it, even saw the evidence on the news.
Yet the harsh reality still hit her like a wrecking ball, and it takes her a few moments to regain her composure.
When she does, she looks over at Dickens, up on all fours in the seat beside her.
“Come on,” she tells him, opening the door. “I’m not ready to go to Sequoia Way just yet.”
Dickens obligingly hops out after her, then lifts his hind leg and pees on the tire.
“Oh, for the love of . . .” Clara shakes her head and reaches back into the backseat for the leash she found at the house.
About to close the car door, she’s struck by a sudden realization.
The backseat is empty.
The leash is there, but . . . that’s all.
There’s no child car seat in the back, and there should be.
But shouldn’t there be one in her own car as well? Surely they have two car seats.
They’re expensive. Maybe we’re too strapped for cash.
So strapped they can’t even afford a second car seat?
The car smells new. We probably just haven’t gotten a new seat for it yet.
That makes sense, right?
Of course it does.
Clinging stubbornly to that possibility, Clara pushes the matter from her mind and locks the car. Then she fastens the leash around the dog’s collar, and they set off toward what used to be Main Street.
For all she knows, it’s still Main Street, minus the pavement, the traffic, the window-shoppers, and many of the buildings. The nearly block-long brick edifice that once housed a number of businesses, including Triangle Shoe store where Drew just bought her new slippers, has vanished altogether.
Instead of piped-in Christmas Carols, the air hums with the music of buzz saws, the staccato beat of hammers, the rumble of bulldozers, and the steady, high-pitched beeping of trucks moving in reverse.
Dickens stops and sniffs around the sidewalk every couple of yards, and he occasionally lifts his hind leg to nonchalantly christen a lamppost, a tree, the quintessential fire hydrant.
“I’m supposed to be the one with the bladder problems,” she informs him as he does his business on a parking meter. “You’re not even pregnant.”
Then again . . .
She glances down to make sure this dog really isn’t a female Dickens impersonator.
Nope. He’s all male, all right.
Hearing the sharp staccato burst of a whistle being blown, she turns to see a uniformed cop on the opposite side of the street.
The stout officer, who sports a brush cut and a blond mustache, is clearly in the process of writing a parking ticket for a double-parked Jeep. But he’s looking directly at her, silver whistle between his lips, and her heart sinks.
Uh-oh.
Maybe this isn’t Dickens after all, and his true owner has reported him missing, and she’s about to be arrested for dog-napping.
“Ma’am, are you aware that your dog just violated the California penal code?”
So dogs aren’t allowed to urinate on the street in 2012?
Terrific. Dickens has been violating the penal—or pee-nal, ha!—code all over town. Okay, well it’s no big deal. Now she knows.
“I’m sorry, Officer,” she calls back.
She tugs Dickens’s leash, but now the cop has slapped the ticket under the Jeep’s windshield wiper and is heading right for them.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to haul you both off to the slammer.”
The slammer? Cops actually talk that way?
On the heels of that incredulous thought, Clara recovers the presence of mind to wonder if he’s really going to arrest her.
And Dickens? Can a dog actually be arrested, too?
Isn’t the slammer a little drastic for peeing on a hydrant?
“I’m . . . I, uh, I’m sorry,” she stammers again. “Really, I didn’t—”
“Aw, save it for the judge!”
Speechless at his attitude, she gapes at him, feeling as though she’s stumbled into a cross between an old movie set and a futuristic militant society.
He bursts out laughing. “Hey, you should’ve stuck with acting, Clara. You’re pretty good.” He gives her a hug, then pets the dog’s head. “Dickens, you’ve got one heck of a tiny bladder for such a gigantic beast.”
Clara . . .
Dickens . . .
He knows us!
And we’re not going to jail!
“Did you have a good Christmas?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she manages to respond, thoughts whirling with all the questions she longs to ask him—if she could just figure out how to begin.
“Been feeling okay?” he asks, gesturing at her stomach.
So he knows she’s pregnant.
Big deal. Anyone looking at her would know that.
But what else does he know?
“I’m fine,” she assures him, floundering for the right way to ask him about Drew. “I just—you know—I’m looking for—”
Before she can say her husband’s name, she hears a shout.
“Aw, jeez, Bobby!”
They both turn to see the Jeep’s owner, apparently, waving the ticket in dismay.
“I was only there for five minutes,” the twenty-something guy tells the cop.
“I watched the car for at least fifteen before I wrote you up.”
“What? No way, Bobby!”
The officer—Bobby, apparently—glances at Clara. “Sorry. Duty calls. Have a good one.”
“You, too,” she calls after him as he crosses the street to the disgruntled driver.
For a moment, she watches the exchange, wondering whether she should wait until they’re finished.
She decides against it. Telling him she’s looking for her husband might not be the best idea. The policeman will probably want to know how long he’s been missing, and then what?
She can hardly tell him it’s been three years since his exact whereabouts were certain.
Maybe for now, she’ll just take a stroll along the street, try to come up with something better in case she runs into her cop friend again.
“Come on, Dickens. Let’s go. And try not to violate any more penal codes, even if they are fake.”
She rounds a corner and is relieved to see that the few shops that are still standing—or perhaps, standing again—seem to be back in business. Among them is Scoops, where a magic-marker-on-poster board sign in the window bears just one promising word: open.
But when she reaches the door, she finds it locked.
“It’s a little early in the morning for ice cream, don’t you think?” a voice behind her asks.
She turns to see a woman about her own age smiling at her. She’s tall and slender, very pretty even without a stitch of makeup and her brown hair pulled back in a rubber band.
Does she know me, like the cop did? Clara wonders. Or is she just a chatty passerby?
“It’s, um, never too early for ice cream when you’re pregnant,” she improvises, and gives her protruding belly a pat.
“You can say that again,” the woman replies as if she knows from personal experience.
Clara darts a glance at her midsection through her open jacket. Her snug-fitting white T-shirt is tucked into her jeans, and her belly is absolutely flat. She’s definitely not a fellow pregnant person—unless she’s in her first trimester.
“You know, every time I see you walking around pregnant, I want to cry with sheer happiness,” the woman tells Clara.
“You, uh . . . you do?”
“Absolutely.” Sure enough, her gray eyes are looking a little . . . moist.
“Well, that’s so . . .”
Weird is what it is. Totally weird.
“So when are you due, exactly?” the woman asks Clara.
Ha. I wish I knew.
“Not soon enough,” she replies evasively.
“Do you guys have names picked out?”
You guys . . .
As in Clara and Drew.
She must know us.
Or maybe not. Maybe she’s a total stranger who’s merely assuming Clara is half of a couple. A total, nutty stranger who goes around crying over random pregnant women.
“We’re still . . . you know. Working on names.”
“I know how that goes. Harry and I had an awful time.”
Harry.
If she were a stranger, she probably would have said my husband instead.
Then again, you never know.
She might be one of those chatty people who simply talks about her own life and everyone who’s part of it in an overly familiar way.
Clara looks at the pretty brunette, trying to gauge whether that’s the case.
It’s impossible to tell—and, judging by the expectant expressio
“So what name did you come up with?” she hears herself ask.
The woman gives her a strange look. Either that was too nosy a question for a stranger to ask, or Clara should have known the answer.
The latter is obviously true, judging by the woman’s tone and arched brows when she replies, “Um . . . Prudence?”
“Oh, Prudence! Right! I remember.”
“You should. You’re the one who came up with it.”
Huh? Since when do I name other people’s babies? Especially Prudence.
“I’ll never forget what you said, Clara, the day I told you that ever since the Mayflower, every firstborn daughter in my family has been named Prudence, but I was going to break the streak.”
“What did I say?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot!”
“No, I just . . . I like to hear about my own cleverness.” Yeah. Talk about lame.
But the woman smiles.
“Who doesn’t?” she asks pleasantly. “What you said was, ‘Honey, if it works, don’t fix it.’”
Clara smiles wistfully, thinking of Doris—then feels a sharp tug on the leash in her other hand.
She looks down just in time to see Dickens lurch into a full-blown frenzy, focused on something down the block. Clara sees that it’s a squirrel-sized, red-sweater-clad dog on a leash held by an elderly woman who just stepped out of the coffee shop.
Barking wildly, Dickens pulls on the leash, dragging Clara along the sidewalk toward the little dog and away from Prudence’s mother.
Uncertain whether to be relieved or dismayed, Clara calls over her shoulder, “See you later!”
The reply is drowned out by her dog, now snarling.
“Dickens, cut it out!”
Up ahead, the tiny dog nonchalantly browses a patch of grass at the base of a tree, but the old lady looks panic-stricken.
“Don’t worry,” Clara calls to her. “I’ve got him.”
No, she doesn’t. Dickens is closing in on the pair, with Clara helplessly in tow.
The old lady frantically tugs her own dog’s leash in the opposite direction. “Gerald! Gerald! It’s him again!”
Gerald looks up, sees Dickens, and lets out a high-pitched yelp.
“Dickens! Stop this right now!” Arms outstretched alongside her gigantic belly, Clara holds the leash with both hands as Dickens ignores the command, pretty much dragging her along by her heels.