The Dog I Loved

by Susan Wilson

  In the northeast corner of the plot lie Bellinghams who are not so long dead. Elijah “Bud” Bellingham 1940–1988. His Wife, Helen Tucker 1943–1988. Their Son Stephen Andrew 1972–1988. This has to be Tucker’s family. What terrible thing had to have happened that all three were gone in the same year? For all my estrangement from my family, at least I know that they are alive.

  * * *

  “I’ve got a pot on. Want a cup?”

  Tucker is sitting at my little kitchen table, making notations on a schematic. “Huh? Oh, yeah. That’d be nice. Black.”

  I carry over mugs for both of us. Shadow rests his chin on the table briefly, just making sure there is nothing on there he should be interested in. I shoo the big dog over to his memory-foam bed beside the crackling woodstove. Beside my elbow on the table sits Susannah Day’s journal, encased now in a proper archival-quality box.

  Tucker taps the box with a knuckle. “You should do something with this. It’s local history.”

  “I will. I just want to finish reading it first.” I set my cup down on the table. “Susannah lived in this house; I’m certain of it. She refers to it as the ‘Baxter house,’ and she and her husband rented it from…”

  “Jacob Baxter.”

  “So, you know this?”

  “I’ve devoted a lot of my life to local history.”

  “She had a dog, you know. Like this one.”

  “So you mentioned the other night.” He scratches Shadow behind the ears as he asks, “What do you mean by ‘like this one’?”

  “What I mean to say is, she had a dog that came into her life just as she was widowed. To help in her loneliness.” Even to my ears, it sounds kind of woo-woo. I hadn’t meant to become all mystical, but I finish the thought. “Because Shadow also just showed up. When I needed him.”

  Shadow, as if alert to being the subject of my words, shakes himself thoroughly. Just like the dogs that I had the privilege of training, he presses himself against me to stanch the sudden onset of hard thoughts.

  “And he helps with your loneliness?” Tucker betrays a sensitivity that one would not expect in a big, somewhat rough-edged man.

  “He does. It’s okay, Tucker. I’m fine. I don’t mean to get melodramatic.”

  I think of the three headstones I encountered in the cemetery and find that I am burning with curiosity, but I don’t know how to ask the question without seeming callous. I could have looked it up online, checked into deaths in 1988 in Gloucester, but that seemed intrusive, or just nosy. It’s really something I want him to tell me, not something I want to know without his being aware that I do. “Um, I took a walk in that cemetery off of Washington Street the other day.”

  “Did you? It’s a very nice spot to walk.”

  Shadow’s chin drifts from my knee to Tucker’s.

  “I noticed the Bellingham plot.”

  Tucker finishes the last of his coffee, makes to rise, then stops. “When I was a junior in college my family died in a house fire. My parents and my younger brother.”

  “Oh my God, Tucker, that’s so sad.”

  “That remains an unfillable void in my life.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “My point isn’t to make you feel sorry for me. My point is that you still have a family, Rosie. You still have one.”

  The women in the correctional facility came from as many different family configurations as is possible to imagine, but so many of them came from matriarchal families, where a single mom had raised her kids and then raised theirs. Aunties and grammas. Sisters raising nieces and nephews. Only the few, mostly those who had committed so-called white-collar crimes, seemed to have come from intact families. Or had them. I was different in that I had come from a patriarchal paradigm. My father was benevolent overlord of the family Collins. And during the days of my father’s illness, Paulie had easily stepped into the role of family head. Which brings me to the conclusion that Paulie, not my mother, is instigating this nuclear winter toward me. He always had her ear. She depended upon him as the eldest to be the enforcer as the rest of us grew up and grew louder and grew unmanageable. And when Teddy was shot, that role was made manifest by the way she deferred to Paulie, granting him almost parental rights over the rest of us. Dominion over me.

  So, in some ways, it made sense that Paulie, and the others, despised Charles. Charles also wanted dominion over me. Had dominion.

  “Tucker, I don’t think the rift between me and my family is ever going away. I made a couple of bad decisions.…” Even I grimace at my weak vocabulary. “And I made my own bed.” My mother’s parting words to me, by the way.

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Did Pete Bannerman tell you anything about me?” I have lost a certain reticence. My deepest desire to keep my most recent history a mystery to everyone is more fragile than I thought.

  “No. Only that you needed a place to…”

  “Hide?”

  “Heal.”

  “And he didn’t tell you from what?”

  “I think it’s something to do with your family.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” I don’t know why I’m suddenly feeling this urge to blurt out my shame, but there is something about Tucker’s big bearlike presence that changes the air in my lungs from pent-up to expressive. But I don’t say anything. There are no words to start that conversation.

  Tucker cradles his coffee mug in his big hands, takes it over to the sink, where the breakfast dishes are still stacked. Oh for a dishwasher. I stay where I am and watch as his shoulders, already downward-cast, grow more slumped. I think about what he’s just told me. His whole family, gone. Not simply living apart from him but gone. Then, like the bear he is, he pulls himself up to his full height and turns to smile at me. To carry the bear analogy further, I notice that, surrounded by the shaggy goatee, his teeth, very white, also have pronounced canines. “I think that you need to reach out to your family.” Even before I can protest, he holds up one finger. “And don’t take no for an answer.”

  * * *

  Shadow sits beside me as I read deeper into Susannah’s diary. “Attended Son Haslet for sore throat. Six others have same ailment. Dr. Bellingham mentioned to me that he has seen more than eleven himself. We concur on treatment and admit concern over possible epidemic. Although he is my chief rival for work, the doctor welcomes my assistance and we have come to an accommodation of sorts.” My heart breaks when I read in Susannah’s book how she has no one to ask for help. Her family seems to have forgotten her, and her husband’s children are unwelcoming in the extreme. She soldiers on, though. Selling off what she must, bartering for services. Finding herself called less and less often to the bedsides of the women who are ill or pregnant. Her pal Dr. Bellingham seems oblivious that he’s taking Susannah’s livelihood from her. I have walked those woods so often that I can picture exactly how isolated she must have been. How desperate.

  It’s been interesting, how her perfunctory recording of daily life in 1832 has evolved into something far more confessional: from an account book, essentially a ledger, to an account in and of itself of a difficult time in her life. My hand finds the soft ears of my dog and I read how she accepted this orphaned dog into her house. I look up from the pages and think that, now that Tucker and his crew have revealed the older house beneath the mid-century “improvements,” I am looking at what Susannah looked at. The beams above my head in the low-ceilinged kitchen would have had hanging bunches of herbs but are bare now. Blank out the woodstove, and the kitchen hearth must look much as it did in her time. There is a mantel above it, and I bet she kept her salt there, maybe used it as a convenient place to rest a cup of tea as she stirred the pot hanging on its pot hook. Susannah has become my invisible companion in the house where she once lived, her voice becoming more and more distinct as I read her words. I sometimes find myself wondering if she would like the improvements slowly accreting to the Homestead.

  It’s grown chilly in here, and
I open the door of the woodstove and slip in another split. I poke it a bit and am pleased with myself for stirring the fire into life. Tucker has shown me how to bank it for the night, but it’s far too early to go to bed, although my rhythms have become more like those of the mid-nineteenth century, up at dawn and exhausted by dusk. Exhausted by inertia more than action. Shadow monitors my movements. His tail thumps a little, then gains momentum as I approach the refrigerator. I know he hopes for a treat, but I am not convinced he needs one for simply being in the same room with me. I grab a slice of cheese and go back to reading. “Tomorrow I must leave this house. I have sold my goods except for what is absolutely necessary in my new home. Two pots. My good tick and three coverlets. I have done what I can to make Goody Mallory’s hovel clean and comfortable.”

  She’s moving to Dogtown.

  * * *

  I’ve got the radio on, and the voices of WGBH natter on about important things, although I haven’t been paying attention; I just like having the sound of other voices in the room. It’s loud enough that I don’t realize my phone is ringing until it quits. I look at the log. I’ve missed a call from Pete. It’s unusual for him to call so late, after business hours. I call him back and he answers on the first ring.

  “How’re you doing, Rosie?”

  “Fine. Things are coming along.” I’m wondering if he’s lost track of time and is choosing eight o’clock on a Wednesday night to check in on things here at the Homestead. “They’ve got all the old wallboard removed and the chimney guy is going to be here—”

  “Mrs. Foster’s legal team contacted me.”

  I sit down.

  “She’s thinking about filing a civil suit. Wrongful death.”

  “What can she get from me? I have nothing.”

  “That’s the point I made to them.”

  I am speechless. What can I say? That I’m surprised? The truth is, I’ve almost been expecting this, or something like it. She was never going to go gently into that good night.

  There is a beat or two before he continues. “I tried to suggest that raking all this up again, especially in a courtroom, would serve no purpose and that only we, the lawyers, would benefit.”

  Now I wait a beat or two. “Should I assume that the Advocacy wouldn’t be taking this on, if she carries out her threat?”

  “Correct. They got your sentence vacated; that’s what they do. You’d have to fight your own civil battle.”

  “Pete, what could she possibly gain from this?”

  “In a word? Revenge.”

  “It wasn’t enough that I served time? I’ll never get those years back. My life was derailed.”

  I hear him take a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So was hers.”

  We sat in that courtroom, she and I, never looking at each other. She sat in a seat behind the prosecutor’s desk, and I, of course, was seated at the public defender’s table. Out of the corner of my eye, all I could see was black, a dark presence in my periphery. I wore that orange jumpsuit of the as-yet-to-be convicted prisoner. I couldn’t make bail. I’d watched too much Law & Order and thus expected my time on the stand. I had my words all rehearsed. I never saw him. He stepped behind the car. I didn’t see him. I was crying. Upset, blinded by tears. But I was never called to the stand to defend myself. My PD had wrangled what she thought was a good deal. A plea bargain. The judge hammered down the deal like an auctioneer, and Mrs. Foster rose to her feet. That was the first time I’d looked her straight in the face, and what was looking back at me was raw emotion. Raw fury. She thought that I had gotten the better deal. That my punishment for the death of her heinous son was somehow a benefit to me. That I’d gotten away with it.

  “She wasn’t happy that I got twenty years. She wanted life without chance of parole. She’d have been thrilled with a death sentence.” Shadow presses his head into my belly, then sniffs my face. “I can imagine that finding out I’m exonerated must be killing her.”

  “Rosie, your verdict was vacated. You weren’t properly defended, and the investigation of the accident was flawed. So, exonerated is a bit of a misnomer.”

  Sometimes I forget that I actually did run Charles over with his own car.

  Shadow

  He does his best to get Rosie to pay attention to him, to get her to sit up straight and tell him that he’s a good boy, say his name, Shadow. He loves the sound of that soft sibilant expression. He pokes at her with his nose and then his forepaw. He stands over his bowl and pretends that he hasn’t already eaten. He leans his chin on the table and breathes in the scent of the old book, the one that reminds him of another time, another woman. Another solitary. Finally through the hand on his back, he feels the agitation begin to ebb.

  Meghan

  Meghan pulls her mind out of its funk, and Shark is instantly on his feet. Evening comes on so quickly and it’s already dark in her apartment. She gives the command and Shark flips the light switch in the kitchen, turns in clear expectation of his reward. With a vehemence she doesn’t usually exert, Meghan throws his stuffie across the room. It smacks the opposite wall, and the one decorative touch she’s added to the blank walls of her apartment, a generic but pretty landscape, tilts. She doesn’t know how she’ll get Shark to push it back into line. Marley was the one who hung it there, showing an unexpectedly good eye.

  How could he? How dare he? Doesn’t he know how she feels? Doesn’t he care? He’s not the only one with needs. So what if his are invisible to the naked eye? Doesn’t he know how incredibly hard it is to be visibly damaged? He can hide his flaws. She cannot.

  Meghan forces herself to open a can of soup for dinner. Shark gets his kibble, which he inhales, and then acts like he hasn’t just had dinner. With every action, opening the can, dumping the soup, adding the water, putting the pot on the burner, she chews on Marley’s words. And then on Don’s not so subtle directive that she confess to Rosie. And then on Rosie and how she actually hasn’t heard from her in a while, which makes her feel all the more guilty. It’s so hard to keep a balance between being a friend and being a liar. Well, not a liar per se, but whatever withholding the truth constitutes as a flaw.

  * * *

  Hey, are you mad at me? A text from Rosie. Meghan had been slow to answer texts; worse, she has merely replied with emojis.

  No, why? Texting has the benefit of disguising a guilt-strained voice.

  I dunno. We haven’t spoken in a while. What Rosie doesn’t say is that Meghan’s phone goes right to voice mail when she calls. Does she know that Meghan has hit DECLINE CALL?

  I’ve been so busy, sorry.

  No response.

  I’ll call tomorrow. A smiley face. A broken promise.

  Rosie hasn’t communicated since that bitter little exchange.

  What do they all want from her?

  Shark shoves his stuffie into her lap. Play with me. Play with me. “At least you’re easy to figure out.” They play a little gentle tug-of-war while the soup heats. The dog pins his red-rimmed eyes on her; his lips scroll back, revealing his white teeth. He looks like he’s working hard at trying to get the toy out of her hand, but she knows that he judges her strength precisely and never exceeds her ability to hold on. She’s seen him with Spike, and how his shoulder muscles bulge against the torque; how he’s literally dragged the other dog into the dirt. Spike. Oh dear, Shark is going to miss Spike.

  The soup is tasteless and Meghan leaves the bowl on the table, wheels herself out of the kitchen. She’s left her phone on the table. “Shark, phone.” The dog has no trouble finding the instrument and mouths it as he might have retrieved a duck for a different kind of owner. He delicately hoists his forepaws to the table surface and, with a desirous glance at the cool soup sitting within reach, he grabs the phone and drops to the floor. He puts the phone in her lap. “Good boy.” His reward, another round of tug-of-war. He is so easy to keep happy. Why can’t other people be as satisfied with simple rewards? Why did they need to have more from her? Love. Friendship. Trust.r />
  “Okay, settle.” Shark, dismissed, finds his bed and performs his circle ritual. Meghan slides from chair to recliner, picks up the remote, then puts it down. Picks up her phone, then puts it down. Picks it up. Texts Got time to talk? and in a moment her phone rings.

  “Rosie? I’ve totally screwed up.”

  To her credit, Rosie Collins doesn’t do a “This is what you should do.” Instead, she listens, and Meghan can picture her nodding. When Meghan finally comes to the end of her diatribe-cum-vent-cum-self-serving whinge, Rosie takes a breath and then says, “Better?”

  “Yeah, a little. I don’t usually do this, you know, talk.”

  “I was aware. It’s really hard for you because I think you spent a lot of years keeping stuff inside. Letting things out only on a need-to-know basis.”

  Meghan is the one nodding now, and she reaches for a tissue. “You get it, don’t you? You get me.”

  “Don’t we sound like a rom-com chick flick?”

  “No. Well, maybe.” Meghan laughs.

  “Meghan, there’s nothing wrong with feeling things.”

  “I wish I could, I mean, where it counts.”

  “You think that Marley doesn’t understand that? Do you really think that he doesn’t care that it might not work for you? Or do you think he is convinced that he can make it work for you?”

  Meghan hesitates. “I don’t know. Maybe both. No. He’s too much of a gentleman; he’s not selfish.”

  There is a pause. Meghan can hear Rosie’s dog in the background; a door opens and shuts.

  “Meghan. Don’t you like him enough to want to give it a try?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “I know. Life is scary. I’m scared all the time.”

  “I’ve been in the killing fields and I was never this afraid.”