The Unexpected Everything

I pulled out my phone and dialed Bri, since she was the only one I knew with a pet. “Andie?” she said, sounding confused. “You okay?”

“What’s your vet’s name?” I practically yelled at her. “I mean, sorry,” I said after a second. “Just have an emergency here. Where does Miss Cupcakes go?”

“Um . . . I think it’s called the Animal Barn,” she said. “Or something like that? Want me to call my mom?”

“It’s okay.” I noticed Clark was already typing on his phone. “Gotta go. Call you later.” I hung up, knowing I could explain when we were out of the woods. “Call them,” I said to Clark, pulling up the search engine on my own phone, “and if they don’t have an emergency vet on call, we’ll look one up.”

Clark nodded as he held his phone to his ear. I looked around the room, then pulled open the nearest cabinet to me. This seemed to have mostly dog stuff in it, bigger stuff than what was in his cabinet in the kitchen, like blankets and towels. I pulled out a monogrammed blanket and wrapped it around the dog, who was still shivering and shaking. I had no idea if this was going to help or not, but it’s what I would have done for a human who was shaking, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. “You’re going to be okay,” I murmured, though even as I spoke, I wasn’t sure if I was talking to the dog or to myself.

“Okay, it’s ringing,” Clark said as he put the phone on speaker and placed it on the carpet between us.

“Animal Barn Emergency,” a man said in a clipped, no-nonsense tone.

“Hi,” Clark and I both said at the same time. We looked up at each other over the phone and he gestured to me. “Hi,” I said again. “So we have an emergency with a dog. He’s a . . .” I paused, looking at the dog, realizing I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of dog Bertie was.

“Great Pyrenees,” Clark chimed in, leaning closer to the phone.

“Right,” I said, “and he ate some chocolate, and now he’s shaking all over. He doesn’t seem like he’s doing too well.”

“I’m going to transfer you to poison control,” the voice said. “They can get more information from you and find out if you need to bring the dog in.”

“Thanks—” I started, but the call had already been transferred, and a moment later, Muzak started playing. I looked up, then drew back slightly. We’d both been leaning over the phone, and I hadn’t realized quite how close together our heads were.

“They have poison control for animals?” Clark asked as he gently patted Bertie’s leg again.

“I guess so,” I said, not wanting Clark to know how far out of my depth I was here. I looked over at Bertie as an instrumental version of the Pi?a Colada song began to play. His eyes were still tightly closed, but he seemed to be shaking less, which I assumed was a good sign. Unless it was a bad one. I ran my hand over the dog’s head. But it wasn’t like we could even ask Bertie where he was hurting, what he was feeling. How did vets do this?

“Hello?” A gentler-sounding woman came on the line, and Clark and I both leaned forward at the same time, coming within a centimeter of bumping our heads together.

“Hi,” I said, then took a breath and started to run through what had happened so far. The woman at the poison control center—Ashley—walked us through a series of questions. She seemed to be trying to figure out exactly how much chocolate Bertie had eaten and what kind. Clark ran to the kitchen to get what was left of the box as I tried to describe the chocolate to her.

“It was dark chocolate,” I said, but even as I said this, I wondered if it was right. Had it been milk chocolate? I had been so focused on not tasting the hazelnut, I wasn’t entirely sure. “I think.”

“Milk or white would have been better,” she said. “But you’d have real trouble if it were baking chocolate. That’s the most dangerous. Dogs can’t process caffeine or theobromine like we can. I get this call a few times a week. Their systems just overload.”

“Okay,” Clark said, running back into the room, holding the pieces of the box in his hands. “It was . . . ten ounces. Dark chocolate.”

“And he ate all of it?” Ashley asked, her voice getting sharper.

“All but a few pieces,” Clark said, meeting my eye. “What does that mean?”

There was a tiny pause, and Ashley said, “I think you’ll be okay. But you’re going to need to get this out of his system. You’re going to need to get him to throw up—”

“Oh, he’s been doing quite a lot of that,” Clark said.

“That’s a good thing,” Ashley said. “He’s basically been poisoned, and he needs to clear it out.”

“So we don’t need to take him to a vet?” I asked, surprised. I’d assumed that the professionals were going to take over at some point. I hadn’t thought this was going to be left to us.

“You’re going to need to monitor him for the rest of the night,” she said. “If he starts seizing, you’ll have to bring him to a vet immediately. But otherwise, based on his weight, I don’t think he ate enough for this to be truly life-threatening.”

“Oh, thank god,” Clark murmured, sitting back and running a hand over his face.