Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  I would have, but my cell phone was still where I’d left it in its charger on the counter. Instead, I used that seemingly endless time in morning traffic praying, pleading and bargaining with god for Tory to be okay.

  The vet took a long time examining Tory, listening to her heart and lungs, palpating her belly, and tapping her legs with a reflex hammer. The front legs twitched, the back ones didn’t react, and when the vet inserted a rectal thermometer, Tory didn’t seem to notice.

  When she finished, she put Tory in my lap. Then she went to the sink and washed and dried her hands before turning to me. “I think it might be time to put her down,” she said, briskly but not unfeelingly. “The paralysis is intermittent now, but soon it will be permanent. She can’t control her bladder or bowels. I can give you something for her discomfort, but she won’t have a very good quality of life. At least, not one you’d want for anyone you loved.”

  I couldn’t make that choice for Alex and I wasn’t sure I could make it for Tory, either. “It’s natural to try to keep them alive as long as possible,” the vet continued. “But we have to think about whose sake it’s for.”

  I didn’t want to listen; instead, I buried my face in Tory’s fur, fighting back my tears helplessly until they dripped on her coat and she twisted her head around to peer at me in confusion. Finally I pulled myself together. “Is there any sense in waiting?” I asked. “Any chance she could get better?”

  The vet shook her head. “Not really. All we can do is make the pain easier to bear.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  She left the room for a few minutes; when she returned she was carrying a syringe and a plastic sheet, which she spread out on my lap and then placed Tory gently down on it. I scrunched my face down next to hers and nuzzled her, mouthing made-up sounds—booja booja, kiss kiss, good doggy. Seconds after the vet slipped in the needle Tory licked me again; her tongue left a damp trail on my cheek when she stopped moving.

  “Do you want to stay here with her for a while?” asked the doctor after she listened for a heartbeat and put her stethoscope away.

  “Maybe a few minutes,” I replied, but as soon as she was gone Tory’s lack of life, her absence even though she was still lying in my lap, sunk in. I felt it in her body first and then in mine, and suddenly I had to get out of that airless room.

  I wrapped Tory up and left her there on the chair. Then I went back to the front desk.

  “Unless you object, we’ll have her cremated,” the veterinary assistant told me, expressing her sympathy for my loss. “We can make the arrangements and return the ashes to you unless you want us to dispose of them. Shall we call you when they’re ready?”

  I agreed, and signed the consent form. By the time I left Westwood it was almost noon. I’d missed the meeting with Nelly and the others but I didn’t really care. I couldn’t think of one good reason not to go home, crawl into bed, and miss my best friend.

  When I came in the next day my desk was littered with pink message slips from Nelly, the production company suits, Robin and Sandro. I ignored them all; instead I wrote them a group e-mail explaining my absence at the meeting. I attached another copy of the treatment for Nelly in case she hadn’t already read it and after I pushed “send” I closed my office door and put my head down on my desk.

  Nelly’s response wasn’t long in coming. “It’s very nice, but as you’d know if you’d been at the meeting we’ve decided to go in a different direction next season, and since this doesn’t set that up, we can’t use it,” she said when she called.

  “What direction is that?” I asked, but she was vague in her reply.

  “Oh, a few cast changes, a shift in the emphasis on certain people,” she said. “We’ve done a few focus groups and, well…Look, why don’t I just send you the memo about what we decided, and Robin’s outline?”

  Robin’s outline? For the finale? Where the fuck had I been while they were doing their focus groups, making their decisions, and writing their memos?

  “You do that,” I said, more politely than I felt. By the time I left the office, the outline hadn’t arrived, and Robin hadn’t come in either.

  Almost as if they’d timed it (the notion that you’re under surveillance isn’t restricted to paranoiacs), my computer zinged with the bell of arriving email a few minutes after I got home. I sat down at my desk to read it. Then I went for a long swim in the pool next door and when I came home I read it again.

  The long and short of it was that they were getting rid of Amelia and refocusing the show around Clea and her on-again, off-again romance with the boyfriend we’d had to replace in the pilot. In the finale they wanted both mother and daughter kidnapped and Amelia killed off, perhaps by an accidental discharge from the boyfriend’s gun when he breaks in to rescue them. The set-up for the second season was Clea trying to keep the agency solvent, at the same time playing I love him/I hate him, on again off again, with the young man who killed her mother.

  The memo discussed demographics, target audiences, “Q” scores and a few comments from the focus groups referencing Amelia—“She’s like the mother from hell, why doesn’t Clea stand up to her more?” was one, and another said Amelia was the only thing wrong with the show.

  I’d only swum up one not-very-good response to what was being proposed, a version of what I’d been so unwilling to consider months before when Robin and her erstwhile agent—who was now much more than that, according to office gossip—first suggested it; the tired old ghost chestnut where Amelia is a spectral presence who makes herself visible whenever Clea’s in trouble or needs motherly advice. But when I got out of the pool and came home to my Tory-less house, I knew that idea was as dead as my dog.

  In the morning I made myself presentable for work, then dawdled over coffee and the newspaper until I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. I’d turned the key in the ignition and backed halfway down the driveway before I shifted into drive and put the car back where I always parked it and went back inside, where I wrote Sandro a long e-mail explaining that I had no interest in writing or running the next season the way the network wanted me to or signing off on Robin’s outline for the last episode of this one.

  Let him do the explaining—that’s what I pay him for, as he so often reminded me. I sent the e-mail and turned off my computer. Then I packed enough clothes for a few weeks, turned off my cell phone and stuck it in the glove compartment of the car and headed north.

  I spent the first night in a motel in Ashland, Oregon. Late the next afternoon I passed the Seattle exits on I-5 and kept driving for another hour until I reached Anacortes, where I boarded a Washington State ferry for the San Juan Islands. It was raining, a steady downpour that kept most of the passengers in their cars or the cabin. I went outside on the uppermost deck and sat on a bench under heat lamps that glowed redder as dusk turned to evening and the smudgy line between the sea and the darkening sky disappeared.

  The weather made the last part of the trip to the cabin slow and difficult; it made me think of that line from E.L. Doctorow, who said writing is like taking a trip at night in your car: You can only see as far as your headlights illuminate, but driving that way you can get all the way home.

  There were lights on in Alex’s cabin; a couple of minutes after I turned off the engine he came out on the front deck. He knew my car but didn’t move toward it; he just stood there until I reached him, all the words I’d rehearsed on the way hanging unspoken in the air between us.

  “How long are you here for?” he said finally.

  “As long as you want me here. Or forever, if that comes first.”

  “That could be a pretty short time.”

  “So? It’s like you told Evan—the long shots are the ones worth playing.”

  “You’re going to try to talk me into letting them cut on my brain, aren’t you?”

  “My father used to say that nagging was the leading cause of death in married men,” I said. “That may be true, since he was eating a plate of f
ried egg and matzo brie while Frances was reminding him about his cholesterol when he keeled over.”

  “Does that mean you’re not going to get on my case?”

  “No, it just means I’ll try to restrain myself. It’s your life, Alex. And every day of it’s a gift.”

  “What if it’s our life?”

  “If it isn’t, what am I doing here?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know, darlin’—what are you doing here?”

  “Taking a risk,” I said. “After all, what’s life worth without risk?”