The following weekend, after Dee and Lydia marched in and marched out, some kind of squadron, when I was finishing up my essay, my father knocked on my door.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course,” I said. “Enter!”
He cracked open the door à la Connor. But it was just my dad. “Mabel wants to go for a walk,” he said.
“Really?” My computer was on my lap, on my knees really, to avoid, like, melting the bag. “Mabel does?”
“Yes. Mabel does.”
“Okay, Dad.” I set my computer aside on my bed and went for my sneakers.
When I opened the front door, it was way colder outside than I’d thought, and so I took my father’s jean jacket from the hook in the front hall closet.
My father put Mabel on her leather leash and we were off.
Which makes it sound easy. It took me a while to get down our stone steps. So it was more like: after ten minutes of my tottering down those and then finally reaching the driveway, then! we were off.
“You okay, honey?” he asked me as we made our way up our street.
“I mean—” I start.
“No, I know,” he interrupted. “I know you’re not okay, but how not okay are you? How okay aren’t you? How are you handling this, honey?”
I gulped, trying to get my swallowing done even though my throat felt blocked. “I don’t know.”
He nodded and we kept walking, Mabel stopping to pee every five seconds, an excuse for me to secretly try to catch my uncatchable breath. One of the many charms of a girl dog.
“Why did we end up with Mabel anyway?” I asked after a period of silence.
“Why?” he asked.
“I mean, how did it end up being her? Why a breeder? Why a springer?”
“Well, your mother had done all this research on dogs, the best ones with kids, the ones who are adaptable. She and I went to some shelters. We didn’t want to bring you and Zoe, because we knew you’d fall in love with every dog! And there were so many ones we wanted there. But in the end, it was always the springers that had our hearts. I had wanted one from the start. We had them when I was growing up.”
“You did?” I asked.
“We did. I had a springer named Daphne. Can you believe it?”
I looked at him. My father. He was graying, and I only noticed it then. I’d seen so many pictures of him young, with a mustache, wearing army pants and tie-dyes, and then when I was born. Now he looked like a professor. Like a dad.
“That is hilarious.” I pictured him as a kid, calling Daphne! Daphne! and my mother in the form of a dog running up and licking his face. “I’d thought you rescued Mabel.”
My father shook his head. “No. That would have been nice, though.”
But then she wouldn’t be Mabel.
“You okay?” He turned to look at me.
I nodded. “I just have this eye thing,” I said, touching the corner of my eye. “You know, Mabel is seven,” I said.
“She is.”
I stopped walking and turned to him. “Okay so, I really want to rescue this dog. She’s like, part beagle, part border collie, a little Lab, I think. She came from North Carolina, from a batch of puppies just left in a Dumpster in the horrible heat. Her hair was matted and her skin was raw from hot spots, but she’s doing really well now, with some of her siblings at a shelter. A kill shelter. In Manassas.”
“She needs to be rescued? I see.”
“She does.”
“I see,” he said again.
“It’s a kill shelter. I don’t know how much time she’s got. She needs to be saved, Dad.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s save her then.”
I was stunned because it’s usually, let’s talk to Mom, let’s see, let’s see if Zoe is comfortable with this, blah blah, but not today, apparently. Post-hospital rules.
“That’s great.”
“It is,” my father said.
My dad stuck his hands in his pockets and I stuck my hands in mine. Well, his. There were some kind of strips of soft plastic, and I fingered them for a second and then took them out of his pocket to see what they were.
My hospital bracelets. The one that was handwritten and the typed-out one. The one Collette cut off only a week before.
I looked at them, flat on my open palm, and then I looked at my father.
“You know, when you were born, your mom wore a bracelet just like that. It said ‘Baby Stoller.’ We hadn’t named you yet. We were waiting to meet you. I have that one too.”
Mabel had her face in the bushes, sniffing deeply and loudly.
“So this first one I took because I was scared. Really, really scared. The second one I took because I wasn’t, but you had worn it every day in there, and you had left it behind. All your bracelets,” he said.
I just rubbed my naked wrist as we made our old loop around the long, tree-lined blocks of my neighborhood.
“So when do you want to go get this puppy dog?” he said, as we turned the corner for home. He looked at his watch. “Don’t know about you, but I’m free this afternoon.”
Next thing I knew we were all in the car, heading to Manassas for Greta. We were heading to her to save her.
“We’re getting you a sister!” I said to Mabel, to explain why she wasn’t coming with us, as we left her, stunned, behind.
In the car I stared out the window along the highway.
“Want to play I Spy?” my mother said from the front seat.
“Um, no?” Zoe put in her earbuds.
“How often are we all in the car together?” my father said, turning to us.
I peeked over at Zoe’s phone. Revolver. I motioned her to give me a bud, and when she handed it over, we both leaned back: “I will be there and everywhere. Here, there and everywhere.”
“Play it again,” I said, and she did: “To lead a better life, I need my love to be here. . . .”
At the shelter Zoe and I knelt down and gripped the metal of her caged-in kennel and watched her. Greta. It means pearl. And that’s what she was, once we got to her, pried her out of that sad, abused shell of hers. The eyes. Such sad, hoping, long-lashed eyes. She jumped and jumped and then she growled as the human at the kennel opened her cage.
“She just needs love and some training.” The human leaned down and scratched her on the neck. “Love, love, and then some more love,” she said.
“Well, we sure have that aplenty!” my mother said, and Zoe rolled her eyes.
They called the puppy Blue Eyes then, and I swear she bent her head and smiled.
Dog smiles. Like no other kinds of smile. It made me think of Verlaine. I would have liked to tell Connor about it.
I also wanted to tell him what I decided on our way back to the car, which was that I was going to take her to get her Canine Good Citizen certificate. So she could go into hospitals. Like Verlaine. Because maybe Connor would come back and maybe Verlaine and Mabel and now lovely Greta, who wasn’t a stranger to suffering either, and I could all go visiting—go candy striping—together. I would finally get the handbook! I would finally see all the secret instructions that were written inside.
Of course, there was no Connor, and it’s not like I didn’t know this when we got into the car, Greta freaking out in the backseat, Zoe on her knees leaning toward her, trying to calm her down. I knew all this. But it is still possible to unknow what you know.
“A new family member,” my father said.
“Perfect,” my mother said. “She’s clearly gotten the memo about how being rabid is an important feature in our household.”
“We’re not going to hurt you!” I placed my hand palm up for her to sniff and then petted her softly on her back, the way the handler had shown us.
“We’re here to save you!” Zoe said.
Poor Greta. Even though it wasn’t even an hour home, we had to stop at a rest station to let her get some energy out. Trucks were idling at the stop as she ran in the little stretch of grass. And she looked so beautiful, all her kinds of dogs inside her, her spotted fur, her pointed face. Watching her, I thought how maybe Connor hadn’t left me. Because maybe, just by coming home and being with my family, by not being so sick anymore, so blue inside, maybe I had left Connor. He could feel that way. That he was the one who had been left behind.
That’s when I decided I would try to find him. I would find Connor the way Connor had found me.