The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Six

MY PULSE’S DRUMBEAT THROBBED THROUGH MY BITE marks. Max and Gingersnap both knew I was awake and were staring at me. If I rolled away from them, they moved to face me again.
“Stop it,” I said. Max licked my face. I gave up and wandered downstairs to my home office.
Hoping for something from Bobby, I checked my e-mail. Nothing.
I e-mailed Vijay. My subject was “Emergency.” I typed, “Are you awake? I need to talk. Don’t worry about what time it is.” As soon as I hit send, I wondered where he was—in New York or still in Botswana? Although his “real” work was with HIV/AIDS for Doctors Without Borders (sometimes in Zimbabwe and Botswana for months at a time), he was most known for his hour-long weekly show on the Discovery Channel. Outbreak was, in spite of its melodramatic title and sometimes gruesome coverage of infectious diseases around the globe, a well-respected program with an almost cultlike following. Vijay’s brother Asheev jokingly called him Dr. Hollywood, but Vijay contended that the show brought much-needed attention—and, more important, funding—to the work of Doctors Without Borders.
Because of our last names—Anderson and Aperjeet—Vijay and I had been in homeroom together from first grade until we graduated. He’d helped me with my calculus; I’d helped him with his English papers. We’d represented China in the model UN trip to Chicago, and we’d been busted for having wine in my hotel room on the French club trip to Paris. If I hadn’t missed so much school, traveling to my father’s competitions (and landing in the hospital for starvation), we might have tied for valedictorian, but as it was he’d taken the honor alone. We’d shared sleepy rantings about medical and veterinary school and listened to praise and complaints about each other’s various dates. I’d read a poem at his wedding. He’d been an usher at mine.
No e-mail popped up. My cell phone didn’t ring.
I put my head down on my desk to wait.
Poor Vijay. Rita left him before Christmas, four months ago. I’d been sympathetic and supportive, but now I knew I hadn’t done enough. I’d had no idea what this felt like.
WHEN THE DOORBELL WOKE ME IN THE MORNING, GINGERSNAP pushed off my lap with pinpricks of claws. Max scrambled from under my desk and tore for the door, barking ferociously. I sat up, stiff from all the abuse my body had taken yesterday. Yesterday. I’d done it. I’d survived that awful day. My arm throbbed. When my haggard face ambushed me in the hallway mirror, I tried to comb my tousled hair with my fingers.
“Maybe it’s Dad!” Gabriella shrieked. She bolted down the stairs so fast I cringed, expecting her to fall. The hope in her voice bruised me. Why would Bobby ring the bell? Oh, God. Don’t let my poor daughter feel abandoned. If she was disappointed, though, she didn’t let it show. She called out “Mr. Henrici!” Why would Nick, Olive’s boyfriend, be here? Did he know our news?
As soon as Nick spoke, Max stopped barking and twirled in lopsided circles. Gabby laughed and said, “I did my Latin homework! I swear!”
Nick taught at the same school where Davy did. Davy, in fact, had introduced Nick to Olive. Gabriella had reported that Nick was the second most popular teacher at school—next to her Uncle Davy, of course. She got points for having an “in” with both of them.
“I need you guys to help me,” Nick said.
He obviously hadn’t heard our news: there was something too exuberant on his face. Gabby and I exchanged a look that was an unspoken agreement to let it slide for now.
“Look!” He held out an open ring box. The diamond on the delicate gold band glittered even in the dim entryway. “I’m proposing today, but you guys have to help me.”
Gabby clapped her hands, but then shot me a worried glance.
Although I smiled, the back of my throat ached at the irony of the timing.
Nick laid out his creative, thoughtful plan. He’d told Olive they were going to a beer garden in Cincinnati with some of his friends. Really, he’d rented a room in a historic bed-and-breakfast. They’d go to dinner—alone—and he’d give her the ring.
He needed us to pack Olive’s overnight bag. “She’ll need a nice dress, makeup, shampoo, stuff like that. I’m picking her up around noon. I’ll tell her I want to get a cup of coffee first. I want you guys”—he made a gesture up the stairs that I knew included the Bobby he believed was there—“to go into her apartment when you see us walk down to the corner.”
So Bobby hadn’t told Olive. I figured he hadn’t, or Olive would’ve been here. Had he told anyone? If he came back, no one else would ever have to know about that horrific day.
“I’ll try to convince her to sit and have our coffee at the café,” Nick went on, “but she might not. I’ll leave the car unlocked. Just pop the trunk and put the bag inside.”
He never asked about Bobby, so we never volunteered.
DAVY, GABRIELLA, AND I PARKED DOWN THE BLOCK FROM Olive’s apartment. Davy had shown up to check on us shortly after Nick had left, bearing a box of pastries from David’s Hot Buns. He’d begged to be allowed to accompany us on our packing mission.
I was glad we had this project to keep our minds off Bobby. My heart pounded as if we were part of a covert operation. As we waited for Nick to arrive, Gabby asked, “How did Dad propose to you?” She hunched her shoulders, realizing how this question might pain me. “Sorry.”
“Not like this,” I said, hoping to make a joke of it. I patted her knee where she sat sandwiched between Davy and me in my truck cab.
I could practically feel all three of us scrambling for something to say after that.
“Any adoption news?” Gabby asked in too chipper a voice.
“Nope,” Davy said.
I looked at my brother’s freckled profile—he’d look youthful even when he was eighty, I bet. Helen—wonderful Helen, my fellow Humane volunteer—was an attorney for the county’s Family Services, currently trying to help the Davids adopt.
Although they might have had better odds applying as single dads, they’d gone the honest route, and pregnant girl after pregnant woman had rejected them as the parents of her unwanted child. Helen assured us all couples could expect to be turned down a dozen or more times before they were chosen, but each time made me feel they’d been spat on.
“I wish you weren’t doing an open adoption,” Gabby said. “Are you sure you can’t get a baby from a foreign country?”
“Gabby!” I said.
But Davy laughed. “We’re sure. Besides, we really believe in open adoption, no matter what you say about it.”
“But the kid’s real parents could be at our Christmases?” Gabriella asked.
“Biological parents,” Davy corrected her. “We’ll be real parents. And, yes, they could be at our Christmases. And our Thanksgivings. And our birthday parties.”
“Eww! What if they’re freaky?”
I laughed out loud. So did Davy. “Freakier than our family already is?” he joked.
My daughter was so intelligent it often startled me, but she occasionally reminded me that she was only seventeen. She didn’t—as she sometimes seemed to believe—know everything. But please please please, Bobby, let her know she has two parents who love her.
Gabriella turned Davy’s silver band on his ring finger.
“Do you think he’ll come home?” she asked, without looking up.
“I don’t know, babe.”
“It’s too soon to tell, right?” Her tone dared us to disagree. When she was sufficiently certain that we wouldn’t, she changed the subject again in a bright, cheerful voice. “I remember your wedding,” she said to Davy. “I remember playing in the fountains at the park.”
Gabby had been nine at their commitment ceremony. Bobby and my mother had been miffed I’d let Gabriella get in the fountains in her tights.
Gabriella kept turning Davy’s wedding band. “I’m glad you wear rings even if . . .” she trailed off, not sure, I imagined, how to tactfully say even if they don’t count.
“Even if,” Davy said simply.
“If I ran the country . . .” Gabby started.
“Oh, brother, here we go again,” Davy said.
“ . . . I’d let you get married.”
“Well, thank you,” he said. “So under President Gabriella Binardi, let’s see, we’d outlaw all plastic grocery sacks—”
“That’s right.”
“We’d outlaw all drive-throughs, and now we’d have gay marriage. Nice.”
“Don’t forget the birth control in the drinking water,” I said.
“Whoa. Isn’t that a little fascist?” Davy asked.
“No, no, no,” Gabby said. “Anyone can have kids. They just have to choose. All they have to do is ask and I’d switch their water to normal.”
Davy nodded. “I like it. I’d vote for you.”
“And,” Gabby said, “I’ll pull that off in my first one hundred days. Just you wait. Law school first, though. Debate’s gonna get me into Harvard.”
She’d been saying that for four years now, ever since Holly, Helen and Hank’s daughter, got accepted there. I feared I’d have to make Gabriella apply to other schools, too.
Nick’s car appeared at the end of the block. The three of us fell into conspiratorial silence and my heart resumed its quickened pace. How had Bobby proposed to me?
Nick lifted his hand in a tentative wave when he spotted my truck. Gabby waved back.
Had there been a proposal? I remembered a conversation in my old apartment kitchen that would have to count. Bobby had made chicken korma, which had reminded me of Vijay and all the times he or his mother, Shivani, had cooked for me in high school.
Bobby’s korma had filled my entire apartment with eye-watering garlic scent. He fed me naan bread dipped in the korma, his fingers lingering on my lips. “Our kitchen will be bigger than this,” he’d said. “I’ll cook for you every night.”
“Our kitchen?” I asked.
“In our house,” he said.
I licked a bit of korma from his lower lip. “We’re getting a house?”
“Yep.” He took my hand.
“Are we getting married?”
“Yes.” He led me down the hall to my bedroom. This had often been our dessert.
A few halfhearted raindrops fell on my truck’s windshield. “I think I proposed to him.”
“What?” Davy and Gabriella turned their heads to me.
“I was trying to remember, since you asked me. I think I proposed to Bobby. I asked, ‘Are we getting married?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Gabby wrinkled her nose. “He didn’t give you a ring?”
“Later. Not that night.” His family had made him give me the heirloom ring I still wore. I self-consciously turned it with my thumb.
“He didn’t get down on one knee?” Gabriella sounded heartbroken.
I shook my head. I’d always defended our low-key engagement and wedding to my mother, to my brother, to friends, and especially to Bobby’s family. Bobby and I hadn’t needed all those trappings, all those “societal conventions,” as we called them.
“It should be romantic,” Gabby declared. “Mr. Henrici is doing it right.” No matter how many times Nick had told her she could call him by his first name outside of school, I’d never heard her do it yet. “That’s how I want Tyler to propose to me, something creative like this.”
“Not anytime soon, I hope,” Davy said.
Gabriella laughed. “We’re getting married as soon as we’re eighteen!”
Davy made a choking sound. He knew as well as I did that she’d been saying that since middle school, back when she’d filled the covers of notebooks and the margins of schoolwork with hundreds of “Gabriella Reed”s (which struck me as odd since I’d kept my own name). Bobby always said, “Over my dead body,” and Gabby would laugh and kiss his cheek.
Before I could speak, though, Davy said, “There they go!”
Olive and Nick strolled down the street holding hands. The little bit of rain didn’t seem to bother them at all.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said. We crossed the street and approached the apartment. As soon as Nick and Olive rounded the corner, the three of us broke into a run, me cradling my arm.
It struck me, as I climbed the stairs to Olive’s apartment, I’m laughing. My husband left me and I’m laughing. Is this okay? Something dreamlike hovered around the scene.
I unlocked Olive’s apartment with trembling hands, the fingers of my injured arm numb, bumping her “Licensed Massage Therapist” sign so hard it nearly fell.
“You go out on the balcony,” I told them, “and keep an eye on the street.”
I ran into Olive’s bedroom. She was still the slob she had been in college. Her bed was unmade, the crazy quilt Mimi had made her in a rumpled ball, the top sheet falling off one side. Her closet stood open, clothes heaped everywhere. I unzipped Olive’s gym bag and tossed the sneakers, sports bra, and towel to the floor.
Okay. Pink dress. I’d decided on her pink dress. I saw it, still in a dry cleaner’s bag. Perfect. I laid it on the bed. The dress was strapless. I dug through drawers and found a strapless bra and sexy panties. I selected a necklace and earrings that matched the dress.
“Hurry up!” Davy pleaded.
“Are they coming?”
“No, but it’s taking you forever!” Gabriella said.
More adrenaline surge. I found a vintage, beaded cream cardigan and folded it into the bag in case she got cold. In the bathroom, I threw in everything—her shampoo, her lotion, her entire makeup kit. Her curling iron. Her hair spray. A million different hair clips and pins.
“Come on!” Gabriella called.
“Stop it! You’re freaking me out.” My fingers felt clumsy as I zipped the bulging bag.
When my cell phone rang, I yelped as if I’d been stung by a bee.
I checked to see who was calling, fearful it was Nick, hoping it was Bobby.
It was Vijay.
The phone rang again. I didn’t know what to do. I’d said emergency.
I answered. “Hey you. Can I call you back in like, ten minutes?”
“What’s going on?” His deep, velvet voice was a balm.
“I’m in the middle of something crazy. Everything’s okay, but—”
“What’s the emergency?”
“Oh. Well, I mean, everything’s not okay, but there’s something else going on . . .”
“Why are you out of breath? Are you all right?”
Davy stood in the doorway. “Who are you talking to?” he asked in his sternest teacher voice.
“I have to go, Vijay. I’m sorry. Thank you for calling. I will call you back in just a little bit.”
“You’re on the phone?” Gabriella appeared beside Davy.
A noise in the hallway startled all of us. “Someone’s here,” Davy whispered.
“Shit,” I said. “Vijay, I gotta go. I’ll explain everything in a minute.” I clicked the phone shut and thrust the gym bag into Davy’s arms, then picked up the dress.
But someone knocked on the door we’d left open. “Hello?” a female voice called.
It wasn’t Olive. I recognized the voice but couldn’t place it.
“Olive?” the voice called. Slightly frightened.
I carried the dress out to the living room, following Davy and Gabriella.
Zayna Arnett stood in Olive’s doorway. Seeing her here, out of context, added to the surreal quality of this morning. I normally saw her assisting the vet techs in my clinic.
“Davy? What are you— Oh, hi, Dr. Anderson!” She looked, for a second, as surprised as I was, and I thought she might turn around and run away. Zayna was a spunky, fun, twenty-two-year-old theater major. She was completely footing her own bill through college because her parents disapproved of her “wasting her time” on an acting degree. I’d convinced Bobby to give Zayna a job waiting tables at Tanti Baci, too, even though he’d sighed and said, “You can’t rescue everyone, Cam.” Here in Olive’s doorway, Zayna looked from Davy to Gabriella to me. “Where’s Olive?”
Had Olive taken off and forgotten about an appointment? How did she stay in business?
Before I could explain, my phone rang again. I looked. Vijay.
“Mom,” Gabriella pleaded.
“Here.” I handed her the dress and bag. “Go put this in Nick’s car.”
As Gabriella ran down the stairs, Davy said to Zayna, “The best massage in town, right?”
Zayna smiled and nodded.
I answered my phone. “Vijay, please. I’ll call you back. Give me a—”
“You don’t sound right. What’s going on?”
Zayna stood there, twisting a curl of her shiny red hair around one finger, watching me with wide eyes. Why was she so nervous? Oh, my God, did she think we were stealing from Olive?
“Look,” I told Vijay and Zayna, “Nick is proposing to Olive today.” Zayna opened her mouth in a little O. “It’s a big, cool surprise, all is well, so please let me call you back—”
Gabriella clomped back up the stairs.
“But what’s the emergency? Your voice sounds all wrong.”
Gabriella stood in the doorway, contemplating Zayna. “Cool shoes,” Gabby said.
I looked. Strappy sandals, with heels that made her legs look like a ballerina’s.
“Let me finish this and then I’ll—” Shoes! “Oh, my God. We need shoes!”
“You didn’t pack shoes?” Davy grabbed his head in both hands.
“Mom!”
Still holding the phone I rushed back to Olive’s closet.
“Cami?” Vijay asked.
Clutching the phone between my ear and shoulder, I dug around on the closet floor and found the cream T-strap heels Olive always wore with the pink dress.
I stood up and turned around, barreling into Davy. “Here, Gabby, run these down.”
“Me? I’m gonna get caught now!” but she snatched them and ran.
“Cami, talk to me.” Vijay sounded panicked.
I took a deep breath. I had, after all, left a melodramatic message. “Bobby left.”
There was a pause. “Left?”
“Yes. Left. As in emptied his closet, packed up his car, and left me.”
Zayna put her hands over her mouth. I turned away from her.
“Oh, Cam. Cam.” The tenderness in Vijay’s voice prompted my eyes to sting.
“I should go—” Zayna said.
But Gabriella ran back into the apartment, blocking Zayna’s exit. “They’re coming!” she said.
“They’ll just get in the car and leave now,” I said. “We can hide up here until they go.”
“Hide?” Vijay asked. “Why are you hiding? Who are you talking to?”
“I’m talking to Gabby. Don’t worry. This is a good thing. It has nothing to do with Bobby—”
Suddenly Nick’s voice boomed in the stairwell. Way too loud he announced, “Okay, just hit the bathroom and we’ll be on our way.”
I reached out to quietly close and lock the door.
“I will call you back,” I whispered and clicked the phone shut again. “Hide.” Davy and Zayna fled to the balcony, closing the door behind them.
I started to follow with Gabriella, but Olive’s voice was right outside the door, her key rattling the lock, “Okay, Mr.-let’s-go-get-a-coffee, don’t be rushing me now.”
Nick laughed, loud and forced. He was trying his best to warn us. I grabbed Gabby’s hand, pulling her into the bedroom. She slid under the bed. I crouched down beside it, yanking the quilt over me. I still clutched my phone. I set it to vibrate.
“I just want to get on the road,” Nick said as they opened the door.
“Quit yelling,” Olive said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I heard Olive drop her purse and head for the bathroom. Oh, no—when Olive saw the mess I’d left, with cabinets and drawers open, she’d think she’d been robbed. But I heard only the sound of Olive peeing. Ah, thank God she was such a slob. I peeked out from under the quilt. Nick stood in the tiny hallway outside the bedroom and bathroom doors. I waved and gave him a thumbs-up. He beamed. When the toilet flushed, I curled into a ball and covered myself again.
The phone buzzed, wasplike, in my hand. I shoved it down the front of my pants and hugged my knees up to muffle the noise.
I stayed still until Nick and Olive’s footsteps faded on the stairs. The balcony door opened and Davy burst into whooping laughter. Gabriella crawled out from under the bed. Zayna left quickly, and Davy and Gabby went into the kitchen and sat on the floor, laughing and eating a bag of Olive’s Doritos, while I called Vijay and told him all about yesterday.
Talking to Vijay grounded me, as it always did. He grounded me before horse shows in high school, when I took my VCAT exam, when I got cold feet before my wedding.
I got cold feet before my wedding.
I’d forgotten, until now, how Vijay, looking dashing in his suit, had come into my little dressing tent, summoned by Olive. He’d taken both my hands in his—he had enormous hands with long, lovely fingers. “Having second thoughts?” he asked.
I nodded. His voice made me breathe. We whispered, since Olive kept watching us. “But not about Bobby. About me. Am I up for this? Worthy of it?”
Vijay’s nostrils flared. “Worthy of Bobby?”
I’d been so quick to correct him, I’d never registered his reaction until this moment. “No, no, of marriage. What will happen to us? Will we do okay?”
He’d smiled, his teeth so white against his caramel skin. “Well . . . that would be reading the last page of the book, wouldn’t it?”
Our favorite teacher in high school had fondly chastised Vijay, saying he needed to relax, he couldn’t plan every aspect of his life, he couldn’t—as I knew he did—make a list of goals, then move on-schedule through life checking them off. “If this were a book,” Mrs. Norvell had teased him, “I’m afraid you’d read the last page!”
He’d looked at her, his expression revealing his opinion: Of course! Who wouldn’t?
I wouldn’t, I told him later. “Life is an adventure. Think how boring it would be if you knew right now how it all turns out. Where’s the fun? The mystery? The discovery?”
Lying there on Olive’s bed, years after those conversations, I said, “You know what? I want to see that last page.”
He laughed, a rich, low sound that always made me think of dark desserts—chocolate mousse, sticky-toffee pudding, melt-in-your-mouth truffles. “I’ll tell you what your book says: you end up happy and discover the life you’re meant to live.”
Hadn’t this been the life I’d been meant to live?
“I meant Bobby’s book,” I said. “I’m really worried about him.”
Vijay snorted. “I think he just changed his story pretty profoundly.”
“And mine.”
“He can affect your story,” Vijay said. “He can change it somewhat, but he can’t change you. You don’t have to be reduced by those changes.”
Maybe it was the doctor in him—that part of his nature he’d displayed since elementary school. He could diagnose and treat just with the sound of his creamy voice. He was in Botswana, leaving in ten days, and promised to fly to Dayton as soon as he was back on this continent.
I stayed on Olive’s messy bed after we hung up. I listened to my daughter and brother rehashing the packing escapade and narrow escape. This project had occupied a couple hours and had kept me focused on something beside the fact that my life had been hurled upside down.
My arm hurt. I needed to tend to the biter. And check on the three-legged cat. Those would be the next projects to get me up off of Olive’s bed.