The Dog I Didn’t Want

It’s strange how I knew that I would hang on to her.  The animal shelter lady had sent me a sympathetic e-mail not long after the accident–one of many emails, cards, and letters I opened in an unreasoning haze, hoping to read the words which could lighten my devastation.  Her message was kind, but also practical, “If you don’t want to keep Annabelle, we can take her back.”

I am extremely embarrassed to admit this, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I had returned a shelter dog to store.  That last fall, my husband and I had brought home a companion for Bruno, our Boxer mix, but she bullied our dog so intensely the first few days that we decided not to keep her.  Little did we know that docile Bruno’s days were numbered, and that he would succumb to cancer just before the New Year.

Not long afterwards, we adopted a big wooly golden retriever, but I was terrified by his brash bouncing across the floor in the path of our six-month-old son.  After a few days, I made my husband turn in this dog as well.  I did not realize how terribly sad he would be about it.  Guilt-stricken, I joined him for a stakeout outside the shelter to see if we could convince the new owners to relinquish him to us. Huddled for warmth in the car, we laughed about our absurd mission as the snowflakes hurtled down.  Unfortunately, our strategy failed.  It appeared that Eli the Dog had already been claimed by more reliable people.

As a result of our wishy-washy behavior, we were effectively blacklisted from our local animal shelter—at least, we thought we were—but I came to the realization that my husband would never be happy without a four-footed companion by his side.  On a sweltering day in June, I fought motion sickness as we rattled over bumpy country roads in pursuit of yet another dog.  She was a mixed-breed loosely identified as a Treeing Walker Coon Hound who had been brought into the shelter pregnant.  The rescue people had already found homes for her nine puppies.  Annabelle was large and gawky; she emanated an oily hound stench and paced restlessly around the kitchen.  Her only virtue appeared to be that she knew how to shake hands.  But we took her home.

I remember pushing the stroller through the park, up the winding hill shrouded with green, while my husband strode along next to me, Annabelle loping just ahead of him.  It was the idyllic kind of setup that I had wistfully envied, wandering through urban parks for years while seeking my fortune as a starving theatre artist: “Look at that lovely young family over there—the sweet young couple with the little baby and the dog.”

Somehow, I had reached the pinnacle of contentment, married to a good man, to a “Joseph” who would teach our son how to sail in a tiny fiberglass boat and to jump the car after I had accidentally left the headlights on.  My child would never know the distress of losing his father at 18, as I had.  Soon, there would be other little ones tottering along in the wake of their big brother—a chaotic parade of Catholic fruitfulness.  Really, putting up with a noisy, stinky hound was a small price to pay, especially if my husband did most of the caretaking work.

One afternoon in late July, after a night of thunderstorms, I took our son to the grocery store.  To my astonishment, the storm had knocked out the power, and none of the refrigerated food was available for purchase.  After a moment of annoyance, I embraced the romance of selecting canned goods and boxes of pasta, pretending I was grocery-shopping by candlelight.

I had never experienced anything like that before, and I looked forward to telling my husband about this adventure after work.  However, he called in the afternoon to ask if he could go out with a friend for a run in his canoe. It looked like a beautiful summer evening, and I didn’t grudge him some free time in the woods.  Instead, I made plans for our son and me to have dinner with my mother.

That evening, he came home from work in a rush, distractedly collecting gear.  “Can you take Annabelle out?” he asked.  As he pulled his truck out of the driveway, I glared at him.  I wanted to head out the door myself, and I wasn’t thrilled to take on extra duties, especially ones pertaining to his dog.  With a very bad grace, I took care of Annabelle, and then headed up to my mother’s house for a few hours before bed.

Around one ‘o’ clock in the morning, a distant tapping wrested me from a deep sleep.  Half-conscious, I recognized the sound of a knock at the door.  Oh, I thought with mild irritation, He’s forgotten his key.  I remember thinking how unlike him that was.  Stumbling out of bed, I descended the stairs and headed for the door.  Framed in the half-moon cutout window was the hat brim of a state trooper.

The last normal night of my life had now ended.

Glassy-eyed, I watched the dawn filter through, lying on my mother-in-law’s couch with my son dozing on a quilt at my feet.  Annabelle curled up on the new pine floor that my husband had installed as a surprise not long before.  I don’t know why I took the dog with me.  It wasn’t as if I were never going to go back home.

When I look back on those first bewildering days of young widowhood, I see a haze of blurs and shadows, each one worse than the one before.  Almost from the beginning I was consumed by a poisonous resentment of those whose lives were still intact.  When two of my sisters took my arms gently to lead me away from the open casket, I submitted quietly, but inwardly I was screaming, “Don’t touch me!”  When my pregnant sister-in-law went into labor right after the funeral luncheon, a relative sadly commented, “One person leaves the world; another comes into it.”  Ripe to take injury from those who had no such intention, I was better off alone under the deadweight of my grief.  Automatically, I nursed my baby and kept him clean; I showed up for Mass on Sundays but rushed away afterwards, unable to field the compassionate banalities of concerned friends.

When the lady from the shelter emailed me about Annabelle, I didn’t even have to stop and consider my response.  No one, I know, would have blamed me for deciding that I didn’t want a dog right then.  But somehow, I could not give her up.  It felt like a disloyalty to my husband, like getting married again would have been.  Perhaps I just needed something to stay the same when my life had changed so drastically.  Or maybe I just wanted to avoid one more interaction with the human race.

Anyway, a month after we brought her home, I had committed myself, solo, to the care and feeding of a nervy blue tick coon hound.  In actuality, it was some time before Annie came back to our house.  For weeks or months (I don’t actually remember how long it was), my mother-in-law offered to take charge of Annie, protecting her pristine armchair from hound-oils with a heavy blanket.

Eventually, though, we moved the dog back across town.  Regrettably, Annabelle quickly proceeded to embody every disagreeable trait of her breed.  When I took her for a walk in the cemetery, she bounded off and had to be lured back with a smorgasbord of biscuits.  If I took pity on her and offered a belly scratch, she would lie down submissively and enjoy the attention, but the moment that I stopped, she would disappear ungratefully.  She was not a dog that repaid love with love.

Life got more complicated when my son began to gain the use of his legs.  Now, when we went for walks, he would toddle along a pace or two behind me, clutching my hand, while Annabelle would strain ahead on the leash.  I felt like I was being torn in two.  Once again, I had to suppress a scream.

“Scent hounds,” declared a little book that I had picked up from the pile in my mother-in-law’s house, “do not make good pets.”  I laughed bitterly.  It was true.  I knew that Annabelle would be much better off out of the city.  She was a hunting breed after all, even though she would never have tolerated gunshots.  The three-day period surrounding Fourth of July always drove her into a frenzy.  In her more agile years, she would clamber into the bathtub, whimpering, to escape the fireworks.  When it was all over, she would morosely reassume her usual activities as if nothing had happened, and I would heave a little sigh of relief.

Once, Annie took off from my mom’s house and was intercepted by a neighbor before she had time to wend her way back on her own steam.  Not knowing what to do with the dog, the good Samaritan turned her over to a local policeman who gave her biscuits and took her out for a ride in his SUV.  When I met up with him, he showed me pictures he’d taken of her at the station, enthused about what a beautiful dog she was, and hinted that he’d be glad to take her off my hands.  However, I knew I couldn’t take him up on his offer.  It would have been like giving away a member of my family—a stinky, disreputable and obnoxious member of my family, but a necessary one nonetheless.

We have had Annabelle now for about eleven years.  The days have taken on a suspenseful cadence.  Will we wake up to a frantic scratching at the door and an unwelcome puddle on the rug?  Her ritual nighttime bark before bed (turn around three times and curl up in a “C” shape) has metamorphosed into a confusing guessing game.  Is she sounding off because the neighbors are home and she wants to visit?  Does she need to go out…again?  If we ignore her and try to snatch a little more sleep, will we be greeted in the morning by yet another puddle on the rug?  I have had more practice in the virtue of patience while scrubbing stains out of the carpet than I have had since the nights that I was nursing.

My life today is not what I expected it to be, eleven years ago on that memorable stroll through the park.  I do not have that bevy of children, “olive branches around my table,” for which I had hoped, and it pains me to see my son struggling through the loneliness of life without siblings.  We no longer live in the house with the half-moon cutout window, having left there three years ago when I married his stepfather.  Strangely, one of the only constant signs of that vanished life, besides the boy himself, is a stiff-legged, restless senior dog with oily black fur.

A few days ago, on my routine nighttime quest to make sure that the cat has not escaped, I realized that Annabelle was not in her typical corner of the living room.  After checking the basement and the dog bed near the front door, I discovered her curled up on the bedroom floor a few feet from my nightstand.  I reeled in momentary amazement that of all the places in the house she should have chosen to nestle close to me.  It was a moment of unaccountable grace.  I have fought the good fight with this dog—we have nearly finished the race we are destined to run together.  And I can’t help thinking that in her irksome way, Annie appreciates it.