Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (8 page)

Michael, Huck, and I headed out the door, into the elevator, past the doormen, who had already begun to refer to our new dog as “the incredible Huck” (a comical reference to the superhero the Incredible Hulk, capable of feats of superhuman strength), and out the front door of our apartment building. We had barely made it outside when several people, hurrying to work and school, stopped to admire Huck. He had such a sweet face, was so small, and was such an unusual color for a dog that it was hard not to take notice. And then there was the smiling blond boy at the other end of the leash. Together, they looked like an urban Norman Rockwell painting.

Michael held the leash, and we started walking toward the bus stop. Like a toddler who had just learned to walk, Huck wanted to stop and examine every piece of paper, every person, every other dog, every parked car, and every mailbox. The five-minute walk from our building to the bus was starting to look like it would take an hour. Michael, unable to really get Huck to keep walking, turned the leash over to me. My luck wasn’t much better. I realized this was not the moment to teach Huck to walk on city streets. Michael was about to be late for school. I picked Huck up and carried him to the bus stop.

Michael stepped onto the bus and then turned to wave at Huck and me, blowing kisses until the bus pulled away. I turned and put Huck down for the walk up East End Avenue and back home. On the walk home Huck was just as determined to explore everything and everyone on the street as he had been on the walk to the bus stop. He’d linger at a fire hydrant and then try to dart across an intersection. I began to wish I were one of those monks.

At one point, Huck started pulling hard on his end of the leash. Before I realized what was happening, he had slipped his collar. I was panic-stricken. “HUCK! HUCK!” I screamed. “Oh no! Oh my God!”

Huck went tearing up East End Avenue. He’d stop for a split second to sniff at something and then take off again. He was a five-pound puppy, loose, with no collar, and no experience on busy city streets. He didn’t really even know his name.

I was terrified. I was afraid he’d be hit by a car. How could this be happening? People tried to help, but that just made Huck run more. So did my running after him. For a moment he stopped to sniff another dog. I was too far away to catch him, but close enough that if I threw my body to the ground, I might be able to fall on top of him. Forgetting all the warnings from my doctors about not getting hurt or cut, that is exactly what I did. I hurled my body on top of Huck.

I now had Huck in my arms. Several people stopped to help. Someone put Huck’s collar back on him. I carried him home. Once we were safely inside, I discovered my own bloodied knees and realized that in the chaos, I had lost the scarf I had been wearing to cover my still bald head. It was a metaphor of sorts; our little dog, our Huck, had from the very beginning made all of us forget about cancer and its debilitating emotional and physical effects.

I knew in that moment how much I already loved Huck, something I had never thought about before we got him. I had only thought about how happy he would make Michael. From the moment he arrived, Huck brought a lot of love into all our lives.

Like all new dog owners, it took a while, but eventually Huck and we developed our own rhythms. Michael taught Huck how to high-five. “Give me five, Huck,” he’d say as he raised an open hand. Huck would raise a paw and touch it to Michael’s hand. “Good boy,” Michael would say, smiling triumphantly.

It, too, was a metaphor of sorts. We had closed the door on a very dark chapter in our lives. We had a victory of our own, and Huck had been our mascot.

I found I had learned from Connie and the monks enough about the fine art of crating, which made training easy enough. Huck never chewed on the furniture or did anything destructive. He had a couple of accidents on the living room rug, but nothing to speak of. After that first day on the street when Huck had slipped his collar, we hired a private dog trainer for one or two sessions, hoping to be taught how to get Huck to walk next to us instead of in front or behind. But it seemed overdone for such a small dog. It was such an over-the-top, New York thing to do. In fact, it was embarrassing. The trainer talked to us about signing a long-term contract, which pretty much put an end to that.

In early December, a close friend, the same friend who had given me the antique-looking earrings, convinced me to give up my reticence and allow myself to be in the spotlight for a night. She and her husband generously hosted a dinner party to celebrate the end of my cancer treatments.

Michael stood up in front of a room filled with my friends and colleagues and said, “I am really proud of the way my mother has powered her way through breast cancer.”

When I looked around the room and thought about how much each of the people there had done for me and my family, I was so choked up, I could not speak. I had had a lot of help getting through it all. The truth of the matter is, I was the one who had cancer, but everyone in that room, along with many people who were not there, had gotten me through it. It was their deep affection and care and compassion that had powered me through. It was Rich’s undaunted spirit and Michael’s bravery.

The holidays quickly approached. I was especially thankful that year for our many blessings and looking forward to the joy of the season more than usual. Since Rich, Michael, and I celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, all December long it feels as though we are either celebrating or planning to celebrate. Our most cherished tradition is cutting down our own Christmas tree. When Michael was about six, Rich located a Christmas tree farm, because he knew it was one of the happiest memories of my childhood.

Ever since then, every December we bundle up and drive an hour and a half to the four-hundred-acre working Jones Family Farm in Shelton, Connecticut, which has been in the Jones Family since the mid-1800s. There are two hundred acres of Christmas trees of all types—Fraser fir, Angel white pine, Douglas fir, Scotch pine, balsam fir, and blue spruce.

Once there, we park the car, pick up a saw from a basket filled with saws, and climb a path up the mountainside, the snow and ice crunching beneath our boots, in search of the perfect tree. My find always comes early on, sometimes halfway up the mountain, but Michael and Rich always insist the best trees are at the top. So we trudge on.

The Jones Family Farm is a happy place. During one of our hunts, a young man with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a freshly chopped tree in the other came out from the thicket of trees and asked if we’d take a picture of his girlfriend and him. Moments earlier, he had asked her to marry him and she had said, “Yes.”

With a brand-new puppy at home, I thought we’d forgo the tree cutting. But tradition being what it is, we didn’t. We left Huck at home, drove through the snow to the farm, climbed the mountain, and debated which of several trees Huck would like. Michael, who by then was doing more and more of the sawing, made the first cut and started sawing. He kept at it until his hands were so cold inside his gloves he could barely move his fingers. He turned the saw over to Rich who finished the job.

Once the tree was felled, we carried it down the mountain to a spot where the farm hands took it, put it through a baler (a conelike device that encased it in twine), and strapped it to the top of our car. We then joined the other people crazy enough to do this and drank hot cider and ate cranberry chocolate chip cookies around an outdoor fire. It was Christmas the way I remembered it.

When we got home, we carried the tree through the front door and set it in the stand. Huck didn’t quite know what to make of it and started barking at it. He soon stopped and settled himself underneath it, where he stayed while we adorned it with lights and ornaments.

We hung four stockings that year, one for Rich, one for Michael, one for me, and one for Huck. Huck’s stocking had been a gift from the Finkelsteins. It was red and green and had Huck’s name embroidered across the top. Down the side was the word
woof
and three paw prints.

On Christmas Eve, before he went to bed, Michael stuffed Huck’s stocking full of gifts he had bought and carefully wrapped for him. There was no mention of the gifts Michael might receive; he was completely focused on Huck. “Do you think Huck will really like his presents?” Michael asked me as I was kissing him good night.

The next morning, Michael, ignoring the presents spilling out from under the tree for him, went right for Huck’s stocking. He sat on the floor, pulled Huck onto his lap, and tried to get Huck to take one of the presents in his teeth to tear the paper. With some assistance from Michael, Huck ripped the paper off the first present. “Huck, it’s a new toy!” Michael exclaimed. “It’s a Santa.” Huck took the soft plastic squeaky Santa in his teeth, ran around the room, dropped it, and sat right down on Michael’s lap again, seemingly waiting for the next present. It was hard to believe this was Huck’s first Christmas. He behaved like an old hand.

It went on that way until all the new doggie toys had been opened. It wasn’t until Huck’s stocking had been emptied that Michael turned to open his own gifts.

And I opened the gift Rich and Michael gave me, a pair of earrings with three interlocking rings to celebrate the strength our small family had shown these past months.

C
HAPTER 4

T
HE POSTHOLIDAY WINTER
was long and cold. By March, when Michael had his midyear school break, I was ready for some sun. It was time to hold Auntie Babs to her word, time for her to make up the spare doggie bed. It would be our first vacation since my cancer treatments had ended and the first time we left Huck for more than a few hours.

Michael, a baseball worshipper and die-hard Yankees fan, wanted to go to Yankees spring training. The Yankees were going to play their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. Rich and I agreed to take Michael to see the Yankees in Florida and decided to add a side trip afterward to a beach resort. Sun, baseball, the beach—the kind of vacation to make me feel young, healthy, and very much alive. No demands, no newspaper, no computers, no phone calls. Perfect.

I had gone through the rigors of cancer treatments fixated on getting myself in shape. The doctors had said that one of the little-understood consequences of the treatments for breast cancer was weight gain. Weight gain? I had always thought chemotherapy leaves everyone depleted and thin. Apparently chemotherapy for breast cancer is different. The depleted part was the same, but the thin part was not. I was determined not to gain weight. Bald AND fat? That really seemed cruel.

All through my treatments, I had spent a lot of hours in the gym doing whatever I had strength for, and I was disciplined about what I ate. I walked everywhere I could. It worked. Despite the months of poison dripped into my body, and the weeks of having my chest, neck, and arm radiated every day, I had come out of it all in better shape than I had been in before it started, back when we sat sipping cappuccinos in Venice.

At a follow-up visit with my surgeon in January, he commented on how fit I was. I told him that exercising had given me the illusion of control over my body. While I am extremely fond of him, and eternally grateful to him, he said in a detached way, “Well, it is just that, an illusion.” I wished he would have just let me take refuge in my denial.

For our trip to Florida, I treated myself to a new bathing suit and a pair of white shorts. I bought gobs of suntan lotion and a new hat, having thrown away the one I had to wear the previous summer to cover my then bald head. In fact, I had thrown away or given away just about everything I owned that was in any way cancer related.

Once I had enough hair to go to work comfortably without a scarf, I took out the stack of scarves given to me by dear friends, washed and ironed each one, wrapped them in tissue paper, and gave them to a woman I knew who was suffering through chemotherapy for the second time. Nearly everything else went into the trash. It was as though I had the garbage collector carry away all the pain and fear that had insidiously become a part of our daily lives. We had a new life now. We had Huck.

The night before we left for Florida, we took Huck, his oversized round pillow of a bed, a turquoise-and-white plastic sneaker that squeaked when he held it in his teeth, his red leash, his red jacket, his food, and a container of cream cheese to the Clarks’ house in Ramsey, New Jersey. Huck had been there only once before for a few hours on Christmas Day.

Huck could not get comfortable in the car. Like a lot of New Yorkers, he’d never had a real reason to be in a car, and the trip to New Jersey was one of only a handful of rides he had ever had. I held him on my lap, and he settled a bit, but trembled for most of the forty-five-minute car ride across the Hudson River and up through the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains in northern New Jersey.

I felt a little like trembling, too. I was glad Rich was driving. I still didn’t feel entirely competent behind the wheel of a car, one of the stranger and unexpected side effects of the cancer treatments. Although my hair had now grown enough to look short chic rather than bizarre, other parts of me were returning more slowly.

At some point over the last eleven months, I had lost my ability to intuit. I found that I could not rely on my gut instincts, whether it was about what Michael wanted for dinner or which angle of a news story to bear down on. It was unnerving. I had an unfamiliar skittishness about my own judgment.

I mentioned it to my doctor, who thought it might be part of the intellectual fog that can be a side effect of chemotherapy. But I always felt it was something deeper. It was as though I had lost depth perception about life. I felt uncertain a lot of the time. I was unable to judge just how far I would fall if I made a wrong decision.

It eventually wore off, but on that cold March night, terra firma seemed hard to find. As we drove through the darkness, I started wondering if it was a mistake to leave Huck in a place so unfamiliar to him. The Clarks had a busy life of their own. Barbara commuted into Manhattan every day. Dave worked. Darian, the only one of their three children young enough to still live at home, played on assorted sports teams. Maybe I was taking advantage of their generosity. I suddenly felt more of a sense of melancholy than excitement. I shook it off.

We drove down Ramsey’s Main Street, past the stone-faced Episcopal Church with the red doors, past Veterans Park with its monument honoring World War II veterans, past the stately looking high school, over the train tracks, past the bank, the hardware store, the ice cream shop, the movie theater, and the library; past all of the symbols of the small town’s pride and fierce sense of community.

There are six churches in Ramsey. Volunteers run the fire department, and the sports teams, as well as dozens of civic organizations. The town’s leaders haven’t allowed a Gap or a McDonald’s to replace the mom-and-pop shops.

In its earliest day, residents of Ramsey grew strawberries by the railroad-cars-full and sent them to New York. The town has pre–Revolutionary War roots and takes great pride in the oldest house, which dates from that period. For much of the 1900s, there was a sign in town:
RAMSEY—ALTITUDE 410 FEET—THE 3RD HEALTHIEST PLACE IN THE UNITED STATES
. Makes me wonder what the first two were.

Every fall, just when the leaves begin to turn bright yellow and orange and the air is crisp, the town holds “Ramsey Day,” complete with a parade, fire engines, flanks of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, at least one marching band, and generations of Ramsey residents who turn out to celebrate their life there.

People like Fred Swallow, whom I once met at Ramsey Day, show up. A tall, kind-looking man, a retired barber and World War II veteran, Fred mans the VFW booth, selling white T-shirts for the post with a picture of a giant bald eagle flanked on either side by American flags and the words
TAKING PRIDE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
.

Fred had gone to barber school in New York after serving in the army as a lab technician; he was stationed in New Guinea and then the Philippines, where he worked to protect soldiers from the ravages of malaria and syphilis.

One of his army buddies came from Wayne, New Jersey, and in 1948 enticed Fred to seek work in Ramsey. Fred eventually bought the barbershop in the Ramsey train station, called it Fred’s Barbershop, and stayed there for thirty-three years, raising the price of a haircut over that time from 90 cents to $7.00. It was a life he loved.

For Fred, the protected world of a barbershop in the Ramsey train station was threatened not by the advent of unisex hair salons but by the Beatles. “We had four chairs. Everything was going good till the Beatles came,” he said, looking back on his entrepreneurial days in town. “After that, the kids stopped coming for haircuts.”

But pastoral Ramsey is also the kind of place where teenagers grow restless. Even as the town celebrates its community, the police are on hand to talk to teenagers about the lethal combination of drinking and driving.

Ramsey is nestled between the township of Mahwah and the borough of Allendale. The clusters of houses are separated by dense woods, hills, and small lakes. The stillness of the suburbs is a welcome respite in the warm weather months, but feels weighty, empty, and desolate in the winter. In those months, the streets are deserted, the yards vacant. Church on Sunday is as much a social gathering as a prayerful one.

On that cold night in mid-March, Ramsey was at once welcoming and bleak. I had no particular relationship to the town other than that it was the place where my sister and her family had lived for more than a decade. Small-town life had a certain dreamy appeal to me, but I had become too ironclad a New Yorker to ever make that kind of life my own.

We pulled into the Clarks’ driveway and parked under the bare trees and the basketball hoop. Their house is on a busy street and is set back from the road by a deep lawn and a split-rail fence. There is a detached garage, with wood stacked on either side, and a big backyard, fenced in for their dogs.

I stepped out of the car with Huck’s leash tightly wound around my hand. I put Huck down on the ground, and he immediately started to explore. The air was bracing, filled with the comforting scent of fireplaces. The black night sky was a patchwork of stars.

Rich, Michael, Huck, and I walked up the stone path, past the garden with the stone that says “Dad’s Garden,” to the front door. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. We walked in with Huck and all his paraphernalia. The television was on, the fire in the fireplace crackled. Barbara and Darian were curled up on the couch, under the vaulted ceiling in the living room, watching television. They were each wearing black sweatpants and tight-fitting blue shirts, which set off their blond hair. They looked more like sisters than mother and daughter.

Darian, a year younger than Michael, was thrilled to see Michael and to have Huck as a houseguest. The cousins immediately whisked Huck up the stairs to Darian’s room, where all three of them lay on the floor. Although she had not yet spent much time with Huck, Darian already loved him, in part because of her closeness to Michael. She had a talent for drawing, and on the Thanksgiving Day before Huck arrived at Newark Airport, she had sat making welcome signs for our new dog.

“You’re sure you brought enough stuff?” Dave quipped before taking the bags from my arms and giving me a kiss on the cheek. “How much does he weigh again?”

As we walked into the kitchen, Dave started explaining to Rich that he had filled in the holes under the fence dug by one of their dogs, lest Huck slip under it. Rich had been worried about the holes. Dave had also moved a boulder in front of a place in the fence where he thought there was too much distance between the bottom of the fence and the ground.

Listening to Rich and Dave talk about the fence, I couldn’t tell if Dave was accommodating our usual overwrought level of concern about things, or if he, too, was worried about Huck slipping underneath the fence. Life at my sister Barbara’s house was always more relaxed than at mine. It wasn’t just the country mouse–city mouse divide. Barbara and Dave never would have bought a second Corky as we did to protect against the loss of Michael’s most cherished childhood stuffed animal. They would have had a lot more confidence that Corky would not be forgotten in the backseat of a car or, if he was, that they’d be able to get him back, or if they couldn’t, that was okay, too.

Admittedly Rich and I watched everything in Michael’s life too closely, more likely an affliction of parents with one child than parents with three children. The difference in our parenting styles allowed Barbara and Dave a lot of laughs at our expense. When the kids were very young and we’d come for a visit, Barbara and Dave were content to have Michael and Darian play outside in the yard without parental supervision. I wasn’t. I spent all my time at the window watching the kids play. Maybe I had lived in New York too long, where venturing outside without an adult is a real rite of passage. Or maybe it was because Darian was the youngest of three children and Barbara and Dave had let go of all of their instincts to overprotect. No matter, they loved to poke fun at me.

Michael was often the beneficiary of his aunt and uncle’s more adventurous approach. One winter afternoon, when Michael was a toddler and Rich was away, Michael and I went to visit the Clarks. There was a lot of snow on the ground and Dave suggested we all go tubing down a nearby hill. I considered myself something of an expert sledder, having grown up in Connecticut, but tubing was new to me. There is no way to steer a tube. A wooden Flexible Flyer can be steered away from a tree. As far as I could tell, a tube leaves the rider no way to avoid calamity other than to bail out of the tube. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan.

Dave said he’d take Michael down the hill. I was reluctant. But Dave quietly nudged me and, to Michael’s unending delight, Dave won out. With Michael in his lap, Dave rode the tube down the ice-slicked hill. As soon as they reached the bottom, Michael jumped out of Dave’s lap and shouted with delight, “Again!”

From the time Michael was born, Barbara had made an effort to have her own close relationship with Michael, and he loved her for it. It was no surprise that when my cancer was first diagnosed, Barbara called Michael and told him that if he ever needed someone to talk to, he should call her.