The Room at the Top of the Stairs

The man came out to fix the gate before the kettle had even finished whistling. Duke heard him first as a change in the weight of the house, the quick heavy tread on the stairs, the back door banging wider than it needed to, and then there he was in the yard in his socks, a towel still around his neck, his hair wet and flattened on one side.

"I latched it," he said to no one in particular. "I know I latched it."

The woman stood on the back step with Marcus on her hip now, the boy's grass stained knees bent around her waist, his face turned toward Duke the way a sunflower turns toward wherever the light is. "You carried the boxes in after eleven," she said. "You had your arms full."

The man said nothing to that. He crouched by the gate and worked the latch up and down, up and down, the metal clacking against itself. Duke came over to supervise, because that was also a rule, and pushed his nose against the man's elbow until the man reached out without looking and scratched the place behind his ear that never stopped itching.

"Good dog," the man said. "Good old dog."

Duke leaned into the hand. He could smell the boxes on the man's fingers, cardboard and tape and something else, a faint unfamiliar sweetness, the same smell that had come drifting out of the house that morning. He could smell a long car ride too, the stale air of a vehicle that had been driven for hours with the windows up. He did not know what any of it meant. He only knew that the man's hand was slower than usual, and that it stayed on his head a long time after the scratching stopped.

The man pulled a length of wire from his pocket and twisted it twice around the latch and the post, then tugged on the gate to be sure. It held. He stood, knees popping, and looked down at Duke.

"You stopped him," he said. "Didn't you."

Duke thumped his tail against the dirt, which was the answer he gave to most questions.

Breakfast was late that day, later than it had been in a long time. Duke waited by the back steps with his chin on his paws and listened to the house through the screen. The voices inside were different. They were softer than usual, and slower, and every so often one of them stopped in the middle of a sentence as though it had walked into a room and forgotten why. There was the clatter of a cereal bowl, a spoon dropped on the floor, a small voice saying "Again" and a larger voice saying "Okay, one more time, but then you eat."

When the door finally opened, it was not the woman who came out with his bowl. It was Marcus.

He carried it with both hands held straight out in front of him, the way you might carry something precious or something on fire, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. The woman walked one step behind him with her hands hovering near his shoulders, not touching, ready. The bowl was too full. Someone had let the boy do the scooping.

Duke stood. He knew better than to rush a person carrying food, so he only stood, and his tail swept wide slow arcs behind him, and he made a small sound in his throat that was not quite a whine.

Marcus made it down the first step. On the second he looked up at Duke instead of at his feet, and the bowl tipped, and a brown landslide of kibble poured over the edge and rattled across the boards and into the grass.

For a moment no one moved. Marcus stared at the spilled food and his lower lip began to shake, and Duke could smell it on him, sudden and sharp, the salt smell of a child about to cry because he has ruined something.

Duke did the only thing that made sense. He put his head down and began to eat the kibble off the step, one piece at a time, crunching loudly, his tail going the whole while. He ate the pieces on the boards and then the pieces in the grass. He nosed through the crabgrass for the ones that had bounced farthest and found every single one. When he was done he went back to the boy, who was still holding the half empty bowl, and he licked a crumb of kibble dust off the boy's wrist.

Marcus laughed. It came out wet and wobbly, still half a cry, but it was a laugh.

"He likes it on the floor," the woman said, and her voice had the same wobble in it. "Look at that. He likes it better on the floor."

Marcus set the bowl down very carefully on the bottom step. Then he sat down beside it, cross legged, and watched Duke finish breakfast with an expression of enormous responsibility.

The boy followed him all morning.

Duke did his second round of the perimeter a little after nine, the way he always did once the sun had cleared the Hendersons' roof, and Marcus walked behind him the whole way. When Duke stopped to smell the tomato stakes, Marcus stopped and bent down and smelled them too. When Duke paused at the oak to consider the squirrel's little mounds of earth, Marcus squatted and patted one flat with both hands. When Duke lifted his head to watch a bird go over, Marcus lifted his head and watched it too, his mouth open, his whole body tipping backward until he sat down hard in the dirt without seeming to notice.

The orange cat was on the Hendersons' side of the fence, stretched along the top of an old flower box in a patch of sun. Duke gave it the look he always gave it, which said that he knew it was there and that he had decided, out of generosity, to allow it.

Marcus looked at the cat. Then he looked at Duke. Then he looked at the cat again and said, very seriously, "No."

The cat opened one eye, considered the two of them, and closed it again.

By late morning the sun was warm enough to make the effort worthwhile, and Duke went to the dent in the dirt by the fence and began to dig. He did not dig for anything in particular. He dug because the ground was soft there and the work was good, because his front legs still remembered how, because there was a particular satisfaction in the cool damp earth that opened up a few inches down. Dirt flew out behind him in a fan.

Marcus watched for a while. Then he got down on his hands and knees beside Duke and began to dig too, scooping at the hole with both small hands, throwing dirt behind him in exactly the same way, or as close to it as he could manage.

When the woman came out to call them in for lunch, she found the two of them side by side at the bottom of a hole almost a foot deep, both of them filthy to the elbows, and she stood at the top of the step with her hand over her mouth for a long time before she said anything at all.

The afternoon was long and slow and golden, and Duke spent most of it under the oak, because his hip had begun to complain. It did that more often now, after a morning of work, a dull ache that started low and spread into his back leg until he had to lie down on his good side and wait for it to pass. He did not mind it much. It was simply one of the things that was true now, like the gray in his muzzle and the way the stairs to the back step seemed to have grown a little taller over the years.

Marcus had been taken inside for a bath and a nap. Duke could hear the bath through the open upstairs window, the splashing and the protests, and later the quiet. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, the boy was lying beside him in the shade.

He had come out on his own somehow, barefoot, his hair still damp, wearing a clean shirt that was too big for him. He lay on his back with his arms flung out and his head resting against Duke's ribs, rising and falling with every breath Duke took. He was asleep. His fingers were curled loosely in the fur of Duke's chest.

Duke did not move. The ache in his hip had settled into the ground beneath him, and the boy's head was warm and heavy and smelled of soap, and the leaves above them moved in the breeze and let the light through in pieces. A bird sang somewhere. The orange cat was gone from the fence. The house was quiet.

After a while the back door opened, and the woman came out. She looked first at the gate, quickly, the way people look at a stove they are afraid they left on. Then she saw them under the oak and stopped.

She did not wake him. She went back inside, and came out again with a blanket, and laid it over the boy's legs. Then she sat down in the grass a little distance away, with her knees pulled up and her arms around them, and she stayed there until the shadows reached the fence.

Duke had slept outside every night of his life. He had a bed on the back porch, a flattened cushion that smelled entirely of himself, under the overhang where the rain could not reach, and from there he could see the whole yard and hear the whole house. It was a good bed. He had never wanted another one.

That night he lay on it with his chin on his paws and listened to the house go quiet, room by room. The kitchen light went out. The television murmured and then stopped. Footsteps went up the stairs, the heavy ones and the lighter ones, and doors closed, and the pipes knocked once and were still.

Then, from the small room at the top of the stairs, the one that had been empty for as long as Duke could remember, there came a sound.

It was a thin sound. It started small and went on and on, rising and falling, the sound of someone very young who has woken in the dark in a place he does not know and cannot find anything familiar to hold on to. Duke lifted his head. His ears went up. The sound went on.

He stood. He went to the back door and stood there, and when nothing happened he put his nose against the screen and whined, low and steady, the way he had not whined since he was a puppy.

Footsteps came down the stairs. The kitchen light went on. The woman's face appeared behind the screen, puffy with sleep and worry, her hair loose. She looked at Duke for a long moment. Upstairs, the crying went on.

"Oh, what the hell," she said softly, and opened the door.

Duke had been inside the house many times, but never at night, and never past the kitchen. The floors were cool and smooth under his paws and smelled of a hundred years of feet. The stairs were steep. His hip caught on the third one and he had to stop and gather himself, and the woman waited with her hand on his back until he was ready, and then they went up together, one step at a time.

The door to the small room was half open. Inside, in a bed that was too big for him, under a blanket printed with faded rockets, Marcus sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and his face wet and red. He saw Duke in the doorway and the crying caught in his throat and stopped.

Duke went to the side of the bed. He did not jump up; he could not have, and he would not have if he could. He lay down on the rug beside it, slowly, with a long low groan as his hip settled, and rested his chin on the edge of the mattress where the boy could reach.

A small hand came down and found his ear. It held on.

The woman stood in the doorway for a long time. Then she turned off the hall light and went back to bed and left the door open behind her.

Duke lay awake until the boy's breathing slowed and deepened, until the hand on his ear went loose and warm. Then he closed his eyes, there in the unfamiliar room, in the house he had slept beside every night of his life, and for the first time, he slept inside it.