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  Thirty minutes later, we had transported Layla to our veterinarian against the advice of the shelter. Layla, we were now told, had mange, an easily treated condition that she was born with, unbeknownst to us, because it doesn’t become symptomatic until a dog begins to mature. We surmised that it had raged out of control until she had been dumped in the road in the center of the island and left for dead. Some goodhearted soul had braved her oozing sores to bring her to the shelter, even knowing it might be hopeless for her. We decided to let our vet make the call. If he thought he could save her, we would let him try.

  Dr. Hess did believe he could, and he did save her.

  It took many weeks of intensive treatment at his clinic to get her well enough to come home. We visited her daily and tried not to look at the receipts when they ran our credit card. Layla had never wowed us with her beauty, but now she was scary ugly, a skinny, hairless, pink-skinned waif who still had silver-dollar-sized open wounds when we brought her home six weeks later.

  When the time came to move to the states, Layla flew ahead to live with Eric’s oldest daughter in Auburn. But Layla was soon kicked out of Marie’s apartment complex, and she moved to Texas, where she has lived with us ever since.

  Layla lives the good life now. She is Cowboy’s devoted partner and companion, and the two of them behave like an old married couple. She hasn’t gotten much prettier, and she is very, very afraid of men, especially men with dark skin. But she has for the most part overcome four months of hell and two months of pain to become a loving and normal dog.

  Layla. Survivor of violent kidnapping, abuse, and neglect. Left for dead. Our muscley little protector who likes you to whisper sweet nothings into her oversized ears as you pet them.

  I think there is a special place in hell for people who hurt children and animals, and I hope her abusers find their way to it. And I also believe there is a place in heaven for people who give their time and love to those who can’t take care of themselves. We will always be grateful to the kind person who rescued Layla, all those years ago.

  ~~~

  Chapter Fourteen: The Gimpy Chicken

  When Eric and I left St. Croix, we not only had a big jumbie house to sell and six dogs and two cats in need of homes, but a chain of GNC stores and triathlon shops on two islands to deal with, too. Alas, try as we might, the stores would not be sold; they met their fate in bankruptcy proceedings a year later. In the here-and-now that was then, we spent two miserable rainy weekends laying the stores on St. Thomas to rest.

  The first weekend, we took the ferry over. Actually, I’m being generous and disingenuous in calling it the ferry, because it never went by any other name at our house than the Vomit Comet. And indeed, vomit I did. Vomit, vomit, and more vomit. Tiny Susanne ended up asleep alone inside the ferry, while Eric held me around the waist to keep me from going overboard along with my lunch.

  The second weekend, you couldn’t have gotten me on the Vomit Comet if you dragged me behind a Wild West stagecoach. And if you had been able to get me on, Eric would have dragged me back off again. The experience hadn’t exactly lit him up with happy, either. Instead, we took the seaplane.

  The seaplane takes off from the bay in Christiansted and lands in the bay of Charlotte Amalie. It’s a fun experience, if you block out the fact that Eric’s father lost an eye, a leg, and nearly his life in a seaplane crash during takeoff from Christiansted less than twenty years before. I blocked it out. The choice between death and two hours barfing aboard the Vomit Comet was an easy one.

  For three days we disassembled and fire-sold the remains of the St. Thomas stores. It was a grim affair. We were exhausted and heartbroken, but we thanked God for our time together, anyway. And we cried a little. It could have gone so differently. Less greed and theft, more oversight, fewer customers shaving off pennies in the short run by shopping online, and the stores might have made it.

  The time came to depart Charlotte Amalie to go back to St. Croix. We sat pressed together on a bench in the open-air departure lounge, our heads back against the wall, our fingers entwined. Gradually, I became aware of a new entrant to the lounge. It was a scraggly, limping chicken, begging for food, traveler by traveler. His feathers were oily, the tuft on his head askew. He fit in well, even as he was so decidedly odd.

  “Check out the gimpy chicken,” I said to Eric.

  The chicken hobbled over to the next passenger and peered up at him through a half-closed eye with his head cocked. No success.

  “I see him,” Eric said, chuckling.

  The chicken scratched the ground and pecked at nothing, then tried his gambit on the next person. The little old West Indian lady dropped him a spoonful of rice and peas from her Styrofoam container. He gobbled it up, then she shooed him away. He retreated six inches, then continued his march down the row of people.

  I put on my really bad Cruzan accent. “Feed a hungry chicken, meh son. Put food in de mouts of me chirrun dem.”

  Eric shook his head at my accent. A lifelong Cruzan, his accent was real, although most of the time he yanked like a continental. “Isn’t it appropriate, as we are here closing these stores that failed in part because of the culture of these islands—everybody thinking they’re owed something, entitled to be given something by someone else—that the chicken is here looking for a handout, too?”

  The chicken finished working the line and disappeared around the corner.

  “I’ll bet when he went around the corner, he took off that fake leg, combed his feathers, and walked off home, hale and hearty. The end of his shift,” I said.

  And we laughed and then laughed some more, a sad sound that turned into something like real happiness as it went on, and we saluted the little bird as we walked to our plane and left our bitterness mostly behind.

  ~~~

  Chapter Fifteen: A Lot Like Cannibals

  Excerpt from the novel Leaving Annalise:

  It was time to go. Nick and I developed a “this and no more” final work list for Annalise. We retained a real estate agent. We printed fliers and an ad for an estate sale, and Nick ran them into town. I packed the things we would take and laid out the things that we would sell. I tried to book travel off-island, but the airport remained closed. Ten days before, a Category 4 hurricane had damaged the airport, although it hadn’t so much as nicked Annalise’s fortress.

  I emailed Nick from my phone about the travel roadblock—or airblock, rather—but I stayed calm. We knew that getting back to Texas was not going to be simple. “We may need to find a boat ride out of here. The storm damaged the terminal, and American won’t resume flights until it’s repaired, which could be months.”

  “We can try to hire a boat captain here,” Nick emailed back.

  I was feeding the dogs while I emailed him, and I noticed something seemed off. I did a head count. Our big rottweiler wasn’t there. She didn’t often miss a meal.

  I sent Nick a text. “Have you seen Sheila? She didn’t come in for food.”

  “Nope. Not since yesterday. Smile, Katie: Ole Sheila must have a boyfriend somewhere.”

  I smiled.

  I set back to work. We knew our plan was ambitious. We had one more day to prepare for the estate sale, then the sale day itself. On the very next day, we would leave St. Marcos, somehow, any way we could. Nick wanted me to go back to the states with him so we could raise his orphaned nephew, Thomas, who was waiting for us in Corpus Christi with Nick’s parents. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Wasn’t it?

  Later, neither Nick nor I could find any boat captains on St. Marcos willing to leave their homes and families. In the states, people jump at the chance to make extra money. There, everyone was aghast at the idea of working during the post-hurricane bonus holiday.

  I tried some of the smaller airlines that flew from island to island. The damaged terminal might not have affected them as much as it had the major airlines. And it really didn’t matter where we flew to, as long as we could eventually get som
ewhere to catch a connecting flight to the states. By the third airline, I had found our ride. LIAT, an airline locals describe as “Leave Islands Any Time,” would be doing just that, starting the next day. I booked us on a flight to Aruba with Oso where we could make connections to the states. As I hung up, the agent said, “Mind your dog don’t weigh no more than a hunner pound with he kennel.” We hung up.

  “All set,” I called from the kitchen to Nick in the garage. “You don’t think Oso and his kennel are over one hundred pounds, do you?”

  Nick walked into the kitchen. “About one-fifteen, I’d say. Why?”

  My heart sunk from diaphragm to belly-button level. Much further and it was going to drop out in my lap. “Oh, no! He’s over the weight limit to fly.”

  Nick shook his head. “No way we’re leaving Oso. Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle this one.”

  “Really?” I asked, grateful to cross one thing off my daunting to-do list.

  “No problem,” he said, and swatted my behind. I swatted his back.

  All the next day we focused on preparing for our sale. It boggled my mind how much I had accumulated on St. Marcos in just over a year. Everything we sold left one less thing to ship to the states or to “walk off”8 from Annalise. Whatever we didn’t sell, we would leave with the house for the buyer to deal with—when we found one.

  Really, we were worried less about all of that and more about Sheila. Out of our six dogs, Oso was the only pet, but we loved the rest of the pack, too, and took good care of them. Oso would come to the states with us, though. The others would stay to guard Annalise. I ran Oso into the vet for a travel clearance check, since the airlines would not transport him into the continental U.S. without a letter testifying to his good health. While I was there, I put up a lost-dog notice for Sheila with my friend Ava’s phone number on it. She would house-sit Annalise and care for the remaining dogs until Annalise sold.

  We had announced in the St. Marcos Daily Source that our sale would begin at eight in the morning. Cars lined up at our gate at seven and started honking. We knew the people of St. Marcos loved nothing more than a good estate sale, but this was too much. We ignored them as we did our last-minute preparations and slammed down some local King’s coffee.

  It was another typically beautiful day, and I steeled myself for it. I was leaving Annalise of my own volition, but not without great sadness. The sight of my things spread out on the driveway made our departure feel real. I hated parting with the baby toys and high chair that I’d bought for Thomas just four months ago at someone else’s estate sale. Nick stepped on a squeaky stuffed animal just then and let out a yelp. I laughed, because what else could I do?

  At 7:45, we took pity on the early birds and opened the gate, ignoring their comments and long drawn-out chuptzes. The posturing and haggling began at once. I did not enjoy this, but here Nick was my polar opposite. So I played Wal-Mart greeter and handled merchandise security while Nick played the used car salesman.

  “How much you want for the pitcher, meh son?” a steely-haired West Indian man asked.

  “Fifty,” Nick said firmly.

  “Whaaaaat?” More chuptzing. “I give you thirty, and you still be taking food out the mouths of me children dem.”

  “Forty-five,” Nick responded.

  Muttering, mild cursing, more chuptzing. “You thiefing me and no lie. I give you thirty-five, and that’s as high as I go.”

  “Forty, and that’s the final price.” Nick said, and turned to walk away to another customer. As the old gentleman nodded and picked up the framed print, Nick called out to me, “Forty for this picture, Katie,” and I hustled over to take the money and be sure that art was all that he loaded into the car.

  As I rang him out, I realized things weren’t going so well with Nick and the next customer. I looked up and my heart sank. The customer was an electrician that Junior—the contractor I’d fired long ago—had brought in to work on the house; the same electrician who did such a poor job that we had refused to pay his full bill. Call me crazy, but when you turn on the light, it shouldn’t run the garbage disposal, too. He was now giving Nick a bit of a rash, proclaiming for all within earshot to hear that we were leaving the island without paying him the rest of the money we owed him. But he wasn’t able to maintain the threat for long.

  The growl that emanated from Oso’s throat was so menacing, I was afraid of him myself. He’d stepped into Sheila’s alpha dog role without hesitation. The electrician made haste to depart, with Oso as his escort.

  “Good dog, Oso,” I said as he trotted back to me. I praised and petted him, to his delight and the jealous consternation of his canine companions.

  The sale went on for hours, with friends and acquaintances showing up off and on during the morning. By midday it had become an impromptu pool party, and we finally shut the gate and counted our money.

  “Eighteen thousand dollars. Not bad at all,” I said.

  “That’s great! I expected half that,” Nick replied.

  “How about we use our guests to help us clean out the refrigerator?” I suggested.

  “You’re good-looking and you’re smart, too,” he said, which I took for a yes.

  We carried a smorgasbord down to the pool. Some of the people who had celebrated our wedding with us in this same place a month before were now gathered here again. It was bittersweet.

  Ms. Ruthie showed up to say goodbye. “You tell that boy I love him,” she said sternly, and turned away to hide the sadness on her face. She embraced both of us and marched back to her car in her dignified way. I swallowed the huge lump in my throat.

  “Ms. Katie,” called out one of the children, “What’s wrong with that big dog over there?”

  Nick and I turned and ran to where the child was pointing. Poor Sheila was staggering around the yard with her face and neck so swollen that they squeezed her eyes shut.

  Our neighbor Paul came up behind us. “Looks like your dog got into a swarm of those African bees. That happened to one of our dogs, too. He lived for a few days, but he didn’t make it.”

  I remembered the giant hives that had appeared overnight on Annalise and had cost a pretty penny to have removed. The rainforest found the weakness in everyone, sooner or later. Nick helped Sheila lie down in the soft dirt by the driveway. He shooed the other dogs away. “I don’t think Sheila’s going to be with us much longer either.”

  We stroked Sheila behind her ears and offered her some water, but she wouldn’t take it. Our mood grew somber and it spread to our friends, who packed up and began to take their leave. The goodbyes felt anticlimactic and mechanical, but I did my best, and then sat back down with Sheila.

  I felt a chill and shivered. Sometimes I forgot what a tough place St. Marcos could be. But it wasn’t that recognition that made me tremble; it was the contrast between how safe we had all felt up at Annalise until now and the timing of this tragedy with Sheila as we left. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  “She’s stopped breathing,” Nick said. “Looks like the old girl wanted to come home and say goodbye.”

  We put our foreheads together and breathed deeply. After a few moments of silence, we carried Sheila away from the house and found a good resting spot for her under a shady mango tree. We covered her body with branches and returned slowly to the house, walking with our hands clasped white-knuckled, each lost in our thoughts.

  Over the next few hours, I cleaned up the aftermath from our estate sale to the sounds of the Dixie Chicks’ mournful album Home. I played it over and over like a wake for Sheila, like a wake for our life here. It was not the only mournful element in my day. Annalise felt like a teenage girl with her sulk on.

  “I’m going to miss you, Annalise. I’m really, really sorry about this,” I said aloud.

  The house remained still, silent, and morose. Well, if she was going to pout, there was nothing I could do about it. You’re doing the right thing, I reminded myself for the zillionth time.

  Nick walked
in from the garage and some of the fog of melancholy lifted.

  “Hi, love. Did you feed the dogs yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he replied.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I want to do it one more time.” I walked toward the side door.

  “Wait.” Nick’s tone stopped me short. “Don’t go outside yet.”

  “What’s outside, Nick?” I asked.

  “Trust me. It’s nothing, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Which is it: nothing, or something you’ll take care of?”

  Nick looked back and forth from me to the door—one Scylla and the other Charybdis—and spoke. “The dogs found Sheila.”

  “What do you mean, ‘found her?’” I probed.

  “Well, the dogs think they’re in the Fiji Islands instead of the West Indies.”

  It took me a moment, but when understanding dawned, it dawned like a blinding strobe light. “They’re eating Sheila?” My lunch of turkey and Swiss sandwich churned with the mango in my stomach.

  “Past tense. She’s pretty far gone. I’m sorry, Katie.”

  I knew from experience that the prickly feeling in my face meant the pale between my freckles had turned to pasty. I sank onto a barstool and put my head in my hands. Nick sat beside me. We held onto each other for several quiet moments.

  “Are you going to bury her?” I asked into his chest.

  “We sold the shovel this morning,” he replied.

  He was right. “Five dollah? That’s criminal,” the man who bought it had said as he fished the money out of his wallet.

  For some reason, that’s what brought on my tears. “But we can’t just leave her there,” I protested, chagrined to hear the tremor in my voice. More softly, I added, “Or what’s left of her.”

  “I’ll cover her up so nothing else can get at her,” Nick promised as he stroked my hair.

  Mollified, I wiped my eyes and nodded. Nick went out to deal with Sheila and the cannibals. Annalise remained still and quiet. Some help you are, I thought.