An Angel in Gray
“‘There’s a dog in the backyard,’ I call out nonchalantly, if only because I am in shock.”
It’s midday on a Friday in late May, but through the window over the doctor’s shoulder, there are no beams of Oakland sunshine tumbling through. The sun is hidden behind a thick veil of gray clouds. My memory recalls the chill of the wind that cut through my thin shirt on the sidewalk from the car. The doctor’s words elicit much the same reaction.
She is the epitome of what we looked for in a fertility doctor. She is equal parts warm, kind, empathetic, brilliant, curious, confident, humble, and truthful. Her words slip delicately around any sort of defensive skepticism that my mind has erected. My brain has decided to trust her implicitly, which makes her words that much more powerful and devastating. They wash over me and I understand them, but I do not hear them, as the volume in my ears has decreased, as if the air suddenly doubled in density.
There are words that never make it to my brain, but somehow I know what she is saying all the same. “Right ovary…one follicle left…left ovary…can’t see…can’t do egg retrieval…fibroids too large…needs MRI…needs surgery…time is critical…small chance…need to prepare…for the worst…I’m sorry.” At some point, I put my hand on my wife’s and try to read between the lines of the calm and steady look on her face. I can tell things are serious as I watch her brilliant medical mind process the onslaught calmly and efficiently. The odds of us having a baby that is biologically ours is fading by the second. As the doctor continues to talk, I find that my hand is now on my other hand, repetitively tracing the skin wrapped around the small bones and veins, desperately trying to anchor my senses in the here and now, to keep me moored to the dock as the wind picks up and waves of panic start to come thicker and faster.
If you’ve seen Ted Lasso, then you’ve seen what the beginning of a panic attack might look like. For Ted, the volume drops out and his ears start to ring violently. I cannot attest to my ears ringing, although my tinnitus ensures my ears are always ringing, so it’s possible that the effect is simply lost on me. I do however feel the volume in the air start to drop, like it does back home when a bad storm is about to come thundering over the ocean. Thankfully, I’ve learned some techniques to ride it out, like the seagulls that bunch up in tight formation on the water to ride out the squall. The texture trick is one of the very oldest, developed when I was a small boy, before I could even spell the word anxiety. Even still, this is a battle that I am losing badly.
Thankfully, the doctor is every bit the doctor we were hoping for. She grabs the paper that she’s been using to illustrate the severity of our circumstances and very soon after, we have a four step plan and a clear starting point. A few moments later, I’m able to go to the bathroom and compose myself. Crisis averted, I think, a small victory for the moment even if defeat looms large and menacing over our heads. We spend the short ride home coming to terms with what we’ve just been told. My wife cries for the first of many times, lamenting that we won’t have a baby that looks like her and like me. I’ll do the same a little later on the phone with my best friend. I tell him that maybe I deserve this bitter disappointment, but that she certainly does not. My wife messages her vast support system and everyone reaches out. I feel stunned, hollow, helpless, as the rest of the day meanders on. Thankfully, the sun has finally come out, but it finds us broken and bewildered.
A little later, we try our best to make a baby, a Hail Mary for the last follicle on the right, which her hormones tell us is almost at peak fertility. We’re trying desperately to hold onto the last few rays of hope that are steadily dipping beneath the horizon. A friend’s birthday party brings some welcome distraction and I’m thankful for the mishmash of weird, wonderful people that make up the tribe we have been accepted to. A beautiful soul hugs me for as long as I hold on to him and I do so for a very long time. The next day, my wife and I alternate between crying and laughing. Even in great pain, she is somehow more beautiful to me than the day I met her. I agonize over my impotence to change the situation. There are moments where I hold her. Moments later, she is holding me. I’m thankful that this is how we cope with difficult situations, by turning inward instead of against each other. We both marvel at how much we’ve endured in our relatively short relationship.
We were supposed to go to another birthday party, but news of a positive COVID test for one of the family members changes our plans. I find myself existing but not really being. I am here, but yet I feel far away. Everything feels surreal, like a long, meandering dream I’ve been thrown into the middle of, my brain trying its best to make sense of everything that came before and continues to come after. My wife is in the bathroom as I walk into the kitchen and look through the open doorway to the backyard. At the screen door, I see a large, gray and tan Husky.
At first, my brain accepts this without a second thought. Suddenly, I remember that Maya, our extremely anxious and reactive dog, is also in the back yard. I rush to the doorway to see Maya gently licking this strange, new animal. The other dog stands there calmly, unbothered by Maya girl’s smaller presence. They lay down next to each other. “There’s a dog in the backyard,” I call out nonchalantly, if only because I am in shock. My wife doesn’t understand me.
“What,” she asks.
“There’s a dog in the backyard and Maya is just hanging out with her.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I’m being totally serious, come look.”
My wife comes to see if I’ve completely lost it. She’s as shocked at the sight as I am.
“How did she get back here,” she asks.
“She must have hopped the gate,” I hypothesize.
“Do you think it’s a sign,” we both muse.
We go to see this new, gray-furred angel that has apparently manifested in our backyard. She has a collar but no tag. A myriad of small green pods, which I call “hitchhikers,” to my wife’s amusement, are tangled into her otherwise clean fur. There’s blood on our back porch from her paws though and we’re worried that she’s hurt, so I call around until I find an animal hospital in Berkley. We sign up for an emergency wait list and take her over, postulating where she might have come from on the short drive to the vet.
A worker at the vet’s office scans her and finds a microchip. I brew a coffee while they track down her information. The dog is restless, tracking little bloody paw prints all over the tile floor. A little while later, the worker tells us the dog’s name is Looksaway. We all marvel at her funny name. The worker calls the listed phone number, but is only able to leave a message. We ask about next steps. They tell us that we can either take her home and wait for the owners to call or take her to the animal shelter in Oakland. I ask them about treating her, so they triage her, and determine that the blood we’re seeing from her paws is mostly dried. I apologize for the mess. I realize later that I’m apologizing as much for the mess I am as for the blood. The worker kindly tells me it’s no problem at all. We prepare to take Looksaway home, making plans to keep her for as long as needs be, until an owner shows up or we adopt her outright.
We’re turning onto the last street before ours when the phone rings. I frantic lady is on the other end. “Looks” apparently suffers from terrible separation anxiety and had escaped from a dog sitter at about nine o’clock in the morning. The lady asks how we found her.
“She just showed up in our backyard,” my wife says.
“She doesn’t really like people though,” the lady says, confused.
“Well, she was hanging out with our dog,” I say.
“Ah, that makes more sense. Looks isn’t a ‘people’ dog, she’s a ‘dog’ dog.” Maya however, is most certainly not, so it’s still a minor miracle, I think.
We tell her we can bring the dog home right away. Relieved, she tells us she is at work and her phone is about to die, so she gives us her daughter’s number to call when we get to the address. It’s two miles away in Oakland. We don’t know where the sitter was, but that explains the bloody paws and frayed nails. She had made the arduous journey to another city to find the people that meant the whole world to her.
Looks, laying down in the backseat, suddenly sits up when we get close to the address. The street is crowded and we have to go further down the block to find parking. Looks is still limping as we make our way back to the address, but as we get closer, she begins to pick up the pace. Part of me is sad, as this angel had seemed to be our sign that things would be alright. Now, we were returning her where she belonged, and with it, the brief hope she had buoyed. I call the number the frantic lady gave me for her daughter. A breathless young woman answers the phone. I tell her we’re here and she tells me she’ll be right there. Moments later, a gate opens and the overjoyed daughter sees Looks. They both sprint towards each other and embrace, melting any sadness I felt away.
A man comes through the gate next, his eyes full of joyful tears, asking us how we had found her. We told him the strange tale, starting from the kitchen, and he marvels that she made it to us in Emeryville. He breaks down as he tells us he’s been riding his bike around all afternoon trying to find her, before sprinting back into the house to get us a bottle of wine as a thank you gift. “I’m a collector, this one is really good,” he says. We thank him and he offers us another gift, telling us to come by the restaurant he owns and he’ll buy us breakfast. He is apologetic for any inconvenience. I tell him that the truth is that we had just received some bad news from the doctor and this sweet, gentle, gray angel had made our otherwise gloomy day a bit brighter. They both thank us again profusely. We say goodbye to our gray angel and wish them a great weekend.
Later that night, we try again to make a baby, this time less out of desperation, and more out of hope. We talk again, deciding that no matter how our kids come to us, through our own genes or by some other means, they will be magical and special, and they will be ours.
