How does she know I’m coming back? How does she know I didn’t just give her away?
Because she trusts me.
Just as I should trust Jeffrey. There’s a perfectly rational explanation for that text. I want to play means poker. I turn to Jeffrey and his laptop is back open with his earphones plugged in. I’ve drifted. I made a fuss about his watching TV and then promptly checked out.
I take a deep breath and try to reengage, tapping him on the shoulder, pulling the earbud out of his left ear. “We each have a few days before we have to be back to work. How would you feel about going to San Francisco?”
I wait for him to react. I wait for his body to physically reject the spontaneity. I wait for him to keep the sunshine out, to make an excuse as to why he has to stay in Los Angeles, something to cover this “playing” with Cliff.
But instead he simply smiles and says, “Okay.”
Backbone
My cell phone rings in an ominous way, sounding almost flat, the way it does when you know something is wrong before you answer the phone. I fumble to retrieve it from my pocket and the call almost goes to voicemail before I can answer. There’s no time for anything to be amiss; we leave for Meredith’s wedding in the morning.
It’s Jeffrey. “Something’s wrong with Lily. You need to come home.”
I look at my watch. It’s a little past three o’clock in the afternoon and I am more or less on my way home anyway. I’m just leaving the grocery store and the last thing on my list is to pick up our suits for the wedding from the dry cleaners.
“Can it wait thirty more minutes?”
I think of all the things that might be wrong with Lily. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Neither pleasant, but neither the end of the world. Too many treats from her Christmas stocking. Limping? She once had a thorn in her paw, like the old fable involving Androcles and the lion. It took some gentle prodding to get her to sit still long enough to remove the craggly thing. Bleeding? Bleeding is easy—just apply pressure. Jeffrey can be an alarmist. Whatever it could be can probably wait.
“She can’t walk. You need to come home now.”
When I burst through the door I find Lily in her bed in the living room with Jeffrey sitting on the floor beside her. Lily looks frustrated and concerned when she sees me, and she doesn’t get up and her tail doesn’t wag. The new red ball from her Christmas stocking sits motionless on the floor. Her inability to greet me in her usual way all by itself makes my stomach drop.
“What’s going on, you two?” I almost don’t want to know the answer. In eighteen hours we are supposed to be on an airplane again.
“Let me show you,” Jeffrey says.
He gingerly lifts Lily out of her bed, in the heedful way he did the first few months we were dating, before they bonded, before he was confident in the proper way to do it. He places her squarely on the floor and the back half of her body immediately wilts, her hind legs splaying sloppily to one side. They just give way underneath her.
My heart sinks to depths normally reserved for my stomach, and it becomes difficult to think or breathe.
I kneel on the floor next to them and tuck one hand under Lily’s muscular chest and one hand under her soft belly. I stand her up again, supporting her with both hands. I almost don’t dare to let go.
“Stand for me, Lily.” I say it like a hypnotist giving a directive to an entranced person under my command. When I let myself remove the hand under her belly, her toenails scrape on the hardwood floor as her legs once again slip to the side. “C’mon.” This time I’m pleading. “Stand up for me, girl.”
Again, when I let go, the awful slithering of toenails on wood and the total wilting of legs. She almost tips over entirely before I catch her at the last second.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Jeffrey replies.
“Something happened,” I insist before adding, “What have you done?”
“What have I done?” Jeffrey is shocked.
She was my dog long before we ever met, and while she has become his dog, too, over the course of our relationship, they don’t have the same bond. He does not treat her with the same attentiveness (or, truthfully, the same permissiveness), and when he’s displeased with her behavior he is always the stepparent absolving himself of responsibility by throwing his hands up and calling her “your dog.” This can’t really be Jeffrey’s fault, but I wonder just the same.
“Are you accusing me of something?”
I stare at Jeffrey. Am I accusing him of something? Even in this moment I’m forced to wonder if my assertion is about Lily or the text message. I don’t know. But I can feel Lily tremble in my hands, and I know immediately now is not the time. “No. No, of course not.”
“I hope not.”