Bond - Jamie Bishop (best fiction novels of all time .txt) 📗

the dog, scooped out the cat boxes…all with a smile. Now, thinking back on all of it, it seemed as though another person had done all those things. Touched all those dirty animals, gotten all those germs on her hands and body…impossible. Unthinkable. It disgusted her enough to quell the idea of eating the PowerBar, and she set it on the nightstand, unopened.
Though it was barely after six, Jenny was tired. The Ativan was making her groggy, and the adrenaline that had coursed through her during the panic attack was wearing off. Flopping back onto her bed, Jenny Rado closed her red, puffy eyes and slept.

Red glowing numbers on her bedside clock told Jenny it was after four in the morning when the crash came. For several seconds, she was sure it was a very realistic dream. The crash, the scrabbling sounds…surely some dreamland monstrosity was trying to follow her into the waking world.
Sitting up, shaking off sleep, she realized she needed to use the bathroom. Groaning inwardly, she swung her legs out of bed and stood up. She froze.
Sitting in the doorway, filling the doorway with its bulk, sat the dog.
Jenny could barely move. Panic flooded back into her, thudding her heart against her ribs, squeezing the breath out of her lungs. She staggered away from the dog on wooden legs, shakily, stopping only when she collided with a dresser.
It didn’t move. Didn’t bark, didn’t whine, didn’t do anything. In the blue glow of the television, she could see its face, placid and friendly, staring at her, tongue lolling.
She would call her mother. Her mother would come and remove the dog, and then Jenny could get to work cleaning the floor and doorframe, anywhere the animal might have touched.
Pressing the cell phone key down, Jenny listened as the house phone rang out in the darkened first floor. Three…four…five rings before the answering machine picked up. Dammit.
She considered calling again, calling and calling until Gina finally rolled over and picked up the phone. She had her finger on the phone, was ready to press down. She hesitated.
Her mother had nothing. She was dealing with a mentally ill daughter with such good cheer and optimism that it broke Jenny’s heart. Now her friends had gone and paid for this dog as a companion. No doubt Gina had gone to bed that night exhausted, but Jenny was sure she was also happy, for Gina loved animals just as much as Jenny herself.
Feeling like a leech on her mother’s good nature, Jenny tossed her cell onto the bed and returned her gaze to the massive animal. Massive was not an overstatement. Gina had told her that the veterinarian, after a short conference with his assistant, had pronounced the dog to be part Newfoundland, part Great Pyrenees, and some smaller part pit bull or Staffordshire terrier, due to his oddly shortened muzzle and extra chest bulk.
Jenny knew dogs. After actually seeing the animal, she had to admit that the strange guess was probably correct, or very close. The dog was at least four feet tall while sitting down, with the long, thick coat of a Newfoundland or Great Pyrenees. That coat was predominantly white, like a Pyrenees, but the muzzle was shorter than either of those breeds would allow, and the neck and chest area, even under all that fur, was obviously wide, well-muscled and powerful.
All in all, a formidable-looking animal. Jenny wasn’t frightened of the dog itself. She liked large dogs. She preferred them, in fact. She’d been raised around them. What made her heart knock almost painfully in her chest was the fear. Dogs, like every animal, every person, every single thing that Jenny hadn’t sanitized personally, carried germs. Untold amounts of them. With every friendly nuzzle or paw touch, unknowably horrible diseases could be transmitted.
“Stay.” The dog didn’t move. It hadn’t moved since she’d left her bed. She was uncomfortably aware that she still needed to use the bathroom, and her panic soared still higher. She would have to get past the dog somehow. Stepping forward, pulling her shirt over her nose and mouth to avoid breathing contaminated dog air, she came to within a few feet of the panting animal. “Back,” she commanded, pointing out into the hallway, realizing that the dog wouldn’t understand. Even if it was a smart dog, “back” was not a basic command, and she was an unfamiliar person.
The dog backed up.
Surprised, Jenny took a few more steps and repeated the command and watched in mild fascination as the dog stood and shuffled backward, glancing once over its huge shoulder to avoid backing down the steps. When there was a clear walkway from Jenny’s bedroom to the bathroom, the dog sat again, watching her from the corner at the top of the steps.
As she used the bathroom, having tiptoed across the hall to avoid as many paw-germs as possible, Jenny noticed a furry white head poked into the doorway. The dog watched her with curiosity, his big head cocked. All that trouble to pee?
With all the cleaning and washing done, Jenny returned to bed. Without being told, the dog had backed out of her way again. She used a Clorox wipe to wash her feet before getting into bed, then pulled the blanket over her and laid back.
She could focus on nothing but the germ machine sitting in the doorway; each panting breath fueling her panic. Staring at the television, she tried to focus on a movie. She chewed more Ativan. Finally, nearly half an hour later, the pills began to take effect as dawn filled the shaded window with soft gray light.
Jenny had closed her eyes, had taken several deep, slow breaths to try and calm her heart. She must have been dancing on the edge of unconsciousness, for she was aware of no noise, and was feeling that elusive, blissful peace that only visited her when falling asleep. Then it was there.
Her eyes snapping open, Jenny realized that the dog had crossed the threshold, approached her bed and was now resting its head on her mattress, its eyes on hers.
Exploding out of bed, Jenny stumbled twice as she reeled backward across the room. Finally she fell, too sleepy, disoriented, and food-deprived to move so quickly. She went down hard, her tailbone cracking against the wooden floor as a scatter rug flew out from under her feet. She didn’t cry out but silently sobbed, tears flowing down her face, petrified, horrified, frozen with fear at the knowledge that the dog was in her room.
At the same time she was crying for herself, for that lost, “other” Jenny who would have delighted in being woken up by such a handsome, well-behaved animal. Such a different person, gone forever.
It wasn’t as though Jenny was ever really unaware of her circumstances. She knew all too well how far she had fallen, and thought of it all the time. Thought about it, dwelt on it, tortured herself with it, sometimes hoping that the torture, the self-disgust of it would somehow spur her into recovery. It never worked, but she never stopped.
So it was strange that the ruin that her life had become should strike her so suddenly and so harshly. Nevertheless, sitting there on the cold wooden floor, the tank top and mens’ pajama pants she wore hanging loosely on her skeletal frame, Jenny Rado wept, with a wrenching pain that surprised her. She couldn’t breathe for her fear, and seriously considered a heart attack because her chest hurt so badly. She finally curled up into herself, drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them like a small child.
There were no blankets in the room except the one on the bed, which was now contaminated. After sobbing for what seemed like hours, Jenny was on her side on the floor, and somehow fell asleep.

Gina was sure her daughter was dead when there was no response from Jenny by one o’clock in the afternoon. She had noticed the gate at the bottom of the stairs, violated, lying on its side and feared the worst, but since the dog was downstairs with her, she’d let it go. Now, though, she didn’t know what to think, and after Jenny failed to pick up her cell phone, Gina mounted the stairs.
She was screaming by the time her daughter answered her. Jenny yelled back irritably. She had slept long and deeply, exhausted by terror and pain, and the wooden floor had wrenched her body into unnatural positions. She had to work for a full minute to rotate her neck normally, and her ribs were sore. “What? I’m up…I just…” Her words dissolved into a coughing fit; she had cried so long and hard that her throat felt raw.
Gina clapped a hand over her mouth when she peeked through the doorway and saw Jenny sitting on the floor. She was horrified, but at least Jenny was alive.
A terse conversation followed; Jenny pacing her bedroom with a cigarette, Gina sitting on the stairs with the dog next to her. Gina apologized, and felt badly, but what could be done? Of course a dog would be curious about people in the house. “Dogs love you, Jen, you know that. Can you blame him? He just wanted to say hi…” Her words trailed off as her daughter’s had earlier, because she knew that the cute curiosity of the animal was lost on Jenny. Where once the blonde girl would have been on the ground, wrestling and playing tug with the animal, walking it proudly and watching it carefully for any sign of the possible illnesses her textbooks described, now Jenny was horrified to breathe the same air as the dog.
Gina sat on the steps as Jenny cleaned, the sharp edges of her bones visible beneath her skin. Despite her starvation, Gina knew that Jenny wouldn’t consider eating for at least a few dog-free days upstairs. The girl sprayed enough disinfectant to choke Gina, though Jenny herself seemed to draw some perverse pleasure in feeling the harsh aerosol spray burn her nostrils.
Jenny declined any offer of help and so, once she was reassured that her daughter was done cleaning and would lie down to rest, Gina went back downstairs. Tears stained her cheeks.
Alone, Jenny picked up the remote control. She turned on the television and stared blankly at the screen. The room was still. She could hear her mother cooking something downstairs, rattling pots and pans. Soon the aroma of garlic began to drift through the air. The smell made Jenny’s mouth water, but she covered her nose with her shirt, afraid that the food was contaminated, and that even the smell of it could carry germs.
Days went by. Jenny’s mother did her best to keep the big dog downstairs. She had named the animal Bond, after her favorite movie character. Jenny found the name amusing; the huge animal was anything but stealthy.
Jenny found herself thinking about Bond more and more. It was like her obsessions: the more she tried to shut the thoughts out, the more they intruded, the more they pushed their way into her mind.
Despite her former love of animals, having the dog in the house was depressing. It was a reminder of what might have been. Jenny held no hope of getting better. She wished, most of the time, that she would simply die of starvation or a heart attack, saving herself from a life not worth living, and saving her mother from the grief of watching her daughter die slowly.
A few times, Bond snuck upstairs.