Cheryl Peck

(Three Rivers, Michigan)

The girl is sleeping like an angel. Her expression is so serene I hate to wake her.

            In the living room the dog has spotted more trespassers on the sidewalk. She chuffs a warning, releasing a barely audible growl, but they cannot hear her and they never heed her warnings. Any minute now she will erupt in another chorus of sharp barks which are, I fear, loud enough to wake the dead.

            Usually the girl wakes up to reprimand the dog. It’s her dog.

            The dog is a nice dog, a Shepherd mixed with something smaller, a forty pound muscular athlete. A running companion for a woman who can no longer run. Now the dog trots restlessly to into the kitchen, her nails clicking lightly on the hardwood floor. She’s on her way to the laundry room to check her food and to keep track of how much of her water the cat drank. She has lived with us for a year and a half now, a co-owned dog. The girl comes and goes, but as the filaments of her former healthy life continue to unravel, she struggles to maintain herself, much less a dog. So she comes and she goes, our house—her mother’s house—a symbol of both what she has left and what she has lost. The dog stays here. With my compromised knees and her mother’s bad hip we struggle to find ways exercise the dog. Neither of us run. Neither of us ever ran. We take the dog to the park and she runs around us. Come on. Come on, you’ll like it. Come on, let’s run…

            The girl has not been running in almost two years. She may have tried, once or twice, last fall. On her good days she gets up out of bed and walks the dog. Or, on her good days she gets up and leads a normal life, but those days exist mostly in the past and maybe again someday in the future. On her good days, as her ‘good days’ are now, she and the dog walk three or four blocks west to where there is a field, and then she stands and waits while the dog runs the field. And then they come home and she goes back to bed.

            The dog is barking again: the garbage men have come for the trash. This offends her. We save all week and on Mondays we proudly display our trash in the front yard as proof of how well we have done and then men in jumpsuits and a big truck come along and steal it. Every week. You need to come out here and look at this, the dog warns me. She is ever-diligent as a watchdog. Something looms out there, threatening us all, and she is ready for it.

            The girl had a bad night last night. Yesterday she had a bad day.  I wonder if these quantifications of time that we use to measure off our lives even matter to her any more. One is bright, one is dark. Yesterday was cold and rainy buried under clouds and we all laid low, huddled under blankets and coats to ward off the damp: if you had spent hours curled up in a ball, willing the pain away, and you floated back to awareness of nausea and still more pain, would it matter if it was day or night or even which day it was?

            And still, the bright days seem the most ironic to me. It is spring. The leaves are unfolding on the trees, the shrubs are blooming, everything is waking up, stirring, stretching out, reaching up for the sun. The dog spends more of her time outside, people are walking up and down the sidewalks with their babies, the entire neighborhood is awake and alive and energized with the promise of new life…and the girl is still sick.

            Should I tell you the nature of her illness? The Latin names, the lists of symptoms and criteria, the labyrinth of narrow, tiny aisles of specialists that must be navigated again and again, up and down, lost souls bumping into dead ends, grasping desperately for a pill or a treatment or a diagnosis or THE ANSWER which does not exists in the appropriately labeled box on a clipboard on a desk behind door number five. She is ‘not sick enough’ to be treated for what she has, although what she has could kill her. Not to fear—so could the cure. No one wants to hear that. No one wants to listen. “You need to find her a different doctor,” my friends direct me, as if I, or she, or the doctor is the problem. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with her: perhaps she is a bad patient. She is laying silently in the bed now, her face smooth, at peace. Last week when, during another episode of pain, I asked her how she was doing, she described her status as, “I can’t find a doctor and I can’t die.” She has a new doctor now. At least for now. The doctors may not know how to treat her illness, but they sure as hell know how to prescribe drugs to mask it. There are times when her speech is so slurred I stop asking her to repeat herself, and I resist counting the references she makes to death.

            The dog has warned off seven intruders this morning alone, sharp, angry warnings of threat and doom. I try to yell quietly. Stop barking. Let her sleep, she needs the rest. The girl has not responded to the dog at all this morning.

            I am not qualified to make these determinations, nor, as we chase this line that blows like a paper wrapper in the wind, do I have any idea when or where to draw it. I go stand in the doorway and watch her sleep. Has she moved? Is she breathing? Should I shake her? She looks so peaceful I hate to wake her.   

Cheryl Peck is a frustrated English major who worked as a responsible adult for thirty years and eventually retired to become a novelist. She is the author of three books, Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs, Revenge of the Paste Eaters, and Splitting the difference, the first two being humorous memoirs and the third a book of poetry. She lives with her partner, an aging cat and a cheerful dog. She is (still) working on a novel.