One Year in Coal Harbor

I
WAS SITTING WITH
Bert and Evie. Evie had their cockapoo, Quincehead, on her lap and was staring into space. Bert was absently patting Quincehead on the head and rhythmically stroking his back while he told me what had happened.

“This morning when we woke up Quincehead’s stomach was huge. Bloated.”

“Too big,” said Evie.

“Not normal big,” said Bert.

“Because sometimes when they eat too much, it gets big,” said Evie.

“You can tell easier with little dogs like Quincehead.”

“It shows more.”

“The big dogs don’t show so much.”

“Not that we ever had a big dog.”

“ ’Cause we haven’t.”

“I prefer a dog that can sit in my lap.”

“We always get Evie lapdogs.”

“So,” they said together as if this were a logical pausing place in their narrative.

I waited patiently. They were looking out the window at the storm with unseeing eyes. The rain poured down and the wind howled. It was probably the last real winter blow.

The storm had started that morning. We had been able to hear the surf even in our classes at school, pounding the shore, flinging spray.

I had been sitting in class thinking that when the earth shakes like this, what you need is some solid ground beneath your feet, such as the bedrock of multiplication, where if you multiply correctly, you always get the same sum. But one look outside tells you how it is all just an invention in the end. What do we really know? Everything we know is just something someone made up. I like to cook, and you would think one of cooking’s reassuring aspects would be that if you make the same recipe the same way, it always comes out the same. This would be a nice antidote to random events if what you always wanted was a peach melba. But anyone who cooks a lot can tell you that it is hogwash. You can make the same recipe the same way a dozen times and each time it comes out differently. There are whole days when everything you cook
comes out terribly and others when you can do no wrong. So many factors you will never be aware of are involved. Anyone who thinks they’ve got it all scoped out is in for a few surprises.

I’d nudged Eleanor, who sits next to me, and continued this thought out loud. “So if you’re going to make something up, you might as well make sure it is something good. Just like if you don’t know what is going to happen and have to assume, you might as well assume something good.”

She’d looked at me blankly. She hates it when I nudge and whisper during class, even though our teacher, Miss Connon, is extremely tolerant. Miss Connon doesn’t mind the odd communication while she’s talking, and she reads us essays by people like Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver because she credits us all with at least as much intelligence as we have. I could see Eleanor turning to look out the window and her brow furrowing again as she thought about what I’d said. I know mine is just one way of seeing things. That this was what I saw in the storm. I’d been hoping, as always, for a meeting of the minds but she just whispered, “Oh, great, indoor gym again.”

I’d turned back to watch the ocean. It looked like the sea was flinging bedsheets over a bed that refused to stay made. It could not make the sheets lie flat and neat and tidy. Waves bunched up and wrinkled and lifted high into the air to be flung across their sea beds once more. Order
and disorder, order and disorder, I’d thought, staring out the window until Miss Connon called on me. That snapped me to, and looking down at my textbook to answer her question, I’d realized that the last time I had looked at my book we were still on math but it turned out they had moved on to Canadian history and the settling of the plains. Miss Connon turned tactfully to someone else while I switched books and caught up. We were now apparently talking about the Doukhobors, who walked naked across Saskatchewan. “We all live in uncertainty, and people will do amazing things in their need to get a grip, even, it would seem, naked protest parades,” said Miss Connon.

I’d drifted back to the window and wondered if my father, who is a fisherman, had docked his boat yet or had come in early before the storm started. I was a little concerned because the previous year he and my mother had been lost at sea during a bad winter storm. So I’d been relieved when after school I met up with my father, still dressed in his fishing gear and carrying a salmon home for us. I had waved, called out I was going to Bert and Evie’s and trotted on. I don’t tell him that I still worry every time his fishing boat goes out. I don’t want him to worry that I worry. After all, what can he do? This is how he makes a living.

Bert and Evie had been my foster parents for a short time when my parents were lost at sea. By the time my
parents returned, Bert and Evie and I were like a small family unit, so it was very unsettling for them to find me leaving for another family, even if that family was my own. The previous night they had called to say I should drop by after school. They might have some good news. But now, here I was, and instead they told me about Quincehead.

“So we took him to the vet,” said Bert. “We told the vet we thought he had eaten something bad. You know how he eats anything.”

“He’s like a shark. Anything in his path. Once he ate a whole tableful of bread dough I had left to rise.” Evie said this while looking dully out into a world that would soon contain no such feats of appetite.

“That’s how we found out he could get up on chairs.”

“So this morning the vet examined him. But …”

“It wasn’t something he ate. It was cancer,” said Bert.

“I didn’t know dogs could get cancer,” I said. I have a dog named Mallomar who my uncle Jack bought for me last year to help take my mind off the fact that everyone thought my parents were dead. But Mallomar is young and healthy so I had had no run-ins with dog diseases yet.

“You don’t ever anticipate all the bad things that can happen,” said Evie. “If we did we would never get through a day. Not a single day.”

“Yep, there’s diseases both dogs and people can have,” said Bert.

“But not colds. Dogs can’t catch your colds, so you don’t have to worry about sneezing on them.”

“But they
do
get some of the same diseases,” said Bert. “Cancer, for one,” said Evie.

“It’s his spleen. That’s why he’s so blown up like that. The vet said he didn’t have much time left.”

“I asked how much time. I was thinking, like months or years even.”

“But it was hours. The vet said the kind thing would be to put him down immediately right there in the office. Right that minute. But Evie couldn’t do that.”

“I wasn’t expecting it! I had no preparation! I thought we were going in for a tummyache!” said Evie.

“It was the terrible unexpectedness,” said Bert. “So Evie said couldn’t we wait.”

“And the doctor said, well, we could.”

“A little.”

“But not too long. Because Quincehead don’t have too long,” said Evie, and a sob burst out of her. She put her head down and buried her face in Quincehead’s fur.

“A few hours,” said Bert. “Because his spleen is going to explode otherwise.”

“It just didn’t seem right, him dying there in a place he don’t like to begin with,” said Evie.

“He don’t like the vet’s,” said Bert.

“Even though he’s always been good at the vet’s.”

“He never makes a fuss.”

“The first time we brought him in, the vet said he was the best-behaved dog he’d ever seen.”

“The vet was pretty upset himself, Evie. He teared right up when he said Quincehead would have to be put down.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“You were distraught,” said Bert. “You weren’t seeing much of anything.” And then he ran his hand through his hair, even though he didn’t have much hair left. “Anyhow, Primrose, the vet said he’d come at the end of his day and his receptionist called right before you got here and said he’s just finishing up now. So it won’t be long. You might not want to stay.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. It never occurred to me to just walk out, although to stay made me feel complicit. It seemed terrible, all of us except Quincehead knowing what was going to happen.

“I just don’t want him to be scared,” said Evie. “I didn’t want him to see me cry or get the idea I’m too upset neither, because that might upset him more. Or make him nervous something bad is going to happen.”

But she couldn’t stop crying and Quincehead, to be honest, looked too out of it to care. He just lay there, bloated and breathing shallowly.

Evie, without looking up, put one hand on my forearm, then quickly put her hand back on Quincehead. As if she wanted to keep him company as long as possible.

“I think it gives Quincehead some comfort you’re here too,” said Evie.

“Now he’s got his whole family here,” said Bert.

Quincehead was breathing less now, more slowly and shallowly as if already the breath was leaving him, the way the waves crash in at high tide and then lessen, becoming quieter and quieter until the sea is still.

“We had no way of knowing he was so ill. His stomach don’t look no different from the way it did the time he ate Evie’s salade Niçoise with mini marshmallows,” said Bert. “Does it, Evie?” But Evie just nodded. She couldn’t talk any more; that much was clear. But Bert seemed to need to.