Let's Take The Long Way Home Part 1

Let's Take the Long Way Home.

by Gail Caldwell.

For Caroline

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.-GEORGE ELIOT, Scenes of Clerical Life Scenes of Clerical Life

IT'S AN OLD, OLD STORY: I HAD A FRIEND AND WE shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too. shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.The year after she was gone, when I thought I had pa.s.sed through the madness of early grief, I was on the path at the Cambridge reservoir where Caroline and I had walked the dogs for years. It was a winter afternoon and the place was empty-there was a bend in the road, with no one ahead of or behind me, and I felt a desolation so great that for a moment my knees wouldn't work. "What am I supposed to do here?" I asked her aloud, by now accustomed to conversations with a dead best friend. "Am I just supposed to keep going?" My life had made so much sense alongside hers: For years we had played the easy, daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and the return. Now I was in the field without her: one glove, no game. Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

1.

I CAN STILL SEE HER STANDING ON THE Sh.o.r.e, A towel around her neck and a post-workout cigarette in her hand-half Gidget and half splendid splinter, her rower's arms in defiant contrast to the awful pink bathing suit she'd found somewhere. It was the summer of 1997, and Caroline and I had decided to swap sports: I would give her swimming lessons and she would teach me how to row. This arrangement explained why I was crouched in my closest friend's needle-thin racing sh.e.l.l, twelve inches across at its widest span, looking less like a rower than a drunken spider. We were on New Hampshire's Chocorua Lake, a pristine mile-long body of water near the White Mountains, and the only other person there to watch my exploits was our friend Tom, who was with us on vacation. towel around her neck and a post-workout cigarette in her hand-half Gidget and half splendid splinter, her rower's arms in defiant contrast to the awful pink bathing suit she'd found somewhere. It was the summer of 1997, and Caroline and I had decided to swap sports: I would give her swimming lessons and she would teach me how to row. This arrangement explained why I was crouched in my closest friend's needle-thin racing sh.e.l.l, twelve inches across at its widest span, looking less like a rower than a drunken spider. We were on New Hampshire's Chocorua Lake, a pristine mile-long body of water near the White Mountains, and the only other person there to watch my exploits was our friend Tom, who was with us on vacation.

"Excellent!" Caroline called out to me every time I made the slightest maneuver, however feeble; I was clinging to the oars with a white-knuckled grip. At thirty-seven, Caroline had been rowing for more than a decade; I was nearly nine years older, a lifelong swimmer, and figured I still had the physical wherewithal to grasp the basics of a scull upon the water. But as much as I longed to imitate Caroline, whose stroke had the precision of a metronome, I hadn't realized that merely sitting in the boat would feel as unstable as balancing on a floating leaf. How had I let her talk me into this?

Novice scullers usually learn in a boat twice the width and weight of Caroline's Van Dusen; later, she confessed that she couldn't wait to see me flip. But poised there on water's edge, hollering instructions, she was all good cheer and steely enthusiasm. And she might as well have been timing my success, fleeting as it was, with a stopwatch. The oars my only leverage, I started listing toward the water and then froze at a precarious sixty-degree angle, held there more by paralysis than by any sense of balance. Tom was belly-laughing from the dock; the farther I tipped, the harder he laughed.

"I'm going in!" I cried.

"No, you're not," said Caroline, her face as deadpan as a coach's in a losing season. "No, you're not. Keep your hands together. Stay still-don't look at the water, look at your hands. Now look at me." The voice consoled and instructed long enough for me to straighten into position, and I managed five or six strokes across flat water before I went flying out of the boat and into the lake. By the time I came up, a few seconds later and ten yards out, Caroline was laughing, and I had been given a glimpse of the rapture.

THE THREE OF US had gone to Chocorua for the month of August after Tom had placed an ad for a summer rental: "Three writers with dogs seek house near water and hiking trails." The result of his search was a ramshackle nineteenth-century farmhouse that we would return to for years. Surrounded by rolling meadows, the place had everything we could have wanted: cavernous rooms with old quilts and spinning wheels, a camp kitchen and ma.s.sive stone fireplace, tall windows that looked out on the White Mountains. The lake was a few hundred yards away. Mornings and some evenings, Caroline and I would leave behind the dogs, watching from the front windows, and walk down to the water, where she rowed the length of the lake and I swam its perimeter. I was the otter and she was the dragonfly, and I'd stop every so often to watch her flight, back and forth for six certain miles. Sometimes she pulled over into the marshes so that she could scrutinize my flip turns in the water. We had been friends for a couple of years by then, and we had the compet.i.tive spirit that belongs to sisters, or adolescent girls-each of us wanted whatever prowess the other possessed. had gone to Chocorua for the month of August after Tom had placed an ad for a summer rental: "Three writers with dogs seek house near water and hiking trails." The result of his search was a ramshackle nineteenth-century farmhouse that we would return to for years. Surrounded by rolling meadows, the place had everything we could have wanted: cavernous rooms with old quilts and spinning wheels, a camp kitchen and ma.s.sive stone fireplace, tall windows that looked out on the White Mountains. The lake was a few hundred yards away. Mornings and some evenings, Caroline and I would leave behind the dogs, watching from the front windows, and walk down to the water, where she rowed the length of the lake and I swam its perimeter. I was the otter and she was the dragonfly, and I'd stop every so often to watch her flight, back and forth for six certain miles. Sometimes she pulled over into the marshes so that she could scrutinize my flip turns in the water. We had been friends for a couple of years by then, and we had the compet.i.tive spirit that belongs to sisters, or adolescent girls-each of us wanted whatever prowess the other possessed.

The golden hues of the place and the easy days it offered-river walks and wildflowers and rhubarb pie-were far loftier than what Caroline had antic.i.p.ated: She considered most vacations forced marches out of town. I was only slightly more adventurous, wishing I could parachute into summer trips without having to fret about the dog or shop for forty pounds of produce. Both writers who lived alone, Caroline and I shared a general intractability at disrupting our routines: the daily walks in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, the exercise regimens we shared or compared, the meals and phone calls and hours of solitary work that we referred to as "our little lives." "Paris is overrated," Caroline liked to claim, partly to make me laugh; when she met a friend of mine one evening who was familiar with her books, he asked if she spent a lot of time in New York. "Are you kidding?" she said. "I hardly even get to Somerville." Wedded to the sanct.i.ty of the familiar, we made ourselves leave town just to check the vacation off the list, then return to the joys and terrors of ordinary life.

I HAVE A PHOTOGRAPH from one of those summers at Chocorua, framing the backs of my dog and Caroline's, Clementine and Lucille, who are silhouetted in the window seat and looking outside. It is the cla.s.sic dog photo, capturing vigilance and loyalty: two tails resting side by side, two animals glued to their post. What I didn't realize for years is that in the middle distance of the picture, through the window and out to the fields beyond, you can make out the smallest of figures-an outline of Caroline and me walking down the hill. We must have been on our way to the lake, and the dogs, by now familiar with our routine, had a.s.sumed their positions. Caroline's boyfriend, Morelli, a photographer, had seen the beauty of the shot and grabbed his camera. from one of those summers at Chocorua, framing the backs of my dog and Caroline's, Clementine and Lucille, who are silhouetted in the window seat and looking outside. It is the cla.s.sic dog photo, capturing vigilance and loyalty: two tails resting side by side, two animals glued to their post. What I didn't realize for years is that in the middle distance of the picture, through the window and out to the fields beyond, you can make out the smallest of figures-an outline of Caroline and me walking down the hill. We must have been on our way to the lake, and the dogs, by now familiar with our routine, had a.s.sumed their positions. Caroline's boyfriend, Morelli, a photographer, had seen the beauty of the shot and grabbed his camera.

I discovered this image the year after she died, and it has always seemed like a clue in a painting-a secret garden revealed only after it is gone. Chocorua itself has taken on an idyllic glow: I remember the night Caroline nearly beat Tom at arm wrestling; the mouse that sent me onto the dining room table while she howled with laughter; the Best Camper awards we inst.i.tuted (and that she always won). I have glossed over the mosquitoes, the day Caroline got angry when I left her in a slower-moving kayak and rowed off into the fog alone. Like most memories tinged with the final chapter, mine carry a physical weight of sadness. What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

THE TWO OF US ROWED, together and in tandem, for five years after that first summer. We both lived near the Charles River, a labyrinthine body of water that winds its way through Greater Boston for nine miles, from upper Newton through Cambridge and into Boston Harbor, with enough curves and consistently flat water to be a mecca for rowers. Because Caroline was small in stature and could body-press more than her own weight, I got to calling her Brut.i.ta, or "little brute." The boathouses we rowed out of were a couple of miles apart, and I could recognize Caroline's stroke from a hundred yards away-I'd be there waiting for her near the Eliot Bridge or the Weeks Footbridge by Harvard, ready to ply her with questions about form and speed and where to position one's thumbs. When she went out hours ahead of me, she fired off unpunctuated e-mails as soon as she got home: "hurry up the water is flat." We logged hundreds of miles, together and solo, from April to November; she endured my calls, in those first couple of summers, to discuss the mechanics of rowing: "I want to talk about thrust," I would say, with insane intensity, or, "Did you know the human head weighs thirteen pounds? thirteen pounds?" "Ummmm-hmmmm?" she'd answer, and soon I would hear a soft click-click click-click in the background-evidence that she had begun a game of computer solitaire, her equivalent of a telephonic yawn. At the end of the day, when we walked the dogs, we compared hand and finger calluses (the battle scars of good rowing) the way teenage girls used to compare tans or charm bracelets; because she was and always would be the better rower, I accepted her continual smugness and vowed to get even in the pool. One year for Christmas I gave her a photograph from the 1940s of two women rowers in a double at Oxford, England. She hung it on a wall near her bed, above a framed banner that read in the background-evidence that she had begun a game of computer solitaire, her equivalent of a telephonic yawn. At the end of the day, when we walked the dogs, we compared hand and finger calluses (the battle scars of good rowing) the way teenage girls used to compare tans or charm bracelets; because she was and always would be the better rower, I accepted her continual smugness and vowed to get even in the pool. One year for Christmas I gave her a photograph from the 1940s of two women rowers in a double at Oxford, England. She hung it on a wall near her bed, above a framed banner that read ZEAL IS A USEFUL FIRE ZEAL IS A USEFUL FIRE.

Both pictures hang in my bedroom now, next to the photograph of the dogs. Caroline died in early June of 2002, when she was forty-two, seven weeks after she was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. In the first few weeks in the hospital, when she was trying to write a will, she told me she wanted me to have her boat, the old Van Dusen in which I'd learned to row and that she had cared for over the years as though it were a beloved horse. I was sitting on her hospital bed when she said it, during one of those early death talks when you know what is coming and are trying to muscle your way through. So I told her I'd take the boat only if I could follow rowing tradition and have her name painted on the bow: It would be the Caroline Knapp Caroline Knapp. No way, she said, the same light in her eyes as the day she had taught me to row. You have to call it Brut.i.ta Brut.i.ta.

BEFORE ONE ENTERS THIS SPECTRUM OF SORROW, which changes even the color of trees, there is a blind and daringly wrong a.s.sumption that probably allows us to blunder through the days. There is a way one thinks that the show will never end-or that loss, when it comes, will be toward the end of the road, not in its middle. I was fifty-one when Caroline died, and by that point in life you should have gone to enough funerals to be able to quote the verses from Ecclesiastes by heart. But the day we found out that Caroline was ill-the day the doctors used those dreaded words "We can make her more comfortable"-I remember walking down the street, a bright April street glimmering with life, and saying aloud to myself, with a sort of shocked innocence, "You really thought you were going to get away with it, didn't you?"

By which I meant that I might somehow sidestep the cruelty of an intolerable loss, one rendered without the willful or natural exit signs of drug overdose, suicide, or old age. These I had encountered, and there had been the common theme of tragic agency (if only he'd taken the lithium; if only he hadn't tried to smuggle the cocaine) or rueful acceptance (she had a good long life). But no one I had loved-no one I counted among the necessary pillars of life-had died suddenly, too young, full of determination not to go. No one had gotten the bad lab report, lost the hair, been told to get her affairs in order. More important, not Caroline. Not the best friend, the kid sister, the one who had joked for years that she would bring me soup decades down the line, when I was too aged and frail to cook.

FROM THE BEGINNING there was something intangible and even spooky between us that could make strangers mistake us as sisters or lovers, and that sometimes had friends refer to us by each other's name: A year after Caroline's death, a mutual friend called out to me at Fresh Pond, the reservoir where we had walked, "Caroline!", then burst into tears at her mistake. The friendship must have announced its depth by its obvious affection, but also by our similarities, muted or apparent. That our life stories had wound their way toward each other on corresponding paths was part of the early connection. Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation. there was something intangible and even spooky between us that could make strangers mistake us as sisters or lovers, and that sometimes had friends refer to us by each other's name: A year after Caroline's death, a mutual friend called out to me at Fresh Pond, the reservoir where we had walked, "Caroline!", then burst into tears at her mistake. The friendship must have announced its depth by its obvious affection, but also by our similarities, muted or apparent. That our life stories had wound their way toward each other on corresponding paths was part of the early connection. Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.

We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time. One was the tatting center we thought we'd open in western Ma.s.sachusetts, populated by Border collies and corgis, because we'd be too old to have dogs that were big or unruly. The Border collies would train the corgis, we declared, and the corgis would be what we fondly called the purse dogs. The tatting notion came about during one of our endless conversations about whether we were living our lives correctly-an ongoing dialogue that ranged from the serious (writing, solitude, loneliness) to the mundane (wasted time, the idiocies of urban life, trash TV). "Oh, don't worry," I'd said to Caroline one day when she asked if I thought she spent too much time with Law & Order Law & Order reruns. "Just think-if we were living two hundred years ago, we'd be playing whist, or tatting, instead of watching television, and we'd be worrying about that." There was a long pause. "What reruns. "Just think-if we were living two hundred years ago, we'd be playing whist, or tatting, instead of watching television, and we'd be worrying about that." There was a long pause. "What is is tatting?" she had asked shyly, as though the old lace-making craft were something of great importance, and so that too became part of the private lexicon-"tatting" was the code word for the time wasters we, and probably everyone else, engaged in. tatting?" she had asked shyly, as though the old lace-making craft were something of great importance, and so that too became part of the private lexicon-"tatting" was the code word for the time wasters we, and probably everyone else, engaged in.

These were the sort of rag-and-bone markers that came flying back to me, in a high wind of anguish, when she was dying: I remember trying to explain the tatting center to someone who knew us, then realizing how absurd it sounded, and breaking down. Of course no one would understand the tatting center; like most codes of intimacy, it resisted translation. Part of what made it funny was that it was ours alone.

ONE OF THE THINGS we loved about rowing was its near mystical beauty-the strokes cresting across the water, the shimmering quiet of the row itself. Days after her death, I dreamed that the two of us were standing together in a dark boathouse, its only light source a line of incandescent blue sculls that hung above us like a wash of constellations. In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness. we loved about rowing was its near mystical beauty-the strokes cresting across the water, the shimmering quiet of the row itself. Days after her death, I dreamed that the two of us were standing together in a dark boathouse, its only light source a line of incandescent blue sculls that hung above us like a wash of constellations. In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.

2.

EVERYTHING REALLY STARTED WITH THE DOGS.

I had met Caroline Knapp briefly in the early 1990s, when she was a columnist for The Boston Phoenix The Boston Phoenix and I was the book review editor at and I was the book review editor at The Boston Globe The Boston Globe. A collection of her columns had just been published, and someone had introduced us at a literary gathering that I was finding insufferable. "Caroline has a new book!" our hostess said brightly, certain that we each had something to offer the other. After the woman had left us, we exchanged half smiles and rolled our eyes. I'd liked that about Caroline immediately-no self-marketer here. She seemed to wear her reserve like silken armor: the French-manicured hand holding a gla.s.s of white wine, the shy, resonant voice. We pa.s.sed a few polite words of mutual regard, then moved apart to make the necessary rounds.

When I saw her again, a few years later, standing near the duck pond at Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, we had both downscaled in appearance. Each of us had young dogs, and a dog trainer we knew had recently mentioned Caroline to me. "Do you know Caroline Knapp?" Kathy had said. "She has a puppy, too. You remind me of each other-you should try to get together."

I had mouthed some vague a.s.sent, though privately I didn't see the resemblance. The Caroline I remembered had been way too well put together to match my presentation in those days. I had a year-old, sixty-pound Samoyed, and I was walking around with gra.s.s in my hair and freeze-dried liver in my pocket. I spent most of my time reveling in the wild pleasures of dog-raising, not much caring how I looked. But the woman I ran into at the pond that late-summer afternoon was a far cry from my memory of Caroline's earlier refinement. She was still shy, to the point of my thinking she didn't remember me. The veil of cla.s.sy attire had been traded for sneakers and a careless braid; hovering over Lucille, her shepherd mix who was the same age as Clementine, she seemed as pa.s.sionately monothematic about her dog as I was about mine.

I also knew, for reasons that were personal as well as public, that the white wine Caroline had been holding that night years before had been her magic scepter and dagger both. Public because Caroline had revealed as much in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story Drinking: A Love Story. This was the summer after the book's publication, and she'd been on enough talk shows and feature pages to be a publisher's dream girl. And she "showed well," as they say in the trade: There was the long blond braid, the beautiful voice, the restraint that suggested wells of darkness behind all that mannered poise. The general a.s.sumption is that most writers want nothing more than the kind of success Caroline's book had just enjoyed. I had a different perspective, from experience and intuition. If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

The personal empathy came from my comparatively cloistered past: I had stopped drinking twelve years earlier, in 1984. But whereas Caroline had gone mainstream with her addiction, I was old school and deeply private about my own struggles with alcohol. I believed the "anonymous" part of AA was there as a protective shield, and I had worn it as such for years.

We traded a tentative h.e.l.lo at the pond that day while the dogs introduced themselves more boisterously. "Caroline, do you remember me?" I said, and she smiled and said yes. I said, "G.o.d, you've been going through it lately-are you all right?" She looked surprised, then relieved. She told me later that she had been walking around that day exhausted, half undone by the exposure she was getting, and that talking to me had been a balm-I was more interested in her dog than her book sales. So was she: We were like new moms in the park, trading vital bits of information about our charges that was enthralling only to us. I mentioned a two-thousand-acre wooded reserve north of the city called Middles.e.x Fells, where I was training my headstrong sled dog to run off-lead, and Caroline asked how to get there. Because the route was complicated, I explained it self-consciously, afraid that she was being polite and I was being long-winded. The place was half an hour away, tough to find even without traffic, and only someone devoted to training, as I was, would ever bother to find it.

A week later, at the Fells, I heard someone calling my name across Sheepfold Meadow, and I saw Caroline on the edge of the grounds, waving and smiling. I was surprised and pleased-she must have actually remembered my byzantine directions, then followed through. Paying attention, I would come to find out, was one of the things Caroline did. She called me a few days later to propose a walk together; when she couldn't reach me, she called again. An introvert with a Texan's affability, I was well intentioned but weak on follow-through; not without reason did an old friend refer to me as the gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone. Caroline knocked politely on the front door of my inner s.p.a.ce, waited, then knocked again. She was persistent, she seemed smart and warmhearted, and-to my delight-she was writing a book, she told me when we spoke, about people's emotional connections to dogs. She seemed like someone for whom I wouldn't mind breaking my monkish ways.

That book became Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, published a couple of years later; Caroline gave me the name of Grace, and recast Clementine as an Alaskan malamute named Oakley. Within weeks after our encounter at Sheepfold Meadow, we were planning outings every few days; the Fells became one of our regular destinations. We ran the dogs for hours in those woods outside of town, and in other woods, searching out gorgeous reserves of forests and fields all over eastern Ma.s.sachusetts. We walked the beaches that autumn, and the fire trails in winter, carrying liver snaps for the dogs and graham crackers for the humans. We walked until all four of us were dumb with fatigue. The dogs would go charging through the switchbacks while Caroline and I walked and talked-over time so much and so deeply that we began referring to our afternoon-long treks as a.n.a.lytic walks.

"Let's take the long way home," she would say when we'd gotten to the car, and then we would wend our way through the day traffic of Somerville or Medford, in no hurry to separate. At the end of the drive, with Clementine snoring softly in the back seat, we would sit outside the house of whoever was being dropped off, and keep talking. Then we would go inside our respective houses and call each other on the phone.

"What about the ponds freezing?" I said one evening after a walk in early winter, when the dogs were still blasting out into the water, oblivious to anything but their own joy. "I'm worried about the ice being thin, and the dogs going out to chase birds, and falling through-you know this happens to someone every winter. Some dog runs out onto the ice, and the owner goes after her, and the dog manages to get out and the human drowns. And you know we would both go after the dogs."

Caroline listened to me rant-I came to realize that her listening could be so intent, it almost had a sound-and sighed before she answered. "We're going to have to start walking with a rope and an ax, aren't we?" she said. She always knew how to talk me down from the tree.

I suppose every friendship has such indicators-the checks and balances of the relationship that make it stronger or more generous than either of you alone. For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch. Whether this sensitivity functioned as a failing or an a.s.set, I think we recognized it in each other from the start. Even on that first afternoon we spent together-a four-hour walk through late-summer woods-I remember being moved moved by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie. She was so quiet, so careful, and yet so fully present, and I found it a weightless liberation to be with someone whose intensity seemed to match and sometimes surpa.s.s my own. Her hesitation was what tethered her sincerity: As much as Caroline revealed in her books, she was a deeply private person who moved into relationships with great deliberation. I had known enough writers in my life, including myself, to recognize this trait: What made it to the page was never the whole story, but rather the writer's version of the story-a narrative with its creator in full control. by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie. She was so quiet, so careful, and yet so fully present, and I found it a weightless liberation to be with someone whose intensity seemed to match and sometimes surpa.s.s my own. Her hesitation was what tethered her sincerity: As much as Caroline revealed in her books, she was a deeply private person who moved into relationships with great deliberation. I had known enough writers in my life, including myself, to recognize this trait: What made it to the page was never the whole story, but rather the writer's version of the story-a narrative with its creator in full control.

I also thought that first day, more than once, that Caroline wished she were someplace else, because she kept checking her watch-she must have looked at it, she believed covertly, a half dozen times. I would learn to live with this little ritual, which had nothing to do with me. It was a marker for Caroline's anxiety, a way to anchor her place in the world no matter how open-ended her schedule. But that day I found it unnerving, and I finally asked her if she had to be somewhere. She was mortified, I think, and apologized, and we walked until dusk pushed us out of the woods. Monitoring the increments of time, particularly since she had stopped drinking, was Caroline's stopgap against the free fall of the days.

And one other repeated gesture would touch me that day in a way I couldn't have articulated at the time. Determined to keep up with Clementine, I had become a devoted dog walker; I also had had polio as a child and so walked with a slight limp and imbalance in the world. However much I compensated by toughing my way through, I was frailer on land than I liked to admit. When we went out in late September, the forest floor was covered with newly fallen acorns, and I kept slipping on them and fell more than once. I was used to my lifelong ungainliness and said so, making light of it; what I didn't say was that I was accustomed to awkward responses. When I explained the limp by saying I'd had polio, people tended to be either overly concerned or uncomfortable. Caroline, who never seemed to doubt my capabilities for a moment, was neither. After that first stumble, whenever I slipped she would put out an arm to brace me; holding on to her became as natural as reaching for a branch. If I was an ambler by nature and ability, Caroline was a sprinter-she was fast, she was agile, and she was often in a hurry, whether she meant to be or not. But once she ascertained my usual gait, she slowed her pace to mine and kept it there.

EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that we had both had sisters, our childhoods had little in common. Caroline had been born a twin, appearing a few minutes after her sister, Becca, and the two had stayed close throughout their lives. Because I'd had a good friend in Texas who was a twin, I recognized in Caroline the parallel traits that seemed born of this primal dyad-she had a capacity for intimacy that could sometimes seem private and absolute. My sister was two years older than I, and I'd grown up accustomed to being both bossed around and looked after. I was the daughter of fourth-generation Texans from struggling farming families; my parents had settled in the desolate Texas Panhandle, and my dad had been a master sergeant in the Second World War. Caroline had led what she called a sheltered existence within the milieu of intellectual Cambridge. Her father, who had died a few years before I met her, was an esteemed psychiatrist and psychoa.n.a.lyst; Caroline had identified with him and adored him. She told me early in our friendship, with no small degree of amus.e.m.e.nt, that when she was a little girl of six or seven, he had sat on the end of her bed with a legal pad, pen at the ready, and asked her about her dreams. Her mother was an artist and an introvert, and she had died a year after Caroline's father. So she had lost both parents to cancer when she was in her early thirties, a double injury that had been cataclysmic for her; she stayed drunk for another year, then drove herself to rehab in 1994. that we had both had sisters, our childhoods had little in common. Caroline had been born a twin, appearing a few minutes after her sister, Becca, and the two had stayed close throughout their lives. Because I'd had a good friend in Texas who was a twin, I recognized in Caroline the parallel traits that seemed born of this primal dyad-she had a capacity for intimacy that could sometimes seem private and absolute. My sister was two years older than I, and I'd grown up accustomed to being both bossed around and looked after. I was the daughter of fourth-generation Texans from struggling farming families; my parents had settled in the desolate Texas Panhandle, and my dad had been a master sergeant in the Second World War. Caroline had led what she called a sheltered existence within the milieu of intellectual Cambridge. Her father, who had died a few years before I met her, was an esteemed psychiatrist and psychoa.n.a.lyst; Caroline had identified with him and adored him. She told me early in our friendship, with no small degree of amus.e.m.e.nt, that when she was a little girl of six or seven, he had sat on the end of her bed with a legal pad, pen at the ready, and asked her about her dreams. Her mother was an artist and an introvert, and she had died a year after Caroline's father. So she had lost both parents to cancer when she was in her early thirties, a double injury that had been cataclysmic for her; she stayed drunk for another year, then drove herself to rehab in 1994.

I knew much of this from her book and some of it from what she told me that first long afternoon in the woods; I also learned that day that she had just separated from her boyfriend of six years-a large-hearted man who went by his last name, Morelli. The break turned out to be temporary, and after Morelli and I became friends, Caroline and I often called him "the last good boyfriend in America." All of this piecemeal story-the narrative unfolding in the early friendship-belonged to a sinewy, solemn woman who seemed to me like the kind of person you'd pick to drive the tractor home in a hailstorm. She was tough, she was una.s.suming, and I suspect her stalwart reliability, which revealed itself to me in more than one crisis, came in part from practice: Having survived both anorexia and alcoholism, she had already walked through her version of worst fears.

I HAD JUST navigated my own crossroads. I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood. I'd spent my thirties in a big-city newsroom where adrenaline and testosterone were as pervasive as deadlines, and I'd recently given up a stint as book review editor to go back to my ordinary job as book critic for navigated my own crossroads. I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood. I'd spent my thirties in a big-city newsroom where adrenaline and testosterone were as pervasive as deadlines, and I'd recently given up a stint as book review editor to go back to my ordinary job as book critic for The Boston Globe The Boston Globe. This transition, as well as the recent shifts in technology, allowed me to work from home and hang around with the dog, who quickly learned that reading was my equivalent of chewing on a bone. I had long thought that the G.o.ds had handed me work tailor-made for my idiosyncrasies: I was too opinionated to be a straight news reporter, too gadabout to be an academic. I was dreamy, stubborn, and selectively fanatical; my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. It was my good fortune that I had found an occupation requiring just these talents; now, with Clementine, I could spend whole days in near silence, reading or writing or speaking in the simpler, heart-sure vernacular of human-to-dog.

The first several months that Caroline and I knew each other come back to me with the scent of winter: the crisp, distinctively East Coast aura of snow and city streets and radiator heat. I gave her fur-lined mittens in November on her birthday; a few weeks later, we both begged off other Thanksgiving plans, then cooked a roast chicken together after a day in the woods with the dogs. The weather got worse and colder and we adjusted our schedules accordingly: She taught me how to walk across frozen trails and sideways down steep hills, digging my feet into the terrain. I taught her the freestyle in an indoor pool, coaxing her to lay her face in the water to learn to regulate her breathing, while she stood there cursing me and shivering.

It seems to me now that Caroline was always cold. After the anorexia of her twenties, she had stayed on the thin side of normal, and she would show up for our walks swaddled in layers of fleece. As often as possible we headed for the woods or the reservoir, but sometimes in the evening, when the New England sun had disappeared at an early hour, we would sneak into the Harvard athletic fields, near where I lived at the time, so that the dogs could have an open s.p.a.ce to run. The fields backed onto a public housing project, separated by a high, dilapidated chain-link fence. Getting onto the hallowed grounds was a two-person job: One of us lifted the fence where it had come loose over a ditch while the other rolled under it with the dogs, then held it up from the other side. Our trespa.s.s was illegal as well as rough-it was the kind of thing I had done all the time as a girl in Texas-and I was glad that Caroline was willing; for all of her exploits in the drinking world, she still possessed a good-girl quality that I had never been able to muster. We'd stand there in the frigid dark, the dogs illuminated against the night sky by Clementine's whiteness and the lights from the ball fields. It was like being encased in a cave of quiet and cold, and we stayed until we couldn't bear it any longer, telling each other stories-Caroline in her new Ugg boots, shivering and smoking, with me getting an illicit, still pleasant whiff of the smoke (I had quit four years earlier). Sometimes we'd sink onto the ground and lean against the old tattered fence, letting the dogs rummage in our pockets for biscuits before they went tearing out into the dark again. We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring. But there was nowhere else I wanted to be, beyond sitting there on the hard earth under a night sky, watching the dogs and talking.

THOSE FIELDS WERE also where we had our first misunderstanding, or confrontation, or whatever you call the seemingly trivial empathic failures that serve as a testing ground and gateway for intimacy. By the end of that winter, it was clear that we cared for each other and the routines we had so quickly established; less acknowledged was the crucial place we were carving out in each other's lives. For a few days I had been bearing a bruise in silence that had to do with our regard for each other as writers: something so core to me that it still gives me pause to remember my discomfort. As a reviewer for a big daily newspaper, I was the older and more seasoned writer; Caroline was the young turk at the alternative paper who'd enjoyed a rush of attention for her memoir. Because we had known of each other for a few years before we'd met, we had relied on that implicit a.s.sumption between writers of recognizing the other's achievement; in most relationships, this commonality of purpose would more than suffice. But Caroline had never said anything directly about what I did or what she thought about how well I did it, though she had given me a copy of her memoir and asked repeatedly if I had liked it. also where we had our first misunderstanding, or confrontation, or whatever you call the seemingly trivial empathic failures that serve as a testing ground and gateway for intimacy. By the end of that winter, it was clear that we cared for each other and the routines we had so quickly established; less acknowledged was the crucial place we were carving out in each other's lives. For a few days I had been bearing a bruise in silence that had to do with our regard for each other as writers: something so core to me that it still gives me pause to remember my discomfort. As a reviewer for a big daily newspaper, I was the older and more seasoned writer; Caroline was the young turk at the alternative paper who'd enjoyed a rush of attention for her memoir. Because we had known of each other for a few years before we'd met, we had relied on that implicit a.s.sumption between writers of recognizing the other's achievement; in most relationships, this commonality of purpose would more than suffice. But Caroline had never said anything directly about what I did or what she thought about how well I did it, though she had given me a copy of her memoir and asked repeatedly if I had liked it.

Now I see this in a different light: I believe she saw me as the one with more of the power and less of the ego needs or demands. That day in the field, I had no such insight. A long piece I'd written for the Globe Globe had just been published, and I was exhausted. We were walking along and Caroline had muttered some acknowledgment about how hard I'd been working, though nothing about the essay itself. Finally I blurted out, "I have to ask you something difficult-I need to know what you think about my work." had just been published, and I was exhausted. We were walking along and Caroline had muttered some acknowledgment about how hard I'd been working, though nothing about the essay itself. Finally I blurted out, "I have to ask you something difficult-I need to know what you think about my work."

She looked at me aghast. "Oh my G.o.d," she said. "I've turned into my mother. I a.s.sumed you knew how I felt, but I never told you." She rushed to rea.s.sure me, and we talked for the rest of the walk about what a swampland this was: the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt (between women, and writers, and women writers), about insecurity and power differentials. We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response was to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come.

As relieved as I was that day by the conversation, I was unnerved by my own vulnerability. It was as though Caroline and I had crossed into a territory where everything mattered and that we were in it together. "Oh no," I said, half laughing but with tears in my eyes. "What is it?" she asked, concerned, and I said, "I need need you." you."

3.

SHE WOULD SAY, I THINK, THAT THE NEED WAS GREATER on her end. She was at the beginning of what would become a two-year separation from Morelli, with whom she'd been involved for years and whom she would later marry; she had recently lost both parents; and she saw me, probably through an idealizing lens, as a competent woman who had built a life alone. The more complicated truth was that I was also at a pivotal point: I'd given up a lot of what didn't work, and drinking was only the beginning of the list. "You chose solitude," another friend had told me. "Well, I think solitude chose me," I said. "The old bride-of-Christ thing." Still, I'd always been comfortable in my own company, sometimes to the displeasure of friends or romantic partners. My last love interest of any importance had ended, badly, a few years earlier. One of my closest friends from the past decade, an artist and filmmaker, had just left Cambridge for New York. I had a number of old and solid friendships, male and female both, but these days most of the local ones belonged in the second circle of intimacy-the people you'd call when you were hit by a bus, but not necessarily if you'd merely sprained an ankle. on her end. She was at the beginning of what would become a two-year separation from Morelli, with whom she'd been involved for years and whom she would later marry; she had recently lost both parents; and she saw me, probably through an idealizing lens, as a competent woman who had built a life alone. The more complicated truth was that I was also at a pivotal point: I'd given up a lot of what didn't work, and drinking was only the beginning of the list. "You chose solitude," another friend had told me. "Well, I think solitude chose me," I said. "The old bride-of-Christ thing." Still, I'd always been comfortable in my own company, sometimes to the displeasure of friends or romantic partners. My last love interest of any importance had ended, badly, a few years earlier. One of my closest friends from the past decade, an artist and filmmaker, had just left Cambridge for New York. I had a number of old and solid friendships, male and female both, but these days most of the local ones belonged in the second circle of intimacy-the people you'd call when you were hit by a bus, but not necessarily if you'd merely sprained an ankle.

"Men don't really understand women's friendships, do they?" I once asked my friend Louise, a writer who lived in Minnesota. "Oh G.o.d, no," she said. "And we must never tell them." The fact was that I had been weaned on intense and valiant friendships among women, thanks to the milieu in which I'd come of age in Texas. I was in my early twenties during the heyday of the antiwar movement and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, which in Austin were closely linked. The women I knew there had burned the old rule book: the one in which women shopped instead of talked, competed for the silverback through any means, protected their fears and longings from one another as if they were professional trade secrets. I'd been part of an all-girl rock-'n'-roll band that got arrested together; we had relied on one another through whatever trials the decade presented, from medical school to drug addiction. When I left Austin for New England in 1981, intent on becoming a writer, what courage I possessed came in part from those pa.s.sionate connections.

The women I gravitated toward in the Northeast had their own versions of the riotous years of the 1960s and '70s, but the demands of adulthood had banked their fires. My friendships in Boston had a tendency to be more distant, less profound. In the predominantly male province of the Globe Globe newsroom, where I was hired in the mid-eighties, most of the women I knew were too busy covering wars or politics-sweet cost of victory!-to give much time to close interactions. My independence and solitude gave proof to this: Most of my emotional resources had gone into making my way as a writer, which had solidified my life and maybe even saved it. newsroom, where I was hired in the mid-eighties, most of the women I knew were too busy covering wars or politics-sweet cost of victory!-to give much time to close interactions. My independence and solitude gave proof to this: Most of my emotional resources had gone into making my way as a writer, which had solidified my life and maybe even saved it.

I had also realized, gradually but surefootedly, that I didn't want to have children. I had glimpsed this possibility early on, I think, even though I'd grown up in the conservative Texas Panhandle, where marriage and motherhood were as implicit as prayer and football. My parents had each come from large families-my father the ninth of ten, my mother the oldest of six-and their crowded childhoods had convinced them of the calmer luxury of having a small family. My mother, Ruby, had a younger sibling hoisted on her hip throughout her youth, and I suspect she was weary of the job by the time she left the farm, at eighteen, during the height of the Great Depression. She'd made her way in the workforce for a decade before marrying my dad, then waited until her late thirties to have children-a radical gesture for mid-twentieth-century America. She celebrated any route toward contentment: When my sister had her daughter, Ruby was out of her mind with joy; when I left Texas for the East and became a writer, she acted as though I'd climbed Kilimanjaro.

Whatever alternate paths my mother may have envisioned for me, feminism broadened into a four-lane highway. I knew a number of women whose emotional choices were closely linked to the idea of motherhood; because that wasn't a piece of my particular dream, I was free to base my mating calls on love alone. As part of the great wave of women who no longer needed to marry for social or economic status or for children, I had liberated myself right into the wide, bland pastures of noncommitment. This was the good news and occasionally the bad. I'd made my little odyssey to the East alone and unenc.u.mbered, and I knew I'd avoided the yoke of an unhappy marriage or being hostage to someone else's paycheck. On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as h.e.l.l. Sick of my Calvinist fort.i.tude, an old friend in Texas sent me a postcard on which she'd scribbled a three-word imperative: "LOWER YOUR STANDARDS."

Thrilling or tiresome, single women's love narratives tend to be desultory stories: Reader, I moved on. I'd had several relationships through my twenties and thirties that ranged from high drama to cosmic misfires, but they belonged to the same era as my rabble-rouser freedom-they were fleeting and fierce, or faux revolutionary and unfulfilling, or decent matches with bad timing. Most of them were wrapped in the amber mist of alcohol, which meant that they rarely stood a chance of trumping my affection for the bottle. With whiskey in the picture, it was always a menage a trois.

Even for a while after I got sober, I had a tendency to choose pa.s.sionately and badly. I laughed off the advances of a young reporter who'd been hanging around my desk at the Globe Globe until he got a foreign bureau a.s.signment; as soon as I learned he was heading for a hot zone in six weeks, where he would be stationed for years, I had an affair with him. Then I met a journalist for a big-city daily who lived five hundred miles away; when he told me he was suffering sh.e.l.l shock from a bad divorce, I decided we were meant for each other. until he got a foreign bureau a.s.signment; as soon as I learned he was heading for a hot zone in six weeks, where he would be stationed for years, I had an affair with him. Then I met a journalist for a big-city daily who lived five hundred miles away; when he told me he was suffering sh.e.l.l shock from a bad divorce, I decided we were meant for each other.

If they weren't unavailable or leaving the country, I favored the Pygmalion slow-death trap: choosing a wise, usually narcissistic mentor who wanted to pull me into his...o...b..t. My last serious relationship, with a man named Sam who was a decade older, had fit this template so thoroughly that it probably rid me of the inclination forever. We spent two years together, a small eternity of good and bad, and while I like to believe I would have summoned the strength to leave him of my own accord, his moving to another city was what finally broke the spell.

The night I left him I said goodbye in a crowded airport, tears streaming down my face, then boarded a late shuttle back to Boston. When I woke up the next morning, instead of feeling shattered, I felt safe for the first time in months. The sensation was physical, as though I'd just gotten off a sickening sailboat ride through bad weather. I had to go to a holiday party that evening, and I put on a velvet shirt and cowboy boots and threw cold water on my face. When the hostess met me at the door, she furrowed her brow with worry, and so I said, simply, "I left him."

"Are you all right?" she asked me.

"No," I said, my no longer tragic smile in place. "But I will be."

I found myself a good therapist: a soft-spoken man so largehearted and inimitably wry that my initial fondness for him very soon grew to include trust. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who quoted to me from Baudelaire and the Song of Solomon; he laughed at my jokes, but he didn't laugh when I was being a wisea.s.s to hide my pain. When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, "If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness." about you, it would be your too-muchness."

So began one of the finest connections of my life, which charted, sometimes guided, my navigation toward the light. I turned forty and quit smoking-a twenty-year pack-a-day habit-two days later. My life seemed spartan but solid: If Freud promised work and love to the well-integrated soul, I was attempting a modern-day version of both. The work sustained me; the love belonged to a constellation of friends instead of the trials and consolations of a romantic partner. It was a bit hard on the bones at night, but the rock I had climbed onto at this point in the journey still had a pretty good view.

AND THEN, IN THE SPRING OF 1995, CAME A DOG named Clementine-an experience so emotionally humbling that it rocked my austere world. I had wanted a Samoyed for as long as I could remember-I even found an old training guide for the breed, a book that I'd had as a child-but because they were large sled dogs, I'd a.s.sumed it would be unfair to keep one in the city; I was also loath to leave a dog alone while I spent long days in the newsroom. Around the same time that I started working at home, my downstairs neighbors, a young surgeon and a lawyer, brought home an eight-week-old Labrador retriever puppy. I offered to look in on her during the day and soon got into the habit of carrying her upstairs each morning. She would sleep in my lap while I read, an arrangement of such mutual reward that it opened the door onto my old sled dog fantasy. My aging Persian cat tolerated the Lab, a reception that convinced me I could introduce another puppy into his domain. So began a Samoyed research expedition that took me all over New England. I talked to dog trainers who a.s.sured me it was acceptable to have a Sam in the city; I sought out breed rescue and breeder-referral people who grilled me to determine whether I would measure up. Whenever I saw a Samoyed being walked on the street, I stopped its owner and pestered him or her with questions. I drove a hundred miles to see a breeder whose blue ribbon dogs were national champions; her kennels were so crowded and obviously profit-oriented that I fled in distress. Then I went to Connecticut; more grilling, this round made pleasurable by the five adult Samoyeds vying for s.p.a.ce in my lap. Finally, after a series of mishaps and unexpectedly small litters, I found a woman in upstate New York with a five-week-old litter of seven. She had a yearlong waiting list for her puppies, she told me, but someone had dropped out that morning, two hours before I called. I've never known whether this was fate or good salesmanship. But two days later, I drove the two hundred miles to Kingston, New York, with a reservation in place at the nearly empty local Holiday Inn. My heart had already left the stratosphere. named Clementine-an experience so emotionally humbling that it rocked my austere world. I had wanted a Samoyed for as long as I could remember-I even found an old training guide for the breed, a book that I'd had as a child-but because they were large sled dogs, I'd a.s.sumed it would be unfair to keep one in the city; I was also loath to leave a dog alone while I spent long days in the newsroom. Around the same time that I started working at home, my downstairs neighbors, a young surgeon and a lawyer, brought home an eight-week-old Labrador retriever puppy. I offered to look in on her during the day and soon got into the habit of carrying her upstairs each morning. She would sleep in my lap while I read, an arrangement of such mutual reward that it opened the door onto my old sled dog fantasy. My aging Persian cat tolerated the Lab, a reception that convinced me I could introduce another puppy into his domain. So began a Samoyed research expedition that took me all over New England. I talked to dog trainers who a.s.sured me it was acceptable to have a Sam in the city; I sought out breed rescue and breeder-referral people who grilled me to determine whether I would measure up. Whenever I saw a Samoyed being walked on the street, I stopped its owner and pestered him or her with questions. I drove a hundred miles to see a breeder whose blue ribbon dogs were national champions; her kennels were so crowded and obviously profit-oriented that I fled in distress. Then I went to Connecticut; more grilling, this round made pleasurable by the five adult Samoyeds vying for s.p.a.ce in my lap. Finally, after a series of mishaps and unexpectedly small litters, I found a woman in upstate New York with a five-week-old litter of seven. She had a yearlong waiting list for her puppies, she told me, but someone had dropped out that morning, two hours before I called. I've never known whether this was fate or good salesmanship. But two days later, I drove the two hundred miles to Kingston, New York, with a reservation in place at the nearly empty local Holiday Inn. My heart had already left the stratosphere.

That trip was only to meet meet the pups, and to give the breeder a chance to meet me-to see if I was worthy to pair with one of her dogs. Anyone who has taken the labyrinthine journey into the world of purebred dogs will recognize this as a normal course of action from reputable breeders, though for the novitiate, it is both intimidating and thrilling. I've gotten jobs and mortgages more easily than I got Clementine. The breeder had her human candidates choose two puppies, then she matched us with the dog she thought would be the best fit. I chose a feisty troublemaker who had stormed her way onto my lap the moment I met her, and a big, sleepy girl who napped during most of the visit. I laughed when the breeder called to tell me I was getting the troublemaker. the pups, and to give the breeder a chance to meet me-to see if I was worthy to pair with one of her dogs. Anyone who has taken the labyrinthine journey into the world of purebred dogs will recognize this as a normal course of action from reputable breeders, though for the novitiate, it is both intimidating and thrilling. I've gotten jobs and mortgages more easily than I got Clementine. The breeder had her human candidates choose two puppies, then she matched us with the dog she thought would be the best fit. I chose a feisty troublemaker who had stormed her way onto my lap the moment I met her, and a big, sleepy girl who napped during most of the visit. I laughed when the breeder called to tell me I was getting the troublemaker.

Two weeks later, I made the round trip to Kingston and back in a day, with a friend driving her Saab while I stayed in the back seat with Clementine, who weighed eleven pounds and within a year would grow to be five times that size. I brought her home and began the frantic reorientation that a new animal always ensures: It seemed as though I had let a wolf cub loose on the place. She was unstoppable, stubborn, and fearless; when a 120-pound Irish wolfhound came to visit, Clemmie stood underneath the dog, barking furiously, undaunted by being outweighed by a factor of ten. After the first sleep-deprived twenty-four hours of her invasion, I sat on the back porch with her sprawled asleep in my lap-She has white eyelashes! I thought-and tears started streaming down my face. I had had animals all my life, but never had my heart been seized with such unequivocal love. I thought-and tears started streaming down my face. I had had animals all my life, but never had my heart been seized with such unequivocal love.

I UNDERSTOOD THIS attachment for what it was: the instinctive and deep, probably maternal, feelings for a being who depends on you for her very survival. My respect for the human-animal connection was well earned; dogs had always gravitated toward my dad, and I had grown up with animals. My sister in Texas had an Airedale and a Border collie. So I was no stranger to cross-species attachments; that mine to Clementine came when and how it did- attachment for what it was: the instinctive and deep, probably maternal, feelings for a being who depends on you for her very survival. My respect for the human-animal connection was well earned; dogs had always gravitated toward my dad, and I had grown up with animals. My sister in Texas had an Airedale and a Border collie. So I was no stranger to cross-species attachments; that mine to Clementine came when and how it did-single woman, doesn't want kids, loves dogs-offered a providential answer to the primary relationships that we all require. This mysterious, intelligent animal I had brought into my life seemed to me not a stand-in, but a blessing.

My life changed in the most gratifying and mundane ways. Instead of having dinner out with friends, I joined neighborhood dog groups in the park at night, hanging out with an array of people whose paths weren't likely to cross in a dogless world. An inveterate night owl, I started rising at six a.m. to keep to the housebreaking schedule; my apartment, a once orderly world of old Persian rugs and bookcases, was now littered with squeaky toys and stuffed lemurs. I postponed the idea of the trip abroad I'd been planning and rented a house on a Wellfleet pond instead, where I taught Clementine to swim. Having come of age in the Panhandle, where you could smell the stockyards from ten miles away, I had missed that roughhewn lifestyle ever since I'd moved to the urban Northeast. Now I was back in uniform, in jeans and boots, with dirt on my knees, and I felt as if I'd returned to some long-forgotten place of shelter.

My new friends-the subterranean enclave of dog people-could entertain themselves for hours with talk of fear-aggressive behavior or socialization techniques; if we were seen as insane or tedious by our non-dog friends, we pitied them for what they were missing. Long summer nights were now spent outside, lolling in the fields watching baseball or walking the neighborhood. My priorities had changed, often to the chagrin of others: At a cla.s.sy soiree in Newton, I irritated my hosts by ignoring the guests and playing in the backyard with their golden retriever. I signed up for obedience cla.s.ses, then a second round and a third, and looked forward to them all week, reveling in the clarity of communication that training an independent sled dog entailed. Bullying revealed itself immediately for what it was; equally useless were mixed signals, irony, or indecision. Dogs craved and responded to straightforward instruction, recognition, and praise, all of it the direct-arrow language of the heart. For a writer, who spent hours of each day thinking through the intricacies and beauty of words, this link between the species was a place of ease and liberation.

SO WHEN CAROLINE told me, not long after we met, that she was in love with her dog, it didn't require any explanation. While I had been immersed in the challenges of Clementine, Caroline's life was being upended by Lucille, an experience later captured in told me, not long after we met, that she was in