Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (13 page)

Dave told Luke, “I don't care what you do with them, just get rid of them.”

Luke felt sick. “She's a member of the family,” he says now. “It was all pretty horrible to take in.”

The only thing to do was jump into action. He drove to the house. The first thing Luke saw as he drove through the remote-controlled wooden gate was the squeaky pork chop, Sophie's favorite toy. “It would
have been like coming home to someone's hat lying around when they've only just gone,” Luke says.

He worked quickly, gathering chewed tennis balls from beneath bushes and fishing a few out of the swimming pool. He took the water and the food bowls and the lead that Dave used to take Sophie walking every day and he threw them in the storage room outside the laundry, down under the house. Luke did the most thorough job he could, knowing that the lump in his throat was nothing compared with what his mom and dad were going through as they made their way back to Mackay.

T
here are many ways to handle grief and Jan and Dave were getting plenty of experience in it. Their initial instinct was to avoid speaking about what had happened, even to one another, and to move on. Their beloved Sophie was gone, but she was a dog, not a person. They hadn't lost a daughter overboard, though the pain was still excruciating. But they had to behave differently to the way they would have done had it been Bridget or Ellen (and this horrifying thought haunted both of them) who toppled over the edge that day.

The Griffiths believed that the bonds between pets and their humans ran incredibly deep. Still, there was only so much room in everyday socializing for the
mourning of a cat or a dog. A week might be the limit for how long people can stomach discussions about how much someone misses their Greypuss or Oscar. Jan and Dave had both adored Sophie with a deep, true love, but they still felt that a sense of proportion needed to be maintained. In theory, at any rate.

In practice, the aftermath of Sophie's disappearance was a nightmare for both of them. It was a Saturday in October when Sophie went overboard. Jan and Dave are able to talk about it now but both of them clip the essential details—what time it was when they hit the man-overboard button, how many days it took to tell people. Their vagueness is partly due to the normal strains of time on memory, but mostly to the total trauma, one that forced them to shut out painful details. Jan cried that night at Scawfell—agonizing crying with choking and gasping and wailing, as Dave hugged her and said nothing; there was nothing, really, to say.

They can't remember driving through the gate the Sunday evening after she disappeared. They don't want to remember what it was like to return to the house with no Sophie. Dave and Jan weren't talking to each other and were trying not to think to themselves. Jan sat in the passenger seat of the car staring straight ahead. Imagining life without Sophie was inconceivable and it was all too easy to imagine the kind of terror they had allowed their girl to fall prey to. It was best to switch off. They needed to if they were going to survive the ordeal.

They unpacked the car, mechanically putting the
picnic basket back in its closet upstairs and the leftover food in the fridge. They showered and went about getting themselves ready to try to sleep. But another dread was looming: first, they needed to call the kids. They always did when they came home from a jaunt on the boat. The conversations were usually short, as they all came home—Jan, Dave, and Sophie—wonderfully exhausted from the sun and the activity.

Neither Jan nor Dave wanted to break the news. They didn't want to upset the kids, nor did they want to talk about Sophie. But if they didn't call, the kids would worry.

Jan phoned Matthew, left an artificially cheerful message when he didn't pick up, and then called Ellen. “Mom called and told me point blank,” says Ellen. “I remember it so well.” Ellen's fiancé, Ben, was on his cell phone talking to his parents and turned around to see Ellen clutching the phone and crying. “I was trying to keep it together because I could hear how upset Mom was,” remembers Ellen. “And trying to signal to Ben to reassure him that I was OK at the same time. I remember wanting to know all the hows and whys but I couldn't bring myself to ask. I got off the phone and cried and cried.”

Then Jan dialed Bridget's number. “Hi, just callin' to say we're home,” Jan said.

“How was it? How's my girl?” Bridget said, immediately. “Dead from all that swimming?” It was just a figure of speech because Bridget knew that all three of them were always worn out after a trip on the boat.

But the line went silent.

“Everything is fine. Look, I'm too tired to talk.” And Jan put the phone down.

Bridget was left with a silent line and a haunted feeling. What was that all about?

Then her phone rang again.

“What's going on?” asked Bridget. It was Dave on the line. “Where's Mom?”

“She's gone to bed, she couldn't talk. Listen, we have some bad news,” said Dave. Bridget's stomach dropped.

“What? What is it, Dad—tell me!”

“We lost Sophie. She went overboard. Your mother is beside herself. We looked for her but she's bloody gone.”

Bridget can't remember what else was said. She put the phone down and went to bed sobbing. She stayed there for two days. When she slept, she dreamed of Sophie—dark, terrible dreams in which Sophie's legs were moving and moving in the ocean until they couldn't move anymore. She would wake thinking that it couldn't be true. She remembered Sophie on the boat, how happy she always was, how eager and well-behaved and content to just follow her family around. In Bridget's mind, Sophie was still alive. She wasn't close enough to the events to really digest the information her father had given her, with the same note in his always perfectly level voice that had alarmed Luke. Sophie had to be at home, where she was when Bridget left her, taking care of Jan and Dave.

The next day was a blur for Jan and Dave. They had
got home late on Sunday evening and were feeling morbidly shut down, not wanting to deal with anything. Jan wanted to go to bed and sleep for days. Dave wanted to drink a lot of Coronas, not that they did anything for him. In fact, he drank less than he might otherwise have in stressful times because he did not want to get emotional. Both of them wanted to close the curtains, sit at the kitchen table and wait for the phone to ring with a fellow boater on the end of the line saying, “We found your Sophie.”

On Monday morning it was terrible to wake up and realize, all over again, that she had gone and wasn't coming back. Dave had barely slept and when he did open his eyes, there was no Sophie looking patiently at him. There was no Sophie to lick his face. Jan tried to keep sleeping, tried not to open her eyes so it wouldn't be so obvious that Sophie wasn't jumping on her and nosing her face. Sophie had been the first lovely interaction of every morning since Bridget had left home, and she'd made waking up every day a joy. Now the house felt cavernously empty and dreadfully quiet. Both of them had to go to work and yet neither of them felt they had anything to get up for.

They agreed that they couldn't shut down and that going about their day might help distract them.

“We can't let this bury us, love,” Dave said. “Let's go to Oscar's.”

Around nine, Jan and Dave entered Oscar's as usual for breakfast, determined to get on with life but heavy
with grief. Everything was normal there, just as it had been before they lost Sophie. They greeted John, who was steaming milk behind the machine, and Desley, who was sitting at her usual table doing the crossword in the
Daily Mercury
. They sat down, ordered, and looked at each other. The usual conversation—Dave's jobs for the day, Jan's chat with one of the kids that morning (Griffith family catch-up calls started as early as the day breaks in Mackay)—did not begin. All they could discuss was what to have for breakfast and what Jan should pick up for dinner.

Jan was smiling and polite and said, “Thank you, darling” to the pretty German waitress delivering her skinny latte. When Desley joined them at their table, Jan forced herself to ask how her weekend was. Desley talked about the movie she'd been to see on Saturday night and then wondered right back, how was Jan and Dave's weekend? Dave looked at Jan.
I'll leave this to you.

“Well,” Jan said, her eyes on her coffee. “We went out to Scawfell on the boat.”

“Oh. lovely,” Desley said, frowning slightly. She could sense that something was wrong, but perhaps Jan and Dave were just weary, as they often were after their adventures on the boat. “Was it fishing weather again?”

“Mmm, yep,” Jan said and raised her eyes to Desley's. “Well, no. We met up with our friends Ian and Denise. They were in a fishing competition.”

Then there was silence. Jan couldn't stand it.

“Actually, Desley,” Jan's voice cracked, “something awful happened.”

Desley looked at Dave, who just shook his head.

“Oh. Are you OK?” Desley felt awkward and alarmed.

“We lost Sophie,” Jan said and the tears welled up. She wasn't going to cry in public, she couldn't.

“Jan, oh my God,” Desley gasped, putting down the spoon she'd been fiddling with.

“She fell overboard. We were over near St. Bees and we left her down on the deck. We only left her for ten minutes. I feel so stupid. It was the first time we've ever left her downstairs alone and now she's gone.”

Desley was picturing Sophie, who she'd met over at Jan and Dave's several times, out there in the ocean. “She is such a lovely dog. Oh. I'm so sorry.”

“I feel sick about it,” said Jan, clasping both of her hands around her latte as if desperate to warm them. “We looked for her. We looked and we looked and we just never did see her swimming out to an island,” Jan said. Her eyes were full of tears. “The worst part is that we just don't know what happened to her. One minute she was there and then she was gone.”

Desley went home that day feeling haunted, herself. “I kept thinking about this little dog swimming and swimming and swimming and getting nowhere,” says Desley. “It was just so painful even for me to imagine. I knew it must have been tearing them apart. They really depended on that dog, and they adored her.”

After opening up to Desley, Jan and Dave were very
selective about who they told back in Mackay and only told a few people who were part of their everyday lives. “I didn't tell very many people at all. I just couldn't. I was so ashamed and I didn't want to think about it any more than I already was,” says Jan. She did call Jenko, who she knew would be nonjudgmental and understanding.

Jenko told Jan the only thing that could have comforted her. “Mrs. Griffith, you mustn't think of her swimming round and round in circles. She would have taken a mouthful of water. Dogs, they have no reflex coordination. She would have taken a mouthful and gone immediately,” Jenko couldn't have been more positive. “It was really awful,” he says. The shake in Jan's voice was worse than when she'd had to call him about putting Jordy down.

Jan kept telling herself that people deal with the death of their pets everyday, but the fact was that there was something extra chilling about Sophie's disappearance, because of all the nightmarish questions it raised. Both Jan and Dave were haunted by endless possible scenarios. They told themselves that she was gone and that she went quickly. But they couldn't help wondering,
what if she was out there?
They were flipping between wanting to imagine she was warm and safe somewhere and returning to the reality that, even if she was alive, she couldn't possibly be warm or safe. How would she cope? She was so reliant on them (not to mention, they on her). Jan pictured her washing up on an island, on Aspatria maybe, surrounded by rocks and ocean and
dark mountains. There was not a drop of fresh water on Aspatria and barely food for her to scrounge for: crabs and oysters and fish, perhaps, if she could muster the energy and the wherewithal to fish. Jan was haunted by the thought of her making it to an island, looking around to see where her family was, and finding herself alone. She would have been tired, thirsty, hungry and so confused. Jan was seized by an image of Sophie lying on sand, her head on her paws, her eyes desperate, at the end of her tether and wondering, despairingly, where Jan and Dave were.

Amid the dread there was the occasional flash of optimism that only really served to torture them even more. They couldn't avoid these thoughts, though.
Was there any chance at all that she could have made it?
Sophie was strong and she was a good swimmer and she was smart. If she had survived the fall overboard, she was resourceful enough to look around and thoughtful enough to know where she might survive and where she might not. She would look to see where the nearest land was and she would know to head for wherever she could detect human activity. “She is certainly bloody-minded enough to make a plan,” Jan would think to herself.

But these were just vague thoughts and hopes. Deep down, Jan and Dave both believed that Sophie was gone. They were trying to accept it, but it was hard when there was nothing to hold on to. One minute Sophie was part of their day, the next she was . . .
A memory? They weren
'
t going to be able to say goodbye?
Jan
closed her eyes when the disturbing images came into her head. She took deep breaths and tried to conjure peaceful images of Sophie experiencing what people talk about in near-drowning experiences: the light and the silence. No pain, no fear.