While I Was Gone (20 page)

The snow continued wetly through the day, sometimes lightening briefly—the sun nearly breaking through and graying the sparse flakes—then thickening again, closing the world up around us.

Night had fallen by four, a combination of the effect of the storm and the recent change from daylight savings time. The last two clients of the day had already called to cancel.

Mary Ellen and I went up front to where Beattie had the radio turned to the news. We all stood around listening and eating cookies that Mary Ellen had had to buy at the bake sale for her day care center. Finally the announcer got to the weather, The snow was icing up now that the temperature was dropping, there’d already been a few fender benders in the evening commute. I looked outside. It was four thirty and our three cars were the only ones left in the parking lot.

Beattie worriedly announced that she thought maybe she ought to go home early. Mary Ellen and I assured her this was fine. And actually, I was glad. I hadn’t wanted her around for Arthur’s euthanasia.

Not that I thought she’d say or do anything while Eli was there, but she might make me uncomfortable somehow afterward. I was just as happy not to have to think about her comments.

We told her now we’d help her close out the off fice and we all began to move easily and efficiently around each other, turning off machines, locking up medications, filing, cleaning. Then Beattie was standing behind her desk, adding layer upon layer of sweaters and outerwear, most of them baggy and vividly colored and knit by herself.

As I headed back to set up for Arthur and Eli, I heard her call, “See you tomorrow!” and I yelled, “Drive carefully.” The bell on the door jangled as she closed it.

After she left, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether we would dispose of Arthur’s body or Eli would take it. When I was finished in back, I went to Beattie’s station behind the front counter and turned on her computer. I called up Eli’s file. There was usually a note as to the disposition of the body, and Beattie had made one here, Eli would take Arthur home. I went up to the start of the file, and there was the address. I I Duxbury Court.

Fancy. Expensive. A ne wish development in what had been the wooded part of an old estate. Eli’s home, and Arthur’s grave. I thought of the trails that had crisscrossed through the land before it was developed, of how, deep in the woods, you could see crumbling stone fences that had once marked off the open fields of old farms. Townspeople had used the estate for bird-watching, for walking dogs, as we sometimes did, or just as a retreat, a nearby place to go that made them feel far away from the world. When the owner died and his family sold it to a developer, there were protests and outraged letters in the local paper. To no avail. Time marched on. And brought me, I thought, Eli Mayhew.

I closed down the computer and went to my exam room to wait.

Eli arrived just after five-thirty. When I heard the bell jangle, I stepped into the hall and called out his name. He appeared around the corner with Arthur in his arms. He came slowly down the hall. He set the dog down on the table again. His face was grim and flat, and I realized by its absence now how much animation had livened it before.

“How long does it take?” he asked. He was unwinding a long, elegant scarf from his neck. Snowdrops glistened on the shoulders of his jacket.

“Just seconds, really. Some people prefer to stay, and other people say goodbye and wait outside. Whatever feels right to you.”

“Jesus, nothing feels right about this. But I’m staying.”

He wouldn’t look at me, I noticed. His face seemed shut in anger or pain.

I kept my voice gentle.

“I need to tell you, then, that it may not be easy. It should be, and most of the time it is—they just go to sleep. But some dogs vocalize. Some lose bowel or bladder control. Some thrash around a bit. I think what it is is that the feeling of the drug disturbs them.”

“They cry?” he said.

“Yes. Howl for a few seconds.”

He turned sharply away.

“Jesus.”

“Arthur most likely won’t. I hope he doesn’t. But I want you to be prepared if he does.”

There was a long silence in the room. Eli’s hands—I noticed again how large they were, but with long, graceful fingers—stroked Arthur’s shiny fur, over and over. Finally he did look up at me, to say, “I don’t know how you do this.”

I shrugged.

“Some vets won’t.” But that had always seemed the cruelest choice to me—when people needed it, to send them searching for someone who would do it, someone they and their animal didn’t know.

“But you chose to.”

“I don’t like it, Eli.”

“No,” he said.

“No, of course not.”

We stood glumly for a minute. I was intensely aware of *e bright pink syringe lying on my table.

“Do you want a minute alone to say goodbye?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I said goodbye.” He looked up at me, his eyes shiny.

“Let’s do it,” he said abruptly.

I opened the door and called Mary Ellen. She came nearly instantly, she’d been waiting too. I made the briefest of introductions-a gesture, really, and their names—and then I turned away to get the syringe while she reached for Arthur’s front leg.

“You can hold him, if you like,” I said to Eli. When I turned back, I saw that he had bent over Arthur, his face buried in the dog’s neck. He was speaking gently, saying what a good boy Arthur was, repeating this over and over.

Arthur was making a soft, throaty noise of pleasure and poking at him with his muzzle.

Mary Ellen nodded at me, she was ready. I came around her in front of Arthur, set my fingers beside the vein, and injected the needle.

I pulled back slightly at the start, and the blood eased in—I had the vein. Quickly I pushed the pink fluid in.

Arthur had turned to me briefly at the stick, but then he relaxed.

And within a few seconds he went limp and rolled slightly farther to his side. I heard Eli’s sharp intake of breath. I had my fingers on Arthur’s vein now. I had felt the throbbing slow and stop. Nothing.

nodded at Mary Ellen and she left, silently. Now I set my stethoscope on Arthur. After a few seconds, I said to Eli, “He’s gone.”

Eli stood up. He was looking down at Arthur, who lay utterly relaxed on his side now, his eyes slightly open. Eli’s eyes were red, his face was pulled into deep lines, nose to mouth, mouth to chin.

My hands were trembling.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I reached Out to touch his arm, feeling his unfamiliar solidity under the thick fabric of his jacket. His head swayed slightly on his neck as if in response, and I remembered suddenly the way he’d looked when I saw him in the police station after Dana died. I “I know,” he said, and turned again to the dead dog.

He left a few minutes later, carrying Arthur out into the heavy wet snowfall in the box we provided. I stood at the door, watching him set the box down tenderly, watching him open the car and then load Arthur in.

Mary Ellen was suddenly behind me, her hand on my shoulder.

“You okay?” she said.

I turned to her. She had her coat on, and big purple boots. She would probably be late to pick up her son at day care. Her broad, pretty face was tense behind her glasses.

“I am. It’s never easy, is it?”

“No,” she said.

“Thanks for staying.”

“You’ve done it for me,” she said. She pulled her hat on, and some mittens. Nothing matched.

“Is he a friend?” she asked. She was gesturing at the parking lot. Arthur and Eli were gone.

“Kind of,” I said.

“Someone I knew way back when, who just moved here.”

“Beattie said something like that.” She pulled her shoulders square.

“Well,” she announced.

“I gotta go.”

“Oh, I know,” I said.

“Go. Go.” I waved her away.

“You’re okay.”

“I really am,” I said.

“Treat yourself when you get home,” she said.

“Thanks, Mary Ellen,” I said.

And then I was alone. I moved around the off fice slowly, putting a few things away, wiping down my uble. I left a note for Ned, explaining that we’d left a little early. I got my coat on.

The air outside was raw, and I was sorry I hadn’t taken the time to get out winter clothes this morning. Gloves anyway, or maybe a hat.

Had I not believed in the snow, after yesterday’s warm sunshine? It was still melting now as it landed, but the ground felt icy underfoot.

I sat in the car and let it warm up, my breath a pale shadow in front of my face with each exhalation.

The houses along the back roads home were lighted for the most part. Here and there you could see someone—usually a woman-moving around, or the bluish flicker of a TV Daniel wouldn’t be home yet. Our house would be dark. I pulled up to a red light at the intersection of Bishops Pond Road. If I turned left instead of right here when the light changed to green, I would have only a half mile or so to get to Eli’s house. I imagined the way it would look—massive, many-windowed, many-terraced. I imagined Eli, carrying the box that held Arthur.

Do you do many of these? Eli had asked.

Hundreds by now. Maybe a thousand. Always with a kind of breathlessness at the last moment. A fear of it, I suppose. A fear, of course, that it might not go well, that the animal might keen or howl, as some did, or that the owner might be overwhelmed by grief. But mostly, just a kind of terror of the speed with which it happened once I gave the injection, of how quickly the line between life and death was crossed. I thought of that moment with Arthur, his utter relaxation into death within seconds, my hands on him as he went over. Eli there.

And then I realized that the Eli who floated somewhere close by this image in my mind, the Eli who bent over his dog, was the young Eli, the Eli sun ding alone on the porch as I pulled away in a cab from the house on Lyman Street. Consciously I tried to focus on the older Eli’s face. And could not quite get it. I realized I was confusing him visually with an old friend of Daniel’s from divinity school, another big, slightly paunchy man who had visited us occasionally over the years when he was on the East Coast.

The light changed, and I turned right, for home. In the headlights, the snow thickened with a dizzying motion. I drove slowly, and after I’d pulled into our driveway and turned the lights off, I sat for a long time in the dark, watching the wet flakes swirl and thinking in a confused overlay of the house on Lyman Street and of putting Arthur down—so that it seemed to me nearly as though I’d done it then, in that world, in that other life.

C H A P’t E R

WHEN I CAME INTO THE KITCHEN TWO DAYS BEFORE

Thanksgiving, Daniel pointed to the dirty duffel bag, the banged-up gtutar case by the back door, and said, “Cass.”

“Where is she?” I asked, still stupid from sleep.

He raised his eyes and pointed his thumb at the ceiling.

Upstairs.

“Sleeping, I reckon.”

“Did you hear her?” I asked.

“I heard something, but I thought it was just the dogs.”

I poured coffee.

“Damn it, why does she do this? I have to go to work.”

“I’ll stay home. I just have calls and letters, and I can do them here.”

“Will you call me when she gets up? Or have her call.

Maybe I can weasel home early somehow. Or for lunch or something.”

“She’ll understand.”

“But it’s so familiar!” I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him at the table.

“She doesn’t say when she’s coming, so I can’t be here to welcome her, so she’ll be hurt and I’ll feel bad.” I drank some coffee.

“But also set up. Da dah, da dah. And off we go again.”

“Don’t get ahead of everything, Joey. Maybe she’s mellowed.” He was smumg at me.

I looked out the window at the dooryard. No cars but our own.

“How’d she get here, I wonder.”

“Somebody must have dropped her off.”

“What time do you think you heard her?”

“I didn’t look. More night than morning, though.”

Allie came and rested her head on my thigh. Good morning.

stroked her fur, absently pulled at a burr stuck in it.

“God, I wish I could stay. I’m so excited to see her. I wish I could stay. I wish I were you and you were me.”

“Mmm. Me too. Then you could call all the members of the fundraising committee.”

“And you could check the stool samples.”

“And you could tell the roofer we’ll have to pay him in installments.”

“And you could ca the erize Florence Dicey’s cat.”

He smiled at me.

“Horrible lives, aren’t they?

Interchangeably and profoundly horrible.”

I couldn’t get away all day. When I arrived home, late in the afternoon, Cass was in the tub—I could hear her singing upstairs over the faint rumble of running water. Daniel had left me a note on the kitchen table, saying he’d be back for dinner briefly at around six, reporting that he and Cass had made chili, suggesting that maybe I could throw a salad together. The table was set for three, the kitchen was neat, the dogs’ bowls were full. The dogs themselves were circling me frantically, and now I stopped to pet each one and then released them into the dark night air. When I flicked the outside light on, it caught their rumps disappearing, the long bushy tails swinging with pleasure as they plunged into the black thicket under the pine trees.

I pried off my boots, hung up my coat, and then climbed the steep painted stairs, pulling on the wooden handrail. Cass’s duffel was open on the floor of her room now, and her clothes were sorted into several messy piles. The bed was made. I leaned against the noisy bathroom door and knocked.

“Cass?” I yelled.

“Cassie, it’s Mom.”

The water stopped.

“Mom?”

“Yes, I’m home.”

“Three sees. Two. I’ll be right down.”

In the kitchen, I poured myself some wine. I rinsed the lettuce and made a dressing. I could hear Cass moving around upstairs. I wanted to go to her, but I felt I’d been instructed not to, told to wait.

Finally I heard her on the stairs. I rushed into the living room and met her as she emerged from the narrow stairwell.