Deck The Halls With Brand New Stories: Ho Ho Holiday Anthology

The White Dog

This story was contributed by JanePeden

I saw the white dog the first time when I was five.

Tall and powerful, with thick full hair and the stance of a wolf. It was the day my father died. I looked out the hospital window, three stories up. Across the crowded parking lot. He stood at the edge of the woods and stared at me while the whoosh of the machine that kept my father breathing was steady and strong.

They asked us to step out of the room, my mother and I, and we waited in the hallway. When we went back into the room the machines were silent. We sat on either side of the bed, each of us holding one of his hands. His chest moved up and down and no one spoke. Up and down. With the time between stretching out longer. Until it didn't.

When I looked out the window again, the white dog was gone.

I'm not sure what made me think of the dog now, twenty years later. Maybe because I'm driving on an unfamiliar road that winds through the snowy woods. And I hear or imagine the distant sound of a wolf howling. It's early still, with a sky already turning gray. There's a storm moving in, but it shouldn't hit until late tonight.

I've lived in Miami for eight years. Sunshine and hot beaches. Fast boats and faster men. Men like Alexandro, who I met on a hot Miami night, in a hot Miami club, on the dance floor. A hot young chef, already making a name for himself. And I was a business school student, hoping to land a job one day at an accounting firm. Hoping to one day not struggle as my mother and I had for years.

Mi-ran-da, he said when I told him my name, each syllable slow and deliberate, as if he were tasting an exotic flavor. I'd never particularly liked my name. But I liked when he said it.

Alexandro took me back to the restaurant that night - one that I had never been to and could not possibly afford. When he unlocked the door at 3:00 a.m. I kept waiting for an alarm to go off. For someone to stop us and tell me I didn't belong there. The door led through a storeroom into a gleaming kitchen, eerily silent. Until he began to cook for me.

A horn blares and I jerk the wheel to the right, narrowly avoiding a collision with an SUV that's traveling too fast on the snow-covered and twisting road. The driver slows as I straighten my wheels, then gives me a friendly wave and disappears down the mountain. Take a deep breath, I tell myself. I need to stay focused or I'll miss the turn. I've only been here once before and that was four years ago in the summer.

I wish for about the hundredth time that I was headed for my mom's cozy apartment in Boston. Or that we'd stayed in Miami for the holiday. But no. I was the one who insisted on the white Christmas, and Mom doesn't live in Boston anymore. Not since she fell in love with Nathaniel, a reclusive artist who lives in Vermont in the middle of nowhere and makes ridiculously sought-after wood carvings with a chainsaw. She met him at an art festival, and that was that. He's a giant of a man, with an unruly graying beard and kind eyes. And those eyes saw something in my mother that touched his soul. She found love again.

I have to be getting close. I check my GPS but dammit I can't get a signal. This never happens in Miami. Or Boston, for that matter. I should have taken an Uber, I think, then laugh at myself. I was lucky there was a rental car available at the small airport. Especially two days before Christmas. I would have preferred an actual SUV - a jeep, maybe - instead of this compact cross-over. But the woman at the counter assured me it had a brand new set of studded snow tires and could get me anywhere.

The snow seems to be falling faster now, but with no signal on my phone I can't check the weather. I'll just have to hope the report I saw several hours ago was accurate and I'll be at Nathaniel's cabin by the time the storm hits.