Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (2 page)

Our uncomplicated Nantucket routines rarely varied day to day or year to year. Every afternoon, we’d pack up bags full of sand toys and changes of clothes for Michael, hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen and head to the beach. We spent hours standing at the ocean’s edge, watching Michael first take tentative steps into the ocean and then daring marches toward and speedy retreats from oncoming waves. We dug deep holes for forts, built sand castles, and collected shells.

After the beach, we’d stop at Bartlett’s Farm. Everyone who has ever cooked a meal on Nantucket has been to Bartlett’s Farm, acres and acres of farmland by the sea, an island fixture since the early 1800s. Somehow the sandy soil and the generations-old care create vegetables that make you wish you never had to buy mass-produced vegetables from a supermarket again. Every Bartlett’s ear of corn, every melon, every tomato is a work of art.

The Bartlett family once owned a steer named Babe. They kept him out in one of their fields behind a split-rail fence. Children were desperate to get near Babe, especially Michael. The Bartletts dispensed their unsold ears of corn to anyone who asked to feed Babe. Michael was their most loyal patron. He never tired of feeding Babe and watching the behemoth’s drooling, slippery, long, pink tongue suck the entire ear of corn into his mouth, husk and all, smash it with his teeth, and swallow it, seemingly in one bite.

Michael loved Babe. Undoubtedly, Michael was partly responsible for Babe’s daunting girth, which kept both Michael and Babe from charging through the fence.

But Babe was not the only attraction at Bartlett’s Farm. Michael managed to find his first pet there. As I picked through the tomatoes, Michael would stand by the large wooden table that held hundreds of ears of corn. He’d examine the ears looking for stray inchworms, which he’d then carry on his finger out to the car. The worms usually died before we made it out of the parking lot, so there was never much discussion about the care and feeding of the inchworm. But one summer, when Michael was about five or six, he found a slender, green inchworm that lived longer than a few minutes.

“I’m going to name him ‘Inchie,’” Michael said as soon as we pulled the car up the shell-covered driveway behind our cottage. Laughing as Inchie crawled up and down Michael’s fingers, Michael insisted we make a home for his newly adopted worm. We rummaged through the kitchen cabinets and found an old mayonnaise jar and then punched some holes in the lid with a screwdriver. There Inchie lived for two days, feeding on grass and leaves. Michael was like a protective parent of a newborn, constantly checking on Inchie. “Do you think he has enough air?” Michael would ask us in earnest, carefully holding the jar and examining the air holes in the lid. “Do you think he knows it is bedtime?” “Is he scared of the dark?”

The older Inchie got, an age measured in hours, the more attached Michael became. When Inchie died, Michael buried him in the garden in back of our little cottage. He fashioned a rock into a tombstone and wrote “Inchie” on it and stood in front of it with his hand over his heart and said, “Inchie, I will love you forever.”

Michael’s tenderness toward his newly found and quickly lost pet was so poignant I allowed myself a private daydream of getting Michael a dog. I went so far as to think we might get him a dog while we were on Nantucket. But by the time I walked from the garden through the back door and into the kitchen and picked up the local newspaper, the
Inquirer and Mirror
, off the kitchen table to look for ads for dogs, I had come to my senses and decided against it once again. No dog. We simply could not handle the responsibility.

Being on Nantucket, living life outdoors, gave Michael a chance to be closer to the natural world, freer than he was used to. Every summer, our city child was ecstatic to have a yard, even for just a few weeks. He ran in and out of the house at will, the screen door slamming behind him, something completely alien to a child who lives the rest of the year in a twenty-story apartment building. We all sat outside blowing bubbles, kicking around an oversized beach ball, grilling fish for dinner, and trying to lure one of a family of rabbits out of the shrubbery.

There was a shed just out the back door where the washer and dryer were housed. The deep sink in the shed was where Rich taught Michael the joys of filling a balloon with water and throwing it at each other, something that became a yearly ritual.

Eventually, Michael and a couple of his buddies from the city, Sam Bresnick and his brother Elias, who also spent part of their summers on Nantucket, escalated the ritual into a yearly battle. The arsenal grew larger as the boys did. By the time they were eight, they set out to battle one another with more than a hundred water balloons, leaving in their wake the exploded, colorful plastic pieces, all of which then had to be picked out of the grass.

Rich and I had our own Nantucket rituals. Once Michael went to sleep at night, we enjoyed the rare pleasure of sitting in the yard, staring at the night sky, listening to the quiet, and sipping wine.

Nantucket held a trove of potential pets. From the time Michael was four until he was about ten or eleven, every day at the beach, he would capture jellyfish, sand crabs, and sea lice, put them in a bucket, and insist that he wanted to bring them back to the cottage and then back to New York. Initially, Rich and I did not react to Michael’s desires in the same way. I was always trying to figure out how to say no without seeming like the exhausted mother I was. Rich was always trying to figure out how this could be made to work. Rich’s undaunted spirit always prevailed.

Every summer, the backyard was lined with buckets and bottles of all shapes and sizes. Fortunately, the sea creatures never lived long enough to make the trip back to New York, but they did live long enough in their buckets to overpower the sweet scent of honeysuckle that grew wild in the backyard.

The collection, care, and feeding of all these sea creatures made Rich and me realize we were on the road to buying Michael some kind of pet. A dog was still out of the question; that had definitely not changed. But right before Michael started kindergarten, right after Inchie died, once we were back in the city, we bought fish. Goldfish. Three of them: “Beautiful,” “Goldie,” and “Blackie.” Goldie died first. Blackie was soon to follow. I wondered if maybe we could prolong Beautiful’s life by feeding it less. I nearly starved the fish, but, remarkably, it went on to live with us for years.

On Michael’s first day of kindergarten, he drew a family portrait and listed the members of his family: Mom, Dad, Michael, and Beautiful. I noticed the other kids had lists that looked more like, Mom, Dad, Susie, Joey, Sarah, and Fido.

Michael was an only child of older parents, and although that provided him with a kind of closeness to his parents he might otherwise not have had, it also meant he didn’t have siblings to play with, fight with, and make fun of his parents with. He also didn’t have a dog. He had Beautiful.

We bought him more fish. After buying, starving, and burying many more fish, we finally retired the tank. Unable to hold and pet the fish, not to mention their rapid demise, Michael’s interest in the fish had naturally waned, though his interest in pets and animals in general had not. If anything, Rich and I had frustrated him by never allowing him a pet he could really play with.

Every so often, Michael would wear me down with a steady stream of comments like “I just need a dog to love,” or “If I had a dog I’d always have a friend.” I’d start to ruminate again about getting a dog. But I knew that even if I could see my way clear, Rich could not. He was willing to take on the overseeing of goldfish, but I knew he would protest at the expense and responsibility of adding a dog to our already demanding lives.

Rich was running his own consulting business; I was always at the newspaper or on the phone with someone there. There wasn’t time for a dog. On a couple of occasions I started to broach the subject, but Rich never really wanted to get too far into it, ending the conversation with: “Can we talk about this some other time?” Which really meant: “I haven’t changed my mind, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

On occasion, though, Rich would start to grapple with getting Michael a pet that required more of a commitment on our part than fish. When Michael was in fourth grade, Rich and I took him to East Hill Farm, a working farm in Massachusetts. After collecting eggs, riding a horse, and learning how to milk a cow, Michael discovered the baby rabbits. He spent every waking moment attending to them. Rich started musing about owning a rabbit. “At least,” he said, “it is an animal that would not have to be walked.” But if it was unthinkable to own a dog, it was utter insanity to think about bringing a rabbit into a New York City apartment.

Michael continued to long for a dog, and we continued to say no and to surround him with poor substitutes. One year, Santa brought Michael a kit that allowed him to hatch butterflies. We sent away for the cocoons, watched and waited until they magically turned into butterflies, and then struggled with whether or not to let them go.

We hit a real low point when Michael came home from school one day and announced that a neighborhood friend’s rat was about to have babies and his buddy had offered to give Michael one. “He said I could have one of the babies. Isn’t that great?” Michael said to me, smiling ear to ear.

I had to call the boy’s mother and ask her to please not allow her child to give Michael a rat. She didn’t see why I was so distraught. I asked her what she would do if Michael had tempted her son with a new puppy, one of the few pets her son did not own. Six months later, I saw the mother and her son walking their new dog.

It was around that time that one of Michael’s friends and fellow New York Yankees devotees, Jack Schlossberg, a boy with two sisters and no brothers, got a dog: “August Yankee Alfonso Soriano Schlossberg.” Jack was so in love with August that he referred to him as his brother. Jack’s mother had been one of the dog holdouts. She had once gone so far as to caution me that if I ever felt myself weakening, I should call her and she’d set me straight. When she called to say she had weakened, her first words were: “I know you’re going to kill me, but …”

Many of our New York friends had also wrestled with the dog issue and decided against it, saying, too, that the complications of life in the city just made the prospect daunting. There was something ironic about the whole mind-set. Here we were, all making sacrifices so that our children could have every advantage in life. We managed to keep a hundred balls in the air all the time, and yet we just couldn’t see our way to taking care of a dog.

One friend, Susan Finkelstein, the mother of Jesse, another of Michael’s friends, repeatedly quoted to me what a friend of hers had said: “It just may be the one thing all of our kids are going to have to do without.”

But it became harder and harder as Michael got older. Like most kids, he had no idea what taking care of a dog would actually be like—walking, bathing, feeding—and he’d vow in the most earnest and heartbreaking way that he would happily take on all of the responsibilities himself. “I promise I will walk him if you come with me, and I will feed him, and he can sleep in my room, if we can just get a dog for me to play with,” he’d say. The longing was genuine. He was simply desperate.

Nothing would set Michael off like seeing a dog, especially “Rocket,” a shy, auburn-colored toy poodle who was the newest member of the Simon family, neighbors who lived three floors above us in an identical apartment, with an only child, too. Emily was two years younger than Michael. She was the sweet, composed, adored daughter of Jennifer and Paul.

Of all the dogs Michael had ever fallen in love with, none captured his heart the way Rocket did, not even McDuff. After all, Rocket lived in our building, not in the pages of a book. One frigid winter’s day, we saw Rocket dressed in a red sweater and Michael declared him “the cutest, most adorable dog I have ever seen in my entire life.” It was another of those moments when I walked right up to the edge of relenting before backing away.

By the time Michael was eleven, his life was chockablock with school, friends, and baseball. Over spring break, for the first time in his life, we were headed to Europe. Michael had not brought up the dog subject for a while.