Carolyn Parkhurst - The Dogs of Babel

It’s partly to get away from these wearying thoughts that I decide to climb the tree. I just want to see how the world looks from up there. I just want to see what Lexy saw.

I close Lorelei in the kitchen and go out to the yard. It’s a hot day, but I’ve put on long pants and a shirt with long sleeves. It’s been quite a while since I’ve climbed a tree, and a middle-aged man with skinned knees and elbows makes a pathetic figure.

It takes me a few tries before I get the right grip to start shinnying upward. As I hoist myself onto one of the lower branches, wondering if it’s strong enough to hold my weight, I hear a curious scratching sound from the kitchen door. It’s Lorelei, trying to get out. We have a dog door that leads into the yard, but Lorelei never uses it. It was installed by a previous owner, who must have had a smaller dog, and it’s too tight for Lorelei; she has to squeeze to get through it. But now as I watch, I see the door flip open and Lorelei’s nose pokes through. Whining her soft, whistling whine, she wedges herself into the small space. I’m afraid she’ll get stuck.

“Lorelei,” I call out to her. “Stay inside. It’s okay, girl.”

But she wriggles and twists until she’s gotten her midsection through the hole, and then she comes barreling through, wide-eyed and alarmed, leaping and making the noise that now passes for barking. She bounds toward the tree. Staring up at me with wide, urgent eyes, she leaps and dances around the base of the trunk, barking her near-soundless bark.

An image pops into my mind, the image of the dog in the tarot cards Lady Arabelle described to me, the dog barking at the Fool about to walk off the cliff, and it hits me all at once. Lorelei tried to stop Lexy. It hits me like a blow, like a fall. It knocks the wind out of me. That’s why she cooked the steak for Lorelei. To distract her, to keep her quiet. Lexy went outside to climb that tree, her mind filled with thoughts of sacrifice, thoughts of the end. But Lorelei wasn’t going to let her go that easily. And how could Lexy complete her task, how could she do what she planned to do, in the face of such fierce, feral love? She couldn’t. There was no way. So she went inside and she gave her dog one last treat. She took the steak from the pan and put it on the floor at Lorelei’s feet, without even the playful teasing dialogue that dog owners love so much, the usual preliminary tantalus of “Who’d like a yummy treat?” And Lorelei, her tail wagging, Lorelei accepted it gratefully.

Look at it from Lorelei’s perspective. A steak laid at her feet. A gift, a reward for her vigilance. She’d done good, and here was the proof. I imagine her gratitude, her relief. And Lexy, pausing to watch this display of animal hunger and fulfillment, this voracious enjoyment of the appetites that give life its shape, did she stop and question what she was about to do? Did it give her pause? Did it make her reconsider, even for a moment? Or was she too focused on her goal—the time she had to fulfill it limited to the time it takes a hungry dog to gobble a piece of meat—to stop and think about it? Lorelei lost herself for a moment, only a moment, in the smell of the meat that filled the kitchen, the task of tearing apart the flesh with her teeth, and by the time she looked up, by the time she had finished licking the floor clean of the meaty juices, Lexy was gone. She was gone. Lorelei, betrayed by her belly and her fine sense of smell. Betrayed by the way her nose twitched at the aroma of the cooking meat and the way the saliva filled her mouth. It only takes a moment of inattention, the moment when a mother turns to answer the phone as her child nears the open window, the moment when the traveler, forgetting that the traffic goes the other way here, looks right instead of left. It only takes an instant, and all is lost. Lexy, dead on the ground. Lorelei, inconsolable, bereft. And all for a piece of meat.

Below me, Lorelei is jumping and gasping, spinning her body in frantic circles.

“It’s okay, girl,” I call to her. “I’m coming down.”

I measure the distance to the ground—I’m still pretty low—and I jump, landing on my feet with a small stagger. Lorelei leaps up onto me, nearly knocking me over. She licks my hands, my arms, whatever she can reach. I bend down to her and give her a hug.

“It’s okay, girl,” I say. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Later on, I put Lorelei in the car and drive to the supermarket. She loves to go for rides, and these days I like to give her whatever small pleasures I can. I crack a window for her and leave her to snarl ferociously at all who dare pass by her car, while I run inside to the meat counter. I buy the two best steaks they have, one for me and one for my dog. At home, while I’m warming the grill, I pick up the phone and I call Matthew Rice.

“Matthew,” I say. “I want to come back to work.”

And so it is that a year has passed since Lexy’s death. Lorelei and I lead a quiet life. We go for long walks, the fallen leaves crunching beneath the weight of our six feet. I teach my classes and chat with my colleagues, who seem a little less wary of me with each day that goes by. I’m beginning to enjoy the pleasures of the living again, eating and reading and throwing a ball for my dog to retrieve. And when Grace from the animal shelter called me up last week and asked if I’d like to get together for a cup of coffee sometime, I only hesitated for a moment before I said yes.

Not too long ago, I had a dream that Lorelei and I walked into a bar, just like all the jokes had said we would.

“No dogs allowed,” the bartender said, just like I always knew he would.

“But you don’t understand,” I said, following a script I knew by heart. “This is a very special dog. This dog can talk.”

“Okay,” said the bartender. “Let’s hear it.”

I lifted Lorelei onto a bar stool. She opened her mouth, and the bartender and I waited to hear what she would say. But she didn’t speak. Instead, she leaned over to me and licked my face. Then, distracted by an itch, she turned away and started chewing on her paw.

“See?” I said to the bartender.

“You’re right,” he said, without a trace of sarcasm. “That’s quite a dog.”

When I woke up, I found that I was smiling.

I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on. I try to remember the woman she was and not the woman I have built out of spare parts to comfort me in my mourning. And I find, more and more, as the days go by and the balm of my forgiveness washes over the cracked and parched surface of my heart, I find that remembering her as she was is a gift I can give us both.

Thank you, first of all, to my parents, Doreen C. Parkhurst, M.D., and William Parkhurst, my stepmother, Molly Katz, and my grandmother Claire T. Carney, for passing along their wisdom and for being my first and most supportive readers.

Thank you to Kim Alleyne, Cybelle Clevenger, Lee Damsky, Paula Whyman, and Katrin Wilde for their friendship, advice, insightful reading, and humor. And a special thank you to Matthew Rosser for his enthusiastic support and promotion.

Thank you to my agent, Douglas Stewart, for all his incredible work, and to everyone at Curtis Brown, especially Ed Wintle and Dave Barbor.