Page 2 of Knocked Up

"Hey. Hey. Get up."

He tried, front legs first. He got a few inches and went back down.

I didn't panic. I'd had a hundred and eighty pounds of forward land on my neck. There were men in that league who called me a robot and meant it as an insult. I had never been insulted. I panicked completely.

I don't remember deciding anything. I remember being on the porch with the dog in my arms, the screen door catching me in the shoulder. I did not know where one single thing was in this city, not a hospital and not a grocery store.

I pinned him into the passenger seat with my elbow. I drove one-handed with the phone in my lap saying emergency vet near me over and over. It gave me something a couple of miles east.

It was past midnight on a Tuesday in a city that went to bed. At Federal the light was red with nothing coming in either direction. I sat there a couple of seconds with my hand flat on the dog's ribs, feeling how fast it was going in there. Then I ran it.

I had never run a red light in my life. I got my license at sixteen with my father in the passenger seat. He told me a man who doesn't respect a rule when nobody's watching doesn't respect it at all.

I ran it and felt nothing about it whatsoever.

The place was a storefront. A lit sign said Reeves Rescue Veterinary, and under it, smaller, Open.

I hit the door with my shoulder because my hands were full.

"I need somebody. I need help."

There were six chairs and a fish tank. A woman stood behind the desk with her back to me, reaching up to a shelf.

And on top of a file cabinet by the window there was a cat. I had a dying animal in my arms and some part of my brain still logged it. She was a tortoiseshell with one and a half ears and her paws together like a magistrate.

She looked at me. She did not blink. Then she put one paw on a pen cup and pushed it off the cabinet.

"Ma'am, please, he collapsed, his gums are white, he's not…"

The woman turned around.

Everything in me went out like a breaker tripping.

Ten years and a month, and I had the number.

Her hair was shorter. She wore scrubs the color of dishwater, with something dried on her forearm. She was thinner than I remembered, and tired in a way faces are not at thirty-one.

"Tessa," I said.

She looked at the dog. That was the reunion. A second and a half, and then she was moving around the desk. Her hand went under his jaw doing exactly the thing I'd done, lifting his lip.

"How long has he been down? Vomiting? Trauma? Was he hit by anything?"

"Ten minutes. Twelve. No. He walked across a kitchen and went down."

"Age? Name?"

"Thirteen, almost fourteen. Bear."

"Bear," she said, and her voice changed for the dog. Then it changed back and got a lot louder. "Marisol! Front."

A technician came through a swinging door with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, which she threw in a trash can.

"Down dog, unknown cause, white as paper," Tessa said. "Table, oxygen, get a line in his front leg. I want his blood counts inside four minutes." She got both arms under him and looked at me for the first time. "Give him to me."

I gave her the dog. She took all eighty pounds like a woman who had been doing it for a decade. She went through the swinging door. The door swung twice and stopped.

I stood in the middle of the waiting room with my hands empty.