A Three Dog Life Read Online Free Page A

the lobbies of old movie theaters with names like the Bijou or the Roxy. Together we bought a couch from Altman's; we re-covered two chairs he had brought with him in a sober dark green fabric. Respectability. We hung my husband's bird prints and I made him put up his running trophies. When periodically I went through closets and threw things away wholesale, he joked that if he weren't careful he'd be on the dustheap too. At first this made me laugh, later I was indignant. Who did he think I was? Didn't he know he was my husband? My companion for life? I don't throw human beings away, I said huffily.
    By now, ten o'clock, I'm on my second Manhattan. Rich has forgotten I was there at all today. He thinks we have missed the train to Providence and is very upset. I can't imagine what this form of hell must feel like. The trivial analogy I make to myself is the time I lost my pocketbook at the Minneapolis airport. After the initial shock, and the immediate dilemma caused by not having my airline tickets, identification, or money, I found what I missed most was not the credit cards or driver's license, not the cell phone or cash, not even my lipstick. What I missed was my chum over my shoulder, the reassurance of rummaging through the whole mess, my fingers closing on my jumble of keys, the odd Kleenex, an old cigarette pack with one bent cigarette inside, through the little bits and pieces of detritus, proof I'd been living my life. Here's the ticket stub, here's the receipt from my framer, here is the checkbook with no checks left but a note scribbled to myself on the back, here are my real checks. Without my bag, I had no comfort, no sense of being at home with myself, a chunk of me had gone missing. This is what my husband has lost. The everyday memories of what he had for breakfast, that day follows night, the jingle of loose coins in his pocket. He has no short-term memory. He must invent it for himself.
    Twenty years ago I asked a friend if he felt (as I did) a kind of chronic longing, a longing I wanted to identify. "Of course," he answered. We were having lunch by the pond at 59th Street, watching the ducks. The sun was out, the grass was thick and green, the ducks paddled around in the not very blue pond. I was between lives. "What is it?" I asked. "What is it we are longing for?" He thought a minute and said, "There isn't any it. There is just the longing for it." This sounded exactly right. Years later and a little wiser, I know what the longing was for:
here is where I belong.
    Last August, after three months in two hospitals, Rich returned to our apartment. He seemed to be himself, a miracle after the trauma to his brain. I recall wondering what this was all about, if after such catastrophe nothing changed. We had been through so much hell, I had changed, I knew more about myself, more about friendship and what human beings most need, I had learned how to accept comfort. And here was my husband, as if nothing had happened on April 24 at quarter to ten at night. As if the car had never hit him. Unchanged. I was almost disappointed that everything seemed just as it had before the accident. What would I do now with all I had learned? How to share it with him? I talked about this with my mentor, a wonderful woman whose husband had suffered a TBI seven years ago. She listened, then she said, "Cherish these days." Oh no, I thought, it's all going to be all right. After all, she couldn't know our future. We were going to resume our life where it had left off on April 24.
    For the first ten days all seemed well. Rich made his way through the kitchen, opening cupboards, touching the table, the counters. He was "reacquainting" himself, he said. But then, very slowly, he began to fall to pieces. "Why did you move?" he began asking. "I didn't move," I said. "This is our home." He continued to marvel that I could have accomplished this—I had made an identical apartment. Perhaps it was that he was not himself anymore, and he