The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Have a plan B in place on behalf of the dog you have chosen. Any dog brought into the home should have a plan B, and that does not mean “If he doesn’t work out, we’ll take him to the pound.” I mean a responsibly chosen, viable safe harbor. I would say the same for anyone simply choosing a pet—be fair, be careful, be prepared, be diligent for a creature that deserves, as we all do, a good life.

  Caveats aside, the good news is that rescuing and owner-training an assistance dog can be done, and brilliantly, for both dog and handler. I would do it again without hesitation.

  If I have any advice to offer about the owner-trained service partnership, it is first to absolutely collaborate with professionals on the finding, evaluating, and training of the candidate dog. Find a trainer with service experience if you can. A community of supportive peers is also a great thing. The gracious help and experiences of other handlers made my own work beside Jake so much stronger.

  Readers are often curious about what happened next for the influential figures that leave their mark across a memoir. At the time of this writing, I know the next chapters for some of them.

  After more than twenty-five years working rescue, Paula retired. After much love and “thorough spoiling” in Paula’s house, whistling Jasper would go on to become an emotional support dog for a chronically ill and bedridden child.

  Severe arthritis forced black Lab Merlin into retirement. Though his partner, Gene, credited Merlin for helping him heal to the point that he no longer required a service dog, Gene did bring in a rescued young poodle mix as company for Merlin, who was quickly besotted.

  Alex, challenged and changed by whippet–pit bull Roscoe, did not need another service dog. After Roscoe’s death, Alex rescued a second pit bull mix, now a loved family pet and companion.

  Beautiful, soulful Lexie continues to serve beside partner Nancy, answering her needs with insistence and devotion. Nancy, her husband, and Lexie have recently rescued Pomeranian Joey, a joyful personality, a mighty presence.

  Search dog Puzzle recovered completely from the six-month skin infection that so mystified us. Working mostly with special-needs missing-person cases, at nine years old Puzzle still works search-and-rescue and assists in the training of service dog orientation tasks. She is in love with her job, happy to work her nose in any way we ask her to.

  Fo’c’sle Jack, the pirate Pom, big eater, lover of treats—the dashing therapy dog that always had an angle—died just days before this book was finished. Though not a rescue, Jack was truly my first working partner of any kind, the one who showed me what goodness a dog can bring forward when given the chance.

  Mr. Sprits’l, the small Pomeranian writ large, continues commenting on everything in the house and outside it. How did I manage, what did the world do, before Mr. Sprits’l was here to put things in order? Jobless, vestless, like so many loved pets, he’s a bright spark nonetheless. I couldn’t ask more of him. I wouldn’t change a thing.

  In late 2008, Smokey began paying close attention to Ellen, a good friend of Erin’s and mine that he has long known. Particularly in that period, if Ellen was in the house, Smokey was where she was. He followed her from room to room. He sat where she sat. Not long after we noted this new hovering, Ellen was diagnosed with breast cancer. The condition was advanced when it was discovered, the treatment rigorous and debilitating, and in the period of Ellen’s long struggle through chemotherapy, aggressive surgery, and radiation, Smokey attached himself to her at every opportunity, as close as he could possibly get. We both remembered Erin. We’d seen Smokey’s behavior before. Smokey gave Ellen the same attentiveness he’d devoted to his Erin, but with a difference. This time he was equally involved, but perhaps he had learned something beside his first person, or perhaps he’d just matured. This time, he was calm where he had once been overwrought. Smokey didn’t interfere with caregivers or snap when he was gestured from Ellen’s side. At the time of this writing, Ellen is three years cancer-free. We can’t really prove why Smokey hovered near before her diagnosis, but Ellen credits his saving presence through the worst of a terrible year.

  Maddye the cat curled up in sunlight until her last day with us, in January 2012. The playful feud long over, it was Jake who led me to Maddye in the health crisis that took her.

  Jake Piper has passed his Public Access Test and trains forward on new tasks beside me—psych service, utility, mobility. In autumn 2012, I was medically advised to prepare for the need of a service dog. That Jake Piper had already begun the process sits somewhere for me between serendipity and miracle. He is both teaching partner and valued helpmate and bound to become more so.

  Chocolate Pomeranian Mizzen is now a wellness day companion through Possibility Dogs, an emotional support/therapy Pom that travels to private homes for daylong visits. Sociable and merrily adaptable, Mizzen enjoys this. She likes going out to new places, and she loves coming home again.

  Tiny, gentle Ollie T is a therapy dog that works primarily with seniors and ill children. Somewhere in the intersection of cartoon features and charm is a serenity one caregiver described as “mystical.” Ollie’s presence soothes.

  Acknowledgments

  I COULD NOT HAVE written this book without the encouragement, information, solid support, and occasional handholding of a whole lot of people. First thanks go to all the patient folks—literally hundreds—of mental health professionals; dog evaluators and trainers; search-and-rescue colleagues; service organization personnel; service and therapy dog handlers; and animal rescue volunteers who contributed generously and mightily to every aspect of this book. Whether I have simply followed your work from afar, exchanged only a sentence with you, had a long conversation, or maintained a working relationship across years, I learned from you, am still learning as fast as you can teach me, and I cannot thank you enough. Special thanks to Dr. Joan Esnayra, Dr. Jon Morris, Suzan Morris, Fleta Kirk, Cindi MacPherson, Jerry Seevers, Susan Blatz, Darcie Boltz, Joan Froling, Susan Ruby, Emma Parsons, Melanie Jannery, Jennifer Arnold, Dr. Patricia McConnell, Meg Boscov, Mary Doane, Pam McKinney, Bonnie McCririe Hale, Karen Deeds, Kim Cain, Carolyn Zagami, Sue Sternberg, Risë van Fleet, Barb Heary Gadola, Jill Blackstone, Kimberly R. Kelly, Steve Duno, Jane Miller, Steve Dale, Barbara Babikian, Jill Schilp, Susan Schultz, and Carolyn Marr.

  Many thanks to my parents; my longtime friends Ellen Sanchez, Marina Hsieh, and Devon Thomas Treadwell (who said Attagirl when I needed it and Oh, stop whining when that was the better response); and the friends I have been lucky enough to make online. You know how much you mean to me and how much strength I’ve drawn from your support, especially in the struggle to rescue and the effort to save. Thank you for every kindness.

  I am fortunate in my agent, Jim Hornfischer, and my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Susan Canavan, for their provocative, thoughtful insight into my work away from the keyboard and my effort to wrangle it onto the page. Thanks also to others at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Martha Kennedy, Tracy Roe, Carla Gray, Sarah Iani, Melissa Lotfy, and Taryn Roeder.

  Though they would better understand this in toys and treats, much love and thank you to the beautiful animals that inform every day of my life. Puzzle, Jake Piper, Fo’c’sle Jack, Mr. Sprits’l, Schooner, Jemmy Ducks, Mizzen, Ollie T, Maddye, Rumblecat, Misty, Smokey, newcomer Soleil, and Sam have been beside me on this journey. Some remain, and some, much missed, have gone ahead.

  A last thank you to Tricia Helfer, Jonathan Marshall, Shauna Galligan, and Mark Derwin, whose high-speed, cross-country, eleventh-hour efforts gave Little Ollie a second chance.

  1

  GONE

  IN THE LONG LIGHT of early morning, Hunter circles what remains of a burned house, his nose low and brow furrowed. The night’s thick air has begun to lift, and the German Shepherd’s movement catches the emerging sun. He is a shining thing against the black of scorched brick, burned timber, and a nearby tree charred leafless. Hunter inspects the tree: half-fallen, tilting south away from where the fire was, its birds long g
one. Quiet here. I can hear his footpads in the wizened grass, the occasional scrape of his nails across debris. The dog moves along the rubble in his characteristic half-crouch, intense and communicative, while his handler, Max, watches.

  Hunter rounds the house twice, crosses cautiously through a clear space in the burned pile, and returns to Max with a huff of finality. Nothing, he seems to say. Hunter is not young. There are little flecks of gray about his dark eyes and muzzle, and his body has begun to fail his willing heart, but he knows his job, and he is a proud boy doing it. He leans into his handler and huffs again. Max rubs his ears and turns away.

  “She’s not in the house,” I murmur into the radio, where a colleague and a sheriff’s deputy wait for word from us.

  “Let’s go,” says Max to Hunter.

  We move on, our tracks dark across the ash, Hunter leading us forward into a field that lies behind the house. Here we have to work a little harder across the uneven terrain. Max, a career firefighter used to unstable spaces, manages the unseen critter holes and slick grass better than I do. Hunter cleaves an easy path. Our passage disturbs the field mice, which move in such a body the ground itself appears to shiver.

  Wide sweeps across the field, back and forth across the wind, Hunter and Max and I (the assistant in trail) continuing to search for some sign of the missing girl. Hunter is an experienced search dog with years of disaster work and many single-victim searches behind him. He moves confidently but not heedlessly, and at the base of a low ridge crowned by a stand of trees, he pauses, head up a long moment, mouth open. His panting stops.

  Max stops, watches. I stand where I last stepped.

  And then Hunter is off, scrambling up the ridge with us behind him, crashing through the trees. We hear a surprised shout, and scuffling, and when we get to where he is, we see two men stumble away from the dog. One is yelping a little, has barked his shin on a battered dinette chair he’s tripped over. The other hauls him forward by the elbow, and they disappear into the surrounding brush.

  A third man has more difficulty. He is elderly and not as fast. He has been lying on a bare set of box springs set flat beneath the canopy of trees, and when he rises the worn cloth of his trousers catches on the coils. We hear rending fabric as he jerks free. He runs in a different direction from the other two—not their companion, I think—and a few yards away he stops and turns to peek through the scrub at us, as though aware the dog is not fierce and we aren’t in pursuit.

  Our search has disturbed a small tent city, and as we work our way through the reclaimed box springs and three-legged coffee tables and mouse-eaten recliners that have become a sort of home for its inhabitants, the third man watches our progress from the edge of the brush. This is a well-lived space, but there is nothing of the missing girl here. Charged on this search to find any human scent in the area, living or dead, Hunter has done what he is supposed to do. But he watches our response. From where I stand, it is clear Hunter knows what we’ve found is not what we seek, and that what we seek isn’t here. He gazes at Max, reading him, his eyebrows working, stands poised for the “Find more” command.

  “Sector clear,” I say into the radio after a signal from Max. I mention the tent city and its inhabitants and learn it is not a surprise.

  “Good boy,” says Max. Hunter’s stance relaxes.

  As we move away, the third man gains confidence. He steps a little forward, watching Hunter go. He is barefoot and shirtless. “Dog, dog, dog,” he says voicelessly, as though he shapes the word but cannot make the sound of it. “Dog,” he rasps again, and smiles wide, and claps his hands.

  Saturday night in a strange town five hundred miles from home. I am sitting in a bar clearly tacked on to our motel as an afterthought. The clientele here are jammed against one another in the gloom, all elbows and ball caps bent down to their drinks—more tired than social. At the nearby pool table, a man makes his shot, trash talks his opponent, and turns to order another beer without having to take more than four steps to get it. This looks like standard procedure. The empty bottles stack up on a nearby shelf that droops from screws half pulled out of the wall. Two men dominate the table while others watch. The shots get a little wild, the trash talk sloppier.

  A half-hour ago, when I walked in with a handful of teammates, every head in the bar briefly turned to regard us, then turned away in perfect synchronization, their eyes meeting and their heads bobbing a nod. We are strangers and out of uniform, but they know who we are and why we are here, and besides, they’ve seen a lot of strangers lately. Now, at the end of the second week of search for a missing local girl, they leave us alone. We find a table, plop down without discussion, and a waitress comes out to take our orders. She calls several of us “honey” and presses a hand to the shoulder of one of us as she turns away.

  Either the town hasn’t passed a smoking ordinance, or here at the city limits this place has conveniently ignored the law. We sit beneath a stratus layer of cigarette smoke that curls above us like an atmosphere of drowsy snakes, tinged blue and red and green by the neon signs over the bar. Beside the door, I see a flyer for the missing girl. Her face hovers beneath the smoke. She appears uneasy even in this photograph taken years ago, her smile tentative and her blond, feathered bangs sprayed close as a helmet, her dark eyes tight at the edges, like this picture was something to be survived.

  I have looked at her face all day. On telephone poles, in the hands of local volunteers, over the shoulder of a big-city newscaster at noon, six, and ten o’clock. She is the ongoing local headline. She’s the girl no one really knew before her disappearance, and now she’s the girl eager eyewitnesses claim to have known all their lives. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t, but for the most part that’s not our job. We go where law enforcement directs us. We run behind search dogs who will tell us their own truths in any given area: never here, was here, hers, not hers, blood, hair, bone, here, here, here.

  We humans aren’t talking about the search, our first day at work in this town. Inappropriate discussion in a public place, and we are exhausted with it anyway. Though today’s bystanders seemed to think we could take our dogs to Main Street and race them outward across all points of the compass—first dog to the victim wins—canine search-and-rescue doesn’t work that way. Assigned to locations chosen by law enforcement, we work methodically, dividing a region into sectors to be searched by individual dog-and-handler teams. It’s a meticulous process, but trained dogs can quickly clear a large area it would take humans days to definitively search.

  Even so, we could be here for weeks. We already feel the trackless absence of this girl. Her hometown is small, but its outlying population is widespread, and there are places to hide a living woman or the remains of a dead one that cross lines into other states. Today we were sent to clear more “hot spots”—places where bodies have been dumped before. Shrouded, ugly areas they were too, scarred from previous events, but not this girl, this time. All day the dogs have been telling us: Not here. Not here. Not here.

  I look at her photograph again. A big guy shifting on his stool blocks the ambient light from the bar, causing the girl’s face to purple beneath the neon and the whites of her eyes to swallow the irises. Her gaze no longer connects. It’s a condition that was true of her in life, some say. She has a history of scuttling head down, of sitting at the back of the class, never speaking unless spoken to, and even then as briefly as possible. She sounds uncertain on her voicemail greeting, enunciating her name with a rising inflection that suggests she isn’t quite sure of it.

  We hear fragments. The cumulative description adds up to a girl who began inching away from this town six years earlier, who saved her allowance and bought a junky car simply to have her first job at a truck stop in another town fifteen miles up the road, who saved her paychecks to buy a used laptop, and who had begun re-creating herself in variations all across the Web. No judgment, says a neighbor. An accident waiting to happen, says one interviewee. Authorities suggest she mi
ght be a runaway if it weren’t for the methodical, calculated nature of her young choices. She might be a runaway if it weren’t for her purse, cell phone, keys, car, and laptop left behind at her grandmother’s house, the last place she was seen alive.

  We’re told she has a tattoo, inked by a trucker where she worked: a butterfly with the letter K on her left wrist. The tattoo is in honor of an online friend, Katie, who had slashed her own wrists in a successful suicide—or so it was rumored, until Katie returned to a chat room a month later with a new location, new name, new boyfriend, holding up her woundless wrists for photographs, laughing at the duped online friends who thought they knew her, who had responded to her loss with depression, Paxil, and new tattoos in her honor. April Fools, all.

  Did our girl admire her, forgive her? I wonder. Is this a copycat drama?

  I turn away from her photograph. She’s not my daughter, but I feel a mother’s impulse to push the bangs from her eyes, the rescuer’s urge to put two fingertips to her carotid to check for a pulse.

  We’re a quiet group, tight and preoccupied. Still wired from the day’s search, we lean forward over our food, weight on the balls of our feet with our heels lifted, as though we’ll push up at any moment to go back to work. Unlikely. We’re stood down for the night and have an early call in the morning. It always takes a while to let go enough to sleep, especially as a search presses forward over days and investigators’ verbs begin to change from she is to she was. That little shift in tense is enough to keep us awake all night, revisiting the day’s barns, ravines, burned houses, tent cities, and trailer parks, triple-checking ourselves against the signals from the dogs. To say this girl haunts us is to overdramatize. But we all mull choices made in the field long after we should be sleeping. I stab at my coleslaw and wonder when one of us will finally relax into the back of a chair.