Love Is the Best Medicine (3 page)

Ben brought his cold hands up to his face, covering his nose.

“Tell me you smell that,” he said.

Eileen let her chin fold into her neck, rolled her eyes up.

“She just needs a bath, that’s all.”

He fanned a flat palm below his nose. The smell had a depth, a maturity, a bouquet combining the ripe pungency of a wild animal with the acerbic whiff of the foulest dog breath.

“You mean a Meryl Streep,
Silkwood
, nuclear-decontamination-type bath?”

Eileen knitted her brows and covered the dog’s ears with her hands as though sparing her the embarrassment.

“We’re ignoring you. What did they say?”

“They said she doesn’t live here. But she comes round all the time looking for food. They don’t know where she’s from.”

Eileen worked her lips into something between a pout and a frown, and the spaniel seemed to sense her concern and a need to reassert a presence, leaving the blanket and crawling into her lap.

Ben felt the “Now what?” moment hanging between the three of them, as he watched Eileen and the dog. It was getting late and he couldn’t deny there was a small part of him that felt like the stinky, if affectionate, intruder in the car was becoming a bit like that uncle who overstays his welcome at the family Thanksgiving party and just as you think he is going to ask for his coat he troubles you for a double espresso!

But then he took in his wife and the dilemma written across her face. Once again Eileen had stepped up and taken action without having to decide or debate because the right thing to do would always be the right thing to do.

“What are you thinking?” said Ben, adding, with a smile, “Or should I say, what do you think
we
should do with the dog?”

Eileen read the beginnings of acquiescence in his eyes and nodded her appreciation.

“Well, we can’t leave her here. She’ll die of cold out there.”

Eileen had a point, Ben thought, but according to his sources it wasn’t as though the dog didn’t make this run to her favorite food bank on a regular basis. She was old enough to have weathered at least a decade of harsh winters far tougher than tonight’s. She would find her way home without difficulty. Then again, tossing her out to fend for herself after giving her this brush with warmth and affection felt all wrong.

“What if someone’s looking for her?” he said.

She didn’t hesitate.

“But what if they’re not? What if they dumped her in the nearest parking lot who knows how long ago and kept driving. What if she’s been left to fend for herself?”

Ben pensively bounced a clenched fist on his lower lip before turning in his seat to face forward, applying his seat belt, and sliding the truck into reverse.

“What are you doing?”

Ben stopped the SUV, slipped it into drive and said, “We need to make sure we’re doing the right thing.”

T
AKING
his directions from the sous chef, Ben drove the half mile down a deserted rural highway in search of the nearest neighborhood, and when the vast, impenetrable woodlands of central Massachusetts suddenly gave way to a modern development, Ben hung a right into a rolling barren landscape peppered with McMansions.

“This doesn’t seem right,” said Eileen.

The homes were set back behind large, rectangular lawns topped by a blanket of frost so neat it looked as though it might have been applied by hand, a white bedsheet with perfect hospital corners. Two- and three-car garages ensured the sidewalks and driveways were empty and there was no one in sight, the occasional floodlight bursting into life as their curb-crawling vehicle set off another motion detector.

“I agree,” said Ben, scanning left and right, unable to find a single stray leaf to spoil the efforts of professional landscaping crews. “With no disrespect to your little friend, I don’t see her making the annual holiday family photo for the kind of people living in these homes.”

The road snaked through the neighborhood, ending at a stop sign where Ben elected to take a left in hopes of working his way back to the main highway. Eileen encouraged the spaniel to stand on her lap and look out the window, as though the dog might divine the correct route and signal it with her tail, like a tracking device.

In the passing gleam from a street lamp, Ben checked in his rearview mirror and caught a flash of the two of them. Eileen, indifferent to the little dog’s smell and the horrors of what was decaying inside her mouth, was animated and encouraging, pointing out the passing sites as if they were touring a capital city.

As the road narrowed, the houses changed—small Capes and ranches emerged, closed above-ground pools, picket fences desperate for a coat of paint. Ben slowed down as he spied one particularly ramshackle Victorian Colonial.

A number of abandoned cars on blocks lay strewn across a front lawn more dirt than grass. The wraparound farmer’s porch was collapsing at the corner, tilting the floor at a perilous Hitchcock camera angle. Bluish television light filled the gap between half-drawn curtains, and last year’s unlit icicle Christmas lights still hung from dilapidated guttering. But what drew Ben’s eye to this particular property was the bottom of a one-car garage. Over to one side, cut into the peeling paint on the aluminum siding, was a black rubber dog door.

Ben glanced over his shoulder at Eileen and the dog and wondered if the spaniel was the Goldilocks whose size fit the flap just right.

“This house might match this dog,” he thought.

“What is it?” said Eileen.

She obviously hadn’t seen the flap cut into the garage. Then again, Ben could have been completely wrong. The dog appeared to show no sign of recognition, no tell, unless her sudden stillness was meant to be a warning, urging him to drive on.

“Nothing,” said Ben. “Let’s go up a bit farther.”

Two hundred yards farther down the road Ben caught sight of something moving in his high beams. He slowed down, believing it to be a wild animal, but the proverbial deer in his headlights was actually a woman bundled into a heavy winter coat and woolen ski hat, attached to a pair of snorting pugs on retractable leashes. He
couldn’t tell whether the woman was more embarrassed to be caught picking up “Tootsie Rolls” and secreting them inside her doggy poop bag or the fact that one of the dynamic duo had crapped on a neighbor’s front lawn.

The SUV pulled up alongside her and Ben powered down the front passenger window only to find Eileen doing the same thing in the back.

“Excuse me,” said Eileen. “I’m sorry to bother you so late at night but I was wondering if you know this dog.”

Eileen didn’t have to encourage the spaniel to show herself in the window space because as soon as the gap appeared she was standing on her back legs, sticking her head out into the night like a hungry kid ordering fast food at a drive-through. And then, for the first time in their presence, the spaniel barked. Whether it was prompted by recognition or a need to be territorial and defensive, aimed at the woman or aimed at the dogs, it was hard to say, but her quick double yap once more fired up her stubby tail and the rest of her enthusiastic derriere.

Both pugs stared back, the more demure of the two returning the greeting while his companion concentrated on scratching parallel grooves into the frost with his back feet.

The woman came up to the spaniel’s window, instinctively petting the dog with her free hand.

“Where did you find her?” said the woman.

“Down at Mario’s,” said Ben. “She was wandering around their parking lot.” All the while he was thinking, “You said
her
. Just a guess?”

“We thought she might have strayed, gone looking for food,” said Eileen. “There’s not too many other neighborhoods nearby. We thought someone might know who she belongs to.”

The woman dipped down a little more, stepped in closer. She seemed to be taking her time and Ben felt as though she was checking him out—thick black hair, neatly trimmed beard, woolen jacket.
She probably had him pegged as a high school teacher rather than a respected local artist. Then the woman turned to Eileen—pretty, strawberry blond—and Ben knew she’d be struck by those big blue eyes that glowed with genuine concern for the little black dog happy to be on her lap.

Suddenly the Pug Lady seemed distracted by something else in the backseat and Ben followed her gaze to, of all things, the dog blanket. It was covered in Didi’s black hairs, and based on their length it was obvious those hairs couldn’t belong to the little black dog sniffing around her face.

Sucking hard on her teeth the Pug Lady said, “Nope,” with an unequivocal finality. “Never seen that dog before.” And then, as if it might be important, added, “Nobody round here owns a spaniel.”

She gave the dog a quick pat on the head, smiled as she said “Sorry,” and dragged her pugs into the darkness behind the truck.

N
ITHER
of them spoke, and in less than a minute they were back at the main highway having to decide which way to go next. Privately neither Eileen nor Ben believed the woman with the pugs, convinced they both heard the same message in her denial—that even if Helen did have a home, she might deserve a better one. For Ben there was nothing left to think about, while Eileen had just being going through the motions anyway.

He indicated left and accelerated, Eileen leaning forward in her seat to squeeze Ben’s shoulder, knowing he was heading back, past the restaurant and toward home.

“You know, I’m still going to try and find out who she belongs to,” she said.

Ben adjusted his position so their eyes could meet in the mirror, so she could read his smile.

She sat back in her seat, the dog virtually asleep in her lap.

“She really does possess some interesting qualities,” said Eileen.

“Aside from a talent for clearing confined spaces.”

She laughed.

“If she wanders the streets begging for food she has to be a fighter, right? A survivor, a go-getter, feisty and determined. I mean, don’t you see it, something familiar about that close-cut fringe of hair over her eyes? Remind you of anyone?”

Ben checked the mirror, and the lights from a passing car let him see his wife passing her hand over the sleeping dog’s body. He shook his head, pretending not to know, rewarded with a moment of delight before she disappeared into darkness and said, “I think we should name her Helen.”

T
HERE
are many reasons why so many of us choose to share our lives with a pet—it’s the perfect antidote for loneliness, providing an endless supply of smiles and the certainty of unwavering companionship, and many of us have seen the way a pet can make a family feel whole. Whatever the reason, something clicks, and evolves into a side effect called love. More often than not the time frame for this connection is brief, perhaps instantaneous. Maybe this was what made the relationship between Sandi Davies and a singular miniature pinscher named Cleo all the more special. For here was a love affair over forty years in the making.

Sandi grew up as a baby boomer in rural Ontario, Canada, a freckle-faced little girl with rust-colored hair, frequently branded by her mother as “the greatest disappointment of my life.”

“You were meant to be a boy,” her mother would say, almost affronted, as though she were the victim of some grievous miscommunication. “Not a girl. I never wanted a girl, let alone imagined a name for a girl. All I had was Michael Ashley. You were meant to be Michael Ashley. Michael Ashley was supposed to be my son.”

Like so many woman of the June Cleaver era, Sandi’s mom was determined to appear permanently elated by the joys of living a
perfect life. Why perfection necessitated an offspring of the opposite sex, Sandi never knew. But perhaps this was why, in a misguided effort to appease her mother’s preference for this hypothetical Michael Ashley, Sandi developed into a tomboy. If worms and dirt and an indelibly grass-stained pair of Levi’s were all it took, her mother’s wish had come true.

“What’s wrong with you?” her mother would scream, trying to brush the snarls from her daughter’s short hair, hair that defied barrettes and bows. “You’re wearing that dress and I won’t hear another word about it.”

Such mixed signals only compounded Sandi’s confusion. She was supposed to be a boy, yet her mother also wanted a doll, something malleable, preferably silent and amenable to dress-up and the application of makeup and jewelry. Fortunately for Sandi the nearest small town was more than a forty-five-minute drive away, and it was at least a two-hour drive to a respectable department store, which meant that her mother’s efforts to mold a protégé took place in the home, where she dreamed of meeting a better class of people and agonized over the latest innovations at the Joneses’. Sandi grew used to being subjected to fantasies about new appliances and haute couture from magazine and newspaper advertising.

“Look at this, just look at this,” Sandi’s mother might say as she accosted the child clomping through the house and demanded an opinion on Dior or Maytag as a long pink nail lovingly pointed out a wool jacket or pearly white washer. And though Sandi tried to please, she failed to appreciate and crave these finer things in life, her indifference to material prizes counterbalanced by a longing for her mother’s attention and affection, simple gifts that were always somehow unattainable.