A Three Dog Life

by Abigail Thomas

  This is a big Manhattan, but it's my third and I allow myself three. Three keeps me from having four. I hadn't had a drink in twenty years before Rich's injury. But in the past year I have returned to drinking and smoking. I drink my drink, I light a cigarette. Familiar ways, the old ways of coping with stress, part of who I was for forty years, not the best part. When I drank my first Manhattan it tasted like home. I told Rich tonight that I loved him. He said, "That's worth twenty hats and all the signatures in the world." I take another swallow. I don't know if my husband will ever be home again. Anywhere.

  My friend at the duck pond now owns a stone house in the green hills somewhere in Massachusetts. He doesn't go there often, he lives in New York City. He thinks he should probably sell it to someone who will live there all the time, love it and care for it. But he says every time he gets there, for the first five minutes he knows he is exactly where he belongs. He is at home. Then, restless inside his own skin, he loses the feeling. But those five minutes every month or so make it worth hanging on to.

  I finish my third drink, pay my bill, and walk a straight line down the long block home. Our apartment is filled with my husband and with his absence. Tonight, fueled by sadness, anger, and three drinks, I manage to move the ten-foot-long table it took three men to get into the study, out of the study. It is a table my father used to write on, very old, a trestle table that weighs—I don't know what it weighs, only that in the morning I can't even lift it. But tonight I get it through the door, down the hall, and in front of the bookcases in six minutes from start to finish. Tonight I need to change something. On the table I place the little copper church Rich gave me the third time we met. There are bells in its steeple. I remember thanking him and thinking, Is this some kind of proposal? It was. Thirteen years ago.

  Tonight is a hard night. So many broken pieces of our life to try and fit into my sense of past and future, but I am lucky—I know what has changed, I know where I am. Rich's compass is gone, he has no direction home. Nothing is as real to him as the ghost of his memory. But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing.

  Comfort

  Every October the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine celebrates the Feast of Saint Francis and is host to a ceremony known as the Blessing of the Animals. Thousands of people come with their pets, the enormous church is crowded to overflowing. A farm provides some of the bigger beasts, the humble cows and horses and sheep who make a procession to the altar, their necks garlanded with flowers. There are snakes and giant parrots and eagles and hawks. Once there was even an elephant. Outside in the parking lot are small petting zoos; a litter of piglets was especially popular. The peacocks who live on the grounds of the cathedral strut their stuff. The year I went, 2001, the brave dogs who searched the burning graveyard that had been the World Trade Center were honored along with their human companions. A lot of us couldn't stop crying.

  I spotted Rosie from half a block away; she was sitting under a table in the parking lot with two other dogs up for adoption. It really was love at first sight, although she looked like a handful—high-strung, and nervous. Half-dachshund, half-whippet (a union that must have come with an instruction sheet), she was simply the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen. She looked like a miniature deer, a gazelle, or a dachshund's dream come true, as someone remarked, looking at Rosie's long legs. Is she housebroken? Spayed? I asked a few unnecessary questions. I knew I wanted her no matter what. I knelt down and stroked her silky brown coat, and looked into a very nervous pair of brown eyes. Her slender body quivered. I had been thinking about a second dog, and here she was.

  My beagle, Harry, didn't exactly jump for joy when Rosie arrived. In fact he growled. He was occupying his half of the sofa (which he takes in the middle) and Rosie's approach was unwelcome, to say the least. But he looked a little more alive, I was happy to see. Harry and I had both been leading a reclusive life for a long time, neither of us inclined to leave the house unless we had to. Since the accident Harry had refused to go out. I had to carry him trembling into the elevator, through the lobby, across the street into Riverside Park, and once I put him down he lunged toward home. I had taken his photograph with me to church that day, he would not have liked being there.

  Harry had been with us only four months when the accident happened. We had gotten him through a friend who'd found him starving in the woods. The day he arrived we were worried: we gave him food but he wouldn't eat; we put down water but he wouldn't drink; we took him for walks and he skulked close to the ground, his tail between his legs. If we approached him, he tried to make himself as small as possible in a corner of the sofa. Finally, despairing, we went to bed. Ten minutes later we heard the click of toenails across the bare floor and then there was Harry, in bed with us. It was going to be all right. It was going to be better than all right.

  "How do you feel about your dog now?" I recall someone asking soon after the disaster. "I love my dog," I said. It seemed a peculiar question. "I couldn't get through this without Harry." In the first weeks of Rich's hospitalization I would often wake in the night to reach for him only to find that the warmth I felt at my side was Harry's small body. In those moments grief and gratitude combined in a way I have since gotten accustomed to.

  After some initial squabbling over property rights, Harry and Rosie reached a détente. The only real fight they had was over a glazed doughnut I had foolishly left within reach, but it was an Entenmann's doughnut, well worth fighting for. Within days of Rosie's arrival Harry was out and about, his tail held high. Now we head off for the dog run every morning. Walking Rosie is like having a kite on the end of a leash while Harry stumps along maturely, a small solid anchor. In the dog run Harry and I sit on the bench watching as Rosie runs, leaps, bounds, races any dog who will follow her and outruns all of them except two—a saluki named Sophie and an Afghan named Chelsea. They are the only dogs faster than Rosie but most days they are too elegant to run at all.

  Rosie got us out of our slump, but she sleeps with one eye open, if I so much as sigh she is alert. If I look up from my book, or take off my reading glasses, she is tensed to follow. I found out that her owner died in the World Trade Center, and she had been brought to the shelter by a weeping relative. Whoever the man was, he must have loved her as I do, he trained her, and when I tell her to sit and she sits, I swear I can feel his ghost hovering nearby. I want to tell the people who loved him that his dog is part of a family now, that she is doing fine.

  I visit my husband once a week. Now he is cared for in a facility upstate that specializes in traumatic brain injury. The accident was more than two years ago, and I still can't get my mind around it. He is there and not there, he is my husband and not my husband. His thoughts seem to break apart and collide with each other, and I try not to think at all. On good days we sit outside. We don't talk, we just sit very close together and hold hands. It feels like the old days, it feels like being married again. When I get home at night my dogs greet me, Rosie bounding as if on springs, Harry wiggling at my feet. Sometimes I sit right down on the floor before taking off my coat.

  If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed. Rosie dives under the quilt on my right, Harry on my left, and we jam ourselves together. After a little bit Harry starts to snore, Rosie rests her chin on my ankle, the blanket rises and falls with our breathing, and I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

  Surprises

  All spring I kept falling down. I tripped over roots, cobblestones, uneven pavement. I slid on horse chestn
uts down hills, my feet entangled themselves in plastic rubbish, I slipped in mud. My new shoes were too big but they were Nikes and very cool, I had stolen them from my daughter. And although I hated these mishaps, I must admit that the split second when you realize you're going down (that moment that seems to last forever) is thrilling. Maybe at sixty some perverse part of me enjoys being out of control.

  Now we're in the middle of a heat wave but my dogs must still go out and this morning I stumbled down the stone steps that lead into the park at 115th Street. It was a hundred degrees. I popped up unhurt, still hanging on to both leashes, and two nice men with a dog whose clipped fur felt like a fleece blanket and who was not as I'd assumed a puppy but eleven years old (what do you feed her—I want to eat that) leapt to assist me, but I hadn't broken anything. The jitters came from not wearing the full complement of underwear de rigueur for a woman my age but it was so hot, and I just hadn't bothered, and since this was the way I wandered around in the 1960s, maybe I was taken back to those foolish and wild days of fled youth, which I have no desire to revisit.

  The nice men and I finished talking about our dogs and as I proceeded into the park I spotted something peculiar in the thickety growth of a young tree. I extricated and examined what turned out to be a four-foot trident, wound round with red and green ribbon, and at the base, a Fuji apple sticker. I glanced around, perhaps the anonymous artist was waiting for his anonymous audience, but there was nobody anywhere. Rosie, who had been pointing, was ready to make her move and Harry was tugging stolidly in the opposite direction so I put the trident back and began to make my gingerly way downhill, acorns scattered like ball bearings all over the place. I stopped once to remove the chicken bone from Harry's mouth and again to comfort Rosie for not being allowed to actually catch the squirrel when every molecule in her quivering body was telling her how. On level ground the three of us were off again, Rosie hunting, Harry sniffing, and me looking for more things people have made.

  There is an artist in Riverside Park, maybe a whole bunch of artists. Months ago I found a bunch of smooth round stones, like a clutch of eggs, tucked into the hollow at the base of a tree. Then there was a tiny place setting: knife, fork, spoon, all made of twigs—at the foot of a giant elm. On various tree stumps I've seen arrangements of stones and branches, like offerings on a makeshift altar. Leaning up against a tree near the huge boulder was a complex structure that formed either an unfinished shelter or half a spiderweb made of sticks. I marveled at it for some time, as it seemed to defy the laws of physics, and I wanted to take its picture but by the next morning it had been knocked down. This depressed me until I thought maybe it was the artist himself, dissatisfied with the way things were going. Yesterday a couple of feet off the path in the Bird Sanctuary were two sticks pushed into the ground about four inches apart, and balanced on top was a wavy twig. It made exactly the symbol for pi. Well, this is Columbia territory after all.

  I keep an eye out for such things, although I don't talk about it much, aware of my reputation as an enthusiast. "Jennifer!" I exclaimed this summer in Scotland, pointing to a lovely bit of crimson in the grass ahead. "That's a Kit Kat wrapper, Mom," she said patiently. And I don't want to sound like a lunatic. I once knew a woman who told me her house was haunted by a child who fashioned dolls out of string and lint and rags, and left them on the stairs for her to find. My hair stood on end. Thirty years later my hair still stands on end, except now I'm afraid she made the dolls herself. One evening last week after a heavy rain I saw a lump of material under a bush by the statue of Louis Kossuth at 113th Street. This turned out to be a shawl and on closer inspection to be my own shawl. It must have fallen from my shoulders one wet windy night and been blown into the bushes, and now sodden and muddy and half hidden, it looked like nothing so much as a clue from a crime scene.

  You never know what you'll see. People have been sleeping in the park these past hot days, one of them a young man in a red-checked shirt who came into the dog run because he missed his own dog. He liked my beagle, Harry. It seems he had had his wallet stolen the day before and needed his bank card back, but he didn't want to talk about that, he wanted to talk about dogs. We chatted for a while; he was soft-spoken. The next day I came upon his body in the tall grass. He was, thank god, alive, and I hoped he wouldn't wake and see me see him there. The dogs and I hurried away.

  But recently, when my spirits were low, and my foot was hurting from a fall with real broken bones, and I was missing my husband in a sudden fresh moment of grief, something new appeared, like a miracle. Balanced between the divided trunk of a fruit tree were a series of bone-thin sticks, like the widening strands of a delicate web, or the ribs of an unfinished boat, or an airy cradle, or a wind instrument, and nearby, another tree with the same almost invisible additions. I stopped dead in my tracks. Talk about wanting to cry out upon finding.

  Of course there are the natural wonders too—the fallen branch with the head of a loon; the root that is exactly a frog, one amphibian forearm and tendril fingers grasping another root; the cobblestone caught up by a tree whose roots seem to have poured down its trunk like lava, and like lava hold the cobblestone lopsided forever. Often I see the small boy and his father who make the alphabet out of sticks on a sidewalk near the dog run; and the Tai Chi experts, like figures on a marvelous clock, who seem in their slow-motion way to be untelling time. There is the boy with a beautiful smile and strong body that I notice through the coffee shop window one Friday afternoon. The boy works for a scaffolding company and the crew is taking apart the structure that has been up so long I can't remember before. Dismantling is an art of its own, nothing is undone before its time. Piece by piece poles are unbolted and handed down, planks lifted and slid to the sidewalk. I love the young boy's pleasure in his own strength, flinging heavy steel rods on the back of the truck, grinning at his co-workers, all men more seasoned than he, and I sense their good-natured pleasure in him too. Maybe he's twenty, his whole life ahead. Imagine, I think, being twenty again, but I can't. The next time I look up, the trucks and crew are gone, the structure has vanished, and there are the spindly trees again, complete with leaves.

  The Magnificent Frigate Bird

  Rich was a birder, dyed in the wool; we have lists from his fourth-grade sightings in Central Park. He wrote with a dark pencil and he pressed down hard. Blue jay, house finch, crow ... Once in his twenties he sighted a Magnificent Frigate Bird off Jones Inlet, blown there by a hurricane. This was the proudest moment of his bird-watching life. On top of his dresser now are a bunch of birds, a small haphazard collection. There are the shorebirds, long-legged wading creatures; a bufflehead duck he made of clay in the seventh grade; two drab decoys we bought at an auction; a red plastic chicken (mine), which neatly lays three white eggs if you push down gently on her back; a papier-mâché crow, mascot of Old Crow, with his jaunty top hat, that I fell in love with because something in its expression reminded me of my father. There is also a little box of grain Rich saved from a cross-country trip he took when he was seventeen; he and a friend worked on farms along the way. It goes with the birds. What used to be on top of his dresser? A small tray for change, his wallet, scraps of paper with things to do, a picture of us taken at his brother's house a couple of weeks after we were married. A flashlight, just in case. A backup alarm clock, just in case. Rich was prepared for everything. He was a man who carried a couple of Band-Aids in his wallet and always had an extra handkerchief if somebody needed one. I've put a corn plant next to the bureau, green and leafy. They never die.

  I go up to see my husband every Wednesday. My friend Ruth picks me up at eight so I get up at six in order to have the dogs walked and the paper read and the coffee drunk. It's a couple of hours north, depending on traffic, and we have become close friends over the last few months. Our destination is Kingston, and once there Ruth and I stop in Monkey Joe's, a coffee shop with fantastic cappuccino and great pumpkin muffins. We sit together for twenty minutes, then she goes to work at Benedi
ctine Hospital and I head for the pay phone behind a Hot Wings joint that seems to be always on the verge of reopening, and call a cab to take me to the rehabilitation center where my husband has been for the past eleven months.

  Sometimes when I arrive Rich is still asleep, his face relaxed, looking so like himself that I can't believe he won't wake up and be all better. Other times he is up, stalled in the middle of whatever he began to do, his back to the door, his arms raised like a conductor, motionless, as if he were playing some cosmic game of statue. Or maybe he sits on the bed, a pair of socks in one hand, his trousers laid out beside him. After our usual greeting, "Absie! How did you find me!" or "What time did you get up? I didn't hear you," he lapses back into silence. The nurses say he can stand in front of the bathroom mirror (made of shiny metal) for an hour or more, toothbrush in his hand. In brain injury jargon, perhaps this is what is meant by "difficulty completing a task."

  The first time I heard this term I imagined a child who can't manage tying shoelaces, a grown-up who forgets how to scramble eggs, some kind of visible difficulty, frustration, something that could be relearned. I didn't know about the getting stuck. For my husband, there is no such thing as a minute ago, there is no but we've been sitting here for an hour and a half. That information has nowhere to lodge in Rich's consciousness. He has a collapsing past. If he doesn't remember, he doesn't believe. And if everything is now, what's the rush? I used to try and coax him, nudge him on (the TBI phrase is "redirect"), but that only made him angry and confused. So I have adapted. I join him. We sit and steep ourselves in 10:37, a single moment, while outside this room an hour disappears, bypassing us. I am always surprised when I look at the clock to find how long we've been there.

  Once he's moving, I see how slowly he puts himself together. We select the clothes. "These aren't mine," he insists, but somehow we get past that. He puts his socks on the way he always did, rolling them back to get his toes in, unrolling them carefully over the rest of his foot, inch by inch, then pulling them over his heel. Next trousers, then shirt carefully buttoned, and everything tucked in neatly. Rich hasn't shaved in some time; instead he pulls his beard out hair by hair. This has a name but I forget what it is.