Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-four

It began with a voicemail. Melissa Moriarty, my dogsitter, or rather, Baker’s dogsitter, left a message on my work line saying that she had been trying to reach me on my cell phone without any success. She said she needed to talk to me — soon. My mobile phone, it’s worth noting, wasn’t working in Europe, and given my roving ways, she wouldn’t have had any idea where I was staying.

I called the house but got no answer. Mongillo had strapped himself in at his desk with the leftover Mexican food and begun working the phones. Martin returned to his office to mull our plight. Justine went wherever it is that publishers go on a Saturday night, which I’m sure was better than anyplace I had in mind. Edgar was protecting all things Record. So I bolted for the parking lot. I didn’t like the tone of Melissa’s voice, and especially didn’t like that she failed to say at the end of her message, as she usually does, that there was nothing to worry about, or that everything with Baker was great.

In the car, my cell phone rang, and it was her. As soon as I heard her unusually taut voice, I said I was on my way home.

“Get here quick,” she said.

“Is he all right?”

“I, I, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him like this before.” And with that, she started to cry.

I soared along the Southeast Expressway as if I were trying to take flight. I descended into the new tunnels of Boston’s infamous Big Dig, exited downtown, zigged and zagged along some waterfront streets, and screeched to a halt in my condominium building parking lot, all in what I would imagine was record time. I bolted from my car, up the stairs two and three steps at a time, and I thrust the key into the door lock as if I were trying to slay it.

Inside, Melissa stood in the living room with both her hands covering her mouth in fear as the tears rolled down her cheeks. Baker was flopped across the couch, his head down and his brown eyes open as he emitted a constant, low moan that seemed to be emanating from the base of his throat. Trotting through the room, I looked hard at Melissa and she shook her head in silence as she tried to collect herself.

I knelt down on the floor in front of the couch, saying in a soft and soothing voice, “I’m here, pal. I’m here. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Baker acknowledged me with a start. His body seemed to spasm once, and he slowly lifted his head, his big brown eyes glazed over in what was undoubtedly pain. His tail pounded several times against the cushions of the couch — Whump, whump, whump — as he focused his vision on my face.

“No, no, no,” I said softly, smiling at him, though it was a smile as forced as anything I’ve ever done in my life. “Put your head back down. Put it down.” Everything soft, smooth, reassuring.

His head still up, he let out a long, dramatic moan, his lips parting and his snout pointed directly at my nose — his way of telling me about his excruciating pain. I was just inches away from him, and I leaned in even closer and kissed the side of his muzzle. He then gave me a long, laborious lick, the grains of his enormous tongue slowly rubbing against every pore on my face.

His gums, I saw, were discolored white. His tongue was oddly dry. I calmly pressed his head back down on the couch and kissed his ear, whispering, “You’re going to be fine, goofball. You’re going to be fine.” Actually, I wasn’t so sure.

“He hasn’t eaten since you left.” That was Melissa, having gathered her wits, coming up from behind me, speaking in the type of low voice usually reserved for hospital rooms and funeral homes. “He’s barely touched any water. He doesn’t go to the bathroom much; he hasn’t really wanted to go out.”

I looked back at her, but before I could say anything, she knelt down beside me and added, “This dog loves you, Jack. A lot of times, when you go away, he gets depressed. I never wanted to tell you that before because I didn’t want you to worry. It usually just takes a day or two for him to perk up and be playful and want to eat. So at first, I just thought it was normal. But by yesterday, when he was still dragging around, I thought it was strange. And then an hour or so ago, he started with this moaning stuff, and hasn’t picked up his head until you arrived. If you didn’t call, I was about to take him to the vet.”

“Thank you,” I said to her. I didn’t know what else to say. Baker’s always had a weak stomach, and I was still hopeful, though not really, that he had a bad ache or a cramp. But I couldn’t get past the knowledge that I had never seen him act like this.

As Baker moaned and Melissa quietly wept and my entire life seemed to be caving in around me like sand into a formless hole, I gently ran my hands all across his furry body, not knowing what I was looking for until I found it, which was when I reached the soft, pink part of his stomach. There was a protrusion that wasn’t there before. I could touch it, feel it, and when I did, Baker moaned louder and tried but failed to lift his exhausted head.

I said, “I’m going to get him over to Angell.” I was referring to Angell Memorial Hospital, arguably the best animal hospital in the world, located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston about twenty minutes away. “You’d be doing us a huge favor if you stayed here and called ahead. His doctor’s name is Lisa Stoles. Maybe she’s there and you could talk to her and explain the symptoms, and if not to her, then any doctor on duty.”

With that, I scooped Baker up in my arms and carried him out the door and down the steps. Melissa came outside with me and opened the passenger side door to my car and I gently placed the dog on the seat beside me. He groaned and shot me a frightened look with those enormous brown eyes that were more familiar than anything else in my life, and then he put his chin down against the center console and moaned anew. This, I knew, was not good.

I caressed his head for the entire, tense ride, caressed around his neck, all over his floppy ears. His eyes were at half-mast. I think he was exhausted from the pain. He kept his eyes trained on me, wondering what was wrong, waiting for me to make it better. I kept telling him again and again and again, “You’re the best dog. You’re my best friend.” I’m not embarrassed to say that more than a couple of times, my voice caught with emotion. I could withstand a lot in this life I lead, but seeing my dog in this kind of pain was a little bit more than I could handle.

Baker kept moaning. I kept talking. He had been a massive part of my life for seven years now, sometimes, in my darkest days, the focus of my life, a reason to exist, making me laugh, always pulling me toward that elusive emotion called happiness.

He was my constant companion, introducing me to people, making me appreciate things that, but for him, I never would have otherwise — the smell of fresh turf on an early spring day, the warmth of the March sun, the sunsets over the Charles River, the crunch of leaves on a chilly autumn night.

He was with me the night that my wife and infant daughter died in the delivery room and I returned from the hospital in an uncomprehending daze. He saw me through girlfriends, new apartments, a move from Washington to Boston, huge stories, endless slumps, bouts of sickness, and the occasional job-related wound. He was trained to walk off-leash, to never jump, not to beg, to wait politely outside stores. He loved kids, and as such, would search out mothers pushing carriages along city sidewalks, then calmly walk beside them, always glancing back at me with a look that said, “Why can’t we get one of these?”

He was a scholar of all things me. He would carefully, quietly, read my moods. When I was happy, he would engage me. Those times I was sad, he would entertain me, run his tongue over my nose until I laughed. Always, every day, his entire philosophy could be broken down into three simple words: Count me in. If I was doing it, whether it was errands or a car drive or a day at the beach, he wanted to do it as well. And usually, he did.

When I pulled up to the hospital emergency room, I bolted around the car, opened his door, and lifted him out onto the pavement. When I put him carefully down, his legs buckled and he fell slowly to the ground with a long, loud moan. He stared at me through those frightened eyes with an odd mix of embarrassment and pain.

I said to him, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I whispered this into his ear, hoisted him back up, and carried him through the automatic doors. Inside, a young man in those pale green hospital scrubs met me in the lobby with a rolling gurney.

“Mr. Flynn?” he asked. I nodded. “Put the dog right down here,” he said, tapping the cold top of the metal cart. I did, and he immediately took off with Baker, me trotting along beside them. Even with all the commotion, Baker’s head remained flat against the surface and his gaze never left mine.

We hurriedly moved through a waiting room filled with people sitting on hard plastic chairs and holding small cages in their laps containing anything from sneezing cats to whining birds. We made our way down a long hallway with painted pale yellow cinder-block walls and the type of shiny linoleum floors that are typically reserved for parochial high schools.

The orderly stopped outside a plain wood door, knocked once, and pushed it open. Inside was a small, bland examination room, with a sink and counter in one corner, a metal table in the middle, a chart that showed various pictures of tapeworms and heart-worms on the near wall, and a light fixture for X-ray shots on the far wall. The young man pushed the cart next to the table and was about to lift Baker from one to the other when I cut in and said, “I’ll do it.” For whatever reason, I didn’t want anyone’s hands on him right now but mine.

Baker sprawled on the table in the same position he had assumed on the couch — stretched out, his head down, his glazed eyes open, a guttural sound emanating from within. The kid asked me a series of typically stupid questions — stupid because the vet would walk in any moment and ask me the same things all over again. I impatiently answered them until I think he began to fear that I might do him some harm, at which point he backed toward the door and said, “I’ll go find the doctor.” And he was gone.

“You’re the best boy in the world,” I whispered into Baker’s ear. “The very best boy.” His tail thumped against the hard surface several times. He had a look on his face like he had done something wrong, so I caressed his forehead and his muzzle and repeatedly said, “You’re going to be fine, pal. You’re going to be just fine.”

A few minutes later, the door opened and Lisa Stoles came in with a concerned look on her well-preserved face. She was a woman of about sixty, with an unkempt mane of grayish black hair that flowed down beyond her shoulders, a true Cantabrigian who I suspect lolled away endless hours in Harvard Square coffee bars reading a much dog-eared copy of Moby Dick or War and Peace. Of this I had little doubt: She loved animals, Baker particularly, and she was every inch as smart as she looked.

“Jesus, I’m glad you’re on tonight,” I said as she made her way into the room.

“So am I,” she said, her tone concerned. She kept walking right toward Baker. The dog whacked his tail a few more times for good measure when he heard her voice. His eyes opened wider. He liked Lisa, despite himself, though he knew that the things she represented — needles and pulling and prodding — he could live without. Or not.

“What is wrong with my Baker?” she asked in her dog voice.

Thump, thump, thump.

I showed her the bulge. I explained the symptoms. She felt around, put her stethoscope up to his heart, looked at his gums, probed inside his mouth, peered into his big brown eyes one at a time. All along, he kept his head down on the cold metal and his gaze focused on mine.

“I’m going to need X-rays, immediately,” she said, and I lifted him from the examination table onto the cart and she began rolling him out. I followed her until she said, “You stay here, Jack. I don’t want him distracted by you. We’ll be back in ten minutes.”

As she pulled him out the door, he lifted his head up with a monumental struggle, his eyes focused like lasers on mine, and let out a long, soft, moan. “Good boy,” I said, but the words didn’t really get out, and by the time I cleared my throat enough to speak, the wood door had clicked shut and I was standing in the spare room all alone.

Standing there with nothing more than my fears, awful memories rushed into my addled mind, first and foremost, the vision of Katherine staring panicked at me on her delivery room bed as her doctor ordered me in no uncertain terms to get out of the room. It is a look that will haunt me the rest of my life.

Then better ones, of Baker, the way he’d sit obediently in front of me to take his arthritis medicine, how he’d paw at tennis balls that rolled under the couch, chewing on sticks in the park while I shot baskets, proudly stalking squirrels in the Public Garden that he never actually caught. “That’s 0 for 7,943,” I used to tell him, and he’d give me a sidelong glance that said, “Whatever.”

He was my last link to a way of life that was never supposed to end — a gift from my late wife, a puffy little ball of blonde fur presented in a hatbox a few days before Christmas as we sipped red wine on the couch and looked at a newly purchased tree that wouldn’t stand straight in its stand. To lose him now was to lose a little bit more of Katherine. No, make that a lot of Katherine, because Baker, physically speaking, was the last remaining tie that binds, and I often pictured that wonderful woman somewhere in the Great Wherever looking at us with a smile on her face as we walked through the park or wrestled on the living-room floor, and saying to herself, “My two boys.” What would happen if I were to lose that?

Not to be overly dramatic, but put it this way: My life is his life. He is there every morning when I wake up; sometimes, he’s the one who wakes me by licking my hand or my chin as a gentle reminder that I’m cutting into his daily routine. If I rose too early, he would fake being asleep, not quite ready to rouse before his desired time. I would hear him have little dreams in the still dark of the night on my bedroom floor, small yelps as he shuffled his paws as if he were in hot pursuit of a neighborhood cat. If I read too late on the couch or got caught up in a show on television, he would stand up with a long, dramatic sigh, pad back to the bedroom, and flop down on the L. L. Bean bed that Katherine had gotten him years before.

We had walked thousands of miles together, had made tens of thousands of throws of the dirty tennis balls that he constantly carried around in his mouth, maintained a running seven-year conversation. If he could actually speak, he’d probably be constantly telling me to shut the hell up. Most important, to borrow that line from the great political novel The Last Hurrah: How do you thank someone for a million laughs?

I was so lost in thought that I jumped when my cell phone rang. I was still standing, leaning with my back flush against the cinder-block wall, and I peered at the incoming number long enough to realize that I didn’t recognize it. At that moment, as the phone continued to ring, the door opened up and the male orderly backed in with Baker following on the cart. The ringing stopped and the kid pushed him toward me and said, “The doctor said she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He quickly got out of the room.

Baker was still moaning, but he thumped his tail again when he saw me, and I buried my face into the soft fur on the side of his neck and told him that nothing would ever go wrong as long as I had any say in it. The question is, did I?

A few minutes later the door opened again, and Lisa Stoles walked in. She wore a flowing peasant skirt beneath a bright white laboratory coat, and her unruly hair was now pulled into a loose bun on the back of her neck. She carried an oversize manila folder. She leaned back on the examination table facing Baker and me and said in a no-nonsense voice that will be forever lodged in that worst part of my mind, “Jack, things don’t look very good.”

Those words hit me like an uppercut. Emotion began to wash from my chest up into my head, as I told myself to stay clear and remain calm.

“Tell me,” I said, swallowing hard. My hand was absently caressing Baker’s ear. His head was still flush on the metal.

She pulled the X-rays out of the folder, walked around to the lamp and flicked on the light. “Push him over here,” she said. I did, and she turned the overhead lights off in the room. She placed a print up against the light-board and pointed at it with a retracted pen.

“I’ve already gone over this with the head of oncology at the hospital, who happens to be on tonight, and she is in complete agreement over what we see. This is a side view of Baker’s stomach. You can see this unusual mass down here, very large. It’s a tumor, a very rapidly growing one, hemangiosarcoma, and it’s opened up and bleeding into his stomach. It could fully burst at any moment now, and if and when that happens, he will die of shock or loss of blood.”

My head went light. I lost all feeling in my body — my hands and my feet and everything else. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see anything, until I turned my face and looked down at the fabulous animal stretched across the gurney beside me, still moaning, still scared, still in deep pain. Now I knew why.

“We could operate,” she said, and I quickly cut her off, saying, “Then do it.”

She didn’t respond. Instead, she pulled the print off the light-board, placed it on the table, and picked another X-ray from the folder. She adhered that up against the pale glow.

“Except for this, Jack. Except for this. Here’s a view, straight-on, of Baker’s chest. Take a look at all these little masses. They’re called metastases, and they’re lodged into his bones, his lungs, and I’m sure in his other vital organs as well. This was a brutally fast-moving tumor, and it’s spread throughout his entire body before you or I or probably even Baker realized it was there.”

I shook my head. I was trying to focus on the X-ray, but couldn’t make out what she was telling me that I needed to see. I blinked hard, stared harder, all as my hand kept rubbing the side of my dog’s face. “What are you saying?” I finally asked.

She folded her arms across her white coat and replied, “I’m saying that, yes, I could do the surgery. We could do it right now. We’d try to pull the tumor from his stomach, and sometimes we get it and it works, and sometimes it doesn’t and the patient dies during the procedure. But even if it was a success, he’s still riddled with tumors everywhere else. He’s never going to fully recover. He’s never going to be healthy again, to run or even walk, or eat, or play. Jack, I hate to tell you this, but I have to. Even if we do the surgery, Baker’s probably going to be dead within a few weeks, best case, and those aren’t going to be comfortable weeks for him. He’s going to be in real pain.”

She paused. I sucked in the stale air in that tiny room, trying to maintain composure, keep my balance, hold on to some vestige of clear thought.

“If you decide on the surgery,” she said, her gaze tight on mine, “it’s for you, not for him. I know how much you love that dog, Jack, and I think I know why, and I love him too. He’s a wonderful animal, my favorite patient. But I have to say, the most humane thing you can do right now is to put him out of his misery and have him pass gently.”

My left hand instinctively covered my eyes as my right hand stayed on Baker’s face. I fought back tears with every ounce of will that I had, and once I found the composure to speak, I said, “Can you give me some time with him in here?”

“Whatever you need.”

She flicked on the overhead lights, shut down the X-ray board, and walked over to the cupboard by the sink. She pulled out a blanket and spread it on the hard floor. She placed a medicine bottle on the counter next to a catheter and a syringe. Every move seemed to be in slow motion, every sound lumbered through my head.

She said, “Just open this door up whenever you two are ready, and I’ll be right along.” And she walked out, clicking the door shut behind her.

I picked Baker up, set him gently down on the blanket, and sat beside him on the floor. I tried to remember every one of those miles we walked on the coldest winter mornings and the softest summer nights. I tried to recall every one of those balls that he fetched, the cookies that he ate, the rawhides that he chewed, the countless times he’d whack me with his paw in an indication that he wanted to be rubbed.

The crying started not in my eyes, but my chest, a quaking rumble that rolled up my throat and into my face until I began to shed a storm of tears — little droplets that rolled down my cheeks and onto his. He struggled again to lift his head and gave me a short lick, but he put his cheek back down on the wool blanket with a painful groan.

How, I wondered to myself, could a grown man who had lost his wife and infant daughter be this upset over the death of his dog? Then I realized: It’s partly because I lost my wife and daughter that I was this upset. Baker was all I truly had.

“Seven years, pal. Seven years of laughs. Seven years of fun. Seven years of stability, of responsibility, seven years of faith, seven years of the best friendship that I’ll ever have.” And I cried anew, kissing his ear, his muzzle, his cheek below his eye. He wagged his tail again, but I knew he wasn’t happy; he was scared, and so was I.

I collected myself. I rubbed my palms along my face as I thought of a random morning seven years ago when I got up early to make waffles and Baker fell sound asleep in bed with Katherine, his paws draped over the back of her neck. When I came into the room to wake her, the two of them lifted their heads in unison.

I thought of him earlier in the week, on Tuesday morning, when he pawed at the glass door to the balcony because he wanted to be outside in the sun with Elizabeth and me. He had the tumor then, and I had no idea.

“You’re the best friend in the world, pal. My very best friend.” I rubbed my hands up and down his sides, trying to bring him some comfort in a time of tremendous pain. He moaned and thumped and kept looking at me, and the thought struck me like a bolt that maybe he knew what was happening, and maybe he had some innate understanding that it was his time to go.

As I rubbed his head, I heard laughter coming from outside the door, two technicians cracking jokes. Someone else yelled something about going on break, their voices bouncing off the walls. I heard a squeaky cart being wheeled down the hall. Life went on, but for the two souls here in this room, everything had just changed.

“I love you,” I said. “I have since the day Katherine brought you home, and I’ll love you until the day I join you wherever it is that we go. Hopefully they’ll have a crate of tennis balls there.” And I kissed him long and hard on the bridge of his nose. I stood up, steadied myself, and opened the door.

A moment later, Lisa walked back in. “You’re ready?” she said in a low voice. I wondered how many times she had done this before, put dogs down, comforted emotional owners. Probably every day of her career.

I nodded. I was back on the floor, sitting beside Baker, my hands caressing his head. She said, “I’m going to put a catheter in his front leg, then administer him a dose of barbiturates that will overwhelm his system. He’ll be very peaceful. There won’t be any pain. And in a moment, it will be done.”

She looked at me with pursed lips and I nodded again. She knelt on the floor and put the catheter in his front leg. Baker and I stared at each other. I told him, repeatedly, “You’re the best boy in the world. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” I fought back tears with every ounce of energy that I had.

She put a blue solution inside the catheter and I watched it out of the corner of my eye flow down the tube and into his leg.

“You’re the very, very best boy,” I said, putting my face directly against his. “You’re my best boy.”

He gave me a half lick. His eyes went from open to half-mast, and then they closed. I kept rubbing his ear, his forehead, his neck. Lisa pressed the stethoscope to his chest and pulled it away.

“He’s gone, Jack.”

I kissed him one final time, letting my face linger on the top of his head, feeling his warm fur tickle my eyes, my cheeks, the sides of my nose, as I had so many thousands of times before.

And that was it. I got up and looked down at the most beautiful animal that I will ever know. And at that moment, I was in every way alone.