Like walking off the edge of a cliff.
She said, “Not yet. In a week . . . or a month . . . we’ll load them in the
truck and take them to a gallery. But not yet, Travis. I just can’t . . I can’t
handle it yet.”
He grinned at her. “Sensory overload again?”
Einstein came to her and rubbed against her leg, looking up with a sweet
expression that made Nora smile.
Scratching behind the dog’s ears, she said, “So much has happened so fast. I
can’t absorb it all. I keep having to fight off attacks of dizziness. I feel a
little bit as if I’m on a carousel that’s whirling around faster and faster, out
of control.”
What she said was true, to an extent, but that was not the only reason she
wished to delay going public with her art. She also wanted to move slowly in
order to have time to savor every glorious development. If she rushed into
things, the transformation from reclusive spinster to a full-fledged participant
in life would go too fast, and later it would be just a blur. She wanted to
enjoy every moment of her metamorphosis.
As if she were an invalid who had been confined since birth to a single dark
room full of life-support equipment, and as if she had just been miraculously
cured, Nora Devon was coming cautiously out into a new world.
Travis was not solely responsible for Nora’s emergence from reclusion. Einstein
had an equally large role in her transformation.
The retriever had obviously decided that Nora could be trusted with the secret
of his extraordinary intelligence. After the Modern Bride and baby business in
Solvang, the dog gave her glimpse after glimpse of his undoglike mind at work.
Taking his lead from Einstein, Travis told Nora how he had found the retriever
in the woods and how something strange—and never seen—had been pursuing it. He
recounted all the amazing things the dog had done since then. He also told her
of Einstein’s occasional bouts with anxiety in the heart of the night, when he
sometimes stood at a window and stared out at the darkness as if he believed the
unknown creature in the woods would find him.
They sat for hours one evening in Nora’s kitchen, drinking pots of coffee and
eating homemade pineapple cake and discussing explanations for the dog’s uncanny
intelligence. When not cadging bits of cake, Einstein listened to them with
interest, as if he understood what they were saying about him, and sometimes he
whined and paced impatiently, as if frustrated that his canine vocal apparatus
did not permit him to speak. But they were mostly spinning their wheels because
they had no explanations worth discussing.
“I believe he could tell us where he comes from, why he’s so damn different from
other dogs,” Nora said.
Einstein busily swept the air with his tail.
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Travis said. “He’s got a humanlike self-awareness.
He knows he’s different, and I suspect he knows why, and I think he’d like to
tell us about it if he could only find a way.”
The retriever barked once, ran to the far end of the kitchen, ran back, looked
up at them, did a frantic little dance of purely human frustration, and finally
slumped on the floor with his head on his paws, alternately chuffing and whining
softly.
Nora was most intrigued by the story of (he night that the dog had gotten
excited over Travis’s book collection. “He recognizes that books are a means of
communication,” she said. “And maybe he senses there’s a way to use books to
bridge the communications gap between him and us.”
“How?” Travis asked as he lifted another forkful of pineapple cake.
Nora shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe the problem was that your books weren’t
the right kind. Novels, you said?”
“Yeah. Fiction.”
She said, “Maybe what we need is books with pictures, images he can react to.
Maybe if we gathered up a lot of picture books of all kinds, and magazines with
pictures, and maybe if we spread them out on the floor and worked with Einstein,