While I Was Gone

by Sue Miller

  “I’ll meet you up front with it. How much do you want? A week’s worth?”

  His mouth tightened. “At the most,” he said.

  As he was standing in the front doorway to leave, a few minutes later, he turned to me, behind the counter, and said, “At some point, Jo, it’d be nice to talk about life. Life beyond dogs.”

  “Oh, is there such a thing?” I asked. I could feel Beattie’s gaze shift sharply over to me from her computer.

  He smiled again, and then he was gone.

  “Who was that big fat man?” Beattie asked later. “You know, Mayhew, the one who belongs to Arthur.”

  “Beattie! He wasn’t fat.” We were moving around each other in the hallway office, she printing out billing records, I checking supplies.

  “You know him from somewhere?”

  “I do, actually. My deep, dark past. Why? What makes you ask?”

  “Your voice was different, is all.”

  I thought about this, wondering if it was true.

  “Well, I thought he was fat,” Beattie said after a few moments. She wasn’t looking at me. The printer ground away. “But I like ’em thin. Daniel, now. That’s my type.”

  “You can’t have him, Beattie.”

  Her laugh shrilled, and she walked off, trailing computer paper.

  Fall seemed to deepen as the week went by. It was colder, very cold at night, and often in the morning a frost clung to the golden grass. The brightest leaves—the cerise and pale yellow of the maples—were gone by now, and just the golden yellow of birches and the deep red-brown of oaks remained. The vistas had opened up slowly as the leaves fell and blew into bright piles that collected against the fence lines and shrubs, that pooled at the edges of the roads. Now you could take in the whole town at once, you could see past the white houses to the distant mountains beyond. All week I waited for Eli to call or appear. I thought of him often, of him and Arthur. But he didn’t come in, and he didn’t telephone.

  Over the weekend, we had a reprieve suddenly: three Indian summer days—golden, warm. Daniel and I decided to take our Monday afternoon to put the storm windows in and clean them. We did this on opposite sides of the glass so we could talk as we went along and also point out streaks to each other. The air was dry and cool as it drifted over me in the house, but Daniel was working outside, in the sun. First he pulled off his sweatshirt, then the plaid flannel long-sleeved shirt under that. In his T-shirt and jeans, he looked lean and tough, like the bad boys I wasn’t allowed to date in high school. I could see the muscles working in his arms, the cording tendons.

  He caught me watching him as he rubbed the glass between us with his cloth, watching and not working. He stopped too. “What?” he said loudly.

  I shook my head and grinned. I leaned forward and put my lips on the cool glass, pressed them. When I pulled back, I yelled, “You’re cute.”

  He smiled and then raised his hand and tapped the glass by the mark of my lips. “Streak,” he announced.

  I made a face and wiped it away.

  Ever since the Sunday I’d gone to church and then waited in bed for Daniel to come home—washed, perfumed, the space heater faintly humming on high so we could be naked in comfort—I’d been eager for him. Not all the time, to be sure, because our lives were so disparate and busy. But there it was, and the three times we had made love since had been with a newness, a wily attentiveness to each other, that surprised me. One of these times we’d actually tried it standing up in the kitchen, with me, in my striped bathrobe, backed up against the wall. But Daniel had abruptly cried, “Ah! no! no!” When we stopped, he said, “That was my back yelling, not me,” so we’d shut the dogs in the kitchen and done it on the living room couch, with their dolorous halloos our distracting music.

  And one night, when we were both tired, we spent a while laughing and arguing desultorily about who should do the work (“No, you get on me”), until finally I reached down between my legs and began lazily to touch myself. Daniel slid back to watch me. After a minute, he began to stroke himself, too, and we watched each other for a while, our breathing getting more and more ragged, until we both shut our eyes and arched away from each other, crying out over and over in a nicely timed duet.

  It was all fun, but to me it felt a little abstract, too—a little the way I’d felt during those impulsive, driven months of hungry activity on and off through veterinary school. It made me wonder if there wasn’t something about seeing Eli again—about the return of my past into my present life—that was fueling my appetite. Why does hunger come when it comes? Or need? And does it matter? Shouldn’t we just be happy to have it arrive again from time to time? I didn’t know, but I thought of it now as I watched Daniel at work through the glass.

  Cass had called two nights before this. Her slow circle around the country was closing, bringing her back to us. She was in Pennsylvania now. She thought she’d be home for about a week at Thanksgiving, though she couldn’t say for sure what day she’d arrive. Daniel and I talked about it during the intervals when I was lifting the panes from inside to set them in place or sliding them up, the intervals of only air between us.

  I wanted to get all the girls home for the holiday. Daniel thought that was probably a mistake, that Cass might want us to herself, and that in any case, all three of them together often led to trouble. “If she wants to see Nora, she can easily go to New York,” he said. He was perched on the extension ladder. Behind him, the sky opened up over the hills, and the dark road wound left and disappeared into pinewoods.

  “But wouldn’t you like to have us all together again? It won’t happen that often in our lives as they get older and move away.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. I hoisted the glass up between us, and we lifted our plastic bottles and sprayed at each other. As we both began to wipe at the mist, as Daniel’s composed face began to come clear, frowning in private concentration at his task, I thought of Eli Mayhew suddenly, that open, expansive quality to the way he looked now. People could change, I thought, and I wondered for an idle moment if Eli had found that true of me. And if so, how.

  In the end, Daniel agreed to my issuing a Thanksgiving invitation to all the girls. That night I called Nora.

  “How long will she be there?”

  “It’s not clear, natch.”

  “Natch is right.” She sighed. “Damn! I have this project due. I wasn’t even going to have Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah, we were just going to have a minimal thing ourselves, just with Sadie, ’cause Daddy has that big church meal the Sunday before.”

  “Christ!” she said. I could imagine her gnawing her lower lip, a habit she didn’t share with Cassie. “Well, I suppose I can work it out.”

  I was silent for a moment, feeling guilty, but then irritated at having to feel that way. “Look, Nor,” I finally said. “It’s not written in stone. I said nothing to Cass about it; it was just an idea I had.”

  “No, I’ll come.” Her voice was resigned.

  “But now I feel guilty. I’m not putting pressure on you, honest I’m not.”

  “Mom, come on. I really do want to see her. I haven’t for more than a year, and she is my sister. My twin, for God’s sake.”

  After a beat, I said, “Brian’s welcome, too, you know.”

  She made a light snorting noise. “I’ll spare him, I think.”

  After I got off the phone, I thought of this response and I felt wounded. Was this how she saw us? Some difficult, O’Neill-like family she had to shield her boyfriend from?

  As we walked the dogs later, I told Daniel about it. He disagreed with my interpretation. “She’s just feeling what I was, that the two of them closed in together for a long weekend is a recipe for trouble.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “No, but it often is.”

  “You’ll help me, won’t you, Daniel?” I must have sounded lonely or frightened to him, because he stopped me on the dark sidewalk and kissed my cheek. Actually, because i
t was so dark—pitch dark, as we were on a side street, away from even the feeble lanterns around the green—he missed and got my ear. We swayed together a moment. When we turned to walk again, he kept his arm around me.

  Lights were off in most of the houses we passed—it was nearly eleven. The town was silent but for the odd barking of a dog. When we walked by the middle of the three Georgian houses facing the green, we looked over as one to the glowing windows of its front parlor. The room was empty, the lamplight fell on an empty chair. We turned away. A little breeze lifted my hair, brought us the smell of dry leaves, of pine. “This is so perfect,” I said. “This weather.” I sighed. “This is why we live in New England.”

  The next morning it was snowing wetly, big plops smeared against the windows. When I opened the kitchen door, the raw damp air blew in, and the dogs milled around behind me with their tails down. “Get!” I said. They cast tragic glances back at me as I shut the door on them.

  “Did you know about this?” I asked Daniel when he came in for coffee. He was a weather fanatic, a holdover from his youth on the farm. There weather told you what you’d be doing on any given day.

  “I did.”

  “And you let me be romantic about our fall night? You laughed up your sleeve at me?”

  He shrugged. “That’s just the perfidious kind of guy I am.”

  “I’ll say.”

  The drops gathered into clear slush at the sides of my windshield as I drove to work. The wet glistened on the road. Feeling sleepy, I stopped off at the bagel place to pick up some coffee.

  “How’ja like Mother Nature’s joke?” the owner asked me energetically. Malcolm. He ran the place single-handedly.

  “She can stuff it,” I said.

  “Joey, Joey!” he scolded, grinning. He shook his head as he rang me up.

  Though normally she worked just Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, Mary Ellen was in today; she wanted Saturday off this week for her son’s birthday party. It was sometimes crowded moving around in the hallway, with all the dogs and people. Late in the morning, Beattie came back to my exam room. “Your old boyfriend called,” she said. Her lips were pinched disapprovingly.

  “He’s not my boyfriend, Beattie.”

  “Didn’t say he was. I said, ‘Your old boyfriend.’”

  “He wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”

  “Well, he called. He’s coming in this afternoon.” She sniffed.

  “To put the dog down.”

  “Yep.” She stood for a moment, watching me, waiting for some response. She cleared her throat. “I ask myself, you know, what I would do. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Beattie,” I said, suddenly irritated, “you don’t even have any animals.”

  She turned to go. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” From the hall she called back, “I know what I know.”

  As I went to tell Mary Ellen I’d need her later for a euthanasia, I was smiling, smiling at Beattie. These were famous lines of hers, spoken, usually, at exactly the moment when she did not know what she did not know. I was thinking, I’ll tell Daniel—we had a store of her pronouncements. But then I realized where she’d come from to get to what she didn’t know, and I told myself that the story was based in a kind of animosity to Eli Mayhew that seemed too complicated and preposterous to explain.

  The snow continued wetly through the day, sometimes lightening briefly—the sun nearly breaking through and graying the sparse flakes—then thickening again, closing the world up around us. Night had fallen by four, a combination of the effect of the storm and the recent change from daylight savings time. The last two clients of the day had already called to cancel.

  Mary Ellen and I went up front to where Beattie had the radio turned to the news. We all stood around listening and eating cookies that Mary Ellen had had to buy at the bake sale for her day care center. Finally the announcer got to the weather: The snow was icing up now that the temperature was dropping; there’d already been a few fender benders in the evening commute. I looked outside. It was four-thirty, and our three cars were the only ones left in the parking lot.

  Beattie worriedly announced that she thought maybe she ought to go home early. Mary Ellen and I assured her this was fine. And actually, I was glad. I hadn’t wanted her around for Arthur’s euthanasia. Not that I thought she’d say or do anything while Eli was there, but she might make me uncomfortable somehow afterward. I was just as happy not to have to think about her comments.

  We told her now we’d help her close out the office, and we all began to move easily and efficiently around each other, turning off machines, locking up medications, filing, cleaning. Then Beattie was standing behind her desk, adding layer upon layer of sweaters and outerwear, most of them baggy and vividly colored and knit by herself. As I headed back to set up for Arthur and Eli, I heard her call, “See you tomorrow!” and I yelled, “Drive carefully.” The bell on the door jangled as she closed it.

  After she left, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether we would dispose of Arthur’s body or Eli would take it. When I was finished in back, I went to Beattie’s station behind the front counter and turned on her computer. I called up Eli’s file. There was usually a note as to the disposition of the body, and Beattie had made one here: Eli would take Arthur home. I went up to the start of the file, and there was the address. 11 Duxbury Court.

  Fancy. Expensive. A newish development in what had been the wooded part of an old estate. Eli’s home, and Arthur’s grave. I thought of the trails that had crisscrossed through the land before it was developed, of how, deep in the woods, you could see crumbling stone fences that had once marked off the open fields of old farms. Townspeople had used the estate for bird-watching, for walking dogs, as we sometimes did, or just as a retreat, a nearby place to go that made them feel far away from the world. When the owner died and his family sold it to a developer, there were protests and outraged letters in the local paper. To no avail. Time marched on. And brought me, I thought, Eli Mayhew.

  I closed down the computer and went to my exam room to wait.

  Eli arrived just after five-thirty. When I heard the bell jangle, I stepped into the hall and called out his name. He appeared around the corner with Arthur in his arms. He came slowly down the hall. He set the dog down on the table again. His face was grim and flat, and I realized by its absence now how much animation had livened it before.

  “How long does it take?” he asked. He was unwinding a long, elegant scarf from his neck. Snowdrops glistened on the shoulders of his jacket.

  “Just seconds, really. Some people prefer to stay, and other people say goodbye and wait outside. Whatever feels right to you.”

  “Jesus, nothing feels right about this. But I’m staying.” He wouldn’t look at me, I noticed. His face seemed shut in anger or pain.

  I kept my voice gentle. “I need to tell you, then, that it may not be easy. It should be, and most of the time it is—they just go to sleep. But some dogs vocalize. Some lose bowel or bladder control. Some thrash around a bit. I think what it is is that the feeling of the drug disturbs them.”

  “They cry?” he said.

  “Yes. Howl for a few seconds.”

  He turned sharply away. “Jesus.”

  “Arthur most likely won’t. I hope he doesn’t. But I want you to be prepared if he does.”

  There was a long silence in the room. Eli’s hands—I noticed again how large they were, but with long, graceful fingers—stroked Arthur’s shiny fur, over and over. Finally he did look up at me, to say, “I don’t know how you do this.”

  I shrugged. “Some vets won’t.” But that had always seemed the cruelest choice to me—when people needed it, to send them searching for someone who would do it, someone they and their animal didn’t know.

  “But you chose to.”

  “I don’t like it, Eli.”

  “No,” he said. “No, of course not.”

  We stood glumly for a minute. I was intensely aware of the bright-pink syringe lying on
my table. “Do you want a minute alone to say goodbye?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I said goodbye.” He looked up at me, his eyes shiny. “Let’s do it,” he said abruptly.

  I opened the door and called Mary Ellen. She came nearly instantly; she’d been waiting too. I made the briefest of introductions—a gesture, really, and their names—and then I turned away to get the syringe while she reached for Arthur’s front leg. “You can hold him, if you like,” I said to Eli. When I turned back, I saw that he had bent over Arthur, his face buried in the dog’s neck. He was speaking gently, saying what a good boy Arthur was, repeating this over and over. Arthur was making a soft, throaty noise of pleasure and poking at him with his muzzle.

  Mary Ellen nodded at me: she was ready. I came around her in front of Arthur, set my fingers beside the vein, and injected the needle. I pulled back slightly at the start, and the blood eased in—I had the vein. Quickly I pushed the pink fluid in.

  Arthur had turned to me briefly at the stick, but then he relaxed. And within a few seconds he went limp and rolled slightly farther to his side. I heard Eli’s sharp intake of breath. I had my fingers on Arthur’s vein now. I had felt the throbbing slow and stop. Nothing. I nodded at Mary Ellen and she left, silently. Now I set my stethoscope on Arthur. After a few seconds, I said to Eli, “He’s gone.”

  Eli stood up. He was looking down at Arthur, who lay utterly relaxed on his side now, his eyes slightly open. Eli’s eyes were red, his face was pulled into deep lines, nose to mouth, mouth to chin.

  My hands were trembling. “I’m sorry,” I said. I reached out to touch his arm, feeling his unfamiliar solidity under the thick fabric of his jacket. His head swayed slightly on his neck as if in response, and I remembered suddenly the way he’d looked when I saw him in the police station after Dana died.

  “I know,” he said, and turned again to the dead dog.

  He left a few minutes later, carrying Arthur out into the heavy wet snowfall in the box we provided. I stood at the door, watching him set the box down tenderly, watching him open the car and then load Arthur in.