Your heart gets the night shift
Corie Rosen
It was the last train to the city, the 11:58 to transfer at Oakland, City Center. Jacob and I were alone in the underground station. The only people breathing blue air into the cold. Mid-January, and I trembled in my thin coat, held the dog to my chest and hoped the two of us could warm each other. Her eyes had been closed like this, her breathing chattery and stilted, since before Jacob and I had run down to get the BART.
Jacob shuffled ahead of me as we walked along the platform, toward the only sign that was still lit up. I tried to walk faster, to pull into stride alongside Jacob, but Woolf was heavy in my arms. She was his dog, or mostly, and when we’d left the apartment, I’d asked if he wanted to be the one to carry her. He’d given me a look I recognized, the one that always made me sorry I had asked.
“It’s too much,” he’d said and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Too much how?”
“Too much like I can’t stand it.”
Even before we’d gotten married, Jacob had been like this. Afraid of anything too big or too painful. I wasn’t sure if the thing he was avoiding was the fear or the sadness. Maybe it was the possibility of losing, the pain of wanting something and then being forced to let go.
“It’s fine,” I had told him. “I can hold her.”
In the station, we stood close together on the platform. Woolf was half-asleep. My arms grew tired under her weight, and I took a breath hoping the cold air would make me stronger. I pressed my cheek into her fur. She smelled like a normal dog, like city dirt
and rainstorms. A good sign, I thought. Good in spite of the limp, uneven way she was slumped against my chest.
“She awake?” Jacob asked.
“Don’t know.”
“If she’s not awake, for Chrissakes, don’t wake her.”
“Sure, okay,” I said. “Sorry.”
“You have any money?”
I shook my head.
We’d only been married for six months and our finances, or lack of finances, were still something we didn’t quite know how to talk about directly. We were both graduate students, and we didn’t have much beyond our stacks of books and frayed T-shirts.
I said, “I get paid on Monday.”
“Oh. Well, okay. Depending on what it costs, my credit card might take it.”
Jacob was the first person I’d ever met who spent on his cards right up to the limit. When a card was full, he negotiated down his debt or consolidated it and opened another. In this way, he managed to live a life similar to the one he’d had when he was young and his parents were still giving him money.
“Is she breathing?” Jacob asked.
I held Woolf close and stopped my own breath until I was sure I’d felt her ribcage moving.
“Yes,” I said, then, “It’s going to be alright. You have to know that.”
Jacob ran his fingers through his hair again, a nervous habit. “Don’t say that. Don’t say it’s going to be alright when you don’t really know.”
“It’s just something people say,” I said.
“Well, a lot of things that people say are stupid.”
I knew I was supposed to offer something else, something that would soothe him. Woolf was heavy in my arms and I felt too worried and cold to search out the words.
Silently and for the millionth time, I chided myself for not having taken my father’s long-ago advice, for not having applied to medical school like he’d suggested. Not that being a medical student would have meant that I’d know what was wrong with Woolf. But maybe, if I were on my way to being something real and well-paid and important, I’d feel more confident, more certain of what to do now.
“It’ll be okay about the money,” I said.
“Maybe. Will they even see us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you don’t have to pay for these things until after they’re done.”
§
On the BART, after the train arrived, everything was bright and garish. White light slanted across the darkness of the windows. The train rumbled and shook, and when I put my face close to the glass, I saw smears of red and yellow. The nighttime glow of Berkeley and Oakland blurring past us as we went.
§
At the clinic, we explained to the woman at the desk about Woolf, about how she’d been like that when we’d found her under the bed that morning. How it had happened once before, a few months ago, but that time she’d come back to herself by evening.
“We’ll tell you when we know something,” she said. “Have a seat.” She gestured to a row of plastic chairs beneath the window.
A few minutes later, a vet tech in blue scrubs came out to the waiting area and carried Woolf away from us, into the invisible world that lay behind the clinic’s high white door.
It had been a long time since I’d been in a hospital for either animals or people. The last was when I’d gone to see my father, doing rehab for the fourth time in the Santa Ynez valley.
“It’s harder than it was last time,” he’d said. “Every time, it gets harder.”
We were in the common room where most of the patients spent their days. You weren’t allowed to stay in bed all day, and you weren’t allowed to leave the building, which meant that the common room was always crowded with people watching TV or lying on the sofa, waiting for their prescription medications to kick in or else waiting for the illegal drugs to leave their system. Trying to hold out one way or another until things came right with the world.
I’d reached out to hold his hand across the metal table. I never felt any less awkward going to visit him in those places.
“You know,” I said, “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”
“Fortune cookie wisdom. Thanks,” he said with a weak smile.
There had been long stints of using, I knew. Lost years when I was younger. All of those supposed business trips, all of that time away from me and my mother.
“Nobody can love him,” my mother had once told me. “It is impossible to love someone who doesn’t love himself.”
She herself was full of fortune cookie wisdom, always quoting the newest self-help books, always insisting that she and I were nothing like him. When she spoke to me about his illness, she called it, “a choice that he was making.” Sometimes, I could almost see him through her eyes, as though he were a stranger. Though, after the divorce, when he came for a visit, he always seemed like just my dad.
My father got worse again after he broke his leg, a fall down some stairs outside a bar in San Francisco. The doctors gave him
pills for when the walking got too painful. He was supposed to tell the doctors he was an addict when he went in to have his leg set, but addiction has a way of hiding itself.
After that, every time I went to visit him at his apartment in San Francisco, I’d find him sitting on his front steps with friends I’d never met, his eyes glassy and distant as though he’d just woken from an impossibly deep sleep.
“Sarah,” he said to me that last time I’d visited him in rehab, “why don’t you go to medical school? Become a doctor. That has value. Trust me. A sick person knows.”
My father had been the first to give me George Elliott, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Dickens, and he knew how much I’d loved these books, how much I, like him, had fallen in love with reading. It was the only way I had ever found to at the same time escape and make sense out of the world.
I’d said, “I’m thinking about doing something in books. Maybe become an editor or an agent.”
“Books? That’s stupid. Why would you do something in books?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I like them. I guess they’re all I really like, so I don’t know what else I might do.”
I was only seventeen then and I still had the sense that my life, all the suffering and the loneliness, all the shame I’d felt around my father’s addiction, all of it was going to add up to something large and satisfying and useful. I was young enough that I still felt owed, as though my pain made me unique and special.
“You have to do something real,” he said. “Forget this other business.”
“I like movies too, I guess.”
“Movies are even worse than books. Movies can be so stupid.”
He had been adamant that I choose a practical profession, sweating and shaking as he leaned across the table.
I said, “I see your point. I’ll think about it.”
I hadn’t really meant it, but I’d wanted to say or do something that would calm him down. There was a long pause as he turned to look over his shoulder and out through the room’s only window. “Think about what?” he said. When he turned back to look at me, there was an emptiness in his expression. He nodded, agreeing with nothing but the air.
“We were talking about my becoming a doctor,” I said. “We were talking about what has value.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked surprised. “I never thought of you as a doctor. Are you sure you’d like that? All that blood and mucus? Is that something you’d want to do?”
He’d had lapses like this before. Sudden blanks when he couldn’t remember the thing that, only a moment before, he’d made me promise. It was as though all those fine powders had at last done what he’d wanted, erased pockets of his experience, bored holes into the deepest, most troubling regions of his mind.
When the lapses came, I tried to be gentle. To talk about something we could both recall. The Fourth of July parade I’d roller skated in wearing a red dress and blue hair ribbons, the bluegreen pool at our old neighbor’s house where he’d first taught me the backstroke.
But on that last visit, I’d sat and held his hand instead of trying to recall a memory. “Dad, are you okay?”
He’d stared back at me with a strange expression. “Be careful you don’t live too much,” he said. “Too much of this life. You don’t want it.”
He died the following week, alone, on his first day back in his apartment. There was no note, and everyone assumed it had been accidental. The overdose after rehab. Common enough that every discharge form I’d ever seen had warned about it. The bad turn you get after you’ve been too good for too long.
When my father died, there had been no money for a funeral. My mother, long divorced by then, had refused to pay any of the expenses.
“Let the state take care of him,” she’d said. “They’re the ones who let him out of that place. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones who killed him.”
I was working part time at a kids’ day camp that summer, spending mornings in the front office of a building that smelled like apple juice and crayons. I had a little money saved up that I’d planned to use for grad school applications. Instead, I’d used it to have his body cremated, the ashes placed in an urn.
§
At the vet clinic, Jacob and I sat in the hard plastic chairs and waited. I folded my hands in my lap. Overhead, a long white fluorescent light flickered. Jacob stared down at his phone.
I was thinking about my father’s ashes when the vet tech came back out from behind the high white door. She was talking to us, but all I could think about was the close cool of the metal container. The cold, smooth feel of its sides as I held it in my hands. An object that had once been a person, a life, so startling in its lightness. People on the street had given me looks when I set it down on the sidewalk outside of his apartment. It was the place he had been happiest, I thought. The last place where he’d been regularly high.
“What can we do?” Jacob was asking the vet tech. “Sarah? Sarah? Are you listening?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m listening. I am.”
Jacob said, “Jesus. Would you please pay attention?”
The vet tech gave me a glance and then shot a look at Jacob. “Your dog is very sick,” she said. “You’re going to need to make a
decision. I think the best thing is to take care of things tonight.” The vet tech looked from Jacob back to me again and crossed her arms across her chest.
“Maybe we should just take her home,” Jacob said. “What else is there to do here?” He was scanning my face as though he could push me into being the one who asked the questions.
The problem was, I didn’t know what to say. In difficult situations, I was never sure which were the right words and which were forbidden. I’ve always struggled with wanting to be too honest, wanting to live in the world in too direct a way. There are rules, codes, hidden modes that other people seem to know but that, for whatever reason, I always find a mystery.
If a person is in pain, why not just say so? If something awful needs to be addressed, as it did now, why not just say it out loud? People are always telling you that words have the power to reveal, but they aren’t magic in the opposite direction. Not saying it won’t make a thing disappear.
“You should consider addressing the situation tonight,” the tech repeated.
“What are you telling us, exactly?” I asked her.
Although I knew what she meant, I wanted the clarity of hearing her say it. I wanted the specificity of loss that the exact language would bring.
Jacob said, “She is telling us we should consider all the options.” I gave him a look. He shook his head.
“Do you want to go in with her,” he said, “or should I do it?”
Woolf raised her head when I stepped into the examination room where she was lying on a table. The room was brightly lit. The air smelled sharp and antiseptic. Woolf lay on top of a strip of white paper, her eyes half-closed, fluttering against the glare.
I wondered if she hated the room as much as I did, or if it felt different to her, if she detected the smells of other dogs, the leftbehind scents of other people. Maybe she could sniff out stories
and events that were comforting to her. Secrets humans couldn’t perceive.
“It’s alright,” I said. “I’m here.” I leaned down and kissed the white spot on her forehead. Her eyes, which had been closed, flickered open. She looked at me as though she understood that an important truth was being shared.
“Ready?” the vet tech said.
I cradled Woolf the best I could and thought that I would never be ready. From experience, I knew that there were moments, just before a thing comes, when you can feel a loss stirring around you. It creates a disturbance, like the pressure in the air before a summer storm.
The tech said, “Sometimes I have to tell people that it’s the right thing, to do this. She’ll feel more pain, suffer more, if you don’t. But I think you knew that when you brought her.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said, “I understand.”
I held Woolf and wished her suffering could leave her body and be transferred into me, though I knew from experience that it was impossible to catch and hold somebody else’s pain.
When it was done, a single injection—such a simple act with such an astonishing outcome—Woolf gave a shudder and all at once stopped moving. After, the room stood, suspended in a silence that I could almost mistake for calm. I held onto her still body and pressed my face into her neck.
The tech said, “You can let go whenever you are ready.”
“Okay,” I said. I sank my cheek deeper into Woolf’s fur.
The tech patted my back. It felt good to be touched, but I also felt ashamed, allowing myself to be consoled by a stranger. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready to let go and lift my head and leave. It seemed unfair that Woolf was going to have to stay and that I would have to desert her.
After a while, the tech touched my cheek with her palm. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we need the room.”
She pulled at my shoulder, and I sat up.
The room felt cold. The light stung my pupils. I had the sudden sense that all the days and nights of my life would add up to nothing. Going forward, things would only ever be like they were in this bright, cold room. A constant line of subtractions as all that I cared for fell away.
“Ready to go?” the tech said.
I nodded, though I wasn’t. Then, because there was nothing left to do, I stood up and left the room.
§
After Woolf died, Jacob started going out for runs. At first it was just mornings, but then he started making excuses, saying he felt like he needed to “get his heart rate up” or “break a clean sweat” and then vanishing for an entire afternoon.
I wasn’t sure where he went, but I doubted he was really running.
“It’s sort of a run-walk thing,” he said when I asked him why, when he came home, he wasn’t out of breath or sweating.
“Run-walk?”
“Uh huh. You know. Because I cover a lot of distance.”
I said nothing, though I noticed that his skin gave off a floral scent not unlike gardenia perfume.
“Going for a run,” he would say, lacing his shoes up.
“Again?”
“Gotta get my heart rate up.”
“You’re doing a lot of running.”
He would give me a look, as though I was the one who had said or done something strange.
“Exercise is a salve,” he’d say. “Best thing you can do for mind and body.”
“Oh, really?”
“I’m off.”
“So you are.”
“See you later.”
I would wave to him from where I stood in our apartment’s open doorway, not sure if I was as foolish as he thought I was, or if he understood that I was agreeing to accept a lie.
There are moments when you have not quite reached a threshold but you can perceive it, when the thing you can feel coming is still blurry, sort of like a freeway interchange or a mountain ridge that is rising up just past the limit of your sight. Each time Jacob went out, I had the same feeling, as though I were straining to recognize a monument mounting the horizon. One I couldn’t yet see or understand.
Alone, in our apartment, I heard sounds I’d never noticed. The creaking of the walls in the wind. The clamor of the windows when the breeze shook them. The footsteps of the new upstairs neighbor who, after more than a year, I had still never met.
“Listen, Jacob,” I said one afternoon when he’d come home from running. “When you go out, you are gone for a really long time.”
“I told you. I’m running. Run-walking.”
“Yes, you mentioned.”
“If you don’t believe me, then you’re imagining things.”
It was the confidence in his voice that had first convinced me to marry him. Even when he was lying to you, Jacob’s tone always made him sound so sure.
While Jacob did whatever it was he did when he was supposedly running, I wandered the neighborhood, alone. The large bookstore on the corner was going out of business, and
when it was cloudy or cold, I would go in and browse the halfempty shelves. They were a spiritual bookstore, dedicated to selfimprovement. The shelves held titles like Find Yourself and Find Yourself Here, and The Only Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, I Promise
In a book called Life, Confidential, I read that a person could create the life she wanted by thinking it into existence. I tried this for several days, thinking how nice it would be if Jacob stopped the running or the lying or maybe both, how nice it would be if Woolf hadn’t died, how nice it would be if my father hadn’t been an addict, how nice it would be if I were somebody—almost anybody else. After three days, I gave up because all of the wishing felt exhausting. Even on the first day, I should had known better than to believe in magical ideas like this.
“Jacob,” I said one morning when we were both putting on our shoes to head to campus, “Do you think maybe we ought to get another dog?”
He looked at me like I’d punched him. “Another dog?”
“I think it might be time.”
Jacob said absolutely not, laced up his high tops, darted out past me and slammed the apartment door.
Loss, when it comes, is a place you live inside of. Another dog wouldn’t replace Woolf any more than one of my mother’s accountant or lawyer boyfriends could replace my father.
But I wanted a dog. A new bright and warm animal to make noise and dirt and bring life back into our apartment. That Tuesday, I skipped my eighteenth century lyrics class and took the bus to Berkeley’s north side.
“Looking for anybody special?” The guy who worked at the pound wore a short tan vest, the kind I imagine they used to make kids wear in Boy Scouts.
I said, “Doesn’t have to be a specific age or breed. Just has to be friendly.”
The guy had a kind face, and he wore his vest with such a serious air that I was tempted to tell him about Woolf, about the all-night clinic, even about Jacob’s suspicious runs.
“It’s wonderful that you’re open to any sort of dog. Adoption is such a kindness.” He gave a gentle smile and poked his hands into the giant pockets on his vest.
I followed him into a room lined with metal cages. The air held the sharp tang of urine. Behind their wire partitions, the dogs barked and panted, clawing at their gates.
I felt dizzy in there, with all those dogs crying out for affection.
Love me, love me, love me, their faces seemed to say, as though the world were nothing more than a bottomless yearning for affection. Something there could never be enough of and the always, always desperate hunger for just a little more. I wished then that I had something to give to each one of them. More money, more time, more love, more space.
“Anyone you like?” the guy in the vest asked.
“They’re all wonderful.”
He nodded.
The dogs were going crazy, howling and barking. I wondered how many other people they had seen come through here just today. People wandering in, looking at them, considering and then deciding to leave them.
Bruno’s was the last at the end of a long row of metal cages. He was a mutt. Puppyish, with a dark coat and the kind of restless energy that Woolf had displayed on her best mornings.
I liked his jitteriness, his constant movement. As though he was sure of where he wanted to go from here.
When I got him back to the apartment, Bruno jumped up on the bed. He barked and wagged his tail as I took the dog bowls out from the back of the cupboard where Jacob had stored them.
I knew Jacob had said he didn’t want another dog, but I couldn’t help smiling when I looked at Bruno. I filled one dish with water. The other one I filled with kibble from the now-dusty dog food bag. Later, I promised, we’d go over to the pet store and get some puppy food.
When I set the bowls down on the floor, Bruno ran back and forth from the kitchen to the bathroom, jumping and barking like he couldn’t believe his luck.
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s exciting here. You are really going to like it.” As though he agreed with me, Bruno sat down on the floor and howled.
I laughed. It was the first time in a while I could remember laughing. It felt good to give over to happiness for a moment. Maybe, I thought, this is what other people feel like all the time.
Jacob didn’t come home for dinner the way he normally did after his seminar on Tuesdays. I made macaroni and cheese from the box and watched Bruno do a dance each time I fed him a spoonful from my plate.
“Where is he?” I asked Bruno in a voice that people reserve for puppies and babies.
“Where is he?” Bruno wagged his tail and barked. Like me, he did not know, but he didn’t seem especially worried.
Around ten o’clock, it started to rain. Either the sound of the water or all the running around had calmed Bruno, and he curled on top of my feet as I lay in bed reading.
“He’s coming,” I told Bruno. “Soon, I promise. You’ll see.”
By the time the rain stopped, it was past midnight. I opened the window above the bed and the apartment filled with the scent of evening. To-go eggrolls frying at the late-night Chinese place next door, the wet smell of city pavement dampened by the rain.
I felt as though my heart awakened then, in night’s cool darkness. Evening air poured through the window, deep and
mysterious. I closed my eyes and understood the thing that had been coming. I knew that I could no longer bear this hollowing out of my life, the constant removal of loved people and things. I wanted to text Jacob to ask where he was, but that wasn’t something we were in the habit of doing. I imagined him walking through the door, happy to be home from some dull meeting, thrilled by the surprise of Bruno, ready to fall into bed.
As any good self-help book will tell you, the mind can invent whatever it desires.
When the sound of a key in the lock finally woke me, I blinked my eyes open. The apartment was washed in anemic, earlymorning light. I sat up. Stiffness crackled through my neck and shoulders.
“Where were you?”
“I went for one of my runs, and I got sort of stranded in Oakland, I got coffee at a twenty-four-hour place, some deli. I’m sorry. Really. I lost track of time.”
There was a long pause while I looked at Jacob and Jacob looked at Bruno. In that moment, he seemed to me like a stranger. Unknown as somebody I’d just seen for the first time.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. I was still sleepy, and I slumped back into the blankets.
“You got a puppy?”
“I did.”
“I thought we agreed not to get another dog yet?” Jacob petted the now awake and wiggling Bruno.
“We didn’t agree on anything,” I told Jacob.
I tried not to think about what Jacob had really been doing. As he slipped into bed next to me, I noticed the gardenia smell rising from his skin.
He rolled onto his side and wrapped his arms around me. I wanted what he’d said to be true, and I knew by instinct that it
wasn’t. In his arms, I held very still, smelling gardenia and barely breathing, hoping that if I didn’t move, the thing we were headed for would never arrive, hoping he would go on holding me and that he would never let me go.
But he did. Eventually, he shifted onto his side and scooted over to his side of the mattress. From above us, pale morning light fell in across the bed.
The more I thought about where Jacob had been, the larger the question of what it was that I was supposed to do seemed to grow around me.
No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn’t rewind your life, couldn’t go back to the better, the before moments, to the person you were when you had still believed your ideal self, your ideal life, was something you would one day wrestle into being.
It felt cold in the apartment, even with all of us under the blankets. From outside, I could hear the drip, drip, drip as the roof shed what was left of the rain. Jacob, his face at ease, the corners of his mouth turned up and guiltless, lay next to me asleep.
“When you lose something,” I whispered, “it is really gone forever.”
Next to me, Bruno stirred and wiggled. In his sleep, Jacob said, “Mmmm,” as though he knew just what I meant.