Chapter 8 #2
The kitty was tiny and terrified and hissing at everything that moved, which I respected because she was six weeks old and alone in the world, and hissing was the only weapon she had.
I held her in one hand while I assessed the break.
She bit me twice on the thumb with teeth so small they barely broke the skin and growled with a ferocity that was wildly disproportionate to her body mass.
“You’re a very tough girl,” I told her. “I’m impressed, but I need to look at your leg now, and you’re going to have to trust me for about sixty seconds.”
She bit me again.
I took that as consent.
The leg was a clean fracture, which was the best news I could give a kitten with no owner and no one to pay for surgery.
The clinic had a fund for strays and surrenders, built from donations and the occasional fundraiser.
It covered cases exactly like this one. I set the fracture, splinted the leg, and settled the kitten into a recovery kennel with a heating pad and a dish of formula.
More importantly, the kennel offered the poor thing the quiet, private darkness that frightened animals needed to feel safe.
“You’re going to be fine,” I told her through the kennel door.
She was watching me with huge, suspicious eyes, her tiny body rigid and her broken leg splinted and wrapped in blue tape because Carlos had a theory that animals healed better when their bandages were colorful.
There was no scientific basis for this.
I let him do it anyway.
“I’ll check on you in an hour,” I said.
She hissed once more, then curled into a ball and closed her eyes.
I stood there longer than I needed to. I always did with the strays.
They were the ones who had no one waiting for them.
They had no Brandon pacing in the lobby nor a Gloria with her laminated questions.
They were the ones whose entire world had narrowed to a kennel and a heating pad and the sound of a stranger’s voice telling them it would be okay.
David used to say I brought them all home because I couldn’t fix the world; but I could fix a six-week-old kitten with a broken leg.
The math worked out close enough to keep me going.
He’d said it gently, the way he said everything that was true and slightly painful, with a hand on my shoulder and a voice that made the truth feel survivable.
He wasn’t wrong.
The math was close enough.
It always had been.
I ate lunch over the sink in the break room, which was a habit I’d developed during residency and never broken because it was efficient and because the break room had a window that looked out onto a strip of grass where the clinic’s long-term boarders got their afternoon walks.
I watched Carlos walking a Great Dane named Caroline who had been with us for two months while her owner recovered from a stroke.
Clementine moved like she’d figured out that her three legs were a design choice rather than a limitation, bounding across the grass with a joy so aggressive it bordered on philosophical.
Three-legged dogs always got to me.
For obvious reasons.
I’d found Hiro eight months earlier. Animal control had brought him into the clinic after being hit by a car.
His leg had been too damaged to save, and the amputation had been mine to perform.
I’d been the one to take something from him before I’d been the one to give him anything back.
There was a weight to that, a responsibility that went beyond the surgical.
I’d kept him because he’d woken up from anesthesia and looked at me with those massive brown eyes and I’d known, with a certainty I hadn’t felt about anything since David, that this dog was mine and I was his.
The math was simple.
“Dr. Loupier.” Debbie appeared in the break room doorway. She was holding a chart and wearing the expression she wore when a case was going to be complicated in ways that had nothing to do with medicine. “Your two o’clock is here. It’s the parrot.”
“The parrot,” I repeated.
“Mr. Henderson’s African Gray. The one who learned words from his ex-wife.”
I remembered.
Mr. Henderson had called last week, deeply distressed, because his parrot, Captain, had spent the last six months repeating phrases that Mr. Henderson’s ex-wife had apparently taught the bird during the divorce proceedings.
The appointment was technically a behavioral consultation, which was not my specialty, but Mr. Henderson had been a client for years and Captain was having feather-plucking issues that warranted a physical exam alongside the behavioral assessment.
“How’s Mr. Henderson?” I asked.
“Emotional. The parrot told me to go to hell when they walked in.”
“The parrot told you to go to hell?”
“In Mr. Henderson’s ex-wife’s voice, apparently. Mr. Henderson said he’s very sorry. He’s been trying to teach Captain new phrases, but the bird is, and I quote, ‘committed to the old material.’”
I put down my sandwich, washed my hands, and went to Room Three.
Mr. Henderson was a small, nervous man in his sixties who sat in the exam chair with the rigid posture of a man who knew that something embarrassing was about to happen and had accepted his inability to prevent it.
Captain perched on a portable faux tree beside him.
The bird was a handsome African Gray with bright orange tail feathers and the cold, calculating intelligence that made African Grays simultaneously the most impressive and most unsettling of parrot species.
“Dr. Loupier,” Mr. Henderson said. “Thank you for seeing us. I want to apologize in advance for anything Captain says. He’s going through a phase.”
“No need to apologize.”
“My ex-wife taught him things during the separation. I didn’t know about it until after she moved out and he started, well, performing.”
“What kind of things?”
Mr. Henderson closed his eyes. “He calls me ‘Leonard’ in her voice. My name isn’t Leonard. That was her . . . her friend.”
“I see.”
“And he says, ‘You never listen,’ approximately forty times a day. And he tells the mailman that he’s the only one who understands her. And last week he told my new girlfriend to get out, which was extremely awkward because we were having a nice dinner.”
Captain, who had been sitting on his perch with the stillness of a creature who was absorbing the conversation and filing it for future use, chose that moment to ruffle his feathers, fix me with one bright, unblinking eye, and say, in a voice that was distinctly female and distinctly contemptuous, “You never listen, Harold.”
Mr. Henderson winced.
“It’s not always Harold,” he explained. “Sometimes it’s Leonard. She was inconsistent.”
I performed the physical exam while Captain provided commentary.
He told me I had icy hands, suggested that I was just like Harold, and during the feather assessment, produced a sound that was either a dramatic sigh or a perfect imitation of a woman losing her patience with a medical professional.
The feather plucking was stress-related, which I could have guessed from the bald patch on his chest and the general atmosphere of domestic tension that followed this bird like a cloud.
I prescribed an enrichment protocol, recommended a behavioral specialist who worked with parrots, and spent ten minutes explaining to Mr. Henderson that Captain’s vocabulary was not a reflection of his feelings toward Mr. Henderson personally but rather a learned behavior that could be redirected with patience and consistency and a lot of positive reinforcement.
“Can you teach him new phrases?” I asked.
“I’ve been trying. I spend an hour every night saying, ‘I love you,’ and ‘Good morning,’ and ‘Harold is great.’ He just stares at me and then says, ‘Fuck you. You never listen.’”
“Try pairing the new phrases with treats. They’ll need to be high-value rewards. Almonds, usually, for African Grays.”
“Almonds.”
“Every time he says something you want him to repeat, give him an almond. Every time he says something you’d rather he didn’t, give no reaction at all. Don’t scold him or laugh. Simply don’t engage. The goal is to make the new material more rewarding than the old.”
Mr. Henderson nodded, though I wasn’t sure he fully understood how trying a re-training regimen could be. Captain watched us both with an expression I thought might’ve been more suited to Mr. Henderson’s ex-wife.
As they were leaving, Captain looked over his shoulder at me and said, clearly and without prompting, “Good boy.”
Mr. Henderson stopped in the doorway. “He’s never said that before.”
“Might be the start of something,” I said with a tight smile.
“Good boy,” Captain said again, and then added, in the female voice, “Fuck you.”
“We’ll keep working on it,” Mr. Henderson said, his shoulders once again drooping.
I stood in the empty exam room and laughed—actually laughed out loud.
The sound bounced off the tile walls in a way that felt unfamiliar, because I didn’t laugh out loud very often, certainly not at work, and certainly not alone; but the parrot had gotten to me.
It all had: Captain and Mr. Henderson and the almonds and the whole absurdly heartbreaking, deeply human mess of a man trying to teach a bird to say something kind after someone had taught it to say something cruel.
But the Captains and Mr. Hendersons were why I did this.
It wasn’t the surgeries, though the surgeries mattered, nor the clinical precision or steady hands or the ability to remove a sock from a Labrador like some guy on Mission Impossible defusing a bomb.
No, it wasn’t those things; it was this, the strange, ridiculous, impossibly tender collision of people and animals, and the way love showed up in the weirdest containers and refused to behave and required me to constantly improvise.
David had understood that.