Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [59]
“You are on probation. Your penance is to be a little nicer to your neighbor girl. She likes you, although I can’t imagine why,” said Tess as she checked her rearview mirror before pulling out to pass a logging truck. “I hate to drive behind them. I’m convinced those logs will burst off the truck.”
Rocky explained her strategy for going to the vet clinic in Orono. “I want to make sure this is really Cooper. They’ve got to have some way to ID him. What do they use anyway? They don’t have fingerprints, and he doesn’t have a chip in him. But if this vet took care of him since he was a puppy, she’s got to be able to identify him. And then they might be able to tell us about Liz.”
Dr. Harris’s clinic was on the north side of Orono, between the town and the college. No cute names here, just Orono Animal Clinic. A sign at the front said, All dogs must be leashed.
“Okay Mr. Cooper-Lloyd, time to leash up,” said Rocky. She had a nylon lead for him, but she had discovered that he generally didn’t need it, and in fact, she detected the slightest sense of embarrassment when she had clicked on a leash. Even now, he turned his head slightly away as she reached into the backseat to leash him.
Cooper looked at the building, got out and took a jumbo-sized leak on a little faux fence. It was colder in Orono and they already had the remains of several snowstorms piled up on either side of the walk. Cooper stopped to push his snout into the snow. He then headed straight for the clinic door.
“He knows where he is,” said Tess.
When Tess opened the front door, they were faced head on by a receptionist’s desk. The young woman at the desk stared at the dog, then at Rocky and Tess, then back at the dog again. She placed both hands on the desk and pushed herself up to standing. Her ponytail rested on one shoulder.
“Cooper, is that you?”
Chapter 19
Tess’s first inkling of danger came in the rich moments before waking when she was filled with light and dark, warm under the comforter and cool on her face. The dark green rectangle was a bad shape to have in the abdomen, and the shade of green was not forest green, decorator green, or chlorophyll, but necrotic. Lower right pelvic bowl. She pulled herself up and wondered if it was a dream. But a part of her brain, the glorious multiwired part that she now so loved, registered the rectangle and she couldn’t stop seeing it.
Tess’s exacting memory for anatomy could not be called a photographic memory, since they were not based on photos of the interior world of the body. What she learned about the body was not just to be found in textbooks. Her vision of the body looked more like Michelangelo’s sketches, someone she long suspected of being a synesthete. That would account for a lot.
In her world, the kidneys and liver were orange brick factories with reliable workers who continually brought in boxes and bags of goods to be sorted. Some were used for fuel, some were trouble, and some were stored. A big recycling effort. Brick, two story, with a continually turning waterwheel.
Or take the heart. It was ruby red and midnight blue, a creature from the sea, a sightless fish that heard everything, vibrated to sad movies and disappointed lovers, and sent its messages in flowing movement, undulating from its core. And the whole uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries were one continent with a long string of islands on either side book-ended by volcanoes that erupted with a glistening egg each month in an unerringly egalitarian manner, one volcano never taking two turns in a row, a perfect Ping-Pong game across the continent.
Tess knew the inside of her body, or anyone’s body, but hers in particular. The green rectangle had set up shop, had slipped in under cover of darkness. Had a switch been flipped somewhere else in the thin dolphin glands or the round star-shaped glands? She was sixty-eight. Was this going to be all she had?
She would wait before going to see a doctor, before the long series of tests that would no doubt be run to tell them what she already