OLIVIA LOOKED AT the seaplane as if it were the epicenter of a tornado. The children boarded, excited for their first day of school.
Oli was still leaning against the car door, with no intention of moving.
“It’s like taking the bus,” I told her. “But this bus goes through the water and flies.”
“I don’t like it. It’s scary.”
“But you’re not scared of airplanes. We went to Alaska in a plane, and you loved seeing everything from up high.”
Mark pulled up in his golf cart with Oliver. We exchanged a brief glance, and by his smile, I could see he understood the situation.
“Why don’t we go back home?”
She was about to burst into tears, and I was about to throw in the towel.
“When you come back from school, I’ll be here with Ruby waiting to take you home.”
“I don’t mean that home. I mean our real home.”
That hit me right in the gut. I felt like a bad mother for dragging her there in my delirium. But she had liked the idea, I had consulted with her, and she had said, We’re going to live on Treasure Island! But she was still young and didn’t know the repercussions of such a decision. And do you, Alice?
Mark came over with Oliver, who looked embarrassed.
“Hi, Olivia. Did you know Oliver was scared too the first time he got in the hydroplane? Isn’t that right, Ollie?”
Oliver nodded, scratching his freckly face.
“But he likes it a lot now,” Mark continued. “You’re the only kids in the whole country who take a plane to school. Isn’t that cool?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me. I already went to Alaska in an airplane, and that’s far away,” Olivia said, braver now that the boy was close by.
“Well, come on, Ollie,” Mark encouraged his son. “Give Olivia a hand, and you can go on together.”
Mark took Oliver’s arm and stretched it out toward Olivia’s. One, two, three, four seconds of uncertainty until the pilot started up the hydroplane’s motor. From fear, Olivia took Oliver’s hand. Mark pushed them softly.
“Good golly, it’s Ollie and Oli. Go ahead!”
The children ran, a little embarrassed but also excited.
As we waited for the airplane to take off, I thanked him again for throwing me a line. He asked me if I was doing better; I told him yes, that for now the Valium pills were untouched. He was glad, we said goodbye, I got in my car, and as I left, I could see him in the rearview mirror following me with his eyes.
That same morning, I went out to run with Ruby in the sport stroller. She loved it and moved her arms as if she were asking me to go faster. I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter baby, seemingly adaptable to any circumstance or life event, as if she knew she had already been through her worst trauma—losing her father before meeting him—and now everything would go fine, without any big upsets. Pure joy. I didn’t feel like running; there were too many boxes to unpack at home and in my head, but it would help me to wake up, get acclimated, and take a look around to get a sense of the layout of the place without anyone stopping me or asking questions. I was surprised at the quantity of dogs there. That justified the existence of a vet on an island that didn’t have a doctor. And more than the quantity of dogs, I was surprised by the dog culture, how social life revolved around dogs. In Shoreline Park, there was the Bark Park, where dogs could run, leap, splash and play while their owners talked over coffee. Did they ever talk about Chris? I was bothered by the feeling I was missing relevant information. Four months had passed since Chris’s death. I had read about it and seen it happen hundreds of times on the news: in investigations, the more time that passes, the harder it is to recover clues.
I caught the ferry to Hyannis and went to the Animal Rescue League in Brewster. I had grown up surrounded by dogs: two German shepherds from the same litter, Jack and Jill; a beagle, Clifford; a Jack Russell, Hawkeye; and a poodle (my mother’s), Cotton. But now I felt a little guilty, as if I were being unfaithful to Chris, because he was allergic to dogs. That’s why we’d never had one. Bringing a dog into the house was like pushing him away a little bit.
Walking through the rooms of the shelter was a mix of being in a candy store and on death row. Terrible stories looking for a happy ending. It was very simple: the ones that didn’t find a family to adopt them ended up dead. So I looked for a dog that would have the worst chances in this unnatural sorting process. I wanted to take home every dog I approached. Their pleading gazes, their crying, their need to be loved and to love broke my heart. Abandoned dogs, lost dogs that no one had claimed, dogs that had been in an accident, sick dogs. Before I got to the third cage, I had already started to cry. The employee took a quick disdainful look at me, as though thinking that for all my crying, if I didn’t find a purebred I’d head straight for the pet store. But no, I was set on picking a dog as abandoned as I was.
And there it was, in a corner, its head resting on its front paws, as if it had already been through the drill many times and had lost all hope.
“What’s with that one?”
“Which?”
“The black one lying down.”
He looked like the dumbest or smartest dog of all. I caught him looking at me sidelong, and when we made eye contact, he looked away. Clever strategy.
“That one is five years old, over the hill.”
Oh no, he isn’t, I thought. He’s waiting for his opportunity to escape from here. Just like me when I decided to go live on Robin Island.
“What breed is he?”
“Breed? Ha!” the guy said, confirming his suspicions that I was a yuppie fraud. “A mutt. Anyway, he’s actually a she.”
Stiff black hair with three white spots on her back and one on her face. Very thin, ribs showing, with long, drooping ears.
I opened the door to the cage. The dog didn’t even move. I knelt down to her height. I had Ruby in the baby carrier.
“Excuse me, you can’t open the cages,” the employee warned me.
I didn’t pay attention. Ruby, who was always marvelously opportune, awoke. The dog raised its head, defensive.
“Excuse me, miss.”
The dog sniffed at Ruby’s little nose and tickled her. She smiled and stretched out her hands, grabbing one of the dog’s ears. The dog let her and licked her. Then she lay down again, as if not wanting to get too attached only to be let down again.
“I’m serious, miss, would you please . . .”
“I’ll take her.”
My plan was perfect. Olivia would come back from school, flooded with contradictory emotions. But when she got home and saw the dog, she’d be happy, she’d name it, and this would be her home, and the island would become our natural habitat. I’d felt a great weight pressing down on my chest since she had told me she wanted to leave. Well, I had wanted to leave several times myself.
That afternoon while waiting for their children, some of the parents were chatting among themselves. Others remained in their golf carts absorbed by other things, making use of those last moments before the children arrived with their homework to gobble up their parents’ time.
I saw Julia and felt the impulse to go over. But there seemed to be a warning signal in her look: Keep away. The fact that Olivia skipped out of the hydroplane, running toward me, saying goodbye to Oliver, Ginger, Tracy, Ryan, Britney, and a few others, gave me back one of the points I had lost as a mother.
When she got to the Cherokee, Olivia walked around it in a circle, counting the wheels. One, two, three, four.
“Olivia, what are you doing?”
And then she did it in the opposite direction, counting them again. One, two, three, four. Then she got in the car.
“Yep, they’re all there; we didn’t lose one on the way,” I said without giving it any particular importance, thinking it must be some game she’d learned in school. “How’d it go, honey?”
When I listened to her hurried, delighted tale, some of the anguish that reigned over much of my life was replaced by a milder sorrow—which I was thankful for, since it was easier to handle. I was a teacher. I should have been giving classes, making the first day of school memorable for lots of frightened children. Making memories, creating adventures. Molding character. Discovering virtues and smoothing out defects. Preparing them for life.
Half an hour earlier I had left the dog alone in the house, attached to a pretty leash that was now destroyed. In brief, this was the message she seemed to want to send to the world, to us: I deceived you, accompanied by a malevolent laugh. She had shit and pissed all over, which she hadn’t done in the car or on the ferry or when we got home or after I fed her and gave her water or after a short walk up the street or after playing in the yard. She was holding it in for a higher purpose. The great final battle, annihilation and destruction. Cushions, shoes and remote controls destroyed. Unopened boxes that the dog had decided it was time to unpack and drag out their contents all over the place. The Tasmanian devil reincarnated in a midsized dog that looked at us very serenely, with floppy ears and her tail between her legs, knowing that she hadn’t behaved well. And worst of all: she had the Big Smelly Bear in her jaws, one arm torn off and one eye MIA. Surprise!
“Smelly!” Olivia shouted, and leapt at the dog with the same determination and absence of fear as a mother protecting her baby from an evildoer.
Two hours later, Olivia was shut up in her room, still glum. I went in with Big Smelly Bear, now better, his eye and arm freshly reattached. I imitated Smelly’s voice: “Hello, Olivia, look, I’m good as new. What a scare we had, right? But it wasn’t the dog’s fault, it was me, I started playing with her, and things got out of control.”
The dog peeped timidly through the door. She seemed genuinely sorry, a little angel coming over slowly.
“Look who’s coming to ask for forgiveness . . .”
“I don’t want a dog. You told me you were going to buy me a pony.” She hammed it up, hugging Smelly tight.
I was about to tell her I’d never promised her anything of the sort and that I hadn’t inherited the promises made by her deceased father. But it didn’t seem appropriate or right.
“It’s not a dog. It’s a pony. Look at her closely. A black-and-white pony. A precious pony. Look at her.”
I got on my knees, crouching down behind the dog. I grabbed her front legs and lifted them up, as though she was rearing back and neighing.
“Giddy up, pony, giddy up!”
Under normal conditions, Olivia would have cracked up and told me: Let me, Mommy, it’s my turn now! But this time, nothing.
“We can’t have dogs, Mommy.” She cut me short, and I smelled what was coming next. “Daddy gets sick from them.”
I know, Oli, but Daddy’s not here. That would have been the logical thing to say. But how could I say something like that to my daughter?
“She’s a good girl, Oli. She’s going to bring us lots of love and happiness. And I promise you she won’t hurt Smelly again. She was scared because it was her first day in the house. Just like you when you went to school.”
“I didn’t tear up the school and eat some kid’s arm.”
“We’re going to name her. What do you want to call our pony?”
“She’s not a pony.”
“What if we call her Pony, then? Do you like it?”
“No, because she’s not a pony.”
“OK, fine. But we have to call her something, whatever kind of animal she is. Come on, choose a name you like.”
“She’s not a pony.”
“I know, Olivia, you’ve made that very clear.”
“No, that’s what I want her name to be.”
“To be what?”
“Shesnotapony. That’s her name.”
It was the first sarcastic comment she made in her life.
To top things off, it turned out Pony had social phobia. She didn’t like to be around other dogs. So our walks through Bark Park were an unmitigated disaster.
After a few days of living together, I understood she hadn’t tricked me, hadn’t sucked up to me, hadn’t carried out some elaborate scheme to escape her mortal fate by presenting a different image from what she was, she had just become a puppy again. She had to learn everything over, good and bad. She had erased all the suffering she must have gone through in the course of her five years. A defense mechanism. Like a person who forgets a trauma to be able to go on living.