Lily and the Octopus(65)

How hard the floor feels.

How hard my face feels.

Lily.

Her tongue.

The octopus.

The octopus! I look at the octopus and he lies there with his eight arms fallen limp and his one visible eye rolled back in his stupid head.

You did this. You could have left, but you didn’t. I hope you rot in hell.

There’s no point in saying it out loud. He can’t hear me.

The octopus is dead, too.

I pull the blanket over Lily’s head just enough to cover the octopus, so that it is just her and me, like it had always been.

“I will love you forever. For the rest of my days and even all of the days after that.”

With one last look, I pull the blanket up high enough to cover her completely. It takes me a minute to stand, but when I do I walk out of the room and, without looking back, I close the door behind me.





1 P.M.


I sit in the car for a long time not knowing what to do or where to go. Eventually, I pull out my phone and call Trent.

“Lily died.”

“Come to my house. I’ll leave work right now.”

Somehow, I drive to Trent’s house. Once, in college, I had to drive home to Maine from Boston during the throes of a migraine headache, and when I got home I had no memory of how I got there. This drive is like that. Except the migraine is heartbreak.

Trent greets me at the front door and pulls me into a hug and we both cry and I say “pills” and he already has them laid out for me. I let a Valium dissolve under my tongue and I kneel down to pet Weezie. Sweet, sweet Weezie. She just wants to play, but I can’t.

I help myself to two shots of this Russian vodka from a bottle I gave Trent for his birthday. We first enjoyed this vodka at the restaurant Red Medicine, a neo-Vietnamese joint that we had sought out because the LA Times named it the “bad boy” of the Los Angeles dining scene, and it goes down smooth and it is just that: medicine. I don’t know if it’s the vodka or the Valium that takes hold first, but the weight lifts from my lungs just enough so that I can breathe.

Trent asks me how it all went, and I tell him as much as I can but it isn’t much. Weezie is nipping at my heels but I just can’t throw this rope chew she wants me to throw for her and my head gets very fuzzy. I collapse on Trent’s sofa and he puts on the TV and we both sit down to watch, but before either of us knows it I’m asleep.





2 P.M.


The waters lap softly at the sides of Fishful Thinking, lulling us into a rhythmic hypnosis. As anxious as we are to get home, I’ve killed the engines just now so we can drift in the quiet and take in the great beauty that surrounds us. The blue of the cloudless sky matches the blue of the water and the air is soft and the sun from the east makes a sparkling golden path for us to follow home. There is total silence except for the gentle sounds of the waters kissing the hull. Since we’re stopped, the octopus sinks and the weight of his corpse raises the hull just enough so that it feels like we’re sailing to the heavens, or at the very least wherever Sandy and Danny flew off to when they left Rydell High at the end of the movie Grease.

Lily is by my side.

I’m almost startled to see her and I start crying, and since the octopus is dead, Lily looks like her old self, her younger self—there’s a lightness to the way she moves, and I hold her head in both hands and scratch behind her ears and just say “oh, my baby” over and over again.

“What?” Lily asks, confused.

I say the only thing I can think to say. “You’re here.”

I lift her off her perch in the deckhouse and we stroll out to the bow and lean over the front of the ship.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It is,” Lily agrees.

Lily places her front paws on the edge of the boat and stands on her hind legs for a better look. Her tail starts wagging in perfect synchronization with the lapping water, her inner metronome setting the beat with slow metrical ticks, and I remember what happiness feels like.

I stand back just to drink it all in. If I had the ability to press a button and pause time and live in one moment forever, this is the moment I would choose.

A breeze picks up from the northeast, and Lily’s ears rise in the wind like the outboard flaps on airplane wings at takeoff.

“What do you see, Monkey?”

Lily takes in the expanse between us and the horizon. There’s a softness to everything, and it really does feel like we’re flying, not floating.

“Everything,” she replies.

“We’re going home now. To return to our lives. How do you feel about that?”

Lily remains silent, transfixed by the sun’s reflection on the water. I wait a moment for her to respond.

“Puppy?”

Lily gives me something of a nod, I think, but she still doesn’t really answer me, and this strikes me as odd. My question hangs limply in the air, uncomfortably, like an unreturned I love you. Why wouldn’t she be ready to get back to our lives? To return to the quiet stability of our everyday togetherness? Does she know of something unpleasant waiting for us on shore?

Suddenly, red ball falls from the sky and lands on the deck with a deafening thwack. Startled, Lily and I both jump. Red ball bounces in a high arc and lands again closer to the deckhouse. Lily springs into action as it bounces in a series of increasingly smaller arcs toward the stern. She catches the ball in her mouth just before it bounces over the rear of the boat and into the water where the octopus anchors us down. She trots proudly with her catch back toward the bow and plays with it near my feet.