The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Read Online Free PDF Page A

and smiled.
    She could not remember the last time she felt unambiguously pleased with herself. Maybe when she had graduated from Mount Holyoke—that was a pretty satisfying day. She had not even known she was getting magna cum laude until she read her name in the class day program. Perhaps once more, when she was accepted to Harvard for graduate school a year after that. But nothing since then. For the first time, really, since beginning her PhD program, Connie felt secure. Validated.
    She slid her key into the lock and turned it silently, not wanting to disturb the sleeping Liz, who had stumbled home alone an hour earlier. As she slipped through the door and into the paneled hallway, two excited paws appeared, scrabbling at her feet.
    “Hi, Arlo,” she whispered, crouching down to enfold the wiggling animal in her arms. Something warm and damp lapped at her cheek. “Aren’t you a grody little guy,” she murmured. Connie scratched him behind the ears, and then she hoisted him up to her hip. She tiptoed with him into the galley kitchen off the study, groping for the light switch.
    The kitchen flickered, filling with buzzing fluorescent light, and Connie squinted her eyes miserably. She placed the dog on the floor and leaned on the counter by the sink, gazing down at the small animal. Asusual she could not decide what precise variety of dog he was; on some days he looked more houndlike, with droopy ears and dark, wet eyes, but on other days she would resolve that he was definitely a terrier, the kind that can fit down a badger hole. His fur was an indistinct, dingy color, something between mud and leaves, which changed and shifted depending on the sunlight and the season.
    “So what did you do today?” she asked him, folding her arms.
    He wagged twice.
    “Yeah?” Connie said. “And then what?”
    The dog sat down.
    “That sounds like fun.” She sighed, turning to fill the teakettle at the sink.
    Connie had never had much interest in animals before Arlo; she had always found them worrisome and dependent, and the idea of keeping a pet touched a deep reservoir of anxiety within her. When she was troubled about her work back in college, as she often was, her dreams had grown populated by identical, replicating animals, snakes and mice or birds, all of them clamoring for food and care that she felt unable to provide. She had long regarded these dreams as an allegory for her worry about research, deadlines, and responsibility but nevertheless decided to take their lesson to heart. While the other women in her college cooperative dorm had brought home cat after cat, Connie held herself aloof.
    A few weeks into her first semester at Harvard, however, Connie emerged from an evening class in the philosophy building to discover the little creature sitting camouflaged under a rhododendron hedge, nearly invisible in the shadows among the leaves. He materialized from under the shrubbery and fell in step with her as she crossed Harvard Yard. At first she tried to shoo him away with one foot as he dodged and weaved in her wake. Stopping in front of the library, she told him to buzz off, pointing with her finger back toward the philosophy building. He just wagged his tail, pink tongue flopping. Halfway across the Yard, she stopped again, telling him to go find his owner. But instead he followed her all the way back to Saltonstall Court, prancing through the door after her.
    For the first few weeks, she had posted flyers around Harvard Square advertising FOUND DOG , to no avail. Then she tried posting a few DOG FREE TO GOOD HOME flyers, until Liz made her take them down. “He chose you!” Liz insisted, and Connie smiled at her roommate’s unabashed sentiment. Liz was the sort of woman who studied medieval Latin because, secretly, she passed her hours imagining the days of knights battling mythical dragons, of ladies in wimples, and of courtly love. Connie appreciated Liz’s fervor in part because Connie was herself a sentimental