Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (19 page)

Sophie tires of ball games and retreats somewhere dark and a little quieter.

Jan, Sophie, and Dave on their new boat,
Molly B
, at Mackay Marina.

Will you please throw the ball now, Dave?

Sophie and her new friend, Ruby.

Sophie and Ruby play games around the pool.

Sophie and Ruby, both allowed inside!

All this would later prove endlessly endearing to the Griffiths, who, despite the fact that it pains them terribly to think of their adored pet's suffering, love the fact that, so far as they can tell, Sophie's self-containment and unflagging loyalty extended to her life on the island. Even when she was flung from the lap of luxury to the unfamiliar wild, she seemed to hold out for the owners she loved and formed her strongest attachment to. In her loyal mind, she didn't need to be rescued by the human race, she needed to be rescued by Jan and Dave. And so far, no one was smelling quite like them.

L
osing Sophie wreaked havoc on everything Jan and Dave had been building their lives towards. Jan had only just started getting her days into gear after Bridget left, and had been coming to terms with the scary but exciting idea that it was only her and Dave from now on, after more than two decades of their children being the heart of everything. Sophie had been there for every high and low moment of the shift. She had allowed them to adjust to a quieter home and pretend that home wasn't entirely an empty nest. Sophie needed them just as much as they needed her.

Now she was gone, in such a shocking way, and Jan was getting nowhere in dealing with it. The fact that Sophie had disappeared out of their care and that they
just did not know what their pet had been through would always make recalling the circumstances a more bruising memory than if Sophie had died in some tangible way—a spider bite in the backyard, perhaps. It was sad when Jordy died, as with the death of any pet, but the Griffiths were also suffering from the uncertainty and drama of what had happened.

Dave and Jan gave themselves a mantra:
one foot in front of the other
. They carried on their lives in Mackay seemingly as usual, breakfasting at Oscar's, going to work, having a Corona, but every day was a challenge. Afternoons for Jan were especially terrible. She knew that staying active would help her mood but she didn't have her walking partner and she couldn't bring herself to go on her own, as it would only foreground the awful absence of her buddy. She was once again flung into wondering how to fill the cavernous home that had bustled for so many years with the noise of children and dogs.

She knew that there were a lot of things that she could and should be doing to get on with what could be a very exciting stage of life. In the wake of Sophie's disappearance, though, contemplating anything big was too daunting. When Bridget left home, she'd talked about getting back to the golf she'd played in the early years of her marriage. After Sophie's loss, Jan had brief moments of wondering whether now was the time to just do it: sign up for a few sessions and get out there again. But it was all too overwhelming.

Jan didn't really even have the stomach for cooking,
which was usually one of her great passions. She put food in front of Dave every night but her heart wasn't in it.

“Ellen and I had visions of Mom and Dad sitting on the couch in complete silence. I'm sure we were being overly dramatic but we were so worried about them. Their days revolved around Sophie,” says Bridget.

In fact, the Griffith daughters weren't being neurotic. Jan and Dave were having a hard time at home with each other without the conviviality of Sophie's company. “For ages we were just lost for conversation because we had no routine anymore,” says Jan. We felt so miserable without her.

Reticence and their own guilt were at work on Jan and Dave throughout the weeks and months following Sophie's disappearance. They felt as though they were carrying around a shameful secret. Their personalities already determined a certain level of stoicism, and the very real possibility of criticism from other dog owners in their small hometown threatened to validate their own nagging doubt that they hadn't done the right thing in taking Sophie on the boat. “I know what Dad would have been thinking,” says Bridget now. “He didn't say it but I know my dad. He would have been thinking, ‘I failed her. I had a duty of care, and I failed her.'”

All the joyful memories—of her first bound down the marina ramp into Jan's arms on
Honey May
, of every gleeful greeting session just inside the house gate—made her absence hard to bear.

For Dave, as well as Jan, the things that he loved to do
would only slap him with a reminder of the terrible hole in their lives. For Dave, the boat had always been a source of relaxation and inspiration but how could he go down there now? Staying at home was not much better, though. Dave had no one to follow him around the garden or sniff at the pool filter box. At the weekends he was lost without Sophie sitting beside him when he looked up from the newspaper or decided that it was time for some exercise.

In some ways, talking to Bridget on the phone helped Jan, but in others it exacerbated the pain. Bridget knew that her parents were hurting and she herself didn't want to lose it on the phone. Her first question after, “How's things?” had always been, “How's my girl?” For the first few weeks after Sophie's disappearance, mother and daughter had much shorter daily conversations than usual because they both knew they would lose it if they talked about Sophie. Bridget admits that the loss of Sophie injected an unwelcome awkwardness into her interactions with her parents.

When Bridget did come home from university, several weeks after Sophie went overboard, she struggled. She missed Sophie terribly, herself. From the moment she came home, it was obvious how different things were. There was no puppy licking and loving her as she drove through the gate, or sleeping in her bed at night. She couldn't escape the house to sit on the steps with her favorite mate or try to compete with Dave for Sophie's attention.

But Bridget was also spooked by the lack of happy chaos in the house. Things seemed quiet and, well, terribly normal. Her parents were going about their days but there was no mischief in the air, none of Dave's roguish digs or Jan's delight in cooking. When Bridget stood in the kitchen chatting to Jan while dinner bubbled on the stove, Bridget struggled to fill in the gaps when she wasn't telling Jan about which Mackay friend was getting married or not going to university.

For Dave, a few weeks of this lackluster existence was all that he could stand. He avoided going down to the boat for as long as he could after losing Sophie. The thought of going to clean her up and, eventually, to take her out again when the kids were in town, was initially too much to handle. But there is only so long one can leave a boat to its own devices in the busy Mackay Marina.

Dave started going down to
Honey May
, desperate for distraction. At weekends he would check on the engine, sand and polish and inspect, and say hello to friends down at the marina. The boat gradually became a positive in Dave's days again. The irony was that the more he missed Sophie and the worse he felt about how it had all gone down, the more he was craving being back out on the boat, even just docked. He would go down there in the afternoons to read newspapers or boating manuals, or he would sit and chat to fellow boaters for hours about the weather, the news and planned trips. Being on
Honey May
was therapy for Dave.

Not so for Jan. “It was unnerving for me,” Jan says of
the idea of going to sit on the treasured boat after Sophie had gone, while Dave fussed around with engine repairs, or sanding and scrubbing walls. “I was really spooked about going to the boat and just hated the mere thought of hanging out on her.”

The Griffiths had loved to spend a day or a night onboard
Honey May
down at the marina. They didn't need to go anywhere—they liked to relax on her deck and have dinner. It was a holiday without going anywhere. But in the immediate aftermath of the accident, the idea didn't even really come up. Dave and Jan knew between them that the boat was no longer a place of relaxing memories, at least not for Jan, at least not for now.

Dave tried to convince Jan to join him once he had got used to being back on the boat by himself. “We have to move on, darling,” he'd say, and try to lure her with the promise of fresh, ocean air and fish burgers from the marina fish shop.

“I think he would've liked my company and support at that sad time,” Jan admits. The couple got into tense conversations about it, in which Dave would tell her that they couldn't abandon the boat, that they'd worked so hard for this sort of lifestyle and that they had to allow themselves to try to have fun again.