Still Life in Shadow Ch. 03

Later that week I walked down to the docks to check in on David and Max.

Yes, Max.

Apparently something quite untoward had happened down below in the storm, and Max now resolutely refused to go back up the hill to Maria's; in fact, he didn't want to leave David's side at all now. I came up on the dock above them, and Max's tail began to thump when he saw me. David turned at the sound and looked up at me after seeing the tail wiping the cockpit.

"She want her dog back yet?"

"She hasn't said anything to me about it, David."

"Where's Jennifer?"

"She's been staying with me this week. She's been kinda confused."

"Ah."

You ever realize just how many syllables are in the word 'Ah'? Or just how much meaning can be packed in that word?

"So, what are you up to? See you got the boat put back together." Actually, there hadn't been much to do but check the rigging for any unseen damage done during the knockdown. Latham just shrugged his shoulders, took on a faraway look. "You doing okay?" I asked a moment later.

"No, not really. Got lab results back. White counts gone loco, the AFP is off the charts, and now the prostate has gotten in on the act."

I nodded my head. He was reaching the terminal phase now. He might last a month, maybe two at the outside.

"Did you talk to Maria about things?"

"Yeah."

Max whimpered and licked his front paw while I looked at David. This was it, and we all knew the score. Max walked over to David and licked his chin, then sat down with his muzzle in David's lap. His eyes were full of sadness, and he looked tired. Pure empathy, I thought as I looked at both of them. David scratched Max behind the ears, knew where to go to give his friend pleasure, and Max knew just exactly where he needed to be, too. He knew the score, too.

"What's the plan now, David?"

"Huh?"

"What are you doing to settle your affairs? Have you thought about that much?"

"A little."

"And? Anything I can do?"

"I'll let you know, Pete." He rubbed Max's belly for a while, then looked up at me. "Pete? There's a lump in here. On Max's gut."

I hopped down onto deck and sat across from David and Max, and reached out to feel Max's belly. He turned toward my hand and his upper lip quivered, and he let out a low growl. I withdrew my hand.

David talked to Max in low, gentle tones, then asked me to check the area again. This time Max didn't move, didn't resist at all, and I palpated where David indicated.

It was a broad, hard mass, and I could feel nodes around the site that were already hard and distended. Max licked my hand now that his secret was blown, and he looked up at me with those soft brown eyes while I started to cry.

"This just isn't fair," I said out loud. "I've got two friends in the world, and they're both gonna die on me."

"Hey, anything I can do to help, let me know." Latham smiled now, now that I had to eat my own patronizing words.

Don't you just hate smart-asses. Even the ironic ones are hard to take.

___________________________________________

Maria and I took Max to the island's only veterinarian, and he just shook his head when he examined Max.

"Nothing to do," the old man said to me through his thickly accented English, and Maria just nodded her head.

They talked for a while in Portuguese, which I was still learning, and I could make out nice little phrases like 'put him down' and 'keep him comfortable', and I suddenly felt very sick to my stomach. I was used to people dying, but not dogs. Max would be my first.

I looked at Max and thought of a world without him in it and I felt really cold and lonely inside. Like a kid again, after the first time you grapple with the idea that mom or dad will one day not be there anymore, and suddenly the world feels like a very lonely place after all. Like all the toys and candy are there to just hide a few plain facts that mom and dad don't want to talk about. Maybe that's why I had gone to med school. And why I had fallen in love with Jennifer.

Maybe I was just running from death, trying to cheat death every chance I could, trying to pile experience into this empty vessel called life so that in the end I could say I had lived a 'full' life. I looked at Max, and suddenly it looked to me like I had wasted a lot of my time.

___________________________________________

I think its safe to say that in the next few weeks Jennifer and I had a tough time.

She had gone to stay at Maria's in search of peace and solace from the upheaval we'd each just been through, and instead she found herself in the middle of one of the most confusing affairs imaginable. She had never, she told me later, once had any inclination to have a relationship with another woman, yet the ease with which she had slipped into the relationship - when she looked back on it - shook her up pretty bad. All of the assumptions she had taken for granted in her early life had been directly challenged.

And it was funny. She didn't feel used, or taken advantage of. In fact, when I asked her about her feelings for Maria she said bluntly that she loved her, that she was sure she always would love the woman. She felt like she had been split in two; one life she could acknowledge in the full light of day. The other was a still life in shadow.

So maybe we were all running from death. The problem with that, I knew, was simple.

Sometimes when we run and run, we forget how to live any other way.

Sometimes all we do is run . . .

Pt IV pending...