by Neil Plakcy
I grabbed Rochester’s leash and he bounded over to me. I locked up the office, and on my way into Leighville I made a pit stop at Genuardi’s grocery. I picked five bouquets of roses in red, pink and white from the bins by the front door.
“You must be in big trouble,” the cashier said to me as she rang them up.
“You could say that.” I paid and carried the roses out to the car. A few minutes later I was parked near Harrow Hall, and Rochester and I were on our way to Lili’s office.
“Oh, my,” Matilda said when I walked in. “How beautiful! She’s on the phone but you can stick your head in.”
I thanked her, and unhooked Rochester’s leash so he could go into Lili’s office first. I’m not stupid; I know the power of the dog.
I heard Lili say, “I’ll call you Monday then,” and hang up the receiver. Staying hidden, I stuck the five bouquets of roses inside the door and waved them like a white flag.
“You can come in,” she said, laughing.
When I walked in she had Rochester’s paws up on her lap and she was receiving doggie kisses. “Five bunches!” she said. “What kind of trouble do you think you’re in?”
I laid the flowers down on her desk and kissed her. I was worried that it might be the last time I’d get to, once I told her what I had to say, and I wanted to make it count.
“Wow,” she said, when we finally parted. “Hello to you, too. But you’ve really got me curious. What’s up? You didn’t hack again, did you?” she asked. “I already told you that it doesn’t matter to me, as long as you’re careful.”
“It wasn’t hacking,” I said. “Let’s sit down.”
She sat behind her desk, and I sat in the visitor’s chair, like a misbehaving student come to the department chair for discipline. Rochester slumped to the floor by my side.
I told her about the confrontation with Eben Hosford, how he’d pulled his rifle. “Rick and I managed to talk him down,” I said. “Rick took him back to the station. After it was over I realized the person I most wanted to be with was you. So I’m here.”
Lili was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I thought when I quit photojournalism I left behind all the hotshots and the adrenaline junkies. Obviously not.” She reached out and took my hand. We’d had this conversation before, how Lili had come to rural Pennsylvania to find a quieter life. And how I had difficulty controlling my curiosity.
“Do you think we’re doomed to love the same kind of person over and over again?” she asked. “To keep on making the same mistakes?”
Was she saying that our romance had been a mistake? “I don’t think so,” I said. “Sure, you have a lot in common with Mary. You’re both smart, beautiful, ambitious. Jewish, with all that means. But in the most important ways, you’re totally different.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ve been working hard to get Mary out of my head, and now I’m not sure that I need to. Because having her to compare you to makes you seem even more amazing. Your independence, your creativity, your heart. And no matter what you might think, I know I’m nothing like Adriano or Phillip. Neither of us is going to repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past.”
“Of course we are,” Lili said, but she smiled. “But the important thing is that when we do, we’ll be smart enough to recognize them and fix them.”
“I’m really sorry, Lili. I should never have confronted Eben like I did. I wasn’t thinking. I was just going on instinct. I promise if you agree to move in with me, I’ll think before I act.”
“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep,” Lili said, but her mouth rose at the edges. She stood up and opened her arms to me.
We hugged and kissed and Rochester kept trying to nose his way between us. When we finally disengaged she said, “You need someone to look after you, and Rochester’s just not doing a good enough job.” She leaned down and wagged her finger in the dog’s face. “You need to keep your daddy out of trouble.”
He licked her finger and his tail swished back and forth.
“I know I don’t have anything big enough to handle all these roses here in the office,” Lili said, picking the first bunch up and sniffing. “Mmm.”
“Guess you’ll have to take them home,” I said. I reached out for her hand and twined it with mine. “Wherever you’re calling home.”
She picked up all the roses and said, “Let’s head to Stewart’s Crossing.”
* * *
Lili baked a pie with the last of the season’s apples, and I brought two six-packs of microbrew beer. When we pulled up in front of Rick’s house there were already a couple of cars along the street and I heard the sound of Springsteen, laughter and dogs barking from his back yard.
The temperature was perfect – cool enough to enjoy the back yard, but not so chilly that you’d need a sweater. I opened the gate and Rascal came running, chased by a cream-colored golden retriever puppy and two young boys. I recognized the younger as Hannah’s son Nathaniel, and assumed the eight-year-old in the baseball jersey was Tamsen’s son Justin. Rochester rushed forward and the three dogs romped together, the two boys jumping in the middle of them.
Mark Figueroa was sitting on a picnic bench talking to Tamsen, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Her sister Hannah stood near her, and I could see the resemblance between them clearly – both slim, blonde and pretty. At the far end of the yard, Joey Capodilupo had a rubber football in his hand, and he threw it toward the dogs, who rushed it.
I assumed that the hipster-looking guy with square black glasses was Nathaniel’s father, because he picked the boy up and twirled him around.
Lili and I walked into the house, dropping off the pie and the beer. I uncapped two beers and joined Rick at the barbecue, where he had begun grilling burgers. “Looks like a pretty good party,” I said.
“That’s for me?” he asked, taking the beer from me. “Thanks.”
Gail and Declan were the last to arrive, both of them looking shyly around. While Rick grilled, I joined Declan, Joey and Hannah’s husband, Eric to play with the kids and the dogs. “What’s your name, handsome?” I asked, picking up the little white golden. He was half Rochester’s size but all muscle and had to weigh close to forty pounds. He licked my face and I laughed.
“That’s Brody,” Joey said. “My baby boy. Just turned a year old.”
“He’s adorable. How’d he get so white?”
“They call it English cream,” Joey said. “All the golden puppies I’m seeing lately are his color. White is the new gold.”
“I’ll stick with the old gold,” I said, as Rochester rushed toward me, jealous of my attention to any other dog. I sat on the grass with Rochester’s head in my lap and looked around at all my friends, their kids and their dogs. It was a life I could only have imagined when I left prison to return home. Lili came over to join me and I said, “Whom dog hath joined, let no man put asunder.”
“An excellent sentiment,” she said. “And now let’s eat.”
Book Six: Dog Have Mercy
1 – Pet Therapy
I didn’t think that my golden retriever Rochester would be calm enough to visit nursing home patients, because he was always eager to pull me down the street, jump up on strangers and lick effusively. But he surprised me when we went to visit Edith Passis at Crossing Manor, the nursing and rehab center where she had gone to recuperate from a broken hip.
Edith was my childhood piano teacher, and she’d been one of the first people I reconnected with when I returned home to Stewart’s Crossing, a small town along the Delaware River in scenic Bucks County, Pennsylvania. With both my parents gone, I’d enjoyed keeping in touch with her as a reminder of my childhood.
She loved Rochester, the big, goofy golden I had adopted two years before, and when I called to check on her, she’d asked if he could come by to say hello. “People bring dogs in all the time,” she said. “Those tiny ones. I’d love to see Rochester.”
I called the Manor to be sure he’d be welcome, and the admi
nistrator said that as long as he could behave I could bring him. So one Saturday morning in mid-December, when the roads were clear of snow and the sun was shining brilliantly, my girlfriend Lili and I loaded him into my ancient BMW sedan for a visit.
It seemed strange to call Lili my girlfriend when we were both in our forties, and had already been living together for a couple of months, but the English language hasn’t caught up with modern-day dating practices. She was a professor of visual art and chair of the fine arts department at Eastern College, where I also worked, and sometimes I looked at her, her auburn curls cascading around her heart-shaped face, so beautiful and smart and funny, and marveled at my luck in finding her.
A block before we reached the rehab center we passed a man wrapped in ragged layers pushing a rickety shopping cart piled with cans and newspapers and other unidentified packages. A brown teddy bear with a missing arm was strapped to the front.
“That’s so sad,” Lili said. “Every time I see someone who looks like they live on the streets I wonder how our society can consider itself progressive when we don’t take care of all our citizens.”
“Some of us are lucky,” I said.
Crossing Manor was a low-slung building down by the Delaware River at the edge of town. A couple of tall pines stood sentinel by the front doors, but the rest of the landscaping was brown, from the grass to the leafless maples and oaks. Shortly before he passed away, my father had spent some time there, recovering from a stroke, and my inability to visit him then still haunted me.
I signaled to turn into the driveway, but had to wait for a hearse from the local funeral home to pull in first. I felt a chill and remembered that many of the patients at Crossing Manor might be leaving like that.
But at least they’d have died of natural causes, unlike those whose deaths Rochester and I had investigated. My neighbor Caroline, who had originally adopted Rochester as a rescue; my old friend and mentor Joe Dagorian; and others Rochester and I had met, known, and lost. I reached over and squeezed Lili’s hand, glad that she was by my side, and that my happy dog was behind me.
Once the hearse had turned in and driven around to the back of the property, I parked and we went inside, to a cheery, clean lobby festooned with photos of staff and patients and posters about bingo night, exercise groups and what to do if someone was choking. Signage indicated that Crossing Manor was home to both short-term rehab patients, and those who needed long-term care. One poster had a photo of a woman whose lip was curled oddly, and the legend “This woman is having a stroke. Get help immediately.”
“You be good, Rochester,” I said, holding my dog on a tight leash. He walked proudly, his head up and his plumy tail waving from side to side.
A plump thirty-something whose name tag read Cindee sat behind the reception desk, a wooden semi-circle stacked with Crossing Manor brochures. A teenaged girl in scrubs decorated with cartoon animals stood beside her. The girl had shoulder-length blonde hair and her right eyebrow was pierced with a small gold ring. “What a beautiful boy,” she said. “Can I pet him?”
When she spoke I saw that her tongue had been pierced as well, and repressed a grimace. “Sure,” I said. “Rochester, sit.”
He plopped his furry butt on the ground and looked up at the girl, who offered him her palm to sniff. “I have a teacup Yorkie at home,” she said.
He didn’t lean forward the way he usually did with new friends, but I assumed that was because he was trying to be quiet and gentle, or perhaps because he could smell the Yorkie on her.
I signed the visitor’s book. “My name is Steve Levitan,” I said to the receptionist. “We’re here to see Edith Passis.”
Cindee looked at me. “Any relation to Dave Levitan?” she asked. “He was a patient here a couple of years ago. Very sweet man.”
“That was my dad,” I said.
She nodded. “He came in right after I started, which is why I remember him so well. He used to come out to the desk and talk to me. I think he was lonely, poor thing.”
A pain rose from the pit of my chest. He was lonely because his only child was in prison in California and couldn’t come to see him.
Lili must have sensed my unhappiness because she took my hand. Her right arm was stacked with silver bangles that tinkled softly as she raised it. She’d worn an old pair of LL Bean duck boots that morning, and they gave her an extra inch in height, so she was almost at my six-one. “Where can we find Edith?” she asked.
“She’s in the lounge. I can take you down there,” the girl said. “I’m Allison.” Rochester ignored her hand, instead rearing up to sniff her pants pocket, then going back to the floor. Allison suddenly reached down to pat her pocket.
“Oh, no, did he take something from you?” I asked. “He likes to grab tissues.”
Rochester lay down on the floor and I could see he had spit whatever was in his mouth out between his paws. It was the shape of a tube of lipstick, but I couldn’t see anything more because Allison quickly reached down and grabbed it from him.
She slipped the tube back into her pocket. “The dining room, exercise rooms and offices are to the right,” she said as she led us through a door to the left. “There are twenty-four rooms with capacity for fifty patients, though some of the triple rooms have only two patients in them right now.”
Most of the rooms we passed were empty, and when I asked, Allison said, “The nurses like to get the patients up and out of bed whenever they can. And it gives the staff a chance to clean the rooms.”
Rochester was behaving very well, walking by my side, not pulling or stopping to sniff anywhere. I was impressed.
“Are you a nurse?” Lili asked Allison.
“Oh, no, I’m still in high school. I’m really interested in science, so I’m a volunteer here. Kind of like a candy striper. I was one of those at the hospital until they told me I had to leave.”
I’d never heard of someone being kicked out of a candy striper program – usually the kids either got bored, or finished their required hours of community service. I had a couple of friends in high school who volunteered that way, and all they ever did was push people around in wheelchairs, fill water pitchers and fetch magazines.
Crossing Manor seemed like the kind of place few teenagers would be willing to volunteer, so perhaps the administrators had been willing to overlook whatever Allison had done wrong at the hospital.
She stopped at the doorway to a large room where a documentary about the clubbing of baby seals was playing. Patients sat in chairs and lay on gurneys positioned around the room, some watching the TV, others looking out the large windows to the parking lot. A few just stared into space.
Edith sat in a large armchair with her feet planted on the floor. Her normally puffy white hair was flat against her head, and her salmon-pink skin had faded, but her eyes were still fierce and blue, and she smiled when she saw us. “You came!” she said.
Rochester gently tugged me toward Edith, as if he knew what his purpose was. He sat obediently by her side, sniffing, and she reached down to scratch behind his ears. “Oh, this is such a treat!” she said.
Lili pulled over a couple of chairs for herself and me, and we sat. “How are you doing, Edith?” she asked.
“I’m getting stronger,” she said. “I can’t wait to get back to my own house, so I’m working extra hard at my therapy. You get so weak so quickly when they have you lying in bed, you know. But I can stand on my own now, and put weight on my new hip. So I should be going home in a few days.”
An emaciated elderly woman on a gurney beside Edith extended her hand toward Rochester, and he turned in her direction, allowing her hand to rest on his head. “That’s Mrs. Tuttle,” Edith said. “Poor thing has dementia. She doesn’t usually respond to any of the staff. I’m surprised she reached out to Rochester.”
“He has that effect on people.” I watched as Mrs. Tuttle caressed Rochester’s head for a moment, then brought her hand back up and smiled a gap-toothed grin. A bag of fluid hu
ng on a movable stanchion beside her, with a tube running into her arm. “They must have a nursing staff here, if they give IV fluids,” I said to Edith.
“They can give us basic care,” Edith said. “I read about it in their brochure before I agreed to come here. Some of the patients have PICC lines – you know, those long-term catheters—and the nurses can use those to dispense medications. They also give insulin shots, clean wounds and change tubes and so on.”
She looked over at the woman beside her. “Mrs. Tuttle is my roommate. She was throwing up this morning and when the doctor stopped by to see her he said she was badly dehydrated. He’s the one who ordered the IV, but he said that if she didn’t respond to the fluids they’d have to send her to the hospital.”
She shook her head. “Poor thing. I pray I don’t end up like that. When God is ready for me, I hope he takes me quickly.”
“Let’s hope he won’t be ready for you for quite a while,” Lili said.
From across the room, an elderly black man called, “Can I pet your dog?”
I looked at Edith for permission. “You go on, I don’t want to be greedy,” she said.
While Lili sat with Edith and chatted, I took Rochester on a circuit of the room. The old man, Mr. MacRae, had a smooth, ebony face with a bit of grizzle at his chin, and short, nappy iron-gray hair. He had been a janitor at Crossing Elementary when I was a kid, and he remembered a couple of the teachers who’d made an impression on me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Going on five years now,” he said. “My kidneys ain’t no good anymore, and they take me for the dialysis. My kids done grown up and moved on, and I can’t live on my own, so I thank God and Franklin Roosevelt for the Social Security and the Medicaid.”
A very short, skinny man in his fifties walked into the lounge leaning heavily on a cane. His face lit up when he saw Rochester, and once he was settled in a chair Rochester went over to be petted. “I could never have a dog when I was a kid,” the man said. “Too sick to take care of one. But I always wanted one.”