Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (22 page)

He stood in the doorway, brushing dirt off his pants. He breathed in, looked at me, and said kindly, “I found Ursula.”

One of the weaknesses of compartmentalization is that the walls between the things the compartmentalizer knows are tall, but fragile. All it takes is the tiniest puff to bring them down. In a second, I knew he hadn’t found her alive. I knew she had been in the front yard. It had been weeks since she was last seen. I cried in sorrow and also in horror of what he must have found.

He held me close and said, “I think she swung around and came back right after the accident the first day. She was way under the outer hedge, which is why we didn’t see her. I had a hunch, so I went looking.”

I asked him, “Was she in pain when she died?” knowing full well he had no idea but pathetically prepared to accept any palliative he was willing to offer. He shook his head firmly and said, “I think her injuries were bad enough so she just lay down and went to sleep. I wrapped her up and put her in the dog run.”

I cried again, filled with guilt over what Consort must have seen and handled, and what Ursula had suffered. I had driven to shelters twenty miles away to check on whether she had been picked up, and she had been a few steps from my front door. If I had only looked…

Mostly, I grieved for having broken my word. I like being the grown-up. I am of service. I help. But this time I brought the dog in from a near-certain death on a busy boulevard to have her die on a quiet street, yards away from the person who vowed to take care of her. In my successful moments, when my altruism works out, I bask in the light of being the good guy. The dark side of being the good guy is the moment where you don’t solve the problem, and someone ends up saying, “You
tried your best.” That seems like a fairly obvious statement because the whole point of being an honorable person is that you try your best; if it doesn’t work, well, no one’s expecting perfection. So why was the idea that I did my best for Ursula breaking my heart?

Because once again my best had been pretty damn pathetic. The dog had died because I didn’t understand exactly how much she loved me, how desperate she was to be with me all the time. How high she could jump. I made a stupid mistake and an innocent creature was dead. And the man I loved had been forced to attend to the consequences. I saw a lifetime ahead of me of trying my best and seeing how small and pitiful my best really was. I sobbed again. And then I dried my tears and woke up Alice. It is a measure of age appropriate self-absorption and an inclination toward ignoring the anomalous before 9:00 a.m. that my daughter noticed nothing. I got her to school and then I called the pet crematorium. They were polite and respectful; they’d pick her up that day and cremate her for me.

“Do you want Ursula back afterward?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said hollowly. “We’ll bury her at home.”

I put her ashes next to the hedge where she had been found, because she had come home. For a stray found trotting down a street, Ursula, in her last moments, knew where to go. She had a home. And that was all I had to console me. I had given her a few months of love, a fair amount of yelling, and a working knowledge of the words “sit,” “heel,” and “stop, you idiot!” I had scratched her back. I had saved her from an immediate death even if I couldn’t save her from her fate. I found her a loving home. Three times. I had taken her on hikes. Dozens of kids had petted her. I fed her the expensive stuff and a few french
fries. I knew exactly who Ursula was capable of becoming and I loved her anyway. During my watch, any hand that touched her did so with kindness. My madcap foster child was a world-class chore, but during the entire time I knew her she never once looked up at me without an ear-to-ear grin. I did the best I could. What else is there?

ONE MORNING, AFTER HEARING HOW MY CALL WAS VERY
important to them, how calls were being taken in the order received, and humming along to something that sounded like “I Could Have Danced All Night” played by an orchestra of nose-harpists, I was finally rewarded with a living human being. I could now order checks.

To access my account, I had to give this human being every relevant detail of my personal life. Distinguishing moles? Check. Dental records? Check. Contents of my glove compartment including the serial number on the tin of Sucrets? Check. As I was spelling my name for the third time, she suddenly piped up, “Oh, you have a famous name.”

I could have argued it is more accurately described as a-name-known-by-a-few-people-with-a-passion-for-trivia-and-members-of-my-daughter’s-carpool, but since I couldn’t think of anything better, I responded with the simple yet always useful, “Huh.”

I heard a few more seconds of typing and then, “I wonder what ever happened to her.”

I toyed with telling her I’d heard Quinn Cummings died at the hands of her pimp.

I toyed with insisting I was quite certain no one else had my name and then throwing a fit if she mentioned the words “former child actor.”

I toyed with speculating that Quinn Cummings has made millions from bank fraud, specializing in counterfeit checks.

Instead, I said, honestly, “Oh, probably a bunch of stuff” and listened to her type and chuckle at the thought of the wild life that the other Quinn Cummings must be living.

Thanks to Brenda Copeland for finding me in the wilderness. Thanks to Jeff Kleinman for support and counsel once I came in from the wilderness. Thanks to Mary Herczog, Ken Miller, and Jeff Greenstein for their wisdom and their mystifying belief that I was actually going to live through writing this. Thanks to Victoria Stafford and Michele East for their friendship and for each saying those unrepayable words, “When can I take your kid so you can write?” Thanks to everyone else I care about; I’d offer to bake you something as a thanks, but you all know what a dreadful cook I am.

Finally, thanks to my blog readers; your support and enthusiasm mean the world to me.