But as the season turns, darkening into a late but raw winter, so do we. Our golden autumn’s gone gray and severe. Our neighborhood, out at the end of town, is empty save for us, the windows of summer houses shuttered tight. The dry canes of the climbing roses rattle, and wind whistles in the wires in the masts of the moored catamarans, a chilly singing. Wally’s mood shifts. He’d planned, these months when he wasn’t working (no shops which could use his skills would be open till April), to paint and sketch, maybe to continue doing some writing, but what he does is walk, whole days of dog-walking, and when I come home from my two days of teaching each week there’s a heaviness and darkness in him, even though I know he’s glad to see me. It feels as if his life is a weight he has to lift, to carry, and he doesn’t quite seem to have the strength. The days I’m away the weight seems to become heavier; free of the distraction of company, he sinks further into himself, into uncertainty, into depression.
And then one morning early in January Wally’s walking Arden, on the way home from the lush wrack and tumble of the salt marsh. They’re crossing a lawn which is separated from the road by a tall hedge when Arden spies a rabbit, object of wonder and delight, and bolts unstoppably after it, right through the hedge and into the road. Wally, left on the other side, hears the sickening screech of brakes, and then, worse, the sound of a body being struck, and then a cry—pain, confusion, terror? He runs to the road. The car has stopped, but Arden isn’t there; Wally looks up to see him racing away down Commercial Street, toward town, and though Wally runs after him shouting Arden’s name till he thinks his heart will burst, the dog can’t hear him. There’s nothing for him but panic’s imperative, nothing but flight.
The driver of the car and his passenger, two kind and concerned men, drive Wally around the neighborhood, stopping to ask people if they’ve seen a dog. Someone says they thought they saw a black dog racing up Franklin Street—in the direction of the dunes and woods, a refuge, but only if Arden also crossed the town’s busiest streets.
No sign of him.
Soon Wally’s calling me at my office; only one other time, two years later, will a telephone call be so terrifying. There are great huge silences between words, when he cannot still his sobs enough to continue.
“Babe…” Long silence, the intake of Wally’s breath. I’m thinking, My God, what’s happened?
“Arden…got hit…by a…car.”
Slowly, my questions get the rest of the story out. I think it’s probably a good sign that Arden could run, and has; at least he was able to, though we’re both terrified that he’s injured internally, that he’s hiding somewhere, in pain, where we can’t get to him. And I’m frightened by this wild panic in Wally’s voice, which is somehow like nothing I’ve heard before, more desperate, more empty, as if the bottom has fallen out of the world.
It takes me six hours to get home. During this time, Wally’s combed the streets, calling till he’s hoarse. No luck. He’s also called his friend Bobby, who’s driven down from Boston; always wanting to please, to make himself indispensable, Bobby shows up all excited saying he’s found Arden, who’s waiting out in the car. Wally rushes out, but the dog in the front seat is someone else’s black pooch, who was perfectly happy to jump into Bobby’s station wagon. Later, Wally will tell me how his knees buckled when he saw that it wasn’t our dog. Bobby wasn’t a stranger to Arden; what was he thinking? Was he so desperate to help that he’d pick up any black dog? Certainly he could behave thoughtlessly, but I think now he must have picked up on that panic in Wally’s voice, that nearly unbearable note of pain. I would have done anything to salve that, too, but confronting the wrong dog only made Wally’s spirits sink more deeply. Bobby has to go home, just after I return, and I’m glad.
We comb the town again, hoping that a new voice might reach Arden; if he’s hiding, panicked or wounded, can I draw him out? We call the police and the radio station and make signs to post all over town: at the A&P, the post office, the café bulletin board. Arden’s not a dog who’s been out in the world on his own. With Wally or me since he was a puppy, carried home in our laps from the animal shelter, he’s bound to us by deep ties, and though he likes exploring, he’s never evidenced the least desire to wander around without us. He is in relation to us; that’s his life.
And though I am frantic with worry for him myself, what I hear in Wally’s voice, what shows in his face, is some panic and terror more primal than mine, a pain that seems to go all the way to the root of him. We drive through the parking lot at Herring Cove Beach, a place we often walk, thinking perhaps he might have run there. A town eccentric—a former therapist, I’ve heard, who’s become a vision of Father Christmas in his long white hair and beard, who dresses all in white and walks with a tall walking stick—is crossing the parking lot, and when we pull up beside him Wally rolls down the window and says, “Have you seen my dog?” It’s the voice of a terrified little boy, helpless, utterly alone.
Back home, having accomplished nothing, we’re looking down into the rough January water of the bay churning against the breakwater stones. “Where is he?” Wally demands, as if I or anyone could answer, “Where is he?”
Our descent seemed a long, imperceptible downward glide, but I can see now there were indeed precipitous drops, moments when we stepped down to a new level, a greater depth.
Arden’s accident was such a moment. In Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls there’s a weird and chilling scene when thunder shatters a glass of water on a bedside table; it is, somehow, the beginning of the speaker’s misfortune, the physical manifestation of his illness beginning. A glass shatters and a room goes dark; nothing is ever the same again.
What opened in Wally then was a depth of vulnerability and despair like nothing I’d ever seen in him before. It was about the real loss—was it?—of Arden, of course, but it was more than that, too, Arden and Wally both struck, everything out of his control, everything veering into his life, unstoppable, an event from which he couldn’t be rescued. We didn’t know where Arden was or how badly he might be hurt—did we know where Wally was, or how much he’d been harmed?
We tried to sleep that night, and did, fitfully. I remember walking the beach at five, a bleary dawn, whistling and calling. Late in the morning, the phone rang. Some neighbors, down for the weekend, had gone to town for breakfast, because it was a warm and sunny morning. Reading the bulletin board in front of the café, they’d recognized Arden’s name and description. Then, walking homeward, in front of the bank, Arden appeared, walking—with a rather confused and tentative look, they thought—in the same direction they were going.
“Arden?” they asked. And it seemed his name brought him back from wherever he’d been to the world of connection. He shook his head, as if clearing it, and looked at them uncertainly, and when they said it again he began to wag his tail and step toward them.
He wasn’t hurt; the vet’s poking and prodding later that day wouldn’t reveal a thing. He must have run in sheer terror, and hidden, not knowing where the familiar might be, not knowing how to return to his name.
The men stroked and talked to him until I got there. Wally said he couldn’t handle going, he was so afraid it would be another mistake, the wrong black dog, and he couldn’t bear it again. So I went alone, and when I stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk Arden came hurrying to me, and leaned all his weight against me, and buried his face in my coat.
Later, when both Wally and I were dealing perhaps most directly with the prospect of his dying (not the literal, actual illness, but the preparatory work, the—what to call it? consideration?—which went on about a year and a half ahead of his death) we both struggled in dreams to come to terms. And the dream that shook me most, night after night, centered on Arden. We were walking in a field, the three of us, near a highway, happy, at ease, and then Arden would catch a scent and bound ahead, wild with it, no calling him back, onto the road. He’d be hit, but in each dream there would be a variation—struck and killed, or run away, his situation unknown. I’d wake up in horror, afraid to sleep because I was afraid the dream would start again. I thought of lines from a poem of James Merrill’s:
the mere word “animal” a skin
through which its old sense glimmers, of the soul.
Always exploring ahead of us on our walks—the walks Wally couldn’t take anymore—Arden was our future’s dark vessel, the part of us that would scout ahead, sniffing out what’s to come. He was, in my dream, where we were about to be struck.