The Dog I Loved Read online

  Time was measured out in paroles and release dates. My first cellmate, Treena, fulfilled her sentence and vanished. A new inmate replaced her, and I claimed the lower bunk and warned her off trespassing into my territory. A week later, she managed to hang herself in the shower room. The next inmate to bunk with me was a repeat offender, and I was scared back onto the top bunk.

  The one day that had some variation in it for me was Sunday. Out of a deep-seated need to feel normal, I attended the nondenominational service in the chapel. And then I stood in line for a turn at the rank of phones. Even though I knew that it was no longer true, I pictured my mother, still in her church dress, apron tied over it, getting Sunday dinner into the oven. I pictured her in our kitchen, an imagined summer sun warming the pale yellow linoleum, even if it was actually snowing outside, the wet snow against the windows further obscuring any natural light where I stood in my fluorescent world. I just wanted to hear her voice, to ask after everyone. And, every Sunday, the phone went unanswered.

  Meghan

  In the service they had called her—ostensibly behind her back—“Captain Buster.” Meaning ballbuster. Meaning she was as hard on them as she was on herself. It was a sweet play on her actual name, Custer, and far better than the comparison to her unrelated namesake, George, of Little Bighorn fame. Capt. Meghan Custer had no particular ambition to become a general, and certainly not to annihilate Native Americans. Her main desire was to keep her soldiers out of harm’s way, conduct whatever mission they had been assigned, and get them all back home safely. Home being an FOB, forward operating base, nestled in some godforsaken chunk of Iraq or Afghanistan. Three tours, and she was only thirty-five. No boyfriend back home, certainly not children. She bled for those women in her unit who kept up brave faces as they Skyped with their children, blew kisses to their babies. She understood the keen desire to have family back home praying for you every day, someone whose image you kept in mind as you “fought for freedom,” but in some ways she saw it as indulgent selfishness.

  Besides her parents, she had left no one behind except a couple of cousins and a jingoistic uncle whose pickup truck sported a pair of snapping flags, Old Glory and the black MIA/POW flag. He was her father’s older brother, and his war, like her dad’s, had been Vietnam. Where her dad’s experience had led to a fifteen-year career in the army after the war’s end, an honorable discharge, and putting it all behind him, her uncle’s war had ended in alcoholism and a constant need to keep that war’s failure front and center in his politics. When Meghan sat with him in his double-wide trailer, he told her that he was proud of her. And, especially, that her dad was proud that she was picking up his sword; the tacit suggestion that it was her late brother, Mark, who had been expected to carry on the military tradition in the Custer family, but she would do. Meghan didn’t quite agree. She knew that neither one of her parents was particularly pleased with her having chosen to follow in her father’s footsteps.

  Now she leaves only tread marks in the dirt. No footsteps ever again.

  * * *

  The only thing that helped was a little pill, slightly ovoid in shape, a miracle of science in the battle against chronic pain. In another century, Meghan imagined, she would have had to find a Chinese opium parlor in order to find relief from the tidal pain in her back, rising and falling almost as if it were directed by the moon. She wondered if opium parlors ever had handicap-accessible entries. She wished that the permanent numbness of the scars on her face would migrate to the division in her spine where pain sat upon the blank space where her legs felt nothing at all. She could stick a pin in her thigh and feel nothing; she could pinch her face where the grafts were shiny with a combination of man-made material and human-grown skin and feel only the pressure.

  The VA doc was certainly willing to prescribe the little pills, with a mild and perfunctory caution not to abuse them. His smile, knowing. Knowing that her self-control was blown away as much as her usefulness to the army. Honorable discharge. Purple Heart. Big deal. Done and sprung. She far more valued the tiny lapel pin depicting the emblem of the Cavalry, her division, that her father had pinned to her collar that overcast summer day when she’d reported for basic training. It was his. And having it meant the world. Having it meant that her father, although initially opposed to the idea of his daughter becoming a career soldier, was proud of her choice. Not once did he mention that he’d always expected to pin this on Mark’s uniform.

  Meghan pushed her chair away from the dorm-size refrigerator, where a bottle of water cooled. Everything in this halfway house of a rehabilitation center was set low for people like her. She knew that outside, where she was supposed to be after today, she would be reaching and looking up like a five-year-old in a grown-up’s world for the rest of her life. Everyone in her life would have to bend down to look her in the eye.

  “You’re ready, Meghan,” the occupational therapist had assured her, pleased with how skillfully Meghan used her modified utensils. Pleased with the way she could maneuver from wheelchair to desk chair, to toilet, to bed using the slant board. How clever she’d become in protecting nerveless feet from banging against doorjambs.

  Tomorrow she would be released to move back in with her parents. Thirty-five years old, consigned to being dependent upon two late-middle-aged people working through their own miseries. Her mother suffered from arthritis. Her dad had high blood pressure. How was it fair to thrust a disabled daughter back into their lives? She should be taking care of them. Hadn’t they suffered enough? First, her older brother, Mark, pride of the Custers, hope of the family, the one actually meant to follow in Dad’s footsteps, was killed by a teenaged drunk driver in a car wreck the day before his high school graduation. Now she was wrecked. Her mother put on this sad, brave face every time she came to visit, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down and remind Meghan of what had happened, as if smiling and gossiping about neighbors would override the fact that they were in a hospital, not a city park. Her dad ran around making sure that everyone was taking better care of her than of anyone else in this godforsaken museum of wounded warriors; asserting his paternal powers, believing that a captaincy now thirty years out-of-date gave him the authority. How was she going to live with this day after day?

  The pill went down. Meghan pushed herself away from the fridge, covered her lap with the handmade lap rug that her mother’s next-door neighbor had crocheted. It was an ugly thing, pink and green, in some homage to Lilly Pulitzer. Floppy crocheted blooms stuck out of it, catching on everything. But she could hide her damaged hand under it. Meghan waited for the pill to take effect. They’d be here soon.

  * * *

  “We got it for a steal.” Meghan’s dad stood beside the white conversion van, holding out his arms as if he were some kind of American Dad car salesman. Meghan half-listened to him crowing about features and accessories, all of which seemed more designed for adventurous campers than a chick in a wheelchair who couldn’t get into the driver’s seat. The point of the van wasn’t her freedom; it was their ability to transport her. It was a glorified ambulance. The good news? The windows were tinted, so no one would be able to see her face.

  Dad pressed a button and a flat ramp lowered itself to the ground. Mom literally applauded the moment it was level with the sidewalk cut. Meghan felt her mother grasp the chair handles. “No. I’ll do it.” She hadn’t yet “graduated” to a motorized wheelchair, so pushing the chair was all manual effort. Meghan’s physical therapist had spent months working on Meghan’s upper body, promising that she’d come out of the rehab hospital able to get herself around. The day before, the therapist had given Meghan a pair of fingerless gloves like the kind weight lifters used. “To prevent blisters. Pavement is a lot harder to travel on than linoleum.”

  “Too late.” Meghan had held up her scarred hand. “I don’t even feel them. But thanks. This will keep them from scaring any little kids. Unlike my face.”

  This grievance was not a new one to the therapist. It had become
a daily complaint and one that the physical therapist had learned to ignore rather than encourage. “I’ll see you next week,” she’d said, referring to a house-call appointment. She hadn’t even waited till Meghan worked her way out of the room, new gloves still sitting on her lap, before turning her attention to a incoming patient.

  Once Meghan was in the van, her chair tethered down, her dad suggested a celebratory lunch out. It had been more than two years from the incident in Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany and then a series of facilities until her transfer back here to her parents’ home in Florida. In all that time, Meghan had scarcely breathed fresh air, only when transported from one VA hospital to another; then to this rehab hospital where she’d lived, yes, lived, for five months. The brief time on the sidewalk before being lifted into the van was as close as she’d come to being outside, and now the van was filled with the air conditioner pumping out against the summer heat. Not air, some false equivalent to air. She shivered. “I’d rather just go home.” She imagined that she could get to the deck, get through the slider, sit in the sun, flaunt the advice against direct sunlight on her scars and hope that the heat would remind her of in-country, of being with her troops. Of being a soldier.

  The wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the sliding door to the lanai. It was the one door in their tiny house that they hadn’t thought to enlarge. “You know, we’ve been talking about putting in a French door there,” her dad said, and she shook her head, saying, “Don’t worry about it.” Meghan could see the scars of unpainted Sheetrock revealing where the opening to her bedroom, once the guest room, had been made larger, and where the doorway to the downstairs bathroom had been retrofitted. Both doors had paddle handles—no need for turning a knob. Except that she couldn’t close the door behind her. “Mom! Can you close the door?”

  “Do you want some help, honey?”

  “I can manage.” First thing they’d taught her in rehab: how to lift herself from chair to toilet. Unfortunately, in this house, the toilet wasn’t situated in a convenient way and the effort ended up humiliating her.

  That evening, they sat out on the lanai, watching a lightning storm approach. Her dad had lifted her out of her chair and her mother had folded it so that they could get her and her chair out here. Meghan could feel how the strain of lifting her hurt her father, who’d had a bad back for years. He certainly couldn’t do that on a regular basis. No one spoke, and the weight of failure bore down on all three.

  Rosie

  LaShonda Greene, tiny, pretty, hard-wired to be belligerent. Incredibly smart. In another life, under wildly different circumstances, she would have been valedictorian at my college. She would have become a world leader. Instead, she was serving eighteen to twenty-five years for using that intelligence to rob a bank. Unfortunately, as she told me, despite meticulous planning, a guard was shot dead and that was a game changer. “He shouldn’t have gotten all hero on us. Shouldn’t have thought he was some kind of Lone Ranger. Poor fella. What did he care if we took that money? They weren’t gonna pay him no prize money for stoppin’ us.” LaShonda’s eyes were a preternatural green, more big cat than human. Like a cat’s eyes, they glittered in the gray light of the overhead fluorescents, giving her a sparkle better suited to a fly girl than a felon. “Waste of life.”

  “Do you regret it? That he died?” I meant was she sorry that she and her boyfriend caused his death. There had been no intention of killing the man; it was just an unfortunate outcome. Like my killing Charles.

  LaShonda shrugged. “It was his own fault, you know. I mean, I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might’ve if Deon had given me the gun like I told him to. So, I guess I’m lucky. Accessory, not killer. But, yeah, maybe I do feel a little bad about how things turned out. He was one of those old guys, probably happy to have this shit job standin’ on his feet all day, nobody talkin’ to him. Too poor to retire.”

  LaShonda and I worked together in the prison laundry and had struck up a casual friendship folding sheets together. As prison jobs go, it wasn’t the worst. At least at the end of the shift you had something to show for the time spent. And it smelled good. I think my pay was maybe ten cents an hour, and it went toward my commissary account, so that I could buy the little things that make prison life livable: a candy bar now and then, ramen noodles, prison-approved dental floss. Nasty old-fashioned sanitary pads that made me feel like I was back in diapers. Real luxuries. Unlike some of my compatriots, I didn’t receive funds from anyone on the outside to supplement my commissary account. No one even sent a letter.

  “What about you?” LaShonda snapped a towel; it crackled with static. “You care that he died, or you care more you got caught?”

  “It was an accident. I shouldn’t be in here.”

  LaShonda laughed, yanked another hot towel out of the massive dryer, and folded it. “That’s what we all say.”

  “But it’s true. I didn’t see him.” Blinded by angry tears, I didn’t see him. “I wasn’t used to the car.”

  “Then why you here? Sounds like a tragic accident.”

  “His mother hates me.”

  “Man, if my man’s mother hated me that much, I’da been in here a lot sooner.”

  “She’s got powerful friends.”

  “Couldn’t you get a better lawyer?”

  “I got a public defender.”

  LaShonda laid the folded towel on the pile and gave me a look of absolute skepticism. “No way. You don’t look like the type that goes through the system. No offense.”

  “None taken. I am the type that goes through the system. I haven’t got any money. My family hasn’t got any money.” I didn’t add that I was alienated from my family. The Collins family doesn’t take disloyalty well. We call it “burning bridges.”

  “So your PD was as good as mine?”

  “Probably worse. She’d been a PD most of her career, so she no longer cared; she was too jaded to feel like she could make a difference anymore. She was lazy. More than once I was pretty sure she was high.”

  “Yeah, sounds like mine.” LaShonda giggled. “You’re better off with some fresh-out-of-law-school kid, stars in her eyes, wavin’ her Mount Blank pen like a sword, defendin’ the rights of the innocent. Thinkin’ she’s makin’ a difference.”

  I smiled at LaShonda’s Montblanc reference. My father would have liked her. He liked the unpretentious of the world.

  Putting on airs is how my mother saw it. My new habits. Like preferring Starbucks to Dunkin’ Donuts. Buying wine by vintner instead of the two-for-ten kind at the local bottle shop. Disdaining chuck roast and choosing to have barely singed sirloin. I’d come home from my Seven Sisters college ready to go back to my plebeian life. Indeed, I had fitted right back in, leaving the thrift store chic in my closet and going back to Target and Old Navy for my clothes. I worked at that fancy-schmancy coffee bar and dreamed of finding a job that would put me on the path to getting my own place, but I imagined it somewhere in the old neighborhood, or maybe Somerville, where all the other recent college grads and twentysomethings were making their way in the world. I fell in with my old friends, and we haunted the karaoke bars and flirted with boys who could pass for my brothers. I made sure that Teddy had company in that long hour before my mother came home from work to start dinner and my father banged through the front door after a “pop” with the boys. We’d play endless games of Scrabble, with me placing his tiles on the board where he directed me. Teddy had a good vocabulary, reading being one of the things he could do independently with what motion he had in his left hand. Thank goodness for e-readers.

  And then Charles came into my life, and, like Henry Higgins, he looked at me as his Eliza Doolittle. I was his project.

  * * *

  It wasn’t a whirlwind romance, although spring did seem to come earlier that year. Charles inched his way into my life, almost teasingly. A call, a text. Silence. A midwinter ski trip. Two weeks of “too busy to get together.” A late-winter weekend in Saint Thomas. First-class flig
ht and accommodations; inseparable for three whole days and then he was off to some business meeting in Chicago and I didn’t hear anything. It was all right. I wasn’t losing my heart to him. At least I didn’t think so. Nonetheless, by May I began to think that maybe he ought to meet my parents. His mother lived in New York, and we hadn’t yet reached the stage of making a special trip to meet her, at least that’s what he implied when I asked, but my family was within a few miles of where we met. A zip over the Zakim Bridge, turn right off the Somerville exit, and there we were.

  As I had learned to do in college, I always referred to my neighborhood by its proper name, Charlestown, because that had more cachet. So when I finally confessed to Charles that I was from the poor side of town, he was mildly appalled. After that, the closest Charles came to my neighborhood was when he sent an Uber to collect me for a Friday-night date. A fact duly noted by my mother, who wondered aloud why if he was such a gentleman he wouldn’t collect me himself, not send a taxi.

  “He’s downtown already, so why would he come here to go back there? And it’s an Uber.”

  “He’s paid someone to pick you up. It’s a taxi.”

  Teddy came into the dining room in his clunky wheelchair. “Ma, give Rosie a break. At least he’s not making her pay for it.” He docked his chair at his place at the dining room table. Mom set down a plate of pasta in front of him.