A Three Dog Life Read Online Free Page B

thought it must be the place itself that had changed. I don't know. As the days went by he got angrier. Why had I done this? Why was I trying to trick him? Why was I lying? His "real" home was upstairs, or downstairs, anywhere but where he was. Then one morning Rich woke up believing that he had an eleven o'clock appointment with the Gestapo. He was afraid, but resigned. "There is no Gestapo," I said over and over, my arms around his shoulder. "We are safe, you are having a bad dream." But he was convinced otherwise.
    His delusions multiplied, there were strangers in his room at night. There were animals running loose. His urine was contaminated, he had sent it to Atlanta, where was the number of the NIH? He had to call them immediately. Soon my own idea of normal began to erode. The floor was tilted under his feet and I began to adjust my gait to his. Home was now a place of chaos and fear. Repeated calls to his doctor were not helpful, and Rich sank further into a paranoid existence that finally became a full-blown psychosis. One night he got out of the apartment at five A.M., barefoot, dressed only in his underwear. "Don't try and stop me," he yelled. "I'm going home." The nurse who came every night drew me aside. "Mrs. Rogin," she said to me, "in this household the insane are ruling the sane." Until that moment, I had been lost in the vortex. We finally found a doctor to treat him, and a hospital that was prepared to admit him through the ER, but though terrified and confused and furious, he wouldn't go. One awful Wednesday morning he insisted again on going home. I brought him his wheelchair. "Get in, Rich," I said, hating myself, "get in. I'll take you home."

    This is a big Manhattan, but it's my third and I allow myself three. Three keeps me from having four. I hadn't had a drink in twenty years before Rich's injury. But in the past year I have returned to drinking and smoking. I drink my drink, I light a cigarette. Familiar ways, the old ways of coping with stress, part of who I was for forty years, not the best part. When I drank my first Manhattan it tasted like home. I told Rich tonight that I loved him. He said, "That's worth twenty hats and all the signatures in the world." I take another swallow. I don't know if my husband will ever be home again. Anywhere.
    My friend at the duck pond now owns a stone house in the green hills somewhere in Massachusetts. He doesn't go there often, he lives in New York City. He thinks he should probably sell it to someone who will live there all the time, love it and care for it. But he says every time he gets there, for the first five minutes he knows he is exactly where he belongs. He is at home. Then, restless inside his own skin, he loses the feeling.
But those five minutes every month or so make it worth hanging on to.
    I finish my third drink, pay my bill, and walk a straight line down the long block home. Our apartment is filled with my husband and with his absence. Tonight, fueled by sadness, anger, and three drinks, I manage to move the ten-foot-long table it took three men to get into the study, out of the study. It is a table my father used to write on, very old, a trestle table that weighs—I don't know what it weighs, only that in the morning I can't even lift it. But tonight I get it through the door, down the hall, and in front of the bookcases in six minutes from start to finish. Tonight I need to change something. On the table I place the little copper church Rich gave me the third time we met. There are bells in its steeple. I remember thanking him and thinking, Is this some kind of proposal? It was. Thirteen years ago.
    Tonight is a hard night. So many broken pieces of our life to try and fit into my sense of past and future, but I am lucky—I know what has changed, I know where I am. Rich's compass is gone, he has no direction home. Nothing is as real to him as the ghost of his memory. But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home,