"Well, some animals do live about as long," he said, "and some live much longer.
Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don't know how old they are... or maybe they do, and they just can't believe it."
Ellie dismissed these simply enough. "Elephants and sea turtles aren't pets.
Pets don't live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it's like nine of our years."
"Seven," Louis corrected automatically. "I see what you're getting at, honey, and there' amp; some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there's this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too-some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people-me, for instance-just can't eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that's all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time."
Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. "Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo-"
"What about cats?" Ellie asked and looked at Church again.
"Well, cats live as long as dogs," he said, "mostly, anyway." This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter's bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and-yes, Louis would have sworn it-cold delight.
He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception-a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another torn got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car.
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.
But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.
"I mean," he said, "Church is only three now, and you're five. He might still be alive when you're fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that's a long time away."
"It doesn't seem long to me," Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. "Not long at all."-Louis gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come.
She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.
"Honey," he said, "if it was up to me, I'd let Church live to be a hundred. But I don't make the rules."
"Who does?" she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: "God, I suppose."
Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious. "God or Somebody," he said.
"Clocks run down-that's all I know. There are no guarantees, babe."
"I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets!" she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. "I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!"
There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis's chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.