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© Jessica Jordan Nudel
Jessica Jordan Nudel
Lissa and I travel together, throughout the world, on the heels of disaster. When tragedy strikes, we come. First comes the tornado, the earthquake, the fire, the flood, and then comes Lissa and I, always following heartache. We go to Romania and Ecuador. We walk through the streets of San Salvador after the ground has been ripped open. We slide down mountains where the snow is piled so thick you could drop inside it like a stone sinking in the ocean.
I trained Lissa myself. She is the one dog I always wanted. Lissa can smell a live body through five feet of crushed cement. She can smell a dead body even farther. And she knows the difference. The minute a person dies, something changes in the air around them. Chemically, they are transformed. Sometimes I think it is their souls lifting up -- Lissa can smell souls like they were roasted sausage. If the person we are looking for is dead, Lissa lifts her left hind leg in the air and looks at me. She sniffs through a wall of ice, and then lifts her leg, and then we know -- leave that one be, we’ll get back to it later, find the live bodies first. Lissa hunts out the smell of
life.
All day long we go through caves and tunnels and down into the heart of earthquakes. When the air shakes, an aftershock is coming. Lissa always feels it. It is like dancing, walking through these wastelands with Lissa. It is like dancing with the perfect partner who knows, even before you move, just where you are going.
When we race through the woods, Lissa lifts her head and air-scents. She leads me effortlessly from place to place. We track down convicts, campers, lost children. Lissa knows how to find their scent, and I know where to look -- Alzheimer’s victims tend to walk in circles, berry-pickers travel over miles, hunters just stay put. Lissa can smell the tiny flakes of skin that waft off their bodies. I didn’t used to know this, but everywhere we go tiny flakes of skin are falling down off us, like snow we can’t see. Everywhere we go, little parts of us are left behind. We are all slowly disintegrating.
When we find a body that is dead, Lissa cringes. She knows right away -- something has been lost. But as bad as it gets, she never lets the sadness break her. After a long search, when no one is found alive, when we have been digging up death day after day, I always hide and let Lissa find me, so she remembers what it feels like to find life. Lissa is so happy when she finds me, it is as if all her dreams have come true. She cannot contain her joy.
After the search is over, after it’s all over, and we get home, Lissa races inside and jumps on everyone. When I come in, the kids run up and hug me. My kids hug me, not knowing where I’ve been, what I’ve touched. They breathe in the dust that falls off my clothes, not knowing it is the insides of buildings crushed open, not knowing that I am tracking earth from mudslides across our carpet, I am holding them with arms that have held bodies split open like over-ripe fruit.
Usually, the kids want to know if we can have pizza for dinner, or why I am late driving them to their swim meet, or if it’s really snowing enough for a legitimate no-school snow day. Christy just turned fourteen, and last week I found her in tears after she accidentally dyed her hair a shade lighter than she’d meant to. She cried like her heart was breaking. It seemed this one act pained her as much as any disaster on earth.
I don’t let the kids know everything I do. They think it’s like a hobby for me, like crocheting or learning to scuba dive. I don’t want them sitting in school in the middle of a math test worrying that their mother might be dead at the bottom of a cavern somewhere. They have to live their lives. They have to get through Algebra just like everybody else.
After Kyle left, I had to start working more. The truth is, we needed the money. I’d leave the kids with my sister, Sue Ann, even though she always gave me such a hard time about it.
"Their Dad already took off," Sue Ann always used to say. "If you wind up on the business end of an avalanche, they end up with nothing."
"Maybe so," I said, "but if I stay here and we starve to death, they start out with nothing, too."
The day Kyle left, there was an earthquake in Armenia. The ground split open in a long dark crack. From the helicopter, it looked just like someone had drawn a black line across the earth. There was one woman who had walked across her street to give something to her neighbor, and then the street had cracked open behind her, permanently dividing her from her house. When we arrived, she was the first thing I saw, standing on the broken sidewalk, staring back at her front porch, which seemed endlessly far away.
For a street that had been so violently torn open, the houses were surprisingly intact. Almost everyone survived, except the people who had fallen in -- the people who had been standing in that one unlucky spot in the center of the street when the earthquake hit. The ground had opened up like a mouth and they had fallen down under it into some irretrievable place.
I always think about the shock they must have felt. One minute, standing in the familiar light of their street and the next minute falling down down down through what they had always assumed to be solid.
When I got home the next night, no one was there. There was a note on the table saying that the kids were at Sue Ann’s. I was so glad to be home, my home. Kyle and I had been talking for a while about moving to New York. He had gotten a new job offer at some fancy research plant there, and we had seriously considered going, but in the end decided not to. Now I knew we had made the right choice. I was so exhausted and so relieved to be back in a house that was not on the verge of collapsing. I poured water for both Lissa and me and we drank and drank and drank, and then I closed my eyes and, without meaning to, we both fell asleep on the living room
couch.
When I woke back up, it wasn’t morning yet. For a minute, everything was black and I had no idea where I was. I thought of those people falling into the chasm, sinking into blackness, and in my mind they were still there falling. The house was empty, so I got up and read back through Kyle’s note. There was no mention of where he was. I sat on the couch and tried hard to remember if he had gone away somewhere for the weekend. It took a long time for it to get light that morning.
When Lissa woke up, she went around the house sniffing everything. Then she came back into the living room and raised her left leg at me. "No, Lissa," I said. "No one’s died here. This is our home."
That afternoon Kyle called and said he had decided to take the job in New York after all. The first thing that popped into my mind was all the travel details. "We’ll have to hire one of those services to drive the car there, and then I’ll need to make special airline arrangements," I started saying. "I’ll have to get permission to take her onboard, or maybe we can get a charter plane, Lissa can’t fly in those luggage carriers you know..." But Lissa wasn’t going with him. Neither were the kids. Neither was I. Kyle was leaving me. And then, as if to prove his point, he hung up the phone.
The minute Kyle hung up, I rushed into the bedroom and, on instinct, I flung open his closet door. It was full. All his suits hung there, drooped on their hangers like empty bodies. All her shirts were there, his socks, his underwear. "What the hell is he wearing?" I kept thinking.
The kitchen cabinets were full, too. Every dish. Even his grandmother’s heirloom china. And the bookshelves. And his records. Even his toothbrush. That’s when I knew he was really gone. When you don’t take your toothbrush, you’re really leaving it all behind.
All week, I kept picturing Kyle walking naked all the way to New York. The kids came back and I had no idea what to say to them. I had no idea period. At night I lay awake and imagined Lissa and I running through fields and into caves and over mountains following Kyle’s scent, and then, in the last place possible, finding him, and finding, despite every indication otherwise, his heart still beating. "No, Karen," I would tell myself when morning hit. "Kyle doesn’t want to be found."
Then on Saturday Kyle called to say he was coming by to visit the kids. When he arrived, he knocked on the door like it wasn’t his own house. Something had changed so I expected him to look different, but when I opened the door, it was just Kyle. For a moment, I traveled back in time. I forgot anything had happened. I hugged him and felt his body sag against me, soft and familiar like our bedroom mattress. He smelled just like Kyle, just like this house. He looked just like himself, just like the kids. I forgot completely that he had left.
But then, when I let go, he walked straight passed me and went into the kids’ room. Kyle stayed in with the kids for a long time. I wandered into the kitchen where Lissa was sleeping and slumped down on the floor next to her. I thought about Kyle’s tennis shoes. All week I had been wondering what shoes he was wearing. I had completely forgotten about the tennis shoes. Kyle’s feet were two different sizes and his shoes had all been custom made. They cost a fortune. Now, of course, they were of no use to anyone but himself. If he didn’t take them, I couldn’t imagine what in the world I would ever do with them. I couldn’t give them away.
Once the kids fell asleep, Kyle came back out and sat down next to me, right on the kitchen floor. That’s one of the things I always liked about Kyle. He was very good looking, but he was never fussy about appearances. If his tire blew out and he was wearing his best suit, he wouldn’t even change his shirt. He’d just fix the tire and get his new white shirt all splattered with grease and come home looking like a Dalmatian.
Sitting there on the kitchen floor, on the other side of Lissa, Kyle looked just like that -- totally comfortable. Kyle and I had never spent a lot of time together, but he had always been there and, I swear, I thought he always would be. "Why are you doing this?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. My hands were shaking, and I was breathing so hard I was practically panting. Kyle, on the other hand, was completely still. He had an expression on his face like he was looking at something very painful. And he was looking at me.
Kyle said he would send child support, and he would visit the kids and fly them to visit him, and I could keep the house and everything in it. But he never answered my question. The one thing he never said was why he was leaving. He couldn’t give a reason. "I don’t understand. Things don’t just happen for no reason," I kept telling myself. Even though every day of my life seemed to prove that they did.
Later, I wished more than anything that I hadn’t cried that night. I wished I had yelled, or thrown him out, or broke his grandmother’s damn china across the flat of his back. But I didn’t think of it then. I just cried and cried and cried and Kyle sat up with me all night, something we had never done together before. Then, in the morning, he got up and put his coat back on. We stood in the doorway of the house and hugged for the last time. "You should take your shoes," I said. "They’re good shoes." But Kyle didn’t take anything.
Everywhere I go it looks like the end of the world has come at last. Sometimes it’s just one person who went out skiing and got lost. When you get hypothermia, you get very very cold and then you get very very sleepy. So you are almost dreaming, and you are thinking "this field of snow will be the last thing I ever see" and then, out of nowhere, this lady and this dog suddenly appear. Most people think we’re angels.
I’ve seen whole city blocks so crushed you could not distinguish the bones chips from the pieces of plaster. After an airplane explodes, limbs hang down from the trees like fresh red apples.
When a person walks away from a thing like that, it is like they’ve been resurrected, like they died at the bottom of a well and now, miraculously, they are crawling back out. I can’t believe that there are still people waiting for the Second Coming, when everyday, somewhere in the world, someone wakes up out of death and walks back home.
In a few years, Lissa won’t be able to work anymore. Her hips will go. That’s what happens with German Shepherds. First the hips. Then the eyes. By the time the kids are grown, Lissa will be dead. I’ll have to get another dog. It’s hard to imagine, but I know no matter what, even without Lissa, I’ll always have a job. The world will never run out of trouble.
One day, I will walk out into my kitchen and Lissa won’t be there. I won’t let her go lame and get hooked up to one of those little wheeling dog-carts. Lissa has a lot of dignity. She is a proud animal. If she lost her legs, I don’t think she would want to go on being just half-there.
When the time comes and I have to take her to the vet, I’ll stay with her to the end. I wonder if she’ll know what’s happening. If she’ll smell her own death coming. If her soul will rise up and I will feel it in the air like rain.
Lissa knows me better than any lover, better than my own children who grew inside my body and nursed at my breasts. Lissa knows when I am coming home, even when I am in the car three blocks away. Her ears perk up. She senses me like an aftershock. There is no amount of crushed cement that Lissa wouldn’t find me through.
In an earthquake, the ground splits opens and offers up its waters like a gift. A volcano is like a heart bursting. It is so painful it cannot stop itself. One day, I will wake up and walk into the kitchen and Lissa won’t be there. It will be empty, or filled with the smell of another dog, and the bedroom will be empty, and the kids’ rooms will be empty, and Kyle will still be gone. Volcanoes will never stop erupting, but one day this house will be empty.
I wonder what will go first on me. My hips? My eyes? My heart? If it came down to it, I don’t know if I would want wheels for back legs. If I would want to be put to sleep in the arms of the one I loved. If I would want to be saved when the whole house came crashing down, and I was the only one left to be trapped beneath.
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