Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  Some days I would sit in the cold living room and let the ache run free; it was the only place that I felt mirrored my heart. All my other places in the world—my own house, my connections with friends, my days with the dog or on the river or in the pool—were a refracted version of my grief; they all contained me, reflected the story, even helped me forget for a while. Here was the story itself. Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone. It broke through my disbelief, my God bartering, my every other defense, and for this reason I both needed and hated to go there.

  One afternoon when I had gone upstairs to check on things, I started going through her closet, the way we used to do together and like my sister and I had done when we were girls. I tried on sweaters and blouses that we had both loved, looking in the mirror while Clementine lay on the floor, watching me. “This looked better on you than it does on me,” I would say to Caroline, and the dog would cock her head, and then I’d try on something else. I felt desperate while this was happening, and confused and guilty, and it has taken me years to remove myself enough from the pain of the incident to comprehend it. I wanted to claim whatever of her was left. I’d always heard stories about grief-stricken families arguing over ugly lamps or cheap coffeemakers; now I understood. The frantic hunger I felt was not trivial or greedy; it was possessive, in the most primal sense. I still have her gym bag and her rain jacket, and for a while I even tried to wear her winter boots, an entire size too big, which was absurd but comforting.

  Memento mori: reminders of the dead. I think we must long for these signatures of history—the baseballs and ornaments and playing cards left on people’s graves—because they take up the space left by the departed. The physical void after she was gone seemed alarmingly like a thing of physics, as if daylight had shifted or a house on the street had disappeared. Whenever Clementine heard the distinctive beep of a Toyota RAV, which is what Caroline had driven for years, she would wag her tail and start to head in that direction—pure conditioning that seemed to me a haiku of what was missing in the world.

  YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer’s building blocks. “Let Her Die,” I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

  THE SUMMER AFTER I had learned to row, one evening on the river in 1998, I remember thinking that someday soon I would lose my beloved dad and that rowing and Caroline would help me through. We all count the tribe whenever we’re scared. Modern Western society has mostly corralled this task within the realm of the nuclear family: The husband will clean out the garage or balance the accounts; the sister will be there to help after our folks are gone. But a huge portion of the world makes other allegiances, unconscious plans. Because of circumstance and desire, Caroline and I had each shifted a degree of that dependence onto each other—along with our siblings and Morelli, we were in line for the quotidian closeness, the emotional proximity of day-to-day life. Who has spare keys to the house, emergency contact numbers in the wallet? These are the lists you don’t even consider before a certain age, when you’re trying to get away from responsibility rather than acquire it. Then the list takes shape along with the attachments. Caroline and I had so thoroughly insinuated ourselves into this primary position that we joked about it for years, even after she reunited with Morelli. One afternoon weeks after she was gone, Morelli and Sandy and I were sitting on a park bench at the pond, talking with the combat candor of her three closest friends about how any of us could go on. “Oh God,” I groaned, with mock distress. “Now I guess I’ll have to get a boyfriend.” Only the three of us, I think, would have found this so germane and so revealing.

  LIFE’S IRREFUTABLE forward motion, a one-way arrow pointed past the dead. For months I felt the violence of time itself, as though some great barge carrying the rest of us had left Caroline stranded on the shore. I was raking leaves one day when I felt such a vast chasm of what was gone that I had to stop and sit down on the porch. All this raw material, from new shoots to compost in what seemed a single breath. Caroline was bone and ash and memory now, and I was raking dead leaves in the shelter of my garden while the bulbs, patient and thoughtless, waited to be planted. It seemed obscene.

  “They take it all,” I cried on the phone to Louise longdistance. “This husk of a life. And then you get to the end and you find out that death is godless, imminent, and cruel.” Louise, who believed above all in the power of words, wrote this down while I was talking. And so she captured for me that moment none of us wants to remember, probably central to survival. What if dying weren’t a bad thing? Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.

  And then finally, unwittingly, acceptance wraps itself around your heart. Late that year I was wandering through an open house in the neighborhood, and I saw a framed Pablo Neruda sonnet on the wall; it spoke to something spatial about loss that I had never before found articulated. Caroline’s death was a vacancy in the heart, a place I neither could nor wished to fill. I had been confused by the prevalence of these feelings, the sense that her goneness was a thing unto itself, a memory outlined by crime tape it would be an outrage to remove. Now here was Neruda, entreating mourners to inhabit death as though it were a dwelling:

  Absence is a house so vast

  that inside you will pass through its walls

  and hang pictures on the air.

  I LIVED IN THAT house of absence, took solace in it, until sorrow became a stand-in for what was gone. “Grief … remembers me of all his gracious parts,” says Shakespeare’s Constance in King John, about the loss of her son. “Then have I reason to be fond of grief.” I knew I would never have another friend like Caroline; I suspected no one would ever know me so well again. That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

  Grief is fundamentally a selfish business. Stripped of its elegant facade—the early onslaught of flowers and casseroles and understanding—it is a place of such particularity that its arc is as complex as the relationship itself. People miss the warm presence in the bed, the laugh in the evening, the gestures or countries or shared awareness traveled together. I missed Caroline in dozens of ways, but through them all was the absence of the ongoing dialogue, real or imagined. “I miss us,” she had said that morning outside the hospital. For years, through the trials of writing or dog training or life’s ordinary bruises, Caroline and I had been the soothing, modulated voice in each other’s heads. Now my thoughts were clanging around unnoticed and unheard, lonely music with too much bass. For months, I kept wanting to call her, half assuming I could, to tell her what her dying had meant, what her death had done to my life.

  I DON’T KNOW MUCH of what I did that first year after Caroline’s death, beyond the usual rituals that were now cloaked in a velvet silence. Walking, reading, watching the light change. I sat on the couch in the living room and read letters and cards from people who loved us both, then reread them so that I could remember who we were together. My friend Andrea dragged me to holiday gatherings on the days I had usually spent with Caroline. Rowing—God, I rowed until my hands were like leather and my whole body ached with the fatigue my heart felt. I would get back to the boathouse in evening light, pull the boat out of the water, and wash and dry it as though I were hot-walking a horse. I know I wrote, though for months not much of it mattered. I puzzled, often and in private, over some promise of consciousness or design beyond the cold triumph of pure biology, muck and creation and reproduction and then muck again. Mostly I couldn’t bear the indisputable lack of her, or the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent
too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn’t survive. I had a friend who years before had lost her firstborn when he was an infant, and she told me one of the piercing consolations she received in her early grief was from a man who recognized the fierce loyalty one feels to the dead. “The real hell of this,” he told her, “is that you’re going to get through it.” Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

  12.

  FOR YEARS I HAD TRIED TO PROTECT MYSELF FROM the psychic weight of New England winters by staying inside with tea and radiators, until I got a northern sled dog. Clementine took me out into the world in myriad ways, the most relentless of which had to do with the seasons. We walked through snowstorms and over icy trails; we walked in six p.m. darkness and single-digit temperatures. Because of her I had learned to love the light in winter—the rose gold of the sky an hour before dusk, framing the minimalist branches of the bare trees beneath. I fixed my routine to the light and to Clementine’s desires. After Caroline was gone I vowed I would take the same walks, eventually finding solace in the missing space by my side.

  So when I was through writing for the day, the dog and I would walk the few long blocks to the edge of Fresh Pond, an established oasis throughout the year, but populated in winter mostly by diehard joggers and dog walkers. Our usual path was a couple of miles round-trip; we would stroll through the woods to the deserted golf course, where Clemmie would chase geese to her heart’s delight and bark at the exhaust signatures of planes across the sky.

  One Friday afternoon at the end of January in 2004, I had driven over and parked by the soccer field on the edge of the reservoir almost a mile from my house; it was sixteen degrees outside, and I wanted to head straight for the woods. The days were growing longer and the light itself seemed brighter, and we walked for an hour under scudding clouds, nodding or saying hello to the other stalwarts who were on the path. Clementine was eight years old, at that point in a dog’s life at which dignity and vitality are in step together, and she rarely strayed from my side, even off-lead in the woods. Whenever we left the reservoir, all I had to do was say, “Wait,” and she would stop wherever she was, standing like a horse with her reins down while I attached her leash.

  We had just come out of the woods onto the edge of the soccer field when I heard a man yell, “Get your dog!” Clemmie was next to me, unleashed, and we both stopped in our tracks, partly in response to the alarm in the man’s voice. About ten yards away, by the bleachers, I saw a young muscle-bound man crouched on the ground, trying desperately to hold on to two pit bulls without collars or leashes. A second later the dogs broke free of his grip and came hurtling toward us. The larger dog, a gray-white male, knocked Clementine to the ground and grabbed her by the neck; the other dog went for her hindquarters. Clemmie weighed sixty pounds and had a full winter coat, which on a Samoyed is a three-inch-long double coat as dense as a carpet. She was thrashing and snapping at both dogs and I was screaming at the top of my lungs—“Get your goddamn dogs!”—while the man tried in vain to get ahold of the pit bulls.

  I didn’t yet know how badly Clemmie was hurt, or if the man was a tough guy or a fool, and there wasn’t another soul around to help. The man finally got an arm around each dog’s neck, and I grabbed Clementine’s collar and cried out, “Please, just let us get to our car.” The field was abutted by a chain-link fence, separating it from the street; I knew we had to get to that gate. He was struggling to maintain his hold on the dogs, and nodded, out of breath. “Go!” he called out. “I’ve got them.” Clemmie was whimpering, panting to break free, and I held on to her and we started loping across the field.

  We had made it halfway—about thirty yards—when I heard the man holler from behind, “Look out!” I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I turned around to see both dogs charging at a full run. Then I saw a flash of gray flying toward me through the air. The next thing I remember is being on my hands and knees on the ground. The gray missile was the larger male, who weighed about a hundred pounds; the female had gone after Clementine. When I scrambled to my feet, I saw Clemmie on the ground a couple of yards away, with both dogs on top of her. One was at her throat and the other had its teeth on her belly. They had never made a sound.

  My bladder emptied like a water balloon. I was wearing jeans, and realized with an almost serene detachment that they were drenched. I was in that state of adrenaline-soaked alacrity when the vision is sharp but tunneled and you feel you can do anything, and I felt not so much fear as a kind of wild horror. I had the flash that this must be what it was like to be in combat: The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the body, which then gets rid of everything it doesn’t need. Through no conscious effort of my own, I’d gone into automatic warrior mode.

  I walked into the fight and started beating on the dogs’ backs. Dressed for the frigid weather, I was wearing a heavy down jacket and fleece-lined mittens, and all the futility in that moment was captured by those mittens: I remember looking down while I flayed on the dogs and thinking that my hands looked like a child’s. Then the female pit bull grabbed my forearm, almost casually, as if to move an obstacle away from its prey. The scariest part of this fleeting moment was not the violence the dog exhibited, but the control—my arm might as well have been a branch, for all the interest it held. You can generally gauge the seriousness of any dog attack by the noise and the restraint exhibited—the quieter it is, the more lethal the intent—and I had known from the start that this was a deadly situation. The pit bulls were after Clementine, not me. The female’s hold on my arm gave Clementine the chance to wrestle away from the other dog, and she went tearing, at sled dog speed, into the woods.

  By now the man had caught up to his dogs and was trying to get them under control. I went running after Clemmie, not knowing how severe her injuries were or where her panicked flight had taken her. I started calling her name and realized that my voice was nearly gone from yelling. It was after five p.m. and getting dark, and I was stumbling through snow in monochromatic woods. No one else was in sight. I remember thinking, with nonsensical logic, that I could probably search for her until about two a.m.—that I had that much time before I would need water or food, or before I would physically give out.

  Years later, most of my visual memories of that afternoon have a cinematic purity—I remember what I was wearing, where I was standing, how my arms and face and voice felt while I scanned the blackening woods for a white dog. Micromoments have disappeared—I remember reaching my friend Peter’s voice mail by cell phone, but I don’t remember calling him or thinking to call him, only the sound of his recorded message. He lived four houses away from me and knew more about dogs than anyone I had ever known, and when I got his voice mail I coughed out something like “We were attacked by pit bulls and Clemmie is hurt and lost in the woods.” He told me later that when he heard the message, he barely recognized my voice. Then I called Avery, who lived on the corner near the pond; she started heading in my direction. By the time she got to me ten minutes later, the first wave of adrenaline had passed and I had realized Clementine was lost, and I was shaking all over and finally terrified. Because my voice was gone, Avery kept calling out for Clemmie, and then my cell phone rang and I heard Peter, out of breath, say, “I’m running toward you.”

  In all the free falls of one’s life, there are moments that stand out as a hand reaching across the abyss, and this, for me, was one of them. Without thinking I said, “No, go to my house first”—he lived down the street in the direction of the pond, which was separated from our houses by a major parkway. Two minutes later the phone rang again, so soon that I knew it had to be either good news or bad. Then I heard him cry, “I’ve got her!” and my knees went out from under me. Avery got me to my car and drove us to the house.

  I’ve always wished for some witness to that day, someone who could come forward to tell me
what Clementine’s path had been. Once she broke away from the dogs, she had gone running into the woods alongside the reservoir, and she had had to cross a field beyond the woods and then a four-lane thoroughfare during evening rush hour. Then two more streets to the block where we lived, a trip of nearly a mile in city traffic. Peter had found her trembling on my front porch. She was bleeding and covered in pit bull saliva, and she had found her way home.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, the vet and his assistant had shaved half of Clemmie’s coat and begun closing the gaping wounds on her back and sides. Peter, whose father had been a horse trainer and who knew how to contain a thrashing animal, held on to Clemmie while they put her under anesthesia. The people in the veterinary practice had known me and my dog since she was a puppy, and Beth, my vet, had gone silent when I’d called to tell her about the attack; the two people left at the clinic had stayed late to wait for us when they found out what had happened. It was almost ten p.m. and none of us had eaten in hours, though I had remembered to grab a loaf of bread on my way out the door; I knew it was going to be a long night. After they got Clemmie under, I finally sank to the floor of the operating room with Cleo, Peter’s Belgian shepherd, beside me. Clemmie was covered with puncture wounds on her hips and belly and violent gashes across her back; her thick double coat had probably saved her life. When they had finally closed the wounds and she began to emerge from the anesthesia, I crouched down by the operating table so she could see and smell me when she woke up. Maggie, who had been assisting the vet and holding Clementine while she was under, smiled at me across the table. “You know,” she said, “you’re doing a lot better than I thought you would be.”