“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I didn’t know what else to say. My mother always says that cursing indicates an inadequate vocabulary and a poor imagination; but in this case, it seemed like just the right word. I leaned in close to Cassie’s mangled hand, as if I might just touch it, but it was a pulsating bloody thing, and I couldn’t. I was only vaguely aware of Leo and Sheba growling at each other in their barely closed cage right next to us, but Cassie was. She closed her eyes and started to shake.
“It’s all fine. It’s going to be fine. I’d better get Marj.” I got to my feet and double-checked the bolt on the grille. I floated in a strange quiet, watching, as though this was happening to other people. Then, in the hush inside my head, suddenly I heard the cacophony of the dogs up and down the hallway. They all barked at once, wild decibels, and I marveled that we’d been held, those few moments, in a terrible bubble of silence.
Walking to the metal door, I had my back to Cassie, I’d actually turned away from her, but it felt like she was a part of me. In the bedlam of the barking, stinking dogs and the hot, wet breeze gusting in from outside with its faint smell of hay, she and I were joined by an invisible thread, and that thread was no less real than everything else, and because of that thread she would be fine, Cassie would be fine, and she wouldn’t even really be alone when I went through the door into the main building, because we were umbilically linked and inseparable.
Marj came through the door before I ever reached it. She saw in an instant what had happened, or enough of it anyway. Even as she ran down to Cassie, she paged Jo to bring the first-aid kit, and she wrapped a blanket around Cassie’s shoulders because of the shock, and had her raise her arm up to stop the bleeding, and when she ascertained the sequence of events, more or less, the only words she had for me were “Why’d you leave her?” As if somehow the whole thing, from beginning to end, were the fault of my inattention.
After she’d got her cleaned up, Marj decided that Cassie needed to go over to the hospital in Haverhill and get it checked out. Marj tried Bev, but the phone went straight to voicemail, so she called my mother and explained the situation and she agreed we’d take Cassie. It was logical. Nobody said anything at that point about whether we’d be allowed back in the shelter—after all, we’d broken the most important rules, and even though we didn’t admit it, Marj must’ve known it wasn’t the first time—but we did feel the pall of adult disapproval, that sense that you’re being helped and punished at the same time.
By the time we came back to the shelter, Leo had been put down. He was dead. As a dog, and especially as an unloved dog, you couldn’t attack a child and get away with it. But of course we knew, and Marj without saying it aloud made sure that we knew, that Leo hadn’t done anything wrong: we’d entered his space, with a tantalizing rawhide chew, and he had merely acted as millennia of genetic imprinting dictated such a dog would act, within the parameters of a rather vicious and impatient canine nature. We must never forget that Cassie’s act—and mine too, I guess, because I was her accomplice, like the bank robber who drives the getaway car—had brought about Leo’s death as surely as if we’d wrung his neck with our bare hands.
But that was later. In the first instance, my mother showed up in the station wagon to take us to the ER. Grim-faced, she played NPR loudly on the radio the whole way so that there could be no conversation. We made the drive to Haverhill listening to a phone-in about the migration patterns of owls, until one caller talked about having hit a giant owl with his car as he crested a hill on a back road at dusk. That was too much for the day, so my mother turned the radio off altogether. Then we listened to the air conditioner blow. I sat on my hands, a reflexive position of childhood guilt, and something Cassie obviously couldn’t do just then.
At the hospital, the nurse who untied Cassie’s bandage crinkled her features at what she saw. Cassie had such delicate limbs, and even after all our tanning, her skin was so fair. Swollen, her hand was purpled and blackened with clotting blood, with deep scratches, tears almost, up her arm. The fingers didn’t quite sit straight. She couldn’t wiggle them, or barely. The nurse cleaned it carefully—even though Marj had already done that, it had bled some more—and Cassie yelped at the sting of the antiseptic. Just little yelps, though. Mostly she was quiet, watching her arm with her blue eyes wide, almost as if it was separate from her.
That was the first time we met Anders, or Dr. Shute, as he was to us then. Anders Shute was the doctor on call in the ER that afternoon. I made fun of him in the car on the way home, to try to make Cassie laugh—“Do you think they bring the shooting victims to Dr. Shute?” and “He looks like he’s already been shot. Or maybe like he already shot someone himself. Doctor, don’t shoot! Oh, shoot, it’s Dr. Shute!”
He was tall and very thin, with pale, pale skin and protruding cheekbones like a death’s head. His lips were thin, his nose was thin, his long fingers were thin, and his eyes had a squinty quality that made them look thin too. He had long hair like a girl’s, down to his chin, and it too was thin, the kind of dishwater brown that looks greasy even when it’s clean. Dr. Shute didn’t have much of a bedside manner in the ER, but he wasn’t horrible or anything, and when he took Cassie’s mangled hand in his to look closely at it, I could tell that his gentleness surprised her: Cassie looked at him with some combination of beseeching and wonder, and for the first time she asked, “Is my hand going to be okay?”
His smile was slight and—inevitably—thin, but he did make a special effort to warm his chilly eyes. “Your hand, young lady, is going to be just fine. As long as you’re a good patient, not an impatient patient—the ‘im-patient,’ as we say around here—then your hand is going to be just fine.”
It struck me afterward that his was a slightly strange way of putting it, as if he were saying it was all up to her. If she would simply do the right thing, then her hand would heal. Which of course implied the fact (undeniable as it was) that if she hadn’t done the wrong thing to begin with, she wouldn’t be there at all. That’s how he was, Anders Shute: the whole way along, from that first encounter, he made out like the ball was in Cassie’s court: if she did the right thing, all would be well. And if she didn’t—well, then.
He injected Cassie’s hand with local anesthetic, and stapled the fine, frayed edges of her skin; he dressed the gouges up her arm with special unguents and pristine bandages, and he prescribed a course of horse-pill antibiotics to stave off any infection. No more nor less than any doctor would have done.
BEV BUSTLED INTO our TV room later that afternoon with her stethoscope still around her neck, breathing heavily, a vision in blue florals, clearly torn between distress and anger. Although she enveloped Cassie in her arms first thing, I could see, which Cassie could not, that as she squeezed her daughter her expression was troubled, like a sky across which clouds are blowing at speed.