A Simple Case of Angels (3 page)

6

—

Nicola lay
on her bed with June Bug. From the basement came the repeated smash of Jared practicing kick-flips on his new skateboard in the desperate hope of impressing Julie Walters-Chen. He'd asked for a cellphone and a laptop. The skateboard had been a distant third choice.

In the hall, Jackson's new remote-control car whirred up and down. Every time it neared Nicola's closed bedroom door, June Bug would stop chewing Nicola's braid, stand at attention and bark.

Nicola began humming along to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”
playing on the radio in the kitchen. June Bug stopped chewing again. She tilted her head.

“What is it, June Bug?” Nicola asked.

June Bug tilted her head the other way and her ears twitched. Her tail, stubby and white, thumped the bedspread. June Bug thumped slowly, then faster and faster until she had wound herself up. Then she pounced on Nicola's chest and washed kisses inside her ears and nose until Nicola shrieked with laughter.

“Dinner!” Terence called. “Come and get it!”

Dinner was one of the words June Bug understood, along with her name and the commands Come, Sit, Lie Down, Roll Over, Bang Bang You're Dead, Shake, Wave and Crawl. Despite being such an intelligent animal, June Bug could not seem to make sense of No, Stop, Leave It, Get Down or I'm Going to Kill That Dog Right Now.

June Bug dashed ahead to the dining room and jumped up on Jared's chair.

“Get Down!” Terence commanded.

June Bug didn't. Her face, divided down the middle, white and black, peeped hopefully over the edge of the table at the enormous turkey spilling out stuffing, the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes, the steaming gravy in the china boat.

“No, June Bug!” Mina scolded, coming in with the Christmas crackers.

June Bug lifted her nose in the air and sniffed.

“I'm Going to Kill That Dog Right Now!” Jared said, shoving June Bug off his chair and throwing himself on it.

“Don't be so mean!” Nicola cried.

“Put her outside,” Mina said.

Nicola didn't want to. It was terribly cold. Despite how much white hair June Bug shed all over the furniture, she hardly seemed to have any on her body. The pink skin of her belly showed right through her skimpy coat.

“Out!” Terence said, and Nicola picked up the squirming dog and carried her to the kitchen door. She shook the snow off the doormat so June Bug would have a more comfortable place to sit while she waited to be let back in.

The Breams popped the Christmas crackers and laughed over the prizes and jokes inside. They put on the colored paper crowns. Then they ate. And ate. Gravy drowned everything, except the trifle. They gobbled up the trifle, then pushed back their chairs, groaning.

“All day to cook,” Mina said. “Fifteen minutes to eat.”

Nicola, who had saved a bit of everything in the napkin in her lap, hurried to the kitchen door to give June Bug her Christmas dinner.

Snowy pawprints disappeared down the back steps.

“June Bug!” Nicola called. “June Bug, come!”

June Bug did not.

Nicola wanted to look for June Bug right away, but her mother said that June Bug always came back.

This was true. They had to phone Grammy and Grampy in Nova Scotia to wish them a Merry Christmas, and Nicola had to help clean up. Then the Breams were going to play rummy.

“If she's not back after rummy, we'll look,” Mina said.

Nicola left the kitchen door open a crack, which she wasn't supposed to do. She wasn't supposed to let the heat out, but she was too worried about June Bug. No one noticed because they were all in the dining room dealing out the cards.

They were well into the game when June Bug came in again, smiling. She was a dog who could smile. She smiled when she dug a hole in the lawn and when she Rolled Over or fell down on her side, Pretending to be Dead. When she did anything she was proud of, she smiled.

Like now, when she backed into the dining room dragging half a snow-covered Christmas turkey.

June Bug parked the turkey at Nicola's feet. It was nearly as big as she was. Jackson saw it first and screamed, “Our turkey! June Bug got our turkey!”

No one else said anything, because what was left of the Breams' turkey was on the kitchen counter.

“June Bug?” Nicola asked in a quavery voice. “Where did you get that turkey?”

“She stole it, obviously,” Jared answered. “She stole Christmas dinner right from under someone's nose.”

Terence said, “Don't jump to conclusions, young man. Anyway, that looks to me like
half
a turkey. If she did steal it, she only stole the leftovers.”

“The leftovers are the best part,” Jared said. “Turkey sandwiches the next day?
Someone's
not getting any.”

Then June Bug, who had been sitting so proudly listening to what she thought was praise coming from the Breams, flattened her ears in discomfort, took two steps away from the table, and threw up.

“There's the other half!” Jared crowed. He stabbed his finger at Nicola. “Two Chances used up today! One More Chance and that dog is
out of here!
”

* * *

Nicola and her mother set off into the frozen night with the remains of their own turkey wrapped in foil and tucked inside Mina's winter coat. They followed June Bug's tracks as best as they could. June Bug was with them, too, being dragged along by her leash. They had hoped that she would lead them to the scene of the crime, but June Bug was not cooperating.

“This is really awful, Nicola,” her mother said. “Imagine having your turkey stolen at Christmas. That family's dinner is ruined.”

“Is June Bug going to the SPCA?” Nicola asked.

“She's got One More Chance.”

“She's still a puppy,” Nicola reminded her mother.

“I know she is, sweetheart. It's just that she's pretty much the worst-behaved puppy there ever was.”

“She's so cute, though, and so smart.” Nicola glanced back at June Bug, who was plowing up the snow behind them with her stiff legs, refusing to walk.

The tracks got mixed up in front of the Durmazes' house. Nicola handed June Bug's leash to Mina, then crept up the front steps. The living-room drapes were partly open. Nicola could see through to the dining room, where everyone was still at the table eating mince pie. She recognized Aleisha, who was in her class. The Durmazes looked too happy to be people whose turkey had been stolen.

Nicola trudged back down the steps. June Bug was sitting on Mina's boots now, shivering.

“Can I take June Bug home?” Nicola asked, but her mother said no.

They looked in the window of every house on the street. If the drapes were closed, there was usually a slit Nicola could peek through. Even if they knew the people, Nicola and Mina were too embarrassed to ring the doorbell and ask if their turkey had gone missing.

“Strange,” Mina commented. “Hardly anyone put up Christmas lights this year.”

“We didn't,” Nicola said.

“You're right. Why didn't we?”

“I guess for the same reason the leaves didn't change color,” Nicola said.

“Didn't they?”

“No.”

When they got to the end of the block, they watched to see if June Bug would turn left or right or keep going straight. June Bug about-faced and tried to take off for home. Nicola picked her up.

They'd checked half the houses in the neighborhood when a police car pulled along beside them.

“I don't believe it,” Mina said.

Nicola was so frightened that she let June Bug go. The dog landed on all fours, lifting one paw at a time off the snowy sidewalk and shaking it.

A police officer stepped out of the car and addressed Mina. “May I ask what you're doing, ma'am?”

“We're trying to return something. Sort of. It can't actually be returned. No one would want it back. But we want to make amends. It's Christmas.”

The officer said, “We've received complaints. Suspicious behavior in the neighborhood. Possibly an attempted break-and-enter.”

Mina put a gloved hand over her face. “The trouble that dog gets us into!”

“I notice there's something under your coat,” he said. “Or are you having twins?”

“It's the rest of our turkey!”

Mina pulled the package out and opened it for the officer. He peered at it to make sure it really was turkey, not someone's silverware.

“Have some,” Mina said.

“Mmm,” he said, pulling off a piece of meat and tasting it.

Mina tapped on the window of the police car to offer some turkey to the officer behind the wheel. He was wearing a Santa hat. He nodded, and when Mina opened the car door, June Bug leapt right inside and bounced off the passenger seat into the back where the criminals ride.

“Ho-ho!” said the Santa officer. “Someone's in a big hurry to get arrested!”

“She's the guilty one, all right,” Mina told him.

“Let's take her down to the station and book her. Get in.”

Mina got in the back seat, taking Nicola's hand and pulling her in. Up front, the two officers turned on the siren and the flashing lights. They drove off with June Bug crouched in the back window, bobbing her head exactly like a dashboard ornament.

All the way home Nicola held back her tears, hoping that this wasn't Chance Number Three.

7

—

Later that
night it started snowing. It was still snowing the next morning, Boxing Day, when Nicola walked June Bug over to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. Out front, the nativity scene was blanketed in white. All that showed were the heads and shoulders of the three plywood wise men and the plywood angel hovering above them, painted gold.

Nicola didn't really expect to find Ignacio at the church. She only hoped. She hoped, and there he was, shoveling the steps in a big hat with earflaps.

Eventually he noticed June Bug — her black patch, one black ear and two pleading black eyes, emerging from the white blur.

“Your dog is cold,” he told Nicola, who was attached to the other end of the leash. “Do you want to bring her inside and warm her up?”

“I don't think we should, Ignacio. I really don't.”

Only when she said his name did he recognize her. “You're Lindsay's friend. Nicola, right?”

“She sits beside me at school.”

“And this is the bad dog you told me about? You don't think she'd make trouble in a church, do you?”

“I know she will,” Nicola said.

Ignacio left the shovel and came down the steps. He asked if he could hold June Bug.

“Be careful,” Nicola said. “If she really likes you, she'll bite your nose.”

He unzipped his parka and slid the dog's small, shivering body in against his chest. June Bug licked his face.

Nicola got straight to the point. “What you told me before, Ignacio? That dogs don't go to hell? Are you really sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” he said.

“She almost got arrested.”

“What? This little creature?” He looked down at June Bug's head poking out so sweetly from under his chin. “I don't believe it.”

Nicola nodded. “Yesterday.
Christmas
Day. Anyway, I got another idea. Once there was a scary movie on TV that I wasn't allowed to watch. I wasn't allowed to know anything about it. So of course my brother Jared told me everything and I couldn't sleep for a whole year. It was about a girl who got infected by a devil. She had to be exercised.”

“I think you mean exorcised,” Ignacio said.

“A priest exercised her,” Nicola said.

“How?”

“Jared didn't say. He just said her head turned completely around and the devil left. Do you think June Bug got infected?”

The janitor laughed.

“Could you ask the priest to exercise June Bug? Just in case?”

“Father Mark? I don't think he does that. But I could throw a ball for her,” Ignacio said.

“That's not going to do it.” Nicola sank to her knees with her mittens pressed together. Huge white flakes floated silently down around her. “Please, Ignacio. She only has One More Chance. Then they'll send her away. She'll go to hell for sure.”

Ignacio's face under the earflap hat was already red from shoveling and from the cold. Nicola thought it looked redder now. He asked her to get off her knees. When she refused, he sat on the bottom step and looked at her with his kind gray eyes.

“What do
you
do when you've done a bad thing, Nicola?”

“Yesterday? After June Bug stole someone's turkey? Me and my mom tried to find the people.”

“She stole someone's turkey?” He looked shocked.

“Yes! We brought what was left of
our
turkey so they could have Christmas dinner. Also fifty dollars from June Bug's damage fund. Mom said it looked like a fifty-dollar turkey. Well, the part we saw looked like thirty dollars. The other part you couldn't pay someone to take.”

“So you tried to do a good deed to make up for it?”

Nicola brightened. “That's a good idea! I'll do something good!”

“Now, Nicola. You already confessed for June Bug, which is fine. She can't talk. But if you do her good deed, too, nothing's going to change. She has to do the good deed herself.”

“That's going to be difficult.”

“It will be easy! A few minutes ago I turned around and saw June Bug for the first time. You know what I felt? I felt filled with happiness. Just looking at this cute dog made me happy. Looking at her now, warm in my coat? I'm overjoyed! I'm ecstatic!” He threw one arm in the air. The other was holding the dog.

Nicola smiled. “She's good when she's asleep.”

“What else is she good at?”

“Besides being bad? Kissing. And she can do tricks.”

“Tricks?” Ignacio said. “People take their pets around to hospitals and nursing homes and places like that. You could do that. She could show off her tricks.”

“I'd be afraid to take her to a hospital.”

“You could try. Do you want to? I'll ask Father Mark if he knows a place. Come back next week, okay?”

Nicola tried not to sound discouraged, but a week was a long time. Long enough for a little dog to do a lot more damage.

Ignacio unzipped his coat and lifted June Bug out. Nicola decided to carry her. Taking her from the warm place next to Ignacio's heart and setting her down in the cold snow seemed cruel.

“See you soon,” Ignacio said before he went back up the church steps to finish shoveling. “We'll save June Bug.”

“I hope so.”

Nicola trudged off with her little dog under her arm, heading in the general direction of home, preoccupied with worry and paying no attention to which street she took. Except for the squeak of her boots in the cold, the whole white world was silent.

June Bug squirmed to be put down.

“There you go,” Nicola said.

June Bug started pulling. She pulled and sniffed and made those strange
ork ork ork
sounds that used to frighten Nicola until the vet explained that June Bug wasn't having an asthma attack, but reverse sneezing.

The snow was getting up her nose, but still she sniffed and sneezed and pulled Nicola on, excited about whatever scent she'd picked up.

Until, abruptly, she stopped.

In the snow bank, some child had swished out an angel — a crisp, perfectly outlined impression with a skirt and wings. June Bug sniffed at it and her stubby tail wagged.

Beyond the snow angel was a low concrete building with high windows and a wooden fence. It could have been an office or a small factory, except for the sign:

SHADY OAKS RETIREMENT HOME

Nicola gave herself a little shake. June Bug did, too, jangling the tags on her collar. She looked at Nicola and tilted her head.

Sometimes it seemed to Nicola that she and June Bug communicated perfectly. Like now. June Bug seemed to have pulled her to the very place they ­needed.

Now she seemed to be saying, “Let's go in.”

“Okay,” Nicola said.

No one at the Shady Oaks Retirement Home had recently shoveled. Nicola carried June Bug again, stepping in the old footprints half filled with fresh snow. These led up a wheelchair ramp to the front door, which was glass. In the vestibule, a few coats hung on hooks. An inner glass door faced a desk.

Nicola tried the outer door, but it was locked. She pressed the intercom button — twice, then three times — before an impatient voice answered, “Can I help you?”

“I'm here to talk to someone about visiting. With my dog.”

Through the glass doors, Nicola could see a plump woman with dyed blonde hair. Not young, but not old, either. A nurse, Nicola guessed from her pajama-like uniform. She was standing behind the desk, which must have been a nursing station, holding the phone and looking through the glass doors right at June Bug.

The second the nurse laid eyes on the little dog, she smiled, just like Ignacio had said.

The front door buzzed and unlocked with a click.

Nicola put June Bug down in the vestibule and stamped the snow off her boots. June Bug sniffed the doormat madly. To her, a doormat was a list of all the people who had ever been to a place. June Bug seemed very interested in who came and went from Shady Oaks.

The nurse met them at the inner door, which was also locked. When she opened it, an odor washed over Nicola, a combination of disinfectant and pee tinged with something sweet.

“And who have we here?” the nurse cooed to June Bug, who wagged, then almost burst through the nurse's legs and into the building that smelled so awful to Nicola, but obviously not to June Bug.

“What's your dog's name?”

“June Bug.”

“Help! Get them out of here!” a man's voice called.

The nurse bent down to pat June Bug. Behind her, Nicola could see an old woman hunched in a wheelchair beside the nursing station. She was wearing a bib, her head tipped forward. Somewhere nearby, commercials blared out of a TV.

“So cute,” the nurse said. “He or she?”

“She,” Nicola said.

The man called for help again.

“And you want to bring her to visit? I'll have to ask Mr. Devon. He's the manager. We've been under new management since the summer. There are so many different rules now.” She pursed her lips, and Nicola could tell she didn't like these new rules.

Meanwhile, the person calling for help was either coming closer, or yelling louder. “Help!”

“I'll tell you what, sweetheart. What's your name?”

“Nicola.”

“Nicola, I'm Jorie. Come back tomorrow. I'll run it by Mr. Devon this afternoon.”

Around the corner came an old man in a stretched brown cardigan flecked with dried bits of food. He was bald except for his eyebrows — which were like insect feelers — and the tufts of white hair above and in his ears. The way he walked, stepping with his left leg and dragging the other up to meet it, his right arm dangling, reminded Nicola of a monster in a horror movie.

June Bug rushed over with her usual greeting.

“Who are you?” he boomed at Nicola.

“Mr. Milton,” Jorie said in a voice nearly as loud as his. She didn't sound angry. She was trying to soothe him. “This little girl has dropped by with her dog. Maybe you'll get to visit with them tomorrow, if Mr. Devon says it's all right.”

Words slurred from the stretched side of his mouth. “Are you a stranger?”

Nicola was too frightened to answer.

Jorie said, “She's not a stranger. Her name is Nicola.”

“Do not forget to entertain strangers!” Mr. Milton bellowed.

Jorie patted the old man's shoulder. “We won't, Mr. Milton. We certainly won't.”

To Nicola she said, “Sweetie? Come back tomorrow.”

Nicola turned to go, pulling June Bug, who seemed to want to stay.

Back outside, Nicola paused on the ramp, gulping air that, though freezing, was at least fresh. Then she and June Bug retraced their steps down the snowy walk, June Bug leaping from footprint to footprint.

They reached the sidewalk and had just turned for home when Nicola heard an ominous thunk behind her. A gray car pulling up at Shady Oaks.

The driver got out, a man dressed in a dark overcoat, a large fur hat like a tea cozy, and tinted glasses. A cigarette dangled from his lips, his exhalations forming clouds in the cold air.

When the man reached the place where the angel was swished out in the snow bank, he stopped, the way Nicola and June Bug had.

What he did next made Nicola cringe.

He stepped on the angel, sinking his boot knee-deep into the snow. He stamped and stamped.

Then he continued up the walk to Shady Oaks Retirement Home.