The Dog Park Page 11

  But I just kept talking about what had happened immediately before the accident, about how I’d taken Baxter for a walk by myself. I needed a break from work, and then the accident happened. I didn’t take my phone with me because I was only going a few blocks.

  But after three hours, the sentences were instilled so deeply in me I didn’t need to repeat them mantralike. I sat on the brown couch, staring blankly at the hospital TV showing that reality show. The normalcy (that I hadn’t realized was normal) faded. Then, I could only see the accident. I could think only of how the person in the SUV had peeled off after the crash, after I’d run toward him, reached under the car and dragged Baxter out in my arms.

  Baxter had been shaking violently. He cried and cried, and those cries cut into me. I watched the SUV screech away. I began to shake as much as my dog.

  A woman on the street—Marilyn Miles, she said her name was; I will never forget that name, Marilyn Miles—drove us to the hospital in her car, which was parked right there. Baxter trembled and mewled painfully the whole way.

  That mewling hung like a low cloud in the back of my mind at the hospital, playing constantly.

  Marilyn Miles had stayed with me for a while, letting me use her cell phone. My brain was scrambled. Sebastian’s number was one of the few I could remember without seeing my contacts. I called him. I knew he was in town, yet his phone was off. My jumbled mind still recalled that sometimes Sebastian turned off the phone when he was deep into research, usually preparing for another trip. I couldn’t bear to text him until I had news. I didn’t want anyone, even my ex-husband, to feel as bad as I did in that hospital.

  I didn’t know Gavin’s number by heart. I’d saved it in my phone the day we met and had never given the actual numbers much thought.

  On the brown couch I kept looking from the TV toward the double doors through which they’d taken Baxy, the doors through which the vet said she would return.

  The waiting room resembled a doctor’s waiting room, but when those tall doors swung open I saw a cavernous, silver space beyond, like a long tube leading to a research lab. I read the brochure for the hospital, my eyes misting over the descriptions—operating rooms, trauma, ICU.

  Hang tight, the vet had said. She looked just like a young doctor on a TV show. Pretty. But I also read grave concern in her features and in the way she touched me on the shoulder. I knew my thinking could be off, but the way I read it, she was worried about my dog.

  When Marilyn Miles had left (hugging me, giving me her business card with her home phone number written on it) the receptionist had said I could use their phone if needed. But who to call other than Sebastian? What other numbers did I know from memory? It was shameful how few.

  I thought of my parents. I knew their number, of course. They’d had the same one since I was a kid. What I didn’t know was how they would respond to a crisis. If history foretold anything, not so well.

  My arrest. I tried never to think about it, had mostly succeeded in that amnesic endeavor since it happened. But it crept up once in a while. Especially then in the pet hospital, for some reason.

  I put my head back on the couch, not caring about the awkward cocked angle of my neck, and my past zoomed in, as if the trauma with Baxter had ripped the doors off the memory.

  When the cops rang the doorbell at the apartment I shared with Billy, they identified themselves, and I not only let them in, I grabbed my bag and told them to take me. Before I got in the car they read the Miranda rights. I kept nodding quickly for them to get it over with, not because I was so mortified to be on the street and being arrested (which I was) but because a small voice was already talking. It had to happen. Good...good.

  But it wasn’t good when Billy came to see me, dragging his eyes up and down the khaki prisoner jumpsuit I wore.

  “This has got to end, Jess,” he said. “We can’t have this kind of publicity.”

  “This kind of publicity?” I said. “This kind of publicity?” I repeated that a few more times. This kind of publicity.

  “Jess...listen to me.”

  “You know your brother Mick asked me to pick up that package.”

  “Those drugs,” Billy said, as if he had never used. As if I ever had.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was your brother who asked me to pick up those drugs. He wanted this to happen.”

  Billy, the only one who’d always been there for me, the one I had blindly assumed would always be there for me, shook his head and walked away.

  And it certainly didn’t get any better when my parents found out. I suppose their response was one many a parent would have—suggestions of inpatient treatment, when I needed none; threats of involuntary hospitalization, pleas combined with begging. They were confused. I wasn’t.

  So I didn’t call my parents from the pet hospital. I finally lifted my head and stared lifelessly ahead, and then I sat and sat and sat on the brown sofa, watching the reality show. I saw the show from a distance—in some sliver of my mind still processing data, refusing to shade it, almost as if I was recording it.

  The show was about a pack of traveling fashion models. They were in an Austrian-looking place, at a photo shoot. A huge chessboard, the pieces chest-high, served as their set. The models lounged on the pieces, draping arms over a knight, kicking out a long beautiful leg. When they spoke you realized they were teenage girls from various towns in the U.S., sounding like teenage girls do.

  After Austria, another episode began.

  I looked toward the front desk at the second receptionist who was video-chatting with a friend, no other patients or clients around. I thought about asking her for the remote because the show was reminding me of my styling business and that was reminding me of Baxter. But I couldn’t seem to move.

  The next episode was set in Spain. Dully, I watched.

  “Baxter’s mom?” Another youngish woman in a doctor’s coat, arms wrapped around a clipboard.

  I stood fast, glancing at the doors that were swinging shut behind her. How had I missed that they had opened?

  “I’m Dr. Kasha,” the woman said. I read her name tag: Brittany Kasha DVM.

  I looked around. “But another doctor took Baxter.”

  “Yes, I just came on shift. I’ve been here for most of the exam and tests, and I took over for Dr. Parsons.”

  I tried to process what she was saying, which I knew, logically, was simple enough information. Over Dr. Kasha’s head, tears streaked down the face of a teenage girl, one of the models without makeup.

  “You’re Baxter’s mom, right?”

  Baxter’s mom. Baxter’s mom. Baxter’s mom.

  “I’m Baxter’s mom.”

  I knew her eyes were searching my face. I saw that. Normally, I would have tried to compose myself. I was unable. Baxter’s mom. Baxter’s mom. Baxter’s mom.

  “Let’s sit,” she said.

  Right there, on the brown couch, we sat. Another sliver of my mind opened—analytical but reckless, guessing at outcomes in the hopes of preparing myself. Was it good she was delivering news in the waiting room? Or was it so dire that they couldn’t let me even see Baxy?

  Prep for the worst, some voice in my mind said. Then it answered itself with a question. How? How? I heard the sound of Baxter mewling. My eyes shot to the silver doors. Closed. Was that sound in my head?

  “So,” Dr. Kasha said, “let’s review what we’ve found so far.” She unclasped the clipboard and looked at it.

  I looked around. No mewling dog. I was still the only one in the waiting room besides Brittany Kasha, DVM.

  The vet ran through test results—no signs of internal bleeding, no obvious fractures “...that we can tell.” She kept saying that.

  ...That we can tell. Right now.

  “Also...”

  I heard that word when she said it,
so distinct, followed by a pause.

  “Also, Baxter’s BUN is elevated.” Another pause.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “It means we’re concerned about kidney damage, possibly perforation.”

  “B-U-N,” I repeated, trying to learn, trying to join all the voices in my head—the observer, the processer, the guesser, the mewler, the logician, the one who wanted to remember leaving for a walk without my phone, when it was all normal.

  I felt dizzy. “Where is Baxter?”

  “We have him in ICU.”

  Not good, not good.

  “Also...” she said. That word again. “Initially, there were no signs of a concussion, but now we notice a red spot on his eye. Could be he just took a hit there, but...”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and the flashes came, the memory bursts—the feel of Baxter’s ears and the two and a half pounds of him when we drove home the day we got him. Baxter streaking across the dog beach at Montrose. Baxter running across the park to Sebastian. Baxter when he was Superdog. When he was still Superdog. When.

  Then Baxter running into the street. Wham!

  Dr. Brittany Kasha continued to talk, sounding young, not like the models on the TV above her head exactly, but not too far, either.

  She started explaining more about the kidney perforation, not calling it possible anymore, just saying, “the kidney perforation.” And then I heard “...could be fatal.”

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  I realized the word no said over and over wasn’t in my mind. It was my voice, and I would not stop saying it.

  23

  There was, with a dog, a finite end to the relationship. And that end was different than with a human being, in that it usually came quicker. Dogs lived maybe ten to fifteen years, I’d been told. Shortly before the accident, I had received an email from a customer who said of her dog, Pepper and I had twenty years together. Well, nineteen years and seven months. Even after he died, I bought him your star collar and leash, because Pepper was a star. My star. And everything dimmed after his passing.

  That email slayed my emotions. Unless you got your dog when you were eighty years old (or some such) you were likely to outlive it. And never did I hear someone discussing the loss of a beloved pet and say, “Eh, it wasn’t so bad.” Never did I hear anyone say that such a death was anything but profoundly sad.

  Baxter came into my life in my thirties, and so I had this vague concept (call it a subtle awareness) that I would have him, maybe, until the end of my forties.

  Sitting in the pet hospital, my forties loomed.

  I could hear my life passing, which meant Baxy’s was passing even faster.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  I stood and tried to shake the way Baxter did, whether he was shaking off the rain or a stressful moment. It kinda worked. But I still needed to call him. Sebastian. As much as I wanted to shield him if possible, I couldn’t handle this alone. Plus he deserved to know—he loved Baxter as much as I did, if that was even possible.

  I walked to the front desk and asked the receptionist if I could make a call. She slid the phone across the high, white counter.

  * * *

  “I love you, Baxter.”

  No response from my dog. It had been only twenty minutes since I left Sebastian a message, but it felt like twenty years of waiting.

  They’d finally let me through the silver doors to see him. It led to a hallway, much less imposing than I’d imagined, and for some reason I found myself disappointed at the banality of it. They couldn’t say when Baxter might leave, or even if he might leave. They wanted to watch his BUN levels, assess him for concussion and have him seen by an orthopedist the next day. Dr. Kasha had received “unfortunate news” from a radiologist who reread the X-rays, spotting a possible hairline fracture in Baxter’s back left leg.

  Another pair of silver doors led into the ICU. I braced for the proliferation of medical equipment, the beep-beep-beep of lifesaving machines. But Baxter was the only ICU patient. And so, while there was a variety of medical paraphernalia throughout the room, some pieces covered in plastic, it was quiet. In the middle was a nurses’ station where two women looked up at me and smiled.

  Dr. Kasha walked me to the other side of the room, which resembled the back room of a groomer’s or the nap room of a doggy day care. Various-sized kennels were stacked along the walls, stuffed animals and toys on a table in the middle.

  “Baxter,” I whispered.

  He was in one of the larger crates along the left wall, asleep on a plush bed the color of sky.

  “Can I touch him?”

  “Sure, just avoid that leg.”

  Baxter woke up at the sound of our voices. He raised his head. His eyes were at half-mast, the way they get when something roused him but he was hoping he could go back to sleep soon.

  But when he saw me, his eyes widened. Yip. This tiny sound came from him. I’d never heard it before. Yip. That second one nearly made me burst into tears. But Baxter always got anxious when I cried, so I just hurried to him. Dr. Kasha opened the crate and I sat cross-legged outside. Baxy crawled out, slowly, too slowly, maybe because of the IVs in both front legs.

  He looked up, licked my chin a few times, then collapsed on my lap.

  “I’ll be back,” the vet said.

  I loved his weight on me; it made me think of all the times he crawled on me in bed. Occasionally, I’d nudge him away—Baxy, go find your own spot. Never again.

  “I love you, Baxter,” I said.

  No response. His head lolled to the side on my leg, his eyes shut.

  I leaned down, sniffed for the delicious scent of him, but it was gone, replaced by antiseptic and something darker, something streetlike.

  He lay, in repose, across my lap. But I could feel his heart beating in his little chest.

  “I love you, Baxter.” He made a faint snoring sound and cocked his head back a little more, baring the soft yellow fur of his neck.

  I’d been told by a therapist that one of the best things a parent could do for their child was to tell them you loved them. Over and over until they felt it.

  The therapist and I had been discussing my parents. I’d told him how my parents were the most amazing couple, how in love they were. I’d talked about them for months. One day, he started asking me if I felt loved by them.

  I was embarrassed, but I answered quickly, without thinking. No. Then I started to hedge. Of course they do love me. Technically. I know that. I explained about them, about their intensity for each other. They do love me. They did say that.

  Well, as important as it is to say, the therapist had responded, it’s more important that the recipient feel it.

  “I love you, Baxter,” I said, scooting myself back so I could lean forward and put my head near his chest, my mouth near his head. “I love you, Baxter. I love you.”

  24

  “Okay, I think it’s time for Baxter to get some sleep,” someone said.

  I straightened up. My back seized. How long had I been bent over Baxter like that?

  I looked around, almost as if I were coming to, the way Baxter had. Still no one in the ICU but us and the nurses. And Dr. Kasha standing over us.

  “He’s asleep,” I said. I looked back down at Baxter, who sighed and shifted around. “I think he’s comfortable.”

  “He is,” she said kindly. “But I’m really not supposed to have you back here for this long.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I didn’t move. None of us did. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “I’d suggest you go home and try to get some sleep. Do you have a car here?”

  “I don’t have a car,” I said. Then I said, “Marilyn Miles.” As if that explained everything. “I don’t
want to leave him.”

  “You’re welcome to stay in the waiting room.”

  Silence. Finally, I said, “Okay.”

  Dr. Kasha and a nurse moved Baxter to the kennel, waking him up in the process. As the kennel doors closed, he seemed wide-awake suddenly. He tried to give his body one of his doggy shakes, but the movement could only reach his little shoulders before the pain, apparently, was too much. He seemed to freeze, black eyes unblinking.

  “Baxter!” I said.

  “He’s okay,” Dr. Kasha said. She reached in and petted him softly, and the gesture calmed him. He looked at me forlornly, his eyes asking, What is happening and why did it happen?

  The walk down the hallway back to the waiting room went too fast. I pushed the silver doors, this time expecting the sterile, brown-sofa’d vacuum of the waiting room. But it was no longer empty.

  “Dude, get over yourself.”

  Gavin?

  He was leaning on the front desk in sort of a casual way, but his voice was tight, nearing loud.

  He didn’t see me right away, and the person he spoke to had their back to me. It was a man. Dark hair.

  “Sebastian?”

  Both of them turned, angry expressions on their faces.

  “Jess,” Sebastian said, his face clearing. He moved to me, looking down from his six-two height. “Is he okay?” His eyes were anguished.

  I shrugged. I shook my head. Then I started to cry. Sebastian pulled me to him, pulling my face into his T-shirt, into the smell of him, and I felt comfort rush over and around me, as if I’d been plunged into a bath of it. I hugged him back.

  I allowed myself a few sobs, hugging Sebastian tighter than I had in a long, long time, before I registered Gavin’s presence again.

  I disentangled myself from Sebastian’s embrace, which seemed reluctant then. “Hi,” I said to Gavin. I hugged him then, too.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Gavin said. His voice sounded pained.

  “I couldn’t remember your phone number. I didn’t have my cell phone.”