Communion: A Boy and His Dogs

Communion

            It wasn’t so much that he said goodbye to them.  It was more like he communed with them. 

            Alex knelt on the floor beside Lucy, our yellow lab mix, and touched his forehead to hers, his fingers stroking the sides of her face.  Both of them, with their eyes closed, understood that this was the last time they’d be like this for a while, and if dogs could cry, I’m certain Lucy would have sobbed.  Desi’s brindle stripes stood out against the red chair that she’d melted into.  Her long body was spread over the back cushion, one back leg underneath her and one dangling toward the seat in a hopeless gesture.  Her head lowered to her front feet and cradled by the arm of the chair, the look in her eyes spoke volumes.  The six-foot-tall young man that moved to her side and kissed the top of her head barely resembled the squealing little boy he’d been almost nine years ago when she bound into the room to surprise him the day we brought them home.

            We’d sat Alex on the couch when he came home from school that day in 2005, instructed him to close his eyes and hold out his hands, and deposited a ball of warm blonde fluff into his small palms.  Lucy relaxed in his hands, pointing her tiny brown nose up at him, her whiskers twitching with curiosity. 

            “This is Lucy.  Lucy?  Alex.  Alex?  Lucy.  What do you think?” I asked him with tears in my eyes.

            “I love her!  I love her so much!”  He lowered his face to hers, both of them breathing in the scent of the other, memorizing the smell of unconditional love. 

            “I hate to break this up, but there’s one more thing...” I trailed off as the door to the family room opened and Desi bounced into the room.  All long, gangly puppy legs and tail wagging in circles like churning helicopter blades, she ran right for him.  Her white toes and chest gave contrast to the black and brown brindle stripes of her coat, and a warm pink tongue hung from her mouth.  I scooped her up and put her in his lap, and within a moment she had her little puppy paws up on his chest, covering his face in tiny, frantic kisses.  A boy and his dogs. 

            He’d find comfort in them through the years of his childhood and young adulthood.  They were there when he had his heart broken for the first time, when his grandmother passed away, when Dave moved to Colorado five months ahead of the family for a new job.  The three of them had seen difficult days together, but their presence was resolute.  They existed as the one constant for the boy who loved them in a string of months and years filled with heartache. 

            So on this last day, when the car was jammed from roof to floor with microwave, mini-fridge, clothes, books, and childhood memories, this was our grown son’s final task before we pulled out of the driveway for the eight hour trek to Fort Lewis College in Durango.  The girls aren’t as perky now as they once were.  Lucy climbs the stairs more slowly than she used to, and Desi’s once dark snout is covered with the white hair of advancing age.  But one thing is still the same: they are still his puppies in every way that counts.

            He never said a word.  No murmurs of goodbye or missing them.  He just knelt down that way, his forehead pressed to theirs, his soft kisses left on their fur.  He unfolded his long limbs from the floor, brushed past his Dad and I in the hallway and walked out onto the back deck.  We watched him there, the sliding glass door closed behind him, at the edge of the world he knew but about to step off into a new one.  Surrounded by the flutter of leaves and the chirps of squirrels running from tree to tree, he stared blankly out into the grass, the garden, the swing set Papa built for him when he was just five years old.

            I turned to my husband and pantomimed a knife stabbing through my heart and turning round and round in jagged circles. 

            A week later, Alex is in his dorm room four hundred miles away.

            They’re still looking for him.