Part 2: Everyone Laughed at the One-Eyed Dog I Adopted. I Had a Line Ready for Them. I Did Not Understand, Until a Pediatric Surgeon Explained It, Why That Dog Had Been the Only One Who Could Do What He Did.
Part 2
I need to tell you about myself, a little, because you cannot understand why I chose Wink, or why the sentence I said about him mattered so much, without knowing one thing about me.
I have a scar.
I have had it since I was eleven years old. It runs along the left side of my jaw and partway up my cheek — a wide, pale, raised scar, from a dog bite, which is its own complicated irony that I have made my peace with and will come back to. I was bitten, badly, by a dog when I was a child, and I had surgeries, and the surgeries did what surgeries in the late 1990s in a not-wealthy family could do, and I came out of my childhood with a face that, like Wink’s, the world does not quite know how to look at.
I want to be careful and honest here. I am not telling you I had a tragic life. I did not. I had a good family, and good friends, and a mostly happy childhood. But I grew up with a visible difference on my face, and anyone who has grown up that way will tell you the same thing — that you develop, very young, a sixth sense for the moment a stranger’s eyes land on the scar. The flinch. The recalculation. The decision people make about where to look.
I learned, as a teenager, every strategy there is for managing other people’s discomfort about my face. I learned to bring it up first. I learned to make the joke before someone else could. I learned that the fastest way to disarm a thing is to walk straight at it.
And I learned — and this is the deepest one — that I was never going to fully escape the low, quiet, background belief that I was, somehow, a slightly damaged version of a person. A second-quality copy. A face that came with an apology attached.
I want you to hold all of that, because it is the lens I was looking through, on a Saturday in March, when I walked into the county shelter not really intending to adopt anything that day, and a volunteer mentioned, almost in passing, that they had one dog who just could not get placed, a one-eyed Pit Bull, and would I like to meet him.
I went back to that kennel, and a fawn-colored dog with one eye stood up and looked at me — looked at me with his one warm brown eye, with that face the world flinched at — and I did not see a damaged dog.
I saw someone who had my exact problem.
I was carrying him to my car within the hour.
Part 3
I want to tell you about the sentence, because the sentence became the spine of that whole first year, and I said it more times than I could ever count.
Wink was, from the first day, a wonderful dog — gentle, calm, affectionate, easy. He had every quality a person could want in a dog, and he had been passed over, again and again, for one reason, which was his face.
And my friends — and I want to be fair to my friends, because they are good people and they love me — my friends, when they first met Wink, did the thing. The flinch. The recalculation. And several of them, more than one, did the laugh. Not a cruel laugh. The nervous one. Oh — oh wow, he’s only got the one eye, huh. A little laugh. The laugh you give a thing that has caught you off guard.
The first time it happened, I felt something old and familiar go tight in my chest — because I knew that laugh from the inside, I had been on the receiving end of that exact laugh my entire life — and I opened my mouth, and a sentence came out that I had not planned, and it came out so cleanly and so completely that I knew, even as I said it, that it had been waiting in me for a long time.
I said: “He smiles with one eye. I smile with two. We’re even.”
And then, because I needed them to actually hear it, I touched the scar on my own jaw, and I said: “All of us. We’re all even.”
The room went quiet. My friends are not bad people; they understood, instantly, what I had just told them — that they had laughed at my dog’s face in front of a woman whose own face they had spent years carefully, kindly not laughing at, and that I had just drawn a line connecting the two, and that the line was true.
I said that sentence, in some version, dozens of times over the following months. To friends. To strangers in the park. To children — children are the most honest, children just ask, what happened to his eye, and I would tell them, gently, and then I would say the sentence, because the sentence was for the children most of all. He smiles with one eye. Some people smile with a scar. Some people smile with two of everything. Everybody’s smile counts the same.
I thought, for a long time, that I was saying that sentence for Wink. That I was his defender, his translator, the person who stood between my unusual-looking dog and a world that flinched at him.
I had it exactly backwards, and it took a small girl in a hospital, and a surgeon, to show me.
Part 4
I want to tell you about my niece, and I am going to tell it carefully, because it is the hard center of this story.
My sister Carmen has a daughter named Lucia. Lucia was six years old at the time I am telling you about, and Lucia is the light of our entire family, and a little under a year after I adopted Wink, Lucia was burned.
It was a household accident — I am not going to detail it, because it is hers, but it was the ordinary kind, the kind that happens in thousands of homes, a moment of bad luck in a kitchen — and Lucia was burned on the right side of her face and her neck. She was treated at the children’s burn unit at the regional medical center, and she healed, physically, the way the doctors needed her to heal.
But Lucia was going to carry a scar.
A facial scar. A visible, permanent one, on a six-year-old girl, on the right side of her face.
And Lucia, in the months after the accident, was not okay. Not in the way the burn team measured okay — her healing was fine — but in the deeper way. She had stopped looking at people. She had started wearing her hair forward, over the side of her face, at six years old. She had told my sister, in the particular flat voice of a child saying a thing she has decided is simply true, that she did not want to go back to school because the other children would think she was “ugly now.”
Six years old.
My sister was devastated, and our whole family was devastated, and we did all the things families do — the reassurance, the you’re beautiful, the gentle correcting — and none of it touched Lucia, because none of it could, because Lucia had already learned the thing that I had learned at eleven, the thing that no amount of a loving adult saying you’re beautiful can un-teach: she had learned that her face was now a thing the world would flinch at.
I knew that feeling from the inside. And I knew, from the inside, the one thing that had never once worked on me as a child, which was a beautiful, unscarred, undamaged adult telling me I was fine.
What I did not have, at eleven, was the thing that I realized — slowly, over a couple of weeks of watching my niece disappear into her own hair — I did have now.
I had Wink.
Part 5
I asked my sister if I could bring Wink to meet Lucia.
I want to be honest about how uncertain I was, because I was very uncertain. Lucia had always liked dogs, but I did not know how a frightened, withdrawn six-year-old who had decided her own face was ruined would react to a dog whose face was also, visibly, unusual. It could have gone wrong. I knew it could have gone wrong.
I brought him anyway, on a Sunday afternoon, to my sister’s house.
And I want to tell you exactly what happened, because it happened faster and more simply than anything I had planned for.
Lucia was on the couch, hair forward, the way she had been for weeks. And I let Wink off his leash, and Wink — who is a calm, polite dog, who does not rush people — Wink walked across that living room and put his front paws up on the couch beside her and turned his head, and looked at my niece, with his one eye.
And Lucia looked back at him.
And here is the thing. Here is the whole thing. Lucia did not flinch. Of course she did not flinch — why would she? She, of anyone on earth, had no flinch left to give a face that was simply made differently. She looked at Wink’s face, at the one warm brown eye and the smooth healed seam where the other one was not, and her own face did something I had not seen it do in months.
It got curious. And then it got soft.
She said — and my sister and I were both standing right there, and neither of us moved — she said, to the dog, in a small voice: “What happened to your eye?”
And I knelt down by the couch, and I said the sentence. The one I had been saying for a year, the one I finally, finally understood I had never been saying for Wink.
I said: “He got hurt when he was little, before anyone was taking care of him. So now he only has the one. But Lucia — look at him. Look how happy he is. He smiles with one eye.” And I touched my own jaw, my own scar, the way I always did, and I said: “I smile with a scar. You smile with a scar now too. And Wink smiles with one eye. And not one of those smiles is worth less than anybody else’s. We’re all even, mija. Every single one of us is even.”
Lucia looked at Wink for a long moment.
And then she reached out, and she put her hand on the side of his face — on the side with no eye, on the seam, the part of him the whole world flinched away from — and she touched it gently, the way you touch a thing you have decided is not frightening and is not ugly and is, in fact, just a part of someone.
And then my niece, who had not let anyone see the right side of her face in two months, reached up with her other hand, and pushed her own hair back.
Part 6
I want to tell you about the surgeon, because a few weeks later something happened that turned this from a sweet family story into something I think about every single day.
Lucia changed, after that Sunday. Not all at once, and not completely — healing is not a switch — but she changed. She and Wink became, immediately and intensely, a unit. She asked to see him constantly. My sister started bringing her to my apartment. Lucia would lie on my floor with her face an inch from Wink’s face, the two of them just looking at each other, and she stopped wearing her hair forward, and she started, slowly, looking at people again.
And when it was time for Lucia to go back to the children’s burn clinic for a follow-up, my sister asked the clinic — half as a long shot — whether Lucia could bring a photo of her dog, because the dog had become so central to how Lucia was coping. And the clinic said yes, of course, and Lucia brought a photo of Wink, and she showed it to everyone, and at some point she showed it to one of the pediatric reconstructive surgeons on Lucia’s team.
And that surgeon, my sister told me afterward, looked at the photo of my one-eyed Pit Bull for a long moment, and then said something that I have carried with me ever since.
The surgeon said that in her field — in the work of helping children heal from facial differences and facial scarring — the single hardest thing is almost never the physical healing. She said the physical healing is, comparatively, the part medicine knows how to do. She said the hardest thing, the thing that surgery cannot reach, is the moment a child decides that their changed face has made them lesser. That it has dropped them into a different, lower category of person.
And she said that a child almost never gets talked out of that belief by a person with an ordinary face. She said it does not matter how loving that person is, or how true their words are — a six-year-old has already done the math, and the math says you are saying that because your face is fine and mine is not.
She said: “What changes it — sometimes the only thing that changes it — is a child meeting someone who lives on the other side of that belief and is visibly, obviously, completely fine. Not someone who reassures them. Someone who is the evidence.“
And she said, looking at the photo of Wink: “Your daughter didn’t need to be told she was still whole. She needed to meet someone who looked different and was unmistakably, joyfully, all the way alive. And it turns out a dog can be that. A dog can’t lie about it, the way an adult can. A dog with one eye who is that happy — that’s not reassurance. That’s proof.”
I sat with that for a long time.
Because I finally understood the sentence.
For a year I had thought I was Wink’s translator — the person who stood between my unusual dog and a flinching world. I had it backwards. Wink had been my evidence, the whole time, and I had not been able to see it, because I was an adult and I had gotten good at managing my face and I had hidden from myself how much I still needed proof.
And then a six-year-old needed the proof out loud, in a living room — and Wink, who could not say a word, who could not reassure anyone, who could only be what he was, gave it to her.
A one-eyed dog cannot tell you a face like yours is still worthy. He can only walk across a room, joyful and whole and entirely unbothered, and let you see it for yourself.
That is the one thing none of the rest of us — with our two eyes and our careful words — could do.
Part 7
Lucia went back to school.
I am not going to tell you it was instant or that there were no hard days, because there were hard days, and there still are, because she is a child carrying a scar and the world is the world. But she went back. Hair back. Face up.
And here is the thing she did, the thing my sister told me about, the thing that undoes me every time I think of it.
A few weeks into being back at school, another child — a younger one, a first-grader Lucia did not really know — fell on the playground and split her chin badly, and was going to need stitches, and was crying, not really from the pain anymore but from the fear, the specific fear of what is my face going to look like now.
And Lucia, six years old, went and sat with her.
And my sister found out, later, from the other child’s mother, what Lucia had said. Lucia had pushed her own hair back, and shown the younger girl the scar on the side of her face, and she had said — and I promise you these are the words, the mother wrote them down because she wanted Carmen to have them —
Lucia said: “I have one of these. My dog only has one eye. You’re going to have a line on your chin. We’re all even. Everybody’s even.”
She had taken the sentence.
She had taken the sentence I had said to her on a couch, the sentence I had been saying for a year without understanding it, the sentence that had been handed down to me, in a way, by a one-eyed dog — and she had passed it to the next frightened kid down the line.
That is what the sentence is for. I know that now. It was never a thing you say to win an argument with a flinching adult. It is a thing you hand to the next person who is about to learn they are different, so they have something to hold.
Part 8
Wink is asleep at my feet as I write this. He is older now, and a little gray around his one-eyed face, and he is, still, the gentlest creature I have ever known.
Lucia is eight. She has a scar on the right side of her face, and she wears her hair back, and she is, by every account, one of the brightest and most confident children in her grade, and she will tell anyone who asks — and some who do not — about her aunt’s dog Wink, who only has one eye, and how that is completely fine.
I am twenty-eight. I have a scar along my jaw that I have had since I was eleven, and for a long time I carried, underneath everything, the quiet belief that it made me a slightly damaged version of a person, a second-quality copy, a face that came with an apology attached.
I do not carry that anymore. I want to be honest that I am not sure exactly when I set it down. But I know it had something to do with watching a six-year-old touch the side of my dog’s face — the part with no eye — with pure, simple, unflinching tenderness, and understanding, in that moment, that this was how Wink had always been worth looking at, and that it was therefore how I had always been worth looking at, and that the flinch had never once been the truth about either of us.
The volunteer at the shelter told me Wink was the hardest dog in the building to place. People looked at his face and walked on.
They were wrong about him. Every one of them was wrong about him.
He was never a damaged dog. He was the proof — walking around on four legs, joyful, one-eyed, completely whole — that the flinch is a thing the world does, and not a thing that is true.
He smiles with one eye.
Some of us smile with a scar.
We are all even.
We always were.
Good boy, Wink.
Follow this page for more stories about the ones the world walked past — who turned out to be exactly what someone needed to see.
