Lamby, the author’s dog, is a mutt who came from a rescue shelter in Brooklyn. Photograph by Robin Schwartz

When I was a child, my greatest dream was to find a box full of puppies. And every shoebox, every discarded Manhattan Mini Storage vessel had the potential to change my life. I knew just what I’d do with the puppies I found: take them home, place them in a corner of my loft bed, give them names like Anastasia and Kristy, and feed them the parts of my dinner I didn’t want. I’d throw them in with my stuffed animals, so you couldn’t tell the plush from the living. I’d keep them in my backpack at school and in my skirts at home. By the time they were fully grown, they would follow me down the streets of SoHo, off-leash. They’d bark at shady characters, and even at my parents when they asked me to do something I didn’t like.

In reality, I was deeply dog-less. Until I was six, I had no pets at all, despite trying to catch rabbits in a net at the park and lure turtles with Sun Chips at other people’s country houses. My first (and worst) pet was a newt that choked to death on a bad worm. Next came a hairless cat my mother bought on Greene Street. Both were poor substitutes for the dog I wanted but couldn’t have. We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway. And all my promises to care for the dog were futile: I wasn’t even allowed to go outside alone.

My parents’ childhood dogs loomed large in our family mythology. My mother had been the proud owner of Cindy, a shepherd-collie mix with serious aggression issues and a pathological obsession with Ritz crackers. She was tied to a tree all day on the lawn outside my mother’s neo-Tudor house. At the age of six, my mother was both her captor and her protector. One of the first sentences I learned was “Cindy was a bad dog.”

A few states away, my father had General George Armstrong Custer (General for short), a runt dachshund whose claim to fame was that he’d once eaten an entire eighteen-pound ham. For days thereafter, General’s gut dragged along the ground. When it was really hot, he liked to run to the riverbank and roll in dead eels. He survived a German-shepherd attack in which he lost part of an ear. He died at eighteen, curled beneath my grandfather’s desk.

Both these dogs seemed to me like outcasts, kooks, pains in the ass who the adults secretly wished would just succumb to their own vices already. And so I concluded that dogs were not man’s best friend but, rather, the mischievous sidekicks of misunderstood children.

When I was fifteen, I took the box-of-puppies fantasy into my own hands. Walking down the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, where we now lived, I stopped to pet a tan mutt, the mascot of an animal-rescue group that had set up a booth at the corner of Montague and Hicks. As I scratched the scarred head of a sleepy “chow mix,” the group explained its mission: to end animal homelessness in our borough.

“My parents won’t let me have a dog,” I said.

“Well, maybe you can foster.”

I don’t remember exactly who the person in charge of the booth was. There were several girls and a man. The situation was so oddly traumatic that in my mind the man is played by the character actor Elias Koteas, of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” fame. I do remember, though, that what came next was a very bad afternoon. It involved my dreams coming true and the empty dread that often follows that experience. I climbed into a van with Elias Koteas, who told me that there was a pit-bull mother dead (in a box!) in a parking lot near the Gowanus Canal and three puppies that desperately needed a foster home. As he drove me out of my neighborhood, away from the bagel shops and the squash players, and into industrial Brooklyn, I suddenly recalled my mother’s countless warnings about “climbing into vans with strangers.” Somehow, this situation seemed outside the bounds of her edict. Just think of the puppies—three of them, he had said, their bodies cold, starving. In the van, one of his colleagues, a silent frizzy-haired woman, filled dog bowls with dirty water. I could hear it sloshing as we rumbled down Atlantic Avenue.

It was dusk by the time we reached the parking lot. It had started to drizzle. Elias Koteas told me to follow him, and I did, to a shipping crate in the corner of the lot. I peered in. The mother wasn’t dead. She lifted her head with tremendous effort, sad-eyed and gaunt, like Fantine, in “Les Misérables.” A mother in a desperate situation. Maybe that’s why she didn’t even growl when I reached in and took her babies, one by one.

They were barely puppies. More like kidney beans, slick and cool, eyes still sealed shut. They whimpered, but quietly, no louder than baby birds. Elias Koteas urged me back to the van. He told me to buy bottles and a heating pad and “make sure they’re warm all night.” I was dropped off near a subway stop.

But I didn’t take the train. I wandered for blocks, the puppies hidden in my orange parka. I saw a laundromat and went inside to get warm. Someone noticed the puppies and suggested that I stuff them into the socks without mates sitting atop a dryer, which I did. (It was cute in the vein of an Anne Geddes calendar, but didn’t seem totally safe.) Back out on the street, I spotted a veterinarian’s office in the distance; it was like one of those cartoons in which someone starving in the wilderness hallucinates a hot-dog stand. The office was just closing, but I opened my coat and flashed the receptionist my puppies, like a freelance salesman on Canal Street, and she quickly ushered me in. The vet was a young, sweet man. Definitely Jewish, which is something I care about only in times of crisis. He checked each dog for a cleft palate and explained that I had to feed them every two hours, and that I should rub their anuses with a hot cloth to express their bowels. It never occurred to me to ask whether the vet might keep them there, at the office, where the staff was better equipped for transient pit-bull infants than a fifteen-year-old girl might be. After all, my parents were on a trip to California and my sister, Grace, was only nine.

On the walk home, I named them—Uno, Bruno, and Devo. Imagine how lively our house would be when we had three grown pit bulls! I presented them to the babysitter, who reacted with the only appropriate emotion: horror. I didn’t care, since technically she wasn’t in charge of me. (I was too old for a babysitter but still too young to be trusted alone with Grace.)

The first night, I woke up every hour on the hour, heated the bottles, rubbed the anuses. Every so often, the puppies cried and I’d reach down into their box, letting whoever got there first suckle my index finger. It was the weekend, so I had all the time in the world to spend with them. But by the end of the second afternoon I was an Octomom-style mess. They weren’t eating enough. They weren’t pooping enough. Once, I left the room for too long and when I came back they were sucking each other’s tiny dicks, in a circle, like crazed swingers, blind to the fact that those things weren’t nipples.