Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  That was pretty much how I felt about their leaving.

  They left in late October, and Shiloh slept on my couch until they were ready to drive away. She got as far as the front porch, leaning up against me after the humans had hugged goodbye, and Peter finally had to pick her up and carry her to the waiting car. What her reluctance meant I can’t know: Maybe she was just sleepy, maybe she didn’t want to split up the pack by leaving me and Tula. But it was an Old Yeller moment that became the image, for me, of what it meant to lose them all.

  For the next couple of months it was just the two of us. I spent weeks cleaning up the fall garden, fussing over meadow rue and sweet peas so that I might be surrounded, day after day, by dust unto dust. I stayed out there till dusk, until my hands cracked from the dirt, and I became wildly happy when I saw a late-season bumper crop of wildflowers. I needed to be reminded, all the time, of the perennial fact of life, of Willa Cather’s exquisite description of lying in the pumpkin patch and floating into the perfect stillness, in My Ántonia—“when we die and become a part of something entire.” It was a balm on my tired heart. Tula lay nearby in the pachysandra while I worked, and I wanted to lie down next to her and let the weeds and nasturtiums fold over us and obliterate our sorrow.

  * * *

  —

  Tyler, with the wonderful egocentrism of a seven-year-old, believes she has much to teach Tula before she’s gone. I hope she lives a month, she tells me, so that I can advance her to the next level of genie training. I ask Tyler if she can fix me while she’s at it—fix a broken heart. No, she tells me, that requires a heart genie, and it’s special training I don’t have.

  I think she’s fudging, and tell her so. Since when has she balked at any genie challenge? I thought you could fix anything, I say. You said I could come to you in dark of night and you would know what to do.

  She sighs, as though the responsibility of being seven and in charge of my heart is just too much, but more like she’s irritated and busy, rather than overwhelmed. “Well, I can call up the heart genies,” she tells me. “But it may take them a while to get here.” It is the first time I’ve laughed in weeks.

  * * *

  —

  When Tula was first diagnosed I checked her breath every time I could, meaning that I awoke about thirty times a night to hear the music of that one breath, remembering what it was like not to hear it, nine years ago when my first dog died. I swore then that I would never love another dog like Clementine, because I loved her so much that I could not bear her leaving. Then I fell in love with her monster replacement, a gorgeous eleven-pound puppy who grew into a fifty-five-pound adult and who turned into the world’s best dog. They all become the world’s best dog, even the worst dog, when you love them.

  She is an animal who has spent her entire life with me. I am an animal who has spent only a small part of my life with her, though now, this long minute, it seems like forever and not nearly long enough.

  This is what love usually means, unless you both go down without a blip of warning.

  I sit somewhere near her and have the same vocabulary. I’m over here. Lie down on your bed. Good girl. Pond. Park. Noodles.

  I give her rigatoni for dinner, right out of the pan. I season the noodles with chicken gravy and Parmesan cheese, cool the pan with cold water and let her have the whole damn thing on the floor. She looks up at me as though she has won the lottery. She is having a great life up until the end, partly because she doesn’t know it’s the end, has no fear, no pain. She lives only in the present and enjoys every noodle.

  Anticipatory grief is the clinical term for what I’m going through, a suspended state of waiting for the anguish that must lie ahead. The curse of consciousness: an ability to contemplate pain yet unknown. Walking today at the cemetery, the first early snow of late autumn, I tear up at Tula’s pure wolflike joy, running like a young dog. When she sleeps after we get home I sing songs to her on the back porch, made-up songs about Clementine, and Caroline, the blond woman in heaven with many dogs in her lap. This is probably ridiculous, but my voice soothes Tula and the stories appease me. The promise of an afterlife, real or not, pulled out like the old tattered velveteen rabbit whenever we need it.

  I often wonder, as I suppose everyone wonders, how I wound up here. Wouldn’t have seen it, though it did occur to me recently that when I was Tyler’s age I announced I was going to be a dog breeder when I grew up. I also claimed, in the next several years, that I would be a mathematician, a barrel racer, a writer. Never a wife, oddly. Not on my fantasy list. I don’t know what that means, or if it means anything at all.

  At the end Tula gets her days and nights mixed up. We go out for late-night walks, eleven P.M., up and down brick-lined streets in the cold, with me trying to get her as tired and calm as possible. She is anxious when we get home, when I give her room to roam, so we sleep together leashed, like we are tied to the mast on the Titanic.

  She dies on the shortest day of the year.

  Through sleep I hear a crash and don’t respond. I am in the middle of a dream I don’t want to leave. In the dream I opened a door to an outside breezeway, and though it was winter there were flowers everywhere—fuchsia, otherworldly plants against a snowy landscape, and a magical tree with streaming iridescent white blossoms that made me gasp. I wondered how anyone could live without this beauty. And Tula was there, a version of Tula, smaller and far away and running against the horizon.

  I hear the crashing noise again and rouse myself from sleep. When I get to her she is standing a room away with one leg straight out, confused and still, and I get her back into the bedroom and onto her bed. Her gums are the color of linen. Once she is lying down, I trickle water into her mouth so that she won’t be thirsty. I make a pallet next to her and lean up against the wall, the phone next to me so I can reach our vet, who loves Tula and has been waiting for this call. When I hold on to Tula’s front paws with one hand, something I have done since she was a puppy, her breathing slows and so does mine.

  We stay like this for a long time.

  At the end of that night I hang blue lights in the upstairs windows and a Buddhist prayer flag. This is my wave at the holidays: blue shooting stars for the dead.

  20

  Two months later, I go to California.

  As soon as I walk into the air terminal I hear Peter’s unmistakable sonorous voice, laughing with some stranger at a coffee kiosk. And so I start to laugh, and then nearly cry. Maybe home is wherever somebody you love can make you laugh for no good reason from halfway across a room.

  I have come to see Pat and Peter, but also Shiloh, who is mostly sleeping and on her way out. When I get out of the car at the house I whistle for her, our private whistle, and she appears at my side immediately, a silent sentinel. She lies next to my bed all night. I feel the connection thrown wide, as though all the love I shared for years with these two magnificent creatures, Tula and Shiloh, has reached like a boomerang across the skies, Cambridge to California, death to life, and we are all OK and the love doesn’t die, just its corporeal object. This is a consolation I have known before but always forget, like innocence being continually reborn.

  When I lived in San Francisco I was in my early twenties, lost and poised, soaring one day and falling the next, and California appealed to all that was best and worst about that era of confusion. I worked as a paralegal in a radical women’s law firm, believed I was saving the world, took drugs in Mendocino, and felt the great cloud of the future carry me into a never-never land of stoner paradise. I roll my eyes when I remember this now, because I was so joyous and melancholy at once, so free of anything that mattered, and when I left there it was by hitchhiking away from Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Decades later, I gave a reading in Marin County, and I told the audience that I had loved Northern California but never learned how to be a grown-up there. The audience didn’t really laugh, either because
(a) no one knows how to be a grown-up in California or (b) they thought I was insulting their home, when in fact I was speaking to the collision of California mellow with my own youthful idiocy.

  I still wonder sometimes which coast would’ve been a better choice. If I’d stayed in California I might have been a sheep farmer or an astrologer, drunk and unhappy, in Ukiah or Mendocino. Instead I wound up a freelance writer, drunk and unhappy, in an attic garret in a cheap neighborhood in Boston. Who then walked downstairs and found my way through snowstorms and fear to the rooms where I got sober. Same hurdles, different circumstances.

  I’ve told Peter and Pat I want to see the redwoods, so we drive to Muir Woods, a place I remember as a portal to heaven, and yet now there are neon signs miles in advance telling us we need to call ahead for parking reservations. Peter drops us off, and Pat and I walk into a timeless sanctuary of those gentle, towering beings that are the redwoods. I could lie down here and stay. Places take you to other places, and this day reminds me of one in Colorado, when I was ten or eleven, when I saw aspen trees in autumn for the first time, and realized that forests were a chapel for the heart. I feel that way today, too, and then we all drive to the beach and Shiloh and I wade into the cold Pacific.

  Could I live in California? Everything feels bountiful, reachable, open here, and I know I am partly responding to the closed cavern back home where my heart has been the past few months. Here I walk miles in sunshine, swim laps in an outside pool, look at the stars. On a long woods walk with Sasha, one of Peter and Pat’s daughters, we are suddenly within a few yards of a horse stable, and we crawl through the split-rail fence to talk to the horses. The woman tending them was once a rodeo princess in east Texas, she tells me, and we nuzzle the horses and I ache with happiness. In the first three stalls are splendid animals who are gradations of white: a speckled white and gray, maybe an Appaloosa, then an uppity ivory mare with a braided mane, and at the end of the row, a proud, cloud-white horse who tosses her head but then relaxes. The trio seems magical, profound, when in fact it is just the luck of the draw, the end of a beautiful day, a moment I will share with Sasha. But this evening it says something to me about that boomerang of love again, white animals giving me everything I need, and it cinches my plans for the future.

  The day before I leave I lie in the grass outside with Shiloh, my head on her neck, and I sing to her and tell her goodbye. Peter tells me she keeps looking for me after I leave. Two days after I get home I will realize I have poison oak on my neck and face where I lay in the grass, probably spread by my tears when I said goodbye to her. Totally worth it.

  At the airport a young woman is walking around with a large therapy pig on a leash. The pig is wearing a THERAPY PIG PET ME sign and glittery angel wings, and she has brightly painted red toenails. She is indeed charming her audiences and making everyone happy. I go to my gate, where another young woman is doing yoga headstands against the wall. She is both oblivious and smug—everything I love and don’t love about California. I send Peter a photo of the pig and thank him for sending her to me. He writes back: Take good care of the sow!

  * * *

  —

  Something happened to me in California. Something pried open the door of my closed system. I can sit in a chair in the dark and not feel alone, or fragmented—just sad, even comforted by sadness. Whole. Experience is what you get sometimes instead of joy.

  Grief is like a wrestling match in the dark. It takes the wind out of you; you’re exhausted, you lose your footing, it doesn’t mean anything beyond its own huge self. Also you must learn it anew every time; you don’t get points or skip ahead for having suffered. I cried so much the first weeks after Tula died that I was dehydrated and my eyes hurt, and the only place I couldn’t cry was in the pool, at night. One evening after hours of circling doubt and despair, when I’d been turning my misery into self-blame, I went to the pool because I didn’t know what else to do. And swimming I just thought, like a little kid, “I miss my girl,” and then my heart broke open all over again and I was actually all right.

  * * *

  —

  Tyler made me a card that I still keep on a shelf. She worried that she had misspelled words (she hadn’t). It is a drawing of a giant bear-head that is Tula, surrounded by hearts and notes of encouragement:

  Dear Gail,

  I’m so sorry about Tula. But we can write a book about your dog!

  P. S. I hope you know she was ready.

  Inside Tula’s chest she has drawn a box with a heart in it and a girl (me) and a sign pointing to me with the name “Gail.” In other words, she tells me, I am inside Tula’s heart and she is inside mine. No guru or grief counselor could have been much wiser. I kiss the card, I kiss Tyler on top of her head and tell her the card is perfect, and so is she.

  * * *

  —

  The thing about the endless winters in the Northeast is that you get the light back before anything else. You can be in the middle of a raging blizzard, still have seven weeks of cold and howling winds to endure, but some reckoning that makes life bearable has blessed you with the returning light, wide vision illuminated against white snow. So that even if you are hurting and desolate there is that bright panorama, that longer day, that promise.

  I’ve learned that you must love what is in front of you, rather than only what is behind, or you will go mad from sorrow on the journey. Inhabit some careful land between the cloak of the past and what you have left ahead, even if it’s just the path itself. I spend a lot of winter days walking the streets of Cambridge, go sometimes to the cemetery and past the graves where for years I’ve left stones. One is an ornate slab of slate eulogizing Benjamin and Sarah Peirce, who died in the late 1880s, and at the bottom of the gravestone is an epitaph, THEY HAVE OUTSOARED THE SHADOW OF OUR NIGHT. What first drew me to the grave was the mark carved at its crest: the mathematical symbol ø, for void, for null or empty set. And beneath it the inscription: THERE IS ONE GOD AND SCIENCE IS THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIM.

  I was intrigued by the whole package, so I went home and researched Peirce, and learned that he was an esteemed mathematician at Harvard. A man who found a way to reconcile the beauty of pi and the golden ratio with his idea of celestial perfection. The grave seemed to me like a clue to the inside of someone’s heart, a sanctum come upon by a stranger more than a century later. Peirce’s son was the famous philosopher C. S. Peirce, whom I studied in school a million years ago, and now here I was at that man’s father’s grave, leaving behind a little rock because I had liked his ø. A void, if you will, filled merely by the act of my having seen it.

  You have to drink from the fountain as often as you can, every day if possible. Doesn’t have to be the Trevi. It can be from a brook, a glass of water. Just take what beauty or kindness is there—the air you breathe, the red-tailed hawk circling overhead at the Peirces’ grave. Leave the rocks. Try not to be afraid. I love this grave and what it teaches me about death and hope and the great rope thrown out across the ages, like Tyler’s imaginary rope when she was little, 250,000-plus-infinity miles long. I’m trying to outwalk my shadow right now, and every step is an act of faith. Every breath a ragged prayer.

  21

  I spend nights swimming in an indoor lap pool and watching the moon through the frosted-over glass windows. One evening at the end of winter, when it is 12 degrees outside, I run into Chris, my tall Chris, world traveler and physics teacher, who loved Tula and once told me I didn’t need to go anywhere; I had a beautiful dog and a good place to swim. She is like that—itinerant but earthbound, eschewing most of life’s norms. I hug her and say, “Guess where I’m going this week?” as the winds rage outside. She rolls her eyes. “Paris?” she asks, because it is a typical threat-promise of mine, that I will travel the wider world that I missed while hanging out with dogs. “No,” I say, laughing. “Canada. I’m going to Canada to get a dog.”

 
Her delight is physical. She half-hollers, she stamps her foot, her six-foot body dancing with happiness. Her eyes confirm everything I had hoped about this being right. I cannot manage to drag myself to Paris, but she knows that I will go anywhere for the right dog. The right dog is my Amalfi Coast.

  My friend Justin is going with me—a man I’ve known for decades, my kid brother were I allowed to choose. He is tall and quiet and funny, the kind of friend you want for a road trip. Two days before we’re scheduled to leave, ominous weather reports start rolling in. We are headed for the snowbelt, through upstate New York, and it will turn out to be a record-breaking March with four nor’easters. The notion of driving to Ontario for a dog during a snowstorm doesn’t faze him. It doesn’t faze me either, but I am no judge of sanity; I have lost my mind over the object of this trip. She is a two-year-old Samoyed, a retired show dog who just weaned her only litter of pups. The breeder picked her for me and so must have the gods, because her name (thank you, Dolly Parton) is Jolene.

  The only people on the roads in the desolate country of upstate New York at this time of year are either crazy or intrepid. The intrepid one in our car is driving, while I look out the window at the stark, barren hills covered with deer, who must be foraging as the days grow longer. Flocks of snow geese are cruising overhead, punctuating the monothematic gray of a late-winter sky. We are far outnumbered up here, species-wise, just a few humans trundling on the highway ahead of a blizzard, pointing north past a one-word road sign with an arrow: CANADA. Heading in the right direction.

  Lake Ontario is a rugged sea of rime ice and waves. We stay over in a little town on its edge, so that we can head back tomorrow with the dog and maybe beat the worst of the storm. Justin is a lifelong New Englander and a good driver. I have called ahead to make a reservation; the Hilton, when we get there, is nearly empty.