This is the first reasonable thing he has said, so I crouch down to speak directly to Lily. “Go with the doctor. He’s going to get a better look at the octopus. I’ll be right out here.”
Doogie collects a veterinary assistant and they whisk Lily away. Back in the waiting room, I flip through an old copy of Dog Fancy magazine. There are articles like “Five Mutts Who Rose to Fame” and “Spotlight on the English Springer Spaniel.” These don’t interest me. But “Dental Debate Erupts over Teeth Cleaning” does, at least enough to dog-ear the page and hopefully catch the attention of at least one rational thinker in this godforsaken place.
I pull out my phone and go to my photo archive to look at pictures of Lily before the octopus came. She and I on a cliff overlooking Santa Barbara that one time we took a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. Her asleep on her paw-print blanket, the sun from the window highlighting the red in her brown coat. Her in the bathtub, wet and annoyed. The two of us in a selfie, exchanging good night kisses in bed before sleep. Her on the sofa sitting like the Great Sphinx of Giza, because I liked the way her coat looked against the gray tweed upholstery. Another selfie—this time we’re in the backyard and she’s wearing a lei I got her on Maui. This one is only a few weeks old, a happier time already long ago.
Something in the picture catches my eye. I use two fingers to zoom in on the photo until I’m focused on her right temple, and there he is, in his usual perch just above her right eye—the octopus, but smaller, younger, less pronounced. How could I not have seen him then? Did he come back with me from Hawaii? Catch a ride in that lei? Did I somehow pick him up from the beach that day when I walked with Wende and Harlan and Jill collecting sea glass? Or when I was swimming in the ocean, my guard down, my cares floating away? Did I bring this upon us by needing to get away with my friends? Or did he crawl out of the Pacific at Santa Monica Beach while I was not there to stop him? Attach himself to my dog while I was on an island sipping rum thousands of miles away? I’m awash in horrible, stomach-churning feelings of guilt. It was just five nights in Hawaii—how could that come with so huge a cost?
“Excuse me, hon.” The large woman who answers the phone is trying to retrieve a few cans of diabetic dog food from the shelf near my feet. I sit up in the chair and swing my legs in the other direction. She grunts as she bends down to get them.
I put my phone away and turn my attention back to Dog Fancy, but I don’t even get into the debate over teeth cleaning before Doogie calls my name.
“Edward?”
When I get back to the examining room, Lily is there on the table waiting for me. She looks pained.
“How did it go?”
“We weren’t able to get a needle as deeply into the octopus as I would have liked.”
“He’s a tough sonofabitch,” I concede.
“We were able to extract a few cells, hopefully enough to tell us if the octopus is malignant. We’ll have to send them out to our lab.”
I show Doogie the picture of Lily in her lei, with the octopus in his infancy. I tell him about the octopus as I know him, about the seizure Lily had last night. He nods and listens and makes a few notes in his chart. Lily doesn’t add anything, but that’s not unusual. She often clams up at the vet.
“Once we get the report back from the lab we’ll know more. We can try her on certain medications, an antiseizure medication for one, but you know, our best options for dealing with the . . .”
“Octopus.” Why is everyone so stupid?
“. . . octopus are probably surgical.”
I look away, purposefully. It would help if there were a window to gaze out of; instead, I’m confronted with the dental care poster again. I think of the dog-eared copy of Dog Fancy in the waiting room and hope to god someone who works here finds it.
“How old is Lily again?” The vet flips through her chart for the answer.
“Twelve,” I say. “And a half.”
He puts the chart down. “That’s older than optimal for invasive surgery. The anesthesia alone can be a risk for older dogs. But we can discuss our options in more detail midweek.”
“When you hear back from the lab.” I sound defeated. I feel defeated, especially when I’m asked to pay $285 for the privilege of being told to wait until Wednesday to be given options that aren’t really options at all.
We get in the car and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they’re after my soul and not just my parking spot and so we sit there for the twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the passenger seat into my lap and curls up in a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh.
“You okay, Bean?”
“They put a needle in my head.”