Page 43 of The Jackal

I stopped a few yards back and watched.

Max came to her. Slow, deliberate, his nose working, the reflex of days of bacon and patience. I still couldn't see his face—just the lean, tan shape of him against the gate, the black mask of his muzzle in profile as he lowered his head toward her shoulder.

Then, he sensed me.

I felt it happen before he moved—felt his attention leave her and cross the concrete and land on me, the way you feel a hand on your back in an empty room. He turned.

And my world stopped.

I don't say that the way people say it. Things don't stop for me. I've stood in rooms that would drop a strong man and felt my own pulse hold flat as a lake. But I looked into that dog's eyes across fifteen feet of kennel aisle, and everything in me went silent at once—the watching, the scanning, the deep cold water, all of it—the whole machinery of what I am standing down without being told, the way it only ever does at the threshold.

Because he saw me.

Not a stranger. Not a man to assess. He saw me—the way the dying see me, the way Duke had seen me at the end, the way no healthy living creature ever has.

His ears went straight up. His eyes went wide and fixed. His whole body stilled into a single point of recognition. Across whatever wire had just connected us, I felt what was on his end of it, and it nearly took my knees.

It was recognition. It was arrival. It was a soldier, weeks into an unbearable watch.

I was moving before I decided to.

"Cash—?" Mags started, coming up off the concrete, a question in it.

"Move back for me," I said. Gentle. Not a request. "Just for a minute."

She looked at my face, and whatever she found there, she trusted it. She stepped away from the gate.

I unlatched it. Swung it open. Stood in the gap.

Max hadn't moved. Not a hair. He stood in the middle of his run with his eyes locked on mine, trembling very slightly now, the fine tremor of a body holding a feeling too big for it. I could feel everything coming off him—everything, the way I feel the dying, the way I feel the dead.

The weeks at the gate. The door that never opened. The waiting that had no word for itself and no end and no answer, the question he'd been asking the empty air since a road in a country he didn't know the name of: where is he, where is he, why won't anyone tell me where he is.

And underneath it, rising, breaking through all that grief like light through a seam—something new. Something that spread through me as it spread through him, warm and wide and unmistakable, a feeling I have exactly one comparison for in all my strange life.

It felt like the in-between. Like a touch of that country. Standing in a kennel in South Carolina, I felt the warmth of the place at the bottom of the mine, and it was coming off a dog, off the connection between us.

If Max could have wept, he'd have been weeping. He didn't have that. What he had was the stillness, the wide, fixed eyes, the tremor—a creature at the absolute edge of hope, afraid to move in case moving broke it.

So, I sat down.

Right there in the gate of his run, on the cool concrete, cross-legged. I put my hands loose in my lap. I looked at him, and I smiled.

And we sat there, the two of us, and had our conversation.

I can't put it in words, because it didn't happen in words—it happened on the frequency, the one he lives on and I got dragged onto at the bottom of a mine shaft as a boy. But if I had to translate it, if I had to bring it up into language for the people who need language, it went something like this.

Where have you been? his eyes said. The whole of him said it. I've been waiting. I've been waiting so long. They kept telling me nothing and I kept the watch, anyway. Where have you been?

I know, pal, I told him. Not out loud. It doesn't need out loud. I know. I'm sorry it took me so long. I was a long way off, bringing somebody else home.

Is he—the question trembled through the wire, the one he'd been holding for three weeks, the one no living soul had been able to answer in a language he could believe. Is he⁠—

And I answered it. The way only I can. Not with words, because words are what everyone had been throwing at him for weeks and words carry nothing on the frequency. I answered it with what I am. I opened the thing in me that stood at the door of the in-between as a child and has never fully closed, and I let him see what I've seen. That there's a country. That it's warm, and it's wide, and it isn't terrible—it's the opposite of terrible. That nobody who goes there is lost, or cold, or alone, or waiting. That his man wasn't missing. His man was home. Safe, home, whole, on the other side of a door that only looks closed from this side of it—and that the watch, the long, faithful, unbearable watch, could end now. Not because the dog had failed it.

Because it had been completed.

I don't know how long we sat there. Time doesn't run right on the frequency; it's one of the first things you learn. Mags stood somewhere behind me, silent—I could feel her, too, her hand over her mouth, understanding without understanding, the way she'd understood everything about me from the first. The morning went on around us. Somewhere out in the sun, her dogs were playing.