Dog Medicine

by Julie Barton

  “It’s okay,” I would whisper. “We’re okay.” And I would tell her that sometimes people fight. Sometimes I’d cry and say I was stupid. Sometimes I’d cry and say that Clay was stupid. Most often I’d just be silent. My brother and I fought daily. We’d insult each other, yell at each other, and inevitably, he would lunge at me and hit me, hard. At seven years old, I knew what a punch to the head felt like. I knew what a kick on the shin felt like. I knew what a bad blow to the gut felt like.

  One day my mom locked Midnight in the laundry closet. She said not to open the door because Midnight would bite. She held up her hand, which bore a gory brown and purple bruise.

  “Midnight did that?” I asked.

  “We think she hurt her back. She’s really sick, honey. It hurts her to move.”

  “Why isn’t she at the doctor?” I asked.

  “I tried to take her, but she bit me when I approached her. So I called, and the vet said to just isolate her and see if she improves.”

  The laundry closet opened from both sides. My mom had moved the laundry basket out and lined the floor with sheets and towels. I peeked inside from a small two-door cabinet in my parents’ bathroom. Midnight was shaking and I could see the whites of her eyes. Every once in a while she would move, then whimper, then scream. Then she was perfectly silent, like she was gone. It was so dark in there.

  I didn’t open the door to pet her. I don’t remember if I spoke through the wooden slats to try to soothe her. I just know that she died. Her back was broken. I don’t know if she died in the closet or if she was euthanized at the hospital, but I do remember seeing my father’s face filled with tears. I’d never seen him cry. My parents told us that the doctor thought that Midnight had slipped a disc while hiding under the bed. A metal slat on the bed frame had probably pushed into her back, dislodged a disc, and broken her spine.

  I decided that fear had killed her. If you run and hide, you die. Her death triggered something dark in me. Because all I wanted to do, just about every day, was run and hide.

  SUNSET

  APRIL 18, 1996

  My mom pulled into the garage with one swooping motion, all of it so familiar, as if the movement of our car back into its spot was encoded in my blood. I’d done it so many times, and so many times I’d felt something unnamable and complex—raging fear and love and sorrow all twirled into one black knot in my belly.

  She killed the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition and rounded the front of the car before I could even blink. She said something as she entered the house, cheerful words I couldn’t discern as I pushed open the passenger door and rested my feet on the oil-stained garage floor. I was struck frozen by the sound of the screen door slapping shut. It was a noise that brought back three words: Everyone hates you. I heard this like an angry, menacing, shouting crowd. I wondered if I was losing my mind, actually hearing voices now. There was the smell of gasoline and fresh-cut grass. My bedroom was next to the garage and I could see the flowered wallpaper from my spot in the passenger seat. I did not want to go back into that room. I paused, my hands clammy in my lap, as the seared-in memory of my brother knocking down my bedroom door played behind my eyes.

  My mom asked, “You coming in?” She passed quickly, opening the back hatch of the car, then limping my sloppily packed suitcase into the house. Our cocker spaniel, Cinder, now thirteen, snuck out of the busted hole in the screen door and ran to me. She was sweet and small, but she left anxiety urine in secret corners. Her stumpy tail wagged into a blur and I came back to the moment, took a few small shuffling steps, and bent down to touch her. She whimpered, kissed my ear, sending a chill down my spine, a desperately needed hit of adrenaline.

  My dad was still at work. Surely he’d heard that his only daughter was coming home, that she’d (thank god) left that awful, dirty, too-crowded city. My father, a lover of Midwestern expansiveness, was proud to call New York City “the smallest city he’d ever been to,” because when he visited, his hotel rooms were consistently minuscule.

  I followed Cinder into the house and straight into my room, to my pink and green floral wallpaper, white wicker furniture, bookshelves filled with track trophies and stuffed animals. I had spent so many nights in this room dreading the next day. It was in this room that I’d sought refuge. It was in that closet that, as a teenager, I’d flown into an uncontrollable rage and broken everything in sight, pulling the rod and shelves out of the wall, my mom too scared to enter the room until the noise stopped. It was in that bed that I stayed awake at night wondering why I felt so much when everyone around me seemed to feel so little. And here I was again, back to this spot where the dark energy seemed inherent. I was back to the falling-in feeling, back to trying like hell to make it through the next hour. I was back to this one question: What is wrong with me?

  I sat down on the edge of my bed like I’d broken several bones. Cinder jumped up next to me, sat down, and pressed her side into mine. I put my arm around her and held her chest with my palm, and the beating of her heart took me one shade out of the darkness. I held on to her as long as she would allow before my mom called, “Cinder, outside!” The backyard’s screened-in porch door slammed. Cinder wiggled out of my grasp and trotted out of my room, her stubby tail twirling, her toenails clicking down the tile hallway.

  I watched from my bedroom as my mom walked out to the patio outside my window, her black cardigan sweater pulled tight across her chest, her arms folded. She was taking a deep breath, searching the sky. It seemed she was whispering a prayer.

  She came back inside, walked to the threshold of my bedroom, and suggested I rest while she made dinner. I opened my bedroom window and inhaled, noting the familiar scent of our forest, green and thick with its spring bounty. But I felt as if I were buzzing, like every fiber in my body was still surging with feedback from Manhattan. My ears rang. My head felt so full that I imagined it could’ve been riddled with tumors. I sat staring out the window and watched the sun disappear. The moon was full, as full as I’d ever seen it, like it was a balloon about to explode. I watched it rise through the trees in our backyard, inching ever so slowly to the tips of their branches like fingertips holding up the white ball. I sat there thinking that maybe this was all hormonal. Maybe I was just too connected to the moon. Maybe I’d spend my life going crazy every full moon, losing my mind until the new moon came and let me be.

  Soon my mom called, “Dinner!” in the voice I’d heard each night around seven o’clock for eighteen years. My hands shook slightly at the dinner table. We ate without talking, then cleared the plates. I found myself mirroring my mother’s chipper attitude as I loaded the dishes she’d rinsed. For this moment, I felt content returning home to the familiar, well-lit kitchen with the clean floor, the double oven, the welcoming tan and brown tiles. The house smelled of spaghetti with meat sauce and melted butter on baked potatoes. Cornhusks sat limp next to the stove; small bright-yellow dots of corn pollen marked the countertop.

  My mom started the dishwasher, then sighed deeply, wiped her hands, turned off the lights in the kitchen, walked to the couch, and turned on the television. I dried my hands on the old baby-blue dishrag we’d had for decades and watched her from the darkened kitchen. She curled up on the couch and pulled a blanket over her lap as my thoughts pinged about. I had envisioned her wanting to talk, because she knew I wanted to talk. I wanted her to know what had gone so terribly wrong that I fell apart in Manhattan. I wanted a heart-to-heart. Her silence left me confused. Did she know something I didn’t? Was my fallout in that apartment nothing to worry about? Again I tried to remember if I’d actually said the word breakdown. Yes, I had. Had I? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t a breakdown but just a really bad day. Why weren’t we talking about it?

  She got up during a commercial break, went to her bedroom, and came back in her pajamas and robe, grinning but not making eye contact. She tied her robe’s belt around her waist before sitting down with h
er feet folded underneath her. The way she didn’t look at me told me that there would be no conversation.

  At about ten o’clock, as I drifted in and out of sleep on the couch, my dad came home from work. I heard the swish of the door to the garage opening, his dress shoes clicking down the hallway, his briefcase hitting the floor, his walk to the coat closet. Every single night, before doing anything, he hung up his coat. I heard the hush of fabric, the clank of the metal hanger on the rod, and then the closet door swinging shut. This night, after the routine was over, I imagined he would go into the kitchen and grab his already-plated cold dinner and start eating, or maybe go change out of his suit and tie into his casual after-work clothes.

  He did neither of those rituals. Instead, he walked over to me, sat down practically on top of me, hugged me tight, held both my hands, and said in a gentle voice, “How ya doin’?” A wave of his cologne hit me and the contrast of my mom’s avoidance versus my dad nearly enveloping me was disorienting. Initially, I felt smothered, uncomfortable. Then, when I took my eyes away from the floor and looked into his, tears came. The emotion gathered in my throat and began to block my wind. He shook his head and pulled me in for a long, tight hug. I cried audibly, then hysterically, and he held on to me.

  His attention helped me let go a little. I knew nothing except that I needed to let go. I had to stop fighting this darkness. As I hugged my dad, I took my hand away from my eyes and saw my mom, who had turned off the television and was crying too.

  It was then that I understood. She was shedding the tears of a mother who was terrified, with no idea what to do or say. She wasn’t turning on the television out of carelessness or anger. Rather, she didn’t understand what had left me lying deadened on my apartment floor in New York City. She was scared that if she said the wrong thing, or probed too deeply, I would shut down forever. My dad’s arrival, his ability to risk reaching out to me, to help me feel something, brought tears of relief to her.

  This was our pattern. My father could look into my eyes and see that something troubled me. When he was home, his radar for my emotional well-being was spot on. He saved me so many times as a child, pulling me aside and saying, “You okay?” as soon as he saw the shadows cross my eyes. The problem was that he was at work most of my waking hours. It was as if I had a lifeline that was there, but out of reach. Always so busy.

  My dad held on to me as I wept, but my arms went limp and my face numb. My mom cradled one of my hands in both of hers and nodded as my dad repeated, quietly, over and over: “It’s going to be okay, Julie. It’s going to be okay.”

  “What happened?” my dad said. In his words, I heard: Who did this to you? What is broken and how can I fix it?

  “Nothing happened,” I said. I didn’t say that for weeks I’d imagined jumping in front of oncoming traffic or stepping onto the third rail. I couldn’t say that at that moment I fantasized about swallowing every pill in the house. “I can’t think. I hate being . . . I just hate being. I could just sleep until I die. I just can’t do this.”

  “Do what, honey?” my mom asked gently.

  “Be,” I said.

  • • •

  It is hard to be a puppy. Your siblings are just as hungry as you, just as uncoordinated, also deaf and blind. You’re not really a dog yet—you’re just longing. You’re just hunger. If you can manage to find your way to a teat, you’ll most likely get pushed over by the bigger, hungrier sibling who, just like you, is simply trying to survive.

  Sometimes puppies wander off, wobble away from their mother, off the whelping blanket and onto the cold, hard ground. That’s when the mama dog gets up, walks over, gently picks up her wayward child, and brings him back to his family. Back to their nest on the blanket, where warmth and nourishment can be found.

  THE WRONG DOG, NEW YORK CITY

  EARLY SPRING 1996

  In the midst of the heartbreak with Will, before I collapsed on the floor, I decided to get a dog. If Will wouldn’t love me, I reasoned, a dog might. Our building allowed dogs and the landlord seemed unfazed by the question. Leah had reluctantly agreed that if the dog was my responsibility, we could get one. We’d already gotten a small gray rabbit—but she bit and didn’t have a single readable emotion. I bought a leash for her and took her out to East 82nd Street. She froze in fear and then crapped on the sidewalk.

  Leah was away for the weekend when I walked up to the animal shelter on Second Avenue, praying I’d find comfort in a dog the way I had as a child. I opened the door to the shelter and introduced myself to the woman at the counter, expressing my interest in adopting a dog. She was Latina with beautiful skin and a kind smile. She handed me a form to fill out, and we chatted politely as I wrote down my address, place of employment, and living situation. “I’ve always had a dog.” I said. “ Always. It just feels so strange not having one right now.”

  She nodded deeply. “I know!” she said. “Walking into a house where there’s no little wagging tail to greet you just feels plain wrong. I have three.” I nodded and laughed, tears brimming. The last thing I wanted was to cry here, now, so I pretended to sneeze and closed my eyes, then wiped them with a tissue.

  I handed her the form and she looked it over. “Great,” she said, scanning the information. “You work full time?” She looked concerned.

  “Well, I work from home a day or two a week.” Total lie. “I’m a writer so I work out of my apartment a lot.” Another total lie.

  She smiled at me. “Jealous!” she said, laughing. “Geez, lucky you. Do you have any other pets currently?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, completely, honestly forgetting about the rabbit.

  “Well, looks great. Come on back. Let’s look at some of these dogs.” She asked what size dog I wanted and I indicated that I usually liked bigger dogs. “With your handling experience, we could probably match you with one of our big guys. Oh! I know! I have the perfect big girl for you.” I stood blissed out by her confidence in me and shoved my hands in my pockets in an attempt to not appear weirdly enthusiastic.

  She sent me to the space where they introduce dogs to potential owners. The room was all concrete, the floor painted purple, the walls a vivid orange. A heavyset trainer with short hair and royal-blue clogs entered and introduced herself as Rita. She told me a bit about a dog they thought might be good for me. “She’s a total goofy love,” she said. “She’s not at all aggressive, has some basic obedience training, and just needs a bit more time and a good home.” I sat there thinking, She just needs a good home. She just needs love. I can give her love.

  My front-desk friend opened the door and in came an enormous gray dog that looked to be part mastiff, part bulldog. I felt no immediate connection but was so happy when the dog came to sniff me, her tail twirling. I cooed, smiled, laughed, and let her lick my cheek before saying I’d take her. I quickly signed the papers, coughed up a hundred bucks and was soon walking down Second Avenue behind my new ninety-five-pound dog.

  At my apartment door, I struggled with the lock as the dog yanked on the leash. I pulled her into the entryway, already worried that this was a mistake. It felt like I was walking a pony into my 750-square-foot apartment. When the door to the place swung open, the leash went taut as the dog lunged straight at the rabbit’s cage. She started barking madly, drooling, clawing the hardwood floor. I dragged the dog downstairs to the bedroom and tried to calm her. She continued to lunge for the stairs but eventually became interested in the scents on the pile of dirty clothes on my bedroom floor. She walked to my bed and jumped up, her dirty paws leaving dusty prints on my pillowcases.

  “Shhhh,” I said. “Shhhhh, it’s okay.” She looked at me, not with anxiety or fear, but with blankness. It seemed as if she’d gone into a shallow, shifty-eyed, fearful state. After all, I’d taken her into my nearly windowless bedroom and wouldn’t let her leave. Who knew what she’d been through prior to meeting me? I turned on some quiet music,
trying to get her to calm down and forget about the bunny she knew was just one floor above. I lay down and invited her to come onto the bed with me. She frantically sniffed everything, as if searching for more traces of edible animals.

  “Come here, girl,” I said, in my sweetest voice. “Come on the bed. Hop up.” I patted the sheets and she obliged. I told her to sit, to lie down, and she half did. Rigid, she lay on the bed with me for about four seconds, and in those few heartbreaking beats, I realized that what I wanted, more than this dog, more than anything, was the weight of someone next to me in my bed. I wanted to be held. I wanted Will.

  She never lay down. Instead she popped up and darted toward the door again, barking. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. I couldn’t keep this dog. I imagined that the whole world hated me for what I’d just done. I put the dog’s leash back on, opened the door, and tried to keep my balance as she clawed her way toward the rabbit’s cage, her hackles up, her lips flapping and spewing drool. “No!” I yelled, pulling with all my might. “Jesus Christ.” I dragged her out of the apartment and back up Second Avenue.

  The shelter was preparing to close when I opened the door and walked back in with the dog. My front-desk confidante looked at me, surprised. “Forget something?” she asked.

  I couldn’t look at her. “I can’t keep her. I’m so sorry.” The dog was panting, her bloodshot eyes darting around the lobby.

  My front-desk friend looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. “What? Why not?”

  “I forgot about my roommate’s rabbit,” I said, another complete lie. “He practically ate it in one bite.”