"On the way to the ultrasound, news came on the radio about a dog attack": a short story by Wellington writer Pip Robertson
The last baby I held was a stranger. I was walking home from work and saw her in the distance, crawling along the footpath. I guessed it was a girl from the pink outfit. She was completely on her own. It’s a quiet street, nice houses, and I kept expecting someone to appear and swoop her up into their arms. But by the time I got close, there was still no one around. She’d navigated the kerb and was in the gutter, heading onto the road. I couldn’t just leave a baby on the street. I picked her up and went door to door. There was no answer at the first two. At the third, a boy, maybe seven years old, opened the door and looked startled to see the baby in my arms, her hands still clutching soggy leaves from the gutter.
“Is this your sister?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You might want to keep her inside,” I said. I gave him the baby and left.
I hadn’t known Dan back then, and the solo baby had never come up in conversation. We’d been seeing each other for a few months, in a happy, meandering kind of way. We didn’t orbit one another. There had been no grand declaration, no big conversation about our shared future. So when I told him I was pregnant I didn’t anticipate his joy. He grabbed me, hugged me.
He paused, sat back a little, gathered himself.
“From that time when—”
“Yeah, must be.”
“And how are you feeling about it?”
I told him about finding the baby on the street, and tried to explain. When I met friends’ new babies, my standard line was: can it do anything interesting yet? It was meant as a kind of joke but also a kind of warning. When holding a baby couldn’t be avoided, like that time on the street, I felt like a chimpanzee dressed up to perform a tea party. My actions were imitation void of instinct. It felt unnatural and therefore absurd.
“I compare that to dogs,” I said. “I’ve always wanted a dog. I’ve always liked other people’s dogs. When my offer was accepted on this house the first thing I did was go to the dog shelter website. I’d adopted Lady before I even had a fridge. A kid has never been part of my plan.”
But it turned out that a kid had always been part of his. Whatever I chose to do, he told me he’d understand. He came from a big family, reassured me that he knew his way around babies, that he was happy to be the one to stay home, happy to be the one to get up in the night. I could trust him.
“I’ve seen how you are with Lady. You’ll be a great mother. Our baby isn’t going to be picked up crawling along the street.”
That hadn’t been the point of the story.
Just because a chimpanzee could make a cup of tea, that didn’t mean it should.
Things are good the way they are, I wanted to say. Why change?
But they already had.
Dan moved in. It was better than I expected. He hummed as he moved about the house, unpacking. It was a happy and industrious sound. I liked the way he greeted Lady when he arrived home. He asked her how she was in a conversational tone, like she might actually answer. I didn’t believe in preparing food that took longer to cook than eat. Dan didn’t have this rule, and it expanded meal options considerably. Less cereal, for instance. More risottos.
Before I was pregnant, I had been a runner, out with Lady every morning. As the weeks passed, I didn’t feel sick, but I did feel tired. I gave up setting my alarm only to snooze it, and went for walks with her in the evening, instead. We did a loop of the reserve, ending at the dog park. If it was empty, I let Lady run off the lead, but if other dogs were there we didn’t stop. She made people nervous.
Lady’s online profile had said she was a gentle giant. When I went to get her, she really was massive. Her ears had been clipped and tail docked – a home job, from the looks of it. She had a scar like a lightning bolt across her shoulders. None of this had been obvious in the online photo. The volunteer said that all the staff loved her, but she’d been there for months because her looks put people off. As he said that, Lady had raised a paw and rested it gently on my leg. Well played, girl, I had thought, and filled in the adoption form.
One evening we were going past the dog park and there was a man playing fetch with a lanky black dog. Worth a try. I called out and asked the owner if I could let Lady off.
“Go for it,” he said.
Lady and the other dog loped around after each other while the man and I watched, calling out occasional words of encouragement.
“Rescue dog?” he said to me.
“Yeah.”
“Same. That’s Moses,” he said, nodding at his dog.
“Lady,” I said.
“She’s a beauty,” he said. In the three years I’d had Lady, this was the first compliment from a stranger. I felt foolishly proud and grateful.
It became a regular thing, seeing Moses and the man at the dog park. We didn’t talk much, and when we did it was only about our dogs. I learned about Moses’ habits, food intolerances, favourite chew toys, but nothing about the man. I didn’t share anything about myself, either. It was like a tacit agreement that our own lives were off limits. I guessed the man was older than me by a couple of decades, but I didn’t know his name, where he lived, whether he worked or was retired, whether he had family or was alone – all were blanks. He had an air of authority, like he was used to a place being his domain. But you could have told me he was a high court judge or a high school caretaker, and either would have been plausible.
On the way to the ultrasound, news came on the radio about a dog attack. It had leapt over a fence into a garden where a toddler was playing. She was undergoing surgery for bites to her hands and face. The owner had never seen his dog display aggression before and had given up the dog to be destroyed.
“They should just say killed,” I said. “Destroyed sounds like they dissolve it in acid or something.”
“What are we going to do about Lady when the baby arrives?” Dan said.
“Teach the baby to ride her like a horse?”
“I’m serious. You told me the shelter said she isn’t safe around children.”
“No, they said she couldn’t be adopted by people with children or other pets, which is their policy for any big dog whose history they don’t know.”
“Exactly. So, we need to think about it.”
“They also said not to worry, because Lady doesn’t have an aggro bone in her body. And I said it made no difference to me, because I had no kids and no plans for that to change.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. This had come out of nowhere. Dan liked Lady. I wouldn’t have considered anyone who didn’t.
In the darkened room the technician slid the scanner over my stomach back and forth, back and forth, like she was trying to find a barcode. The ultrasound pictures looked more meteorological than human, even when the technician pointed out a flicker and told me it was a heart.
I held off telling people. Then, when I did, I received warmer congratulations for this accident than for anything I’d actually worked for in my life. I endured some birth stories, and advice about newborns, and a video of a colleague’s three-month-old rolling over. It was effortful and inelegant. I didn’t know how I was meant to react. Amusement? Pity?
“Amazing,” I said.
One of Dan’s sisters was full of facts.
“Did you know that a mother’s stress levels during pregnancy can have a lifelong effect on their child’s tooth enamel?”
“Amazing,” I said.
My torso itched as it grew. I lay on the sofa, rubbing coconut oil into my stretching skin. Lady lay next to me, also on her back, waiting so she could have a belly rub too. I sang to her in the way that she liked, and she joined in with her whiney little barks. I looked up to see Dan watching us from the doorway.
“You two,” he said, and smiled.
But that afternoon I found a list of dog attack statistics he’d put on the fridge, next to the card with the next midwife appointment. I put it in the bin.
The day after I had found the solo baby crawling down the road, I had told people at work about it, expecting them, like me, to find it odd and funny. But they were shocked by both the baby and my response. They asked why I didn’t ask to talk to the parents, or at least make sure an adult was there.
“You’ll feel different when you have your own,” someone had said in a tone that was meant to both reassure and excuse me. “Your instincts will change. This maternal urge to protect – it just takes over.”
I remember being impatient for the time when people would no longer assume that a baby was waiting in my future. Only few more years, I had thought.
I ran a bath and as I lay back in the water I started to cry. The tears came from nowhere. I hadn’t even felt sad. The coconut oil was a greasy film on the surface. My stomach rose from the water like a fleshy island.
A couple with four pugs came to the edge of the dog park. They retreated when they saw Moses and Lady.
“Good riddance,” Moses’ owner muttered.
“You know them?”
“I can’t abide people who get brachycephalic dog breeds.”
“What breeds?”
“Ones with squashed faces. They’re rife with medical issues. You look at a photo of those dogs from a hundred years ago and they were fine looking animals. They’ve been bred to become caricatures. It’s the equivalent of setting out to have a baby with dwarfism and obstructed airways, simply because you like the way it looks.”
Because we only talked about dogs, I couldn’t tell if Moses’ owner was generally knowledgeable, or only about dogs.
“If there is a reckoning, humans are going to have a lot to answer for,” he said.
Also, whether he was religious.
I made the mistake of watching the sad vet tv show. The vet isn’t sad; the vet is handsome. But all the animal stories, even the ones that end well, are engineered to make you cry. Dan came in as the credits rolled. I had my arms around Lady and was sobbing into her neck. She sighed under my weight.
“Can I do something?” Dan asked. “Get you something? Tea?”
At the antenatal class the women sat in small groups to talk about our birth plans. The men were in another room.
“There is no right or wrong, and no obligation,” the woman leading the class said. “This is purely an opportunity if you’d like to share.”
In my group there was a waterbirth, and a homebirth. The third woman said she was planning a lotus birth.
“Is that in water?” I asked.
“No, it’s when you keep the afterbirth attached.”
The others were nodding, but I didn’t understand.
“Attached to what?”
“The baby. When the baby’s born you don’t cut the cord, so the placenta is still attached. You wrap it and keep it with the baby, until it naturally detaches after a week or so.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a link back to the mother’s body. It eases the trauma of being born, helps them transition. There are studies. You should look into it.”
“I don’t think I could do the lotus thing,” another woman said, “but we’re going to bury the afterbirth and plant a native in the earth. How about you?”
The group’s attention turned to me.
I went out with a guy at university who called the mess that was left on your plate when you were eating nachos and ran out of corn chips ‘the afterbirth’. Before the antenatal classes that was my main association with the word.
“Not sure,” I said. “I was thinking, maybe feed it to my dog?”
Two women frowned, but the other one nodded. No one took it as the joke I intended.
A resolutely childless friend called. I had been avoiding her, thinking that she would be disappointed in me. We met at a Thai place. Her choice. I scanned the menu for whatever would give me the least heartburn. She drank wine in a provocative, showy way.
“I tried IVF, you know,” she said after two courses of small talk.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Three rounds. Didn’t work. I mean, obviously.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea that you wanted a baby.”
“Well, no. You’re not always the easiest person to talk to, are you?”
At home, on the sad vet show, twin girls were burying their pet rabbit. They had woken to it dragging its back legs, and the tumour was inoperable. Even the good-looking vet was teary-eyed. I didn’t stand a chance.
My friend sent me a message, saying sorry if she came across a bit, you know.
Not at all! I wrote back.
Dan was at the kitchen table, watching a video by an American Navy Seal on how to survive a dog attack. He had headphones on, but I didn’t need the audio – the messages played in all caps across the screen: protect your major arteries; punch, kick, gouge; fight with vengeance.
“Really?” I said loudly, “Vengeance?”
Dan jumped and snapped his laptop shut.
“Do you find me easy to talk to?” I asked him.
He shook his head – not saying no, saying that he was not going to answer.
I walked like I was steadying myself against rolling waves. I could feel when the baby got hiccups. It kicked up under my ribs and pressed into the small of my back. Some of its movements made my belly bulge, horror-movie style.
My midwife said I was doing beautifully. Beautifully.
I had never told Moses’ owner that I was pregnant. Even as it became more and more obvious, it still went unmentioned. We watched our dogs take off after an old tennis ball like it was a prize, chomping at tufts of grass so they could drink the dew off them. It was a baby-free respite in my day.
One day he told me that he was thinking of getting another dog.
“Moses is old enough to be patient with a young dog, but not so old as to get irritated. Just something to mull over at this stage.”
That was the closest we ever got to an opening to talk about expanding families. If it was meant as a prompt, I didn’t take it.
A woman in Virginia was killed by her dogs while walking in the woods. A friend of the woman was publicly incredulous. “Those two dogs would kill you with kisses,” she said. She criticised the investigation and posited her own theories about how her friend had died. The Goochland Country Sherriff held a press conference to confirm the dogs’ culpability. He had personally seen them chewing on the woman’s ribcage.
I couldn’t point to Goochland on a map, but I know this story because Dan emailed it to me at work with the subject line ‘We need to talk’.
“Lady is not about to attack us,” I said that night.
“It’s not us that I’m worried about,” he said. “Dogs can be unpredictable, and we don’t know how a baby might provoke her.”
“So you’re forcing me to get rid of my dog, is that it?”
Dan floundered, like I knew he would. It wasn’t in his nature to force anyone to do anything.
“No. I mean, I don’t know.” He swallowed, sighed. “Lady’s a great dog and you love her, I get that. But any aggression, she goes. Can we agree on that?”
“Fine,” I said. “Fine, fine, fine.”
The pug people were at the park when Lady and I arrived. I was going to keep walking, but Lady was whining in the way that meant she wanted to play. I kept her on the lead and walked towards them, thinking there was no harm in asking. But, as we approached, they gathered up their dogs, one under each arm, and hurried away. Perhaps they thought Lady’s tail and ears and scar were my doing, but even so.
“You’re the cruel ones,” I yelled after them.
And there were the tears, again.
I was standing outside the supermarket with Lady, waiting for Dan, when a freckled boy came over. His mother had a push chair and was loading shopping bags into a car nearby.
“What’s its name?” the boy asked.
“Lady.”
“Lady’s not a dog’s name.”
The boy didn’t touch Lady, but jerked his hand up and down over her head, like it was a ball he was pretending to bounce.
“Please don’t,” I said but he kept going. Lady’s eyes widened. Her neck bristled in a way I had never seen before.
“Excuse me, can you get your son,” I called out to the boy’s mother, but she was leaning into her car, strapping a baby into a seat. I went to leave, but as I stepped away Lady lunged at the boy, snarling and snapping, lips curled back, all teeth. The boy stumbled backwards and started to cry.
The mother ran over, grabbed her boy asking him over and over if he was hurt, checking his arms and legs. I was holding Lady back by the collar, my hands shaking, heart racing. I tried to apologise and explain that Lady hadn’t touched him. From inside the car, the baby started to wail. Lady whined, and I could feel her body coiled, ready.
“What are you doing?” the mother yelled. “Get that dog away from us!”
That set Lady off again, barking and straining on the end of the lead. For a moment I thought I wouldn’t be able to hold her, then Dan was beside me, grabbing Lady by the collar, and pulling her away.
We didn’t talk as we walked home. Lady padded along beside us like nothing had happened. I felt sick, but didn’t cry until I was inside.
“That kid was an idiot,” I said.
Dan hugged me.
“Our kid might be an idiot,” he said.
One last walk. Moses was at the dog park. He and Lady ran in loops.
“Windy,” his owner said.
“Yep.”
I could imagine it. The dogs would be confused at first. It would take some time to work out who would sleep where, who would eat first, but with time they would do everything side by side. Lady might not ever completely lose that expectation that I would come back. Perhaps she would wait by the door in those first days, and perhaps it would become a habit even as I became hazy in her mind. But the man would be patient. The man would be kind.
I was too ashamed to ask. Each time the words stuck in my throat.
“Well, we’re off,” the man said, and whistled for Moses. Lady trotted along with them for a bit like she always did, before turning around and running back to me.
*
People describe it as a fog. A fog would have been welcome. It would mean things were present, just obscured. But those first weeks with a baby my mind felt like a desert: parched and empty.
The midwife corrected me when I talked about my daughter’s paws.
“You mean her hands.”
She did it again at the last visit when I said something about the baby’s front legs. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Her arms. On a baby they’re arms.”
I knew that, of course I knew that. But she wasn’t like any human I had ever known.
True to his word, Dan was willing to do anything.
“Let me know if you need me to take her,” he said, repeatedly. “Any time.”
But the baby shrieked when he picked her up. She cried plenty with me, but with him it was next level: limbs rigid, face red, like his touch actually burned her. He tried, hoping that she would get accustomed to him, but he had nothing to offer her. I was her food. She wanted to sleep on me or not at all. I was her world.
Can she do anything interesting yet?
She smiles, sometimes. Does smiling count?
A break in the weather. I put the baby in the front pack, and walked to the park. My body still felt soft and elastic and weak. I eased myself to sitting, with my back against a tree trunk. I was in view of a playground, and a woman pushing a kid on a swing that creaked like a bad violin.
The baby stirred. I undid the straps and lifted her out. She was fussing in that way that sometimes turned into crying and could sometimes be placated.
“What do you want, baby? What do you want?”
She looked at the spring leaves, moving bright and fresh above us, and reached her hands up towards them. I wanted that to be the thing that calmed her. I wanted to be able to go home and tell Dan that I had found a solution: go and sit under a tree! But her sight was still developing. I couldn’t even be sure that the leaves were in her field of vision.
Between us and the playground, I saw a familiar pair: tall black dog with a ball in his mouth, and the man in the same jacket he always wore.
“Moses!” I called out. His big shaggy head turned in my direction.
The man saw me. I waved and sat up, trying to move the baby back into the front pack and quickly do up all the straps so I could go over to them.
Dan had said that once the baby arrived I wouldn’t even notice that Lady was gone. But I did notice. I missed the way she shadowed me around the house. I missed the gentle clack of her claws on the wooden floor. I missed walking with her beside me, and how with the slightest pressure on the lead she would pause and turn back to me and wait for my instruction, her face full of pleasure at us simply being alive together.
The man saw me and grabbed Moses by the collar before he could move. The man recognised me – seeing his face there was no doubt about that. He said nothing, turned and walked away in the direction of the dog park, didn’t look back.
