Better than Words

She was so small when I brought her home that she couldn't even go up the high threshold at the back door. It took me a while to realize that she was hesitating before entering the house not because she was afraid or shy but because she just couldn't make it. Either she needed a running start to clear the "hurdle," or she'd jump from the step below and get stranded half-way so I'd have to pick her up and bring her inside.

Over the three weeks she spent with me, she cracked my heart and mended it many times, and all that without a single word.

There was this one time when I took her out to pee, and she fell from my arms. She was wriggling too much for some reason, and before I had a chance to lower her and put her gently on the ground, she slipped out and hit the concrete in front of the back door. She fell on her right side and remained motionless for a few seconds, enough to scare me into thinking that she'd hurt her leg. She just kept looking up at me, not moving. I crouched a couple of meters away, snapped my fingers and called her, "Zara, come here, girl, come on, doggy!" She stood up and tried to run towards me, but her right leg hurt and she lifted it up for a second, then limped a few steps, and finally sat down again, all the time looking at me with this strange mixture of frowning accusation for having let her fall, and sincere sadness that she was letting me down and not running to me. Something inside me contracted, and died a little. Long after it turned out that it was just a bruise and that she could run and frolic around the yard as usual only a few minutes later, I had that strangely eloquent, accusing and apologizing look lodged in my mind, like a fishbone stuck in the throat.

One of Zara's little gestures that I fell in love with unconditionally was a gentle touch of her muzzle against the inside of my knee; it was her way of checking that everything was alright, of reminding me that she was there, of touching base. Like that time when she accidentally made the CD player come crashing to the floor. She was playing around the stereo system, and as she was moving away, she didn't see the cord of the CD player on top of the tower, pulled it, and wreaked havoc when it hit the floor and continued to emit small explosions of noise as she dragged it around, trying to run away from it in fright and panic. In two steps I was there, disentagled her from the cord, and while I was putting the CD player back to its place, she came softly from behind, and brushed her nose gingerly against the inside of my knee, apologizing, saying she didn't mean to do it, checking to see if I was mad at her. My heart swelled, and, had there been a gust of wind, it would have lifted us both off the ground, like a happy balloon.

Two days ago at work, two weeks after Zara went back, I was filling the old, chipped tea-pot that Judy gave me to use as a watering can for our office plants, when Patrick from an office a few doors down the corridor from ours showed up. Relaxed after the end of our classes, feeling the end-of-term whiff in the air, we chit-chatted for a few minutes; he told me about a very clever but very troubling student in one of his classes, whose mother wouldn't accept that her daughter may be having a behaviour problem... I nodded, and even recalled one or two similar cases from my own experience -- but during our entire conversation my eyes were fixed on the round, brown birthmark on Patrick's left cheek, and all I could think of was "Zara had a round hairless scar in the exact same spot on her left cheek..."