A Three Dog Life

by Abigail Thomas

  But it isn't true. There is a dividing line. I am careful with Crystal to say only what I mean, not to exaggerate. Her life scares me. There have been injuries to her children, the eldest in particular, her arm broken in some disciplinary action taken about an open window. "It wasn't Ray's fault," says Crystal, "it was an accident," and I look at the girl who says nothing, stares at the table. Crystal has another family of grown children in Florida, but she mentions their existence only once, and she hasn't seen them in twelve years. Her husband used to smoke crack, she finally tells me, but he's clean now.

  Then one day there is Crystal and all eight kids—she has eight now, the pregnancy was twins—waiting for me outside my work. The children look tired and grimy. Crystal is nervous. She is perspiring. "I told them to be quiet and to put on all their underwear this morning," she says. "I decided on the spur of the moment." Ray is smoking crack, and she isn't going to go through that again. She is taking the children and going tomorrow to Tuskegee, where she has heard they are good to strangers. They've been all day at a park far from their neighborhood, and they need a place to sleep. The bus leaves in the morning. Can they stay at my apartment?

  "Of course," I say.

  Catherine isn't pleased, these are the kids who ate her special Italian lollipop, the one she had been saving for two years; it had a design inside like a flower. She isn't happy, but she knows there is no choice. "What can I say, Mom? No, you can't stay here with your kids, you have to sleep on a bench?" They arrive, we order pizza, everyone is fed, and the kids run around. It's as if my apartment is full of little wildfires, and I can't put them all out, the floor is burning. Finally I tell Crystal that Catherine and I are going to the movies. Crystal is going through a bag of children's clothes that my eldest daughter has given me for her. "Have a good time," she says, smiling.

  "Maybe when we get back they'll all be asleep," I say to my daughter.

  "But, Ma, it's like we don't have a home," Catherine says as we walk downtown to the Olympia. When we return the children are sleeping. They are everywhere, draped over the arms of chairs, the back of the sofa, under the coffee table, on the rug, on the bare floor. They look like little birds who have been shot out of the sky, all lying where they fell. Crystal is asleep in the rocker and Catherine and I tiptoe past, and I ask if Catherine wants to come in my bed and she does, and neither of us sleep. "What if they don't leave?" she whispers, but I am already afraid of that.

  Crystal moves slowly the next morning. Socks are carefully chosen from those sorted out of the bag, shoes are tied carefully; everyone wears something new, everyone has their hair brushed, everyone washes their face and brushes their teeth. I stand around mentally wringing my hands, sneaking peeks at the clock. What if they miss the bus? What if she asks to stay longer? Whatever this is a test of, I'm not passing it. Finally they are ready to set off. Crystal carries a suitcase I give her that contains the rest of the hand-me-down clothes from my daughter's family.

  "I was afraid you'd miss the bus," I say, hoping I don't sound relieved. They have fifty-five minutes to get to Port Authority.

  "I didn't want to rush them," she says. "I wanted this to seem like a normal day." I have made sandwiches for the trip, peanut butter and jelly, and the eldest girl takes that shopping bag murmuring thanks.

  We say good-bye, embrace, Crystal says she'll call. She is grateful and I don't deserve gratitude. Here is this brave woman taking eight kids to a strange city where she knows no one, and all I can think of is please don't ask me for something I can't give. Part of me fears I will see them all tomorrow, outside the West Side Market again. But several nights later she telephones from Alabama; they have arrived safely, they have somewhere to stay, and Crystal already has a job working in a cafeteria.

  For a long time afterward, I was afraid when the telephone rang. I was afraid when the downstairs buzzer sounded. I was equally afraid of seeing her again, and of never seeing her again. But my center would not hold, and I knew it, and I was most terribly afraid of who I would become when I said No.

  iii

  It is 2003. A new social worker greets me as I walk down the hall of the neurobehavioral unit of the Northeast Center for Special Care. This is the locked ward; residents here all suffer serious behavioral problems brought on by brain injury. "Poor impulse control" is the euphemism. The young woman introduces herself, and I say I am here to visit my husband. Who is your husband? she asks. I tell her.

  " Well," she chirps, much too cheerily, "we'll start work on getting Rich home."

  My husband was hit by a car three years ago. He sustained traumatic brain injuries. Most of the recovery in traumatic brain injury occurs during the first year. Does this person know my husband? Does she know anything?

  "I think we're way past that," I say.

  "Oh. For the weekend then," she says. I am not inclined to smile. She isn't well meaning, she is on automatic. One size fits all.

  I don't want to bring my husband home for the weekend. This doesn't mean I don't love him, it doesn't mean I don't miss him, but I know what's possible and what isn't. Traumatic brain injury is characterized by the following symptoms: psychosis, paranoia, hallucinations, aggressive behavior, rages.

  I remember how quickly my husband's tenuous grasp of reality slipped away. He was, for all intents and purposes, a madman. He stood among bloody bodies, he was unarmed in battle, desperate and terrified. The Gestapo were coming for him. The food was poisoned, the apartment wasn't ours, it was a replica, why was I trying to fool him? He was also gentle and sweet for stretches of time, but madness held sway. Twenty-four hours a day a home health aide was there; together we tried to get him to his doctors' appointments, his outpatient rehab, into clean clothes, into his shoes, out for a walk in the park. Simple tasks were uphill sledding. What would take an ordinary person five minutes took Rich hours, and we learned to start preparing him long ahead of time, but he fell into rages and we often got nowhere. There were three shifts, everybody went home after eight hours except me and Rich. We were home.

  Five weeks later, Rich was admitted to the psychiatric ward of another hospital, and from there to a rehab facility on Long Island. But he got no better, and after ten months they couldn't keep him any longer. This wasn't a locked facility, and he had gotten out of the building several times, headed up the hill toward a six-lane highway. They locked the elevator, an inconvenience for everybody, but then Rich found the stairs. They were sorry, but he wasn't improving, they couldn't keep him safe, and they needed the bed.

  I remember sitting in the little office with the head of the program. I liked her very much. We had grown to know each other well over the past year. "What options do we have?" I asked. She looked uncomfortable. I could look for a nursing home with a locked unit, she said, although she knew of no place offhand, or I could take him home.

  Take him home?

  I was terrified. What would happen to us? Where would my life go? I wouldn't be Rich's wife; I would be his jailor and my own. This was a sacrifice that made no sense, I couldn't do it.

  It has taken me almost five years to accept this about myself. What kind of woman was I? What about my wedding vows? Who was I that keeping hold of my own life was more important than taking care of my husband? I kept forgetting the fact that I actually couldn't take care of him. My terror obscured the truth: no single person, no two people could have taken care of a man in Rich's condition. Why then did I feel so ashamed? What standard do we women hold ourselves to? After all these years I can finally say the words I want to live my life without feeling unnatural, selfish, cowardly.

  The social worker didn't last long.

  iv

  The house feels lonely when I first get back, although the dogs are barking and jumping their greetings. I feed them, put down fresh water. If Rich has washed the dishes I take them out of the rack and wash them again, his eyesight is no good. Maybe I make myself a cup of tea. When I go into the living room the dogs follow, Rosie hopping up on the cushion
behind my back on the big red chair, Harry and Carolina curling up on either end of the sofa. The blue chair where Rich sat stays empty. It takes maybe half an hour for me and the dogs to fill the house again, but we do.

  Guilt

  A door blew open last summer and a cardinal flew through and got itself trapped on my screened-in porch. I don't know how long it was there before the dogs started barking. It was a small bird, or maybe it just looked small, beating its red wings and banging against the screen opposite the door. I locked the dogs in the kitchen and went out waving my arms around, giving instructions in English. "No, you idiot bird, turn around, the door is behind you, behind you," which only alarmed it further. I got a broom and tried to shoo it to freedom, but this didn't work either. I began to wonder how long it had been there, and how long before its wild heart gave out. I went back for a towel and luckily I managed to throw it over the bird on the first try. When I gathered it up I could feel the little body thrumming through the folds of terry cloth—amazing—and then I released it, and watched it fly high into the branches of a pine, a blotch of red against the green. The screen door was falling off its hinges. I shut it and propped a chair under the knob so the wind wouldn't blow it open again.

  I bring up the bird because I'm interested in guilt these days.

  Thirty years ago, my old friend Quin took a step back and the heel of his shoe cracked a kitten's skull. He carried the little thing into the bathroom and filled the sink with warm water and held the kitten under because it wasn't dead, wouldn't die, despite the blood leaking out of its eyes and mouth. After an endless minute he lifted it up and the tiny creature gasped for breath. So he held it under again, and then again, until all nine lives had given up the ghost. Before it was over, the water had turned pink and then red. Quin didn't talk for the rest of the afternoon.

  I don't know the connection between these animals and guilt. But here's another one, a raccoon I saw on the Palisades Parkway two years ago. It must have been hit by the car ahead of me, because when I drove past, the left half of its body was smashed against the road while the right half still pawed frantically at the air. The merciful thing would have been to hit it again, but I didn't think fast enough, and couldn't have done it. I'm stuck with the image. It doesn't fade.

  I am thinking about animals, and guilt, staring at the fire, my dog Rosie sleeping on the cushion behind my back. I want to look up guilt, but am too lazy to find the dictionary, and outside the blizzard snow is coming down like soft white dinner plates, and I am cozy. I am obsessed by guilt because I think mine's gone, at least the all-purpose kind that makes you feel you are to blame for a bad dinner party at which you are only a guest, that toxic mist that can be activated by small offenses, or—as in when somebody's else's party never gets off the ground—no offense at all. ("Don't worry about it, they probably invited you at the last minute," says my friend Chuck.) Recently I did something thoughtless, and caused someone to do hours of work for what turned out to be nothing. I was very sorry and I said so, but the stab of guilt that used to produce a familiar feeling of worthlessness didn't appear.

  Finally I'm so curious that I rouse myself and find the dictionary, which is not where it should be (I am so disorganized, I'll never keep anything straight, what's wrong with me, I...). And I look up guilt. There are two meanings that apply to me—the first is to be responsible for committing an offense, the next is the feeling of remorse for doing so. That other guilt—the kind that doesn't discriminate—they don't mention it, but no matter. I burned out my receptors for that nonsense.

  I know what real guilt is.

  My husband was hurt, not me. I was safe in the apartment that night, already in my nightgown, wondering what was taking Rich so long but grateful for half an hour alone. Rich had opted for early retirement; he had been a reporter and the news wasn't news anymore and this depressed and angered him. He was home all the time now, and so was I, and neither of us could get an act together. My own problems—worries about children, a restlessness I didn't understand, raw grief over the loss of an old friend—were easy to lay at Rich's door. I was used to eight hours of solitude every day and his presence derailed me. I badgered him about volunteering, nagged him about taking a course, bullied him to start writing again, all in vain. I would have done anything to get him out of the house, although I couldn't seem to get out myself. "For better or for worse, but not for lunch," my friend Liz quoted an aunt of hers, but nothing struck me funny anymore. That Monday evening I was irritable, and after supper went into the bedroom to read. Rich washed the dishes, and took the dog out. Twenty minutes became thirty became forty. I looked out the window—surely he was coming now—but could see nothing. Where was he? Maybe Harry was taking his sweet time, maybe Rich had stopped to talk to another dog owner. Then the call came from Pedro.

  It took a year to realize the severity of Rich's injuries. His body was slowly recovering, but his mind was not. His grip was strong but his balance was off, he was tottery, he shuffled, he walked with his head down. I was able to walk, run, stand. I could see out of both eyes. I could remember what I'd had for breakfast. Rich's short-term memory was shot, setting him adrift in time; the damage done his frontal lobes had smashed open his own personal Pandora's box. I pieced together details—Rich imagined himself on a battlefield, he was attacked by dogs, his children were missing—looking for connections, wanting to understand what triggered what inside his head. It was like being on a psychic scavenger hunt where at the end of the day everything would make sense. On the days I didn't visit, I called. If he was having a bad day I called all the time. It was impossible to separate my life from his.

  The word permanent was a long time coming. Rich had suffered permanent brain damage. He was never going to live at home again, never going to drive a car, read a book, make a cup of coffee. I knew this, and I didn't believe it. But fourteen months after the accident, Sally and I moved him to a long-term care facility for people with brain injuries. The staff knew what they were doing, they had seen everything, they were kind and patient and overworked and I trusted them. After a week or two, somebody gently suggested that frequent telephone calls were not necessary. I shouldn't worry. If there was a problem, they would let me know. I took this to mean that in the nicest possible way I was being told to Get a Life.

  So that's what I did. I put a life together with my family and friends and dogs. I learned to make use of the solitude I now had aplenty. I started writing, wanting to make something useful come from our catastrophe, and working hard, I began to be happy. Rich's paranoia began to subside. Two years after Rich was hurt, I bought a house nearer to where he lived, and was able to start bringing him home for afternoons. I made new friends, I learned to knit, I watched my dogs play with no leashes. I met other writers, and we began to get together to share our work. And then one day I asked myself a terrible question. If I could make Rich's accident never have happened, would I do it? Of course I would. Wouldn't I? And instead of yes, I hesitated. But by posing the question I had assumed the power, and by hesitating I put myself behind the wheel of the car that struck my husband.

  You want to talk about guilt?

  I lived with this shame a long time before I could speak of it. Finally I told my sister. "But it's not about Rich's accident," Eliza said. "You don't want to return to unhappiness. That's all." I will never forget that instant of absolute clarity. And just like that, I was free.

  But, Look at you, I still say to myself. How dare you. You built this on tragedy.

  I am trying to make sense of this. Survivor's guilt, acceptance, these were words that made me roll my eyes; surely I was too sophisticated for such clichés. I thought I had accepted Rich's accident, even though I kept putting myself in a place where it hadn't happened yet. Rich hadn't yet left for his walk. I could stop him at the door. I thought that not accepting meant turning my face to the wall, unable to function. So now today I look up the word acceptance and the definition is "to receive gladly" and that doesn't sound
right. I flip to the back, and look up its earliest root, "to grasp," and discover this comes from the old English for "a thread used in weaving," and bingo, that's it. You can't keep pulling out the thread. You have to weave it in and then you have to go on weaving.

  I love my husband. Every time I see him there is the moment when I can't believe it. I look at his face and think only, How did this happen to you, I can't believe this thing happened to you. I would make him well again if I could. I would change everything about that day if I could. I wouldn't have bought the new leash that broke. I would have walked the dog myself. I would have gone with Rich to keep him company. There are days when the thread snaps and I see him in lying in Riverside Drive, his head caved in, the street wet with blood, and I gasp. But it passes. Rich is necessary to my happiness; I love the person he is now, I love who I am when I'm with him, and I can sometimes hold these two truths in my head at once: I wish he were whole, and I love my life.