Again

The doctor delivers two kinds of news.  The good news is that the patient is doing better.  Anti-nausea drugs have stopped the vomiting and an IV bag has brought electrolyte levels back to normal.  Another one will be administered before discharge, just for good measure.  The bad news is they don't know what caused the vomiting.

"Are you sure there haven't been any internal injuries?  Perhaps a fall you didn't witness?"

The woman next to me, her face drawn and tear-streaked, shakes her head no.  "She has been with me the whole time.  I don't leave the house without her."

"Well," the doctor notes something on his chart, "Sometimes they can grab something off the ground when you're not looking."

I know the woman does not believe this, feels she has been beyond diligent, but it seems pointless to argue or speculate further.  He says it will be about another half hour, then slips behind the counter and disappears into the back.

I pat the woman's hand reassuringly.  We have looked at all the magazines, asked all of the polite small talk questions one feels comfortable asking of strangers.  It is well past one o'clock in the morning now.   My husband has wandered over to the vending machines but has yet to purchase something.

The dog is woozy when they bring her out and the fluid beneath her skin makes it look as if she is wearing football pads.  A veterinary assistant helps my husband lift her into the back of the woman's car, her daughter's car, and closes the hatchback.  I look through the window and study her outline against the upholstery, so dark her edges blend in, a shadow of a dog.  Her size and weight are similar to Ava's but the tail is wrong, it is bushy and curves in an arc toward the dog's back, a German Shepherd tail.  Ava was all inky black sleekness, shiny like a seal, with a long thin tail that thumped against the ground like a heartbeat.

Later in the week we see the woman and the dog out walking.  They both strike me as a little frail, stepping slowly and carefully over the cracks and blisters in the sidewalk created by tree roots well over a hundred years old.  The woman waves and I raise my coffee cup in response.  She gestures toward the dog with a "ta da" sort of flourish and smiles.  My husband nods and claps his hands.

A few days later a young woman knocks on my door and immediately I see the resemblance.  She introduces herself, apologizing that we haven't met sooner, and holds out a bottle of red wine with a card attached.  Her gratitude makes her stammer and brings a flush to her cheeks.   "I didn't seriously consider the stairs," she says, almost to herself.  "She couldn't have lifted a 70 pound dog if something went wrong...what was I thinking?"

I reach for the wine and wave her in.  "How was your trip?  Your first time in Europe, your mother told us. How exciting!"  My voice sounds shrill.  I have never been at ease with new people.

Standing in my entryway she still seems a bit lost in thought, her eyes taking in the living room, kitchen, scanning the floors, her cap of dark hair swinging down into her face.  "You don't have a dog," she observes.

"You sound surprised."

"Really, I'm just realizing how much I'm at work and not home or I would have known that.  My husband knows it, I'm sure."  She smiles and rubs the back of her neck absently.  "I mean that you would help a stranger with a sick dog like that...its just beyond decent."

She is standing there, looking at me and I know I should ask her to sit.  We could open the wine and discuss her trip or the late Indian Summer or the home that just sold across the street but instead I start telling her about Ava.

We got her for the kids, the way people do, but of course they quickly lost interest and then it was all up to me.  With three boys running around it felt like one more set of feet tromping around in the house would put me over the edge. We had a nice big yard and a doghouse and she lived outside. She was always excited when the kids came home but she wasn't a barker or really any trouble that way, just thumped her tail.  My husband walked her early on but then he changed jobs and was traveling all the time.  I had the kids to contend with and the yard seemed plenty big enough, room to run around whenever she wanted.  I had been the one to name her.  Something about her dark, dark fur and the way the bones in her face were angled made me think of Ava Gardner.  Although she was big she could be very dainty. When she took a nap she would cross her front paws and place her chin on them just so.

Sometimes I wonder if the boys didn't take to her as much because she had such a girly name.  Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should make a difference and probably it didn't.  They were just more seriously into sports by that time.  The oldest one was always in a game or tournament somewhere and the other two followed soon enough.  Most of my weekends were spent sitting in a beach chair on the edge of a field watching one or more of them chase after balls of various colors and shapes.  With the post-game pizza parties and carpools we were rarely home before dark.  I'd call Ava to come get her food and she would meet me in front of her doghouse.  Sometimes I noticed she got up from same spot she'd been in when we left.

After our youngest son graduated my husband and I moved to a fixer.  With the money from the other house we planned to upgrade and flip this new one.  We both had a passion for remodeling that we hadn't indulged since I became pregnant with our first child and he had taken a new job that kept him off the road.  The house also needed serious landscaping and with the garage full to the rafters with tiles, loose boards and other supplies, for a few weeks Ava lived inside.  I blocked off a section of the kitchen with baby gates I picked up at Home Depot, brought her bed and bowls in and told her it was her space.  At first she just stared at me, keeping her feet planted firmly outside the threshold.   I got closer to the floor and spoke very sweetly and even tried to ply her with a piece of leftover chicken.  She raised one paw and put it back down, maybe four or five times, but still would not cross.  Finally, I got her leash, clipped it to her collar and just pulled her in.  She went directly to her bed and sat down.  It seemed like her hind legs shook a bit. She must have been around ten then and had started to get a little arthritic. The whole time the yard was being dug up she stayed on that bed and only got up to eat and when we took her out front to relieve herself.  After the yard was complete we moved her back outside but a few times when I thought it was too damp or cold I called her in.  She went to that same section of the kitchen and plopped down until it was time to go out again.  No baby gates necessary. She died at twelve, a normal lifespan for a Lab I'm told.  No long illnesses or incontinence or drama that some people deal with.  One morning she just didn't get up.

"It sounds like she had a good life," my neighbor says but it is phrased more like a question.   Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, which my husband says I tend to do.

After she died, I gathered up her bed and bowls and leftover food and brought it to the local animal shelter.  The man behind the front desk accepted my items with more gratitude than I thought they warranted.  "Unfortunately," he told me, "Most toys we can't take.  Its too easy to pass germs so we only keep a handful that we can easily disinfect, and those stay outside."

"I don't have any toys," I told him.

"If I had it to do again, it would be different," I tell my neighbor.

She gives a little shake to her head, "Not every time in life is ideal to have a pet, especially a dog.  They're a lot of work," she adds with a smile. She says "work" the way people do who comment that maintaining their beautiful home or planning their dream vacation was a lot of work.

After she leaves I open the wine and settle onto the couch with a glass.  For a long time I was angry at my husband, for his incessant travel, for leaving me alone to raise the boys, for the family life that never  quite lived up to the promise of the house.  I think about our old yard.  Level and rectangular with lush grass, mature oaks that gave plenty of shade and a tire swing.  There was a long wooden picnic table and a double-decker BBQ and strings of outdoor lights shaped like chili peppers.  There was drip irrigation and flower beds and late summer tomatoes.  There was a dog house and a dog.

Letter to Ryan

It was icy here this morning in the NW. I woke up to the news of a fully engulfed bus fire on I-5 at 85th - even on the traffic cams the freeway overpasses looked like they had been dipped in egg white, then sugared. Except for the flare of yellow where the bus was.

In the morning, I take the dog out first thing, careful on the ramp Tom built for her, frosted in the morning sometimes, sometimes just wet from rain and the bad gutters on the house. She moves slowly, stands and looks at the yard, seems to forget what she's doing there. When we come back into the house, I bend down and rub her soft ears, tell her she's a good dog, every day. She wanders back into the bedroom and I close her in with Tom for a few more hours of sleep. I shower, make tea, toast, pull things together and go out to chip the frost off my car for the long drive to work.

It feels like I'm traveling a lot these days, though it's the same 59.9 miles back and forth all the time. It's ten days into January and not a good month, already. When RGIII wrecked his already-injured knee last weekend, someone said "There are no grown-ups down there on the sidelines during NFL games", meaning someone should have benched him, but no one did. I'm being bounced against all the hard edges of adulthood every day these days, getting good at things no one wants to be good at, telling people they didn't get the job, and worse. Some times people tell me "I would hate to have your job" and I think Yeah me too, but I give a shit about there being good grown-ups in the world, and it's ok with me if I have to try to be one. Not that I succeed all the time, there are still those bad gutters on the house, after all, but sometimes people know to come to me to ask for things, to ask for help, and often I can. That doesn't make every day good but it makes the whole life good, I think.

I don't picture you on the internet much these days, and I wish I could send a letter, handwriting, paper, an envelope, some amount of stamps that I would have to look up to get right. We haven't known each other long enough for you to decipher my handwriting all that well, but we have to start somewhere, and even if you understood every individual letter, who is to say that we ever understand all the words that anyone else writes to us anyway? They are all subject to misinterpretation, like my ill-defined Rs or lazy Gs. You'd get most of it, I think, anyway.

I do picture you getting this message, reading it, and thinking, did she mean to write this to me? And yes, I did, Ryan, who used to always smell surprisingly like soap, in spite of that dirty hair. I meant to send it to my white t-shirt-wearing two-step partner, with the good eyes that are often kind of somewhere else, until they're not, and then there's that singular, unforgettable focus. We talk about that, behind your back, and love you for it.

When I woke up this morning, it was from a long dream you were in. You were back from a faraway trip, as you would be if you were here. You had brought a girl with you, someone I knew, and things weren't quite right between you. You were staying in a loft, clothes hung on pipes strung up with rope, and she had filled the pipe/rod with bathing suits, a vintage style, all one piece and embellished, some with halter necks that would criss-cross in an X over collarbones, some embroidered with small dust-colored flowers. That part was too much for you, all those bathing suits filling up the one place to hang clothes.

You and I went into town, a small one where the restaurants were all close together, so that with their doors open it was almost like they were all rooms in a house. You knew the Japanese man who ran a French restaurant, had worked for him before. We walked through the kitchen where the orders were piling up, ready to be taken out and served, but no servers were around anywhere, just the owner. For fun, you took plates out and served them for him while I waited.

Sometimes there isn't much of a point to what you write to someone else, except to say, this is where I am, somewhere always slightly unimaginable no matter how familiar a place it might be. You might remember a little what the house where I live looks like, and that tells you one thing, but you know so much more when I tell you I keep stubbing my toe on the hard furniture of being grown-up and my foot fucking hurts but sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the night in the dark to take the dog out, and if you love that dog and know she won't last forever, even that one little painful duty is a kind of honor and something you'll miss when she's gone.

That is to say, life back here is hard and sweet and you and I had a funny friendship that existed in a space so undefined and out of place that it seems right to send you something random, because also, you are on the road, and who knows what you will see next, there is always surprise and I hope for that for you always.

Love to you,
H