“He—”
“Wait, I think I remember your dog. Three O’clock, something like that? Ugly as sin?”
“He’s—”
“A dog and an erg,” he said, making a note in her file. “Okay. Excellent.”
He clicked his pen again, then set her file aside. “Now, as soon as you’re able—let’s say in a year— I want to see you back at the boathouse. My boat’s been looking for the right two seat and something tells me you’re it. You’ll have to arrange for a sitter, though. No babies in the boat. We have plenty of those as it is.”
Elizabeth reached for her jacket. “That’s very kind, Dr. Mason,” she said, assuming he was only trying to be nice, “but according to you I’m about to get hit by a truck.”
“An accident from which you’ll recover,” he corrected. “Look, I have an impeccable memory when it comes to rows, and I very much remember ours. They were good. Very good.”
“Because of Calvin.”
Dr. Mason looked surprised. “No, Miss Zott. Not just because of Evans. It takes all eight to row well. All eight. Anyway, back to the business at hand. I’m starting to feel a bit better about your situation. I know you’ve been through quite a shock with Evans’s passing, and then this,” he added, pointing to her belly. “But things will be fine. Maybe even better than fine. A dog, an erg, two seat. Excellent.”
Then he took both of her hands in his and gave them a cheerful squeeze, and although his words hadn’t made complete sense, compared to everything else she’d heard up to that point, they were the first that finally made some.
Chapter 16
Labor
“Library?” Elizabeth asked Six-Thirty about five weeks later. “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Mason later today and I’d like to return these books first. I’m thinking you might enjoy Moby-Dick. It’s a story about how humans continually underestimate other life-forms. At their peril.”
In addition to the receptive learning technique, Elizabeth had been reading aloud to him, long ago replacing simple children’s books with far weightier texts. “Reading aloud promotes brain development,” she’d told him, quoting a research study she’d read. “It also speeds vocabulary accumulation.” It seemed to be working because, according to her notebook, he now knew 391 words.
“You’re a very smart dog,” she’d told him just yesterday, and he longed to agree, but the truth was, he still didn’t understand what “smart” meant. The word seemed to have as many definitions as there were species, and yet humans—with the exception of Elizabeth—seemed to only recognize “smart” if and when it played by their own rules. “Dolphins are smart,” they’d say. “But cows aren’t.” This seemed partly based on the fact that cows didn’t do tricks. In Six-Thirty’s view that made cows smarter, not dumber. But again, what did he know?
Three hundred ninety-one words, according to Elizabeth. But really, only 390.
Worse, he’d just learned that English wasn’t the only human language. Elizabeth revealed that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of others, and that no human spoke them all. In fact, most people spoke only one—maybe two—unless they were something called Swiss and spoke eight. No wonder people didn’t understand animals. They could barely understand each other.
At least she realized he would not be able to draw. Drawing seemed to be the way young children preferred to communicate, and he admired their efforts even if their results fell short of the mark. Not a day went by when he didn’t witness little fingers earnestly pressing their chunky chalks into the sidewalk, their impossible houses and primitive stick figures filling the cement with a story no one understood but themselves.
* * *
—
“What a pretty picture!” he heard a mother say earlier that week as she looked down on her child’s ugly, violent scribble. Human parents, he’d noted, had a tendency to lie to their children.
“It’s a puppy,” her child said, her hands covered in chalk.
“And such a pretty puppy!” the mother rejoined.
“No,” the child said, “it’s not pretty. The puppy’s dead. It got killed!” Which Six-Thirty, after a second, closer look, found disturbingly accurate.
“It is not a dead puppy,” the mother said sternly. “It is a very happy puppy, and it is eating a bowl of ice cream.” At which point the frustrated child flung the chalk across the grass and stomped off for the swings.