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, all sorts of 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 who 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 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 the animal put into a shelter or to take him home.
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 I76, 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?” […]
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A graduate of the Iowa Fiction Writers Workshop, stories by Ilene Rush have appeared in OHenry Prize Stories, The Threepenny Review, Lilith, The Saturday Evening Post,and many other print and online publications.
Saints and Shadows originally appeared in Philadelphia Stories.