Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [24]
I asked, “Do you guys feel differently from your friends because you’re adopted?”
“Not at all,” said Dan.
“Yeah, sometimes I do,” Noah said.
“Really?” I asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “How do you feel differently?”
“Well, sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if we hadn’t been adopted.”
Dan immediately reached across the backseat and punched Noah in his left shoulder. “Well, for one thing,” Dan said, “you’d have been Thaddeus and I’d have been Basil.”
This cracked the ice as the moodiness dissolved in laughter.
Before I became a father, I relished my solitude. At the start of Labor Day weekend of the boys’ senior year of high school, our plans to go to the Jersey shore to relax and shut down the house there were interrupted when an unexpected preschool project came up that required Noah to stay home. As Dan did not want to go without Noah, and Jennifer felt uncomfortable leaving them both alone, I went by myself.
My folks had bought the place back in the mid-1960s. It is a three-bedroom cottage, the smallest house on our end of the island and one of only two houses on the block that remain from the day they moved in. Since they had sold the house I grew up in thirty-five years ago, the shore house had become the repository of a lot of memories. I started spending time there as a junior in high school, and the summer freedom it represented had always been an integral part of my life.
Now I was uncomfortable being there alone.
Closing down the shore house always causes me to wonder about what will have happened in my life before we reopen it for the next summer. Seeing one of Oogy’s chew toys in the living room made palpable the tenuous hold we have on what is dear to us. This was the start of the boys’ final year at home, and image after image of them kaleidoscoped before me: running, laughing, standing on the rock jetty as the surf exploded around them, digging holes in the sand, making sand castles, cavorting in the surf with Jennifer. I remembered putting them in the car when they were toddlers and driving around so they would fall asleep. I saw them on the jetty as a storm rolled in, each wearing one of my hooded sweatshirts that reached to their ankles. I could see and hear them playing outside as they showered off the sand before coming into the house. I recalled my mom making us dinner, remembered putting them to sleep on the sofa bed, relived the smell of the clean sheets and the scent of their skin. I could see their sun blond hair, feel the heat of their bodies. They appeared before me, utterly exhausted, suspended in the sleep of the pure.
I had been part of an instrument of joy for them, and it made me feel complete. Laughter resounded within these walls, like distant thunder. It was still so odd for me to contemplate, after all that had happened in my life: How lucky was I?
CHAPTER 4
Doors
two months after the boys turned twelve, in January 2002, Buzzy, our black-and-white cat, began dying, an irreversible decline. It was like watching a slow-motion movie of a car crash without the power to alter the ending.
I had worked hard his entire life at keeping him alive. We had rescued Buzz when he was only five weeks old, and at the time no one thought he would survive. He had infections in both eyes and was so flea-ridden that we ended up having to hire an exterminator to bomb the house to get rid of the infestation. He weighed so little that we could have mailed him with a first-class stamp. He was not even the cat I had wanted. I had envisioned a white cat with black spots, and Buzz was the inverse of that. The first time I picked him up at the animal rescue, he climbed onto my shoulder and went to sleep, purring away as if he were being paid to be cute. To this day I do not