your job, Bailey, and you did a good job; you are a good dog, a good dog.”
I had the sense that the nice man was talking about death; there was a feeling of kind finality and peace emanating from him. Then Mom and Grandma and Grandpa and Rick all came in, and they hugged me and said they loved me and told me I was a good dog.
Yet from Mom I felt a tension, a sure sense of something—not danger, exactly, but something I needed to protect her from. I gave her hand a feeble lick and, as the darkness came from within me, I pushed back against it. I had to stay alert; Mom needed me.
The tension seemed to rise after another hour went by, first Grandpa joining in Mom’s mood, then Grandma, and then even Rick, so that just as I felt myself flagging, a new resolve to protect my family from this unknown threat would renew my strength.
And then I heard the boy. “Bailey!” he shouted. He burst into the room and the tension left everyone at once— this, I realized, was what they had been waiting for. Somehow, they’d known the boy was coming.
The boy buried his face in my neck and sobbed. It took everything I had to lift my head up and lick him, to let him know it was all right. I wasn’t afraid.
My breathing turned raspy, and everyone remained with me, holding me. It felt wonderful to receive so much attention, but then a shudder of pain shot through my stomach so sharp I couldn’t help but cry out loud. The nice man came in then, and he had another needle.
“We need to do this now; Bailey shouldn’t have to suffer.”
“Okay,” the boy said, crying. I tried to wag my tail at the sound of my name, but I found I couldn’t manage even a twitch. There was another jab in my neck.
“Bailey, Bailey, Bailey, I’m going to miss you, doodle dog,” Ethan whispered in my ear. His breath was warm and delightful. I closed my eyes at the pleasure of it, the sheer pleasure of love from the boy, love by the boy.
And then, just like that, the pain was gone—in fact, I felt like a puppy again, full of life and joy. I remembered feeling like this the first time I ever saw the boy, coming out of his house and running to me with his arms open wide. That made me think of diving after the boy during rescue, the fading light as I dove deeper, the way the thick water pushed against my body, just like now. I could no longer feel the boy’s hands touching me; I could just feel the water on all sides: warm and gentle and dark.
{ EIGHTEEN }
Awareness came long after I’d come to recognize my mother’s smell and learned how to fight my way to her teat for nourishment. My eyes were open and my vision was starting to sharpen well enough for me to see my mother’s dark brown face the day I understood, with a jolt, that I was a puppy again.
No, that wasn’t quite it. It was more that I was a puppy who suddenly remembered being
Now that I remembered everything that had come before, I was truly puzzled. I’d felt so complete, there just didn’t seem to be any reason for me to go on—how could I possibly have a more important mission than loving the boy?
I missed Ethan so much I sometimes whimpered, which my new siblings always mistook for a weakness and jumped on me with the intent to dominate. There were seven of them, all dark brown with black markings, and I was impatient with the idea that they didn’t recognize who was going to be in charge, here.
A woman took care of us most of the time, though there was a man who often came down into the basement to feed us and it was he who carried us in a box to the backyard when we were a few weeks old. A male dog in a cage sniffed at us when we all ran over to see him, and I understood instinctively that this was our father. I’d never met a father before, and was curious as to what he was doing there.
“He seems fine with them,” the man said to the woman.
“You going to be okay, Bernie? You want to come out?” The woman opened Father’s cage—his name was obviously Bernie—and the male dog bounded out, sniffed at us, and then went over to pee on the fence.
We all galloped after him, falling on our faces because our puppy legs could barely move. Bernie put his face down and one of my brothers jumped up and disrespectfully bit at his ears, but Bernie didn’t seem to mind. He even played with us a little, knocking us around before trotting over to the back door to be let in.
A few weeks later I was in the yard, showing one of my brothers who was boss, when I stopped and squatted and all at once realized I was a female! I sniffed in amazement at my urine, snarling a warning when my brother took the opportunity to barrel into me. What would Ethan think?
How could I, Bailey, be a girl dog?
Except I wasn’t Bailey. One day a man came and played with us in an unusual fashion. He clapped his hands, and the puppies who didn’t cower from the noise (I was one of these) he put into a box. Then one at a time he took those of us in the box out into the yard—when it was my turn, he turned and walked away from me as if he had forgotten I was there, so I followed. He told me I was a good dog just for doing that—this guy was a pushover. He was about the age that Mom had been the day she broke the car window and gave me some water, the first day I ever saw the boy.
The man put me inside a T-shirt and then spoke to me, calling me. “Hey, girl, can you find your way out?” I figured he’d changed his mind about wanting me bagged up inside the shirt, so I jumped out and ran over to him again for more praise.
The woman had come out into the yard to watch.
“Most of them take a minute to figure it out, but this one’s pretty bright,” the man remarked. He flipped me over on my back, and I squirmed with it, playing, thinking to myself that it was unfair since he was so much bigger than I was.
“She doesn’t like that, Jakob,” the woman observed.
