Dog Crazy

by Meg Donohue

  I try to envision walking beyond the sidewalk gate with a dog at my side and feel the cool beat of panic, low and steady, pulse in my ear. Still, I’d rather attempt to overcome my fear with the aid of a dog than with medication. Even if it were an easy endeavor to get a prescription for an antianxiety drug, it’s a route I’d prefer to avoid. I never liked how my mother acted when she took the pills that she relied on to leave the house—they made her a quieter, less interesting version of herself, dampening her humor. At home she had an elastic face, full of life and love, but her range of expressions narrowed when she was medicated.

  She mostly left the house for me—to attend school plays, swim meets, an annual back-to-school shopping trip. She was never herself on these outings, always heavily medicated, always moving her lips, counting her breath in an effort to remain calm. I longed to tell her not to bother, but I never did—not even when I was my most petulant teenage self. I was afraid she would think I was embarrassed of her. I was afraid I was embarrassed of her.

  Lourdes keeps offering to help me, but even though she is my dearest, closest friend, I don’t want her to see me the way I saw my mother whenever we stepped outside and she struggled to ward off a panic attack. Maybe I’m too proud, but I know that it changes the way you feel about someone when you witness her shaking, struggling to keep her feet, in the hard wind of terror. I don’t want to do that to Lourdes, to myself, to our friendship.

  This dog thing, I decide, might be worth a shot.

  I’M FINALLY PEELING myself out of bed to make dinner when my dad calls.

  “How’s Toby?” he asks. It’s always his first question.

  “Oh, you know,” I say. “Toby is Toby.” I haven’t told my parents that Toby died a month after I arrived in San Francisco. I’m afraid they’ll somehow sense the specific ways his death has affected me, and I don’t want them to worry.

  My dad, as usual, breezes by my answer on his way to his inevitable follow-up question. “And how’s work?” He owns his own business, too, a real estate development company. I know he’s proud of me for taking the risk of opening my own practice, and he’s warned me that the early months, and even years, can be difficult.

  Without giving her name or going into specifics—not that I have many to share—I tell him about Anya Ravenhurst, how she doesn’t believe her dog is dead and won’t return to see me again.

  “It sounds like you did everything you possibly could for her,” my dad says.

  I find myself blinking back tears. My dad’s kind voice often has the power to do this to me, tapping some vulnerable vein that pulses back to a time when it seemed he could solve all of my problems. I swallow. “No, I didn’t. I don’t think I helped her at all.”

  “Maggie, you don’t know that. Maybe you nudged her closer to accepting that her dog is gone.”

  “Oh, she’s not ready for that. She’s still really upset.” I try to think of how I can make my dad understand Anya’s state of mind. “Imagine how you would feel if something you really loved just disappeared one day,” I tell him. “Imagine if someone stole your golf clubs.”

  “WHAT KIND OF MONSTER WOULD STEAL A MAN’S GOLF CLUBS?”

  I laugh. My dad loves golf, and since my mom isn’t exactly the golfing type, I was often his companion for his Sunday round. I loved sitting beside him, zipping along in the cart, watching the leaves change color in autumn and the little tree buds burst into pink flowers in spring. I was a city kid, so going to the golf course with my dad was like taking a trip to the countryside. I became a pretty good golfer myself, but the truth is, I enjoyed the activity more for my father’s cheerful company and the fresh air than for the sport itself.

  I tell my dad that the only way for me to keep seeing Anya is to help her look for her dog.

  My dad is quiet for a moment and then, softly, he says, “You can’t help everyone, sweetheart.” I hear years of sadness and defeat in his voice, the hardship of loving a woman he can’t seem to help, and I feel guilty our conversation has brought us here.

  My mother’s voice is in the background. I can see them perfectly: my dad poking around the fruit bin in the fridge; my mom giving the counters one final scrub for the night.

  “Hang on,” my dad says. “Here’s your mother.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “What’s all this?”

  So I tell her about Anya, too, everything I’ve just told my dad. She’s quiet, listening, until I get to the part about Anya wanting me to search for Billy with her.

  “Well, you have to help her find her dog,” my mom interrupts. “It sounds black and white to me.”

  “No, no,” I say. “Billy isn’t a Dalmatian. He’s a mutt.”

  My mom laughs and then abruptly stops, so it’s clear she’s only humoring me. She knows that jokes are my go-to diversion tactic; I learned the trick from her. A nice thick blanket of humor gives all sorts of unpleasant emotions a safe place to take cover and hide.

  “Really,” she says, “what’s the difference if you talk to her in your office or out on a walk? If you think she should be talking to someone, go help her look for her dog, and talk to her while you do it.”

  “But what if the best thing for her would be to accept that her dog is gone?” I ask. “I don’t want to enable unhealthy behavior.”

  “This patient of yours is looking for something,” my mom says, her tone decisive. “And she’s made it clear that she’s not going to find it in your office.”

  AFTER I HANG up with my parents, I call Lourdes. I can hear her phone ringing upstairs, her footsteps against the floor as she moves to answer it.

  “Howdy, stranger,” she says.

  I take a deep breath.

  “Lourdes,” I say. “I’m going to need your dog.”

  Chapter 5

  Giselle is practically apoplectic with excitement when Lourdes brings her down the next morning. She springs from paw to paw, tail furiously whipping the air. Even her fur seems more tightly wound than usual, her ginger curls reverberating with each step. I don’t think that she’s feeding off my nervous energy, just happy to be out of the house, but who knows? In my experience, all rumors of poodles’ impressive, and sometimes troublesome, intelligence are well founded.

  Lourdes hands me a grocery bag filled with dog food and bowls and toys and a leash. When I told her my plan, she decided she and Leo and the kids would take the dog-free weekend as an opportunity to go up to Napa for the night.

  “Don’t forget,” Lourdes says, “she’s a toilet drinker.”

  “Noted.”

  “And she’ll hop up on the furniture the minute you walk out the door.”

  “Lourdes. Don’t worry about us. Go have fun.”

  “Okay. I’ll bring you back a bottle of something. It might or might not be empty, depending on how many times Gabby asks if we’re there yet on the drive home.” She frowns. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better if I stayed? Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”

  I nod toward Giselle. “You are helping.”

  Lourdes glances doubtfully at her dog. Then she breaks out her jazz hands and begins singing, to the tune of “Master of the House” from Les Misérables, “Never leaves the house, never through the gate, orders so much from Amazon that she gets a special rate!” She mimics the sound of a crowd cheering. “And the audience goes wild following Maggie Brennan’s final performance in the The Agoraphobic Therapist, this year’s Tony winner for Weirdest New Musical.” Lourdes throws her jazz hands around me, squeezing me within one of her signature robust hugs.

  “Good luck,” she whispers. “I love you.”

  After she leaves, I pour water into Giselle’s bowl. It’s the first time I’ve had a dog in the apartment since Toby died. She laps up water in a different way than he did; her sounds are softer, daintier.

  “Exposure therapy,” I say aloud. “Systematic desensitization.”

  When the house is silent and I know Lourdes and her family have
left, I clip Giselle’s leash to her collar.

  As we near the sidewalk gate, I do all the things I know I should do—the very things I tell my patients to practice when they are overcome by anxiety. I concentrate on my breathing, drawing air in through my nose and expelling it through my mouth. I visualize our walk—a quick, uneventful trip to the corner. I reach down and run my hand along the length of Giselle’s back. As if on command, she sits. Her gaze is nailed to the gate, her body shivering with anticipation. I wrap the leash around my hand until it’s so short that I can touch the ends of Giselle’s curls with my fingers.

  I open the gate.

  Something black and cold courses through me.

  I breathe and count, count and breathe.

  One.

  Two.

  I force myself to picture Anya’s pained face, to consider the possibility of not helping her, and in the same moment, Giselle tugs me forward onto the sidewalk. In a blur, I reach out and shut the gate behind me. I put my hand on top of Giselle’s head, steadying myself, warding off the panic with my breath. I’m not quite leaning on her, but I get the sense that I could if I needed to, that she would not let me fall.

  I squeeze the leash in my hand and begin to walk. I try to imagine that I’m breathing out the negative thoughts, that my chest is expanding instead of constricting, but mostly I focus on Giselle, her warm, solid presence at my side, the softness of her strawberry-blond fur against my taut knuckles. She’s cheerful and confident, completely unfazed by how short I’ve made the leash. I pretend I have blinders on, that I couldn’t look around even if I wanted to, that I’m only able to see Giselle, but with each step, my skin tightens, my muscles tensing. Bile rises into the back of my throat. Panic buzzes in my ears, swarming through me, filling my chest, and I can barely breathe. The sound of Giselle’s nails clicking against the pavement cuts through my haze. The tags on her collar chime together. Her collar and leash are pale brown leather, good, sturdy tethers that will not fail. I slip my shaking fingers into her soft neck and begin again.

  One.

  Two.

  When I spot the curb ahead, I realize I’ve made it to the corner, about half a block away from Lourdes’s house. I immediately turn around and hurry back toward the gate. Giselle lopes along at my side.

  When the gate latch falls into place behind me, I double over, pressing my hands against my knees, and inhale deeply. After a couple of minutes, my head begins to clear, and I straighten. It actually worked! I hadn’t gone far, but for the first time in one hundred days I’d made it beyond the gate. It was a start.

  “Well,” I say to Giselle once we’re in my apartment. I’m scrubbing my hands under hot water and she’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom, watching me. “That was some adventure, kid.”

  Giselle is too polite to argue.

  “Baby steps,” I say. Then I try to translate: “Puppy steps.” But the translation doesn’t really work—a puppy would have bounded joyfully down that street instead of hobbling along like someone recently released from a full-body cast. A puppy would have kept going beyond the curb.

  There’s still a box of dog biscuits in a kitchen cabinet. I hold a treat out to Giselle, smoothing back her soft bouffant with my other hand, and she takes it delicately, her muzzle brushing my fingers like a light kiss. She trots over to the rug and bites the biscuit into pieces, letting chunks of it fall out of her mouth and onto the rug, and then licks up the pieces one at a time. Afterward, she snorts into the rug a few times, hunting for crumbs, and then looks up at me expectantly. When I don’t make a move toward the cabinet that holds the biscuit box, she stretches out her long legs in front of her, separating all of her claws, and yawns.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Am I boring you already?” I feel punch-drunk, so adrenaline-addled that I’m almost giddy. I’d only been beyond the gate for a couple of minutes, but the length of time is beside the point. I’d done it. I’d felt anxious and breathless and my heart had raced, but the mushroom cloud of panic had never darkened the sky—or at least I’d never looked up to see it. That was important. I can’t push myself too far, too quickly. A full-blown panic attack would only make things worse. What I need is a series of short walks that go well enough to work as positive reinforcement—a foundation upon which I can build when I’m ready.

  Giselle rolls over on her side and looks up at me, thumping her feather duster of a tail against the rug.

  Two more walks, I decide. I’ll force myself to take two more walks today, each one longer than the last.

  IT WOULD BE easier if I didn’t live in a city of hills.

  Even as a kid, I wasn’t a fan of heights, a fear that I now see as a precursor to my current phobias. I was eight years old when I first realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother leave our house; I realize now it’s surely no coincidence that it was also the year I felt my first spell of vertigo. That year, my mother signed me up for a ballet class that took place in a fifth-floor studio just high enough to overlook the tops of three streets of row houses and the flat expanse of the Delaware River in the distance. During the first class, I ran with all the other girls to the window to take in the view, but as I stood there touching the cool glass with my fingertips I felt my mouth go dry. I turned away, worried I was going to be sick, and spent the rest of class wondering why the floor kept wobbling. After watching me stumble around for a couple of sessions, my teacher decided I was unfocused and clumsy and stuck me, to my relief, in the back row of class, where I learned to keep my eyes trained on my classmates’ bright hair bows rather than the view that was multiplied in the studio’s many mirrors. I never told my parents how I felt about that view, how I didn’t like seeing my world look so large, how it made me feel lost and alone. I must have sensed that the news would worry them.

  Lourdes’s house is tucked into one of the steep hills that rise out of Cole Valley, a neighborhood in the geographic center of San Francisco, and an expansive view of the city threatens me from every direction. I didn’t mind this so much when I first moved in and my fear of heights was relatively easy to ignore, but now I can’t help feeling that living here, of all places, is akin to someone deathly allergic to bee stings setting up a picnic under a swarming hive.

  Nonetheless, I force myself through the gate and down the street, past the curb that ended my first walk of the day. The steep hill makes me feel woozy. When I catch sight of a nearby café, its sidewalk tables filled with people, my heart races into overdrive, each beat a painful squeeze. If I must deal with the humiliating symptoms of panic, I’d rather face them alone on a quiet street than on a bustling city block. I try to focus my attention on Giselle, but I’m distracted by the sounds of the café and my imaginary blinders aren’t working anymore. I slow my pace, debating whether I can continue in this direction. Giselle stops short and I nearly fall over her. Her nose is buried in a food-stained paper bag on the sidewalk.

  “No,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “Leave it.” I give a little tug on the leash and we keep walking . . . haltingly, because within a few steps she finds a gum wrapper and then a soiled napkin, and I have to keep a close eye on her and repeat myself. When she spots a plastic coffee lid on the ground, I swear she looks up at me and winks before scooping it into her mouth. I grab the lid from her and she releases it easily, tail wagging, her nonchalant strut like a shrug.

  Can’t blame a girl for trying! her expression says.

  Giselle finally stops scouring the sidewalk long enough for me to look up and get my bearings, and I realize we’ve passed the café without my even noticing. I turn the corner and we’re on our way home.

  When Lourdes’s fence comes into view again, relief cracks open inside of me, and I allow myself to jog toward the gate. My legs are creaky, sand-filled, after so many inactive months, but it’s good to move, to feel my body working with me instead of against me. I push myself into a sprint. Giselle bounds beside me, her funny bouffant bouncing on top of her head.r />
  Back in my apartment, I scrub my hands and gulp down water. I give Giselle another biscuit and make myself a sandwich for lunch. When she finishes the biscuit, Giselle curls into a ball on the rug and within moments she’s snoring.

  There’s another e-mail from Sybil Gainsbury of SuperMutt Rescue at the top of my in-box. This time, she’s writing to tell me that we need to find a new foster-care family for a dog named Seymour. I sigh. It’s not the first time Seymour has needed to be moved.

  I thought he only had that troublesome leash issue, Sybil writes, but it seems he has problems with trains, too! His current foster family lives on the N-Judah line and apparently he wedges himself behind the couch and pees a little each time a train passes the building—every fifteen minutes or so. Poor guy!

  She has attached a photograph. Of all the dogs that have moved in and out of SuperMutt since I began volunteering with the organization, Seymour is the one who gets to me the most. He’s one of those dogs that are so clearly forged from two vastly different breeds that the result is comical; he has the dense, creamy-yellow coat of a golden retriever but his thick torso is stretched improbably long and balanced—barely, it seems—on the stubby legs of a basset hound. His face, too, is a distinct mix; he has the wide muzzle and blocky forehead of a golden and the large, drooping ears of a basset.

  A dog as adorably funny-looking as Seymour should have been in and out of SuperMutt in a week; he should already be living happily-ever-after with his bighearted forever family. He isn’t even one of those dogs that are so ugly that they’re cute—a specific aesthetic that I’ve learned appeals tremendously to the dog rescue community. Seymour isn’t ugly-cute; he’s cute cute. And no wonder! He’s a mix of two of the country’s most popular breeds. He should be a slam dunk; an easy case; an adoption success story. Instead, he’s been lingering in the SuperMutt system for months, bouncing from foster family to foster family.