It was strange, but the prison didn’t seem so foreign to Meghan as she might have thought. So many years of being a part of a large military-industrial complex had softened her attitude toward gunmetal gray and razor wire, uniforms. The first guard to greet her thanked her for her service, as did the second. The third, who opened the door to allow her to wheel into the visitors’ room, bent down and whispered, “Two tours.”
“Where?”
“Helmand Province.”
Meghan touched his hand with her scarred one. “Good man.”
“Where were you?”
Meghan shook her head. She was here to get better, not to have an informal reunion. “I’m here now.”
Edith Moore had arrived ahead of Meghan and was sitting at a table in the visitors’ room. Each rectangular table had four orange chairs fixed two to a side. Meghan rolled up to the empty end, keeping Edith to her right, where she could hear her better. The high windows, crosshatched with wire, allowed in enough light to reveal the sad, utilitarian nature of the room, the mottled beige linoleum, the grimy tables, the ugly plastic chairs. There was no one else in there, but the place still held the odor of bodies, of the women and their families who filled this place on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons. She couldn’t imagine children being brought in here to visit mothers. Mothers should be associated with kitchens, with playgrounds and baths at night.
“So, when do I get to meet her?” Her mouth was dry and she wished she’d brought a bottle of water. “It’s been almost an hour.”
“Soon. We’re on their schedule, not ours.” Edith, dressed for the occasion in an A-line wool skirt and white blouse with a floppy bow set both her palms on the surface of the slightly sticky table. “This inmate has been working with her dog for ten months. She’s never done this before, so I don’t know how she’ll react to actually giving him up. They all go into it knowing that the training is a temporary thing, but emotions aren’t always predictable.”
“But she has to give him up.”
“Yes, and I think she’ll be okay, but just be prepared.”
Meghan glanced at her phone, another minute went by, then another. She thought about making a joke—“It’s just like the Army, hurry up and wait”—but didn’t. A starling flitted by the high windows, a dark etch against the blue sky. “What did she do? To be put in here?”
“She’s doing her time. What she did to be here has no relevance as to how well she’ll train you to work with the dog. We don’t reveal that information; that’s up to the inmate to volunteer. And don’t expect her to.”
Another minute. Meghan was beginning to wish she’d taken a pill. Something to take the edge off. She was uncomfortable, but not in pain, and that had become her rule: She had to be in pain to take a pill. Knowing that she was going to have to be completely functional to take on the training of the dog had been a great incentive toward keeping the little white pills in their vial.
Finally, a door opened. Edith and Meghan looked up from their contemplation of their own hands to see a young woman come into the room accompanied by a uniformed guard. Her strawberry-blond hair was bundled into a loose bun, a few tendrils framing her face. She wasn’t wearing a prison jumpsuit as Meghan had pictured, but generic blue jeans and a white T-shirt, plain white sneakers on her feet. So, this is an inmate in its natural habitat. But, she’s smiling and there is something so very ordinary about her. Like Meghan, she’s a little nervous. “Hey there, I’m Rosie.”
They met for the first time without the dog. Meghan was surprised to be as nervous as she was, a feeling more appropriate to a first date. If you’d asked her what she was expecting, she would have said, “Not Rosie Collins.” Not someone so, okay, say it, normal. No tattoos, no horns, no gum chewing, no foulmouthedness. Meghan could see that Rosie was as nervous as she was. Maybe she wasn’t expecting someone quite like her. Quite as wounded. And then Rosie said something that floored Meghan. “What kind of ride is that?” Meaning her wheelchair.
“It’s not my regular one. I’ve got a motorized one back home.”
“My brother coveted a motorized chair, but could never afford one.”
“Wounded military?” She was ready to suggest a phone number for help.
“No. Homegrown wounding. He was a victim of gun violence. A paraplegic.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We all were. It was a long time ago.”
Meghan most often encountered people who tried hard to ignore the fact that she was in a wheelchair. They either didn’t speak to her or spoke loudly, as if she were deaf. Which she kind of was, but still. Or they crouched down, so that she felt like a child being addressed by an adult. Rosie’s quick acknowledgment of the chair made Meghan feel, in a very odd way, almost normal. The elephant wasn’t allowed into the room.
Later, Meghan thought that if she and Rosie had met in a spin class or at a party, they would have hit it off and probably met up for drinks some Friday night. If they had been normal, they would have fallen into a friendship like two regular girls with similar interests. For Meghan, female friendships were few and far between, juxtaposed as they were by frequent deployments. Her female friends were also soldiers. They had one another’s backs; they shared cookies from home; they wept privately together. These were intense relationships that were different from having a civilian friend. A civilian friend made sure your bra straps weren’t showing; a soldier made sure your body armor was in place. They had a deep connection while in the field, but so often that connection was gone as soon as someone was sent home or reassigned.
“So, Rosie, what got you interested in this program?”
“Anything to change things up. It’s pretty boring in here.”
“I’ll bet it is.” Oddly, there were parts of this place that reminded Meghan of hospitals. Maybe it was the institutional vibe. Excluding the razor wire, of course.
“And why do you think a dog will help you?”
It was, of course, the first question in the first interview Meghan had endured while applying for the program. Her answer hadn’t changed. “I need my independence back.”
“Okay. Shark will help you with that.”
“That’s his name, Shark?”
“Yes.” For the first time, Rosie looked unhappy. “I call him Sharkey. He’s a Labrador, really sweet…” And then she stopped talking, turned her face away from Meghan.
Meghan glanced at the guard stationed in the corner. Edith Moore was talking with the other training pair meeting for the first time. She cautiously reached across the tabletop with her damaged left hand. “I’ll make you proud of him. I promise he’ll be as happy with me as he must be with you.”
Rosie’s blue eyes were moist, but she blinked hard and a toughness bloomed. “I know. I couldn’t do this unless I believed that he’s going to be doing a very important job.”
“When I was in Afghanistan, we had military working dogs, bomb sniffers. Those dogs had critical jobs, and we know that they saved our asses so many times. I envied the attachment those dogs had with their handlers. And, you know what? Sometimes those handlers went home and the dogs were assigned to new handlers. And they did their jobs with the same zeal as they had with their original handlers.” Meghan saw the guard notice the verboten touch. “The thing is, those dogs never forgot their first handlers.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
Rosie laughed. The toughness faded and a set of tiny dimples appeared.
Carol was waiting for Meghan at Edith’s office building, where the van with the other candidates for service dogs had just arrived back from the prison.
Meghan pushed herself off the lowered ramp and over to Carol’s car.
It was a physical negotiation to get Meghan out of the chair and into the front seat, but somehow they managed it. Carol slid into the driver’s seat. “How did the meeting go?”
“I think it went really well.”
“What’s the dog like?”
“I meet him tomorrow. Today was a meet and greet with the…” She hesitated, wanting another word besides inmate. “Trainer.”
“What’s she like?”
“I think we’re going to get on just fine.”
“Your mom called me.”
“How is she?”
“Concerned that you haven’t called her, given her an update.”
“There wasn’t much to tell her.”
“There is now.”
Meghan rested her head against the seat, closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. Tomorrow everything would begin to be different. Tomorrow she’d start her canine education, learn how to command the dog to pick up what had been dropped, to flip wall switches she couldn’t reach. To find her missing socks. To help her when she felt the black cloud of despair looming. Tomorrow she would learn independence once more—an independence that precluded going back to Florida to live in her parents’ house ever again.
There he was. At last. Shining coat, white teeth, kind eyes. Shark. Sharkey. No, for her, he would be Shark. Meghan rolled into the activity room, paused ten feet from where Rosie stood with the dog sitting at her heel, the leash in her hands. This is the moment when everything will change, Meghan thought. In a dream last night, she’d been running; a dog, more shadow than actual, ran beside her. In some kind of magical thinking, Meghan had been imagining that Shark would bring her back to her feet. She pictured looking down on him from above, not practically eye-to-eye, as he was now. Rosie had brought him over to her for their official, program-sanctioned, introduction.
“Shark, sit.”
The dog, the color of a Dove Bar, sat in front of her. Like a gentleman, he didn’t push himself on her, but his head bobbed and his open, laughing mouth confessed his impatience to be touched. She wanted to lay her head against his. Instead, Meghan, doing as she was instructed, put out one hand for him to sniff, then touched his head. The skull was hard beneath amazingly soft skin. His small brown eyes were outlined in faint pink, and he studied her without blinking. “Shark. Are you ready to help me?” He hun-hunned a response, and his thick rudder of a tail whipped back and forth as he stood and told her, I will.
“I think he likes me.” Meghan looked up from the dog and saw Rosie’s crumpled face, and her heart broke for the inmate.
“He does. He’s going to love you.” Rosie wiped away the tears, and Meghan watched her make the transition from emotionally overcome to being a good soldier. This was what she had been working for; this was what she would do. “Let’s go over some of his basic stuff today.”