The Dog Park Read online

  “I’m very okay, Mom. I’m actually great.”

  “Is any of this excitement about the video bringing up past...inclinations?”

  I felt a flash of irritation. “Mom,” I said in a low, strained voice. “I never had those inclinations. That’s not why it happened.”

  Here was the other reason my parents and I didn’t talk often. They knew about the Amalie Project and what had led to it.

  “I know,” my mother said. “You’ve told me that. But we worry.”

  “Don’t!” I wanted to say, Why didn’t you worry about me when I was growing up? Why didn’t you ever worry until I was in too deep? Before I slipped away?

  My mother sighed. “Okay, okay.” Silence and then she asked, “So when do you think you can have the collars done for the puppies?”

  “I’ll put it at the top of my list.” I wanted to be nice to my mom. There was no reason not to be. She and my dad were who they were, never anything else. “I’ll send them within a few days.”

  “Oh, take your time. Don’t put stress on yourself.”

  “It’s not stress.”

  “You just don’t want to get so overwhelmed that you go back to past habits.”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I took a deep breath. I asked about my dad. She gave me a quick rundown—all was good—and then she was off to find her husband.

  7

  The next call surprised me even more than my mom’s.

  Sebastian.

  He’d seen the video online, and he actually sounded a tad excited himself. Not like my mom had, but definitely amused, interested.

  “Isn’t it hysterical?” I told Sebastian about Baxter darting and Vinnie shooting the whole thing.

  We fell right into conversation, the way we used to a long time ago—no awkward “Hi, how ya been feeling? Okay, how about you?” chitchat.

  When something like this happened—rarely, I grant you—it made me remember that when we were “us,” Sebastian and I had a hell of a lot of fun.

  One of the reasons I’d shut down my online dating profile without even going on a date was because I feared that no one could be quite as fun as Sebastian when he wanted to be. And I knew fun, having been deeply involved (way too deep, it would turn out) in my teens and twenties with a touring rock band.

  The problem, toward the end of us, was Sebastian hadn’t desired much fun with me. It had made me terribly wistful—remembering the days when Sebastian was on, when we were engaged. Sometimes, he would wake me at five in the morning and he would make some crazy dish—whatever he’d found at the ready-market that morning, whatever his imagination lit upon. Once, it was pretzels and scrambled eggs with cheese and hot sauce. His were the most bizarre breakfasts and the most delicious because he infused them with that fun. He brought that sense of fun to each day. He loved to “call an audible,” as he put it, hitting a last-minute Cubs game, or going to see a blues band at Kingston Mines.

  But there was no such fun like that in the last year of our marriage. It was one of the factors that made me say, Okay, let’s give up.

  But the conversation about our child dog was fun. “And you know it was on the news,” I told Sebastian.

  “What do you mean?” He didn’t sound so amused. “Who was on the news?”

  “Baxter. On Pamela’s morning show. It wasn’t just a video on the internet.”

  He groaned.

  “What?”

  “They must have been desperate.”

  “It was cute,” I said. “And then my mom called from New York. It was on their news, too.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I ignored the slightly scornful tone.

  “My mom called,” I repeated. I knew that would stop him. He knew I had issues with my parents that had been visited and revisited at therapists’ offices.

  “Oh?” he said.

  “Yeah. We had a great conversation.”

  I told Sebastian about it. And maybe he was in a good mood—maybe because I’d mentioned my parents and he knew that could be a tough situation for me—because soon, he softened, I could tell. It was his tone when he responded, asked questions, it was the volume of his voice, too, that showed his level of interest. I was awarded with his full attention—questions illuminated with years of hearing about Simon and Muriel Champlin.

  “How old are they now?” he said.

  “Sixty-six. My mom’s sixty-five.”

  “My mom’s seventy next year.” He told me of his own recent conversations with his mom. Not that his mom was anything like mine. On the contrary, she loved and adored Sebastian so much that I was pretty sure that she was secretly relieved at our divorce. That should have made me feel bitter, I suppose, but instead it only made me feel more wistful when I thought of the kind of mother’s love and adoration he got from her.

  Sebastian scoffed. “I can’t believe the dog was on the news out in the sticks.”

  It was the scoff that brought me back. I had heard that scoff too many times.

  “What’s up, Hess?” I said, putting on a chummy tone. “You’ve got a problem with your dog being on a video?”

  “Well, it’s not news.”

  I wanted to bite back. But that would only start up an argument. I changed the topic, and we talked for a few minutes about nothing.

  And as often happened when Sebastian and I had some kind of clash on the phone, or in this case a near clash, I took to walking around the condo, Baxter, our de facto kid, at my feet. We had spent time designing and decorating every room. The condo was our first real place together (he’d moved into mine when we were in New York). There was the joint office, and the master bedroom with the Moroccan-inspired leather headboard, the wide-planked hardwood floors we’d chosen for throughout the rest of the condo. We’d done it together. Hence, this condo was ours. I still felt like that most of the time.

  But when we fought, and I walked the place, that’s when I could remind myself that this was mine now.

  It took some of the sting away from Sebastian’s haughty opinions about what constituted news. I don’t know if he ever understood how much it hurt when he did that, especially back when I was working for a local magazine he considered “just a society rag—it’s a grown-up yearbook.”

  That reminder rankled me, and I asked how his trip was going, just to bug him.

  I got a few mumbled words in response.

  “C’mon, where are you?” I asked, not because I thought he’d tell me, but more because I wanted to needle him.

  “Jess,” was all he said in a tight voice.

  I sighed.

  I went into the kitchen with its 1950s dining chairs and the kitchen table, which had been Sebastian’s grandfather’s worktable, adorned with new legs.

  “You’re back when?” I said. Another jab.

  But he didn’t take the bait. “I do love you, Jess,” Sebastian said.

  I waited, then muttered, “I love you, too.” Even though it didn’t matter.

  We were both silent.

  “Sebastian,” I said his name back to him. Not with a question mark, just said it.

  At his name, Baxy seemed to have realized who I was talking with. He’d been playing with an old sock of Sebastian’s, but then his head shot up and he ran over, jumped on a kitchen chair, black nose in the air, pink tongue hanging from his mouth in a happy pant.

  We fell quiet again, and in the silence of me and Sebastian, I leaned over and stroked Baxter’s neck. He stretched his head up to allow more.

  Then Sebastian had to go, and I said goodbye. I’m not sure he heard me.

  When I hung up, Baxter looked at me, then looked around, his eyes quickly scanning the room, darting back to me. I could hear him thinking
, But where is he?

  “Gone,” I said. “Gone.”

  8

  Sebastian returned to Chicago a week after he left. A short trip for him. He called on the way home from the airport.

  “How’s Superdog?” he said when I answered.

  I looked at Baxter, who sat on the checkerboard kitchen floor, patiently waiting for me to scoop his lunch into his bowl.

  “He’s super.”

  “I missed him.”

  “I know.”

  Baxter always seemed to ground Sebastian. When we’d first gotten him, Sebastian was suddenly happier working in the home office—the office we’d outfitted just to make Sebastian feel inspired, feel as if he was back in New York, with a row of state-of-the-art TVs that showed—close-up and raw—news stations around the world. The BBC usually ran on the monitor closest to him, except for Saturdays in the fall when all the TVs bore college football, the most prominent being whichever game Iowa was playing in.

  Sebastian had gone to Iowa, strictly for the writing program. Creative writing. He didn’t know then that he would stray to journalism, that it would hook him in and turn him on in a way that was different from creative writing. He suddenly knew one day in his senior year, in the middle of a seminar on fiction writers who turn to nonfiction. He didn’t want to make people up. He wanted to write about the people who were. War reporters and investigative journalists—those were the heroes, those were the people he wanted to be. After graduating he spent years living in Italy, working on a book exposing various Berlusconi scandals.

  I met him a year after his first book on Italian politics was published. It was such a lively book—written in a lively voice about admittedly lively people who had a lot of sex—that it was on the bestseller lists for two weeks, enough to get him another contract. It had made him sparkle, that book deal, which had just been inked the day we met. The sparkle gave him something beyond the sexy hair, the strong jaw, the soft eyes that didn’t so much bore into yours as melt into them, and that bottom lip of his. It made him reverberate with charisma.

  On the kitchen floor now, Baxter rolled over to show his belly. Rub me, please!

  I bent and put my hand on his warm dog belly, using him for comfort while I broke the news to Sebastian. I told him that since he was gone, Baxter’s video was still running on news stations around the country, the web video getting nearly half a million hits.

  “Christ,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

  I said nothing, waiting for a nice whip of sarcasm.

  He waited, too, probably for me to make some crack about his attitude, launch into the ruts of priors.

  Instead, Sebastian took an audible breath. “How is he handling it?” he asked.

  I looked down at Baxter again, who flipped back to a sit. He thumped his tail, then tilted his head as if he expected something, a trait I couldn’t recall him doing before. “He might be getting a bit of child star syndrome,” I said. “Possibly impatient. But otherwise he’s great.”

  I put Baxy’s food on the floor and he gave my wrist a quick lick in thanks before he nose-dived into the bowl. “Nah,” I said to Sebastian. “Not really. He’s still our little guy.”

  “I miss him,” he said again.

  “I know,” I said again.

  We chatted for a few minutes about some clients who had recently retained me again to outfit them for a wedding, about the magazine editors I’d had lunch with last week who’d promised work, about a good friend of Sebastian’s who had sold a book, about Sebastian’s family.

  It would be the last normal conversation we would have for a long time. If I had known it, I might have thought to couch what I told him next. “The national news is going to run it.”

  “What?” A distinctive snip to his voice that I knew meant displeasure.

  “Baxter’s video.”

  “What national news program?”

  I wasn’t sure. I told him a producer had called.

  “What was his name?”

  I looked at the stack of cut up, old index cards that I used for notes in the kitchen. I read off the person’s name.

  “Jesus, are you serious?” Sebastian said. “I know that guy. Does he know Baxter is my dog?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem like you’d want people to know that.”

  He exhaled in a short burst, as if through clenched teeth. “I have to go.” He hung up.

  Yet an hour later, he was knocking at the door of my condo.

  I peered through the keyhole and saw him. This is my condo, I thought. Mine.

  Of course, Sebastian knew the doorman, who had simply let him up. Still, the building staff also knew we were divorced. It annoyed me that they would give him free reign, without so much as a warning call to me, even if it was to tell me he was elevator-bound.

  I glanced down at what I was wearing—yoga clothes for a class I planned to attend—gray pants, a thin, hot-pink top. I reached back and pulled my hair over one shoulder, smoothing the front and tucking the other side behind my ear. It occurred to me only as I was in the middle of the action that I was doing it because that was how Sebastian liked it.

  But he definitely wasn’t in the mood to appreciate my hair.

  He strode inside. “Hi.” He stopped suddenly, as if realizing in that instant he didn’t live there anymore.

  “Hi?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, but it was hard.

  “Where’s Baxter?”

  “He’s playing at Daisy’s house.”

  Sebastian looked a little blank.

  “You know Daisy,” I said. “From the dog park.”

  “I didn’t know they had play dates,” he said.

  “Usually when one of us has to work. Maureen came and got him after we got off the phone.”

  Sebastian nodded. “Well, I just wanted to tell you, in person, that I got ahold of him.”

  “Who?”

  “Paul.” The national news producer. I opened my mouth, but Sebastian kept talking. “They’re not going to run it.”

  9

  After Sebastian spoke those words—They’re not going to run it—I spun around and marched to our bedroom. I mean, my bedroom!

  “Hey, Jess,” I heard Sebastian say, still in the kitchen.

  I kept walking, breathed in deep, then again and again. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t let Sebastian make me sad or angry anymore.

  I stepped into the bedroom and closed the door. I inhaled slowly. I was alive without him, I reminded myself.

  After a minute I opened the door and, trying to tone down the marching, walked back to the kitchen. Sebastian sat on one of our kitchen chairs (my kitchen chairs), a leg crossed, ankle resting on the knee. He looked at me with a confused, maybe a little scared, expression. I couldn’t read him like I used to.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Get the producer to cancel the piece on Baxter.”

  “Because it’s not news.”

  “What do you care if your dog is on a news program?” I asked. “Even if it’s not ‘news’?”

  “I happen to be a journalist who works in real news and I don’t want anyone associating me with the dog video.”

  “Are you embarrassed by Baxter?”

  “Of course not. Jesus.”

  “By me?”

  A scoff.

  “Well, then what? Do you think that some source in Pakistan won’t give you information if he knows your dog is in a video?”

  He said nothing.

  “Will the army not let you embed with some troop?”

  Sebastian scowled.

  “Hey, just show them that he saved a kid.” I shook my head. “D
o you even care that the video makes people happy?”

  “I’m not here to make people happy.”

  “Well, what if your ex-wife is expanding her business because of being on these programs? Would that make you even a little happy? What if she wanted to make people happy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to show you something.” My breath was still short. I hadn’t shown anyone, or even talked to anyone, about what I’d been up to this past week—staying up past midnight and getting up at five to work again.

  I gestured at him to follow me. He stood. I walked him into the office.

  Where Sebastian’s desk used to be, a long folding table now resided. On the closest end was my sewing machine in front of a chair. In the middle was an empty space where I stood when I flipped through magazines, searching for inspiration, but rarely having to do so for very long.

  I walked toward the far end of the folding table, Sebastian following me. There lay piles (organized by color) of plain, inexpensive dog collars and leashes, along with rolls of ribbon and small plastic boxes of embellishments.

  I explained to Sebastian how people had been contacting me since the day of the video. “At first,” I told him, “they wanted to order the Superdog collar or leash, sometimes both. It took me hardly any time to make them. Then things started expanding.”

  “Expanding how?” Sebastian stood with his hands behind his back, bent over my materials as if he were in a museum studying a display case.

  I held up a few sheets of paper with print on them. “These are all the orders I have to fill in the next week.”

  Sebastian scanned the first page, then the next. “There are at least forty.”

  “I know. And I bet when I check my email, I’ll have another five or ten.”

  He looked at me over the sheet. “Do you have a website?”

  “Not for this. I have that static one for my styling business. People have been tracking me down through that. Like I said, first, they wanted the Superdog stuff. Now they’re putting in their own ideas. It’s like I take their idea, track down the materials and make it.”