The Dog I Loved

by Susan Wilson

  He opens the door of the grand old car and I sit, click the old-fashioned lap belt into place. And I am launched into my new life.

  * * *

  “Tell me again how this happened?” I am in Bannerman’s office, seated on a plump couch the color of a bruise. He’s kindly offered me coffee, and I have been momentarily distracted by this taste of heaven.

  “You were—how should I put this diplomatically? Screwed over by your”—he pauses, fingers the air, looking for the right words—“public defender.”

  “I am aware.” I take another sip of coffee. “I had no choice, Mr. Bannerman. I have no assets.”

  “Yes, but you deserved better than … I’m sorry. That’s hardly professional. Let’s just say that a review of your case disclosed a number of mistakes.”

  “Well, yes. But, Mr. Bannerman…”

  “Pete, please.”

  “Pete. What led you to reexamine the case? I’ve been trying for years to get someone to pay attention, with no success. Frankly, Cecily Foster has done everything in her power to make sure that didn’t happen.”

  “First of all, I wasn’t in on the investigation; that was the Advocacy for Justice. Why they settled on you, I have no idea. The only thing I’m involved in is this.” He gets up and goes to his desk. I wonder if he buys his suits in the boys’ department of Brooks Brothers. He comes back with a letter that bears no letterhead, no return address, and no signature. Buried deep within the legalese it is, essentially, a job offer.

  I hand it back, realizing that this isn’t an original letter, that it is a transcription. “Who is it?”

  “Ever read Great Expectations?”

  “Of course. Ninth-grade English.” I pick up the china cup with the last of the good coffee in it. “So this is some Magwitch? Someone for whom I’ve done a good deed in my childhood?”

  “Not entirely, but you do have expectations.”

  “Pete. You are being far too mysterious.”

  “So’s your benefactor. I will tell you what I am allowed to tell you. There is a family foundation involved. The Homestead Trust. They have a property in Gloucester and they need a project manager. I can’t tell you if this family foundation is responsible for getting the attention of the AFJ on your behalf or if they simply make a habit out of hiring…”

  “Ex-cons?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word for it.”

  “I will always have been a prisoner. No amount of reframing my past is going to remedy that fact.”

  “Rosie. Just be happy.”

  If I thought that Pete would make things clear by his explanation, I was wrong. I still feel so out of body that it is easy to think that I’m actually in some kind of dream state, that maybe I hit my head and have awakened in an alternate universe where I am no longer in prison, handling wonderful dogs, but down some rabbit hole, having coffee with a diminutive Mad Hatter. As I recall, that tea party was interrupted by the Red Queen calling for Alice’s head. Cecily Foster’s perfect avatar.

  The offer is that I take charge of a property in Gloucester, Massachusetts, commit to living in it for possibly a year while overseeing its rehabilitation. Housing with a modest paycheck.

  “I have no experience rehabbing houses.”

  “They’ve hired a general contractor to do the work. Your job will be to administrate the project, basically oversee the work and spend the money.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” This is an understatement. I’m flummoxed, afraid. I have no home. I have no job—unless I take this mysterious offer and head off to a place I’ve been maybe twice in my life. But it isn’t far from Boston; it isn’t far at all.

  Pete sits patiently waiting for me to come to the only conclusion I can.

  “All right. I’ll take the offer.”

  * * *

  Pete Bannerman, my new best friend, hands me a cell phone, a really nice one, so many generations from my last that I hardly recognize what it is. He gives me a quick tutorial on its functions and then quietly leaves the room. I stare at the keypad. I sneak a look at the contacts, predictably empty. If I was hoping that all the numbers I needed would be handily logged, I was wrong. I have two numbers committed to memory. There are two people I need to tell my good news to. Well, three if you count Edith Moore, who will need to know from me that Lulu is currently trainerless.

  I am suddenly shy. What if my great news is just news to them? I have a rush of self-consciousness, of fearing that I am mistaken if I think that anyone cares that I am free, that my status in the eyes of the world has been upgraded. Pete won’t stay out of the room indefinitely, so I’d better get over myself.

  My first call is to Meghan. It is Meghan Custer who has remained a steadfast friend long past the time when she and Shark were my trainees. She never avoids my calls. She sends care packages and, until she moved to New York, she managed, with Shark, to visit me. My only visitor. Unless you have been separated from all whom you love, there can be no understanding of how beautiful a smiling visitor can be. The first time, a complete surprise, I wept from the kindness of it. So it is no surprise that my first free-from-prison-operator phone call isn’t to my mother, but to my friend.

  Meghan is wildly excited and makes me feel like this strange turn of events isn’t going to disappear in a puff of smoke. I won’t wake up tomorrow back on my bunk. “I couldn’t be happier for you, Rosie.” Shark barks in the background and I get really excited thinking that I will be able to see them again. On my own terms. I can hug Meghan. I can drop to my knees and hug Shark.

  “I guess I still don’t understand how this all happened, or why. Six hours ago, less, I was an inmate. Now, I’m…” My words trail off. I have no word for what I am now.

  “You’re a free woman, Rose Collins.”

  * * *

  If I thought that being exonerated would bridge the chasm between myself and my family, I was quite wrong. My next call is to my mother. It is the first time in a very long time that I don’t have a prison operator asking if the recipient will accept a call from an inmate of Mid-State Women’s Correctional Facility. With no buffer between us, my mother has only the choice of speaking to me or hanging up on me. “Mom, it’s me. I’m free. My conviction was vacated.”

  “Rose?”

  I bite back the pithy remark: “Do you have another daughter in prison?” Instead, I burble on about having been released, how I can’t wait to see her.

  Dead silence.

  My unforgiveable sin wasn’t killing Charles (conviction vacated or not, I did cause his death) or even turning my back on my family in favor of living with Charles, of moving to New York when my family needed me the most. My filial disloyalty wasn’t just in not being there when they needed me, of not being there physically when my father finally succumbed to the preventable plague of asbestos particulate–caused cancer. It was in not defending the family home from the rapacious machinations of Charles’s company, Wright, Melrose & Foster. I don’t think they ever understood that I had no power, no sway, no voice in the matter. My mother has chosen to believe that it was my fault. I should have never brought him to the house and I should never have made the devil’s bargain with him that I did. Unforgivable.

  So today, my mother keeps silent on the phone, but I can hear her breathing, and as long as I can, I keep talking. “I’m heading to Cape Ann, to work as a project manager for a family trust. They’re fixing up their old house and it’s a good job. Temporary, though. I’m not sure how much I know about being a project manager, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “Who did you say got you out?”

  Just having her break into my soliloquy gives me hope. “I don’t know who they are. Advocacy for Justice. I don’t know how they knew about me, and I really don’t know how they got past Cecily Foster’s reach, but here I am.”

  “And where are you?”

  “I’m in New Haven for a couple of days. The Trust is putting me up in a hotel until I can get my driver’s license and, well, some c
lothes.” Here goes nothing. “Mom, I’d like to come see you, and the boys, and everyone before I drive up to Cape Ann. You’re on my way.” I’m attempting to get in every word before she hangs up on me.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Why not?” I feel the burn of tears. Why won’t she let me back into the family? It wasn’t my fault.

  * * *

  “This has been really hard on your brother.” When my mother said “your brother,” she only ever meant Teddy. Whereas everyone else had grown up, Teddy would always be there, always need her, infantilized by his injuries. There had been a time, when I was a little girl, that I was jealous. Teddy got the lion’s share of Mom’s attention. Here I was, the longed-for girl child, and suddenly I was just another kid in the house, Teddy sucked up all of her time and most of her available emotions. By the time I was a young adult, I understood it, but I still chafed on occasion. And that was what my mother accused me of that day she’d called to ask that I come home for the duration. “You are too old to still be jealous of Teddy. He needs so much help and I can’t be in two places at once.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I’m begging you, Rosie. Quit your job. You can get another one. We’ll pay your bills. I’ll pay your bills.”

  I didn’t tell her that I had no bills to speak of. Charles covered everything. Everything. I had no job. The position Charles implied I would take in the New York offices of WM&F failed to materialize.

  “Rosie, come home.”

  I told Charles that I was going to visit my parents for the weekend. This time, he was unnervingly supportive of my “quick” visit to my family. “I’ll run out to the Hamptons for the weekend. Have a family visit of my own.” What neither one of us said was that Cecily Foster would be ever so pleased to have Charles to herself. My presence in her house was never comfortable for either of us. Despite my every effort to be a good potential daughter-in-law, Mrs. Foster viewed me as, at best, a guest in her home. Both of them. Technically, she’d moved full-time to the house in the Hamptons, giving us her Central Park apartment. On the afternoons she came into the city for luncheon or a committee meeting, she might simply drop in, so I dared not move so much as a bibelot to make the apartment my own; I never knew when she might just show up in the foyer, bringing in the cold air with her. I tried it once, moving a Meissen vase from one side of the mantel to the other so that I could set a family picture where the light from the windows wouldn’t obscure it. Without a word, Mrs. Foster removed the picture, handed it to me, and put the vase back where it had been. “Why don’t you put that in your room?” I might have stuck a bobblehead souvenir from a pie-eating contest on the mantel by the way she handled my family photo with such disdain.

  * * *

  I was throwing a few things into my overnight bag when Charles came into our bedroom. He put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a squeeze that suggested I should take the later train to Boston. He nuzzled my neck, did that thing that always gave me a frisson of desire. “Why don’t you drop by the hairdresser while you’re in Boston. I still think she gives you the best version of your style.”

  “If I can get an appointment. I’ll only be there a day or so.”

  “Stay longer. Have a really good visit.”

  I was a little surprised by his sudden generosity of spirit. Usually, he sulked when I went away, and, at times, I thought he was perhaps jealous of my relationship with my family. A relationship that had, admittedly, begun to fray. “Won’t you miss me too much?”

  “Oh, I will. But…” And Charles took my face in his hands. “I need you to do a little work for WM&F.”

  “Go on.” A giddy little imp of excitement at being offered a role in his company percolated in my chest, nearly deafening me to Charles’s next words.

  “I imagine that your father’s medical bills are substantially more than his insurance will cover.”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I haven’t discussed it with them.” Immediately, I knew that I should have been less head-in-the-sand about my parents’ finances. About how they were paying for all these treatments.

  “Let them know that Wright, Melrose & Foster will cover his out-of-pocket costs.”

  “Oh my God, Charles, that’s so generous. I can’t thank you enough.” There was a less-than-three-second interval when I thought that Charles Foster was a kind man. That he was capable of generosity toward my family even though I knew he wasn’t ever going to love them.

  “In exchange for a purchase and sales agreement on the house.”

  The hope of Charles’s selflessness flattened out into a wash of sick feeling. “My parents would never sell. Where would they go?” Bunker Hill was their neighborhood, their identity. I couldn’t imagine them anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine them ever agreeing to sell the house that they had worked so hard to own. Even as I thought that, I knew that the houses on either side of theirs had been sold. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, who the buyer was.

  Charles gave me a shrug. “If WM&F doesn’t buy it, someone else will, and I doubt they’ll get the kind of money we’re offering. It’s inevitable. They’ll have to divest of their only asset to keep up with those bills.” Divest. Asset. My childhood home reduced to currency.

  “How much? How much are you offering?” I deliberately used the pronoun you.

  He shrugged again, a gesture not of uncertainty, but of reluctance. “You know that’s WM&F’s business, not yours.”

  “What do you mean? How is it not my business? They’re my parents.”

  “I can only say that your father’s medical bills will be somewhat less burdensome.”

  Somehow, Charles’s munificent declaration that WM&F would cover all out-of-pocket medical costs had shrunk to somewhat less burdensome.

  “I won’t do it.” I turned my back on him, began stuffing things willy-nilly into my suitcase.

  I felt his hands upon my shoulders, his fingers digging deep, finding that spot in front of my collarbone, the spot where it can feel so good, and then hurt. “Don’t be a child. Don’t be sentimental. Do you want your mother to be a poor widow, or one with a few dollars left?”

  “Where will they go? Where will Teddy go?” I heard a subtle acquiescence in my use of the future tense.

  “You can help them, Rose. Help them have some control over their future.” His breath was soft against the skin of my neck. He’d had mussels for dinner and I could smell a faint lingering garlic. “Being a good daughter may not be easy, but, in the end, they’ll thank you.”

  How wrong he was.

  Meghan

  The dog sits in front of her, panting and hun-hunning, his amber eyes locked on hers. He is fairly vibrating with excitement. It’s hard not to catch some of that primal enjoyment, to laugh out loud at the expression on his face. Who would have thought that a dog’s face could have so much character? Meghan is even getting so she can read his thoughts. Right now, his only thought is for her to toss the ball. He’s performed the task she’s given him, to flip on the light switch that sits just above her head, and so he’s entitled to his reward, a tossed tennis ball. He’ll retrieve it, drop it into her lap, and then hope for another task. Her pitching arm is getting stronger. The ball flies out of her office and she can hear it bounce down the hallway. Shark scampers after it and she hopes that he won’t plow down any unsuspecting visitor. The rest of the staff at Don Flint’s law office are used to the disruption.

  Two years ago, Meghan couldn’t have imagined herself being a functional adult ever again, and here she is, in New York City, with a job, an apartment, an improved relationship with her parents, who still want her to come home but have accepted that while she’s never going to be the daughter who left for Iraq, she’s on her way toward normalizing her life, and that means not living in their Florida home. The law offices of Don Flint and Associates rarely calls upon the skill set she learned as a captain in the army—for instance, the effective use of night-visi
on goggles—but her leadership skills have come in handy. Her official title is special projects manager, and her job is to oversee the nonlegal elements of complicated situations. She is unafraid of pressing down hard to get facts, arranging for meetings between players who might not want to meet, and proud to have earned the sobriquet “Sarge” from the rest of the office staff. “Actually, it’s Captain,” she’ll say when someone playfully mocks her sometimes intense style. The fact that the others are willing to tease her makes Meghan’s reach toward a normal life that much closer.

  And she owes it all to Shark. No, not just to Shark but also, of course, to Rosie.

  The day that their training ended and she left the prison dayroom with Shark by her side, Meghan was silent, holding back the bolus of emotion that she had never expected to feel. Maybe it was the fact that she and Rosie weren’t allowed that all too human expression of affection, a departing hug, that she felt like her business with Rosie was unfinished. Maybe it was that she felt like she was, in some way, abandoning Rosie; worse, taking the inmate’s only joy away from her: Shark. Meghan wasn’t blind to the way Rosie loved that dog. Another woman might even have been jealous and sure to establish her own rights to the dog’s heart. But that wasn’t how she felt. “Edith, what are the rules about coming back here and visiting?”

  Edith, just ahead of Meghan, turned and shook her head. “It’s never come up before.”

  “I want to.”

  “It may not be wise.”

  “Why?”

  “Shark needs to be devoted to you. That’s the contract. Rosie has done her job and she’ll have another dog soon.”

  “Edith, I’m not talking about Shark. I’m talking about Rosie. I’m talking about me.”

  * * *

  Meghan tilts a photograph on her desk so that the late-afternoon light doesn’t obscure the image. Most of the other staff around here have pictures of their kids or their fiancés on their credenzas. She has a photograph of Shark, a beautiful head study that almost looks contrived, like one of those pictures of beautiful people they put in frames as an enticement to purchase that particular frame. The real deal is flopped down beside her, the tennis ball firmly clutched in his predator teeth; his eyes are blissed out, his tail thumps, and he clearly is hoping that she’ll find something else for him to do. She gives him the command to shut the light off.