A Three Dog Life

by Abigail Thomas

  ii

  In the morning I decide to go through the rubbish in my bag. I gave up the keys to my old apartment, but there are still four keys left on my key ring; I have no idea what they used to unlock. I ought to throw them out too, but I'm going to hang on to them. One of them might have opened my parents' house, which was sold years ago. My sister has dreams that our parents appear at her door, asking why they can't go home. "What do you tell them?" I ask, horrified.

  "I skirt the issue," she says, and we both laugh. "But there was this one dream, I think they were younger. They were in the driveway and so was I. They wanted to go in the house and I told them they'd been gone a long time and somebody else lived there now."

  "Then what?" I ask.

  "I don't remember," my sister says.

  "How did they look? What did they say?"

  "It was a dream. I woke up."

  "But—"

  "It was a dream," my sister says again.

  There was a very old magnolia in their yard, and I remember standing under it with my father one day when the thick petals were mostly on the ground, making a lush slippery carpet underfoot. "This is an example of nature's profligacy," my father said, rather proudly, as if he were responsible for such wild abandon. My memory has filed this together with something else he said another time—how nature wastes nothing, everything is used again and again, nothing vanishes, it only changes form. Did he say the next thing outright or did I make it up? Why go to all that trouble just to waste a soul?

  V

  Five Years

  One afternoon in March, in the middle of what Rich always called a "lie-down," I feel a hot coin in my chest, burning through my body to the bed. It goes away when I get up but then it happens again and next I think I'm feeling pains shooting down my left arm and finally I call the doctor, which is most unlike me, and she makes me come in even when I try to cancel. How are you feeling? she asks, and I tell her, well, I'm tired all the time and I sleep all the time and I can't stand to think and so I fill my life with sleep and movies and I have this burning hot coin in my chest and I can't breathe properly. Describe your day, she says, and I do, which doesn't take long. I tell her I stopped smoking to cheer her up. Well, that's good, she says, why did you do that? I tell her my husband was in the hospital and somehow I decided to quit. How is your husband? she asks. "It's been almost five years," I say, and I start to cry and can't stop. Five years sounds so permanent.

  I arrive at the Northeast Center. Rich looks good. "How are you?" I yell into Rich's ear. He smiles at me. In twenty-nine days it will be five years.

  "Either I feel weak and can't find something or I feel good, inexplicably good." I love it when he talks, when he answers with more than just a word or two.

  " That's great," I say, "how did you sleep?" I no longer feel silly shouting such simple questions. They are easy to hear, easy to answer.

  "I don't have any trouble sleeping," says Rich. "I just replay everything."

  " What do you replay?" This is curious, something new.

  " The accident," he says, "with none of the ghastly details."

  " What do you remember?" I'm shocked.

  "I don't remember being out with the dog."

  I don't remember Rich ever talking about the accident.

  " What made you think of it?" I'm careful to shout and enunciate at the same time.

  "Lying here." Lying here alone, I think.

  " Tell me more," I say, feeling my heart pound.

  "I wish I could. I wish there were more to tell."

  " What else do you remember?" To keep this conversation alive, I can't allow silence.

  "I don't remember anything from before. Just that I'm trying to piece together the past, the very recent past."

  " What pieces do you have?" He looks calm. I don't feel calm at all.

  "Just the aftermath. I don't remember anything about the dog, about running after the dog, the whole thing escapes me."

  "But you're remembering it now."

  "I've been remembering that aspect ever since I can remember."

  "What else?" I have to keep the balloon in the air. If it touches the ground, the conversation will be over.

  "Nothing else really. I don't even remember that it was raining because I would have suggested we skip the rain because it was very hilly."

  We sound like two people having a normal conversation.

  "You can ask me questions and I can answer them," I tell him. Rich doesn't say anything so I continue. It is suddenly terribly important that he know this: "I was upstairs when it happened. Pedro called and I ran to where you were."

  "You gave out a scream?"

  "I did. Many screams."

  We both fall silent. I realize that what he wants to remember I am trying to forget.

  A minute goes by. I ask Rich if he knows how long we've been married.

  "About a year," he answers.

  I shake my head. "Seventeen years," I say, "we got married in 1988 and it's 2005."

  "Abby," he says, smiling, "our life has been so easy that the days glide by."