Page 32 of Holding On

Chapter Seven

Travis Russo

The next couple of days fly by. By Wednesday, I’m beyond busy and it isn’t fun. A plow horse named Sammy has a broken leg and has to be put down. He’s an old friend of Claire’s, and she’s pretty upset. Two dogs, a newfie and a graying terrier, also have to be euthanized, one for the worst case of mange I’ve ever seen—even in textbooks—and the other for cancer.

Thursday hasn’t proven much better. Plus, I’m beginning to feel as though our practice caters to elderly pets and putting them down. I’m trying hard to separate from it all, to see what I do as important and not get caught in what their human friends are going through.

But it’s fucking hard. The weather is shitty too. There’s a major summer storm predicted to hit by noon, and the skies have been dark since this morning.

Then the neighbors across the street, Edna and Albert, contact us. They’d watched us grow up and were kind of like our surrogate grandparents. Edna catches me as I’m exiting the clinic. Clouds are continuing to thicken, converging for the summer squall.

“Hey,” I say, putting an arm around her for a moment. I swear she’s shrinking.

“Kaylee is gone,” she says, almost wringing her hands. “She had an abscess on her front paw, and I was treating it. But she’s run off and the storm’s coming in.”

The wind is starting to whip. All morning, weather alerts were going off as the clouds darkened. Now, the wind is really lashing. Finn’s outside, closing shutters, securing the door to the hot tub, and making sure both generators are up. Claire told me this morning that he’d instructed guests to not leave for dinner and to stay and dine in.

Claire and I both shook our heads. Guests, especially those not from the coast, always think we exaggerate, and they end up doing what they want and then get lost, stuck, or like one time, have their car lifted off in a flood up near Ellsworth.

The last thing I want to do right now is look for a cat that doesn’t want to be found, but I don’t have much choice. I’d spent many an afternoon after school, testing out Edna’s “new” cookie recipes. When I got older, I realized they weren’t “new,” and she certainly didn’t need to bake them. She did it for me.

After shooing Edna back in and watching her two attempts to shut their flimsy screen door, I start the search.

The wind is cold, chipped right off the sea. After milling around for about an hour, I finally find Kaylee, the cat.

She’s out in the gardening cottage in the back, inside the lawnmower, meowing. As soon as I pick the poor thing up, I can tell she has a fever. “Kaylee, let’s go inside,” I say. “That’s a swift two-stroke striker. We can do better.”

The wind beats against the flimsy wall and the shed shakes. The noise is loud and out of control. In response to this chaos, Kaylee sinks a tooth into my finger.

I don’t flinch and I don’t drop her. I merely pull my finger out and grab a burlap bag hanging on a nail. Before the cat can recalibrate for a second attack, I’ve got her wrapped tight in burlap.

The rain is starting to fall in large fat drops, sputtering sideways in the wind. I dash across the dirt road, mud already splattering, and rap on the side door. Frank lets me in, rubbing a hand across the top of his speckled bald head.

The house is old and smells ironically of dust and Pine-Sol. The light is good by the front window.

“You’re bleeding,” Edna says. “Did she bite you?” Her horror is real.

“She’s in pain,” I say by way of explanation. It’s not enough for her, and she sends Frank banging around in the bathroom for disinfectant and a bandage.

It takes me a few minutes to finally lacerate the abscess with one of Frank’s scalpels that he uses for miniature ship building. Using the sterile pads Frank brought for me, I clean up the cat’s wound. He seems inordinately proud his scalpel was utilized and sits puffing on a pipe in the corner, eyes watering, thrilled something he had could be put to use.

I disinfect the wound, keep Kaylee tightly wrapped in the burlap, and leave them with a promise to come right back and instructions about what to do about fever.

I run quickly across to the clinic and confiscate a syringe of antibiotic, stuff it into my jacket pocket, and slosh back through the mud and driving rain. I get only a glimpse of Finn next door, slamming the front door on the porch.

By now, Kaylee is happy to be the jewel of the house once more, purring away in Edna’s lap. I have been relegated to enemy status, and it takes quite a bit of coaxing and deft hands to get that needle placed. Just as I remove the syringe, there’s a knock on the door.

It’s Bryce. His face looks drawn. He won’t come in, and at first, I think it’s because he’s so massive that he knows he’ll shed a gallon of water on their hand-braided ancient rugs.

But it’s because he’s in a rush.

“We got to go to Rockland now,” he says. “Get in the car.” There’s a black corporate Lexus pulled right up to the door. Jackson’s in the back on the passenger side, and I’m to ride shotgun.

Out of habit, I snap the needle in half. “Throw this out,” I tell Edna before I duck under my hoodie and follow Bryce into the storm.

Through the rain, I see Luke and Mateus on the front porch. Mateus has a cell phone pressed to his ear, then he shakes his head and crams it into a back pocket. Reception here is always sketchy and mad worse during heavy cloud cover.

I have to shout to be heard above the metallic pounding on the roof of the Lexis. “What’s going on?”