The Unexpected Everything

“Sorry,” Clark said, wincing, as I tried not to breathe in through my nose. “I’ve been trying to clean up, but he just keeps going.”

“Where’s Bertie?” I asked, looking around, noticing as I did paper towels covering up various puddles on the kitchen floor. I didn’t know exactly what they were and wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“I think he went to the laundry room,” Clark said. “That’s where his bed is. I’ve been trying to research what to do online, since I couldn’t get his vet on the phone—”

“What happened?” I asked, and Clark pointed to a box on the counter—the box of chocolates he’d offered to me only a few hours ago, when I’d picked the hazelnut and seriously regretted it. It had been full then—I was pretty sure there was even a second layer underneath the first one. The box wasn’t full any longer. It was ripped apart, chewed along one edge, and all that seemed to be left in the box were scraps of the black paper wrappings the chocolate had been in.

“I thought I had it back far enough on the counter,” Clark said. “But I got home from the, uh . . .” He looked up at me for a second, then at the kitchen counter. “From dropping you off,” he said after a tiny pause, “and it was like this.”

“He ate them all?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink. I was in no way a dog expert, but I’d watched enough Psychic Vet Tech to know that chocolate was terrible for dogs. As in, it sometimes killed them.

“Well, he’s thrown up a lot of them by now.”

I realized that probably explained the puddles—not to mention the smell. “This isn’t good,” I said. I was feeling totally out of my depth here, and like there should be someone else—Maya, a vet, an adult—telling us what we should be doing. “Are . . . ? Should we call your parents?”

“We can,” Clark said. “But they live in Colorado. And they’re really more cat people.”

Just like that, I remembered what he’d said to me in the foyer—Bertie wasn’t his dog, and this wasn’t really his house. I’d been so fixated on keeping the dinner conversation going, I hadn’t followed up on any of it.

“It’s my publisher’s house,” he explained, gesturing around him. “She and her husband are getting divorced, and it was going to be sitting empty for the summer, so she offered it to me. Also, I think she wanted someone to watch the dog. Though if she’d known this was going to happen . . .” Clark’s mouth twisted in a grimace, and he looked down at the ground.

“Right,” I said, trying to get my bearings. This did explain why Clark hadn’t seemed to know how to walk a dog when we’d met. “Um . . .” I heard a faint whimpering sound, and Clark started moving toward it. I followed him to a room off the kitchen I’d never noticed before. It was small and carpeted, with one wall of cabinets—presumably, the washer and dryer were behind them. A huge round dog bed, with a paw-print design and BERTIE monogrammed on it, was in the center of the room, and there were toys scattered all around. But my eye immediately went to the corner, where Bertie was curled in a tight ball, whimpering.

“Oh my god,” I said as I crossed over to him. Somehow, the fact that he had taken himself to the corner, that he wasn’t on his soft bed, made this that much more worrisome. “Hey, buddy, it’s okay,” I murmured, running my hand over his white fur, which felt damp, the fluff turned into curls. He was shaking under my touch, violently, almost more like spasms. “You’re okay.” Bertie stopped shaking for a moment and looked up at me with his dark eyes. His white eyelashes were stuck together in triangles, and the look he gave me was so trusting—so helpless—that I felt something inside me quake. This dog was in serious pain and needed actual help. And what he had was me and Clark.

“He was running around when I got back,” Clark said, and I looked over to see him crouched down next to me, tentatively patting Bertie’s leg. “I thought he was just happy to see me—he sometimes does that if you leave the room and come back into it. But then it didn’t stop. And that’s when I saw the chocolate box.”

“And you called his vet?” I asked, feeling like we’d very quickly reached the end of what I knew to do with sick dogs.

Clark nodded and handed me his phone—on it, I could see an instruction list, with a vet’s name and number. “I called,” he said. “But the office is closed, and there wasn’t an answering service. I was about to look up emergency vets when you got here.”

“And you called Maya?”

Bertie closed his eyes tightly as another spasm shook him. He was making a soft whimpering sound that was breaking my heart.

Clark nodded. “I left a message for Dave, too,” he said, spreading his hands helplessly. “But . . .”

“Okay,” I said, nodding like I knew what to do. “Okay.” I looked down at the dog, wishing I knew more about this. If this were a person, I would have known how to take their vitals and would have felt like I had some idea of how to proceed. But I had no idea how to begin to help a dog. I put both hands on Bertie, smoothing his ears down, wondering if they were always so hot, or if this had to do with the chocolate. “Okay,” I said again, aware that just saying the word did not actually accomplish anything, but not sure that I was going to be able to stop doing it.