My mother walked beside me, Dog on his leash. She listened to all my surface chatter. She followed my arm with her eyes as I flung it right and flung it left, describing the wonder of the days I was living now. She went to the dinner and the brunch and the tea and the campus walkabout with me, she and Dog, and both nights of the weekend they left me on campus after dinner and drove out to the pets-allowed cheap motel half an hour away.
Sunday morning they left. She put her arms around me and squeezed my shoulders. She said nothing and neither did I. Then she and Dog got back into the truck and drove down from the White Mountains and over the Green Mountains, crossed Lake Champlain and made their way into the Adirondacks, to the house where I used to live but didn’t anymore and never would again.
* * *
I got a ride to the Utica thruway exit for winter break my senior year in college. Tamar was there to pick me up, but Dog wasn’t in the backseat waiting the way he usually was.
“Where’s Dog?”
“He didn’t want to come.”
“Since when? Did you tell him you were coming to pick me up?”
She said nothing. Gave me a look. Tamar was not a believer in explaining to animals what was going on, the way I was. If Dog didn’t feel like a ride, then she wouldn’t press the issue. By the woodstove he would remain, his head resting on that old stuffed monkey.
But when I walked in the door, he struggled up from the rug and the monkey and wobbled toward me. Those were the words: struggled and wobbled. Tamar was turned away from me, shaking the snow off her jacket and scarf.
“Ma,” I said, tried to say, but nothing came out.
Dog had made his way to me but his head was tilted and stayed that way, as if he couldn’t lift it all the way up.
“MA.” That time it came out.
She turned then, and saw me crouched down next to him. Confusion and surprise and then something else flitted over her face and I knew she was suddenly seeing him the way I was, with eyes new to the scene, eyes that hadn’t beheld my dog in four months. She crouched down then too, and we both put our arms around him. The memory of a night the spring of my senior year in high school flooded into my head. I had been out at a party, one of the constant parties that seniors seem to have, the same franticness to all of them, as if time were running out. I came up the dirt driveway late, in my flip-flops. The house was dark. The door was unlocked. No sound from upstairs, where Tamar was either asleep or lying awake silently.
Dog, though. Dog was waiting for me at the door. He wasn’t a barker, just a low rrff once in a while, if an unfamiliar car pulled into the driveway. He pushed his head into my leg, there in the dark kitchen, and I fell onto the floor next to him. I lay down and clutched him as if I were drowning and he was my life preserver. I had missed Asa all night long, missed his presence next to me at the party, and in that moment I missed him with my whole body, aching for him, for the life we had shared, the one he had abandoned for the army, the life I too was about to leave behind.
Once I returned to college after that winter break, Dog took himself out in the woods to die. He had taken to standing by the door, nosing at it, and Tamar would let him out, but when she went to let him back in a few minutes later he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t come when she called either. She went searching for him, in the old storage barn, down the dirt road, in the woods. Each time she found him he would be nearly invisible, a shadow by a dark tree. Each time, she led him back to the house with one hand on his head to encourage him along.
That was the way I imagined it. My mother didn’t use any of those words. Her words were more like He kept wandering away down the dirt road and He wouldn’t come when I called.
“Remember when Tamar called to tell me that Dog had died?” I said to Sunshine and Brown in the car. We were on our way back from DiOrio’s. “He’d died the night before, but she didn’t tell me. You were with me when she finally called the next morning. The next morning!”
Neither of them said anything. I could feel them talking, though, without words, in that way they had. Brown cleared his throat. He was riding shotgun. “Maybe she wasn’t sure how to tell you,” he said.
“Give me a break. ‘Dog died.’ That’s all she had to say. She should have told me right away.”
Sunshine leaned forward from the backseat and put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Clara,” she said. “Remember we told you she used to call us sometimes? That was one of those times.”
“What? Why?”
“She was worried. She didn’t want you to be alone when you found out. She wanted to make sure we were with you when she called. She knew what Dog meant to you.”
But Tamar was my mother. Dog was my dog. Italics scrolled along the bottom of my brain.
“How often did she used to call you guys, anyway?”
“Once in a while. When she was worried about you.”
My mind, with the influx of new information, was adding and subtracting, shaking everything up and redistributing it. Shuffling a deck of memory cards. A Jacob’s ladder, each tile clapping down upon the next. Dominoes. Games of chance and skill barreled their way through my mind, each of them built around the image of my mother on the phone, the heavy old phone in the kitchen at our old house, talking to Sunshine and Brown over the years that I had known them. I pictured the Jeopardy! grid that Brown had printed out for me, back in the cabin, pinned under a shot glass on the kitchen table.
Cans and Jars
Baseball
Breakup with Asa
Choir but No Church
Out-of-State College
Self-Eviction
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
“But I’m her daughter,” I said, as if somehow this would bring insight that had thus far escaped me.
* * *
“Do you know anything about her dreams?” Sunshine said.
“She sleeps okay,” I said. “As far as I know, anyway. Sylvia or whoever’s on duty that night calls me if she gets too agitated.”
“No, the other kind of dreams. Things she wanted to do, places she wanted to go. Is it too late or could we take her somewhere?”
“She told me once she wanted to go to San Francisco.”
My mother had told me this late one night. She always went to bed early, before me, but on this night I went to the kitchen to make some popcorn, and she was sitting at the kitchen table reading something. Number one, she was not a reader, and number two, when she looked up at me her eyes were wet. She was wearing the same pretty white shirt as in the mysterious photo. The shirt I didn’t remember her wearing in later years. The sight of her crying twisted something up in me.
“Ma? What are you reading?”
I pretended I didn’t notice she was crying. Stop crying, Ma. Stop it. She slid the paper, stapled sheets of notebook paper, across the table to me. It was an essay I had written for Great Books. Compare and contrast Virginia Woolf’s dream of a room of her own to a personal dream of your own. Stupid topic. Why was she crying? Stop crying, Ma.
“I didn’t know you wanted to go to Hong Kong,” she said.