Chester and Gus Read online

  Finally Ms. Winger comes over and touches my head. “Come on, Chester. I don’t see him. Gus is probably outside. We’ll do our count there—don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

  Ms. Cooper, who is supposed to be watching out for Gus, is dealing with some other kids. I don’t think he’s outside, but I can’t be sure. I smell something, but it’s far away. It’s telling me not to go outside. “Come on, Chester,” Ms. Winger says. “You need to come now.”

  I definitely smell something. It’s him. It’s Gus. I know it.

  “I’m getting your leash, Chester. I can’t leave you inside by yourself.”

  The noise has stopped, which helps me concentrate. Ms. Winger clips the leash onto my collar, which is okay, I think, because now I can lead her to where Gus is. He’s not outside, he’s in here, up the hallway, and he’s in trouble.

  Sometimes I can smell trouble before it comes. Like Amelia before she has a meltdown. My nose wakes me up so I can do what I can, which usually isn’t much. A dog nuzzling a knee doesn’t stop a meltdown, but sometimes it helps.

  This time, though, it’s worse.

  It’s not just a meltdown.

  “Come, Chester,” Ms. Winger says, pulling me toward the door to the playground. “Right now. We have to get outside to the other children.”

  I sit down so she knows: NO. I won’t go that way. I pull her the other direction.

  “Chester—”

  I pull harder so she knows: I mean it. This way, and she follows. I’ve got my nose to the ground where the smell is strongest. There are chemicals in the smell, and other things I don’t recognize. It’s Gus, too, though, and it’s getting stronger. I know this is right.

  I get to a door and Gus’s smell is all around me. I scratch and bark because there’s a doorknob and my paws won’t work for opening the door. We have to do it fast. He’s in trouble, I know.

  Ms. Winger opens the door and screams. She’s surprised but I’m not, because Gus is my person and a dog always knows when his person is in trouble. Gus is on the floor of the janitor’s closet. He’s wet his pants but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that he’s asleep and even when I lick him and lick him and lick him, he won’t wake up.

  Never Run Away Again

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND. I LICK GUS’S HAND because I know he doesn’t want me to lick his face. When he still doesn’t wake up, I get so scared, I lick his face.

  Nothing.

  Ms. Winger doesn’t understand either. She calls for help on her cell phone and has to answer questions for the person on the other end. “I don’t think he drank anything in here. I don’t see any evidence of that . . . He’s unconscious, but he’s breathing . . .”

  “The ambulance is coming, Chester,” she says when she’s done talking on her phone. “You did a great job, didn’t you? You knew he wasn’t outside. Can you wait here for a minute with him while I get some help?”

  She doesn’t leave for long, but while we’re alone I talk to Gus. I’m so sorry I ran away. I won’t ever do it again, I promise. We’ll practice every day and I’ll never run away again.

  I don’t know if he can hear me.

  If he can, he doesn’t say anything.

  Pretty soon, Ms. Winger is back with Mr. McGregor. “Oh, poor boy,” he says first, then into the black box he usually wears on his belt: “Have we got someone outside to tell the paramedics where we are?”

  Ms. Winger holds Gus’s hand while we wait, which he ordinarily doesn’t like, but I think it’s okay now because he’s asleep.

  “You should know that Chester is the one who found him,” she tells Mr. McGregor. “I thought Gus was already outside. Chester forced me to come this way and look in this closet. If he hadn’t been here it would have taken another twenty minutes to find him. Maybe longer.”

  There’s a sound up the hallway. Mr. McGregor steps out of the closet. “BACK HERE!” he calls to two men who wear uniforms and are pushing a rolling bed.

  After that, there’s a lot of commotion. Two men lift Gus up and strap him to a bed that has wheels on the bottom so they can roll him outside. I follow them out to a big white car. After they’ve got him inside it, one of the men looks at me. “Does this dog belong to him?”

  I can tell Mr. McGregor isn’t sure what to say. “Yes, he’s not an official service dog, but he works for this boy, yes. He found him just now.”

  “We can’t bring a service dog with us unless there’s someone at the other end to take charge of him.”

  “Right, of course. Then he’ll stay here with us.”

  A few seconds later, the truck door is closed and another loud pulsing noise stabs my ears. I do everything I can not to run away. I tell my legs that Gus needs me to stand right here. I tell my legs, Look what happened just now when you got scared and ran away.

  “You’re a good dog,” Mr. McGregor says. He’s nice enough to bend down and pet my head while the noise moves away from us. “His parents will be at the hospital to take care of him. Don’t you worry. He’ll be okay.”

  That makes me feel better.

  “Why don’t you come inside and stay with me? I’m sorry about all this, laddie, but we’ll get you sorted out.”

  I’m not sure who Laddie is or why he’s calling me that.

  By the time Marc picks me up from Mr. McGregor’s office, I feel like I’ve been there for hours and my nerves are raw from the sound of the telephone ringing all the time. Mostly I haven’t listened to his conversations, but I did listen when I heard him ask the other person how Gus Stevenson was doing.

  “Very good, okay. Thank you so much, then.”

  His door opened and a secretary leaned in. “What did the hospital say?”

  “Yes, they’ve confirmed it was a seizure and they’ve admitted him for some monitoring. He’d never been diagnosed with epilepsy in the past, but they think he’s had three or four seizures in the last few months.”

  I wonder if “seizures” is another word for having accidents.

  “His father will be here in an hour to pick up the dog.”

  “Is this really Chester’s last day?” the secretary asks.

  “I’m afraid so. It seems a shame, especially after what he did today, but I haven’t got a choice really.”

  She shakes her head. “Such a sweet dog. We’ll all miss him, won’t we?”

  “Except for Pauline, I’d say yes.”

  “That’s right. Except for Pauline.”

  How to Worry More

  GUS DOESN’T COME HOME AT ALL that night.

  Sara comes home late, in the middle of the night. She turns on the kitchen light quickly where I’m sleeping and turns it off again. “Sorry, Chester. Don’t wake up.”

  That’s all she says.

  I don’t know where Gus is or if he’s going to be okay.

  Earlier Marc came home to give me my dinner and take me for a walk. While he was home, he made a few calls and told whoever he was talking to that they didn’t know too much of the story. Presumably Gus ran into the custodian’s closet to get away from the fire drill and something in there—one of the chemicals in the cleaning agents maybe—triggered what he called a grand mal seizure. “They have to keep him in the hospital for observation. Right now, they’ve got him hooked up to machines to see if he has another . . . You can imagine how much he hates that. The poor guy had to be sedated before they could attach the electrodes to his head.”

  The only thing I know about hospitals is that Penny’s father died in one. It had something to do with his heart. She went to the hospital one afternoon and I didn’t see her for a whole day. When she finally came home, she was very sad.

  All night I have trouble sleeping.

  I exhaust myself so much I don’t even wake up the next morning when Marc and Sara leave. Instead of our usual morning routine where they eat oatmeal and make jokes, they’re gone when I get up and my food bowl has my breakfast in it.

  It’s a terrible feeling—eating food you haven’t watc
hed them fix. I don’t even feel like eating, except after a few hours, I do.

  Later Cora, a neighbor who is scared of dogs, stops by to let me out. She thinks she needs to keep me on my leash even though we’re standing in our fenced-in yard. I feel so silly, I have a hard time peeing.

  Eventually, I do. Instead of saying, “Good dog,” or telling me how my family is doing, she says, “Finally,” and brings me back inside.

  Home Again

  MARC AND SARA DON’T COME HOME again until just before dinner. I’m so happy at the sound of the car in the driveway, I run around downstairs carrying one of Gus’s shoes in my mouth.

  “Oh, silly dog, put that down,” Sara says. She’s in a good mood, I can tell, because she bends down to hug me. “He’s home, Chess! They let him come home!”

  I notice she doesn’t say he’s okay.

  Maybe that doesn’t mean anything, though.

  I also notice he doesn’t eat dinner with them that night. “He’s so tired,” Sara keeps saying. “The doctor says it’ll go away once he’s used to this new medication. It’s just hard to watch him sleep all the time.”

  From their dinner conversation, I learn a few things. Apparently, Gus has been having seizures for a while. So far, they’ve been little ones that make him zone out and sometimes wet his pants. He’s probably had headaches that he hasn’t been able to tell anyone about, and maybe other issues—blurred vision, confusion. They think the fire alarm made him panic and triggered a bigger seizure. This is as much as I understand. They talk about medicines and side effects and a special diet. It sounds like they’re saying, “No cardboard at all, or very little anyway.”

  I don’t understand until Marc says it again, sadly: “Oh, poor Gus. He loves his carbohydrates.”

  Sara talks some more, mostly saying there’s a lot they don’t know and they’ll have to wait and see.

  “So that’s it?” Marc says. “They send us home with two prescriptions and we wait and see if it happens again?”

  “The hospital says he has to stay under observation by a nurse trained in seizure protocol for the next two weeks. It’s possible he’s been having seizures every time he’s had an accident.”

  Sara looks sad. She’s not eating her food. “Which means he has to go back to school with a nurse who will stay with him the whole time, watching for a seizure. I hate the idea of him having one more adult around him. Do you think the other kids see him as the strange boy who hardly talks and is surrounded by adults all the time?”

  Marc pats her hand. “Yes, Sare, I do. Not to us or his teachers. But to other kids who don’t understand what he means with his squeals and his flapping—yeah, he’s the strange kid in the corner surrounded by adults.”

  Now Sara is really sad. “Why does everything just keep getting worse? Having autism isn’t hard enough, I guess, we have to have seizures on top of it too.”

  Marc comes over and puts his arms around her again. “One fight at a time,” he whispers into her ear. “We take all of this one fight at a time.”

  My Bed

  IN THE MORNING, I FEEL SO nervous about Gus going back to school with a nurse at his side that I scoot out behind him and almost make it into the car, before Marc holds his foot in front of the door. “Sorry, Chester, remember the new rule? No dogs at school.”

  I want to tell him: Gus doesn’t need a nurse at school. He needs me.

  Sara gives me a hug. “I’m so sorry, Chess, but remember? Mr. McGregor said you can’t go to school with Gus anymore.” She stands up. “Oh, look at him, Marc, he wants to go. He knows what’s going on.”

  Of course I do, I think. She knows I do.

  All day at home with Sara is like being with Penny the day after I failed my test. Sara tries to work, but she’s distracted and thinking about other things. Her computer’s on but she keeps coming into the kitchen, where I’m lying on my bed. On her third trip in, she lies down on my bed with me. “I wish you could be there with him,” she says. “I just keep worrying that he’s sad and alone . . .”

  I want to tell her that Gus isn’t as sad at school as she thinks he is. I remember what she said before school started—that she wanted him to find something that he loved. I wish I could tell her, He loves Mama. He loves the dish room. He might even love Amelia or at least like her a little. But Mama is the main one.

  I don’t think anyone knows this except me. They think he likes watching the steam come out of her machine, which he does, but what he really likes is Mama. He likes the way she puts one finger between the plates as she loads them into the machine so they don’t make a sound. He likes how she pulls the glass racks out at the other end. He likes how she says, “Hello, my boy. How you doing today?” It makes him laugh inside. He doesn’t laugh on the outside because it confuses him to hear himself laugh. He doesn’t like that sound, so he laughs inside.

  I wish I could tell Sara, He’s not alone. He’ll visit Mama today. She’ll probably tell him it’s good to see him again. She might not know about the hospital. She might say, “Where you been hiding, my boy?” And he’ll rock and laugh inside at that.

  I wish I could tell Sara, It’s not so sad, but I can’t. Or I do, but she doesn’t hear me.

  For a while, it’s nice lying together on my bed instead of hers. Then it gets a little uncomfortable and she says we need to wash my cover, it doesn’t smell good. That’s where she’s wrong. It smells great to me—full of memories and good times when I’ve found dead animals to roll in. I hope she doesn’t wash it, but she doesn’t hear that wish either because that afternoon, I come back to my bed and my cover is gone.

  How to Not Talk

  THIS SCARES ME: IT’S BEEN MORE than a week since his seizure, and Gus still hasn’t talked to me once. I’ve been trying every evening, asking different questions like: How was the hospital? Did you see any dead things? I like seeing dead things, but maybe that’s not true for people. Now I ask: How’s Mama and her steamy machine?

  He doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s mad at me because I can’t come to school anymore.

  I want to come to school! I tell him in the morning while he’s getting ready. I wish I could! Mr. McGregor said no!

  For a long time, he eats his oatmeal and doesn’t say anything. Do you want me to come back? I finally say. He might say no, I remind myself. He might say, I don’t like the way the girls crowd around me to pet you. You cause too much commotion.

  I can’t blame him if he says this, because it’s true. He doesn’t know I’m there for him, doing a job. He doesn’t know that I found him in the closet. It’s not his job to remember everything I do for him or say thank you.

  He doesn’t answer my questions. That’s okay, I tell myself. Gus is still my person, and I still have a job, I’m just not sure what it is these days.

  I want to remind Sara about teaching me to read. Even if it doesn’t work for me, it might help Gus get more interested in using a word board or his computer. He has those things, he just never uses them. Sara’s forgotten about that idea because now she has another idea that’s taking all her time.

  She’s reading the laws about service dogs. It turns out there are some exceptions to the rules with children who have autism. “Apparently, if we got a judge to approve of Chester as a service dog because of Gus’s autism, he’d be allowed to go into the public areas of school with him, like the cafeteria and the playground. The classroom isn’t considered a public area, so he’d have to stay in the main office for most of the day, but Gus could take him outside for recess and when he goes to lunch. Is that a terrible idea?”

  Mark makes a face. “That sounds like a dog spending a lot of time in an office where a dog isn’t really meant to be.”

  “But he’d be there. Gus could visit him any time he asked to.”

  Marc bends down in front of her. “Can you picture Gus asking to visit Chester in the principal’s office?”

  She puts her hands over her face and shakes her head. I think she’s saying no, she can’t p
icture it.

  I can’t either. Gus doesn’t ask for me out loud. But there’re a lot of things he likes and doesn’t ask for out loud. Like Mama and her dish room. Like sparkly pens. I remember Penny once saying, “Part of your job will be understanding what your person needs even if they don’t say it.” I think that she was right, but how can I do my job if I only see Gus a few hours in the afternoon when he’s too tired to talk?

  That night I go into Gus’s room like I always do while he’s getting ready for bed. I watch Sara brush his teeth and hold his pajama bottoms open.

  I don’t think he’ll say anything because I’ve sat here every night since he’s come home from the hospital and he hasn’t said a thing. Still, I want to be here if he does. I think about some of our old conversations. When he told me the things he’s afraid of. When he said he loved his parents but sometimes they touch him too much and it hurts his skin. I remember this and never get up on Gus’s bed the way I get on the bed with Sara.

  Tonight, instead of waiting for Gus to say something, I start talking to myself. I can’t help it. I tell him I’ve been lonely sitting at home with no one but Sara, who has her own job to do. I wish I had a job again, I say. And someplace to go like school.

  I don’t mean to sound pathetic. I’m afraid I do anyway, but now that I’ve started I can’t stop. It’s quiet at home. I liked being at school watching out for you. I liked going out for recess and all the smells of science time and stopping by Mama and her machine. I sound like someone who hasn’t had anyone to talk to in months.

  Gus climbs into bed without looking at me.

  Sara comes in first to kiss him good night. Marc comes in later to sit with Gus for a bit and pat his back in the right rhythm. Marc likes to hum as he does this. I don’t think Gus likes the humming, but I do. It makes me sleepy enough to curl up on the rug next to his bed.