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By Root 477 0

with the vet for the next afternoon, but when Beatrice spent the rest of the day and that night under the bed, Martin—after conferring with the vet over the phone—decided to take her to the emergency room. He went into the bedroom to break the news. “Beatrice,” he began softly after kneeling down, “I’m sorry, but we need to go to the hospital.” She did not respond, leaving him at a loss as to what to do. He spent a few minutes trying to reason with her as she peered back, her eyes dull and metallic like the heads of nails. Food was obviously not going to entice her at this point, and he did not like the idea of chasing her out, in the event it might exacerbate whatever was wrong. “Beatrice—please—you’re sick,” Martin begged. “Will you come out for me?”

When she would not, Martin retrieved the carrier from the closet and brought it back to the bedroom, the door of which he shut to keep out Dante, whose pacing and moaning seemed to convey an understanding that something perilous was afoot. Martin pulled down the cover from the bed and sat on top of the mattress, as if he were about to go to sleep. “Beatrice,” he called and tapped on the bed three times, their usual signal. He held his breath for a few seconds and repeated the taps; finally, somewhat clumsily, she staggered out, jumped up on top of the bed, and took a few tentative steps toward him in her growth-stunted waddle. Martin suppressed his dismay at seeing how much smaller she had become in just two days. Worse, she trembled slightly, just like the first time he had seen her, trapped in the corner of that miserable cage at the vet’s office.

Still, out in the light, her eyes seemed brighter, and Martin tried to reassure her. “Beatrice, I know this is going to feel like a betrayal, but you need to see a doctor. I’m sure it’s nothing—maybe you have a summer cold.” As he finished saying this, he lunged for her with his left hand—still quick from his hockey days—and managed to scoop her up against his body as he placed his other hand on the scruff of her neck to hold her steady. Weak as she was, she could not escape, although she fought and cried as he managed to stand slowly and place her, one leg at a time, into the crate. Martin was relieved to note that she had the strength to scratch, so that a rivulet of blood ran down the inside of his left arm.

After setting her down by the front door, he ran around the corner to the garage to pick up his car. When he returned a few minutes later, Dante was sitting in front of her carrier, licking her paws, and Martin was relieved that Beatrice was no longer crying. “Say good-bye now,” he instructed them, “just for a little while.”

He drove down Fort Washington to Broadway and crossed east on 155th, past the public-housing towers at the old Polo Grounds. “We don’t like Robert Moses, do we?” he asked in an attempt to distract her, but she remained quiet as he entered the Harlem River Drive and started south. “You picked a good time to get sick,” he pointed out. “Not only is it August but it’s Sunday, so there’s no traffic.” In less than ten minutes, they arrived at the Animal Medical Center, which—he could not fail to note with a mix of trepidation and hope—was not far from Sloan-Kettering. “You’re going to get the best doctors in the world,” he declared, an assessment that seemed to be confirmed by the high-tech swoosh of the automatic doors and the army of staff inside.

It was harder to remain optimistic as he stepped into the inalterably dreary scene of a Sunday afternoon at the emergency room, where he passed through a waiting area filled with sad-looking families and their even sadder-looking pets, along with an assortment of chairs, pay phones, and vending machines. After he explained the situation to a receptionist, he was given the intake forms, which he filled out among the ranks of the downtrodden as he now and again placed one of his fingers through the metal grate of her carrier, where Beatrice sat quietly petrified. From behind the reception counter, Martin could hear people sobbing as vets delivered bad news or