Ten
TEN
SHE WAITED UP to hear him come in, but she did not hear him come in.
And then, still sleepless, and because she assumed nobody would notice, she borrowed another dog.
Most of the Tbilisi strays in the basement—eleven of them, yes, asleep in piles—seemed to be medium-sized, nondescript, but this one was small and soft, a generation or two removed from some pampered Soviet shih tzu.
She had liquid brown eyes, a mop of gray and brown fur, and a kind of placid expression that said I will not be frightened, I will accept my fate.
Amy wondered how this one had ended up here, in Irine’s basement (how had any of them ended up here?), as she picked her up under her scruffy belly.
The other dogs looked on, curious, but neither barked nor growled.
Maybe they understood that this one was the only one who could fit with Amy on a single bed.
Maybe they understood that all of their fates were determined by strange middle-aged women who could pluck them up with no warning.
Amy cuddled the placid shih tzu on her way back up to her room, felt the reassuring weight of her like a newborn against her chest. At home, when she could not fall asleep, the steady breathing of a dog sometimes helped, especially when the Xanax didn’t, or the animal videos.
She plopped the dog (she had a tag but it was filled out in Georgian—fine, she’d call her Georgia) onto the bed and the dog watched her curiously.
It was almost two, and the house had settled into its creaky rest. Outside, the moon was just a sliver but the stars glowed like neon through her window.
Maybe that was why she couldn’t sleep. At home, despite the streetlights and drunks of the East Village, nothing felt particularly exciting or worth staying up for.
A good night was a decent meal, maybe something on Netflix, a meditation podcast and asleep by 10:30.
A bad night was the same thing but asleep at 3:30 or 4:00, wracked by Judd’s snoring or a sense of panic that would overtake her for reasons that, by dawn, had always vanished.
Georgia stretched, lifted her head for a moment, then curled up into a ball on the foot of the bed as if she always did this.
What a docile girl! She had a feeling that Angel wouldn’t be so docile.
Angel was too maternal, too in charge. Angel was a dog with a job, whereas this one had clearly been bred for decor.
At the shelter, Amy was quick to assess the different personalities of her charges: timid or assertive, sometimes unfortunately aggressive, or maternal or yappy or needy.
But of course always traumatized; shelter dogs—American shelter dogs, that is to say—were usually stressed out, even in the nicer shelters, because they spent all day separated into small cages with (if they were lucky) tiny individual outside areas where they could get some sunshine or pee in the cold, and (if they were lucky) they were walked once a day, and they were generally only fed once a day (and sometimes not at all on weekends or holidays), and when people came by to visit they were so crazed for attention they would bark their faces off and their eyes would roll back in their heads and they’d jump up and press their bodies against the cages anxiously, aggressively, scaring the nice family that had come in looking for a dog like the ones they’d seen on the Purina bag.
Or they’d be so scared and shut down they’d hide in the corners of their cages and not make eye contact and not even try. “Come on, baby,” Amy would say. “You’ve got to try! Show some initiative!” But the shut-down ones wouldn’t even look at her.
The hardest cases, of course, would snap and bite, because they’d been trained to behave that way or because they were just so scared.
But there were always a few dogs that seemed to know what to do, the ones who could perform for people, wag their tails and jump, but just a little, and roll over for belly rubs the second they got outside for meet-and-greets.
When Amy took dogs out of their kennels to meet potential owners, she could always tell within three minutes which dogs were going to luck out and which ones were going to return.
She thought of the lucky ones as the A students; they were smart enough to have learned how to bark cheerfully (not aggressively), how to lick faces (adorably), how not to scare children or intimidate the moms. They knew they could never seem the least bit intimidating!
Even if they weren’t really intimidating, only large or bulky or strange-looking; the smart ones would somehow make themselves smaller, make their eyes look especially large. How did they know to do that?
Still, the small dogs always went first, and then fluffy dogs, and then the lighter-colored dogs, since the public saw these sorts of dogs as more feminine and domestic, and of course because of racism (black animals were adopted less than half as frequently as light-colored animals).
Which was why, at the end of the day, it was always the pit bulls who broke Amy’s heart, the pit bulls who were rarely pulled from their cages, and when they were pulled they generally got returned.
Big, smart pit bulls were the worst, as they were so eager to be with people, so eager to please, that they couldn’t help themselves, and would jump and pull on their leashes from the very first hello.
And they were strong! And short-haired, and their canine teeth were so prominent, and they weren’t cute in that golden retriever way or even in a sort of ugly-sweet bulldog way; they just looked tough and watchful and aggressive.
They marketed the pit bulls as “Staffordshire Terriers,” but nobody was fooled.
But sometimes—sometimes someone would come in, a single man, tattooed knuckles, boots, and Amy would have a feeling he was looking for a specific kind of dog, a specific look .
If she was working the kennels that day, or coordinating the other volunteers, she would say, “Pull Babette” or “Pull Samantha” (they always gave the pit bulls girly names), and she’d spend a few minutes with Babette or Samantha before bringing her out, give her some treats, brush her fur and the space between her eyes, maybe even stick a little bow on her collar, anything to say to Tattooed Knuckles, Look at me, I’m beautiful, I’m your girl.
And when Tattooed Knuckles got to the desk, Amy would be ready, maybe she herself would have unbuttoned the top button of her own shirt.
“Do I have a dog for you,” she would say.
“Do you?” And he’d look a little lascivious, even though they really were talking about a dog. Nothing else. Even if he were wearing a wedding ring.
And out would come Babette, who had been soothed (she hoped) into a state of relative calm, and because pit bulls were so smart Amy would have already taught her sit and stay and paw, and watch how gently she takes treats and she’s been in the shelter for eleven months, and it’s just been so unfair, she’s such a good girl, but it takes someone really special to notice her.
It was a thing she was unreservedly good at.
Tattooed Knuckles would think about it or say I really was only looking or maybe even You got anything else?
Maybe a little smaller? But then Babette would look up at him with those beautiful gray eyes (most pit bulls did have disarmingly lovely eyes) and Amy could always pinpoint the exact moment it was over.
The moment Knuckles sighed. The moment Babette licked his hand, gently, hopefully.
The exact moment that Babette settled into Knuckles’s heart.
Pit bulls were still destroyed at three times the rate of other dogs; they were so smart and eager to please and easy to train that they could be trained to do terrible things, and sometimes could not be untaught.
But that was rare. Under Amy’s watch, the pit bulls of the Avenue D shelter found homes or found fosters or found refuges upstate or in New Jersey or, for a week or two at a time, in her own apartment (the cats hated it, Roxy hated it).
Under Amy’s watch, the animals who most needed saving were always saved.
Rescue after rescue, she put parts of herself back together. The loneliness of her childhood. The disappointments of her marriage.
“Hey Georgia, what’s your story, anyway?”
The dog sniffed Amy’s outstretched hand.
She seemed relatively well fed, which was good for several reasons—it meant not only that Irine had enough to feed all the dogs but that the smaller ones weren’t crowded out during feeding time.
She had the tag in her ear that meant she’d had her shots, and protruding nipples that meant that, at least once in her life, she’d given birth.
“When did you have your babies, mama? Were you on the streets?”
Amy let her hand run down the soft fur at the back of Georgia’s neck.
She felt oily, a little dirty, really, and it would be a nice thing to give this dog a bath, especially if this were her temperament at all times.
Would this dog freak out around water? Or would she, like Roxy, love the warmth and the scrubbing and the devoted attention?
Grooming Roxy took at least an hour of hands-on work: scrubbing her with special shampoo and conditioner, rinsing her, cleaning her ears, trimming her nails, brushing her teeth with peanut-butter-flavored toothpaste.
Blow-drying her as best she could, then wrapping a towel around her warm, moist body and fitting a specially-designed terrycloth turban on her head.
She always posted the results on the shelter Instagram page with the caption “Spa Day.”
Hmmm. Georgia did smell a little like pee.
Well, if bathing her made too much noise, she’d simply stop.