Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (12 page)

Then Dr. Roundtree entered the room. He was a man of medium height, maybe fifty years old, with dark hair, wearing a white shirt and blue tie beneath his white laboratory coat. He looked at the dog first, then at me, then back at the dog.

“Wow,” he said. “What a pitiful sight.”

My heart sank. I knew the vet had probably seen dogs in all kinds of conditions. He’d seen the worst, and the dog I’d brought in fit into that category before he’d even laid a hand on him.

“Where did you find him?” he asked me. I told him the name of the canyon. “When was this?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” I said. “I got out of the canyon and got some water and dog food to bring him and went back in.”

“What sort of dog food?”

I couldn’t remember the brand, but I described the foul smelling glob of protein and fat I’d managed to set in front of the dog.

“He eat any?”

“Some,” I said. “Was that the right thing to do?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “It probably helped rehydrate him a little. Dry food wouldn’t have done that.”

He poked and prodded the dog, looking at his eyes, his teeth. He looked at the dog’s foot pads and ran a finger across the dog’s nose where a crust had formed.

“Looks like he might have had distemper at some point,” Dr. Roundtree explained. “That’s why his teeth look the way they do. Destroys the enamel.”

He listened to the dog’s heart with a stethoscope, and then he looked at his watch for ten seconds as he listened, writing down the dog’s heart rate on a chart Krista had provided.

“What do you think?” I asked him, trying to sound hopeful.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “I’m worried about his white blood cell count. With malnutrition and dehydration this severe, we often see brain damage. It could be very minor or it could mean he’s not going to pull through. There’s actually a fairly broad spectrum of possibilities.”

In a way, it felt worse now, because I still needed the dog to survive, but it was out of my hands. The dog’s fate was in the right hands, but it left me feeling helpless.

Finally, Dr. Roundtree stepped away, and Krista and the other technician transferred the dog to another larger, padded crate before moving him to the recovery room.

“So how does the billing for this work?” I asked, dreading the answer.

Michelle and I had started a do-it-yourself garage called the Wrench-It Center, where we supplied the tools and equipment, based on an idea I had as a Marine where the military would let enlisted personnel work on their personal vehicles in the automotive shop, but the Wrench-It Center had turned from a do-it-yourself business into an awkward mix of self-service and full service, and it was foundering.

“We’ll do what we can for the pup, but we’d like it if someone could assume financial responsibility,” Dr. Roundtree said.

This was what I was afraid he would say. The idea that we could run up a huge tab, and then the dog wouldn’t make it, was more than a little disheartening. I’d gone into the automotive repair business with my eyes wide open, knowing it was a gamble, but knowing what the odds and the stakes were, too. With the dog, I didn’t know either.

“I’ll take responsibility,” I said.

“Fair enough,” the vet said. “He’s stabilized now. Do we have your contact information?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You can leave it with Krista so we can call you if anything changes.”

He left. I found Krista at the reception desk and gave her both my home phone number and the number for my cell. When she asked me where I was staying in town, I said I didn’t know. I thought it might be a good night to sleep beneath the stars.

“So what do you think?” I asked her. “I know it’s probably hard to say, but what do you think his chances are?”

“You’re right,” she told me. “It’s hard to say. When we see severe dehydration, sometimes the internal organs shut down, and even if we can restart them, they might be damaged. There could be brain damage. Seizures or convulsions. Maybe blindness. We’ll keep an eye on him. The best I can say is fifty-fifty. He might make it, or he might have to be euthanized.”

The word hit me like a punch in the stomach.

It was another emotional blow I hadn’t anticipated. The feeling was physical, the way you might feel if you were in an elevator that suddenly drops two feet. I was now responsible for a life. This may be the way a new parent feels on the way home from the hospital with a new baby in a baby carrier in the back seat, overwhelmed and unprepared, with no turning back. That was ironic, considering the day before was Father’s Day. New fathers, however, have nine months to get used to the idea, while I was being hit with it all at once. If the universe ran according to some kind of plan, then I had suddenly become part of that plan, and if there wasn’t a plan, and every event was the result of a random roll of the dice, then I had reached in and changed the way the dice had landed. Everything was shifting. Nothing was simple any more.

I took a right out of the parking lot onto North Seventh Avenue to where it dead ended at Bureau Street, turned left, then took a right on Lake Powell Boulevard, past the Courtyard Marriott, until I hit 89 and open country. I asked myself as I drove, what was I going to do if the dog died?

Part of me thought,
No big deal. Dogs die all the time. It’s not my dog, I did my part, and now it’s out of my hands
. But that part was a lesser part of me, a voice I recognized, the one I used when I was trying to convince myself everything was going to be okay. The greater part of me knew I would be devastated, because it would mean evil had won after I’d vowed not to let it.

But something even bigger was going on.

I pulled over to the side of the road and got out of my truck when I realized I felt like I was about to cry. I was simultaneously struck with two questions, related but separate. I didn’t understand exactly why I wanted to cry, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. The fact that a stray dog was deathly ill and might not make it through the night was a sad thought, but what was it to me? There were far worse things going on in the world that I could have been upset about. I didn’t cry when my father died, so why now? Why this? I told myself I was just exhausted, and that I’d been holding my emotions in all day, and now they simply wanted to come out. I was labile or lachrymose, but it was just a result of fatigue.

Why I couldn’t cry was slightly easier to understand. I didn’t cry because I didn’t know how to. That might sound odd, because it’s something even newborn babies know to do, but I’d forgotten how . . . or maybe I’d trained myself not to. Growing up, I’d never seen anybody else do it. My mother seldom cried around me. I never saw my father, or my stepmother, shed a tear when I was a child. When I was little, having a wart removed at the doctor’s office, the liquid nitrogen he used to freeze the wart stung like a thousand bees, but I didn’t cry, and afterward, my mother told a coworker that she was surprised. I guess that was a sort of compliment. Boys generally get complimented for being “big” and “brave,” even though crying is a natural emotional release, and no more so for girls than for boys. But for boys, it’s not allowed. I’d never seen any value in crying, any up-side to it, when all it was likely to do was result in a scolding, or worse. Sure, when I was getting held down and beaten and bloodied up—or terrorized and chased through the streets—I may have shed a few tears, but in those moments, I had absolutely no control of the way my body was reacting to the circumstances surrounding it. Those tears were in response to the sheer terror I was feeling; they were not part of a conscious, emotional moment. Crying from sadness or grief is very different from crying hysterically because you’re terrified.

“I have rules,” I thought, there on the side of the road. “‘No crying’ is one.”

I couldn’t cry now because I’d told myself, my entire life, not to. And I couldn’t cry because I worried that if I consciously made the decision to start now, I couldn’t be sure I could ever stop. A dam would burst, and I needed to keep that dam in place. Otherwise, I might explode, and then melt into a puddle.

I didn’t call Michelle right away because I knew she’d be at work. After dinner, I got back in my truck and went to a place I knew off Route 89, a viewpoint behind the Denny’s restaurant with a spectacular view of the canyon, the dam, and Lake Powell to the north. There was a seven-hundred-foot drop to the river below with an easily crossed guardrail. The opposite side of the canyon was maybe three hundred yards away. The river below looked black from where I stood, no rapids that I could see, but I saw eddies and turbulence where the current had built up shoals of rock. Despite the incredible drop, you could actually hear the water flowing down below. The water was low, with only as much water flowing as the Glen Canyon Dam allowed.

I needed to think, absorb the landscape, and locate myself in it. I saw the cars crossing the bridge turn on their headlights, and the first few stars of early evening appeared in the blue overhead, while the sky in the west blazed with fire, the color that gave the cliffs their name. I witnessed the sky turn dark as the stars came out, the Milky Way a river of light above me. Traffic on 89 across the Glen Canyon Bridge slowed to a trickle. The dam was lit up like some kind of monument.

I took out my phone and called Michelle. I recounted the day’s events, and what the vet had said.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Well,” I began, “I’ve been better . . .” But I couldn’t articulate what was going on. “The bottom line is, the dog is in the hospital. So I guess it’s up to them. Or up to him.”

“Did they say what they think his chances are?”

“Fifty-fifty,” I said. “It depends. He may have to be euthanized.”

I didn’t have to say any more, and Michelle knew me well enough not to press. She knew me well enough to know what those words did to me. She understood me like no one else, which was why our marriage had endured owning and running two businesses together. She understood, as best she could, the trauma that had shaped me, and she knew why I would be so affected if we lost the puppy. The love we shared was strong, and as tangible over the phone as it would have been if she was there beside me.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, and then I hung up.

I kept the phone in my hand, thinking there was a chance that Michelle was going to call me back, worried about me. I knew, however, that she knew to leave me alone when I gave the signal that I needed to put some time and distance between me and what I was feeling. In a different place, I would go to the gym and lift weights until all I could think of was how tired I was.

She also knew me well enough to know how the dog in the canyon and I had something in common. We’d both been the victims of senseless cruelty. Maybe that explained why the dog’s survival was so important to me—if he could survive, I could, too. But if he couldn’t . . . In the desert, under a canopy of summer stars, I thought of the dog, for the first time, as another motherless creature. If he died, I knew I would take it personally. I would feel like I let him down, the way people let me down.

Then I’m ten, and my mother and I are at the mall, shortly before Christmas, and I have twenty dollars in my pocket, so I buy the game Battleship at Walgreens, but when I meet my mom in one of the restaurants at the mall, she says, “Nice going—Gary already got you that game.” She could have told our neighbor, Gary, to return his present, rather than tell me to return mine. I feel deflated but know better than to ask her to help me return it, so I go back to Walgreens on my own. When the girl at Walgreens says she can only give me store credit, I get flustered and buy twenty dollars’ worth of pure crap, candy and worthless plastic junk that I buy because I have to buy something and I’m running out of time.

When I return to the restaurant, my mother asks me what I bought. I show her. She tries hiding her laughter at my predicament, covering her mouth with her hand and snickering at me.

I’m ten, and my mother is laughing at me. . . .