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.