You Had Me at Woof

by Julie Klam

  It once again made me believe that people could change. We both did, because I also tried very hard to stop acting like it was a given that Otto came first.

  ON THE WAY to get Rascal, Violet came along when she found out the rendezvous point was a Toys “R” Us, and Bea came along, too, because she loved a car ride. We had just come out of the store, Violet with a new Dora backpack and candy necklace and ring, when we saw the truck pull up with Rascal in the front seat.

  I’d done this many times. The dog would jump out, run over, jump up on me, run back, run over to the grass, pee, and eventually would happily hop in the car. Not this time. Rascal, who was so not a Rascal, shook like no dog I had ever seen. Like Scooby-Doo in a haunted house. Though he didn’t know the woman who brought him well at all, he Velcroed himself to her leg while she was greeting tiny, perfect Beatrice.

  Rascal was twice Bea’s size and his markings were all wrong according to breed standard, but he was so, so cute. It was really hard to get him to come over to me, especially with Bea jumping and barking and running around like a lunatic. I finally just took the leash and dragged him into Mattie’s car. I held him on my lap; he was just terrified. There is a certain breath I notice my dogs get when they’re scared, almost chemical-like, and I smelled it strongly coming from him. At some point in the trip, he relaxed a little and started to release some tension. It was like he let himself get heavier.

  The first couple of days I e-mailed with the board, I was of the conviction that this Rascal was irreparably damaged. Sheryl told me what I had told other people: “Imagine how he feels. Give him time.”

  But it was difficult to have this stricken little fellow who trembled almost constantly and sometimes, like in the elevator, seemed close to passing out from fear. I felt so sorry for him and hated that I just could not get through to him and calm him down.

  While Violet was in school I sat with him and talked to him and told him no one would be scaring him anymore. He was safe and loved. After spending some time with him one morning I told Paul I felt strongly that we must change his name. He didn’t respond at all to Rascal, and it was just so totally unsuited to him. He was such a serious guy. He struck me more as a Gandhi. I e-mailed Sheryl to say that I would be changing his name, and she said fine as long as I didn’t name him Buddy or Buster because the database was overflowing with them. But she should know, I still wasn’t keeping him.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him, scratching him behind his ears. He put his muzzle on my lap and from somewhere out in the naming ether it came to me. Moses.

  I swear that once he had a new name, his personality changed to go with it. He was a little less nervous, he would let you pet him longer, and wherever I went, he was right there with me. Beatrice was a bit of a loner, so when we were in the apartment she’d be off in our room tucked away in her bed, and Moses mostly had me to himself.

  I worried a lot about him. The first two days he did not go to the bathroom at all. I’d call Sheryl while I walked him. “Eventually he will go,” she said. “He’ll have to.” She was right. Finally the third day he peed, one long, long, long pee. I didn’t know who was more relieved, he or I. I found myself talking about him all the time. A new foster moving in is always dramatic, but he was also so enigmatic. He didn’t gobble down food or go crazy when he heard a noise. He was a somber, earnest boy. I reread the original post about how he spent all of his time hiding under the couch, and I planted my lips on the top of his very flat head. While doing the dishes one day, I looked down at him. He was staring up at me and I think from that moment on, his eyes never left me.

  He started to come into his own—or as much of his own as he could—at about the one-month mark. I noticed that he didn’t shake anymore, and he was absolutely smitten with me. I have to say the feeling was mutual. I would pick him up and put his front legs over my shoulder, his big head right at my face, looking into my eyes, breathing his breath. I would start slow dancing, singing, “Heaven, I’m in heaven ...” Then I’d dip him. Paul would yell, “Get a room!”

  We laughed a lot with Moses. He reminded us of Buster Keaton, all deadpan and black-and-white. And he just blossomed like a sunflower. He got a little skip in his step and just the tiniest amount of moxie. He started to bark at other dogs and wag his tail and chase squirrels and even have a little swagger. The feeling we had of taking this dog from under the couch in the trailer and restoring him to the top of the bed was pretty breathtaking. We were very proud of what he was able to accomplish.

  Occasionally, ever so slightly, he bit people. Like when my brother came to visit. Matt strode into our apartment and came to give me a hug and Moses jumped up and bit him on the ass. Matt told me later that the only cure for this type of behavior was euthanasia. I told him I didn’t want to make him feel any worse, but I think I’d sooner euthanize him than Mosie. I did have to keep him on a little tighter lead, though. We just had to be extra careful.

  So Moses burrowed his way into my heart. I just loved him and it was different from the other dogs. He became my little boy, my fur kid, as Oprah says. He always wanted to be near me. When I worked at the computer, he sat his big body on my lap and put his head on the keyboard. It was okay, I could always use another space in between words. Plus, it represented how far he had come. He had a minor set-back when I took him to get neutered. All the shaking came back. But the vet’s office was absolutely in love with him, and when I came to pick him up the entire staff came out to say good-bye. About a day later he was okay again.

  I loved him to the moon and back. I wouldn’t want to compare any other dog, but I did think he was the first dog who came close to being what Otto was to me. I never thought it was possible that once I had an adoring spouse and loving little child, I would still feel the dog love in the same way I did when I was single. But with Moses I began to understand that “dog” was its own category of “love.” Sometimes you just need to hold and kiss a member of the dog species. Even when humans are available.

  And with that growing connection, Violet started to turn on him. Just four at the time, she asked with increasing regularity if Moses could go live with Paul’s uncle Dan, who had often talked to us about getting a dog. And then she stopped asking if he could go, and she started pointing at days on the calendar that would be good for him to leave. It reminded me of when my friend Mae had a baby girl. Her son often asked if they could send her back to the sky.

  “Mom, Moses isn’t going to live here anymore, he’s moving away,” Violet would announce. “We don’t want him here anymore.”

  “Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work with me, kid,” I told her. But I tried to make things better. Moses wanted to be the closest one to me. In the evening, Paul and I would read books to Violet before she went to sleep. We would lie on our bed with Violet in the middle of us, but now Moses would jump up and get between her and me. And she’d be shoving him and pushing him and grunting at him to move. He would suction himself to the bed and stare straight ahead as if he were deaf. She grew more frustrated, and he remained stubborn. I wasn’t happy that Violet was having difficulty, but I did think that the simulated sibling conflict might not be a bad thing in the end.

  Our schedules had gotten busier. Paul’s workday was longer now and I was doing all of the household, child, and dog chores. I started to feel like walking the dogs punctuated every moment of my life. It sort of reminded me of breast-feeding, in that I was either doing it or heading toward doing it or just finishing doing it. So we hired a dog walker to do one of the shifts. In the evenings, she came in and sat on the floor leashing up the dogs and talking to them in her funny dog voice. “What is this lady doing to me?” she squeaked, as though she were one of them. “I was just fine sitting here minding my own business. I don’t want to put my leg through there! Oh, lady!”

  For the sheer fact that she wasn’t me or Paul, Moses didn’t want to go with her. It was always a struggle. She came in one night upset and said Moses had wiggled out of his harnes
s, but she’d been able to grab him before he went into traffic. I’d never had that problem with him before but we tightened up the harness so it wouldn’t happen again.

  It was a very chaotic time in our home. I was getting ready for a book publication that involved a tour of eight cities in eleven days. I would also be leaving Violet for the first time in her life, and I’d never even taken an overnight trip away from her. My mother would come to stay with her and Paul and then he’d come out and meet me on the West Coast. We talked about it a lot. I would call all the time, I’d always have my phone with me, and she could have whatever she wanted while I was away. When Paul came to meet me, my mother would take Violet and the dogs up to her house in Vermont, which was near my last tour stop so I’d come and pick her up there. It was so stressful. Not my first book or this development in my life, but abandoning my child. My therapist suggested that this was a good thing for Violet, that she’d probably thrive and would feel very good about herself afterward. It was all being planned and then my dad said no to bringing the dogs up. We’d come there briefly with Moses and Bea at Christmas, and Moses had started fights with my parents’ dogs. He just had no good social experience. Bea had taken on being the alpha at home, but elsewhere, to Moses, it was still up for grabs. I understood my father’s feelings, that they were going to have to deal with little Violet and maybe that was enough. So I decided on the dog walker coming to our apartment to dog-sit. In a distant second place to my concerns for Violet was my fretting for Moses. How would he take our leaving? Would he think we were gone forever? Would he bond more with the dog walker or totally freak out? Clearly, if there’s a more anxious person than me, they are probably sitting in a hospital somewhere. When I finish worrying about one thing, I can go to the list and take my pick of the next.

  At the three-week countdown I started physically preparing: ramping up my gym schedule, shopping for new clothes, making hair appointments, figuring out which nail polish would say to people around the country, “I’m a writer you want to get to know better!” It was a lot like my wedding, except that I hoped, in the future, I’d have other books.

  In truth, I was excited and happy and felt like for the first time in my life I was realizing myself. I loved my husband, my daughter, my work, and I was in love with a dog again, something I never thought would happen after Otto. With Beatrice I very consciously kept from getting too close to her. I didn’t want the heartbreak I had with losing Otto ever again. But Moses blindsided me. He slipped in through an unguarded entrance.

  One evening, the dog walker came to pick up Bea and Moses while Violet was taking a bath. As she was playing with the bubbles, she told me she wanted Moses to go away forever and never come back. She had also told me this in the morning. I don’t know why but that day he was really getting in her craw. I was used to her insistence.

  It wasn’t much later when I heard first the house phone and then the cell phone ring. I answered and it was the dog walker and she was upset but I was having difficulty understanding her. I finally heard that Moses had gotten out of his harness.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In the lobby with Bea,” she said. “He ran out the front door before the doorman could shut it. Some men went after him.”

  I whipped Violet out of the bath and threw clothes on her and we ran down to the lobby. I told the dog walker to take Violet up to the apartment and I’d go look for him. Violet was too upset, though, and she wanted to go. As we were leaving the building, my next-door neighbor and close friend Margaret was coming in and when I told her about Moses, she dropped her bags and went to look with us. It was twilight, and the doorman had seen him go east, so that’s the way we went. We got a block away and I realized it was just impossible to try to look for Moses at Violet’s pace, so Margaret took Violet back to her apartment. I tried to call the city to see if anyone had reported him, but I couldn’t get through, so I called my mother and asked her to keep trying to call the city, and then I called Paul and left a message on his cell phone. I phoned Mattie, who was out to dinner. She said, “He’ll come back.”

  I walked and called his name, thinking of where he could have gone. I was worried that someone had grabbed him, someone not nice. We were always hearing about people who used small dogs as bait for training pit bulls to fight. I had to stop thinking of that. I worried that he’d gone into Central Park, which was now falling into darkness. I even tried to talk to him telepathically. I felt like I should’ve been able to figure out where he had gone, but my mind was blank, except for thinking about Moses being afraid. I thought about his eyes and how it felt to hold him and how terribly much I had let myself love him. If he was lost forever, I thought I might go crazy. I felt horrendous anguish and guilt for not having replaced the stupid harness when the dog walker first noticed he could get out of it.

  I decided to walk back toward my apartment and go west, look in the park by our apartment building and then head toward Riverside. I walked and looked between buildings and called his name, my voice starting to break. When I got up to my building, a group of guys who worked there and people I didn’t know were talking about where they’d looked and who had seen him go. I said I was going to try the other park. It was probably a hundred feet from the door to Broadway, where there are two wide lanes of traffic going north and two going south separated by a median. I looked across Broadway and saw him. I saw his eyes shining and he saw me. I yelled for him to stay, but he didn’t. He came toward me and into an oncoming SUV. The rest of what happened operated on some other level of my consciousness, because when that car hit Moses, my thinking stopped and it was all feeling. He lay in the street in a pool of blood, not moving. Before another car could hit him I ran out and picked him up. I could still feel his heart beating, but he had been hit head-on. I was kissing him and crying and neighbors whom I’d never spoken to ran with me up to a vet two blocks away. My mind was replaying and replaying the events of the evening. I wanted to go back so badly and change what had happened that I almost felt I could. When we got to the vet, I was covered in blood and tears. They took Moses into the emergency room, and I sat with these two kind strangers.

  “Maybe they can do something,” the woman said.

  I begged and pleaded with God. Paul called and he couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I just told him to come to where I was. A few seconds later the vet came in and said he would not be able to save him, that he’d been hit in the head and it would be better to let him go. I needed to give him permission. He asked me if I wanted to go in and say good-bye, but I had done that when I carried him. I knew he’d had some breath in him, and the last image he’d been conscious of was seeing me across the street and I just tried to stay with that. Paul came in and I told him Moses was gone. We both cried and gathered our things. The neighbors left and we walked home together in pieces.

  Unlike when Otto had died, I was now a parent of a small child and I couldn’t let myself totally fall apart. When we came home, Violet was still at Margaret’s. Margaret came over and without saying a word hugged me and cried. A few minutes later Paul came in with Violet, who did not know what had happened.

  “Did you find him, Mom?”

  I said no at first, thinking it would be easier for her to think of him as having “run away” than having been killed. And she went into a panic. Of course it had to have been the day she demanded he go away that this happened, and now she thought she had driven him off and she wanted to know why I had stopped looking for him. So I told her that he had gone to heaven, a place she was somewhat familiar with. Paul’s parents were in heaven, and his uncle had recently moved there.

  Now my little girl was so hurt and crying and crying. She said she was sorry, and if she was sorry, could he come back? Paul and I told her that it was an accident and none of it had anything to do with her. She lay down on our bed weeping until she fell asleep.

  I e-mailed Joy and told her. She posted on the message board: Hi All—

  This
is probably the most difficult post I’ve ever made.

  Julie Klam’s beloved Moses (one of the PA Dogs and my Cal’s littermate) somehow got out of his harness today while being walked by the dog walker. He was loose in Manhattan for over an hour. Julie chased and chased him. As he was heading back home, he went to cross a median and was hit by a car. As Julie was taking him to the vet, he left for the Bridge. Fortunately, Violet, Julie’s 4-year-old daughter, was taken by a friend and didn’t see it. Julie is now explaining to Violet that Moses has gone to doggie heaven.

  Please say a very special prayer for Julie and her family and light a candle so Moses can see his way to the Rainbow Bridge.

  Hug your pups just a little closer tonight for Moses.

  THE RAINBOW BRIDGE refers to a poem:Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

  When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water, and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

  All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.