Part 4
Eddie had cleared a path from the front door, but the living room itself had not changed in three years. June Doyle’s china stood behind glass. Her knitting basket remained beside the armchair, holding a half-finished blue scarf. Faint dents in the carpet marked the place where June’s hospice bed had stood before the medical-equipment company collected it.
Maggie had told herself she preserved the room out of love. Standing there while a sick dog waited outside because the room had no safe place for him, she saw something less flattering. She had made the house answer to the dead because the dead could no longer ask anything difficult of her.
“Where do you want him?” Eddie asked.
Maggie pointed to the warmest spot, beside the radiator.
June’s armchair occupied it.
For a moment, Maggie could not move. Then she gripped one wooden arm and pulled. Eddie took the other side. Together they shifted the chair to the front window, rolled up the slick area rug, and laid the rubber-backed runners from the rescue across the floor. Maggie moved the knitting basket. Dust showed where it had been.
Carla and Eddie carried Duke inside on the secured bed and settled him beside the radiator. Eddie filled bowls and checked the furnace vent. Before leaving, he put the rescue coordinator’s number on the refrigerator with a magnet.
“Call somebody before you try lifting him alone,” he said.
“I’ve managed alone for years.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
After Eddie and Carla left, Ash vanished under the china cabinet. Maggie heard his claws against the wall and saw two gold-green eyes in the darkness. She set food several feet away and sat on the floor with her back turned.
“I’m not reaching under there,” she said. “You’ve made your opinion of my hands clear.”
The house answered with the furnace, Duke’s breathing, and the faint scrape of a bowl. Ten minutes later, the kitten emerged. He ate with his body low and one eye on Maggie, then crossed to Duke and washed the old dog’s muzzle with quick, angry strokes.
“Ash,” Maggie said.
The kitten paused.
“You look like you came out of a chimney, and I need something to call you besides criminal.”
Ash resumed washing Duke, and Maggie used the name again.
Maggie warmed a small portion of the veterinary food and added water as Dr. Lee had shown her. Duke ate only when she held the bowl close enough for his whiskers to touch its rim. Afterward, she gave him the first dose of heart medication and sat beside him until the shivering eased.
At nine, she went into the kitchen for a glass of water. The old calendar confronted her beside the refrigerator.
She reached for the bottom corner. The paper had curled with age and grease. Instead of tearing off one page, she lifted the calendar from its nail, carried it to the table, and closed it. Beneath it on the wall was a clean square untouched by sunlight.
Maggie found the current year’s calendar in a drawer where the electric company had mailed it eleven months earlier. She opened it to November and wrote Dr. Lee’s instructions in the square for the twenty-eighth: Count resting breaths. Morning and night.
She had just recorded thirty-two when Duke began to cry.
It was a thin sound, startling from so large an animal. He pushed at the bed with his front legs, tried to rise, and lost track of the floor. His paws struck the runner; his body twisted; panic made each breath shorter.
Ash shot from beneath the table and circled him, crying back.
“Duke.” Maggie knelt where he could smell her. “You’re inside. Listen to me.”
The dog kept struggling. Maggie slid one hand beneath his jaw and rubbed the cramped muscles of his shoulder with the other. Ash bumped her wrist, then pressed his face against Duke’s.
For nearly an hour, the three of them remained on the floor. Maggie talked because silence frightened Duke. She told him the radiator always knocked before it warmed. She told him the number seven bus squealed at the corner and the neighbor’s pipes banged at midnight. She described every unfamiliar sound until his legs stopped running against the bed.
At two thirty, he slept.
Maggie eased herself against the wall. Ash climbed onto Duke’s ribs, turned twice, and lay down. The room smelled of wet fur and canned food. Mud streaked the runner. June’s chair stood in the wrong place.
The house had not looked this disorderly in years, and for the first time in years it did not feel empty.
Near dawn, Maggie woke to Ash pawing her sleeve. Duke’s sides were moving too quickly. She counted once, then again. Forty-four breaths in one minute. She called the clinic’s emergency number. Dr. Lee answered on the fourth ring and asked Maggie to count aloud. When Maggie finished, the veterinarian’s voice sharpened. “Keep him calm, don’t make him walk, and let him stay in whatever position makes breathing easiest. I’m coming now…”
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