"Misty"

The four year old girl ran towards the looming shelves of toys, roughly pulling a gray wolf with yellow eyes down and slamming it along the floor in harsh galloping motion like waves pounding a jetty. “Gabriella-Nicole! Time to go. Come take Mommy’s hand and we’ll get some ice cream!” The girl responded to the sing-songy voice coming from the other end of the Bar Harbor, Maine tourist shop and I watched with horror as she violently threw the wolf pup across the room and ran the other way. 

Quietly stepping out from my position of relative safety by the wall, I skirted around little tables with puzzles and beads towards the still figure. The pup had bounced off the shelf and was laying in a rather painful looking position on the floor. “Are you okay?” I whispered, kneeling down to assess the damage. She seemed fine. I scooped her up and petted her reassuringly before carefully placing her on the shelf. 

My dad had said I could get one of the wolf pups, now I just had to choose. The options can be overwhelming when you’re six. There were wolves with blue eyes, yellow eyes, green eyes, and brown eyes and some were sitting, some laying down, and some with looser legs so if you held them off of the ground, it looked like they were standing. We had come into the store earlier–before I had gotten permission to buy one–and I had decided that I would probably get one with blue eyes in the seated position. As I looked at them now though, I was struck by how similar those ones were. They seemed lifeless and, well, stuffed! I turned back to the recovering pup I had just put back on the shelf. I hadn’t been planning on getting one with yellow eyes. Then a terrifying thought struck me. What if Gabriella-Nicole came back? What if she tried to hurt the one with yellow eyes again? 

I looked again at the blue eyes pups, all sitting in uniform rows, wave after wave staring past me with a blank expression, then back at the one with yellow eyes and she looked back. Her head was cocked at me as if to gently inquire. I lifted her from the shelf once more, cradling her in my arms as I walked back to where my dad was looking at postcards of whales and lobsters near the counter. 

“Find one, Joy?”

“Yes.”

“What will you call it?”

I looked down at the soft gray figure in my arms, contemplating for a second before answering, “Her name is Misty.”

When they rung up the order, they rolled Misty in tissue paper and placed her in a white paper bag. As we walked towards the door, I said, “Hold on a second,” and crouched down next to the bag, easing Misty out of the tightly wrapped tissue paper and crumpling it up so she could perch on it. When her head was poking out of the bag to my satisfaction, we continued down the street in the salty air.

***

That was how Misty and I met. Since then she has accompanied me on innumerable trips, staying in hotel rooms, at camp, sleepovers, and relative’s houses and being a faithful comforter through tears or after one of my frequent nightmares. We were separated by an evil force called a pre-med major and a silly notion on my part that such majors didn’t have such close friends as Misty accompany them. Now that has been corrected and Misty once again occupies her rightful place on my bed.