Dog Medicine (14 page)

A
UGUST
1996

The final day's drive felt quick. We'd left Sun Valley and drove almost eight hours before spending the night near Moses Lake, Washington. We woke the next morning, excited because it was only three more hours to Seattle. We tumbled across the Columbia River at ten o'clock, the loping hills and coming mountains promising something different. I felt like a homing pigeon following a magnetic field. Something already felt right about Seattle, like it would go easier on me than New York.

We were quiet as we peaked the evergreen-laden mountains, speeding our way through Snoqualmie Pass. The impossible green richness of the hills seemed to fill me with hope, like the greener the world became, the happier I felt. With all that rain in Seattle, I thought, I'm going to be ecstatic.

On the drive, at rest stops, I carried Bunker to pee. He didn't seem unhappy, but he was not his usual energetic, goofy self. Still, his mobility seemed to slowly improve with each stop. It seemed fortuitous that yesterday and most of today, he was required to stay in his crate and rest except for occasional pit stops.

Three hours later we climbed my aunt's narrow two-lane road canopied by enormous pines and flanked by ferns of prehistoric proportions. I noticed that my palms were sweating. When we pulled up to Aurora's house, the front door was wide open. My foot was on the driveway before the car was completely stopped. We'd made it. An orange and white cat curled around the doorframe, then sped under a bush when Brandy the Brittany spaniel
careened through the doorway, barreling, tail twirling, toward our car. My fingers jangled nervous energy as I watched the door for my aunt. She didn't appear, so I greeted the animals first, a much less formidable task. I loved my aunt Aurora, but greeting anyone was difficult for me: the sudden rush of emotion, the hugs, the high-pitched hellos. My upper lip would sweat; my ears would ring.

I lifted Bunker out of his crate and as soon as his paws hit the ground, it was clear he was feeling better. He greeted Brandy with his body erect, his tail a circling flag. Then four doggie elbows down on the ground and they were off, playing like old friends. They chased each other in the front yard and Bunker paused hastily to pee, still a puppy that didn't lift his leg.

“I wonder where Aurora is,” my mom said. “The door's open. Aurora!” she yelled. The house was a fifties-era ranch built into a gentle hill on a quiet street. On clear days, the porch off the living room boasted views of the Cascade Mountains. It was one of those houses that look like they'd just grown out of the ground—all rock and wood and green plants. Inside, it smelled musty, like animals, a little bit like a barn: hay and feed and animal hair.

“I'm here!” came a voice from inside the darkened doorway. It was a sunny day in Seattle. The clerk at the gas station east of Snoqualmie had joked that we were going to arrive just in time for Seattle's three days of summer. Aurora appeared in the doorway, her hair in an orange bandanna, hands in green garden gloves blackened with dirt. There was a smear of soil on her forehead. She gave us a closed-mouth, head-tilted smile and opened her arms. I hugged her awkwardly. I felt light-headed so sat down on a concrete bench next to a fountain that was caked with bright-green algae. Brandy trotted up to the fountain and slurped some murky water.

“Is that okay?” I asked, imagining dirt and grime sliding down his gullet.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Good minerals in there.” She peeled off her gloves and looked at me. I thought about Aurora as a therapist, transported her to my own therapist's chair. What would she say about what a mess I'd been?

Mom and I settled into the guest room, then ate a quiet dinner with Aurora, my uncle Bob, and their two daughters, one in middle school and one in high school. I loved this family, always had. They felt solid. Aurora seemed to genuinely listen to her kids. I watched as she spoke to them in a language that seemed all their own. I could tell that they talked a lot. My uncle Bob was a soft-spoken former hippie, a thoughtful man. Watching them made me feel like an alien coming to a lovely new planet, one where dad came home at the same time every night, where mom was emotionally involved with her kids, where the kids didn't fight to the death.

It was my mom who first said, “Aurora, you're going to have to be Julie's surrogate mother while she's living here.” I beamed at this idea. If my mom felt threatened by her depressed daughter happily living in her sister's house, she never expressed it. She only showed support, and for that I was grateful.

After a few days at Aurora's, it was time for my mom to fly back to Ohio. Bunker and I drove her to the airport and pulled up to the departures curb. I couldn't imagine the passenger seat without my mom, but she seemed ready to go home. She said she missed Cinder and that Dad had probably eaten peanut butter sandwiches for the entire week she was gone. “That and chocolate chips,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, laughing and opening the car door. I pulled her suitcase out from the back of the truck and put it on the sidewalk. “Let me say good-bye to Bunk first,” she said. She opened the backseat door and hugged him like he was her own son. She whispered something into his ear, held his head with both her hands, and kissed the bridge of his nose.

“I'm gonna miss that dog,” she said.

“Mom,” I said, taking her hands. “I think I'm going to be okay here. I really do. Thank you for everything you've done for me. I love you. So much.”

“You are going to be so happy,” she said. “I just know it.”

“Thank you, Mama,” I said, through the massive lump in my throat. “I love you.”

She hugged me and gave me a quick kiss. “Listen,” she said, holding both my hands. “Let's do the same thing we did when you were away at college. Let's look at the moon. Remember? When you see the moon, know that I'm looking at the same moon you are, no matter where we are. It's the same moon shining on us. Okay?” she said. We'd done this when I spent a semester abroad in Australia while I was in college, and we'd done it when I went to Italy on a high school exchange program. It was my mom's way of connecting us despite any distance. “I'll call you when I get home. Have
fun
, Julie. You're going to do wonderful things.”

With that, she blew me a kiss, turned around, and rushed through the airport's sliding doors. I took a deep breath and walked around my car. I buckled my seat belt as tears came. Big tears. I wiped my eyes, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. I missed my mom terribly already. Then Bunker jumped from the backseat into the passenger seat, opened his mouth and let his long pink tongue dangle carelessly, so I laughed through my tears.

“Okay, buddy,” I said. “I get it. No lingering all sad at the departures curb. Let's get on with it. Here we go.” I put the car in drive, pressed the gas and rested my right hand on Bunker's back as I drove past the city back to Aunt Aurora's house.

A
UGUST
1996

Aurora loved Bunker. She sat down on the ground with him and let his puppy paws climb all over her. She got orange dog hair all over her clothes, let him lick her cheek and sniff her ears with intensity. Animals loved her. They spoke to her in a way I knew well. All my life my mom had suggested that Aurora was a little odd for how much she loved animals, her endless parade of guinea pigs and cats and dogs as a kid. Animals were her childhood solace in a world that made her feel alone and not good enough. Just like me. She was the youngest of three, with two over-achieving sisters. She had a wandering eye as a child and struggled through surgeries and glasses while her older sister, my mother, was the homecoming queen, and her middle sister was the blonde athlete of the family. I remember hearing jokes about how she was supposed to be a boy. Part of her always felt she'd failed before she was even born, her father's last failed attempt at a son.

I think Bunker sensed Aurora's deep connection to animals and the natural world. He listened intently to her, loved her with a heart-crackling clarity that I understood was from the depths, from far, far below what we understand to be visible in this world. The three of us seemed to congregate there.

Those nights at Aurora's, we'd sit on the couch flanked by cats and dogs, her rabbit Radar sleeping soundly on her chest. We'd just be together. I got to feel a different kind of mothering. It wasn't better than my mom's—just more my frequency. Like Seattle. A better-fitting longitude. We spent time together with
no small talk. Only real talk. Emotions were not a taboo subject in this house. In fact, they were almost always the topic of conversation. Aurora told me, for the first time, that depression and alcoholism ran in my family. I learned that everyone knew my immediate family's problems, despite no one's ever mentioning them to me. I felt a reckoning, a peace. Maybe I wasn't so weak and crazy after all.

Melissa and I connected on the phone and made plans to have dinner with the guys, the other two soon-to-be roommates who also were friends from high school in California. We all went to different colleges and graduated in 1995. One guy was in graduate school and the other was working downtown at a film company.

I talked to the grad-school guy on the phone to plan our first meeting. I told him I'd pick him up outside his building on the University of Washington's campus. He said his name was Greg and that he'd be the guy in the plaid shirt waiting on Fifteenth Avenue. “What color plaid?” I asked.

“Well, let me see.” I could hear by his voice that he was looking down at his chest. “Red, yellow, blue, green, a little bit of, I don't know, purple?” he said.

“Any more colors?” I said. “Because that'll make it much more specific.”

He laughed. I bit my nails sitting on Aurora's carpeted living room stairs. She stood in the kitchen, cooking pasta for her daughters. The bunny scratched his ear just outside the sliding glass door. Bunker slept at my feet. And I had just made a boy laugh.

Not long after my mom left, the infamous Seattle clouds crept in. Days and days of gray-white skies, cool temperatures, and intermittent drizzle. But the gray came as a surprising comfort to me. Seattle felt like a gentle friend, taking me in her arms, holding me with her dim light, making my re-entry into the world a quiet, slow, easy one. I loved the clouds. They made me feel as if a
blanket were wrapped around me. It wasn't always sunny all the time, and that was okay. A place can still be beautiful, breathtaking even, when it's gray and damp. The flourishing plants, the animals thriving there, they all spoke so much more than the sun could. Like the roots of a tree, hidden underground and more elaborate and astounding than we would ever know.

A
UGUST
1996

On a Friday afternoon, I kissed Bunker good-bye, left Aunt Aurora's house, and drove to the University of Washington to pick up Greg. The housemates were meeting for the first time, gathering at a pub for beer and burgers. I pulled up to the sidewalk at the university and spotted him. The plaid shirt was indeed just about every color but pink and I chuckled as he circled my car and opened the passenger door.

“Sounds like you need new brakes,” he said. “I'm Greg.” He was right. The brakes on my truck had been squeaking since Missouri.

“I know,” I said. “Good thing I made it cross-country. I'm Julie.” We shook hands. I laughed a little; he was cute. Melissa was not exaggerating when she said he had the bluest eyes she'd ever seen. He had dark hair, beautiful full lips, and black lashes that made his eyes stand out like lit-from-behind gemstones. I wanted to keep looking at him, but I forced myself to watch the road. “This is weird,” I said, pushing my hair behind my ear and flicking the turn signal. “It's like we're all on a blind roommates date.” He laughed and adjusted his backpack between his legs.

“That's because we kind of are,” he said, smiling, confident. We chatted for the rest of the drive about what he was studying (molecular biology, whatever that is), and where he grew up (Northern California). I told him about my year in New York and about how I was looking forward to living in a real house
with a real yard because I had a dog. A great dog. A dog he would love. “Can't wait to meet him,” he said. “I really wanted to get a dog, but I'm at the lab too much, so this works out perfectly.”

Driving down from Aurora's house, I had contemplated my last few months: the depression, the medication and therapy, Bunker's companionship giving me enough courage to try something new. I vacillated between hope and dread; sure one minute that the housemates would love me, sure the next that we'd hate each other and I'd be forced to crawl back to Ohio defeated again. But when I met Greg, there was a simple calm, like a leaf floating to the ground, or maybe rather an enormous 767 landing with a barely perceptible touch. There was a peace about him, a surefootedness that I found comforting. I knew we would be friends.

We parked and met Melissa outside the pub. I hadn't seen her in a few years and she looked fantastic; slim with her normally bobbed hair lopped into a pixie cut. She introduced me to our other roommate, Chris, a tall Nordic-looking guy who hugged me tight upon our meeting. The four of us slid into a booth made of dark wood, sour with the smell of old beer. Everyone seemed a little nervous and I wondered how Bunker was doing without me. My mind wandered to various scenarios: my cousins accidentally letting him out the front door, him getting hit by a car, a horrific scene looping through my mind's eye. I tried to fight the thoughts away and listen to my new housemates. Melissa ordered four glasses and a pitcher, then poured us each a golden-brown beer. She held up her glass. “Here's to our new place,” Melissa said. “It's going to be awesome.”

We drank and talked about our first years out of college. Melissa had lived in an apartment by herself. Greg too. Greg had gone to Princeton and was in his first year of grad school. Chris had gone to Davidson, graduated, and spent a year traveling in Africa. He gestured wildly with his hands when he spoke and
laughed from deep in his belly. I told them I had spent the year in Manhattan but realized East Coast big-city life wasn't for me. Greg said he'd decided that living alone wasn't for him, that he was excited to have roommates. Chris said living in Kenya had changed his life forever.

They asked about my road trip, and as I spoke, I felt that we were like four pegs in a board, all sliding into place. Gathered around that dented, sticky table, I don't think I was the only one who felt a surge of hope, as if somehow the four of us would create our own makeshift family, a family of friends. They asked about Bunker and I told them what a mellow puppy he was, how he would love all of them. They all responded with such eager enthusiasm about meeting him that tears crept to my eyes. It was both their openness and kindness, but also their seeming immediate acceptance of me that moved me so deeply. That, and this was my first real afternoon being away from Bunker. I missed him terribly. Not having him next to me left me feeling untethered. I tried not to think about how much time we'd spend apart once I found my first job, which had to happen soon. My bank account was running low.

We said good-bye on the sidewalk outside of the pub and planned our move-in for one week later. Melissa gave me the address of the house they'd found so that I could swing by and check it out. She said it was in Queen Anne, and that it was beautiful. It had a huge yard we could landscape however we wanted, four separate bedrooms, two big bathrooms, and a deck off the kitchen and dining room that had incredible views of downtown Seattle and Mount Rainier. The rent was only $400 per person per month. We'd gotten approved for the property after Chris's mom wrote a letter to the landlord saying what wonderful, upstanding, and responsible young people we were. I asked if it mattered that I didn't have a job yet and Melissa said the landlord had never asked. “Sucker!” she said. “Who cares anyway? We got
the place!” I hugged her good-bye and walked to my car, realizing as I drove back to Aunt Aurora's that I was smiling.

Bunker greeted me at the door with his happy dance, his body bending and wiggling wildly. I held his head in my hands, inhaled his beautiful puppy breath, kissed his fur, and whispered, “We're going to be okay, buddy.”