Second Contact

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The dog on the table in Exam Two was registered to my house, and I had never seen it before in my life.

I ran the scanner over him a second time, slower, from the shoulder blades down the left side the way they teach you, in case the first read was a ghost. It wasn't. The little grey screen showed the same fifteen digits, and the shelter system came back with the same record: adopted from us, the Rockaway Valley Animal Shelter, on the eleventh of February this year. Male, neutered, terrier mix, approximately two years. Name at adoption: CHESTER. Name on the registration update: PICKLES.

Adopter: Tyler Pell. 41 Fernbrook Road, Denville.

Tyler Pell is my son. 41 Fernbrook Road is where I have slept every night for twenty-two years.

"He's sweet," said Lou Petrakis. Lou is Denville animal control, a big soft man with a moustache like a push broom, and he was leaning in the doorway with his clipboard. "Picked him up on Diamond Spring Road around six. Running the shoulder like he had somewhere to be. No collar. You find a chip?"

"Yeah," I said. "I found a chip."

The dog looked at me. He was a scruffy brown thing, maybe twenty pounds, with one ear up and one ear down and burrs in his beard. He had stopped shaking. When I put my hand flat on his ribs he leaned into it, the way dogs do when they've decided you're the one in charge, which I very much was not.

Diamond Spring Road is four streets from my house.

---

I called Tyler from the break room. It went to voicemail. He's nineteen, a freshman at County College of Morris, and on Thursday nights he has Intro to Accounting until nine-fifteen and keeps his phone in his backpack because the professor takes them if he sees them. I know this because I'm the one who told him to keep it in his backpack.

Hey, it's Ty, leave it.

"Call me," I said. "It's Dad. It's not an emergency." Then, because it might be: "Call me as soon as you're out."

I sat there with the vending machine humming and the dogs in the kennel block starting up their evening chorus, and I tried to fit the dog into my son's life.

February. In February Tyler had been working at the ShopRite in Rockaway and saving for a car, and moody, and quiet, and eighteen. In February we had not had a dog, because our last dog, Gus, died in 2021 and Marisol had said, at the vet's, holding his collar, that she couldn't do that again.

There was something else. Three weeks ago, at the start of October, Marisol had found a stainless-steel bowl full of water on the floor of the garage, next to the recycling, and had asked at dinner who'd put it there.

"Raccoons," Tyler had said, with his mouth full.

"Raccoons put out a bowl of water?"

"I put it out for the raccoons. Mom. They're thirsty. It's getting cold."

Marisol had rolled her eyes and let it go. I had laughed. It was the kind of thing Tyler used to do when he was six, rescuing worms off the driveway after rain. I'd thought it was nice that some of the six-year-old was still in there.

The bowl was still in the garage. I'd moved it last Saturday to get at the leaf blower. It was full.

---

I work Saturdays and Sundays at the shelter, plus Thursday evenings, because the weekday adoption counselors go home at five and somebody has to be here when animal control comes in. Weekdays I do intake at a veterinary practice in Parsippany. So it was possible, perfectly possible, that my son had walked into the building where I work, on a Wednesday in February, filled in the forms, paid his ninety-five dollars, and walked out with a dog, and that nobody had thought to mention it to me. Half the weekday staff have never met me.

I opened the adoption file.

It was a scan of the paper application, the long one we make everybody fill in: landlord, other pets, hours the dog would be alone. Tyler's handwriting, which has not improved since the fourth grade. Own home. No other pets. Dog will be alone: 0–2 hrs.

Under Second Contact (required), he had written:

J. Daley.

And a phone number with a 973 area code.

I sat very still. In the kennel block a hound started baying and wouldn't stop, and somebody yelled at it to knock it off, and it didn't.

Daley.

---

There are things you tell yourself are finished.

In the spring of 2013, Marisol and I separated for five months. We'd been married eleven years. There was no affair that started it; there was a miscarriage, and then another, and then a silence in the house so thick you could lean on it. She went to her sister's in Morristown. I stayed with Tyler, who was six, and who asked every night when Mommy was coming home from Aunt Lucy's, and I said soon, because I didn't know.

That May, at a fundraiser for the shelter, I met a woman named Corinne Daley. She was funny and sad and three years out of a divorce, and for six weeks I was someone I have spent thirteen years pretending I wasn't.

In August, Marisol came home. In September, Corinne called me from a pay phone outside the Rockaway Townsquare Mall, which even in 2013 was an achievement, and told me she was pregnant, and that she was keeping it, and that she wanted nothing from me.

"Nothing," she said. "I mean it, Gary. Go home to your wife."

I sent money anyway. She sent the first check back, so after that it was money orders from the post office in Mountain Lakes, six hundred dollars on the first of every month, to a PO box in Randolph. Thirteen years. Corinne never cashed one late, and she never wrote back, and she never once sent a picture. I knew the baby was a girl because the clerk at the post office in Randolph had a cousin who knew somebody, and Morris County is smaller than it looks. That was all I knew. That was all I'd let myself know.

I had never told anyone. Not Marisol. Not my brother. Not a priest. I'd carried it the way I carried the money order receipts, folded small, in an inside pocket nobody ever checked.

J. Daley.

---

I called the number.

It rang five times. I was about to hang up when it picked up, and nobody spoke, and I could hear breathing and a television somewhere, a game show, people cheering for a car.

"Hello?" I said. "This is the Rockaway Valley Animal Shelter."

"Did you find him?"

A girl. Young. Hoarse, like she'd been crying or shouting, or both.

"We have a dog here," I said carefully. "A brown terrier. One ear up."

"That's Pickles." Her voice went up and cracked. "That's him, that's Pickles, is he okay? Is he hurt? I called the one in Parsippany and the one in Randolph and the police, and the police lady said to call in the morning—"

"He's fine. He's not hurt. He's eating." Behind me, through the open door of Exam Two, I could hear Lou's voice going up into the register people use for babies and dogs. "Who am I speaking to?"

A pause.

"Jade."

"Jade. Is your mom there? I need to talk to a grown-up."

The pause was longer this time. The game show audience groaned. Somebody had picked the wrong door.

"She's asleep," Jade said.

It was ten to eight. Nineteen years of being a parent teaches you what a lie sounds like when it comes out of a kid. It sounds exactly like that.

"Okay," I said. "That's okay. Can you tell me your address? I can bring him to you."

"No." Fast. Then, slower: "No, it's okay. I'll come get him. I know where you are. It's on Route 46, by the Dunkin'."

"It's three miles from Randolph, Jade. It's dark."

"I'll walk. I walk everywhere."

"Jade—"

She'd hung up.

I called back. It rang and rang, and went to a robot voice telling me the mailbox was full.

---

I told Lou to hold the dog in Exam Two, not the kennel block, and I said I'd be right back, and then I was in my car with the engine running before I'd decided anything.

The number on the form was a cell, no help. But Corinne's PO box had always been in Randolph, and the girl knew where the shelter was, by the Dunkin'. If you walk from Randolph to here there is one sensible way. Route 10 to Old Quarry Road, Old Quarry Road down the hill to Route 46. The last half-mile of Old Quarry Road has no sidewalk, and a curve, and a shoulder about as wide as a pizza box, and the trucks come down it from the quarry doing fifty.

I drove it slowly, the wrong way, toward Randolph, with my hazards on and my high beams on and other drivers flashing me.

My phone rang. TYLER on the dash.

"Dad? I walked out of class. What's wrong? Is it Mom?"

"Mom's fine," I said. "I've got your dog."

Silence. Then a car door, an engine, the click of a turn signal. He was driving.

"Ty."

"He got out," Tyler said. His voice was small. "I came home at four to walk him before class and the side door of the garage was open, and he was gone. I've been keeping him in the garage in the daytime since Corinne went in, so he's not alone in that apartment all day. I looked for an hour, Dad, I swear, I drove around, and then I had to go to class because there's a test next week and if I fail it I lose the—"

"Where's Jade?"

The silence that came after that was a different silence. I'd heard it before, from Marisol, in the spring of 2013, after I asked her if she was ever coming home.

"How do you know about Jade?" he said.

"She's walking to the shelter. Right now. In the dark. Down Old Quarry Road."

"Oh my God."

"Where does she live, Tyler?"

"Ironia Road. The apartments behind the Wawa. I'm ten minutes."

"I'm five. Where's her mother?"

Another silence. The turn signal. Click, click.

"Morristown Medical," Tyler said. "Since the first week of October. Dad, it's her liver, she's on a list. She made Jade promise not to tell anybody, because Jade's twelve and there's nobody else, and if the school finds out the state comes, and Corinne says the state—" He stopped. He took a breath like he was going under water. "I've been taking her groceries. I take her to see her mom on Sundays. I'm the only one who knows."

I nearly said No, you're not. What came out was: "Did your mother know?"

"No. God, no."

"Tyler. How long have you known who she is?"

"Since last year," he said. "She found me. On Instagram. She found the money order stubs in her mom's desk and they say G. Pell, and she looked up every Pell in Morris County and she found my lacrosse pictures because I'm, like, the only one who doesn't have a private account." He laughed, a terrible wet laugh. "She said we have the same ears."

I touched my ear. I didn't mean to. Then I put my hand back on the wheel.

"I'm sorry," Tyler said. "I didn't know how to tell you that I knew. I didn't know what you'd do. I didn't want you to stop. The money. Corinne said that's what pays the rent."

"I'll never stop," I said, and it was the first true thing I'd said in a long time.

---

I found her a quarter-mile short of the curve.

A small figure on the wrong side of the guardrail, in a hoodie with the hood up and a pink backpack, walking fast with her head down. She had a dog leash in her hand. Just the leash, wound around her fist, with nothing on the end of it.

I pulled onto the shoulder ahead of her and got out and stood by the car with my hands where she could see them, the way you approach a dog you don't know.

"Jade? I'm from the shelter. I called you."

She stopped. She looked at the car, and at me, and I saw her decide whether to run. There was a lot of road behind her and nothing in front of her but me.

Then she pushed her hood back.

I want to tell you I saw myself in her face. I didn't. I saw Corinne, the wide mouth and the eyebrows that went up in the middle, and I was so ambushed by it, by thirteen years folding up like a card table, that for a second I couldn't say anything at all.

"You're him," Jade said. "Aren't you."

A truck came round the curve and lit us both up white and blew past, and the wind of it pushed her hair across her face.

"Yes," I said.

She nodded, as if I'd confirmed the time. "Is Pickles really okay?"

"He's really okay. He ate a whole can of the expensive stuff. He's got burrs in his beard."

"He always gets burrs." She looked at the empty leash in her hand. Then she looked up at me, and her chin wobbled, just once, and she clamped it still. "Tyler said you were nice. He said you used to rescue worms off the driveway with him."

"That was his idea," I said. "I just held the umbrella."

---

Tyler's Corolla came down Old Quarry Road with its high beams on and stopped on the opposite shoulder, crooked, half in a ditch. He crossed without looking, the idiot, and Jade ran to him, and he caught her and held her the way I used to hold him when he was six and asked when Mommy was coming home.

Over her head he looked at me.

I have been a father for nineteen years. I thought I knew every face my son had. I didn't know that one. It wasn't guilt, or fear. It was the face of a man who'd been holding something heavy for a very long time and was waiting to see if somebody would take the other end.

We collected Pickles from Exam Two at eight-forty. Lou didn't ask any questions, which is one of Lou's great gifts. Jade got down on the linoleum, and the dog went into her lap like water poured into a glass, and she put her face in his dirty beard and stayed like that, with her shoulders going.

"Where are we taking her?" Tyler said quietly. "She can't go back to the apartment by herself. Not tonight."

"No," I said.

"Dad. If you take her home—"

"I know."

"Mom's going to—"

"I know, Ty."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, and picked up Jade's pink backpack, and held the door.

---

The porch light at 41 Fernbrook Road was on. It's on a timer; it comes on at six and goes off at midnight, and I installed it myself, in 2013, in August, the week Marisol came home, so she'd never come back to a dark house again.

I parked in the driveway. Tyler pulled in behind me. Jade sat in my passenger seat with Pickles in her lap and looked at the house, at the pumpkins on the steps and the wreath of fake leaves Marisol puts up every October, and she held the dog a little tighter.

"Does she know?" Jade asked. "About me?"

"No," I said. "Nobody knew."

The front door opened before I got to it.

Marisol stood in the doorway in her reading glasses and the grey cardigan with the hole in the elbow, with her finger still holding her place in a paperback. She looked at me. She looked past me at Tyler, coming up the path with a pink backpack over his shoulder. And then she looked down at the girl on the step beside me, the girl in the hoodie, holding a brown dog with one ear up and one ear down.

I had the speech ready. I'd been building it for thirteen years, and I'd rehearsed it all the way home from Old Quarry Road. It started with the spring of 2013 and it ended with I'm sorry, and in between it explained everything.

I opened my mouth.

Marisol took off her reading glasses and folded them, slowly, and put them in the pocket of her cardigan. She didn't look at me again. She crouched down, so that she was at the girl's height, and held out the back of her hand for the dog to smell, the way you're supposed to.

"Hello, Jade," my wife said. "I wondered when you'd come."

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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