who took Bax to the park. And even when Sebastian did, he didn’t often talk to the owners of Baxter’s dog buddies like I did. Sebastian was intent on quality time with the dog, throwing Baxy’s ball over and over, then having him sit and stay for minutes on end before he could retrieve it. He taught Baxter tricks that his father had taught their family golden retrievers over the years. We got the dog shortly after his dad died.
So it seemed obvious to me that Sebastian could continue to do those things in another park. I hadn’t expected him to miss the park that we went to, as he apparently did. But I guess change is tough for everyone, even a tough guy like Sebastian.
He stood. “I should go.”
I knew better than to ask when he’d return, because I knew the answer. When I have the story. That’s what he always said.
I used to think, Why aren’t we your story? I want to be your story.
We had made a plan—move from New York, where we were living at the time, to Chicago (his hometown) where he would work as a regular journalist. It “worked” for a little while. A year or so. But ultimately Sebastian couldn’t stop. He couldn’t explain why, but he had to be the correspondent who crossed enemy lines in the middle of the night. I encouraged him to let me in. Keep the job, I’d said. I’d get used to worrying about him, I’d told him. That was okay. But bring me into the fold, tell me what you do, what you feel when you’re there, how I can support you when you’re here.
He decided that it would be breaking confidences and so he couldn’t tell me—not about the stories he was covering, where he was covering them or who he was covering them with. I could read the pieces in the paper, usually a day or two ahead of everyone else. So I would know then, for example, that he’d been in Afghanistan, embedded with a navy SEAL team that took out a top-level terrorist. I would also read the byline and see that he sometimes had cowriters. But he couldn’t fill in any blanks. He couldn’t answer questions. And if the story had been killed and never published, he couldn’t give me any clues. Or he wouldn’t. Same thing.
His inability showed me the gaps in our relationship. I had to decide if I could live with the not knowing, the having to make a leap of faith to trust him, when the fact was I knew little about how my husband spent his professional life. And, therefore, much of his life.
I decided I couldn’t do that. Or maybe I just couldn’t live with the disappointment of not having the kind of love I wanted. I’d thought that with Sebastian I’d had the kind of love my parents had, the kind I’d felt once before. But neither turned out to be true. And eventually, with Sebastian, the ball I’d been pushing uphill for so long started to roll back over me.
Now I looked at Sebastian, said nothing, just stared into his eyes, and some bigger strength kicked in. I was past that, I told myself. I was way past it, and I was past him.
I’d started my life over once before. And under much, much, much worse circumstances. I knew I could do it again. I could survive.
Neither of us said anything. But I felt a joint sense of tiredness. We’re done.
“Okay,” I said, just to say something.
When Sebastian didn’t reply, the moment of pause gave me time to make a decision. I decided then I wasn’t just going to survive. I was going to thrive. I was going to come alive.
Right now. Those words intoned through me.
And suddenly it seemed clear what I had to do right then, how I had to conduct myself going forward. There would be no more seeing life as an endurance exercise. No more considering dates just because a software program told me I should. I wouldn’t just react to Sebastian or the lack of him. I would stop seeing everything as a reminder of the lives past. I would open my eyes and see things differently.
I would be different.
“Have a good trip,” I said, and I opened the door.
After Sebastian left, I put Bax in the gold-starred blue collar, clipped on the matching leash, and Baxter and I took a come-to-Jesus walk. It was the kind of walk we needed in order to get reacquainted after a week apart, in order to become Jess and Baxter again. Such walks were usually long and meandering, often around favorite places like the Lincoln Park Lagoon or the beach, but always landing at the dog park. Once we came back from such a walk, Bax and I always returned to normal. To get Baxter acquainted to the neighborhood again, I first walked Baxter down State Street, cutting up and around Goethe, Burton and Astor, letting him stop and sniff every wrought iron fence and bountiful bush that he wanted. It was a gorgeous summer day, one that was warm but not unbearable as the previous three weeks had been. Instead of huddling in air-conditioned rooms (or coffee shops or bars) everyone was outside. This was the same route Sebastian and I used to take when we first got Baxter. It was hard not to think of that time.
The decision to get a puppy had been carefully debated, test-driven. We had long thought we’d get a shelter dog. We had volunteered at rescues, had run 5K races to raise money for no-kill facilities. We regularly visited adoption places in Chicago. We dogsat and read dog books and frequented dog parks. In the end, we fell in love with the idea of a goldendoodle (no shed, hypoallergenic) and a mini one. Sebastian pointed out that a dog under twenty pounds could travel with us. We could travel. That’s what he’d said. We. And we decided we wanted a puppy, a brand-new being in the brand-new world we were creating. Or trying to create.
So we investigated every breeder. We visited many. We called people who’d gotten puppies from them before. It felt, joyously, like Sebastian and I were working together on one of his stories.
The day we got him felt so alive in my memory, I could almost touch it when I closed my eyes. A responsibility never felt so good before—the responsibility of deciding to take custody of a new creature, a new ball of life energy, and pledging to care for it.
We decided I would take the wheel during the three-hour drive to Indiana. Sebastian would drive the return trip while I rode with the puppy in the back, which the breeder had recommended for bonding.
We’d already been once to the breeder’s farm, run by a young family, with a red barn behind the house. So it wasn’t a surprise to walk in that house in the middle of winter and see two litters of squirming golden fluff. But what was different was that one would be ours. Ours. I loved that word.
Sebastian and I clasped hands tight as the breeder led us to the eight-week-old litter in the back—six dogs, four females and two males, one of whom was soon to be (that word again) ours.
The breeder was in her late thirties with curly copper hair that matched some of the dogs in her barn. She smiled over her shoulder at us. “Ready?”
She opened an octagon-shaped enclosure that held the litter and quickly waved a hand. “Get in before one gets out.”
We were rushed by puppies—scraps of panting aliveness crawling over us, their faces peering up at ours, pink tongues darting at our chins.
“How are we going to decide?” Sebastian asked. He laughed then, as a red-goldish puppy climbed up and stuck her tongue in Sebastian’s nose.
The hour we spent in that pen was a different world in a different time. We were suspended in between our old lives and our new, and we both knew it.
While all the
