Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  “They were friendly and chewed on each other’s necks a little bit,” Jim reported after their first encounter. “It was very sweet.”

  Honey, a small setter and cocker spaniel mix, was love at first sight—Eddie peed three times while she was watching. Cody, some kind of terrier, a Westie or something, eventually became a friend also. But I was soon instructed to watch out for Daisy, some beige mutt. With no kids in the house, I had to pitch in more with dog-walking duties. The streets were mostly deserted when I walked Eddie and I usually checked e-mail on my phone while he meandered.

  One morning, though, a guy startled us when he stopped his car in front of us.

  “Is that a pit bull?”

  My guard was up. It was hard to switch from my New York City state of mind. I was always on high alert for strangers on the street pretending to be friendly. Usually they just wanted money but I was once flashed by a pervert. I relaxed when I saw a four-legged passenger in the backseat panting and checking us out. The guy was either a dog lover or a dognapper. Either way, it was fine with me.

  “No, he’s a mutt.”

  “Oh, because he does look a little bit like a pit bull.”

  “Well, my husband says he’s a mix of blue heeler and something else.”

  “He’s one hundred percent pure beauty,” the guy said, driving off as quickly as he appeared.

  I told Jim about the encounter later that night.

  “He was talking about you,” my hubby said.

  “Thanks, baby, but no, that’s what’s sad,” I said. “Your dog, not your wife, stops traffic.”

  The world just revolved around the dog.

  “Hope everything looks good,” our twice-a-month housekeeper wrote on a note asking for stainless steel cleaner and Swiffer wet mopping cloths. “Eddie must not like the rain. He’s in the doldrums this a.m.!”

  Montclair allowed us a semblance of a California lifestyle, and Jim loved it. He could still mow the lawn and walk his dog at a leisurely pace along tree-shaded streets. And our house, on the border of Montclair and Glen Ridge, was seven-tenths of a mile from the nearest train station and bus stop. Jim biked to the station, happily pedaling with his briefcase in a front basket.

  “Good-bye, Beaver!” I teased as he rode away.

  I had to walk, and often ran if I was late along with the other laggards. At least we got the exercise. I managed to miss several annoyingly punctual trains before I was able to time my walks right.

  The area had the feel to me of a weekend getaway more than home. Beautiful, peaceful, and not so boring. We had Russian spies! Soon after we moved in, news broke that an all-American-looking family living somewhere in Montclair had been caught in an FBI sweep that also snared a woman columnist for El Diario La Prensa. Kind of exciting. The case even inspired the FX drama The Americans.

  Montclair was not the wild reserve the Palisades was, but there was still plenty of wildlife, including deer and coyotes. Eddie liked to loll about in our backyard, although there was not as much sunlight as there was in California. In the unpredictable, too-hot-or-too-cold East Coast weather, we seldom ate outdoors. Too many bugs too, although we loved the fireflies. Eddie resourcefully found a new pastime: digging. We were not sure what he was digging for, but we tried not to leave him to his own devices outdoors for too long.

  Jim was also vigilant against a new potential hassle—Jersey squirrels. We read that squirrels didn’t normally attack unprovoked, which meant they would bite and scratch the hell out of our provocateur. They seemed to travel in packs and they were not easily intimidated. In a typical encounter during one walk, Jim and Eddie turned the corner and a trio of squirrels stopped what they were doing to watch from the lawn of a house. They were just a few feet from Eddie, but they didn’t scurry away. The three amigos were unflappable, Jim told me, and secure in their turf. They just stared him down, like Tony Soprano, and Eddie knew to move on.

  Blotched-head, however, could be fearless when he should retreat. We discovered our dog was a stone-cold killer on a miserably hot summer night. It was ninety degrees and humid, and Jim was grilling on the back porch. Eddie was in and out, with the kitchen door open for a minute or two, as Jim tended to the chicken. All was well until Eddie shot past Jim like a rocket. Jim heard some strange growling, and by the time he looked up, Eddie was shaking his head with a skunk in his mouth.

  “Drop it, drop it,” Jim screamed, but it was too late.

  The smell was overpowering.

  Eddie kept shaking his head even with a dead skunk in his mouth. Jim was surprised his darling dog had not been just curious or aggressive—he’d set out to murder. But this was no time for reflection. He grabbed a plastic bucket and threw it at the dog, who finally dropped his prey. Now the real fun began. Eddie started to run toward the house, and Jim slammed the door shut before the dog could get in. He was licking himself, with all this goo on his face. Jim got the leash and tied Eddie to the metal handle on one of the storm doors below the porch, leaving him to hose the backyard down to dilute the smell. He shoveled the skunk into a garbage bag and that bag into another two bags and put it on the driveway. That’s when he called lucky me. I happened to be staying at the apartment that night because of an early assignment in the city the next day.

  “How the fuck do I treat this dog?”

  I Googled “how to remove skunk smell from dog” and gave Jim a de-skunking recipe that included hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and liquid soap. Jim didn’t have all the ingredients, so he got in the car to drive to the store. He called me again.

  “I suddenly have this vision that I’m going to get in the car, leave him tied up on the porch, and the skunks in the neighborhood are going to organize and attack him to get even for killing their friend.”

  “Baby, skunks are not coyotes,” I said, not really knowing what I was talking about but fairly certain Jim was panicking and it was my job to calm him down. “Go get the stuff. Eddie will be fine.”

  Dinner was history. Jim stayed up until midnight making batches of the mixture and alternating between scrubbing Eddie in the driveway and flooding the backyard. He went to bed exhausted and hungry. When I came home the next day, I wondered if Eddie would be a blond. He wasn’t. His spots had survived the hydrogen peroxide. But he stank for days. Skunks always have the last word.

  I felt sorry for my husband, but I’m not going to lie—I was relieved I wasn’t in the house for this particular dog drama. There are times that define who the real dog owner is, and this was one of them. Jim made so many other sacrifices for his mutt. When we stayed in the city overnight on Fridays, he had to rush back to Montclair on the eight a.m. train from Penn Station so he could walk and feed Eddie. That meant getting up at six-thirty a.m. on a weekend morning.

  “I feel like the mistress,” I told Jim every time he left me.

  Even when the New York City Office of Emergency Management issued hazardous travel advisories for rain, snow, sleet, and locusts, Jim braved the mile-long walk or bike ride from the train station in Montclair to the house. He put himself in harm’s way for this dog. He couldn’t find sitters to feed Eddie in the morning. And if the entrance to the house was not shoveled, forget it—the sitters wouldn’t come anyway, even if bribed with money and Godiva chocolates.

  Such are the joys of dog ownership.

  New York weather complicated everyone’s lives, even the dog’s. Eddie wasn’t used to this East Coast hell in the summer, which made him lethargic. On the worst days, Jim had to leave the air conditioner on in the living room while we were at work.

  Our first winter in Montclair, Eddie snapped back to his old self once temperatures started cooling. When it snowed, he didn’t seem to mind. His nose could still detect smells. But the first time it got really cold, in the twenties, he cut his own walk short. He pulled on the leash toward the house mere minutes after I took him out. Jim gave walking another tr
y and Eddie resorted to civil disobedience—he played dead and Jim had to carry him back to the house. He shivered indoors and came looking for extra warmth by sitting at my feet. I placed my hand on his head and it was vibrating. The heater was on, but he was freezing.

  For the first time in a blue moon, I went shopping for the dog. I got him a green nylon coat with black reflective stripes, lined with fleece inside, on sale for eleven dollars. With the new orange collar Jim recently got him, he looked as well coordinated as Ralph Lauren’s blue heeler. At the pet shop’s checkout counter I had ignored booties for $39.99. Eddie was likely to hate them and bite them off the second after I put them on. But when I strapped the coat on him, he didn’t fight it.

  “Maybe we can wrap plastic around his paws and tie it with a rubber band as a test,” I told Jim.

  “He’d be embarrassed when he runs into his friends. He may be bullied.”

  “Well, I’m not spending forty dollars unless I’m sure he won’t pull them off again.”

  After weeks of cold temperatures, Jim and I were looking forward to our annual escape to Puerto Rico for New Year’s Eve. We kenneled Eddie and headed for the airport right after work on a Friday night. I called Mami as we waited at the gate, but she didn’t pick up. This had become typical. My mom had reached the age of memory trouble and unexplainable quirks. Her new thing was to unplug anything pluggable “to prevent fires.” She had started losing short-term memory in her seventies, but, in her eighties now, she was still able to take care of herself and function normally enough to give me laughs and make me mad in equal parts. The only way to reach her lately was to call my sister so she could hand her cell phone over to our mother.

  So I called my sister and went through the drill.

  “Mami, you have to take the cordless phone with you wherever you are in the house. I’ve called and called, but you never answer it.”

  “What? But I haven’t been out. When did you call?”

  “Just now. And Tuesday, and Thursday.”

  “At what time?”

  “At different times, Mami. You just don’t hear it because you have it in the bedroom behind a closed door and you’re watching television in another room. Or maybe it’s unplugged.”

  “But I haven’t been out. Let me check if there’s a tone.”

  “No, Mami. Forget it. Just take it with you wherever you are.”

  “But I’ve been in the house and no one has called.”

  Ooooooooooooooommmmm.

  I cut our conversation short as Jim and I boarded the plane.

  “See you soon, Mamita,” I said. I just wanted to hear her voice, just in case. I’d never completely lost my fear of flying. But it was a short hop to the island from New York, about four hours. Soon enough, Jim was looking at my hair with a grin.

  “We must be close,” he said.

  It was an old joke. We were about to land in humid San Juan and my straight winter tresses had already started curling upward as we approached the airport. By touchdown, the top of my head was a forest of frizz. We never needed the pilot to tell us we were on our final descent. When I began to look like Big Orphan Annie, it was time to put all electronics away. Growing up in tropical weather, this was the bane of my young life—every day was a bad hair day. On this trip, my carry-on contained bobby pins for the dubi-dubi—the trick of wrapping your hair around the crown of your head and pinning it tightly for a few hours to straighten the waves and curls. I also carried plenty of clips, barrettes, headbands, and elastic bands for further taming. It was all in vain.

  When Jim and I visited Puerto Rico, we took time to both see family and vacation all around the island. We stayed in cute B&Bs or paradors in places like El Yunque’s rain forest; Rincón, a surfers’ hot spot on the island’s west; and Vieques, a beach paradise off the coast of Puerto Rico where the United States Navy used to stage live-fire and bombing training exercises. My idea of bliss was to sit by the water with a book and a piña colada; Jim’s was to be out in the water catching and releasing (also known as harassing) tarpon. But we always timed our annual visits to the main event: New Year’s Eve. It was the biggest party of the year and it was a family affair. Older kids could go do whatever they wanted after midnight, but for the countdown you needed your loved ones with you. That meant parents and kids celebrated the new year together, mostly at house parties. Within my huge extended family on my mom’s side—three brothers and seven sisters multiplied by children and grandchildren—New Year’s Eve had been hosted at some relative’s home or our own house in rotation. The bar was stocked with rum, whiskey, and homemade coquito, the rum-spiked coconut eggnog. The potluck food includes the traditional pasteles, arroz con gandules, pernil, and guineitos en escabeche, a fat-and-carb fest of plantain pies, rice with pigeon peas, pork shoulder, and green plantains in a vinegary marinade.

  After that, only more sugar with our alcohol would do: arroz con dulce (coconut rice pudding), tembleque (a coconut gelatin that shakes like Jell-O), and guava paste with cheese. But nothing got eaten until we formed a circle to scream “Diez! Nueve! Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno! Happy New Year!” In the ensuing kissing and hugging, an aunt or two would peel off to sit by the radio and cry listening to the traditional El Brindis del Bohemio, a Mexican poem about a man’s New Year’s toast to his absent mother. Tears wiped off and dried, the buffet dinner would follow and the party would continue until two or three in the morning or until the last drunk stumbled out.

  The party had shrunk considerably by the time Jim met me and joined in. The family had sustained departures—usually to the afterlife or Miami. In time, my extended family became even more so, scattered farther north and west in the States, in places like Atlanta, Dallas, and Corpus Christi. For this year’s celebration, it was just Mami, my sister and nephews, and a friend or two and their families. My closest cousin, Ednita, was with her daughter in Orlando and other cousins were otherwise occupied, so we stayed home. We gathered on Mari’s terrace upstairs. My sister cooked the traditional foods, and Jim and I took care of the liquor and refreshments.

  But while there was plenty to eat and drink as the party got under way at nine p.m., no one was dancing. My sister and a girlfriend sat on the terrace chatting, the kids were running in and out with loads of firecrackers to set off on the street, and only my mom and I were trying to get into the spirit, with Jim pitching in as our salsa partner every other song with a frown. Jim was appalled that kids of all ages were handling fireworks on the street with little adult supervision. The kids were fine. It was the adults I worried about. It was common around the island for guns to go off at midnight. Even though they were pointed up, New Year’s Day was a day of reckoning—revelers woke up hung over and bracing themselves for the news and the toll of people killed or injured by stray bullets.

  But tonight Mami and I danced and danced to salsa and merengue music from the rocking party playing out on one of the island’s television channels, oblivious to the deafening noise from the sky. My mom was just shy of her eighty-fourth birthday but she had a strong grip as she held me and a sure step when we separated to break it down. She was a little thin, and had diabetes and a touch of dementia, but her body still responded to the percussion of our African roots. When the song was jamming, she did a little jump and let out an “Ehee!” I laughed and wished with all my heart that dancing was the last thing to go for me too.

  A few days later, Jim and I were on our way to pick up my mother to go to Costco when my sister called me to say that our mom had fallen in the bathroom. She was bent down, toweling off her legs, and when she straightened up she lost her balance and fell backward. My sister, who was always with her when she showered these days, caught her, but not before my mother hit her back hard against the tiled wall.

  When we got to the house my mom was in pain but nothing seemed broken. We all thought she just needed some Advil and rest. Jim was leaving for New Yo
rk the next day and when they said good-bye as she lay in bed my mom held his hand and told him in English: “I love you, Jim.” The next day, she complained about excruciating pain so we took her to the emergency room, where they didn’t find anything broken but sent her home with ultra-strong painkillers.

  “Make sure she drinks a lot of water,” the doctors told us.

  Somehow, Mami began a steady deterioration that within days led her back to the hospital and, finally, renal failure. My sister and I didn’t leave her bedside. We took turns covering her with kisses, telling her we loved her over and over, sitting by her side with our heads buried on her chest, feeling her heart. We put earphones on her so she could listen to salsa music on an iPod as her breathing became more labored. A nurse warned us not to talk about her condition within earshot.

  “They can hear everything,” she said.

  We knew Mami could hear us and feel us because she waited for my sister and me to fall asleep next to her in a cot, and only then did she take her last breath.

  Losing my mother so abruptly, exactly fourteen days after we’d danced, felt like she was killed in a car accident or some act of violence. I didn’t think I had experienced real suffering until that day—not when my father died, not when my dear childhood friend and dance partner, Junior, died in his thirties after a long illness, not when a younger cousin was stabbed to death by her boyfriend, not when her brother, who was my age, later died of abdominal cancer. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Whatever faith I had, it failed me. Where did you go, Mami? ¿Dónde estás? Where are you? I tried to change the subject in my head so I wasn’t pulled into a black hole of despair.

  Regrets provided a huge distraction. I should have phoned my mother more. Our conversations had gotten shorter over time as she was losing her memory. She asked the same questions over and over and I usually began my good-byes after she’d asked me for the fifth time, “And how are things over there?” She could no longer catch me up about the neighbors or remember what my nephews were up to. She wasn’t able to share the latest shenanigans of local politicians or island celebrity gossip. I had been losing Mami in dribs and drabs. But she had not forgotten she was my mother. I still asked for her advice and she still listened to my whining about work or life with great interest. She was still the person who loved me the most, and she was the person I loved the most.