While I Was Gone (19 page)

“And then, unfortunately, have to get weighed against the kind of affection you feel for the dog.”

“Yes,” he said. His hands moved to Arthur again. The dog made a loving grumble of response.

“And it’s hardest of all, I think, with this kind of injury.” I gestured at Arthur’s muzzle.

“When they’re not in pain and they’re so normal in the front.”

“Yes,” he said softly.

We stood there for a moment, both looking at Arthur. He blinked and lowered his head to his paws, watching us, as though he understood we were talking about him.

“You certainly don’t need to decide anything now,” I said.

“Or on any kind of schedule.”

He cleared his throat.

“The awful thing is I have decided. I’m just not ready to act on it.”

“Well, that’s fine too. Take him home again, get used to the idea.

Or as used to it as you can. And just call me whenever you’re ready. We can keep him on the Valium, to make his life easier.”

Another long silence fell. Then he looked at me keenly.

“Do you do a lot of these?”

“Euthanasias? ” “Yes.”

“Not enough to ever find it easy.”

“Would you do it to a dog of yours in a similar situation? Do you have a dog?”

“I have three.”

“Ah.” He smiled.

“One for each daughter.”

“As it turned out. And the answer is I don’t know what I’d do. I think I might find it easier than you to have an incapacitated dog around, just because of my work. But I can also think of situations my dogs could be in where I’d have no hesitation—none—about euthanasia.” I had actually tried five or six years earlier to euthanize one of our own dogs myself. Lou. He was eighteen, incontinent, and so arthritic that he could barely move. He snapped when you tried to help him, it hurt so much. We had all adored him, for his beauty and strength and speed when young, for his gentleness, particularly with the girls when they were little, and for his great heart, whenever anyone in the household wept, he came and sat leaned against her, whimpering gently in sympathy. When I picked up the pink syringe of Beuthanasia, I started to cry so hard that I couldn’t see through my tears to find a vein, and Mary Ellen had had to take over.

“But even that’s beside the point,” I said now.

“It’s your judgment and your feelings that matter.”

“I understand that, of course. I just wondered.”

Another silent moment passed. I looked quickly at my watch. Eli saw me.

He bent at once over Arthur and lifted him, just as I stepped toward him and touched his arm.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to rush you.”

“No. No, this is really between me and Arthur now. We don’t need to take any more of your time. We shouldn’t.”

I came around behind him to open the door, and when he turned to me, our faces were suddenly very close. I could smell him, an expensive, lathery odor.

“I’ll call you next week, then,” he said. He smiled, a quick, sad smile.

“That terrible line. True in this case.”

I had stepped back.

“I’m sorry it has to be.”

He sobered.

“And the Valium?”

“I’ll meet you up front with it. How much do you want? A week’s worth?”

His mouth tightened.

“At the most,” he said.

As he was standing in the front doorway to leave, a few minutes later, he turned to me, behind the counter, and said, “At some point, Jo, it’d be nice to talk about life. Life beyond dogs.”

“Oh, is there such a thing?” I asked. I could feel Beattie’s gaze shift sharply over to me from her computer.

He smiled again, and then he was gone.

“Who was that big fat man?” Beattie asked later.

“You know, Mayhew, the one who belongs to Arthur.”

“Beattie! He wasn’t fat.” We were moving around each other in the hallway office, she printing out billing records, I checking supplies.

“You know him from somewhere?”

“I do, actually. My deep, dark past. Why? What makes you ask?”

“Your voice was different, is all.”

I thought about this, wondering if it was true.

“Well, I thought he was fat,” Beattie said after a few moments. She wasn’t looking at me. The printer ground away.

“But I like em thin.

Daniel, now. That’s my type.”

“You can’t have him, Beattie.”

Her laugh shrilled, and she walked off, trailing computer paper.

FALL SEEMED TO DEEPEN AS THE WEEK WENT BY. IT WAS

colder, very cold at night, and often in the morning a frost clung to the golden grass. The brightest leaves—the cerise and pale yellow of the maples—were gone by now, and just the golden yellow of birches and the deep red-brown of oaks remained. The vistas had opened up slowly as the leaves fell and blew into bright piles that collected against the fence lines and shrubs, that pooled at the edges of the roads.

Now you could take in the whole town at once, you could see past the white houses to the distant mountains beyond. All week I waited for Eli to call or appear. I thought of him often, of him and Arthur. But he didn’t come in, and he didn’t telephone.

Over the weekend, we had a reprieve suddenly, three Indian summer days—golden, warm. Daniel and I decided to take our Monday afternoon to put the storm windows in and clean them. We did this on opposite sides of the glass so we could talk as we went along and also point out streaks to each other. The air was dry and cool as it drifted over me in the house, but Daniel was working outside, in the sun.

First he pulled off his sweatshirt, then the plaid flannel long-sleeved shirt under that. In his T-shirt and jeans, he looked lean and tough, like the bad boys I wasn’t allowed to date in high school. I could see the muscles working in his arms, the cording tendons.

He caught me watching him as he rubbed the glass between us with his cloth, watching and not working. He stopped too.

“What?” he said loudly.

I shook my head and grinned. I leaned forward and put my lips on the cool glass, pressed them. When I pulled back, I yelled, “You’re cute.”

He smiled and then raised his hand and tapped the glass by the mark of my lips.

“Streak,” he announced.

I made a face and wiped it away.

Ever since the Sunday I’d gone to church and then waited in bed for Daniel to come home—washed, perfumed, the space heater faintly humming on high so we could be naked in comfort—I’d been eager for him. Not all the time, to be sure, because our lives were so disparate and busy. But there it was, and the three times we had made love since had been with a newness, a wily attentiveness to each other, that surprised me. One of these times we’d actually tried it standing up in the kitchen, with me, in my striped bathrobe, backed up against the wall.

But Daniel had abruptly cried, “Ah! no! no!” When we stopped, he said, “That was my back yelling, not me,” so we’d shut the dogs in the kitchen and done it on the living room couch, with their dolorous halloos our distracting music.

And one night, when we were both tired, we spent a while laughing and arguing desultorily about who should do the work (“No, you get on me”), until finally I reached down between my legs and began lazily to touch myself. Daniel slid back to watch me. After a minute, he began to stroke himself, too, and we watched each other for a while, our breathing getting more and more ragged, until we both shut our eyes and arched away from each other, crying out over and over in nicely timed duet.

It was all fun, but to me it felt a little abstract, too—a little the way I’d felt during those impulsive, driven months of hungry activity on and off through veterinary school. It made me wonder if there wasn’t something about seeing Eli again—about the return of my past into my present life—that was fueling my appetite. Why does hunger come when it comes? Or need? And does it matter? Shouldn’t we just be happy to have it arrive again from time to time? I didn’t know, but thought of it now as I watched Daniel at work through the glass.

Cass had called two nights before this. Her slow circle around the country was closing, bringing her back to us. She was in Pennsylvania now. She thought she’d be home for about a week at Thanksgiving, though she couldn’t say for sure what day she’d arrive. Daniel and talked about it during the intervals when I was lifting the panes from inside to set them in place or sliding them up, the intervals of only air between us.

I wanted to get all the girls home for the holiday.

Daniel thought that was probably a mistake, that Cass might want us to herself, and that in any case, all three of them together often led to trouble.

“If she wants to see Nora, she can easily go to New York,” he said. He was perched on the extension ladder. Behind him, the sky opened up over the hills, and the dark road wound left and disappeared into pine woods

“But wouldn’t you like to have us all together again? It won’t happen that often in our lives as they get older and move away.”

“I don’t know,” he said. I hoisted the glass up between us, and we lifted our plastic bottles and sprayed at each other. As we both began to wipe at the mist, as Daniel’s composed face began to come clear, frowning in private concentration at his task, I thought of Eli Mayhew suddenly, that open, expansive quality to the way he looked now.

People could change, I thought, and I wondered for an idle moment if Eli had found that true of me. And if so, how.

In the end, Daniel agreed to my issuing a Thanksgiving invitation to all the girls. That night I called Nora.

“How long will she be there?”

“It’s not clear, natch.”

“Natch is right.” She sighed.

“Damn! I have this prryect due. I wasn’t even going to have Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, we were just going to have a minimal thing ourselves, just with Sadie, cause Daddy has that big church meal the Sunday before.”

“Christ!” she said. I could imagine her gnawing her lower lip, a habit she didn’t share with Cassie.

“Well, I suppose I can work it out.”

I was silent for a moment, feeling guilty, but then irritated at having to feel that way.

“Look, Nor,” I finally said.

“It’s not written in stone. I said nothing to Cass about it, it was just an idea I had.”

“No, I’ll come.” Her voice was resigned.

“But now I feel guilty. I’m not putting pressure on you, honest I’m not.”

“Mom, come on. I really do want to see her. I haven’t for more than a year, and she is my sister. My twin, for God’s sake.”

After a beat, I said, “Brian’s welcome, too, you know.”

She made a light snorting noise.

“I’ll spare him, I think.”

After I got off the phone, I thought of this response and I felt wounded. Was this how she saw us? Some difficult, O’Neill-like family she had to shield her boyfriend from?

As we walked the dogs later, I told Daniel about it. He disagreed with my interpretation.

“She’s just feeling what I was, that the two of them closed in together for a long weekend is a recipe for trouble.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“No, but it often is.”

“You’ll help me, won’t you, Daniel? ” I must have sounded lonely or frightened to him, because he stopped me on the dark sidewalk and kissed my cheek. Actually, because it was so dark—pitch dark, as we were on a side street, away from even the feeble lanterns around the green—he missed and got my ear. We swayed together a moment.

When we turned to walk again, he kept his arm around me.

Lights were off in most of the houses we passed—it was nearly eleven. The town was silent but for the odd barking of a dog. When we walked by the middle of the three Georgian houses facing the green, we looked over as one to the glowing windows of its front parlor. The room was empty, the lamplight fell on an empty chair.

We turned away. A little breeze lifted my hair, brought us the smell of dry leaves, of pine.

“This is so perfect,” I said.

“This weather.” I sighed.

“This is why we live in New England.”

The next morning it was snowing wetly, big plops smeared against the windows. When I opened the kitchen door, the raw damp air blew in, and the dogs milled around behind me with their tails down.

“Get!” I said. They cast tragic glances back at me as I shut the door on them.

“Did you know about this?” I asked Daniel when he came in for coffee. He was a weather fanatic, a holdover from his youth on the farm. There weather told you what you’d be doing on any given day.

“I did.”

“And you let me be romantic about our fall night? You laughed up your sleeve at me?”

He shrugged.

“That’s just the perfidious kind of guy I am.”

“I’ll say.”

The drops gathered into clear slush at the sides of my windshield as I drove to work. The wet glistened on the road. Feeling sleepy, I stopped off at the bagel place to pick up some coffee.

“How’ja like Mother Nature’s joke?” the owner asked me energetically. Malcolm. He ran the place single-handedly.

“She can stuff it,” I said.

“Joey, Joey!” he scolded, grinning. He shook his head as he rang me up.

Though normally she worked just Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, Mary Ellen was in today, she wanted Saturday off this week for her son’s birthday party. It was sometimes crowded moving around in the hallway, with all the dogs and people. Late in the morning, Beattie came back to my exam room.

“Your old boyfriend called,” she said.

Her lips were pinched disapprovingly.

“He’s not my boyfriend, Beattie.”

“Didn’t say he was. I said, Your old boyfriend.”

“He wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”

“Well, he called. He’s coming in this afternoon.” She sniffed.

“To put the dog down.”

“Yep.” She stood for a moment, watching me, waiting for some response. She cleared her throat.

“I ask myself, you know, what I would do. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Beattie,” I said, suddenly irritated, “you don’t even have any animals.”

She turned to go.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” From the hall she called back, “I know what I know.”

As I went to tell Mary Ellen I’d need her later for a euthanasia, I was smiling, smiling at Beattie. These were famous lines of hers, spoken, usually, at exactly the moment when she did not know what she did not know. I was thinking, I ll tell Daniel—we had a store of her pronouncements. But then I realized where she’d come from to get to what she didn’t know, and I told myself that the story was based in kind of animosity to Eli Mayhew that seemed too complicated and preposterous to explain.