Lily And The Octopus Part 6

"You scared me." I cup her head in my hands and she looks like a nun in a wimple.

She licks her chops for any remaining flavor from the pill pocket. "I know you put medicine in those things."

"I know you know." Then I add, "The medicine will help you heal."

Lily considers this. "Can I have my red ball?"

I gently lift her up and study her Frankenstein scar. It's like she's now a.s.sembled from two different dogs: the puppy who will always want to play, and the senior dog who must come to understand her limits. I make her a promise: "Soon."

I place Lily gently on a layer of towels in our bed, nestled safely between Jeffrey and me, and the pain pill and the toll of the day knock her out within minutes. Sleep comes fast for me, as well. It's almost impossible to believe that when I woke up this morning I was in San Francisco.

I dream of the beach where Lily would run off-season when she was a puppy. In my dream she runs and runs, not getting anywhere fast. There are other dogs, bigger dogs, and she wants to run near them but not with them; she's slightly intimidated by their size and the sand they kick up with their paws. Her whole body is a compression spring that launches her with each step into momentary levitation. Her floppy ears bound upward with each gallop, sometimes floating there in the wind as if someone has put them on pause. When she comes back to me I know they will be flipped backward, pinned to her head and the back of her neck. I spend half my life restoring that dog's ears to their factory setting.

THE! SAND! IS! SO! SQUISHY! UNDER! MY! PAWS! AND! LOOK! HOW! VAST! THE! OCEAN! WATCH! ME! RUN! WITHOUT! MY! LEA- Before she can say leash, a wave sweeps in and engulfs her delicate paws in a strand of slick seaweed and a look of terror washes over her face.

SERPENT! SERPENT! SERPENT!.

She turns and hightails it to drier sand, closer to the dunes where the last of the tall gra.s.s waves. Immediately, her nose picks up the scent of a dead crab. She rips off a leg and runs with it in her mouth off into the distance until she is no more than a speck on the horizon.

In the morning, Jeffrey and I dress quickly and immediately take Lily outside. We set her on the gra.s.s and again she is able to stand. She even attempts an excited step or two, looking not unlike Bambi but with shorter legs, before I can calm her to keep her from overexerting herself. "Shhh. Shhh. Shhh."

Jeffrey looks to intervene but I shrug him off. This is my job. This is my moment. I will not be a coward, I will not be afraid. I will not be someone who can love only so much. I will not be someone who is not whole or fully present when things get tough. I will not let others do the heavy lifting for me. I will not be distracted by a text message. Wringing the p.i.s.s out of this dog I love-this is my Everest. This is on me.

I tuck Lily's hind legs under her and settle her into her usual crouch, legs slightly splayed like a frog's. From behind her I reach under her abdomen and feel for the water balloon, for the soft squish the size of a lemon. When I find it, I take a deep breath, gird myself, and squeeze. Up and to the back.

I don't know what's different in the morning light-the fullness of her bladder, her willingness to do her part, my fearlessness brought on by the dawn of a new day, the dream of her running, the desire to see her run again. Whatever it is, when I squeeze up and to the back her tail rises to that familiar forty-five-degree angle that makes it look like a missile about to launch and slowly she starts to pee.

"She's doing it! You're doing it!" I'm so excited I almost let go. But I don't. I continue to squeeze.

Lily is startled by the sensation and overwhelmed with relief. Jeffrey pumps his fist and we both break out in smiles.

"At last," Jeffrey says, relieved.

"Ha-ha!" I am triumphant.

Lily attempts to stand and I realize I can stop squeezing. I gently guide her over the puddle of her making.

"You did it, Bean." Everything else fades away.

I'm the happiest I have ever been.

Suction Monday The octopus sits in his usual perch as Lily and I make our way to the veterinarian's office. We skirt the construction around LACMA because no one in Los Angeles knows how to merge. Lily sits as she always does when I drive, in my lap with her chin nestled in the crook of my left elbow-the arm I try in vain to steer with as I downs.h.i.+ft with my right. She looks up at me, annoyed, whenever we actually have to make a turn. The octopus hasn't said anything this morning. He doesn't have to; the echo of his voice rings hauntingly in my brain. He's getting bigger by the hour.

The waiting room is small and dark and cramped, the brown linoleum floor is peeling in the corners, and any available breathing room is filled with shelves of dietary pet food and supplements with names like Rimadyl and Glycoflex. I'm not sure why I still go to this vet, other than that it's close to my house. This is a pattern in my life I need to rethink: Jenny the therapist, this dumpy veterinary office. I will say there are new doctors here who are better than the last rotation, who disappeared suddenly after some unflattering Yelp reviews.

I find a seat on an empty bench made of wood and wrought iron. It makes me feel like I'm waiting for a trolley. The shelves tower over us, which would be our doom in an earthquake, but also mercifully provide at least the illusion of privacy. Veterinary offices can be a grab bag of emotions. Cats are always frightened and in crates, their owners equally skittish. There are happy dogs here for simple things like checkups, excited to be out in the world and scenting the lingering promise of a biscuit. There are nervous dogs who hate the vet under any circ.u.mstance. There are sick and injured dogs with fretful owners who may bark and lunge and bite. There are owners leaving with no pets, having just received some kind of devastating news. And then there's us. People with dogs with octopuses on their heads. We, apparently, are the worst of the lot. Since we are too horrific and deformed to look at, others who pa.s.s through give us a wide berth.

After some time, we are led into an examining room to wait for the doctor. I set Lily down on the table and she flinches as her pads make contact with cold metal. I stroke her back to get her to stay calm. This room is also small. On the wall is a poster promoting pet dental care with photos of dog teeth in varying stages of decay. The wallpaper, somewhat ironically, is the color of gum disease.

The vet enters with a smile. He's the cutest of the newer staff and I've named him Doogie in my head because he looks too young to be a doctor, even an animal doctor, which may (or may not, who really knows?) require fewer years in school. His khakis have pleats and I wonder if I should mention something about how outdated they look, but maybe he wears them in an attempt to look older.

"What brings you in today?"

Flabbergasted, I stare at him square in the eye. If he was reading a chart, or looking at notes from Lily's patient file, that would be one thing. But he's looking right at my dog with that grin. This is probably where his inexperience cuts against him.

"Are you serious?" It's all I can stammer.

"How is Lily?" He pulls back her lips and stares at her teeth. What's he getting at? I know they are old. I know they're rotting. I know both her teeth and her gums are victims of my tight budget and neglect. But are they worse than what's on her head? Is that really what he's saying? What is the obsession in this place with teeth?!

"Well, for starters, she has an octopus on her head."

The vet lets go of her jaw, looks at Lily's head, and blanches.

"Oh."

Yes, oh.

The vet crouches down to get a better view of the octopus.

"How long has that been there?"

"I first noticed him late last week."

He grabs Lily by the snout and angles her head around to get a good look at it from all sides. "And an octopus, you're calling it."

"What would you call it?" I begin to scan the room to see if there is a framed veterinary degree of some kind on the wall that might inspire confidence. I remember Internet-stalking Doogie after our last visit because I thought he was handsome. I think he went to school in Pennsylvania, but now I'm not so sure. The pants, his cluelessness. Maybe he just purchased a degree from a fake school in Guam. I won't be Internet-stalking him again.

Doogie doesn't break his study of the octopus. He touches it, taps it, and then reaches for a few gauze squares and tries to squeeze it. "Octopus is as good a word as any." His tone suggests that he's trying to keep me calm.

"Careful," I tell him. "You're going to make him angry."

He gets his hands fully around the octopus. "I'd say he's already pretty angry." Doogie stands up, steps on a lever to open the lid of a covered metal garbage can marked Medical Waste, and tosses the gauze away.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?"

"First, we need to know more. I'd like to take Lily into the back and see if I can't get a needle into it and extract some fluid. Then we can run some tests to see what we're dealing with."

Lily looks up at me, annoyed as I am. This makes me lose my patience.

"We're dealing with an octopus!" I'm red in the face and I can feel sweat forming on my back even though I don't want to be this worked up. So help me G.o.d, if he wants to look at the octopus's teeth.

"I know that. But the more we know about the octopus, the more we will know how to fight him."

This is the first reasonable thing he has said, so I crouch down to speak directly to Lily. "Go with the doctor. He's going to get a better look at the octopus. I'll be right out here."

Doogie collects a veterinary a.s.sistant and they whisk Lily away. Back in the waiting room, I flip through an old copy of Dog Fancy magazine. There are articles like "Five Mutts Who Rose to Fame" and "Spotlight on the English Springer Spaniel." These don't interest me. But "Dental Debate Erupts over Teeth Cleaning" does, at least enough to dog-ear the page and hopefully catch the attention of at least one rational thinker in this G.o.dforsaken place.

I pull out my phone and go to my photo archive to look at pictures of Lily before the octopus came. She and I on a cliff overlooking Santa Barbara that one time we took a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. Her asleep on her paw-print blanket, the sun from the window highlighting the red in her brown coat. Her in the bathtub, wet and annoyed. The two of us in a selfie, exchanging good night kisses in bed before sleep. Her on the sofa sitting like the Great Sphinx of Giza, because I liked the way her coat looked against the gray tweed upholstery. Another selfie-this time we're in the backyard and she's wearing a lei I got her on Maui. This one is only a few weeks old, a happier time already long ago.

Something in the picture catches my eye. I use two fingers to zoom in on the photo until I'm focused on her right temple, and there he is, in his usual perch just above her right eye-the octopus, but smaller, younger, less p.r.o.nounced. How could I not have seen him then? Did he come back with me from Hawaii? Catch a ride in that lei? Did I somehow pick him up from the beach that day when I walked with Wende and Harlan and Jill collecting sea gla.s.s? Or when I was swimming in the ocean, my guard down, my cares floating away? Did I bring this upon us by needing to get away with my friends? Or did he crawl out of the Pacific at Santa Monica Beach while I was not there to stop him? Attach himself to my dog while I was on an island sipping rum thousands of miles away? I'm awash in horrible, stomach-churning feelings of guilt. It was just five nights in Hawaii-how could that come with so huge a cost?

"Excuse me, hon." The large woman who answers the phone is trying to retrieve a few cans of diabetic dog food from the shelf near my feet. I sit up in the chair and swing my legs in the other direction. She grunts as she bends down to get them.

I put my phone away and turn my attention back to Dog Fancy, but I don't even get into the debate over teeth cleaning before Doogie calls my name.

"Edward?"

When I get back to the examining room, Lily is there on the table waiting for me. She looks pained.

"How did it go?"

"We weren't able to get a needle as deeply into the octopus as I would have liked."

"He's a tough sonofab.i.t.c.h," I concede.

"We were able to extract a few cells, hopefully enough to tell us if the octopus is malignant. We'll have to send them out to our lab."

I show Doogie the picture of Lily in her lei, with the octopus in his infancy. I tell him about the octopus as I know him, about the seizure Lily had last night. He nods and listens and makes a few notes in his chart. Lily doesn't add anything, but that's not unusual. She often clams up at the vet.

"Once we get the report back from the lab we'll know more. We can try her on certain medications, an antiseizure medication for one, but you know, our best options for dealing with the . . ."

"Octopus." Why is everyone so stupid?

". . . octopus are probably surgical."

I look away, purposefully. It would help if there were a window to gaze out of; instead, I'm confronted with the dental care poster again. I think of the dog-eared copy of Dog Fancy in the waiting room and hope to G.o.d someone who works here finds it.

"How old is Lily again?" The vet flips through her chart for the answer.

"Twelve," I say. "And a half."

He puts the chart down. "That's older than optimal for invasive surgery. The anesthesia alone can be a risk for older dogs. But we can discuss our options in more detail midweek."

"When you hear back from the lab." I sound defeated. I feel defeated, especially when I'm asked to pay $285 for the privilege of being told to wait until Wednesday to be given options that aren't really options at all.

We get in the car and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they're after my soul and not just my parking spot and so we sit there for the twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the pa.s.senger seat into my lap and curls up in a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh.

"You okay, Bean?"

"They put a needle in my head."

"They put a needle in the octopus."

Lily looks at me as if they're one and the same and I wonder if she's already giving up hope. I feel like I've swallowed my own bag of wasabi peas as my throat starts to burn and then close. I try to focus on something, anything, and I choose the spelling of wasabi and how odd it is that I can't remember if it ends with an ie or just an i. I think it's just an i. Can that be right? Both ways I can see a squiggly red line underneath, like the word processor in my brain is telling me there's no correct way to spell it. Is wasabi a proper noun? Should it be capitalized? No, it's just a plant, isn't it? I want to run back inside the veterinary office and have them do for me what they did for Lily all those years ago: give me back my ability to breathe. And maybe confirm the spelling of wasabi. I can't remember the last time I've taken a breath, a long, deep, true breath, the kind they talk about in Lamaze cla.s.ses and on yoga DVDs. Hawaii, I guess. Vacation. When I was free of work and deadlines and dating and the need for anything else but to just be. But the last time at home? Without mai tais easing my circulation? I can't say.

I feel a sudden need to forget the morning, to turn the day around. To vomit the wasabi peas.

To breathe again.

"You know what we need?" I ask. I don't even wait for her to guess. Lily perks up; she can tell by the tone of my voice I'm going to say something that she finds exciting. "Ice cream."

On the way home, we stop at the corner pet store near our house, the one the Korean family runs, and I select a peanut b.u.t.ter frozen yogurt made especially for dogs. I don't even wait for us to get home.

The octopus blinks and asks, "What you got there?" I don't think I'll ever get used to hearing him speak.

"Nothing," is my reply. I hold the Styrofoam dish for Lily right there in the car and she laps at it hungrily until the frozen treat is gone. Even then she licks the empty dish for another three minutes, her mood brightened.

The octopus eyes me hungrily the whole time, but I don't let him have any. I hope not to pay dearly for that later.

Tuesday Lily and I have no standing plans on Tuesday nights, so when Trent calls and says we should go grab a drink by the beach, I agree. It's night, and I immediately have second thoughts-it feels like a ha.s.sle to go all the way to the beach this late when you can't even see the beach-but Trent is already down there for a business dinner that's just ending, and the beach always seems like a getaway, a respite, a destination. Even in darkness you can smell the salt.w.a.ter, hear the cras.h.i.+ng waves, feel the cool ocean breeze. These used to be of comfort; now, the ocean is mostly the swamp the octopus crawled out of. Trent wants to know what the vet said about Lily's prognosis, and since I don't have Jenny until Friday, it's probably a good idea for me to talk.

Trent is feeling nostalgic and suggests this gay bar we went to in the nineties that's right across the Pacific Coast Highway from Will Rogers Beach, specifically the gay section of Will Rogers Beach known affectionately as Ginger Rogers. Parking is usually a nightmare, but I luck out and find the perfect spot under a broken streetlamp, hidden from drivers in a pool of gloom. It's maddeningly too small, and after five minutes of trying to fit in the d.a.m.n thing I have to concede defeat and move on to the next spot I find a good quarter mile away.

On my hike back to the bar I step in a puddle. It hasn't rained in weeks, so that's of some concern. I try to text Trent but my phone is frozen and I have to give it a hard reboot. When I finally make it to the bar, the exterior looks different. It has a nautical theme like I remember, but something is amiss. I guess the bar could look at my haggard face and say the same about me.

The place is dimly lit, but it's easy to spot Trent sitting at the bar; he's one of the few people here. I pull back the stool next to him, wave for the bartender, and take a seat.

"What made you think of this place?" I ask.

"Client dinner. The fog of work. Remembering simpler times."

The bartender comes over and he's good looking, but not the threatening kind of good looking that's usually a job requirement for bartenders in gay bars. I ask Trent what he's drinking and he says vodka tonic so I order the same.

"What did the vet say?" Trent asks. "What are the options?"

The bartender pushes the drink in my direction, at the last second adding a lime. I reach for my wallet before Trent stops me. "I opened a tab."

I take a sip of the drink and it's strong, which I like. "They can either make her comfortable with medications to stop any pain and seizures, or they can put her under, take a bigger sample of the octopus, and devise a more aggressive treatment plan."

"What are you going to choose?"

I shrug and take another sip of my drink. "I dunno. I have to talk it over with Lily."

"It's your decision, though."

"Is it?" I look around the deserted bar. "Where is everyone?"

Trent turns around and flinches, like it's the first time he's noticing the emptiness. "Don't know. I guess it's a later crowd."

The bartender must be eavesdropping because he chimes in. "It picks up after eleven."

I take out my phone to check the time, but it's not rebooting and I plunk it down on the bar. "Great. f.u.c.king Tuesdays."

"What's wrong with Tuesdays?" Trent asks.

"Everything. Monday's always Monday, but at least it's the start of something new. Wednesday is hump day, Thursday's almost Friday, and Friday brings the weekend. But Tuesday? Nada."

Trent looks at me and shakes his head. "What difference does it make? You work at home."