Or was it merely that Beth was capable of seeing Sarie just as I had been able to at that age?
I didn’t know, couldn’t know.
I had no choice but to wait and see.
I watched Beth intently for the next three days, never letting my guard down, ready to stay death should it come to try and collect my daughter. The more closely I watched her, the more nervous I became, the more Sarie seemed determined to stay near me and, therefore, Beth, by default.
I couldn’t pet my good dog’s ears, couldn’t smile fondly at her or kiss her head. I couldn’t reassure her in any way–I was too frightened. Not of her, but of her presence, of what she had foretold twice before.
By the fourth day, my heart started to resume its normal beat, and to my relief, it finally climbed down out of my throat where it seemed to have taken up permanent residence. My lungs loosened, became capable of more than a thin sip of air, and my mind calmed.
Beth was not going to die.
And she continued to see Sarie.
Beth laughed as Sarie licked her toes, and she cooed and hugged the little dog to her side to nap. Beth’s tiny fingers became entangled in the long, silky fur of Sarie’s ears, and I had to gently part the strands of fur to release Beth’s chubby, sticky little hand. Sarie was entranced and only left Beth’s side when I called her away and at night, and she slept with me as she’d done since I was an infant.
Then, one day when Beth was ten months, Sarie disappeared.
I woke that morning disoriented and unsure. I’d had a dream that Sarie licked the back of my hand so long that it became chafed, and I’d struck out at her in irritation. On waking I reached for her, patting the covers sleepily. “Sarie? C’mere, my good girl,” I said. There was no answering bounce on the spread, no shaking of the covers as she wormed her way up to me.
Sarie was gone.
I sat up in a panic. Sarie had always been there when I woke. Always.
“Sarie,” I said, whispering because Paul was still asleep. I swung my legs out from under the covers and sat to look around the room. No Sarie. Dread rose in me like smoke. “Sarie? Where are you?”
Down the hall, Beth giggled from her nursery. My heart leapt. Sarie must be in with her. I padded down the hall, being very quiet. I wanted to peek at them, watch as Sarie played with my daughter as she must have once played with me. I reached the nursery doorway, and with slow caution, I peeked around it, an anticipatory smile starting on my lips.
But Beth was alone in her crib. She stood at the bars, looking at me, her hair flung about like windblown field grass. She smiled at me and cooed, raising one tiny hand to work her fingers in a wave, the way I’d taught her…wave hello…wave bye-bye.
I waved back, opening and closing my fingers over my palm. “Hello, Beth, my lovey-dove,” I said. “How’s my girl this morning?”
“Gut,” she said, meaning ‘good’, and her smile grew wider. Paul always laughed when she said ‘gut’–he claimed she sounded like a little German.
“You’re good? Want to get up?” I asked her as I stepped to her crib. She smelled of sleep and milk and slightly of urine. “Need a diaper?”
“Dipe!” she said and slapped her hand on the crib railing. “Dipe, Mum, dipe!”
I laid the changing pad in a ray of early morning sun and lowered her onto it. I took a minute to gaze at her beautiful eyes, her perfect face. I’d never seen a baby so beautiful.
“Want to help Mum find Sarie?” I asked as I carefully folded the old diaper away and spread the clean one beneath her. I kissed her belly. “Want to help? Help Mum?”
She considered me very seriously and for such a long moment that I almost laughed. What could she be thinking, my little girl, my angel?
She finally raised an arm and swirled it beside herself. “Sar…Sar,” she said.
“Yes, that’s right! Good girl, Beth! Help Mum find Sarie!”
Her face tightened in confused frustration.
“Sar, Sar,” she said and gestured next to herself. “Sar…goggie…Sar.” Then she flexed her fingers like she was waving…or petting a small dog.
I understood all at once.
Beth could see Sarie, but I no longer could.
My life after that became more normal but also, much less colorful. Beth grew, and we had Caroline. Then we had Jake and Peter (named for Paul’s brother who had died the year before and way too young). Then Meghan. She was to be my last baby.
Mum died of another stroke soon after Meghan was born. She went in the blink of an eye, and I was glad for that part of it, at least. She wouldn’t have been a good sufferer, although I was sad that my children wouldn’t get to know her as I had known her.
In the intervening years, I grew to almost forget Sarie…as though she had, indeed, just been an imaginary playmate as my parents had for so long assumed. It seems hard to believe, I know, but I was only twenty-one when Sarie disappeared for me. And I’ve lived a lot more than twenty-one years since then. If you are in your late nineties like me, tell me–do you remember your teens? Your early twenties?
Well, sometimes, yes.
Sometimes a snippet of that time would come back to me, usually in a dream, and when I woke, I’d mourn the loss of Sarie all over again.
My Beth died when she was sixty-seven. Brain cancer. I sat with her throughout her last six, difficult months. A mum should never have to see her daughter into her grave, but I felt lucky, at least, that I was there to be with her. She was not capable of communication at the end; the surgeries, the pain and medications for pain had taken too much of her away by then.
But as she lay in that rented hospital bed in her daughter’s (my granddaughter’s) rec room, her fingers curled and uncurled, over and over, and I knew that she was able to feel the silk of Sarie’s ears.
That must have been a comfort to her and, so, was a comfort to me, also.
The day Beth died, her children had gathered. I moved back from Beth’s bed to give them room and sat by myself near a sliding glass door that gave onto the backyard. I stared out over a beautiful winter landscape and only listened with half an ear as my grandchildren murmured and cried, each saying their piece.
Then there came a hushed silence, one of my granddaughters gave a short wail of pain, and then the sobs started, although muffled and well reigned in; while Beth’s diagnoses two years ago had been shocking, her death had certainly not come as a surprise. Especially to me, who’d walked hand in hand with her down the long road of the last six months. I’d felt her fingers wither, seen her eyes glaze as her essence, her Beth-ness drained away.
I was also not surprised when a small weight dented the space of my skinny lap. Without turning my gaze from the yard, I reached out…
…and put my hand on Sarie’s head. I could feel her, but not see her; it didn’t matter–my fingers, my whole body, recognized her at once. I ran my hands down her sides, and her little body shook as if with fear or cold. Finally, I gathered her to me, and as I did, she materialized, her dark eyes appearing first, large and liquid and sad. Her forehead, the gentle slope of her nose. Her beautiful, silken ears. Her body, thin legs, and finally, her tail, which had curled under in her grief. Her fur had gone gray around her eyes and her muzzle, and when she tilted her head, I caught the blue haze of cataracts forming well down in her eyes.
My Sarie had gotten old right along with me.
I hugged her and told her I had missed her.
I told her I was glad to have her back and thanked her for staying with Beth all these long years. I asked her if she could stay with me now.
Selfishly, I told her that I needed her, that it was my turn again. That I could no longer do without my angel, Sarie.
She curled in my lap and slept as though Beth’s long illness had drained her, too, of something important as she ushered my first baby into the next world.
But I would take care of my angel now, I vowed as I ran my fingers through the grayed, silken fur on her ears.
I
would take care of her from now until the day I died.
~•~
If you need a hanky, you kin borrow mine.
I waited one week after Colleen’s story, and then my curiosity and guilt got the better of me. I called around the old-ager homes that were within the reach of my little station’s paltry broadcast radius. I wanted to ask Colleen how she was feeling and, also, whether she’d like to come stay awhile with me and Angie and the kids.
I’d talked to Angie about it, you know, and she said, “Rabbit, let’s find the old gal and bring her on over here. A ghost dog would do well with the ménage we already have, darlin’.” She meant the three cats, two dogs, guinea pig, and turtle that inhabited our home. She might well have been counting the children as part of the ménage, too; I wasn’t sure.
I felt a little doubtful, but Angie was as warm-hearted as a woman gets, you know. Anything or anyone that ran across her sight, seemed she became responsible for ’em in some way. A real earth-mother type.
So I made my calls and finally found Colleen, but I found her three days too late. She’d died out of The Autumn House two towns over. I felt a real loss, you know, when they told me, as though she’d been my own grandmum. It’s easy to feel that way once you’ve heard someone’s story, isn’t it? Especially a story like hers.
I found out where she’d been buried and took a little bouquet on out there. I thought about bringin’ Angie and the kids, introducing ’em all, you know, but in the end decided against it.
I guess I was a little afraid I’d see my little girl or boy reach out for that ghost dog, Sarie.
I knelt and made my manners, told Colleen I was sorry I’d missed her but was glad she’d finally gotten what she wanted. She had told me on the phone that day that if her old legs had been capable of it, she’d jump up outta her chair and just chase Mr. Death down…tell him she was good and ready and what the hell was he waiting on, anyway?
She said she didn’t have it in her to see any more of her children die; Beth had been enough. Besides, she’d said, she knew her Mum and Pop and Beth were all waitin’ on her up in heaven. She said as how she felt it was like a party that she was late gettin’ to.
It started to rain, so finally I straightened up and told Colleen goodbye. Told her I hoped to make her acquaintance some day and that I hoped she’d look for me when it was my turn to join the party.
I hadn’t tried to think too much about just exactly what Sarie was, you know. Was she an old woman’s dementia? Had she been a real dog at some point in Colleen’s life and now become mixed up in her recollections? Had Sarie been a ghost? An angel?
I got to the far edge of the cemetery and took a quick glance back. What I saw, or thought I saw, both scared and amazed me. There was a little girl in very old-fashioned clothes, and she was squatted down near one of the bigger tombstones. I took a reflexive look around, looking for her parents. But there was no one else in sight. I took a step toward her; I was going to ask was she okay, but something stopped me. She was laughing, but…I couldn’t hear it. I could see her plain as day, plain as my own hands at the ends of my arms. I could hear birds, cars on a distant highway, the rain playing in the leaves above my head, but not that little girl.
Then a small dog, brown with long fur on its ears, trotted out from behind the tombstone the little girl was squatting near. It danced on its hind legs and barked, but I couldn’t hear the bark, either.
I got cold all over. I turned around fast and kind of half-ran to my car. I sat there for a while, shaking and holding onto the steering wheel for the comfort of it. I was half-scared, you know, that seeing Sarie meant I was going to die soon.
I didn’t tell nobody about it, not even Angie.
You, my dear reader, are the first to know.
Well, looks like I’ve gone and given myself the willies, so let me switch gears a little here. Let me tell you George’s story. It’s a good one and very, can we say, grounded in reality.
I laughed so hard the day George called in that I had to mute my own mike. The best part was, he told his story so almighty dry. I wasn’t sure at the time if he found his circumstances half so amusing as I (and hopefully my listeners) found them to be.
Who Takes This Dog?
I wanted to marry June, but I didn’t want her baggage. In most cases, that would mean in-laws, a terrible ex, or unbearable friends, but in this case, the baggage was her dog, Edward.
Edward was roughly a hundred pounds of mostly-lab and shepherd, but with some Rottweiler and maybe even a little Saint Bernard thrown in for bad measure. His fur was too long in the back and around his neck, but too short on his heavy barrel of a body; it made him look patchy, as though he always had mange. He was almost entirely deaf when you wanted him to be somewhere in particular, but when you opened a bag, box, or can of anything he’d coming chugging like an old choo-choo to wherever you were to beg with his rheumy eyes as he licked his thick and drooping chops. He had terrible breath and an even more terrible digestive tract. He could create odors that hung in the air for hours, like the bad atmosphere after a dreadful argument.
And June loved him with all her huge (and clearly misguided) heart.
June and I met in college during our senior year. She lived off-campus with a handful of other girls, and there was always a cat winding itself around your legs when you stopped by, but no dog. Remember that part, okay? There was no dog, certainly no hundred-pound, black and tan monster.
I might have reconsidered things if I’d known about Edward right from the start.
What kind of name is ‘Edward’ for a dog, anyway?
It wasn’t until the first time I met June’s family that I even came to realize that a lumbering beast called ‘Edward’ even existed. We were there for a Sunday dinner. Well, ostensibly, a Sunday dinner…in all reality it was a meet and greet. This was the first time I was meeting her mom and dad and maybe some siblings, depending on who showed up. June said the Sunday dinners were a weekly occurrence, but attendance was sort of a ‘if you make it, great, if not, see you another time’ kind of affair. June said that her mom and dad were very laid back.
I was at first glad to hear of her easygoing parents, but when we entered the house, my first thought was that they were taking this casual thing a bit too far–the house was a mess.
The front hall rug had been chewed to tatters, and an umbrella had been pulled from a nearby stand and mangled. The thin, metal armature strung with what remained of the fabric looked like some defeated prehistoric bird. A hall table had been upended, and a lamp lay in a spray of pottery shatters. The hallway floor was scattered with what looked like tissues and Q-tips and random scraps of paper. A shampoo bottle stood upright in the middle of the hall like a sentinel.
I turned to June, dismayed. “Were they…were they robbed?” In my mind, it was the only thing that could have accounted for the disarray. The rampant, deliberate disarray.
“What? No…at least…I don’t…Mom?” she called, stepping over the carcass of the umbrella. “Mom, are you–?”
“Back here, June!” A woman’s voice and I could detect no distress. She didn’t sound as though she were tied to a chair back there, didn’t sound as though she’d just had a terrifying brush with a robber.
We went through the hall, and it opened onto a big kitchen, where a woman, who did look vaguely like my June, was drying her hands on a towel. She was smiling, but I felt as though there was a hint of strain at the corners of her eyes. “Hello, darling,” she said and hugged June. “This must be George,” she said and took my hands in hers. “So nice to meet you, George. I’m Carol. I’m so glad you were able to come for–”
Cursing and a crash interrupted her, but she didn’t take her eyes from mine…her smile merely thinned, tightened with determined good cheer. “–so glad you could come for supper,” she finished. Then she turned in the direction of the cursing. All semblance of refinement disappeared when she belted out, “BOB, I TOLD YOU TO PUT HIM OUTSIDE!”
/> There was another curse, and I leaned slightly to see where the voice was coming from. There was a sunken family room, where a man wrestled with what looked like a small bear.
“Good Lord,” I said and took a step in their direction. “Quick, June, is there a gun in the house?” I thought I understood, finally, the mess in the front hall and the strain on June’s mom’s face–somehow a wild animal had gotten into their house and was in the process of ravaging it. “June! A baseball bat? Anything?”
June’s eyes were wide and startled, and her mom looked at me as though I might well have lost my mind.
“George?” June said, and behind me came a great scrape. I turned, ready to help June’s dad in battle, but saw instead that he had managed to push the bear into the backyard via the sliding glass door. Relief swept through me.
“But you should still call the police,” I told June as though carrying on a conversation. “I’ll see if your dad is–”
“George!” Bob said, pulling his cardigan down and straightening his glasses. He held his hand out to me. “Glad to meet you, fellow. I’m Bob! June’s told us so much about you!”
I couldn’t understand their calm; how often did animals get in here, anyway? It wasn’t that rural of a neighborhood!
“Are you…you’re all right?” I asked, dazed. I took him by the shoulders, bypassing his hand, and scanned him up and down. Then I strode past him to look out the door. The bear was at the back of the garden, digging near the fence. “June! Get the police on the line. Tell them it’s still here!” I glanced back to see her, her mom, and her dad all looking at me as though I were naked. Or a ghost. I assumed they were all in shock because of the bear. “June! Please! Tell them they’ll need tranquilizer darts!” I looked at the monstrous beast, now tearing at the base of a small euonymus bush. “LOTS of them.”
There was silence behind me, and then June’s dad cleared his throat.
“Ah, George,” he said and cleared his throat again. He smoothed his hair and then tucked his hands into the pockets of his cardigan. “That’s Edward. He’s…ah…he’s June’s dog. He was causing a bit of trouble…did you see the hallway? That’s the bathroom trash…so I put him outside for a little while.”
More Good Dogs: More Stories About Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them Page 8
