“Oh, I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Keene said.
“Yes, it is, oh yes, entirely possible,” Travis said, babbling now in his eagerness to convince the vet. “Don’t worry about us, Doctor. We’ll manage just fine. Einstein needs us here, so we’ll stay, the important thing is that we stay, and of course we’ll pay you extra for the inconvenience.”
“But I’m not running a hotel!”
“We must stay,” Nora said firmly.
Keene said, “Now, really, I’m a reasonable man, but-”
With both hands, Travis seized the vet’s right hand and held it tightly, startling Keene. “Listen, Dr. Keene, please, let me try to explain. I know this is an unusual request. I know we must sound like a couple of lunatics to you, but we’ve got our reasons, and they’re good ones. This is no ordinary dog, Dr. Keene. He saved my life-”
“And he saved mine, too,” Nora said. “In a separate incident.”
“And he brought us together,” Travis said. “Without Einstein, we would never have met, never married, and we’d both be dead.”
Astonished, Keene looked from one to the other. “You mean he saved your lives-literally? And in two separate incidents?”
“Literally,” Nora said.
“And then brought you together?”
“Yes,” Travis said. “Changed our lives in more ways than we can count or ever explain.”
Held fast in Travis’s hands, the vet looked at Nora, lowered his kind eyes to the wheezing retriever, shook his head, and said, “I’m a sucker for heroic dog stories. I’ll want to hear this one, for sure.”
“We’ll tell you all about it,” Nora promised. But, she thought, it’ll be a carefully edited version.
“When I was five years old,” James Keene said, “I was saved from drowning by a black Labrador.”
Nora remembered the beautiful black lab in the living room and wondered if it was actually a descendant of the animal that had saved Keene-or just a reminder of the great debt he owed to dogs.
“All right,” Keene said, “you can stay.”
“Thank you.” Travis’s voice cracked. “Thank you.”
Freeing his hand from Travis, Keene said, “But it’ll be at least forty-eight hours before we can be at all confident that Einstein will survive. It’ll be a long haul.”
“Forty-eight hours is nothing,” Travis said. “Two nights of sleeping on the floor. We can handle that.”
Keene said, “I have a hunch that, for you two, forty-eight hours is going to be an eternity, under the circumstances.” He looked at his wristwatch and said, “Now, my assistant will arrive in about ten minutes, and shortly after that we’ll open the office for morning hours. I can’t have you underfoot in here while I’m seeing other patients. And you wouldn’t want to wait in the patient lounge with a bunch of other anxious owners and sick animals; that would only depress you. You can wait in the living room, and when the office is closed late this afternoon, you can return here to be with Einstein.”
“Can we peek in on him during the day?” Travis asked.
Smiling, Keene said, “All right. But just a peek.”
Under Nora’s hand, Einstein finally stopped shivering. Some of the tension went out of him, and he relaxed, as if he had heard they would be allowed to remain close by, and was immensely comforted.
The morning passed at an agonizingly slow pace. Dr. Keene’s living room had a television set, books, and magazines, but neither Nora nor Travis could get interested in TV or reading.
Every half hour or so, they slipped down the hall, one at a time, and peeked in at Einstein. He never seemed worse, but he never seemed any better, either.
Keene came in once and said, “By the way, feel free to use the bathroom. And there’s cold drinks in the refrigerator. Make coffee if you want.” He smiled down at the black lab at his side. “And this fella is Pooka. He’ll love you to death if you give him a chance.”
Pooka was, indeed, one of the friendliest dogs Nora had ever seen. Without encouragement, he would roll over, play dead, sit up on his haunches, and then come snuffling around, tail wagging, to be rewarded with some petting and scratching.
All morning, Travis ignored the dog’s pleas for affection, as if petting Pooka would in some way be a betrayal of Einstein and would insure Einstein’s death of distemper.
However, Nora took comfort from the dog and gave it the attention it desired. She told herself that treating Pooka well would please the gods and that the gods would then look favorably upon Einstein. Her desperation produced in her a superstition just as fierce as-if different from-that which gripped her husband.
Travis paced. He sat on the edge of a chair, head bowed, his face in his hands. For long periods, he stood at one of the windows, staring out, not seeing the street that lay out there but some dark vision of his own. He blamed himself for what had happened, and the truth of the situation (which Nora recalled for him) did nothing to lessen his irrational sense of guilt.
Facing a window, hugging himself as if he were cold, Travis said quietly, “Do you think Keene saw the tattoo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“Do you think there’s really been a description of Einstein circulated to vets? Will Keene know what the tattoo means?”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe we’re too paranoid about this.”
But after hearing from Garrison and learning of the lengths to which the government had gone to prevent him from getting a warning to them, they knew that an enormous and urgent search for the dog must be still under way. So there was no such thing as being “too paranoid.”
From noon until two, Dr. Keene closed the office for lunch. He invited Nora and Travis to eat with him in the big kitchen. He was a bachelor who knew how to take care of himself, and he had a freezer stocked with frozen entrées that he had prepared and packaged himself. He defrosted individually wrapped slabs of homemade lasagna and, with their help, made three salads. The food was good, but neither Nora nor Travis was able to eat much of it.
The more Nora knew of James Keene, the more she liked him. He was lighthearted in spite of his morose appearance, and his sense of humor ran toward self-deprecation. His love of animals was a light within that gave him a special glow. Dogs were his greatest love, and when he spoke of them his enthusiasm transformed his homely features and made of him a handsomer and quite appealing man.
The doctor told them of the black lab, King, that had saved him from drowning when he was a child, and he encouraged them to tell him how Einstein saved their lives. Travis recounted a colorful story about going hiking and almost walking into an injured and angry bear. He described how Einstein warned him off and then, when the half-mad bear gave chase, how Einstein challenged and repeatedly foiled the beast. Nora was able to tell a story closer to the truth: harassment by a sexual psychopath whose attack had been interrupted by Einstein and who had been held by the retriever until the police arrived.
Keene was impressed. “He really is a hero!”
Nora sensed that the stories about Einstein had so completely won the vet Over that, if he did spot the tattoo and knew what it meant, he might conceivably put it out of his mind and might let them go in peace once Einstein was recovered. If Einstein recovered.
But as they were gathering up the dishes, Keene said, “Sam, I’ve been wondering why your wife calls you ‘Travis.’
They were prepared for this. Since assuming new identities, they had decided that it was easier and safer for Nora to continue calling him Travis, rather than trying to use Sam all the time and then, at some crucial moment, slipping up. They could claim that Travis was a nickname she’d given him, that the origin was a private joke; with winks at each other and foolish grins, they could imply there was something sexual about it, something much too embarrassing to explain further. That was how they handled Keene’s question, but they were in no mood to wink and grin foolishly with any conviction, so Nora was not sure they carried it off. In fact she thought their nervous and inept performance might increase Keene’s suspicions if he had any.