Lawyer for the Dog (6 page)

“I won't let anything happen to him.”

“Just ring the doorbell when you get back. I don't like to leave the door unlocked.”

*   *   *

Sherman walks in front of me, his nose held high. He seems to know how handsome he is: gray coat, perfectly groomed white eyebrows and whiskers. He tugs at the leash and I give him an extra foot or two. At the intersection just past Mrs. Hart's house, he pauses, puts his nose to the pavement, then starts to turn to cross the street.

“No, we can't go to the beach,” I say, and give his leash a tug. He looks up at me, black eyes pleading. What harms can come from a little detour? “Oh, okay. I need to check on my mom, anyway.” There's a wave of dark clouds coming from the west, moving closer.

The dog leads the way down the public boardwalk through the dunes, stopping to sniff an abandoned plastic bucket and a once-blue flip-flop, bleached by the sun. As the dunes give way to level sand he stops again, sits, takes in the salt smell and the roar of the ocean, then heads for the blanket I brought for my mother and Delores. One of the chairs is still there, but the other has blown down the beach.

“Mom and Delores must have taken a walk,” I say. I've always thought people who talk to their dogs are a little pathetic, but I feel the need to explain. “Let's just sit here for a while and—”

It's then that I see Delores at the ocean's edge maybe fifty yards down the beach, up to her knees in the water, arms waving frantically.

“Delores! Where's Mom?” I yell, coming up behind her.

“Out there!” she says, pointing toward the roiling waves. Sherman hears her panic, lets out a series of piercing barks. “She just wanted to dip her feet in the water. I was holding her hand and then she … then she—”

I can barely see my mother bobbing in the waves. She's not exactly swimming—I can't remember the last time my mother went swimming—but floating in the swells, so far out you could mistake her head for a crab trap or a piece of flotsam.

“Mom!” I scream. But of course she can't hear me. The undertow is pulling her farther and farther down the beach, toward Breach Inlet, where even strong swimmers can drown. There's nothing to do but go after her. “Here, you hold onto the dog,” I say to Delores, who's crying now. I throw off my jacket, kick off my shoes and jump in—the water's so cold it stings—swimming hard, the waves smacking my face. I see a huge one coming and I duck under, as my father taught me to do so long ago. I come up for breath, go under again, and then I come up next to her.

“Mom!”

The expression in her eyes is not exactly amusement, but something close, as if she thinks it's odd to find another of her kind out here.

“Mom, hold onto me. I'll take you back in.” There's an instant when I think she won't listen, but then she grabs my arm. “Don't fight the undertow, just go with it.” Slowly, slowly I pull her back to shore, the waves whacking the backs of our heads, half submerging us, taking us under, then pushing us to safety.

Delores meets us with the blanket and wraps it around my mother, whose lips are blue and trembling. “Lord, Miz Margaret, you scared the bejesus out of me. What you been thinking to jump in like that?”

“I lost…” my mother says breathlessly. “My dog.”

And that's when I realize that we're not just missing my mother's stuffed chihuahua. We're missing Sherman.

How can I go back to Mrs. Hart and say, “I'm sorry, I lost your dog”? As I run up the beach looking for him, the sky turns purple and the wind shoots sand in my eyes.

To stay calm I talk to myself:
You'll find him. How far can he go on those little legs?

 

Losing Things

“You're always losing things,” my mother used to say.

When I was twelve I lost an Easter hat my mother paid twenty dollars for—a lot of money for a little girl's hat back then—a white straw hat festooned with fake daisies and a yellow ribbon that matched my dress. I hated the hat as much as I hated the dress, and maybe that had something to do with my losing it somewhere in the graveyard behind the church. My father was buried in that graveyard, and I used to go there to visit him after the service while my mother chatted over coffee in the parish hall. I believed it was somehow my fault that I had lost him. Maybe I hadn't loved him enough.

And I lost Brownie, the spaniel my father gave me just before he died. He'd adored the dog as much as I had, and in the weeks after the funeral I clung to Brownie as if she had magical powers, as if her presence meant my father hadn't completely vanished from the earth. My mother dealt with her grief by packing Daddy's clothes for the Salvation Army and putting an ad in the paper: “Spaniel free to good home.” Weren't
we
a good home? “Of course,” she said, “but I'll be working now and you'll be in school. There'll be no one here to take care of the dog.” Maybe if I'd cried harder, begged harder, she might have changed her mind, but I was exhausted from weeks of crying. Looking back, I realize she was exhausted, too, and terrified of going back to work after all those years.

And I've lost plenty of cases, important cases—although no case is unimportant for the human beings in the middle of it. Early on, imagining that with a little practice I could be Clarence Darrow, I lost a murder case. I wasn't hoping for a miracle, just for the jury to come back with a manslaughter verdict for my client, a nineteen-year-old woman from the housing project on America Street, who'd shot her boyfriend when she found him screwing her best girlfriend. Surely, I argued, she'd done it “in the heat of passion.” There'd be no problem convincing the jury she was only guilty of manslaughter. I hoped they'd overlook the fact that after she discovered his infidelity she drove two miles to her cousin's house to get a gun.

I was young and inexperienced. I shared her righteous indignation. After all, this wasn't the first time her boyfriend had betrayed her with other women, and he'd forged her welfare check to buy drugs. This SOB, I thought,
deserved
what he got. I gave a dramatic closing argument. One of the men on the jury cried. A couple of the women nodded their heads.
Yes
, I thought,
they're with me
.

But the jury deliberated for only half an hour. When the foreman stood up and uttered the words “guilty” and “murder” in a loud, unequivocal voice, I almost fainted.

What had I done wrong? I'd lost my judgment. I'd let myself believe her.

I've lost other cases, of course, but I've never gotten used to it. I always feel I've failed—not just for my client, but maybe for justice in general, although I know that sounds corny. I still believe in justice, though I always give my clients my “Beware of the Notion of Justice” speech.

It goes something like this:
Justice is an ideal we strive for, but it doesn't exist in the real world. The judge who'll hear your case is a real-live, messed-up human being just like you and me, with pimples and prejudices, and on the day she or he bangs the gavel to start your so-called fair trial, she or he may have hemorrhoids or a hangover, or at best will just be in a hurry to move on, to finish up early for that golf game, or a kid's soccer match, or to take a nap. So forget justice. You don't want to gamble your life or your children's future on the temperament of that particular human being. You want to settle on something reasonable, something you can live with. I know, it's not fair. Maybe justice prevails somewhere out there in a different universe, but it's a rare commodity here in the courts of Charleston County, South Carolina.

I hate giving this speech. I hate the sound of my own voice, the sourness and cynicism in it. But it's my duty to try to save my clients from their own fantasies, their own childlike belief in a perfect world.

Or maybe I'm just steering them—and myself—away from the possibility of another devastating loss. Twice in my adult life I've suffered losses that had nothing to do with the law, losses that knocked me flat, like those giant waves that catch you off guard, roll you over and hurl you onto the hard beach of your own hardheaded self.

After the miscarriage I stayed in bed for a week. Physically I was fine, but I couldn't make myself think about going back to the firm, couldn't eat, couldn't even get dressed. Joe was dealing with his own grief, but he was clueless about mine: “I don't understand, Sally. You didn't want the baby in the first place.” Which was true. We'd talked about having children and I'd told him I wasn't ready. But I'd been careless, forgetting to take my birth control pills because in the midst of all our arguing, we were rarely having sex, and after the miscarriage I felt guilty in a way I couldn't make sense of, as if I'd been a bad mother to a child I'd never even met.

Joe was patient, sweet, supportive, but he wanted a child. He wanted a wife who'd have no hesitation about trying to get pregnant again right away. “You'll be a great mother,” he said, with too much enthusiasm. Of course he also wanted the kind of wife who wouldn't embarrass him with her politics, her outspokenness, a wife who knew how to throw a fabulous party, who wanted what he wanted: a big house downtown, a comfortable, untroubled life. “My mother can get you in the Junior League,” he said, as if he'd forgotten who he was talking to.

Before the miscarriage I'd been considering a separation, but I still loved him, even after all the feuding. He was—and is—a kind and decent man. Afterward, though, I could see with awful clarity how different we were. He deserved a wife who'd make him happy. I deserved … I didn't know exactly what, except that it wasn't this uneasy truce.

He cried. I cried. I found an apartment, hired a mover.

And again I was blindsided. How could I feel such grief over the loss of something I'd decided to give up? I've never told Joe about the times—in those first few months after I left him—I thought about going back. I nearly lost my nerve. How would I lead the rest of my life, the next year, even the next few months, alone? I'd looked forward to dinners by myself, eating what I wanted to eat—an artichoke, some yogurt, or nothing at all—but I found I dreaded eating alone. I left the firm and felt a temporary lift at having my old job back again, but soon found my cubicle at the P.D.'s office depressing: those stacks of files crowding the top of the dented metal desk, the swivel chair that screeched when I turned to answer the phone, the torn linoleum floor. I had a new roster of about one hundred clients, but they came with a slew of problems even the best trial lawyer couldn't solve: poverty and poor education, addiction, a string of prior convictions.

After the divorce I drafted a name-change petition to become “Sarah Bright” again, but I never went through with it. I'd established myself professionally as “Baynard” and going back to my maiden name, I told myself, would just complicate things. I carry Joe's name behind mine now, and sometimes it feels like the weight of all my failures in this life, all my losses.

*   *   *

My mother is safe in the car with Delores, wrapped in a beach towel, but there's no sign of Sherman.

I'm drenched, freezing, but I keep running. My breath burns in my chest, but the wind pushes me forward, gives me the impetus to keep going, though there's thunder and lightning now and everyone else has fled the beach. In the distance I make out something on the sand, a creature traveling away from me with a strange, unsteady gait—a desperate dog, I think, a dog who's been hurt—and I run to catch up with it, but when I come closer I see it's just a gray plastic bag filled with wind.

“Sherman!” I yell, but the wind carries the sound of my voice off into nothingness. “Sherman!” I'm not even calling the dog anymore, I'm just screaming.

 

These Things Happen

I can see in Maryann Hart's eyes what
she
sees when she opens her front door: not a woman, but a girl, a child as big as a woman but a child nevertheless, a wretched overgrown child who's rung her doorbell by mistake, some homeless creature whose wet clothes cling to her angular body and drip onto the doormat.

“I'm so sorry,” I blurt out. “I don't know what—”

I expect her to slam the door in my face. Maybe I
want
her to slam the door in my face so I won't have to explain what's happened. I want to run away, back to my office, where I'll draft the order for Joe Baynard to sign, firing me and appointing someone else, some fit and proper lawyer for the dog, someone who's actually capable of walking a schnauzer on a leash without losing him.

But Mrs. Hart doesn't slam the door. “Oh, dear,” she says, “That's why I was so nervous about letting you … He does this sometimes, with people he's not used to.” She's clearly worried, but she doesn't blame or scold. Before I know it she's bringing me a towel, wiping my face, doing her best to calm me down. “Sherman knows his way home. We just have to hope no one picks him up. He's too friendly for his own good.”

This is not the same Mrs. Hart I met an hour ago, so I risk telling her the whole story: how I left my mother and Delores on the beach, thinking they'd have a nice respite from the condo, my mother's unplanned ocean adventure. “I'll drive them home,” I say, still breathless, “and come back. Maybe I can find him. He can't have gone too far.”

“You're not listening, sweetie,” she says. Her “sweetie” sounds at once reassuring and tender. “Sherman knows his way home. He doesn't like being out on the rain, so I'm sure he'll be back soon. You just settle down and I'll make you a cup of hot tea.”

“But I need to get my mother home.”

“How thoughtless of me! They can't sit out there in the car all wet, can they? By all means, bring them in.”

That's how we all end up in Mrs. Hart's kitchen drinking hot mint tea, wrapped in her “old everyday” bathrobes, which seem pretty elegant to me, while our clothes roll around in the dryer. “Would you like something stronger?” she asks. “It's not quite five o'clock yet, but I suppose we could break that silly little rule in a situation like this, don't you think?” There's a wine glass and a half-empty bottle of chardonnay on the counter. Maybe that explains her mood change.