Chapter 6 Tessa #2
He had brought a water bottle and a collapsible bowl for a ten-minute walk.
When Bear stopped at the second bench, Beckett crouched and poured and held the bowl and waited.
Bear drank about a tablespoon and looked away.
Beckett folded the bowl and put it back in his jacket without a word.
It was simply the procedure, and he expected to run it again in four minutes.
He ran it again in four minutes.
He matched the dog's pace the whole way, not roughly but exactly. Bear would shorten up on the left going into the turn and Beckett would come off the gas without ever looking down.
And we talked about nothing. The geese, and why they don't leave. He said that seemed like an enormous number of golf courses. I said, "It's Denver," and he said, "Fair." There was a food truck on Tennyson that Eli, unknowingly, also loves, which I did not mention.
He said, "Is the bottle heavy? I can take the leash."
I said, "I'm holding a leash."
He said, "I know. That's why I offered."
On the far side of the pond the wind came across the water. I did not cross my arms, because crossing my arms would have meant I was cold. About a minute later a jacket landed on my shoulders.
"I'm not cold."
"Keep it on anyway."
That jacket weighed nine pounds and smelled like a truck and like him. I wore it the rest of the loop like a woman with no self-respect whatsoever.
Underneath all of it, I was running the equation.
I've run it since I was twenty-two and it has never given me a different answer.
More than a hundred living creatures depend on me.
That counts the fosters, and Margaret, and the tortoise nobody has ever explained.
There is a brother who was twelve when our mother died and did not have a parent after that.
There is a building with my mother's name over the door.
There is a lease on the land under it with a renewal coming, and a chain that keeps mailing me a golden retriever.
And there is a finite amount of me.
So anything I take for myself, I'm taking from somewhere, from something with a name.
That was the entire architecture of my personality. And there I was on a gravel path with a man's jacket on my shoulders, doing arithmetic like a woman checking a receipt she already knew was right.
"You went somewhere," Beckett said.
"I'm tired."
"Tessa."
"Don't," I said. "Please."
He stopped walking. The dog stopped too, because the dog goes where he goes.
"Okay," he said.
And that was it. No follow-up, no second attempt. It was the single most disarming thing a person can do to me, and I was fairly sure he had no idea about it.
We came around the last turn with the streetlights coming on. The path narrowed where the willow was, and we went through it at the same time.
His arm came against my shoulder.
Both of us stopped. Neither of us stepped back.
"Tessa," he said, and my name in his mouth sounded the way it did when I was twenty-one. I looked up and he was already looking down. His hand came up about six inches and hovered there like a man reaching for something behind glass in a shop that's closed.
I wasn't surprised. My chin was already going up.
My phone went off in my pocket like a bomb.
"I have to look at it."
"I know," he said.
Violet. A missed call, and then:
Get back here! Gump is down. Not breathing right, gasping, cold. I have him on the heat.
"Go," I said. "Now. The truck. Go."
He drove fourteen blocks in four minutes. Violet met us at the door with two hundred grams of kitten in a towel.
"He was fine at six. He ate at six."
"Incubator on. Warm the fluids to body temperature, not hotter. Give him to me."
His blood sugar had crashed and he had gone cold, which in a four-week-old is one event wearing two hats. It took forty minutes, a heat disc, and sugar rubbed into his gums.
Then he lifted his head and screamed at us.
"That's the good sound," I said.
Beckett was in the doorway. He had been there the entire time, out of the way, holding the door open with his shoulder so it wouldn't swing. A person only does that if he has noticed the door swings. He had been watching the room long enough to learn its habits.
"Is he okay?" he said.
"He's okay. You should go. He's been in your truck an hour."
He nodded once. He took his jacket off the chair where I had put it, and left.
Violet came and stood next to me.
"So," she said.
"Don't."
"I'm going to say it, because if I don't say it I will die. You are not over him."
"I am extremely over him."
"You are so far from over him that if over him were Kansas, you would be in a boat. I have literally never seen you get into a car with a man to look at a dog's hips."
"It was a gait assessment."
"It was a gait assessment," Violet repeated. "At sunset."
"Go home, Violet."
"I'm taking the drunken noodle," she said, "because you didn't eat it and I have needs." And she hugged me too hard and left.
I locked up at 9:30 and checked the incubator twice. I walked through the breezeway to my mother's house and stood in her kitchen with the refrigerator open.
I'd claimed ten years of getting over Beckett Douglas. That was not true, and I was too tired that night to keep it standing up.
The problem was never that I stopped loving him.
The problem was that I never did. Not for one day, and not in Fort Collins.
Not in the nine months I watched my mother die, or on the night I signed the papers on a building I could not afford.
Not at any point in a decade of being extremely convincing about it.
I never stopped. I just got very good at running a clinic on top of it.
And now I knew why he left. Knowing was worse. The story I'd been using was load-bearing, and somebody had just taken it out from under the room.
I shut the fridge. Out the back window I could see the whole loud, hungry, endless thing that had my name on it. I said it out loud, to nobody, "Absolutely not."
Then I went and stood in the lobby in the dark.
The waiting room television was nineteen years old and had not been turned on since the remote died. I knew exactly where the remote was. Second drawer, with the tongue depressors.
I stood there with a dead remote in my hand and told myself I was checking whether the batteries had leaked.
The Vegas game was a week Thursday. National window.
I put two double-As in it, and the little red light came on. The television woke up with the sound off, showing a used car commercial to six chairs and nobody.
"Absolutely not," I said again.
I did not put the remote back in the drawer. I left it on the counter, next to the bowl.