The Woman with the Dog
Brian Sutton
I. Introduction and Ending
She hadn’t wanted the dog in the first place.
Getting a dog had been the kids’ idea. “It’ll be something we’ll care for as a family,” they had said, ignoring the fact that they would both be gone soon, being almost college age. Max had sided with them, as usual.
She had reluctantly gone along. This had been near the end, when she would have agreed to almost anything to hold the marriage together. Or to be able to tell herself, “Hey, I tried,” after it fell apart.
If they had to get a dog, she would’ve preferred a big one, a German shepherd maybe. But Max and the kids chose a little Bichon-poodle mix, with a fluffy grayish-white coat, floppy ears and a curly tail. Annoyingly cute.
And of course she got stuck with taking care of the dog. The kids lost interest almost right away, when he peed on the carpet within thirty seconds of first entering the house. Their involvement after that consisted mainly of sneaking him table scraps, so that he learned that sad-eyed look dogs use for begging. She was the one who fed him dog food, cleaned up after him, and above all walked him. The electric fence they installed never worked right, nobody in the neighborhood had regular fences, and the dog stubbornly refused to just go outside, do his business, and come back in. So she walked him almost hourly when he wasn’t yet house-trained, then later four times a day, regular as clockwork. She once told a man who lived nearby that she was probably known around the neighborhood as the lady with the dog. She had smiled as she said it, but the man just nodded his head blankly. As she had expected.
They never bothered to change the dog’s name from the mundane one the shelter had assigned him. But they got him right after returning from a vacation in France—another desperate attempt at relationship rescue, as if the Champs Élysées could somehow cut through the anger and rekindle whatever flame they’d once had—so they nicknamed him Paris.
Later, when they were divvying up items too unimportant to be covered in the divorce settlement, they had both agreed that despite the dog’s obvious preference for Max, she was the caretaker and should retain custody. “You’ll always have Paris,” he had said. The joke seemed hilarious at the time, a temporary respite from their immediate misery, and they had laughed uproariously.
It was the last time she could recall them laughing together. Moments later, the conversation had turned brittle when she pointed out that she had gone along with getting a dog to please him and the kids, and they had never taken care of him. “Yeah, and you never let us forget it, Helen,” he had snapped. “Always criticizing us, always complaining about all you have to do for us. But when it’s crunch time, you can’t be relied on for help. So now we’ll see if anyone’s left for you to rely on when it’s crunch time for you.” Then he added “Take good care of the dog” as he walked out, closing the door behind him.
II. The Hero’s Journey: Departure
So now here she is, a decade later, still taking care of the dog. More specifically, leashing him for his after-dinner walk. And thinking about how it was just like Max to have the nerve to say she couldn’t be relied on just as he was deserting her. And also just like him to make it worse by using a cliché like “crunch time.”
They cut through the garage, edging between the car and the boxes lining the walls, full of novels and literature textbooks she still hasn’t gotten around to unpacking after she retired and cleared out her office at the university over a year ago. She had begun cutting through last February, after she stopped bothering to shovel the snow off the front porch, and now she continues simply out of habit. In a corner are a few haphazardly placed towels, left there months ago for reasons she no longer remembers.
The dog looks back over his shoulder every few seconds, checking in. The woman ignores him, but his mouth stays open in that goofy doggie version of a grin, and his tail wags like a windshield wiper on amphetamines. He strains at the leash, and as a result almost immediately starts panting. He’s old now and has begun putting on weight.
The woman doesn’t care which route they take, so she lets the dog choose. At the end of the driveway he pees and, after a moment’s hesitation, turns right. This means they’ll walk past the older houses and duplexes, rather than the more upscale new development on the left, where until a few years ago the woods had been. The woman can fondly remember jogging through those woods when she was younger and ran 10Ks. But she hasn’t run a single step in years, partly because of arthritis, partly because she can no longer think of anything worth running for. Besides, the dog isn’t the only one who has put on a few pounds. But this doesn’t bother her. True, her face is still attractive—capable of launching, if not a thousand ships, then at least a leaky rowboat or two, as she likes to put it. But even the thought of going out and trying to meet someone, starting all over again at her age, makes her weary. So she doesn’t worry about the added weight and avoids looking in mirrors.
Across the street, the last few red and yellow leaves cling to the branches of the neighbors’ maple trees. “Bare ruined choirs,” the woman murmurs. The dog glances at her inquiringly, not unlike her students, especially in the later years, whenever she mentioned any literary work other than the one assigned for that day—and sometimes even when she mentioned the assigned one. Most of them had been unfamiliar with any literature beyond warhorses like “The Road Not Taken,” which she assumed they knew from hearing it quoted at high school graduation.
But the woman had relished her literary allusions, deriving sardonic pleasure from her students’ incomprehension. She loves allusions so much that although the dog was named, or rather nicknamed, after the city, in her mind “Paris” always evokes the clueless minor character from Romeo and Juliet, dying pointlessly in defense of someone who had never even wanted him.
There’s a chill in the late-October air, and the woman is glad she remembered to wear a jacket. This far north, the first snowfall might arrive any day now. She’ll need to be careful walking the dog this winter. During one walk the previous March she had slipped on the ice and torn the rotator cuff in her right shoulder. After the operation, about seven months ago, the doctor had emphasized that the injury would take a full year to heal completely and that if she tore it again, the pain would be excruciating, the injury irreparable.
She also remembered to wear her luminous yellow vest. The neighborhood lacks sidewalks and its tranquility encourages some people, mainly those from outside the neighborhood who don’t know better, to drive too fast for a residential area, especially coming around that corner from Mahon onto Birchwood. It’s still light out now, but the sun is dipping toward the horizon. The woman imagines the darkness speeding westward like an audiovisual aid for a lesson on carpe diem poetry.
Where the street dead-ends onto Birchwood, the woman and the dog stop and look left toward the front lawn of a nearby duplex. After confirming that the lawn is empty, they turn left.
III. Chekhov’s Gun
They always check first. As they had passed the duplex one night the previous December, a pit bull had hurtled out of the darkness, eerily silent, and attacked the dog. Shocked, the woman had shouted but hadn’t moved—“As indecisive as Prufrock,” she later told herself. She hadn’t even released the leash at first, leaving the dog trapped, unable to run away or even to move freely in self-defense.
After a few seconds the pit bull’s owner had appeared and managed to drag the animal off. “I’m awful sorry, lady! He usually behaves real good!” he had shouted over his shoulder before turning and saying, “Sit, Captain!” But instead of giving the pit bull a chance to sit, he had immediately kicked it in the ribs.
Once out of danger, the woman had unleashed a stream of invective against the pit bull and its owner, one for its unprovoked attack and the other for his abuse of both his dog and the English language. Both dog and owner turned and gave her a hard stare before disappearing into the duplex.
Although the woman’s dog suffered only minor scratches, he had scuttled back to the house, jumped onto the sofa, trembling, and burrowed his head into a crevice between cushions. Later he had crept into his kennel and refused to come out until the next day. All this reminded the woman of yet another Paris: the character in The Iliad who is spirited home in disgrace after defeat in single combat, then refuses to leave his bedroom until Hector coaxes him out. Of course that same Paris, according to the myth, later kills the fierce Achilles. But the woman couldn’t imagine that the dog had anything like that in him, any more than she did.
For a week or so after the attack, the dog had taken all his walks in the other direction, avoiding the duplex. But gradually he returned to his routine of alternating between routes. Still, he always stops at the corner to look and scurries the other way if the pit bull is out. And even when the pit bull isn’t there, the dog always pulls away from the duplex as they pass it, speeding up and stealing glances toward the empty yard. The woman sometimes laughs and calls him things like “Brave warrior” and “Fearless protector.”
They’ve seen the pit bull only a few times since that night, always chained to a tree in the yard. Invariably on those occasions, the animal at first growls and barks, lunging to the end of the chain. Then, still staring at them, it settles back as if waiting, certain its time will come.
IV. Freytag’s Pyramid: Exposition
Once the woman is past the duplex, she reaches into her pocket. During their daytime walks she habitually reads paperback editions of works from what she still unapologetically refers to as the canon. But she has never warmed to audiobooks, so when the light fades she’s reduced to staring at her phone like everyone else.
She begins by checking Facebook, where she’s mostly a lurker, having nothing to post and nobody to “like” it if she did. Her older daughter, Jane, has posted an album captioned “Weekend with Grandma and Grandpa.” There’s Max, short-sleeved, smiling as he gestures toward a tourist attraction in the Sun Belt city where he now lives. Max, cradling their new grandson while Jane and her husband beam approvingly. Max and his much-younger second wife, incongruously called “Grandma” here, nuzzling affectionately over dinner and wine.
The woman only glances before scrolling past, but a glance suffices. As always at such times, she wonders if there’s some way to avoid seeing images like this, short of blocking her daughters.
The picture of Max holding their baby grandson is especially galling. When the girls were small he hadn’t even known how to change a diaper, any more than how to operate the washing machine or vacuum cleaner. She had been responsible for the bedtime readings and the 3 a.m. feedings and, years later, for getting the girls ready for school in the morning and then taxiing them to and from lessons or practice or rehearsals or club meetings after school as well as playdates and eventually sleepovers on weekends.
“Sorry, Hon,” Max had said. “It’s just, your work hours are way more flexible than mine.” Meaning she could slip away from campus during the day as long as she paid the price by working until past midnight at home. She graded papers and did course prep while sitting in a car waiting for the girls; her scholarly agenda narrowed to short articles for minor journals, and she gave up on trying to make full professor. A little of the frustration occasionally seeped out, leaving her daughters wary of her.
Max had been the fun parent, the one who could make the girls laugh, listened sympathetically when a clique or a boy had reduced them to tears, kicked a soccer ball around the yard with them, drove them to Dairy Queen for treats. They had grown up daddy’s girls.
It had been the same with the dog. Max never touched a leash or a poop bag, but he occasionally gave the dog belly rubs and got down on the floor and wrestled with him, and when the mood struck him he’d take the dog out and toss a tennis ball or a Frisbee. And the dog loved him. Each weekday evening he had stared out the living room window until Max’s car came around the corner. Then he’d run in circles and bark, his whole body wiggling with joy when Max came through the door. When the woman had returned from work on campus, the dog had usually glanced up and wagged his tail slightly, then retreated into his kennel. Which was, the woman recalls, not all that different from how Max and the kids had responded.
Then Max began coming home later and later, sometimes disappearing on weekends as well. “Special project at work,” he said when she asked about his absences. “Just for now, I’ll be gone a lot. Help me out, okay? Take care of things around the house for a little while.”
Looking back, she figures it was the “for a little while” that finally set her off. “I was consumed by rage,” she told a colleague at work when describing what happened next. She hadn’t meant to take it as far as she did, but everything had been bottled in for so long. Afterward she felt more regretful than cathartic. But the marriage was broken, and no trip to Paris or an adopted shelter dog could fix it.
Soon after the divorce, Max moved in with and then married his assistant from work, who was one year over half his age. Although appalled, the woman had hoped her daughters would bond with her in their indignation. But they had seemed delighted, as if gaining a big sister.
A few years later, around the time the younger daughter was graduating from college, Max relocated after being promoted to chief executive of the company’s Southern division. The woman had again hoped this would bring her closer to her daughters, if only through mere proximity. But instead both daughters moved South, with Max helping them find jobs near him. Now, judging from social media, Max and his child-bride, as the woman thinks of her, get together with one or both daughters, along with sons-in-law and now a grandson, almost every weekend. The woman’s unstated portion is an annual visit with her daughters, usually for a few days just before or after Christmas, for an awkward exchange of gifts. She has gradually become callused to the situation; it no longer hurts to just go through the motions.
V. Argos
The woman and the dog reach the cul-de-sac marking the furthest extent of their usual walk. The dog has done his business, and the woman grips a poop bag in the same hand that holds the leash. A block away, a car’s headlights blink on.
The dog pulls, straining toward a discarded hamburger wrapper—the sort of thing he’s apt to vomit onto the carpet later. Exasperated, the woman shortens the leash and jerks hard. The dog’s head snaps up, his front legs rise off the ground, and he gags. Then he turns for home, occasionally stopping for a hacking fit.
Now the woman feels guilty. “Sorry, little guy,” she says. She reaches out to pet the dog, but he cringes and shies away. Still, moments later he licks her hand when she lowers it to scratch him under the chin, and he wags his tail when she bends closer. But her lower back tightens up, so she straightens as best she can and they resume their homeward journey.
She shakes her head: still taking out her frustrations on the dog after all these years. It hadn’t been fair to him even in the early years, on those cold evenings when she needed to get home to do the dishes and finish the laundry and then spend half the night grading papers and trying to write a journal article, and he was meandering off to sniff where some other dog had peed and then circling endlessly before peeing himself. But now she no longer has the excuse that pressing tasks await her at home—not even writing. During her years teaching literature she had dreamed that once she retired and had the time, she would create literature of her own, sprinkling elegant allusions into her works to situate them within the great tradition. But retirement had quickly taught her about the huge gulf between an idea in one’s head and a fully achieved manuscript. During her first months of retirement she had gone from waking in anticipation, knowing she had the time to write that day, to waking in dread, knowing she had the self-imposed obligation to try to write, to waking in indifference, knowing she just wasn’t a writer and there was no use in trying to pretend otherwise. Now she measures out her life with coffee spoons, her days a series of trivial errands punctuated by rehab exercises to strengthen the rotator cuff and by the four-a-day dog walks, with no reason to get home quickly, no excuse for her impatient outbursts.
Besides, she knows that the dog probably suffered as much as she did from the divorce. For weeks after Max left, the dog spent hours at the window each evening, waiting. Only after the weeks turned into months did he begin to act excited when the woman herself returned from work. Eventually he began following her from room to room in the silent house as if leashed even indoors, curling on the empty side of the bed at night, staring solemnly and creepily up at her while she sat on the toilet, giving her that sad-eyed look at the dinner table to beg for scraps. It took a while, the woman told herself, but the dog finally realized that she was all he had left.
It had taken her even longer to realize that the reverse was also true.
VI. Katabasis: The Descent into the Underworld
Turning the corner from Mahon back onto Birchwood, the woman minimizes Facebook and checks her email. She still uses her university account, an emeritus perk. Other than a promo stating, “A lot has happened on Facebook since you last logged in,” there’s nothing.
When she retired the stream of work-related messages had dried up as suddenly as a faucet shuts off. A few messages intended for former colleagues still reached her by mistake, and she had forwarded these, appending a sentence or two stating that she hoped all was well with the colleague and the university. She never received a response. And when she attended the occasional play or concert on campus and saw former colleagues, they usually turned away, feigning interest in something in the opposite direction. If she saw any of her former students—even the good ones, the ones who had formerly sought her out during office hours—they walked past as though nobody was there.
It wasn’t surprising. For most of her career she had been respected by all and liked by many—admittedly tough, but fair, and good at her work. But after things fell apart at home, they unraveled at work as well. She became the type of professor who replies sarcastically when a student asks a question betraying unfamiliarity with information she had provided in detail just a few minutes earlier, or who fires off belligerent emails to colleagues about campus politics, cc’d to far too many people. Eventually nobody sat in the front row of her classes or on either side of her at faculty meetings. When she finally retired, nobody appeared to be sad to see her go. Only natural that she had been “ghosted,” as her former students would’ve put it.
But there was an alternative explanation, even more discouraging: maybe she wasn’t ostracized because she was angry and abrasive, but simply forgotten because she was archaic and irrelevant. Even before her classroom demeanor had turned so antagonistic, her students had been growing increasingly disengaged, indifferent not only toward the literary works she cherished but toward her outmoded analytical approach, heavy on traditional concepts like the quest narrative and on old-school terms like point of attack, rising and falling action, and deus ex machina. The weaker students complained that her allusions made them feel dumb; the brighter ones pointed out that those allusions, like her syllabi, seemed limited to works by dead white men. Her course-evaluation scores dropped, and the phrase “out of touch” began appearing in the comments portion of the evaluation forms. No wonder nobody seemed to miss her when she left.
Besides, in her younger days whenever she had seen a former colleague, now retired, wandering the halls or squinting at a book in the library, she had tried to detour before being seen, and if seen had adopted a transparently hearty tone designed to keep the encounter cheerful, superficial, and short. The university was a closed world, and once you retired you were no longer part of it. Her time was past, like those insubstantial spirits from the afterlife that Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante the Pilgrim all try to embrace, only to have their hands pass right through them. Maybe she had been ghosted because she was, for all practical purposes, a ghost.
VII. Point of Attack
The woman is awakened from her troubled dreams by an unearthly sound from the dog—half growl, half whimper, all panic. Looking up, she sees that they’re across the street from the duplex, its windows darkened, no sign of life inside. Out front the pit bull, its hour come round at last, shoots out of the yard, aiming straight toward them.
With no time to dial for help, the woman jams her cell phone into her pocket with one hand and drops the leash and poop bag with the other. Even though she knows the dog can’t even make it to the corner before being caught, she whispers, “Run home, little buddy.” Immediately she feels mortified: she has just unintentionally alluded to Gilligan’s Island.
Then she feels the shock of impact and realizes that this time the pit bull isn’t coming for the dog. It’s coming for her.
VIII. Falling Action
The woman staggers but keeps her footing, aware that her survival might depend on her ability to remain standing and remain calm. She knows enough to ball her hands into fists to protect her fingers from being bitten off. Then she pulls her arms in front of her body, fists guarding her face like a boxer on the ropes. She can feel the pit bull, again eerily silent, tearing at her clothes as if this were a different kind of assault.
Something is constricting her legs, about calf-high. Looking down she realizes that the dog, rather than heading home, must have run around her legs in tight circles, more than once. The leash, hopelessly tangled, is now wrapped firmly around her legs.
As far as the woman is concerned, this isn’t a problem. She couldn’t outrun the pit bull anyway and unless its concentration were somehow diverted, her running would only arouse its prey instinct, leading her to get knocked over and probably killed. And although her legs are bound by the leash, her feet are planted well apart, giving her a stable base. She doesn’t know for sure, but she assumes that the leash, by binding her legs in this position, increases her chances of staying upright and, thus, alive.
Then she hears the shrill yips, metallic with fear, and sees the dog straining at the end of the leash. The two of them are bound together, both equally immobile. And once the pit bull has enjoyed its fill of her, the dog will be next.
With a scream, the woman kicks out her left leg as hard as she can—not at the pit bull but against the constraining leash. The pressure against her calves disappears and she sees the dog scurrying away, the leash trailing behind. “Run home, dammit!” she shouts.
Before her left foot can return to the ground, the pit bull slams into the outside part of her right leg, cutting it out from under her. She falls hard on her right shoulder. Waves of pain, worse even than during childbirth, pulse through her like an electric current. She smells shit and momentarily thinks that just like during childbirth, she has lost control of her bowels. Then she realizes she has fallen on the poop bag and her right pants leg is smeared. “Story of my life,” she mutters.
She sees the pit bull’s face, giant-sized, a few inches in front of her eyes. Then she sees only the top of its head and feels something wet on her left cheek. She raises her left hand, still clenched into a fist for protection, up to her cheek and finds a cavity there, without even any loose flesh. The pit bull has simply chomped off a piece of her. Consumed by rage.
The animal is about to attack her again, and she cannot defend herself. The woman thinks about all that she could have done better. It occurs to her that given the choice, this is not how she would have preferred to die.
Then she hears a growl, small but intense, up against the silence of the pit bull, and sees something grayish-white flash past the pit bull’s legs, with something ropelike trailing behind. The pit bull yelps and turns to snap at the foe that has just bitten it.
IX. Rising Action, with Conflicts
The woman knows that her life depends on her getting up, and doing it within the next second or two, before the pit bull is on her again. Lying on her right side, she has no choice but to push off with her right arm, torn rotator cuff or not. She screams in pain, her head spins, and she hears a whirring noise that she knows isn’t really there. But she’s back on her feet.
The pit bull tears into her again and she staggers. Her legs shake and the street beneath her seems to be tilting at crazy, ever-shifting angles. She knows she can’t stay on her feet for long at this rate. But the dog keeps coming back, nipping at the pit bull’s heels and then scurrying away. The dog’s panting has become wheezing gasps and he leaves a trickle of blood as he runs, but he returns again and again. He’s a light-hitting boxer taking on a massive slugger, an elusive guerilla squadron up against a well-armed regiment. Except in this case the opponent is not only powerful and fierce, but also a great runner.
X. Two Roads Diverged, or, Crunch Time
Now the pit bull turns toward the dog, seemingly forgetting the woman for the moment. If she’s ever going to run, this is her chance. The dog will surely put up enough resistance that she can be around the corner, almost home, before the pit bull finishes with him and turns back for her.
The dog crouches, chin tucked in, teeth bared, midriff bloodied, defiance but also despair in his growl. He looks toward the pit bull, which is now speeding toward him. Then he seems to look past the pit bull, and for a moment he and the woman make eye contact. He has that sad-eyed look he uses at the dinner table when he’s begging.
The woman runs—away from her home and toward the pit bull, which has just reached the dog. She comes up from behind, stifling a scream, hoping to catch the animal by surprise. She kicks as hard as she can. But the pit bull is moving rapidly and unpredictably, so she misses her target, the animal’s head. Still, she kicks it in the side, hard enough to lift it off the ground. If the pit bull had fallen, she would have come down on it with all her weight, using her knee to break any bones she could.
Instead the pit bull turns on her once more, attacking with what seems like the final fury of battle. The dog keeps running past and nipping at the pit bull’s legs, but the pit bull ignores him.
The woman is feeling weaker. It’s hard to hold her arms up in self-defense, especially with her shoulder throbbing whenever she raises her right arm. The energy expended in kicking the pit bull has taken a lot out of her. And she’s weary. She wants to fight no more forever.
She’s about to lower her arms in surrender when the dog bites hard on the pit bull’s right rear leg, near the ankle. The pit bull emits a surprisingly high-pitched yelp, then turns to face its tormentor. The dog runs toward the same corner he and the woman had rounded a few minutes earlier—away from their house, but directly in the pit bull’s line of sight. Occasionally he slows down and glances back over his shoulder, and whenever he does, the woman could swear he manages to flash that goofy doggie grin. It’s as if he’s teasing his bigger, stronger, faster antagonist, daring it to pursue.
XI. Climax, or, Deus ex Machina
The pit bull springs. Almost instantly it devours the distance between itself and the dog, moving too fast for the woman’s eyes to follow. Everything happens too quickly for her to notice the machine coming in the opposite direction, out of the gathering darkness. Then she hears the squeal of brakes, followed by a yelp and a muffled thud.
The headlights come on only after the car has stopped. The woman can just make out the words “Tony’s Pizza” on the driver’s side door.
The pit bull lies on its back, illuminated by the car’s right headlight. A little farther away from the car, the dog lies in almost the fetal position, illuminated by the left headlight. Neither animal moves.
A long, cylindrical mass, white except for the blood oozing down, descends from the dog’s midsection. The woman hopes it’s only fatty tissue, not organs or bowels. She rushes across the street and kneels over the dog. He’s still breathing, in rapid, shallow, irregular gasps.
The car door opens, delivering the smells of pizza and marijuana and the thump of drums and bass. The pizza-delivery guy, red-haired and scraggly-bearded, gets out and closes the door, simultaneously tucking a cell phone into his pocket.
“Jesus, I’m awful sorry, lady, but they just—” he begins, but then he looks at the woman and stops. “Professor?” he says.
She recognizes him—an intermittent presence in the back row of an intro course from her final semester.
“My God, Professor, your face! You need to get to the hospital.”
“I’ll be okay,” she says, knowing it’s true as soon as she hears herself say it. “Did you hit them both?”
“I dunno. It happened so fast, and it was hard to see, so I—”
“Can you give us a ride to my house?” she interrupts. She scoops the dog into her arms, ignoring the searing pain from her right shoulder, and now from her lower back as well.
“Oh man, I dunno. I mean, it’s the company’s car—all that blood—and sorry, but I think your pants have, like—”
With a wordless scream the woman turns and begins running home, the dog still cradled in her arms. She hears the delivery guy’s voice behind her, shouting, “Okay Professor, what the hell, get in,” but she keeps running. She feels awkward, unable to swing her arms because of the burden she carries. Her knees and hips and back are stiff, and her shoulder hurts so much that she’s scarcely conscious of the throbbing from the dog bites, which will surely turn out to be numerous when she has the time to take inventory. But she runs.
XII. Conclusion and (Possibly) New Beginning
Even though it takes only a minute or two, she’s lightheaded and gasping for breath by the time she reaches the house. The dog’s breathing has evened out. Occasionally he makes a low-pitched sound unlike anything she’s ever heard before.
She lays the dog on the lawn as gently as possible, unhooks the leash and jams it into her pocket, then rushes into the garage and overturns one of the boxes, sending books sliding across the concrete floor. Then she places the dog in the box and puts the box in the foot space before the passenger-side front seat of the car. The dog is shivering, but the woman isn’t sure there’s time to run inside for a blanket. She grabs a towel from the corner of the garage and spreads it over the dog’s torso and legs.
The cover to her cell phone is cracked from the fall, but the phone still works. She Googles “pet emergency.” It turns out there’s one 24-hour pet emergency service in the city. It’s in a neighborhood she’s familiar with—no need to wait for GPS directions. The drive will take maybe fifteen minutes.
The stench from her pants leg fills the car immediately, but she leaves the windows closed because the dog is shivering. She drives fast but not so fast as to run the risk of being pulled over for speeding. She tries to avoid potholes and she slows for bumps. From time to time she reaches over to caress the dog, careful to avoid visibly injured areas, touching him only lightly for fear of worsening any internal damage.
When she stops for a red light she reattaches the leash to the dog’s collar, even though she knows he’ll be carried, not walked, into the emergency center. As the light changes she feels the dog’s tongue against her hand. She doesn’t know whether he’s licking her or his tongue is simply lolling out in his extreme condition, but she whispers, “Good boy.”
As she drives, the woman tries to prepare for the night ahead. She hasn’t dared to look at her face in the rearview mirror, but she knows that the people at the animal emergency center will tell her to leave the dog with them and go to the nearest hospital’s emergency room right away. But she’s determined to stay until they’ve done whatever can be done for the dog, even if it takes all night and she has to wait outside in the cold. While she’s waiting she’ll text her daughters to tell them what has happened, then perhaps post something on Facebook in case anyone else might care to know.
Once she knows for sure about the dog, she’ll go to the emergency room. And after that, there will be plenty of time—“And indeed there will be time” she says to herself with a weary smile—time to look in the mirror, accept her scars, tally up her losses, assess the fragments shored against her ruins, and try to figure out what, if anything, she has left, what she might still count on if she were somehow, against all odds, to try again.
