Dirty Secret (22 page)

I walk to the refrigerator, grab a bottle of white wine, and open it. I can't talk to my mother anymore without something to distract me, either the internet or wine.

“I highly doubt that, Mom.” By now I'm an expert on scabies transmission. Prolonged touch—the kind that occurs when you're handholding or sleeping with someone—is the main culprit. Supposedly skin-to-skin contact is necessary. But I got them from that pillow, I know, because my mom and I never touch. We rarely hug, and when we do there are layers of clothes between us. I got them after being in her house and now my dad has them after being in her house. The house being the common denominator, it's pretty clear that somehow this parasite is living there.

Through the phone, I hear a sort of screechy gulping noise.

She's crying.

Here's a crazy fact about my mom that doesn't seem crazy to me: Normally, there are two things—and only two things—that make her cry. John Lennon's murder and the Bird Man of Alcatraz.

When my brother and I were kids and feeling evil, we'd say, “Mom, what about the Bird Man of Alcatraz?” and she'd immediately start crying. “All those years he spent locked up, taking care of those birds,” she'd say through her tears. “Yeah, the Bird Man, so sad,” we'd taunt, trying to get her to cry harder. (Evil, like I said.)

Later, after we got older and stopped teasing her like that, she'd do it to herself by saying, “I just can't believe what happened to John Lennon,” sometimes saying it twice before the tears began to fall.

The reason it doesn't seem that crazy to me is that I went through a similar phase a few years ago, while reading a stack
of books about the Holocaust for a novel I was researching. The more I read, the more gutted I felt. I'd only have to think about the Holocaust and I'd begin weeping; I couldn't even say the words without my voice cracking. Commercials for 90 percent of the shows on the History Channel would leave me in a puddle, and when I went to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam I barely made it through the museum without collapsing.

So although the two subjects that make her cry seem a little random, I understand how a certain topic can trigger tears. She's told me many times how disconnected she feels—from people and from her own emotions. Maybe crying over seemingly random events is a shortcut to emotion, not unlike the way some cutters claim to cut themselves in order to feel something. Or it could be an avoidance tactic. Maybe there's something out there she doesn't want to feel. By feeling strongly about
this
you don't have to feel strongly about
that.
So the tears over John Lennon or the Bird Man of Alcatraz don't seem crazy to me. What's crazy is to hear my mother cry about something else.

And she's still crying.

“Mom?”

“I feel so bad for what I've done. I gave you these things . . . and now your dad, too!”

“It's okay. Nobody blames you,” I lie. “It's not your fault.”

“It
is
my fault.”

“Well, technically it is, but we don't hold it against you. It's not like these things are fatal. Annoying, yes, embarrassing, yes, but no one's going to die. And we
will
get rid of them. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Things could be worse, I tell myself, much worse.

And soon, they will be.

I DIDN'T REALIZE IT AT THE TIME—I DIDN'T REALIZE IT for years—but David and I may have gotten Abraham Lincoln from an animal hoarder. It was 2003, right around the time I began to use a keyboard again after recovering from repetitive strain injury. David and I had just moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan, to an apartment building that allowed dogs. We'd been waiting years, literally, to get one. We knew we wanted a rescue dog and we knew he or she had to be small and portable, so we could bring him traveling with us. On a website that allows users to search for animals by age, size, and gender, we entered our criteria and up popped a photo of a one-year-old black Chihuahua mix with huge eyes and enormous batlike ears.

The dog's name was Milton and he was in Hartsdale, about an hour's train ride from Manhattan. I called and spoke to
Penny, who ran the shelter, and a few days later David and I took the subway to Grand Central and then a train. It was dark when we walked out of the station. In the parking lot, a rusty brown car sat idling; a woman opened the passenger side door and called out, “Are you David and Jessie?” I detected an English accent.

“Yes,” we said.

“I'm Maureen,” she said, “I volunteer with Penny sometimes.”

“Come on in,” the driver, who I assumed was Penny, said. Her voice was muffled because she was leaning over the backseat, shoving blankets, dog toys, empty boxes, and down comforters or coats—I couldn't tell which—onto the floor to make room for us. Her hair was gray and messy, and when she finally looked up, she seemed dazed and hyper at the same time. Her owlish glasses were smudged, her clothes baggy and disheveled.

She was my mother.

I hesitated to get into the car, but after David did, I followed.

“I can't show you Milton at my house right now because there's too much going on there,” Penny said as she pulled her car out of the lot.

Too much going on there.
Right. That sounded familiar.

“So we're going to my husband's office,” she said.

“Is that where Milton is?” David asked.

“Milton's right here,” Maureen said, and opened up her coat. He was snuggled on her chest like a baby. Even in the dark car I could see that his black eyes were watery as he clung to Maureen, shaking. His long, deerlike snout was set in a grim frown, his big ears flattened against his head as if he wanted to be more streamlined for flight. I reached my hand toward him so he could sniff it and he growled at me.

What I knew about him from Penny was this: When he was
a few months old he was brought to a veterinarian because one of his front legs was broken. The veterinarian set his leg, but the couple who'd dropped him off never returned to claim him. So, Penny had told me over the phone, he'd been living at the veterinarian's office for the last year. I figured he frolicked all day with the other animals being treated or boarded there and that he must've been fed well and gotten lots of attention from the staff and customers. It didn't sound like a bad life.

When we got to Penny's husband's office—a nondescript, gray-carpeted room in a nondescript building—Maureen tried to peel Milton off her chest, but he was digging in to her brown sweater. She tried again. Suddenly there was a loud screeching noise, and then another, and another—at first I thought it was a smoke detector. But it was Milton.

I'd never heard a dog sound like that. I didn't even know it was possible.

“How long have you been taking care of him?” I asked Maureen. He was obviously really attached to her.

“I just met him today,” she said, her brow wrinkled as she stroked his back. “It was just a few hours ago, actually.”

David and I looked at each other, alarmed. Milton was clearly neurotic.

Penny came running over then, leading a dog on a leash—I had no idea where it came from, but it looked like a shih tzu.

“Here's Oliver,” she said. “I thought you might be interested in him. He's a purebred.”

David and I both shook our heads no. He was way too big. We had a ten-pound limit because that's the maximum weight most airlines allow for pets in the cabin. Penny had said that Milton was seven and a half pounds.

Finally Maureen managed to peel Milton off her chest. David and I were sitting cross-legged on the floor and she set
the trembling pooch on my thigh. He hung on as if he'd finally found a safe raft on a violent ocean.

“Look how scared he is,” I whispered to David. I didn't want Penny to hear me because I didn't want her to decide we couldn't have him. Over the phone she'd grilled me about whether we'd grown up with dogs—even wanting to know the breeds, what our attitudes were about hitting pets (I thought she was joking, but she wasn't), and how many hours David and I worked each week. Apparently one guy had been interested in Milton before us but when Penny found out he had a full-time job, she turned him down—even though his office was dog friendly and he was planning to bring Milton to work with him. She was pleased when I told her that David and I worked mainly from home and thrilled when I assured her that one of us was almost always there.

She'd also told me Milton's tail was docked, and as he clutched my thigh his two-inch nub was tucked tightly against his Cornish hen–size hindquarters. I could feel his sharp claws through my jeans. The noxious smell coming from him made me wonder if he'd ever had a bath in his life. And he was so skinny that his ribs were visible. What kind of vet's office had he been living in?

“Milton,” David said softly as he pulled a Liv-A-Snap from the bag we'd brought and reached it out to him. The little dog only growled in response.

Penny was hovering at the edge of the room, watching us, still holding the shih tzu's leash.

“So,” David said and I could tell he was trying to sound casual, “what exactly was Milton's life like before this, again?”

“I told Jessie already. He was at a veterinarian's office,” Penny insisted. “It's where I take my other rescues. I kept seeing him there in his little cage—”

“In a
cage
?” David and I said at the same time.

Penny hung her head and her straggly gray hair covered her eyes. “Yes. I kept seeing him there so eventually I asked the veterinarian what happened to him. She told me about the couple leaving him and I offered to find him a home.”

I reached down and covered the poor dog with my palms. I had a feeling he'd been in the cage the entire year he was there, probably twenty-four hours a day.

“What kind of veterinarian would treat an animal like that?” I was livid, too upset to worry about Penny deciding we couldn't have him.

“Well, if you don't want him that's fine.” Penny seemed to be shrinking and puffing out her chest at the same time.

“That's not what I'm saying,” I said.

“So you
do
want him?”

David and I looked at each other—did we want a dog this damaged? One of our friends had the cuddliest dog, who'd sit in anyone's lap, and that's what we'd had in mind, too. And we needed a dog who would be adaptable to new places, because we intended to travel.

“Can we think about him over the weekend and let you know on Monday?” I asked.

“I've got no room for him this weekend,” Penny said. “If you don't take him now he'll have to go back into the cage, starting tonight.”

Maureen had been sitting at one of the desks, scrolling through her BlackBerry. She looked up and said, “I would take him, but I've got two large dogs and I fear they'd trample him.”

“You'd really put him back in a cage?” David asked Penny.

Penny shook her head. “I'd have no choice.”

I looked down at Milton, so helpless, wrapped along my thigh. I was covering his body with my hands and he was starting
to shake a little less. There was no way I was letting this dog go back into a cage.

“Let's take him,” David and I both said.

“Great,” Penny said. “I know you'll give him a good home. I can tell.”

I shifted Milton to my shoulder and David and I got to our feet. “Do you think it's a problem for us to change his name?” David asked Penny as he wrote her a check for $350—a little high for a shelter dog, but we didn't care.

Penny shook her head. “He didn't really have a name—we just started calling him Milton when we put the ad up.”

“He didn't even have a name?” I asked, feeling my teeth begin to grit.

“Un-be-liev-able,” David said as he handed Penny the check. She shoved it into her pocket.

We didn't have any kind of carrier so I just zipped my parka over him and kept it that way during the ride in Penny's car back to the train station, the train to Grand Central, and the subway. His almost-lethal smell wafted up to my face every so often, but I didn't mind. While David and I settled on the name Abraham Lincoln, the pooch stole glances up at me; through the course of the journey home, the glances got longer and longer, and by the time we got to our apartment he couldn't take his eyes off of me.

The first day we had him, rather than walking, he slunk along the floor like Gollum from
Lord of the Rings.
The second day he began walking instead of slinking, and that's when we noticed his limp. He wouldn't put any weight at all on his back, right leg. I called Penny to ask her if she'd noticed it—supposedly he'd stayed at her place for a week between the vet's office and us. No, she said, and suggested that maybe he hurt it when he was playing with the other dogs at her house. She offered to pick him up and take him to the veterinarian to have him checked out.

“I don't want him going back to that vet,” I said, picturing the post-traumatic stress disorder he'd get just by entering that office.

“I've got a few vets I go to. I'll bring him to another one to have his leg x-rayed.”

“Are you sure? I mean, we already adopted him; he's our responsibility.”

“Well, I guaranteed you a healthy dog, so I want to do this.”

“Okay,” I said, though I was a little nervous about letting him near her. I didn't trust her.

Maureen came to pick him up. She told me she was probably going to stop volunteering with Penny and find another animal group instead—Penny's chronic disorganization was driving her crazy, she said. Chronic disorganization, I thought, that sounded familiar. Maureen said she couldn't bring Abraham Lincoln back to us that night, but would bring him the next day. He looked terrified, shaking as I handed him over to Maureen, who set him inside an open, blanket-lined cardboard box. I teared up as they drove away but I told myself we needed to get that leg checked out.