PART 7 – “The Wrong Way Home”
The day after James fell, he didn’t get out of bed.
He wasn’t in pain—just quiet. A calmness had settled over him, like someone who had made peace with forgetting. He lay still, eyes open, watching light move across the ceiling like he was tracking something only he could see.
Carol stayed at his side.
She brought a folding chair close to the bed and held his hand, tracing the veins like roads on a faded map. His fingers twitched gently under hers. He hadn’t spoken in almost two days.
“You used to hum to me,” she whispered. “Right after Mom died. I remember it.”
He didn’t blink, but his mouth moved—barely. A word she couldn’t quite hear.
So she hummed it for him. The old lullaby. “All the Pretty Little Horses.”
A tear slid down his temple.
Etta brought the sketchbook that afternoon.
“Found it under his pillow,” she said softly.
Carol flipped to the last page.
There, in pencil smudges, was a drawing of a fence with a gate slightly ajar. A man stood just beyond it. A dog waited on the other side, sitting upright, alert.
Above the fence, words written in James’s slanted hand:
He always knew which side I was on.
Carol touched the page with trembling fingers.
“I think he’s saying goodbye.”
That evening, a breeze moved through James’s room even though the windows were closed. It carried the scent of honeysuckle—faint, familiar, impossible. Carol turned, startled. Etta looked up from the chair by the door.
“You smell that?” she asked.
Carol nodded slowly.
And then James whispered, “Gideon.”
His eyes didn’t open. His voice was no louder than a falling leaf.
But it was clear. Certain.
Carol leaned in. “Is he here, Dad?”
James smiled—small, peaceful.
“He never left.”
That night, James slept with the old dog tag clutched in one hand, the red sketchbook in the other. Carol sat by his bedside, fingers laced with his, until her head nodded forward and she drifted off in the chair.
Around 3 a.m., Etta came in to check his vitals.
She paused in the doorway.
James’s chest rose once.
Then again—slowly, gently.
Then no more.
They buried him with the penny in his pocket.
The dog tag looped around his neck, resting just over his heart.
The sketchbook went to Carol.
She kept it on her desk in a sunlit room that smelled of cedar and chamomile. She turned its pages like scripture—slowly, reverently. Each image a breadcrumb of a man who had once lost himself and found his way home.
With help.
With memory.
With a dog who had waited at every turn.
A week after the funeral, Carol walked the trail behind Magnolia Glen.
It was warmer now, the last chill of spring fading. Robins darted through the canopy. She paused by the old oak bench—the one James always returned to.
And she sat.
She closed her eyes and listened.
No voices. No footsteps.
Just wind.
But then—softly, almost imagined—she felt it.
A warm breath near her calf.
A gentle brush of fur against her leg.
When she opened her eyes, there was nothing there.
Nothing but a single paw print in the mud.
Facing home.
PART 8 – “The Wrong Way Home”
Carol didn’t tell anyone about the paw print.
She stood there for a long time, staring at it—one perfect print in the mud near the bench where her father always ended his walks. Deep, clear, facing the path back to Magnolia Glen.
No other prints followed.
No second, no third.
Just one.
Like a memory pressing down hard enough to hold its shape.
After James passed, the staff at Magnolia Glen planted a tree in his honor. A silver maple, just beyond the east courtyard where the sunlight caught in long stripes every afternoon. Carol picked the spot.
“He loved that light,” she said. “Said it looked like the world remembering itself.”
They buried a small time capsule beneath it.
Inside: a copy of the sketchbook, his bent wheat penny, and the drawing of the open gate with Shadow waiting beyond.
They didn’t include the original dog tag.
Carol kept that.
Threaded on a leather cord, resting just under her collarbone.
In May, Carol began visiting more often.
Not just to remember—but to be remembered.
The staff let her sit in on art classes, help with lunch prep, read aloud in the library nook her father had once feared. She found herself sketching again too—something she hadn’t done since childhood.
One day she drew Shadow from memory.
Strong legs. Folded ear. Watching the horizon.
When she showed it to Etta, the nurse just smiled and said, “He never left, did he?”
Carol shook her head. “No. He just stopped needing to be seen.”
Residents began reporting dreams.
Not frightening ones—quiet ones. Comforting.
One woman, Miss Alberta, said she dreamed she was walking in the woods with a dog who always stayed just ahead, looking back now and then to make sure she followed.
“He took me to a kitchen,” she said. “One I hadn’t seen since I was a girl. I could smell cornbread in the oven.”
Another man dreamed of a porch swing.
“I sat down next to the dog,” he said, “and suddenly I could smell my father’s pipe tobacco again.”
Carol listened.
And every time she heard the stories, her eyes prickled.
They weren’t just dreams.
They were glimmers.
One rainy Thursday, a volunteer brought in a new therapy dog.
A rescue mutt—black-and-brindle, nervous around doors but gentle with laps.
He had a split in one ear.
And when he stepped through the front lobby, he paused.
Stared toward the far hallway.
Then walked, without prompting, straight to the east courtyard window.
Right where James used to sit.
Carol rose slowly, watching him.
He looked at her once.
Tilted his head.
Then lay down at the foot of the bench and closed his eyes.
They named him Gideon.
Not because they knew for sure.
Not because they needed it to be true.
But because some stories deserve to finish the way they started.
Carol brought out her father’s sketchbook that night.
She sat cross-legged on the floor beside the dog, flipping through the pages.
She stopped at the one with the two figures on the dock—the man and the girl, legs swinging over the lake, the dog between them.
She traced the lines of the dog’s body with one fingertip.
“You brought him home,” she whispered. “Now maybe… you brought me too.”
Gideon stirred.
Just enough to press his nose to her knee.
Then sighed.
And fell asleep again.