Sex and bring his Labrador retriever along?How twisted did these two think I was? As I
pulled a newspaper out of the box in front of the
store, a car arrived—Harold, I presumed—and
the girls drove off with him.
I wasn’t the only one witnessing the burgeon-
ing prostitution trade along Dixie Highway. On a
visit, my older sister, dressed as modestly as a
nun, went for a midday walk and was proposi-
tioned twice by would-be johns trolling by in
cars. Another guest arrived at our house to re-
port that a woman had just exposed her breasts
to him as he drove past, not that he particularly
minded.
In response to complaints from residents, the
mayor promised to publicly embarrass men ar-
rested for soliciting, and the police began running
stings, positioning undercover women officers on
the corner and waiting for would-be customers to
take the bait. The decoy cops were the homeliest
hookers I had ever seen—think J. Edgar Hoover in
drag—but that didn’t stop men from seeking their
services. One bust went down on the curb directly
John Grogan
in front of our house—with a television news crew
in tow.
If it had been just the hookers and their cus-
tomers, we could have made our separate peace,
but the criminal activity didn’t stop there. Our
neighborhood seemed to grow dicier each day. On
one of our walks along the water, Jenny, suffering
a particularly debilitating bout of pregnancy-
related nausea, decided to head home alone while I
continued on with Patrick and Marley. As she
walked along a side street, she heard a car idling
behind her. Her first thought was that it was a
neighbor pulling up to say hello or someone need-
ing directions. When she turned to look into the
car, the driver sat fully exposed and masturbating.
After he got the expected response, he sped in re-
verse down the street so as to hide his license tag.
When Patrick was not quite a year old, murder
again came to our block. Like Mrs. Nedermier,
the victim was an elderly woman who lived alone.
Hers was the first house as you turned onto
Churchill Road off Dixie Highway, directly be-
hind the all-night, open-air Laundromat, and I
only knew her to wave to as I passed. Unlike Mrs.
Nedermier’s murder, this crime did not afford us
the tidy self-denial of an inside job. The victim
was chosen at random, and the attacker was a
stranger who snuck into her house while she was
Marley & Me
in the backyard hanging her laundry on a Saturday
afternoon. When she returned, he bound her
wrists with telephone cord and shoved her be-
neath a mattress as he ransacked the house for
money. He fled with his plunder as my frail neigh-
bor slowly suffocated beneath the weight of the
mattress. Police quickly arrested a drifter who had
been seen hanging around the coin laundry; when
they emptied his pockets they found his total haul
had been sixteen dollars and change. The price of
a human life.
The crime swirling around us made us grateful
for Marley’s bigger-than-life presence in our
house. So what if he was an avowed pacifist whose
most aggressive attack strategy was known as the
Slobber Offensive? Who cared if his immediate
response to the arrival of any stranger was to grab
a tennis ball in the hope of having someone new to
play catch with? The intruders didn’t need to
know that. When strangers came to our door, we
no longer locked Marley away before answering.
We stopped assuring them how harmless he was.
Instead we now let drop vaguely ominous warn-
ings, such as “He’s getting so unpredictable
lately,” and “I don’t know how many more of his
lunges this screen door can take.”
We had a baby now and another on the way. We
were no longer so cheerfully cavalier about per-
John Grogan
sonal safety. Jenny and I often speculated about
just what, if anything, Marley would do if some-
one ever tried to hurt the baby or us. I tended to
think he would merely grow frantic, yapping and
panting. Jenny placed more faith in him. She was
convinced his special loyalty to us, especially to his
new Cheerios pusher, Patrick, would translate in a
crisis to a fierce primal protectiveness that would
rise up from deep within him. “No way,” I said.
“He’d ram his nose into the bad guy’s crotch and
call it a day.” Either way, we agreed, he scared the
hell out of people. That was just fine with us. His
presence made the difference between us feeling
vulnerable or secure in our own home. Even as we
continued to debate his effectiveness as a protec-
tor, we slept easily in bed knowing he was beside
us. Then one night he settled the dispute once and
for all.
It was October and the weather still had not
turned. The night was sweltering, and we had the
air-conditioning on and windows shut. After the
eleven o’clock news I let Marley out to pee,
checked Patrick in his crib, turned off the lights,
and crawled into bed beside Jenny, already fast
asleep. Marley, as he always did, collapsed in a
heap on the floor beside me, releasing an exagger-
ated sigh. I was just drifting off when I heard it—
a shrill, sustained, piercing noise. I was instantly
Marley & Me
wide awake, and Marley was, too. He stood frozen
beside the bed in the dark, ears cocked. It came
again, penetrating the sealed windows, rising
above the hum of the air conditioner. A scream. A
woman’s scream, loud and unmistakable. My first
thought was teenagers clowning around in the
street, not an unusual occurrence. But this was not
a happy, stop-tickling-me scream. There was des-
peration in it, real terror, and it was dawning on
me that someone was in terrible trouble.
“Come on, boy,” I whispered, slipping out
of bed.
“Don’t go out there.” Jenny’s voice came from
beside me in the dark. I hadn’t realized she was
awake and listening.
“Call the police,” I told her. “I’ll be careful.”
Holding Marley by the end of his choker chain,
I stepped out onto the front porch in my boxer
shorts just in time to glimpse a figure sprinting
down the street toward the water. The scream
came again, from the opposite direction. Outside,
without the walls and glass to buffet it, the
woman’s voice filled the night air with an amazing,
piercing velocity, the likes of which I had heard
only in horror movies. Other porch lights were
flicking on. The two young men who shared a
rental house across the street from me burst out-
side, wearing nothing but cutoffs, and ran toward
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the screams. I followed cautiously at a distance,
Marley tight by my side. I saw them run up on a
lawn a few houses away and then, seconds later,
come dashing back toward me.
“Go to the girl!” one of them shouted, pointing.
“She’s been stabbed.”
“We’re going after him!” the other yelled, and
they sprinted off barefoot down the street in the
direction the figure had fled. My neighbor Barry, a
fearless single woman who had bought and reha-
bilitated a rundown bungalow next to the Neder-
mier house, jumped into her car and joined the
chase.
I let go of Marley’s collar and ran toward the
scream. Three doors down I found my seventeen-
year-old neighbor standing alone in her driveway,
bent over, sobbing in jagged raspy gasps. She
clasped her ribs, and beneath her hands I could see
a circle of blood spreading across her blouse. She
was a thin, pretty girl with sand-colored hair that
fell over her shoulders. She lived in the house with
her divorced mother, a pleasant woman who
worked as a night nurse. I had chatted a few times
with the mother, but I only knew her daughter to
wave to. I didn’t even know her name.
“He said not to scream or he’d stab me,” she
said, sobbing; her words gushed out in heaving,
hyperventilated gulps. “But I screamed. I
Marley & Me
screamed, and he stabbed me.” As if I might not
believe her, she lifted her shirt to show me the
puckered wound that had punctured her rib cage.
“I was sitting in my car with the radio on. He just
came out of nowhere.” I put my hand on her arm
to calm her, and as I did I saw her knees buckling.
She collapsed into my arms, her legs folding fawn-
like beneath her. I eased her down to the pavement
and sat cradling her. Her words came softer,
calmer now, and she fought to keep her eyes open.
“He told me not to scream,” she kept saying. “He
put his hand on my mouth and told me not to
scream.”
“You did the right thing,” I said. “You scared
him away.”
It occurred to me that she was going into shock,
and I had not the first idea what to do about it.
Come on, ambulance. Where are you?I com-
forted her in the only way I knew how, as I would
comfort my own child, stroking her hair, holding
my palm against her cheek, wiping her tears away.
As she grew weaker, I kept telling her to hang on,
help was on the way. “You’re going to be okay,” I
said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Her skin was
ashen. We sat alone on the pavement like that for
what seemed hours but was in actuality, the police
report later showed, about three minutes. Only
gradually did I think to check on what had be-
John Grogan
come of Marley. When I looked up, there he
stood, ten feet from us, facing the street, in a de-
termined, bull-like crouch I had never seen be-
fore. It was a fighter’s stance. His muscles bulged
at the neck; his jaw was clenched; the fur between
his shoulder blades bristled. He was intensely fo-
cused on the street and appeared poised to lunge. I
realized in that instant that Jenny had been right.
If the armed assailant returned, he would have to
get past my dog first. At that moment I knew—I
absolutely knew without doubt—that Marley
would fight him to the death before he would let
him at us. I was emotional anyway as I held this
young girl, wondering if she was dying in my
arms. The sight of Marley so uncharacteristically
guarding us like that, so majestically fierce,
brought tears to my eyes. Man’s best friend?
Damn straight he was.
“I’ve got you,” I told the girl, but what I meant
to say, what I should have said, was that wehad
her. Marley and me. “The police are coming,” I
said. “Hold on. Please, just hold on.”
Before she closed her eyes, she whispered, “My
name is Lisa.”
“I’m John,” I said. It seemed ridiculous, intro-
ducing ourselves in these circumstances as though
we were at a neighborhood potluck. I almost
laughed at the absurdity of it. Instead, I tucked a
Marley & Me
strand of her hair behind her ear and said, “You’re
safe now, Lisa.”
Like an archangel sent from heaven, a police of-
ficer came charging up the sidewalk. I whistled to
Marley and called, “It’s okay, boy. He’s okay.” And
it was as if, with that whistle, I had broken some
kind of trance. My goofy, good-natured pal was
back, trotting in circles, panting, trying to sniff us.
Whatever ancient instinct had welled up from the
recesses of his ancestral psyche was back in its
bottle again. Then more officers swarmed around
us, and soon an ambulance crew arrived with a
stretcher and wads of sterile gauze. I stepped out
of the way, told the police what I could, and
walked home, Marley loping ahead of me.
Jenny met me at the door and together we stood
in the front window watching the drama unfold on
the street. Our neighborhood looked like the set
from a police television drama. Red strobe lights
splashed through the windows. A police helicopter
hovered overhead, shining its spotlight down on
backyards and alleys. Cops set up roadblocks and
combed the neighborhood on foot. Their efforts
would be in vain; a suspect was never apprehended
and a motive never determined. My neighbors who
gave chase later told me they had not even caught a
glimpse of him. Jenny and I eventually returned to
bed, where we both lay awake for a long time.
John Grogan
“You would have been proud of Marley,” I told
her. “It was so strange. Somehow he knew how se-
rious this was. He just knew. He felt the danger,
and he was like a completely different dog.”
“I told you so,” she said. And she had.
As the helicopter thumped the air above us,
Jenny rolled onto her side and, before drifting off,
said, “Just another ho-hum night in the neighbor-
hood.” I reached down and felt in the dark for
Marley, lying beside me.
“You did all right tonight, big guy,” I whis-
pered, scratching his ears. “You earned your dog
chow.” My hand on his back, I drifted off to sleep.
It said something about South Florida’s numbness
to crime that the stabbing of a teenage girl as she
sat in her car in front of her home would merit
just six sentences in the morning newspaper. The
Sun-Sentinel’s account of the crime ran in the
briefs column on page 3B beneath the headline
“Man Attacks Girl.”
The story made no mention of me or Marley
or the guys across the street who set out half
naked after the assailant. It didn’t mention Barry,
who gave chase in her car. Or all the neighbors up
and down the block who turned on porch lights
and dialed 911. In South Florida’s seamy world of
Marley & Me
violent crime, our neighborhood’s drama was
just a minor hiccup. No deaths, no hostages, no
big deal.
The knife had punctured Lisa’s lung, and she
spent five days in the hospital and several weeks
recuperating at home. Her mother kept the neigh-
bors apprised of her recovery, but the girl re-
mained inside and out of sight. I worried about
the emotional wounds the attack might leave.
Would she ever again be comfortable leaving the
safety of her home? Our lives had come together
for just three minutes, but I felt invested in her as
a brother might be in a kid sister. I wanted to re-
spect her privacy, but I also wanted to see her, to
prove to myself she was going to be all right.
Then as I washed the cars in the driveway on a
Saturday, Marley chained up beside me, I looked
up and there she stood. Prettier than I had remem-
bered. Tanned, strong, athletic—looking whole
again. She smiled and asked, “Remember me?”
“Let’s see,” I said, feigning puzzlement. “You
look vaguely familiar. Weren’t you the one in front
of me at the Tom Petty concert who wouldn’t sit
down?”
She laughed, and I asked, “So how are you do-
ing, Lisa?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Just about back to nor-
mal.”
John Grogan
“You look great,” I told her. “A little better than
the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, and looked down at her
feet. “What a night.”
“What a night,” I repeated.
That was all we said about it. She told me about
the hospital, the doctors, the detective who inter-
viewed her, the endless fruit baskets, the boredom
of sitting at home as she healed. But she steered
clear of the attack, and so did I. Some things were
best left behind.
Lisa stayed a long time that afternoon, following
me around the yard as I did chores, playing with
Marley, making small talk. I sensed there was
something she wanted to say but could not bring
herself to. She was seventeen; I didn’t expect her
to find the words. Our lives had collided without
plan or warning, two strangers thrown together by
a burst of inexplicable violence. There had been
no time for the usual proprieties that exist be-
tween neighbors; no time to establish boundaries.
In a heartbeat, there we were, intimately locked
together in crisis, a dad in boxer shorts and a
teenage girl in a blood-soaked blouse, clinging to
each other and to hope. There was a closeness
there now. How could there not be? There was
also awkwardness, a slight embarrassment, for in
that moment we had caught each other with our
Marley & Me
guards down. Words were not necessary. I knew
she was grateful that I had come to her; I knew she
appreciated my efforts to comfort her, however
lame. She knew I cared deeply and was in her cor-
ner. We had shared something that night on the
pavement—one of those brief, fleeting moments
of clarity that define all the others in a life—that
neither of us would soon forget.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” I said.
“I’m glad I did, too,” Lisa answered.
By the time she left, I had a good feeling about
this girl. She was strong. She was tough. She would
move forward. And indeed I found out years later,
when I learned she had built a career for herself as
a television broadcaster, that she had.
C H A P T E R 1 4
An Early Arrival
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John.”
Through the fog of sleep, I gradually regis-
tered my name being called. “John. John, wake
up.” It was Jenny; she was shaking me. “John, I
think the baby might be coming.”
I propped myself up on an elbow and rubbed
my eyes. Jenny was lying on her side, knees pulled
to her chest. “The baby what?”
“I’m having bad cramps,” she said. “I’ve been
lying here timing them. We need to call Dr.
Sherman.”
I was wide awake now. The baby was coming?I
was wild with anticipation for the birth of our sec-
ond child—another boy, we already knew from the
sonogram. The timing, though, was wrong, terri-
bly wrong. Jenny was twenty-one weeks into the
pregnancy, barely halfway through the forty-week
John Grogan
gestation period. Among her motherhood books
was a collection of high-definition in vitro photo-
graphs showing a fetus at each week of develop-
ment. Just days earlier we had sat with the book,
studying the photos taken at twenty-one weeks
and marveling at how our baby was coming along.
At twenty-one weeks a fetus can fit in the palm of
a hand. It weighs less than a pound. Its eyes are
fused shut, its fingers like fragile little twigs, its
lungs not yet developed enough to distill oxygen
from air. At twenty-one weeks, a baby is barely vi-
able. The chance of surviving outside the womb is
small, and the chance of surviving without seri-
ous, long-term health problems smaller yet.
There’s a reason nature keeps babies in the womb
for nine long months. At twenty-one weeks, the
odds are exceptionally long.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said. But I could feel
my heart pounding as I speed-dialed the ob-gyn
answering service. Two minutes later Dr. Sherman
called back, sounding groggy himself. “It might
just be gas,” he said, “but we better have a look.”
He told me to get Jenny to the hospital immedi-
ately. I raced around the house, throwing items
into an overnight bag for her, making baby bot-
tles, packing the diaper bag. Jenny called her
friend and coworker Sandy, another new mom
who lived a few blocks away, and asked if we could
Marley & Me
drop Patrick off. Marley was up now, too, stretch-
ing, yawning, shaking. Late-night road trip!
“Sorry, Mar,” I told him as I led him out to the
garage, grave disappointment on his face. “You’ve
got to hold down the fort.” I scooped Patrick out
of his crib, buckled him into his car seat without
waking him, and into the night we went.
At St. Mary’s neonatal intensive care unit, the
nurses quickly went to work. They got Jenny into
a hospital gown and hooked her to a monitor that
measured contractions and the baby’s heartbeat.
Sure enough, Jenny was having a contraction every
six minutes. This was definitely not gas. “Your
baby wants to come out,” one of the nurses said.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make
sure he doesn’t just yet.”
Over the phone Dr. Sherman asked them to
check whether she was dilating. A nurse inserted a
gloved finger and reported that Jenny was dilated
one centimeter. Even I knew this was not good. At
ten centimeters the cervix is fully dilated, the
point at which, in a normal delivery, the mother
begins to push. With each painful cramp, Jenny’s
body was pushing her one step closer to the point
of no return.
Dr. Sherman ordered an intravenous saline drip
and an injection of the labor inhibitor Brethine.
The contractions leveled out, but less than two
John Grogan
hours later they were back again with a fury, re-
quiring a second shot, then a third.
For the next twelve days Jenny remained hospi-
talized, poked and prodded by a parade of perinat-
alogists and tethered to monitors and intravenous
drips. I took vacation time and played single parent
to Patrick, doing my best to hold everything
together—the laundry, the feedings, meals, bills,
housework, the yard. Oh, yes, and that other living
creature in our home. Poor Marley’s status dropped
precipitously from second fiddle to not even in the
orchestra. Even as I ignored him, he kept up his end
of the relationship, never letting me out of his sight.
He faithfully followed me as I careened through the
house with Patrick in one arm, vacuuming or toting
laundry or fixing a meal with the other. I would stop
in the kitchen to toss a few dirty plates into the dish-
washer, and Marley would plod in after me, circle
around a half dozen times trying to pinpoint the ex-
act perfect location, and then drop to the floor. No
sooner had he settled in than I would dart to the
laundry room to move the clothes from the washing
machine to the dryer. He would follow after me, cir-
cle around, paw at the throw rugs until they were
arranged to his liking, and plop down again, only to
have me head for the living room to pick up the
newspapers. So it would go. If he was lucky, I would
pause in my mad dash to give him a quick pat.
Marley & Me
One night after I finally got Patrick to sleep, I
fell back on the couch, exhausted. Marley pranced
over and dropped his rope tug toy in my lap and
looked up at me with those giant brown eyes of
his. “Aw, Marley,” I said. “I’m beat.” He put his
snout under the rope toy and flicked it up in the
air, waiting for me to try to grab it, ready to beat
me to the draw. “Sorry, pal,” I said. “Not to-
night.” He crinkled his brow and cocked his head.
Suddenly, his comfortable daily routine was in tat-
ters. His mistress was mysteriously absent, his
master no fun, and nothing the same. He let out a
little whine, and I could see he was trying to figure
it out. Why doesn’t John want to play anymore?
Date: 2015-12-17; view: 897
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