“Oh my god,” says Natalie. “Never. That’s such a cliché. Mom would never come back as a rainbow. She’d come back as, I don’t know, like, a sandpiper or a seal or a surfboard or something. Something more interesting.”
“Natalie’s right,” says Jordan. “Mom hated clichés.”
“You guys are wrong,” says Mae. “That’sourrainbow. That’s Mom.”
Mae waves at the rainbow and says, “Hi, Mom.” She looks at her sisters expectantly.
“Really?” asks Jordan. Mae nods. “Okay. Fine. Hi, Mom,” says Jordan. They both turn to Natalie.
Natalie sighs.
“Go ahead,” says Mae.
“Hey, girl,” says Natalie, nodding at the rainbow. She feels silly, but she does it for Mae.
“I wish she left us a letter,” says Mae.
“What kind of letter?”
“With, like, life advice, the way moms do in a movie.”
“We were there when she died,” points out Jordan. “Why would she also have written a letter?”
“To remind us not to put our drinks down at the bar.”
“Not to dry an untreated stain.”
“That thank-you notes are not optional.”
“I think we know the advice,” says Jordan. “Now we just have to live it.” Then she squints down the beach, where a gray blur is visible, running in wild circles, and asks, “Is that Leo?”
“It looks like him. Somebody let him out!” Natalie cries. “Oh, no, I bet it was Austin, he didn’t know any better, I’m sorry, Mae!”
“It was probably Kara,” says Jordan. Then she says, “Sorry. I forgot I’m nice now. It probably wasn’t Kara.”
“It’s okay,” says Mae, although it really isn’t okay. If Leo gets in a situation he can’t handle, if he finds another dog on the beach and goes after it, if he getsabove threshold, as Hal would say, thirty seconds could undo all of the hours of careful training Mae has put in over the last week.
She inhales, and on her exhale she yells, “Leo, COME!”
No dog’s recall is perfect when the whole world beckons, that’s just a fact. Mae learned from Hal that the recall word is not to be overused, because if you let a dog ignore you too many times you havepoisoned the cueand your dog won’t listen when you really need him to.
(“Be careful not to poison the cue.” —Hal Miller.)
Mae has been so careful with her recall word! She doesn’t think she has poisoned the cue, but of course you never know. All you can do is hope.
Always offer something enticing, Hal would say.Always be the best option.
She sees Leo’s head turn toward her and watches his body still, watches him pause, considering. One way to freedom, but also to uncertainty, unpredictability, possibly danger. The other way to home. Mae calls one more time, and one more time is all it takes for Leo to run toward her as fast as he can, ignoring anything he passes on the way, sliding like a baseball player into the most beautiful sit in front of Mae.
It’s aperfectrecall.
“Good boy, Leo,” says Mae. She’s so happy she could cry. She takes off her belt and fashions it into a leash to hook around his collar. “Good, good, good boy. The best boy.”
They start back. How many times have they walked this beach in the past? So many times.So many!They were little girls on this beach, and preteens, and teens, and young adults, and now here they are, the girls from the photos, the girls from the memories, the girls from yesterday and today and tomorrow. Here they are, the Shipman girls.
Epilogue
One Year Later
