Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“I can’t believe you dragged us here,” Joey said.

Peter kicked at the gravel in the parking lot. “This sucks.”

“Language,” Lacy warned. “And as for all of us being here, I cannot believe you’d be selfish enough to not want to say good-bye to a member of the family.”

“We could have said good-bye at home,” Joey muttered.

Lacy put her hands on her hips. “Death is a part of life. I’d want to be surrounded by people I love when it’s my time, too.” She waited for Lewis to haul Dozer into his arms, then closed the hatch of the door.

Lacy had requested the last appointment of the day, so that the doctor wouldn’t be rushed. They sat alone in the waiting room, the dog draped like a blanket over Lewis’s legs. Joey picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine from three years ago and started to read. Peter folded his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

“Let’s all talk about our best Dozer memory,” Lacy said.

Lewis sighed. “For God’s sake…”

“This is lame,” Joey added.

“For me,” Lacy said, as if they hadn’t even spoken, “it was when Dozer was a puppy, and I found him on the dining room table with his head stuck inside the turkey.” She stroked the dog’s head. “That was the year we had soup for Thanksgiving.”

Joey slapped the magazine back on the end table and sighed.

Marcia, the vet’s assistant, was a woman with a long braid that reached past her hips. Lacy had delivered her twin sons five years ago. “Hi, Lacy,” she said, and she came right up and folded her in her arms. “You okay?”

The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.

Marcia walked up to Dozer and rubbed him behind the ears. “Did you want to wait out here?”

“Yes,” Joey mouthed toward Peter.

“We’re all coming in,” Lacy said firmly.

They followed Marcia into one of the treatment rooms and settled Dozer on the examination table. He scrabbled for purchase, his claws clicking against the metal. “That’s a good boy,” Marcia said.

Lewis and the boys filed into the room, standing against the wall like a police lineup. When the vet walked in, bearing his hypodermic, they shrank back even further. “Would you like to help hold him?” the vet asked.

Lacy moved forward, nodding, and settled her arms around Marcia’s.

“Well, Dozer, you put up a fine fight,” the vet said. He turned to the boys. “He won’t feel this.”

“What is it?” Lewis asked, staring at the needle.

“A combination of chemicals that relax the muscles and terminate nerve transmission. And without nerve transmission, there’s no thought, no feeling, no movement. It’s a bit like drifting off to sleep.” He felt around for a vein in the dog’s leg, while Marcia kept Dozer steady. He injected the solution and rubbed Dozer’s head.

The dog took a deeper breath, and then stopped moving. Marcia stepped away, leaving Dozer in Lacy’s arms. “We’ll give you a minute,” she said, and she and the vet left the room.

Lacy was used to holding new life in her hands, not feeling it pass from the body in her arms. It was just another transition-pregnancy to birth, child to adult, life to death-but there was something about letting go of the family pet that was even more difficult, as if it were silly to have feelings this strong for something that wasn’t human. As if admitting that you loved a dog-one that was always underfoot and scratching the leather and tracking mud into the house-as much as you loved your biological children were foolish.

And yet.

This was the dog who had stoically and silently allowed two-year-old Peter to ride him like a horse around the yard. This was the dog who had barked the house down when Joey had fallen asleep on the couch while his dinner was cooking, until the entire oven was on fire. This was the dog who sat beneath the desk on Lacy’s feet in the dead of winter as she answered email, sharing the heat of his pale, pinkened belly.

She bent over the dog’s body and began to weep-quietly, at first, and then with loud sobs that made Joey turn away and Lewis wince.

“Do something,” she heard Joey say, his voice thick and ropy.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and assumed it was Lewis, but then Peter began to speak. “When he was a puppy,” Peter said. “The time we went to pick him out from the litter. All his brothers and sisters were trying to climb over the pen, and he was on the top of the stairs, and he looked at us and tripped and fell down them.” Lacy raised her face and stared at him. “That’s my best memory,” Peter said.

Lacy had always considered herself lucky to have somehow received a child who was not the cookie-cutter American boy, one who was sensitive and emotional and so in tune with what others felt and thought. She let go of her fist-grip on the dog’s fur and opened her arms so that Peter could move into them. Unlike Joey, who was already taller than her and more muscular than Lewis, Peter still fit into her embrace. Even that square span of his shoulder blades-so expansive underneath a cotton shirt-seemed more delicate underneath her hands. Unfinished and rough-hewn, a man still waiting to happen.

If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.

At every school concert and play in Josie’s life, she’d had only one parent in the audience. Her mother-to her credit-had rearranged court dates so that she could watch Josie be plaque in the school dental hygiene play, or hear her five-note solo in the Christmas chorale. There were other kids who also had single parents-the ones who came from divorced families, for example-but Josie was the only person in the school who had never met her father. When she was little and her second-grade class was making necktie cards for Father’s Day, she was relegated to sitting in the corner with the girl whose dad had died prematurely at age forty-two of cancer.

Like any curious kid, she’d asked her mother about this when she was growing up. Josie wanted to know why her parents weren’t married anymore; she hadn’t expected to hear that they were never married. “He wasn’t the marrying type,” she’d told Josie, and Josie hadn’t understood why that also meant he wasn’t the type to send a present for his daughter’s birthday, or to invite her to his home for a week during the summer, or to even call to hear her voice.

This year, she was supposed to be taking biology, and she was already nervous about the unit on genetics. Josie didn’t know if her father had brown eyes or blue ones; if he had curly hair or freckles or six toes. Her mother had shrugged off Josie’s concerns. “Surely there’s someone in your class who’s adopted,” she said. “You know fifty percent more about your background than they do.”

This is what Josie had pieced together about her father:

His name was Logan Rourke. He’d been a teacher at the law school her mother had attended.

His hair had gone white prematurely, but-her mother assured her-in a cool, not creepy, way.

He was ten years older than her mother, which meant he was fifty.

He had long fingers and played the piano.

He couldn’t whistle.

Not quite enough to fill a standard biography, if you asked Josie, not that anyone ever bothered to.

She was sitting in bio lab next to Courtney. Josie ordinarily would not have picked Courtney as a lab partner-she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier-but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Aracort was the teacher-adviser to the cheerleaders, and Courtney was one of those. No matter how skimpy their lab reports turned out, they still always managed to get A’s.

A dissected cat brain was sitting on the front desk next to Mrs. Aracort. It smelled of formaldehyde and looked like roadkill, which would have been bad enough, but in addition, last period had been lunchtime. (“That thing,” Courtney had shuddered, “is going to make me even more bulimic.”) Josie was trying not to look at it while she worked on her class project: each student had been given a wireless-enabled Dell laptop to surf the Net for examples of humane animal research. So far Josie had catalogued a primate study being done by an allergy pill manufacturer, where monkeys were made asthmatic and then cured, and another one that involved SIDS and puppies.