Between Now and Then

Ellen walked her champion Golden Retriever into a side room off the main convention center floor for a quiet place to brush Amber one more time before her next competition. “Amber” was short for the beauty’s official name of “Amber Star of Dreams”, which was on her pedigree and all her competition records. Her coat was thick and long, and Amber’s physical beauty was made even more entrancing by her easy-going nature and clear love of being the center of attention. In the show ring, Amber smiled and turned her head toward the judges in a most beguiling way, but never so long that she missed Ellen’s silent cues to walk or stand to show off her smooth gait or perfect conformation.

The room they entered was plain: gray linoleum on the floor and pale yellow paint covering the windowless cement-block walls. “Good girl, Amber,” Ellen said as she fed her sweet tempered champion a dog biscuit. Amber crunched it happily as Ellen began to brush Amber’s already silky hair to a lustrous sheen.

The door opened and a short portly bald man in a white t-shirt and khaki pants looked in.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know anyone would be in here. Is it okay if I leave my dogs in here with you for a minute while I head to the rest room?” he asked.

“As long as they’re friendly and like other dogs, and it’s only for a few minutes,” answered Ellen.

“Great, thanks, I really appreciate it. Okay boys, come on in!”

The stranger stepped aside, and a massive English bulldog entered the room, followed by another, and then another, and another, until six muscular flat-faced drooling canines lined up one behind the other, filling the now-crowded room with their panting.

“Wait a minute!” Ellen yelled after a shocked momentary pause. But it was too late.  The man had quickly left and closed the door after himself as soon as the last dog was fully inside. This wasn’t what she had expected at all. Most handlers only had one dog, two maximum, and Ellen was dismayed by the extra four unanticipated wards now facing her. How had the man even managed to get them into the building? Dogs were to be leashed or crated, never allowed to walk freely when not competing. Due to their stocky nearly neckless build, bulldogs never wore collars, and instead were harnessed. Still sitting on the floor with Amber, Ellen looked at the first visitor in the line to see if he wore a harness.

Yes, each of the brindled dogs wore something, but they didn’t look like harnesses. No, definitely not harnesses. They were vests. Kelly green vests with collars and buttons running down the broad chests of the dogs. This is just too absurd, thought Ellen, shaking her head. Too many dogs, left here by someone I don’t know for I don’t know how long. If any of them starts acting like he needs to go out, I won’t be able to do anything about it. I hope that man gets back here soon.  

At least Amber didn’t seem perturbed by the visitors. Instead, she was looking around like it might be play time. She gave a big doggie smile and a short bark. “Oh, no, Amber. No play time now. You’re up in just a short while for the next obedience trial,” Ellen said in a warning voice. She knew Amber only understood “No” and “Amber” out of that whole statement, but Ellen’s tone was usually enough to keep her sleek and easy-going Golden under control. Amber turned back toward Ellen and stopped smiling, as if to say, “Aw, Mom, I never get to have any fun.”

The door to the outside suddenly flew open, as if by a gust of wind.  Amber swiveled her head, then turned and ran full tilt out into the parking lot before Ellen could stop her, followed by the line of six green-vested bulldogs. It was a back lot, with no traffic and only a few vans parked along the building, and Ellen quickly noted with a bit of relief that it was edged by a six-foot tall chain link fence, with a wooded area on the other side. But first Amber and then all six bulldogs leaped over the fence and into the woods. “Nooooo!” cried Ellen. She ran after them yelling, “Come back!”   

Her husband was suddenly by her side, asking, “Ellie, what’s wrong?”

Ellen shook her head in disbelief. She described the entire misadventure in detail, from the moment the short man had poked his head into the room to every last dog disappearing over the fence.

“I don’t know how you always remember your dreams so vividly,” Daniel said in wonderment. “I barely remember anything when I wake up other than feeling happy or stressed. Maybe all those extra dogs had something to do with the extra work you seem to be getting piled onto you lately. But bulldogs in green vests? I wonder where that came from.”

“I have no idea,” Ellen mumbled. 

She rose from bed and dressed slowly, knowing that even though it was the weekend, she still had a full day of another kind of work ahead of her. She and her brother Philip had been working to move their increasingly senile mother from her independent living apartment in her retirement center to the memory care section where she would be much safer. Mom had already been the target of scammers who had almost succeeded in clearing thousands of dollars from her bank account. That had been a close call. It was time for the extra help that memory care could offer.

Ellen lived an hour closer, so she had taken on the task of thinning out the hoarded mess of papers, boxes, and clothes that had at first covered the three-room apartment floor thigh deep but was finally down to just below knee-high. Philip had taken on all the paperwork and finances. Their time and anguish were about equal, just spent on different tasks. But it meant Ellen had spent every Saturday for the past four months with their mother, sneaking boxes and bags of things out of the apartment while involving Mom in “helping” to clean up by arranging clothes in the bureau or closet or sorting books in the nook off the kitchen.

Arriving at her mother’s apartment, Ellen greeted her mother with a quick kiss. “Let’s work on your bedroom again today, Mom,” she said. “We made some good progress last weekend, didn’t we?” Her mother smiled brightly and babbled about having rearranged the closet to make more space. Ellen’s own smile wavered, wondering what that meant in terms of piles on the floor.

Weaving through the path of boxes in the living room, Ellen had her answer: a new mess. Stacks of sweaters tumbled into one another on the bed. Ellen took a closer look. How could Mom actually have this many sweaters? She could see the basket drawers in the closet were still full of others. “I’ll clear your bed so you have a place to sleep besides the sofa,” she said, forcing a cheerful note into her voice. “How about if you go through the stack of books in the other room?” Ellen knew that could keep her mother busy for hours, going through the same ten books over and over again, never getting past the first pile.

With Mom safely distracted, Ellen started to sort the sweaters on the bed by color, intending to leave the best one of each color and taking away the others for donation. She sorted through the seventeen green ones, putting the frayed and faded ones in a bag, and placing the nicest one back in the sweater drawer. But when she turned back to the bed, it was just as full as before. New green sweaters seemed to have arrived from nowhere.

How did that happen? Ellen wondered. She peeked around the corner. Her mother was still reading the same stack of books, so she hadn’t put the new sweaters there. Ellen turned back to the bed. Could it be? Had the pile just grown again? I could have just missed some, but I can’t imagine I missed that many, Ellen mused. 

She sorted again, compared the one saved sweater with the one in the closet, and took the two bags of “too many sweaters” out to the hallway, placing them just out of view of the doorway so when she left, Mom wouldn’t see them and want to go through everything at least twice to make sure there wasn’t something she wanted to keep. Ellen had learned to be sneaky that way after the first couple of visits. She didn’t like how it made her feel, almost like stealing from her own mother, but the clutter in the apartment was both dangerous and unhealthy. Besides that, the fact that her mother couldn’t find anything meant that she was always sure someone was stealing from her. This translated to Ellen fielding a lot of paranoid phone calls during the week about items Ellen had carefully placed on a cleared table top or hung in the closet for Mom, showing her mother where things were before departing.

On her return, Ellen found the bed had seemingly sprouted a new heap of sweaters. “This bed is like a clown car,” she muttered to herself. At least a clown car had a limited number of clowns in it, even though far more than anyone would expect. Mom’s bed seemed to be on some endless clutter self-replenishment loop.

Frustrated, Ellen turned to the task of widening a path between the bedroom and the bathroom. She discovered a pile of shopping bags filled with purses, the price tags still on them, never used. Mom always wore one black purse slung across her chest, holding an extra key (in case she misplaced the one on the lanyard around her neck) and a packet of tissues. She had more than a few clones to that purse in the drawer under her platform bed. Ellen was positive Mom didn’t need these brand new extras, so she quietly carried them out to the hallway when her mother wasn’t looking.

She stood in the hall a moment to take a deep breath, staring blankly at the beige-swirled maroon carpet as she thought about getting these three heavy bags down to her car as quickly as she could. She had brought a small folding wheeled luggage carrier with her, but wasn’t sure that even with bungee cords she could balance them all at once. “Worth a try, at least,” Ellen grunted as she reshaped the bags to stack neatly atop each other and then ran the bungee cords around them tightly. “That looks like it should hold. Into the elevator we go.”

Down in the lobby, Ellen pulled the cart past the receptionist and waved. “I’ll be right back,” she called as the receptionist waved back. She headed out to the parking lot, suddenly realizing she had a lot further to go than she had remembered. The parking area was down the street, through a golf course laced with sand traps and past a pond guarded by geese that snapped if anyone got too close. 

Maybe she had tripped, she couldn’t tell, but without warning, Ellen found herself in the pond’s cold water, trying to find which way was up toward the surface. She flailed wildly, trying to find air, but something limp and heavy and dark was soggily clinging to her face, keeping her from catching even a small breath. She tried to scream for help, but with horror realized that one of her mother’s black purses had covered her face and sealed itself over both her nose and mouth. She struggled harder to free herself, terror growing as the air left her lungs.

“Ellie, Ellie, wake up!” Daniel sounded worried as he scooped up his wife in his arms. Her eyes opened and she took a deep breath – a deep dry clear breath of golden sunrise coming in through their bedroom window.

“Ohhh,” moaned Ellen, and she described her dream down to the last detail.

“Well, there’s not much question about what all that means,” Daniel said. “And I’m coming with you today to your Mom’s apartment.”

Ellen wordlessly replied with a grateful hug.