While I Was Gone Read online

  “Ugh,” I said.

  She began to tell me how unfair her humanities teacher was, not to grant her an extension.

  As I listened and commiserated, I could hear the dogs stirring at some noise in the living room. Sadie’s voice, her own sweet voice combined with all the standardized cadences and phrasing of adolescence, rattled on in her world. The dishwasher sloshed in the kitchen. Daniel’s clothes hung touching mine on the rows of hooks. I was alive, I was in all these worlds at once. A finger in every pie, I thought. This, this is what we grow old for.

  Sadie asked me our news, and I reported it as blandly as I could. No need to mention Amy, no point in trying to describe my odd feeling of the afternoon. It was gone now anyway.

  Finally she said she had to get off. “Oh! But, Mom . . . just, when Jean comes, if she comes, don’t talk about me, okay?”

  “Never in a million years.”

  “And don’t dare tell her how enthralled I am. Swoon, swoon.”

  “Well, now, that would be talking about you, Sade.”

  “Right, Mom.” Her voice had dried.

  “Good night, sweetie.”

  “Night.”

  When Daniel wasn’t back by eleven, I took the dogs out for their walk. The air was cool, and I pulled my jacket tight. Light fell from the windows behind me into the yard, and the world disappeared beyond its touch. I stepped forward, into it.

  Often Daniel and I had done the dogs’ walk together when the girls were still home, happy just to be alone with each other at the end of the long day, to escape from them and the phone and the duties of the house. We’d stumble through the dark, reviewing our separate days for one another, ignoring the dogs, who ran ahead or trailed behind. We’d walk past the stores, the fancy houses, looking in at other people’s lives like strolling gods, commenting. We’d wander into the unlighted streets off the common that turned gradually into knotted paths, into fields. We’d walk slower and slower as we wound down, bumping into each other more, unmoored and dizzy in the dark. And then finally Daniel would say, “Well, we better head home and see if anyone’s still alive.” Reluctantly, yet eagerly now, we’d whistle for the dogs in the soft night air and turn to start back.

  That’s what I was thinking of that Monday night before everything changed, before my other life caught up with me. I’d pushed aside that moment in the boat, I was thinking only of Daniel trying to offer comfort in the face of death, of Sadie turning back to her world, and Cass and Nora moving around in theirs; even of the dogs, running after each other through the dark village to sounds and smells I couldn’t guess at. And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When I arrived at work the next day, Beattie was already behind the counter, with three dogs moving excitedly around her feet. We let the good-natured boarders loose for company for each other during the day, so there were almost always three or four of them nosing about officiously or sleeping under Beattie’s desk. “The supervisors” she called them. The barkers, the fighters, we kept in the runs in the back, and the cats had their own room, so they wouldn’t be in perpetual panic at the dogs’ noise.

  Beattie was on the phone, making reassuring, motherly sounds to someone. She would be on the phone fairly steadily through the morning. Tuesday was my day to catch up with all the bad things that had happened to my people’s pets while I had my two days off. My partner, Mary Ellen, handled the worst of it on Mondays, the real emergencies left over from the weekend: fights, traumas, difficult births, the sudden onset of skin problems, unexplained loss of appetite or other gastrointestinal issues. “Party time” was what Beattie called Monday. Mary Ellen always said she loved it.

  Even on Tuesdays, though, we tried to hold up to two hours empty in the afternoon for the unscheduled visits of clients who’d waited to see me, and we kept the rest of the appointments the equivalent of well-baby care, so we could flex around the odd disaster.

  This was ample random excitement for me. I took my deepest pleasure in the ordinary: in simply reentering the office with its familiar animal and medicinal smell, in giving what comfort and help I could to the animals and their owners, in just moving around among the polite and curious boarding dogs. I even enjoyed the way Beattie’s loud, clucking voice threaded through my day. Now I waved to her and went back down the hall to my exam room to see who my first clients were and what I’d be asked to do for their pets.

  Animals had come into my life almost by accident, when I was twenty-three. I’d just separated from my first husband, and for this and other reasons, I felt that my life was ruined—I didn’t believe then in second chances. Broke and full of despair, I retreated from everything and went home to Maine, to my mother’s house. There I wouldn’t have to worry about rent or food for a while.

  But I still needed a job. Any job. Any job but waitressing, I told myself. I was done with that. What I had in mind was some mindless secretarial position, and that’s what I got. I thought. I was hired as a receptionist-assistant in a veterinarian’s office.

  And so it began before I recognized it—my second chance.

  Dr. Moran, my boss, was about sixty-five then, I suppose. Of course, he seemed ancient to me. He was unsentimental, but gentle and slow-spoken. He called the animals we saw—the cats, the dogs, even the snakes and guinea pigs and gerbils—“our friends” or “our silent friends.” He was fairly silent himself, but I learned to watch the way his hands did his talking for him with the animals. He was small, portly and neat and almost completely bald, but he had large square hands, the hands of a young, strong man. As they moved over the pets, the animals gentled and stilled. He used his voice, too, but only a little. It was his hands that did the trick, and it was the way he used his hands that I imitated when I began to work with the animals.

  I worked seven days a week, including the cleanup and feedings on Sundays, and I was grateful for every minute of it, every minute away from the consciousness of my own failures, away from my misery. Gradually Dr. Moran trained me to take over more responsibility in the clinic, though the chores were still menial—giving medications, changing dressings, removing sutures, preparing injections. I’d never had pets as a kid—my father, plant-lover that he was, didn’t believe in it—so I was startled at how easy I felt with the animals, even when, at first, they were aggressive. I learned to touch them, to move with confidence around them. I was surprised at how much their need and trust affected me. I was surprised when they touched me back—the unexpected flick of a rough, warm tongue, the deliberate gentle nudge of a wet nose. The first time it happened, I started, and then had to swallow several times to keep from crying, I was so oddly moved.

  Slowly, then, over the first weeks and months of my life in the clinic, I began to believe again in the possibility of a simple kind of goodness, the goodness of the animals’ dependency and trust. In response to it, I felt some shift, some opening up, in what I’d thought of as my hardened self. I remember the first time I woke in the morning and was aware of anticipation, of eagerly looking forward to getting up, going to work: just to take care of, to be touching again, a young hunting dog I’d nursed through a chest injury—he’d been ripped open by a barbed-wire fence he tried to jump. A few months after I’d started the job, I signed up at the university for the first of the science courses I’d need for vet school, and a year and a half later I was enrolled and beginning my training.

  Even now, at this point in my life, when much of what I did at work was routine, when very little could happen to the primarily dogs and cats I had in my suburban practice that I hadn’t seen and dealt with dozens of times before; even now I enjoyed it, enjoyed the falling away of other concerns when I came into the office, enjoy
ed the differences among our “silent friends.” I took delight in the humor in much of what went on, and felt grieved, but enlarged, too, by what was sad or painful in the powerful bonds between animals and humans.

  That Tuesday morning I had some puppy shots, a suture removal, two rabies vaccines, a dog who needed his anal sacs emptied, a cat catheterization, and an abscess to clean on a cat named Henry, who was entirely too familiar to me. I tried, for the sixth or seventh time, to persuade his owner that he should be neutered.

  “Neutralized” she insisted on calling it, as though it were some science fiction fate I’d inflict on him with a ray gun. She was young, what we might have called a hippie thirty years ago. The flannel shirt rather than the pierced nostril kind. She always turned me down about Henry. “I like him to know he’s a boy,” she said to me coyly today.

  “Louise, he has absolutely no doubt that he’s a boy!” I said. “He’s tormented by being a boy. How many times have I treated him for abscesses? Do you think he enjoys that? Do you think he enjoys the fights? It’s not dating when you’re a cat, Louise.”

  She stroked his scarred orange head. He’d lost a good chunk of ear long ago. He looked tired today. Tired and dusty. “We don’t know what it’s like for him,” she said.

  “I think it’s fair to say that this stuff hurts. I would venture that.”

  “But you can’t say he’d choose not to do it.”

  “It’s your choice, Louise. Not his.”

  “Well, I like him just the way he is.” She put her face down next to his head. He squinted his eyes shut in pleasure. His tail whipped, once, on the table.

  I heaved a sigh. “Well, I have to accede to that, but I also have to say I don’t like to. It’s against medical advice, and it’s contrary to common sense. And it’s not too responsible either.” I pointed at her. “All those kittens and no child support.”

  She laughed gaily and carried Henry out.

  Over lunch, Beattie talked about her older sister, who had lived with her since her retirement and who was addicted to the shopping network. It made her mad, Beattie said. “It should be like gambling,” she announced. “You should have to go someplace special to do it, like Atlantic City, so’s you’d notice it more, what you were up to.” She said her sister often didn’t even bother to open the cartons and packages when they came now. They were stacked in the hall, or behind the couch her sister pulled out to sleep on.

  When she said this, Beattie gestured over her shoulder, where, as it happened, the dog runs were. We were sitting at a picnic table out back in the weak sunlight, wearing sweaters against the fall chill and listening to the intermittent barking. Our office was in one of the tiny malls that had sprung up everywhere around these old towns as quickly as mushroom patches after rain. It was next to a bagel shop and a dry cleaner, and the land behind us rolled slowly down to a brook whose name I loved: Brother Brook. When the dogs were quiet, you could hear its steady rush.

  “Isn’t there something like TV Shoppers Anonymous?” I asked. “Some group cure?”

  She made a snorting sound. “Should be, if there isn’t,” she said. She took a tiny bite from her sandwich and chewed, daintily. “And how’s your family?” she asked after a moment, as though it were all part of the same enterprise, from her perspective. Beattie was white-haired, small, with a birdlike quick delicacy. She’d known the girls since they were babies.

  “Good,” I said. “We never hear from Cass, but Nora and Sadie are well. Thriving, I’d say.”

  “And how’s my boy?” she asked, grinning. The wind puffed her thin hair strangely around her ears, and I looked away.

  “Daniel? He’s fine. He caught two trout yesterday, and he said he was happy.”

  “Happy,” she said in a faraway voice, as though it were an emotion she could only vaguely recollect. “Lovely.”

  The afternoon jammed up and was crazy, as often happened. I had a cat who’d been hit by a car and needed a bone set. A dog who’d gotten into a fight with some kind of wild animal. A boa constrictor who seemed “depressed,” according to his worried teenage owner—he had, I thought, a cold. It wasn’t until after four that Beattie tossed a folder labeled Jean Bennett onto the steel examining table, and I remembered Sadie’s call from the night before.

  I glanced through the information quickly. The dog’s name was Arthur. A mutt. He was nine. He’d been experiencing trouble walking for a while, most acutely for the last couple of days. I stepped into the hallway and called the woman’s last name: “Bennett?”

  To my surprise as she appeared around the corner—I’d assumed glamorous youth—Jean Bennett was close to my age. I would have said forty-six or -seven to my fifty-two. A different type, though. Exotic. Long, frizzing gray hair was set free around her head and shoulders. I watched her approach down the hallway. She was carrying the dog, who was medium-sized—mostly cocker spaniel, I thought. Jean Bennett wore dangly earrings and several loops of beaded necklace. Black leather pants with a long knitted tunic top over them. Expensive leather boots.

  “Hello,” she said as she moved toward me.

  I said, “Hi,” and stood back to let her enter the room. She moved awkwardly past me to the table, where she set the whimpering dog. He lay down immediately.

  “I’m Jean Bennett,” she said, turning. She made a quick pass at smoothing her hair down.

  “Well, I’m awfully glad to meet you,” I said. “I’m Dr. Becker, the famous Sadie’s mom.”

  We shook hands. Her bracelets clashed metallically. She had smooth olive skin, dark brows.

  “I’m strictly forbidden on pain of death to talk about Sadie with you”—I drew my finger across my throat, and she smiled—“so let’s move right in on our friend Arthur here. Tell me what’s going on with him.” I moved to my side of the table and put my hand on his back. He was trembling with fear, long shudders every few seconds. He was short-haired, mostly a marmalade color, with a cocker’s sweet, reproachful eyes. His ears were flat to his head.

  “Well, Arthur.” She shrugged, an exaggerated helplessness. “What can I tell you? His story is, all of a sudden he seems not to be able to walk. But just in his hindquarters. He’s mostly just been dragging himself around by his front legs.”

  “For how long?”

  “Well. He’s been like this for a couple of days now. Actually, he’s had arthritis for a couple of years—he’s on medication for that—and it’s been lots worse this fall. Worse than ever. So that’s what I was thinking this was. And all fall, really, it would get worse for a few days, and then it would get better. And honestly, my life is so crazy right now that I just kind of ignored it, I guess, thinking the same thing would happen. And now it’s somehow over the edge. I feel terribly guilty. Mea culpa.” She patted her chest.

  “Has he lost bladder control? Bowels?”

  Now her hand rose to her throat. “Well, it’s hard to know, exactly, since he can’t get himself to the door anymore.”

  “So he has had accidents.”

  “Oh, yes. Plenty of those.” She sounded grimly amused.

  “And was there any trauma that you know of? Did he have a fall or get struck by a car? Something like that. Even a glancing blow?”

  “No, no. Nothing. Nothing that I know of. Arthur has what you might call a quiet life. He’s inside by himself all day. And I probably don’t walk him enough at night either. He just got up Friday and . . . well, he couldn’t get up on Friday, actually. But I thought maybe it was just one of these temporary crises—something that would get better by itself. So I went to work. And then I was in and out over the weekend and not paying him enough attention. I did have to carry him back and forth, you know, because he didn’t want to move himself. But sometimes we’ve had to do that when his arthritis was bad. And he didn’t seem to be in pain, so I just waited. And now it seems clear that something is really wrong.” While she talked, her hands moved nervously, expressively, in front of her. She was plainly upset.

  I turned to th
e dog. “Well, let’s check you out, Arthur,” I said. I stroked him a moment, scratched his silky ears gently. He looked at me dubiously. Then I lifted the front part of his body so that he was sitting. He growled at me. “I know, I know,” I said to him. “It isn’t fun, is it?”

  “He doesn’t much like to be moved,” Jean Bennett said.

  Arthur’s hind legs made no accommodation to the sitting posture, and he lay down again as soon as I released him. I came around by his hind legs and manipulated them gently. They were utterly limp. He turned to watch me, perhaps thinking about warning me off. But clearly nothing hurt him. “Good boy,” I said.

  I did a couple of other tests on him—a few needle sticks for superficial pain, with no result until I was halfway up his back. I was explaining things to Jean Bennett as I went along, that it seemed Arthur had a spinal injury that was causing paralysis. I talked about the levels of pain response in the spinal column. She winced when I pinched his toe with a hemostat, but Arthur just watched. His ears were down, he was nervous still, but he didn’t cry or try to bite.

  Jean Bennett was sitting by now, in the client chair. I asked her again when Arthur had gone down.

  “Go down?” she said.

  “When did he stop being able to walk?”

  “Well, he had pain all week, I think. But on Friday he just wouldn’t walk. Or couldn’t. But he did seem more comfortable, so I thought . . . I thought, Well, this is bad, but it’s a good sign he’s not in so much pain, and anyway . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I blew it, didn’t I?”

  “Well, it’s not good that he’s been like this for so long. If we’d gotten to him right away—if he’d come in on Friday—I would have sent you immediately to Angell Memorial for surgery. Back surgery.”

  “And Angell Memorial is . . . ?”