The Dog I Loved

by Susan Wilson

  * * *

  Shark takes Meghan’s motorized wheelchair as a reason to go for long walks. He is no longer satisfied with a spin around the block, avoiding the steeper inclines. Now he trots along, leading her farther and farther afield from their apartment. There is an enclosed dog park a block or so away, and if they don’t find themselves there, he sulks. Meghan has one of those ball-tossing devices, and it’s a good way to retain her upper-body strength, flinging a tennis ball as far as she can. The long summer twilights have been a blessing, as she’s spending so much time in the office.

  Her cell phone rings with the ringtone she’s assigned Rosie, the theme from Born Free. Meghan isn’t above a little irony.

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Great. Just packing up for the trip to Gloucester.”

  “How are you getting there?”

  “The Trust’s lawyer, Pete Bannerman, helped me get my license renewed, and, can you believe it, I’ve got a car!”

  They chat, almost like ordinary friends, about the newish Forester that Pete has secured for her, about Meghan’s new motorized wheels. Meghan finds that she can’t picture Rosie anywhere but in the prison dayroom, and she has to keep reminding herself that her friend is not standing at a rank of pay phones, but ensconced on a hotel bed, or standing at a wide window overlooking a parking lot instead of a prison yard. “You okay to do this?”

  “I am. I won’t lie; I’m pretty nervous, but it’s okay.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I keep thinking that if I get pulled over, I won’t know how to explain myself.”

  “First of all, you won’t. Second of all, don’t go down that path.”

  Rosie blurts, “I wish you were coming with me. At least for a bit.”

  Meghan has no answer for this except to reiterate that Rosie will be fine. “You’re a strong woman; you’ve endured so much. You can do this.” Shark drops the moist tennis ball into Meghan’s lap. She fingers his ears. “I should go.”

  “Just tell me how Sharkey is doing.”

  “So perfect. Everyone at the office loves him. He’s getting so spoiled.”

  “No treats.”

  “No treats. I’m a stickler about that.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice,” Rosie says.

  “Yours, too. Be well.”

  “I’ll send pictures of the place so you can see what I’m up against.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Meghan signs off, sets the phone down in her lap. The first time Rosie called her was the day she was released. The shock of her sudden change of fortune had been obvious. She’d struggled with telling the story, trying to cope with a narrative that made no sense. Going from no hope of parole to exonerated, from lockdown to a hotel room with room service all in the same day. She wept. “Oh Meghan, I don’t know how to feel.”

  Meghan had counseled a long hot shower and to use all of the hotel-supplied toiletries. That got Rosie laughing.

  Shark is back and again drops the yellow ball in Meghan’s lap. She fixes it into the flinger, heaves it with all her might. The dog is a ballistic missile after a target. Boom!

  “Too bad he doesn’t like fetch.” An African-American man with a curly-haired mixed breed is standing beside her.

  “He actually prefers tug-of-war, but this is his second favorite.”

  The man, fortyish, balding, unclips the leash from his dog and sends her on the same trajectory as Shark has gone. The two dogs meet, greet, and run back to their owners. Meghan notices that his dog wears a harness similar to Shark’s, the badge of service dog prominent on both dogs’ backs.

  As the dogs burn off energy, their owners, like parents on a playground, fill in all kinds of details about the dogs, but nothing about themselves. Still, as Meghan motors home, she feels like she’s getting to know her neighborhood better, one dog owner at a time.

  Shark

  This is the best. So much of his short life beyond his few weeks with his littermates has been in the exclusive company of human beings. This place, what Meghan calls the dog park is redolent of the marks of others; better, there are actual dogs to play with. The rough and tumble and the delicate all convene to chase balls, sticks, and one another. Some are more friendly than others, and he’s learned to be conservative in his approach, but, for the most part, everyone has the same goal; mark territory and run free.

  And now there is this other dog who has the same job, comfort and aide to her human. Shark likes this new dog, Spike.

  Rosie

  It took me five minutes to get the courage to turn the ignition on. It took me six to swallow the bile that accompanied having to back out of the driveway at Pete’s office. I knew he was looking at me through the curtain, wondering if I had the guts to put my innocence to the test. By the third red light, I had stopped shaking.

  On Google maps, it looks like a straight shot through central Connecticut to Cape Ann, an optimistic three-hour journey from hell to my new adventure. Interstate 84 to the Mass Pike, then swing onto I-95 to its 128 terminus, and Bob’s your uncle. Except that I’ve chosen to begin the journey to the next place in my life during rush hour. I’m slowed way down through Hartford, but once past East Hartford, it’s open road to the state line. I’m sailing along by that time, cheerfully confident I’m making good time, when I get to the unpredictable Mass Pike, where I-84 débouchés onto it and all these lanes of traffic compete with the speeding vehicles already on the Pike that want to move over to the Sturbridge service plaza. Worse, there’s been a car fire on the right shoulder a mile down, and that’s the real holdup.

  Creep, stop. Creep a bit more, get excited. Stop. I’m supposed to meet the contractor at eleven. It’s ten-thirty now. Ignoring the lighted signage along the turnpike that reminds me that texting and driving is illegal, I text Tucker Bellingham, the project’s general manager, to let him know I’ll be late. Great way to make an impression as the new project manager. I’m no traffic virgin; I know this east-west route very well.

  I crank up the radio in a vain attempt to muffle the persistent thoughts that have engaged the worst parts of my brain since the moment Warden Hinckley set me free. Why me? Why not me? It’s an interesting dichotomy. My case is hardly sexy: White woman runs over heinous but rich boyfriend, revenge or accident? If I knew who had recommended me to the Advocacy for Justice, maybe I could better understand why I was chosen to be advocated for. I think back to my erstwhile fellow inmates, and there isn’t one who might not have benefited from the attention of a nonprofit group bent on getting justice served where justice had been thwarted. Certainly LaShonda deserved a second chance. She, too, had been victimized by a boyfriend, and the system. I’d said as much to Meghan, and all she said was that it had been my turn—my turn for something good to happen.

  LaShonda had said about the same. If there was resentment or jealousy in those green eyes, she kept it from me. “Hey,” she said, “life sometimes gives you a break. Take it and run.”

  Surrounding the topography of my thoughts is the extreme pleasure of changing radio stations. I dabble in oldies, news, classical, and rap. I have a choice!

  And then, as these things do, the road opens up, we pick up speed, and I am over the bridge spanning the Annisquam River and around the two rotaries into Gloucester by one o’clock. It takes a little more time to find the Homestead, mostly because I drive by it, convinced the my nav app is wrong. I leave the well-kept county road, turning onto a narrow lane. This can’t be the place. This looks like it’s ready to fall down. It’s dressed in clapboards so old that they appear soft, with tinges of green at the edges and no obvious paint. Despite my lofty title, I’m no expert on construction, but the roofline seems to sag; no, it does sag, like a inverted bow. There is a foursquare chimney in the center of it, and the roof shingles that should surround it are missing; tar paper flaps in the light breeze. Blind windows flank either side of the black front door, two on one side, one on the other, giving the house a lopsided
face.

  The yard, such as it is, is a wonderful example of the term benign neglect. Weeds flourish in the uncut grass, itself a stalky brush of more gold than green. I realize that I’ve stopped dead in the road, so I follow a two-track dent in the grass that leads to a barnlike structure appended to the house by a breezeway, or what must have been a woodshed back in the olden days. I shut the car off, grab my phone, and text Mr. Tucker Bellingham, principal of Dogtown Construction Company, to say that I have arrived. In a moment, I get a text back; we’ll meet here at two o’clock.

  That’s fine. I’m starving.

  * * *

  The coffee shop is so busy that I have to sit at the endmost counter stool. I’m facing myself in a mirror. I try not to look at the face reflected back at me, because she looks like someone I used to know, but I can’t recall her name. I haven’t had a proper haircut in a very long time, all those expensive layers have grown out, along with my highlights, replaced by premature gray, and I have gotten into the habit of tying it back, a look that narrows my face, a face that is the very definition of prison pallor. It’s not that I hadn’t spent time outside. With the dogs, I’d had the one privilege of access to the prison yard whenever I needed it. But the yard is walled, and the sun is a reluctant visitor, and the very climate within the prison steals the color from your cheeks. There are no beautiful women in prison. Any beauty a woman walks in with is quickly taken from her. The stress of communal living, the poor-quality food, the constant tension, the loss of privacy, all suck the beauty from her face and her soul. I look at myself in the mirror across from me and see a pinched and faded remnant of who I was. My nose looks more prominent. My brows are shaggy and I should put on lipstick. I should find a CVS and buy some.

  The other reason I don’t want to keep looking in that unforgiving mirror is that I am aware of the proximity of men in this narrow place as reflected in that mirror. Workingmen, come to grab a cup of coffee between jobs; retired men, killing time before having to go home. Men in the fluorescent yellow vests of construction jobs; men in blue jeans and flannel shirts. Heavy leather work boots. Thick white or black rubber boots, suggesting a maritime profession. Big men, most of them. Bearded or not, balding; potbellied or slender. Put a gray guard’s uniform on any of them, switch out the hammers hanging from their utility belts for truncheons, and they could have been the same men I encountered every day in prison. In a world of women, it was the men who controlled the universe. Warden Hinckley, Officer Tierney, and the rest of the sundry poorly trained guards who either bullied or flirted, or worse. In my experience, men are not to be trusted.

  “Can I have this wrapped, please?” I ask the woman behind the counter. She plops my half-eaten egg-salad sandwich into a Styrofoam container far too big for it. I order a coffee to go. I drag a few dollars out of my jeans pocket and hope that it’s enough. I remember to take in a deep breath, to let it out slowly. The passage between the counter and the booths is narrow, and I have to wait for a guy standing at the register to move enough that I can squeeze by and get out the door. He doesn’t notice me standing there, take-out container held at chest level, coffee seeping its heat into my hand. I need to make him move; I need to get out of here.

  I am attempting a clumsy dance step to sidle out behind him when he suddenly turns and, sure enough, bumps the coffee in my hand. The lid pops off, but, miraculously, the spillage hits neither of us, only the floor. I feel the scarlet of anxiety hit my face.

  You are so clumsy, what is wrong with you? Charles’s voice is always in my head at times like these.

  “Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry.” The guy quickly grabs a handful of inadequate paper napkins out of a dispenser and starts sweeping away the mess. “Marcy, can I get this lady a new coffee?” He rises to his full height and I am put in mind of a bear on its hind legs. He’s one of the flannel shirt guys I’ve been trying not to look at.

  “It’s fine. No, please. I don’t need another. There’s plenty left.” I bolt out the door, dropping the remains of the coffee and the sandwich into a trash can. I lock the doors of the Forester. Officer Tierney liked nothing better than bumping into you, making sure he led with his crotch, knocking the food tray out of your hands. Standing there watching with his serpent’s eyes as you bent to pick up the mess. Especially after I had declined his offer of sex in exchange for feminine products.

  * * *

  Back at the Homestead, as my benefactors call it, I get out of the car. I pull the key that Pete Bannerman gave me out of my jeans pocket and realize that I don’t know if it’s the key to the back or the front door. I try the front door first. It sports a very tarnished door knocker in the shape of a fish. Just out of curiosity, I lift it by the tail and drop it to see if it still works. It does, although the hinge squeaks. I bet some 3-in-One oil would fix that. There are cracked panes in the flanking windows, and I wonder if the windows will have to be replaced. Modern energy-efficient windows would certainly help with what must be enormous heating costs for a leaky old house like this. Well done, me, a very pertinent observation with its companion suggestion. I try the key, but it doesn’t fit. So around to the back I go.

  Approaching the back of the house, I think that it looks as bad as it did from the front. Maybe worse, because, at some point in the house’s life, a clumsy addition was tacked on, aluminum-sided, sporting those crank-out windows, completely at odds with the rest of the house. A vent pipe sticks up through the roof, and I figure this must be for the bathroom. There is a slouching screen door, sans screen, its cranky hinges protesting as I pull it away from the back door. I try the key, but it doesn’t fit this lock, either. Guess I’ll have to wait for Bellingham. Maybe he’s got the right key. Unless there’s a door I haven’t spotted.

  In the meantime, I’ll explore the yard. The day is just lovely and having the freedom to stroll around and, literally, sniff the flowers is a delight. My circumnavigation around the house and property takes me to a stone wall. There are gaps in it, places where the drystone construction has given up, gravity has won, and the stones, many of them dressed granite, have fallen off, seeking a return to the earth. I notice one rock with something painted on it. I brush the lichen from its surface and read Boy. It gives me a little shiver. Is some poor nameless child buried here, all by himself? And then I think, No, this is a pet. A dog, maybe. I look around for other markers. Have I come across a pet cemetery and should I be prepared for a Stephen Kingesque haunting? But there don’t seem to be any others, at least none marked by hand-painted stones.

  I spot a tangle of undergrowth and skinny trees on the other side of the tumbled rock wall. If I was a country girl, I might be able to name the trees and bushes that fill in the space beyond the wall. I know oak; at least I think I do. Maybe beech? That white-and-black tree must be white birch. Isn’t that what the Native Americans used for canoes? I’ll have to ask someone. I don’t know who. I don’t know anybody. Oh wait! I have a smartphone, so I guess I can look it up for myself.

  Here’s something I can identify, blueberries! Or are they huckleberries? I can’t tell the difference, but they are sweet, and I pluck a handful to make up for the lost half of that pretty good egg-salad sandwich. When I was a kid, we used to go blueberry picking at those U-Pick-Em places up Route 1. I have a flash of memory, of Teddy, on his feet, dropping berries into my pint basket. I grab another handful of berries. After so many years of fruit privation, the sweet tang of ripe berries is beyond luscious. I feel a ripple of excitement in my gut, I can go to the supermarket and freakin’ buy fresh food! My circumstances have changed so rapidly I haven’t had time to process the magnitude of it. Little realizations keep popping up, and I add them to the string of happiness beads that each moment away from Mid-State accretes. I pop another handful of berries into my mouth. Blueberry juice stains my fingers and I lick them.

  A massive silver pickup truck pulls up beside my red Forester. DOGTOWN CONSTRUCTION COMPANY is professionally lettered on its side in gold and blue. Tucker Belli
ngham has arrived.

  As I approach, the driver climbs out of the truck. It is my dance partner from the diner.

  “Tucker Bellingham?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, are you with the clerk?” He does that man thing, looking around for the man who should be standing here instead of this woman.

  “I am the clerk. Mary Rose Collins.”

  There is this little flush of embarrassment that hits his cheeks above the gray-shot black goatee he sports, “Oh. Okay. Of course. M. R. Collins. I thought it was Mr. Autocorrect.”

  “Not what you were expecting?” I’m not going to think about why Pete managed to keep my gender out of the conversation. I’m just hopeful he kept the really important things about me out of the conversation, too. “Mary Rose—M.R. Mostly known as Rosie.”

  Bellingham shrugs off his faux pas. “We’ve kind of met, haven’t we?”

  “We have. The incident at the coffee shop.”

  “Righto. Sorry about that.”

  “Ah, I can’t seem to make this key work.” Better a non sequitur than an explanation.

  Tucker takes the key and leads me into the woodshed and then to a side door, unlocks it, and gives it a shove with his shoulder. “After you.”

  Now is my moment of reckoning. I go in.

  The woodshed door leads directly into the kitchen. The only thing that suggests the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first, is the combination gas stove, which is white, with a fringe of hardened grease. The sink is black soapstone, with a brass faucet and a sloping enamel drain board. A china cup is on the drainboard, a remnant of the last occupant, maybe her last cup of tea. No saucer. A woodstove protrudes from the mouth of a fireplace, and there is a rag rug centered in front of it on the warped brown-painted floorboards. Whatever colors the braided rug might have once been, it is now a uniform gray color, and even as I step on it, a plume of dust rises from it. I feel like I’m treading into a crypt, a burial place.