Wake the Sleeping Dog

Sometimes reconnecting with long lost friends leads to rousing a sleeping dog. Whether it wanted to be woken up was another matter, especially if it was woken up by the person who abandoned it.

Michelle’s attention diverted from her friend, Angel, in the passenger seat, as a familiar hulking figure walking a pit bull up came into view. The last few sentences of Angel’s conversation fragmented into meaninglessness the closer they got to the dogwalker.

As going over a yellow speed bump jostled the car, Michelle’s stomach lurched, her jaw set defensively, and her eyes grew wide in fury and disbelief. She barely pressed the gas pedal and leaned in, squinting at the dogwalker. Black man with close-cropped hair, about six feet tall, short neck and broad shoulders hugged by a black tee-shirt. Narrow hips and perfect ass in grey sweatpants. Loping gait. Unmistakably Shawn. 

Engulfed in an emotional tsunami at the sight of him, Michelle’s carefully buried pain clawed its way from her gut to her throat. The last thing on her mind was crossing paths with the source of her heartbreak. Shawn had broken up with her four years prior with the detached precision of an assassin.  He’d offered no answers, no explanations. She’d spent the years numbing the agony, layer by layer.

“Are you listening?” Angel asked in her high-pitched, girlish voice, though she was already retired. “That was funny!”

“Something was funny?” Michelle asked, facing Angel briefly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention. That guy up there with the dog is my ex-boyfriend.” 

Angel glanced ahead. “Oh? He’s my neighbor.”

“Small world.” Michelle felt like stray cards flying out of the deck during a clumsy shuffle. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel as she brought her red car abreast of Shawn and his dog. The suburban community’s gentle curving road was lined with carefully manicured palm trees and shrubbery. No other cars were on the road.

She lowered the window. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked. “You were living in Pompano. We were never going to see each other again.”

Shawn’s expression gave nothing away. He bent down with a glance and nod to Angel, then back to Michelle. A hot breeze wafted Calvin Klein cologne into the car. His dark eyes held no malice but no warmth either. Maybe a trace of curiosity. “I live here.”

“No! Are you kidding me? This complex is only two minutes away from my mother’s,” Michelle continued, borderline shrilly. “We had a safe distance between us! For years!” That safe distance allowed her to trick herself into believing she’d healed. In actuality, she’d been living in the ghostly shadow of her favorite intimate relationship’s demise.

Shawn arched his bushy eyebrows and stood straight. “Is that a threat? I don’t take kindly to threats.”

“Who’s threatening who?” Michelle demanded. The words Shawn had chosen to break up with her four years ago circled her mind. “When you say you love me, I can’t say it back. I don’t love you.” The icy edge cut her all over again on a repeating loop, the wound forever fresh and bleeding. She bit back tears and turned to Angel with a forced, tight smile. “Let me get you home.” She glared at Shawn as she held the button to raise her window.

“I’m sorry about that,” Michelle said, driving away from Shawn. “Seeing him again took me by surprise. My God, what is he doing here?”

“His wife helped me find a contractor to replace my roof,” Angel said, lightly.

Wife. So Shawn got married. She wondered if they started a family. Michelle took a deep breath to try to steady herself, but her heart continued pounding, body temperature rising hot despite the air conditioning. She brought the car in front of Angel’s one-story unit. Under different circumstances, she would have gone inside to reacquaint with Angel, but she decided her emotional state was too heavy for a friendship that was restarting from scratch. “I’d come in, but I-”

“I understand,” Angel replied with a kind smile. “It’s great to see you again. We’ll have to stay in touch.” She got out of the car and headed to her front door while Michelle plotted a way out of the complex without doubling back past Shawn and his dog.

She hadn’t even reached home when the questions lined up like fighter jets and took off from her mental launchpad.

“What does his wife look like? Is she a good cook? Can she keep up with his agile mind and dark sense of humor? Is she good in bed? Does she remind him of me? How did they meet? How long after he broke up with me did he meet her? Did he use that same line on her about being his last girlfriend, implying he was ready to propose and settle down? How much of our relationship did he tell her or is everything about our history a secret? Why did he really break up with me in the first place? What did I do?”

The flurry of questions left her exhausted, and when she got home to her one-bedroom apartment, she flung herself in bed face down.

The days passed and lengthened into weeks and months while Michelle resumed her daily routines. The dry winter chill inched into a balmy midsummer. Michelle had just reached home after work and a grueling slog through Miami traffic when her cell phone beeped. She hadn’t seen the number in a long time, but recognized it as Shawn’s immediately.

“Hello?”

“Michelle,” he stated with a tone of openness and perhaps surprise.

She sniffled and stepped outside to sit on her stoop, still in uniform. The mango tree in the courtyard at the center of her apartment complex was bathed in early dusk shadows. “I have so many questions, but I don’t know how to proceed with you, to be honest. It took so long to finally get over you, and I thought I was over you. I never expected the pain was just dormant.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“I don’t know what to make of that, Shawn,” she said, absently scraping at the peeling red paint on her stoop. “You broke up with me when I thought everything between us was fine. I thought you were happy. All I had for the longest time were songs by Adele to keep me company.” She didn’t want to confess her whole journey without knowing his motives. “What do you want?”

“I have questions, too, Michelle.”

She couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “The breakup was your idea, not mine. Look,  what are you proposing, lunch or something?” 

“Would you be open to that?”

Would she? Looking Shawn in the eyes again could set her off, but the unrelenting barrage of questions that plagued her could only be answered by him. There was no way around that. If she wanted answers, she’d have to open lines of communication between them. That meant being brave.

“Michelle?”

“Yeah, I’m still here.” She hugged her knees, felt the hardness of the painted concrete stoop under her butt, and swallowed hard. “Maybe not lunch, but yes, we can talk face to face.”

“There’s a little park by the lake at the entrance of my development.”

“I know it,” she said. The location would provide a good backdrop - a measure of privacy, but just enough public exposure to prevent emotional outbursts. “That’s perfect, actually.”

They arranged to meet under the pergola in the park the following afternoon. Michelle lingered on the stoop, waving to her neighbors as they returned home from grocery shopping or wherever they’d been. A pair of squirrels chased each other up and around the mango tree. When Michelle’s bottom couldn’t stand the hard stoop surface anymore, she went inside to fix dinner and organize her flurry of questions for Shawn.

The next day, she dressed casually in black leggings and a long purple tee-shirt. During the twenty minute drive west, memories popped into her head as if on a carousel. Shawn had seen her at her worst in the psychiatric ward after the death of her father sent her over the edge. He’d watched her mind unravel in a movie theater and, instead of taking advantage of her, he cradled her in his arms until she seemed calm enough to drive home. 

Their intimacy had sizzling heat and warm tenderness. At his core, Shawn was patient. He didn’t like to wait for Valentine’s to make romantic gestures. But then, that unexpected breakup. She’d come to the conclusion that her depression was simply more than he could bear.

The sun was slung low when she pulled into a parking space. Shawn was already there leaning against his Jeep with a smattering of Egyptian geese, white ibis, and iguanas on the grass between the pergola and the lake.

Michelle joined him and they walked with an awkward, sticky silence between them. “Where should we start?” she asked, as he gestured for her to sit first.

“You’ve made me the asshole who broke your heart.”

“You were the asshole who broke my heart. And you just walked away without having to deal with any of the fallout.”

“Do you have any idea what your other personality was like? She was extremely protective and violent. Plus, she had full access to your intelligence. All I needed was to have you straddle me and have her reach for my knife.”

Michelle chuckled at first, but realized he was serious. A few people close to her had witnessed the “Other” but only Shawn made a distinction between that Michelle and regular Michelle. 

“I counted five separate personalities emerge when we saw Karate Kid in the theater,” he continued. “I tried to describe it to your brother, but he couldn’t be interrupted from his favorite TV show.” Shawn frowned.

“I remember that,” Michelle said. She got hospitalized after that hypo-manic incident. “Five? Really?”

He pointed at her in the direction of her chin. “You have a little child personality in there, and a Mama Bear who protects her by any means necessary. There’s a kinky little firestarter inside you, too. Jesus, Michelle, that horny chick could switch to Mama Bear when I’m in the throes and jab me in the ribs!”

She sat quietly with the picture forming in her mind. “You loved me.”

“Yes, very much.” The white ibis ran off together to another area along the lake for feeding.

She began connecting dots. “If I posed a mortal threat to you, and you had to defend yourself, you’d have to choose sides between putting me down to save yourself, or letting me hurt you.”

He looked her square in the eyes. “I came to the conclusion that hurting you emotionally would be easier on you than hurting you physically.” 

“They both suck, just for the record,” she said, her lips parted.

“It’s a choice I didn’t want to have to make.” The bass of Shawn’s voice gave off solemn gravity.

Michelle’s mind looped back. At a time when her mental health wasn’t the least bit healthy, Shawn had shown up for her repeatedly, even when her own family could barely handle the burden and unpleasant surprises. “Have you ever told me a lie to spare my feelings?”

“Yes,” he answered flatly without hesitation.

She glanced away for a moment at the curving row of single-family homes on the other side of the lake. “Can you tell me the truth now? Are you telling me that you broke up with me because you were afraid I’d force your hand to choose me over yourself?”

“Yes.” 

She couldn’t deny that would have been an absurd position to put anyone in, especially a Marine like Shawn who had been trained to kill first and never ask questions. “So are you saying that you never stopped having feelings for me? You were simply sparing yourself the agony.”

“I have always adored you, Michelle,” he said. “That has not changed. You act like our breakup was all my doing.”

“Wasn’t it.”

His voice rose half an octave. “How many times did you just disappear for months, leaving me wondering if you had any feelings for me at all or if you were secretly married?”

“You thought I was hiding a husband?”

“You never once invited me inside your apartment,” he continued. “You only stayed the night at my place when you invited yourself over. There were times you’d just vanish. You wouldn’t take my calls or respond to my texts. What was I supposed to think?”

An unfamiliar sheepish feeling came over her. She’d never thought twice about her behavior, especially since she couldn’t remember all of it. The sleeping dog was awake. She couldn’t abandon it or turn her back on it now. “Your feelings intimidated me. For the first couple years that we knew each other, I knew you wanted more from me than I wanted from you, and I’ve never been good at expressing deep emotion. I can have deep conversation. Deep philosophical conversation, but when my feelings get involved, I can trip over myself. It’s very uncomfortable for me.”

“I see.”

“But now I see, too. The truth is…” she grasped for words until she could make sense of what she was feeling. “The truth is that I’ve never felt as safe with a man as I do with you. I definitely have trust issues, but you earned my trust over and over.”

“And tried my patience,” he added, as a three-foot long iguana made a mad dash, startling a duck.

She let out half a laugh. “Yes, that too. What I’m trying to say is that I ran when my feelings got too much because I was afraid I’d get hurt.”

“Have I ever hurt you?”

“Before the breakup?” She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “You did play a little rough, but no. You always created safe space for me, so you deserve for me to be honest with you. I promise, I won’t shut you out or pull a disappearing act, even if I’m uncomfortable. I will find a way to express what’s going on with me. Back then, I wasn’t altogether there.”

“Neither was I,” he said to her surprise.

“I missed out on making a life with you,” she said, wistfully and gripped his thigh. Her voice quivered and eyes welled up. “You were the only one I ever even considered having children with.” They exchanged a shared smile. “I’d been on the fence for so long, worrying whether I’d be a good mother, and then by time I came around and thought we’d be a great parenting team, you told me that you didn’t want any kids because you were afraid of dying. It’s too late now, and maybe it’s just as well.”

Shawn looked at her face with a tender pain, part regret, part wonder. Would he try to rekindle the embers between them? Could she handle it if he made that move?

“You would have had our kids torment me though, you know that right?”

“What?” He shrugged and grinned. “Any kid of mine needs to learn how to handle a knife properly. It wouldn’t be my fault if they practiced sneaking up on you.”

Michelle laughed and wiped away a stray tear. He could always make her laugh. She had an idea. “What if we had a shared drive? We have to establish the terms of our friendship going forward.”

“How would we do that?”

She swallowed hard. “I’m not sure, but not having you in my life these last few years has been hellish. Losing you was my worst fear come true. I can’t talk to anyone the way I can with you. Every song on the radio seemed to drive the knife in my heart deeper. You know I think Adele and I are kindred spirits, sisters with the same achy heart.”

“What are the conditions?” he asked.

“We get to set those.”

“Hm,” he murmured.

“There isn’t really a model for the way we relate to each other, so we set the terms. Jointly. If it turns out that we can’t make it work, we decide that together. No unilateral decisions. Agreed?”

Shawn studied her face and smiled. “Agreed.”

“Shawn?”

“Michelle?” He put his arm around her shoulder.

“Thank you. This is the beginning of a healing journey.”

“For both of us.”

“They say that the only one who can heal you is the one who hurt you. Do you believe that’s true?”

“Feels like it.” He pulled her in close and rested her head on his chest.

Tears rolled down her cheeks, the beginning of reclaiming the shattered remnants of her heart and making it whole again.

That’s how Michelle woke the dog that had been sleeping. Instead of growling and biting her, it led her home.