by Susan Wilson
* * *
When my father got sick, I tried to divide my time between Charles and my family. When Dad was hospitalized, as he often was, I stayed home with Teddy. His jigsaw puzzles had been moved to the dining room and so we worked on the puzzles on the table that now was rarely cleared for family meals.
I would return to the apartment I shared with Charles, weary and sad. Charles would greet me as if I’d been off gallivanting with girlfriends, a little coldly; only later, after I had cajoled him with sex would he think to ask how my father was. And he never asked if there was anything he could do. I chose to think of Charles as my oasis in the desert of my father’s prolonged illness—an illness we all knew he wasn’t going to recover from. I chose not to think Charles had an empathy problem, but, rather, that as an only child he had had no experience with a family like mine. How could he?
My new job with Wright, Melrose & Foster was in the marketing department, where our job was to develop a steady stream of positive outreach to potential clients. Social media, newsletters both online and in print, a glossy brochure with WM&F properties, some actual, some still imagined, complete with the smiling faces of employed people enjoying an architecturally impressive building situated on a block where once only trees—or run-down homes—had stood, as depicted in the “before and after” renderings. The focus was to match properties with clients and then with architects. In effect, WM&F was a matchmaker.
My job was an entry-level one. About as entry as you can get. I filed, tallied clicks, and, yes, fetched coffee—a job for which I demonstrated a remarkable proficiency. A proficiency that might mean I’d never get promoted out of this modern-day steno pool.
I was so excited on my first day. I had moved into Charles’s South End condo over the weekend and the flush of this new step in our lives had me singing a cracked-voice version of Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring on It.” I wasn’t being ironic; I was being silly. Charles frowned, and reminded me of a very important rule. No one at work was to know that we were a couple. “It wouldn’t look right. It would look like…”
“Nepotism?” I laughed.
He didn’t answer.
“Where am I supposed to say I live?”
“At a nice address. We might be neighbors.”
“Hellooo, neighbor.” I sashayed up to him, did a little Marilyn Monroe shimmy.
“Hello yourself. New to this neighborhood?” Whatever else he would turn out to be, Charles was a pretty good lover.
It was getting late, and Charles, a clock watcher, grabbed the keys to his Camaro, which he had garaged half a block away. I slipped on my nice new Kate Spade heels, my lovely trench coat, and grabbed my bag. “I’m ready.”
“Rose, you take the T. Or a cab.” He shoved a few twenties into my hand. “We can’t get out of the same car.”
“I thought we were neighbors. Wouldn’t you offer me a ride?”
“Don’t be late to work on your first day, Rose.”
I pulled off the heels and put on my Nikes to make the run to the T stop. I was probably going to be late my first day at Wright, Melrose & Foster.
* * *
And then one day, he called me into his office, something that he’d never done before. As far as anyone knew, we were strangers. My job did not take me into his circle.
He was beaming. That’s the only word for it, like someone had turned on an inner light I’d never seen in him before. “Rosie. Pack your bags; we’re moving to New York.”
“I can’t move now.” I said it and immediately regretted it. The look on Charles’s face spoke volumes, as they say. Clearly, he was surprised at my refusal. I didn’t know if it was the fact that I so quickly stuck a pin in his excitement, or that he had truly not given my situation any thought at all.
“I’m only going to ask you once, Rose. This is your moment to decide if what we have is what you want.”
“I do. It’s just that this is such a bad time for me to leave.”
“It’s been a ‘bad time’ for you for the last six months. Are you telling me that you’re going to put your life on hold, our life on hold, for however long your father survives?”
“No, of course not.” But, of course, that was exactly what I had been doing. Over the past few weeks, Charles had convinced me that I didn’t need to go see my father every evening when he wasn’t in the hospital, but at home. When Dad was hospitalized, Charles was a bit more understanding, particularly as the hospital was closer and I could sneak over there on my lunch hour. And visiting hours had an end. I was often home just as Charles got home. He seemed to work later and later, and I assumed it was because I was otherwise occupied with my dying father. As it turned out, what Charles was doing was setting his company’s new venture into motion. A New York City branch, of which he would be the top dog. This wasn’t simply moving up in the company; it was the equivalent of becoming a founder. This wasn’t a choice; this was destiny, according to Charles. He was taking his grandfather’s success and building on it. Plus, he was going home to New York, where his mother had already offered us—him—her rarely used apartment overlooking Central Park.
At this point, Dad was back at home, where a hospital bed had been set up; the dining room table, incomplete puzzle still on it, was pushed to the back wall. A curtain on a tension rod hung in the doorway, affording him some privacy. The television—my family had only the one—had been moved into the dining room, as well, so he was rarely alone, especially during playoff season. My mother could cook and keep an eye on him. My job was to be the entertainment. Sometimes that was telling him stories about my day at work. Sometimes it was just flipping the channels until we found something that he could doze off to. I found it hard to leave after those visits, and despite the alternative arrangement of my childhood home, it still felt like I belonged there. It was comfortable, even with the weight of my father’s disease changing the tenor of our family conversations from gruff to mild.
It took me a week before I announced that I would be moving with Charles to New York. It took that long for me to formulate my story. In my family, it was always family first. Charles wasn’t family. Charles wasn’t even close. My parents had received another letter, this one with a slightly higher offer in it. I had promised to look into the matter, but I never did. I wasn’t in any position to go about questioning the decisions of senior management. I knew, even if my parents didn’t, that I was still a flunky at Wright, Melrose & Foster.
What my parents also didn’t know was that Charles had dangled the most tempting of fruits before me as an incentive toward making the decision he wanted me to make—we would announce our engagement to the world, which included WM&F. I was to be made public. So, in one way, this big move to New York was what made possible my being outed as Charles’s girlfriend. Otherwise, I would continue to be the shadow girlfriend. I was withholding that bit of information because it just seemed wrong to find happiness while my parents’ lives were being torn apart.
* * *
I left Edith in the visiting room and went back to my cell, where I lay on my bed and broke the rules by letting my dog climb up with me. I knew in my heart that whoever she was, this Meghan Custer, she would probably let Sharkey climb into her bed, too. Who wouldn’t? He was dependably comforting. I whispered into his ear, breathing in his doggy scent. “Are you ready to complete your mission? Are you ready to leave me?”
Shark
There it is again, that sadness, but this time it is tempered with something else, an excitement that has his inside person working him twice as hard as she has done before—making sure he has his commands down, making sure he gets tons of playtime as a reward for simply doing what she asks. Even the dog knows that something special is coming.
A new word keeps being said: Meghan. It doesn’t seem to be a command, and there is no action that is required after it is said, but he knows that there is significance in it. And, soon enough, he realizes that this is a name, like his own, something that identifies a particular huma
n. And there she is.
Meghan
It was strange, but the prison didn’t seem so foreign to Meghan as she might have thought. So many years of being a part of a large military-industrial complex had softened her attitude toward gunmetal gray and razor wire, uniforms. The first guard to greet her thanked her for her service, as did the second. The third, who opened the door to allow her to wheel into the visitors’ room, bent down and whispered, “Two tours.”
“Where?”
“Helmand Province.”
Meghan touched his hand with her scarred one. “Good man.”
“Where were you?”
Meghan shook her head. She was here to get better, not to have an informal reunion. “I’m here now.”
Edith Moore had arrived ahead of Meghan and was sitting at a table in the visitors’ room. Each rectangular table had four orange chairs fixed two to a side. Meghan rolled up to the empty end, keeping Edith to her right, where she could hear her better. The high windows, crosshatched with wire, allowed in enough light to reveal the sad, utilitarian nature of the room, the mottled beige linoleum, the grimy tables, the ugly plastic chairs. There was no one else in there, but the place still held the odor of bodies, of the women and their families who filled this place on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons. She couldn’t imagine children being brought in here to visit mothers. Mothers should be associated with kitchens, with playgrounds and baths at night.
“So, when do I get to meet her?” Her mouth was dry and she wished she’d brought a bottle of water. “It’s been almost an hour.”
“Soon. We’re on their schedule, not ours.” Edith, dressed for the occasion in an A-line wool skirt and white blouse with a floppy bow set both her palms on the surface of the slightly sticky table. “This inmate has been working with her dog for ten months. She’s never done this before, so I don’t know how she’ll react to actually giving him up. They all go into it knowing that the training is a temporary thing, but emotions aren’t always predictable.”
“But she has to give him up.”
“Yes, and I think she’ll be okay, but just be prepared.”
Meghan glanced at her phone, another minute went by, then another. She thought about making a joke—“It’s just like the Army, hurry up and wait”—but didn’t. A starling flitted by the high windows, a dark etch against the blue sky. “What did she do? To be put in here?”
“She’s doing her time. What she did to be here has no relevance as to how well she’ll train you to work with the dog. We don’t reveal that information; that’s up to the inmate to volunteer. And don’t expect her to.”
Another minute. Meghan was beginning to wish she’d taken a pill. Something to take the edge off. She was uncomfortable, but not in pain, and that had become her rule: She had to be in pain to take a pill. Knowing that she was going to have to be completely functional to take on the training of the dog had been a great incentive toward keeping the little white pills in their vial.
Finally, a door opened. Edith and Meghan looked up from their contemplation of their own hands to see a young woman come into the room accompanied by a uniformed guard. Her strawberry-blond hair was bundled into a loose bun, a few tendrils framing her face. She wasn’t wearing a prison jumpsuit as Meghan had pictured, but generic blue jeans and a white T-shirt, plain white sneakers on her feet. So, this is an inmate in its natural habitat. But, she’s smiling and there is something so very ordinary about her. Like Meghan, she’s a little nervous. “Hey there, I’m Rosie.”
They met for the first time without the dog. Meghan was surprised to be as nervous as she was, a feeling more appropriate to a first date. If you’d asked her what she was expecting, she would have said, “Not Rosie Collins.” Not someone so, okay, say it, normal. No tattoos, no horns, no gum chewing, no foulmouthedness. Meghan could see that Rosie was as nervous as she was. Maybe she wasn’t expecting someone quite like her. Quite as wounded. And then Rosie said something that floored Meghan. “What kind of ride is that?” Meaning her wheelchair.
“It’s not my regular one. I’ve got a motorized one back home.”
“My brother coveted a motorized chair, but could never afford one.”
“Wounded military?” She was ready to suggest a phone number for help.
“No. Homegrown wounding. He was a victim of gun violence. A paraplegic.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We all were. It was a long time ago.”
Meghan most often encountered people who tried hard to ignore the fact that she was in a wheelchair. They either didn’t speak to her or spoke loudly, as if she were deaf. Which she kind of was, but still. Or they crouched down, so that she felt like a child being addressed by an adult. Rosie’s quick acknowledgment of the chair made Meghan feel, in a very odd way, almost normal. The elephant wasn’t allowed into the room.
Later, Meghan thought that if she and Rosie had met in a spin class or at a party, they would have hit it off and probably met up for drinks some Friday night. If they had been normal, they would have fallen into a friendship like two regular girls with similar interests. For Meghan, female friendships were few and far between, juxtaposed as they were by frequent deployments. Her female friends were also soldiers. They had one another’s backs; they shared cookies from home; they wept privately together. These were intense relationships that were different from having a civilian friend. A civilian friend made sure your bra straps weren’t showing; a soldier made sure your body armor was in place. They had a deep connection while in the field, but so often that connection was gone as soon as someone was sent home or reassigned.
“So, Rosie, what got you interested in this program?”
“Anything to change things up. It’s pretty boring in here.”
“I’ll bet it is.” Oddly, there were parts of this place that reminded Meghan of hospitals. Maybe it was the institutional vibe. Excluding the razor wire, of course.
“And why do you think a dog will help you?”
It was, of course, the first question in the first interview Meghan had endured while applying for the program. Her answer hadn’t changed. “I need my independence back.”
“Okay. Shark will help you with that.”
“That’s his name, Shark?”
“Yes.” For the first time, Rosie looked unhappy. “I call him Sharkey. He’s a Labrador, really sweet…” And then she stopped talking, turned her face away from Meghan.
Meghan glanced at the guard stationed in the corner. Edith Moore was talking with the other training pair meeting for the first time. She cautiously reached across the tabletop with her damaged left hand. “I’ll make you proud of him. I promise he’ll be as happy with me as he must be with you.”
Rosie’s blue eyes were moist, but she blinked hard and a toughness bloomed. “I know. I couldn’t do this unless I believed that he’s going to be doing a very important job.”
“When I was in Afghanistan, we had military working dogs, bomb sniffers. Those dogs had critical jobs, and we know that they saved our asses so many times. I envied the attachment those dogs had with their handlers. And, you know what? Sometimes those handlers went home and the dogs were assigned to new handlers. And they did their jobs with the same zeal as they had with their original handlers.” Meghan saw the guard notice the verboten touch. “The thing is, those dogs never forgot their first handlers.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
Rosie laughed. The toughness faded and a set of tiny dimples appeared.
* * *
Carol was waiting for Meghan at Edith’s office building, where the van with the other candidates for service dogs had just arrived back from the prison.
Meghan pushed herself off the lowered ramp and over to Carol’s car.
It was a physical negotiation to get Meghan out of the chair and into the front seat, but somehow they managed it. Carol slid into the driver’s seat. “How did the meeting go?”
“I think it went re
ally well.”
“What’s the dog like?”
“I meet him tomorrow. Today was a meet and greet with the…” She hesitated, wanting another word besides inmate. “Trainer.”
“What’s she like?”
“I think we’re going to get on just fine.”
“Your mom called me.”
“How is she?”
“Concerned that you haven’t called her, given her an update.”
“There wasn’t much to tell her.”
“There is now.”
Meghan rested her head against the seat, closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. Tomorrow everything would begin to be different. Tomorrow she’d start her canine education, learn how to command the dog to pick up what had been dropped, to flip wall switches she couldn’t reach. To find her missing socks. To help her when she felt the black cloud of despair looming. Tomorrow she would learn independence once more—an independence that precluded going back to Florida to live in her parents’ house ever again.
* * *
There he was. At last. Shining coat, white teeth, kind eyes. Shark. Sharkey. No, for her, he would be Shark. Meghan rolled into the activity room, paused ten feet from where Rosie stood with the dog sitting at her heel, the leash in her hands. This is the moment when everything will change, Meghan thought. In a dream last night, she’d been running; a dog, more shadow than actual, ran beside her. In some kind of magical thinking, Meghan had been imagining that Shark would bring her back to her feet. She pictured looking down on him from above, not practically eye-to-eye, as he was now. Rosie had brought him over to her for their official, program-sanctioned, introduction.
“Shark, sit.”
The dog, the color of a Dove Bar, sat in front of her. Like a gentleman, he didn’t push himself on her, but his head bobbed and his open, laughing mouth confessed his impatience to be touched. She wanted to lay her head against his. Instead, Meghan, doing as she was instructed, put out one hand for him to sniff, then touched his head. The skull was hard beneath amazingly soft skin. His small brown eyes were outlined in faint pink, and he studied her without blinking. “Shark. Are you ready to help me?” He hun-hunned a response, and his thick rudder of a tail whipped back and forth as he stood and told her, I will.