Rain On The Horizon, by Jenny Bahn

I used to have a dog that was afraid of thunder. She’s gone now, but when she was here she would hide under sofas and in dark corners, the booming too much for her nervous Cocker Spaniel sentiment and hearing to handle. BOOM. By a chair in the dining room. BOOM. Under the glass table in the formal and underused living room.

She was my favorite dog. Not because she was afraid of the weather, but because she was my childhood pet. Technically, there was one before her. That dog’s name was Katie Brown Bear, but I have no memory of her, only pictures of me leaning next to her, put there by someone else’s hands because I did not yet have the ability to walk. My mom tells a story of how Bear tried to bite someone’s face. I think that person was me, but I don’t want to begin a smear campaign on my first house animal.

The dog that mattered, the dog that will matter the most to me until I die, we named Lady. We bought her in Paris. Not France, but Paris, California. Paris is a city located in the middle of some desert in the center of the state. It does not resemble Paris, France at all. In fact, I don’t even remember passing through the city. We just moved past sand, ducked under a rainbow, and eventually arrived at a breeder.
Lady was small. She had been kept in a room with a washer and dryer. Either that or Toad was the one that was kept in that room. Toad was a little white dog that looked remarkably like his namesake. He was lily pad-sized and was supposedly riddled with worms. I had no concept of what “worms” in a dog might have been, but I imagined it to be something like a Tim Burton movie, similar to the villain in The Nightmare Before Christmas. You cut them open on the stomach and grubs pour out in the shape of the outside thing.

We took Lady home in a kennel. She whimpered and cried. I am sure she missed her mother and the brother that looked like her. I would have missed my family, too. I wouldn’t have missed Paris. My brother and I straddled the bench seat with our skinny arms and put our fingers through the slats of the kennel to indicate that we were friendly, and that life with us would be better than life next to a washer and dryer, even if those appliances did keep her warm.

She was ours. As we grew up, the dog grew up – although at a noticeably and markedly faster rate than my brother and I. I was not self aware enough to notice the changes in my face or how my head began to slowly separate itself from my feet. Up, up, and away from a floor that I was once so close to, so dependent on.

When she was still a puppy, Lady attempted to jump a brick step and broke her leg when she missed it. She yelped sharply the way animals do when they hurt terribly. We drove her to the vet whose lobby smells like all vets: antiseptic and dog piss. The dogs in that lobby never wanted to be there; they looked out the glass front door and plotted impossible escapes.

The doctor put her on the cold silver table and examined her leg. Lady hated that table. She skated along it as long as she could before someone would make her sit down. I don’t know if it’s because the surface was too cold or she knew that this person was going to do something to her, good or bad.

I held her on the way home after the surgery. She was drugged up and sitting in my lap, her puppy fur warming my thighs and her ridiculous cast that looked like an airplane wing sticking out where her right leg used to be. She didn’t smell like the lobby of the vet, but she didn’t smell like my dog, either. When I smell that smell, once maybe every seven years, I am taken back to the seat of my mom’s Toyota Landcruiser, holding a dog that isn’t here anymore.

Her bones healed and even though the doctor said she would most certainly come down with nasty arthritis early in her life, she never did. In fact, she was quite capable of moving and moving quickly. My dad called her “The Rocket Ishmael” after a famous football player. She ran away often. Usually we caught her just as she ducked out of the house, watching her black ears covered with curls flap behind her and her latte colored paws rotate furiously on the pavement until we snatched her with capable hands.

One time, Lady ran away and was gone for a couple days. My stomach hurt and I thought I would never see my dog again. We lived close to a busy street and I prayed that no one had hit her, just as every dog owner does when their dog disappears. We made fliers and my mom called my dad and made him come home from the ranch to look for her. A day or so later we picked her up at the pound where some nice lady had dropped her off. We still had our dog.

Lady carried stuffed animals around the house in her mouth. She never ate them or tore them apart, just dragged them around by their ears or an arm. They were called her “babies” because she treated them like her children. She never got bigger than thirty-five pounds and she always fit in my lap. It seemed as though we grew in direct proportion to one another: as she expanded from a puppy and I into a bigger young girl, she fit more perfectly in my lap each time – like two puzzle pieces forever adjusting to fit the other.

I have memories of this dog like I have memories of friends. She chased deer at the ranch and had a tick once. My mom burned it off with a match. That’s what you’re supposed to do, I guess. When she drove in the car with us to our dad’s new place after he moved out of the house, she shifted her weight from left to right, left to right with each passing curve of Topanga Canyon. She watched intently forward although she wasn’t high enough to see much of the road.

In high school, Lady caught a rattling cough that wouldn’t go away. She sounded like an eighty-year-old man who had smoked too much. It boomed in her chest and made her stop in her tracks because it took life out of her. On the morning of her first big coughing fit, my mom gave her antianxiety medication to maybe relax her enough that her chest wouldn’t get tight and she wouldn’t cough. My mom takes it when her chest gets tight.

We left Lady at home that day while we were at school and Mom was at work and when I came home she was laying outside in a bush with her eyes closed. I ran to her, thinking she had died. But her breath was there, and although labored, she was still alive, with me, breathing in and out, in and out. I later heard that when dogs are about to die they attach themselves to nature in preparation. My mom’s new dog does this when he has seizures. Out of morbidity and unwillingness to let my dog go, I grabbed a video camera and filmed her there, breathing in a bush, so that I would have something to remember later. That tape sits in a desk somewhere, an ode to irrelevant technology and the passing of time.

Lady didn’t die that day. Mom came home and took her to the vet who gave her medication for dogs, not humans. Her heart was inflamed and was putting pressure on her lungs; that’s what was making her cough.

For months, she lived. Coughing. Being a dog. She had slowed down considerably. She wouldn’t jump on the sofa to sit in my lap anymore. Energy must be conserved for those who don’t have much of it left. But she seemed happy enough. Her tail still wiggled when she saw us, and she still sat next to our feet when we were cooking in the kitchen. It was almost the same.

Eventually the coughs worsened and mom decided that it was time to let Lady go. She had been with us fourteen years, the better part of my life. She scheduled an appointment with the deaf veterinarian.

The night before the appointment I set up a stack of pillows and blankets outside of my bedroom to give Lady a nice place to be. I would have had her sleep in the bed with me, but she couldn’t jump on or off so I kept her on the ground. I slept next to her, looking at her little puppy face with the little gray hairs around her mouth as long as I could and listening to her breathing that sounded painful until I fell asleep.

Coincidentally, I was meant to go to visit a friend in Lake Tahoe the morning of Lady’s last day. My mom was left to do the dirty work, to hold Lady’s paw as the doctor injected her with drugs to make her die. I was on a plane, staring out the window and crying quietly. I cried all week.

My mom hadn’t thought of what to do with Lady once the drugs had passed through all of the blood in her veins. She wasn’t sure she should take her home and bury her or have her cremated or what. The doctor said that they could keep her in the freezer until she decided, at which point Mom wrapped Lady in a blanket and took her home.

Dad and Phil dug a hole halfway through the backyard, next to the fence. They buried what used to be Lady in a blanket and with her bright blue Cookie Monster “baby” with the white plastic eyeballs. I hear that when you sell a property you have to tell the buyers about any buried animals so they don’t uproot bones if they ever do construction on the property.

Mom hasn’t moved yet and Lady’s still back there. In the last few years, we’ve put in a pool and some lights that look like a town in a Charles Dickens story. I used to leave her flowers in a jar and tell her that I missed her and that I would love her forever, but I don’t do that anymore. The plants around her change every few years, but the same tree will forever hang above her, protecting her from thunder, shielding her from rain.