The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  “Do you ever get anything bad said about you because you have such a mean breed?” the woman asked.

  Like so many questions, this was really a statement.

  “No,” said Pam. “I don’t.” And she let it go.

  But during the course the class, which also included the woman’s husband, Pam made a point of keeping Caro in the woman’s sightline. Sweet, eager to learn, and in control, Caro had it in her to override prejudice, and Pam wanted to give her a chance to do it. After the class, Pam purposely walked Caro close to the woman and stopped near her as she was gathering up her things. Pam knew what was going to happen. Caro wiggled her way up to the woman and, at some sign of invitation, sat down, leaning on her, just doing her sweetness. Pam could see the change. The woman first bent over to pet her and then couldn’t resist hugging Caro, saying, “Oh, she’s just the sweetest dog.” It was a little moment, just a little thing, but it felt good to change one mind.

  Pam is a thorough partner. Caro was a quick study. Caro earned her therapy-dog certification within six months of adoption. With Pam, Caro works in the Paws to Read program at a local library, a “listener” for children to read aloud to, an encouragement for anxious readers who struggle. Caro’s compassion for kids is leading other places. Soon she will assist at a local child-advocacy center, a support resource while children who have been sexually abused wait before forensic interviews. Such centers strive to be child-friendly, and dogs like Caro provide distraction, encouragement, and calm.

  Going from last-chance dog to goodwill ambassador is a long journey to make in a short time, especially for a dog that once literally climbed the walls of an animal shelter and exploded from the side of a horse trailer.

  Mary comments on the phone:

  “I didn’t go into rescue thinking that this would happen. I went into this to save the lives of dogs and to match those dogs up with good families and people. But to see one of our dogs—[like] Caro in her therapy vest—it is that sense of accomplishment that wow, we had something to do with this. It’s good work. It’s worthy work. Pam deserved the chance to have this dog, and this dog deserved the chance to have her. It was just a great meeting of spirit and generosity and energy. She was not a dog everybody would be able to take. They would just overlook her.

  “We’ve had it happen that way before. Someone sees a dog and says, ‘That is my dog,’ and he’s a plain brown dog. But that doesn’t happen often. And it’s different from when it’s a little adorable Maltese cross, and he’s very cute, and someone, several someones, will quickly say, ‘That is my dog,’ about a little Maltese cross. And little Maltese crosses deserve good homes too. I don’t try to figure it out. But when it happens for one of these dogs—for one of the black dogs or the brown dogs—that’s when I think . . . ah . . . it was a very good day.”

  26

  IT’S A BLUSTERY, UNCERTAIN morning when I leave Puzzle with the vet who has long cared for her. Puzzle picked up a skin infection after search work in an unfamiliar area, and she is now very sick. She is always slow to show pain, but yesterday, on the Take Me Back portion of a search exercise, she lay down on a sidewalk, put her head on her paws, and whimpered. It was only the third time I’d ever heard her cry.

  What began as an annoyance, a rash across her belly, has progressed to something that I cannot seem to get control of—not with Eastern, Western, traditional, and holistic therapies; medication; food changes; flea preventive for dog, house, and yard; healing shampoos; and all kinds of prayers and psychic incantations for her by friends near and far. She rallies sometimes and always wants to go out-out-out to work, but I don’t know why that’s so. She hasn’t been able to shake whatever this is. Now Puzzle’s exhausted with itching, and it seems her inflamed skin cannot heal. Golden retrievers and itchy skin—a common misery, apparently, but it has come to a desperate pass. This morning I could not find an inch of my dog that wasn’t inflamed.

  The vets and I have tried every medical approach we know over the past four months. In that time, I’ve watched my merry girl diminish. She’s lost fur, she’s lost weight, she’s lost joy. I’ve pulled her from wilderness work until we can get her well, and Puzzle still lights up briefly during urban-search training, but then she comes home and fades. Even after she has a soothing bath in oatmeal shampoo to get rid of whatever might be out there in wherever, it’s scratch-scratch-scratch, often deep into the night. By day she withdraws into a fitful sleep.

  The only relief we found was during a brief visit to Colorado during a late-spring snowfall, where the itching stopped and her eyes grew bright again. Now I half wonder if my dog has grown allergic to Texas. I half wonder if we’ll have to move to heal her. Search-and-rescue friends in other states make offers. They can keep her in the bad seasons. They have a room, a guesthouse, an apartment where we could both come and live and work in the summer worst of it. They offer every kindness, and I consider their offers carefully. Puzzle is a young dog still, but she moves now like she is very old.

  I stay with Puzzle at night, following her restless course from room to room as she tries to elude the itching. We move from my bed to the couch to the daybed to the living room floor. Puzzle paces, and I am just behind her, dragging a pillow and a quilt to lie near wherever she can manage to settle. The dogwatch, I call it with any of my sick dogs, feeling better about being nearby in case one takes a sudden turn for the terrible. We’ve had enough sudden turns for the terrible that go more terrible still, and I can’t bear the thought of that happening to Puzzle. How bad does infected skin have to get before her other organs are affected? Like so many ill dogs, Puzzle has grown remote in her distress. Even so, she seems vaguely grateful to have me close these nights. Often when she feels me settle beside her, she extends her head to give my hand a lick.

  Jake Piper, in turn, shadows both of us. Puzzle has ceased playing with him during these sick days, and he seems aware that she’s unwell. He doesn’t try to provoke her into play, but he lies nearby with an intent expression, watching me, watching her. He is the only dog in the house that chooses to do so. The little dogs are mildly disturbed by our restlessness—a few grumble, the new, sightless rescues raise their heads and gaze toward us like oracles, but Jake Piper alone is involved.

  When the vet recommended that I bring her in so he could isolate and treat the skin infection, I hoped, as I’d hoped all the other times, that at last we’d get an answer. I felt heartsick leaving her behind, and she was bewildered by it: my beautiful, vibrant, happy working dog who, other than when she was bitten by a snake, has never been sick in her life. I cradled her in my arms and kissed her too-hot ears, and when the vet returned to take her, I went so swiftly out of the room and down the corridor and out the door that I heard one customer say to another: “She must have lost that little golden.”

  It helps to be busy. I can’t stop myself from falling into the old routine of getting on with things, so for the next few days I make a too-long list of errands and overbook myself to distract my thoughts from a much-loved dog in shadow. The little dogs get bathed and brushed out. The house is impossibly, even obsessively cleaned.

  But there’s a difference. I’ve done enough pacing over sick dogs in the past to feel it. Jake Piper is now a figure in this waiting. He’s a dog trained to attend a human partner, and he does so. He is pensive over Puzzle’s absence, but he keeps me in his sightline, stays beside me nonetheless. A calendar note shows that he’s due for a trip to his own vet, who’s closer to home. It’s just a checkup that could be done at any time in the next month. We’ll do it now, I say to him. Despite his confusion, he carefully watches me lock the door. When I don’t double-check it, he seems relieved for both of us. He hops in the Jeep without a backward glance. Jake seems eager to be out of the house. Inside, he never stops searching for his missing friend.

  For a dog who’s about to do nothing more than get a standard vet check and a toenail trim, Jake Piper is awfully pleased with himself. He seems to think any vet visit is
one big party for the good white dog. He pads into the waiting room at the vet’s office, gives a friendly chuff to the office cat, and wags wildly to the receptionist, but when he’s asked, he drops into a polite Down/Stay at my feet and waits for whatever celebration of Jake Piper is to come. The receptionist leans over the counter and remarks on the change since she last saw him. Jake is bigger, stronger, his ears are up, and his eyes are clear, she says. And he’s better behaved! We say that almost in unison. The first time he came here, he was still a little freaky over friendly young faces. I can see the wannabe-freak in his eyes even now, looking up at her smiling down, but he holds Sit, he holds it, and he doesn’t budge as she coos at him, against all odds and despite the bowl of dog biscuits on the counter.

  Then the glass door opens, and a man and two children enter leading a long-coated white German shepherd. She is a beauty, with dark almond-shaped eyes, upright ears, and a gracious, regal manner. She fills up the room. Everyone stares at her for an extended moment—she is that kind of dog—and then all of Jake’s obedience evaporates in the flash of their connection. He gives a happy shriek. The German shepherd lets out a single bark at the same time that Jake Piper belly-crawls toward her whimpering, his ears folded and his tail whip-whipping across the linoleum floor.

  “Can they meet?” asks the gentleman, ready to reel in his dog.

  “They can meet,” I answer, lapsing as a handler, unhappy with Jake’s lapse of obedience but wondering at this. He has never responded to an unfamiliar dog this way before. Jake frog-swims over to her on his belly, remains low while she nuzzles his ears and licks his face with meticulous swipes. He squeaks and waves his paws, rolling belly-up before her. It’s a playful lovefest, a lovefest interrupted when a client wrangling cats in two carriers pushes the door open with her backside. The poor woman is overladen, her purse, bra strap, and glasses slipping every which way, her cats yowling profanities from the depths of the carriers.

  We separate the dogs to help her. When I call Jake back to me, he surprises me by scrambling to his feet and returning quickly, sniffing my hands, his eyes wide and his ears alternately perking and folding at the tremendous noise set up by the unhappy cats. A spiked, angry paw fishes out of one of the carriers. Jake knows cats, but this . . . Joy, wonder, curiosity, fear all play across my transparent dog’s face.

  The German shepherd isn’t ready to let go. She is uninterested in the cats, but she strains across the floor to get back to Jake Piper, her tail waving lightly. Her owner is apologetic; she is usually not this way. The children haul away at their dog by pulling on the leash in their father’s hand, and the German shepherd acquiesces, giving in to their pull even while her eyes are on Jake and his are on her. The two dogs are completely different in build, coat, ears, and tail, but their faces look so much alike in that moment of parting that I suddenly wonder if this is Jake’s mother.

  Such a beautiful dog. The children tell me she came from a shelter. More than a year ago, their father adds. They had in mind to get a puppy, but then they found this grown dog. My God, he says, there were so many dogs and not enough people coming in the door. They saw her big brown eyes and had to save her. Perhaps, like Jake, she too had once been abandoned. The timing of her adoption at the shelter and Jake’s appearance at my house would be right.

  But their dog is as elegant as mine is ungainly. The two dogs do have common features and some shared spark—but what is it? I’ve heard that female dogs and their puppies typically lose a sense of each other over time. It seems wildly romantic and Disney-esque to think that Jake and his mother have found each other now, to believe that on a random day by coincidence some terrible parting was healed.

  What does matter is that their meeting today has given Jake Piper some happiness. It could be, of course, that Jake Piper senses something in the female dog that is similar to Puzzle, the dog that actually raised him. There are similarities between this girl and our golden, too, especially the soft eye and the quick, affectionate acceptance. Perhaps for Jake, even though this dog isn’t Puzzle, she is close enough.

  The German shepherd’s appointment is before ours. Her name is called; the family leads her back to the examining area easily, her pretty head up, plume tail waving as she tap-tap-taps across the speckled linoleum floor. Jake Piper cannot take his eyes off her. I have not asked him to. He holds his Down/Stay, but with his head resting on his paws, he watches her go.

  After his checkup and nail trim, after all the praise and cookies that come to fearless, social Jake Piper back in the reception area, we head home. The Poms seem furious that he has had some adventure that they have not. This is always the way of it. Though they can no doubt smell the vet’s office, which they dislike, they appear to scold Jake for getting a trip they were denied. They scrimmage around his ankles, suspiciously working the scent he’s brought in. Jake ignores them, which can’t be easy. He turns away from spinning Mr. Sprits’l, sidesteps Smokey, and high-steps over Mizzen, who would feed her head to him. Jake disregards all of them and immediately begins looking for Puzzle, clearing the house the way a search dog would, room by room.

  “She isn’t here. She isn’t here,” I remind him. We’re told dogs live in the moment. That sounds like a virtue, until I realize Jake may have the new pain of loss each time he returns.

  He clears the house and returns to me. Whether he stays close because he senses my distress or because he seeks to comfort his own, I don’t know, but Jake is at my side. The third night without Puzzle brings me a series of bad dreams, a tangle of losses in the search field that will not resolve, and I wake to find Jake has crawled up into the Solace position that I taught him, his paws on my upper arm, head resting on my chest just in the place where a heart would ache. Solace is our command word for the task so often needed by those with panic attacks, night terrors, or sudden sinks of depression, and I taught it to Jake without ever thinking forward to a moment he might need to offer it to me.

  The Poms are also anxious, and they have spun up with it. On the third day, the only way to quiet them is to give them something else to think about. Jake and the little guys get Sits and treats for goodness, and then I vest Jake up and lock the door—lock it only once (he is watching)—and we head out to train. I don’t know what he understands, how he framed Puzzle’s illness, which he could surely scent, and how he makes sense of her absence now. He is subdued where he’d normally be electric on a walk. Jake Piper steps into a Heel beside me as we turn northward from the house. The prettier walk is the other direction, but we head out along the same street Puzzle and I once took while looking for Lost signs and waiting for a word from the vet about puppy Jake.

  I can see approaching weather ahead of us, a blue-gray roll of cloud with a darker sky behind it. This is the kind of weather that Puzzle and I love to work. With the wind swinging across the compass, working scent direction becomes a challenge. If she were home, and well, I would have Puzzle out now. I would have called some neighbor, asked some friend to leave a shoe out for us and to hide blocks away. Puzzle would have enjoyed trailing our volunteer missing person to the find, and then she would have brought us all home, head up, tail swishing, prideful.

  But Jake is with me, bless him. His working walks have other tasks. His walks are about attentiveness and self-discipline and orientation. So we’ll head north, and east, and randomly south and east and north again. We’ll walk until we’re tired. My intention is to wander the way any distressed person might, and carrying the weight of worry for Puzzle makes it easy.

  We’ll wander, and maybe at the end of that meander, Jake can lead us home. He’s been closer to success with the long-distance Home command lately, though once he sidetracked us to a playground full of children, and last time he took us to a very promising backyard barbecue with a keg, a smoker, and three grills going. Apparently, to Jake, home is where the party is.

  No kids on playgrounds. No steaks today. He looks up at me now and again in question. It’s not Puzzle’s glance to doubl
e-check my position on a search; Jake is focused on my face. Once I catch his gaze and realize I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and am just standing there. Scared has caught up with me; sad has too.

  As one neighborhood shifts into the next, we pass more dogs than people. Some of the dogs are interested in us. They poise at fences, some wagging, some springing up as though savage, some booming happy woofs out of eager faces. Some dogs seem anxious with the sense of storm. We see a brownish Lab mix pacing on a chain in a side yard. He is a big dog, but exposed to the weather, he is reduced by every new gust of wind, has his ears down and his tail tucked. He stretches to the very end of his chain, yearning toward a front porch he cannot reach. We see dogs in crates under carports. We see inside dogs straining to see us, their paws on streaked windows. One tiny, very senior fuzzy mop appears to be on the back of a couch. She’s a pretty little dog, wreathed by a quilt in what seems to be a place of honor. She has a whole picture window to herself, and though she watches us pass before her, she doesn’t speak. Jake Piper is silent also. He notices all the dogs—ears perked and gait growing more sprightly in some nonverbal exchange with some of them—but he holds his walk beside me.