I promised myself I would take hold.
* * *
I spent that next Monday arranging for a woman to live in and went back to work the following Tuesday. When I got home that night it was very late, almost nine. It had been a long day of re-acclimating myself at the office, but I’d jumped in with a will, using the activity as an excuse to brush off everyone’s well wishes and expressions of sympathy.
The house was dim and quiet and, best of all, tidy. I could almost believe that the chaos of the last three weeks had never happened. I shrugged off my jacket and loosened my tie and headed for the kitchen. A quick tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap followed me down the hallway, and when I turned on the kitchen light, Ben looked up at me expectantly.
“Yes?” I asked him. “How might I be of service to you this evening?” His mouth opened in a kind of doggy grin, and I smiled back. He was quite charming, really. For an animal. I was about to ask after his health to see if he would grin again when Matilda came into the kitchen.
Her hair was rumpled as though she’d been in bed, but her eyes were clear. “He needs to go out,” she said and reached for the leash. She clipped it onto Ben’s collar, and her hand went to the doorknob.
“You need a coat. It’s cold out there,” I told her and then realized what I was saying. “Here, give me the leash. I’ll take him out.”
The backyard was very dark, very quiet. Neighbors’ windows glowed in yellow squares of warmth, and in the Millers’ house behind my own, Mrs. Miller stood at what must be her kitchen sink, washing dishes with slow, contemplative movements, framed like an oil painting.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in my own backyard. I didn’t even cut my grass or maintain the landscaping in any way; I had a service for that. I tried to picture Ellen and I sitting on the small patio, but what came to my mind instead was Ellen sitting halfway down the yard in bright, morning sunshine, the checked tablecloth from the kitchen spread under her. A very small Kenny lay before her, arms and legs wheeling in delight as a butterfly lit, tickling, onto his feet and hands.
Why was I not in that picture with them?
Because I had most likely glanced at them and then gone to work, not thinking twice about it. I didn’t even recall that I had retained this particular memory of her and him.
I looked down at Ben and was surprised to see him sitting patiently, staring into the backyard as though he, too, were looking at the scene my memory had conjured.
I looked up again, and now Ellen was looking past me, waving. Smiling. Her other hand on Kenny’s small, round stomach. In a moment of confusion, I looked over my shoulder to see who Ellen was waving to and found Matilda had pulled one of the kitchen chairs to the window. The light around her was dimmer than the one that surrounded Mrs. Miller and left half her face in shadow. She raised her hand–to wave to me, I know–but disorientation caused me to look quickly back the other way. But Ellen was gone.
Well, but, of course. She hadn’t really been there in the first place. I was just very tired after a first, rigorous day back at the office. I massaged my forehead, allowing my face time to cool before I went in. I didn’t want Matilda to see my embarrassment.
Ben whined lightly, then stood to put his front paws on my knees, his white ears picking up the moonlight and haloing it in a diffuse glow. He’s trying to comfort me, I thought. I laughed. “Nothing to be embarrassed of, you say? Everyone has these little moments of weakness?” He tilted his head as if agreeing that, yes…that was exactly what he’d meant.
Back in the kitchen I snapped on the stronger light (thinking briefly that now it was I who was framed like a painting for anyone outside) and put on a kettle. Matilda wiped Ben’s paws with the kitchen towel I’d set aside for that purpose. She was a very conscientious child.
* * *
The days went on and became weeks. The weeks, months. I saw very little of the children–I was rarely home in time for their too-early suppers–but I’d made it a habit to take Ben out in the evenings. As the weather improved, he and I started to walk the neighborhood rather than confine ourselves to the backyard. Without realizing it fully, I had developed the habit of talking to the little dog and, for some reason, found it a comfort. He listened so attentively and without judgment.
First I would tell him about my day, the surface stuff of meetings and appointments, triumphs and setbacks. But as I became used to speaking quietly in the dark and became more comfortable that no one heard my nightly musings, I started to tell him the things that worried me. The things that seemed to plague me no matter how many times I tried to brush them aside.
“I don’t think my son liked me very much,” I told Ben one night, surprised that I was saying it. It was almost summer, and the day’s heat was still in the sidewalk, coming up through my shoes to warm my legs. I cleared my throat, embarrassed. But Ben merely glanced up at me, almost nodding as he trotted at my heel, as if to say, go on, I want to hear.
“I believe I was too hard on him,” I said, and it was a relief to say it out. “I never spent the proper amount of time with him, either. Always working, you know.” I glanced at the dog to see how he was taking my confession. His shoulders worked as he click-clacked along, his white fur glowing. He had one ear cocked back toward me. That’s how I knew he was still listening.
“Even now,” I went on, “with Matilda and Alex–” here the dog’s ears twitched as he heard the names he found most dear, “–even with them, I am too distant. Even though I know I am going wrong, I seem unable to change my direction.” I sighed in the night as I never allowed myself to do in the day. Ben sat abruptly, and I stopped, too. I considered his triangle ears, triangle face, his foxy little black eyes as he gazed at me. “I don’t know how to change,” I told him, the words choking and hesitant. My biggest fears lay on the sidewalk for his careful inspection. He panted. “I don’t know if I even can. I think it might be too late. I think I’ve been…dead inside…since my Ellen passed away.”
He jumped up then, yipping and excited. I stepped back, afraid almost, as though he’d changed to some strange messenger of the spirit world. Then I heard the running of small feet in the dark.
“Granddad! Granddad!” Matilda called. She was in her nightgown and bare feet; I knew it must be something upsetting indeed if it had caused this careful little girl to forget her slippers. “Grandad! Come home, please!” She had reached me by then, and she grabbed my hand. “Alex is very sick,” she said, and Ben barked, stretched to the length of his leash, straining in the direction of home. I closed my hand around her small one, and the three of us ran home together.
Ms. Carey, the live-in lady, was sitting in Alex’s room. She had draped a washcloth over Alex’s forehead, and a bucket stood at the ready beside the boy’s bed. She looked up when we came in. “I told her not to go out. But she doesn’t listen.” She was a middle-aged woman with no generosity of frame but a no-nonsense manner that had appealed to me. “He’s got a fever, probably has the flu.” She looked from Alex to me. “He’ll be fine, Mr. Mayfield. I’ll sit up with him.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and Matilda’s hand tightened on mine–I hadn’t realized she and I were still holding hands. I looked down at her, and she looked up at me, her eyes large with fright. Ben stood at her ankle, his body tense, his ears straight up and listening. Then he, too, looked up at me, and he was not grinning, or tilting his head, or waving his paws. As I watched, he put his paw on Matilda’s small, bare foot as if directing my attention there. The hem of Matilda’s nightgown quaked although it was warm in the room.
Of course. Alex was the only person she had left of her old life. She was terrified of losing him, too.
“I’ll watch over him, Ms. Carey, thank you,” I said.
She nodded and got up. “Thermometer’s on the night table there. I gave him four of the baby aspirin. If his fever goes above, say, one-oh-four, one-oh-five, we’ll have to call the doctor.”
I nodded and brought the desk chair around to the
side of the bed. Alex kicked and moaned, caught in a fever dream. “Climb into your bed, Matilda,” I said, indicating the other twin bed, but she huddled closer to my side instead. I raised my arm, pulling my hand from hers, and her small face clamped into lines of panic. Then, unaware that it had been my intent, I reached down and drew her onto my lap.
She curled there, her head under my chin, her eyes on Alex. Ben jumped unbidden onto the bed and curled as close to Alex’s restless legs as he could get.
I stared first at Alex and then let my eyes travel to the bedside lamp. It was a trophy, a baseball trophy that Ellen had very cleverly turned into a lamp. The small plaque had Kenny’s name and the date–it was during his eighth year he’d won that trophy, the year his mother had died. I don’t recall now if he’d continued to play or not.
I couldn’t recall much of his childhood, in fact, and could probably have cited cases and verdicts and dispositions more easily than the score of the game where Kenny had won that trophy.
My throat tightened, and I swallowed back tears. I rocked Matilda in my arms and watched Alex’s face, so pale in the lamplight. Eventually Matilda sagged in my arms as she fell asleep, and I transferred her carefully to the other bed. I tucked the sheet up to her chin, and again, without realizing it was my intent, I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
I glanced back, embarrassed, but Ben had his eyes trained on Alex. So I kissed Matilda again.
I went back to my chair and sat. I checked my watch: nearly midnight. Maybe I would skip work tomorrow.
As though he’d heard my thought, Ben’s head shot up and tilted, his eyes on mine in astonishment.
I reached over to adjust the washcloth on Alex’s forehead and let my hand rest there, trying to absorb some of his heat into my colder hand. It must have been a bit of a relief to him because he shifted and then relaxed, falling into a deeper sleep.
After a time Ms. Carey tiptoed into the room.
Ben and I were still awake, still keeping watch.
“How is he?” she asked and crossed her arms over her chest. Her bathrobe was pale and thin. Maybe I would buy her a new one, chenille, something very soft.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to change.
“He’s all right; he’s going to be fine,” I said. I smiled at her, and the corners of her mouth lifted tentatively and with some surprise.
I turned my attention back to Alex and tilted my head back against the chair to get more comfortable.
I said, “The fever has broken.”
~•~
Rabbit here; I guess anyone can change, can’t they?
Donald’s story came back to me many times as I was raising my kids. Emily was a wonderful big sister to Davey, and I was aware of making sure she knew how much I loved both her and her little brother and how proud I was of her for her big sisterin’ ways.
Donald had told me how he’d been afraid that he wouldn’t be capable of change, that maybe the night of Alex’s fever would lose its power over him at some point. You know how those things do–you start off with the best of intentions and then inevitably backslide into old, bad habits. But he’d actually made quite the radical change (those were his fancy words) and had even retired from his firm by the end of that year. “Not that it was a very difficult decision by then, you understand,” he’d told me, “since I’d found out by then that I had developed a little touch of cancer.”
That shocked me, you know, and I told him so. He laughed, and it was an old man’s laugh, but a strong old man. “Oh, I beat it,” he said. “I couldn’t let Matilda and Alex grow up without me, of course. But the doctors tell me it will come back at some point, and when it does, that will be the end of me.”
I asked about Ben and found out the dog was sitting on Donald’s lap, sleeping comfortably. “When the kids are in school, he and I generally spend the days together.” You could hear the fondness in his voice. He went on, “He’s an old man, now, too. We don’t walk up the road so much as creep up it, you know. But…we do it together.”
I could picture Donald’s old-man hand on that little terrier’s wide, sturdy back. There was a lot that little guy’d taken on, so it was a good thing he was the mix of breeds he was. Terrier’ll never leave something go. They are determined little dogs. And loyal as the day is long.
As often happens, writing out Donald’s story has put me in mind of another one: Colleen Kendricks had called me to talk about her rescue dog, Sarie. I wasn’t sure how much of a story there was there at first blush. It seemed mostly like the old gal’s reminiscence, but then her tale took…well, it took a bit of an odd turn.
I won’t say any more about it. Let’s just see what you think.
My Angel, Sarie
I have been around too long.
My oldest daughter passed on before me, my other children are old, and my grandchildren are having children of their own. They all seem to think that I am irrelevant. Maybe it’s true, but it still doesn’t give them the right to talk to me as though my body were a bag of bones that my mind had long since left behind.
My mind is perfectly intact.
Although, I could agree that my body has become, more or less, a bag of bones. In that part of their assumption, they are correct.
My little dog, Sarie, sits on my lap even as I am speaking to you on this telephone. She seems to actually enjoy this wheelchair I am in and will ride along no matter my destination, speed, lack of continence, or the company.
Today I seem to be continent, and the company–so to speak–is an orderly named Shane, who has wheeled me out here with a bag of quarters and a lapful of Sarie. Sarie is small and brown. She is of indeterminate lineage, but I would guess there is some Chihuahua, some rat terrier, possibly a bit of Jack Russell, and maybe even some weiner, as that would account for her beautifully large, drooping, silken ears. The rest of her is as short-haired as short-haired can get. It you were to groom her, you’d be best to do it with a piece of tape rather than a brush of any sort. Except her ears, those you could brush to your heart’s content.
How, you might ask, am I allowed a dog in an old-ager’s home filled with the half-dead, near-dead, and clinically dead? It’s very simple, really; no one can see my Sarie.
No one except me.
Dementia, you’re telling yourself. Well, you can content yourself with that explanation if it comforts you and helps your mind to stay within its confines of the well-known. Do as ye list, in other words.
Sarie first appeared when I was an infant. That is what my mum told me, although she did not tell me in those words. She used to say, “When you were just a little thing, your age counted in months on one hand alone, there came a day when you began to laugh in your cradle.” She would tell me this when I was older, but not yet old enough to believe that the world could not be forced to be a fair and just place. Back when I would cry with frustration and abject misery that my circumstances were shaped not by myself but by those around me. “Colleen,” Mum would say, “My dearest Colleen, you used to laugh and squeak and carry on, waving your chubby little hands and peeping like a bird. We took every toy from your cradle to see which had bewitched you so, but even on a mattress bereft of amusements, you still acted the same.”
Of course, she didn’t know that it was Sarie who’d stolen my heart; she couldn’t have known.
My first clear memory of Sarie was of sitting in my mum’s kitchen, listening to fat sizzling in the pan as Mum cooked, and I sat on the floor and drew with a chalk on a slate. Mum was laughing as she braised the beef, telling me about a donkey who’d chased her when she was a girl. At her feet, Sarie stared with concentration at the pan as though willing the beef to fly out of it and into her mouth. I laughed as Sarie twirled, flinging her paws about as the long hair on her ears danced as though lit on a breeze.
Mum said, “Oh, you like the story of the donkey chasing me, little Colleen?” and I said yes, because I did like the story, but I told her it was Sarie making me laugh.
“Sarie,
is it? Your little playmate?” Mum smiled and laid her hand on my head, then her eyes went to the slate in my hand and widened. “Colleen,” she said, “is that the donkey from my story?”
I told her no, that it was Sarie I’d drawn; Sarie dancing at Mum’s feet begging for a scrap.
Mum shook her head and smiled. “It’s funny, Colleen, but I never knew that your Sarie was a doggie.” She went back to her stove. “Tell the little mite not to get too close under my feet, or she’s liable to get a fat burn.”
I looked at Sarie to make sure she’d heard what Mum had said and was satisfied that Sarie had moved a prudent distance from the stove.
“She’s well back, Mum,” I said. “You can go on and cook.”
Mum never saw Sarie, but accepted her with ease. Not so with my schoolmates when I was finally a big girl and able to walk to the schoolhouse three miles from home. A neighbor girl, Kelly Sinclair–at eleven, the oldest of the Sinclair children–was tasked with taking me along with her own clutch of sister and two brothers, all the Sinclairs of school age.
Kelly was beautiful, with long black hair and beautiful blue eyes. She had a scattering of freckles and kept her hair neatly tied off in braids. And her temper was as sweet as her looks. She held my hand and paid me no less attention just because I was not her kin; in fact, she seemed to give me extra. It was most likely because I was the youngest at five years of age. Paul and Peter were nine and ten, and Mary was seven, and they all treated me well, like an honorary Sinclair.
As we walked along the first day, Kelly asked me was I afraid of school, and I said that I wasn’t. Kelly said that I was a brave little girl and what had made me so brave? I told her that having my dog along made me feel brave.
More Good Dogs: More Stories About Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them Page 5
