by Meg Donohue
She takes an angry, ragged breath. “He was fine. But, you know, the moral of the story is that people are pricks.”
“Not all of them,” I say. “But, yeah, they’re out there.” No wonder she thinks someone stole Billy—it has happened before.
“Anyway, I walked back around the school and punched that kid in the face. I broke his nose. Broke two of my fingers, too, and I was suspended for a week and had to see the school counselor for the rest of the year, but breaking his nose was worth all of it.” Her eyes have a sly glint. “He told everyone he didn’t hit back because he doesn’t hit girls, but the truth is he didn’t hit back because he was writhing around on the ground, blubbering like a baby.”
Grief, I know, is a shapeshifter. Sometimes the form it takes is a fog so thick and gray that you find yourself forgetting the places where you once saw color. Other times, it’s floodwater, dark and toxic and rising quickly within you. I think of Anya losing her parents at a young age. I think of the sadness and loneliness and anger that lives within her, waiting to be released.
In seventh grade, a boy in my math class used to tease me for having a crazy mother. Gossip about my mother’s agoraphobia was rampant by then, the cat was out of the bag, and I often felt my classmates watching me, wondering if my bookishness was something more, whether I was crazy, too.
“Did it feel good?” I ask Anya. “Hitting that guy?”
She looks at me, surprised. “It felt awesome,” she says. “Awesome.”
Then she breaks into a grin—a real grin—and I find myself grinning right back at her.
TEN MINUTES LATER, we stand in front of Anya’s house. “I usually head out to look for Billy around nine in the morning,” she tells me. “If you ever want to come again.”
I check the calendar on my phone. “I have an appointment at nine tomorrow, but I could be here by ten thirty if you don’t mind waiting for me.”
I can tell Anya is happy even if she seems reluctant to show it. “Sure. I can wait.” She leans down until her nose is inches from Giselle’s. “If you come tomorrow, I’ll make you bacon.” Anya straightens abruptly. “I mean,” she says, her voice falling flat, “if Billy’s not home by then.”
LOURDES IS EAGER to hear everything when she gets back from Napa that night. I assure her that I did, in fact, manage to leave the property. She lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief.
“Oh, thank God! Does this mean you’re back to normal? I mean, not normal normal. We couldn’t be friends if you were normal normal. But, you know, your version of normal. Weird normal.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m quite back to weird normal. But I do think The Agoraphobic Therapist has reached the end of its run. Maybe it’s just the The Anxious Therapist now. Or The Cautiously Optimistic Therapist.”
“Doesn’t sound nearly as catchy as the original, but I guess that’s a good thing.” Lourdes looks down and rubs Giselle’s head. “And this one? How did she behave?”
“Like a very frisky angel,” I answer. “How was your trip?”
“Gabby put a Skittle in her ear.”
“A what?”
“You heard me. A Skittle. Why would she do that?”
“To see if it would fit?”
“Well,” she says, “it did. It fit so perfectly that it took an ER doctor twenty minutes to remove it.”
“No!”
“Oh, she’s fine. Hopped up on ice cream now.” Lourdes studies me. “You got some sun. You look good, Mags.” Her eyes narrow. “Wait, can vitamin C turn your skin orange? Tell the truth: How many vitamins did you take today?”
“None!” I say, startled. I laugh. I’d completely forgotten to take my usual bucket of pills. “I guess it’s just sun and fresh air.” I tell Lourdes a little about Anya, and how I’ve agreed to help her look for her missing dog. I ask if I can take Giselle with me on morning walks for a while.
“She helps me,” I admit. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go out without her.”
“Sure. It’ll be a relief, actually, having one of her walks off my plate.” Lourdes looks down at her dog. “And it’s about time you pulled your weight around here, old girl.”
THAT NIGHT, I fall asleep halfway through the movie I’m watching in bed. I wake up when the credits are running and stare blearily at the clock, surprised to see that it’s only midnight. I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep so early. All that walking, I think, closing my laptop. The steep hill of Buena Vista Park must have worn me out. I barely form the thought before I’m drifting off again, this time into a deep sleep that lasts straight through to morning.
Chapter 8
Over the next five days, I learn a lot about Anya. Walk an hour a day for nearly a week with someone and it turns out that’s what happens. Maybe it’s the physical act of walking side by side instead of facing each other, static, in chairs. Sometimes it’s easier to tell someone something if you don’t have to look her right in the eye while you speak.
When Anya’s parents died in a car accident when she was seven, her brothers were all in their twenties and living away from home. Anya went to live with her grandmother Rosie. She tells me it’s not as traumatic as it sounds—since she was so much younger than her siblings, she was already used to a quieter, single-child upbringing, and she’d always had a strong bond with her grandmother. But, of course, it must have been incredibly hard. She lost her parents. Grief, I believe, is cumulative—each experience of loss shaping the size and scope of the next, each loss holding reverberations of the losses a person has experienced over a lifetime. The pain of grief is real, but it’s also an echo and an aftershock, the spirits of past emotions rising up to grip your hand again. Examine one loss and you’re likely to find another inside of it, and then another inside of that one, all that grief repeating like a set of Russian nesting dolls.
So, really, it’s no wonder she refuses to stop looking for Billy.
Each morning when I leave my apartment to meet Anya, I ask myself if I’m ready to go beyond the gate without Giselle at my side. But when I put my hand on the gate to open it, I lose my breath, that crushing sensation crackling through my chest. And so I turn around, knock on Lourdes’s door, and collect Giselle.
We walk the streets around Anya’s house, setting off on a slightly different route each day. Anya tapes her “Billy Ravenhurst Is Missing!” posters to every pole and mailbox we pass. I’m better on the streets than I was in Buena Vista Park, especially the streets that are cut off from views by houses or hills. It’s a sly city, I’m learning, with its hills and valleys breeding long shadows, its whispering fog, its sudden, heart-quickening, coastal views, its unstable earth below. The streets can’t be trusted; glimpses of wide-open vistas suddenly appear when I’m least expecting them, so I’m careful about where I look.
Occasionally, when we pass one of these views, I notice Anya reach into her bag, a look of confusion darkening her face, and I realize she’s searching for her camera. She probably used to take it everywhere, and now she doesn’t take it anywhere. Sometimes grief cuts us off from the people and activities we love for the simple reason that we don’t want to feel happy, which feels too much like moving on.
She tells me that although Henry signed her up for a photography class at City College, she hasn’t been to school in weeks. Anya shrugs. “I’m responsible for Billy,” she tells me. “He depends on me. I have to find him. Everything else can wait.”
I nod, listening to her tell me again how she had come home from work to find Billy, simply, gone. When she tells me that each one of her brothers stopped by that day to check on Rosie, I feel sure that one of them let him out by accident, and doesn’t want to admit the mistake to her. What other explanation could there be? Anya is certain Billy wouldn’t run away, but even the most unadventurous dog would feel the tug of an open door, wouldn’t he? And if Billy wandered out into the city streets, a car might have hit him. I’m sorry to even think the thought, but something happened to Billy. Dogs don’t vanish. He h
adn’t turned up at the San Francisco SPCA, and none of the other rescue organizations I contacted had seen him. So either he was picked up by a family that was kind enough to keep him, but not kind enough to contact his rightful owner (assuming his collar with Anya’s contact information hadn’t fallen off), or he is dead.
I glance over at Anya, knowing that despite her determination to find Billy, she has run through these scenarios, too. She just won’t admit it. She stops then, as she does every once in a while on these walks, and screams out Billy’s name, cupping her hands around her mouth. She lets her hands fall and keeps walking.
I smile apologetically at an approaching teenage girl who promptly cuts across the street, glancing nervously over her shoulder at Anya.
It’s hard not to wonder, just as Henry had, how long this will go on.
AFTER MY LAST session of the day, I call home.
“How’s Toby?” my dad asks.
I sink down into the armchair, and run my hand over my face, exhausted. “Toby is Toby.”
“And work?”
“Slow,” I admit. I’d like to maintain the upbeat tone I usually strike in these calls home, but I’m feeling deflated tonight. I’m less discouraged by Anya’s lack of progress than my own. It’s hard to believe that only four months ago I drove all the way across the country. Now it feels like an enormous act of courage just to open a gate.
“You’re just starting out,” my dad says. “A practice like yours is going to take some time to establish. You’re resourceful. You’ll figure it out.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Well, let me think. It’s Friday, so I guess she’s out at her rock-climbing class.” In the background, I hear my mom’s peal of laughter. A punch of homesickness lands in my gut.
“Hi, honey!” my mom says, coming onto the line. “Did you find that girl’s dog yet?”
“No. I’m not sure we’re going to find him. He’s been gone awhile.”
My mom clucks her tongue. “What a shame. You would have been heartbroken if one of your dogs had run away. Remember Star? What a good dog.”
I murmur my agreement, but my mind is elsewhere.
“What are you afraid of, Mom?” I ask suddenly. “When you try to go outside?” I’ve never asked her this exact question before, but I’m feeling very low and I wonder if understanding my mom’s mental state will give me some key to understanding my own.
My mom is silent for a moment. “Why do you ask?”
“Maybe I can help. What’s the point of having a master’s in psychology if you can’t give your mom a little free therapy every once in a while?”
“Maggie. You didn’t become a therapist to try to save me, did you?” I know she has wondered this for a long time. Of course she has; we all have.
“No,” I say. “Yes? Absolutely, definitely maybe.”
She laughs sadly. “Honey, I have a therapist. The only thing I want you to be is my daughter. My happy daughter.”
I sigh.
“Anyway,” she says, “I don’t want to talk about it with you. What I feel when I try to go outside—I don’t want you to even have a glimpse of it.”
It’s a dark bird, I think, feeling it beat inside of me, threatening to grow. A beast.
LATER THAT NIGHT, I get an e-mail from Sybil.
The Seymour situation is now even more urgent! she writes. His foster family is getting restless. I’m not sure how much more peeing behind the couch they can take before they give up on him entirely! Have any other volunteers expressed interest? I’d take him myself but I’m fostering that aggressive akita, Zack, right now and I’m afraid that even if I kept them separate, his barking and pacing would give poor Seymour a heart attack!
Once again, as if I might have forgotten which dog she’s referring to, Sybil has attached Seymour’s photograph. I wonder if there’s something calculated about the act—I’m sure she’s surprised I haven’t volunteered to foster him myself. In truth, I hate myself for not offering. My apartment is quiet and blocks from a train line—perfect for an anxious dog like Seymour. But I’m not ready to let another dog into my life. A new dog’s scent would overwhelm the distinctly Toby smell that still lingers in parts of my apartment. A new dog would surely win my heart, and that would be a wonderful, healing thing. But I’m not ready.
Besides, I tell myself, Seymour has already been through a lot in his life, and he deserves more than I can offer him right now.
Still, I’m not prepared to see him wind up in a shelter either, and I’ll have to come up with some sort of plan for him to avert that from happening.
I click on his picture and study it. Again, his eyes strike me as brimming with quivering nerves—that bright, unmistakable flash of anxiety. I’d bet anything that he leaped toward the person behind the camera a split second after the photograph was taken. He probably licked him all over, starting under his chin the way submissive wolves greet their pack leader. He might even have nipped a bit at the photographer as he licked him, his whole body trembling with a nervous abundance of affection and need. Then again, he might have just raced away and wedged himself behind a couch.
As I study his photograph, an idea forms.
Maybe it’s the photo, I write to Sybil. He looks a little . . . nuts. I just met a photographer who might be willing take another photo for free. Maybe if she captures Seymour in a calmer light we’ll get some new interest from SuperMutt website surfers or the foster volunteer pool. Worth a try?
I’m not surprised to learn that Sybil is willing to try anything at this point. Go for it! she writes. And put him in a tuxedo if you need to! Make him look dapper and suave!
Bond, I write. Seymour Bond. We’ll photograph him with a martini shaker. Who wouldn’t want a dog that makes cocktails?
I have a few ulterior motives in suggesting that Anya Ravenhurst might be just the photographer to capture Seymour’s more adoptable side. I’ve had a feeling since our first meeting that photography might be a way for Anya to work through her grief, and it saddens me that she stopped taking photos when Billy disappeared. And then there’s Anya’s house—huge and quiet with, I imagine, a yard out back that is probably perfect for a dog. I think of the gentle tone Anya uses to address Giselle during our walks. She doesn’t love just Billy; she loves dogs.
The devotion of someone like Anya might be just what Seymour needs, and vice versa.
Chapter 9
The next morning, Saturday, Leo opens the door in flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt with the words NERD ALERT in an old-school computer font across the chest. Leo works at an IT consulting firm, and I’m sure the T-shirt was a gift from Lourdes. He’s bleary-eyed, lifting his glasses to rub his hand over his face, and the house smells of coffee. I hear Gabby wailing in the kitchen.
Giselle flies at me, wedging her body between my legs. Her leash trails from her collar and writhes on the floor behind her, smacking against Leo’s bare feet. He looks down and blinks slowly.
“Please don’t report me to the Humane Society,” he says. “I swear I haven’t given her a drop of coffee.”
I reach for Giselle’s collar and she immediately sits on her haunches in front of me, trembling with excitement. “If only we could bottle her energy.”
“Or just be her. Just for a day.”
I smile. “Is it Lourdes’s morning to sleep in?”
Leo nods. He glances over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where Gabby is still wailing. “We’re out of frozen waffles,” he murmurs. He looks shell-shocked.
“Ah.” I think for a moment. “Do you have cinnamon?”
He frowns, considering. I’m sure they have cinnamon, but I also suspect Leo is capable of staring at their well-organized spice rack for five full minutes without finding it. All men, in my experience, have this problem, which I’ve diagnosed as Male-Pattern Blindness. I send Lourdes a telepathic apology for the fact that her husband is probably about to wake her up to ask if they have cinnamon.
“I think so,” he answer
s finally.
“Butter? Sugar? Bread?”
He nods, this time with more confidence.
I wrap Giselle’s leash around my hand. “Cinnamon toast. My mom used to make it for me when I was upset. It’s like kiddie crack. Beats waffles any day.”
“Cinnamon toast,” Leo repeats. I think he might kiss me. “Cinnamon. Toast.” He straightens his shoulders resolutely, looking a degree or two more awake than he did a moment ago. I have the sense there’s something else he’d like to say. He scratches at the scruff of dark hair along his jaw, adjusts his glasses, then reaches down to pet Giselle a few times. Finally, he says, “I’m really glad you’re getting back out there, Maggie. I know you know that Lourdes is here for you, but I hope you know that I’m here for you, too, if you ever need anything. I’m cheering you on.”
I’m touched. Leo and Lourdes began dating in college, so I’ve known him nearly as long as I’ve known her. If Lourdes is like the sister I never had, then I suppose Leo is like the brother I never had. “Thanks, Leo. That means a lot to me.”
He scratches at his jaw again. “I’ve been thinking. Is there an agoraphobia spectrum, like an autism spectrum? If so, I think a lot more of us fall somewhere on it than we’d like to admit. I don’t mean to make light of the people who really suffer from the, um, illness,” he says quickly. “But there’s so much social interaction and consumption we can do from our homes these days. I think we’re all losing some of our practice with negotiating the real world outside our doors and face-to-face relationships. And the less you practice, the harder something becomes.”
“Why, Leo. If I didn’t know you were a tech guy,” I tell him, smiling, “I’d say you’re starting to sound like a Luddite.”
He shrugs. “You should see some of these guys who work for me. Their skin gets all lobster red and blotchy when they’re faced with the daunting task of saying ‘good morning’ to me in the hall. Honestly, it’s a miracle they make it out of their bedrooms in the morning, let alone their apartments.”