Little Boy Blue (18 page)

“You’re doing such a great thing,” the woman said as she handed me my change and the cashier’s receipt. “These seem like terrific dogs. I’d take one myself if I didn’t already have my own at home.”

The crate came clean easily with the spray and paper towels, and Summer, well, she also ended up smelling lemony fresh. I had to wipe the poop off her fur with the paper towels after giving them a small squirt of the stuff, since I didn’t have dog shampoo or a bathtub in the backseat. I took both dogs for a walk on the grass next to the gas station before returning them to the crates, and I sat down for a minute to collect my thoughts before beginning the rest of the drive home.

That’s when I realized that Summer was shaking. She was like Blue had been, submissive and terrified. She struck me as the kind of dog who, like him, would have cowered in the back of her cage at the shelter. She, too, was most likely from the long row of cages, the ones for the non-preferable dogs. She could have just as similarly ended up being transported in the back of a dark RV where nobody talked to her or took her out for a walk. She could have easily been forced to ride the whole way covered in her own filth, just as Blue had been forced to ride next to a pile of vomit.

Instead, she was now sitting in my lap on the grass next to the rest stop, burying her eyes and nose in my armpit. I stroked her black fur and told her everything was going to be all right. I wished somebody had done the same for Blue when he’d been so afraid.

Dogs like Summer and Blue who seem to be further traumatized by transport are the reason some rescuers now forgo longdistance ground transports altogether. Instead, they work with groups like Pilots N Paws, a charity that provides private planes for rescue dogs. This is the organization I’d first heard about at my kitchen table as a possibility for moving Blue up to New Jersey. At the time, I’d thought the woman telling me about it was insane. Now I understood exactly why such a service is invaluable.

When I spoke with Debi Boies, who cofounded Pilots N Paws, she told me that the idea stemmed from the death of her twelve-year-old Doberman. She looked into dogs needing rescue, just as I had, and decided to adopt a Dobie from Florida into her South Carolina home. She asked everyone she knew for help driving the dog north, and a friend named Jon Wehrenberg offered to go her one better. He’s a pilot from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he said he would skip the driving altogether and pick up the dog in his plane.

The experience left Wehrenberg wondering whether dogs needed long-range transports on a regular basis. He and Boies conceived Pilots N Paws that same day. They started small, with Wehrenberg’s sixteen-year-old son building their first website. Soon after that,
USA Today
took notice. Two days before Thanksgiving in 2008, the newspaper published an article about what Pilots N Paws was trying to do. And then, Boies said, every news organization in America called. The carmaker Subaru offered to become a financial sponsor. The company Petmate offered to donate supplies. Today, about 2,000 registered pilots are among the 9,500 people who regularly use the Pilots N Paws online forum to arrange transports of dogs just like Blue, Izzy, and Summer.

“Contrary to what some people believe, these pilots are not always wealthy people,” Boies told me. “Most of our pilots are hard-working people with daily jobs that run the gamut from airport workers to heads of corporations. They own small planes, and they love to fly as a hobby. Since they do this out of their own pockets, Jon and I pursued 501(c)(3) charity status, which means they can now be eligible for some tax benefits as humanitarians. But I’ll tell you, they’d do it even without that. These pilots are so committed. We had one pilot who couldn’t fly because of weather, so he rented an RV and drove the dogs himself. We have another pilot, one single pilot who has been with us for less than a year, and he alone is already approaching his thousandth dog moved. He had ‘Pilots N Paws’ painted on the side of his plane, and a big picture of a beagle painted on its tail. I have no clue how many dogs we’ve moved overall, but I would not be surprised if it’s in the tens of thousands by now.”

I’m sure that Summer would have preferred the two-hour flight in the back of a private plane to the eight-hour drive in the back of my car, just as Blue’s stomach would have been better off without the sixteen-and-a-half-hour drive in an RV. Heck, if Blue had been flown to New Jersey in just a few short hours instead of spending so much time in that RV, he might have avoided feeling scared in the car for all of his young life. He’d vomited a few times after first coming home, during random drives we took together, and I’d chalked the incidents up to his still-settling nerves or the fact that he didn’t yet understand what cars were. But Blue’s carsickness was becoming more commonplace the longer he was with me. He seemed to have some kind of a deeper fear. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with that long, bumpy drive in the RV.

I thought about how much better Izzy and Summer had things as I drove them up Interstate 95, along the same route that had carried Blue. It was just the three of us. They heard my voice talking to them the whole time. If the bang of a loud truck or the hum of being inside a tunnel pierced our calm, I let them know that everything was all right.

Indeed, I told them, everything was finally going to be all right for the rest of their lives.

And I hoped it was true, since nobody had actually applied to adopt them yet.

Loving, and Letting Go

My niece Kate Deurr is one of the people who helped to convince me that I could handle the responsibility of fostering two dogs. She and my nephew live in a modest home in Wall Township, New Jersey, where, from morning till night, she looks over two energy-packed pre-teen daughters, an autistic son, and, for the past few months, two foster babies. In her spare time, which she somehow finds tucked away in the deep recesses of her ever-giving soul, Kate opens her home to dogs who are being rescued by Canines in Need of Ocean Township. It’s a group like the one that saved Blue—a team of volunteers who work with people in the South to move dogs up North and put them into foster care until permanent homes can be found.

On the day I called her to tell her what I was preparing to do, I expected to hear kids screaming and babies crying and dogs barking in the background—the kind of mutinous cacophany that most people only need imagine once before deciding that fostering a homeless dog is simply too much of a hassle. Instead, though, we enjoyed a quiet half hour conversation. She told me the foster dogs were no problem at all. They are, to her mind, just one more blessing in her day-to-day life. Like Blue, most of them arrive from North Carolina.

She has lost count of how many dogs she has fostered, but she thinks it’s in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty during the past five years. Most of the dogs come through her home like transient borders, just needing a warm bed for a few days or a couple of weeks, but a few have left lasting impressions on her entire family. There was Wyatt the Labradoodle, for one. “He was such a beautiful boy,” she says. “I got e-mails from as far away as Canada from people willing to drive to New Jersey to take him.” There was also Willie the Terrier. “He was a pee-er,” she told me. “He couldn’t hold it and wait to go out. I had him right around Easter, and my whole house smelled like pee.” With her encouragement, Willie was adopted by a family whose house had a doggy door that he could use at any time. He not only stopped wrecking the carpets, but he also went on to become a therapy dog and remains a beloved family member today.

Kate seemed to know her own foster dogs the way I was getting to know Izzy and Summer after spending just a few hours with them in my car—not just as numbers moving through a system, but as individuals with distinct personalities and needs. This is key to the adoption process. The better the fosters get to know the dogs, the better the rescuers can match them with homes where they are likely to fit in and remain happy forever.

I decided to learn as much as possible about Izzy and Summer so that I could give Lulu’s Rescue some great nuggets to include in their online profiles. I figured if my niece Kate could do it with all of her other obligations, I could sure as heck do it without any kids or other responsibilities of my own besides my work. I really had no excuse except to try. I frankly felt a little guilty for never having tried before.

My biggest worry at first was making sure that both Izzy and Summer got along with Blue. Adding two dogs to any household with another dog can be a challenge, and if Stella had still been living with me at the time, too, I don’t think I’d have even attempted it. She had a history of showing aggression toward female dogs in particular, and Izzy and Summer both likely would have ended up in a dogfight with her at one point or another.

But Stella, my wonderful alpha menace, was no longer a part of our lives by the time I returned from North Carolina.

A few months before I drove down South to trace Blue’s history, I caught my husband in what turned out to be an affair that can only be described as calculated, sinister, and cruel. Everything about our lives had seemed wonderful, from our home and careers to our beautiful dogs, right until the moment I saw the text messages on his BlackBerry. About an hour earlier, he’d been telling me how much he loved and appreciated me. And then, suddenly, I was horrified to be looking at similar words having been sent to somebody else. He admitted that he was in love with two women, and that the other one, he’d met before he and I even began dating nearly thirteen years earlier. I’d soon learn that she is a married mother of four. They’d been sleeping together since before he and I were married. Her phone number traced to a location about twenty minutes from his dream job that had brought us to New Jersey in the first place.

I threw him out that night, and he left without argument—as if he’d been waiting for years for the very moment to come. I still remember the way Blue and Stella looked, huddled together on the sofa well after midnight, staring at me with wide eyes as I screamed and cried and dragged the garbage bags full of his clothes across the house and into the garage. I never saw him again except for the day just ten weeks later that we went before the judge to get divorced. While he did send me a single, apologetic e-mail of precisely eight sentences, he never once uttered the words “I’m sorry” or even attempted to reconcile. He fled from our life like a con artist, literally reaching for his coat before I could even ask what had happened. With the exception of his car, he didn’t ask to keep a single possession we had collected during more than a decade together. Blue, who had loved him the way any puppy loves his new daddy, who had snuggled with him on the sofa and played with him in the yard, wasn’t any more of a consideration in my husband’s mind than I was as I lay weeping in our bed, cursing the tainted sheets.

Stella, though, for some reason was different. Not only did he want her, but everyone offering me emotional support reminded me that she had always shared a more special bond with him than she had allowed with me. She had spent far more time with me, since I work from home and walked her just about every day, but she’d always listened better to him. Blue was clearly my dog, just as Floyd had been. But Stella, if I was being honest, was his.

I last saw Stella on a sunny winter’s day when I left her in the care of our veterinary surgeon. She recognized Stella immediately; hers were the talented hands that had saved Stella’s life during the great Gorilla Glue-eating incident of 2006, which coated Stella’s stomach and intestines in the nasty, sticky stuff. This time, Stella had torn her knee ligament by making an Evel Knievel-esque leap off the back deck’s stairs. She needed expensive reconstructive surgery just a week after I discovered my husband’s secret other life and paid a large retainer to a lawyer. I’d gotten the X-rays and the bad news late at night while sitting by Stella’s side and petting her on the cold floor of the emergency clinic where we’d put Floyd to sleep earlier in the year. It was the same room where I’d held him in my arms as he took his last breath.

Between Floyd’s recent death, the shocking discovery of my husband’s affair, Blue’s erratic sleep schedule as a puppy, and my own new battles with the symptoms of depression, my psyche quickly became the equivalent of a mass-murder scene. I thought about how difficult it was going to be to keep Stella calm and contained while her knee healed. I reluctantly accepted that that there is only so much any single human being can bear. I offered to pay four figures toward Stella’s knee surgery so that she would be able to have it, I packed up her food and favorite things, and I agreed to let him collect her at the vet’s office and take her to his new home to heal, and then to live. I blubbered like a desperate parent in a hospital waiting room as the veterinary technician took Stella away. After the vet tech handed Stella’s leash to me, with her no longer attached, I walked outside to my car, placed Blue gently on my lap, and wept uncontrollably into his soft puppy fur.

Bringing Izzy and Summer home as foster dogs obviously could not quench the loss that I felt for Stella and everything else that had vanished so horribly from my life, but the extra puppy love in the house sure helped me to smile at a time when it seemed all but impossible. During the first few months after my divorce, when loyalty and trust seemed like figments of an imaginary life, these foster dogs gave me both, immediately and completely. They did what dogs do best in times of sadness— snuggled by my side, encouraged me to get out into the fresh air for walks at the park, and licked away any tears that streamed down my cheeks. My bond with Blue grew even stronger, too, as I made sure he knew that while Izzy and Summer were our houseguests, he was my number one priority in the whole world. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw how much he loved playing with them the way he used to play with Stella all day long. The activity helped the house to feel somehow, blessedly, happy and full.