The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Eight

I CHECKED MY E-MAIL AND CELL PHONE OBSESSIVELY, BUT there was still no word from Bobby. Gabriella flew to the landline every time it rang. She carried her cell phone from room to room, leaving it beside her while we ate. Bobby’s treatment of me was one thing, but his self-absorbed insensitivity to our daughter made me nauseous with anxiety.
I went out to do the morning feed a full hour earlier than I usually did—and ended up waking every single animal. I attempted to groom the biter, but he shied away from me and threatened to kick, so I leaned on his fence—the electric off—to contemplate my next move.
He faced me, his whole body hunched and defensive. I understood—abandonment hurt.
When he stepped toward me, I hid my surprise and stood still. He took another step, then another. I didn’t breathe as he flared his nostrils to snuff my hair, my head, my shoulders.
Go ahead. Bite me. I longed for him to leave me looking as bleeding and wounded as I felt.
Raw, open sores peeped from where his too-big halter rubbed across the gaunt bones of his face. His forelock and mane dangled in dreadlocks of mud. But through this disguise of neglect and cruelty, anyone could see he was magnificent. “Hey, beautiful,” I whispered.
He tossed his head up and down violently, the way a person might shake out a dusty rag. Then he wheeled around and let loose with one mighty kick before he tore across the small paddock. The little shit’s hoof struck the fence just a foot away from my left shoulder.
WHEN GABBY LEFT FOR SCHOOL—HER RED, SWOLLEN EYES belying her “fine”—I called Bobby’s cell, not caring about the hour, and told his voice mail: “You need to talk to Gabriella. Call her, meet with her, something. She deserves more than a message left on her phone.”
At the clinic, I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I was partly following my mother’s advice, but mostly I still couldn’t believe this really had happened.
The three-legged cat growled and hissed even when no one was near him. Aurora had told me he’d come out of anesthesia fighting, thrashing around and banging his head against the sides of his kennel. She’d had to hold him down until he was fully conscious. I ignored his ferocious sounds and rubbed his broad wildcat nose until I eventually earned a grudging purr.
“How’s your arm?” Aurora asked when she came in. “Do we need to switch today?”
Mondays and Wednesdays were my surgery mornings, Tuesdays and Thursdays were hers. Whoever wasn’t in surgery saw patients. I flexed my fingers. “I think I’m okay.”
“Are you?” Aurora asked, and again I felt ashamed for withholding from her. “What’s going on with you, Cam?”
I looked into her kind, concerned eyes and lied that I was fine.
My first procedure was a tracheal wash on a dog who’d been coughing and vomiting for a month. Since I hadn’t scrubbed in yet, I checked my phone and computer again for word from Bobby while Bridget, my technician, and Zayna prepped the dog. Nothing.
After the procedure (we retrieved a sample for lab analysis), I checked again. Nothing.
Sweet Zayna took away the coughing dog and brought in my next surgery. She didn’t let on to anyone else that she knew anything unusual about my weekend.
After a routine spay on a labradoodle, still no messages.
After a cat neuter, and another cat neuter, nothing.
I’d gotten all the routine surgeries out of the way and into recovery so I could concentrate on this last, likely to be complicated, case—a chow with a huge abdominal mass. I operated with a poor prognosis and ended up removing an enormous spleen full of tumors. The rest of the abdomen looked “clean”—no obvious tumors in the liver, lymph nodes, or intestinal tract. Probably still a poor prognosis, but we’d see what the pathologist said.
All through the afternoon appointments—in between a cat with an eye infection, two spay follow-ups, the Rottweiler with heartworm, and the expectant rabbit—I frequently stopped in the hall outside the exam rooms, braced my arms on the walls, and took deep breaths to stop my stampeding pulse.
Aurora caught me doing my brace-and-breathe routine. “I’m fine,” I said, a rote answer. Aurora narrowed her eyes. Over her shoulder, I saw that Zayna had witnessed this act.
The only e-mail that came was from Olive: “I have big news to tell you! It must be in person! We need a GNO!” She obviously had no idea what Bobby had done or she wouldn’t wait for a GNO. The fact that he hadn’t told her made me hopeful that perhaps his leaving wasn’t permanent, that perhaps he’d come home.
The only voice mail that came was from Gabriella: “Dad called me. I’m going to meet him for coffee after school. Tyler said he’d do my kennel work for me, okay?”
Her voice brimmed with giddy relief.
When we sent the surgeries home, that chow who’d lost his spleen walked out five pounds lighter. I watched his happy owners drive him away and figured I’d bought him some time.
Time.
Maybe I could buy some time with Bobby, too. Maybe I could get him back home before anyone else knew what had happened.
WHEN I LEFT ANIMAL KIND THAT EVENING, I AVOIDED MY own home and drove instead to my parents’ to check on the foster horses.
I walked to the barn, wandering from immaculate stall to tidy paddock until I found the two rescue fillies. Their manes and tails were clean and tangle-free and their legs and jaws trimmed. I sheepishly pictured the biter’s appearance at my own farm.
“Hello, Camden.” My mother walked out of the barn, dressed in black field boots, suede tan breeches, and a green sweater I knew was cashmere. She stroked the fillies’ foreheads. “If I’m not careful, your father will want to keep these two.”
I grinned. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“You’re no help,” Mom said, but I knew it was only in jest. Just then Dad came around the corner in the slow shuffle he’d had since his accident five years ago. He carried a saddle.
“Camden.” He rested his gloved hand on my arm. “How are you doing?”
I nodded, touched by his concern. I knew this was all I could expect him to say about Bobby leaving.
“Caroline, are you going to ride?”
“Yes, I’m going to school the Burgans’ mare,” she said.
“All right, then, I’ll leave you the Passier,” he said of the saddle they’d had for . . . it had to be nearly twenty-five years. He set the saddle on the fence beside her.
“How nice of you,” I teased him, “to leave Mom the old, battered saddle.”
My mother raised her eyebrows.
Dad chuckled. “This ‘old, battered saddle’ is the most comfortable, well-made one we own.” He touched the pommel flap. “Looks like we may need another visit to Benny soon.”
I couldn’t count the times their saddler had tended to the Passier.
“Ever going to just give in and buy a new one?” I asked.
They exchanged a look full of meaning. “Nah,” they said, smiling at something shared that excluded me, tilting me a bit off balance.
“I remember when Stormwatch bit that saddle,” I said, hoping to bring them back.
Mom and Dad both reached out to touch the scar on the cantle. For no apparent reason, one day the stallion had chomped into the back of the saddle as it sat on his stall door.
I’d seen my parents rub countless hours of saddle soap and oil into the gash Benny had stitched together, each passing year making the mark less visible.
Dad ran his finger over the faint ridge. “These teeth marks?” he said. “These stitches? They add to the beauty of the saddle, to the value. They announce it was worth saving. I won’t replace it until it falls off in two pieces from the horse’s back.”
Mom pursed her lips, as if to comment on his rare sentimentality.
Once I had examined the fillies, I drove home. I passed the decapitated St. Francis still lying facedown in the mud, the shingles scattered in the yard, the branches down everywhere. I walked straight to the barn, where Muriel wandered in the aisle and the biter wouldn’t let me touch him.
What if you thought something was worth saving but you didn’t know where to begin?
HELEN AND HANK SHOWED UP WITH THE DAVIDS TO TAKE us to dinner. Davy had told them the news at an adoption meeting. Helen put her arm around me. “I’m so sorry, Cami.” She held me for a moment. “You pick the restaurant,” she said. “We’re not taking no for an answer.”
My heart lifted at this command invitation, at being taken care of, but my skeleton felt like it weighed a ton. I didn’t want to go anywhere but to bed.
Wonderful Hank—an attorney, like his wife—had brought a huge pot of homemade macaroni and cheese. “It has healing properties, I swear,” he said. “It’s good for the soul.”
Hank had run Cincinnati’s Flying Pig Marathon with Davy last spring. I envied these guys’ ability to eat any damn thing they pleased and still stay so greyhound scrappy.
I lifted the lid on Hank’s pot. Not your usual mac ’n’ cheese—fusilli and thin strips of red bell pepper peeked through the layer of bubbly golden-brown.
Hunger awoke in my belly, but with it came the image of Bobby, a towel tossed over his shoulder, expertly whacking a clove of garlic with the side of his knife.
I pushed that image from my head and joked I’d be content to sit on the kitchen floor to eat from this pot, but they insisted we go out and I eat Hank’s gift later.
I thought I could use Gabriella as an excuse to stay home and send everyone away, but when she returned, she seemed pleased to see everyone: “I’m starving. Are we going out?”
WE GOT A TABLE UPSTAIRS AT MY FAVORITE THAI RESTAURANT.
My eagerness for scraps about Bobby embarrassed me, so I was relieved when Gabby dove right in. “I met him at his apartment,” she said, “and we went to—”
“You met him where?” I asked.
I saw from Gabriella’s eyes that she’d thought I’d known this. “He rented an apartment.”
“Oh.” When I pictured him looking at apartments, signing a lease, making arrangements to move, then coming home to the farm each night pretending all was fine, the image cut into me with the precision of a scalpel.
“Everything he said sounded rehearsed and stupid,” Gabriella continued. “He said, ‘How do you tell someone you still love them but just don’t want to be married to them?’ ”
He had told me. He’d told me loud and clear last fall. My cheeks stung as I remembered.
A party at the farm. A crisp, first-sweatshirt-of-the-season night. A bonfire. Bobby grilled steaks. Gabby and Tyler searched the pasture edges to collect sticks for s’mores. The talk had turned to Ohio’s proposition to ban gay marriage. Gabby, the Davids, and I had spent many weekends chanting at rallies and pounding yard signs into the dirt of willing properties.
“Why shouldn’t gay people marry?” I’d asked. I’d stood on the patio overlooking our farm, surrounded by my tribe of family and friends. “No one’s ever given me a worthy argument.”
“Gay people?” Davy said in mock horror. “Gay people? Eww!”
“We don’t know any gay people,” Big David deadpanned. “There aren’t any around here.”
When the laughter had died down, Bobby asked into the silence, “Why do gays want to get married?”
Something about his tone slapped my cheeks.
“I mean,” he went on, “nobody needs to be married. Not anymore. It’s obsolete.”
Olive smacked Bobby in the back of the head. “That’s a nice thing to say to your wife, you stupid son of a bitch.” But I’d pretended not to be offended. We were just talking politics, right? It hadn’t been a judgment on our own marriage. I’d been quick to rush in to defend, to show I wasn’t hurt, to make light of it.
Helen rubbed my shoulder, bringing me back to the crab rangoon they’d ordered that I couldn’t swallow. What the hell had I been thinking, letting these people drag me out in public? I felt peeled back, everything inside me visible for anyone to sift and poke through.
Gabriella chased her half-eaten rangoon around her plate with a fork and told us more. “Dad said he’s always hated that he doesn’t know what his calling is in life—his purpose.”
Whenever we’d had those conversations, I tried to be supportive and encouraging. I joked that “Your purpose is to love me.” That always made him smile. It often had led us to the bedroom.
“He’s a chef!” my brother said. “He owns a restaurant. What the hell is he talking about?”
“He really struggled with the restaurant.” I hated my knee-jerk reaction to defend him. “He worked so hard to get it, but then it didn’t make him happy the way he thought it would.”
Gabriella pushed that same bite of rangoon around her plate. My breath snagged in my chest for the confusion I saw in her eyes.
She scooted her chair back and stood. Without looking at us, she said, “He looked horrible. He looked like he’d been crying.”
Good. But I couldn’t mean it. The thought made me feel empty and bleak.
After Gabriella excused herself for the restroom, Davy said, “I never liked Bobby anyway,” his voice cold and dismissive.
“Yeah, me neither,” Big David said.
“Here, here,” Hank said, raising his glass and downing the last of his gin and tonic.
I couldn’t breathe.
Then Davy put down his glass and sighed. A real sigh, swollen with sorrow. “No, I really did like him.”
Helen rubbed the top of her wineglass and made it hum.
“Yeah,” Big David agreed. “I wish we didn’t.”
We lingered over dinner (I managed a couple spoonfuls of my seafood stew). I made Davy promise not to tell Nick yet at school and convinced them all not to spread the news until I told them. I still needed time to talk to Bobby, to figure out what I was going to do. As we stood to go, the late hour—how much time we’d filled—felt like an accomplishment.
We walked downstairs, Davy and Gabby talking about some AP History exam at school.
Gabriella said, “Oh, my God,” in such a chilling way I knew it wasn’t in reaction to the test. I was pulling on my coat and sensed everyone freeze. A beat behind, I snapped to attention.
As I followed his gaze, Big David said, “Of all the restaurants in Dayton . . .”
Bobby sat at a small table near the door.
He was with someone.
He lifted that someone’s hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles.
He was smiling.