by Susan Perabo
I went over to the table and sat down across from her.
“Hey,” she said. There was a cup of cranapple juice in front of her and she took a sip.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“They’re trying to take me over there,” she said.
(“Over there” = seclusion. Strapped in your special chair all day, then strapped in your bed all night. Straps to straps, for as long as they say. I had been strapped down once, only for one night, when I broke the thermostat off the wall and pulled out its insides just to see if it might explode like a hand grenade. You think it’s just going to be one strap, but it’s three, one like a belt around you, and then one on each side of the belt strapping you to the bedframe, so not only can you not get out of bed, but you can’t lie any way but flat on your back. It was just one night, but in the morning only the top layer of me got up, peeled in a thin strip from the softball player, who stayed in the bed forever.)
“Why?” I asked. I turned to the nurse. “Why?”
“Doctor’s orders,” the nurse said. The nurse’s name was Cindy. She always looked tired. One time she saw a picture of my dog, the only picture I kept in my room, and she talked to me for like ten hours about her golden retriever.
“I’m not going,” Madeline said. “I want to stay here.”
“You should have thought of that before,” the nurse said. She didn’t say it like a bitch, though. She said it like she was genuinely sorry Madeline hadn’t thought of it before.
“I’m not going,” Madeline said. “You guys can’t make me go.” (This would have been hilarious under any other circumstance. We might have laughed about it later if we’d had the chance.) “I’m staying here with my friend.”
“I killed it down there,” I said. “I gave you like ten minutes.”
“Good job,” she said.
“Let’s go,” the beef said.
“I’m not going,” she said.
“You’re going,” he said. He took hold of her arm and she looked at me wildly.
“Do something,” she said through clenched teeth.
I was frozen in my chair. Do something? Like what, exactly? Resistance was futile and would only result in straps to straps for us both. Another orderly came through the door and headed toward us. This one was scrawny.
“Take her other arm,” beefy told scrawny.
Scrawny took her other arm and Madeline started kicking frantically. Everybody in the solarium turned around and watched. It was good clean fun. Two more orderlies came running.
“Do something!” she screamed at me. It was an ugly, frantic sound and nothing like her.
“Don’t hurt her,” I said. I said it quietly but firmly. “Please stop. You’re hurting her.”
“Do something!”
Then they really had her, one on each limb. Like I said, she was tiny, rail thin, so even thrashing wildly it didn’t take much for them to contain her. The nurse and I watched her go. They carried her off like an animal.
The cranapple juice was still sitting on the table. Somehow it hadn’t spilled in all the commotion. I stood up and swiped it off the table with my hand and it splashed all over the floor. Cindy the nurse made a little sound, “ooh,” and I turned to her triumphantly. But she just looked sad.
“I’m not cleaning it up,” I said.
“I’ll get it,” she said. And she did.
Would it have made any difference, what I did or didn’t do that day, to the rest of her life? Would it have made any difference, what I did or didn’t do that day, to the rest of mine?
Story goes she went from seclusion to another hospital, and then another. I sent her a letter and she sent me a postcard back and the writing was shaky. But then things got better for her. She went home, and was there for a few months and started thinking about going back to college. Story goes she even packed her bags. It was the end of summer and she was all registered for classes. Then one morning her mother came into her room and she wasn’t there and they went looking for her. They must have known right away, as soon as they saw she was gone, what had happened. Story goes they found her in a field. On her back or on her side, I don’t know.
Once she told me about a guy she knew at that other hospital who had found a yellow construction hard hat, left behind in a redone bathroom. The guy put on the hard hat and walked out into the unit and went up to a nurse he didn’t know and asked where the exit was. The nurse showed him to the door, entered the code, and let him out. The guy walked about a mile until he got to a gas station. He went inside and bought a sandwich, and then he sat on the curb in front of the gas station with his feet in a puddle and ate the sandwich. Then he walked back to the hospital and went up the stairs to the unit and rang the buzzer, because he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. He just wanted to see if he could get away with it. And he could. Because under the right circumstances, Madeline said, even a crap disguise could be your ticket out. She said this was one of those things you might need to remember.
And so I have.
SHELTER
More often than not it happens like so: in the middle of the night I’m woken up by a car door slamming out front. Usually the car’s idling and there’s a little bit of radio playing and sometimes there’s a whistle or tongue click or scuffle. Not often words. People come alone mostly, and people who do what they’re doing aren’t the kind of people who’d have words for a dog, though every so often someone’ll say a “sorry” or a “see ya” before getting back into the car and driving away. When I can tell they’re good and gone I pull out of bed and, unless it’s winter, open up the front door in my nightie and bare feet and usually the dog’s standing about where it was dropped, wagging its tail and looking up the road after the car, not getting the picture entirely, and I rattle my jar of Milk-Bones and nine times out of ten the mutt’ll turn and run right up to me, and I let it stay in the house until morning, so it don’t have to go meet all the others out back in the kennel in the middle of the night. They’re barking by now, of course—they bark all the time, once one starts they all gotta be heard—but the sound is as familiar to me as crickets or trucks on the highway, so I hardly hear it anymore.
I’ve found families for somewhere near four hundred homeless dogs across the state of New Hampshire. For twenty-five years I answered the phone for Dr. Brick, the town vet, but when Doc retired I looked around and saw I was fifty-two and had lots of days left and no clear way to fill them. I was still living in the house I’d grown up in, the mortgage long since settled. And I had a little money saved, so I didn’t need a job that would pay much, if anything. I’d seen lots of hard-luck dogs in my years with Dr. Brick, strays brought in by folks who’d found but couldn’t keep them, healthy, good dogs taken down (sometimes by me, in the back of my station wagon) to the shelter where I knew damn well they’d be gassed in a matter of weeks. So it seemed like maybe this was a way I could fill those days.
I’ve been at it nearly a decade now, so a lot of people know I do what I do, and if all a person wants is a regular old dog—not one to show or train for some job or another—they might call me instead of going to a pet store or a puppy mill. Then what I do is I go out to the person’s house, check things over to make sure they’ve got the right kind of space and the right reasons to be looking for a dog—that they’re not the type to lose interest or change their minds after a week or two, landing the dog right back where it started—and then once they’ve signed the papers I let them come out to my place and take their pick from the lot. For the picking, the dogs line up against the kennel fence, slapping tails and nosing through the holes. A few hang back, some shy, others seeming not to care, scratching at a flea or stretching out in the sunshine, like they don’t give a damn who wants them and never did.
Twenty dollars is all I ask as payment, enough to buy a couple more bags of the store-brand food for the ones left behind. Some people give me more. One time a lady from Hanover wrote me a check for five hundred dollars. She
said I was doing the lord’s work. I thought to myself that maybe the lord had more important things to worry about than a kennel full of slobbering dogs, but I wasn’t about to say so, standing there with her check in my hand. The truth was, I didn’t really know why I did what I did, and I didn’t see any reason to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It was just the way it was.
I’ve gotten through a lot by not overthinking things, by being able to keep certain matters out of my mind. You busy yourself with living, however it is you choose to busy yourself—dogs or kids or broken cars or numbers in a book—and you might well forget that after a year of anticipation your father decided not to move the family to Florida after all, or that the man you almost married had a change of heart at the last minute and traded you in for another. My sister, who lives down in Boston, thinks all the time about everything and as a result takes a half dozen pills every morning. Last year I watched her suffer every detail of her daughter’s wedding and I thought: you can have it. And so when I felt that thing while I was soaping in the shower, that thing like an acorn, I just put it right out of my mind. I went on tending to my dogs and making home visits and doing what I do and I went so far as to cancel my yearly checkup with Dr. Lands because I knew once I had that paper gown on there would be no more not thinking about it. And one day in October, when I was starting to feel a little weak walking from the house to the kennel and the acorn wasn’t an acorn anymore but a walnut, I drove up to the top of my dirt drive and swung shut the rusty iron gate and put a sign on the bars that said CLOSED—DO NOT DROP DOGS. Because I had twenty-seven dogs in the kennel and I had to find homes for all of them before I was dead.
It was a week or so later, around about Halloween, that I got a call from a man named Jerry who said he’d read about my kennel in his local newspaper and wanted to get one of my dogs. A big dog, he said.
“Not tall and bony,” he said over the telephone. “Stocky. Fat if you have one. Do you?”
“Sure,” I said. “I got all kinds.” They were barking out back as we spoke.
“I’d like to see them immediately.” He talked swift and clipped like a military man, everything an order. “I’ll be there at three o’clock.”
I hesitated, but not for more than a breath or two. I needed to place the dogs in a hurry, sure, but I had to stick to the rules. What did the dogs care about a little lump? All they wanted was somebody who’d take them and keep them. So I told this Jerry I would have to make a home visit first, and if he passed then he could come out and take his pick.
“I’ll bring references,” he said. “There’s no need for—”
“This is the way it works,” I said. “No home visit, no dog.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute, but I could tell he was still there. I could practically hear the spokes in his head creaking through the telephone line. Then he said, “Just you? Nobody else?”
“There is nobody else,” I said.
And so he gave me directions to his house, up in Cornish, about forty miles from my town. We set a time for the following morning.
One day last year I did a home visit in New London and I was walking through the house and I saw an old man sitting in an easy chair and I knew right off he was dead. His hands were droopy in his lap in a way only dead hands droop. So I said to the woman walking me around—she wanted a little dog, one that would sit on her lap while she did the crossword—I said, “Ma’am is that man okay?” even though I knew full well he wasn’t, but didn’t know quite how to say it. And she said, “Oh, Daddy always takes his nap around this time,” and instead of telling her that her father was dead as a doornail I just said “oh, all right.” And I guess a little while after I left she must have figured it out. I don’t know what exactly happened because she never did call me about getting a little dog.
Lying in bed that night before I went out to Jerry’s, I started thinking of that old man and his droopy hands. I tried to imagine the way my body would relax when I went, in which direction my head would nod, where my eyes might be fixed before somebody had a chance to shut them. When my mother died, down at the hospital in Manchester, frail as a leaf, she gave a little gasp of surprise right before the end. I wondered if anything would surprise me, if I would think something different than I’d thought before.
Then I pushed all that garbage out of my mind and went to sleep.
There was a gate at Jerry’s driveway, with a little box like at Wendy’s. I poked the button and a crackly woman came on and I told her who I was and she sighed and said, “Come on up.” And the gate swung open and I pulled through. And right then an idea started coming to me that these were people who could take three or four of my dogs. There must have been ten acres of grass and trees from what I could see and every bit of it fenced. The house was just shy of a mansion, two stories with tall windows and long white steps leading to a front porch that was empty but big enough to hold twenty rocking chairs. I parked my car at the foot of those stairs and saw Jerry was waiting for me up on the porch. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone. He looked eighty, though he also looked like he’d be okay with a few big dogs, tall and spry and with those muscled forearms you always find yourself looking at a moment too long. He had a head full of gray hair that was going in a hundred directions and a rectangle chin. There was no sign of the woman who’d sighed into the box.
“You gotta lot of room for a dog to run,” I called to him as I got out of the car.
“I don’t want a dog to run,” he said, crossing those arms as I climbed the steps toward him. “I want a dog to lie on my feet.”
“Most dogs’ll want to run every so often,” I said, reaching the top. My words came out thin and wheezy. It was weary work, climbing, and I wasn’t sure how many stairs I had left in me.
“Don’t you have a fat, old dog?”
I gathered my breath. “Sure I do. I got a few of ’em in fact. But even fat, old dogs need to get up every so often.”
He twisted his lips into a lopsided frown. He looked like a child when he did it, a young child experimenting in the bathroom mirror with what his own face could do, and I nearly busted out laughing.
“What is it you need to see?” he asked.
By now, frankly, I was more than a little curious. I’d been to a lot of houses, met a lot of people. And I know they say everyone’s different, that we’re just like snowflakes, no two alike and all that, but I think that’s a load. I think most people are alike. I think most people go from the job to the TV to the pillow. In between are meals and a quick game of catch or checkers and a telephone call and one minute of looking out the window wondering what happened to someone.
But there was something about Jerry that wasn’t like a person you met coming and going, something about the way he was old and young all at once. Plus, if I was going to talk him into taking more than one of my dogs (four was the number I had in my head right then), I was going to have to warm him up a little bit first.
“I need to look inside,” I said. “I need to see where the dog’ll be kept.”
“The dog will be kept in the dungeon,” he said. “And forced to wear a clown costume.”
“Listen, you’d be surprised,” I said. “I’ve had some real weirdos. Once I—”
“No need for stories,” he said, opening the door.
I figured he must have just been moving in. The first two rooms we entered—what might have been a living room and dining room—were empty of furniture, the walls peeling paint. Our footsteps on the wood floors echoed all the way to the high ceilings.
“Where you comin’ from?” I asked. “Out of state?”
“Pardon?”
I gestured to the emptiness. “I’m guessin’ you just bought the place?”
“I’ve lived here for fifty years,” he said. “So it depends on your definition of ‘just.’ ”
In the kitchen there was a breakfast-nook-type area with a small circle table and two wood chairs. There was nothing on the coun
ters, and I don’t mean there were no plates or cups or cereal boxes. There was just nothing—no toaster or sugar bowl or roll of paper towels. The only thing in the whole room that would have moved in an earthquake were two dog bowls in the corner by the fridge. One of the bowls was filled to the rim with water.
“You got a dog already?” I asked. “Lookin’ for a pal?”
“No dog.” He cleared his throat. “Just the bowls so far.”
“A dog needs bowls, all right,” I said.
“Then you’re satisfied. I can—”
“Just one more thing,” I said. “I need to see where the dog will sleep. Some people, they—”
He held up his hand. “No stories,” he said.
He led me to a small room off the kitchen. If it hadn’t been connected by wood and plaster you couldn’t have convinced me it was part of the same house. First off, it was tiny compared to everything else—maybe it had been a laundry room or a mud porch. But now it was carpeted with thick brown shag and stuffed with furniture: a fat brown recliner, a rickety old tray table, and one of those big fancy TVs with cables and speakers and slots for movies and whatnot. The Andy Griffith Show was playing on the TV. There was an open jar of pickles and three cans of ginger ale on the tray table, and at least four or five socks flopped on the floor like dead fish.
“This is where it’ll sleep?”
“I expect so,” he said. “It’s where I spend most of my time.”
No kiddin’, I thought. But instead I said, “Are there others in the household?”
“Possibly,” he said, taking a small step away from me. “But they won’t have anything to do with the dog. The dog will be my responsibility.”
He said this like he was repeating something he’d been told a bunch of times, and I thought again that he was like a gray-haired boy. Here he stood, seventy-five, eighty years old, and I could imagine that crackly woman on the intercom saying to him, “I’m not feeding that dog, not walking that dog, not brushing that dog. You bring a dog into this house you better be willing to take care of it, buster.” And Jerry toeing the floor, like little Opie Taylor on TV, saying, “Oh yes, ma’am, I’ll take care of it, I promise.”