Stepdog (22 page)

“He's jumping out of his skin waiting for his breakfast,” he announced.

I looked at Eddie, sprawled on the floor looking at us, and he seemed all right. In fact, he had gotten up to let me pet him by way of greeting—no growling—so he was better than all right. You never knew with his moods.

I took a cupful of his dry food and mixed it with a half can of wet food, smashing the dry pellets into the soft glob. I placed the bowl down and he almost bit my fingers off to get to it. Yum-yum. He loved his food. He inhaled it. Soon I saw the effect of my effort. I was upstairs, reading in the bedroom, while Jim was out running errands, when I heard Eddie whimpering outside the bedroom door. What? The mutt has breached the off-limits area again!

“Eddie!” I screamed.

He knew he'd been a bad dog and headed back for the stairs, but, again, the poor thing was scared to go down the steps. He didn't think ahead as usual. I prodded him gently, holding his collar, so he was reassured he wouldn't tumble down. As we stepped down I wondered—could this breach be a sign of new affection?

Sure thing! Between the second and third food-dispensing weeks most barking at me stopped as if we had turned off a switch.

What a feeling of accomplishment that first bark-free morning. I came down the stairs and Eddie was in his usual spot in the kitchen, behind his boyfriend's legs. Now that he didn't hear so well he sometimes didn't sense me until I was right next to him. As I leaned in to kiss Jim, Eddie began to grunt but caught himself, as if he just remembered that I served breakfast. He looked away sheepishly and pretended he had found something interesting to sniff on the floor.

The next morning, I came down to the dining room and he didn't leap to bark at me as I passed his inert body. He was in his bed, his eyes were wide open, but I heard nary a peep as I leaned in to kiss Jim. This was awesome. How ignorant we had been. People should all go to doggie school before they are allowed to own a dog. It'd avert so much misery.

“There's nothing in between—either he's in love with you and he can't live a moment without you,” Jim said with a chuckle, “or he's going to eat your face off if you fall asleep.”

A loving Eddie, of course, brought its own irritations. For one thing, this new appreciation for his stepmom didn't seem genuine. I fed him and all of a sudden he found me acceptable? But my worries were for naught because Jim began sabotaging my food dispensing soon into the new routine.

“I fed Eddie,” he chirped from the dining room as I entered the kitchen to make my morning coffee a few days later.

“Why?”

“Sorry, it's my routine. I forget sometimes.”

“I forget” were fighting words. They instantly put me in a bad mood. They took me back to the Palisades years when I was always out of the loop, when he'd ask me to help one of the kids with homework and then sit within earshot “reading” a book, as if to say: “I'm here nearby, don't worry, in case stepmom attacks.” It felt then like he was sabotaging my efforts to bond. Now he was doing it again.

Was it possible Jim purposely didn't want to let go of Eddie, even this little allowance? I'd also noticed he always found something to do in the kitchen—make a snack, empty out the dishwasher—while I prepared Eddie's meal. Maybe I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“You are undermining me,” I told him. “It's a pattern.”

Jim laughed it off. “Now you think you're the dog Freud,” he said.

But he did it again, always ready with an excuse for feeding Eddie.

“I didn't want to wake you and he seemed uncomfortable.”

Or: “He's gotten into this thing where he scratches the floor. He was driving me crazy.”

When I approached Jim one morning, Eddie growled and barked. It was the first time he returned to his old habit since I started feeding him.

“No!” Jim commanded. “You're not going to start that again. You're a new dog.”

Eddie waited for a pat, but there was no petting or mercy this time from Jim, who knew I was pissed.

“Stop sabotaging me,” I warned him. “If we're not going to do it well, I shouldn't bother.”

“You should bother. I'll do my best.”

“Don't do your best. Just do it.”

“I'm with you one hundred percent.”

Jim fulfilled his promise. He stopped feeding Eddie and started nagging me.

“Eddie needs his breakfast!”

•   •   •

T
hat was my husband's new “Good morning” for a few days, until we found our food-dispensing groove.

Ultimately, Eddie remained hot and cold with me, which was better than mostly cold. One evening, as I was watching TV in the den, he came over and sat quietly in front of me. He didn't have the psycho look he got when he was desperate for a walk. And he wasn't giving me his back like he did when he was ready to race me to Jim. It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. He was waiting for his dinner! I was taken aback by how good it felt to have him sitting there needing me. Now I got it. This was what Jim cherished the most and maybe had been afraid to lose, to let go of—feeling needed. Oy. I was brimming with dog-fueled insights, but it wasn't all good. I had to work hard to let go of new waves of resentment, of the shoulda, woulda, coulda. What was done was done.

I would find a way to assuage Jim's fears, if in fact he harbored them, and to make him understand I stood no chance to replace him with the dog or kids because that had never been my intention.

Fall came, the days were cooler, and Eddie underwent his seasonal personality change, from lethargic to perky. All of a sudden he had more energy, wagged his tail faster, foraged for food in all corners of the house with more conviction, whimpered louder, scratched doors more forcefully, slept less, and followed us more. He was back to his healthy self and for the first time I felt I had played a role in his nurturing and recovery. I cared about him.

It felt good, even if the fireworks were still reserved for Jim.

The news from the vet after his latest checkup was not good, though.

“Darling, Eddie may be sick. He may be seriously sick,” Jim said as the two of them got back from the doctor's office.

“What? What's wrong?”

“So I took Eddie to Dr. Cameron and everything is fine. He weighs forty-two pounds. Squirmed like crazy. Hated being there. All the normal healthy stuff. But Dr. Cameron listened to his heart and immediately said, ‘Has he had a heart murmur before?' I said, ‘No, not to my knowledge.' And he said, ‘Well, he has a really bad one. It's a three over six,' whatever that means. That's how they measure it, I guess. He said, ‘This is really a bad sign if I didn't hear anything a year ago. And now it's three over six. It's been incremental at a very fast pace. You need to see a cardiologist right away and get a sonogram and get a definitive diagnosis of exactly what it is that's wrong.'”

Jesus. This was unexpected, because there had been no symptoms of anything.

“Is it life-threatening?” I asked Jim.

He didn't answer.

I hugged my husband. “Baby, you take such good care of Eddie.” I tried a joke: “So no more vodka for Eddie?”

“No more martinis for Eddie,” Jim said, lightening up a bit. “He'll miss the olives.”

On the day of his ten a.m. appointment with the cardiologist, a fasting Eddie was vacuuming under the refrigerator and the cabinets while Jim ate his breakfast. The two left in Jim's brand-new Prius, the fuel-efficient hybrid electric car that replaced our old station wagon. Eddie loved the Prius. It brought him one seat closer to Jim, allowing him to pant in his ear during rides and get a scratch or two at stoplights.

Not long after they left, Jim called on his way back from the doctor. “Things are okay. Your mutt is going to make it. We paid six hundred dollars for the doctor to say bring him back if he gets sick.”

That old geezer. He was indestructible. That night over dinner, Jim and I joked we should put him in our respective wills. You never knew.

“Really, Jim, he may outlive us.”

“I'd have to think who could take him.”

Henry and Arielle were the obvious candidates, but between work and college they were not immediately available. We really had no one else, so we shelved the subject and toasted to our good health instead.

The Saturday of Martin Luther King Day weekend, Jim and I planned a party. We called it Octavitas, in keeping with the Puerto Rican tradition of stretching the Christmas and Three Kings' Day holiday for eight extra days. Our tree was still up and we partied Puerto Rican–style—drinking
coquito
, eating
pasteles
, turkey, and ham, and dancing salsa and merengue until early morning. Jim and I were so happy about the turnout of close to thirty friends that we decided to host Octavitas parties every January.

The next morning, the birds chirped, the dog sniffed, and Jim and I sipped our strong coffee at the dining table while partaking of that old American custom known as holding a newspaper. Jim made waffles for me and our friend Clemson, who had stayed over. We lingered around the breakfast table, happily gossiping about the party and skimming the Sunday
Times
. Before me was a day of lazy chores—cleaning out my office topped the list—and I left the table first. A couple of hours later, Jim swung by my office all layered up for riding in thirty-five-degree weather.

Jim had taken up biking for exercise a few months earlier. He could no longer run with his worn-out knees. He'd been getting painful shots of a lubricant for his knees once a week. But he had taken to biking like a little kid. Clemson, an experienced rider, had been coaching him and giving him expensive hand-me-downs. Jim now showed up in my office in full multicolor bike gear and posed sideways all proud of himself. For this ride, he was wearing bib shorts with straps that looked like suspenders and made him look like a Ukrainian wrestler. He also put on long biking pants and a multicolored jersey cluttered with brand names—Subaru, Shimano, Dell, LeMond, Gary Fisher, Harman Kardon—in red, yellow, blue, and black. He looked fit and healthy and Tour de France athletic for a ride on the busy streets of Montclair.

I almost told him to be careful and not overdo it showing off to Clemson—men—but I stopped myself. I had been nagging him lately about the dangers of bicycling but he didn't want to hear it. He was the man.

“The turkey gumbo is simmering on the stove,” he said on his way out.

The plan was for them to come back, watch football all afternoon, and eat the gumbo, made with the turkey bone leftovers from the party. Jim was going to serve it over white rice and I planned to make plantain
tostones
, my specialty.

The phone rang not even fifteen minutes after Jim and Clemson left for their bike ride.

It was Clemson.

“I have some bad news.”

Third Wheel

W
hat?” I said, trying not to think.

“Jim had an accident and the ambulance is going to take him to . . . what's the hospital's name? . . . Universal Hospital. Hold on, here's the paramedic.”

I waited on the phone, holding my breath and thinking that I knew all along something like this would happen. I viewed bikes as I do motorcycles—not worth the risk. Yet, scores of my colleagues and friends rode those stupid Citi Bikes all over New York, sharing the road with aggressive drivers of cars, cabs, and buses and ignoring the frequency with which those cars, cabs, and buses ran over bikers and pedestrians. Clemson, who lived an hour north in Garrison and who rode on country roads, was himself hit by a car in Bear Mountain State Park not long ago. Inside a park! But he still got Jim all enthused about biking and there he was, on a lazy Sunday, riding behind my husband when somehow Jim did a flip and landed on his face. Damn you, Clemson.

“He has a concussion, but he is conscious,” the paramedic said on the phone. “Is he allergic to any medication?”

Was my husband allergic to any medication? He hardly ever got sick.

“No.”

I rushed to get dressed, trying not to panic, but my thoughts were hitting the alarm button. Clemson didn't want to tell me the truth over the phone, that's why he gave the phone to the medic. Jim was paralyzed. Jim would be dead by the time I got to the hospital. I thought about how I jumped out of bed that morning when he wanted me to linger, about what a bitch I'd been to begrudge him spoiling his children and his dog, about wanting to get rid of Eddie when he was already facing an empty nest, about a thousand more regrets. I'd accused Jim of wearing rose-colored glasses, but I had benefited from his positive outlook, from his good nature, from his looking past my flaws. I had been a control freak, hardheaded. Pretending not to be vulnerable didn't make me any less so, it was obvious now. I had a partner who loved me. It wasn't just me, alone in the world. I loved and was loved. Was this how you lost your husband? I didn't want to be a widow. I'd go right after him, I didn't care.

As thoughts attacked from all directions, I cursed Clemson, again, because he was blocking our car with his car in the driveway and because there I was looking online and there was no such thing as Universal Hospital in New Jersey. There was, however, a University Hospital in Newark that was part of Rutgers University. While I waited for Clemson to get back, I got a change of clothes for Jim and looked in his file cabinet for medical insurance records. He was so organized that I found the information quickly. When I couldn't sit anymore, I put Eddie on the leash and took him out for a walk. Innocent, naive, unsuspecting Eddie. If he only knew. I watched him trot along and thought of his devotion to Jim. Eddie would be my only comfort if the worst were to happen. I knew so because, after 9/11, I interviewed widows with arms wrapped around their husbands' dogs as they spoke of their tragedy. Eddie and I would be inseparable, united in mourning for the same love. Wasn't that something? Jim would not have believed it.

Half an hour went by before Clemson showed up on his bike, followed by a patrol car with Jim's bike in the trunk. I asked the officer where the hell they had taken my husband. University Hospital in Newark. On the way to the hospital, Clemson told me what had happened.

“We were on a flat stretch of Ridgewood Avenue, approaching Bay Avenue. We were cruising at eighteen to twenty miles per hour and I was watching his form and technique and, all of sudden, his rear wheel goes up and he goes upside down and hits the ground hard. He's knocked out. No screaming or ‘Whoa!' He did a cartwheel, went up and over, and came down hard on head and face, and he was knocked out with his eyes open.”

I listened and drove, trying hard to keep it together and not go back to my worst-case-scenario trance. Jim was knocked out for a few minutes but his eyes had remained open, Clemson said. What did that mean? As he was calling 911, Clemson said, he had checked Jim's breathing and mouth to make sure he was not swallowing his tongue. Jim was bleeding on the right side from an opened eyebrow. They were fortunate that two cars stopped immediately—one with a father and son and the other one with a couple. She was a nurse and squatted by Jim to take his vital signs and keep him still.

“I think he's going to be okay,” she told Clemson as two cop cars arrived and she deferred to the officers.

Jim made some noises and moved his legs, Clemson said. But he wasn't responding to questions. He tried to get up and Clemson had to tackle his legs to prevent him from moving. The paramedics arrived and took over. They put him on a board and spent fifteen minutes deciding where to go. There was Mountainside Hospital nearby in Montclair, but they took him to the bigger hospital with the trauma center twenty minutes away.

We got to the hospital and when I saw Jim laid up in his emergency room cubicle, I almost fainted from all the blood—on his face, his clothes, the gauzes strewn about on the floor. The right side of his face looked like a butcher's cut, his eye lost in skin. He was a swollen, misshapen mess, but he was alert. I tried to focus my gaze on the one limpid blue eye that was open and tearing up looking at me. I squeezed his hand and cried along.

“I'm here, baby.”

My poor baby. I felt so immensely sad for him. He had been so happy and healthy only hours before, only to end up like this, on a hospital bed looking like a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie. Aside from the eye swollen shut, he was dark purple from lid to cheek on his right side. Streaks of blood ran down the cheek to his neck. Half his face was raw from road rash. His upper lip was also swollen and purple. He was wearing a neck brace. I didn't know where to begin.

“What's wrong with his neck?” I asked one of the resident doctors hovering over him.

“Just a precaution until the results of X-rays are back.”

“I don't remember what happened,” Jim kept repeating. He looked disoriented, so childlike and defenseless, I just wanted to bring him to my bosom and hold him. Four resident doctors worked around us, ready to stitch him up. They were very young and seemed impressed with the bike injury.

“What kind of bike do you ride?” one of them asked Jim.

“A Cannondale road bike,” Jim answered weakly.

Good. He didn't say President Barack Obama. And good that the doctors were relating on a personal level. They might not kill him. I spotted a plastic bag with Jim's helmet and clothes by a wall. All the expensive attire had been cut off of him. I looked through swaths of fabric from what used to be the bib shorts and jersey and the checkered red vest his mom had given him ages ago. The helmet was also in the bag, badly scuffed and stained with blood. Without a doubt, it protected him. The shoes had made it intact, just like his teeth.

The doctors asked me to take a chair outside the curtain while they stitched up his eyebrow and eyelid—fourteen stitches across the brow, another ten across the lid and temple. We then waited for the results of a CT scan. Clemson was outside in the general waiting room, doing penance. Poor Clemson. He was shaken up by the accident too. He was a kind friend. I got over my anger.

An hour went by and as I sat watching the goings-on in the emergency room it became evident why the paramedics decided to take Jim to Newark. The ER was busier than Penn Station. It dealt with all kinds of mayhem. In quick succession, I saw patients wheeled in and out with open wounds and broken bones. A twentysomething woman glided by on a stretcher with her neck in a cast, her purse and shopping bags tucked safely by her legs. A group of cops and paramedics wheeled in an older guy with blood trickling from his left eye. He'd been punched in the head and kicked in the chest while walking on Seventh Street, a robbery victim in plain daylight on a Sunday afternoon.

“Did you lose consciousness?” a doctor asked from behind his curtain.

“How many guys?” the cops wanted to know.

The victim, who said he was sixty-seven, was lucid and answered every question.

“Go get them, Officer,” a jovial nurse told the cops on their way out.

“There are, like, a million of them,” replied a female officer as she walked out writing on a pad.

Moments later, another man came in on a stretcher trailed by escorts. A prisoner. I couldn't hear what was wrong with him, but two officers stood guard outside his curtain for the rest of the evening. Between perp and victim, there lay my beloved. With his grade-one concussion (mild), no bleeding in the brain, and no broken bones, it turned out that Jim was in relatively good shape. I asked the resident doctor who told us Jim could go home, a Dr. Chandler, how soon my husband could go to work. I knew Jim would want to wait all of two or three days before trying to resume normal activities and I was hoping the doctor would dissuade him.

“What does he do?”

“He's a journalist.”

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“
Wall Street Journal
.”

Dr. Benjamin Chandler happened to be the son of a former editor of the
New York Post
, Ken Chandler.

“So how come you didn't follow in his footsteps,” I asked him as we chitchatted about the coincidence.

“He worked crazy hours,” he said.

An emergency room doctor thinks journalists work crazy hours? Jim and I laughed.

I brought Clemson in after Jim was stitched up to describe the fall to the doctors. Now he and I tried to get Jim to get up, but he couldn't. He complained about terrible back and shoulder pain on his right side. A cycling friend of Clemson's, a nurse, kept texting him that it'd be prudent to keep Jim in the hospital for observation. The ER docs ultimately decided to keep him overnight. He was transferred to a hospital room, where the nurses tucked him in and I fed him some yogurt bought from a cafeteria snack machine. Jim was chatty and very much sounding like himself again. Clemson and I left after midnight. Clemson, a Spanish-language sports announcer, had a Knicks game the next day, the MLK holiday, so I went back to the hospital alone the next morning to retrieve my husband.

I found Jim sitting in a chair, smiling, with his black-and-purple face. He was a little loopy from the Percocet.

“Let's go home and scare the neighborhood children,” I told him as I took his arm.

It was strange to see my husband so vulnerable. I flashed forward to our old age.

Was this how it was going to be? I was only three years younger than Jim, so who knew if I would be the first one to become infirm. But I hoped I would be the one to take care of him, as lovingly as he had always taken care of his family.

When we got home, Eddie was ecstatic to see Jim. He didn't seem to notice anything wrong, and the dancing and their scratching ritual went on as usual.

“There he is. Hiya, monkey! I know, I know, I know.”

Pant-pant-pant. Snort. Sneeze. Pant-pant-pant. Yelp.

But when Jim finally sat down on the sofa in the den, Eddie stood still by his side, looking at him with the intensity of someone who was trying to figure out if he'd met this person before. He eased up only when Jim talked again in his unmistakable deep voice.

Karin, Eddie's walker, was more rattled. She took one look at Jim and seemed queasy. For days afterward, she'd say her hellos and good-byes looking at the floor.

Jim stayed home the week, shuffling around the house with no particular destination, a heating pad hanging from his injured right shoulder like an appendage. He dozed off whenever the urge struck—in his reading chair in the living room, on the sofa in the den, at the dining table. Eddie stayed close. He and I found common cause taking care of our sweetheart. Eddie knew something was up and, whatever it was, he had to be in the middle of it.

Jim, meanwhile, was the perfect nightmare patient. His range of motion was so limited he couldn't even towel off by himself, but he insisted on taking showers and going up and down the stairs alone so that he could finally succeed in breaking his neck. He got cabin fever and wanted to go to work. He couldn't possibly go to the office, so he had to walk Eddie in five-degree weather with ten inches of snow on the ground. I accompanied them the first time out so I could hold the dog but Eddie soon started pulling on the leash to get back to the house. The dog was no fool. He wanted nothing to do with freezing weather. Jim tried to follow along but he walked at the pace of Frankenstein.

By the time we got home, Eddie was walking on three legs, dramatically holding one paw aloft.

“Everybody inside!” I said.

Good boy, Eddie.

Back inside, Jim made appointments with his doctors in the city for a few days hence, way too early to even think about taking trains. He asked for a beer while still on Percocet. He pet Eddie and then scratched his face without washing his hands. I applied ointment to his face wounds and Eddie licked it off. Soon I had had it with them both.