Divided by puppy love

New member of the pack
I had the baby and, my cesarean section still healing, we brought her home. We arrived to two dogs howling with joy — hello, hello — kisses and slurps all around, ears pressed back in pleasure. The books I’d read emphasized the importance of letting the dogs thoroughly sniff the new family member. I lowered the bundle of baby down. The summer breeze blew in, and the dogs caught a whiff of the strange smell and froze. Their eyes turned canine, carnivore, the little dots of yellow in their irises taking on a wolfish gleam.

“Stop,” said Ben, who claimed he heard a low growl emanating from Lila’s throat. Had I heard it, I would have stopped, of course. I, however, had heard nothing.

“Musashi, Lila,” I sang. Something was amiss, but what? “This is Clara,” I said, and then she was down, this baby so bundled that only the disk of her face was visible, the mini-nose, the eyelids scrawled with whisper-thin capillaries.

Lila stepped forward. Her snout was wet, her black lips seamed shut, but it was her eyes that gave me pause. Slowly, slowly, she lifted one foot and pawed at the bunting, almost batted it — playful? Aggressive? Curious? Musashi followed, and then, before I could stop them their noses were in the wrappings, the huff of their hungry breath, the child screamed, the dogs shot back, Ben grabbed the baby, his own face full of rage. “How could you?” he spit. “They’ve bitten her.”

Understand, I was doped up on painkillers, the whole world wavy, and I’d done what the books instructed. “No,” I said. “No.” We peeled back the wrappings. Our baby was unmarked, unbitten. In an instant she plunged into slumber again.

A mother's love — for babies and dogs
I have never brought up until now the idea that I might love my animals as much as I love my daughter, and, when he arrived a few years later, my son. As a mother, I wanted to feel clearly driven only to my offspring, the people who grew within me for the first nine months of their lives. It didn’t happen that way. In the early years of my daughter’s life, and then my son’s, I’d sometimes feel a longing for my dogs that overrode every other affection. I wanted to touch another kind of being, snout and paw, the oblong ears. Perhaps this is what I love: how animals confirm for us the rapturous fact that we are part of a chain stretching back to everything breathing on earth.

After my babies were asleep, I’d often sit in the kitchen and groom my dogs, fur flying, piling up, until it was very late and Benjamin came down, the 2 A.M. feeding over. “Making love to the pups?” he’d ask, and I said the only thing I could: Yes.

The realization that my love could go either way — children or dogs — occurred to me one day in a local park, when I lost track of both my dog and daughter. For a split second before I caught sight of them, I could not quite figure out who to search for first. Did this then mean that if I was forced to choose between my children and my dogs, I would have to stop, to consider? I have not been forced to make this choice, thank God, but if I was, I’d choose my children, my babies, my darlings, but not because I love them more. I would choose them because their humanity comes prepackaged with a particular prize: the future, and all it holds. We know it’s out there while animals don’t, and so we suffer more at the thought of all that possibility, that sense of hope, being taken away.

The children arrived into a marriage already divided by the dogs; our babies sharpened the wedge, drove it deeper. We were two parents with full-time jobs and a moderate income determined to give our kids the best we could — skating lessons, day camp. The expectations quadrupled along with the bills, while time tucked its tail between its legs and went away.

When Clara was 5, we received a reminder card from our vet: time for the vaccines, the teeth cleaning. “We spend,” Ben said, “well over a thousand dollars a year on these animals.”

I was spooning mash into our son Lucas’s mouth. “They’re worth it,” I said.

No comment.

“To me,” I added.

“But to us?” he said.

“These dogs have taught our children a lot,” I said.

“Yes,” said Benjamin. “They have taught our children a lot. I agree.” He didn’t say anything after that.

Pain strikes close to home

See readers’ photos of pets that have changed their lives.

It was around that time that Ben developed a mysterious ailment in his arms, one that defied diagnosis. Thoracic outlet syndrome, carpal tunnel, whatever it was, it resulted from the computer, which he used most moments of his 70-hour workweek. There were visits to pain clinics, each one hushed and cold, tiled and white. There were visits to pharmacologists, psychologists, neurologists, chiropractors. Unresponsive to any type of treatment except morphine, the pain drained the blood from Benjamin’s face; his arms and hands grew limp and spastic. Simple tasks — twisting the top off a jar — became impossible. The man with the elfin humor went away and someone distant took his place. I remember the night he stood in the living room holding our son. I was in the kitchen, fixing dinner. I heard a crash and came running. Benjamin was standing, arms held out in front of him as though they were dripping poison. On the floor, Lucas screamed himself blue. “I dropped our baby,” Benjamin whispered, tears — the first I’d seen from him — flowing copiously from his eyes.

My husband stopped working, time passed, and we both turned 40. Benjamin took out a calendar. “Do you realize,” he said, after punching some numbers, “that we have about 12,000 days left?” The next day, when we had only 11,999, Benjamin gave his great whistle, and the dogs, who once would have bounded over at the sound, stretched creakily and came cautiously trotting. “Lila girl,” he said, cupping her bony chin. She turned her brown eyes up to him. “Look,” he said. “She’s got some gray on her muzzle.” Like us, they live and die.

Like us.

Blindsided by illness
I came downstairs one morning, our children now in school, and found Lila hunched in the hall, shivering. I called to her and she swung her head in my direction, tried to walk to me, but her solid legs buckled, her body coming down hard. “Lila, Lila … what is it?” I held her head in my hands, and when I offered her favorite food, a bowl of strawberry ice cream, she turned away. I raced to the vet thinking, fever, flu, rabies; thinking, old, old, old, and they whisked her away.

Hours later, the vet came out and said, “Your dog has glaucoma. Your dog is completely blind.”

Blind! How could Lila be blind when just yesterday she wasn’t? It can happen, the vet explained. It can happen, I said to myself as I drove home. Lila stayed in the hospital for two days. When I came to get her, I saw that she’d lost more than her eyes. My fat, feisty dog was now huddled in fear. I called to her — Lila, Lila — and she at last turned toward me, her eyes marbled over, her face so empty of expression that I saw in a flash what so many scientists deny: Dogs can scowl, smirk and smile; their faces are mobile maps of reaction, of feeling.

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Ben’s reaction was appropriately sympathetic, but, not surprisingly, he seemed more or less unmoved by the event. Until he saw Lila. I carried her into the house and set her down on the floor. We stood silent on the sidelines, watching. Musashi padded up to her, tentatively sniffing his longtime companion, then slowly backed away. Lila, whose happiest moments had been spent rolling in the grass, her whole body a comma of pure pleasure, sat very small, moving her head slowly from side to side, her blank eyes filled with a bluish fluid. “Lila, Lila,” Clara called, and clapped her hands. The dog stumbled toward the sound, crashed into a chair. “Lila!” I called again. Trouper, she forged forward but walked into a wall. Urine puddled beneath her, a rank, strong smell: panic. Lucas began to wail. Ben looked slapped. I carried my dog upstairs. Her rump was soaked and smelly. I didn’t care. I lay with her on the bed. The house was quiet. “Poor Lila,” Ben said later, finally wiping up the puddle. He paused, held his lame hands up in the air. “Our dog,” he said (italics mine), “has gone blind as a bat.”

For two weeks Lila didn’t move, and because I hated to see her suffer, I said to Ben, “Maybe we should put her down.”

His answer surprised me. “Give her some time,” he said.

What dogs can teach us
So I did. And something strange happened. Ben began to watch “our” dog differently. I caught him studying her, his head cocked like a curious canine’s. I caught him holding her chin in his palm, looking into her dead eyes. I remember when she took her first blind steps, how we clapped, how he clapped.

After that, the changes came quick. Lila gained confidence, braving the stairs. Soon she was chasing birds, hunting by smell and sound. Sometimes her abilities were so precise we swore she had some vision, but she didn’t. One evening, Ben threw a ball into the dining room. “Ball!” he shouted, and at the sound Lila bounded toward it, swerving cleanly around the furniture, sidestepping toys and locking onto the ball with her open jaw in seconds. She then trotted back to Benjamin and dropped the ball, head turned up, half-coquettish, half-challenging, as if to say, “See what I can do? Now it’s your turn.”

And it was. Ben would deny my interpretation, but in my memory, Lila’s blindness and resilience coincide with my husband’s return to health. As the dog was relearning to balance on her hind legs, Benjamin told me he’d like to have an orchard. “Fruit trees,” he said, as though the phrase itself were crisp like an apple. He stopped most of his pain medication and began to chop wood to strengthen his arms. “I need physical activity,” said my husband, he who’d sat in a chair for the past few years. I want to resist the neat nature of my conclusions, my desire to fuse Lila’s recovery with Ben’s. But this is what makes me human; I seek my squares of meaning.

I cannot lie and say I came home one night and found my mate transformed. I cannot say Ben put a picture of our pooches in his office, or that we came to share a love of dogs that was anywhere near equal, and thus became closer. But there is a little more between us than before, a strand of connection stretching between two beings who happen to be human.

Recently, I was putting the kids to bed, telling them a story about an archaeologist in Israel. He was digging when he came upon a grave. Inside, remarkably intact, he found the skeleton of a person curled in a fetal position. Lying next to him or her was the skeleton of a puppy, the two buried together for all time. The skeleton’s hand rested upon the skull of the puppy as Lucas’s hand rested on mine. Human and canine, living together, buried together. It has been this way for a long, long while, and so it will be in the future.

When I finished, my children were asleep. I looked up and saw Ben sitting in the doorway, listening — his copper hair, just like the pups’, now mixed with white, like the pups’. He sat on the floor, a dog on each side, in this year, our 44th circle around the sun, bracketed by our animals, he Indian-style, they on folded haunches, all eyes open, each dog alert, their ears pricked forward, Ben’s hands resting lightly on their beautiful heads.

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