Impossible Things by Connie Willis Page B

did.”
    “And he ran across the road,” Katie said. “And I hit him.”
    She was looking down at her hands. I waited for her to look up, dreading what I would see in her face. Or not see.
    “It took me a long time to find out where you’d gone,” she said to her hands. “I was afraid you’d refuse me access to your lifeline. I finally saw one of your pictures in a newspaper, and I moved to Phoenix, but after I got here, I was afraid to call you for fear you’d hang up on me.”
    She twisted her hands the way she had twisted her mittens at the vet’s. “My husband said I was obsessedwith it, that I should have gotten over it by now, everybody else had, that they were only dogs anyway.” She looked up, and I braced my hands against the developer. “He said forgiveness wasn’t something somebody else could give you, but I didn’t want you to forgive me exactly. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”
    There hadn’t been any reproach, any accusation in her face when I told her she was responsible for the extinction of a species that day at the vet’s, and there wasn’t now. Maybe she didn’t have the facial muscles for it, I thought bitterly.
    “Do you know why I came to see you today?” I said angrily. “My camera broke when I tried to catch Aberfan. I didn’t get any pictures.” I grabbed the picture of Mrs. Ambler out of the developer’s tray and flung it at her. “Her dog died of newparvo. They left it in the Winnebago, and when they came back, it was dead.”
    “Poor thing,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the picture. She was looking at me.
    “She didn’t know she was having her picture taken. I thought if I got you talking about Aberfan, I could get a picture like that of you.”
    And surely now I would see it, the look I had really wanted when I set the eisenstadt down on Katie’s kitchen table, the look I still wanted, even though the eisenstadt was facing the wrong way, the look of betrayal the dogs had never given us. Not even Misha. Not even Aberfan. How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?
    I pointed at the eisenstadt. “It’s not a briefcase. It’s a camera. I was going to take your picture without your even knowing it.”
    She had never known Aberfan. She had never known Mrs. Ambler either, but in that instant before she started to cry, she looked like both of them. She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and the love, the loss wasthere in her voice, too. “If you’d had it then, it wouldn’t have happened.”
    I looked at the eisenstadt. If I had had it, I could have set it on the porch and Aberfan would never have even noticed it. He would have burrowed through the snow and tossed it up with his nose, and I could have thrown snow up in big glittering sprays that he would have leapt at, and it never would have happened. Katie Powell would have driven past, and I would have stopped to wave at her, and she, sixteen years old and just learning to drive, would maybe even have risked taking a mittened hand off the steering wheel to wave back, and Aberfan would have wagged his tail into a blizzard and then barked at the snow he’d churned up.
    He wouldn’t have caught the third wave. He would have lived to be an old dog, fourteen or fifteen, too old to play in the snow anymore, and even if he had been the last dog in the world, I would not have let them lock him up in a cage, I would not have let them take him away. If I had had the eisenstadt.
    No wonder I hated it.
    It had been at least fifteen minutes since Ramirez called. The Society would be here any minute. “You shouldn’t be here when the Society comes,” I said, and Katie nodded and smudged the tears off her cheeks and stood up, reaching for her carryit.
    “Do you ever take pictures?” she said, shouldering the carryit. “I mean, besides for the papers?”
    “I don’t know if I’ll be taking pictures for them much longer. Photojournalists are becoming an