While I Was Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

enthralled I am. Swoon, swoon.”
    “Well, now, that would be talking about you, Sade.”
    “Right, Mom.” Her voice had dried.
    “Good night, sweetie.”
    “Night.”
    WHEN DANIEL WASN’t BACK BY ELEVEN, I TOOK THE DOGS out for their walk. The air was cool, and I pulled my jacket tight.
    Light fell from the windows behind me into the yard, and the world disappeared beyond its touch. I stepped forward, into it.
    Often Daniel and I had done the dogs’ walk together when the girls were still home, happy just to be alone with each other at the end of the long day, to escape from them and the phone and the duties of the house. We’d stumble through the dark, reviewing our separate days for one another, ignoring the dogs, who ran ahead or trailed behind.
    We’d walk past the stores, the fancy houses, looking in at other people’s lives like strolling gods, commenting. We’d wander into the unlighted streets off the common that turned gradually into knotted paths, into fields. We’d walk slower and slower as we wound down, bumping into each other more, unmoored and dizzy in the dark. And then finally Daniel would say, “Well, we better head home and see if anyone’s still alive.” Reluctantly, yet eagerly now, we’d whistle for the dogs in the soft night air and turn to start back.
    That’s what I was thinking of that Monday night before everything changed, before my other life caught up with me. I’d pushed aside that moment in the boat, I was thinking only of Daniel trying to offer comfort in the face of death, of Sadie turning back to her world, and Cass and Nora moving around in theirs, even of the dogs, running after each other through the dark village to sounds and smells I couldn’t guess at. And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same.
    WHEN I ARRIVED AT WORK THE NEXT DAY, BEAT TIE
    was already behind the counter, with three dogs moving excitedly around her feet. We let the good-natured boarders loose for company for each other during the day, so there were almost always three or four of them nosing about officiously or sleeping under Beattie’s desk.
    “The supervisors” she called them.
    the barkers, the fighters, we kept in the runs in the back, and the cats had their own room, so they wouldn’t be in perpetual panic at the dogs’ noise.
    Beattie was on the phone, making reassuring, motherly sounds to someone. She would be on the phone fairly steadily through the morning. Tuesday was my day to catch up with all the bad things that had happened to my people’s pets while I had my two days off. My partner, Mary Ellen, handled the worst of it on Mondays, the real emergencies left over from the weekend, fights, traumas, difficult births, the sudden onset of skin problems, unexplained loss of appetite or other gastrointestinal issues.
    “Party time” was what Beattie called Monday. Mary Ellen always said she loved it.
    Even on Tuesdays, though, we tried to hold up to two hours empty in the afternoon for the unscheduled visits of clients who’d waited to see me, and we kept the rest of the appointments the equivalent of well-baby care, so we could flex around the odd disaster.
    This was ample random excitement for me. I took my deepest pleasure in the ordinary, in simply reentering the office with its familiar animal and medicinal smell, in giving what comfort and help I could to the animals and their owners, in just moving around among the polite and curiouS boarding dogs I even enjoyed the way Beattie’s loud, clucking voice threaded through my day. Now I waved to her and went back down the hall to my exam room to see who my first clients were and what I’d be asked to do for their pets.
    ANIMALS HAD COME