Page 2 of Avelina

My eyes snapped to his face. “I died?”

“Just for, like, a minute. Your lung collapsed, and your windpipe got cut off, then you died. Your heart stopped, but the doctor says your brain is fine. They put that tube in your chest, did CPR, and brought you back. Cool, huh?”

I stared at him, then glanced over at my mom, giving her my famous What the hell? expression. She shrugged.

“Drew came to visit you yesterday,” she said.

I focused on my woolly feet. Drew was my ex-girlfriend, an artist, and my first and only real relationship and heartbreak. She had been my college roommate for two years and was the first girl I ever kissed. We broke up the day after graduation when Drew confessed that she’d been accepted to the master’s program at CalArts. I offered to follow her there, but she said we needed a clean break. I hadn’t taken it well.

Now, two years after finishing that degree, she was trying to reestablish a relationship and had been texting me almost every day. I had moved back home to work for my parents at Silverstone Stables, wanting desperately to build some semblance of an adult life. I wasn’t interested in dredging up the past. At least, I didn’t think I was.

I pretended that my mom hadn’t mentioned Drew. I needed to shoot the elephant in the room. I took a semi-deep breath, coughed until my face turned pink, then asked, “Did you find Rogue?”

Nobody said anything for what seemed like forever. A blood pressure cuff on my left upper arm inflated and deflated of its own accord. I waited, coughing a few more times and looking back and forth between my parents.

Finally, my dad said, “Rogue never came out of the woods, Lina. We searched for him, but . . . he’s gone.” The stab I felt was worse than my chest tube.

Rogue was my dog, but that tiny noun is grossly inadequate for describing what he really was to me. He meandered into my life when I was fifteen, when I had just begun figuring out who I was and what I wanted to be.

We weren’t exactly sure what he was either. Rogue looked like a pharaoh hound, except huge. The vet said that he was about four times bigger than normal, so he couldn’t possibly be a purebred pharaoh hound. She had recommended a DNA test, but my dad said that was a hilarious waste of money and refused.

Rogue had a rich auburn coat everywhere except for a white patch on the left side of his face in the shape of a handprint. His eyes were a deep amber that followed everyone around the room, missing nothing. He had these adorably huge Dumbo ears that stood straight up and turned pink when he got excited or nervous.

When he first came to us as a stray, Rogue never wanted to leave the house. He would just throw himself on the ground and go limp when we tried to make him go outside to do his business.

My mom said he had abandonment issues, but that stinker knew exactly what he was doing. My dad had to pick up his ninety-pound body and carry him out. Since he wasn’t fully grown yet and eventually got up to a hundred ninety pounds, that was not a winning strategy.

One day, about a month after we found him, he followed me into the bathroom. When I pulled my pants down and sat on the toilet, Rogue tensed, and his ears turned bright pink. Then he walked in a little circle and lay down, facing away from me. It was the funniest damned thing I’d ever seen. I laughed for literally days after that, and every time I did, his ears would turn pink again.

After that, Rogue used the toilet. Yes, I’m serious. He would wait for everyone to get busy, then run in there. Based on the mess, it must have taken him a couple tries to figure out how to get his butt in the right place, but he did it. That is how I learned that my dog was brilliant, and I treated him more like a person than a pet.

For ten years, Rogue was my best friend. I talked to him about everything, including the secret stuff. He was there every time I had a bad day, which could be fairly often. I used to talk to him when I was alone in my room, telling him about what frustrations or exciting events had happened. He was the first one to hear that I had a girlfriend, a full six months before I told my parents.

He was there, whining, when I left for college, and he was there when I came home for every break. He had gone missing a couple of times during the school year. My mom said he was out searching for me, which sounded like nonsense. Then again, he hadn’t disappeared since I came back to start working for my parents.

I couldn’t believe he was gone. I wouldn’t believe it. My throat tightened in that burning way that precedes crying, and I squeezed my eyes closed.

“I’ll search for him when I get home,” I said, my voice breaking.

My mom didn’t meet my eyes, but my dad asked, “Lina, do you remember what you told us when we found you?”

I shook my head. I remembered that little bird, the bright sky, Rogue barking, and . . . something else. The barking had stopped suddenly when I heard it. What was it? A man’s voice, I thought. No, that must have been my dad when he got to me.

“You said that a white wolf had spooked Fantasma,” he said and waited for me to put together the pieces.

I was still clamping down on the emotion burning in my throat, and speaking would have broken the tenuous hold I had on my grief.

“Baby,” Mom said, “Rogue was more than ten years old. That’s ancient for a dog his size. You remember our shar-pei, Molly, don’t you? She only lived to be ten, and Rogue was three or four times her size.”

Is, I thought. Not was.

“He saved me,” I whispered, choking on the words. A tear escaped my right eye. I moved to wipe it away but forgot about my wrist. A lightning bolt flew up my forearm to my elbow and I winced. A few more tears slipped out, running down both my cheeks.

My parents glanced at each other, making vague gestures and facial expressions that indicated a silent continuation of a previous disagreement. They were always talking to each other like that. My dad sighed, saying, “Okay, we can search for him again when you get home.”

I guess my mom won.

I nodded and closed my eyes. The nurse, Tarah, came in and helped me maneuver my chest tube so that I could lie on my left side. The pain in my chest was excruciating, but at least I got to blame that for my crying. She said chest tubes hurt like a son of a bitch and that I would feel a lot better when it came out.

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