Love Love (43 page)

“How are things in White Plains?” Kevin asked.

“We haven't been in White Plains for about three years. No, we're near Boston now.”

“Boston?

There was silence on the line, punctuated by a throat clearing. “I shouldn't be surprised that Alice didn't tell you. By this point, I should know my own daughter well enough, but I suppose I still don't. Yes, she's here now, and she's not well. In fact, she's very sick.”

Kevin heard the words, but he didn't process them.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Kevin said, “I'm here. But could you . . .”

“You heard me right. Alice isn't well, not at all, and that's why I'm calling. I'm taking the initiative to let the people she cared about know, because time is growing short. It's a brain disease. I don't know if . . .”

Kevin snapped his phone off, walked out of the Sanctuary and onto the driveway, and hurled the device with every bit of his strength against the asphalt. It burst into a hundred glittery pieces. His chest felt so tight that he thought it a heart attack, but no, it was just anger. He hated George for calling him, for dispatching the news to him without warning. It was a classic case of shooting the messenger, but what choice did he have? As he stood there with the electronic guts of the phone splayed on the blacktop, he was hard-pressed to think how else information of this magnitude could've been conveyed. Would it have made any difference if George had offered some stock bit of comfort—brace yourself, you better sit down, that sort of bullshit? No, not at all. This was a tragedy, and there was no real way to shine any light into such blackness.

Alice. His Alice. What the fuck could've happened to her? She'd always been slight, always the envy of her girlfriends for her ability
to eat whatever she wanted without ever gaining a pound, but she'd been a dancer, and dancers were not weaklings. They were healthy, they were every bit as fit as tennis players, and she was going to die? She was barely forty years old. It didn't make any sense. It had to be a mistake.

But it wasn't a mistake. It was, he knew as well as anyone, how Alice would handle it. Was this why they'd broken up, because she didn't want him to witness her demise? No, it was more than that, but it had to have played a part. The only people she'd let in at this point were her parents, because she owed them. But what about him, didn't she owe him anything? They were married, husband and wife. This was beyond selfish, it was cruel.

He squatted down to pick up the pieces of his shattered phone. Denise came out the back door and walked over to his side.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

He would tell her, but not now. Right now, what he needed was to sink into this pain and sadness, drown in it, let it wash over him like some twisted baptismal waters.

27

J
udy had never heard Kevin sound the way he did. It was like talking to a corpse, his voice not even monotone but no tone, nothing at all. He was not flying into Newark tonight but rather Boston Wednesday morning.

“Kevin, do you want me there? Because I can do that. We're still here at the Cape, and it's like an hour and change from Pocasset to Logan.”

“Oh,” he said. “Why? I thought you drove home yesterday.”

When her brother had called, she had planned to tell him what was going on with Snaps, but after hearing about Alice, she figured the last thing Kevin needed was to hear that his dog was dying, too.

“Roger had some business to take care of,” she lied. Roger was on the other side of the living room, on the phone with the vet. “We'll probably be here for another couple of days. But never mind us. I'm worried about you. I've never even heard of this . . . ?”

“Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,” Kevin said. “It's like Alzheimer's, but it happens really fast. There's no cure, and . . .”

And here was another frightening sign, Kevin crying to the point where he couldn't speak. He was not one to break down like this. Even when he'd delivered the news of their mother's passing, he'd managed to compose himself.

“It's going to be hard to see her, I'm not gonna lie,” he said. “But no, Judy. It's between me and her. I'll manage.”

After they exchanged good-byes, Judy sat back in the sofa and felt as if she'd been punched. Alice, dying. The last image of her was at the supermarket, where she'd looked as healthy and normal as anyone, but even then, she must've been sick. Had Alice known? She must have, because she'd been on her way to Boston. Judy looked at
her hands, turned them slowly back and forth, like a queen's wave. Times like these, it seemed very true that human bodies were nothing more than temporary vessels formed of unreliable flesh and bone.

She made herself get up and walk over to Roger, who was sitting where he'd sat all day yesterday, by Snaps's side on the circular dog bed in the kitchen. He stroked her fur. The dog didn't look any worse this evening, but she also didn't look any better. Eyes glazed, she stared off into the distance as she lay on her side like a fallen horse. Her breathing remained shallow.

“The vet will be here in half an hour,” he said. “What was that all about?”

She told him, and Roger listened. “Your brother must be devastated. From what it sounds like, he's still in love with her.”

“They were married for fourteen years. And they dated a bit before that, too, so we're talking close to twenty years, half his life.”

“What went wrong?”

Judy thought back to that conversation she had with Alice last Christmas on the balcony, and her determined words echoed in her ear:
If I need someone's help, it's not worth doing.
It seemed preposterous; the whole point of getting married was so you wouldn't die alone, and yet the more Judy considered her ex-sister-in-law, the more it made sense. Alice had always been a tough girl, and now she was making her toughest stand.

She shared her thoughts with Roger, and he agreed. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with death.”

That's what the vet informed them when he came and listened to the faint beats of Snaps's heart. “There's not much we can do for her at this point,” Dr. Gordon said, wiping his glasses. “The numbers from yesterday's blood work aren't good. Her organs are shutting down; she doesn't have long to go. If you want to euthanize her, I wouldn't argue with you.”

“But it's not what you'd do,” Judy said.

“No,” he said. “She's not suffering, and that's the only reason I'd ever put down an animal. But everyone is different. Some people find it too difficult to bear the decline. Has she eaten anything?”

“Some kibble this morning, but in an hour she threw it up,” Roger said.

The vet crouched down and petted Snaps's black and tan head. He ran his fingers down her fur. When his hand came near her grayed
muzzle, she poked out her tongue for a tentative lick. “Just be with her,” he said. “She's here now.”

As soon as Dr. Gordon left, Judy wished they had put her down. She knew it was wrong to feel this way, which made her feel even worse. She thought back to her mother's death, how she'd pushed that awful task of witnessing her passing onto her brother while she'd stolen away to her bedroom to literally hide underneath the covers. Judy hoped that she would be nowhere near Kevin's dog when Snaps expired and felt no compunction to tell Roger otherwise.

“If you say so,” he said, which she knew was his way of telling her that he didn't agree.

“I just don't like it, okay? Dying sucks, and I don't want to see it. I know this makes me a monster, but I don't care.”

“You're not a monster,” he said. “But you could look at what it might mean.”

“It means my father didn't love me, I didn't love myself, my mother abandoned me through her death. Believe me, I've gone over it a godzillion times with therapists and gurus and swamis and transcendental spirit-guides, and it all still points to the fact that when a being goes from here to wherever the hell they go, I don't want to be there.”

That evening, they ordered Chinese takeout from Lo Fatt, a place that made healthy versions of staple dishes, which meant everything tasted as though it was missing something.

“It's all sort of horrible, isn't it,” Roger said, holding up a brown piece of General Tso's chicken skewered through a chopstick.

“At least we'll live longer to eat more bad food.”

Thankfully, there was decent wine to go along with it, and after emptying a bottle of shiraz, they stumbled to the bedroom and crashed. When Judy awoke to a full bladder, it was still pitch black, and as she felt her way to the bathroom, she almost tripped on the figure lying on top of the bearskin rug.

It had been Snaps's favorite place to sleep, so at some point during the night, she must've crawled her way over here. Judy crouched down, terrified that she might be already gone, even more terrified when she realized that the dog was, at this very moment, straddling the mortal line between life and death.

It took every bit of strength in Judy not to run. She bit her lip as she stopped herself from yelling out Roger's name so he would be here and she could disappear, but this was it, it was happening right now,
and as she heard the unnatural quickening of canine breath and the sudden shuddering from the dog's body, she knew that turning away would be an unforgivable offense to the spirit of this dog who'd been her brother's companion for her whole life. Kevin should be here comforting Snaps instead of her, but that was the idiot part of Judy's brain talking. She had to be brave, no excuses.

She placed both hands on Snaps's ribs and was surprised at the stiffness of her fur, the coldness of the flesh underneath. Enough moonlight shined from the window to see the dog's amber eyes as they focused on hers. There was an understanding in those pupils, of exactly what, Judy didn't know, but Snaps knew, and Judy wished she spoke dog, or she wished Snaps spoke English, because there was such clarity there, and then, all at once, it was gone. Snaps let out a sigh, her final breath, her release. Judy wept, and when she smelled the emptied bowels of the dog, it seemed appropriate that there was no dignity to this, that in the end, it was all shit, this life, this death, forever and ever.

Forever. What a cruel and impossible concept humans had invented, since nothing in the universe was forever, not even the universe itself. Here was the opposite of forever, this deadness underneath her fingers, and there was nothing to be done.

After her mother passed away, everyone told Judy that with time, she would get over it, that the wound would heal, but it wasn't that simple. If a cut is deep enough, it leaves a scar, and that's what Judy had now instead of her mother: this gash inside that opened up and bled. These tears she shed now went beyond Snaps. She grieved in the darkness for the woman who brought her into this world—but then something unexpected happened. Not only did Judy see her mother in her mind, but she also saw her father next to her, the two of them sitting catty-corner at the dining room table, with Kevin and Judy completing the family square. Those were the good times, together for dinner, the aroma of her mother's Korean cooking smoothing out the bumps and divots of their daily grind. For that hour, the war between Judy and her father came to a begrudging cease-fire as they bit into the falling-off-the-bone
kalbi
shortribs, as they spooned the kimchi stew into their hungry, grateful mouths.

Her father was going to be no different than Snaps here. When she'd imagined his demise with grim satisfaction, she saw him in the coffin, his black suit in stark contrast to the white satin interior, his
hair combed neatly against his scalp, a red carnation in the lapel of his jacket, but now she knew she'd jumped several guns, if not the entire armory. This was death in front of her, from being to nothing, from movement to permanent stillness. When she'd taken him to see Dr. Elias last month, she'd glanced at his hands, how bloated his fingers were, nothing like the long, elegant digits they used to be. His hands were her hands, this she knew every time she picked up a pen or a brush, and it had hurt to see their transformation.

Like the good cat that he was, Momo sidled up next to her, rubbing her thigh. The Siamese feline sniffed at Snaps's nose, then laid a momentary paw on it, a gesture that seemed so human that Judy wondered if she'd imagined it. Judy rose and found the beach towel she'd brought from Kevin's house, the one that Snaps used to lie on until she'd fallen in love with the bear rug. With several sheets of wet paper towels, she cleaned the mess as best she could, scrubbed her hands clean, then tucked Snaps in with the beach towel, wishing there was something more she could do.

When Roger awoke in the morning, Judy was already making breakfast.

“Oh,” he said, when he saw Snaps. “I'm so sorry, Judy. It must've been awful finding her gone.”

She cracked two more eggs into the pan. She'd thought about how she would tell him about what happened last night, but when she tried to form the words, none seemed appropriate, nor entirely necessary. After all, she hadn't actually done anything but just be present for Snaps's passing, but maybe that was the point of it all, to have been conscious and aware as this being had moved from this plane to the next. Everything felt light this morning, the spatula in her hand a mere feather, the pan levitating over the flames as if it were made of clouds. As terrifying as it had been, last night was also a gift, and Judy promised herself she wouldn't squander it.