Until the Morning

"The hardest thing you do with a sick animal is the thing they will not know you did."

The door closed behind Turner with the soft click I had registered without noticing across a hundred previous consultations. The fluorescent above the bench went on with its faint electric buzz. Millie went on being asleep beneath the tartan blanket Karen had draped over her, her breathing long and slow now, the deep post-ictal recovery sleep that her body always dropped into after a bad one.

I sat with my hand resting on her flank and waited. Down the corridor I could hear the particular sequence of small sounds that meant Karen was collecting what she needed for the bloods — a drawer opening, a tray being lifted, the faint glass tap of vacutainers settling against each other.

She came in a few minutes later with the tray and set it on the bench beside the examination table without ceremony. The kit was the standard one. Three vacutainers, a butterfly needle, the small bottle of alcohol swabs, the roll of purple tape. Karen had drawn Millie's bloods more times than anyone else in the building and her hands moved through the sequence without needing her to watch them.

"She won't feel any of this." More to herself than to me. She rolled Millie gently onto her side, found the cephalic vein in the foreleg with the two-finger press she used because it did not require the dog to be awake for it, and drew the three tubes in about ninety seconds. "Good girl."

She capped the butterfly and dropped it into the sharps bin, labelled the tubes with the particular peeled-back thumbnail motion I had watched her do before, slid them into the rack.

"Right." She tore the admission sheet off the clipboard. "I'm going to settle her in the kennelling room. Do you want to come through, or say goodbye in here."

"Through."

"Come on, then."

The kennelling room was through a door at the end of the consult corridor that I had passed a hundred times and had never needed to go through. Karen unlocked it with a keypad code and held it open with her hip while I carried Millie through, the tartan blanket still wrapped around her. Inside the room was smaller than I had expected. Two walls of stacked cages along the right side. A low bench along the left with a shelf of clean towels above it. A sink in the corner. A window set too high for anyone to look out of. Along the back wall, two larger floor-level enclosures with their doors already open, and in the left-hand one a vet-bed folded into a nest and a steel water bowl set against the back corner.

"This one's hers." Karen nodded at the made-up enclosure. "She gets the whole thing to herself. Sophie will set the drip up in a few minutes once she's settled."

I knelt and laid Millie on the vet-bed. The blanket came with her. Karen crouched down beside me and tucked the edge of it under Millie's chin the way you'd tuck in a child, and then she straightened up and stepped back a pace.

"Talk to her."

I looked at her.

"She's not going to be in a great state when she wakes up. Familiar voice, she'll settle faster. Give her something to remember you saying."

Karen had moved to the bench by then, giving me the space by turning her attention to something that did not need her attention. I looked at Millie.

Her eyes were half-closed and not tracking. A small amount of drool had collected at the corner of her mouth from the posture she had been in on the blanket, and I took the edge of the tartan and wiped it away. Her head was heavy against the vet-bed. The white blaze on her nose was half-hidden under the fold of the blanket, and I smoothed the blanket back so that her face was clear.

"Hey, Mills."

She did not respond. She would not have responded even if she had been fully conscious.

"I'm going to leave you here tonight."

The words were easier to say than I had expected them to be. They arrived as the clear statement of what was happening, which was all they needed to be.

"They're going to look after you. Sophie's going to set up a drip. Turner will be in first thing in the morning to check your bloods. Okay?"

She was absolutely still under my hand.

"I'll be here in the morning. First thing. Nine. I'll come and get you."

I said it the way you say things to children. Not as a statement of fact, which it was not — the events of the morning were not yet fact and would not be until the morning arrived — but as a promise, which made the statement mean something slightly different and something slightly more. I had made promises to her before. The particular unnoticed strangeness of the present moment was that I believed this one absolutely.

I put my palm flat against the side of her face, thumb resting against the white blaze between her eyes, and held it there for longer than I would have if anyone had been watching. Karen was watching. I did not care. I leaned down and pressed my forehead against the top of her skull and stayed there until I had finished whatever it was I was doing, and then I straightened up.

"She'll be alright, Jerome."

"Yeah."

"I'll be here until nine. Sophie takes over then. She'll ring you personally if anything changes across the night."

"Thank you, Karen."

She nodded, once. I walked out of the enclosure. She shut the door behind me. I did not look back.

The waiting room had thinned by the time I came back through the consult corridor. The boxer and its owner were gone. A woman had come in with a carrier containing something that from the movement was probably a cat. Ava was off the phone, and she looked up as I approached the front desk.

"She's settled. Karen's getting Sophie on to the line."

"Good." Ava paused. I recognised, across half a second of her expression, the particular struggle of a twenty-four-year-old receptionist who had been on the job for six months and had not yet figured out what the professional thing was to say when a client walked past the counter without his dog. "We'll ring you if anything changes."

"I know."

"Turner said you can call any time. Ask whoever picks up to put you through to the kennelling room."

"I know."

She looked down at the appointment book for a moment and then up again. And I watched her find, in that small interval, the simpler thing she had been reaching for.

"Jerome. I'm opening in the morning. Nine."

"Thanks, Ava."

"I'll be here."

"Thanks."

I nodded to her. I could feel the woman with the cat carrier watching me, the way the people in the waiting room always watched anyone walking out past them without their animal, and I did not look at her either. The automatic doors hissed open at my approach. The cold air of the car park came in across the threshold.

I walked out.

The sun had moved. The Corolla was sitting in the loading bay with its bonnet in the slanted late afternoon light and its interior several degrees warmer than it had been when I had pulled in. I opened the driver's door. I did not get in yet. I stood there for a moment with my hand on the top of the door, looking at the passenger seat.

The blanket was still there. Bunched against the back of the seat in the shape Millie's body had made against it on the way in. The small pale circle she had fogged on the inside of the window had long since faded, but the press of her against the blanket had not. The blanket held her absence the way the bed at home was going to hold it when I got there. A small organised vacancy in the shape of a dog.

I reached across and took the blanket in both hands and folded it. I did it properly — corners matched, then folded again in thirds — and laid it on the back seat behind the passenger side. Leaving it in the shape she had left it in felt worse than moving it.

Then I got in.

I sat down in the driver's seat and closed the door. It clicked. For several seconds I did not put the key in the ignition. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and looked at the passenger seat without the blanket in it, and it was — as I had suspected it would be — worse without the blanket than it had been with. The vinyl was bare. The seatbelt clip sat untouched in its cradle. The small fogged circle on the window had finished fading.

The key went in. The engine caught on the second try.