Ed rolls off the bed and goes into Stacy’s room, which is opposite theirs. The room is filled with Stacy’s things and completely devoid of life—a stage waiting for the play to begin. No, a stage after the play has ended. They have left everything as it was, just as if Stacy has walked out of the room. It is a room clearly once the domain of an adolescent girl. The Barbies have long since been packed away in the closet, instead of scattered all over the room, to be expected when a girl enters high school. Novels and poetry line the bookshelf instead of The Baby-sitter’s Club. Plath, Woolf, and Shakespeare—typical reading for a girl in honors English. On the wall, a famous print depicting Ophelia floating down the stream, looking peaceful and untouched, her arms open and her gaze upward, singing. Stacy had brought that back from some school field trip to a museum.

Ed touches the trophy Stacy earned in the eighth grade for soccer. He turns it a little, just enough to dispel the museum-quality stasis of Alice’s rule over this room.

As he leaves the room, his foot hits something. Ed bends down to retrieve the dog’s latest stuffed toy, a faceless teddy bear. Ed can’t imagine how the dog’s toy got here.

*   *   *

Today’s go-for-a-ride took him too far from where Buddy/Mack thinks that Justine will find him. At first, he thought Alice was going to take him all the way home. They were in the car for far longer, even by a dog’s reckoning, than ever before. Which might have meant it was time to go home. When they ended up at that house with the dog smells, Buddy/Mack expected that something was going to happen. Nothing did, except Alice’s clumsy attempt to get him to perform. All he could think was that Alice had come to the wrong place to find Justine. It was a little like Saundra’s house with her pack, but the silence was unnerving. Who had dogs that didn’t welcome visitors? Finally, Alice put him back in the car and they drove home, Alice talking the whole way home, as if she was trying to convince him of something.

When they came in through the back door, Ed was there and greeted him with a long back scratch and lots of soft words spoken into his ruff. Then Ed straightened up and went to where Alice remained in the doorway. They stared at each other for a moment, long enough that Buddy/Mack got worried. They were like two stranger dogs meeting for the first time, studying each other for signs of fear or friendliness, aggression or attraction. Finally, they did something that Buddy/Mack hadn’t seen them do before: They touched.