Bond, Jamie Bishop [fiction novels to read .txt] 📗

He hadn’t awakened Jenny after that first night, but he had slowly ascended the stairs, unnaturally quiet despite his bulk.
Each time, he seemed strangely aware of Jenny’s fear. Though he was a well-behaved dog, he was naturally friendly, but he kept his distance. He watched Jenny from the doorway, his eyes probing into hers, as if he was trying to understand. Several times he lay down in the doorway, his head on his large paws, watching her silently. Once he had crept a few feet into the room, crawling on his belly, stopping when Jenny had flashed him a razor-sharp look. He had uttered a short, sad whine and backed out of the door.

Bond had been living in the Rado house for nearly a month when the blowup came. The day had started like any other. Jenny was watching the Today show upstairs while her mother watched it downstairs. After the show ended, Gina would come and sit on the steps to chat for a while before taking the dog for its morning walk.
During the Today show, Bond left Gina downstairs. Quietly, he made his way upstairs. When Jenny heard a soft chuffing sound, she turned to see the huge white form filling her doorway. Bond was carrying something in his mouth. Looking more closely, Jenny realized that it was a blue-and-white tug rope, one of the many toys her mother had bought.
The gentle giant wanted to play.
Jenny could see it in his eyes. They were excited, anticipatory. Whatever made the animal think that things might be different that morning, Jenny didn’t know, but she knew that nothing had changed. She ducked her nose into her shirt and made a shooing motion with her hand.
Bond wasn’t having it. Normally so obedient, the dog advanced further into the room, the toy clutched in his mouth, a glistening string of drool inching from his lip. In a few seconds it would hit the floor.
All of Jenny’s attention was riveted on that strand of drool. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Perhaps the dog took her silence for acceptance. He approached her more boldly, his bushy tail wagging slowly back and forth. Finally he was in front of her as she sat at her desk. She watched, seeing everything in slow motion as Bond opened his mouth and dropped the soggy, drool-soaked, slimy tug toy at her feet.
What followed was not pretty. Part of the rope toy hit Jenny’s foot when it fell. In an instant, she was on her feet, screaming incoherently. She had no idea what she was saying, or if she was trying to say anything at all. Primal, unfocused terror had her in its grip, and nothing mattered except getting away from the source of that terror.
Jenny moved spasmodically. She wanted to run from the room, but walking on the floor that Bond had just contaminated terrified her. She wanted to jump up on her desk chair, but doing that would put her foot in contact with the chair, and her foot was contaminated by the rope toy. She slapped hysterically at her foot, and then realized she’d just contaminated her hand. She heard herself screaming and could hardly believe the sound was coming from her own mouth. It was an animal sound, devoid of any thought or consciousness.
Docile beyond belief, Bond didn’t get agitated by all the noise. He only cocked his head to one side, then the other, his eyes on Jenny. He backed up a few paces, utterly baffled. He’d only wanted to play.
He got the message loud and clear when she picked up a book and flung it at him, hitting him squarely in the forehead. Yelping in surprise, he backed up, forgetting about his toy.
Jenny picked up and flung another book, then another. Some of them hit the dog and some didn’t. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t control herself.
“Jenny!” Gina’s voice was shrill. Jenny hadn’t heard her mounting the stairs, but now her mother was inside her bedroom, staring at the pitiful spectacle, her eyes wide with shock.
Gina hurried the dog back down the stairs. “He only wanted to play, Jen,” she said, her voice sad and quiet. She was angry, but a deep melancholy overshadowed the anger. This person living in her house was not her Jenny. Jenny would not lift a finger against an animal. Never. As she descended the steps, ready to console the big dog who had quickly become a close friend, Gina felt, more than ever before, that her daughter was lost forever.
Jenny spent nearly five hours cleaning that day. Once the shock wore off, she had worked diligently, scouring every surface the dog or her mother might have touched. With that accomplished, she got into the shower and stayed there until the hot water ran out, turning it up so high that her skin turned bright red. When she emerged, she felt raw all over, but raw meant clean, and so she bore the pain.
Dusk was falling when she finally collapsed onto her bed. Without any cleaning to occupy her mind, she thought about what she had done. She saw herself screaming, saw herself throwing things at a defenseless animal. She had done volunteer work with abused pit bulls in the past, and felt a deep connection with the battered animals. She had never raised a hand in anger against any animal, and she took serious offense to people who did. What was she becoming?
For the first time, as she lay in bed, her thin body curled under the soft blanket, Jenny Rado seriously considered ending her life.


Jenny didn’t get out of bed for several days. She communicated with her mother only by phone. As disgusting as she felt, she couldn’t summon the energy to get up and shower. Feeling so filthy on compounded her self-hatred, and several times she wondered if it was possible for a person to will themselves dead.
It was late at night when the call came. Gina had fallen in the kitchen. She had landed hard on her wrist. Twisted her ankle badly. She’d broken both of those bones as well as causing a hairline fracture in her lower leg. She was in the hospital, and would be for several days.
She would call the next-door neighbor to care for Bond; feeding and walking him while she was gone. Jenny didn’t need to worry about anything.
After hanging up, Jenny sobbed. She should have been able to care for the dog. More than that, she should have been downstairs, should have been the one to drive her mother to the hospital, should have been a help instead of a hindrance in the woman’s life.
Setting the phone on the nightstand, Jenny buried her face in her pillow and cried herself to sleep.

Gina’s stay in the hospital was shorter than she’d expected, but once she was home, she was amazed to see just how much she couldn’t do. She walked with crutches and couldn’t use her right hand at all. As much as she hated to do it, she asked her neighbor to keep helping with Bond.
Jenny and her mother didn’t talk much. Gina was always tired, and the doctors had told her that rest was what her body needed more than anything.
More than medical advice, however, hung heavily between mother and daughter. Seeing Jenny flinging books at Bond had forced Gina to look at her daughter realistically. She didn’t like what she saw. Perhaps her friends were right. Perhaps her laughing, happy, normal daughter was, indeed, gone for good. It was painful to talk to Jenny. The girl had taken another downward turn. Her voice was flat. Lifeless.
Talking with her mother hurt Jenny just as badly. She longed for her touch, for a reassuring hug, for a kiss on the head to tell her it was all going to be all right. She could accept none of those things without flying into a panic.
Her room became more of a cell than it had ever been. She ate nothing, and drank very little. She could feel herself getting progressively weaker, though she told her mother that she was eating. As the days rolled into weeks, Jenny began to look forward to the day when she would not wake up.

Winter had Duluth firmly in its grip, with temperatures dipping into the thirty-below range at night. Jenny’s near-constant panic attacks were soothed somewhat by cold air, and so even on those frigid nights, she often cracked the window to let in a draft.
It was on such a night, wracked with panic, sitting in bed and watching a movie at two o’clock, that Jenny got up and crossed the room. Perhaps some cold air swirling through the stuffy room would clear her head a bit.
She was only a few steps from the bed when the pressure in her chest went from constant and dull to crushing. She’d experienced this before. It was a particularly bad panic attack, made worse by the fact that she hadn’t eaten for nearly two weeks.
She lowered herself back down onto the bed, trying to force deep breaths into her constricted lungs. It was difficult. Fear grew inside her, looming even larger than it had been only moments earlier. She wanted to call for her mother, but knew that her mother was hurt. She refused to give in to any more selfish impulses. She would get through this on her own.
She wasn’t sure how smart that decision was. In the past weeks, she’d felt out of breath after nearly any activity, and had felt her heart begin to pound after walking from the bedroom to the bathroom. She knew she had to eat. With the dog in the house, however, it was impossible. The few bites she’d tried to put in her mouth had stuck in her throat. Gagging, she’d spit them out. She’d been sure, irrationally but absolutely sure, that she could actually taste the dog germs on the food.
Shaking, and with tears streaming down her face, Jenny got to her feet and moved again toward the window. Again the pressure in her chest increased, and she was driven to the ground.
Determined to ride it out, Jenny sat down and tried to breathe. She practiced all the relaxation techniques that were etched into her mind after years and years of assorted therapies. Finally she was able to fill her lungs, and she got to her feet.
Immediately, a looming blackness blotted the corners of her vision. This was nothing new, either, but Jenny was still afraid. Once, a blackout had started out this way, and ended up in the ER.
Unwilling to abandon the window, desperately thinking that somehow a breath of fresh air would make up for weeks without food, Jenny pushed on. Reaching the sill, she shoved the window up hard, her eyes on the moon outside.
Even that small amount of exertion was too much, and she hit the floor hard. She hadn’t lost consciousness, not quite, but blackness had filled in all but a tiny point of light in her field of vision, and dizziness crumpled her legs beneath her. Her shoulder and elbow struck the floor first, sending shockwaves of pain through her body.
She could move, but didn’t really want to. Waves of freezing air were flowing over the windowsill, actually visible as the warm air inside met the cold. She put a trembling hand up into the foggy swirl, dreamily waving her fingers, enjoying the fresh, icy sensation.
She thought that if she was to die as a result of this phobia – and