Elizabeth Wrenn - Second Chance

‘ Heloise ? That’s a weird name for a dog!’ said Lainey, sticking her comic book under her arm and scratching Heloise behind the ear. Heloise immediately mouthed her finger, and she laughed. ‘She’s cute! Can we call her Harmony?’

‘Don’t let her mouth your finger like that, okay, sweetheart?’ Bill said pleasantly.

Lainey looked taken aback but didn’t move her finger. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Bill, gently pulling her arm away from me and Heloise. ‘These pups need to learn right from the start not to be mouthy with people.’

Lainey looked sideways at Matt, but said nothing more.

Bill turned to me. ‘Do you want to head home or stay? They’ve started the recalls.’ He nodded toward the truck.

I watched, transfixed, as the acned teen again knelt by his dog, now next to the truck. Josie waited quietly nearby, no longer in a hurry, giving them time. The boy grasped his dog’s head and shoulders in a last tremulous embrace.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, the tears welling in my eyes.

We gave the puppies a chance to pee, which they both took advantage of. Bill opened the back of his ancient station wagon, revealing two small crates for the dogs. The crates were on top of a platform box, built onto the floor of the back of his wagon. He lifted a thin, hinged door and stowed the leashes and paperwork inside. Matt and Lainey climbed into the backseat and traded magazines.

Bill tucked Donald expertly into one small crate, looked at me expectantly, then to the other crate.

‘Do I have to put her in there?’ I asked, clutching her to my breast. Bill nodded. I somewhat clumsily set the squirming Heloise into the crate. Bill quickly latched it before she could get her gangly feet under her and sprint out. She immediately started whining. I looked at Bill, my lower lip out. This time Bill shook his head, smiling.

‘Nope. She’s safer back here.’ He turned both crates around, so we’d be able to see the dogs through the silver bars of their little prisons on the trip home. ‘Okey-doke, troopers,’ he said, closing the wagon door on Heloise’s whimpering.

We pulled out onto the street, and when Bill shifted into second, Heloise geared right up, too, adding sorrowful little yips to her whines. I’d read in a women’s magazine about results from a study that showed that a baby crying in a public place would raise the blood pressure of nearly all women within earshot, but if the woman was a mother, her pressure soared. Evidently my maternal instincts covered even young canines. The need to rescue surged in my bloodstream. I thought of the teen boy, wondering if he’d finished his good-bye to his dog yet. Wondering what he’d do the rest of today. Tomorrow. The next day.

My two teens in the backseat had already said goodbye, as in checked out. They both wore their headphones, the volume high enough to drown Heloise out and for me to hear the bass pulsing through on their different choices of music. I wondered if they’d have any hearing at all by the time they were my age.

I looked out my window, watching the strip malls whiz by. When we stopped at a red light, my eyes landed on a young mother walking along the sidewalk, a baby on her chest in a carrier. Then the light changed and they flew behind us, along with the donut shops and dry cleaners. I had to blink back sudden tears. Heloise switched to moaning. My eyes became unseeing, as colors, shapes, and years flew by.

The thing I remember most is clenching newborn Sam, still waxy and bloody from birth, to my chest. And I acutely remember them taking him away from me. Repeatedly. First they’d taken him from me to clean him up, weigh him, and who knows what. I felt like they’d pulled some vital body part out of me and disappeared with it. Which, of course, they had. Then they took him again ‘to let me sleep.’ But even with drugs, sleep eluded me. I pressed the buzzer and pleaded for my baby, till finally they’d wheeled him in in a Plexiglas bassinette, like my disembodied heart beating in a petri dish beside me. I longed to hold him, but I was too exhausted and in pain, and the nurse would not lift him out for me.

‘You need your sleep, doll,’ she’d said. ‘He’s fine in there.’ I was more assertive with Matt and then Lainey, often sleeping with them in my arms. I’ll never know if I would have slept if I had been able to hold Sam, but as it was, I spent all the dark hours of that newborn night with my neck bent toward him, watching him watching me. I never closed my eyes, much less slept. Nor did he. I lay in the dual company of my wakeful but quiet baby and the unshakable thought that I was doing something wrong before he was even a day old.

‘Yowww, yip, yip!’ Heloise’s mournful cries filled the car.

‘She’s a noisy girl, that one,’ said Bill, his eyebrows raised above his crinkling eyes and warm smile. But it was his hands, lightly gripping the steering wheel, where my gaze lingered. Long, rectangular backs, not too hairy; slender, strong fingers with clean square nails. I’d always been fascinated with hands. I’d fallen in love with Neil’s hands, when we’d first met. And Neil had loved my hands, too. ‘Strong but feminine,’ he’d said, on our third date, holding both of mine in both of his between two mugs of coffee at a Denny’s after a movie. ‘If I could have looked only at your hands to decide if I wanted to date you, the answer would have been yes,’ he’d said, then added softly, ‘and I would have been ecstatic when I saw all of you.’ Then he’d blushed apple red. I’d laughed, but my internal romance-o-meter just about blew off the dial.

I shook my head, suddenly embarrassed that I’d even made a mental comparison between Bill and Neil. ‘She’s scared, I bet,’ I said, quickly responding to his comment about Heloise. I looked over my shoulder at the crates, self-consciously tucking my hair behind my ear. ‘It’s okay, girl,’ I cooed across the backseat. ‘It’s okay. There, there.’

Both Lainey and Matt pulled up one earpiece of their headphones.

‘ What? ’ they both asked.

‘I’m talking to Heloise.’ I pointed over their shoulders. They both slid their pulsing headphones back over their ears.

Heloise was looking right at me. ‘It’s okay, girl,’ I repeated, turning back around.

Who was I kidding? It wasn’t okay. She’d been taken from her mother and now was in my care, and surely even her young, unrefined dog sense told her of my lack of experience, that my need for escape from my own existence had landed me in this canine terra incognita.

I looked back again, careful to avoid eye contact with Matt and Lainey, and through the door of the other crate I could see little Donald, lying quietly on his side, gazing toward me, his expression for all the world looking the dog equivalent of embarrassed exasperation. He seemed to be thinking, Girls! Or maybe it was Labs!

I was starting to feel carsick from looking backward. Twisting forward once again, I told Bill, ‘ Donald seems to be doing fine.’

‘You know, Deena,’ Bill said, ‘Heloise might be picking up on your anxiety. They’re like kids that way. They instinctively tune in to whatever you’re feeling.’ He shot an encouraging smile my way.

It was like he’d read my thoughts a moment ago. I’d often wondered if it was I who had kept Sam awake that night, and for many nights after, bathing him in my anxiety. It was an indisputable fact to me that I instilled fear more often than courage in my kids. They were always fine after they’d fallen if Neil was on the scene. But the moment I dashed over to their crumpled bodies on the sidewalk, the tears began. Too often, theirs and mine.

‘So what should I do?’