by Stein, Garth
He turned and walked away. I heard him shuffle around in the living room and then turn on the TV.
So he didn’t fall hopelessly into the bottle, the refuge of the weak and the maudlin. He got my point. Gestures are all that I have.
I found him on the couch watching a video of Eve, Zoë, and me, from years ago when we went to Long Beach, on the Washington coast. Zoë was a toddler. I remembered that weekend well; we were all so young, it seemed, chasing kites on the wide beach that went on for miles. I sat next to the couch and watched, too. We were so naive; we had no knowledge of where the road would take us, no idea that we would ever be separated. The beach, the ocean, the sky. It was there for us and only for us. A world without end.
“No race has ever been won in the first corner,” he said. “But plenty of races have been lost there.”
I looked at him. He reached out, settled his hand on the crown of my head, and scratched my ear like he has always done.
“That’s right,” he said to me. “If we’re going to be a cliché, let’s be a positive cliché.”
Yes: the race is long—to finish first, first you must finish.
36
I love very few things more than a nice long walk in the drizzle of Seattle. I don’t care for the heaviness of real rain; I like the misting, the feeling of the tiny droplets on my muzzle and eyelashes. The freshness of the air, which has been suddenly infused with ozone and negative ions. While rain is heavy and can suppress the scents, a light shower actually amplifies smells; it releases the molecules, brings odor to life, and then carries it through the air to my nose. Which is why I love Seattle more than any other place, even Thunderhill Raceway Park. Because, while the summers are very dry, once the damp season begins, nary a day goes by without a helping of my much-loved drizzle.
Denny took me for a walk in the drizzle, and I relished it. Eve had only been dead for a few days, but since her death, I had felt so bottled up and congested, sitting with Denny in the house for much of the time, breathing the same stale air over and over. Denny seemed to crave the change, too; instead of jeans, a sweatshirt, and his yellow slicker, he put on a pair of dark slacks, and he wore his black trench coat over a high-necked cashmere sweater.
We walked north out of Madison Valley and into the Arboretum. Once past the dangerous part, where there is no walkway and the cars drive well over the safe speed limit, we turned off on the smaller road, and Denny released me from my leash.
This is what I love to do: I love to run through a field of wet grass that has not been mowed recently, I love to run, keeping my snout low to the ground so the grass and the sparkles of water cover my face. I imagine myself as a vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the smells, all the life, a spear of summer grass. It reminds me of my childhood, back on the farm in Spangle, where there was no rain, but there was grass, there were fields, and I ran.
I ran and I ran that day. And Denny walked on, trudging steadily. At the point where we usually turned around, we kept going. We crossed the pedestrian bridge and curled up into Montlake. Denny reattached my leash and we crossed a larger road and we were in a new park! I loved this one, too. But it was different.
“Interlaken,” Denny said to me as he unleashed me.
Interlaken. This park was not fields and flatland. It was a gnarled and twisty ravine painted with vines and bushes and groundcover, tented by the tallest of trees and a canopy of leaves. It was wonderful. As Denny followed the path, I bounded up and down the hillside, hiding in the low brush and pretending I was a secret agent, or running as fast as I could through the obstacles and pretending I was a predator like in the movies, hunting something down, tracking my prey.
For a long time we walked and ran in this park, me running five paces for every one of Denny’s, until I was exhausted and thirsty. We emerged from the park and walked in a neighborhood that was foreign to me. Denny stopped in a café to purchase a cup of coffee for himself. He brought some water for me, which was in a paper cup and difficult to drink, but sated me nonetheless.
And we continued walking.
I have always loved activity and walking, especially with Denny, my favorite walking partner, and especially in the drizzle, but I have to admit, at that time I was getting quite tired. We had been out for more than two hours, and after a long walk like that, I like to go home for a playful toweling off, and then settle down for a nice long nap. But there was no nap; we kept walking.
I recognized Fifteenth Avenue when we reached it, and I knew Volunteer Park quite well. But I was surprised when we went into the Lake View Cemetery. Of course, I knew the importance of Lake View Cemetery, though I had never been there. I had seen a documentary on Bruce Lee; Lake View is where he is buried, alongside his son, Brandon, who was a wonderful actor until his untimely death. I feel very badly for Brandon Lee, because he fell victim to the family curse, but also because the last film he made was The Crow, an unfortunate title for an unfortunate film based on a comic book written by someone who clearly had no idea of the real nature of crows. But that’s a discussion for another time. We entered the cemetery, and we did not seek out the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee, two very fine actors. We sought something else. Following the paved road to the north we looped around the central hill and came upon a temporary tent structure, under which many people were assembled.
They were all dressed nicely and those who weren’t protected from the drizzle by the tent were holding umbrellas. Immediately, I saw Zoë.
Ah. The light switch—it’s either on or it’s off. Denny had dressed for the event.
We approached the people, who were slightly disorganized, milling about, their collective attention fragmented. The proceedings had not yet begun.
We got very close to them, and then, suddenly, someone broke off from the group. A man. And then another man, and another. The three of them walked toward us.
One of them was Maxwell. The others were Eve’s brothers, whose names I never knew because they showed themselves so infrequently.
“You’re not welcome here,” Maxwell said sternly.
“She’s my wife,” Denny said calmly. “The mother of my child.”
She was there, the child. Zoë saw her father. She waved at him, and he waved back.
“You’re not welcome here,” Maxwell said again. “Leave, or I’ll call the police.”
The two brothers raised themselves. Pre-battle posturing.
“You already called them, didn’t you?” Denny asked.
Maxwell sneered at Denny.
“You were warned,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?”
Maxwell pushed up into Denny’s personal space.
“You’ve never been good to Eve,” Maxwell said. “And with what you did to Annika, I will not trust you with Zoë.”
“Nothing happened that night—”
But Maxwell had already turned. “Please escort Mr. Swift away from here,” he said to his two sons, and he abruptly walked away.
In the distance, I saw Zoë, unable to contain herself any longer; she jumped out of her seat and ran toward us.
“Beat it,” one of the men said.
“It’s my wife’s funeral,” Denny said. “I’m staying.”
“Get the hell out of here,” the other man said, jabbing Denny in the ribs.
“Punch me if you want,” Denny said. “I won’t fight back.”
“Child molester!” the first man hissed, flinging his hands into Denny’s chest. Denny didn’t budge. A man who drives a two-thousand-pound car at one hundred seventy miles per hour does not get flustered by the honking of the geese.
Zoë reached us and leapt at Denny. He hoisted her into the air and propped her on his hip and kissed her cheek.
“How’s my baby?” he asked.
“How’s my daddy?” she replied.
“I’m getting by,” he said. He turned to the brother who had just pushed him. “Sorry, I didn’t catch what you just said. Maybe you’d like to repeat it in front of my daughter.”<
br />
The man took a step back, and then Trish rushed up to us. She inserted herself between Denny and the brothers. She told them to leave, and she turned to Denny.
“Please,” she said. “I understand why you’re here, but it can’t be done like this. I really don’t think you should stay.” She hesitated for a moment, and then she said: “I’m sorry. You must be so alone.”
Denny didn’t respond. I looked up at him, and his eyes were full of tears. Zoë noticed, too, and started crying with him.
“It’s okay to cry,” she said. “Grandma says crying helps because it washes away the hurting.”
He looked at Zoë for a long moment and she at him. Then he sighed sadly.
“You help Grandma and Grandpa be strong, okay?” he said. “I have some important business to take care of. About Mommy. There are things that have to be done.”
“I know,” she said.
“You’ll stay with Grandma and Grandpa for a little bit longer, until I get everything worked out, okay?”
“They told me I might stay with them for a while.”
“Well,” he said regretfully, “Grandma and Grandpa are very good at thinking ahead.”
“We can all compromise,” Trish said. “I know you’re not a bad person—”
“There is no compromise,” Denny said.
“Given time, you’ll see. It’s what’s best for Zoë.”
“Enzo!” Zoë called out suddenly, locating me beneath her. She squirmed loose of Denny and grabbed me around the neck. “Enzo!”
I was surprised and pleased by her hearty greeting, so I licked her face.
Trish leaned in to Denny.
“You must have been missing Eve terribly,” she whispered to him. “But to take advantage of a fifteen-year-old girl—”
Denny abruptly straightened and pulled away from her.
“Zoë,” he said. “Enzo and I are going to watch from a special spot. Come on, Enzo.”
He bent down and kissed her forehead, and we walked away.
Zoë and Trish watched us go. We continued on the circular path and walked up the bump of a hill to the top, where we stood underneath the trees, and, protected from the lightly falling rain, watched the whole thing. The people coming to attention. The man reading from a book. The people laying roses on the coffin. And everyone leaving in their cars.
We stayed. We waited for the workers who came and dismantled the tents. The workers who came and used a strange winch device to lower the coffin into the ground.
We stayed. We watched the men with their little Caterpillar as they shoveled all the dirt over her. We waited.
When they were all gone, we walked down the hill and we stood before the mound of dirt and we cried. We kneeled and we cried and we grabbed at handfuls of the dirt, the mound, and we felt the last bit of her, the last part of her that we could feel, and we cried.
And finally, when we could do no more, we stood. And we began the long walk home.
37
The morning after Eve’s funeral, I could barely move. My body was so stiff, I couldn’t even stand, and Denny had to look for me because I usually got up immediately and helped him with breakfast. I was eight years old, two years older than Zoë, though I felt much more like her uncle than her brother. While I was still too young to suffer an arthritic condition in my hips, that’s exactly what I suffered from. Degenerative arthritis caused by hip dysplasia. It was an unpleasant condition, yes; but in a sense it was a relief that I could concentrate on my own difficulties rather than dwell on other things that preoccupied my thoughts: specifically, Zoë being stranded with the Twins.
I was quite young when I understood that my hips were abnormal. I had spent most of my first months of life running and playing with Denny, just the two of us, and so I had little opportunity to compare myself with other dogs. When I was old enough to frequent dog parks, I realized that keeping my hind legs together in my gait—though much more comfortable for me—was an obvious sign that my hips were defective. The last thing I wanted was to be seen as a misfit, and so I trained myself to walk and run in certain ways to disguise my defect.
As I matured and the protective cartilage at the ends of my bones wore away, as cartilage tends to do, the pain became more acute. And yet, instead of complaining, I tried to hide my problem. Perhaps I have always been more like Eve than I’ve ever admitted, for I distrusted the medical world immensely, and I found ways to compensate for my disability so I could avoid a diagnosis that would undoubtedly hasten my demise.
As I mentioned, I do not know the source of Eve’s distrust of medicine; the origins of my distrust, however, are all too clear. When I was just a pup, not more than a week or two old, the alpha man on the farm in Spangle introduced me to a friend of his. The man held me in his lap and petted me, feeling my forelegs at length.
“They should come off,” he said to the alpha man.
“I’ll hold him,” the alpha man said.
“He needs anesthetic, Will. You should have called me last week.”
“I’m not wasting my money on a dog, Doc,” the alpha man said. “Cut.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but then the alpha man gripped me tightly around my midsection. The other man, “Doc,” took hold of my right paw and, with shiny scissors that glinted in the sunlight, snipped off my right dew claw. My right thumb. The pain blazed through my body, a wracking, shattering pain. It was bloody and horrible and I cried out. I struggled mightily to free myself, but the alpha man squeezed me so tightly I could barely breathe. Then Doc took hold of my left paw and, without hesitating for a moment, cut off my left thumb. Click. I remember that perhaps more than the pain. The sound. Click. So loud. And then the blood was everywhere. The pain was so intense it left me shivering and weak. Later, Doc applied salve to my wounds and wrapped my forelegs tightly and whispered to me, “It’s a mean bastard who won’t pay for a little local anesthetic for his pups.”
Do you see? This is why I distrust them. It’s a mean bastard who will do the cutting without anesthetic because he wants to get paid.
The day after Eve’s funeral, Denny took me to the vet, a thin man who smelled of hay, and who had a bottomless pocket full of treats. He felt my hips and I tried not to wince, but I couldn’t help myself when he squeezed certain places. He diagnosed me, prescribed anti-inflammatory medication, and said there was nothing else he could do except, some day in the future, perform expensive surgery to replace my defective parts.
Denny thanked the man and drove me home.
“You have hip dysplasia,” he said to me.
If I’d had fingers, I’d have shoved them into my ears until I burst my own eardrums. Anything to avoid hearing.
“Hip dysplasia,” he repeated, shaking his head in amazement.
I shook my head, too. With my diagnosis, I knew, would come my end. Slowly, perhaps. Painfully, without a doubt; marked by the signposts laid out by the veterinarian. The visible becomes inevitable. The car goes where the eyes go. Whatever the trauma that led to Eve’s distrust of medicine, I was able to see only the effects: she had been unable to look away from where the others had told her to look. It is a rare person who can hear the blunt authority of a terminal diagnosis, refuse to accept it, and choose a different path. I thought of Eve and how quickly she embraced her death once the people around her agreed to it; I considered the foretelling of my own end, which was to be full of suffering and pain, as death is believed to be by most of the world, and I tried to look away.
38
Because of the criminal charges against Denny, the Twins had been granted a temporary restraining order that meant, pending challenge in court, Denny didn’t get to see Zoë at all for several months. Minutes after he was arrested, Maxwell and Trish filed a motion to terminate Denny’s right to custody of any kind, since he was clearly an unfit parent. A pedophile. A sex offender.
Well. We all play by the same rules; it’s just that some people spend more time reading those rules a
nd figuring out how to make them work in their behalf.
I have seen movies that involve abducted children and the grief and terror that suffocate the parents when their children are taken by strangers. Denny felt every bit of that grief, and, in my own way, I did, too. And we knew where Zoë was. We knew who had taken her. And, still, we could do nothing.
Mark Fein suggested it would be inflammatory to tell Zoë about the legal proceedings, and he suggested that Denny invent a story about driving race cars in Europe to explain his prolonged absence. Mark Fein also negotiated a letter exchange: notes and drawings made by Zoë would be delivered to Denny, and Denny could write letters to his child, as long as he agreed to allow those letters to be censored by the Twins’ counsel. I will tell you, every vertical surface in our house was decorated with Zoë’s delightful artwork, and many long nights were spent by Denny and me crafting the letters we sent to Zoë, telling of Denny’s exploits on the European race circuit.
As much as I wanted Denny to act, to lash out against the establishment in a bold and passionate way, I respected his restraint. Denny has long admired the legendary driver Emerson Fittipaldi. “Emmo,” as he was called by his peers, was a champion of great stature and consistency, and was known for his pragmatism on the track. Taking chances is not a good idea if choosing wrong may send you into the wall at Indy, twist your car into a fiery metal sculpture that emergency workers struggle to untangle while your flesh is melted from your bones by the invisible flames of burning ethanol. Not only did Emmo never panic, Emmo never put himself in a position where he might have to; like Emmo, Denny never took unnecessary risks.
While I, too, admire and try to emulate Emmo, I still think that I would like to drive like Ayrton Senna, full of emotion and daring. I would like to have packed our necessities in the BMW, driven by Zoë’s school one day to pick her up unannounced, and then headed directly for Canada. From Vancouver, we could have driven east to Montreal—where they have many fabulous road courses and where they host a Formula One Grand Prix every summer—to live by ourselves in peace for the rest of our lives.
