Chapter 4 Tessa
Bear went home on a Thursday with his medications and a soft cone he defeated in the parking lot. He also went home with two pages of discharge instructions. Beckett read them all the way through, front and back, standing at my counter.
"It says restrict activity. Define restrict."
"Leash walks to pee. Nothing else. No stairs if you can help it."
He turned the page over. "It says monitor the incision for discharge. What counts as discharge?"
"Anything wet that isn't him licking it."
"What color?"
"Beckett."
"I want to know what I'm looking at before I'm looking at it," he said. That was the least annoying version of a difficult client I'd ever had.
He carried the dog out to the truck. Marisol stood at the window with her chin in her hand and watched him do it.
"Go clean run four," I said.
"Absolutely," she said. She did not move.
Six days later the staples came out, which took under a minute. The recheck bloodwork came back, and that took the rest of my afternoon apart.
His kidneys were not good. It was not a disaster. His creatinine was up from June, which meant the kidneys were clearing less waste out of his blood. He was thirteen years old.
So he needed fluids under the skin, every other day, at home.
"Can you come in tomorrow?" I said. "I want to teach you something. It's not bad news, it's maintenance. His kidneys need help. The help is a bag of fluid under the skin. It's cheaper and better if you do it at home."
"I don't…"
"You do. Everybody does. It takes ten minutes and I've taught it to an eighty-eight-year-old woman with a tremor and a grudge."
"What time?"
"Six. After my last appointment."
"Tessa. Is he in pain?"
"No. Not from this."
"Okay," he said, and hung up. I stood there holding a phone, thinking about how one man could make a two-syllable word carry a suitcase up a flight of stairs.
He came at six with the dog and a canvas bag of supplies. He had apparently already bought them somewhere, unprompted, down to the exact right gauge of needle.
"How did you know what to get?"
"I called and asked what you'd want."
"You called my clinic and asked my staff…"
"I called the supply place and described you."
I elected not to touch that.
We set up in exam three. Beckett stood there in a gray T-shirt regarding a length of plastic tubing like it was a live wire in standing water.
"Watch first."
I ran the line and popped the cap. I showed him the bevel, the slanted cut at the tip of the needle. Then I did it myself once, quick, and Bear did not lift his head.
"See? Nobody in this room cares about this except you."
"He cares. He's being polite."
"He wants a snack. He's a dog, Beckett. He's not at a dinner party." I dropped the needle in the sharps. "Your turn."
That was where the trouble started, and I did not go looking for it. Teaching fluids under the skin cannot be done from across the room. I had to put my hands on his hands.
"Tent it. Grab the skin behind his shoulder blades and lift. He's got a mile of loose skin back there. It's the entire point of a dog."
He put his hand on the dog and did approximately nothing.
"You're petting him."
"I'm not petting him."
"You are absolutely petting him. Lift."
"I'm going to hurt him."
"You are not. Here."
So I stepped in and put my hand over his. I closed his fingers around a fold of Bear's skin and lifted.
Beckett Douglas's hands were enormous. That was not an opinion, it was a job requirement.
There is an entire industry that measures those hands and publishes the numbers.
They were also warm and dry and rough across the knuckles.
I knew the exact shape of the tendon that ran up the back of the second one.
I used to trace it in a truck, on a couch, at twenty-one years old, for hours, like an idiot with time.
I had my hands on animals and on people all day long. It had never once been a thought in my head.
It was a thought in my head.
"Like that," I said, and my voice came out completely normal. I considered it one of the great performances of my career. "The needle goes in at the base of the tent, parallel to his spine, and you're going to feel a pop. Two, sometimes. It's supposed to feel horrible."
"That's a bad sentence."
"Do it."
He did. He went in too shallow and came out the other side. A jet of warm saline caught me across the collarbone.
"I put a hole in your…"
"I've been peed on today, Beckett. This is a spa treatment. New needle. Go again."
He went again. This time he stopped halfway, hand frozen, needle a quarter of the way in. The muscle in his jaw was doing something complicated.
"Hey."
"I've got it."
"You're going to bend it. Push."
So I put my hand over the back of his hand and pushed. To reach I had to come in against his shoulder. That was where I was when I felt him stop breathing.
I felt it. He stopped breathing, and then started again badly. The needle went in. Bear sighed and put his head back on the mat like a man being read the minutes of a meeting.
"There," I said, roughly into his sleeve. "Open the clamp all the way and let it run."
I stepped back fast, too fast to look casual to a professional athlete whose entire job was reading what a body does a quarter-second before it does it.
"How long?" he said. His voice had gravel in it that had not been there a minute ago.
"Six or seven minutes. He'll get a lump like a camel. It settles. Don't call me about it at nine at night."
"I wouldn't," he said. There was something underneath it. I made a decision not to go down there and get it.
While the bag ran into an old dog, I brought the kittens out. If I stood in one place with that man for seven minutes with nothing in my hands, I was going to say something I could not take back.
There were four of them, four weeks old, in a plastic tub with a towel.
"What are those?"
"Kittens."
"I can see they're kittens. There are four of them."
"There are always four of them. Or five. Or seven, once, which was a bad autumn. Somebody finds them in a wheel well. It's the job."
He crouched down and looked into the tub, and the orange one screamed at him.
"That's Dryden. He's screamed since the day he got here."
Beckett went very still.
"Dryden. Like Ken Dryden."
"I have no idea who that is. There's a second-grade class that sponsors the foster litters.
They get to name them. Their teacher's husband is apparently a hockey person, so every kitten through this building has been named after a goalie who won a Stanley Cup.
" I lifted the black one out. "This is Luna.
That's Gump, which is a name, apparently, Gump. And that one…"
He was already looking at that one.
"That one's Roy."
I heard it come out of my mouth. I heard it land. I watched it get all the way across the room to him.
Because I knew who his father was.
"It's pronounced Wah," I said, too fast, "according to a seven-year-old who was extremely firm with me about it…"
"It is," Beckett said. "That's right."
"Beckett."
"It's fine."
"It isn't, though, is it?"
He didn't answer. He picked a piece of towel lint off his knee.
"Do you want to hold one? I have to weigh them anyway."
"No. Give me Luna."
So I put a four-week-old kitten in the hand of the starting goaltender of the Denver Peaks. It went straight up his forearm, got itself stuck in his sleeve and screamed. He looked at me with genuine terror on his face.
I laughed so hard I had to put a hand on the exam table.
That was the first time I laughed in front of him in ten years. I felt something get up and walk out of the building.
While I was busy laughing, the little gray one climbed out of the tub and fell asleep against his thigh.
Obviously Roy.
"He's on me," Beckett said, not moving.
"He is."
"Should I…"
"No. Absolutely do not."
Margaret came in through the door that did not latch, sat down, and stared at him.
"Is she going to jump on me again?"
"Probably."
"Can we shut the door?"
"That door doesn't latch. It hasn't latched since 2016."
"I could fix that. It's a strike plate. Four minutes and an $8 part."
"Beckett."
"I'm only saying it's a strike plate."
Some enormous, tired, badly-maintained part of me wanted to say yes, please, fix the door. While you're in the building there are forty other things. I hadn't slept a full night since the spring. The leasing company called on Tuesdays and I'd started not answering my own phone.
And what I said was, "It's fine the way it is."
Because if I let somebody hand me one thing, I would find out what it was like to be handed things.
And then they stop.
Then the front bell went and I heard my brother's boots. On Wednesdays Eli did the runs.
"Tess, the drain in four is doing the thing again and I'm not putting my arm in it a second…"
He stopped in the doorway.
I had watched my brother's face do a great many things. But I had forgotten this one. It was the one from when he was eleven. I was twenty-one, crying on the kitchen floor, and I would not tell him why.
"Eli," I said.
Eli looked at Beckett. Beckett stood up, because Beckett standing up is an event.
"Hi," Beckett said.
Eli looked him up and down.
"You're taller than you look on TV. That's the only nice thing I've got and I want credit for it."
"Eli."
"I'm going to go do the drain. In four." He was still looking at him. "And then I'll be out back for a while."
He left. The temperature in that room dropped thirty degrees and stayed there.
Beckett sat down slowly.
"He's twenty-one," I said. "He was twelve when Mom died and I was twenty-two." I was talking too fast. "He's not going to be nice to you."
"He shouldn't be."
"That's not…"
"Tessa." He was watching the fluid line.
I did not have one single thing to say to that, so I went and got the scale.
The bag ran out. Beckett pulled the needle and put his thumb over the spot. He held pressure there longer than the job required.
"Do I do it again Friday?"
"Friday. Then Sunday. Then I see him in two weeks."
"Can I do it again now? A dry run. Without the…"
"You want to practice."
"I want to be good at it."
That's the one I'd have carved into something if I were a different woman.
So we stayed until seven-thirty, because a man wanted to practice tenting a dog's skin.
Somewhere in there he ended up sitting on my exam room floor with a kitten in each hand.
He held them out in front of him like two grenades with the pins already out.
He asked me in a serious voice whether Gump was supposed to be that heavy.
"He's heavier than Dryden."
"Then he's winning."
"Winning what?"
"Nothing. There's no contest. It's kittens."
He looked at the two of them.
"There's a contest," he said.
The light in that room was fluorescent and unkind to every living thing. He had a kitten asleep in the crook of his arm and one asleep against his thigh. His shoulders were down for the first time in nine days. Bear was flat out on the mat with his paws twitching.
I stood there with a clipboard and thought, in complete sentences: this is the thing I told myself I stopped wanting.
It was not only about him.
I was twenty-two when I inherited a brother.
I did his laundry and signed his permission slips.
I drove I-25 twice a week between a clinic and a veterinary school, with a twelve-year-old asleep in the back seat and a cooler of vaccines in the footwell.
I got him to twenty-one alive and employed and standing up straight.
There is no version of my life in which I regret it.
There is also no version in which anyone ever asked me whether I wanted a different one.
So I said it out loud. Because I've found that if I say a thing out loud in front of a witness it becomes load-bearing.
"Hey. Beckett. This is professional."
He didn't look up.
"I mean it. You're a client. Bear's a patient. That's the whole arrangement, I'm not…"
"I know."
"Because you cannot be in my building three times a week and have it be anything else. I have a business and a brother and forty animals and a lease. I do not have room for…"
"Tessa."
"I know," he said, and finally looked up. He had that flat unreadable television face on. I could not tell one single thing about what was happening behind it. "Understood."
"Good."
Luna yawned in the crook of his arm and went back to sleep. Neither of us said anything for a good long while. Both of us pretended that was a normal thing for two adults to do.
Out back, at some volume, my brother started running water.