Tried to Save Him

Tried to Save Him

For the Essay This! project.

When Lucy Kaplan leaves the bathroom and her daughter's dirty toenails in search of nail clippers, her hand brushes a piece of paper stuffed in a dog collar on her husband's dresser. It all comes back: that night at Weight Watchers, when she had accidentally left her phone on. And it rang.

Lucy went into the reception area to answer the frantic call from her husband. Their dog was lost. She had to come home immediately to console a trembling daughter while he went back to the park to search, in the November darkness, for their sweet brown dog, who took off after a fox.

She rounded up her mother, and the two left he meeting quietly. No one was at the house when they arrived home, so her mother continued on toward the park. At the bottom of the hill, Lucy saw a scene she would replay in her mind often over the next two years: her husband walking slowly and silently across Harford Road, the street lights casting his shadow long and wide, the dog, lit up like an angel, lifeless across his arms.

Lucy got out of the car before it had come to a complete stop, ran to the side of the road, and collapsed under the crush of fresh grief. Passers-by, if they didn't know already, would now learn the sound that unconditional love makes when it collides with death. Lucy's tortured sobs bounced off the trees and road signs. Cars slowed to watch the two as they attempted to wake their dog with noise and tears, tried to love him back to life.

She blamed her husband a little then but doesn't blame him now. She knows that the will of a dog on the trail of a fox is a hard one to quell with obedience-school commands.

And now, her daughter's dirty feet lead her to this, to the discovery of a note she had not seen until now: "tried to save him—saw him hit—(410) 889-xxxx."

Lucy Kaplan returns to the bathroom with a pair of clippers and a bucket of tears.

-----

A girl and her father walk their dogs at 5:00 p.m. every evening in Herring Run Park. In mid-November, one of the dogs catches sight of a fox and chases it through the woods while the father commands the dog to stop then calls his name repeatedly. The little girl panics.

After an hour of searching in the darkness, the man takes his daughter home and calls his wife at her meeting.

He drops the child off at a neighbor's house and returns to the park, this time taking a different route. On the way, he finds the dog, lying dead on the bridge. Someone has moved it out of the street and stuffed a note in its collar: "tried to save him—saw him hit—(410) 889-xxxx."

As he carries the dog across the street, his wife arrives. The couple sits with their pet by the side of the road, sobbing, as cars roll slowly by.