Emma nodded, eager to help.
“I guess the first order of business would be a name.”
“Peter Finnegan,” said Peter.
“Emma Healy.”
The vet looked at them over the top of the clipboard. “I meant the dog.”
“Oh,” Emma said, looking helplessly at Peter. “Um, we don’t …”
“Yeah,” said Peter. “We never …”
“He’s actually not technically ours—”
“Though he sort of acts like he is—”
“But we picked him up at a rest stop in New Jersey—”
“More like he picked us up—”
“But it wasn’t like we stole him or anything—”
“No, he was just a stray.”
The vet looked from one to the other with a little frown. “Right,” she said, jotting down a note on the chart. “No name then. What I was really hoping to find out was how he got the cut. Before I get in there, it would be good to know whether it was from glass or metal, maybe a rusty fence or can, a broken bottle …”
“We don’t actually know,” Emma said, feeling like the world’s worst non-owner. “He ran off this morning, and he was like that when we found him.”
“So I assume you don’t know anything about the original injury to the other leg?”
They shook their heads.
“Okay, then,” the vet said, tucking the clipboard under her arm. “We’ll go ahead and get him all fixed up. He’ll have to go easy on that paw for a little while, but he should be just fine. You did a good thing, bringing him in here. Not everyone would take care of a stray like that.”
“Well, he’s sort of been taking care of us, too,” Emma said.
The vet smiled. “Someone will let you know when we’re finished back here,” she said. “And in the meantime there are some brochures for different rescue groups and animal shelters in the waiting room, all of which help find good homes for strays.”
Emma stared at her. “What?”
“I just assumed, since you found him, that you’d be giving him up …”
“No,” Emma said firmly, surprising even herself. She hadn’t, until this moment, actually thought about what they’d do with the dog when they got to North Carolina. There was a strange feeling to this trip, a sense of perpetual motion that made an end point seem somehow very far away. But now that they’d come this far, now that he’d been lost and found, injured and saved, it seemed impossible to think they might leave him behind. He was as much a part of this trip as they were.
“No,” she said again, shaking her head. “He’s with us.”
The vet nodded, looking pleasantly surprised, then walked off toward the examination rooms. And when Emma turned back to Peter, it was to find him watching her with such unmistakable pride, such open admiration, that the memory of last night’s fight—the failed kiss and all that had come after it—went crashing over her again with renewed regret.
They watched the vet disappear into one of the rooms, closing the door behind her, and then they stood there together and waited for news like so many families in hospital waiting rooms: grateful for the support, relieved for the company, yet somehow feeling terribly alone just the same.
Chapter twenty-two
The dog was drugged and drowsy, worn out and bandaged up, but his tail still swiped lazily at the air as they set him in the backseat of the car. The veterinary technician slid him off the gurney like he was serving a pancake, then left him dangling there, the last third of him drooping toward the balding tire of the convertible. Emma tried gently nudging him forward so that they might close the door, but the dog was too doped up to be anything more than dead weight, and it was clear that more drastic measures needed to be taken, so Peter jogged around to the other side and wiggled him into position.
Back inside they’d filled out all the necessary paperwork, and then Peter had watched as Emma paid the bill, sliding her parents’ credit card across the counter while he looked the other way, trying to act casual but coming off as quite the opposite.
“Better get some tags for that dog,” the vet told them as they walked out the door, and he saw something skip across Emma’s face, something like guilt, and he knew she must be thinking about the invented story she’d given the cop back in Maryland. What had been a sham of an excuse to get out of a ticket—an injured dog and a visit to a vet—had actually returned to haunt them. And wasn’t that just like this trip, Peter thought. Wasn’t it just so typical that all the things you never really meant to say were the very ones that came back around to you in the end?
Emma made herself a little wedge of space in the backseat between the dog’s hind legs and the door, and she sat pressed up against the side like that as he quivered in his sleep, the faintest hint of a doggy smile on his face, like a drowsy but contented drunk.
It was still early in the day, the sun sitting snugly in a bed of clouds, and Peter avoided the highways, feeling a bit like a chauffeur now that he was alone up front, responsible for the delicate cargo in back. They passed a cemetery, the kind that seems to go on forever, with neat lines of pink and gray stones like crops sprouting up from the ground. He glanced in the rearview to see that Emma was looking out too, her lips pursed and her eyes still and focused, like she was holding her breath in that way children do, exhaling only once they’re safely past.
When Peter thought of his mother’s grave now, it was no longer a reflex or a reaction, but a conscious decision, like reciting a poem or following a recipe, something done with thought and planning. Over the years he’d trained himself in this way, corralling those parts of him that missed her, the pieces of him that still knew how to wonder. It was a luxury he didn’t often allow himself, thinking of her.
But cemeteries are like mousetraps for memories, catching grief by the tail before it knows what’s what. And Peter felt the yank of it now, the part of him that had been scooped out before he was even fully part of the world, so that he would always remain achingly hollow.
Once, when he was little, Peter had asked what the word “amputate” meant, and without realizing it Dad had brought a hand to his chest, thumping a closed fist softly against the dark pocket of his uniform, right near his heart.
“Cut off,” he’d said, so gruffly that it had sounded to Peter an awful lot like “gutted.” After that, whenever they went fishing, whenever he watched his dad slide the knife along the soft belly of a fish, Peter couldn’t help thinking of the invisible damage that must have been done when his heart had been cut off, stopped short on the day Peter’s mother died.