At the animal hospital they took Blister away and made me stay in the waiting room. I was crying — hysterically, I'll admit — and couldn't stop. I was also trembling and shaking. I didn't care who saw. Self-control was not a thing to be considered. The guy in the red Gore-Tex took off his coat and folded it carefully on the plastic seat beside him, and I hated him for that, for taking so much care with a goddamn coat after his dog tore mine to pieces.
“You should've had your dog on a leash,” I finally said between sobs, and had to repeat it several times to make myself understood. We were surrounded by photos on the walls and photos on magazine covers: all images of healthy, glossy dogs and cats, and they hit me like reproach.
“She got out,” is all he said. His singsong voice was actually an accent — Haitian, I guessed. He was in his forties, and neatly dressed in a blue shirt and chinos; he had high cheekbones and a trace of a beard and a compact, athletic build. “She belongs to my niece. I am sorry.”
“You'd better be fucking sorry,” is what I had to say to that.
He nodded. Then he leaned forward, his hands clasped over the knees of his neatly creased chinos. “You are bleeding,” he said.
“It's from the dog. It's from Blister.”
“No, I think it's from you.”
There was a dark splotch on my pants, below my knee. He knelt down in front of me, without asking, and quickly unlaced my boot and rolled up my corduroys and there it was: a rip in the fabric of my calf, jagged and bloody. My white sock was red. He touched his fingers to my leg and I swatted him away.
“Your dog bit me! Your fucking dog bit me, too!”
“She belongs to my niece,” he said, still kneeling in front of me.
I started to wail. “I'm going to be late for work,” I said.
His name was Jean-Michel and he came from Port-au-Prince. He worked in a hotel downtown, nights, like me. He'd come here five years earlier and lived with his brother, who was a doctor, and his brother's wife and their daughter, who was nine years old. The niece, Mireille, was beautiful and intelligent, but she was growing up wild. Her parents both worked and were very busy, and they did nothing to discipline her, and instead they bought her too many gifts, including new clothes all the time, earrings, CDs, and the dog. Jean-Michel told me all this in the waiting room at the animal hospital while my bloody calf throbbed and dripped onto the floor. His voice was low and melodic, and he seemed to think that he could soothe me with it, and he was right. I sat there listening to him while they worked on Blister, and I said nothing. Every once in a while I blew my nose into the cuff of my sweatshirt.
I interrupted him once, to ask him to call Phil and my supervisor at work. He took a notepad out of his pocket, wrote down the numbers, nodded, then did it. When he came back I said, “Thanks,” and he shook his head and said, “No. Nothing to thank.”
A veterinary assistant, looking all of nineteen, her hair in two long braids, came out and examined my leg. “Ooh, that's gotta smart,” she said, bending down. Her braids flapped around my ankles.
“Blister,” I said, “how is he?”
“You should get that looked at as soon as possible.”
I was in no mood for advice.
“If you aren't here to talk to me about Blister,” I told her, “get your fucking braids away from my leg.” I rolled down my pant leg over the bite.
Jean-Michel smiled weakly at her. “She's very upset,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later Phil came in, his nose red, his eyes wild, and said, “What in the hell happened?” and when Jean-Michel started to explain, Phil looked at him as if he couldn't understand a word he was saying, as if he were speaking a language that was eerily similar to English yet not English, and Jean-Michel trailed off into silence.
“Phil,” I said, “go find out about Blister.”
He barged past the reception desk into the hospital room and was gone for a long ten minutes. During this time Jean-Michel wrote down his name, address, and phone number, tucked the piece of paper into the pocket of my coat, and left me alone with the glossy photographs of healthy cats and dogs. When Phil came back he was crying, so I thought the worst, but he took my head in his hands and told me that Blister was torn up, that Blister was bloody and weak, but that Blister was going to be fine.
At home Blister recovered quickly. He had to wear that lampshade on his head for a few days, kept knocking into things without understanding why, and Phil and I had some good laughs about that, but he didn't seem to mind. I recovered, too. They couldn't give me stitches because dogs' mouths are septic, so I had a hole in my calf that reminded me of a tin can ripped open using an improper tool; it hurt like hell before it got better. Phil contacted the animal-control officer, who went to Jean-Michel's house next to the apartment complex and examined Sweetpea. When a dog breaks out of a fenced area and attacks a person, the officer told us, it's designated a dangerous dog. The owner must put up collateral against the possibility of the dog ever attacking anybody else, and if it does, the dog will die. This information was relayed with a certain amount of relish. The owner, he added, must also take out quite a lot of expensive insurance. And at his behest Jean-Michel's brother, the doctor, sent us a check to cover my medical expenses and Blister's.
March turned to April, though the weather didn't get any better. One day I was home alone with Blister — the walking wounded, as Phil called us — when the doorbell rang and Jean-Michel stood there on the front porch in that stupid red Gore-Tex jacket. I let him in, he took off his boots, and then we sat down in the living room.
“So,” he said, his voice still low and melodic. “You are all right. I was concerned.”
“I'm okay.”
“Ellen,” he said. “Is it all right if I call you Ellen?”
“Call me whatever you want,” I said. “I don't care.”
“I've come here today, Ellen, to tell you that we are going to contest the dangerous-dog designation. My family, we cannot afford it. The collateral, the insurance. It is too much.”
Blister came into the room and lay down at his feet. Jean-Michel reached down, stroking the dog's head while looking at his healing wounds, his buffed nails long and elegant. The palms of his hands were a much lighter color than the backs, and I found myself staring at the two colors as he gestured.
“What am I supposed to say?” I asked him.
“You will be called to trial,” he said. “To testify about what happened. I wanted to ask you something, because I have a feeling about you. I can tell that in your heart you are a kind woman, Ellen. I wanted to ask you to be kind. At the trial, be kind.”
“Be kind?” I said. Nobody had ever asked me such a thing before. I had never thought of myself as being kind, or unkind, either. The issue had never crossed my mind.
Jean-Michel's eyes were dark, dark brown. As I looked at him a strange thing happened. I fell a bit in love with him then, in that one look; it was simple and immediate, like walking through a doorway. I was so attracted to him, in fact, that I could hardly breathe; but I also wanted to know everything about him, what every day of his life was like from his childhood in Haiti to his nights at the hotel. I'd been married to Phil for six years and nothing like this had happened before — crushes, yes, an occasional passing attraction to someone else's husband at a summer barbecue after too much beer. But not this: a moment when you felt like your whole life could change.
I stood up. “I'll think about it,” I said.