Cherished (4 page)

In retrospect, it's easy to see that I was looking for solid ground, a new center to my life now that my mother, once the sun I orbited, was gone. It would be this job in Santa Fe. So Don and I sold most of our stuff for pennies, loaded a moving
truck, put Mercy in the car, and went in search of a life.

It was nothing like I'd imagined. It was an unmitigated disaster.

We'd rented a house quickly, in a weekend. It was cute. A converted barn in the hills north of town. The landlady was a slow-moving, New Age therapist, and the house, we learned later, had been built on a lark by a man who'd left her years ago. We were novices to Santa Fe, and didn't realize the barn was built directly on the dust in a depression beneath a steep slope. In other words, the house was in a drainage ditch below the landlady's much nicer house — that solid structure with a view. Before renting it, we didn't look for gaps that would let in critters, rain, snow, freezing air, hot air, dust. We didn't ask about the cost of propane heat in a house full of holes — and whether cathedral ceilings were a good idea in a house heated that way.

The first week there, the monsoon came. The rains pelted this poorly built barn, and in came water, brown with dust. It came under our doors, through our vents and the old stovepipe over the bed. Rivers ran over the slate tiles. Then came the bugs, seeking shelter from the rain. A spider the size of a baseball, a pinkish scorpion, a centipede the size of a serving spoon. Our well broke, turning our water into blood-colored silt, which, because of the dirt in it, caused our toilet, sink, washer, and dishwasher to break, one by one. When the washing machine failed in the middle of the night, it filled our house with inches of water. (I woke with Mercy nestled next to me, gazing down as if from a raft.) Our heaters, it turned out, were spitting out carbon monoxide. (We survived, ironically, because of the holes in our walls.) And then, when we — too tired to move again — asked for a rent reduction, our landlady declared that we “were not a match” and terminated our lease.

Meanwhile, the job that brought us there fell apart. First, the college said it was broke. They would be laying people off. Then they declared exigency. Eventually, a year and a half later, they closed.

I offer you this so you can imagine my hopefulness, my vulnerability, my frailness. So you can see what I might have seen the day she appeared, this small white and black puppy. She stood nosing a pile of garbage in front of a dilapidated adobe down the street from the new house we rented downtown. We were walking Mercy when I spotted her. She paused and looked at me. Her eyes were a glossy black. Her nose was oddly indented, flat like a pig's and mottled with
pink. She had the body of a dachshund and the head of some sort of terrier. Her legs were bowed, feet turned out like a duck's, and she had an underbite so large you could have put a bar of soap on it.

Some neighborhood kids were in their yard.

“Is this your dog?” I asked. They shook their heads.

“A stray, I think,” the little boy said, wielding a toy gun. “Been around here for a few days.” The pup had no collar, and you could see her ribs.

I paused, afraid to walk over to her — afraid that she would dart away or bite. The little girl flipped her long hair over one shoulder and put a hand on her hip. “You want it?” she asked. I didn't know what to say, but before I could begin overthinking the situation, she knelt. “Come on,” she said to the puppy, patting her knees. The puppy jumped to its hind legs. She scooped it up and thrust it at me.

People describe love this way — that chemical
yes
. The way the brain turns off and the heart turns on, and all you want is the smell of the beloved. This little ferret dog with her weird feet and wiry fur rested smoothly against my chest. She looked at me, those doggie questions in her eyes. And out came a tiny pink tongue, like a petal. She kissed me right there, no reservations.

“What are you doing?” Don asked again. He stood across the street with Mercy, who had begun to growl.

“We can't just leave her here,” I said. How could I convince him? I could tell from the locked-up look on his face that he was not experiencing the same thing as me. He was not in the throes of a magic spell.

“She's cute, Robin, but she's probably somebody's dog.” The pup put a paw on my shoulder so she could get a better look at him. She cocked her head. Don took out his phone and called the animal shelter.

“Can't she stay the night?” I asked.

“Robin, you found her on the street. We should take her in so someone can claim her. Also, she's in heat,” he said. She looked too young to be in heat, but when I took a closer look it was true. I held her so that part wasn't as visible.

In the end, I swaddled the dog in towels and we got in the car. The ride to the shelter was long. The pup stretched out in my lap, paws dangling over my knees, and fell asleep. The road turned bumpy and she woke, climbed down to my feet, and licked each toe. She looked up sleepily a few times, full of thanks and trust.

When we got to the counter, I couldn't hand her over. A woman was getting rid of a large black Rottie mix that bit her boyfriend. The pup peered over my arms, alert and curious.

“Robin, you're being unreasonable,” Don said. “It's a little dog, and someone might come and claim her. If not, she'll get adopted fast. You know I love dogs, but let's prepare
for a puppy if we're going to get one.”

But it was clear, even to Don, who was overwhelmed by deadlines and his father's grave illness: I needed solid ground. And if it wasn't to be Santa Fe or a job at a college, if it wasn't to be my mother or anything else, well it was going to be that little dog with the smashed face and underbite. I would rescue her and she would rescue us — the way Mercy had when my mother died — and then we would be whole.

I buried my nose in the puppy's fur all the way home, hiding tears. We'd done our duty, filled out a found report, but we still had her, the unexpected answer to our problems. Don looked resigned. He reached over to scratch her terrier scruff.

Rain began to pour, that big desert sky cracking open, the giant drops obscuring our view. I concocted a plan. I would walk Mercy for an hour, try to wear her out, and then Don and I would do an introduction. What could go wrong? The puppy had a lovely temperament. Mercy had a wise soul — this was my closest animal friend, the same dog who the day of my mother's funeral watched the house fill with people in high heels offering false comfort, and, though she'd never chewed anything before, chewed a hole through the bedroom wall.
Let's get out of here
, she seemed to say, and nothing could have felt more in tune. She is my mutt, the master of metaphor, the largest love, the star of the hiking trail. These dogs would understand that together they could be twice as powerful, twice as distracting, twice as capable of large and heroic acts.

When I returned from the walk with Mercy, the puppy was waiting for us at the gate. I didn't see her little white body, and before I could stop her, Mercy roared and lunged, pinning the puppy against the wall, growling and snapping. The pup squealed, over and over, like a piglet being slaughtered, her body flat against the adobe. Don ran out. “No no no!” we cried. Shaken, Don pulled Mercy away. The hair around her neck bristled, and her eyes, usually so accepting, were flat as a bear's. The little dog hid between my legs, her black eyes filled with soft terror.

For hours we sat with the dogs under the covered patio, watching the rain, watching the dogs watch each other. We quieted them. But if we loosened Mercy's leash, she lunged. Don looked worried.

“This is not going to work,” he said. “I told you.”

We didn't yet own a crate, so I spent the night in my office, on our pullout sofa with the puppy. She followed me around the room, a little piece of my shadow, wagging her body furiously every time I talked to her. “Do you want to live here?” I'd ask. wag. “Do you like this sofa?” wag. “Is this true love?”
WAG WAG WAG
. And when I stretched out to sleep, she hopped on the bed, stretched out beside me, and conked out. I felt her heat against my chest and thought of names. Hope, Sprout, Devonne. Mercy had been difficult at first, too, lunging at our cats. Growling. This would pass, and she, this Hope, would be mine.

In the morning, the puppy ran in circles, her tongue stuck in her underbite, pink and wet. I taught her to walk on a leash,
a skill she lacked, by luring her with cheese. She seemed proud of her accomplishment. Though she was a good-natured dog, it was me she preferred. Unlike Mercy, who would collapse for a belly rub in front of absolutely anyone, this dog reserved her distilled delight for me.

And so I fell completely under her spell. I held her tiny body against my chest and felt her heartbeat, soft under her fur. She showed up in my life at the precise moment it was falling apart. It mattered. She mattered. I couldn't lose her.

But the problems with Mercy persisted. No matter how happy or calm I made the situation, if the puppy was near, Mercy immediately gave her the whale eye and lunged, sounds of murderous rage coming from deep inside her.

Our friend from the animal shelter came over to help. “You'd have a long, dangerous road,” she said after two hours of awkward play at a fenced baseball field that ended in snarls. “Your dog just doesn't like this puppy.” I called a trainer. “You have a territorial heeler with a prey drive. My guess is, you should find that little dog a loving home before the bloodbath ensues.”

I couldn't sleep. How could this be true? No one had come looking for this puppy. I'd posted ads and filled out the reports. It had clearly been fate that she stopped to smell trash right near our house after an epically bad year. The nights I slept with Don and Mercy in the bedroom, I got up repeatedly to visit the puppy in the new crate in my office, and every time, our reunion was ecstatic, full of heat and wild joy.

But Don kept insisting that this dog could have a great life with another family — a family that didn't have a dog who wanted to kill her. In addition, his eyes were itching. He felt allergic to her fur. All the dog people were telling me that two females have a hard time living together, that bringing a bitch in heat into the house with another female was unwise. During summer, I had the time to walk them separately, pet them separately — live a two-dog life. But once my teaching job started up in the fall, I'd be screwed.

After a particularly bad day of trying to get the dogs to sit in the living room together (which ended with me bawling on the sofa, unable to understand why Mercy would want to prevent the exponential increase in animal love in our home), I emailed the staff at the college. My love for this dog must have come out in the writing, because in only an hour, I had twelve replies. A man came by, crazy for dogs, and was delighted by her underbite and the cute way she rolled and showed her belly. He claimed he'd take her home for an hour, introduce her to his dog, wife, and child. I reluctantly gave her to him, assuming I'd have her back later that day and could try with Mercy a few more times.

Three hours later, the man phoned. The dog fit perfectly into their family. She followed their kid around, delighted. She rubbed up against their gentle coonhound. They needed to know if I was going to take this dog back. Already, he said, his wife was attached. The dog was lying at his wife's hip. Everything was happy, peaceful, safe.

What was it I wanted?

I stammered. I stumbled. I said I would call them back.

For a while, I sat dumbly on the sofa, staring at the font on the phone book. I wanted the dog to save me, but wasn't it the dog who needed saving?

The week following my decision, I waited with bated breath every time the phone rang, hoping it would be the family saying they'd changed their minds. That puppy and I were destined to make this work. I had to believe it. But they didn't call. I emailed the man asking about her. He emailed
back saying that all was well. Did I want to visit her? They'd named her Frida, after Frida Kahlo, saying they both were “almost attractive.”

No. No, I didn't want to visit. I'd like to say that I rose above it, that I took the high road. Frida was out of harm's way, our rapture on the fold-out sofa bed lost in her doggie mind. She, like all dogs, existed solely in the present. But it wasn't that easy for me.

Because that puppy wasn't simply a puppy. She was all the things I yearned for but couldn't have: a mother, a death free young adulthood, a safe home, a solid job. She was Hope, and she, too, had been wrested from me the moment she came into view.

A few days later, Don and I went to a party on a mesa overlooking a crystalline river. It was a New Mexico early fall, the sun pouring so feverishly over rock and shrub that it did away with shadow.

“What did you end up doing with that
creature
?” my friend asked in his South African accent. He'd been teasing me about my strange bond with what he claimed was the world's ugliest animal. And there on that wooden bench in a crowd of festively dressed people on that perfect day, I cried.

I cried chopping carrots, sitting on the sofa, reading, in bed. Don hugged me, gave me tissues. He promised me other dogs. He promised me his undying affection. But nothing soothed me.

And Mercy. For a while I couldn't touch her, couldn't be near her. “Go away,” I commanded this dog I had rescued from the Merced pound, who had stayed loyally by my side through my mother's death and all the tumult that followed. She'd betrayed me, acted in her own interest.

I sulked. No one quite believed the depths of my grief. That dog? My friends laughed. The piggy one with the messed up jaw?

She wasn't dead. She wasn't sick. She was happily trotting behind that coonhound in the nice house of another family.

I remember going to a grief group in Berkeley once, and a woman talked about how she cried when she lost her dog — tears she hadn't cried when her own mother died. The counselor explained that when a parent dies, the loss is often too large for the mind to comprehend. But when a pet dies, we understand it. We see the finality. We experience the loss in smaller, more accessible ways. We can get in touch with that grief — and it touches the shore of that larger island of loss inside us.