The Dog Walker
For months, she’s been waking early, rising before the sun, before the dog has a chance to nudge her feet with his nose and beg to be taken outside.
Absurd, she knows, to walk on the beach in the dead of winter, the breeze off the ocean so stiff and so cold. But it’s been like this ever since her husband passed. Not a tragedy, they said; he’d been old, he’d been ill. Expected, they said, like that should cushion the blow.
They’d been married for more than fifty years. They had no children: It was the two of them and their collection of dogs. They’d moved to Shelter Island years ago, declaring that they didn’t need a bustling city, they didn’t need people and places and things—they needed only each other.
What did they think, she wonders now as the cold air snakes its way beneath her layers, goose bumps blossoming on her skin, that they would die at the exact same time, neither leaving the other alone?
For good measure, did they think their last dog would die on schedule as well, and they’d leave nothing behind but a kitchen full of chipped pots and pans, a collection of books and letters and clothes, all of it trash for strangers to clear out?
Well, it hadn’t happened that way, and now she’s alone.
She walks their dog for miles every day, the last dog that will ever belong to both of them, the last creature, she’s decided, with whom she will share a home, a bed, a life.
When they reach the beach, she unclips his harness, and he runs ahead.
In the warmer months, he heads straight for the water, but he knows better when it’s this cold.
She should be more careful with him, she thinks. If something happens to him, what would she do?
Suddenly panicked, she calls the dog’s name.
Normally, he comes right back to her side, but this morning—this cold, gray morning—he keeps moving, his nose in the air, like he’s smelled something more interesting than she could ever possibly be.
She runs after him, her aging bones moving slowly over the sand, calling his name over and over, her voice growing more high-pitched with each step.
By the time she reaches the dunes, she’s crawling on her hands and knees up the incline. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, she could scramble up the sand like a wild animal, but now she is out of breath.
The dog stands motionless now, but he still won’t come when she calls. He lets out a whine, then paws at the ground.
It feels like it takes her ages to reach him. She notices footprints in the sand, a long winding path.
There is a person sitting cross-legged like a child where the prints stop. The dog nudges the face, and the person falls over.
At once, the dog walker recognizes that what she’s seeing isn’t a person at all. Not anymore.
The wind picks up, making her shiver, erasing the prints on the sand.
The hair on the body’s head moves in the breeze so that for a second it looks alive again, and without thinking, she moves closer, as if she could possibly help.
But when the wind stops, the body stills again, and there is no denying its lifelessness.
There are icicles on its eyelashes. Its lips are blue.
The body isn’t wearing a coat. What was the person who used to be in there thinking, dressing like that this time of year?
Maybe they weren’t thinking. That recovery center brings all sorts to the island, people out of their mind on god knows what. In the end, her husband was on so many painkillers he’d have gone outside in his underwear without realizing it.
Or maybe, the dog walker thinks, the person who used to be in this body wanted to die out here. The thought makes her angry, when she thinks of how badly her husband wanted to live, how badly she wanted him to live.
Then again, she understands longing for oblivion. She won’t do anything to hurt herself while their dog is still alive—she has to take care of him—but she’s considered what she might do after he’s gone.
Her hands shake as she dials 911.