A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

I caught the eye of a burly kennel worker that one of the women at the desk had called Enrique. I asked him quietly if he knew where the two dogs that Animal Control had brought in ten days ago were being held.

He told me they get more than a hundred dogs a week: “Do you have their kennel numbers?”

I knew nothing about kennel numbers, and said instead, “The ones in the paper, the man was killed.”

“The red-nose pit and the big white one?”

“Great Pyrenees, yes.”

“They’re in Ward Four, but they’re on DOH-HB hold.” When I looked blank, he said, “Department of Health Hold for Human Bite. Though I saw in the paper they did a lot more than that.”

“They’re my dogs.”

“I can’t let you take them out or let you inside their kennels. Their kennel cards are stamped CAUTION.”

“But can I at least see them? Could you take me to see them?”

I saw Enrique look to the preoccupied women at the front desk, then he motioned me to follow him. We slipped past the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign and were instantly inside a howling asylum, not unlike Bellevue. I tried to look without seeing — the dogs crazed with fear and frustration, turning in circles in their too-small cages, water bowls overturned, feces not only on the floors but on the walls. Why were there no other attendants to minister to the dogs’ needs?

Cloud had never slept anywhere but my bed.

She was pressed against the rear of the cage, her head down, her ears flattened back in terror. I approached her and she looked up and whimpered. I cried out her name and reached for her.

Enrique stopped me. “You can’t touch the dog.”

I dropped to my knees and spoke to Cloud. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry you’re here.”

Was I looking at Bennett’s killer? No one could make me believe that this dog had killed Bennett, which left Chester and George.

“Where’s George, the pittie?”

“Next kennel over. He’s right here.”

I realized that the whimpering I’d been hearing was coming from George, who recognized my voice, my scent. I wished I’d never met this dog. I wished I hated this dog. If not for this dog, and for the now-dead Chester, Bennett would still be alive. Maybe George had been on death row for a reason when I took him home to foster. A reason other than an overcrowded shelter. But he had been so gentle and grateful. He was the only dog I knew who wouldn’t use his teeth to eat from my hand, only his lips.

I started to cry. George was the beta dog to Chester’s alpha. Did that factor into whether I could forgive him? I did not want an eye for an eye. Strange given the circumstances, but I did not want George to suffer. What about the mother whose son kills his father, her husband? Is she expected to hate her son? It’s the same boy she loved an hour before. Doesn’t she make a choice to forgive? And how is that ever possible?

“I got work to do,” Enrique told me. “I’ll send in one of the volunteers. Promise you won’t touch the dogs.”

I thanked him as he quickly shut the door behind us, and then I sat between the dogs’ cages, on the filthy floor where I could see them both and they could see me, but not each other. I wished I knew what I was feeling. I felt responsible for Cloud’s fate. She wouldn’t be here if not for my — the therapist in me took over — pathological altruism, when selfless acts backfire and inadvertently do great damage to others.

“You’re a brave woman to come here,” said a woman who entered the ward. My first thought was how clean she looked, considering where she worked. She wore a T-shirt with the shelter’s name on it. Maybe her shift had just begun? “Enrique told me you were here. I’m Billie.” She squatted beside me. She reached out to George’s cage, waited for George to rise and muster the courage to come closer, then reached inside with her fingers to let George lick them.

“You’re not frightened? You know what my dogs did?”

“Your picture was online.” She knew the whole story, yet she was now stroking George. He had pressed his flank against the metal bars so that she could touch as much of him as possible. I heard him sigh, a baritone exhalation of contentment. “He’s a love bug,” she said, her fingernails scratching his flank.

I couldn’t believe what she was doing.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, withdrawing her fingers. George turned around in his tiny cage, so that she could do his other side. She took his cue and started in on his other flank. “Was he good-looking? Your fiancé.”

It was the second thing about her that surprised me. Who would ask the grieving such a question? Yet I liked her. She was the first person, other than Cilla, who spoke to me as though I would survive this. I had learned from Kathy that surviving such an experience was possible. Only in my case, in the moment, I had to “act as if” I would make it. I could not pretend to the faith that was available to others, but I acted as if I could.

Back to Billie’s odd question — I found myself answering no. No, Bennett had not been remarkably good-looking, and when I’d first met him, I registered that and, almost simultaneously, dismissed it. I had responded to something else in him — his confidence, a different kind of strength.

“Your dogs are stronger than you think. We’d better leave before someone finds you in here. You’re supposed to have a court order to see them. Your dogs are evidence.”

I said good-bye to Cloud, but did not speak to George, although his body was still pressed against the bars.

Billie and I walked out of the ward together.

“Are they safe?” I asked.

“For now. Nothing will happen to them as long as they’re evidence.”

I didn’t ask, And after that? We both knew what would happen.

“I’ll look out for them. Here.” She gave me her card — no profession, only a name and a number. “I’m here three times a week. Call me and I’ll give you updates on how they’re doing.”

I thanked her and asked how she came to volunteer here.

“I had my own dog in here once, a shepherd mix with some chow in him. He bit a neighbor’s child. I’d have bitten the child, too, if she had been taunting me the way she taunted Cubby.”

“What happened to Cubby?”

“He wasn’t evidence.”

“And you still choose to work here?”

“It’s where I’m needed.”

Steven picked me up in his car outside the shelter. He had offered to take me to the airport. He thought I was insane for visiting my dogs. “How can you look at them knowing what they did?”

I tried out the analogy of the mother with the murderous son, but Steven said, “These are dogs, not children.”

The analogy worked for me. “You’ve known Cloud since she was eight weeks old.”

“I’m talking about the other one.”

I didn’t plan to spend the night in Montreal. My plan was to find contact information for Bennett’s parents and leave.

Steven made me promise to return to his apartment when I got back. “I went to your place yesterday to check on the cleaning service. It’s spotless, but there’s nowhere to sleep. They took the bed away.”

“What else did they take away?”

“It looks pretty empty. But they did what they needed to do. Are you sure you want to go back there?”

This kind of concern from my brother had precedent. A lifetime of precedent. He had deflected our father’s madness when it was directed at me. Our father was not a violent man except when his mania broke and he plunged into depression. In his blackest moods, he was capable of brandishing a knife at our mother. He saw me as a smaller version of her, and just as insubordinate. One summer night when I was ten and Steven was eighteen, our father came into the kitchen and saw the empty fruit bowl.