Buddy Read online

  We spent most of that August at a rented house in Maine a mile or so from the beach he loved, and Harry made the most of every minute. He padded slowly along the sand, waded gloriously through the cold surf, and slept soundly in the shade of the wooden back deck as I pecked on a laptop beside him. As inseparable as we were in the rest of his life, we were Krazy Glued together that summer. When I picked up my keys, he didn’t even look at me with a question about whether he was coming, he just sashayed over to the car.

  By then his fur had grown long and even more tousled. His face was completely gray. He had aged about twenty years in the past four months, but somehow he looked more appealing, more dignified, more Harry-like than ever. When we got back to Boston on Labor Day, I feared the lack of beach and constant fresh air would depress him, but no. He still loved his morning walks, his evenings on the stoop, his time under the coffee table as I watched the Red Sox make an epic run toward their first World Series victory in eighty-six years. All the while, he was fighting intense bouts of stomach pain, but he refused to surrender, to give me a sign that it was time to go.

  “Harry, it’s okay if you want to give up,” I would tell him softly as he moaned in the dark of the night. But no, he didn’t, or wouldn’t, not until the Sunday in the middle of September when he refused to go out for his last walk of the night and hung his head so low that his nose just about scraped the floor. He slipped into my study and slept alone under my desk, his breathing labored when I got up in the night to sit silently with him.

  He appeared even weaker and more dejected the next morning, so I called Dr. Bendock to let her know it was time. I had vowed not to keep him going on my account, and another day would have been cruel.

  Dogs don’t fear death, I convinced myself. They don’t even think of it. It’s just what comes at the end. I was adamant that his last hours would be as natural, as dignified, as the life that had led up to them, meaning there would be no morose music, no storm of tears, no darkened rooms, just Harry, living as he always had until he couldn’t live anymore.

  Inside, Dr. Bendock had unpacked the blue solution and needle and waited. Harry stunned me by picking up a stuffed toy and tossing it around for the briefest moment, showing off for the vet on whom he had always had an obvious crush, until he collapsed on the floor in his favorite spot beneath the bay window with a raspy sigh. He lacked the strength or the will ever to lift his head again.

  After some long, silent moments, I nodded, and Pam brought over the syringe. I placed my face next to Harry’s as she rubbed fluid on his leg. “Not yet,” I said softly, and I told him I loved him, familiar words for him, that he was the best friend I would ever have, which was also old news, and that I wouldn’t trade one minute of one day with him for anything in the world. All of the thoughts fit together into an irrevocable truth.

  Harry had taught me patience. He had instilled empathy in me. He had made me slow down, to take my time, to collect my bearings along life’s winding path. He had gotten me up on quiet, beautiful mornings that I would never have seen and taken me out in invigorating night air that I would never have felt. He had introduced me to dozens of people, very good people, I would never have met.

  Tears rolled from my face onto his, despite my best effort, and he looked up at me from the corner of his eye, knowingly, it seemed, though that might just have been me. I nodded to Dr. Bendock, and soon I could see the fluid flow slowly through a tube and into his leg. Harry closed his eyes. I stroked his face. Pam cried softly. A moment later, he was gone.

  We didn’t talk much in the moments after, Dr. Bendock and I. Hours of consultations and conversations in the weeks and months before, and now there was nothing left to say. Her cheeks were glistening as she collected her things. I told her I’d bring Harry to her clinic, a few blocks away, as soon as I got myself together.

  Alone, I sat on the floor next to him and thought about the December evening ten years before when he had arrived in the cargo terminal of Logan airport, the absurdly cute puppy so frightened that he hadn’t wanted to come out of his crate. I thought about the look on my then wife’s face when I had given him to her for Christmas, the kind of moment it would be impossible to ever forget.

  I thought about his paws slapping the water the first time he swam. I thought about playing in the Boston Public Garden all alone in a late-night blizzard, until Harry got so tired he stood by the gate and insisted on heading home. I thought about our first nights alone when my marriage had ended, the drive to Washington to work at the White House. I thought about the thousands of miles we had walked together, the tens of thousands of throws he had fetched. I wished I could remember every minute, every step, every toss. As Frank Skeffington asked in the classic Boston novel The Last Hurrah, how in the world do you thank someone for a million laughs?

  As I sat on the floor with him that day, I thought only of what had been, not of what might come. I didn’t realize, couldn’t realize, that Harry, even in death, would lead me to a wife, and that wife would come with a family, and that family would include—there’s no subtle transition to this, in print as in life—a rooster named Buddy.

  7

  It was like nothing I had predicted or expected or ever experienced, the pain of losing a wonderful dog. There was that awkward touch of relief that Harry was no longer in pain. I no longer spent just about every cognizant moment on edge, feeling awful for him, imagining the piercing feeling in his gut, the helplessness of it all, the confusion that he must have felt over the fact that his very own body had turned on him.

  But that relief was swallowed up by acres of emptiness like I had never imagined—an emotion that non–animal people could never possibly understand. As heretical as this may sound, losing a cherished dog may be worse than losing a parent. As much as you appreciate your mother and father and are hopefully close to them and you owe them for all they’ve done, they are not a daily, moment-by-moment presence in your everyday life after you enter the world of adulthood.

  But a dog? The best ones are confidants. They are trusted advisers. They are occasional excuses (“Oh, I’d love to, but I’ve got no one to care for Sammy”). They keep you honest. They keep you in shape. They introduce you to a larger world while giving you an odd comfort within the smaller environment of your home.

  When I lost Harry, part of me was just no longer there—the part that didn’t allow bad moods or sedentary habits, the part that never felt alone. Harry was a fixture, an unflappably vibrant presence, riding shotgun in the car, always nearby as I walked along city streets, beside me on the stoop, sprawled by the entrance of a store patiently waiting while I got whatever it was I needed or wanted. He was serious and comic, wry and earnest, accommodating and headstrong. He was the one who constantly urged us outside, always introduced me to new people, and forever seemed to get my jokes. And then, one long-feared day, he just wasn’t there. I felt like Nixon in his final days at the White House as I wandered our home in the middle of the night talking to the large photograph of Harry on the mantle, stroking his face, telling him he was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Maybe some people would have seen the newfound freedom in the morning as a luxury, no long walk dominating the start of every day. It felt more like a punch to the gut. I was quickly turning into the exact kind of working drone I’d never wanted to be: rise, shower, commute. Rise, shower, commute. Sometimes, I’d get in to work at eight o’clock and realize I had yet to actually open my mouth and speak a word aloud. By contrast, every morning with Harry was a subtle adventure born in a welcome routine. He splashed in the Charles River. We saw the seasons change in the Public Garden. We were the first to know of store closings and openings on Newbury Street. We walked down the middle of unplowed boulevards after overnight snowstorms.

  And now I had exactly none of that.

  It was an eventful autumn in Boston that year. The Red Sox, down 0–3 to the New York Yankees, staged the greatest playoff comeback in the history of professional sports and brought the fi
rst World Series title to their appreciative city in eighty-six years. Massachusetts’ own John Kerry was striving to become the president of the United States—and it was looking as though he might succeed. In a city famous for both sports and politics, we had it going both ways that October 2004. I went to Fenway for every playoff game, traveled to Yankee Stadium for two games, and ran around the nation reporting on the Kerry campaign. I didn’t have to worry about finding care for Harry. I didn’t have to feel guilty about leaving him behind. It should have felt liberating, but with nothing or nobody to pull me back home at the end of a night or a trip, specifically not a grand animal, a wonderful friend, whom I had raised since he was a shy eleven-week-old pup, I felt untethered. Total freedom sounds great until you have it, and then you realize the extremely fine line between independence and hollowness.

  My girlfriend at the time, that very attractive British woman with an enticing accent, meant as well as any non–dog lover could mean. But she didn’t get what I was going through, and I didn’t have the energy or the desire to explain. It wasn’t her fault. It was probably mine. I knew when I didn’t call her within a few hours of Harry’s death that our relationship had died as well.

  All of which is a long way of explaining how I happened to be sitting in my apartment in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, absently flipping through old photographs of Harry instead of writing my column, when my phone buzzed with a call from the foyer. Since I was on the first floor, next to the entry, I just opened my door to see who was there. That’s when I came face-to-face with Dr. Bendock, whom I don’t believe I’d seen since that day with Harry a few weeks before.

  She was, as always, relentlessly attractive, though with her it’s tough to separate the warmth from the looks to figure out which carried the most appeal. She was laden with shopping bags and smiling through the glass door.

  “Sorry to barge in,” she said, and I gave her a moment to finish the thought, to explain what she was doing there. There was a brief silence, until she added, “Just checking up on you to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Come on in,” I said, sort of awkwardly, letting her slip by me as I held the door.

  She walked into my apartment and sat in the exact place on the couch where she had been the morning of Harry’s death. I quickly gathered up the photographs and placed them in a cabinet, but I’m pretty sure she’d seen them. I offered her a bottle of water from my sad, empty refrigerator, which she accepted.

  The way she was sitting, kind of closed off to the world, the look on her face uncharacteristically dark, her voice unusually soft, told me that something was wrong. It was strange to be in the presence of Harry’s vet, even a vet whom I had known for a decade, without Harry around. He had been our only bond, aside from the vacations we used to talk about or the restaurant tips we traded, all of it just idle chitchat, interesting as it might or might not have been.

  I took a seat in a chair in the corner of the room. “Everything all right?”

  “Things are fine,” she said. She talked some about her kids, about her clinic, about business, all of it light, no real substance, as if you could wave your hand right through the conversation and hit nothing that really mattered. Still, there was an edge to her, a sense of restlessness that belied the calm presence I was so accustomed to in her exam rooms. She asked me how I was in a tone of voice that suggested she knew exactly how I’d be—sad, a little uncertain, but fully realizing that when a dog dies, as big a hit as it is to the head and the heart, you dust yourself off and move on. It’s just how the world works.

  “It’s a little harder than I thought it would be,” I said. “But you can’t get too caught up in it, or it defeats everything you learned about life when you were with him.”

  “Have you thought about getting another?” She paused for a second, realizing it might have been too soon, then added, “You’re too good a dog owner not to have one.”

  Truth is, in Harry’s final weeks, I had sworn off any future dogs for a variety of reasons: I didn’t want to have my heart broken like that again; I needed freedom going forward; and I was at a much different stage in my life than I had been when Harry arrived. Those were all true, but the vivid fear that any new dog wouldn’t be anywhere near the dog that I’d already had overlay them. How do you follow perfection?

  But I missed Harry dearly, and I missed the routines that formed the foundation of our very good life. I needed the constant companionship, the morning walks and long tours of the city. I realized that with him had come purpose and passions. Not to have this was not to have the life I knew and very much liked, not to be the person that, with Harry’s friendship, I had become.

  “I don’t know yet,” I told Pam, but the way she looked at me, she knew I was lying.

  “You’ll be getting one very soon,” she said, and not for the first time or for the last, she was right.

  Then the thought struck me, maybe suddenly, maybe gradually, maybe out of nowhere, or maybe out of somewhere where it had been growing in silence for a while. My mind flashed to the tie, the Hermès necktie, which had been sitting on a shelf in the living room all these months in its original orange box, the great mystery of the sender unsolved, the minidrama or melodrama overtaken by the realities of everyday life. I caught a glimpse of the tie sitting on its perch, then said, innocently, “You’re not going to believe what I got in the mail a few months ago.”

  She flashed me a strange look and took a self-conscious pull from her bottle of water. “What?”

  “A tie,” I said. “An Hermès necktie.” Pause.

  “With a card that had no signature,” I added. “A secret admirer, basically.” I paused again. “Have you ever shopped at Hermès?”

  She hesitated. Pam Bendock didn’t lie, so she didn’t lie well, which says precisely everything about her. “Not really,” she said, “a little too rich for my blood. And too formal.”

  Note, she didn’t add anything about the absurdity of an anonymous gift. She didn’t wonder aloud about the giver. I caught her looking down at her lap for a long moment, which is when I leaped up a little too fast, retrieved the tie from the shelf, and laid it in front of her.

  “This is it,” I said, and sat back down.

  Her head remained down. Her eyes stayed on the tie. No “Nice tie” or “Lovely gift” or “What the hell were they thinking?” Just an odd silence, unlike any other reaction I’d gotten from the roughly two hundred women I had interrogated before.

  As I improvised, it started making sense, and in fact, given how I was pressing the point, this possibility had undoubtedly been in the back of my mind all along. We had known each other forever. She’d never seemed to regard me as a garden-variety veterinary client, and she’d taken extraordinary care with Harry. Sitting there, watching her squirm in the middle of the afternoon on this surprise visit to my house, it emerged with the full force of truth: it was Pam.

  “It was you.”

  She didn’t even look up at me when I said it. Her head stayed down, her eyes staring vacantly in the general direction of the tie. “I’m really sorry. It was an obnoxious thing to do.”

  Ten years I had known Pam Bendock. For every one of them, I felt a nice, casual connection. We’d talked about vacations, restaurants, Back Bay, my dog. She exuded unflappability and quiet confidence, jeans and a T-shirt under a sharp white lab coat, a woman who had a world-view that seemed similar to my own. But a relationship? A connection outside of the exam room? No. No. And more no. In retrospect, I should have thought of Pam earlier, and in some distant part of my brain, I probably had, but she’d never come close to making my obvious list of suspects.

  For one, she was spoken for, loudly, by a husband and two young girls, and, unlike some people, she didn’t seem like the type to head off in another direction on an inexplicable whim. Quite the opposite, actually. That was part of her appeal.

  Beyond that, we came from different worlds, albeit worlds just a few miles apart. I lived in the city, remain
ed uncommitted, ate late dinners on just about every given night, and remained embarrassingly void of any meaningful responsibilities. She came from the land of lawn services, anxiety over perfect end-of-year gifts for grade school teachers, neighborhood Christmas cookie swaps, and tables for four at safe restaurants on Saturday nights with like-minded couples that you don’t actually know all that well.

  Sitting in my living room that weekday afternoon, watching the top of her head because she kept gazing down at the tie on the coffee table, I couldn’t have been more floored or, oddly enough, annoyed. The thought flashing through my simple head was that she was basically trying to use me, intentionally or not, as a little distraction from what I could only assume to be her mundane suburban life.

  “You’re married,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she replied. She looked up for the first time since the Great Discovery, revealing teardrops on her smooth cheeks.

  “We’re all done, unfortunately,” she said. “We made each other miserable.”

  I let that hang in the air and in our heads for a long while. There was nothing obvious to say here, no dog filling the void between us.

  Finally, she gave in. “I’m really sorry about this. This was stupid. I have no business being here.”