by Susan Wilson
* * *
The effort to change position made it a nightly exercise in how long she could tolerate being in the position she was in before she extended the effort to roll to her other side. In those long hours, she rehearsed the names and ranks and smiles of those she’d been close to in-country. She didn’t want to forget them. She didn’t want them to forget her. The air-conditioning in her room was set too high. Her arms were freezing; the thin Florida-weight blanket did nothing to warm her. I’m a creature of heat, she thought, of hot, dry living, with the taste of fine windblown grit flavoring everything. She licked her lips. She should call out, demand that the air-conditioning be shut off, but she knew that the heat that would then envelop her would be of a thick, viscous, humid variety and as unlike Iraqi heat as mud is from sand. She pushed the button that would elevate her. She had finally convinced her mother that she didn’t need bed rails, reasoning that as she couldn’t turn over, how was she going to fall out of bed? Sitting, she could reach the trapeze that dangled over her bed.
That embarrassing moment in the waiting room with her mother making nice with that dog-assisted vet had gotten Meghan thinking about the military working dogs that she had known. Real service dogs. Bomb sniffers. Security guards. Keeping watch with their handlers. Carrying their own burden of gear and never complaining. Never counting the days until the end of deployment, just doing their best. One dog in particular came to mind, an explosive-detection dog. Not one of the aloof Belgian Malinois, but a spaniel. He looked more suited to a snuggle on a couch than poking his nose in and around vehicles stopped at checkpoints, sussing out with his remarkable nose the hint of explosive material. All for a chance to play with his tug-of-war toy. Sidney, his name was. And his handler turned a blind eye when one of the newer soldiers, sitting po-faced in the convoy, pale and swallowing hard against fear, reached out to the soft-coated dog, running a trembling hand along the dog’s spine, stroking his ears with nicotine-stained fingers. Okay, maybe once or twice she’d given in to the temptation to touch the dog, to feel the strange comfort of his pink tongue touching her hand.
Meghan looked down at her hand, the soft fabric of the lightweight blanket clutched between her fingers.
* * *
Although she professed to hate it, Meghan, by necessity, spent a lot of time watching television. Her day had become a routine of morning news shows, afternoon movie picks, and evening sitcoms. Her mother had finally given up trying to convince her that she wasn’t purposeless. Right now, Meghan felt that her purpose in life was to blot out thinking with mindless television. The opiate of the masses, hadn’t someone said that? How apt. Once she got comfortable, she could focus on whatever nonsense was in front of her instead of the nagging pain, raise the volume to drown out the incessant desire to relieve that pain with an oxycodone pill.
Tonight, she’d accidentally tuned in to a documentary about therapy dogs, and as the remote had slipped out of her hand to the floor, she was helpless to flip the channel. With both of her parents out of the house for an hour, there was no yelling for help. She really had no interest in watching this “heartwarming” documentary that would make her angry. Angry because of the exploitative nature of pity. In her opinion, the documentarian would milk the pity scene, the struggles, the self-consciousness of the tragically handicapped, either from birth or some terrible accident of fate; and then, the glorious moment—and who was to say it wasn’t scripted?—of success when the dog would bring the veteran some out-of-reach object, like a phone or a freakin’ remote. Oh, no, let’s hear it for the dog. Life will be wonderful now.
And yet, there was something poignant about the autistic kid and the dog who made it possible for him to manage in school.
One section of the program, maybe a quarter of the broadcast, talked about dogs being trained to work with wounded warriors. She thought that she recognized the inside of Walter Reed. Then again, maybe all VA hospitals looked alike. They interviewed a guy with raging PTSD and another like the guy she’d seen at therapy, a double amputee.
She hadn’t seen him lately. The last time she’d seen him leave the building, the dog was at his side and he was laughing at something. The big window of the waiting room looked out over the parking lot, and Meghan couldn’t help but notice that he was being picked up by a young woman in a top-down Mini Cooper. She didn’t jump out of the car to help him. She kissed him. The dog leaped into the backseat.
The PTSD sufferer looked into the camera and acknowledged that he might not still be alive if it weren’t for his dog.
The documentary broke for a PBS fund-raising segment.
“Meghan, do you want a drink?” asked Evelyn, back from her single hour of respite.
“Mom, come in and watch this.”
The fund-raising segment over, the documentary had moved on to who trained these dogs. Various organizations were mentioned, but only one was featured. On-screen, an African-American woman dressed in plain blue jeans and a T-shirt talked about how her dog, a Labrador, was almost ready to take on his mission, to be the constant companion of a returning veteran suffering from multiple injuries. “I’ve worked with him for almost a year and I can tell you that this dog knows his job.” What was remarkable about the woman was that she was identified as an inmate of a correctional facility in New York. The look on the prisoner’s face was joyful, and a little sad. The expression on the soldier’s face was clearly one of hope.
And there it was, the money shot, a former U.S. Navy SEAL with tears in his eyes.
* * *
“I could find out where Ken Silensky got his dog.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“If I do it, and I’m not saying I will, I would want to go through the prison program.”
Evelyn smiled, putting her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Whenever you’re ready. We can make room for a dog.”
“No. Don’t you see? The whole point of getting a service dog is so that I can leave.”
Meghan felt the loosening of her mother’s hands on her shoulders. “Okay.”
* * *
There was no local program where they lived in Florida. There was a program in New York, and another in Connecticut.
“Mom, why don’t you call your cousin Carol. Doesn’t she live in Fairfield?”
“We haven’t had any contact with the New England cousins in years.”
The glue holding the relatives together all those years ago had been Evelyn’s grandmother, Henrietta Baxter, matriarch over all. Once Gramma had passed, and as Meghan’s dad had gone from posting to posting, her mother let the connection to her living cousins thin out. They’d all last seen one another when Mark died. A Christmas card now and then. Evelyn was clearly squeamish about imposing on a long-lost relative, but Meghan was not. Once you’ve been blown up by an IED, there’s little to be squeamish about. “Never mind, I’ll call her. Hand me my iPad. Nothing more fun than looking up long-lost relatives online. I’ll see if I can track her down on Facebook.”
By the end of the day, Meghan and her first cousin once removed, Carol Baxter-Flint, had friended each other. By the end of the month, Meghan’s parents had put her on a plane headed for Bradley International Airport, where Carol and Don Flint would meet her plane.
Rosie
Shark and I made great progress in our basic training, the stuff of sit, stay, down. Heel was coming along, and of the four dogs in the program, I can say without exaggeration that he was the cleverest. LaShonda’s Mimi was a cute pup, but stubborn. Zella and her Lab struggled, and I think it was because she didn’t have quite enough patience to stick to it. She got frustrated, and I wasn’t surprised when she dropped out of the program. Next thing I heard, Zella was sent down to seg. I was sorry to hear that; after all, you had to be clean of infractions for two years before even being considered for the program. LaShonda told me later that Zella had gotten word that her teenage son had been killed on the street. Her only child, a boy she had barely had a cha
nce to raise. So when Edith came to help us work on specialized training, I took her aside.
“Zella really needs another chance.” I told her what I’d heard. “She needs this. She may not realize it, but I think it would help a lot more than getting into trouble and being segregated.” Shark was sitting on my feet, as he liked to do, and the weight of him doing that reminded me of being held. Not held by a boyfriend, but by a parent or dear friend. Maybe he reminded me most of Teddy, who would roll up next to me and wrap his arms around my waist and press his head against me and tell me that I was the best sister he had. Our joke. Of everyone I had lost, I missed him the most.
“I wish it was up to me, Rosie. But it’s not.” Edith had been disappointed by Zella’s failure, and by the fact that no one else stepped up to take her place. The dog had been moved to the New York facility. We missed her, the only yellow Lab in the group, a portly little dog who would do anything for a chance to chase the ball.
The remaining dog was another black Lab, Scooter, who was handled by a tough lesbian whose insecurities manifested themselves in her being equally silent and combative. But with her dog, Pilar was all mushy-squishy, lovey-dovey. Because we were often in the activity room together, and all working toward the same goal, Pilar eventually showed us a certain wry charm. But we kept it to ourselves rather than jeopardize her reputation as a hard-ass among the rest of the prison population.
So, there we were, three women of varying backgrounds, crimes, and sentences. Eventually, I knew, these others would be paroled. With success in this program, they might even earn their way out via time off for good behavior. Their remaining sentences combined were half a decade less than the sixteen years I still had left unless God was good and the elusive parole I hankered after was granted. Every time I was eligible to ask, I was bluntly denied parole. Cecily Foster’s reach was long and her anger undiminished. That sounds paranoid and like something out of a bad novel, but it was true.
The other loss that was inevitable was, of course, that these first dogs would graduate from our care and go into the hands of those for whom we’d trained them. It was hard enough on weekends to watch our dogs happily join up with the volunteers who socialized them on the outside. If we were successful, we knew that soon enough we’d have another puppy to work with, and that was some comfort. In our own lives, we’d each suffered catastrophic losses, and so losing a puppy to a PTSD sufferer or a paraplegic was not a loss, I told myself; it was a sign of success.
* * *
Not long after I got Shark, I got in line at the bank of telephones. I leaned against the wall, moving up slowly and taking the long wait to school my puppy on sit and stay, but mostly I spent the hour introducing him to the ladies who gathered around, each one profoundly desiring to touch this dog. They oooed and aahed and one or two even embarrassedly wiped away a tear. When Teddy was in the rehabilitation hospital after one of his surgeries, volunteers would bring in pets for the patients to cuddle. It was pretty much like that with Shark, who became this emissary from the life outside, an emissary of normal, and one happy to lick noses. I wiped up his excitement-caused piddle, and when it was finally my turn at the phone, I wasn’t nervous anymore about dialing my mother’s number.
On the rare Sunday when she would answer the phone, the minute my mother heard the prison operator’s voice asking if she’d accept a call from Mid-State Women’s Correctional Facility, she would hang up. This time, she didn’t. I considered that progress, and maybe it was the surprise of getting a call on a Wednesday instead of a Sunday that kept her from hanging up. Maybe she was alone in the house. At any rate, she said yes.
My mother listened without comment to my nattering on about getting into the dog-training program. I gushed about having this wonderful, smart, active puppy and how he distinguished me from most of the other inmates—although I referred to them as ladies, not inmates. It was a bit like not mentioning the recently deceased to the chief mourner, in the vain belief that by keeping mum you wouldn’t remind her of her loss. An impossibility. Nonetheless, I tried hard to pretend as if I were in a new women’s college, never using the words prison, inmates, guards, in the naïve hope that my mother wouldn’t remember that she was on the phone with her convict daughter. To hear me talk, I was just away, not incarcerated.
“He’s so darn smart. You should see him. His little face gets all scrunchy, just like he’s trying to figure out a puzzle. He’ll do anything for a game of fetch.” We trained with toys as rewards, not treats. Shark lived for his tennis ball, and Mimi would do anything for her squeaky. Scooter loved tug-of-war.
Even as I pontificated on the various training methods we were employing, I knew that my mother was struggling to stay on the phone with me, and I talked faster and faster, as if my dime was going to run out. She had never once come to Connecticut to see me and she had forbidden my brothers to make the trip. Ever the obedient sons, even well into their thirties, they complied. She avoided most of my calls, and I don’t know if she ever even opened up my letters. I certainly never got one back from her. It wasn’t what put me in there that alienated us; it was what had happened long before. In my mother’s view, I had abandoned the family, turned my back on them in their critical moment, and I was dead to them. Do you remember that scene in Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye, pushed to accept two daughters’ independent choices for marriage, cannot and will not accept his last daughter’s choice of the Russian soldier? That’s kind of what it was like. I had gone a treasonable step too far.
* * *
My brother Patrick had sat in front of me, cradling a cup of hot coffee between his big hands. He had that Collins skin and hair, both tending toward red, especially in circumstances like the one he found himself in on this winter afternoon. Like the rest of us, he had blue eyes framed by sandy lashes. My third-eldest brother, he was always the spokesman for the family. Unlike the rest of us, he didn’t have a diminutive added to his name—Paulie, Frankie, Bobby, Teddy, and Rosie. He was Patrick or Pat. Maybe that’s why he always seemed more mature. He was the only one with a proper adult name. No wonder, now that I think of it, I always called Shark “Sharkey.”
“Out with it, man. What brings you to the posh side of town?” We were in a coffee shop near to my South End apartment—the one I now shared with Charles. I had been shocked to get Patrick’s call, his dour request that I meet him that day.
“It’s Dad.”
“Bronchitis again?” I was mildly ashamed at my cringing at the sound of Dad’s wet cough and the fact that I had been embarrassed by it in front of Charles at that dinner with my folks.
Pat unclenched his coffee cup and reached for my hand. “Cancer.”
Such an awful word. Followed by the particular variety our father had, mesothelioma, a word like a curse. All the years he’d spent in construction, ripping out insulation from old buildings, tearing down ceilings, he was breathing in the asbestos that filled the air. We all knew about asbestos; of course we did. Nowadays, workers wore proper protection. But our father had begun working when he was fifteen years old, long before anyone knew how deadly it could be.
“How? He’s been a supervisor for as long as I can remember. He doesn’t do the grunt work anymore.”
“Rosie, it doesn’t work that way. He was exposed twenty-some years ago. He’s been living with a time bomb.”
“Oh my God.” I blew my nose into a paper napkin. “I’ve got to go home.”
“Yes.” Patrick removed his hand from mine. “You need to be there.” It had been some months since I’d last been home. Home. Why did I, a grown woman living in a large, well-equipped apartment with a man who gave her everything, still think of her parents’ cramped house as home?
“Pat?” I couldn’t quite bring the words to my mouth. Asking how long he had seemed like an inconsiderate question. One that would suggest I had other things on my plate. Other concerns.
“I don’t know. We don’t know.”
So I told Charles that I would need
to spend more time with my family. He kept an arm around my shoulders as I weepily described to him the bare facts that my brother had described to me. No, we didn’t know how long, but that I needed to be there with them.
“Of course,” he said. “You can see him after work as often as you want.”
“I think I need to do more than that.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Be there for my mother.”
Charles smiled at me, revealing perfect teeth but no humor. “But what about me? I need you, too.”
“I know you do.”
Having grown up in a large family, even though the only girl, my share of parental attention was parceled out in small dribs of necessity. Always there was someone else’s needs, a permission-slip crisis while I was trying to get my mother to notice my crayon drawing; if my mother was overseeing homework at the kitchen table, it was one of my less achieving brothers who got the lion’s share of attention. And then there was Teddy. After his injury, I was simply grateful to have my father’s nod of approval as I sashayed around the living room in my prom dress. I loved my brother, and told myself that it was everyone’s job now to make him comfortable. So when Charles told me so often that he needed me, I mistook that for filling a gap in my emotional life. I mistook it for fulfilling my needs.
The rift was exacerbated when I announced that I was moving in with Charles.
I had been living back in my parents’ house for well over a year when Charles and I met, and almost a year later, I informed them that I would be moving. In. With. Charles.
“I’m over twenty-one.” I didn’t even try to keep my powder dry.
“You won’t be happy with him.” My mother folded her arms across her midsection, lifted her chin, and then pointed at me. It was as if she was placing a curse on me. I could almost hear the bones rattle, smell the brimstone.