Chapter 13
The waiting room was full of dogs. Most hadn’t stopped yowling since they arrived.
One had pooed in his crate, making the whole room smell of feces.
A select few were so well-mannered I suspected they were planted there by the vets to model good behavior.
There were no cats, which worried me. When was the last time they’d operated on a cat?
Isabelle bought two chocolate bars from the vending machine.
“We might be here for a while,” she said.
It was seven. We arrived two hours ago. There had been a waiting line for the emergency room, and it was full of dogs that looked fine.
When I asked to skip the line, showing Silver’s paint-stained muzzle, the woman at the front desk told me that everybody had to wait their turn.
“Not all illnesses are visible,” she said pointedly.
When Silver’s turn finally came, I was relieved. But it’d been hours since they vanished with her behind the white door next to my chair, and I began to regret giving her up.
“Please sit back down.” The woman from the front desk materialized next to me. “You can’t go in there.”
I saw that I was knocking on the door. Someone grabbed my arm and tugged.
Isabelle. She sat me down and rubbed her hand up and down my thigh.
She was always doing that, putting her hands on parts of my body.
“It’ll be okay, they know Silver,” she said.
“She’s been with them since James first found her. They’re good, I promise.”
It didn’t matter how long they’d known Silver if she could still die. I had been out for the entire afternoon. I wasn’t sure how long the paints had been in her system. Maybe she was hungry, very possibly I’d forgotten to feed her. I hadn’t eaten yet, which meant she probably hadn’t, either.
Eventually, Isabelle fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.
A long time passed before the door opened at last and the vet beckoned us in.
She led us into a room with an aluminum island at the center.
I gasped at the sight of Silver’s unmoving body on the surface, nearly white under the fluorescent light.
A yellow bandage wrapped around her right wrist, thin as a noodle.
“She’s okay, just knocked out for a while,” said the vet.
They’d induced more vomiting and pumped her with fluids.
The vet reassured me it wasn’t my fault, but I knew that it was.
The last time she ate something she shouldn’t have and got sick was when James and I left for dinner on my birthday.
I wondered if animals, like babies, lacked object permanence.
If they knew that when people disappeared, it wasn’t forever.
I thought Silver was probably smarter than a baby, but maybe she wasn’t.
She was just a small creature. When you were that small, all suffering was unbearable, you had no idea when it would end.
Didn’t I feel that way as a child? Back then, wasn’t there a part of me that feared my mother would go on one of her long drives and never come back?
I used to fantasize about something terrible happening to me, being kidnapped or starving to death, my mother opening the door to a quiet house.
I stepped toward the table. As soon as I stuck out my hand, Silver opened her eyes, yawned, and leaned into my touch, as if she’d been faking sleep the entire time, waiting for my cue to drop the act.
“Little thing,” I whispered. “I’m sorry for leaving you.”
Silver licked my finger. Her tongue was dry and papery and left no trace on my skin.
Behind me, Isabelle and the vet stood in silence while I ran my fingers down the silky fur of her back.
The buzz of the fluorescent ceiling light took over the room.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before the vet cleared her throat and said, in a bright voice, “All right, I’m going to have to see the next furry friend in need,” and I clasped my hands tight so as not to slap her.
—
Silver had to stay overnight so they could ensure the paint passed through her system successfully. The total cost for her treatment was $1,299. The woman at the front desk said this like “twelve ninety-nine,” so I put my card down. It was declined. In a swift motion Isabelle slid hers before me.
I was given a copy of the invoice with a summary of Silver’s treatment: an exam, IV drip, catheter insertion, bath, and a couple of bags of fluids.
On top of the sheet sat Silver’s name in capital letters, followed by my last name.
They must’ve processed the intake form before discovering that she already existed in their system with James’s family.
I knew I would keep this piece of paper forever.
We sat in Isabelle’s car. The warmth of the day had faded, and Isabelle turned on the heating. “I’ll pay you back, I promise,” I said. “It’ll just have to be in increments. My paycheck’s late.”
Isabelle waved the same way her mother did, swatting an invisible bug. “Take as much time as you need. The paycheck thing sounds annoying.”
“I sent my job a strongly worded email about it. I even threatened bodily harm. That part was an accident, though.” I cleared James’s missed calls from my phone screen, then showed Isabelle the email.
She shrieked and grabbed my phone. I found the action startling and attractive, like so many of her mannerisms. Certain people could get away with snatching phones out of people’s hands. Lou was also one of these people.
“You’re insane, you’re insane,” Isabelle said. She read aloud: “ ‘I will do terrible things to myself, possibly in your own building. I am not beyond throwing myself down a flight of stairs.’ Holy shit, Katie.”
“It’s bad, right? I’m so embarrassed. But I was really mad.”
“Of course you were.” Isabelle nodded gravely, her excitement gone as quickly as it materialized. “This is fucked. I mean, you could sue.”
“No, it’s fine.” Her righteousness bemused me.
Maybe I could sue. I’d never considered it before; even banter about lawsuits was thrilling and foreign to me, a real grasp at power hiding behind a joke.
“I’ve already paid rent, so I don’t have any huge expenses.
I do owe my roommate for utilities. She’s moved out because of it, so I should take care of that first.”
“Oh,” Isabelle said. She sounded cautious. “I’m sorry. Was she just a roommate, or an actual friend?”
“I’m not really sure.” I slid my hands underneath my thighs, then removed them because the seat was too hot. Isabelle turned down the temperature. “She flips the switch very quickly on people.”
“Tough person to be friends with.”
I thought about it before deciding: no, Lou was easy.
I still remembered every detail of our first real day together, a late Thursday afternoon on the last summer-hot week of the year.
Lou had unveiled a handle of vodka from beneath her pillow.
I thought she might drink it on her own until she passed me a cup, which filled me with equal parts terror and exhilaration.
We skipped our 4:10s and cleared the vending machine with her debit card.
She introduced me to a Korean girl in the junior year who gave me her old driving license, the fake ID that would get me into every bar in every year following until I no longer needed it.
Lou was like that. She opened doors for me, stretching the boundaries of what I could expect from life before I even knew to want it.
“She did me a huge favor moving me into her cousin’s place uptown,” I said. “Away from all her actual friends.”
“You’re not an actual friend?”
“I think we were mostly just roommates who got along.”
“Listen, I’ve had my fair share of roommate and friendship drama,” Isabelle said.
“No fight is permanent. Relationships aren’t these one-act shows, you don’t know how they’ll end.
You think you’re in act three, but really you’re just at, I don’t know, an intermission.
” She made her voice confident. “The love doesn’t go away just because you’re fighting. ”
Isabelle’s words made me feel like we were in a movie, and this was supposed to be the scene that changed everything. Even so, I thought she was overperforming slightly.
“I don’t think we love each other,” I said.
“But you chose to stick together for four years. That sounds something like love. It doesn’t have to be this big confessional thing, you know. It can be simple.”
Part of me saw Isabelle as completely absurd, while another part of me wanted to believe her.
Love as simple, love as the answer, love as something you could give to anyone.
James certainly did not hesitate to say he loved me.
But the confession had felt trivial, unearned.
Just a few small words, offered in the same breath as his offer of a home.
It seemed unfair that these words could change my life.
I’d said it back. But did I really love James, or did I simply need him?
He might love me, but he didn’t need me. What good was one without the other?
If I knew the answer, I might’ve believed Isabelle’s version of love, one that was unscarce and gave more than it demanded. But that wasn’t how I saw it. Love wasn’t for roommates or friends or even men you got to take you in. Love turned me into a bad child. It was for my mother, who needed it.
—
That night, as I waited in bed for sleep, my banking app notified me that money had entered my account: last month’s paycheck, just under two thousand dollars.
I looked at the numbers and felt nothing, no sense of relief.
They were weightless things, figures that altered the surface of my life without ever touching its core.
Figures that never lasted past an hour. I sent Lou all the money I owed her.
I sent Isabelle the remaining amount. I owed them both something more than the money, but money was the only thing I had.