Dog Crazy

by Meg Donohue

  My hands stilled on Toby’s back. I began to sob. “But he’s been fine! He can’t be in pain.”

  “Some dogs are like this,” I heard the vet say from far away. “They don’t show their pain. They just keep going, as long as they can.” He paused. “But Toby’s pain, I’m very sorry to tell you, must be significant.”

  I shook my head. This man didn’t understand. I knew Toby. I would have known if he were in pain. Even as I protested, I thought of the way he ran now: a slow lope, his hind legs stiff. I thought of the way he groaned when he lay down and how rising back up took twice as long as it used to. How I had to lift him onto my bed at night. But these were signs of age, maybe a touch of arthritis—not pain. Not cancer. Toby’s tail was always wagging; his eyes were always eager; his spirit was as bright as it had been the day we met thirteen years earlier.

  “It’s hard for us to know what’s going on until we see something like this,” the vet continued. I knew he was pointing at the X-ray, but I couldn’t look at it again. The vet paused. “Once we see this, there isn’t room for doubt. The pain is evident and it will only worsen—quickly.” His tone was definitive, but it somehow held a question, too. I knew what he was telling me in his kind, certain, heavy way. I knew what he was asking.

  I couldn’t take my hands off Toby. I petted him over and over. I’m so sorry, I told him with my mind. I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? I didn’t ask him why he hadn’t told me that he was in pain, because I was sure he had told me, in his manner, and I had missed it. I had failed him. I had let my friend suffer because I was distracted and hopeful and focusing on moving forward, and I needed his help.

  Toby looked at me with his familiar gaze, full of dignity and trust and cheer, even now, and his tail beat slowly against the bench I sat on. It struck me that he was trying to reassure me, but there are so many things he might have been communicating in those moments.

  Despite being in decent touch with reality, despite my profession, despite knowing the average life-span of a dog of Toby’s size, it turned out that some part of me had believed that Toby would live forever. I knew, because my patients told me, that I wasn’t alone. We think that because our dogs are by our side every day, because they are our best friends, because the love we feel for them is so pure, so funny and beautiful and profound, that our dog will be the dog that beats the odds. Should it have been a shock that my Toby had reached the end of his life? No. But it was. It was.

  I knew what I would have told a friend if she were going through this. It was what I would tell my patients when I opened my practice the very next week. This is our responsibility. This is the burden of loving and caring for a dog. We have to know when it is time to say good-bye.

  I kept my arms around Toby as the veterinarian inserted the needle. I felt my beloved dog grow heavy in my arms, the weight that I’d felt so many times before, leaning up against me on the couch, pressing into my leg on our walks, tripping excitedly over my feet whenever I came home, the weight I was feeling for the last time. I tried to memorize the way his long, soft, black fur felt below my palms. The shape of his muzzle, the wet warmth of his gray beard, the lovely golden brown of his eyes, happy and devoted even now, as we parted.

  We had met when I was nineteen years old and now I was thirty-two. What would my life have been without him? I hoped he knew how much he meant to me, and how much I loved him.

  I felt his breathing slow. Thirteen years we’d been together, and now, suddenly, our time was over. I wasn’t ready to live without him, but I couldn’t let him feel my fear. He’d taught me how to be brave, how to keep moving, how to see the beauty of the world glimmering even through darkness.

  “You are such a good boy,” I whispered to him over and over again, holding him close in my arms. “And you have given me so much joy.”

  I felt his last exhale, a final breath that warmed my forearm and then was gone.

  Chapter 15

  I’m staring into the fire in a sort of hollowed-out, post-cry haze when the doorbell rings.

  “I’m still not feeling well, Lourdes,” I call. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  The doorbell rings again. I groan, standing. My legs ache from running home from Anya’s house and my chest has a scorched feeling. At some point in the evening, I’d poured myself a glass of wine but it’s still on the coffee table, untouched. I take three deep breaths.

  “Lourdes, honestly—” I start to say, opening the door.

  It’s Henry. He looks the way I feel—sad and exhausted. “Maggie, I’m so sorry. I wanted to follow you right away after you left this morning, but Rosie was really upset and had a coughing fit. I couldn’t leave.”

  “Oh no! Is she okay?”

  “Health-wise, she’s stable. But she’s worried about Anya. She knows she’s not going to be around too much longer, and I think she’d do anything to be sure that Anya is going to recover from all of this.”

  I open the door for him to pass through. “Do you want to come in?”

  He nods and walks past me, dropping down onto the couch. I sit across from him, not wanting to be too close. I’m afraid he’s there to admonish me for hiding my mental instability all this time, for the charade I’ve been acting out. I wonder if he plans to call my old boss in Philadelphia to tell him about my behavior, to warn him that he should think twice before recommending me again. I know how protective Henry is of his sister, how angry he must be with me.

  So far, though, he’s just looking at me sadly. “Anya lashes out when she’s hurt,” he says. “She shouldn’t have said what she said this morning.”

  “She had every right to say it. Everything she said was true.”

  Henry doesn’t seem surprised by my admission. “That’s not the point. She shouldn’t have announced it like that. You’ve been trying to help her.”

  I look down at my hands. “I haven’t done a very good job.”

  “You’ve done more than anyone else.” He sighs. “Listen, Maggie. I’m not going to lie. If I’d known what you were dealing with when we first met, I don’t know that I would have felt comfortable enlisting you to help my sister. But everything is different now. I know you. I’ve seen you with Anya; I’ve seen how you’ve helped her. You listened to her and understood how important photography is to her. You convinced her to pick up her camera again. She’s been talking about SuperMutt and the idea of starting her own photography business for days. Do you understand what a big deal it is that she’s even thinking about something other than Billy? We were all at our wits’ end, but you found a way to get through to her. You did help her, Maggie. You are helping her. It’s such a relief.”

  I give him a halfhearted smile. He’s leaving for Los Angeles soon, and I guess now he’ll be able to go without feeling quite so worried about his sister.

  “Do you think I could have one of those?” he asks, looking at the wineglass on the table.

  I nod. “I would have offered you a glass earlier, but I thought you were here to tell me what a horrible person I am. I didn’t want to fuel a tirade.”

  When I stand and walk by him on my way to the kitchen, Henry reaches out and touches my wrist, stopping me. “You know I don’t think that you’re a horrible person, right? That couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  I look down at his hand on my wrist. The reflection of the fire moves in his eyes. He’s leaving, I remind myself. He’s just another dead end. I step away from his grasp and walk toward the kitchen. When I return, I hand him the glass of wine, careful not to allow my fingers to touch his.

  “Thanks,” he says. He shifts in his seat, his expression hesitant. “So, I’d like to ask you about the stuff Anya said, but we don’t have to talk about it if you’d rather not. We can just drink our wine, enjoy the fire. I don’t have anything against companionable silence. It’s my favorite kind of silence, actually.”

  Maybe it’s the kindness in his eyes. Or maybe it’s the fact that he’s leaving, that I’ll probably never see him ag
ain, and there’s nothing to lose. I take a deep breath and tell him everything.

  “My mother is agoraphobic,” I begin. “She hasn’t left the house in over twenty-five years without being heavily medicated. So I guess you could say she taught me everything I know.” I smile to let Henry know that I’m joking, but his steady gaze doesn’t waver. I shrug. “Note to self: Never lead with a mental health joke.”

  Now he returns my smile. “At least not a bad one.”

  “Ouch! In matters of psychology, humor is relative. And by ‘relative,’ I mean ‘mother.’ ”

  Henry’s smile turns sly. “I’m just surprised you’re willing to joke about the situation. Don’t jokes about agoraphobia hit a little too close to home?”

  I burst out laughing. “That’s the spirit.”

  “Anyway,” he says, growing serious again, “I really do want to hear everything. Please go on.”

  “You sound like me. Am I being shrinked?”

  He strokes his chin with one hand and pretends to write in a notebook with the other. “Patient uses humor to deflect attention . . .” he murmurs.

  So I tell him how my mother had packed my childhood schedule in an attempt to ensure that I didn’t inherit her phobias, and how I now suspect this was even the motivation behind the acquisition of our family dogs. I tell him about my fear of heights, and how I’ve hidden it from my parents for years because I didn’t want to worry or disappoint them. I tell him that in graduate school I learned that the fear of heights isn’t all that dissimilar from other phobias like the one my mother has—they’re panic disorders rooted in anxiety. So even though I only became agoraphobic recently, I realize now that low currents of anxiety have coursed through much of my life.

  Then I tell him about adopting Toby, and how much I had loved him. I tell him what a comfort he’d been to me throughout my twenties, how his exuberance and gregarious spirit had changed the way I viewed the world and pushed me to be more outgoing, even inspiring me to finally make the decision to leave my job and move across the country.

  All the while, Henry listens, his gaze never losing that sheen of kindness and warmth.

  I tell him about Toby’s death, and how when I walked home from the veterinarian’s office I’d been struck by a panic so terrifying that I’d been sure I was either dying or going crazy, and the fear of experiencing that sensation again had kept me home for one hundred days.

  “For a while, I told myself that I was shocked by Toby’s sudden death, and I was grieving. I tell my patients not to be too hard on themselves in the painful period of time following the loss of a loved one, that it’s okay to give in to the grief, to allow yourself to really feel it. I made excuses for my own behavior in the name of grief. But, really, it’s always been more than grief—it’s been fear, too. Irrational, but debilitating fear.” I sigh, looking down into my wineglass. I still haven’t taken a sip. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “You’re doing well,” Henry says. “I’m sure it’s difficult to talk about.”

  “It was meeting Anya, and wanting to help her, that finally motivated me to find a way to get better. It turns out that dogs can be very effective at helping agoraphobes leave their homes, so I started borrowing Lourdes’s dog and taking her on walks. Giselle isn’t a therapy dog—and I’m not training her to be one in the literal sense—but she has helped me.”

  “I’ve always had this feeling,” Henry says, “that all dogs are really therapy dogs.”

  I’ve probably circled this thought a thousand times, but have never formulated it so concisely before. It seems to me that it’s the sort of thing only someone who loves dogs could say. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “So, what does it feel like? When the panic hits?”

  I close my eyes, thinking. “It’s like being trapped somewhere where there isn’t enough air. It’s like being completely disoriented and dizzy. It’s like walls closing in on you, but it isn’t walls, it’s your own skin tightening—around your neck, your chest, your heart, your veins.”

  “Jesus. And you feel that way every time you walk outside?”

  I open my eyes, shaking away the sensation. “No, not anymore. I’m much better—though I still haven’t tried to go outside without Giselle. It’s worse around heights, or when I’m not sure how to get back home. So San Francisco isn’t exactly the easiest place for me right now. But . . . you know Sutro Tower? Up on Twin Peaks?”

  Henry nods. “When I was a kid I thought it looked like Poseidon’s staff—his trident. I had all sorts of elaborate fantasies about how San Francisco used to be Poseidon’s underwater kingdom and that he left his trident behind when the ocean receded. Even now, every time we have an earthquake, a part of me still thinks maybe it’s Poseidon’s doing—somewhere out there in the ocean he’s sending a signal to his trident, making it shake.”

  I smile. “We should really give back that old guy’s cane before someone gets hurt.”

  “Hell hath no fury like a doddering Greek god.”

  “Well, with all due respect to the pantheon, I hope Poseidon never gets Sutro Tower back. I feel better when I see it up there. It orients me. I always look for it when I’m out on a walk. The hardest days are the ones when the fog hides it. Anyway, now you know my two secret weapons in the fight against panic: Giselle and Sutro Tower.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” Henry says, shrugging. “But your secrets are safe with me.”

  And I actually believe that what I’ve said does make sense to him, and that his opinion of me hasn’t changed. I lean back into the armchair, feeling a weight lift off me.

  “Since the company of a dog is so calming for you, have you thought about getting another one?” he asks. “Or does it feel too soon?”

  “I’m sure I will someday, but I’m just not ready yet. I think I’ll know when the time is right. In the meantime, I have Giselle. She’s my Band-Aid dog.”

  “She seems like a happy, solid sort.”

  “She’s a good dog,” I agree. “Why don’t you have one of your own? You clearly like them.”

  “To tell the truth, I always sort of thought of Billy as my dog, too. Anya did all the heavy lifting in terms of caring for him, obviously. But I was a doting uncle.”

  “You miss him. I guess I didn’t realize. I’m sorry.”

  Henry gives a “what can you do?” shrug. “He deserves a happy ending. He was so good for Anya. He was there for her every single day, through thick and thin. For a girl who lost her parents, that means everything.” His eyes shift away from mine for a moment, and I can almost feel the heaviness of his thoughts.

  “It’s interesting,” he says. “I think that losing our parents made us all become slightly different versions of the people we used to be—or the people we would have become. Clive has become more cynical, more sarcastic. He’s left a steady stream of ex-girlfriends in his wake for the last decade. I think he’s still too terrified of loss to let himself fall in love. Terrence went the opposite direction—he got married, had children, and now he’s intensely devoted to his family. He’d do anything for them. And Anya has become this very independent, thorny sort of person. When I first saw that happening, I gave her Billy. I thought a dog might help draw her out.”

  “And you?” I ask.

  Henry gives me a questioning look.

  “Who have you become?”

  “Ah.” He rakes his fingers through his dark air, and when he pulls them out, his hair sticks out in all directions. He makes a stressed-out face. “The worrier?”

  I laugh and shake my head. “You’re the caretaker,” I say. “The glue.”

  “Anya would probably accuse me of being superglue. I’m a bit overprotective for her taste.”

  “Yes, I do recall an irate maniac jumping out of the bushes to yell at me during my first visit to her house.”

  Henry cringes, laughing. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve kept me on my toes.”

  His smile fades. “It�
�s not just Anya. I feel responsible for Billy, too. I wish things could have been different. It’s hard to not know what happened to him. It’s hard to keep yourself from thinking the worst.”

  Opening up to each other in this way feels inevitable, like something Henry and I were meant to do. It’s getting harder and harder to remind myself that he’s leaving, that I should curb my growing feelings for him.

  “It’s been difficult to keep Toby’s death from overshadowing his life,” I say. “I’m sure that’s an even bigger challenge when you don’t know what happened to your dog, when there’s a question mark hovering over the death.”

  Henry sits back. He studies me, smiling. “You’re very easy to talk to, Maggie. It must be nice to know you’re able to bring comfort to so many people.”

  “Am I comforting you? I thought I was just commiserating.”

  “Maybe it’s the same thing.”

  “Sometimes,” I agree.

  “Whatever it is, I feel better when I’m with you. I’d like to think I’m special, but I suspect a lot of people feel better when they’re with you.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.” I smile, but my heart is beating fast. People, I remind myself, are full of flattery before they say good-bye.

  Eventually, I walk Henry to the door, but he seems reluctant to leave. I guess I’m just as reluctant to say good night as he is, because we both stand there facing each other, neither of us reaching for the door handle. Without moving his eyes from mine, Henry puts his hand on the curve of my shoulder, then runs it down the length of my arm, takes hold of my hand, and lifts it to his mouth. His gaze is full of desire, but there is something questioning there, too, ready to stop if I ask him to. He presses a gentle kiss against the base of my thumb, all the while watching me. He turns my hand in his and kisses my palm, and then the inside of my wrist. He slides the sleeve of my shirt up, his fingertips warm against my skin, and kisses my forearm.