A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

my house.
    It has been almost three years since Rich's accident. I bought this house, which is only twenty minutes from where he lives. As sometimes happens with traumatic brain injury, Rich has slipped into premature dementia. I don't know what he remembers of our old life, the places we lived, the conversations we had, the routines. It's hard for me to remember what we were like before the accident, the years since have been harrowing, Rich in and out of psychosis, terrible paranoias, rages, the kinds of things brain injury sets in motion. He is calm now, he has settled comfortably into his skin, often he is merry, the rages flown, the terrors abated. Our conversations don't always make sense but they are wonderful. "You squeezed all those colors from fruit," Rich observed the other day. I was knitting a scarf out of red and purple wool. "Yes, I did," I agreed. He speaks sometimes of the "knitting lady" and the "other Abby," and if I tell him there's only one Abby and I am here right now, "Yes," he will say, then add gently, "but there's the other Abby too." And what do I know? Maybe I do have some shadowy doppelgänger in a corner of the room, or down the hall.
    Doppelgängers, ghosts, my mind has always been open, which is part of the problem. Starting with the gorilla I was convinced lurked in the streets of Saint Paul when I was eleven (despite the twenty-foot snowdrifts), I've had irrational fears all my life. Back in Minnesota my father had to stand on our back porch and Mrs. Rice on her back porch, while I made the dash home after an evening of Monopoly with my friend Karen, shouting all the way. One summer Rich and I rented a small cabin in the woods of Maine—"as far from anyone else as we can get, I don't want to see another house" was my absurd criterion. It was terrible. There wasn't another living soul. When the old gent who rented us the place told us reassuringly that in thirty years there had only been one break-in "but all they took was the ax," I wanted to leave immediately. We stayed. Every night I stared at the ceiling and waited for the footfall that would herald our bloody execution. It didn't help that there were millions of daddy longlegs all over the living room and the walls were decorated with farm tools of the kind you don't want to have an accident with. It didn't help that the book I had naively brought was
The Silence of the Lambs.
Rich wasn't scared. He tried to be helpful, but he just wasn't scared. We left a day early anyway, Rich gamely driving through the worst rainstorm in the history of the world just to get me back to good old, safe old New York City. From then on I was not a candidate for a freestanding house in the country. People next to me and over me and under me, that was the natural way to live. Millions of people everywhere.
    Yet here I am. Nowadays if I see the attic light on when I'm outside at night with my dogs, I simply do not look up again. This doesn't even require willpower. I have a choice: go crazy with the fear or get a grip. The image of a small creature hunched up in what I imagined to be a crawl space, eating peanut butter sandwiches and dropping the crusts might give me a turn, but I am able to put it out of my head. The next morning I find which switch controls the attic light (something I hadn't known) and turn it off. I also make it my business to go with a friend into the attic for the first time. We pull down the stairs, walk around, and I see it isn't a crawl space and there are no gargoyles, and realize it is better to see the attic than to not see the attic. There have been lots of other odd noises. First there were the wind chimes that went off with no wind, a whole bunch of them on the screened porch. I was loath to take them down lest I continue to hear them, but my youngest daughter, annoyed to tears by their incessant tinkling, cut them down willy-nilly and we haven't been troubled since. Then there was the banging that woke me and the dogs