Part beagle, part spaniel, part God knows what, the dog–bedraggled with a bit of mange, no microchip–wandered onto their driveway the same day they learned that Henry was sick. Through her office window, she noticed it sniffing at the edge of the work shed in the early afternoon, but figured, much as the occasional deer that stumbled into their suburban Philadelphia yard, that soon enough it would wander away on its own.
But at twilight, pushing the trash cans to the curb, she almost stumbled over the animal spread across her path; for a second she believed it had died. She left the containers and knelt to the asphalt, setting her hand against the dog’s flank, relieved to sense a faint rise and fall. And that might have been it, had Henry, who insisted on teaching his Wednesday night class despite the news, not suddenly swung his headlights to where the dog lay and she had jumped up, waving both arms to alert him that the creature lay inches from his tires.
Henry credited her with saving the animal, but if he had not arrived at that moment, she wasn’t certain about her next move. It was possible that she may have left the dog in place, expecting that it would eventually rouse itself and leave. After all, various creatures roamed these once wide-open spaces, not only dogs and deer but feral cats, owls, small red foxes. Once, a neighbor posted a picture of a bedraggled cattle dog that turned out to be a dehydrated coyote.
The only pets in their house had belonged to Henry’s son from his first marriage. The boy spent two weeks with them every summer. At four, he won two guppies from a hospital fair that he named Jack and Jill. After a week swimming in an unfiltered bowl murky from overfeeding, she came downstairs at breakfast to find both fish belly up. Quick, before the boy appeared, she scooped the two from the bowl with a spaghetti spoon and flushed them down the drain. When the boy awoke, she told him they had left early for day care and would return by afternoon.
At the time she worried the boy might realize the differences–the new fish she bought at the pet store to dump into fresh water looked smaller and healthier–but if so, he never let on. Four times during that visit she or Henry replaced the damned fish until at last, fed up, she washed the bowl and set it on the highest kitchen shelf. Out of sight, out of mind, she hoped. The funny thing was the son never mentioned the missing fish or asked where they had gone. Maybe he had never been that attached.
Of course, a parent wasn’t a goldfish.
The night of the dog, Henry parked on the street and together they carried the animal through the garage into the house. It was not that it weighed nothing; it had a certain heft, but when they took it to the vet the next morning, the woman shook her head, mentioning malnourishment, mites, maybe heartworm or worse. They put the dog into the animal hospital, where the doctors reset a poorly healed broken bone, siphoned his eyes, and after two weeks of rest sent a bill for $5000 and asked if they wanted to take the animal home, or put him into a shelter.
By that time, Henry’s biopsy had been reaffirmed, and the plan was set–chemo, followed by radiation with no promises. Surgery not a possibility. Did the dog sense that Henry was sick? The next-door neighbor, a young woman with pink hair who agreed to walk the dog twice a day when they had chemo, insisted that animals knew. When they arrived home after treatment, Henry spent and wanting only sleep, the dog often curled on the floor beside him, snout on Henry’s slipper, refusing to leave his side. Exhausted, worried, she wanted to tell the neighbor girl that animals responded to food – Henry smelled of the feeding tube. And more than once, she had witnessed Henry sharing little bits of pancakes she had made for him while he could still swallow. But the neighbor girl shook her head.
“They know when things aren’t right,” she said.
Dogs eat their own poop, the wife wanted to tell her. Dogs lick their own butts. But it was no time to argue. Or maybe it was. She didn’t know. It was ridiculous to argue about the dog; the dog was the least of everything. But even so, listening to the neighbor girl’s ridiculous claims, she wanted to fight, to flail, to strike the walls, the furniture, even the floors but she held back because Henry needed her whole.
“It doesn’t matter,” she lied.
*
Three weeks later, and Henry slept nine, ten, twelve hours a day. The chemo was now five brutal days a week. He could no longer swallow, and he slept on the way to the hospital and on the way home. One afternoon they entered the house to find the neighbor girl curled up on Henry’s special recliner, the dog sprawled across her lap, their limbs entwined like lovers. She tossed a look at Henry, but he stared at them as if they were Madonna and child, and rather than let her wake them, he went to a less comfortable wing chair and sat down.
“Let me,” she said.
“No, it’s fine,” he told her, as the girl blinked awake, the dog stretching in her lap. Seeing them home, she flushed a shade that matched her hair.
“I..” she began.
“Such… beauty,” Henry said. He waved one of his wasted hands.
Standing by Henry, she watched the dog jump from the girl’s lap and wander into the kitchen to sniff for food. Before she said something she might regret, she went to the bathroom and shut the door. Fingers shaking, she ran the faucet until clouds of steam concealed the mirror, her image vanishing as she pumped liquid soap onto her hands building clouds of bubbles, then moving the frisson of foam from left to right, and right to left again, willing her anger to dissolve into the suds, concentrating until she floated above her body, looking down at the ridiculous sight of a grown woman jealous of what? A pink-haired girl and a stray dog? A man with stage four cancer taking pleasure in the graceful sight of two creatures entwined on a ragged La-Z-Boy. Ridiculous and yet, something did bother her, maybe the way the dog and the girl completed their family as if she, the person he had left his wife and son for, had not. As if the animal and girl filled things up for him in a way Henry had never mentioned but always craved.
*
Two and a half months and the house had changed. The living room, once a repository for photographs and philosophy journals, was now lined with Styrofoam-packed chemo supplies and cardboard cans of liquid nourishment. Cocktail tables held cleaning brushes, sterilizers, stool softeners, and Tums; the colors in the rooms had turned from turquoise to filtered grays. Time tipped over. Everything happened slowly and all at once. Henry held on as long as he could, making his way up the steps at twilight to ease into their bed until one day he could no longer climb the stairs, and had to spend the nights propped up in the old La-Z-Boy chair. When the chair began to hurt his back, the social worker suggested moving to the sofa and propping himself on pillows. He didn’t want a hospital bed. Or at least, not yet.
Once or twice, driving home from chemo on I-76, she considered taking a sharp right turn over the barrier into the opposite lane, but what if, instead of ending a story that already was headed to a certain end, she made things worse. What if, instead of dying, they were simply thrown from the car with smashed limbs. Or they survived while a bus on the other side, packed with schoolchildren, rose into flames. Or if Henry survived without her–who would watch out for him then?
*
No one wanted the son to visit that summer, but he wanted to come. In August, she waited for him to ask questions about what was going to happen. If Henry might die. But to her surprise and relief, no questions arrived. At 17, on his way to college in the fall, he appeared oblivious to everything in the house, concentrating on having a normal visit, whatever the hell normal was. He helped–emptying the dishwasher, doing his own laundry, filling out forms he needed for school. He played with the dog, hiding treats in his pockets, letting the dog run over him, sniffing out bits of chicken and cheese. A picky eater as a child, the boy now ate everything and anything–delicatessen meats the pink-haired girl brought from the corner mini-mart, the occasional casserole dropped by a worried neighbor–Mexican, Italian, Chinese. Ice cream from a passing truck. In the two weeks he stayed, his face took on a roundness. For the first time, he developed a little extra chin that made him resemble his mother. Sometimes, when Henry’s fever subsided, she left him in the living room watching the Phillies on TV and knocked on the guest bedroom where the son lay reading The Invisible Man, a book assigned for all incoming freshmen that year.
“Do you remember the goldfish?” she once asked.
On the bed, he didn’t move. She knew it was an absurd question. It was so long ago. Two weeks out of a childhood mostly spent far from his father. And he was no longer four. His legs and chest sprouted hair. Rough patches of stubble clustered along his jaw. In the bed, he lowered the book.
“You mean the ones that died?”
“You knew?”
He nodded and smiled. “Of course,” he said.
*
In September, five months after they got the bad news, Henry began to rouse. The oncologists had predicted this, not a remission but a time when he would feel better, a time of false hope. Despite their warnings, she could not help but feel renewed. Everything about Henry looked better–his color, his breathing, his sleep. For at least three weeks, she could help him again climb the stairs, where, winded but steadier than he had been in months, he insisted on washing his face and brushing his teeth on his own. Once he even shaved, leaving his cheek tattooed with tiny shreds of toilet paper seeping blood. And yet she knew to praise it as a sort of victory.
Released from the disease, freed from the horrific feeding tube and chemo, they talked of travelling, maybe to Greece. Or Portugal. They decided on Porto, a city that sat along the Douro River, where they could eat ceviche and drink green wine.
The doctors neither dissuaded nor persuaded; they watched, nodding, listening to their words with or without furrowed brows. When they shared that they had decided to visit Porto, the oldest doctor nodded.
“Don’t forget travel insurance,” he said.
*
“Isn’t this remission?” Henry’s mother asked over the phone. She had a friend in Tallahassee where she lived who worked in pediatric oncology – she had learned the terms.
“No,” she told his mother. “It’s something that can happen if the immunotherapy works, but it doesn’t last. Everything is coming back.”
The mother was silent on the other end of the phone. Her friend had told her that she–the wife–was too pessimistic, that to win the battle against cancer you had to fight.
“It’s a war,” her friend said.
The dog lay on the floor in a sunbeam, panting as if it had come from a run. She had noticed that lately, it seemed out of breath for no reason, but there was no way she was taking the dog to the vet. If it got sick in a way they could see, then, yes. But panting was not enough.
“You do you,” she told the mother and, though she knew she would hear about it later, clicked off the phone.
*
On the flight home from Europe Henry started to cough up blood. By the time they reached the airport in Philadelphia, the crew had alerted ground, the rest of the passengers told to wait while they wheeled Henry off the plane to a waiting ambulance. In the back of the van, they stabilized him, asking Henry if he knew the date, the time, the country where he had landed; she tried to see it as a victory when he scored one hundred percent. In her head, she ran down the list of people who needed to be notified: his mother, his doctors, his son. The girl who lived next door, who had taken the dog while they were away. Clutching Henry’s hand, she saw his face contort with pain when they inserted a needle into his arm.
“Can we take him home?” she asked, although she knew the answer. Henry turned to her; his sickly pale face unmarked by the Portuguese sun. She leaned close to him, only to hear him ask, “Who will take the dog?”
Later, she believed he might have been hallucinating. He had a fever of 105 and though they tried everything, it took two days to get it down. By then his mother had arrived. When she rose to greet her, the mother took her folding chair, the one closest to Henry’s bed.
“Don’t you give up,” she told Henry.
Standing beside the old woman, the wife wanted to slap her out of the way. Couldn’t she see that Henry was tired, that he was burning up, that the last thing he wanted was to fight? But instead, she stood, arms crossed on her chest, watching his chest rise and fall, thinking of how she had found the dog, how she had rested her hand on his chest, how the dog had not moved, how if Henry had not appeared she might have pushed herself from the asphalt and let him go.
At three o’ clock, two doctors entered the room and asked if she might follow them into the hall. The mother made to stand, but she told her to stay put. In the beige-on-beige hallway the doctors, one Indian, one Asian, bent their heads as if in prayer. Before they spoke, she knew.
When they left, she dialed the next-door neighbor girl.
“I’m at the vet’s,” the girl said, before she could say hello and fill her in. “The dog started throwing up at midnight,” she said. “I thought you would be home, so I waited but he didn’t stop so I drove him to the emergency.”
“What?”
“The dog. Couldn’t breathe.”
“No,” she said. Why had she called the girl? She couldn’t remember.
“The dog,” the girl said. “The dog.” She pressed the phone tight to her ear.
*
In Henry’s room, someone had come in and pulled a curtain around his bed and wheeled out the other bed beside his to change the room into a private one. A sign stuck to the door frame outside warned visitors to stay out: Hospice care, it read. Someone had put a catheter bag by the side of the bed; fresh specks of blood had been wiped from Henry’s lips. The mother told her she would call Henry’s son.
On the folding chair, the wife thought about how Henry and she had walked along the Douro River an hour each day. How he had tripped twice on the cobblestones but refused to go home early.
“We’ll keep that between us,” he said of his falls. How she had loved his confiding voice; how there were secrets between them that no one knew. Replacing the goldfish. Betraying and caring for his son. Pretending that he was theirs.
Out in the hallway she heard Henry’s mother talking to the son, letting him know where his father was. Henry was headed to a better place, she told him, a place of saints and shadows. Nothing she would have said, but how kind of the mother to take that burden. She reached for Henry’s hand, mostly bones now, and watched his chest rise and fall, her eyelids fluttering with exhaustion, letting the edges of things dissolve and meld. Sitting there, she remembered something she had blocked, how, when the boy had been 10 or so, his mother, Henry’s ex, had sent the boy and the grandmother by train to spend Christmas in Philadelphia so she and her new husband could holiday in Acapulco.
It was the first time the boy visited in winter; he had never seen snow before. He arrived at 30th Street Station holding a cage that contained a lizard that belonged to the boy’s fifth grade class. It had been his turn to take care of it over winter holidays and though the mother and new husband told him to leave it home, he had insisted it was his turn.
“A promise is a promise,” he said.
In the car, the grandmother removed her winter coat to shelter the lizard, and when they reached home, set it by the kitchen stove. But in the middle of the night the lizard passed–maybe the rocky train ride all the way from Florida, maybe the sudden rush of cold, maybe the stress of being in a new place–they didn’t know. Unlike the goldfish, there was no chance of replacing the lizard–the next morning was Christmas Day.
In bed, before the boy woke, Henry and she concocted a plan. After he opened his presents, they would tell him that during the night the lizard had somehow escaped and wandered off into the snow. That way, it might return.
But the grandmother reached him first.
“Um-Gog,” she told the boy. That was the name the class had given the lizard. “Um-Gog died. In the night.”
How she hated her for that truth. Wasn’t it enough that the boy had been uprooted from his home at Christmas time? Uprooted to spend the holidays with a father who–let’s face facts–had pretty much abandoned him save for two lousy weeks of the year? What would a white lie have cost?
But now, as Henry’s breath slowed into a ragged wheeze, she couldn’t recall why she had been so mad. To protect the son, sure. But no matter what they said or thought, it was true: the lizard was gone.
The grandmother drifted back into the hospital room. Before she might offer her seat to the older woman, the grandmother set her hand to the wife’s shoulder, pressing her into the chair. I didn’t know what to do, she wanted to tell the grandmother. I didn’t understand. But neither of them spoke. Instead, the two women sat, waiting, until dusky shadows outside the drawn blinds announced the birth of yet another day.
Ilene Raymond Rush has published fiction in a wide variety of publications, including The Threepenny Review, Lilith, The Saturday Evening Post, and Longform. Her work has won an O. Henry Short Story Prize and a James Michener Copernicus Award and has been featured in a number of anthologies. Her essays and health journalism have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Next Avenue, The Washington Post and many other venues. Mother of two married children, she lives in Chestnut Hill with her husband, Jeff, and their senior pup, Augie the Doggy.