Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  I was beaming. “Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s alive.”

  IT WAS MORE THAN a week before Clementine could get beyond the driveway of my house without trembling, but as a sled dog, she had strong social instincts, and I think she recovered psychologically faster and better than I did. Besides being sore and exhausted, my only physical legacy from the attack was a black half-moon on my forearm I had found the next afternoon, a bruise the size of a pit bull’s jaw where the female had grabbed me. The dog had bitten through a thick down coat and two sweaters to leave this mark, but I didn’t feel or notice it until a day later, when the adrenaline had been replaced by a crushing fatigue. I fell apart on the phone to Louise, who loved dogs and loved me and knew how to care for both species in the worst of times. She sent white roses for the immediate pain and—ruthless acolyte to narrative—had an even better solution for the long-term damage. “I know this sounds cold,” she said during our first conversation, “but are you taking notes?”

  My intrepid Texas mother, who had just turned ninety, displayed a different brand of loyalty, more sword than pen and fierce enough to make me laugh with gratitude. She adored Clementine and was horrified by what had happened to both of us. “It just makes you want to pick up a gun, doesn’t it?” she said on the phone one day when I was particularly shaken, and I answered, my voice trembling, “Yeah, it really does.”

  “Now, honey,” she said, as though she were trying to placate a determined child, “you just can’t.”

  THE PIT BULLS HAD been picked up by Animal Control and quarantined the day after the attack. Months of court appearances lay ahead, as well as a long campaign by the city to euthanize one dog and permanently sequester the other. For me there would also be flashbacks and fears and seemingly misplaced worries, the detritus of trauma that tends to insinuate itself into the psyche only after the danger has passed. I had already armed myself instinctively against some of this refuse with the simple power of narrative: From the moment I called Peter from the woods, the events of that day began shaping themselves into a bearable truth. And Caroline, who had long been the search-and-rescue spirit in my pantheon, was as essential as air to the retelling of the tale.

  For about three weeks after the attack, I was certain that Caroline had saved Clementine that day—that she had gotten her away from the dogs and guided her through speeding traffic to safety. I believed this fully and categorically, with a sincerity that helped to shield me from the random iniquity of what had happened. Clementine had achieved legendary status in the neighborhood within days after the assault, both for the horror of the story and for her odyssey home, and her wounds and shaved coat drew enough attention that strangers stopped to ask about us. When people who had known Caroline would see us at the pond, I would say, probably with the eyes of a madwoman, “I think Caroline saved her!” I was not known for such pronouncements, having a slant more empirical than mystical, and if people looked surprised when I told them this, they were kind enough to let me be. I had had a semiawake dream in the first few days after the attack in which I woke from a deep sleep and said to Caroline, in the dark of my room, “Oh my God—it was you, wasn’t it?” And she responded with her soft, knowing laugh, amused by my slowness in recognizing the obvious. I wore my conviction like a Kryptonite shield for as long as I needed its powers, until I could stand in a field with the dog again without scanning the horizon for disaster.

  And now? I doubt that I will ever be convinced in either direction. It is a story I still tell myself, framed within the magical thinking of a children’s tale, where the forests are enchanted and the monsters vincible, where love and courage always trump danger.

  “THE DEAD PROTECT US,” I said to my friend Andrea at dinner one night when that bleak day in the field was behind me, long after I had stopped announcing that Caroline’s spirit had shepherded us home. The words came out of my mouth with the certainty of litany, though I was only half sure of what I meant and unaware that I thought it until I spoke aloud. The dead protect us. I feel this now with an almost fierce relief. Caroline’s dying had forced me into courage under fire; now I had her inside me as a silent sentinel. And whether one attributes this attachment to memory or to God, it is a consolation unlike any I have known. Thou art with me. “They take it all,” I had cried on the phone to Louise that night, knocked down by despair. Turns out they don’t take everything after all.

  I LEARNED SOMETHING in the aftermath of the attack on Clementine that confused and alarmed me at the time. After so much fear and violence, here was my dog, safe and alive, and yet I worried about her with such maternal vengeance that it seemed to eclipse my grief for the dead. I was ashamed by the inconsolable quality of my anxiety; Clemmie was alive, and Caroline was gone, and yet my anguish now was about the one who had been saved. Then I realized something else they don’t tell you in the instruction books for mourning: that we only fret about the living. I might well grieve Caroline for all my days, but I wasn’t worried about her anymore.

  Years after she was gone, I found the inscriptions Caroline had written to me in two of her books—the first written a few months into our friendship, the second one two years later. We knew from the beginning, I think, that this friendship was different, that we would work to make it immune to the erosions of time. “For my dearest Gail,” she had written at the beginning of Pack of Two, “with more love and gratitude than I have words to express. Your presence—in the world, in the woods, in this book—has altered the very texture of my life. Here’s to all we have shared, and to many more years, many more miles with our beautiful girls.”

  Caroline’s boat has rowed some two thousand miles since I moved it upriver on that calm day in 2002. I am fifteen years older now than Caroline would ever be; the rows are slower, but when I falter at the beginning of each season I close my eyes and visualize the precision of her stroke and straighten out my own. She is still my coach. One afternoon when I had come in from a five-mile row, as I was putting the boat into its bay, I said out loud to her, “You would be so proud of me.” I meant because I had kept on rowing: Endurance was one of the traits we each admired in the other. But I know now that I meant something larger than the rowing, something that parallels the miles logged through fatigue and discouragement and inclement weather. Caroline would be so proud of me—proud of us—because I kept her, too.

  13.

  CLEMENTINE WAS WITH ME FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. I used to lie next to her on the Persian rug in the dining room and wrap my arms around her and say, “Let’s see if you can make it to thirteen. Can we do that?” And she would sigh her deep-chested sigh and roll over on her back. I had brought her home in 1995, when she was eight weeks old, on June 3, which was my father’s eighty-first birthday. I thought at the time that after he died, I would have this dual anniversary to soften the sadness of the loss of him. Then Caroline died at midnight on the third of June, seven years later, and so the date had a wrenching significance.

  That first year of raising a puppy, just before Caroline and I became friends, I had taken Clementine to Castle Island, a beach walk on Boston Harbor, on a windy day in March. We were walking across a long causeway when the wind picked up, and I saw her hesitate; she looked up at me for a directional cue, then plowed ahead. The first year or so with any dog is a steep relational curve—you are each finding out who the other is, and who you will be together. I knew at that moment, when we locked eyes and she started taking me forward, that we had become a team and that she knew it, too, and would go anywhere I asked.

  In the ensuing decade, she had been integral to the most soul-stretching, joyful years of my life, and witness to some of the saddest. She led me into the woods with the closest woman friend I would ever have, and she was there waiting each night when I came home from the hospital where Caroline was dying. She was the sentry at the end of every trip I made back to Texas to care for my aging mother and father. After they were both gone, buried next to each other in the Texas sun, I flew back to Cambridg
e and Clementine nipped my nose when I walked in the front door, a gentle, herding nip, and then leaned against me and hardly left my side for days.

  Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages. By the time she turned eleven, Clementine had started to lose her coat, a condition that can happen in older female Samoyeds, and so she was a far cry from the majestic white image of her earlier years. Once a model for the breed, now she looked like the velveteen rabbit, disheveled and patchy and loved into raggedness. Sometimes thoughtless people on the street would say, “Ooh, what happened to your dog?” with more rubbernecking curiosity than genuine concern, and I would say, just to annoy them, “I think she looks a little like Katharine Hepburn; don’t you?” She always looked the same to me. The last few years, our daily walks got slower and shorter. Sometimes we would make it only as far as the Virginia Woolf bench, a granite seat in the woods of Fresh Pond that overlooks the pond’s edge and has on it an Orlando quote, and Clementine would lie under the bench while I lay upon it, watching the towering pine trees and the sky overhead. Or she would lie in the front yard next to me while I planted flowers, seeming content to survey the world rather than try to run it.

  In spring of 2008, she started coughing with a bronchitis that wouldn’t get better, and I knew we were in that passage of aged dogs where a constellation of symptoms presages the final outcome. I couldn’t bear the idea that she might leave me on June 3, and that night I got down next to her on the floor and wrapped my arms around her and said, “Well, we made it, honey, didn’t we?” Two nights later, she started going downhill fast. I got enough Valium in her to ease her distress, and when I walked into Angell Memorial Hospital at one-thirty in the morning, it was with the dry-mouthed certainty that I would be going home with her leash and collar but not with her. I had a close friend who was a veterinarian, who had known Clementine since she was a puppy, and she had insisted that I call her in the middle of the night when the time came. So Amy was there waiting for me in the hospital parking lot, ready to navigate the stark terrain of euthanasia and anonymous clinicians, and she was there on the floor beside us when we let her go. I was crying more than I wanted, afraid of upsetting Clementine, but she stayed calm, with her paw on my arm. “Go find Caroline,” I said to her, and when she died she reached her front legs up toward me and rolled over into my arms, where I feel quite sure she will stay forever.

  I DIDN’T WANT to leave her there. They tagged the body and we loaded her into Amy’s van so that she could take her to be cremated in a couple of hours when the veterinary practice opened that morning. We sat in the van outside the hospital’s bright, welcoming lights for a long time, talking and sometimes crying, Clementine’s body in the back an odd comfort. I was staring into that too-familiar space of a world fresh with the initial disbelief of grief. It was nearly five a.m. when I walked back into my infernally quiet house, sadder than tears can ever tell, knowing that I was in the corridor of something far larger than I and that I just had to stand it and stay where I was. I went into the bedroom and saw the photograph of Caroline on my dresser, and I looked at her across that great divide and said, “Catch.”

  “CARLO DIED,” EMILY DICKINSON WROTE HER FRIEND and mentor about the death of her beloved Newfoundland. “Would you instruct me now?” To say I could not bear this final departure is useless commentary, because bear I did and bear we do; to say I did not believe that I could is perhaps more to the point. Caroline and I had talked for years about the unthinkable notion of losing Lucille and Clementine; it seemed a graceful fluke of time that we would probably endure their deaths together.

  Clementine’s favorite denning spot in the backyard was under an enormous yew, a shrub so overgrown that a wild rosebush next to it has wound its way through and above the yew’s branches. In spring, from the second-floor porch, it looks as if the yew has borne white blossoms—a magical hybrid of thorns and flowers and evergreens. Parlor tricks or God, I know now there are visions like this everywhere. Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.

  Early in Clementine’s life, when Caroline and I had forged the beginning depths of our bond, I took a house for a few weeks one summer in the woods of Truro on Cape Cod. Caroline and Lucille were meeting us there the next day. The evening I arrived, the caretakers in the large house on the grounds came by to tell me they were looking after the elderly woman inside—in her late nineties and failing day by day. I was not to be alarmed, they said, if I heard cars coming and going; they were on shifts of twenty-four-hour nursing care.

  An hour later, at dusk, after I had unpacked the car with Clemmie by my side, one of the nurses came back and knocked on my door. “Mrs. C wondered if you could stop by,” she said shyly. “She wants to see the big white dog.” Clemmie had grown up around a neighbor in a wheelchair, so I wasn’t concerned about her being gentle, and when we went inside the house, she walked over to Mrs. C’s wheelchair and placed herself next to her hand. The woman’s clouded eyes lit up, and she smiled as she ran her hand through Clementine’s ruff. “I like a big dog,” she said by way of introduction; she spoke with un-hesitant authority, as though we had just picked up a long-running conversation in which her opinion mattered greatly. However frail the rest of her was, all her strength was in her voice. “When I was growing up, I had Alsatians,” she told me, her voice warm with memory. “They used to run through the woods here and terrify everyone.” She smiled as she told me this story, and for a moment I could see her as a girl, fearless in the wilds of midcentury Truro, protected by her shepherd dogs and running free.

  I’ve always thought there would be worse fates than to be that woman, bowed but undaunted by everything physical in life, her memories and imperious presence outshining the waning light of aging. A woman still able to summon to her side a creature that nearly outweighed her; still able to say, with glad conviction, “I like a big dog.” I like a big dog, too.

  “THE HEART BREAKS OPEN,” A FRIEND SAID TO ME upon Clementine’s death. I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution. Grief and memory create their own narrative: This is the shining truth at the heart of Freud and Neruda and every war story ever told. The death mandates and gives rise to the story for the same reason that ancient tribes used to bury flowers with their dead. We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

  After Caroline died, I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish before my life was over: write a book, go to Paris, find a great love, fit in as many dogs as I could. Oh, and find God, I said to a friend, the postscript that might change the world entire. Not a very long list, but everything on it seemed essential. I set out to achieve these things both systematically and unconsciously, aware that the map of one’s life is made up of luck and circumstance and determination. I had always told Caroline that when I lost Clementine, I planned to go to Paris, cry my heart out for six months, then come home and get a puppy.

  Paris is still on the list. The spring of Clemmie’s decline was exhausting and heartbreaking, and I was no more fit to travel abroad when she was gone than I was to bike to the moon. Instead I spent the summer in the shadows of sorrow and anxiety, wondering how I would navigate the world without her in it. The very fact of me felt diminished.

  I laid the flowers people brought me on her denning spot by the yew, and when they had yellowed I piled more on top, so that there was a pallet of dried flowers where she had lain. I sat on the porch and talked to her, as I had talked to Caroline after she was gone and to Clemmie throughout her life. I found out from listening to memory and silence that I di
dn’t much care, at least then, about going to Paris. That what I wanted was the breath in the house and the warmth and demands of someone who needed me. “It’s your love,” my old friend Pete had said to me years before, when I was trying to leave a lousy relationship. “You get to keep that.” My love: precious, lonely gift.

  I spent an hour one afternoon on the phone with a breeder of Border collies, a stranger who understood my distress and stayed in touch with me for months afterward, toward no other end than kindness. Peter, who had helped save Clementine that cold day years before, knew what I had lost but couldn’t express it, so most days, after he and Shiloh, his young Belgian shepherd, had had their run, he would open my back door and holler, “Dog!” In she would come, my auxiliary shepherd for the morning, who had long since added me to her pack and who probably sensed Clemmie’s departure before she was gone. Shiloh would lie down beside me for an hour while I wrote, as focused and calm as a visiting nurse.

  THE OLD NAVAJO WEAVERS used to insert an unmatched thread into each of their rugs, a contrasting color that runs to the outside edge. You can spot an authentic rug by this intentional flaw, which is called a spirit line, meant to release the energy trapped inside the rug and pave the way for the next creation.

  Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the “and then” of narrative itself, but without it—without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control—consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.