42
TATUM
DECEMBER
Monster collapses on the kitchen floor while I’m pouring myself coffee. I hear a loud thud, and it takes a moment to register because Joey is at school, and the house is otherwise quiet, just as I need it to be to go over the towering stack of scripts this afternoon. I’ve promised my team I’ll make a pick on my next three projects—line up my entire next year—by Christmas. Piper and Scooter and the kids are arriving in two days; I’ve left myself no time to consider the next twelve months of my life.
I race around the kitchen island and see him, helpless, shaken, in a pool of his urine.
“Monster! Oh baby boy, oh sweet boy, no, no, no, I’m here.” I sink to my knees and cradle his head.
His lost eyes find mine, his nose nuzzling my lap.
He is too big for me to carry myself. And I promised myself I wouldn’t call Ben. It’s a stupid thing: my pride, the welt that sits with me because he’s with Amanda, and I’m still alone. There’s Damon, but that isn’t much of anything yet, just a second date where he kissed me again, and I felt woozy with desire, but then I said good night and returned to my cocoon, behind my wall, figurative and literal. I can’t call Damon because my dog is dying.
I find my cell in my back pocket and dial the vet.
“My dog, Monster Connelly Livingston, he . . . he collapsed, and he’s breathing and I guess he’s alert, but he’s a hundred pounds, and I can’t get him to you, and I don’t know what to do now . . .”
I don’t even realize I’m crying until Monster licks my fallen tears off his snout.
“Ms. Connelly,” she says, because she always knows when Hollywood royalty calls—it happens this way all over town. “We’ll send someone with a van out to you immediately.”
“You can do that?” I hiccup.
“We provide the service,” the receptionist says. What she means is We provide the service to people who are special. “Our driver will be to you within fifteen minutes.”
“OK,” I breathe. “OK.”
It turns out I don’t have to call Ben, or Damon, or anyone who can penetrate my bubble. The vet will send a van. I kiss Monster’s snout and tell myself that I won’t fall apart when I say good-bye to him alone.
The vet assures me that I have time. If I’d like, he says, I can take Monster home, make him comfortable with pain meds, but he has a tumor that is untreatable, and it will one day, literally, explode his heart. It’s cancer. Fast-moving and vicious. But he can live for a few months until it ultimately eats him from the inside out. They’ve sedated him for now so they could do all the proper scans, take a closer view of the tumor on his heart.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Connelly, this is difficult news,” Dr. Britton says, resting his hand on my shoulder. I jump, and he pulls back. “I apologize, I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”
“No, I just . . .” What can I say? That other than my son or when faking love with costars, no one touches me anymore, Damon’s two kisses notwithstanding? I miss those lazy days in bed with Ben from so many moons ago; the way he held me even in his sleep, the way he’d massage my ankles after the long shifts at P. F. Chang’s. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just falling apart a bit.”
“Everyone does,” the kind man says. “This is the impossible part of loving a dog.”
“How do I bring him home, knowing that his heart will explode?” My voice breaks, and the tears come quickly.
“Can you call someone? That will help. This decision doesn’t have to be on you.”
I shake my head no.
“Are you sure? Going through this alone can be very tough.”
I wonder if he’s read about me: surely, he knows I have a (semi-ex-) husband, a son, an entourage. There is no anonymity for me any longer, even in my dying dog’s vet’s office. He doesn’t mean to pry, and he doesn’t even mean to allude to all the details he knows about me without actually knowing anything. That’s just how it is now. When Damon takes me to a jazz club for our second date and heads turn, when I show up for Joey’s birthday celebration at school and eyes widen, when I bring my cancer-laden dog to the hospital.
“He was the best dog I ever could have asked for,” I say.
“If we could find a way to make them live forever, we would,” he concurs. “Let me give you a minute. I’ll check back and you let me know what you decide.”
He closes the door behind him, and I’m alone again.
My shaking hands find my phone in my purse. I don’t want to call Ben, I don’t want to call Ben, I don’t want to call Ben. He’s moved on, and I need to get that, that calling him is needy, emotional, is something you do with your partner, which he’s not now. But who else is there? Daisy is in New York, and Luann is on my payroll, not a friend for the sake of pure friendship. I haven’t spoken to Mariana in weeks. Lily Marple? Has it come to me calling Lily Marple when my dog is dying?
I remember how I brought Monster home, back to our Ocean Avenue bungalow, how I thought a dog would be a great idea to prepare for kids, how Ben was skeptical and not on board, so I promised to do all the work. I didn’t, of course. He rose early to walk him and feed him because of my late shifts at P. F. Chang’s, and he’d take him to the beach to burn off his endless energy, and he caved and let him sleep in our bed after the first month, when I’d already ignored that rule anyway.
I’d promised that Monster would be mine alone, but I’d broken that promise to Ben—probably knew that I would from the start—and he graciously, openheartedly accepted it.
And now our beloved dog has a tumor on his own heart.
I consider this, and how maybe I feel like I have a tumor on my heart too.
But I don’t. I’m lucky enough that I don’t.
My poor, poor boy. I love him so very much, love him as if I’ve birthed him.
I realize that so does Ben. And if I ever have a moment to excise this tumor that Ben and I have grown for each other from my own heart, it’s now.
I press his number into my phone, and pray that Amanda doesn’t answer, and pray that Ben can hear that the pain in my heart is nearly suffocating me. And that he might be the only one who can heal me.