Chapter 2 Tessa
By eleven o'clock that night I had been at work for sixteen hours. I knew exactly whose fault that was. I made the schedule.
Behind the clinic is the shelter. Behind that, sharing the same back fence and the same water bill, is my mother's house.
A covered breezeway runs from the surgical suite to the kitchen door, poured in concrete on purpose, because June Reeves did not believe in going home.
She believed in going out to the house for a minute.
She's been dead nine years and I still call it that.
The equipment financing was sixty days out. There was a letter from the leasing company on the desk that I had opened and then folded back up.
Underneath it was the glossy one, with a golden retriever on the front: A partner for the next chapter of your practice. Apex Veterinary Partners. Somebody had written Dr. Reeves, following up! in blue pen. The exclamation point was the most threatening thing on the page.
They bought the strip mall in March. They bought the practice on Sheridan in June. Every eight weeks I got one of these and put it in the drawer. One of these days I was going to run out of drawer.
Margaret was on top of the file cabinet.
Margaret was a nineteen-year-old tortoiseshell with one and a half ears and the moral outlook of a war crimes tribunal.
She came in as a stray in 2011 and could not be adopted out.
She had bitten every human being who ever attempted to love her.
That category included me, twice, this year.
"Don't," I said.
She looked at me and put her paw on the pen cup.
"Margaret."
She pushed it off the file cabinet.
That was the last normal thing that happened for nine hours.
I heard the truck first. The lot had one particular pothole and everybody hit it.
Then the door opened, and a voice came at a certain pitch. My hands started doing things before the rest of me caught up. There was a dog in his arms.
Then I looked up.
The floor did not tilt. My hearing went strange for about half a second, like coming up out of a pool. My hands kept going and the rest of me stopped. There was a very clear and very stupid voice somewhere behind my sternum that said, oh, there you are.
Ten years. He got bigger.
"Tessa," he said.
And I thought: no. Not for one second. Not now.
So I ran triage instead. I had run it so many times I could have run it in a coma.
That was convenient, because functionally I was in one.
His gums were white. The color came back too slowly when I pressed them.
His heart was at a hundred and eighty and weak, and the pulse in his leg felt like something apologizing.
He gave me the dog, eighty pounds. I've carried heavier. But I remember that specific eighty pounds. He handed it over so carefully, both hands staying under the animal an extra beat. He'd said the dog's name twice, once to me and once to the dog.
I went through the door and let it swing shut on him. It was medically appropriate. It was also the single most satisfying thing I did all week.
"Talk to me."
"Red cell volume nineteen, solids four two." Marisol had the tube up to the light. "Lactate six point one."
"Great. Fantastic. Belly tap kit."
I put a needle in his belly and got blood. It did not clot, which was the answer.
"He's bleeding into his belly. Do we have a bag of Sixty-Two?"
"One unit. It expires in nine days."
"Then it's having the week of its life. Start it. Slow, and watch him."
I ultrasounded with the machine that had a crack down the screen from 2019, and there it was. It was big and ugly, sitting on the spleen with free fluid all around it.
"You want me to take the consent out?"
I looked at the swinging door.
"No. I'll do it."
There is a version of me who sends the technician out with a clipboard. That version had a whole life in which she never had to see this man again, and I killed her, in a hallway, with my own hands.
I went out and told him. It was fast and clean, the way I'd tell anybody. It is one of the two or three things I am actually good at.
He said okay after every sentence, with no argument and no bargaining.
Then he signed four documents without reading a word of any of them. I had a feeling I was in no way prepared for, and I shoved it somewhere with a broom.
Because I remembered. He read everything. He read the terms and conditions of a parking app out loud while I begged him to stop.
Then he said he's my grandfather's dog, and there was Walt in the middle of my waiting room ten years later. He was an old man in a paper hat behind a counter, saying sit down, honey, you look like a stray.
And because I have a mouth and no supervision, I told him about the Thursdays.
I got through the door before my face did anything. I had ten years to prepare an inventory of things I would not say to Beckett Douglas. That one was in the top four.
Surgery.
Gas him down and tube him. Clip and scrub and drape. By the time I was gowned his blood pressure had dropped to fifty-eight. The monitor was making the noise the monitor makes.
"Blood wide open. Bolus the hetastarch."
"That's the last bag."
"Then this is the thing we were saving it for."
I cut down the middle of him, and the second I was through the belly wall it came up over my gloves and onto the floor. Suction. Pack the quadrants. Find the stalk of vessels that feeds the spleen, which is like reaching into a bathtub in the dark for one specific fish.
"I've got it. Vessel sealer."
"It's charging."
"Fine. Give me the big clamps and a pack of suture. I'll do it like it's 1983."
Three throws and a knot, and my hands did not shake. I watched them do it from somewhere slightly above and behind my own head.
The spleen came out the size of a football with a ruptured knuckle on it. Marisol said "oh my god" with three syllables. I dropped it in a basin. "Bag it for the lab."
Rinse. Suction. Count the sponges. Count them again. Close and staple the skin, because it was one in the morning and my hands were finished being fancy.
Somewhere in the middle of that my phone went off in my scrub pocket. Marisol fished it out. It said Violet.
"Speaker," Marisol said.
"Tessa Anne. I've been awake for six minutes because a foster parent named Kimberly has sent me nine photographs of a rash…"
"Beckett's here."
There was a silence on that phone like the inside of a bank vault.
"Beckett Douglas," Violet said. "Is in your building."
"His grandfather's dog is on my table with his spleen in a bag."
"Tessa."
"I can't. I have a bleeder."
"Okay. I'm not going to say anything." Two full seconds. "I'm going to say one thing. I've been telling you for ten years that this city is a small town wearing a very large hat."
"Marisol, hang up on her."
"I love you and I'll be there at seven with a coffee and questions…"
Marisol hung up on her.
A foster kitten started screaming. He was the four-week-old orange one who screams because the world is unbearable. He screamed the entire rest of the surgery, and honestly, same.
He came off the table. His pressure was ninety-four over sixty soon, which I announced out loud to nobody. He was in the oxygen cage half an hour later on a pain drip with a warm-water blanket and Marisol's hand flat on his chest. His gums came up from envelope to something nearly pink.
I stood in front of that cage and did absolutely nothing for a quarter of an hour. For me that was a religious experience.
Then I went and printed the invoice.
I stood at that printer at three in the morning and thought about eating it. Then I thought about the leasing company and the $141. I thought about the fact that Marisol had a kid and a car payment. And I thought about the word arrears, which means money already owed and sounds like a body part.
I could not afford to be a good person on a Tuesday.
So I printed a bill for four thousand and change. It went in a folder for the man who broke my heart, for the privilege of me saving the last living thing his grandfather touched.
He was still there.
I looked out through the glass at four in the morning. He was in a plastic waiting room chair with his arms folded and his head back against the wall. He was six foot four, and that chair was a joke.
Marisol came and stood next to me.
"Should I tell him he can go home? Should I offer him a blanket?"
"He's not going to go home. No," I said, and then, "yes. Fine. Yes."
She got the maroon fleece and laid it over him. He didn't move. She came back in and said, "He's enormous." I said, "Go check the bulldog."
She checked the bulldog for a very long time, from a position that let her see the lobby.
At 6:00 the sky over the back fence went the color of a bruise going away. I took the chart out to him.
He came awake all at once, with no stages, the way people do who have been trained to.
"Is he…"
"He's alive."
His face did something. He put it away as fast as a man can put a thing away. He wasn't fast enough. I saw it, and I wish I hadn't.
"Stable. Guarded. Those are two different words and I mean both.
" I looked at the chart, which I did not need to look at.
"Pressure's holding. He threw some extra heartbeats around four, which is normal after a spleen comes out.
We're watching it. He's on oxygen because he earned it.
The mass goes to the lab today. It's either the thing that's already everywhere or it's the thing that isn't. I'm not going to give you the odds, because odds are for a thousand dogs and you have one. "
"You say okay like other people breathe."
"Okay," he said.
He looked back at me with a face that could have been printed on a bank building.
"You can see him. Two minutes. Don't put your fingers in the cage."
He stood up. The blanket slid off him. He caught it and folded it badly and set it on the chair.
Bear was in the cage on his side in the blue light with a shaved belly and a line of staples and a catheter.
And his ear moved, just the ear. He didn't lift his head and he didn't open his eyes. He heard him.
Beckett went down on one knee in front of the glass and put his forehead nearly against it.
"Hey, bud," he said.
For about four seconds, standing behind him with a clipboard, ten years was not there. I was twenty-one and it was a hot afternoon in August. This was the person I was going to be with. That was not a hope, it was a settled fact, like the sky.
Then the oxygen concentrator kicked on with a bang and I came back into my body.
"Two minutes," I said, to the chart. "I have a bulldog."
And I went and stood in a room with a bulldog who did not need one thing from me.