I returned two minutes later with my bag and pulled out a deep pink vial of phenobarbital and a large syringe. Death comes in such a pretty color.
“What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill her.”
“Kill her? But we just—”
“—she’s got massive internal bleeding. Her abdomen’s already full of blood. I’m a vet. Trust me, she’s done.”
“When did you know that?”
“As soon as I saw her in the road,” I said as I drew the pheno into the syringe like I’d done dozens of times before.
“Then why’d we just almost kill ourselves bringing her out of the road?” David didn’t sound angry, just confused.
“Because I want my voice to be the last thing she hears, not the sound of oncoming traffic. I want her to feel gentle hands as she goes, not the force of a car crushing her sternum. I’m sorry, but she deserves that. We all do.”
David nodded at my answer. I don’t think he understood, but neither did he argue. “What should I do?”
“I can do this by myself,” I told him as I turned toward the deer.
David grabbed my arm. “I know you can, but you don’t need to. Let me help.”
“Okay. Hold her down and as still as you can. I need to go into her neck.” David did his best to comply. The doe’s eyes were wide with fear and pain. I stroked the doe’s throat for a moment to give comfort, but also to find the major vein for the needle. I finally found it.
I took a deep breath, jabbed the needle in, and quickly injected the contents of the syringe. The doe struggled for a moment, and then her lifeless head dropped into David’s arms. I took the stethoscope from my bag and listened for a heartbeat. “She’s gone,” I said.
A tear rolled down David’s undamaged cheek as he stroked the head of the animal. His shoulders relaxed, his breathing deepened, and his teeth chattered. Perhaps it was the accident, or the pain from the deep cut on his face, maybe it was the accumulation of the events of his day or simply being witness to the act of taking a life, but this man I didn’t know was suddenly known to me.
For that instant, David was again the lonely high school boy who learned that his father was gone, and whose mother left him
so soon after. He was the responsible only child who swallowed his pain because there was no one to share his grief. Death had spoken to him in a secret language, and this act of communication had changed him and set him apart. He was both an innocent and damaged by experience.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered into the dead deer’s ear.
We called the sheriff’s office from the Tompkins County Community Hospital thirty minutes later, reported the deer carcass, and requested a tow for David’s car. I held David’s hand while they put twenty-two stitches in his cheek and fed him antibiotics and painkillers. You can still see the faint line of a scar when the sun hits his face just the right way.
After that night, without too much discussion and even less fanfare, David and I were together. Period.
Such is the power of death. It can rip apart or fuse together. And now, sixteen years later, it sits on David’s chest, slowly squeezing the life out of him.
We lived in a beautiful part of New York State—close enough to Manhattan that David could get to his office in seventy-five minutes, but far enough away that I could pretend I was a simple country veterinarian.
Our house sits in the middle of a clearing at the top of a small hill. The house itself is modest, but the property is very pretty and provided more than enough room for all my creatures.
We bought the house and moved north from the city at my request two years before David made partner at his firm. This was my first real demand during our marriage. I believe it was the right decision—for both me and him. In return for the additional stress
of becoming a homeowner and a commuter, David gained a house full of life and love—until, of course, it wasn’t anymore.
I hardly recognize our place now. A thin dusting of snow provides the only color to this otherwise steel-gray day. The grounds around the house are a mess—newspapers and small bits of garbage blow across the property. The source of the refuse, a trash bag torn open by a hungry raccoon, lies in the driveway next to two overturned plastic garbage cans. My Jeep is encrusted in snow and ice, its battery long dead. Several unopened FedEx packages marked
URGENT
and addressed to David Colden line the steps leading up to the house.
I’m reminded by the scene before me that a home is an organism, and no organism gripped by death is particularly attractive.
Right next to the house, a small wood-framed barn and a paddock fill out several acres. My two horses, bored and restless from lack of attention, paw the ground looking for fresh hay.
Arthur and Alice were Premarin foals, unwanted by-products of the manufacture of a drug made from the urine of pregnant horses. We saved these two from the slaughterhouse within a month of our move north.
With Premarin foals, you just never know what kind of horse you’re going to end up with, and my two well make the point. Alice, who looks part Morgan and part quarter horse, is shy, sweet, and always up for a good scratch on the head. Arthur, my huge draft horse, is very smart and has little tolerance for any human contact except mine. Even now I believe he senses me; he stares right at the spot where I’m standing and snorts curiously.
A second smaller enclosure abuts the paddock. Several years ago, I placed a large doghouse into the space. Now something moves within the doghouse and pushes mounds of old straw out onto the
ground. The creature in the doghouse—a 375-pound pink pig—raises its massive head and grunts in my direction. This is Collette.
We adopted Collette four years ago. She’d been abandoned with her twenty young brothers and sisters in a rotting upstate barn in the middle of winter. When the piglets were discovered, all but three were frozen to the barn’s dirt floor. Collette was one of the three.
Collette is a survivor, a champion over death, but her early experiences have left their mark. She is moody and even on good days does not have a vast sense of humor. Today clearly is not a good day.
In the house itself, there is some evidence of life—but just barely. Empty Chinese food boxes merge with condolence cards to form an odd sculpture on the hallway table. A dozen of the cards have cascaded off the table and landed on the floor. Several of these have been chewed to shreds.
The living room curtains are drawn and, but for the glow cast by the dying embers in the fireplace and a dim floor lamp, the room is dark. Loose stacks of unopened mail and used wineglasses cover most of the flat surfaces.
The wineglasses frighten me. David likes wine. In the few times that I’ve seen him seriously troubled, his wine consumption soared. He was never roaring drunk. To the contrary, the alcohol made him even more subdued and closed off to me. The wine deadens him and that, I believe, is his intention.
I raised this concern with him perhaps twice, but the episode always passed before it escalated. The demands of David’s job require that he be 100 percent mentally focused, so his work invariably served as an outer limit for his alcohol intake. But without the daily burdens of the job? I don’t know. We’ve never gone there.
Like the rest of the house, the kitchen is a mess. Empty wine
bottles line the counter, and dirty dishes and glasses fill the sink. If this were the city, roaches would be everywhere. Because we live beyond even the borders of suburbia, however, there are no vermin that cannot be rationalized as “wildlife.”
I find David in the kitchen struggling to open a can of dog food while my three dogs—Chip, Bernie, and Skippy—wait patiently at his feet. In a dirty pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, work boots, and several days of stubble, he is the house personified. He’s lost even more weight and looks so gaunt that the new harsh angles of his face mar his handsomeness.
He is too young for this. Thirty-seven is too young to bury a wife. He still wears our wedding band because even now he cannot believe this is happening to him. I know this because he has the same look on his face as the deer trapped in his headlights so many years ago.
It is more than just the fact that I’m gone. David poured himself into my life. My friends became his friends. My animals became his animals. My plans became his plans. All connections passed through me. That’s not a complaint. I was not only a willing vessel for David’s life; I found it exhilarating.
In return, David became my rock—steady and dependent, a safe harbor when I became overwhelmed by the accumulation of still, little bodies. He calmed me down when I started to lose it on a difficult case and convinced me to trust my own instincts instead of the textbooks. David’s confidence in me was a great gift, and I realize now that I never really thanked him for it.
Up until now, it all worked, didn’t it, David? It was a good deal all around, wasn’t it? Still, I cannot help but fear that my death has severed your slender tether to this human plane. You are beginning to fade, just like me.
I swear, David, I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was all going to
end this way. It’s not like I could’ve changed things; we met at a crossroads, and the people you meet at the most important times of your life invariably become the most important people in your life. But I do wonder if it would’ve turned out differently if there had been no death—no Charlie—in the story line. Would I have been available for you when the layers finally peeled away? Would you even have cared if I hadn’t been so haunted? Every action is inextricably dependent upon the one that preceded it, like some infinite dance that continues out in perpetuity until one of the partners exits the floor. I know that now. A fat lot of good it does me, though.
David finally manages to open the can of dog food and quickly fills the three bowls on the floor. The dogs look at David, then the food, and back to David. I usually add rice and chicken broth to their dinners, but David doesn’t remember this or (as likely) can’t be bothered by the extra effort.
Chip, Bernie, and Skippy. My sweet, sweet boys. I miss you so much. I long for the feel of you, to rub your fur, touch your wet noses.
Seeing my dogs again is almost as heartrending as looking at my husband. The always-anxious Chip, the Labrador, was with me the longest. I brought him home soon after our move following one of my monthly vet visits to a nearby mall pet store. When I first saw Chip, the product of some Midwest puppy mill hell, he was only eight weeks old and his face was covered with running sores from a rampant staph infection. I told the asshole of a store owner that I could cure him with a month or so of antibiotics, but the owner complained that the dog would then be too “old” to sell. He demanded that I “put him down” so he could save the cost of the drugs. Chip came home with me that same day and left me only when David drove me to the hospital for the last time.
Bernie, the Bernese mountain dog, is beautiful, huge, goofy, and the sweetest dog I’ve ever known. He came to us a year later. Bernie had been bred locally to be a show dog. Given Bernie’s parents, the breeder had high hopes for “best of breed” at Westminster and then many years of stud fees. Within a few months of his birth, however, it became clear that Bernie’s bad shoulders would keep him out of not only Westminster, but any breeding circle that would pay his way.
The breeder requested that Bernie be “put to sleep.” I told her that I could easily find Bernie a good home. The breeder insisted that death was the only option that would preserve her reputation; it simply wouldn’t do to have a “defective”—her word—out in the world that was traceable to her stock.
I sent the breeder away with assurances that I would take care of it, and then I snuck Bernie home on my lunch break. That was a good day. Chip loved the company, and the two big dogs became fast friends.
Skippy the schipperke, the last dog I adopted in life, was my greatest challenge. He is a small black bundle of thick fur with a beautiful fox-like face and pointed ears. Intelligent, industrious, and energetic, Skippy does not suffer fools lightly. Of the three, he reminds me most of my husband.
I always assumed that Skippy was yet another Missouri puppy mill special, although I don’t really know where he came from. Early one winter morning, I went to open my office and found Skippy sitting patiently and alone on the welcome mat at the front door as if he were waiting for an appointment. When I opened the office door, Skippy trotted in with an air of entitlement that I could not question.
I carried Skippy into my exam room and gave him a once-over. Skippy didn’t object. He had no tags, no collar, and no visible
injuries. I noticed almost immediately, however, that he was breathing too fast for a small dog at rest. When I listened to his chest for the first time, I began to understand why. Skippy had a heart murmur that sounded only slightly less turbulent than Niagara Falls. The sonogram I took of Skippy’s heart later that morning completed the sad picture of a heart built wrong. We predicted he had maybe a year of life in that heart before it gave out.
I figured Skippy was a runaway. My staff posted notices everywhere while I silently prayed that no one would come to claim him. That particular prayer, at least, was answered.
Skippy is unaware of his death sentence, or it may be simply that he enjoyed our life together too much to let it go. He is now almost four years old and still going. He’s been a great companion and helped keep my own heart open during my last year. I could hold him upside down between my legs or swing him high in the air and he would wag his little stump of a tail and yip with excitement. He would wake me every morning by licking my nose and then run and hide until I found him. After we had our special morning alone time, he would go off and play with the big guys, oblivious to being stepped on or the physiological failings of his heart.
The fact that Skippy has actually outlived me makes me smile. You just never know with dogs.
“Well, come on then,” David says, motioning to the food. The dogs reluctantly move to their respective bowls as David raises a full wineglass in toast. “Cheers.”
The doorbell rings and the dogs run out of the kitchen barking wildly. David slowly follows them.