Authors: W. Bruce Cameron
“How are you feeling today, CJ, any better?” Mrs. Warren would reply.
“A little,” CJ usually told her.
I never saw Mrs. Warren anywhere but on her balcony, though I sometimes smelled her in the hallway. She did not have a dog.
“Look at my wrists; they’re all swollen,” CJ told Trent when he came home one afternoon.
“Honey, have you been out here in the sun all day?” he asked.
“I’m freezing.”
“You didn’t go to class?”
“What? What day is it?”
“Oh, CJ. I’m worried about you. Let me check your BP.”
Trent got his special ball out and I watched him alertly as he squeezed it, thinking maybe this time he’d let me have a turn with it.
“I think it’s probably time to talk about … about a more permanent treatment regimen.”
“I don’t want to do dialysis, Trent!”
“Honey, you’re the center of my universe. I’d die if anything happened to you. Please, CJ, let’s go to the doctor.
Please.
”
CJ went to bed early that night. Trent didn’t give me the command to pray when he fed me, but the odor on his breath was so strong I did it anyway. “Good dog,” Trent said in the way people will praise dogs without really even looking at them.
The next morning, just after Trent left, CJ fell down in the kitchen. One minute she was making a second trip from the balcony to the kitchen to fill a can of water and the next she toppled to the floor. I felt the crash through the pads in my feet and when I ran to her and licked her face she was unresponsive.
I whimpered, then barked. She didn’t move. Her breath smelled sickly and sour as she shallowly inhaled and exhaled.
I was frantic. I ran to the front door but could hear no one on the other side. I barked. Then I ran out on the balcony.
Mrs. Warren was kneeling, playing with her plants. I barked at her.
“Hello, Max!” she called to me.
I thought of my girl lying in the kitchen, unconscious and sick. I needed to communicate what was happening to Mrs. Warren. I pushed forward until my face was sticking out between the bars and I barked at her with such high urgency that a clear note of hysteria rang in my voice like a bell.
Mrs. Warren knelt there looking at me. I barked and barked and barked.
“What is it, Max?”
Hearing my name as a question, I turned and ran back into the apartment, so Mrs. Warren would know the problem was in there. Then I ran back out onto the balcony and barked some more.
Mrs. Warren stood up. “CJ?” she called tentatively, leaning out to try to see into our home.
I kept barking. “Shush, Max,” Mrs. Warren said. “Trent? CJ?”
I kept barking. Then Mrs. Warren shook her head, went to her door, opened it, and stepped inside. When she slid her door shut I was so dumbfounded I stopped barking.
What was she doing?
Whimpering, I dashed back in to my girl. Her breathing was getting weaker.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Though it was hopeless, I went to the door and desperately scratched at it. My nails carved a groove in the wood, but that was all. I was crying my fear, my voice shrill and brittle. Then I heard a noise on the other side, the sound of footfalls. I barked and put my nose to the crack at the bottom of the door and smelled Mrs. Warren and a man named Harry, who often carried tools with him in the hallway.
The door opened a crack. “Hello?” Harry called.
“CJ? Trent?” Mrs. Warren said. They cautiously pushed into the room. I headed toward the kitchen, looking over my shoulder to make sure they were following.
“Oh my God,” Mrs. Warren said.
A few minutes later some men came and put CJ on a bed and took her away. Mrs. Warren picked me up while this was happening, petting me and telling me I was a good dog, but my heart was pounding and I was sick with a frantic fear. Then she put me down and she and Harry and everyone left and I was alone in the place.
I fretfully paced back and forth, anxious and worried. The light faded and it was night and still CJ wasn’t home. I remembered her lying with her cheek pressed to the floor of the kitchen and the thought made me whimper.
When the door finally opened it was Trent. CJ was not with him.
“Oh, Max, I’m so sorry,” he said.
He took me for a walk and it was a relief to be able to lift my leg on some shrubbery. “We have to be there for CJ, now, Max. She isn’t going to like dialysis, but she has no choice. We have to do it. This could have been much, much worse.”
When CJ came home a few days later she was very tired and went right to bed. I curled up next to her, relieved and yet apprehensive about how sad and frustrated she seemed.
From that point forward, CJ and I would take a trip every few days in the back of a car that would pick us up out in front of our building. At first, Trent always went with us. We’d go to a room and lie there quietly while some people fussed over my girl. She always felt weak and ill when she arrived and was exhausted and sad when she got up off the couch, but I realized it was not the fault of the people who were bending over her, not even when they hurt her arm. I didn’t growl at them as I might have before.
The day after we went to this place was usually a good day for CJ. She felt stronger and happier.
“They say it will probably be years before I get a kidney,” CJ said one night. “There are just so few of them available.”
“Well, I was wondering what to buy you for your birthday,” Trent replied with a laugh. “I’ve got one just your size right here.”
“Don’t even think about it. I’m not taking yours or any other living person’s. I put myself in this position, Trent.”
“I only need one. The other one’s a spare; I hardly ever even use it.”
“Funny guy. No. I’ll get one from a cadaver eventually. There are some people who have gone twenty years on dialysis. It will happen when it happens.”
That winter CJ walked in the door one day with a plastic crate. I was astonished when she opened the door and out walked Sneakers! I rushed up to the cat, frankly excited to see her, and she arched her back and drew her ears back and hissed at me, so I skittered to a stop. What was wrong with Sneakers?
She spent the day sniffing around the apartment, while I followed her, trying to interest her in a little game of tug-on-a-toy. She would have nothing to do with me.
“How are Mrs. Minnick’s kids doing?” Trent asked at dinner.
“I think they’re feeling guilty. They hardly ever visited her, and then one day she was gone,” CJ said.
I watched Sneakers leap silently onto a counter and regard the kitchen disdainfully from her perch.
“What? What is it?” Trent said.
“I’m just thinking about Gloria. Is that how I’m going to feel? One day she’ll be gone and I’ll regret I didn’t make more of an effort?”
“Want to go see her? Invite her to come out?”
“Truthfully? I have no idea.”
“Just let me know.”
“You’re the best husband in the world, Trent. I’m so lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one, CJ. My whole life, I only really wanted one girl, and now she’s my wife.”
CJ stood and I leaped to my feet, though all she did was jump on Trent’s chair with him, pressing her face to his. They started to lean, falling sideways.
“Okay, be brave now,” CJ said as they slid off the chair and landed on the floor, laughing. Then they wrestled for a while. I looked over at Sneakers, who didn’t seem to care about anything at all, but what I felt between Trent and my girl was a love both powerful and complete.
Sneakers eventually became more affectionate. She might be walking through the room and then, without warning, would pad over to me and rub her head against my face, or lick my ears while I lay curled on the floor. But she never wanted to play any wrestling games like we used to. I couldn’t help but feel that the time she had spent without a dog in her life had been bad for her.
CJ and Trent spent cool evenings wrapped in a blanket together on the balcony and cold nights lying together on the couch. Sometimes CJ would put on nice-smelling shoes and they’d leave in the evening, but when they returned they were always happy—though even if she’d been sad I doubted I would have done anything to her shoes.
We took walks down the streets and in the park. Sometimes CJ would fall asleep on a blanket on the grass and Trent would lie with her, watching her, a smile on his face.
When we spent the day in the park I was always famished and wanted to eat as soon as we got home. I was dancing around impatiently in the kitchen on one such day, watching Trent make my dinner, when there was a slight change in the routine.
“Going to take forever to finish my degree and then, when I think of my master’s, it’s like I’m going to be in my thirties. That used to seem so old!”
CJ held my bowl up in the air. “Okay, Max. Pray,” she said.
I tensed. I wanted dinner, but the command only made sense in the context of the odor that sometimes lingered on Trent’s breath.
“He always does it for me,” Trent remarked. “Max? Pray!”
CJ had my dinner and I was starving. I went over to Trent and, as he was leaning down, caught the scent. I signaled.
“Good dog!” Trent praised. CJ put my bowl down and I raced over to eat. I was conscious of her standing over me, her hands on her hips.
“What is it?” Trent asked CJ.
“Max never prays for me. Just you.”
“So?”
I was bolting down my food. “I want to try something when he’s finished,” CJ said. I focused on my eating. When I was done I licked the bowl. “Okay, call him.”
“Max! Come!” Trent said. I obediently went over to him and sat. There had been a time when he would call me and always give me a treat when I responded, but sadly, those days had passed for some reason.
“Now, lean down close to him, like you’re putting the food bowl on the floor,” CJ said.
“What are we doing?”
“Just do it. Please.”
Trent bent down to me. The odor was particularly strong today.
“Pray!” CJ called.
I obediently signaled.
“Oh God. Is that possible?” I snapped my head up and focused on CJ. A jolt of fear had come off her, and now she had her hand to her mouth. I went to her, nuzzling her, not sure what the threat was.
“CJ, what’s wrong? Why do you look like that?” Trent asked.
“There’s something I want you to do for me,” CJ replied.
“What? What is it?”
“I want you to go to the doctor.”
“What? Why?”
“Please, Trent!” CJ replied, her voice breaking. “You have to do this for me!”
Over the next year, Trent became very sick. Many times he would vomit in the bathroom, and it would remind me of how CJ used to throw up on a regular basis, which she did not do anymore. CJ seemed just as upset when Trent vomited as when she used to do it herself, and I always whimpered anxiously for both of them.
Trent’s mother and father came to visit several times, and his sister, Carolina, and a man and some children from the wedding showed up as well, from which I concluded that Carolina now had a family. These visits were odd, though, not at all like when everyone gathered at the Farm, in that only the children seemed happy and ready to laugh and pay attention to a good dog.
All of the hair on Trent’s head came off and I could make him laugh by licking his scalp while he lay in bed. CJ would laugh, too, but there was always an underlying sad desperation in her, a constant anxious worrying.
“I don’t want this to be my last Christmas with my husband,” she said that winter.
“It won’t be, honey; I promise,” Trent replied.
I had learned from watching Duke’s rambunctious conduct with CJ how
not
to behave around a sick person, so I concentrated on being calm and comforting, which Trent and CJ both seemed to appreciate very much. It had been my job to keep threats at bay and I had done that, and now it was my job to try to keep the sadness away, and that required a different set of behaviors.
I still went with CJ a few times a week to lie on the couch and let people fuss over her. They all knew me and loved me and petted me and told me that I was a good dog, and I knew it was because I would lie quietly and not jump around the room. When we left the place with the couch it always seemed to me that my girl wasn’t nearly as sick as she had been when we first started going, but I was just a dog and could have been wrong.
One night CJ and Trent were cuddled on the couch together and I was burrowed in snug between them. Sneakers was across the room, watching us expressionlessly. I never knew what cats were thinking, or even if they were thinking.
“I just want you to know, I’ve got plenty of insurance and investments. You’ll be okay,” Trent said.
“But we’re not doing that. You’re going to get better. You are getting better,” CJ said. She felt angry.
“Yes, but just in case, I want you to know it.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not happening,” CJ insisted.
There were a few times when Trent would be gone for days at a time and CJ would mostly be missing as well, though she always came home to walk me and feed me and always smelled like Trent, so I knew the two of them had been someplace together.
One day it was just the two of us, CJ and me, sitting in the grass on a warm summer day. I’d run around as much as I’d wanted and was now content to sit in my girl’s lap. She stroked my head.
“You are such a good dog,” she told me. Her fingers scratched the itchy part along my spine and I groaned in pleasure. “I know what you were doing, Max. You weren’t saying grace, were you? You were trying to tell us about Trent, trying to say you could smell his cancer. We just didn’t understand at first. Did Molly tell you that? Does she talk to you, Max? Is that how you knew? Is she an angel dog, watching over us? Are you an angel dog, too?”
I liked hearing the name Molly spoken by CJ. I wagged.
“We got it in time, Max. Because of you they got it and it hasn’t come back. You saved my husband. I don’t know how, but if you talk to Molly, would you tell her thank you for me?”
I was pretty disappointed when Trent’s hair grew back on his head, because my licking his scalp always made him laugh. But things change: CJ’s hair, for example, was longer than it had ever been, a glorious tent that would fall over me when she bent over. And when Trent bent over I could no longer detect that metallic odor. When he said “Pray” to me now I looked at him in frustrated confusion. What did he want? I was even more confused when, after I sat and stared at him for a long moment after the Pray command, he and CJ both laughed and clapped and said, “Good dog!” and fed me a treat—though I had done
nothing.