Following Ezra (21 page)

One evening as we are dressing to head out for a family dinner, Ted arranges a complex of gates to confine the dogs to the kitchen. Before anyone can notice, Ezra has taken a long, not-so-careful stride over the barrier to play. As predicted, Reese greets him with a nip on the heel. Despite the warnings, despite his previous experience, Ezra is flabbergasted, bouncing away on one foot while he grasps the injured ankle.

“I just wanted to play!” he says, voice full of enthusiasm despite the snap. “Why does Reese have to be so rebellious?” Then, looking over the gate and directly at the skinny, diminutive canine, he asks: “Why do you have to be such a rebellious cousin dog?”

Again and again, Ezra demonstrates how impulsive behavior and pets can be an unfortunate mix—though usually it is the pets that pay the price. More than once when he is young, he is at a family friend’s house when the sight of a goldfish piques his interest. The first time, when he is six, Shawn and I both hear the crash of shattering glass, run to the scene, and discover shards of what had been a fishbowl on one family’s TV room floor, while Ezra cowers in the corner.

“I just wanted to see what it
felt
like,” he says.

He learns to be more careful when he’s eleven and gets his own pair of white mice acquired at PETCO for $1.99 apiece. He names them Mia and Tia, after characters in his favorite movie, Pixar’s
Cars.
He keeps them for a couple months on a bookshelf in his room, helping to clean the cage, and taking responsibility for feeding them a single food pellet when he awakens each morning, until one Saturday morning when I’m eating breakfast and I hear his panicked cry from upstairs.

“Abba, I think Tia is dead!”

Before I can even stand up, Ezra comes bounding down the steps, a concerned look on his face, his right hand extended and cupping something small and white.

“Is it dead?” he asks.

It certainly appears to be. Once we settle Ezra down, I try to get him to explain.

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“She was old?” he says, more asking than telling. At eleven, he still has a juvenile understanding of death: It is something that happens to old people—and animals.

“She was old?” I repeat. “Is that why she died?”

He looks at me. “No?”

“How did the mouse die?”

“She just died.”

I wait.

“She was in the window and she died.”

“In the window? What do you mean?”

For reasons he cannot explain, he took the pair of mice from their cage and put them in the space between his bedroom window and the outer window screen. Then he lowered the window sash, not realizing, perhaps, that the tiny creature was in the way.

“It was an accident,” Ezra says. “I didn’t
mean
to.” He seems genuinely sad, even bewildered. He asks again, “Was Tia old?”

“What do you think?” I ask.

“No,” he says. And then, after a pause: “Can we get a new mouse?”

“Well, first I want you to understand what happened.”

“Tia died.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I feel sad.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” he says in a forlorn, resigned tone. “Tia died.”

 

 

Ezra’s impulsiveness around pets doesn’t reach a nadir until shortly after that, when we acquire our cat, a gray-and-white shorthair the boys name Dash. At first the kitten provides a point of commonality among our three boys, who take turns luring him with pieces of string and compete for time snuggling with him on the couch. The cat inspires the best in them, and brings our family a new sense of peace and calm.

Until the thump at the bottom of the steps.

I am sitting alone, reading a magazine in the family room that evening, when, out of nowhere, I hear the sound, a dull thud on the oak floor at the foot of the stairway. A few seconds later: a muted meow. I look up to see Dash, still a kitten, limping from the spot, gingerly making his way across the hardwood.

I leap to my feet and run up the stairs, stopping on the landing to look upward, where I spot Ezra peering down from between the balusters. His expression is neither gleeful nor guilty. He’s just looking.

“What happened?” I demand.

“I threw Dash,” he says coolly.

“Why did you do
that
?” I ask.

Nothing. Now Shawn has emerged from another room and Ami and Noam come from the den, where they have been watching
SpongeBob
and heard the commotion.

“What’s going
on
?” Ami yells. Noam looks incredulous. Shawn scoops up the hobbled kitten, the three of them closely examining the victim while I focus on the alleged perpetrator.

“Ezra, what were you thinking?”

“I’m
sorry
!” he says.

“Do you see what you did?” I say. “You hurt the cat.”

“I didn’t throw Dash down,” he says. I wait a moment for an explanation. “I threw him
up
.”

I look at the hard wooden stairway, in two flights with a landing between floors, and realize what he means: He tossed Dash upward toward the ceiling, so that the cat arced and then landed—on its feet, surely—midstaircase.

I shake my head. “Why?”

“I’m
sorry
,” he says, and then he says what he wants me to say: “It’s okay. Say, ‘It’s okay.’ ”

“It’s
not
okay,” I say. “You could have killed him.”

I think of the lengthy contract the SPCA lady insisted we sign before she would give us the cat. No declawing; no outside time (felines in our area commonly fall victim to coyotes or cars); no abuse of any kind. I do not recall a specific clause about tossing down stairways, but I figure it was implied.

The after-hours veterinarian feels around Dash’s extremities, examines his eyes and ears, and determines that the kitten will survive. He has escaped without significant injuries. Relieved, I drive home, pondering whether Ezra will ever be able to learn to control his rash behavior around pets. I know these incidents—the run-in with Reese, with the mouse, and this one with the cat—have happened in spite of his intentions. It is no different from the way he involuntarily flapped his arms as a preschooler, or how he sometimes can’t stop himself from blurting out comments about people’s weight or hair. Ezra doesn’t mean to do these things to animals. He cannot yet stop himself.

That is clear from his encounters with dogs. Walking around the neighborhood, he lavishes attention on almost every mongrel he encounters, and develops an exhaustive knowledge of their breeds, traits, and vital statistics. He finds it impossible to saunter past a person walking a dog without accosting them both. Spotting an elderly woman approaching from up the block with her poodle, Ezra abruptly sits himself cross-legged in their path on the sidewalk. When they near, he grabs the high-strung animal as it approaches and tries to cuddle it in his lap while the owner looks on with alarm.

He develops a routine inquisition to which he subjects anyone he spots with a canine:

“Excuse me, can I pet your dog?

“What kind of dog is your dog?

“Male or female?

“How old?”

Hearing the age, Ezra always replies with a commentary. “
Ooh
, a puppy!” Or “She’s
old
!” Or simply: “Middle-aged.” (Of course, most people don’t think of their dogs as middle-aged, a designation that brings to mind AARP membership, argyle sweaters, and hot flashes.)

Not being a master of social nuance, he often follows up, to my chagrin, with another question: “When is he going to
die
?”

It is that last part that gives dog owners pause.
When is he going to die?

“Ummm . . .”

“Ezra!” I say, feigning shock that my own son has uttered such an insensitive question.

“I think he’ll be around for a while,” the person might respond.

“He’s not going to
die
soon?” Ezra says. Then he reassures himself:

“No, he’ll be around for a few years.” Sometimes Ezra launches into a monologue about the data about canine longevity he has gleaned from his books: A small dog like a Chihuahua can live up to eighteen or nineteen years, while a Labrador might survive only eleven or twelve.

That makes it awkward when Ezra learns that a larger dog has reached the advanced age of twelve or thirteen.

“Oooh, she’s going to pass away
soon
!” he’ll say.

It’s at that point that I usually smile at the person and pull Ezra away.

“Ezra, stop!” I say under my breath. “They don’t want to think about when their dog is going to
die
!” To him, it isn’t a sensitive matter, just an objective piece of information, like the country of origin or average weight.

I try to teach him to offer a compliment—something like, “Beautiful dog!”—instead of predicting a dog’s imminent demise. But sometimes it comes out with such exuberance or such awkward intonation that people still find his comments unsettling.

Most seem to understand, though, especially when they see that Ezra enjoys dogs so much that he hunches on all fours, lets the pooches lick him all over his face, and often licks them back. (The same neurological wiring that makes him overly sensitive to sudden sounds and makes him crave hot foods causes him to seek out sensations from which other people recoil—like the feeling of being licked by a slobbery dog.)

And they are delighted and impressed when, on later encounters, he spouts from memory their pets’ vital statistics: name, gender, birth date, temperament. He almost never forgets a dog. Ezra knows the names of only a handful of neighbors, but he knows Ollie the shih tzu, Milo the terrier mix, and he always bounds out our front door and barrels toward the sidewalk when he spots Rox, a spirited local Dalmatian, dragging his owner past. He rarely sees any of their owners at the market or a restaurant without asking after the dog the way other people might inquire about grandchildren or work. “How’s your dog Fiona? She turned three!” Or “Is Griff still itching from fleas?”

A couple who move in up the block is charmed by the way Ezra lights up at the sight of their golden retriever, wrapping his entire body around the animal with full abandon as if he were embracing a beloved friend, and smothering the pooch with kisses.

“You really need to get him a dog,” the woman says.

“We know,” Shawn and I say in unison, though we have no plans to do so; we feel like our hands are full with the boys.

Taking pity, they tell Ezra he can borrow the dog anytime. He likes that idea, so on a few weekend afternoons, I tag along as he proudly holds the leash and lets the retriever lead him at a trot, weaving through the neighborhood, Ezra scrambling to keep up, an elated grin across his face.

In spite of our hesitation, seeing Ezra so savor his time with the dog convinces us that our family should indeed consider acquiring one, mostly as a companion for Ezra, a mate in lieu of the human friends he still doesn’t seem to be making.

We begin looking at the nearest shelter, a county facility not far from home. It seems to go on forever, with cage after cage containing sad dogs with pleading eyes. Ezra wants every last one: the rangy Doberman, the snarling pit bull, the yappy poodle. He can find no fault, sitting on concrete floors and looking at the dogs eye-to-eye and—defying our instructions—sticking his fingers in the kennel for the dogs to lick. At some, he rests a cheek against the wire to let dogs lap at his face. On the way home, he recollects a dozen of the pooches by name and breed—the beagle named Lucky, the chow chow named Buzz—but cannot settle on just one.

At a rescue organization in Beverly Hills, the volunteer looks over our application form and our family, asks us a few questions, then says he has two dogs that might be perfect. The first, a Dalmatian, doesn’t seem to respond to anything we say.

“Oh, he’s deaf,” the volunteer finally says. “I thought I had mentioned that.”

The second dog is a Labrador missing an eye. The boys find that unsettling. Shawn—always looking for ways to make the world better—feels pity for the dog, and tells me that adopting it would be a lovely expression of our values.

I shake my head. “I have enough problems,” I say with a smile, “without a special-needs dog.”

Shawn takes ownership of the search, shuttling Ezra the next weekend to another series of rescue shelters. She phones Sunday afternoon from one.

“We found the dog,” she says, a smile in her voice.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“This dog is licking Ezra all over the place,” she says. “You have to come see her.”

I drive over with Noam. Shawn meets us at the door and walks us in, past rows of cages of cats, through a compact warren of kennels holding dogs of various breeds and sizes, to a window looking into a small cage. There, Ezra sits on the floor, looking into the eyes of a midsize, year-old mongrel with the coloring of a German shepherd, dark, soulful eyes, the ears of a Labrador, a spotted tongue, and a tight, slender frame.