Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  The idea to get a puppy arose when my friend Steph was over, looking at my table full of framed animal photos, and said, “Which one of these is Fenton?” At the sound of Fenton’s name, William swung his head around and looked at me urgently. What in the hell have you people done with Fenton, his big sensitive eyes seemed to say.

  William was out in California when Fenton died at the ranch. I had assumed that when he returned he would have been able to figure out what happened by the various smells, but now I wasn’t sure. I had also assumed William was liking being an only dog—the extra treasured one—but that look he gave at the sound of Fenton’s name made me fear he thought Fenton was on an extended vacation and might still one day show up.

  William loves all creatures great and small. He tries to make friends with every other dog in the world—and cat and horse and porcupine and skunk, and even each one of his squeaky toys. His great beauty notwithstanding, other animals don’t that often dig William. It could be his size, or that he still has his balls, or maybe he’s just too eager. The big needy kid at the cool kid’s birthday party. A puppy, I knew, would love him, would look up to him, would admire and imitate his every move. He’ll love that, I thought, but I was wrong.

  To say William was utterly bereft at the sight of Olivia would be a grotesque understatement. For the first two weeks after I brought her home he’d look at me with eyes older than time that said, Why wasn’t I enough for you, and mine said to him, Quite honestly, you were! But I thought I wasn’t enough for you!

  Livie was entirely unconcerned her presence had ruined William’s life. She’d wind her beautiful little body around his front legs and under his nose while he forced himself not to growl (mostly). If he got up and moved to another spot in an attempt to ignore her, she’d lie down a respectful foot or two away in the exact same position.

  It crossed my mind to return the puppy. That I had gotten her for him was not just a story I was telling myself (though I can imagine myself capable of such a thing), and his misery suggested I’d made a mistake. But I did not return the puppy, partly because it would have been painful and embarrassing, but mostly because I knew, more so even than any of my other dogs, William was made of love, and his giant goofy heart would win out over his ego in the end.

  I had to admire Livie’s chutzpah. She was indefatigable, never more than three steps behind him, mirroring every move he made. You don’t like me? she seemed to say. Then teach me how to be a dog you will like better. If she ever felt his deep disdain for her she never let it show.

  During those weeks I took a series of photographs of the two of them: William stretched out on the living room floor, Livie three feet behind him, the S curves of their spines identical. William out on the lawn chewing a bone, Livie three feet away with a smaller bone held in her identically crisscrossed paws. The two of them on the floor of the car repair shop wearing their harnesses, front left paws cocked, long tails extended, Livie, a perfect mini-me.

  I’m going to make you love me, she seemed to say, every time she sashayed past him, dragging the top of her tail along the underside of his chin, and by the time Isaac rolled her under his feet in the pasture, it was clear: love had done its work.

  A Kind of Quiet Most People Have Forgotten

  It’s July 2014. I am guest teaching in the Chatham University low-residency M.F.A. program in Pittsburgh, where I have been adopted for these ten days by a couple of smart, talented and beautiful young women named Kyle and Maggie, and their handsome, entirely self-possessed mutt, Apacha. It is always both mystifying and flattering when the cool kids want to hang out with my sturdy, skort-wearing, middle-aged self, and makes for a very satisfying do-over from my teenaged years, during which the Kyle and Maggie equivalents would have rolled their eyes hard if I had taken one step in their direction. Or perhaps there were no Kyle and Maggie equivalents in my teenhood, because along with being the most popular girls in the M.F.A. program, Kyle and Maggie are almost preternaturally kind.

  I can see by their eyes, though, they each carry some large and not short-term sadness within them—which is the same thing people say about me when they look into my eyes for the first time, even on the rare days when I feel as though I don’t have a care in the world. Maggie, I know, has recently lost her mother, who was very dear to her, and she is swimming in the deep waters of that grief. But Kyle’s sadness, about which I have been told nothing, has a different flavor, one as familiar to me as my name, and has something to do—I am nearly certain—with how she is letting herself be treated by a man.

  The girls and I have taken Apacha for a walk through the huge, half-wild and fabulous Frick Park, on Pittsburgh’s east side, and now we’re having a beer—well, they are having a beer—while we decide whether to stay where we are and eat vegetarian, or move on to BRGR for organic bison lettuce wraps. I’m not drinking beer these days, nor any alcoholic beverage, nor soda, nor coffee, nor even green tea. I’m not eating wheat, nor sugar, nor anything packaged, processed, or inorganic, because when I went to the doctor for my yearly checkup in May, I had the first high blood pressure reading of my life, along with a precancer diagnosis in the form of HPV 16. The ecosystem that is me was clearly in trouble, and it was time, I decided, to clean up my act.

  As the doctor was writing a prescription for the blood pressure meds, I asked her if I could have six months to right the ship. “No,” she said, without looking up, so then I asked her if I could have three. “I’m writing the prescription,” she said, “I won’t be there to see whether you take the pills or not.” Which I realized was true, and which I chose to interpret as permission.

  Caffeine has always been my go-to antidepressant, and I’ve said for years if I ever had to make a choice between giving up coffee and dying I would choose death. But as it turned out, all death had to do was wave at me from the window of a bus at a distant intersection for me to quit all caffeinated beverages cold turkey. To heal, I reasoned, my body needed sleep, and I had not slept properly in decades, if ever. Not if we define sleep as the state that, when you emerge from it, is like coming up from some deep ocean-y paradise of nothingness at the very bottom of the world. Unsurprisingly, I spent my first ten noncaffeinated days wanting to kill myself.

  And look just there, how I have used the phrase “wanting to kill myself” as a kind of mildly self-deprecating but good-humored figure of speech.

  Surprising, one of my selves says to another. As I was likewise surprised when, a few weeks ago, I was standing behind a podium and in answer to a reader’s too personal question I heard myself saying, “There was a period of my life when I would have considered killing myself, but that period is over now.”

  Is that so? That same self, the cynic, asked.

  Yes, another answered—this one has a slightly imperious, almost British accent—I feel quite confident that’s where we are.

  Two mostly wonderful things about life after fifty: I’m never sure what I am going to say until I hear myself saying it, and it’s hard to remember, with any real accuracy, feeling any way other than how I feel right now. But if a person’s books are any reliable record of her life, and in my case they certainly ought to be, there were periods in both my thirties and forties where—and here I want to be careful with the wording—the possibility of suicide came up a lot.

  In my thirties I wrote a book called Waltzing the Cat and that book contains a story called “Cataract,” about a river trip gone awry, and after the flip where both female characters nearly drown in a series of class V rapids, there is this moment of dialogue:

  “Lucy,” Thea said, “if you were to kill yourself ever, what would it be over?”

  “A man,” I said, though I didn’t have a face for him. “It would only be over a man. And you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe something, not that.”

  “What then?” I said. But she didn’t answer.

  “If you are ever about to kill yourself over a man,” she said, “get yourself to my
house. Knock on my door.”

  “You do the same,” I said. “For any reason.”

  “We’ll talk about what it was like being under the water,” she said, “what it was like when we popped out free.”

  The only decade of my life in which I don’t remember having suicidal thoughts—until this one—was my twenties, possibly because I seemed to be trying so hard to kill myself in more socially acceptable outdoorsy ways. In addition to high water, hurricanes and out-of-bounds skiing, I also dabbled in tornados and mudslides, and found myself flat on my back looking up at the underside of any number of bucking, green-broke horses.

  Back in Park City, in grad school, I looked after a horse named Whoosie, a beautiful young Thoroughbred just off the track who, kicking up for joy one day while I had him on the lunge line, came into contact with my left arm, his hoof breaking my radius like a breadstick and pulverizing a significant portion of my ulna.

  I’d been alone at the barn when it happened, and when I came to, there on the floor of the indoor arena, Whoosie’s nose inches from my face in concern, I saw my hand was flipped over backward in relation to my elbow. Glorious shock kicked in, allowing me to sit up, turn my hand the right way round and tie it tight to my body with my scarf, one handed, before stalling the horse, bolting the barn doors and walking nearly a mile to the nearest residence. The temperature that January night was 10 below zero.

  Several times along the way I nearly fainted, and when that happened I would sit myself down, take big breaths and nearly nod off or pass out—it’s hard to say which in that condition—but then I would hear a train whistle, clear and loud, and I would get myself together and go a little farther.

  I told my story many times that evening: to the nice people in the house closest to the barn, who called the ambulance; to the EMTs, who cut all three of my layered coats off of me in strips; to the receiving nurse in the ER; to my grad school friends, who rushed to the hospital and to the intern while we waited for the surgeon—I had somehow, on graduate student health insurance, scored the orthopedic surgeon for the Utah Jazz—to arrive.

  It was close to midnight when he did, and as I heard myself describe that train whistle for the tenth time, I stopped midsentence. There were no trains in Park City. “Now wait,” I said. “I would swear. . . .”

  “Oh,” my surgeon said, smiling kindly, “lots of people hear the train.” He patted my good arm and told me he would see me first thing in the morning.

  Before they wheeled me into surgery, my surgeon told me I ought to prepare myself to wake up to my arm amputated at the elbow. “I’m going to do everything I can to save it,” he said solemnly, “but it’s a hell of a mess in there.”

  I’d been too afraid of freaking out my mother to call and tell her about the accident, and now I was glad I hadn’t. If I did wake up without my arm, I would need a few days to grieve it before it became something she had lost.

  The team operated for four solid hours, removing eighty-five bone chips, reconnecting tendons, transplanting a hunk of cadaver bone from the bone bank, and securing their work with two metal plates and eighteen screws. They wheeled me out of surgery and my doctor ordered X-rays. He decided he didn’t like the way everything looked, so the team spent four more hours doing most of it all over again.

  Waking up with my arm still attached gave me the courage to call my mother, though my surgeon warned me it would be six to twelve months before we knew for certain whether the bone transplant would take.

  “No really,” I told her. “It’s a miracle. I got the best doctor in Utah, and my arm is still here!”

  “May-be,” she said, in two distinct syllables, and I heard ice rattle in the glass in her hand. “But you’re still going to have those big ugly scars. . . .”

  The surgeon who spent those nine hours replacing my pulverized ulna with cadaver bone sent me home with a bag full of Darvocet which, within forty-eight hours, created some kind of chemical reaction in my brain that sent me so low I called, for the first and only time in my life, a suicide hotline.

  When the guy picked up the phone, I immediately apologized for taking his time. “I know I ought to be happy,” I said. “My arm is still here, hurting like a son of a bitch, but more or less intact.”

  “Are you taking anything?” he asked, and when I told him about the Darvocet he said, “Well for chrissake, stop! Haven’t you ever heard of Advil?” Which turned out to be some of the best advice I’ve gotten in my life.

  I spent most of my forties writing a book called Contents May Have Shifted, and its working title, for all the years it lived in my laptop was, Suicide Note, or 144 Reasons Not to Kill Yourself.

  Really? The cynic pipes up again. Really? If you were ever actually suicidal, you must not have been very good at it. And it’s hard to argue with her now, over our daily lunch of hibiscus tea and kale superfood salad. It’s bad business to deny your past, the earnest self, the one who pays attention in therapy, tells her, and for now they—we—leave it at that.

  Much was made of my working title in interviews I gave when Contents came out because it was mentioned in the jacket copy, but I had never intended to call the published book Suicide Note. Too maudlin, too melodramatic, the contradiction within the longer version of the title dishonest, almost coy. The working title was simply a daily way to describe to myself what I was doing: prophylactically collecting and transliterating suicide prevention nuggets, gathering up all the things about this planet that made me want to stay on it, against some unknown future moment when I might feel it would be better not to. And, because I find myself here on the other side of fifty, trying with all my might to stay alive, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least to some extent, my strategy worked.

  The waitress brings Kyle and Maggie their beers and me my Pellegrino with lime, and we are talking about favorite dogs or favorite bands, but Kyle is looking at me so intently with those sad, soulful eyes the next thing I know I’m saying, “You know, there was a period of my life when I thought I might kill myself because a man I thought I loved didn’t love me back. It embarrasses me a little to say so, but there it is.”

  Kyle’s face is some mixture of stunned and relieved, which I take as a sign to continue. “I’ve always measured my sense of well-being on airplanes, when we hit turbulence. You know, how much—or how little—do I care if this plane goes down?” They nod. They both do know.

  “I can remember actually willing the plane to tumble from the sky a few times, because some Joe I probably could not pick out of a lineup, were he here tonight, didn’t call, or went out with one of his four other girlfriends, or lied about where he was last Saturday.”

  The girls are quiet—even Apacha has stopped licking his balls. It flashes through my mind I might be grossing them out, like in the way you don’t want your parents to mention the great sex they had over breakfast.

  “You didn’t ask me to dinner, I know, so I would sit here and rattle on with my old lady advice,” I continue. “But I have been thinking a lot lately about how much power I used to give the men in my life to make me feel okay, or not okay. There are reasons for that—ugly childhood reasons—so I try to give myself a break. I’m not a regretter, exactly—I think writers all need something to push against and that was my thing for a long time—and yet at fifty-two it seems absolutely mystifying to me I would give men so much power. It’s power I don’t think most of them even really want.”

  Now Kyle is looking at me like I have crawled inside her brain. We are all silent for a while. “Maggie’s got a good man” is what she finally manages to say.

  I nod. I don’t doubt it. Maggie’s grief for her mom is palpable, piercing, but it is not full of the shadows and confusion that come when a little girl is treated badly in a hundred different ways by fathers or father figures, that insidious, everlasting training.

  “I don’t know anything about your past,” I say to Kyle, “and I’m not trying to tell you how to live. Somebody could have said all this to
me when I was your age—I’m sure someone did—and it would have probably just made me double down. I had to do it as long as I had to do it, chase those nasty cowboys.” I smile and Kyle smiles, but her eyes never do. “I’m just saying, I guess, there’s another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. If you live long enough you quit chasing things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”

  Apacha groans, maybe signaling the end of the conversation, so I drain my Pellegrino and reach for the check, but Kyle stills my hand.

  “What made it change,” she asks, “for you?”

  There are so many possible answers, including thirty thousand dollars worth of therapy; several New Age healing ceremonies—one involving a man who set his chest on fire and another involving a dust buster; five published books and a precancer diagnosis, but I say the thing that feels first, truest, and most long-term: “I realized I could make my own life,” I say. “I could have my own ranch. I finally realized I could be the cowboy.”

  But now it is a gray, late November morning, and I’m here, a cowboy on her very own ranch—120 acres of hard dirt and ponderosa, of 60 mph winds and blizzards that drop five feet of snow in twenty-four hours; of floods and drought and fire; of blue columbine and quaking aspen and 12,000-foot peaks all around; of unspeakable beauty and a kind of quiet, on a winter morning, most people on the planet have forgotten exists. I am here, in the middle of all that, and I am pretty damn sad anyhow.

  The days seem impossibly short already and yet we’ll lose daylight for another month before this planetary ship turns itself around. I’m worried about old Roany’s chances of making the winter, and I can’t decide whether it is more humane to move him to a warmer place where everything would be unfamiliar, or try to heat the barn a few degrees with chicken lamps so he can live—or die—in the place he knows. I had to rush little Ingrid, this year’s lamb, out of Jordan, to Doc’s yesterday with bloat, and he saved her life, but once an animal is prone to bloat it tends to return. Facebook has already made me cry four times this morning. First it was Ursula Le Guin reminding me we don’t write for profit, we write for freedom; next it was a video of the Unist’ot’en indigenous camp resistance trying to stop the Keystone pipeline; and then it was the state of Nevada electing a man to their house of representatives who said “simple minded darkies” show “lack of gratitude” to whites. Honestly, who wouldn’t be sad waking up in this world? And then I clicked on the Prairie Fire Lady Choir singing a song my friend Annette wrote called “Not a Good Man”—a kind of Irving Berlin meets Laurie Anderson number with all the women wearing lollipop-colored dresses and big hair, and when that teared me up I knew I might be in serious trouble.