Part Six: The Question
Carolyn had not planned to adopt a dog. She had come to the shelter with the specific, qualified intention of finding a companion for Mia, and she had specific, qualified parameters: a dog that was manageable, gentle, patient, suitable for a child with a visual impairment. A dog that would be a good match.
She had not planned for this particular dog.
But she was a woman who had spent eight years learning to be the parent her daughter needed rather than the parent she had imagined being, and one of the things she had learned was the difference between the plan and the right response. The plan said: manageable, gentle, patient. The right response was in front of her, in the form of her daughter standing at a kennel with her hand extended and a dog on the other side of it who had, for the first time in eleven months, been quiet.
She had listened to Diane’s phone call — not the words, but the tone, the shifting quality of it. She had watched Dr. Singh’s examination. She had sat in the shelter’s small family waiting room with Mia and told her what the examination had found, and Mia had listened with the focused stillness she brought to information she was incorporating.
“He can’t see,” Mia said.
“Not well. Not anymore.”
“And that’s why he was scared.”
“Yes.”
Mia was quiet for a moment. “I know what that’s like,” she said. “When things come at you and you can’t tell what they are. It makes the startle worse.” She paused. “Because you can’t prepare.”
Carolyn looked at her daughter — eight years old, in the orange sweater she had chosen that morning by the feel of the knit, her dark hair in the braid that she had done herself because she had practiced until she could do it herself. She thought about the three years of watching Mia adapt, which was not the right word — not adapt, because adapt suggested the world was fixed and Mia was changing to fit it. Mia was not fitting herself to a fixed world. She was building a different relationship with the world, a deeper one in some ways, and the building was hard and was ongoing and was, Carolyn thought, one of the most extraordinary things she had ever witnessed.
“Would you want him?” Carolyn asked. Not leading — genuinely asking.
Mia thought about it. She did this with many things — held the question instead of rushing to answer, turned it over, let it settle. “I think,” she said slowly, “that he needs someone who won’t look at him the way everyone has been looking at him.” She paused. “And I’m probably the right person for that.”
