Saving Gracie (11 page)

“If you decide you don’t want her, you can always bring her back,” the tech said.

Linda thanked her and said goodbye. She crossed the parking lot, placed the crate in the rear seat of her car, got in behind the wheel, and started the engine. Almost instantly the dog’s putrid odor filled the car. The shelter’s groomer had bathed all the dogs in preparation for Adoption Day, but this one was going to need another bath, maybe two or three, before she smelled good enough to hug close.

Linda drove out of the parking lot and retraced her route down the winding road. She had just pulled onto the fast-paced bypass when she felt the Cavalier’s presence next to her. Silently the dog had scrambled out of her crate, climbed down off the backseat, and scampered on top of the leather console between the front seats. She was standing at Linda’s elbow, wobbling. Before Linda could stop her, the dog half-jumped, half-fell into her lap.

Linda grimaced. The papaya-colored sundress she was wearing—the all-cotton sheath that was such a chore to iron—would have to be washed now. She thought about setting Dog 132 down in the passenger seat, but the little dog dug in her nails. She wasn’t going anywhere. Linda, touched by her tenacity, let her stay.

Halfway home, she decided to drop by and show her new find to her friend Cathy, a former colleague of hers at the Y who lived just off the highway. Linda had kept Cathy up to date on her search for a dog, and Cathy, an ardent dog lover, was eager to meet her friend’s new pet.

On the outskirts of town, Linda phoned Cathy and moments later pulled alongside her house. Cathy was waiting. She had read about King Charles Spaniels on the Internet. The long-eared, multicolor dogs were adorable. Cathy loved the history of the breed, too. Linda was incredibly lucky to have found this dog at no cost, Cathy told her.

Then Linda stepped out of the car holding her new dog, and Cathy winced at the sight of the dull-coated creature with the distended belly. Linda knew what she was thinking: She looks like a cow. “She’s going to need a breast lift,” she said aloud, and the two women laughed.

Months later, Cathy confessed that the Cavalier had looked so sickly that she wasn’t certain the dog would survive. But outwardly she forced a smile. “Maybe she’ll come around,” she said finally, and Linda smiled back. Leave it to Cathy to put a sunny spin on something she clearly thought was a mistake.

The two friends chatted briefly before Linda got back on the road. This time she didn’t bother putting the Cavalier in the crate. She had to admit that, despite the smell, the warmth of the dog’s scrubby little body on her lap felt good.

Linda had never thought of herself as a dog person. Growing up in Cumbola, a village in the thick of Pennsylvania’s coal country, she, her sister, and their mother had owned a couple of Toy Poodles, first Gigi and then Tina. But while the dogs were allowed inside the family’s modest row house during the day, they were forbidden from jumping onto the furniture, so the girls never cuddled with them much. At night, or any time the family left the house, the dogs were locked in the basement, often for long stretches. They were paper-trained and didn’t have to go outside. In hindsight, Linda was struck by how much of the dogs’ lives were spent in the dark.

For reasons she couldn’t explain, Linda had always preferred cats. She’d doted on Puddy, a striped tabby she and her ex-husband had adopted from the pound when they were still dating. Before her own children came along, Puddy was her baby. Uncharacteristically for a cat, he loved to go on car rides, and consequently he went everywhere with Linda. When, years later, he was struck by a car and crawled under a neighbor’s porch to die, Linda was overcome with grief.

Still, something felt right about taking this needy little dog. Linda thought back over the events that had led to this moment. The fact that the Harrisburg paper hadn’t been delivered to the coffeehouse that morning, for one; if it had, she never would have learned about the rescued Cavaliers. Then, when she’d called the shelter that morning, she had been told it was too late. Yet she’d driven there anyway to discover Dog 132—the puppy mill survivor no one else wanted—waiting.

Maybe in some odd, serendipitous way this was destined to be. She was meant to have not just any Cavalier, but this particular dog, problems and all. “And here she is sitting in my lap,” Linda thought. “She likes me, too.”

Chapter 13: Overwhelmed

It was after two by the time Linda arrived home. She’d been missing in action for three hours now. If she dropped the Cavalier off at her house, she could slink back into the office and spend a couple of hours calling prospective donors. Not exactly a memorable welcome for a new pet, but it was the best Linda could do.

She pulled into her driveway, got out of the car, set the dog down in the grass, and quickly went up the two stairs to the back door. “Come on, let’s go inside,” she called out. The Cavalier toddled along behind her, stopped at the steps, and stared up at her, confused. “My gosh, she has no idea how to climb stairs,” Linda thought. She was about to reach down and scoop the dog up when the Cavalier solved the problem on her own by clambering up a small bank by the side of the steps. It struck Linda that the dog wanted to follow her badly enough to find a way.

Inside, Linda set a bowl of water on the floor. The Cavalier stood motionless. Linda knelt beside her and offered her a couple of treats. “Good girl,” she said, stroking her. “You’re in your new home now.” The dog accepted the treats but stood stiffly, too confused to explore.

Linda spent several more minutes talking to the dog before she placed the crate on the floor beside the dining room table, helped the Cavalier inside, and braced the broken door. The crate was too small, but she didn’t want to give the dog the run of the place just yet. She wasn’t housetrained. “You take a nap now, sweetheart,” she told the little dog. “I’ll be back soon.”

A little after five, she left work and swung by a friend’s house to pick up the kids. Ryan, Erika, and Julia were spending the week at golf camp at a public course. Linda had told them a Cavalier might be available, and they were waiting with a flurry of questions.

“Did you get the dog?” Erika wanted to know as soon as she climbed into the back seat.

“What dog?” Linda teased.

Erika raised her voice in exasperation. “You know. The dog you said you were going to get!”

“I don’t know,” Linda replied. “We’ll have to see.”

She’d never been terribly good at keeping secrets. Grinning, she glanced in the rearview mirror and confessed that yes, she’d adopted a dog. And yes, it was a Cavalier. But she has a couple of problems, Linda warned.

She explained that the dog had come from a puppy mill and had led a difficult life. Okay, the kids nodded. She has some skin problems, Linda said. She’s going to need to take medicine to clear them up. The kids shrugged. No big deal. And she has an ear infection.
And
some eye issues. Okay, okay, the kids said.

Also, Linda told them, she has almost no teeth. The kids stared back at her incredulously. “No teeth?”

“If you don’t like her, I can take her back,” Linda said matter-of-factly. She wanted the kids to feel as if they had some say in the matter. They seemed mollified.

Even before they laid eyes on the new dog, the kids bandied about possible names. Wilma, everyone agreed, sounded like somebody’s fusty great-aunt. Julia suggested naming her Princess or Precious. “Keep going,” Linda said. They considered Checkers or Oreo, but neither sounded right.

“How about Gracie?”
Erika said, finally.
Gracie.
Linda liked it. It sounded right for the little dog. Gracie it would be.

When they arrived home and saw their new pet, the kids were ambivalent. Gracie was clearly anxious to be sprung from the carrier. Julia opened the latch and reached inside to pull the dog out. Inadvertently, she felt the dog’s protruding nipples. “That’s disgusting!” she said, drawing her hands back.

The kids stood back to watch Gracie explore her new surroundings. But the wide open space of the living room was too much for the little dog. She stood still, petrified.

Linda needed to throw together something for dinner. She left Gracie in the care of the girls. Julia, determined to connect with the Cavalier, attached Spike’s old leash to her and tugged her out the back door to go for a walk. Julia walked slowly, but Gracie resisted every step of the way. She did everything she could to turn her
sixteen-pound body into a dead weight.

Gracie had a new home that offered plenty of space to explore. For a dog accustomed to constant confinement, the freedom was overwhelming. (
Linda Jackson
)

From the kitchen window, Linda watched as her daughter inched down the sidewalk with their new pet. Erika and Ryan stayed behind. They were unimpressed. To Ryan, the Cavalier looked like a frightened stuffed toy—not at all the kind of dog you could toss balls to or wrestle with. To Erika, Gracie was too scared to be much fun.

After supper the girls helped Linda bathe Gracie, and that night, when Linda went out on a date with her boyfriend, Eric, they took turns holding and dressing Gracie in doll gowns. The little dog remained apprehensive. She wasn’t used to this much attention.

Erika and Julia weren’t sure they wanted anything to do with her, either. The Cavalier still stank, not of feces, as she once did, but of some sort of medicine, like she’d been dipped in flea powder. They sat on the floor with her because they didn’t want her anywhere near the furniture.

“Well, should I take her back?” Linda asked late that evening as she leaned against the doorjamb of the girls’ second-floor bedroom. Erika and Julia agreed that no, they guessed she should stay. Despite Gracie’s smell, the girls had sandwiched her between them on Erika’s bed, and that’s where she stayed until the alarm clock buzzed the next morning.

At school that day, Erika complained to her friends that the family’s new pet was boring. Later she told Linda, “I was expecting a normal dog. Why can’t you get a normal dog?”

The family vet, Robert Kezell, wondered the same thing. Two days after Linda brought Gracie home, she took Gracie in for a checkup. The Cavalier cowered on the cold metal counter as the veterinarian looked her over carefully. The clinic’s medicinal smell seemed to exacerbate her fear. Kezell picked up on her anxiety, looked at Linda, and shook his head.

“This poor dog,” he said.

It turned out Gracie had a staph infection on her chest. Kezell prescribed antibiotics to treat it. Her left ear canal was partially closed, thanks to chronic infections. The vet showed Linda how to massage the sides of the dog’s ears to work out the mucus. The dog suffered from anemia, and her eyes were in bad shape. Scar tissue clouded her right eye, and Kezell diagnosed both eyes as being severely dry; Linda would need to put drops in them daily to ease the pain.

Kezell’s good news was that Gracie’s heartbeat sounded strong. Cavaliers as a breed were notorious for dying from mitral valve disease, a heart condition that causes blood to flow backward into the atrium. The prevalence of mitral valve disease in Cavaliers is about twenty times that of other breeds. By the time they are 5 years old, more than half of all Cavaliers have developed mitral valve disease, and nearly all develop it by the time they are 10—if they live that long. The average Cavalier only lives to be 7 or 8. As far as Gracie was concerned, though, so far, so good, Kezell said.

Still, he wanted to make it clear Gracie did not get a clean bill of health. “I want to run some blood work,” the vet told Linda. He also asked, “How far do you want to go with this? She could be really sick and you could wind up spending a lot.”

For a moment Linda said nothing
.
“Let’s clear up the obvious things and then we’ll reevaluate her,” she said finally.

How naive she’d been to think a dog from the pound might truly come problem free. Despite that, Linda already felt attached to her vulnerable new pet. For now, anyway, she had no desire to learn whether Gracie’s health was more fragile than she already knew. What mattered, right this instant, was that, for once, this deserving little dog felt safe and comfortable—and that she be given every chance possible to enjoy a better life.

Chapter 14: Too Scared to Play

No question about it: Gracie was a cutie. Her coat of jet-black-against-snow-white hair (with just a pinch of the red that made her a tricolor) was striking; her feathery paws were adorable; and those long, curly ears made complete strangers want to reach out and take her in their arms.

But if the newest member of the Jackson family possessed anything approximating a personality, Ryan, Erika, and Julia couldn’t detect it. The kids had expected the Cavalier to frolic about the house, chase after toys, and bond with them instantly, the way a pet dog was supposed to do. They figured she’d connect with them in that special, primal way dogs have, that together they’d be a
pack.

In nearly every instance, Gracie came up short. She was unsure of her surroundings and too bewildered to enjoy herself. She didn’t seem to comprehend what it meant to have fun. She just sat there, day after day, like a furry blob, camped out in an out-of-the-way corner of the kitchen.

The kitchen was the nerve center of the household. It’s where Linda and the kids exited out the back door and reappeared through it several times a day. It was the gathering place for the family, where conversations took place and—most important—where meals were consumed, including Gracie’s. Mealtime was the highlight of the day for the little dog, the one time she showed any spark. If Gracie had had to fight for her food in the puppy mill, it was no wonder the sound of kibble hitting plastic brought her running. Linda had never seen a dog inhale nourishment so quickly.

The first couple of days after adopting Gracie, Linda kept her in the cat carrier when no one was home. Gracie wasn’t housetrained, and Linda wasn’t about to let an untrained dog wander loose through the house. But after a couple of days, the sight of the Cavalier practically stuffed inside the carrier wore thin. Linda brought up from the basement a plump, fleecy bed, the kind with a puffy border designed to make a pet feel protected and safe. She’d bought the bed for Kitty, the family’s elegant gray cat, but in typical feline fashion, Kitty had never once deigned to use it. Affectionate and friendly, Kitty much preferred the intimacy of someone’s lap.

Gracie took to the bed right away. It was her very first possession, something she didn’t have to share. No one had to coax her to curl up in it and claim it as her own.

The solution, unfortunately, was short-lived. As soon as Kitty observed Gracie in her bed, she decided to reclaim it for herself. The bed was just big enough for one animal, so when Kitty took over, Gracie found herself displaced. Linda remedied the situation by buying Gracie another bed, just like the first one. Now Kitty’s bed remained in the kitchen, and Gracie’s bed was positioned a few feet away. After all that accommodating, Kitty lost interest in the bed all over again. She went back to her perch on the windowsill. From there she could gaze out at the birds and squirrels that fluttered and scampered about the patio, and also keep an eye on the bashful Cavalier below.

As far as anyone knew, Kitty was the first cat Gracie had ever been exposed to. The two animals mostly sidestepped each other, but occasionally Gracie would get too close, the cat would swat her, and the little dog would skitter away.

It wasn’t just Kitty. Gracie seemed uncomfortable around other
animals
,
period. She was especially afraid of Baxter, a Golden Retriever who lived a few doors down. At a neighborhood picnic one afternoon, Baxter discovered Gracie sitting on Linda’s lap and came galloping over to say hello. He was a gentle dog who wouldn’t have dreamed of hurting her, but Gracie had no way of knowing that. She panicked, and from then on she bared what few teeth she had left at Baxter whenever he came around.

If doggy playmates weren’t an option, surely the Cavalier would enjoy having a toy or two. Linda’s boyfriend, Eric Walter, picked up at the grocery store a plush leopard-print bone that looked irresistible. A few days later the family presented Gracie with a second toy, one that squeaked. Gracie had no idea what to do with either. She left them alone.

Erika was right: Gracie wasn’t a normal dog. Even so, the family kept trying to treat her like one. For help, they turned to Eric, who was a dog lover from way back. Just recently he’d had to put down his 17-year-old dog, Barley, a large and lovable mutt. Helping
acclimatize Gracie to her new home eased the grief of losing Barley. Eric helped Linda understand that, first and foremost, dogs liked routine. In fact, they thrived on it. Gracie would adapt more quickly to her new life if she could count on being fed at the same time every day and taken outside to go to the bathroom on a regular schedule, Eric said. So far, that wasn’t happening.

The family drew up a loose schedule. In a matter of days, Gracie learned that each morning, shortly after she awoke, Linda would take her outside to go potty. After that, Gracie traipsed after Linda while she made coffee, showered, and dressed. Gracie stayed by her side until she walked out the door. While Linda was gone for the day, the kids, home for the summer, were available to take Gracie on walks, feed her, and let her out. Linda had decided to give Gracie one meal a day, around 2 p.m., in hopes of reducing the number of times she needed to go outside.

In time, the Cavalier learned that she could count on Linda to return home at the end of the day. Linda would change out of her work clothes and begin preparing dinner, often by grilling something outside. It didn’t matter what she did; Gracie never left her side.

The best time of the day came at the very end, when Linda finally sat down to unwind. If she was especially tired, she would stretch out on the sofa. Gracie would look up at her, Linda would reach down to pick her up, and together they would snuggle. Gracie wanted to burrow in as close as she could to the woman who had given her a home.

The Jacksons worked at encouraging Gracie to explore her new world. At first, she didn’t seem terribly interested in leaving the comfort and safety of her bed. Maybe she was too timid to check out her surroundings. Or maybe she was apprehensive at the thought of feeling her way around in rooms she had trouble seeing. Inside the house, she kept bumping into furniture. Outside, on walks, she tended to stumble when she encountered a curb.

A couple of weeks passed before she finally began to venture around the house, taking first a few steps into the living room, then around the corner to the front hallway, down the hall past Ryan’s room, a bathroom, and back to the kitchen. The full circle might take a human five seconds to navigate. To a small dog unaccustomed to freedom, it could easily take five minutes.

There was plenty to sniff along the way. The living room was carpeted and full of smells. Scents undetectable to humans were all over the floral couch and the pair of side chairs. From the far end of the living room, Gracie could veer right into the front hall, which was tiled—a different type of floor to master. A flight of stairs led from the entryway to the second floor, but Gracie didn’t begin to know how to negotiate them, so she passed them by. She sniffed her way past Ryan’s room, which was filled with the athletic-sock aromas typical of a teenage boy. Next, she passed the bathroom, where the fragrance of scented soap wafted out. Finally, at the end of the hallway was the kitchen, a buffet of aromas, the most tantalizing room of all. After years of inhaling the lung-piercing fumes of urine and feces, these ordinary, run-of-the-mill scents must have been a pleasant surprise.

Learning to climb the stairs was a major challenge. Gracie wasn’t used to them: a seven-inch step was a significant obstacle to the Cavalier. The family approached the problem methodically. Linda would climb the stairs and then call to Gracie from the top. From down below, Julia and Erika would hold the dog and show her, step by step, how to climb up. Gracie finally learned to get to the top, but going back down again was another story. She would stand at the head of the stairs and whimper for help. Several weeks passed before she overcame her fear and learned to climb up and down without help.

Walks were equally challenging. Some dogs who had spent years in a crate might relish the chance to walk on grass. But to Gracie, after a lifetime of stepping on hard wire, grass was disconcertingly soft. It wasn’t long before she overcame her misgivings and began to enjoy sniffing all things outdoors: the grass, the bushes, the calling cards left behind by dogs who had strolled by before her. Most days, the promise of enticing smells combined with some pulling, tugging, and cajoling was enough to entice her to circle the block. But she followed on a leash reluctantly, her paws pressed into the sidewalk to discourage anyone from pulling her too far. The entire excursion might take ten minutes, and when she arrived back at home, she was exhausted. Linda had to remind herself that Gracie’s muscles were weak; she was unaccustomed to exercise. For her, a walk around the block was the equivalent of a three-day trek.

The walks were one tool the family used to instill in Gracie the fundamentals of housetraining. While Linda was at work during the day, the kids took turns taking the Cavalier outside to do her
business. Over and over they tried to enforce the message. “Go potty, Gracie. Go potty,” they said, hoping she would associate the words with going outside. When she did as told, they praised her effusively—
“
Good Gracie. Good girl!”
and Gracie wagged her tail enthusiastically. She devoured applause in any form.

Despite that, a lifetime of going wherever and whenever she needed would take months to undo. Gracie had never had a chance to develop the instinct most dogs have to eliminate somewhere other than where they live. She’d been stuck in a crate; she’d had no choice. Linda knew this when she adopted Gracie. But now that the dog was living in her house day and night, her inability to distinguish outside from inside was distressingly apparent. Time and again she would squat on the champagne-colored carpet in the living room, near tables or chairs, and within seconds she’d had another accident. She didn’t recognize this as a misdeed and therefore didn’t try to hide it. Linda lost count of the number of times she had to have the carpet shampooed.

Beneath all that timidity and fear was a dog full of whimsy and charm—Linda was sure of it. She’d glimpsed it the day she’d picked Gracie up from the Berks County shelter and the little dog had crawled into Linda’s lap in the car. But friends of the family weren’t convinced. Instead, everyone wanted to focus on Gracie’s “weird” right eye.

Erika’s friends winced at the sight of it. The neighbors pointed it out, too. Even Linda’s financial adviser zeroed in on the imperfection when Linda dropped by his office to show Gracie off to him and his wife. What was she doing with this crazy-eyed dog? He asked jokingly.

Gracie’s right eye
was
abnormal. It was cloudy, as if someone had colored the inside with a silver crayon. And it protruded slightly, a side effect of her keratitis, or dry eye.

Linda wasn’t bothered by Gracie’s milky, scratched eye. To her, it was a permanent reminder of the suffering the Cavalier had borne. Harder to overlook was the peculiarly pungent smell that suddenly flared up six weeks after Linda brought Gracie home. She’d never smelled truly clean, despite weekly baths, but this new odor went above and beyond. Now she reeked like a sack of rotten potatoes. An experienced dog owner would have known immediately what to suspect, but Linda was mystified. The smell wafted from Gracie’s hind end, where she had a callous—the result, Linda assumed, of having sat for so many years on wire. Maybe the callous had gotten infected, she thought, so she repeatedly shampooed Gracie’s rear. The odor remained.

Finally, Linda gave up. She took her to Dr. Kezell, who within minutes was able to diagnose and solve the problem. Gracie’s anal sacs, the glands that lined the inside of her rear end, were infected and full—as full as any the vet had ever seen. In a matter of minutes he was able to express the foul-smelling substance. Problem solved.

It wasn’t Gracie’s fault she had stunk up the room, but her malodorous condition didn’t exactly endear her to the kids. They flat-out didn’t like Gracie, they informed their mother a month or so after Linda brought her home. The Cavalier wasn’t any
fun
. Early on, when Ryan had tried kneeling on the floor to play with Gracie, it scared her silly. Even the sound of his voice seemed to make her tremble. “What is up with that dog?” he said, frustrated.

The girls made no attempt to hide their disappointment. Over and over Julia tried to get Gracie to sleep with her, but each time the little dog jumped off the bed and went in search of Linda. Both Julia and Erika missed Spike, the Yorkie Linda had given away a year earlier. “Spike was my favorite dog,” Erika said. “He liked me and only me.”

The girls evidently had banished from memory Spike’s less appealing traits, Linda thought to herself. Spike was tiny but loud, and even a little bad-tempered. He had a bad habit of biting ankles, and he wasn’t housetrained either, even after
five
years, no matter how diligently Linda had worked with him. Spike never stopped hiking his leg against the furniture; it didn’t matter which room.

But Linda was frustrated, too. She’d jumped through hoops to get the kids this new dog—and not just any dog, but the breed they’d clamored for. What she’d ended up with was a dog who had next to no teeth, had trouble seeing, and smelled. Who, worst of all, wanted nothing to do with the children she was supposed to adore. “What is up with this?”
Linda wondered to herself.

One morning, lulled into confidence, she left Gracie in her bed, went downstairs to make coffee, and came back upstairs to find a wet circle on the bedspread. Another accident from this accidental dog. But that’s when it dawned on Linda that despite all of Gracie’s problems, Linda hadn’t for a second regretted adopting her. She wasn’t put out with her the way she’d been with Spike. She felt sorry for Gracie, but at the same time she also admired her. Some dogs who have been mistreated become angry or mean-spirited. Gracie was just the opposite. She was loving and appreciative. Cheerful, even.