Jenny licks her upper lip, hungry for more of the story.
“Lily and I have an octopus.” I pause for dramatic effect, but only get a confused stare. Then I launch into the whole ordeal, like I did for Trent, like I did for Doogie. It’s already becoming like the package of stories I have preselected to recount on dates; I bore myself in the telling. Jenny nods as she listens and her eye contact is unwavering. I almost don’t know who this woman is that I’m pouring my heart out to. Seriously, her scrutiny is unnerving.
“And when you say octopus, you mean . . .”
“Octopus. When I say we, I mean Lily and me, and when I say octopus, I mean octopus.” Jenny still looks uncertain, so I pull out my phone and show her the picture of Lily and me with the lei. “Look. Right here. Except now it’s bigger and more prominent and angry.”
Jenny studies the photo and uses her fingers to zoom in on the octopus. This in itself enrages me (even though I did the same thing), like she’s saying I’m making mountains out of molehills, that I have now been living a week and a day on the edge of hysteria for nothing. Plus, I just told her it was bigger now. Meaner. When she looks up there’s something akin to pity in her eyes. Something more than a sorrowful understanding, yet shy of commiseration. But I don’t want her pity, or whatever is pity-adjacent. I don’t need it. I am going to fix this. I am going to prevail over the octopus. I don’t want this look.
Jenny hands me back my phone. “Have you been to the veterinarian?”
Duh. “On Monday.”
“What did she say?” Jenny does this thing where she defaults to the feminine pronoun to make some sort of point about a male-dominated society, something she probably picked up in a women’s studies class in the late nineties and that now feels woeful and stilted.
“He”—I emphasize the he—“couldn’t say much of anything. He took a few cells to run some tests and the tests were inconclusive. Now they want to put Lily under anesthesia and take a larger sample.”
“How do you feel about that?”
When I don’t want to answer the question someone asks, I just give the answer to another, unasked question. I realize in this moment that I do this a lot. “I find myself leaving her alone for short periods. I don’t want to be apart from her, but to be with her means I also have to be with him.” I pause and Jenny nods. “Plus, the octopus came when I wasn’t there, and there’s a part of me that thinks I need to be gone for him to leave.”
“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave.”
My answer to that is a glare.
“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave, and what you’re doing is emotionally detaching from Lily.”
My stomach turns. “That’s offensive. You’re being offensive.”
“I’m not meaning to be. It’s a natural reaction to grief.”
“Grief?” I say it with three question marks, as the word catches me by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m not grieving.”
Jenny raises an eyebrow as if to say, Aren’t you?
“Grieving what? I’m fully focused on forcing the octopus to leave.”
“Why can’t you do both?” she asks.
Look who showed up to play.
Jenny continues. “Why can’t you focus on getting the octopus to leave and prepare yourself for the possibility that he may not?”
“He will leave.”
“I’ll leave that for you and the vet to say. But Lily is older, and you’ve said yourself that she was the runt of her litter and her health has at times been tenuous. Unless something catastrophic happens to you in the near future, in all likelihood she is going to predecease you, and in the greater context of your life, relatively soon. If it’s not the octopus that takes her, something else will eventually. A rhinoceros or a giraffe.”
“A rhinoceros or a gir— How would a dog have a giraffe?” New Jenny has gone completely around the bend.
“It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”
I run her words by my imaginary therapist, the one who I count on to take Jenny’s bungled advice and turn it into something less botched. He’s strangely silent for once; I’m afraid it means he finds nothing wrong with her diagnosis.
“What is grief, anyhow? What does it even mean?” I’m being obstinate.
“People describe it in different ways. I’d say it’s a temporary derangement. Freud put it as something like a departure from the normal attitude toward life.”
I stare Jenny square in the eyes so she can see my annoyance. “One, my questions were rhetorical. I know what grief is. Two, thank you for calling me deranged.”