Chapter 22
Astrid
It'd been three weeks since I watched his truck pull out of the driveway across Maple Avenue, turn at the end of the block, and go.
I woke up alone. I made coffee for one. I looked out the window over the sink at a bungalow with its lights off, its driveway empty, and a for-sale sign at the curb that the wind kept working on.
The realtor came back twice to straighten it.
The second time, she stood at the curb with her hands on her hips and looked across the street at my window.
I stepped back from the glass before she decided to come over.
The clinic was what kept me upright.
The bell over the door started ringing the morning the four firefighters walked in with their pets, and it never stopped.
The Bishops referred Mrs. Bishop's sister-in-law, who referred the woman who ran the bookstore, who referred two families from her church group.
Halsey brought his cat back for the post-spay check.
Mendoza's terrier went on a six-month rotation.
Duke's mother switched her spaniel's chart over without making a thing of it—called the practice on Elm and told them, in plain language, to send the file across town.
By the second week, the waiting room was full.
I hired Marisol full-time on a Wednesday and a part-time receptionist on the Friday.
The receptionist was a woman named Joanne who had run the front desk at the dentist's office on Main for fifteen years, retired in the spring, gotten bored by August, and walked in on a Thursday afternoon to tell me she could start Monday. She started on Monday.
In three weeks, I never took lunch. I took coffee at the counter, standing up, and half a sandwich between appointments, and the second half cold at four in the afternoon at the desk in the back office.
Audrey clocked it in the first week. She came by on a Wednesday at one with a paper bag from the diner and the face she'd been using on me since the third grade. She came back the next Wednesday with another bag. She didn't ask. She ate her half standing up. I ate mine on the stool.
Neither of us said his name.
I crossed Maple at six-fifteen on a Tuesday morning in the middle of the third week. The cold had come in overnight. The grass was stiff with frost, and my breath made a small cloud every other step.
Moose was at my hip. He'd been at my hip every morning for three weeks. He stopped going to the back door around the time Easton used to come home from shift. He stopped putting his paw on the front door when a truck went by on Maple. He stopped looking up at boots on the porch boards.
He still slept with his head pointed at the front door. Every night. His chin on his paws, his head turned toward the hallway, and the hallway led to the front door, and the front door faced Maple.
He was waiting. I couldn't look at him doing it without my throat going tight.
He came into the clinic at my hip, went to his bed in the corner of the waiting room, turned a circle on it, and lay down. I turned the lights on. I started the coffee.
Steve was on the filing cabinet in the back. He blinked at me with the yellow eye and the half-shut one. Marisol had started putting his food bowl on top of the cabinet rather than on the floor, and Steve had decided this was a reasonable arrangement.
I hung my coat on the hook in the back office. The crewneck was on the chair where it had been for three weeks. I'd been wearing it the morning he left and hadn't taken it home since.
I hung my coat next to it and went to the front.
The bell went off at seven-twenty.
I'd unlocked the front door at seven. I wasn't expecting a patient until eight-fifteen. The bell at seven-twenty belonged to someone who didn't have an appointment.
Joe Caldwell was through the door before the bell stopped.
He was holding his cat. One hand under his shoulders, one hand cupped under his hips—no carrier, because there hadn't been time. Marjorie. A big orange tabby, twelve years old, named after his late wife, the year she died.
The cat was in trouble. He wasn't vocalizing anymore, which was the wrong sign. His belly was the wrong shape under Caldwell's arm. His eyes were the eyes of a cat who'd been straining at a litter box since one in the morning and was, at seven-twenty, finished trying.
"Astrid."
His voice came out the way it does when a man has run from his car to a door. No fleece vest. No clasped hands at his waist. He said my name without a single second budgeted for pride.
"Joe."
I came around the counter.
"How long has he been blocked?"
"Since the night."
"Are you sure?"
"I checked the box at two. He'd been in and out of it for the hour before. By four, he stopped going to it. By six, his belly was this shape. I was at my clinic by six-fifteen."
"You tried to pass a catheter."
"I tried."
"Couldn't?"
"My vaporizer is leaking. I noticed it last week. I told myself I'd call the rep on Monday. I can't sedate him this morning, Astrid. I can't sedate him without putting him under in a room I can't breathe in."
He was looking at the floor of my waiting room.
"I drove him over. Hudson Valley is forty minutes. He doesn't have forty minutes."
I came around the counter the rest of the way.
"Joe. Back exam room. First door on the left. Lay him on his side. I'm right behind you."
He went.
I went to the back office, pulled a fresh smock on over my sweater, and came into the exam room in ten seconds. He had Marjorie on the table, on his side. Caldwell's hand was on his flank.
"Joe. I need you in the waiting room."
"Astrid."
"I have to sedate him, pass a catheter, run fluids, and pull a blood gas.
I have a clean vaporizer, an IV pump, and a bench analyzer that's going to tell me what his potassium is in two minutes, which is what's going to keep him alive on the table.
I can't do any of it with you on this side of the door.
Go sit on the bench. Marisol is going to bring you coffee. "
"Astrid."
"Joe. Go."
He went. He'd heard, in three sentences, that the version of me he was looking at was the version that worked on a cat, and that version didn't have a free hand for the man at the table.
Marisol came through the back door with her hair already tied up.
"What've we got?"
"Twelve-year-old male tabby, blocked since the night. Belly's tight. He's flat. I need a blood gas, a line, and the cath tray. We're going to sedate. Tell Joanne to push the eight-fifteen."
"On it."
She moved.
The next forty minutes were the forty minutes I'd done a hundred times in school and a hundred times in the brownstone basement clinic the summer I moonlighted for the woman in Brookline.
The blood gas came back at six point nine.
The potassium was high enough to stop a heart and not yet high enough to have stopped this one.
I ran fluids first, then calcium gluconate slow on a second line while Marisol set up the catheter tray.
The sedation was light—the cat was already three-quarters out of the metabolic state, and a heavy dose would have been the end.
I passed the catheter. The first inch was the inch a junior vet could do.
The next inch was the inch a junior vet couldn't. The inch after that was the inch I'd spent six hundred hours of school and five years of practice learning.
The flush went through on the third try.
The urine came back the wrong color—the color it came back when a bladder had been holding for ten hours, and the cat had been straining against it for eight.
I taped the catheter in place. I watched the bag fill. I watched his chest.
The breath came in. The breath went out.
The breath came in again, and the second one belonged to a cat whose body had remembered what the air was for.
The bag at the end of the line filled at the rate it was supposed to, slow and steady, and the flat panic that had been sitting in the back of my head since seven-twenty-one started to lift.
Marisol caught my eye across the table. She didn't say anything. She gave me the small nod a tech gives a vet at a moment like that one. We got him.
I sat down on the floor of the exam room. I hadn't been planning on it. My legs decided for me. I sat with my back against the cabinet under the counter, knees up, and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes for a count of three.
"You good, Doc?"
"I'm good."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm good, Mari."
She nodded her head toward Marjorie. "He's good, too."
"Yeah."
I sat there another beat. I took my hands off my eyes. I got up off the floor.
I went out to the waiting room.
Joe Caldwell was on the bench by the window. Elbows on his knees. Hands clasped in front of him. The coffee Marisol brought was on the side table, untouched.
He looked up when I came through the door.
"Joe."
"Astrid."
"He's good. He's stable. The catheter is in.
His potassium was at six point nine on the gas—high enough that he would have gone in another hour or two—and I've got him on fluids and calcium, and he's coming down.
I want to keep the catheter in for forty-eight hours and run him on fluids the whole time.
I'd like to keep him overnight tonight and tomorrow night.
I want to recheck the gas at six tonight.
He's good, Joe. You got him here on time. "
He closed his eyes.
He kept them closed for a count of five.
When he opened them, the rims were wet. He didn't let it pass the rims. He took his glasses off—the small wire-frame readers he'd been wearing on his porch the night he came to mine—wiped the lenses on his shirt, and put them back on.
"Thank you, Astrid."
"You're welcome."
"I'd like to see him."
"Give me ten minutes to get him settled. Marisol will come get you."
"Alright."
I started to turn back toward the exam room.
"Astrid."
I turned back. He was still looking at the floor.
"I think it's about time I retired."
He said it to the floor. He'd been carrying the thing for a stretch, and it came out of his mouth whether he'd planned to say it or not.
I didn't move.
He'd been the only vet in this town for thirty years.
He'd built a practice from nothing in a place that didn't have one.
His wife died five years ago, and the practice became the thing that gave his mornings a shape.
He walked into his practice at six-fifteen that morning and the practice wasn't what saved his cat.
The vaporizer he'd noticed leaking a week ago and hadn't called the rep about was what he walked into.
Five years of small refusals to call a rep. I was what saved his cat.
He'd figured out which version of himself he was looking at.
"Joe. You don't have to decide that today."
He looked up. His face did something I'd never seen it do.
"No," he said. "I think I do."
I let it sit.
"Alright."
"Alright."
"Marisol will come get you."
I went back to the exam room.
I worked through the morning. The Yorkie with the torn nail at nine-thirty. A vaccine for a six-month-old lab puppy at ten. A recheck on a basset named Earl at ten-forty. Joanne pushed two clients to the afternoon and slotted in a walk-in at eleven.
Caldwell sat in the waiting room through the whole of it. He moved to the corner chair after eleven, when the bench filled up. He read a six-month-old magazine cover to cover. He drank the coffee cold. Joanne brought him a fresh one at ten.
At twelve-thirty, I told him to go home.
"I'll call you at three. He'll be awake by then. You can come back tonight to sit with him. He's not going anywhere."
He went.
The afternoon was quieter. I cleaned the surgery suite at one, scrubbed the table, changed the drape, and autoclaved the instruments.
Marisol took her lunch at one-fifteen. Joanne ate hers at the front desk, standing up, because Joanne was sixty-four and had been eating lunch standing up for forty years and wasn't going to be talked out of it now.
Caldwell came at six. He sat in the back with his cat on a heated pad and his hand on the cat's flank until seven-forty. On his way out, he paused at the door.
"Astrid."
"Joe."
"I'm going to call my clients. The ones who've been mine for thirty years. I'm going to tell them I'm closing the practice at the end of the month, and I want them to bring their charts across town to you. I'm going to tell them I'd be grateful if they would."
I didn't have a sentence ready for that.
"Joe. You don't have to do that yet."
"I do."
He let it sit a beat.
"You did right by my Marjorie today. I'm not going to make you keep doing right by my clients with one hand tied behind your back."
He went.
I stood at the front counter a long time after the bell stopped.
I locked the front door at eight-fifteen and walked back through the dark waiting room toward the back office for my coat. The small lamp on the desk was still on from the afternoon.
The crewneck was on the chair.
I crossed the room. I put my hand on the back of the chair. I let it sit there.
I didn't move the crewneck.
I picked up my coat, put it on, turned off the lamp, and closed the door behind me.
It was going to be on the chair in the morning. I still couldn't tell myself what I was waiting for.
I locked the back door and went home.
The first thing I noticed at six-twenty the next morning was that Moose was not under my feet.
The coffee maker was on the counter. The kettle was on the back burner. Moose was supposed to be there because he was at my feet between six-fifteen and six-thirty every morning—that was when I fed him.
I called him. Nothing. I went through the house. His bed was empty. He wasn't at the front door, the bedroom, or the bathroom.
The back door was closed. The deadbolt was across, exactly as I'd left it the night before.
But the back gate was open.
I could see it through the window above the sink. The gate had come away from the latch in the wind. Easton fixed that latch in October, but the wood had moved with the freeze, and the latch had been slack on the bolt for days. I'd been meaning to look at it on a weekend. The weekend never came.
I went out the back door in my robe and slippers.
"Moose."
The yard was empty. The gate stood open. The frost on the grass was marked with paw prints going through the gate, down the alley between my fence and the Maguires', and up the back trail.
I stood at the open gate and looked at the trail going up into the woods behind the houses on Maple.
I'd walked it a hundred times in the autumn with him at my hip, and in October with Easton at my shoulder, the dogs ahead of us in the leaves, and the day at the lake when the heron came up off the water.
The woods were quiet at six-thirty in the morning in December. Quiet in the particular way it's quiet when there's a dog in it that doesn't know the way home.