Judith once again buzzed me during class. I assumed things had taken a turn with Aunt Becky, but she told me a woman was waiting for me in the office.
I stopped short upon entering. Lorrie sat hunched in a corner chair. When she saw me, fear seized her features, but she stood, her jaw set in resolve. We borrowed Peter’s old office, closing the door behind us. I didn’t suggest we sit and neither did she, and so we stood, contained in the room. She kept her gaze averted, but I refused to break the silence. Eventually she met my eyes and said, “I’m sorry. For what I did last fall. For letting you suffer not knowing.”
She kept her gaze steady, wanting me to know it had taken everything in her to come to me and that she would allow me to injure her further if I needed to. She had left herself defenseless, so any cruelty I inflicted would make me a monster. But what did I care? I’d made myself a monster in February, and I saw no reason to change course.
“Is that why you’re here?” I said, stepping toward her, looming over her.
Her eyes teared, but she didn’t flinch. “Thank you for not going to the police. For letting Nells keep her moth—”
“Judith said there was some kind of emergency. Or was that another of your lies?” Even then I marveled at my cruelty, wondered if I’d adopted my son’s meanness as he had in some ways adopted mine.
Lorrie winced but quickly told me about Rufus, about Evangeline and the blood and the race to the vet in Chimacum. I felt ashamed for my treatment of her and angrier still that she’d induced this feeling in me.
“Dr. Abrams wants to keep Rufus overnight,” she said. “He’d like to talk with you about options, asked to have you call him as soon as you can.” She turned to leave.
“Lorrie,” I said.
She stopped but didn’t look at me.
I didn’t know if I wanted to berate her or thank her, but with the saying of her name something tight in me, a thick band that girded my chest, loosened.
When I managed nothing further, she gave that little nod of her head and left.
DR. ABRAMS ADVISED A “TOTAL RESECTION.” He wanted to split Rufus’s face down the middle and open it like a pair of hangar doors.
“Why not access through the nostrils?”
He huffed. “Do you have any idea how convoluted a dog’s sinuses are?”
I wanted to snap, Why such cruelty? Hasn’t Rufus suffered enough? But I knew that in Dr. Abrams’s world medical violence and medical heroism were often the same thing. If Rufus was to be spared, it would be up to me.
It should have been a simple matter. But I waffled. When I saw Rufus, I also saw my son. Only a few days before his death, Daniel had chased the dog. Rufus, his paws skittering on the floor, flicked looks of terrified glee over his shoulder like the puppy he once was. Then the two rolled around, Daniel chanting, “Who’s a good dog? Who’s a good dog?” Given my son’s mysteries and hostilities in the last years, my desire to see that playful, fun boy was intense. At times, I thought I would torture the dog if it would grant me one more glimpse of Daniel.
Now, seeing Rufus struggling to breathe, I realized I’d stopped that vignette too soon. When Daniel was done roughhousing that day, he patted the dog’s head and bounded upstairs. Rufus, left in his old worn body, had whined a little, as if hoping Daniel would return, then stumbled to his feet and limped to his chair.
IN THE END, Dr. Abrams performed a biopsy. A few days later, he called to say it was cancer. “A resection might give him a few extra months,” he said. “Maybe as many as six, you never know. But with the lymph-node involvement and the complications of surgery in this area, there’s not much hope of a cure.”
Other options included experimental chemo and radiation at the veterinary school on the other side of the state, but all had painful side effects and none offered hope of long-term survival. Afterward I sat stiff-backed in my room, quieting my mind, trying to hold myself in the light that appeared at a distance, darted away like a fish when approached. An hour in, my mind lit with images of poor Rufus, monstrous, his head shaved, heavy black staples straining to hold his face together, his eyes watery with pain and accusation.
I told Evangeline of my feelings but let her know I would consider hers as well, that I recognized the bond that had developed between them. She nodded and went to her room, taking Rufus with her. An hour later she emerged, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. “Can the doctor help him breathe without hurting him?”
“He can go through his nostrils to open things up. That would help for a while.”
“Could we do that?”
“Of course.”
“Okay,” she said, avoiding my eyes, and left the room.
I called Dr. Abrams and made the request. “As long as you know this is solely palliative.” And that—providing comfort without false promises—was precisely what my heart wanted. I’d been through this before. The last time I saw my mother, she lay in a hospital bed enslaved to devices that pumped and drained, alarmed and scolded. Time and again, surgeons pursued her cancer, carved away at her, taking this and that. They left her gray-skinned and foreign, part machine and hardly human. I promise you, she would never have chosen it. She endured it for my father and me. So we could cling a little longer to unreasonable hope.
The only moment I saw my mother at peace in those last weeks was when three Friends gathered around her bed and sang of the ocean, sang of the One.
RUFUS WOULD DIE FROM HIS TUMOR, but I never considered putting him down. At times, as I witnessed his suffering, I wondered at my heart for allowing it. But then, animals know how to die. Once a fate is clear—and I believe it was as clear to Rufus as it was to me—they make choices to stay or to go. I’d put down pets in the past and may again someday, but Rufus was a singular being. My duty was to not interfere, to trust he had his reasons for staying or leaving.
The procedure went smoothly, and in a few days Rufus’s breathing had eased. The following Friday, Evangeline stayed overnight at Natalia’s. I was happy she had some semblance of normal adolescence, but when I got home to Rufus barely lifting his head and Evangeline gone, I felt a little lost.
Ever since I’d brought Evangeline back from George’s boat, the house had felt like a home again. And this was all the more obvious in her absence. I remembered Evangeline appearing in the salon, how she’d resisted those few steps, then acted as if they were no big deal. But those steps had made all the difference. Not only for me but for her. This way she could know, feel it deep in her bones, that she had made the choice to return.
In the mudroom, I pulled on a light jacket and headed outside, walked toward Lorrie’s lot. I’m not sure what I planned to do. Maybe knock on the door, invite her and Nells to dinner, pretend I hadn’t already destroyed whatever might have been salvaged.
Once again, I stood unseen in the border trees. In the early-evening dimness, the kitchen light was on. Lorrie was working at the stove, Nells chopping at the counter. Lorrie pulled a pan off the heat and went to her daughter, watched her a minute, then appeared to be giving instruction. Nells seemed angry, gesturing with her hands, but maybe not, because then they were laughing, clearly laughing. Lorrie placed a kiss at the nape of her daughter’s neck and returned to the stove.
Their intimacy and affection, their irritation and tenderness, lit that small kitchen, lit the entire house and yard. I felt the love between them even from that distance, and it broke my heart knowing what Evangeline would never have.