While I don’t think I want to have a baby on my own, there’s an urgency inside my thirty-nine-year-old body telling me I need someone to mother. I’ve been trying to write my second novel, and hoping my manuscript would be what I parent, but I can’t stop thinking about making a human family. It’s been six years since my first book came out. That’s forty-two years, if time were a dog. My reading series has brought me many unexpected opportunities. One is that I got over my stage fright. I used to think the worst that could happen to me onstage if I did badly was that I’d die, but then I bombed onstage two shows in a row, and not only did I not die, I experienced a certain glory in surviving; and just like that, I was suddenly much less afraid. The second was the offer to write children’s books for an editor who attended one of the events. Because I have failed, so far, to publish a second adult novel, and I am instead under contract for a nine-book series for kids called Frankly, Frannie—I have deemed myself less valid than the writers around me, despite the fact I love children’s books, and their authors. This makes facing the second book harder. My “real” writing is what fills my life with purpose, and it’s this specifically set-aside time a “real” writer utilizes to their advantage. However, I discover it’s also the perfect time to binge-watch TV shows on an illegal streaming site that’s probably infecting my computer with malware and stealing all my secrets, but who cares, because Nurse Jackie! Also, this is probably a good time to adopt a dog.
“You gave yourself three months to finish your novel,” my therapist reminds me.
“I can do both,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “It’s your life.”
I log on to Petfinder and scroll through all the cute dogs. I can already feel how much better my life will be. We’ll play Frisbee in the park, race around the house, and collapse on the couch in a giggling out-of-breath heap of love. I apply for a gorgeous dog. She’s part beagle, part shiksa, and I’ve decided to name her Pilot, and raise her as a Jew.
My friend Laurie drives me to New Jersey to pick her up. At the shelter, Pilot walks right over to me, without knowing who I am, and that means she’s my destiny. I bend down to meet her face-to-face. She won’t look in my eyes, yet there’s something about her that’s profoundly familiar, that calls to me.
In the car on the way back she sits on my lap. I cuddle her, but then I notice that as we drive away, she starts panting, like she’s taking a brisk walk. Her nails dig through my jeans and her dry tongue hangs out the side of her stunned, open mouth. My lap looks like a bamboo doormat—shit, I didn’t even think about shedding. As she hyperventilates, my own chest tightens, and I, too, start struggling for air. A dread creeps through me then, in the backseat of that car. The reason for her familiarity dawns on me. What have I done?
In my apartment Pilot takes a lazy jump onto the first chair she sees, and then she lies there—mouth open, tongue out, stress-panting, depressed and listless—for hours, then days. She won’t move to eat, or drink water, or sleep in her bed. Toys don’t interest her. Neither do treats. I spend a lot of time at her side, running my hand through her fur, talking to her, trying to soothe and calm her. I know what she feels. She’s me at my dad’s house; she’s me as a child. After several days in the chair she finally gets down, only to shadow me. When I’m sitting, she stands on her hind legs and keeps her paws on me. It’s incredibly sweet, and everyone thinks she must feel rescued, but I know it’s not relief that’s driving her to cling to me; it’s her lack of relief, her uncertainty is what’s drawing her so close, and this fills me with anxiety, and a deep unbridled sadness. When I get into bed, she needs to sleep so close that she practically burrows her way into my body, and this makes me want to cry. No matter how near she is, I know she feels like she can’t get close enough. Instead of feeling needed, I feel only her existential anguish of needing.
Soon I will have to leave her alone, and I know she won’t know whether or not I’ll ever return; I know she’ll feel I’ve left her to die. Her anxiety fills my body, which is already filled with my own. I cannot tell whether I am me or the dog.
I go to therapy; I’m gone for an hour and a half. On my way home I have a terrible image: Pilot, sprawled dead on Cumberland Street, having jumped out the window, trying to race after me. The image feels so real that when I don’t see her lifeless body on the sidewalk I am genuinely surprised. At home, she’s at the door, jumping up on me and grabbing at my legs just the way I used to do with my mother.
In the living room it takes a minute for me to register the overturned shelves, the books scattered across the floor. The window curtains have been pulled down, and above my desk there is a tear in the window screen the size of her body. It’s a miracle she didn’t fall out, four floors down. I am chilled by my earlier vision. Later I find dog scratches down the back of the front door. She was trying to get out of the apartment when I wasn’t there. I burst into tears and worry that the former boyfriend from whom I’d inherited this apartment really did curse it. The day he’d moved out after we broke up I discovered toppled furniture, books and broken wine bottles flung across the floor, and the words “I HOPE YOU HATE IT HERE” scrawled across the hall mirror in Sharpie.
I call the rescue people who sound bewildered. The dog didn’t have separation anxiety at their house.
“That’s because at your house there were other dogs, here she’s all alone when I leave,” I say.
“Oh, we never thought of that,” the rescue woman says.
She tells me to crate Pilot when I leave and not make a big deal out of coming and going. I tell her I don’t think putting anyone with anxiety in an enclosed space is a good idea.
“Trust me,” she says. “If you crate her, she’ll get over this in no time.”
I take her word for it. Shy of hanging posters of boy bands, I decorate Pilot’s crate like a preteen’s bedroom. I keep the door open so she can come and go as she pleases. Still, the idea of a crate doesn’t sit well with me, but most of the world’s ways strike me as counterintuitive, and this is probably one of them. I put food in the crate, leave the radio on, shut the crate door, go about my business at home, and ignore her when I leave.
When I get home, the crate is ten feet from where I left it, and it’s filled with the white cotton innards of the crate cushion. Blankets have been pulled through the mesh and shredded. She’s biting the bars in a full-scale panic attack. I rush to let her out, wrecked that the person who’s supposed to protect her from her fears instead actively conjured this mental anguish. She has torn bits of fur off her own body.
As weeks pass, things get worse for her, and for me. I absorb her depression and panic. I cry, that I’ve taken her from her home where she was secure and am keeping her in a place she fears. Her harrowing, unendurable fear echoes as my own. Now I know something else, something I couldn’t ever know—the helplessness of being a parent whose every effort to solve and fix their child falls short. I’ve failed both her and myself.
I have to make a choice. I can meet my own longing for connection by keeping her, guaranteeing her helpless misery, or I can sacrifice my own needs for hers. Pilot needs what I haven’t yet been able to find for myself: a family. I have to find Pilot a new home. While liberating her was my attempt to rescue myself and give us both a family, I am not enough for her. I am not cut out to have a baby.
The rescue place finds a family in the country, away from cars and honking, away from skateboards. Before I hand her over, I bend down and sob into her face. We are the same, and I worry I’m giving up on us both.