Dog Crazy

by Meg Donohue

  “Ninety-eight days,” Lourdes says. Despite her casual tone, I can tell she is troubled. “That’s too long.”

  I know that it’s not fair that Lourdes and Leo are the only ones who know that I haven’t left the property in three months. Every once in a while she threatens to call my parents and fill them in, but she won’t follow through. She feels responsible—she thinks she’s the one who convinced me to move across the country, to leave my job and my old life behind. She worries that the stress of so many changes at once hit me hard, and she’s not wrong. Her guilt works to my advantage. I hate that she feels accountable, but my parents can’t know what is going on. The news would crush my father—my mother, maybe worse.

  I lift the wine bottle and pretend to read the description on the label. “Have you ever noticed that they never describe wine as tasting like grapes? Leather . . . nutmeg . . . but grapes? Never.” I turn the bottle in my hand and address it sternly. “What, you’re too good for the fruit that made you?”

  Lourdes holds up her hands. “Fine, fine, I get it. We can change the subject right after you tell me you’ll try to go outside. I’ll go with you. Let me help you. Please, Maggie.”

  Even though we joke easily about it, I don’t want Lourdes to see me in the grip of a panic attack. It’s too embarrassing. As a mental health professional, I know mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of; as a woman, I have my pride.

  Ninety-eight days ago, just a week before opening my practice, I sat in a veterinarian’s office and watched my beloved Toby die. Afterward, I walked home through Golden Gate Park, heartbroken. It was dusk, the park a web of unfamiliar, darkening paths. The panic didn’t descend gradually. I felt the very moment it took hold of me, plunging me into an icy black sea that I’d heard patients describe, but into which I myself had never dipped more than a toe. My heart felt grotesquely swollen, shuddering and pounding in the space of my suddenly too-tight chest. Inky holes, opaque as oil slicks, traveled across my vision. I gasped for breath, and when I swallowed, my saliva tasted sour, toxic. All around me, the trees moved, bending toward me, shadows closing in on me, and then I was running, stumbling, terrified, desperate to be safely home. I felt as though I were running for my life.

  It was only much later, after hours of sobbing in my horribly empty, Toby-less apartment, that my breathing slowly returned to normal and I was able to put on my Mental Health Professional cap. I knew that what I’d experienced in the park was not a heart attack, but a panic attack; despite how it had felt, my life—even my sanity—had never been in true danger. And then, the next day, when I finally tried to push open the sidewalk gate and walk to the market for coffee, I realized how little my years of education and training and counseling helped. Being armed with knowledge was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Immediately, my heart began to pound. My throat tightened and then I was shaking, crumpling in half, gasping for air. My fear morphed into an enormous, hungry beast that gripped my chest in its claws, stealing my oxygen, blocking the sun.

  And so even though I know better—even though everything I have ever studied has stated otherwise—I’m convinced the panic is not something that can be controlled, only avoided. This is what I had never fully comprehended when I heard my patients describe the panic they felt, what I am not sure is possible to understand unless you experience it firsthand: the panic is so terrifying that the decision to change your entire life so that you might avoid feeling it again seems reasonable, even rational.

  But I can’t go on like this. I know I can’t. I can’t let my life crumble because I’m unable to follow the very advice I’ve doled out to my patients for years. And chatting comfortably with my best friend here in her home, it’s easy to pretend I’m the same person I’ve always been; someone with a few quirks, perhaps—a bit of an allergy to change, a slight fear of heights, something of a neat freak—but nothing that can’t be controlled with a good tug on my own bootstraps. It’s easy to sit here and analyze and dissect the enormous panic I have recently felt and, in so doing, contain it. After all, I know it’s just a big physiological misunderstanding; my anxiety makes my heart race, which makes my brain think I’m in physical danger, under attack, and it kicks my body into fight-or-flight mode, pumping out adrenaline, making my pulse soar, my hands shake, my vision narrow. It’s a chain reaction of misguided and misinterpreted signals. Nerve cells. Chemicals. From a distance, it all fits into a neat equation. And for the moment, rational thought and the warm buzz of wine and friendship and the sweet sound of Giselle’s sleepy breathing below the table all join forces to quiet the hulking beast that is my fear.

  “Okay,” I promise Lourdes. “I’ll try.” I take a sip of wine, my throat excruciatingly dry all of a sudden.

  Lourdes beams, clearly relieved.

  I’m eager to change the subject—I’ve always felt more comfortable listening to others’ problems than discussing my own—so I ask Lourdes again about the vegetable garden project at Portia’s school. Now that the wine has loosened her up a bit, I know she won’t be able to resist airing her grievances.

  “Oh, Maggie, these parents.” She groans. “They can’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that the vegetables will grow. They want to pack the veggies in an inch apart, and mix them all up without any plan. They think it will provide teachable moments about diversity. Those plants are going to choke the life out of each other. It will be gruesome. Little kids watering dying plants day after day. It will be a teachable moment, all right. A teachable moment about death. A teachable moment about assholes.”

  “Mama.”

  We both jump in our seats. Gabby stands nearby in her pajamas, a naked baby doll dangling from one of her hands. She’d somehow come back downstairs without us hearing her.

  “Did you brush your teeth, pumpkin?” Lourdes asks. Gabby shakes her head. “Go back upstairs and ask your sister to help you. I’ll be up for books in a minute.” As Gabby pads silently away, Lourdes turns to me and whispers, “How is there not a horror movie about toddlers in footed pajamas? They’re so fucking stealthy!”

  I MUST BE drunk by the time I leave Lourdes’s because I find myself standing at the bottom of her front steps, swaying slightly as I stare at the line of fence in front of me. The pretty, arched gate at its center is one of the quaint touches that had so charmed me when I first pulled up in front of the house. In a flash of memory, I see Toby lumbering out of the rental car and trotting toward it. In that intuitive way of dogs, he’d somehow known exactly where we were going and decided to lead the way.

  I turn away from the gate and instantly feel better. Just looking in the direction of my apartment makes something dark and heavy evaporate from my chest, freeing space for air. I practically float down the path to my apartment, my feet barely connecting with the stones that hug the side of Lourdes’s house and mark my way home. By the time I feel the cool metal of the doorknob turn in my hand, I’m smiling. When I shut the door behind me, the breath I exhale sounds like a laugh. It’s a sort of mild euphoria, returning home, a delicious loosening in all of my joints. I sink into the couch, feeling dull and mellow until I remember the promise I made to Lourdes.

  I’ll try, I’d said.

  As if it were simple.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning when I embark on my usual scroll through my in-box, I find an e-mail from Sybil Gainsbury, the executive director of SuperMutt Rescue.

  During my first month in San Francisco, I’d busied myself with the logistics of setting up my practice, sending introductory e-mails to dog-related organizations and veterinary clinics all over the Bay Area. Sybil Gainsbury in particular seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the local dog-lover community; a few of my first patients found their way to me after Sybil forwarded my contact information to her vast network. It was out of both gratitude and sincere interest that I began volunteering for her dog rescue organization.

  Over the past few months I suppose I’ve become SuperMutt’s unofficial Webmaster. Fost
er families e-mail me descriptions of the dogs they are hosting and I post them, along with photos of the dogs, to the organization’s website. It’s work I can do from home and it keeps me busy during the hours of the day that I’m not seeing patients. If I can’t be out there gathering abandoned dogs from the street myself, this feels like the next best thing.

  Lately I’ve also been helping Sybil organize SuperMutt’s annual fund-raiser, a cocktail party and auction that will be held at the home of a wealthy dog lover and patron in San Francisco’s tony Sea Cliff neighborhood. A few of the dogs in foster care will be auctioned off (to suitable, vetted families), as will a long list of items and services that I’m in charge of convincing local businesses to donate.

  As usual, Sybil’s e-mail is full of exclamation points. Great work getting that sunset cruise donated, Maggie! she writes. I have a feeling we’re going to raise more money than ever before and it’s all thanks to you! Can’t wait to finally meet you in person at the party!

  I have never said that I will attend the fund-raiser, but it’s only natural that Sybil assumes I’ll be there. Even though we haven’t met in person, we e-mail several times each week and have formed a fast friendship. Somewhere along the way I started imagining her as a cross between a relentlessly chipper version of Joan Didion and a female Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. In other words, I picture Sybil birdlike and earthy, with graying hair, long skirts in shades of granola, eyes blinking behind oversized glasses, surrounded by a pack of mutts representing every dog breed under the sun.

  My plan is to e-mail an apology on the afternoon of the event, explaining that I’m not feeling well. It won’t be a lie; just thinking of attending makes my heart race. This reaction isn’t new; I’ve always felt vaguely uncomfortable at parties—the press of people, the noise. In the past, my uneasiness at parties, like my fear of heights, never overwhelmed my life, but now I worry that any emotional discomfort might trigger a panic attack.

  I e-mail Sybil to let her know about a couple of the other donations that I’m working on securing: free grooming for a year from a dog spa in Russian Hill called The Pampered Pup and a wine class with a well-known local sommelier who adopted a dog through SuperMutt a few years ago.

  I don’t say anything about the party.

  I HAVE A new patient that afternoon. In theory, this is a relief; I’m glad to fill one of the many holes in my appointment book. In actuality, it turns out to be something else entirely because she shows up filthy and pissed off, her eyes flashing like those of a feral cat about to be dropped into a hot bath.

  “You must be Anya,” I say. “I’m Maggie Brennan.” Her eyes slide away from mine, one bony finger shooting out from the cuff of her enormous coat to swipe violently at the bottom of her nose. There isn’t enough antibacterial soap in the world to make me comfortable with the idea of shaking her hand, so I just wave her through the doorway and hope the gesture seems welcoming. “Please come in.”

  She skulks by without a word, the arm of her coat brushing my blazer. A musky, sour scent follows in her wake. Before I know it, I’m coughing into the crook of my elbow. One Echinacea, one probiotic, two vitamin C, peppermint tea with honey, saline nose spray (two per nostril). The prescription practically writes itself—a modern spell to ward off the germs carried on bone-chilling blasts of wind and the unclean hands of visiting patients.

  The only thing I know about this woman—girl, really, she can’t be more than twenty years old—is that her brother is worried about her. He’s the one who found my website and reached out to me via e-mail to schedule the appointment. It’s a curious arrangement, but after years of counseling patients through various forms of grief at the hospital, it would take more than an e-mail from a concerned family member to surprise me.

  My sister might be difficult, Henry Ravenhurst had warned in his e-mail. But she really needs to speak with someone.

  Anya stands a few feet inside the door now, her molten gaze moving slowly over the living room and kitchen, the potted jade plant in the corner (a housewarming gift from Lourdes), the fireplace with its bare mantel, the pair of yellow armchairs across the coffee table from the dove-gray couch, the framed diplomas and licenses and certifications on the wall. As she studies my apartment, I study her. Her long hair, which might be auburn but is too dirty to tell for sure, hangs in front of her shoulders like a damp dish towel slung around the neck of a faucet. Scuffed leather combat boots poke out from the bottom of the bulky army-green jacket that swallows most of her body. Those boots look as though they weigh as much as she does, and are clearly cleaned with even less frequency than her hair.

  “Can I take your coat?” I ask, though really what I’d like to do is ask her to remove her shoes.

  “I’m not staying long.” Anya hefts her bag—a big black canvas thing covered with pockets—higher on her shoulder and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

  “Well,” I say. “Please sit anywhere you like. How about something to drink? Water or tea?”

  She shakes her head and drops onto the couch. Something in the middle of her face catches the overhead light and glitters—a tiny green nose piercing, I realize, a pinprick of color on her sallow face, like the distant beam of a lighthouse in a sea of fog. Underneath her hard expression, sadness looms, irrepressible.

  “My dog is gone,” she says, staring at the floor. Her voice is flat, affectless.

  My heart contracts. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. All of my patients have lost their dogs; that’s why they come to me. Still, every time I hear the words, the hard thorn of loss draws blood.

  I sit down across the coffee table from her and tell her how sorry I am. She’s boring holes into the carpet with her eyes, so I direct my words to the milky, jagged line of skin exposed by the part in her hair. “Would you like to tell me about him?” I ask. “What kind of dog was he?”

  “No.” Anya’s lips clip the word but she still doesn’t look up. She begins unzipping and zipping her jacket, the motion electric with a fierce sort of frustration.

  Already, I can see how a dog must have been good for someone with her uneven swings of energy, how the schedule and activity of the care and feeding and walking of a dog might have helped to balance her. Even petting a dog can lower your heart rate, producing endorphins that mirror the effects of antidepressants and pain medication. It’s just one of many reasons why some people take the death of a pet so hard. Another of my patients recently compared the experience to being cut off from Prozac.

  The word “no” still hangs in the air.

  “We don’t have to talk about your dog,” I say. Some patients can’t contain their emotions—anger and anguish and even laughter bubble up and out of them as urgently as water gushing from a broken hydrant. Others need time, encouragement, or sometimes silence before they can begin. “We could start by talking about something else.”

  At this, she finally looks up. Her eyes are a murky shade of green, the color of plant life at the bottom of a lake. “No,” she says again. “Billy isn’t dead. He’s just . . . gone. I’m only here because my brother Henry blackmailed me into coming.”

  I glance down at the open notebook on my lap. At the top of the page I’d written Anya’s name. Below this I’d written: Brother—Henry. Now I add: Dog—Billy.

  I’ve never had a patient with a missing dog, let alone one who claimed to have been blackmailed into seeing me. The relationship between each patient and his or her dog is unique and the symptoms of grief vary, but the fact that the dog is dead has always been the same.

  “How long has Billy been gone?” I ask.

  “Twenty-four days.”

  I write this down. “How awful. Can I ask what happened?”

  When Anya begins moving the zipper of her coat up and down again, I notice that the outline of an old-fashioned camera is tattooed on the top of her right hand. Inwardly, I wince; it strikes me as a particularly painful place to pierce repeatedly with a needle.

  “What g
ood is talking about it going to do?” she asks. Her voice is losing its flat affect now, splintering into hard, jagged pieces. “I just want to find him.” Then, before I have a chance to respond, she leans toward me, eyes darkening. “Let me ask you something, Doctor—”

  “Oh, please call me Maggie. I’m not—”

  Anya interrupts before I can remind her that I’m a bereavement counselor, not a doctor.

  “Maggie.” She says my name the way I imagine she would say the words “day spa” or “decaf.” “Do you have a dog?”

  I only hesitate for a moment, but in that moment I see her eyes flick back and forth between mine, a spark of interest briefly lit.

  “No,” I say. “But I love dogs.”

  “You love dogs. Okay. So let’s say one of these dogs you love disappears. He’s just . . . gone. Would you want to come to some lady’s office and drink tea and chat about how he disappeared? Or would you want to be out there”—she jabs her thumb toward the door, her words rushing out in a frustrated hiss—“where you had at least a fucking chance in hell of finding him?”

  “I’d want to be out there,” I say immediately. And I’d like to think it’s true. I’d like to believe that if I thought I could find Toby somewhere in the city, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d grit my teeth through the galloping heart, the breathlessness, the fear. I’d walk the streets until I found him.

  Anya must have thought I was going to say something else because now she sits back, studying me through narrowed eyes. After a beat of time she stands and slings her large bag onto her shoulder.

  “If Henry gets in touch with you again,” she says, “just let him know I was here. I told him I’d come; I didn’t tell him I’d stay.”

  “Sure.”

  I know how to keep my expression calm even as my mind races. My boss at Philadelphia Hospital was always eager to tell me that it can be dangerous to become too invested in your patients. There’s something to be said for emotional distance, he warned me over and over again. Distance is necessary for the process. I was never very good at heeding his advice, which was undoubtedly why he spent all that time repeating himself. I can’t afford to lose patients, but more importantly, everything about Anya—her anger, the hollow, haunted look of her face, the sadness that lurks below, not to mention her blatant disregard for basic hygiene—worries me. I want to help her. I have to help her. I can’t let her leave.