Lily and the Octopus (15 page)

“We have some decisions to make, Monkey.”

Lily mulls the weight of this for a moment before asking, “Why do you call me that?”

“Why do I call you what?”

“Monkey.”

“Why do I call you Monkey?”

“And all those other names.”

“Those are terms of endearment.”

“I don’t understand.” Lily squints as she stares out into the sun.

“Terms of endearment are names or phrases that you use to address someone that you feel great affection for.”

The wind picks up and we sit quietly for a moment.

“You have a lot of them for me,” she observes.

“That’s because I have a lot of affection for you.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Do you have any terms of endearment for me?”

Lily thinks about this. “Mostly, I think of you as That Guy.”

I could let that bother me, but I don’t. Terms of endearment are probably a human thing. They’re certainly not a dog creation. They have other things—tail wagging, for
instance—instead. To her, I am That Guy. The guy.

Her guy.

In the water, a pod of dolphins breaks the surface and we watch them as they dive up and down over the forming waves. Part of me wishes we were not high on a cliff; part of me wishes I could
swim out to the dolphins and enlist their help in prying the octopus from Lily with their bottle noses and returning him to the ocean depths.

“Can the octopus hear us now?” I ask.

“No.”

“You can tell?”

“Sometimes. He gets bored with us a lot and tunes out.”

“If he’s so bored, then he should leave.” I scratch the back of Lily’s neck while trying to choke down my offense. Bored with
us
? Really? He’s not exactly a
master of witticisms and repartee. Who the hell does he think he is?

Lily does this thing where she lifts her snout in the air, and I can tell that the backrub feels good, so I continue. I’m more comfortable snuggling with her when I know the octopus
isn’t going to interfere. “We have some decisions to make, Goose. Hard ones. About how to get rid of . . .” Instead of saying
the octopus
, I point at it. I don’t want
his curiosity piqued by his mention. “And to be blunt about it, all of the options suck.”

I continue stroking Lily’s back. I’m not sure how much of this she grasps. Sucks for the octopus? Sucks for her? Sucks for us. I think of what Doogie has told me, as well as what
I’ve read in my own research, although my own research is limited—if you Google “octopus on dogs,” most results you get are about making an octopus out of a hot dog by
cutting the bottom two-thirds the long way into eight sections to look like arms and leaving the head of the hot dog intact. Apparently the Japanese add these to bento-type lunch boxes for
children. This makes me think less of the Japanese.

“There’s surgery, where they’ll try to cut him off. That’s perhaps the most obvious thing to do. But the doctors won’t know if they can get all of him until they
put you under and see what kind of grip he holds.” Lily looks confused, so I remind her, “You had surgery once on your spine.”

Lily recoils and I feel her tremble. “I don’t like surgery.”

“I don’t think anyone does.” Maybe only surgeons.

“What else?”

Her reaction confirms what I already know, but surgery in many ways would be the most satisfying. The idea of stabbing a scalpel into the octopus and starting to cut is so appealing, I almost
want to do it myself. To bring about his demise at the violent end of a knife. But there’s no way for even the most decorated surgeon to do this without also stabbing a knife into Lily.
Neither of us can abide by this, if it’s even a worthwhile option at all.

“There’s chemotherapy and radiation.”

“What do those things do?”

“They would try to shrink the octo—him, I suppose.” It’s a funny visual, like a cartoon. The octopus getting smaller and smaller in front of our eyes until he has only a
high squeaky voice and croaks something along the lines of “I’m mellllt-t-t-ting,” like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Do those hurt like surgery?”

I try to imagine putting Lily through either. What they would both do to her already subdued spirit. Her voice would be lost. I can’t imagine ever hearing her exclaim
I! JUST! CAME!
BACK! FROM! CHEMOTHERAPY! AND! IT! WAS! SO! MUCH! FUN! LET’S! ALL! STICK! PEANUT! BUTTER! TO! THE! ROOFS! OF! OUR! MOUTHS! AND! LICK! FRANTICALLY! UNTIL! IT’S! GONE!

I can’t imagine ever hearing her exclaim anything again.

“Neither is pleasant,” I say.

“Next,” she says dismissively.

“They can put you on steroids to try to reduce the octopus that way—reduce the swelling he’s causing on your brain—and start you on anticonvulsants to lessen the
frequency of seizures. But those do a lot of damage to your kidneys.”

Lily has already had several courses of steroids on occasions when swelling returned to her spine. I used to find the idea of her on steroids funny—that I might come home and find a
dachshund-shaped hole in the wall and half the cars on the block overturned in a Hulk-like rage. But only funny because I was so scared. I needed to think of the steroids as superhuman,
supercanine. There could be no surgery for her again on her spine. The steroids had to be powerful. They had to work.

“Harrumph,” Lily scoffs, summing up her feelings on all the choices.

She’s not going to help me make this decision. She’s a dog and has other concerns, and what about any of this can she really understand? Or maybe she’s made her decision, and
what I need to do is listen. Maybe she knows what the vet says, what may seem obvious to anyone who thinks about it. That there is no true cure for canine octopus. Not any that has been discovered
yet.

Lily stands on my lap and raises one of her front paws in her best guard-dog stance.

LOOK! THE! DOLPHINS! ARE! BACK! AND! THEY’RE! JUMPING! I! WANT! TO! JUMP! IN! THE! WAVES! LIKE! THAT!

I look up and the pod has returned, and sure enough, they are jumping and twisting and flipping and flopping playfully in the rising tide.

And yet even more enchanting is Lily’s voice. The one I can’t bear to dim or silence. It’s older, and her exclamations are fewer and farther between. Her puppyish enthusiasm is
gone. But it is still her voice. It is still her.

“You don’t like to get wet,” I say.

“Oh, yeah,” Lily says. She settles back down in my lap.

“It’s a fun idea, though, Mouse. Splashing in the waves.”

After a pause Lily looks up at me. “Sometimes I think of you as Dad.”

My heart rises in my throat.

That’s the only term of endearment I need.

I
t’s late, past the time I usually go searching for Lily to bring her to bed, except tonight I don’t have to search for her because
she’s creating such a ruckus in the hallway, barking and growling and carrying on. When I catch up to her, she’s staring into the corner between the bedroom and bathroom doors, in her
offensive low crouch, hackles raised, clearly startled and upset.

“Goose? Goose! Mongoose! What is it?”

She doesn’t miss a beat or move to back down or acknowledge my presence in any way. She just barks at the damned corner like it’s an advancing battalion. I’m already leaning
down to grab her when she stops me cold in my tracks.

THIS! LLAMA! BEACHBALL! SEVEN! PARLIAMENT! CASSEROLE! ANTARCTICA! PAJAMAS!

What the . . .

We both stare at each other, frozen. It’s like being in a horror film when someone starts speaking in tongues and the whole room falls silent. I’m almost waiting for Lily’s
head to rotate like an owl’s and for her to start vomiting pea soup. But I know for a fact she’s not possessed by demons—just one demon, a squishy, eight-tentacled prick. I scoop
her up and squeeze her tight to soothe her, but she wriggles left, then right, then nearly out of my grip altogether. It takes a moment pressed against my chest for her to snap out of whatever
trance she’s in, and when she does she begins to shake uncontrollably in my arms.

“Guppy, what was that?”

Lily turns from me to the light, then from the light to the dining room, then from the dining room to the bedroom.

“I can’t see,” she says.

This startles me. “Can’t see what?” I turn on the light, hoping it will help.

There’s a long silence. “Anything.”

I look at the octopus. “What have you done?”

The octopus looks annoyed. “Have you noticed there’s an emerging pattern in this household? I’m always the first to be blamed.”

“What have you done!”

“To her?”

I’ve resisted doing this previously, but since Lily is in a state anyway, I swat the octopus. Hard. I immediately regret it, but Lily remains oblivious.

“Ow!” One of his arms reaches up to soothe the spot where I hit him. “I released my ink sac. Satisfied?”

“She can’t see!”

“That’s really the whole point of releasing an ink sac.” The octopus’s ability to stay calm in the face of my rage is one of the things I hate most about him.

“And you wonder why you get blamed.”

“Oh, hey, look at that. Yeah, I guess this one is on me.” I loathe his epiphanies.

I wish there was a way to punch him, really deck him square in the jaw, but there isn’t. Not without also risking further harm to Lily. So instead I kiss her on the neck, on the far side,
away from the octopus.

“Get a room,” the octopus says.

I imagine grabbing that arm of his and wrapping it around his neck and choking the life right out of him, much as Princess Leia did to Jabba the Hutt, until his obnoxious tongue hangs limply in
death. But I don’t. I set Lily down on the ground and continue to stroke her back in a way that calms both of us. After a moment or two she gathers some initiative and takes three steps
forward straight into the wall.

“Whoa. Take it easy, Monkey.”

Lily backs up, adjusts her course, and takes another few steps, again into the wall, but this time a little closer to the kitchen door.

“Where’s my water?” Lily asks.

I grab her around the middle and gently guide her through the doorway into the kitchen toward the water. Before I can stop her, she walks into the side of her bowl and water sloshes over the
edge and onto her feet.

“Found it,” she says, lifting her paws away from the puddle, then thirstily lapping at the remaining water in her bowl.

“Aren’t you supposed to leave now, octopus?”

“I don’t think so,” he says as Lily continues to drink. “Why?”

“Releasing your ink sac is what you do so that you can make your escape. It’s what you do to cloud the water to evade a predator.”

The octopus shakes his head, which throws Lily slightly off balance, but she recovers easily enough. “Oh, so suddenly between the two of us
you’re
the octopus
expert?”

“Don’t kid yourself into thinking that the instant you fall asleep I’m not reading everything I can about your kind so I can find a way to kill you.” I probably
shouldn’t have said that, played that hand in so obvious a fashion, but since Lily’s usually in my lap when I’m doing my research, I figure on some level he already knows.

Lily finishes drinking and takes a few steps toward her bed and I almost yell at the octopus
don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you
before remembering he’s only a
passenger, and I want Lily to move around to help her orient herself. She knows where her bed is in relation to the water bowl, and she makes it there without incident.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call this thing a predator,” the octopus answers. He shakes his head in pity as Lily turns her usual three times before lying down.

“Why don’t you crawl down off her head and see how long you last against
that thing
.” This may be the only moment that I’m not horrified by Lily’s hunting
instincts, her skill in eviscerating plush prey, her innate Germanity. If only she could grab the octopus by his squishy flesh and shake until his insides decorate his outsides.

“That’s okay. I’m fine where I am.” He smiles a crooked smile. Lily settles her chin over the side of the bed. It’s probably the best thing for her to do, sleep.
But part of me wishes she was not giving in to the blinding. Part of me wishes she was charging, head down, at the walls of the kitchen full speed, that she would ram the octopus into submission,
making him choke on his hubris.

“So if she’s not a predator, and you’re not scuttling away, why release your ink?”

The octopus rolls his eyes. “I thought you were the octopus expert.”

We glare at each other and I know neither of us is going to back down, just as he knows it, so I answer my own question. “Because sometimes you get bored.”

The octopus looks surprised, maybe even a little impressed, but he tries to mask that quickly. “Very good.”

“How long will the ink last? When will she be able to see?”

The octopus shrugs. I don’t know how he manages it, because an octopus doesn’t have shoulders, but that’s exactly what he does—he shrugs. “I don’t
know.” He sounds genuinely baffled.

“Why not? Why don’t you know? How long does it usually last?”

“I don’t know because I’m usually long gone by the time it clears.”

“But you’re still here!” I’m on the verge of pulling my hair out in clumps.

“You know, I take it back. You really are becoming quite the expert.”

I turn away from him and place my hand over my mouth to muffle my agonizing scream.

“Also, I don’t know because I’ve never released my ink sac directly into someone’s brain.” He blows air through his lips, causing them to vibrate, to intonate that
it’s anyone’s best guess.

And just like that, I understand that Lily’s eyesight is not coming back. The octopus took it simply because he was bored and he could. She has seen my face, the world, her world, for the
last time. She’s a blind dog now.

My quiver is emptying of arrows, but I mentally draw one of the few I have left and carefully take aim. “The octopus does have predators, you know.”

The octopus laughs. “Ha-ha. Yeah. Sharks!” He looks around the kitchen. “I don’t see any sharks here!”