The Stud Book (42 page)

They dressed and drove to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet, the overpriced lifesaving dog ER. When they got there and started to explain, the woman behind the counter looked at Shadow. She picked up the phone and said, “Let’s get urgent triage to the front desk.”

Urgent.

That didn’t sound good.

It wasn’t long before the three of them were in one of the medical rooms. Ben and Sarah sat in chairs, Shadow lay at their feet. He looked better now, really. He’d stopped drooling. But he still couldn’t walk.

The vet was young and earnest and everything they needed from a specialist. He wrote notes. He said, “We’ll need to run a blood panel and take X-rays. When an animal presents in this condition, it’s hard to rule out poisoning. It could be an inner-ear problem, though that usually leads to nystagmus, a movement in the eyes. We’re not seeing that.”

They spoke at length about tests and costs—about the value of a complete blood panel versus a less extensive version.

“He presents as though he’s had some kind of neurological event,” the veterinarian said. “We’ll run him through a few tests. You can wait out front, or leave a phone number with the receptionist if you’re comfortable with that.”

Ben and Sarah were still in the front lobby, drinking water from the cooler in paper cups, when a technician called them back in.

It was sooner than they had expected.

This time, they weren’t shown to an exam room, but to a professionally arranged parlor, a living room of sorts, a tidy space like a good hotel. They sat together on a couch.

A technician brought Shadow in, and the old dog staggered toward Ben and Sarah. Shadow had a catheter in his bony front leg, held on with bright pink tape. “Oh my God,” Sarah said.

Ben was already crying, his big manly face folded up in creases under his lips, under his jaw, everything tense and sad and reddened. He wiped a hand at his eyes. Sarah leaned into him.

The vet said, “I don’t think we need to run the tests we discussed earlier. Our first X-rays give us a pretty good indication of what’s going on.” He put the X-rays up on a light board, reminding Sarah of the light boards at the OMSI science exhibit.

A white clouded patch was a mass on Shadow’s lungs. The dog had extensive cancer. “When we’re dealing with lung cancer, and the animal presents with neurological trouble, it’s generally a sign that it has progressed to the brain.” The vet said, “I’m sorry. We need to talk about options.”

Sarah ran a hand over her old dog’s silky ear. Ben took one of Sarah’s hands.

They went through a list with the vet: Chemotherapy? Shadow would likely not survive. They could take him home, see how he’d do. He might live a little longer. The vet said, “It all depends on what you’re willing to handle. His world is probably spinning right now. He may have had a seizure already. It’s likely he’ll have more.”

The dog slipped, as one foot went out from under him, and Sarah screamed; she’d been holding her dog together with her will, trying to will him back to health.

He walked lifting his feet too high, moving them in random directions.

That fast, the time had come. Shadow had seemed fine in the morning, and in the afternoon, too, but now they’d put him down. His life was over.

He was the dog of Sarah’s youth. He was the dog of their early marriage. This was a lifetime. She said, “Why didn’t I notice?” She was a goddamn animal behaviorist, an ethologist. She was supposed to be paying attention.

She ran her hand over Shadow’s head, and he looked into her eyes, and he was love. Her baby. “We have to do this fast,” she said. She couldn’t stand it.

The vet left and came back with a kit. He knelt at their side. Shadow got up on Sarah’s lap. The three of them were together on
the couch. The vet said, “The first shot feels good. It’s propofol, made famous by Michael Jackson. I’ve tried it myself. He’ll be calm.”

And he slid a needle into the catheter. Shadow blinked, settled, closed his eyes. With the second shot, Sarah felt her dog’s heart stop beating under her hand. Still she couldn’t quit running her fingers through his short fur, and she couldn’t stop touching his ears long after he had left the world behind.

A
rena’s phone message was cryptic and unsettling. When Nyla called back, she wouldn’t answer, and she hadn’t come home. Nyla tried not to watch the clock. She left a simple, cheerful message of love and being present: “Dinner’s ready! I love you! Love, love, love!” She couldn’t say it enough. Then she sat down to dinner alone.

Trust was crucial.

She picked through a plate of quinoa with feta and herbs and knocked the bones out of a slim bit of sustainably harvested Alaskan salmon.

After she’d faked her way through the meal long enough, for an audience of nobody, she got up, put the rest of the salad in a glass bowl, and snapped on an environmentally friendly reusable lid. She put the salad and Arena’s dinner in the fridge.

The wait for Arena to come home was killing her. She couldn’t do it. She reached for the car keys. She left a note on the table: “Call when you’re in, dear!” She slipped on her shoes and went to her store to stay busy.

There Nyla chipped and chipped and chipped at her perfect world. With each swing of her putty knife she was improving her
circumstances in all ways, building her self-sustaining economic future while making her mark of environmental awareness.

But when she looked at her clock and it was past eleven and she still hadn’t heard from Arena, her self-restraint cracked. What the hell was going on? Her daughter never stayed out this late. Nyla slapped down the putty knife.

She called Arena again, and there was still no answer. She dialed 911, then hung up.

Was this an emergency?

That call would contribute to the city’s problem of an overburdened 911 system. She tried the nonemergency police, where she reached a recording. She followed the instructions, well accustomed to their automated system by now, punched in the right numbers, and left a message.

As soon as she hung up, she regretted the call—Arena was still on parole. Had she just turned her own daughter in?

Arena wasn’t out of control, only out of the house.

Now Nyla waited for two things—Arena to come home, or the police to call back, whichever came first.

She couldn’t pretend to do any more work that night. She lifted her worn canvas bag and locked up the store. The street was dark. Nyla pulled her coat closed against the cold. When a lone man passed, she kept a careful distance. The shadowy stranger materialized into a Kurt Cobain look-alike. Portland was flooded with them these days, now more than ever, as though Cobain’s death had spawned his likeness, born the moment he died, and now they were all teenagers, his energy transferred—

She knew where Arena was.

The Temple Everlasting was a short walk. Nyla was barely in her own body, and she ran. The blocks flew by. She ignored the pull in her groin muscle and the ache in her side. That damn human body with its demands. Her body served her children, that was its best use. With each gallop, her bag slapped her hip like an eager jockey.

She gulped air.

When she got there, she pounded on the glass of the Temple’s front door. Then she saw the notice: a green tag stuck firmly against the front window.

Eviction due to safety concerns.

The building had been vacated, and the owners had forty-five days to remove property for repairs. Eviction? She ran her hand over the tag as though over a lover’s portrait and immediately felt almost a nostalgia for Mack and his little world, because if Arena wasn’t there, where was she?

It was dark inside and looked half-ransacked, but it had looked like that before. The cool glass was soothing to Nyla’s worried forehead, and even though it was covered in street grime, she pressed her skin against it and closed her eyes, as though welcoming her own mother’s soothing hand. When she opened her eyes, she saw a sliver of light that radiated from under another door in the far back.

Was he there? Mack and Arena could be there, behind that door getting it on, drinking booze or church tea. Maybe laughing at her. Sure he’d been evicted, but maybe he hadn’t gone.

She slapped on the window again.

When Nyla was that age she and Dulcet had hung out with old men who bought booze, and Greek bar owners, and a drug dealer named D’Loi. One time, at Pittock Mansion, a historic house with a sprawling lawn outside of town, they’d been up there drinking in the dark, overlooking the city with an old rocker who had coke, and Dulcet went to pee in the bushes and the rocker attacked Nyla, rolling her on the grass. Maybe it was meant as a seduction.

She’d been Arena’s age.

It all seemed like a good time back then. Really. Even when it was awful.

She smacked her palm against the glass, rattled the door handle, kicked at the wood along the bottom, and yelled, “Open this door!”

After a wait long enough to hide a dead body, long enough for Nyla to almost give up, Mack shuffled out from the back of his place. He was there! He was in a robe, with his hair sticking up, and had a big cardboard box under one arm.

A box? That was creepy. It was only a box but it seemed so wrong.

He came to the door and slid open a lock. Then he turned a key, another lock. He took off a chain. Nyla could see it all through the glass. Three locks, and still anybody could break that glass if they really wanted in. His robe was stained, and his socks had holes. He said, “Not evicted, right? Because there is no true eviction.”

His breath smelled like curdled milk. He put the box out on the
sidewalk. “We just circulate, like a box of Portland’s finest castoffs. I’ll find new digs.”

Nyla pushed Mack out of the way and went inside.

He said, “Arena’s not here.”

She marched to the far back and peered through the open door. There was a couch and a fat old TV set with a cop show on. She called, “Arena?”

“How long’s she been gone?”

Nyla felt a fist in her gut. She clutched her phone—that severed, invisible cord that linked to her baby.

Mack was sleepy eyed. He poured a glass of water from a speckled Brita pitcher, handed the water to Nyla, and said, “If I see her, I’ll tell her to go home. I’ve got my own kid out there, too, you know.”

Nyla had no idea.

“He lives with his mom.”

The walk back to her store was a march of anxiety. She held a hand to her side and limped forward. She scanned the crowd in a bar, through the front window. What if Arena was there?

She saw the back of a man and recognized the fit of his jeans. It was Humble, at the end of the bar, his back to the glass of the storefront window.

Was that really him? Was she so versed in the shape of her friend’s husband’s ass? He turned. It
was
Humble, poised, about to drink. He saw her, gave a nod, and raised his glass.

She wiped her eyes with her palm. She checked her phone, where there were no calls, no texts from Arena or the police. She was afraid to go home and worry alone. Instead she doubled back, found the door to the bar, and went in.

She hadn’t been in a bar in forever. The dive bars of her youth had all been converted to yoga studios, as though the buildings in the city had grown up alongside her, their interests evolving together.