Lady’s Last Day
April 6th, 2008Generally vacation for me is just that. I vacate. I escape — from my job, from my house, from my husband (when possible), and even from myself. I leave everything behind and just try to recuperate or recover through sleeping, eating, and good ol’ fashioned fun.
But this week, I’m taking a different approach. Having found myself vacating my marriage, my problems, my insecurities, and my work day-to-day through day-dreaming, checking out, and just plain blanking, I’ve decided it’d be good for me to spend this vacation getting to know myself once again. Perhaps vacating everything doesn’t actually give me the recuperation I need.
So on my first morning back at my parents’ house, I start strong. I get up at 9 am instead of sleeping until noon like I typically would. I make myself coffee and sit down to journal and read for an hour. I play ball with my family dog, Caleb–a straggly but spry small blonde mutt I found in college and brought home to my parents just after our precious dog Zach died. Even though they swore they did not want another dog, I figured they might change their mind when face-to-face with quirky but lovable, homeless Caleb. On the weekend I brought Caleb on the two-hour drive home with me, he spent the entire trip puking in my car (my roommate had fed him American cheese slices…apparently), and luckily, they were glad to keep him and make him part of the family.
I check my personal and work email (something that I never do on vacation), and then decide to take a walk before my shower. I change into my yoga pants, tank top, sports bra, and tie my hair back. Then I head to the backyard to get Caleb on his leash.
After putting Caleb on his leash, we set off. Instead of going down the street beside my house, the normal routine, I go to the right and head into the neighborhood that was such a part of my youth. My sister, brother and I would spend hours upon hours every summer day down at the Hermitage Plantation pool and tennis courts. Our favorite thing was to have our mother put on the heat full-blast for the two-minute drive down to the pool so it’d feel amazingly cool and refreshing when we jumped in the pool. Only now do I realize the sacrifice in this by my mother who rarely got into the pool with us.
Caleb, generally a very obedient dog, is the worst at walking on a leash. As soon as you put him on his leash, he pulls with a force you just don’t see when you look at him. So my walking soon led to running to lessen the tension on the chain. As I ran down Hermitage Road, I thought of the old neighbors who I’d known, and marveled at how their houses had changed. This one has new siding. That one has gone from yellow to green. Another was completely different, brick where there used to be siding and some sort of new addition. I tried to take it all in, wondering at my past, and sticking to my mantra of sticking to myself.
Running down the steepest hill in the neighborhood, something suddenly caught my eye. On my left, right beside a large brick mailbox, I saw something that looked like a small deer laid out in the person’s front yard. Even though I was in the land of suburbia, with perfecting kept lawns, shrubbery for days, and newly planted flowers around each front porch, it was as if I were seeing a small, murdered deer just taken down by hunter’s shot. As Caleb and I neared the body, we realized it was a dog. A dead dog lying perfectly still, like a decorative hedge on the freshly mown grass of this suburban American residence. Pulling Caleb back, I saw that the dog looked just like all the living dogs I had seen. Besides his lack of breathing, he was completely alive-looking. He lay on his side with his legs straight out towards the road. His eyes were open and his mouth was slightly ajar. I looked at his neck. No signs of choking, and also…no collar. The only thing I could figure was that someone had just hit him on the way to work that morning and he’d taken two steps into the comfy green grass beside him and laid down to die.
My first thought was to marvel at the body, the weirdness of it all, and then continue on with my run. But before I moved away, I knew what I should do. Since moving to Boston, I’ve learned some things about being neighborly. With smaller space to call your own, you have to interact more with each other. You have to share a mailbox with a neighbor, or a yard, or a porch. And living like that had changed my view of neighborly obligations. With a deep breath, I headed towards the front door of the perfect-looking house whose yard held the body of the deceased.
“Do you have a dog?” I thought I’d start off by saying. If the answer were yes, I’d then ask if it was missing. Then I’d wing it from there, either consoling them with the horrible news or asking them if they knew whose dog this might be who’d been laid to rest in their yard.
I rang the bell and stepped back. All the while waiting on their porch, I thought about how horrible it’d be to have lost your dog, just like that. How sad it was to think that someone earlier this morning had hit this dog on the way to work and just kept on driving…
No answer.
I rang the bell again and leaned in towards the door to make sure I could hear the bell ringing. I could. Hardly cognoscente of Caleb throughout my doorbell ringing, I shrieked when I looked down and saw that he was stepping upon freshly planted daffodils. Great, I thought. Now I have to tell them their dog has died AND their daffodils.
But the second ring yielded no answer as well. Looking over to the driveway and seeing no cars I figured they were indeed out since it’s pretty impossible to survive in this area of town car-less.
Feeling more and more the need to do something or tell someone about the dead dog, I crossed over the pine straw bank dividing the house from its neighbor and rehearsed my line of questioning again. Do you have a dog? Is your dog missing?
Arriving at the door to the second house, I rang their bell and again there was no answer. Again I looked in the driveway and there was no car.
I stood still, wondering what was I going to do? Do I continue to knock on every house on the block until I find someone to tell or to I continue on my walk/run with Caleb and let the situation play out by the next passerby? I looked across the street at the two houses closest to where I was standing. Both had cars in their driveway and I felt relieved. Surely, someone is home at one of those houses.
I headed to the house directly across the street and closest in proximity to the dead body. I walked up the driveway, leading Caleb around the curve of it and trying to deter him from ruining another person’s chances of winning “Best Yard” in the neighborhood. Before ringing the bell, I thought again of my lines: Do you own a dog? Is it missing?
Approaching the third house I was full of dignity at the task; I would not be a passive neighbor (even if this wasn’t my neighborhood anymore), I was going to find someone to tell about this dog who either was the owner, or would help me find the owner.
I rang the bell and stood back, telling Caleb to mind himself and that, hopefully, we’d be going back to our walk very soon.
I saw a woman approach the door from the left and begin to open it very slowly. She was about forty years old with shoulder-length, unfixed blonde hair tucked behind her ears, and she was dressed just like me — a ribbed tank top (I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the same brand as the one I was wearing) and grey yoga pants. She was bra-less, shoe-less, and sock-less. Although she had opened the heavy front door, she looked hesitant to remove the wall of the glass storm door between us. Her obvious hesitancy distracted me from my original speech. Instead of thinking of my well-thought out lines, I wanted to affirm that I wasn’t crazy and indeed had a very good reason to be standing on her front porch. And I involuntarily blurted out:
“I was running and I saw a dead dog in this person’s yard across the street.”
Damn! That came out all wrong. Her face fell and she said, “Oh no! Our dog is missing. Lady, my boyfriend’s dog, got out of the gate this morning and didn’t come back. But I was just down at the mailbox calling for her…and she didn’t come….”
All the sudden I began extremely aware of Caleb’s presence there on the porch with me. I wanted him to disappear. Why had I not thought to tie him somewhere or to take him home? Here I was on a pleasant outing with my dog while hers lay deceased in the yard across the street.
“Is she a big dog?” she asked. “Bigger than yours?”
“Yes,” I answered. I felt so unprepared. I have never given news of the death of a loved one to the person closest. Most people who give this sort of news surely have some training. Police officers and army workers must be given some speech about the proper way to deliver such grievous news. And here I was standing with my dog, happy and alive as can be, fumbling for words and mimicking her worried looks. Like a policeman holding the hand of his daughter while giving the news of a daughter’s death to a frightened and lonely mother, I had come to give the news of this woman’s dog’s death holding mine.
“I don’t want to look,” she fumbled. Then asked, “is she blonde, like your dog?”
“Yes” I sadly confirmed.
Throughout the short period of questioning, she had opened the door more and more.
“I don’t want to look,” she said again. But this time she stepped out of the door, allowing me to lead her down her driveway to see into the neighbor’s yard. With warmth I’ve known my mother to use, I put my hand on her back and told her where to look.
“She’s just over there. Can you see, just to the right a bit by the mailbox?”
Shaking, she lifted her head, and exclaimed, “She looks just like a deer. That’s Lady.”
A string of apologies and regrets spewed from my mouth: “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry…..” I meant it completely. I wanted to take all her pain away at that moment. I could imagine the pain I’d have felt if that were Caleb, or my cat Simon.
Pulling away from my hand, she moved back towards the house starting to cry.
“I’m so sorry. Is there something I can do?” I asked.
Crying fully now, she moved back towards the safety of her home, no doubt wishing she hadn’t let me or my news reach her.
“No,” she sobbed, “I need to call my boyfriend.”
Backing down her driveway and away from her house, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I felt her loss and sadness and fought not to make it my own. As I passed by Lady one final time, I wanted to give her some dignity–shut her eyes or something to recover the decency of the name she bore. But there was nothing I could do. She belonged to someone else, and now it was their job. I had passed the news on and now it was time for me to go home.
When Caleb and I got to my parents’ house, we entered the back gate and I checked three times to make sure it was shut tight before letting him off his leash.
I’ve recently begun to get more into creating art. Saturday night, a group of girls came over to pose for fashion photography in front of my camera. I looked like a pro with my tripod set-up and didn’t use the flash (doing those two things makes you a pro, right?). The girls and I had a lot of fun dressing up, posing, and shooting. During the days since, I’ve found myself reading photography composition websites and editing the photos endlessly. As I lay here on my couch thinking of my delving into online browsing in a way that I thought only my husband could, I can look right above my computer screen and see a large black and white photograph with beautiful composition. In the bottom center of the shot is a girl, curled up, knees into body and arms hugging legs, head resting on the woman’s right knee. Two unique square-painned windows line either side of the girl, and a pulled curtain flows behind her.
