Lily and the Octopus (10 page)

“Yes. Like a water balloon. About the size of a small lemon.”

Lily’s abdomen does feel like a water balloon. Soft and squishy. Expressing her bladder was not something I had steeled myself for on the flight back from San Francisco. I thought I had
prepared mentally as well as I could. I drank coffee instead of liquor. I stayed awake instead of sleeping. I made a shopping list for all the things we would need on the back of a napkin: a pen to
keep her quarantined to a small area, blankets so she wouldn’t slip on the hardwood floors, toys that would keep her mentally engaged without exciting her physically. Treats—healthy
ones, so that she wouldn’t gain weight during the inactivity of recovery. Carrying added pounds would just be additional stress on her spine.

Learning to express a dog’s bladder, however, was not on that list, despite how obvious it seems to me now. The vet who discharged us laid down a weewee pad on the cold metal examining
table and showed us just how it was done. She made it seem so effortless, I assumed I had understood the lesson. Turns out I was wrong. We haven’t been able to get her to pee since we left
the hospital.

“My poor girl. The indignity of it all.” I hoist Lily in the football carry that was demonstrated for us, supporting her hindquarters, careful to avoid the tree branch above.
“Let’s go to bed.” Frustrated, Jeffrey switches off the flashlight. I know this means she may release her bladder in her sleep, in our bed, but we’ll just have to get up and
change the sheets. There’s no squeezing her any harder.

Inside, I set her down on a blanket and she stands upright. I’m amazed by this progress, even though she can’t yet walk. She can stand, unsteady though she is, and that in itself is
a huge accomplishment. For now, that’s enough. I read the instructions again on Lily’s red prescription bottles and select a Tramadol for pain and a Clavamox to ward off infection and
seal them into a pill pocket. She gobbles up the treat.

“Monkey, look at you. You’re standing.”

“My name is Lily.”

“I know it is.” I rest my hand on the top of her head, and her eyes blink heavily. She is only seven, but for the first time she looks old. A strip of bare skin runs down her back
where the staples are. She looks sad, disrobed of her mahogany fur.

“What happened to you?”

Lily seems to concentrate on remembering. “I don’t know. I woke up and I couldn’t walk.”

“You scared me.” I cup her head in my hands and she looks like a nun in a wimple.

She licks her chops for any remaining flavor from the pill pocket. “I know you put medicine in those things.”

“I know you know.” Then I add, “The medicine will help you heal.”

Lily considers this. “Can I have my red ball?”

I gently lift her up and study her Frankenstein scar. It’s like she’s now assembled from two different dogs: the puppy who will always want to play, and the senior dog who must come
to understand her limits. I make her a promise: “Soon.”

I place Lily gently on a layer of towels in our bed, nestled safely between Jeffrey and me, and the pain pill and the toll of the day knock her out within minutes. Sleep comes fast for me, as
well. It’s almost impossible to believe that when I woke up this morning I was in San Francisco.

I dream of the beach where Lily would run off-season when she was a puppy. In my dream she runs and runs, not getting anywhere fast. There are other dogs, bigger dogs, and she wants to run near
them but not with them; she’s slightly intimidated by their size and the sand they kick up with their paws. Her whole body is a compression spring that launches her with each step into
momentary levitation. Her floppy ears bound upward with each gallop, sometimes floating there in the wind as if someone has put them on pause. When she comes back to me I know they will be flipped
backward, pinned to her head and the back of her neck. I spend half my life restoring that dog’s ears to their factory setting.

THE! SAND! IS! SO! SQUISHY! UNDER! MY! PAWS! AND! LOOK! HOW! VAST! THE! OCEAN! WATCH! ME! RUN! WITHOUT! MY! LEA—

Before she can say leash, a wave sweeps in and engulfs her delicate paws in a strand of slick seaweed and a look of terror washes over her face.

SERPENT! SERPENT! SERPENT!

She turns and hightails it to drier sand, closer to the dunes where the last of the tall grass waves. Immediately, her nose picks up the scent of a dead crab. She rips off a leg and runs with it
in her mouth off into the distance until she is no more than a speck on the horizon.

In the morning, Jeffrey and I dress quickly and immediately take Lily outside. We set her on the grass and again she is able to stand. She even attempts an excited step or two, looking not
unlike Bambi but with shorter legs, before I can calm her to keep her from overexerting herself. “Shhh. Shhh. Shhh.”

Jeffrey looks to intervene but I shrug him off. This is my job. This is my moment. I will not be a coward, I will not be afraid. I will not be someone who can love only so much. I will not be
someone who is not whole or fully present when things get tough. I will not let others do the heavy lifting for me. I will not be distracted by a text message. Wringing the piss out of this dog I
love—this is my Everest. This is on me.

I tuck Lily’s hind legs under her and settle her into her usual crouch, legs slightly splayed like a frog’s. From behind her I reach under her abdomen and feel for the water balloon,
for the soft squish the size of a lemon. When I find it, I take a deep breath, gird myself, and squeeze.
Up and to the back.

I don’t know what’s different in the morning light—the fullness of her bladder, her willingness to do her part, my fearlessness brought on by the dawn of a new day, the dream
of her running, the desire to see her run again. Whatever it is, when I squeeze up and to the back her tail rises to that familiar forty-five-degree angle that makes it look like a missile about to
launch and slowly she starts to pee.

“She’s doing it! You’re doing it!” I’m so excited I almost let go. But I don’t. I continue to squeeze.

Lily is startled by the sensation and overwhelmed with relief. Jeffrey pumps his fist and we both break out in smiles.

“At last,” Jeffrey says, relieved.

“Ha-
ha
!” I am triumphant.

Lily attempts to stand and I realize I can stop squeezing. I gently guide her over the puddle of her making.

“You did it, Bean.” Everything else fades away.

I’m the happiest I have ever been.

T
he octopus sits in his usual perch as Lily and I make our way to the veterinarian’s office. We skirt the construction around LACMA because
no one in Los Angeles knows how to merge. Lily sits as she always does when I drive, in my lap with her chin nestled in the crook of my left elbow—the arm I try in vain to steer with as I
downshift with my right. She looks up at me, annoyed, whenever we actually have to make a turn. The octopus hasn’t said anything this morning. He doesn’t have to; the echo of his voice
rings hauntingly in my brain. He’s getting bigger by the hour.

The waiting room is small and dark and cramped, the brown linoleum floor is peeling in the corners, and any available breathing room is filled with shelves of dietary pet food and supplements
with names like Rimadyl and Glycoflex. I’m not sure why I still go to this vet, other than that it’s close to my house. This is a pattern in my life I need to rethink: Jenny the
therapist, this dumpy veterinary office. I will say there are new doctors here who are better than the last rotation, who disappeared suddenly after some unflattering Yelp reviews.

I find a seat on an empty bench made of wood and wrought iron. It makes me feel like I’m waiting for a trolley. The shelves tower over us, which would be our doom in an earthquake, but
also mercifully provide at least the illusion of privacy. Veterinary offices can be a grab bag of emotions. Cats are always frightened and in crates, their owners equally skittish. There are happy
dogs here for simple things like checkups, excited to be out in the world and scenting the lingering promise of a biscuit. There are nervous dogs who hate the vet under any circumstance. There are
sick and injured dogs with fretful owners who may bark and lunge and bite. There are owners leaving with no pets, having just received some kind of devastating news. And then there’s us.
People with dogs with octopuses on their heads. We, apparently, are the worst of the lot. Since we are too horrific and deformed to look at, others who pass through give us a wide berth.

After some time, we are led into an examining room to wait for the doctor. I set Lily down on the table and she flinches as her pads make contact with cold metal. I stroke her back to get her to
stay calm. This room is also small. On the wall is a poster promoting pet dental care with photos of dog teeth in varying stages of decay. The wallpaper, somewhat ironically, is the color of gum
disease.

The vet enters with a smile. He’s the cutest of the newer staff and I’ve named him Doogie in my head because he looks too young to be a doctor, even an animal doctor, which may (or
may not, who really knows?) require fewer years in school. His khakis have pleats and I wonder if I should mention something about how outdated they look, but maybe he wears them in an attempt to
look older.

“What brings you in today?”

Flabbergasted, I stare at him square in the eye. If he was reading a chart, or looking at notes from Lily’s patient file, that would be one thing. But he’s looking right at my dog
with that grin. This is probably where his inexperience cuts against him.

“Are you serious?” It’s all I can stammer.

“How is Lily?” He pulls back her lips and stares at her teeth. What’s he getting at? I know they are old. I know they’re rotting. I know both her teeth and her gums are
victims of my tight budget and neglect. But are they worse than what’s on her head? Is that really what he’s saying? What is the obsession in this place with teeth?!

“Well, for starters, she has an octopus on her head.”

The vet lets go of her jaw, looks at Lily’s head, and blanches.

“Oh.”

Yes,
oh.

The vet crouches down to get a better view of the octopus.

“How long has that been there?”

“I first noticed him late last week.”

He grabs Lily by the snout and angles her head around to get a good look at it from all sides. “And
an octopus
, you’re calling it.”

“What would you call it?” I begin to scan the room to see if there is a framed veterinary degree of some kind on the wall that might inspire confidence. I remember Internet-stalking
Doogie after our last visit because I thought he was handsome. I think he went to school in Pennsylvania, but now I’m not so sure. The pants, his cluelessness. Maybe he just purchased a
degree from a fake school in Guam. I won’t be Internet-stalking him again.

Doogie doesn’t break his study of the octopus. He touches it, taps it, and then reaches for a few gauze squares and tries to squeeze it. “
Octopus
is as good a word as
any.” His tone suggests that he’s trying to keep me calm.

“Careful,” I tell him. “You’re going to make him angry.”

He gets his hands fully around the octopus. “I’d say he’s already pretty angry.” Doogie stands up, steps on a lever to open the lid of a covered metal garbage can marked
Medical Waste, and tosses the gauze away.

“Well, what are we going to do about it?”

“First, we need to know more. I’d like to take Lily into the back and see if I can’t get a needle into it and extract some fluid. Then we can run some tests to see what
we’re dealing with.”

Lily looks up at me, annoyed as I am. This makes me lose my patience.

“We’re dealing with an octopus!” I’m red in the face and I can feel sweat forming on my back even though I don’t want to be this worked up. So help me god, if he
wants to look at the octopus’s teeth.

“I know that. But the more we know about the octopus, the more we will know how to fight him.”

This is the first reasonable thing he has said, so I crouch down to speak directly to Lily. “Go with the doctor. He’s going to get a better look at the octopus. I’ll be right
out here.”

Doogie collects a veterinary assistant and they whisk Lily away. Back in the waiting room, I flip through an old copy of
Dog Fancy
magazine. There are articles like “Five Mutts Who
Rose to Fame” and “Spotlight on the English Springer Spaniel.” These don’t interest me. But “Dental Debate Erupts over Teeth Cleaning” does, at least enough to
dog-ear the page and hopefully catch the attention of at least one rational thinker in this godforsaken place.

I pull out my phone and go to my photo archive to look at pictures of Lily before the octopus came. She and I on a cliff overlooking Santa Barbara that one time we took a drive up the Pacific
Coast Highway. Her asleep on her paw-print blanket, the sun from the window highlighting the red in her brown coat. Her in the bathtub, wet and annoyed. The two of us in a selfie, exchanging good
night kisses in bed before sleep. Her on the sofa sitting like the Great Sphinx of Giza, because I liked the way her coat looked against the gray tweed upholstery. Another selfie—this time
we’re in the backyard and she’s wearing a lei I got her on Maui. This one is only a few weeks old, a happier time already long ago.

Something in the picture catches my eye. I use two fingers to zoom in on the photo until I’m focused on her right temple, and there he is, in his usual perch just above her right
eye—the octopus, but smaller, younger, less pronounced. How could I not have seen him then? Did he come back with me from Hawaii? Catch a ride in that lei? Did I somehow pick him up from the
beach that day when I walked with Wende and Harlan and Jill collecting sea glass? Or when I was swimming in the ocean, my guard down, my cares floating away? Did I bring this upon us by needing to
get away with my friends? Or did he crawl out of the Pacific at Santa Monica Beach while I was not there to stop him? Attach himself to my dog while I was on an island sipping rum thousands of
miles away? I’m awash in horrible, stomach-churning feelings of guilt. It was just five nights in Hawaii—how could that come with so huge a cost?