“They say horses don’t know what size they are,” said Ben, just throwing it out there.
“What a good dog you have,” said an elderly man with an anxious, wild-eyed dachshund that happily shadowed Merlin as he circuited.
“You should have named him Paxil,” added another. (Oh, the things Gene could have said but did not.)
Word got around that Merlin was good with small, reactive dogs. Somehow a casual volunteerism emerged. Gene and his service dog became regulars. They made dog-park dates at odd hours with others. Gene, the former recluse, now sits on a park bench with like-minded friends, cradling a cup of coffee, watching Merlin trot a circular course through the compound, a black sun to an orbit of little dogs of all tempers. The Lab can keep this up for hours, giving himself plenty of exercise and the small dogs four times more.
10
IT IS DARK, DARK, and I am dreaming of dogs when one of my own wakes me. It is Sam, I think at first, because I’ve been dreaming about him—Sam, who is known for his sweet shyness, his soft requests for attention. It takes me a moment to realize it can’t be Sam, whose heart failed as he lay in my arms during a seizure ten days before. I resuscitated him only to have him die again a few minutes later. I wake to feel his absence like a bruise.
No, it’s not Sam. It’s Misty now at my shoulder pawing frantically. Was I having a nightmare? I roll over and recognize that we must have had a hard night. I am lying diagonally across the bed, with my head almost at the foot of it, and Misty is on my pillow. But something isn’t right. She’s lying uneasily on her chest, like a boat tilted to starboard, and she’s got her neck stretched oddly. I can hear her gasping for air. In the faint light from a hallway lamp, her dark eyes are terrified.
How long has she been in distress? How hard was it to wake me? I don’t know, but I can see the situation is bad, and worse, I can hear the wet, gurgly sound of her breathing. Misty is drowning. This is congestive heart failure at its ugliest. I’ve seen it before. I am up out of bed immediately, and with a glance at the clock I realize that the lowered window shades made it seem earlier and darker than it is. It is actually 6:45 A.M.
Shoes. Glasses. Driver’s license. Keys. And behind the search for all of that, the gurgle of a little dog’s lungs.
Misty.
And which way to travel? The emergency vet will close in forty-five minutes. A regular vet clinic miles in the other direction will open in forty-five, but vets may not arrive for another hour and a half.
From her position on the bed, Misty wheezes and watches me throw on tennis shoes with my pajamas, phone cradled against my shoulder as I call the emergency vet asking if I can give her more Lasix before we make our way to help. They confirm that I should but tell me to head to a regular clinic. They will be closed by the time I can get there. Knowing Misty’s distress, I can’t be sure she will take anything by mouth, but I wrap the pill in a bit of dog food. It is small, and I expect refusal, but she seems to understand the urgency. She takes it and swallows, gagging and choking wetly before the swallow. When she looks up, I see her mouth has turned a bluish-gray.
The other dogs are concerned, moving in and out like an anxious entourage. Smart too. They give way to our scramble, and we are off as quickly as I can get Misty and my pillow out of the house and down the steps. She doesn’t struggle. In the car, I secure her seat-belt harness, tilt her up on the pillow, and am relieved to see her panting mouth pinken slightly as she sits propped upright, though her breathing still seems to bubble in her throat. We head out on the sleepy streets of my small town, with its four-way stops and kindly you-go-first hand motions, and into early-rush-hour freeway traffic on a Friday. It’s the tortoise-and-hare commute I’ve made every day for five months, but now I’m alternately cursing every left-lane driver on a cell phone and pleading with Misty to hang on, as though anything I say to her can help her body as well as her frightened little spirit. I’m watching the road, but I can feel her eyes on me and hear her shift awkwardly on the pillow, tilting left and right in her struggle for air.
Traffic inbound to the city is slow, slower, slowest, and stopped. Something is clearly wrong ahead. As I exit to get onto an access road, Misty gags and falls sideways, shuddering against the seat belt, her open mouth blue and her eyes rolling upward. Clear of traffic now, I veer onto the shoulder, stop, bang on the hazard lights with my knuckle, and take her out of the seat belt and up into my arms, holding her in a sitting position against my chest, ready to breathe into her mouth. She goes limp and her urine soaks through the front of my pajamas, and I think that maybe nothing I can do will be enough to save her. But when I tilt her a little more in my arms, she gasps deeply and blinks, licking her lips and retracting her blue tongue.
There is no help for it; I have to hold her all the way to the vet like this.
It is a slow drive on the access road, charged and surreal, my own heartbeat thudding dully in my ears. We arrive at the clinic just as they open. I bump open the door with my hip as soon as a receptionist unlocks it. She takes one look at my little blue dog and soaked pajamas and calls a vet tech from where we stand. Without introduction or apology, the vet tech scoops Misty out of my arms and heads for oxygen.
The interim is a blur of paperwork and tedious personal details, like remembering my own name and address. Misty’s information comes more easily: her age and general state of health, the historic carpet-tack surgery, the exact date of the congestive heart failure diagnosis, her medications. Filling out those forms is a frustration and a comfort while we wait for the vet’s arrival. My hand shakes across the paper, and I feel every sense stretching toward the room where little Misty dog lies. I can hear the tech talking to the vet on the phone quite clearly, giving Misty’s particulars in the dispassionate way of professionals, confirming what he’s done, confirming what he needs to do further before the vet arrives.
“She looks a little better,” I hear him say through the door, and my heart beats time to that awhile. It’s the only good word I have.
Twenty minutes later, the vet has arrived, the forms have been completed, and I’m studying a poster promoting dental hygiene and feline health. The vet comes out of Misty’s room. He looks young and pink and sleepy. But when we speak, and he pulls out a pad to draw me a diagram of Misty’s condition as he sees it in real time, he is calm and competent. This is a bad event, he tells me, but her color has improved under the oxygen, and more Lasix seems to have helped. She is breathing better and sounds stronger, and, when I pick her up this afternoon or tomorrow morning, would I be willing to add another med to the rotation of pills she gets already?
I agree to anything. I agree to everything, elated by the news that she has taken a turn for the better. The vet gives me a high-five (not to tempt the devil, he says as he does so)—my emergency rush for help was right on. Misty wouldn’t have made it much longer.
So go, he says, and I’ll give you a call this afternoon to tell you whether you should come get her tonight or in the morning. I head home to shower and dress for a day’s worth of meetings and a radio interview. I’ll have to rush not to be late. But my mind is full of the little Pomeranian. I’ll buy Misty a special cushion as a welcome home.
When my cell phone pips ninety minutes later with a text—CALL VET—I know it’s not a good thing. When the vet calls sixty seconds after that, it’s to tell me Misty is gone.
I can’t remember a thing about the two days that follow.
“Not your fault,” says Paula, in the early morning of the third.
Not your fault, posts a good friend online shortly after that.
“Not your fault,” says a search-and-rescue colleague, says pretty much everyone who hears the story of our double loss—Sam the first week of August, and Misty the second. I know my friends mean well, and I know that I did everything I could, but the ghosts of lost minutes and different decisions will follow me for a while, as though a better, smarter Susannah would have wakened earlier or moved faster or done some miraculous
other thing that would have made a difference to either of them. I cannot shake the notion that I failed them. It is a consuming grief. Those first days I too have the sensation of drowning.
Get on with it, I say to myself, and I do, somehow. The remaining dogs and I follow the greased grooves of our habits together, but the absence of Misty and Sam has affected them too, and I notice they seem in a kind of perpetual hover as we move through the house, their anxious eyes on me as we avoid the spaces the lost dogs once loved.
It is normal to grieve but pointless to brood, I tell myself. Get on with it, I repeat like a punishment, get on with it. I clean furiously, and I garden with a vengeance. I do more psych dog research. I draft the outline of a novel. I wash all the dogs in turn, whether they need it or not. (I wash Mr. Sprits’l twice in the same day—first and last—and he submits with merely a raise of eyebrows before I realize he was the first dog in the soap earlier that morning. Oh, well. He is very, very clean.) We are busy and productive, by God, making the hours count. Nothing about this cold anger with myself makes me think, Uh-oh. It takes the immediate return of nightmares, the same dreams of chained dogs abandoned and rescues failed, to show me how much old trouble is rising.
As I catch myself double- and triple-checking the locked back door one morning (Uh-oh), I hear a knock at the front. I’m in a suit and heels, ready for a full day of by God, getting on with it, and I hurry down the hall, ready to be furious with some solicitor trying to sell me something just as I’m heading out to work. I am really ready to take all this out on someone.
At the door is a neighbor I’ve seen around but don’t know, holding a wiggling bundle of white.
“We found this little . . .” he says without introduction. “We don’t know what to do. The lady next door says you rescue . . . and we’re . . . allergic,” he adds. He thrusts the bundle into my arms like it’s a peanut he very much fears.
The wiggle squeaks. It’s a puppy—all jutting hipbones and ribs and trembling. He looks up at me with desperate eyes, and I can see how sunken they are. It’s a pit bull terrier puppy, and he is starving to death.
11
OF COURSE I TAKE THE PUPPY. Of course I say yes, though I’ll be late for the meeting I was heading out to, and I retreat into the house, where I’m surrounded by furious Pomeranians and inquisitive search dog Puzzle. I lift the puppy high, folding his little bones up and away from all of them (he could be infectious), but Puzzle makes sense of him anyway, trotting behind me with her head up. I can hear the huff-huff-huff of her working his scent. I put him in my bathroom with food, water, and a folded quilt, sit on the floor beside him in my suit and heels. He tucks into the kibble and then curls up without protest, which shows how weak he is. A ten-week-old puppy in health would have been bounding, tugging, checking things out, braiding around my ankles like he was wrapping a Maypole. This one eats like he has never had a meal, then flops down as though the eating wore him out. He falls asleep almost immediately, his chin on the lip of the bowl.
I sit in the meeting full of conflicting thoughts, and the white huddle of puppy on a blanket is present in all of them. I am anxious for him, angry that someone allowed him to starve to that state, and I’m dizzy with the sudden logistics of vet trips and—if he survives—having a potentially large-breed puppy in my house full of small, senior dogs.
Not all of my thoughts are selfless. In fact, it’s pretty safe to say most of them aren’t. The start of a brand-new academic year, this is no time for a puppy. And this one has arrived when I’m not ready to receive him—grieving that I couldn’t save Misty and grieving that I put Sam through a second round of dying, and I am probably also angry that I have not yet made peace with the loss of them and with my own sense of failure. In the space of just a few days, the insomnia, guilt, and nightmares I’d known in 2004 have all returned in a rush—the locked door might not really be locked—and now there is all that and a puppy, who will not bring peace. I think my heart is closed to this stranger, too sad to be open to another dog so soon. I have no thought that his unplanned presence might rewrite my depression and invigorate the other dogs, who in their dog way also seem to be grieving lost companions. I am too full of burden to be compassionate or wise.
He’ll have to go somewhere else. That’s all there is to it. Decision made. Firm.
This is something worse than starvation, the vet tells me as he palpates the puppy’s abdomen and shakes his head over the thermometer. Less than twenty-four hours after little-mister-no-name arrived, I found blood on his back end and a red bubble at the corner of his mouth, and within an hour, we were at the vet. We made the same trip I’d made with Misty days before. The pup sat in the same seat, wearing the same seat-belt harness, and as we threaded the same anxious way southward, we probably passed the same cars. If I believed in cosmic jokes, I’d be looking for the punch line right about now, I said to the little dog.
As it is, I’m looking down on a veterinarian’s metal table at a diminishing puppy that is far too ill to be frightened, too weak to even struggle against the pokes and sticks and swabs, and I’m aware that I’m already hopelessly attached. I’ve got to find him a place to go—I am still telling myself that—but he deserves good care. Decision made. Firm. “Whatever he needs,” I say in the same way I agreed to anything that might have helped Misty, and something lurches inside, because this all feels too familiar, and this little guy looks far worse than she did. After a long scrutiny, the vet can give me a maybe at best. He says the puppy will need days of hospitalization, massive antibiotics, and fluids by IV. Despite all this, he still may not survive.
The vet gives us a private moment before I leave. It is the same quiet move always made at the point of euthanasia, and I wonder if this good doctor, who has known me and all my animals a long while, is telling me indirectly to say goodbye. Almost literally fading before my eyes, the puppy is now too weak to sit up. I kneel down beside the metal table, and he lays his head on my open hand. He is ugly from neglect, patchy fur stretched taut over visible bones, but he is beautiful, nonetheless, all dark eyes and wonky crashed-kite ears. Despite his recent hardship, there is trust in his eyes.
“You stay strong,” I tell him. I can hardly speak. I lift his forepaw to my mouth and kiss the spotted pads.
I foolishly hit PetSmart on the way home, as if buying him things, believing in him, gives him a better chance to make it. By evening he has a puppy bed, a collar, and an unreasonable number of toys. He also has a name: Piper, because his ears look like the gull-winged version of that airplane, and Jake, because it’s strong. Jake Piper sounds like the detective hero of an old noir film.
At home, the dogs are surely aware of Jake Piper’s absence. They sniff and circle all the places where he had been, even though I was on my hands and knees scouring and disinfecting every surface he’d touched before they ever got near. He is there in some way for all of us. I wash all his brand-new, waiting toys. The dogs stand in the doorway of the laundry room and watch me dump the bright lot of fuzzy dinosaurs and stuffed hamburgers, the googly-eyed carrot and the I am loved embroidered bear, the whole lot of them into soap and more soap, temperature set on hot.
So much change in a week. None of it escapes them. And whether answering my obvious anxiety or comforting their own, I’m not sure, but all the dogs are following me. Normally, they’d be napping in the middle of a summer day, but now Puzzle trots through the house at my right, her expression thoughtful, and Sprits’l leads the rest of the pack at my left. When I stop, they stop. The Pomeranians’ eyebrows raise. Puzzle waits with her tail swaying expectantly. The house is clean. The puppy is gone. What’s next? the dogs seem to wonder, charged with my restlessness.
The vet said he would call at the end of the day with an update. That he hasn’t called already is a good sign, but I’m too wired to sit and wait. What’s next, I think, is to find out what went on with Jake Piper before. Maybe someone lost him. Maybe someone is missing him. Maybe someone’s child is missing him.
Maybe he got into this shape by digging under a fence or bolting out a door, and it’s no one’s fault really, the starvation and infection, and maybe there is as much love on the departure side of Jake Piper as there is, already, where he has arrived with me. (I’m aware that finding whoever might be missing him will likely mean the end of us, a thought I avoid.)
Knowing the day he arrived and from what direction, I clip on Puzzle’s lead and out we head into the neighborhood. My little dogs, of course, have something to say about that. They follow our passage as long as they can see us, moving northward through the house along the windows, yapping in protest.
Mine are not the only dogs interested in Puzzle and me. Most of our canine neighbors rush the fence line to greet us. Some announce their territory. Others petition for play. I see the perked ears and wags. I see them stamp with excitement and bow. A few whine to Puzzle, particularly the retrievers. Puzzle whines back, and whatever they are saying to each other seems to make them both happy. I imagine those scenes in 101 Dalmatians where all the dogs of a city transmit news across neighborhoods to one another, and I wish it were possible to ask Puzzle to ask all those dogs that press their faces toward us if they have any information on a white puppy, about this tall, with crazy ears like this, mostly bones and bad luck, who came from the north.
As it is, we have nothing obvious—no Lost or Missing signs, no anxious person walking the same streets that we are, puppy collar in hand, calling an unfamiliar name. We are a neighborhood with animals, but strangely, everyone with a dog, cat, parrot, or potbellied pig seems to know where his pets are. Apparently, no one has lost a puppy. Of course, Jake’s disappearance may have been welcomed by someone. He could well have been dumped at the edge of our dog-loving neighborhood, dumped hungry, which at least was a notch above tossing him into a lake in a bag with a brick. In this town, there are always more puppies than homes.
The Possibility Dogs Page 10