You Never Get It Back by Cara Blue Adams

Author:Cara Blue Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the Wrong Time, to the Wrong People

SHE AND HER SISTER work together silently. They no longer need to speak. They focus on the dog, moving him as they would a mattress. Half collie, half German shepherd, he weighs a good eighty pounds. Together, they prop his forelegs on the stairs that lead to the second floor of the house. He whines softly as they raise his legs so that his body stretches toward the sky.

Teresa holds the dog’s bowl to his mouth. Seven. This is the seventh day that he has not been able to eat properly, that his esophagus has refused to function, that she and her sister have needed to hold him in such a way that gravity pulls the food from his throat to his stomach, so that he starves more slowly than he would otherwise. A rich, meaty smell rises from the dish she holds to his nose. The dog laps weakly, pants, grins at her.

Given his choice, the dog would have stopped eating days ago, would have let his weakness numb him, carry him off somewhere she can’t follow: into unconsciousness and then death. Death: she can name it, but he can’t, and she wonders, briefly, at the propriety of getting this dog to defend against her ex-husband, even to death, and then to refuse to relinquish him when nature attempts what violence has not.

“They don’t feel pain as we do,” the vet said once. What he meant, surely, was that the dog cannot think self-reflexively, cannot wonder what he would do if an intruder was to enter, whose life he would prefer to sacrifice—hers, her ex-husband’s, their daughters’, his own—and which second, which third, which fourth, which last—that lying awake wondering this cannot be a source of pain for a dog. But then a dog also cannot grow accustomed to pain, cannot come to greet it as a tolerable, if contemptible, dinner guest. Each time she feeds the dog this way, hurting him no matter how gently she hefts his skinny ribcage onto the carpeted stair, how much of his weight she supports with her own body, he casts his watery eyes on her with a look that says, I did not expect this from you.

When the dog finishes eating, tired—he rests his muzzle on the bowl, leaving half the portion of mushy food to congeal beneath his nose, as he would not have done even yesterday, even this morning—she and her sister ease him off the stairs. He limps to the window, circles three times, and plops with a sigh onto an old wool blanket she has spread for him. The dog carries himself with dignity, but no longer with grace; lying down is now a process of positioning himself over the spot where he will rest and letting go. She had thought to use her goose-down comforter—he deserved that, at least—but then she could not afford a new one, and the dog does not know the difference between one softness and another.

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