The Hidden Photo

The cat started yowling around eleven on Tuesday night, and by midnight I was carrying her carrier through the rain to the emergency vet on Delmore Street. Her name is Moose. She's nine years old, mostly fur and opinions, and she had thrown up four times since dinner, which for Moose is roughly the equivalent of a human writing a will.

The clinic sits between a laundromat and a check cashing place, and the waiting room is about the size of my kitchen. Fluorescent lights, four plastic chairs, a fish tank with one depressed-looking tetra in it. There was nobody else there. Just me, a soaked cardboard carrier, and a cat screaming like she was being paid to do it.

The door behind the reception window opened and a nurse came out. Young guy, maybe late twenties, scrubs, hair tied back, a clipboard in one hand and a syringe cap between his teeth like a pencil. He took the cap out and smiled at me.

"Hey there. What's going on tonight?"

"She's been puking since seven. Won't eat, won't drink. She's nine."

"Okay, bring her around. What's her name?"

"Moose."

"Moose," he repeated, and crouched down to look into the carrier. "Hey, Moose. You're being real dramatic about this, huh?"

I don't remember what I said next, because that was the moment I actually looked at his face. And my stomach did something complicated.

I knew that face. I'd seen it in a photograph I had no business owning, in a drawer my wife had never mentioned, two years after her funeral.

"Sir? Sir, can you fill these out?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Yeah."

He took Moose back through the double doors and I sat down with a clipboard and a pen chained to it and tried to make my handwriting look like a person's handwriting. Name. Address. How long has this behavior been present. I stared at that last question longer than a grown man should.

Here's the unglamorous part, and I'll just say it plainly. My wife Ruth died two years ago. Car accident, a Wednesday in October, on her way home from her sister's place. She was thirty-one. I was thirty-two, and I have been thirty-four and lost ever since, if that makes sense. I own half of a small brewery, which sounds more romantic than it is. Mostly I scrub tanks and argue with my business partner about hops.

Three weeks ago I was looking for tax documents in her old desk, which I had never gone through, because grief makes cowards of us, and I found a photograph. Just one photograph, printed at a drugstore, in an envelope with nothing written on it. Ruth, younger than when I met her, standing outside a building I didn't recognize, laughing at someone just out of frame. The someone was this nurse. Oliver, said his badge. Younger in the photo, sure, but the same face, the same crooked smile. On the back, in Ruth's handwriting, a date and the words thank you for everything, and a phone number.

I never called it. I told myself I'd throw it away and I didn't. I carried it around in my wallet like a splinter, and every time I reached for my card at the grocery store there it was, her handwriting, asking me a question I couldn't answer.

And now the man in the photograph was filling out a chart ten feet away from me.

The vet tech, when she came out an hour later, said Moose had eaten something she shouldn't have. "Possibly a hair tie," she said. "We'll keep her overnight on fluids. You can call tomorrow."

I drove home through the empty streets and did not think about the photograph, meaning I thought about nothing else.

* * *

Wednesday I called the clinic four times. Moose was resting. Moose was improving. Moose was being, quote, "a real character with the night staff." I hung up the phone after that last one and looked at the clock and thought, well, I could just go there. In person. To check on the cat. It's a normal thing, people do it.

I got there around eleven on Wednesday. The waiting room was empty again, same tetra, still depressed. Oliver was at the desk this time, eating something out of a plastic container with a fork, and he looked up and recognized me before I'd finished failing to look casual.

"Hey, Moose's dad. Come to check on her?"

"Yeah. I know I can't go back there, they told me, I just. Couldn't sit at home."

"That's fair." He set the container down. "She's doing good, honestly. Eating us out of house and home. She yelled at me for ten minutes this afternoon, which I took as a great sign."

"That is a great sign. She only yells at people she respects."

He laughed at that, a real one, and something in my chest unclenched for the first time in weeks. God help me.

"You want to sit? It's dead tonight," he said. "I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a working-class neighborhood, somebody's dog will eat a sock before sunrise, they always do. But for now it's dead."

I sat. I want to be accurate about this part, because it matters. He asked. I accepted. There was no grabbing, no spark leaping across the room, none of that. Two tired adults in plastic chairs on a Wednesday night, one of them lying to himself about why he'd come.

"You work nights a lot?" I asked.

"Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and every other weekend. It's just me back there overnight, which sounds terrifying and mostly isn't." He gestured at the fish tank with his fork. "Lenny keeps me company."

"Lenny's the fish?"

"Lenny's the fish. He's seen some things."

I laughed, and then we talked about nothing for forty minutes. His sister in Sacramento. My brewery. The cat he had at home, a three-legged orange monster named Doug. It was easy, is the thing. Talking to him was the easiest thing I'd done in two years, and every five minutes or so the photograph floated up in my head and I shoved it back down.

Near one in the morning he checked his watch and stood up.

"Okay, so, Moose's probably getting discharged tomorrow morning, but here's the deal. Dr. Ford wants her on a bland diet for a week and she wants to go over the discharge stuff with you herself. She comes in around ten tomorrow night. Why don't you come back then, do the pickup late, and I'll walk you through the whole boring medication thing."

"So I'd get to take her home tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night. Ten-ish. You can even wait around while I finish her paperwork, it takes me forever, I type with two fingers."

"Two fingers," I said. "That explains the chart I got yesterday. I thought a raccoon had filled it out."

"Rude. Accurate, but rude." He grinned, and I stood to go, and at the door I turned around, and I don't know why I said what I said except that it was true.

"Thanks, Oliver. My week's been pretty bad and this helped."

"Anytime, man. That's the whole job, sort of."

I drove home in the rain and sat in the truck in my own driveway for ten minutes with the engine off. Then I got the photograph out of my wallet and looked at it under the dome light. Ruth, laughing, younger, alive. Him, half in frame, caught mid-joke. The date on the back was seven years ago. I'd only known her for six.

There was a whole piece of my wife's life I had never been invited into, and the door to it was a fluorescent waiting room on Delmore Street, and I had just agreed to walk back through it tomorrow night.

I put the photo back in my wallet, went inside, and slept terribly. Moose would have approved.

Thursday I did not go to the clinic at ten. I want that understood up front. I picked Moose up at nine that morning from the day nurse, like a coward, and then I sat in my truck in the brewery parking lot at lunch with the photo on the seat next to a ham sandwich and got nothing done, and Thursday night I made Moose's bland diet rice and she looked at me like I'd personally insulted her, and I did not drive to Delmore Street. I was proud of myself for about eleven hours.

Then the next Thursday came around, because Thursdays come around whether you deserve them or not.

Moose was fine by then. Fully fine, back to yelling at the rice, back to sitting on my chest at six a.m. like a sandbag with opinions. I had no reason to go to that clinic. I want to be accurate about that too, since I've been keeping score. I had a cat, a truck, half a brewery, and exactly zero reasons.

I went anyway.

It was just after midnight on the next Thursday when I walked in, and the rain had started up again, the light sideways stuff that doesn't so much fall as hover. Lenny was on duty in his tank. Oliver was behind the desk in scrubs, hair tied back, doing paperwork with the two fingers, and he looked up and did that thing where his face went surprised and then pleased and then tried to look neutral about it.

"Well, hey. Everything okay? Moose all right?"

"Yeah, she's great. She's home being mad at rice. I was just." I stopped. I had a whole lie ready on the drive over, something about being in the neighborhood, which is a laugh because nobody is in that neighborhood, it's wedged between a laundromat and a check cashing place, you go there on purpose or you're lost. "I was just in the neighborhood," I said, and heard how it sounded.

Oliver leaned back in his chair. "Nobody's in the neighborhood."

"That's what I've heard."

"Uh huh." He glanced at the clock, then at the empty waiting room, and something in him made a decision, because he stood up and picked up his coffee mug. "Come back to the break room. I've been up since four and I'm not going to make it to two a.m.