Lucky in the Corner (27 page)

Pam goes on. “I want to take you for dinner at my parents’. Make love in
our
bed.”

“We don’t have a bed.”

“We could. Beds are obtainable.”

Nora doesn’t respond. She feels as though large items—marble sculptures and grand pianos—are moving around inside her. In the room that is her, there isn’t space for everything and so the individual pieces keep shoving, jockeying for position.

With Pam she was only prepared for something that didn’t take up any space at all. She didn’t go in looking for a whole new life to replace the one she was already living. Her life was already in place, already satisfactory, requiring at most a few small improvements. New windows in the spring. Jeanne finishing her article. And nothing about that life has changed. The only problem is that, at some critical point when she wasn’t looking, she fell in love with this woman she had thought she was merely sleeping with. The elements of initial attraction have expanded in directions she hadn’t anticipated. She loves the large way Pam inhabits her life, the agility with which she moves through it. And now, the way she wants to be with Nora free and clear (while Nora is still looking for places to hide).

Another thing is that having Pam, even though she has her for only an hour or two at a time, has become such a huge part of her internal life. Without her, she would have a sequence of days, a schedule of activity, that was sufficient before Pam’s appearance, but would now be terribly diminished by her absence.

“I have a Christmas present for you,” Pam says. “Wait a minute.” She stretches off the bed to tug something out of a pocket of her jacket on the floor.

Nora closes her eyes and thinks,
Please don’t give me a present.
Even though she has brought something for Pam, a pair of socks she has knitted herself, the first knitting she has done since the earliest, domestically ambitious days of her marriage when she knitted socks and scarves for birthdays, cross-stitched pillowcases for wedding presents. These socks are irrefutable evidence of premeditation. She has had to work on them over several weeks’ worth of stolen moments. Nights when Jeanne was teaching and Fern was over at James’s. When time grew short, she would sometimes knit and purl in her car at the far edge of the parking lot at school, the heater running, the engine idling, the dash light on so she could read the instructions.

Pam’s gift is also premeditated. It’s an old silver ID bracelet, scratched and nicked by its previous owner, polished by Pam, nameless on the front, but on its underside, in small, lowercase letters, Pam has had engraved “trouble.”

“Oh man,” Nora says, and folds her hand around the back of Pam’s neck and kisses her.

Still, the socks remain across the room in her shoulder bag, wrapped in red tissue, pushed beneath her wallet and cell phone. Giving them would be a response—to Pam’s present, which at the moment hangs heavy as an anchor on her wrist. The bracelet is not just about sex or mischief; it is recognition of a level of emotional content that has begun to assert its presence. And so Nora can’t give her the socks, which would be a reply she is shy of making. Shy and cowardly.

“What about Melanie?” Nora says. Might as well bring her into the dialogue.

“She knows,” Pam says. “About us.”

Something icy shoots through Nora.

“You told her?”

“I told her there was someone else. I didn’t say it was you.”

Nora wonders how much time she has, closes her eyes and sees the sparks running merrily along the fuse.

WHEN LUCKY STARTED PACING
through the night, Fern would get dressed and take him for three-thirty or five
A.M.
(or whenever) walks. When he started hiding in closets, the vet, Dr. Sanders, told Fern that pacing and hiding are animal attempts to get away from pain. Lucky’s joints are cemented with arthritis. The vet prescribed something that worked for a few months, but now the dog is bad again, this time lying in the same spot most of the day. Fern and James have to carry him up the stairs, not only to James’s apartment, but even just up the front steps of Fern’s house. He has been on cortisone for four days—a last-ditch shot at buying him some more time—but Fern can see the stuff is not kicking in. Lucky is practically immobile, and now one side of his face is swollen from an abscess in his mouth.

“He’s crashing,” Fern tells her mother on the phone. “I’ve been hanging out with him. Just to be around. He looks at me and I know he needs help, but there’s nothing I can do to make him suffer less. Except one thing.”

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Nora says.

“They’re open until four. I called.”

“Where’s James?”

Fern sighs.

“That came out wrong,” Nora says. “Of course I want to help.”

“He’s out at his parents’. They’ve got a tree-trimming thing they do every year. It’s not like he deserted me. We didn’t know Lucky was going to go downhill so fast.” This is a lie. The truth is that James couldn’t handle the situation. Hanging out for the past couple of days with Fern and Lucky, he had eventually gone completely silent, buried beneath the weight of his grief, forcing Fern to feel bad for him as well as for Lucky. James’s sadness used up all the available space for emotion in the room where Lucky was dying. Still, when Fern said maybe he should just go out for a while, leave the rest to her,
she
expected him to rally and say of course not, that he’d see this through with her. Instead, he nodded and said she was probably right, threw a change of clothes in his backpack and took the train up to his parents’ so she could have the car. Fern watched him hold Lucky’s paw for a moment, then kiss the dog’s head, then head out the door, and it was as if she was seeing not only this particular departure but ahead to all the other clutches in which James wouldn’t be able to be with her.

“I’ll take him to the vet’s myself,” she tells her mother now, trying to let Nora off the hook, too. “It’s okay. I only need for you to keep Vaughn while I’m gone.”

“No. Let me come with you. I can get out of here anytime. Everybody’s leaving. Most people didn’t even come in today.” Nora’s voice goes to a muffled murmur; Fern can tell she’s wrapping her hand around the receiver and her mouth. “Except Mrs. Rathko. She informed me this morning that
‘half
holidays are not
whole
holidays.’ She gave me a Christmas present for you, by the way.”

“I’m really looking forward to that,” Fern says. Last year Mrs. Rathko sent along a self-help book of tips on improving posture.

“I’ll call Jeanne and get her to come by and stay with Vaughn,” Nora says. You and I can go over to the vet’s together. You don’t want to do this alone. Plus, he’s our dog, really. All this time.”

“Do you remember when we got him? How the card on his cage at Anti-Cruelty said he’d been brought back twice for bad behavior, but Dad and I told you it only said ‘Likes to look out windows.’”

“I remember he ate the sofa the first time we left him alone. He was a lunatic when we got him,” Nora says. “
Tons
of personality, but a lunatic. I’ll be right there. And I’ll send Jeanne to stay with the baby.”

“Can you pick up a Hershey bar on your way?” Lucky has a long history of trying to get at any chocolate in the house. And chocolate, they’ve been told, is toxic for dogs. Fern tells Nora, “What I’m saying now is, well, toxic-schmoxic.”

When her mother doesn’t say anything on the other end, Fern knows she’s crying.

At the vet’s, there’s a Christmas tree decorated with dog biscuits and all the helper girls at the front counter—only irritating and incompetent on regular days—are this afternoon also dressed as Santa’s elves with red velvet caps and jingle-bell belts. One of them, jingling all the way, brings Fern and her mother and Lucky (who walks unsteadily, but on his own, about two inches an hour) into an examination room.

Dr. Sanders comes in through the door on the other side of the room.

“Sorry about the festivities,” she says.

They’ve gone to Dr. Sanders since she was just out of vet school and worked out at the Bone Animal Hospital with a portrait in the lobby of its improbably named founder, Dr. Bone. Now she has two kids and is onto her second marriage. She has been Lucky’s vet practically his whole life. She stitched him up after the terrible fight with the two Dobermans, pulled his broken tooth, gave him all his boosters.

“Here’s the part they don’t tell you at the puppy shop or the animal shelter,” she tells Fern and Nora. “They don’t warn you that taking on a pet is a contract with sorrow.” (Dr. Sanders herself has made several of these contracts. She has four dogs—all rescued from dumpsters or fires or grim situations. Dogs with suspicious natures or half their fur missing.)

Fern sits cross-legged on the floor and settles Lucky across her lap.

“If I can just give him this first,” she says, tearing the wrapper off the Hershey bar. She breaks it into a few pieces and holds one under his nose to get him going. Piece by piece, while they all wait, Lucky eats the whole bar, then licks Fern’s hand and looks around at everyone as if to say, “Okay, what’s next?”

Dr. Sanders squats and, with a syringe, gives him a pinprick in his haunch.

“This is just a sedative. To relax him. He should be pretty out of it soon.”

And within moments, he gives Fern a goofy look, then his tongue slips out of his mouth and his eyes get sleepy. The elf spreads a towel on the steel examining table and they lay Lucky down on his side on top of it. Dr. Sanders shaves the hair off a patch of his hind leg, near his paw, and gets the IV in, then starts the euthanasia solution.

“Stay close to him so he can smell you,” she tells Fern. “Talk to him if you like. It’s hard to know how much he’s perceiving through the sedative, but I think it comforts the animal to have his human close by.”

Fern pets Lucky and rubs his ears and tells him how she used to take him shopping with her and leave him in the car. And when she came back, someone was almost always there laughing at him sitting in the driver’s seat, pressing on the horn with his paw, honking for her.

“What happens now?” Nora says.

“We wait a little while. Then I listen to his heart,” Dr. Sanders says. She puts her stethoscope to his chest, and says, “Very faint now.” Then, a moment later, she listens for a longer time, and they all stay very still until she looks up at them.

“It’s stopped.”

Fern bends down and kisses him.

“Lucky was a great dog,” Dr. Sanders says. If she says the same thing about every dog she puts down, Fern doesn’t want to know.

“You can stay with him awhile, if you want. When you’re ready, you can use the back door to the parking lot. So you won’t have to go through the party.” She nods her head sideways, in the direction of the lobby, where Brenda Lee is singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

Nora rubs Lucky’s head, then puts a hand on Fern’s shoulder and tells her, “I’ll wait outside.”

Left alone with her dog, Fern remembers how big and rambunctious Lucky seemed to her when she was a child, how insubstantial he appears now. A million pictures of him flip through her inner field of vision. She unfastens the collar with his nametag on it and puts it in the pocket of her pea coat. She puts her hand into the thick fur on his neck. He’s warm. Warm, but so terribly still. This, then, is the essential element of death. The theft of animation.

She bends over and kisses his ear, then puts her mouth against it.

“You wait for me,” she tells him.

In the parking lot, Fern and Nora stand facing each other and a future minus Lucky.

“I’ve been standing out here thinking about the dumbest stuff,” Nora says. “Like no more surprise bones under our pillows.”

Fern nods. “I know. And we’ll have an unhairy sofa.” Neither of them says anything for a little while, then Fern says, “The best thing about him, for me, was his there-ness. No matter who else has come and gone, he’s always been there, filling in the blank, completing the scene.” She stops for a second to gather up her emotions. “There were times, you know, when you needed things to change. But I was a kid; I needed them more to stay the same. That was Lucky—always the same. He liked his walks and his dinner at the same time every day and he’d turn exactly three times on his bed before he’d drop down and go to sleep. And he wasn’t going anywhere on me. He was always going to be there, lying on his blue bed in the corner.”

They are only a foot apart, which, in ordinary circumstances, would be the same as a mile. But right now, it’s an easy fall into each other’s arms, where they cry for much longer than Fern could have expected. After a while, it begins to seem to her that they are crying for more than Lucky, that they have both caught a glimpse of some broader palette of sorrow and have incorporated into this moment the sadness they have already encountered and that which still lies ahead. Even when it seems they should be done, they’re not and just keep crying. Only when they finally break apart and start hunting down Kleenexes in coat pockets does Fern think what a long time it has been since she has been held by her mother.

And when they get into the car, Nora says “Come home with me. So you don’t have to be alone tonight.”

“Okay.”

“Jeanne and I were just going to do something low-key anyway,” Nora says. “We can make it even lower-key. I’ll make cheesy eggs. We can have a non-Christmas Eve.”

“Oh, Mom,” Fern says, meaning too many things to go into.

At dinner, Vaughn is calm and happy, making a big mess on his highchair tray, breaking down his portion of eggs into lumps, then determining which lumps are eating lumps, which are throw-on-the-floor lumps. He is the only happy human at the table.

Nora and Jeanne try to help Fern by paying tribute to Lucky, to his great addlepated sensibility, his cockeyed journey through life. Fern can’t quite chime in, isn’t up to packaging Lucky in anecdote yet, but she is appreciative, for their stories, and for their company tonight, for the comfort of other living beings in the room with her.

Through a wash of pain, Fern sort of notices that her mother is doting on Jeanne in a peculiar way, slightly formal, as though Jeanne is a rare visitor from afar rather than the person Nora lives with. Fern is sorry for all of them. For herself, for losing Lucky. For Jeanne, who will soon, one way or the other, find out she is being betrayed. For her mother, who has been made vulnerable to disaster by one small shoddy aspect of her character, which is ridiculous, almost hilarious if you look at it from a certain angle. Fern can’t quite get to that perspective tonight, though. Tonight, her mother just looks stupid and tragic, sitting on a kitchen chair, possibly about to blow up something good and essential for something that is almost surely beside the point.