Ever by My Side (20 page)

The reckoning with my dad came on my last day, as I was shutting down the electricity, draining the water from the pipes, and otherwise readying the cottage for a few weeks of wintry isolation before my parents’ next visit. Dad phoned, clearly prompted by my mother, to offer an unnecessary reminder to make sure everything was switched off. Somehow or another he caught me completely off guard when he managed to slip in the question “So, is this the kind of vetting you see yourself doing when you qualify?”

“No,” I said, and I was shocked by how quickly I had answered,
how the silence on the other end of the line stretched between us. It was more than the negativity and the way I managed to sound lackadaisical and heartless, so capable of crushing a dream years in the making, it was the fact that I never hesitated, didn’t need to deliberate, as though I had never even entertained the option in the first place. This was my father, the man who had kept me on task for all the right reasons, to whom I owed so much for having this chance, and here I was, cutting him down, consigning his hopes to the garbage with one word.

“I mean, I don’t know. It’s still too early to decide,” I said, but I’m sure he saw my offering for what it was, an attempt to backpedal, like someone who windmills his arms after he has lost his balance and moved beyond the point of no return, the long fall inevitable.

What made it all the worse was the way he managed to carry on, changing topic, as though my answer had never really mattered. By the time I said goodbye and hung up he seemed perfectly fine, but I was pretty sure he was about to mull over the same scenarios starting to run through my mind. We were both thinking about his role as Arthur Stone, practice manager, the man with the connections, the liaison between the pet-owning and farming public and his son. He was leaning into a fence, wearing his beloved flat cap and Wellington boots, sharing a joke with a farmer at my expense as they looked on, enjoying my attempts to extricate a calf from its mother. He was sticking his head around an examination room door asking if I could just have a quick look at the cat of an elderly widow, pro bono. It was the life I knew he had imagined the two of us would savor and share. I wished it were different, but before I closed the cottage door behind me, he and I both knew this dream of a veterinary life had vanished, the stuff of fantasy and nothing more. As much as my honesty hurt him, fooling myself,
trying to be someone I wasn’t, was destined to fail. I had to trust my subconscious, the way it had spoken faster than my brain could think. The bigger question, the one my father had dared not ask, still remained.

“If you’re not interested in the Yorkshire Dales, son, then where?”

I
t was to be our last walk together across those familiar fields, though, of course, I didn’t realize it at the time. Autumn was just getting started; gray, thumb-smudged sky, swirling wind, the satisfaction of a golden crunch under every footfall. I had joined the trio—Dad, Whiskey, and Bess—striding out along the same public footpath, passing through the same farmland across which Bess had strayed all those years before when she had been eager to meet some cows and nearly met her maker instead.

“Even though I rarely see ‘the girls’ out and about this time of day I always keep Whiskey and Bess on a leash for the next three fields,” said Dad. “Then they can run loose a bit until the way back.”

“Is it okay, I mean, for Whiskey, what with his tendency to go after a … what did you call her … a ‘lady friend’?”

Dad frowned, as if it were an effort to answer such a ridiculous question.

“He’s fine. He can’t go too far out this way. There are no other houses for miles.”

I noticed he was setting quite the pace, or maybe it was the dogs eager to get to freedom beyond the third field. With one leash in
each hand, he looked like Ben-Hur sans chariot. He had blown off my offer to take one of them as if it might upset the natural order of things, the routine all three of them savored, and so I focused on keeping up. The wind was really gusting at times, though it still held some leftover summer warmth and I found myself working to keep the hair out of my face and eyes, noticing that my bald father had the advantage of unimpeded vision. Over the years his receding hairline had fused with a monk’s tonsure, leaving a neat corona of gray hair over the back of his head and ears. Enjoy the windblown sensation, I thought, seeing into my future.

The footpath was well worn, the bare earth tacky but not slippery, so no problems with traction for canine footpads or a sturdy pair of Wellington boots. I was sporting a “hunter green” pair (and matching Barbour jacket), the classic attire of a British equine veterinarian and the closest I would come to fooling the world into thinking I knew what I was doing around horses. Dad was in an industrial charcoal pair, and though he had forsaken the flat cap (since it would have been a challenge to keep it in place given the windy conditions), he was striding out in the same raincoat, and armed with the same infamous walking stick of my childhood.

For a while the four of us were content to keep our rhythm, juggling our thoughts, letting the brisk air and the countryside in.

I was about to go back to college for my final year at veterinary school and I had just returned home after a three-month visit to the Unites States. There was a great deal for my father and I to discuss, not least my plans for what I might do after graduation, a subject he and I had purposely avoided after my apparent dismissal of a future in the Yorkshire Dales.

“It’s funny,” I said as we crossed over a wooden stile, “it’s always been Whiskey and Bess, not Bess and Whiskey, even though, technically, thanks to Mum, Bess got there first.”

Dad considered me and kept walking.

“Nobody ever says, ‘The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy’ now do they?”

I smiled, kept the pace, and said nothing. These three really were a trio.

I had come to accept that they were happy for me to join them but, as with Patch, I felt like an outsider, never really felt part of a quartet. If ever I was asked, “Do you have dogs of your own?” I wouldn’t hesitate to talk about Whiskey and Bess, to proudly recount their virtues, their foibles, and their individuality. But how much could I really claim to know about them, having not been around them for the greater part of their lives? In this context, my sentiments about Whiskey and Bess seemed so broad and sweeping, lacking the nuance and fine detail I remembered from my life with Patch. I watched them, these two dogs, constantly monitoring my father, connected, visually checking in, trotting forward and dropping back, another glance, eye contact, connection made, trot forward and drop back. They were all around him, moving in and out of formation, canine wingmen, covering him from all sides. I found myself thinking that they had come to feel more like cousins, still family, but, to me, slightly more distant relatives.

“So how was the trip?” said Dad, now that both dogs were loose, as though he could finally relax, all bovine danger behind him. Whiskey was off, last seen disappearing into a copse whereas Bess stayed within a fifty-yard radius, checking in every fifteen seconds or so.

“It was good,” I said, choosing my words carefully. In truth, I wanted to gush, I wanted to share my excitement, but I sensed the need for diplomacy.

“I hope you can do better than that,” he said.

I paused, deliberated, found the mental notes I had previously prepared when I suggested joining him for this walk, and started in.

“You know this was all very spontaneous. I was lucky to get a place, it was so last-minute.” Solid opening gambit, I thought, pointing out the fact that none of this was premeditated or part of a cunning plan I had been working on for years. What I didn’t tell him was how I had been eavesdropping on a conversation in the school cafeteria between two of my classmates regarding their upcoming summer visit to the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They were part of a small number of English students who were about to blend in with our colonial cousins across the pond for specialized final-year rotations. Most veterinary schools have a lecture-free, purely clinical final year and theirs had already started, whereas ours did not begin until after the summer break. Here was an opportunity to get a sneak preview, to discover a fresh, American perspective on veterinary medicine and visit a country I had always wanted to visit, all at the same time. Even though it had felt as though they were discussing a party to which I had not been invited, in that instant, I became Cinderella, determined to get to the ball at all costs.

“I had so much more responsibility, meeting with the client one on one, taking the history, doing the examination of the pet myself rather than just watching the real vet do it.”

“I can appreciate that,” said Dad, “but was it so different from what we do over here?”

I noticed how he picked up the pace a little. Perhaps this was his defensive prelude to an uncomfortable turn in the conversation.

“I doubt it,” I said. “I guess I’ll find out during this next year. But, I did have a few … let’s call them, communication difficulties.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing major.” I smiled at the recollection. “Everybody was great, really friendly, it’s just that we happen to say a few things differently. For example, I had a rottweiler with dirty ears and I wanted to clean them up, so I asked the nurse for some ‘baby buds’ and she looked at me like I had two heads.”

Dad glanced my way, visibly confused, trying to fathom the nurse’s problem.

“She didn’t know what a baby bud was?”

“No,” I said. “Apparently they call them ‘Q-tips.’ ”

My father played with “Q-tips” in his mouth, didn’t like it, spat it out, and shook his head in disgust.

“What else?”

“I don’t know, silly stuff, like that. One time I cut my hand and asked for a plaster and everyone thought I wanted to put a cast on the cut instead of wanting what they call a ‘Band-Aid.’ In surgery they use ‘sponges’ and not ‘swabs,’ and when I told another female student I would see her in theater rather than the ‘operating room,’ she practically fluttered her eyelashes and asked which show we were going to see.”

Dad laughed and Bess padded toward him, as if to make sure all was well.

“Go find your brother,” he said, waving her away. “Go on. Go find him.”

Bess seemed to understand and trotted off, but still she refused to stray too far.

Whiskey and Bess, I thought, brother and sister, and now son and daughter, the replacements for me and Fiona. Maybe it is inevitable, the transition of pets into surrogate children for empty nesters, the kids who always want to stay home. Perhaps this was what I had noticed most about my sporadic visits over the years, the increase in direct verbal communication between my father and the dogs, as though he wanted to share his thoughts with them and even sought their input, their approval. Was this part of a natural evolution in the relationship between a man and his dogs or was it a sign of isolation and loneliness?

“You think she’s overweight?”

Safe territory, I thought, pulling me away from what I wanted
to really discuss about America. Lie, use tact, or use honesty. This was Dad. I knew which he would prefer, for this question and for the bigger one both of us knew we still needed to address.

“Definitely. She needs to lose five pounds, maybe a little more.”

“Oh, dear,” he said on a lengthy exhalation. “I’ll have to have words with your mother.”

I huffed a fake laugh because we both knew who was to blame for too many treats and secret handouts under the kitchen table.

“But what about her coat? Just look at the shine. Now you can’t complain about that. That’s a teaspoon of cod-liver oil added to her food every—”

“Dad, I want to talk to you about something that really hit me during the summer.”

I’d stopped him in his tracks even though we kept marching at the same pace, his hazel eyes telling me to go on.

“I think I might want to become a surgeon.”

“Surgeon,” he said, shocked, sounding almost affronted, as though I might have told him I was quitting veterinary medicine to become, oh, I don’t know, a puppeteer or perhaps a mime artist. “But I thought that was what you were: a veterinary surgeon—MRCVS—a member of the Royal College of Veterinary
Surgeons.
”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, “but I’m talking about trying to become an actual specialist in surgery, someone who focuses solely on surgical problems in cats and dogs and fixes them with surgery.”

My father pursed the blood out of his lips, looking troubled by what he was about to say.

“Not being funny, son …”

This phrase, “not being funny,” a rejoinder frequently employed as a preamble to a polite snub, instantly had me on the defensive.

“Not being funny, son, and remember, I love you dearly, but, in fairness, you’ve never been exactly … well … dare I say … practical or particularly good with your hands.”

I wasn’t affronted because he was right. I may have put together a few plastic airplane kits as a kid, but they never turned out anything like the picture on the box they came in. At school, my pottery class bowls always wobbled precariously on level surfaces and my dovetail joints in woodwork wept with obligatory sticky white glue. In short, I was not handy and we both knew it.

“I know. And I’m not offended. But I hope I can learn because, for some reason, surgery just seems to feel right.”

“In what way?”

This was a question I knew he would ask though I had never tried to put an answer into words before.

“Well,” I started, caught myself, laughed. “Um … I don’t know, so many different ways. For example, I like the idea of being someone to turn to when you’re out of options, or when you need a definitive fix, or when you are an animal’s last hope. I like this responsibility, I like the weight of it because the heavier it gets, the greater the reward to the pet, the owner, and finally, to you. It seems so … what’s the word … dynamic, scary, exciting, difficult, and demanding. That was part of the reason for going to the States, the chance to try out lots of different specialties and of all the ones I tried, surgery felt like the best fit. I’m not sure why, but I felt most at home in scrubs and a paper mask.”