The Photograph

by Tayfilly

anybody you recognize is, regrettably, not mine.

10/07 author's note: After watching "Amends," I decided to revisit this piece and see how well my version of events holds up now that we have more information about the relevant character history. I've made a few timeline-related changes so as not to breach the updated canon of the show.

It's been so long now that most days, she scarcely notices him, right there in front of her face. Between all the database checking and the shuffling of the file folders and the peering across the two desks in bemusement or confusion or sometimes wonder, she often looks right over the top of the dark red frame.

Off she'll rush, quick on the heels of her partner in the direction of some other room on the eleventh floor or any one of millions of possible places in the city. They go everywhere, places most people won't ever discover, and shouldn't. Places where corpses have been left to rot and where plans of blinding human cruelty are hatched every day.

But back she comes, to the modest chair and the stacks of papers and the utilitarian telephone, where she sighs and drinks her tea and smirks at the view across the way. There are some days when she is relieved to be at the desks with her coat off instead of somewhere colder or less well-lit, and others when she is itchy with desperation to escape, to hurry up and do something to keep the horror and sickness from unfolding any further.

And there are some days when her gaze wanders down for a few moments and settles on him. And involuntarily, she always smiles briefly. She is the opposite of sentimental, but even after all these years, there is something about the sight of his long muzzle and solemn, restful eyes that lingers, that melts a hidden place within her that is otherwise nearly always hard.

The day she met him, he was eight months old and sixty pounds of thoroughly unregulated joy. She groaned at the sight of him straining gleefully at the end of his red leash, determined to adorn every likely city object with pee, because holding the other end of the leash was the man she already suspected she was going to marry. She could see with doomed certainty as the pair came lunging down the sidewalk toward her so they could go to lunch that the man let the dog sleep in his bed and had only halfheartedly tried to teach him to do anything useful, all in the name of helpless love.

She was right. The dog not only slept in their bed, he hogged the covers, left his hair everywhere, snored, and whined like he was being abused when they shut the bedroom door in his face on occasions when the bed could only accommodate two occupants. Her sister came to visit one weekend and was appalled when the dog galloped toward her, his toenails scrabbling on the floor, and greeted her with an enthusiastic and heartfelt nose to the crotch.

The evening she arrived home from a shift to find her favorite boots mangled and slobbery in a dark corner of the apartment and the dog not even ashamed of himself, she decided to take action. Dirty mutt, she called him, dragging him into the bathroom so she wouldn't have to look at his perfectly cheerful, happy-to-see-her face. His parentage was a bit of a mystery, her husband having acquired him from an anonymous cardboard box in Queens when he was seven weeks old. His face and long ears looked vaguely pointerish and houndy, and he had spots like a dairy cow, big clownish paws and chocolate eyes devoid of even a drop of guilt.

From that day forward, she took no prisoners. The dog sat before he ate, learned to sleep quietly on the floor unless invited onto the bed, barked twice politely when someone knocked on the door, and chewed only his own squeaky toys. Her husband tried valiantly at first to undermine her efforts and continue to spoil the dog as he always had, but she persisted in convincing him to reinforce the dog's new good-citizen habits and make sure he got enough exercise. Gradually he saw that she had improved the dog's life in the same way that she improved everything around her, the same indomitable, charming way that he had fallen in love with. Both were pleased at how the dog had been transformed from his outlaw puppy self and began, tentatively, to imagine what they might be like as parents.

And then came the night and day only a few short years after the wedding that she spent at the emergency room, avoiding the eyes of their fellow officers because she knew that if her gaze locked on someone else's face then her body would betray her and she would collapse in a damp, quivering puddle of weakness. She remembered in the morning to call one of her neighbors and ask him to take the dog out to pee. A day later, she was calling her husband's parents in Florida to tell them what day the funeral was going to be.

What she thought about during those hopelessly long twenty-four hours was not the bullet that had ripped him apart or the blood that had left his shining blonde hair all dark and matted, but the conversation the two of them had had that last happy morning, which of course, in her sleeplessness and barely suppressed panic, seemed like weeks before. She had confided that there was the smallest, foggiest possibility that she was pregnant, and he had been immediately giddy. She had tried to be casual about it—she was late, technically, but was also very lean and fit. There was no tempering him in his happiness. When the dog bounded into the bedroom to find out what all the excitement was about, her husband took the big brown head in his beautiful hands and told him he was going to be a big brother. She mocked him gently and he kissed her, deeply, for the last time.

By the day of the funeral it was clear that there was no baby. She sat through the service wishing there were fewer people to fuel the strange, irregular waves of grief and wondering if she was being ridiculous for wanting, in the back of her mind, at least the chance to be a single parent to his child. She was young, capable, strong. She knew already that his death would not incapacitate her. But she was afraid that in the moving on that she knew she would do gracefully, she might move too fast and leave him too far behind. She was exhausted and edgy and in the church he was already beginning to seem like a memory, a faceless casualty, an abstraction.

Until she went home to their apartment and was flooded with relief to remember that it was not empty. The dog was waiting for her, hungry and anxious for his walk but otherwise his usual, well-behaved self. She quickly shed the stiff, dark uniform she had worn to the funeral and took him right out to the park, where he chased a stick over and over again with such blissful, athletic abandon that she nearly cried at the golden light of the autumn afternoon and the happiness and beauty of the dog as he did the same thing he'd done every day with her husband.

But she saved the tears for just a little while longer, until late that night when the cool far side of the bed finally became too much. She was just about to relent and invite the dog up from his place on the floor when she saw his dark, patchy shape creeping through the lesser darkness of the room, climbing nimbly, silently up onto the bed. She reached out for him and he burrowed firmly, decisively against her belly. The relaxation of his breath and long limbs seeped into her with his warmth and she was finally ready to be weak and after that, peaceful.

The dog lived until he was old but not frail and was always content to spend every day of his unworried life alongside her as long as she kept him walked, fed, and sufficiently cuddled. She met more than one likely man in the park throughout the years when she took him there to chase balls and sticks. Her ascent through the police ranks more or less coincided with his gradual decline in energy as he aged, and toward the end he spent most of his time dozing in the shifting squares of sunshine on the hardwood floor. She finally felt sorry enough for his old joints that she bought him one of those big doggy pillows that she had once refused to spoil him with, although she made sure it wasn't printed with anything undignified like graphics of dog bones or paw prints or the like.

It was late autumn when she awoke one morning to find the big brown and white bulk of him cool and still next to her bed. She knelt beside him and smoothed his ears back from his face like she had countless times before, the fur velvety beneath her fingers, taking note of the easy, unperturbed lines of his gray muzzle and closed eyes. She was overwhelmed with gladness that he had not suffered. The night before he had panted his hot stinky breath in her face while she watched TV, grinning in his confidence that she would eventually give in and get him a treat from the yellow box in the cupboard, another new habit she told herself was just a concession to his age.

She went to work and when she and her new partner sat down at their adjacent desks and began assembling their information for their current case, she suddenly found herself feeling unsettled as she surveyed her desk, with its well-stocked drawers, carefully ordered paperwork, and new laptop. At some point, as her partner spread psychology textbooks and obscure magazines across the surface in front of him, she plunked her trusty Santa mug down. She sat back in her chair and observed. There was still something missing.

Now on the days when he pulls her weary eyes down to his tranquil, spotted image she knows his is the only photograph that could sit here in front of her every day. She's too practical to clutter up her space with pictures of her family, a dead husband or a fast-growing, sandy-haired imp of a nephew. She has a ready reply to anyone who asks about the photo in the red frame. He's just a dog she used to have.