Free Out of the Woods by Lynn Darling Page A

They talked about women—Mike was moving into the trailer with his stepfather and his mom; he and his girlfriend weren’t getting along. He worked days, and she worked nights so that one of them would be with their son, but they never saw each other. And the coming hunting season—the winter had been hard and the deer scarce and the freezer still needed to be filled if they were going to make ends meet. How stupid my inertia would seem to them, if I were to join the conversation: “Well, my daughter left home, you see, and I don’t know who I am now, and the days fit like a coat three sizes too big . . .” It would sound like Urdu.
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    A few weeks before the men had arrived, I had brought home the puppy I had contracted for in the spring, in New York. He was a fat ball of fluff, with a big head and no shape to speak of, and his hair was so white and thick he looked more like a baby polar bear than anything else. A dog had always been an essential element in the full Fortress of Solitude fantasy. I had planned to name him Carlo after Emily Dickinson’s dog. Like Dickinson (before she became a recluse), I would wander the country with only my dog for company, and I would write great things that no one would see, and be at one with nature.
    But if I was no Emily, the dopey little pile of sleep I had brought home from New Hampshire was no Carlo. He had, to the extent that he had any expression at all, a mild, unintelligent look, as if he might grow up to be a docile country curate, the poor, unambitious kind who yearns after the pretty girl in Victorian novels. Henry, I decided. He was a Henry.
    So far our life together had been rocky. I’m not sure what had possessed me to get a dog—I had once had a wheaten terrier, and it had been a nightmare. That decision had been equally well thought out—Zoë, aged six, had lost a beloved stuffed dog, and coming so soon after her father had died, the loss loomed large; it seemed imperative that I go out and immediately buy her a real one as a replacement. The result was a turbocharged, highly aggressive puppy in the hands of an incompetent and unmotivated owner who thought the creature’s crazed disposition was kind of cute until she wreaked absolute havoc in the apartment, as well as on my friendships. Two threatened lawsuits and three trainers later, I was told by the last one in no uncertain terms that the dog was too nuts to live in a city, and so Rosie went off to live on a beautiful farm in Vermont, where she has lived happily to this day.
    Henry would be different.
    Henry was different: Henry hated me. It had been fine the first few days, when he would fall asleep next to his food bowl and I would carry him to the sofa and hold him while he napped. But then he woke up.
    Henry didn’t want to play with me. He didn’t want to cuddle or for that matter be touched. He didn’t like any of the pile of educational toys I bought him. He ignored all my attempts to house-train him. We would walk around the front yard for hours—at dawn, after every meal, in the middle of the night—while I encouraged, pleaded, threatened, and begged him to do what he needed to do, without result. Then he would toddle back inside and shit on the floor. When he wasn’t comatose or incontinent, he was half shark, shredding magazines and furniture and shoes and electric cords. Most of the time, I didn’t even have the will to stop him, so completely oblivious was he to my presence. Except once.
    I remember that day because it was one of those moments of rare insight when you realize just how crazy you have become. It was late on a hot afternoon, another day of getting nothing done. The sun was just beginning to disappear over the ridge, for which I was grateful—it was the hour when the fury at myself for doing nothing and the anxiety that prevented me from doing anything about it finally dissolved into a promise that tomorrow