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of homeless dogs were being put down so she'd driven over and visited with the keeper, who told her she could have any one she liked. A roar of barking had filled the aisle of wire cages. Amidst all the noise, Wilkie stood silent and intent at the far end, the sinews of his legs and neck visible beneath a gleaming coat.
He slept the first week in the yard and then a month or more in the vestibule before claiming a large wicker basket inside the back door. Once Sam had fought him out of the dining room and Wilkie had claimed the hall, they got along grudgingly and lay beside each other on the warm stones in front of the fireplace. Slowly, her days had formed themselves around their habits: rising before dawn, a long walk before breakfast, a nap in the late afternoon, dinner earlier than she ever used to eat, and another walk before bed.
Naturally, conversation ran in everyone's head, snippets of talk, a moment's complaint dismissed, plans for the week or the hour or the minute debated back and forth. If you lived on your own, of course, the volume tended to rise, filling the silence. Fair enough. She'd had decades of this as a single woman. If you added the everyday fact of people speaking to their pets, and more, of their sensing, sometimes keenly, the wishes, wants, or moods of the animals they lived with, then none of what had begun happening a few months ago should have been thought abnormal. She resented the judgment she knew others would make: dogs don't talk. There's help you could get.
As a young woman living in New York, she had visited certain apartments with Eric, apartments of those who considered themselves radicals, the rent on walk-ups paid by suburban parents while the children decried the system, the main attribute of which was an authority so pervasive the masses couldn't see it. Dime-store Marxism peddled to the disaffected. And then there was the other strand, the young men and women who ate their peyote and read their Huxley and spoke of the subtler tyranny of the ordered senses. Damp is how she remembered them, pale, long hair pasted down the sides of their faces, sweating in overheated apartments eating cake and oranges. Visiting in those rooms, observing, Charlotte found herself standing behind a cordon sanitaire, a line drawn in the invisible but deeply staining ink of class. It's not that her parents would have reproved her for doing such things or taken drastic steps. They would merely have been disappointed, their distaste, like hers, more aesthetic than political.
For years afterward, a criticism had lodged itself in her: that she'd been afraid of experience, a coward, a debutante stuck in the mind of the ball. But what sloppiness and vagary those believers had been delivered into. What bathos of posture and commercialism. All their therapy and their divorces and now their wretched houses built up to her door. And what of their radical perception now? Would they even think to credit Charlotte's mind for a minute?
So a few months ago the conversations in her head had grown a bit in volume, and pushing outward the bicker and debate had circled into her companions, Wilkie and Sam, with whom she'd always communicated in one way or another. So what? They'd taken to conversation in the way she would have predicted from their personalities: Sam the more arrogant of the two, convinced of himself, Wilkie making up for self-doubt with an added righteousness. Were the flower children-cum-yuppies going to cart her off for an imagination gone too florid?
If she were honest with herself, however, Charlotte had to admit the animals themselves had begun to trouble her of late. At first they had merely taken up one side or another of exchanges long conducted internally, most of them quotidian: when to put in the storm windows, when to take them out; whether to read the paper or give oneself a rest from news of death. Helpmates, they were. Companions who cared enough to take a view of the daily dilemmas. But recently their talk had begun to veer from what occupied Charlotte's conscious mind. More and more the topics were their own.
An odd couple they made, she considered, walking behind them now as they moved along the bank of the stream. Sam with his blond coat and oafish head, that openmouthed lumber of a walk, his tongue hanging from his mouth; Wilkie,