I wondered what we were doing.
{ THREE }
Ava patted her thighs with her palms flat. “Please come, Mommy Dog! Please. If you don’t come save your babies, they will die.”
Though I didn’t understand, I heard the anguish layered through her words. This tense situation, I decided, called for a puppy. I turned my back on my mother, making a conscious choice. I loved my mother dog, but I knew in my heart I belonged with humans.
“Mommy Dog, come get your little boy!” Ava called. She scooped me up and eased through the door to the building, moving backward down a hallway. Mother crept right to the threshold, but stopped suspiciously, not budging.
Ava set me on the floor. “Want your baby?” she asked.
I did not know what to do. Both my mother and Ava were brittle with anxiety. I could feel it crackling off them, it was in my mother’s sour breath and came as a scent off the little girl’s skin. I whimpered, wagging, confused. I began inching toward Mother and that seemed to decide it. Mother took a few steps inside, her eyes on me. I flashed to a memory of her leaping into the den, Heavy Boy’s nape in her teeth, and knew what was coming. Mother darted for me.
Then the door banged shut behind her. The noise seemed to terrify Mother. Her ears back, she darted back and forth in the narrow hallway, utterly panicked, then dashed through a side doorway. I saw Smooth Face Man looking in the window, and for some reason I wagged at him.
When he dropped from the window I followed Mother’s scent into a small room. There was a bench at the far end of the space and Mother cowered under it, panting, her face tight with fear.
I sensed the little girl and the man behind me in the doorway.
“Don’t go any closer, Ava,” said the man. “I’ll be right back.”
I was going to run to Mother, but the little girl gathered me up. She nuzzled me and I wiggled in delight.
Mother didn’t move, was hunkered down, hiding. Then the man reappeared, trailing a strong odor of my siblings, and put our cage on the floor, popping open the door. Heavy Boy, followed by the rest of my littermates, poured out, trampling over one another. When they spotted Mother they stampeded her in an uncoordinated rush. She eased out from under the bench, ears up, staring at Ava. Then the wave of puppies was upon her, shrieking and squealing, and Mother flopped down by the bench, allowing her puppies to nurse.
The girl put me on the floor and I ran over to join my family.
“That was so smart, Ava! You did it exactly right,” the man praised.
The man was, I learned, called Dad by Ava, and Sam by all the other people in the building. This was far too complex of a concept for me, and I eventually just thought of him as Sam Dad.
Ava wasn’t in the building all the time, or even every day. I nonetheless regarded her as my girl, belonging to me and nobody else. There were other dogs sharing our big room, dogs to see and smell and hear in their cages nearby. One of them was a mother dog like ours; the scent of her milk wafted through the air, and I heard the peeps and squeals of another litter, out of sight in a cage at the other end of the big room. I also detected a different sort of animal, coming to me as a strong and alien scent from another part of the building, and wondered what it could be.
Life in the metal den with the rattling roof seemed long ago and far away. Mother’s milk was suddenly richer and more plentiful, and her breath was no longer fetid.
“She’s gaining weight even with the nursing; that’s good,” Sam Dad told Ava. “When she’s weaned them, we’ll spay her and find her a new forever home.” Mother always shied away from Sam Dad but after a time went willingly to Ava, who called Mother “Kiki.”
Ava addressed me as Bailey, and eventually I understood that was who I was, I was Bailey. Heavy Boy was Buddha. All of my siblings had names, and I spent the days playing with them in our cage and out in a grassy yard with high wooden walls.
None of my littermates understood that Ava and I shared a special relationship, and they would crowd her when she opened our cage door. I finally decided to rush to the opening the moment the little girl entered the big room, to be ready if she was there to let us out.
It worked! She picked me up, while all the others remained teeming at her feet and probably feeling jealous. “Well, Bailey, you’re so eager, do you know what’s happening?”
She carried me because I was the special one. My siblings trailed after us down the hallway. She pushed open the door and set me down and I jumped on Heavy Boy Buddha. “I’ll be right back!” Ava sang.
We were old enough now that we no longer tripped over our paws when we ran. Heavy Boy Buddha leaped on a hard rubber ball, so we all leaped on him. It was satisfying to realize I wasn’t the only puppy who resented being crushed by our brother.
The door opened again and Ava astounded me by setting down three new puppies! We all rushed to one another, sniffing and wagging and climbing up to chew on each other’s ears.
One puppy, a girl, had a black, pushed-in muzzle and a brown body with a splash of white on her chest—her two brothers had white marks on their faces. Her fur was short and when we were nose-to-nose, it seemed as if all the other puppies in the yard faded away, not present even when one of them careened into us. When the black-faced girl dog ran the perimeter of the yard, I ran right with her.
The mingling of the two puppy families became routine, and Ava called the girl dog Lacey. Lacey was close to my age, with a muscular but compact frame and bright black eyes. We sought each other out and played together in the yard with exclusive devotion. In ways I could not understand, I felt I belonged more to Lacey than to Ava. When I slept, Lacey and I wrestled in my dreams; when I was awake, I raised my nose in an obsessive hunt to isolate her scent from those of all the other animals. My chief frustration with my otherwise marvelous life was that no one thought to put Lacey and me in the same cage.
When Mother began evading our pleading approaches to her teats, Sam Dad set out small bowls of mushy food, which Heavy Boy Buddha seemed to think he could only eat if he was standing in it. This new circumstance, this food, was such a wonderful development I would dream about it as often as I dreamed of Lacey.
I was overjoyed when Lacey and I were finally put in a cage together, inside what Sam Dad called “the van.” It was a high-sided metal room with dog cages stacked on top of each other, though the interior of the van was redolent with that same mysterious, absent animal. I didn’t care: Ava had observed how much Lacey and I loved each other and had rightly concluded we needed to be together always. Lacey rolled on her back and I mouthed her throat and jaw. Lacey’s stomach was mostly white and the fur there was as dense and short as on her back, as opposed to my siblings, who had bushy gray hair and a face mostly white with tracings of gray between the eyes and around the snout. I supposed, when I thought about it, I probably appeared the same. Lacey’s ears were so soft and warm, I loved to nibble them gently, my jaw quivering with affection.
“Will there be cats at the adoption event, Daddy?” Ava asked.
“Nope. Just dogs. Cats are in two months—May is the start of what we call kitten season.”
In the van we were subjected to the same torsion and pull that I remembered from the day we met Sam Dad and Ava. It went on so long that Lacey and I fell asleep, my paw cradled between her jaws.