After a while, it was time for Penny to go. She hugged me and said she would never forget me. I told her what I’d been thinking: If this boy has problems, maybe I can help him!
Penny turned to Sara. “It looks like maybe he has to go to the bathroom. This is his look for ‘Can I please go outside?’”
It was sad, really, how little Penny understood me. I loved her so much, but I don’t think that’s enough for people to understand what you’re trying to say.
Freezing Like Statues
THIS MORNING I MET MY BOY.
His name is Gus and he came into the kitchen before anyone else was awake. His pajama pants smelled like urine, which I loved. All dogs love this smell. To us, it smells like a friendly hello. I went closer to smell it better and he screamed so loud I ran back to my bed in the corner.
A second later, Sara came into the kitchen and turned on the light. “Gus, baby, it’s okay,” she said. She almost hugged him, then came over to my bed and hugged me instead. “It’s okay, Gus. This is Chester. You remember we told you about Chester coming to live with us.”
He stopped screaming and started making a high-pitched squealing sound that hurt my ears and must have hurt his too, because his hands were covering both of them.
I wished my paws could cover my ears.
Sara kept talking to him. “Shh, baby. Calm your body down. Breathe in and out. Chester isn’t going to hurt you.”
She kept talking like that. Calmly. Saying “Shh . . .” in between her words.
Eventually Gus started to listen. His hands came down from his ears.
“That’s good, baby. You’re calming yourself down.” Sara held her breath and then kept going. “Good for you, brave boy. Do you see that you’re okay? You’re in the same room with Chester and everything’s okay?”
I could tell this made her happy.
When Marc came in, he and Sara made silent, happy faces at each other.
Marc held out one hand, close to Gus’s shoulder, but didn’t touch him. “I’m proud of you, Gus. You’re very brave,” he said.
I didn’t move at all.
Judging by the way Sara and Marc held still, I thought: Maybe it’s not me he’s scared of, it’s anything that moves. We stayed like that for a long time. Frozen like statues. Marc’s hand reaching out, almost touching Gus’s shoulder but not quite.
None of us looked at each other. None of us were sure what to do next. Eventually we moved again, because of course we had to breathe and eat breakfast and all of that.
Windows and Movies
I’VE SEEN GUS TWICE NOW AND, though he walks a little funny, he doesn’t use a wheelchair. He’s also not blind and he isn’t deaf. Still, I can tell he’s different from other boys. For one thing, he doesn’t talk. He can talk, I think, he just never does, except a little bit to himself. I don’t think he means for anyone else to hear him, because once he said three words together and Sara stopped what she was doing and clapped. “Nice talking, Gus! That was from the movie we watched last week! What made you think of that, I wonder?”
Gus got up and left the room. I think it was an accident that she’d heard what he was thinking.
I watched this from my bed in the kitchen and thought: He has the opposite problem as me. I have thoughts I want to say and can’t. He has thoughts he wants to keep inside and can’t.
Mostly, though, he never talks.
Instead of talking, he screeches or chirps or just moans softly for a long time. Sara calls it droning. “No droning in the living room, babe,” she’ll say. “Mom is trying to work and it drives Mom crazy while she’s trying to work, remember?”
Usually he doesn’t stop.
“Gus?” she’ll say. “Do you hear me? No droning down here. If you have to drone, go up to your room.”
He still doesn’t stop.
“GUS! I’M GOING TO COUNT TO THREE . . .”
Then it’s like his brain is listening, because if she says she’s counting to three, he stops. He doesn’t want her to count to three. I keep my head down but I watch all of this carefully.
Except for Gus’s droning sounds, it’s quieter here than it was at Penny’s. No one watches TV all the time the way Penny did. Gus spends most of his day standing at a window in the living room, staring out at the front lawn and a tree. I sit behind him to see what he’s looking at, which isn’t much. I’m not sure why he looks out the window when nothing changes or seems to happen out there. It’s late summer, so there’s no wind and even the leaves don’t move really.
At Penny’s house, the TV was on almost all the time, which I loved. TV shows helped me learn a lot about people. Penny was a big fan of detective shows and mysteries, and she would explain what was happening as they went along. “A lot of times, the criminal is a person who seems really nice at first. Sometimes even old ladies are killers. It’s who you don’t expect,” she once told me.
I didn’t know what “expect” meant when she first said it. Now I do. I can even use it in a sentence: Gus doesn’t act in any of the ways I expect a boy to act. He doesn’t play rough. He doesn’t pull my tail or try to pick me up.
Sometimes I watch him and I think maybe he’s not looking at anything. Maybe the window is where he watches TV shows that only play in his mind. I don’t know how I got this idea, but I watch his face and I think I might be right. His eyes change sometimes—like he’s surprised one minute and laughing the next. Like a story is happening inside his head and the rest of us don’t see it.
How to Not Scare Someone
GUS STILL DOESN’T LIKE BEING IN the same room with me, but these days he doesn’t scream if he walks into a room and I’m here. Instead he turns his face away from the corner where I’m lying. I try to make myself small. I don’t move, because moving scares him most of all. Moving makes him remember that I’m here and I’m unpredictable, and I’m pretty sure he wishes both those things weren’t true.
I haven’t been here very long, but I’m starting to think maybe I do have a job after all. If Gus is scared of me because I move, that means he must be scared of a lot of things that move, like cars and bicycles and balls and people. I think helping Gus not be afraid of me could be my job.
I try an experiment. After dinner, instead of staying as far away from Gus as possible, I go upstairs quietly while Sara helps him get ready for bed. I don’t go into his room. I stay in the hallway outside his door and watch as Sara holds puffy underwear open for him to step into, then his pajama bottoms. After he gets into bed, he sits up on his pillow and rocks so hard his head hits the wall.
It’s hard to watch. It looks like it hurts, but Sara doesn’t stop him. She lets him do it for a while and then she puts her hand on his shoulder. “Shh, baby, shh . . . ,” she says. “Roll over on your tummy, sweetheart. I’ll rub your back.”
He stops banging and rolls over, like this is something they do every night.
Sara sits down on the edge of his bed. She hums softly and pats his back in the same rhythm that he was banging his head. As his body calms down, I realize it’s the rhythm, not the banging that he likes. I try moving my tail to the same beat.
Maybe this will help, I think. If I practice, I can help him get to sleep like Sara does.
Then Gus’s eyes open at the sound of my tail. This is a mistake. He sees me at the door and I feel terrible. Sara is tired. She wants to go to sleep too but she can’t until Gus falls asleep. And now he’s awake again, staring at me.
I get ready for a scream.
If he screams, I’ll scramble myself back downstairs as fast as I possibly can. I’ll say sorry a million times in my head to Sara. I’ll promise never to come near Gus’s room again.
I’m so nervous I look away. Another rule with Gus is he doesn’t like looking people in the eye. If you do, he always looks away like it hurts his eyes. But this time, I’m surprised: When I peek up for a second, his eyes are still open and they’re looking at me.
He’s seeing me and he’s not screaming.
He doesn’t mind that I’m sitting in the hall outside his door.
He’s not smiling but he’s not minding either.
He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him and it’s okay. He doesn’t mind my being here. Which makes me feel like maybe I’ve just done a pretty good job.
A New Idea
GUS IS DEFINITELY GETTING USED TO me. Sara notices it too.
In the morning as Marc gets dressed for work, she asks if he’s noticed. I don’t know what Marc does for a job, but he smells like wood and sawdust and sometimes paint. I love how Marc smells. I love that he hardly ever washes his pants. He takes them off next to the bed and in the morning he steps back into them. When he says, “I guess so. Maybe,” Sara says, “It’s making me think about that idea I had. I called the school yesterday and asked if they’d be willing to consider having Chester in school with Gus a few hours a day, and they’re willing to at least talk to me about it! Mr. McGregor told me to stop by.”
I can tell Marc is surprised by the way he looks up. “The principal?”
“Yes! We’d have to get it approved by the new teacher and also have to make sure no child in his classroom has an allergy . . .”
“Did you tell him that Chester’s not an official service dog?”
“I did some research and it turns out those rules are a lot looser than I thought. There are all kinds of service dogs and there’s no official licensing test or anything like that. You just have to prove that the dog performs a necessary task that the disabled person can’t perform for themselves. SDI is a private organization that only certifies its best dogs but the state doesn’t mandate any certification. I read a whole forum online last night. A lot of people said they’d used their SDI dropout dogs as regular service dogs. Some of them turned their old dog-in-training vests inside out and no one ever asked a single question.”
Marc shakes his head. “I don’t know, Sare—”
“Chester wants to work, Marc. I watch him all day and I can tell. He’ll bring me things he thinks I’ve lost, like socks and car keys. It’s like he spends all day showing me everything he can do. During the day when you’re gone, every time I turn around he’s sitting behind me, waiting for an assignment. Sometimes I ask him to get my keys just so he feels useful.”
Now I feel embarrassed, of course. I’d wondered about all the key-fetching I’d done. I thought maybe her office was full of locks.
“I’m not saying he’d have to go to school every day. Maybe he’d go a few mornings a week. I just want to try something that will make this year better than last year.”
“I don’t want to start making a lot of demands on the school again if we’re not sure it’ll do any good. Last year they spent a lot of money on a talking computer that Gus refused to learn how to use.”
“But we had to try it, right? He’s a nonverbal ten-year-old. We have to try every alternative communication form while he’s still young enough to learn it.”
“Look, Sara, what would we be trying to accomplish by sending Chester into school with Gus? He still makes Gus nervous. I’ll admit he’s gotten better but it’s not like they have some magical bond.”
“You’re not home all day with them—you don’t see what I do.”
“What do you see? Does Gus ever go over to him? Or voluntarily interact with him?”
“Not exactly, but there’s something happening below the surface. I feel it. Gus is aware of Chester and it’s making him more aware of other things, too.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure how to describe it.”
“Is he using any new words?”
“No. He repeats a little more but he doesn’t use any new words.”
“Does he respond when you ask him to do something?”
“Not really. Not without counting to three.”
“So what’s different?”
“Well—maybe this will seem silly, but sometimes I’ll see Gus at his window and Chester sitting behind him. Then I’ll look again, maybe half an hour later, and they’re both still in the exact same position, only Gus has turned his body a little bit so Chester can look out the window too. Like he’s aware of Chester and he doesn’t want to block his view.”
It’s funny that she noticed that. I noticed it too. That’s how I figured out Gus isn’t really looking out the window, because there’s nothing there. He’s doing something else but I don’t know what it is.
“And you think that’s significant? That he moved two inches for the dog?”
“I think it’s significant that they stayed in the same room together for a half hour without moving more than two inches. Yes, I do.”
Marc sits down on the bed beside her. “I think Chester is a very sweet dog who’s been trained to sit for two hours without moving if his person needs that. I’m not sure it means anything except he knows how to sit still for a long time.”
“But think about it, Marc. He’s never been told that he’s supposed to work with Gus. He figured it out himself. Doesn’t that tell you that he wants this job? I don’t know if this is the answer, but I feel like we have to try something.” There’s so much emotion in her voice, I go closer and put my head in her lap, the way I always did with Penny.
Marc scoots closer to her. He can’t stand to see her cry either, but he can do more than I can, because he has arms. It’s nice to see him hug her. It makes me wish I had arms too.
How to Build a Nest
THE MINUTE I HEARD SARA’S IDEA yesterday, I started to get nervous. All morning while Sara’s at school talking to the principal, I think about my problems. Being too anxious. Overreacting to loud sounds. These are bad problems to have, but they also mean I understand what Gus feels like. I know why he puts his fingers in his ears when things get loud and noisy. I only wish I could do the same thing with my paws.
I also know what it feels like when your body does things you don’t want it to, like run under a bed during a thunderstorm. Gus doesn’t do this, but I do. I can’t help it. I just have to get under something. During a thunderstorm, Gus does other things like rock back and forth on his toes and flap his hands and hold his sparkly pen up to the corner of his eye. That’s his way of hiding under the bed. He gets very loud and tries to do all his favorite things at once so his body will calm down.
Gus is scared of a lot of things. I smell it all the time. Whenever he hears an unexpected sound. Whenever I bark or even just walk past his room with my toenails clicking the floor. Noises hurt his ears and I make too many of them. I wish there was a way to promise him I won’t ever bark at school, but there isn’t. He’ll be anxious all the time, his fingers ready to jam into his ears, in case I bark.
I want this job, but I’m afraid Marc might be right. This isn’t the right job for a dog to have. I don’t think Gus needs a dog, he needs a world that is very quiet and a family who will let him do exactly what he wants to do all day long, which is look out the window.
I don’t know what he thinks about when he stares out the window, but that’s when he smells the happiest. It’s the only time, really, when he smells calm. The rest of the time, he smells nervous. Doing everything Sara makes him do—going on errands, helping her cook dinner, taking me for a walk—he doesn’t like any of it. It all makes him anxious.
He loves his mom, but he knows he can never make her happy, which is sad for him, I think. I’m not sure, because I can’t smell quiet emotions underneath the surface. I can only smell big ones.
I remember when we were getting ready to return to the farm to test my skills and maybe find a match for me, Penny said she was sure I would pass the tests, she had no doubts at all. “The main question will be pairing you with the right person. You can be the best dog in the room, but you still need to find the right match. That’s what I’m most nervous about.”
Now we know she should have been nervous about a few other things, too. Now I know wanting a job isn’t the same thing as being able to do it.
Sara is at
the school for a long time, talking to them about letting me come to class while Marc stays home with Gus and me. Sitting behind Gus, staring out his window, I’ve noticed something interesting: A pair of birds is building a nest on the front porch. I don’t understand what they’re saying because bird noises are hard for a dog to interpret. It seems like they’re fighting most of the time, but still, by the end of the morning, they’ve got a nest in the rafters for the mother to lay her eggs in. I can only imagine how accomplished they must feel. They had a job and they did it.
It gets me wanting to feel the same way.
Something to Love
“THEY SAID YES!” SARA SCREAMS THE minute she walks in the door. She’s very happy—clapping her hands and laughing. “Everyone was so nice! It’s like they still feel bad about last year or something.”
What happened last year? I want to ask. I walk over to Sara and put my head in her lap so maybe she’ll say what happened last year.
She doesn’t.
“Did you tell them he’s not an official service dog?”
“I called him a therapy dog, which is different. He’ll just spend a few hours a day at school, helping Gus socialize with other kids.”
“And they were okay with that?”
“Yes!” Sara smiles. “I told them if there were any problems I’ll come right back and pick him up. We’re going to be very flexible about it all.”
Marc makes a face like he’s not too sure.
Chester and Gus Page 3