Learning to Stay (41 page)

Almost two years have passed since Brad returned. Sometimes it seems like yesterday. But most of the time, it feels like decades have gone by, not months. Our work together, our life here, feels so right, so natural, that it’s hard to believe there was ever a choice to make at all, or that we so nearly made a different one. I try to imagine a version of me somewhere in California right now, one dating someone like Zach—or maybe Zach himself—but the vision won’t crystallize. It’s as difficult as trying to imagine the harsh bite of snow while lounging on a tropical beach and baking under a hot sun.

In the past year I’ve become the fundraising, lobbying, and legal arm of our operation. I’ve made weekly trips to Washington, D.C., to court potential donors and politicians. We have built kennels, bought food and bowls and cots and paid vet bills, and brought Randy on full-time. She has created a stable of reliable interns from nearby
Northern Michigan University. We’re still waiting for the senator’s legislation—the federal funding—to kick in, and for a couple of grants to come through, but we’re doing well enough to have rescued eleven pit bulls or pit bull mixes from local shelters. Three—Bama, Orlando, and Monchichi—are ready to be placed, while the rest are in various stages of rehabilitation and training.

We’ve done all that in only a year. And now, I’m looking at those vests, and the sight of them hanging there in a row makes me a little wistful. Tomorrow, we give the dogs new homes where we can’t be absolutely certain they’ll be taken care of and loved as we’ve cared for them. These dogs have become our family. I’ve come to accept that they may be the closest thing to children I’ll ever have. Brad’s made great gains, but I’m not sure a baby, a child, is something Brad will ever be able to handle. A few weeks ago, Darcy came for a visit with Mia, and Brad wouldn’t—couldn’t—hold her. That night, lying in bed, I heard him say, “Those eyes.” I could sense him shaking his head. “Every kid has those same goddamn eyes.” For him, the equation is that simple. That tragic. That haunting.

The door to our apartment opens and Jones bounds in, all muscle and exuberance, a linebacker at a tea party. Brad follows her and catches me eyeing the vests.

“You tired?” he asks.

I nod.

“Me too.” Brad hunches down onto his heels. Jones bounds back to Brad and bucks in circles around him. She doesn’t slow down enough for him to even pet her. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says to me.

I raise an eyebrow at him and stuff myself deeper into the chair. “I thought you said you were tired.”

“I am,” he says, “but I want a little time with you.”

He’s right—the next two weeks are going to be round-the-clock work. And something in the way he looks at me stops me from protesting
and makes me want to go along with him. It’s equal parts pleading and kind. It’s Brad—my Brad.

“Okay,” I acquiesce.

We drive along County Road 550 with all the windows down and two dogs hanging their heads out of either side of the car, the wind flapping their jowls like flags. I drop my hand out of my window and meditate on this moment—the wind and the warmth and Brad’s hand resting on my leg.

Brad turns right onto a dirt road that spits us out almost on the beach, where white sand is lit by a burning, setting sun. We each open a back door to let the dogs spill out and charge ahead to water that has only recently warmed enough to wade in, at least for me.

Brad shoulders a backpack and I ask him what it’s for. “Just in case,” he says, but the dogs are bounding out into the lake, happy and carefree, and the sun is hovering low and orange and beautiful over the water, so I don’t press him. If he feels the need to be overprepared, so be it.

“Come here,” Brad says, twining his fingers with mine as we reach the beach. His skin is soft and warm, and his touch makes me tingle. Still. After everything we’ve weathered, I feel so alive in this moment that suddenly I’m nearly brought to my knees with gratitude.

The dogs give chase up and down the beach, juking one another like running backs on the football field. Sand sprays under their feet. Tongues hang from their mouths, relaxed into playful grimaces as each tries to outrun the others. I watch them, amazed at their capacity to trust, to heal. Monchichi was found downstate, chained to an old car axle on a leash so short she couldn’t lie down, starving and freezing to death. Bama and Orlando were rescued from a dog-fighting ring. Bama escaped the worst of it, but the first time I saw Orlando, his face resembled crusted raw hamburger. It was
impossible, really, to tell if he still had a face. And yet, he crawled right into my lap, licked my cheek once, circled, and fell asleep.

When I asked Randy if it was really the best idea to have a kennel full of pit bulls, she was sitting cross-legged on the ground with Monchichi belly-up on her lap. Her answer was immediate and unequivocal. “If this operation is really going to be about saving lives, then we need to help those who most need it,” she said, explaining that most people are afraid of pit bulls, so most shelters can’t adopt them out and end up euthanizing them. “These guys are so willing that when you tell them to fight until they die, they do it. Imagine what they’ll do with a little love and positive motivation. You just wait.”

She was right. Running on the beach in front of me is the proof.

This is the last time they’ll be together like this—their little fur family—and I’m sad for them. But when I think of where they’ve been, where they’re going doesn’t seem so bad at all. They’ll have one person to dote on them, care for them, snuggle them; they’ll have one person who needs them, who will honor them, who is deserving of their unconditional trust and love. Each will have a new life—a new normal.

The sun dips below the horizon, and despite this afternoon’s sweltering heat, the air takes on a sudden sharpness. Marquette’s weather is interesting—as a rule, only in July do the days and nights seem to belong to the same month. By August, even the hottest summer day gives way to a night better suited to fall. I shiver and run my hands up and down my arms to ignite some spark of warmth. It doesn’t work. It never does, that move.

Like Brad, I should have prepared. But I have a sweatshirt in the truck that I can grab. When I turn my attention from the dogs, though, I see a blanket spread on the sand and sitting on top of it, Brad with a toothy smile so warm it makes me forget all about the chill. He pats the space next to him. I smile back and walk to the
blanket’s edge. “What’s this?” I ask, lowering myself beside him. “You’re like a Boy Scout.”

“Nah,” Brad says. “I’m not nearly as good at fire building and I have a lot more facial hair.”

I shake my head and roll my eyes. Out in front of us, Gitche Gumee is transforming in the almost-moonlight from ink black to a sheet of liquid silver. The dogs have slowed, shifting from play to quiet exploration. Monchichi and Jones are wading through the shallow water near shore. Orlando is rolling in the sand, flipping back and forth on his back like a beached fish. Bama is teasing a stick the size of a small tree from the edge of the woods. Brad and I are sitting shoulder to shoulder on a blanket on a beach in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula. Tonight we’ll curl against each other in a bed in an apartment fashioned out of a barn and over a pack of dogs with whom we live.

Each of these statements is true, strange though they seem. Yet living it, this life we’ve built, feels like the second best thing I’ve ever done.

“Give me your hand,” Brad says, but he doesn’t wait for me to comply. He takes my hand in his and opens it, palm up. I am looking to see if I can spot Bama, if he’s sticking around, when I feel something cold and sharp in my palm. Brad closes my fingers around it.

I look down and open my hand, and in it lies a gold heart affixed to a purple ribbon—a Purple Heart medal. I look at Brad.

“This is yours,” he says.

I think about the scars crisscrossing his body, about the pieces of metal, sharp and jagged, hibernating inside him, about his brain that doesn’t work quite right anymore, and probably never will—not as it used to, anyway. I think of what he had to do for this medal. I think of that little Iraqi boy called Jones.

I shake my head. I hold the medal out to Brad. “I can’t—”

He closes my fingers around it again. “It’s yours, Elise. I want you to have it.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” I tell him.

“You stayed,” he says, and his voice cracks.

I reach for his arm and push up the sleeve covering it. I trace the letters, inked into his skin in black, following each bend they make. I am trying to understand. This body of his has a new topography that I need to learn. When I get to the tail of the last letter, “a,” I let my finger fall from his arm and replace it with my lips, closing my eyes and letting them follow the same trail. Brad holds still, watching me.

Then he reaches for me and presses my head to his chest. I can hear the faint thud of his heart. I close my eyes and lose myself in its rhythm. I want to be this close to him. I want to be his, always.

A truck backfires on the road above us, and I tense and pull back, anticipating Brad’s reaction. Jones has the same idea, because she bolts up to us. She licks Brad’s face hard, three times, and when Brad tousles her ears, she must sense that she’s not needed, because she pivots and runs back down to the water’s edge.

Brad still goes away sometimes. His eyes get small and hard, his face goes blank, and his body stiffens. Mine does, too, then. But not Jones’s. That’s when she springs into action, leaning into Brad or putting her paws in his lap and licking his face with a fervor most dogs reserve for peanut-butter-covered toys. Sometimes she’ll yip at him, too, when he needs a little extra coaxing, when she needs to be extra assertive. Regardless of how she does it, she always brings him back.

She always brings him back to me.

No book gets to the shelf without a whole team of people dedicated to making that happen, and I’ve got quite the team, if I do say so myself. Thank you to Andrea Somberg for championing this book; to Ellen Edwards for being the editorial mastermind that she is; and to Kara Welsh for believing in this project. Thanks to my beloved Inwellians—Aaron, Ann, Carrie, Erika, Maggie, Marysa, and Trish. Thanks to Jason and Nicki, and Brian and Georgett, for your invaluable feedback and input, and for your selfless service. To Angela, for being the best beta reader a girl could ever ask for, and to Anne for your double checks on law firm life. To my friends for their unending patience with phone calls slowly returned and social outings skipped. To Mary and Dean—if this project were a pair of pants, you’d be the suspenders; I can’t even begin to tell you how appreciative I am of your constant willingness to watch over, occupy, and love the Wee One, no matter what deadline was looming. Always, to my big, extended family—
all
of you—who have believed in, encouraged, loved, and supported me, then and now. To my little family—ADO and the Wee Z; you are my whole life. And finally, to all those who have served: thank you, thank you, thank you for your dedication and your sacrifice. It does not go unnoticed. It will not be forgotten.

Erin Celello
was born in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she earned an MFA in fiction from Northern University. She now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, son, and two unruly vizslas. She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.