The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Photos

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from SCENT OF THE MISSING

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  The Possibility Dogs is a memoir grounded in events and interactions that took place across a decade. Out of respect for individual privacy, some names and identifying circumstances have been changed.

  Copyright © 2013 by Susannah Charleson

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-547-73493-4

  eISBN 978-0-547-73500-9

  v2.0613

  For assistance dog Logan,

  beautiful golden gone far too soon,

  and for Suzan and Jon Morris,

  who cherish her still

  1

  IF HE CHOOSES TO REMEMBER, what he remembers first is the taste of grit in eggs. Cold scrambled eggs on a blue plate with a half-moon chip along the edge. He had the eggs sometime that morning, he’s pretty sure, probably with toast, probably with coffee, though it’s only the eggs and the plate he can still get hold of—he makes parentheses with his hands—the battered plate and the rubbery eggs gritted with sand, leftover sand from a goddamn sandstorm that had blown hard the day before, rusting the sky and coating everything and everyone with a layer of red grime. It was the kind of sandstorm that would make you think the world was ending, but it wasn’t. Next day the sun came up like any other, only you could write wash me on every surface of the house and eat dirty eggs for breakfast.

  If he chooses to remember, he repeats, that’s what he gets.

  Everything else is flash and bang. Bob knows mostly what other firefighters have told him. There was a fire that afternoon. A vacant two-story building almost a hundred years old, for the record sitting empty, but broken windows, bedrolls, and graffiti inside said vagrants had been living there awhile. A convenience store clerk across the street smelled something before there was anything to see, and then there was a haze of smoke and a lick of flame, and that old building went right up. The clerk made the call. The fire department was there fast, trucking in water to this nonsupplied area, but the fire blazed upward two beats ahead of them, smoke rolling from the windows, distorted walls bulging and bowing from the pressure, the gush of water pink where it met yesterday’s sand.

  The whole building was involved, and containing the fire was the issue, there being a row of other derelict buildings on the block—some houses nearby, too, with families in them—equally old and primed like kindling. The firefighters were on it, and on it, and on it some more, putting out the fire only to have it spring up again in some far corner. A company from a nearby town also responded. After a couple of hours, it was over, the building three-quarters gone, soggy and smoldering. Some of the men had tried to search for trapped victims early in the blaze, but it had forced them back. Now that the fire was spent, it was time to go in.

  The ugliest job of all. They were thigh-deep, pushing through the shit of it, he’s been told, finding no living and no dead, when a triangle of roof collapsed. Bob doesn’t remember that roof, but the roof brought down a wall that he does remember: a roar of falling brick, and he was running toward a slash of sunlight, several of his company steps ahead. This memory repeats like a loop tape. It is a race he thinks they’ll win every time. He went down in the joy of escape and woke buried—how long later?—to the exhausted wail of a friend dying three feet away.

  He was in the hospital a long, long time.

  A man born to motion, he has a stillness about him now. Bob is burly, obviously powerful—tall and broad without being fat—eclipsing the wooden chair that holds him. But when he speaks, there is vulnerability, a sense of bewilderment, as though something here a moment ago, and precious, is gone. A big guy with a ravaged face and a wavering voice, he’s tough to read. You could be scared by him or moved. Bob knows this. I’m difficult, he says, turning a little more toward me from his position at a table flanked by windows. He reaches down to touch his dog. She looks up into his eyes even before the touch connects.

  They are an unexpected pair sitting quietly together in this tapas bar in Baltimore. The salt-and-pepper speckled dog at Bob’s left, just in the place where he can drop his hand and cup the dome of her head, is petite. She is thirty pounds, maybe, with delicate, deerlike white feet. The rest of her is spots all over. A circle of rust-colored fur around one eye looks like a monocle. She could be a Border collie crossed with an Aussie shepherd whose mother had had a fling with a husky fathered by a beagle. A right mix. Her red vest reads In Service on one side and Please Do Not Distract on the other.

  When the host first sat me at the table next to them, the man looked up, nodded, and looked back down at his menu. The dog gave me a single glance, sweetly alert, a double huff of nostrils that said she’d tagged my scent, and then she turned away. This dog was all business. When her partner cleared his throat, she looked up into his face immediately, holding her gaze there until something in his behavior satisfied her, and then she relaxed again. He extended his index finger to her cheek and gave it an absent scritch. She opened her mouth in the half smile, half pant of a happy dog. They obviously had things worked out.

  I partner a search-and-rescue dog of my own, so I was naturally intrigued by the pair. Since I’ve been on the other side of the admiring glances and the outright stares in public, I turned away, giving them their privacy. But the seated man had seen the logo of the search team I worked with, the silhouette of a dog, embroidered on my shirt, and he started the conversation.

  “Canine search-and-rescue?” he asked. I nodded. “Retired firefighter,” he said about himself, pointing his fork toward his chest. “Worked with the search dogs a few times. Good work.”

  “Beautiful partner you have there.”

  “Haska.” The dog glanced up at the sound of her name, poised forward on her keel and elbows in question, as if she was ready to get up if he was. He scratched her cheek, and she settled. “Bob.” He pointed the fork to his chest again.

  “Susannah.”

  We could see through the wide windows that it was still a nasty day here in Baltimore—strong winds scudding across a low-hung sky; intermittent sleet following a week of snow. Now and then, sun sliced through the gray, then disappeared again. Bob and I were the only patrons in the restaurant, both of us here for conferences. His hotel was rumored to have a norovirus running amok; my hotel had only one restaurant to serve several hundred attendees who didn’t want to leave the hotel and brave the ice.

  Both Bob and I had cabin fever, it turned out, so today we headed here from separate directions, teetering across the slick sidewalks to the Inner Harbor, to find lunch. We will end up sitting here for hours.

  We have much in common, we discover as we talk across two tables. H
e was born in Texas; I live there now. I’m a flight instructor; he took a dozen lessons a long time ago. He was a firefighter who sometimes worked with search dogs; I am a search dog handler who sometimes works with firefighters. We explore that shared ground, about calamity and scent and where the goodwill of the dogs instructs the lesser parts of us, and looking down into Haska’s face, Bob says that his dog has never seen a fire that he knows of, but she saves him plenty every day. That might sound sentimental from anyone else, but from him, it’s frank. This is my dog. This is what she does.

  Bob clears his throat often. He speaks in fits and starts—a burst of information and then a full stop for half a minute or more. He tells me about the fire, about losing fellow firefighters in the accident. I was lucky for so long, he says. Bound to happen sometime—getting hurt, losing brothers. Traumatic brain injury and subsequent psychological conditions put him in the hospital for almost a year. He stayed with a sister for another year after that.

  Once he was able to live independently again, Bob decided to get a dog. He says he wanted something to come home to, a dog that needed him as much as he needed her. Bob has balance problems now and then, so he didn’t want a small dog he might stumble over and crush, and at the city pound he nearly rejected petite Haska on that count. But he liked how she came right up to him when he approached her kennel and put her paws up on the chain link so softly that they didn’t make a sound. He fell for her pretty fast, he says, but because she’d been taken in as a stray who might have an owner searching for her, Haska wasn’t adoptable when they first met. So he went back every day to visit, and on every visit Haska wiggle-butted her way to him across the cold cement. Shelter staff took pity on their mutual devotion, and Bob was able to put in a first-bid application for her even before she was available. No one came to claim her, and Haska became adoptable on a Wednesday at 9:00 A.M. Bob got her at 9:01.

  And then she was his, and he was hers, and everyone, everyone questioned it, Bob says, because he’s recovering from an injury that should go away and posttraumatic stress disorder that maybe never will. He has headaches often and nightmares sometimes and tinnitus, which causes some everyday noises to be unbearable. He once walked into a quilting shop with his mother and the sound of a sewing machine nearly took the top of his head off. The worst thing about all of it, he tells me, is that he can’t go back to firefighting, ever, and yet he seems to live in a state of emergency.

  It was his therapist who suggested a service dog trained to intervene during PTSD events, something Bob had never heard of. They were discussing his ability to financially support a second dog when they realized he already had a trainable dog at home who could take on the job. Haska is now more than just a sensitive pet that is devoted to her owner. Through careful training, she has learned the changes of voice and posture and the fidgeting that begin her partner’s episodes. Always near Bob, at these times she is trained to redirect him. A nudge of his hand or a lick of his fingertips is sometimes enough, but in nightmare season, sometimes she has to paw him awake. He gets flashbacks, sometimes, and the public shakes, as he calls them, often, and then she may have to repeat her correction behaviors a dozen times or more: Here I am, here you are, here we are together. Haska can guide him from buildings. If he gets disoriented on neighborhood walks, she can lead him home.

  She’s very patient, but she’s also insistent. Bob says it’s Haska who grounds him in a better reality. Not every bang is a falling wall. A squeal of brakes is not a scream. He looks to his dog to tell the difference. Bob clears his throat again when he says this, a tense, habitual grind. Haska looks up at him thoughtfully, and he puts his hand to her head. In that moment, I see that the throat-clearing must be something he does both in an episode and out of it, and her assessment and his immediate response is the quick check between them.

  Haska is a psychiatric service dog, the first I have ever met. Her carefully developed partnership with Bob is a hard-won achievement on both sides, one that allows him to lead a fuller, independent life. Bob is proud of his dog and proud of himself, but he says they can’t really rest on their laurels. His disability, while thoroughly documented, is invisible. Any public outing has potential conflict. He takes a sip of iced tea and guesstimates that every third restaurant they enter tries to throw them out.

  According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a service animal is any animal that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act defines a disability as a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits one or more of a person’s major life activities. Regulations specify that the tasks performed by a service animal must be directly related to his handler’s disability. Disabilities may be physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or combinations of any of these, and dogs can be trained to serve them all.

  It is mighty work. There are thousands of service dogs performing thousands of tasks, partnering children and adults in public and private spaces worldwide. Most recognizable, perhaps, are guide dogs serving the blind; they began to be used in the late 1920s. Guide dogs stepped into the public consciousness in the years following World War II, when many veterans returned from battle with vision impairment, and the need for assistance was high. These partnerships were recognizable by both the harness and vest on the dog and the obvious disability of the handler.

  Guide dogs have proved their worth over decades. Other kinds of canine service have also demonstrated their importance: there are hearing-assistance dogs, dogs that aid mobility and balance, dogs that pick up or carry needed objects for their partners, dogs that respond to seizures, alert diabetic crises, or other catastrophic medical conditions, and, much more recently, dogs like Haska, who are trained to intervene in their handlers’ psychiatric disorders by performing specific tasks to prevent, lessen, or redirect their behaviors. Talented service animals empower human partners in all kinds of ways. But despite the service dogs’ long history, a great deal of media attention, the protections offered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and formal statements made by the Department of Justice, problems still arise. Misconceptions about them are common, everyday errands can create conflict, and in public places, partners with service dogs are often wrongly shown the door.

  Why is this? The United States provides some of the greatest support for service dog partnerships in the world, but perhaps problems still occur because service animals’ full access to public establishments was not a right until the Americans with Disabilities Act made it so, in the late twentieth century. Up to then, the public lives of assistance-dog-and-handler teams were limited. Now, more than twenty years later, some proprietors still don’t know about ADA protections. Some are not aware of the difference between a pet and a service animal and perceive any dog on the premises as a health-code violation. Some believe the dog’s presence is a safety risk to other customers and that they, the proprietors, are liable for any injury or accident that might occur. Some don’t understand the nature of canine service or believe in it. Some suspect they are being duped by ordinary pet owners. Others openly admit they simply don’t like dogs. Finally, especially in the case of medical-response canines and those that serve handlers with invisible disabilities, it’s not merely the necessity of the dog that’s questioned but also the existence of the disability itself. And for these partnerships, some of the greatest problems arise.

  In some ways, Bob says, he is fortunate. He is a big man and imposing, and as he was a firefighter, he is confident in tense situations and used to taking charge. Sometimes he doesn’t get questioned, and he attributes this to his size and the firefighter insignia he has on a couple of jackets. He’s been given a discreet high sign a few times, the wink-wink, as though proprietors were willing to sneak in the two of them under the halo of emergency services, as if Haska were a disaster dog and Bob were getting a quick hamburger before they went back on the job. This was especially true in the early years following 9/11. In
some ways, this made things easier for Bob, and he rolled with it, and in other ways, he says, it was frustrating. Bob had the uncomfortable feeling that sliding in as a firefighter wasn’t going to help the next guy who came along with a service dog.

  And so he has tried to become an educator, he says, which means being far more open about himself and his condition than he could have ever imagined three years ago. Bob has taken off the firefighter jacket. He has learned to recognize the double take at his dog, and the hesitation, and when he’s questioned, he responds by saying, “This is my service dog, Haska. She is trained to prompt me out of PTSD episodes that I can’t predict.” Bob recognizes that in telling others his dog’s task, he necessarily discloses the disability that Haska serves. He is not required by law to state his disability to anyone. But how can he explain what she does without revealing something of himself? He’s not a wordsmith. He shrugs and says he thinks this is a place he had to get to. It’s all right. Strangely enough, the more he owns his condition, the more empowered he seems to become.

  Bob and Haska leave the restaurant before I do. I see them out the door, hear the ting-ting of Haska’s tags as she pads with him down the stairs. Moments later, they move cautiously across the reddish pavement on the water side of the Inner Harbor, bright figures on a gray day in early February. They are completely in sync. I like my last view of them, the big man and the petite dog picking their careful way across the ice.

  2

  I UNDERSTOOD BOB BETTER than I let on to him. While I’ve never experienced disaster in the ways that he had as a firefighter, I know some of the symptoms he described all too well. I’ve had the nightmares and the breathless wakefulness that follows them, the sense of universal urgency, and the insomnia that leads to punchy, disconnected days. Construction bangs and squealing brakes don’t bother me, but I do know what it is to be caught in a set of behaviors that seem almost impossible to control.