Water Dogs by Lewis Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

that world felt distant. When the busty nurse’s aide left on his second night in the hospital, she bent down close to his face and told him, “It’s your job to just float there on your little raft.”
    He flipped on the TV. He watched but he couldn’t concentrate. Animal Planet was often his best bet. Any show about pets and their dotingowners. No matter what he watched, his mind often returned to the winter he lived in Brooklyn with Gwen, a year after she’d first moved there, right after he’d dropped out of college. It was almost hard to believe now that he’d gone to the city in his early twenties and worked as a truck driver, moving artwork for an outfit in Queens. The sapphire lights on the truck’s dashboard; stopping for eggs and potatoes in Williamsburg; nearly dropping an obscure gilt-framed Monet in a town house on the Upper East Side; napping on the subway coming back from the warehouse; meeting Hillary Koeman while she was taking classes at Hunter College; her fantasies about Maine, which he was happy to fulfill; his proposal and their breakup; accidentally stepping through the side of a crate containing a sculpture made of twigs he was late in delivering to Sotheby’s; getting fired; helping Gwen find a new roommate; having Littlefield come down late at night to pick him up and drive him back to Meadow Island; the queasy relief he felt coming up over the Piscataqua River.
    Since then, he’d spent time pretending he belonged in Maine. He’d been born there; that helped. After a while, the pretending had melted away. He knew they were real, his financial struggles, his misplaced plans. Being in the hospital—especially when it was nearly time for more Dilaudid, when his room looked dull and shabby—made him think about these realities.
    While Bennie was in New York, Littlefield joined the Elks, bought a truck, spent his paychecks on beer and weed. He’d stopped calling their mother, though she would call him from time to time. The day Bennie got back from New York, the harbor looked pristine, the spruce forest and the ground beneath smelled like heaven—it had been raining—and the sky over the ocean went on forever. Littlefield, though, felt like a stranger. He knew his brother was glad to have him back, but Bennie could also sense his brother’s wariness. What had happened during their time apart—the things each of them had learned, the failures they’d had—seemed unsettling to Littlefield. Bennie didn’t know how to talk about this.
    The ceiling in his room at the hospital was white. It seemed wet, like the underbelly of a flounder.
    Before he switched the light off for the night, Lynne Pettigrew, a cop from the Musquacook Police Department, knocked on the door and entered his room.
    “Bennie?”
    “Hello?” he said.
    “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Lynne Pettigrew was an old family friend of the Littlefields’; her mother had gone to high school with Coach. Bennie had never gotten to know her well, but their families had spent Easter together once when they were younger. She was of medium height but her shoulders were wide. Her brown hair was cut in a neat bob and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. Bennie knew she’d been a hockey standout at UNH. She coached the Brunswick girls’ team when she wasn’t policing.
    “Sure.” He tried to sit up in bed, to look more presentable, but his ankles were still in the pressurized sleeves. It was difficult to move.
    “You feeling okay?” she asked.
    “Pretty good,” he said.
    “You probably know by now that Mr. Ray LaBrecque has gone missing. Officers from various towns are helping out with the search.”
    “My brother told me.”
    “We’re looking in the quarry and all of the woods nearby. We even got the Brunswick guys to bring their dogs down, but nothing came of it. According to your brother and Julian Fischer, it was a pretty wide territory that was covered that evening. Hard to say where he went, exactly, with the storm and