The Puppy That Came for Christmas

by Megan Rix

  “See if he can wait,” Jamie said.

  “Wait,” I said to Freddy, and held up my hand, palm facing him, to show him exactly what I meant.

  Puppies, like the toddlers they are, find it very difficult to wait. Their sense of time, and in particular their perception of how long they’ve been waiting, is at odds with that of the adults around them.

  Freddy was still only twelve weeks old, and I thought he might find it very difficult, particularly because of the distractions of the people, dogs and the new environment all around him.

  “Wait,” I repeated, and started to walk backward through the cones, still holding up my hand. Freddy’s eyes never left me once. I reached the end of the row.

  “Come, Freddy!” I said in an excited happy voice, and crouched down, holding my hands out to him. He ran to me as fast as he could.

  “Sit,” I whispered. And he sat and looked up at me. As proud of himself as could be. He knew he’d done well.

  “What a good boy,” I said, crouching down to give him a cuddle and a treat. “Very, very clever!”

  He was a talented little puppy; it was plain to see for everyone at the fête, but Jamie in particular was impressed.

  Back at home, Eliana and Freddy played together with some of Freddy’s many toys. She seemed to have no fear of him now and once or twice even gave him a kiss—which Susan and Graham didn’t seem to think was a good idea. Freddy somehow seemed to realize that he needed to take extra care around Eliana and was very gentle. The day might have been overwhelming and tiring for them both, but Freddy was already showing that he liked to look after people, and Eliana had become much more confident in the presence of another miniature being—and not just with Freddy but with everyone.

  I caught Ian watching the two of them together and smiled at him. Maybe it was time for us to investigate the possibility of IVF further. We’d been so busy with losing Emma and gaining Freddy that it had taken a backseat.

  15

  Every day Ian had a two-hour journey on the train and tube to get to work, starting at 5 a.m. Then, in the evenings, he turned around and tubed and trained it home again. Usually, I’d drop him off and pick him up at the station, which some days was quite a stretch; whenever I suggested to him, though, that I might not do it, he’d tell me how important that extra ten minutes with me were to him, how it brightened up the dark grim mornings . . . so how could I refuse?

  One night the week after Eliana, Susan and Graham had left, Ian phoned sounding exhausted. He’d had a nightmare of a journey—all delays and diversions—and had ended up at a small, isolated station. One of the many things I loved about him was his calmness in emergency situations. One night when we’d first started going out, we were so busy mooning at each other and staring into each other’s eyes that the bag containing his work computer was stolen. This was a disaster because there was sensitive information on the laptop, and he’d had to phone his U.S. office immediately to explain the security breach. He’d dealt with each portion of the emergency with a calmness I’d never be able to achieve, leaving me full of admiration; so if he was at the end of his tether, he must have been exhausted after another long day of work and travel.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find the station,” I said as he tried to explain to me the route I should take to get there.

  I pulled some shoes on and grabbed the car keys. Freddy had been sitting at my feet while I worked on the sofa, but at the sound of the phone, he had begun prowling around the room looking for computer wires to chew on—his latest obsession—and currently appeared to be considering urinating in what had become his favorite corner of the room. He was too little to leave by himself for any length of time, but there was a problem taking him with me: I didn’t have a car harness for him as I’d passed on Emma’s, along with her princess bolster seat and all of her many other possessions, to Helper Dogs, and I was loath to put him in his crate that he hated so much. A rebellious puppy “accident” wouldn’t make anybody’s evening less stressful. Nevertheless, he had to come. Other puppy parents put their dogs in the front footwell on the passenger’s side of their car when they were traveling, so I decided to try that. At first he sat quite still and it seemed that it might work, but as soon as I got onto the busy bypass he decided he wasn’t going to sit still anymore and started clambering about and yapping.

  “Calm down, Freddy. Stay still.” I tried to soothe him, but his Helper Dogs obedience seemed temporarily to have deserted him; he wasn’t at all frightened, just increasingly excited, and I was having a job keeping my eyes on him and also on the road.

  “STAY STILL!” I barked, and Freddy, without paying me a blind bit of notice, stamped on the button that changed the car from automatic to manual transmission. At forty miles per hour on the dual carriageway the engine revs soared as the transmission struggled to cope. Quickly, fearing he’d kill us both if I didn’t do something, I pulled over, screeched to a halt on the gravelly border and, kissing his nose as he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong, very regretfully put him in the boot of the hatchback. I drove the remaining distance to the station both as fast as I could (to shorten the ordeal for him) and as slow as possible, terrified that he’d be injured because of not being strapped in.

  I pulled into the small station car park and drew up in front of Ian’s huddled figure. I pecked him on the cheek and ran around to open the back of the car. Freddy bounced into my arms. I hugged him to me; I’d never been more relieved.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Sorry for being so stupid. It wasn’t his fault he’d put us in danger.

  Ian had been sheltering under an awning from the autumnal winds for over an hour and was very pleased to see us. He was exhausted from the terrible train journey, but Freddy soon cheered him up.

  “We’ll stop at the pet store on the way home and get him a harness,” he said.

  Ian drove the car home while I had Freddy on my lap. Freddy soon fell fast asleep after his adventure, and Ian and I took the time alone to talk about IVF once more. Seeing Eliana, and how happy Graham and Susan were, had made us both realize we’d still like to have a child of our own. Since their visit, I’d started to look into the practicalities again and had landed once more upon the clinic I’d found a few months previously, in Billingsford.

  “I think this could be the answer,” I said. “Susan got pregnant with three embryos once when she had IVF. Of course they didn’t . . . they didn’t survive.”

  It must have been about five years ago that Susan had rung, from her mum and dad’s, where she’d been staying, to tell me the news.

  “They’ve put me on complete bed rest so all I can do is lie here and watch TV. But there’s three—three!”

  A week later Susan wasn’t pregnant anymore. In more than ten years of trying it was the first and only time she ever became pregnant.

  “They’re having an open evening next week,” I said.

  There was the problem of the puppy, of course, and also that Ian wouldn’t get home from work until just before it started, so we agreed that he’d stay and take care of the pooch while I went along.

  The next morning, I booked my place for the open evening at the fertility clinic and then put Freddy’s tiny Helper Dogs jacket on him and drove the short journey to the supermarket, using the new harness that Ian had bought on the way home from the station.

  The idea of taking Freddy to the supermarket was to habituate him to new places, noises, smells and people, and to give him a first experience of one of the environments where he’d be expected to work. The little Helper Dogs coat he was wearing clearly said on the side “Helper Dog in Training” along with “Please do not disturb me as I am working.” Some of the stricter puppy parents would tell passersby not even to stroke the puppy while it was working, but I found that impossible to do—and nobody we met could keep their hands off Freddy. At thirteen weeks old, he was utterly and totally adorable. His fur hadn’t really settled down, as some puppies’ did, and he looked, when freshly sho
wered, as if he’d been through the tumble dryer or received an electric shock. He was always more than happy to let people stroke him and cuddle him.

  I hadn’t been able to forbid anyone to stroke Emma either, all too aware that, especially for children, it may be their first experience of stroking a puppy—and that a Helper Dog, with its sweet temperament and smart jacket, was a good dog to trust. Often, too, I’d meet people who were grieving a lost dog, and they’d want to stroke, chat and reminisce for hours. Walking around town with a Helper Dog pup always made me half an hour late for any appointment—and I was rarely on time to begin with. I’d found with Emma that shopping with a Helper Dog was trying when you needed to get everything done quickly, and with Freddy you could measure the time it took on a sundial. People couldn’t resist coming to say hello and made a beeline for him down the aisles. Some even forgot about their own shopping entirely and followed us around the aisles. As he was still a very little boy, all the attention quickly got too exhausting for him. So much so that he lay down to nap in the middle of the supermarket.

  “Ahhh, isn’t he sweet,” people said as they maneuvered their shopping trolleys around him, prostrate plum in the center of the aisle.

  I was worried that someone might bump into him accidentally, so I abandoned my shopping plans—who needed food anyway?—and left my basket and carried him toward the exit. As I was about to leave, I saw the row of shopping trolleys and realized that here was the perfect solution. I popped Freddy into one of the smaller trolleys and went back to my basket, rescued the items and resumed shopping. Now he could take a nap, people could pet him and I could buy some food.

  Freddy’s trolley arrangement went really well and we became a regular attraction. One day we arrived at the store to find a mum and her two young sons standing outside. The boys pounced on Freddy as soon as we got there, while their mum sheepishly explained that, while they never used to want to come shopping, once they’d heard about the little dog in the trolley they’d become desperate to see him. We’d become part of local life: it reminded me of what one of the Helper Dog partners had said to me at the fête.

  “I used to be too frightened to go to the shops. My joints dislocate really easily—just bending down to pick a tin off a low shelf can make my shoulder dislocate. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a shoulder dislocation, but it isn’t exactly a walk in the park,” Mark had said. He was a man of about thirty-five who’d been given a Labrador called Tilly the year before.

  “Then I got Tilly and everything changed. No one used to talk to me before, but now people want to chat to me all the time. Till is like my social bridge. Plus she loves going shopping! My life is a million times better because of her. She even hands over my wallet and helps put the shopping in my shopping bag. Since I’ve had her I haven’t had a single dislocation—she’s always there when I need her and she never lets me down.”

  Freddy rode around the supermarket for weeks, until one day we were stopped by one of the staff, a young, inexperienced man, who ran over and said that unfortunately the store had received some complaints about hygiene. I explained that he was a trainee Helper Dog and therefore allowed in the shop, to which the boy said that coming in was fine, but he wasn’t allowed in the trolley.

  I was furious. Which spiteful person had complained?

  He was very apologetic, and really only a kid who must have drawn the short straw among his colleagues to tell me the bad news—I knew that Freddy was popular with all the checkout staff. But rules were rules, so I swept Freddy up and left the supermarket vowing never to go back.

  Freddy found the regular market in the square, with its variety of smells, far more interesting, and, really, I reflected, he’d been so good at being in the supermarket anyway that there was no need to go back until he was a qualified Helper Dog, and far too big for any trolley.

  16

  I was driving along the motorway on my way to the IVF clinic’s open evening and thinking of Susan and Graham. They’d gone to endless fertility clinics and endured years on different regimes of pills, injections and alcohol-free living while they were trying for their own baby, before they adopted Eliana. I said a silent prayer in the hope that it wouldn’t take so many years of trying, before giving up, for me to get pregnant.

  I had imagined the clinic would be part of a hospital, but it was in a very large house on a residential street, with just a small, subtle sign. It was near the general hospital and I wondered if perhaps it had been a convalescent hospital in the old days, the sort of place where people went to recover after they’d had a major operation. It was an Edwardian redbrick building with a metal spiral staircase at the back that descended into a small car park.

  I arrived much too early and sat in my car, waiting and watching, as other people arrived. About half of the women seemed to be with their partners, who carefully helped them out of the car and into the building as if they were already heavily pregnant. Five minutes before the talk was due to start, I followed them in and was directed to a room with about thirty chairs. I sat at the back. People were well spaced out and weren’t talking to or looking at each other. The atmosphere was palpably tense.

  The talk began and everyone leaned forward in their plastic chairs, eager for any scraps of hope as the smart, middle-aged lady who managed the clinic told us about the procedures their doctors carried out and the high success rate they achieved. The eggs would be extracted and the embryos would be grown at the clinic; then the procedure to return them to the womb would be conducted there too, the aim being to cause as little stress as possible. She spoke eloquently about the facilities and the advantages they offered.

  “Fertility treatment at a larger hospital might mean you don’t know which doctor you’ll be seen by from week to week. Here we have a small dedicated and professional team. You’ll be treated as a valued individual. A member of the family, almost . . .”

  There was polite laughter at this.

  “And we like nothing better than when one of our clients pops in to show us how well the baby we helped them conceive is doing.”

  Then a male doctor gave us some statistics and told us the clinic’s statistic for new patients who were under the age of thirty-six was more than double the national average. What about older women? I wanted to know, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask.

  After the talk we were given a tour of the clinic and shown the laboratory, scanning room, consultant’s room and ward. It all looked very new and spotlessly clean, and I was impressed. It was small, but I hoped that small would mean I wouldn’t be lost in the system, and they’d pay my tricky case some special attention. By the end of the tour, the atmosphere had thawed: couples were smiling and talking to each other. We were invited to stay for coffee and to ask questions, but I’d heard enough. I was sure this was the clinic for us. The atmosphere had been welcoming and professional, and their procedures seemed to work smoothly for the vast majority of people they treated. All we needed was some private treatment and I’d be pregnant in no time. I tried to book a private consultation for Ian and I there and then but was told I’d need to get some blood tests done at my local hospital first.

  I drove home, excited and happy, to tell Ian the good news.

  The next morning I took my temperature as usual and waited, lying back into my pillow, for the little beeping sound to alert me that the reading was ready. Freddy’s familiar tread hit the stairs, and he came into the room and began pawing at the bed. Ian helped him up, turned to the mirror to finish knotting his tie and went downstairs to make some breakfast and bring me a cup of tea before he left for work—he was driving himself.

  Freddy was delighted to be on the bed, and scrabbled and snuffled a bit but soon settled down for a cuddle. It was bliss. Warm and in bed, not being obliged to get up. Maybe a baby would come, maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, I didn’t have to think about it just now. Freddy jumped off the bed and went to investigate as Ian left. I heard the sound of the car driving away as the dog trod caref
ully down the stairs. He returned soon after and lay on the carpet as I dozed. Ten minutes more, ten minutes more . . . I awoke two hours later, just in time for a hospital appointment to confirm the blood tests I’d had for Dr. Boston, which had shown I could possibly be a suitable candidate for IVF.

  On the way back from the hospital, I stopped at the local shops for food and then went home. Freddy, whom I’d left shut in the kitchen, was very pleased to see me and hadn’t done any damage while I was away, or gone to the toilet indoors. He helped me with the supermarket shopping by carrying one of the bags from the hallway to the kitchen. This was a surprise as I hadn’t asked him to, and hadn’t even been aware it was in his repertoire; his usual trick with plastic bags was to shred them with his teeth—which I found annoying and frightening in equal measure. This time, though, he took the bag—albeit a light one—in his teeth and gently deposited it with the pile in the kitchen. I was delighted with him and gave him a treat; my little boy was growing up.

  The phone rang, and I went to answer it in the living room. When I looked around thirty seconds later, Freddy was lying on the sofa with a pack of raw chicken in his mouth. He hadn’t tried to open it but had started ripping the paper off the back. I sighed. Oh, well. Some days it felt like we were taking one step forward and then taking two steps back.

  Notwithstanding occasional lapses, Freddy was learning fast. Every day we ticked off another first: first swim in a stream, first oysters and shrimps consumed (at an oyster festival after his first trip on a train), first nap under a classic car (after eating shrimps and oysters). He was also coming on in leaps and bounds at his regular obedience class, led by Frank, and he’d made some great friends there, his favorite being Morris, a Labradoodle, who was even bouncier than he was. He was patient and accommodating, even as a puppy, and always ready to play, so he was naturally popular even with cranky or antisocial dogs.