* * *
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AROUND THE TIME OF EVANGELINE’S SHOWER, Rufus’s eyes began to be deviled by his inner eyelid, the nictitating membranes, thin and milky, like gauze curtains closing against the light. It made him ghastly, a ghost dog risen from the grave. I expected Evangeline to be repulsed, but his appearance brought out a new tenderness in her.
The following Wednesday, she arrived home after school with drops from the drugstore. “I’m worried about those inner thingies—those nicotiney things—that they’ll dry out,” she said. “Seems they could get stuck that way. The pharmacist guy said this might help.”
She sat next to Rufus and tipped drops into the sluice of his lower lids. “He said to do it this way. Just setting them in. Nobody wants drops splatting on their eyeballs.” She closed his lids and massaged them gently.
Rufus didn’t resist, not in the slightest. I was glad he was accepting Evangeline’s ministrations, but a melancholy fogged over me. Only a month back, he’d put up a hell of a fight when I attempted to administer drops for a mild infection, twisting his head out of my grasp again and again. When Rufus was in his prime, Dr. Abrams and I working together couldn’t hold his powerful neck still enough to accomplish it.
I liked to think the drops did soothe him, but those inner lids didn’t retreat. He was shutting down in other ways too. Despite coaxing, he was reluctant to eat and lost weight rapidly. I thought this was his right. Isn’t this how many animals, including some humans, chose to die? Death is certain. Yet stories rain down on us of souls who “bravely battled” their fatal condition “until the end,” as if being at war with an unalterable fate is the highest possible good. Rufus’s next great transition was death, and how he chose to approach it was his alone to decide.
The dog’s form was abandoning him. About the time he began refusing food, I was cutting an apple for an afternoon snack. Rufus trotted to my side as he always did, waiting for his treat. I held out the slice. Rufus put his nose to it, then backed away, confusion on his face. This seemed odd, so I went to the fridge, found a piece of leftover steak, and cut him a bite. Again he leaned in, nostrils twitching, then backed away, fixing me with a look of betrayal. I understood then. The tumor had destroyed his sense of smell. An apple is not an apple without a scent. Nor is meat meat. He couldn’t understand why I would taunt him with fakes.
I remembered how a week before, I’d found Rufus in my closet, rummaging through my dirty laundry. When I knelt to pet him, he poked his runny nose into my armpit, rubbing hard as if in search, and when he pulled back and studied my eyes, the look on his face was one of great sadness.
Without his sense of smell, I was fading from him. He was not only lacking any appetite but very much blind, for it was my scent that told him what he needed to know, where I’d traveled during the day, whom I’d been with, whether I was happy or anxious or sad. He would breathe me in, swirl me over his palate, let the state of my heart form inside him. Even love—or its absence—can be tasted in the invisible language of scent.
Sometimes over these past months when he’d rush to greet me, I’d think of all that he wouldn’t find emanating from my skin, the emptiness of it. He knew of my aloneness. And now I knew his.
The world with its spring rains and sap rising in trees, with hatchlings hidden in brambles and storms approaching, had taken shape in his mind through smell. When he put his nose to the ground or lifted it to the breeze, time was not linear but layered, everything there—past and present and future—all of a piece. Every plant and animal left traces of their lives, stories of struggle and calm: shrubs impregnating the air in great clouds of scent, deer grazing in a morning’s soft drizzle or thrashing panicked through a night wood. A universe of stories. All now lost to him.
I didn’t talk to Evangeline about this, and I failed to take into account the ferocity of her attachment, her youthful belief that death is always the enemy. I came home the next night to find Rufus out of his chair, sitting upright, Evangeline kneeling beside him. She had mixed canned dog food with chicken broth and was injecting it into his mouth with a feeding syringe.
Rufus had no interest in eating, but he kept his eyes, open and surprisingly clear, upon hers. When she squirted the brownish gray liquid into his mouth, he gagged but dutifully attempted to swallow. Much of the liquid oozed out the sides of his lips and dribbled down his chin, but his look of fixed devotion didn’t change. When she praised him, he thumped his tail in happiness, something beatific in his expression, as if every ounce of desire he held for himself had been relinquished and he cared only about this one task—easing her suffering.
Watching this marvel of a creature so willingly gagging and swallowing food that had to be tasteless, knowing it would sustain a life he was ready to depart, was perhaps the most pure-hearted act of love I have ever witnessed.
Evangeline looked up at me, her face a wreck of grief and hope. “This is working,” she said sharply. Defiant. Already at battle. She put another squirt in his mouth. Again he gagged before managing a partial swallow. “See. He wants to eat.”
I went to her and touched her shoulder. That was all.
She froze, then dropped the syringe. Her lips contorted, and she turned from me, her frame shuddering. I lowered my rebellious knees to the ground, set them down gently between girl and dog, and put an arm around each. Evangeline bristled, but only for a moment before letting go and leaning in. Rufus too shifted his weight against me. The love that sizzled between them swept me up in a terrible aliveness, an aliveness that rendered senseless the labels of dog and man and girl and contained a moment that was not a moment but a place without time, a place holding nothing and everything.
A lifetime there. Millions of lifetimes.
Then gone. All that blessed emptiness, that overwhelming fullness, gone. A return to one second. And the next. We appeared again: A dog. A girl. A man. All of us grieving.
65
The next week, Rufus moved less and less, often collapsing in his effort to get outside. I found myself carrying him out to the grass and back in, hoping to provide him some small dignity. As he could no longer even attempt the jump to Evangeline’s bed, he slept beside her on a blanket on the floor. Several times, I woke to her voice whispering through my door. “Isaac. It’s Rufus. I think he needs out.” I’d rouse myself, pull on a pair of jeans, and fetch the poor animal.
She would have carried him herself if she could have. But even had she been as strong as Lorrie, Evangeline’s first duty was to her child, to protect herself from strain. She was closing in on the last weeks of her pregnancy. Maybe I’d forgotten how huge a woman got at the end, but I couldn’t imagine another three weeks of growth.
To my surprise, Evangeline had asked me to be present at the delivery. “You know, up by my head, keeping me company.” Of equal surprise was how much I wanted to be there, how it seemed right, the way I’d feel if she were my daughter.
The third Saturday of May started with the usual drizzle, but by midmorning sun lit the new grasses of the field. Rufus’s breath came as wet, wheezing gasps that racked his ribs. When I walked into the kitchen that afternoon, I half expected to find him dead. Instead Rufus lifted his head with a buoyancy that’d long been missing. His eyes were clear, the inner lids stowed away, and the muscles of his head and neck restored, held in place by some new purpose.