Dog Stays in the Picture Read Online Free

tendency to linger till she was happy. The PTSD therapist instructed me to stay very calm, matter-of-fact, and not to be overly demonstrative when saying good-bye. This behavior did not come naturally to me. I really felt Eliza’s pain, and wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and take her home with me. But I tried to be stoic, and Eliza’s sweet, gentle teacher would watch us at the door, perplexed: Eliza begging me not to go, and me with my poker face, forcing out awkward reassurance, Robot Alarm Man–style. (You will be. O-kay. I’ll be back. Ve-ry soon.)
    I don’t think it was only earthquake trauma that made me so desperately attached to Eliza; it just made things more complicated. I’d been this way since her jaundice, and when I’d wrestled myself away and shut that schoolroom door I’d go home with an uneasy feeling. There was something about the look on that teacher’s face. …
    David was still filming in L.A. Yolanda had agreed to come with us and help out in Philadelphia, and she and the boys were getting along famously. I was making a special effort to give our traumatized daughter as much quality time as possible, and so we went to her school’s Family Fun Day, just the two of us.
    Eliza and I were sitting with our juice boxes on a little patch of grass, watching jolly children and their parents walking by. Out of nowhere this stern old nun I had never laid eyes on before stopped and said: Hello, Eliza.
    Eliza did not seem to know who this was, and I smiled. But the nun did not make eye contact with me at all, and disappeared into the crowd. That uneasy feeling again.
    We’d moved to yet another post-earthquake temporary rental, a vintage Addams Family –style gabled Victorian, which usually served as our church’s rectory, and David came home from filming. One afternoon a friend brought her three children over for an afternoon playdate, and the house was busy. At some point I happened to glance out a leaded front window, and paused to watch a sort of ordinary man with a clipboard ease tentatively out of his car and linger at the end of our front walk, gazing up at the façade. Jehovah’s Witness, maybe? He seemed to be psyching himself up in exactly the way that banker with the briefcase used to screw up his courage before knocking on the Addams Family’s front door. Long story short: it was Child Protective Services.
    This was about the car episode. Eliza explained to me later that she had felt she needed a hug one day at school. She figured out she could have one if she told her teacher she was upset because her mother had left her in the car alone and it got really hot and she was sooo scared.
    Ever since Eliza’s outpouring, behind the scenes, her teacher began watching my weird Robot Mama routine at drop-off and scanned Eliza daily for possible bruises. She had mentioned something about Eliza’s car story in a conference I’d requested, but it didn’t occur to naïve me (or to the teacher, as she explained when I later called in a panic after Mr. Child Protector’s visit) that the headmistress (the creepy old nun from Family Fun Day!) had decided to alert the state.
    So now we had a new kind of danger to grapple with. This was my hometown—people knew me, sort of. But I was returning after more than a decade, with a new exotic identity: Wife of Movie Actor. Kurt Cobain had just died, and his wife, Courtney Love, was battling rumors of heroin addiction and trying to keep custody of their new baby. David and I were not interesting enough for the tabloids and never would be (thank God). But he was playing an ex-con in The Crossing Guard. David prepares for his roles meticulously, so he had this fantastic new hard-earned prison-yard bodybuilder physique; he had grown his hair long and was keeping it slicked back in a greasy little ponytail; and whenever he turned up in our small, cloistered new neighborhood, people