Sleeps with Dogs (16 page)

Money entirely aside, I kept up the overnights when the request arose because I couldn't abandon Felicity entirely. For better or worse, she was subject to owners who addressed her desire to munch other dogs to death by trussing her up and attempting to shock her into submission. I hoped, perhaps foolishly, that my love for her might in some small way offset the trauma of their approach. Sad as it was, she was the closest thing I had to a friend at that point, and I knew I'd miss her too much if I quit the client altogether.

The Benjamins enrolled her in a highly reputable—and appropriately expensive—training program for aggressive dogs. It was with an unbecoming sense of schadenfreude that I learned Felicity took off after another dog at one of the classes and pulled Mrs. Benjamin down, dragging her for a short distance and cracking two of her ribs in the process. Apparently she wasn't alpha female enough for Felicity either.

After that accident, she seemed to concede that Felicity's previous transgressions weren't my fault. She never said as much, but the rapport between us became markedly less chilly. I liked to think that she understood that no one—neither she nor I nor anyone else—could be expected to easily bring to heel an enraged eighty-pound dog that, despite her bedroom eyes and propensity for spooning, was still an animal. With all the accompanying natural instincts for hunting and establishing dominance. And resisting electrocution.

Perhaps, and this was pushing my luck, she finally understood that Felicity couldn't be controlled. Not by anyone of normal strength and a reasonable aversion to canine torture. If nothing else, we had something in common; we were both victims of Felicity, and her insatiable penchant for mayhem. And we both loved that dog immeasurably, no matter what harm she did.

In the end, it wasn't an alpha female who changed Felicity at all. It was Tom, my mentor and the one who had introduced me to Felicity and the Benjamins in the first place. He'd walked her long before I ever came on the scene, before the muzzle and the shock collar and our many misadventures together. He, too, believed in the power of love and a soft touch. But unlike me, he put his faith into action and blew us all away with his impossibly quick rehabilitation of our irascible bully.

After mere months under Tom's careful tutelage—without the use of a choke or pinch collar, and certainly not the shock collar,
or any other form of negative reinforcement—Felicity was riding in his van with other dogs and romping about out on leash- and violence-free group walks. This, the same dog who had nearly killed a puppy, muzzle-jumped an innocent retriever, and mangled her owner's rib cage.

Thrilled as I was by this transformation, I'd be a big liar not to admit that I wished it had been me who brought our girl back from the dark side. I had the pure, unadulterated desire to make her happy. But actually achieving that required skills I simply didn't possess. At least not yet. The question was whether I could learn to be as assertive as I needed to be. And whether I could learn fast enough. My success in this line of work depended on it. While I wasn't yet an old dog, per se, it was a hell of trick for me to pick up after so many years of being carefully and comfortably submissive.

The alpha in me, it seemed, remained ever elusive, both in matters professional
and
personal.

 

To: “Sis”

Subject: Pizza-face thanks you

Sister mine,

I got my first shipment of Proactiv today. Thank you for this! My face is just too awful to bear—I can't even touch it, it's so bad. Truly a pizza face. Until the medication works its magic, I am thinking about wearing one of those
Phantom of the Opera
masks—except I think my jaw would still be exposed. Maybe a traditional paper sack would work best? I promise I'll pay you back. Do you think I am allergic to dog saliva? I'm probably allergic to having no money. Maybe the pharmacist could prescribe me a roll of twenties . . . I'm going to look into it.

Lindsey

CHAPTER SEVEN

Desperate Measures

M
y cell phone's musical ringtone jarred me from sleep. Cheerful as it might have sounded to the untrained ear, it had started inciting in me a physical response. A tensing, or a bracing, in recognition that there could be nothing but bad news on the line. This was likely due to the fact that for every kindly call I got from a family member or, even more rarely, an old friend, there were dozens coming in concerning this dog or that appointment that required quick thinking, flexibility, and light-on-my-feet troubleshooting. Hence my Pavlovian response to the ringing phone.

Considering that the sun was barely up and I'd been fast asleep, I was hardly primed for any feats of problem-solving prowess. Before answering the incoming call, I cleared my throat hard, giving my voice a few practice runs. I always sound phlegmy and hung-over in the morning, whether that's actually the case or not. Either way, I didn't need to give my clients the impression that I was
answering the phone in bed, still half-asleep. Even though I was, on both counts. I didn't want the person on the other end of the line to free associate toward unbrushed teeth and rumpled pajamas.

“
Uhhhahhheeeeaaaaooooo
.” I cleared my throat again. “Good morning. Good MORNing!” I flipped open my phone.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, hi! It's Sally, Tucker and Abbie's mom.”

Their puppy profiles popped into my head automatically.
Tucker and Abbie, Border collies. She's purebred; he's a mix. She's high-strung; he's just hyper.

“Sally, hi!”

“Sorry to call so early. I need to cancel Tucker and Abbie's walk today. By the time I remembered I should call you last night, it was way too late. I'll pay for the late cancellation.”

“It's okay! No worries.” I was way too nice. Cancellations were a pain and could wreak havoc on a carefully scheduled day of visits, but it was pretty cool when they were late enough to warrant payment. I felt bad enforcing the penalty, though, and rarely held my clients to it out of sheer codependency. Especially in this case, when Abbie and Tucker were my first visits of the day and didn't throw much else off schedule.

“Abbie's had a terrible accident. She jumped out of the living room window yesterday before I got home from work. I found the screen popped out, and Abbie was down on the patio just covered in blood. Even after the stitches and medication, she's in pretty bad shape, so I'm going to take her in to work with me for the rest of the week.”

My prior experience with animal suicide was limited. When I was a baby, the family dog chewed all her fur off in a gruesome reaction to her extreme flea allergies. Dinah, hairless and grotesque to behold and still in itchy agony, no doubt, was euthanized soon after.
More recently, I returned home to the apartment in Berkeley and found my $2 goldfish, Chubs, lying on my bookcase, his dried-out gills still twitching. I put him back in the water, but he was a floater within minutes. I wouldn't classify either of these as attempts at suicide, although I guess my fish came much closer than our poor, tormented dog. I couldn't rightly say what was going through his fishy little mind when he jumped the bowl. Was it an accident? The result of overzealous exercise?

Luckily, Abbie's leap from the second-story window hadn't been fatal. Sally spared no detail in recounting Abbie's fractured rib and a large gash in her left rear haunch from hitting the downspout in the fall.

I was still trying to envision how this would have been possible. Sally's living room did have floor-to-ceiling windows, and I supposed, with the sash raised, it was of a height for a dog to leap out—screen or no screen. But what an odd sequence of events. I couldn't really wrap my brain around what Abbie's frame of mind must have been to do such a thing. It didn't seem possible that she'd inadvertently fall over the lip of the window and break through the screen. She and Tucker would have had to be playing one hell of a game of chase for her to accidentally catapult herself that hard and that far. I was starting to see the practicality of keeping a nanny cam after all; many a mystery might be solved with the help of a live feed, documenting the events of the dogs' every day.

“Abbie's vet upped her Clomicalm and added a prescription for Deramaxx for the pain, as well as a sedative if she goes into panic mode. I'm worried about Tucker as well—being alone in the house is going to be distressing for him as long as Abbie is coming to work with me. Let's touch base after his walks and stay in communication about his spirits, okay?”

Had I been more conscientious, or more awake, I would have
pulled the dogs' file from my cabinet and recorded Abbie's medication names and the prescribed amounts, along with her injuries and the implications for healing. For Tucker's “extra emotional support,” I was making a mental note to give him some additional turkey treats and plenty of vigorous scratches under his collar. I'd worry about Abbie's pharmacopoeia when the time came. She'd be with Sally for long enough that her regimen of medications would likely change before she came under my care anyway. For now, I was happy to let Sally lead the suicide watch.

Of the two dogs, Tucker was a Border collie mix, where Abbie was of purebred provenance. I attributed Tucker's slightly reduced levels of crazy to this nuanced difference. He was still arguably hyper, but it didn't verge on unpredictably neurotic like Abbie's temperament could. I never imagined she was capable of self-harm, though, and her desperate leap left me not just surprised but also feeling very sorry for the poor girl. She was clearly suffering more than anyone knew.

With the first appointment of the day canceled and my alarm set to go off in over an hour, I flipped my drool-dampened pillow, curled into a ball, and drifted back to sleep.

I was noticing that many of my clients' dogs seemed to require, and certainly received, an inordinate amount of medical attention. These two were no exception. Just days before, Tucker had chipped a front tooth—how, I couldn't say—and Sally had it capped.

I hadn't been present for the chipping or the capping, but, in Sally's note to me following his dental procedure, she warned me that his anesthetic might not have entirely worn off and that I might keep him on-leash for the walk in case he was woozy. She went on about how impressed she was with the job they'd done, and how affordable it was thanks to Tucker's dental coverage. I was in awe that Tucker even had dental coverage. I could have used some of
that, as I was entirely without health insurance of any kind since graduating from college the year before.

This was one of the very few lies that I had ever told my parents, and I knew it was a biggie. Not just because they wanted me to be well cared for, but because a medical emergency without any kind of insurance could be financially ruinous. I wasn't just gambling with my health; I was playing fast and loose with their savings. I was learning, too, that working with occasionally aggressive dogs didn't exactly reduce my chances of having an accident that would require medical attention.

Uneasy as I was with untruths when it came to my parents, who truly deserved nothing but the best and most honest communication from me, I avoided the topic of my health as assiduously as I could. Unfortunately for me, it was one of my mother's favorite means of checking up on me. She was forever asking how I was feeling and was I coming down with something? Was I sleeping enough? Eating enough? I tried not to clear my throat too often or sniff too loudly lest she jump to the conclusion that I had a cold coming on.

Whether or not this was the cause for my mother's near-constant concerns about my health, I don't know, but I'd been on antidepressants since the summer after my sophomore year of college. My nervous breakdown would have been, well, depressing, if the resulting prescription hadn't made such a miraculous difference in me.

I'd planned to spend the summer months as a counselor at the Quaker farm camp I'd attended as a child. When I arrived and started orientation prior to the campers' arrival, something about returning as an almost-adult to such a significant place from my easy and innocent youth, and assuming so much responsibility for these contemporary versions of little me, broke the barrier that had held my long-ignored depression at bay.

Instead of spending those long sunny days guiding kids in cow-milking and berry-picking, mud-wrestling and quiet contemplation, I returned home for an alternate summer filled with talk therapy and a new prescription for antianxiety meds. It was my good fortune that the camp director had long suffered from bipolar disorder and was exceedingly understanding in her acceptance of my sudden and inconvenient resignation.