Dog Crazy (6 page)

G
iselle is practically apoplectic with excitement when Lourdes brings her down the next morning. She springs from paw to paw, tail furiously whipping the air. Even her fur seems more tightly wound than usual, her ginger curls reverberating with each step. I don't think that she's feeding off my nervous energy, just happy to be out of the house, but who knows? In my experience, all rumors of poodles' impressive, and sometimes troublesome, intelligence are well founded.

Lourdes hands me a grocery bag filled with dog food and bowls and toys and a leash. When I told her my plan, she decided she and Leo and the kids would take the dog-free weekend as an opportunity to go up to Napa for the night.

“Don't forget,” Lourdes says, “she's a toilet drinker.”

“Noted.”

“And she'll hop up on the furniture the minute you walk out the door.”

“Lourdes. Don't worry about us. Go have fun.”

“Okay. I'll bring you back a bottle of something. It might or might not be empty, depending on how many times Gabby asks if we're there yet on the drive home.” She frowns. “Are you sure it wouldn't be better if I stayed? Isn't there anything I can do to help?”

I nod toward Giselle. “You
are
helping.”

Lourdes glances doubtfully at her dog. Then she breaks out her jazz hands and begins singing, to the tune of “Master of the House” from
Les Misérables
,
“Never leaves the house, never through the gate, orders so much from Amazon that she gets a special rate!”
She mimics the sound of a crowd cheering. “And the audience goes wild following Maggie Brennan's final performance in the
The Agoraphobic Therapist,
this year's Tony winner for Weirdest New Musical.” Lourdes throws her jazz hands around me, squeezing me within one of her signature robust hugs.

“Good luck,” she whispers. “I love you.”

After she leaves, I pour water into Giselle's bowl. It's the first time I've had a dog in the apartment since Toby died. She laps up water in a different way than he did; her sounds are softer, daintier.

“Exposure therapy,” I say aloud. “Systematic desensitization.”

When the house is silent and I know Lourdes and her family have left, I clip Giselle's leash to her collar.

As we near the sidewalk gate, I do all the things I know I should do—the very things I tell my patients to practice when they are overcome by anxiety. I concentrate on my breathing, drawing air
in through my nose and expelling it through my mouth. I visualize our walk—a quick, uneventful trip to the corner. I reach down and run my hand along the length of Giselle's back. As if on command, she sits. Her gaze is nailed to the gate, her body shivering with anticipation. I wrap the leash around my hand until it's so short that I can touch the ends of Giselle's curls with my fingers.

I open the gate.

Something black and cold courses through me.

I breathe and count, count and breathe.

One.

Two.

I force myself to picture Anya's pained face, to consider the possibility of not helping her, and in the same moment, Giselle tugs me forward onto the sidewalk. In a blur, I reach out and shut the gate behind me. I put my hand on top of Giselle's head, steadying myself, warding off the panic with my breath. I'm not quite leaning on her, but I get the sense that I could if I needed to, that she would not let me fall.

I squeeze the leash in my hand and begin to walk. I try to imagine that I'm breathing out the negative thoughts, that my chest is expanding instead of constricting, but mostly I focus on Giselle, her warm, solid presence at my side, the softness of her strawberry-blond fur against my taut knuckles. She's cheerful and confident, completely unfazed by how short I've made the leash. I pretend I have blinders on, that I couldn't look around even if I wanted to, that I'm only able to see Giselle, but with each step, my skin tightens, my muscles tensing. Bile rises into the back of my throat. Panic buzzes in my ears, swarming through me, filling my chest, and I can barely breathe. The sound of Giselle's nails
clicking against the pavement cuts through my haze. The tags on her collar chime together. Her collar and leash are pale brown leather, good, sturdy tethers that will not fail. I slip my shaking fingers into her soft neck and begin again.

One.

Two.

When I spot the curb ahead, I realize I've made it to the corner, about half a block away from Lourdes's house. I immediately turn around and hurry back toward the gate. Giselle lopes along at my side.

When the gate latch falls into place behind me, I double over, pressing my hands against my knees, and inhale deeply. After a couple of minutes, my head begins to clear, and I straighten.
It actually worked!
I hadn't gone far, but for the first time in one hundred days I'd made it beyond the gate. It was a start.

“Well,” I say to Giselle once we're in my apartment. I'm scrubbing my hands under hot water and she's standing in the doorway of the bathroom, watching me. “That was some adventure, kid.”

Giselle is too polite to argue.

“Baby steps,” I say. Then I try to translate: “Puppy steps.” But the translation doesn't really work—a puppy would have bounded joyfully down that street instead of hobbling along like someone recently released from a full-body cast. A puppy would have kept going beyond the curb.

There's still a box of dog biscuits in a kitchen cabinet. I hold a treat out to Giselle, smoothing back her soft bouffant with my other hand, and she takes it delicately, her muzzle brushing my fingers like a light kiss. She trots over to the rug and bites the biscuit into pieces, letting chunks of it fall out of her mouth and
onto the rug, and then licks up the pieces one at a time. Afterward, she snorts into the rug a few times, hunting for crumbs, and then looks up at me expectantly. When I don't make a move toward the cabinet that holds the biscuit box, she stretches out her long legs in front of her, separating all of her claws, and yawns.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Am I boring you already?” I feel punch-drunk, so adrenaline-addled that I'm almost giddy. I'd only been beyond the gate for a couple of minutes, but the length of time is beside the point. I'd done it. I'd felt anxious and breathless and my heart had raced, but the mushroom cloud of panic had never darkened the sky—or at least I'd never looked up to see it. That was important. I can't push myself too far, too quickly. A full-blown panic attack would only make things worse. What I need is a series of short walks that go well enough to work as positive reinforcement—a foundation upon which I can build when I'm ready.

Giselle rolls over on her side and looks up at me, thumping her feather duster of a tail against the rug.

Two more walks,
I decide. I'll force myself to take two more walks today, each one longer than the last.

I
T WOULD BE
easier if I didn't live in a city of hills.

Even as a kid, I wasn't a fan of heights, a fear that I now see as a precursor to my current phobias. I was eight years old when I first realized that I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen my mother leave our house; I realize now it's surely no coincidence that it was also the year I felt my first spell of vertigo. That year, my mother signed me up for a ballet class that took place in a fifth-floor studio just high enough to overlook the tops of three
streets of row houses and the flat expanse of the Delaware River in the distance. During the first class, I ran with all the other girls to the window to take in the view, but as I stood there touching the cool glass with my fingertips I felt my mouth go dry. I turned away, worried I was going to be sick, and spent the rest of class wondering why the floor kept wobbling. After watching me stumble around for a couple of sessions, my teacher decided I was unfocused and clumsy and stuck me, to my relief, in the back row of class, where I learned to keep my eyes trained on my classmates' bright hair bows rather than the view that was multiplied in the studio's many mirrors. I never told my parents how I felt about that view, how I didn't like seeing my world look so large, how it made me feel lost and alone. I must have sensed that the news would worry them.

Lourdes's house is tucked into one of the steep hills that rise out of Cole Valley, a neighborhood in the geographic center of San Francisco, and an expansive view of the city threatens me from every direction. I didn't mind this so much when I first moved in and my fear of heights was relatively easy to ignore, but now I can't help feeling that living here, of all places, is akin to someone deathly allergic to bee stings setting up a picnic under a swarming hive.

Nonetheless, I force myself through the gate and down the street, past the curb that ended my first walk of the day. The steep hill makes me feel woozy. When I catch sight of a nearby café, its sidewalk tables filled with people, my heart races into overdrive, each beat a painful squeeze. If I must deal with the humiliating symptoms of panic, I'd rather face them alone on a quiet street than on a bustling city block. I try to focus my
attention on Giselle, but I'm distracted by the sounds of the café and my imaginary blinders aren't working anymore. I slow my pace, debating whether I can continue in this direction. Giselle stops short and I nearly fall over her. Her nose is buried in a food-stained paper bag on the sidewalk.

“No,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “Leave it.” I give a little tug on the leash and we keep walking . . . haltingly, because within a few steps she finds a gum wrapper and then a soiled napkin, and I have to keep a close eye on her and repeat myself. When she spots a plastic coffee lid on the ground, I swear she looks up at me and winks before scooping it into her mouth. I grab the lid from her and she releases it easily, tail wagging, her nonchalant strut like a shrug.

Can't blame a girl for trying!
her expression says.

Giselle finally stops scouring the sidewalk long enough for me to look up and get my bearings, and I realize we've passed the café without my even noticing. I turn the corner and we're on our way home.

When Lourdes's fence comes into view again, relief cracks open inside of me, and I allow myself to jog toward the gate. My legs are creaky, sand-filled, after so many inactive months, but it's good to move, to feel my body working with me instead of against me. I push myself into a sprint. Giselle bounds beside me, her funny bouffant bouncing on top of her head.

Back in my apartment, I scrub my hands and gulp down water. I give Giselle another biscuit and make myself a sandwich for lunch. When she finishes the biscuit, Giselle curls into a ball on the rug and within moments she's snoring.

There's another e-mail from Sybil Gainsbury of SuperMutt
Rescue at the top of my in-box. This time, she's writing to tell me that we need to find a new foster-care family for a dog named Seymour. I sigh. It's not the first time Seymour has needed to be moved.

I thought he only had that troublesome leash issue,
Sybil writes,
but it seems he has problems with trains, too! His current foster family lives on the N-Judah line and apparently he wedges himself behind the couch and pees a little each time a train passes the building—every fifteen minutes or so. Poor guy!


She has attached a photograph. Of all the dogs that have moved in and out of SuperMutt since I began volunteering with the organization, Seymour is the one who gets to me the most. He's one of those dogs that are so clearly forged from two vastly different breeds that the result is comical; he has the dense, creamy-yellow coat of a golden retriever but his thick torso is stretched improbably long and balanced—barely, it seems—on the stubby legs of a basset hound. His face, too, is a distinct mix; he has the wide muzzle and blocky forehead of a golden and the large, drooping ears of a basset.

A dog as adorably funny-looking as Seymour should have been in and out of SuperMutt in a week; he should already be living happily-ever-after with his bighearted forever family. He isn't even one of those dogs that are so ugly that they're cute—a specific aesthetic that I've learned appeals tremendously to the dog rescue community. Seymour isn't ugly-cute; he's
cute
cute. And no wonder! He's a mix of two of the country's most popular breeds. He should be a slam dunk; an easy case; an adoption
success story. Instead, he's been lingering in the SuperMutt system for months, bouncing from foster family to foster family.

The problem is that he is always pulling out of his collar on walks and darting away into traffic. Not a smart move for a city dog. And now this train issue. As I study his photograph, I realize that it all shows in his expression. Seymour's eyes, while soft brown and shaped like a golden retriever's, hold neither a golden's friendly confidence nor a basset's droll charm. The look in his eyes, unfortunately, is straight-up neurotic. And whoever took that photo snapped it at a moment when Seymour's eyes were so wide open that you could see crescents of white around his golden brown irises, lending him a particularly nutty look. Everyone can see his vibrating nerves right there in his expression before they even hear the stories from the various foster families between which he's been shuttled.