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  For my angels—Isabelle, Madeleine, and Amy

  Acknowledgments

  I am so grateful to many people who have helped make this book a reality.

  I was continually amazed at the extraordinary level of skill, genuineness, care, enthusiasm, and integrity of everyone I worked with at Center Street and Hachette Book Group. Unsaid could not have found a better home.

  At Center Street, profound gratitude to Christina Boys, my wonderful and wise editor; Angela Valente, my daily go-to person, who makes everything run so smoothly; Rolf Zettersten, publisher, and Harry Helm, associate publisher, who believed in this book.

  The sales, marketing, and publicity teams have worked so hard and with such passion and creativity. Huge thanks to Andrea Glickson, Martha Otis (and Teddy and Winston), Karen Torres, Chris Barba, Mindy Im, Kelly Leonard, Chris Murphy, Shanon Stowe, Janice Wilkins, Gina Wynn, and Jean Griffin. I am humbled by your talent and moved by your compassion. For his incredible eye, thank you to Jody Waldrup, art director. For his guiding hand, thank you to Bob Castillo, the managing editor, and his terrific team, including my copy editor, Laura Jorstad.

  This book could never have happened without Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management. Seriously. He never gave up on me and never lost his faith in this book. He is brilliant at what he does, but more important he is, as my grandmother used to say, “a good man.” And to Celeste Fine and the rest of the gang at Folio, thank you for everything.

  My colleagues at Proskauer, and in particular in the great labor and employment department of the firm, have taught me so much more than the practice of law. They have never let me down and, when I needed, actually propped me up. I cannot imagine a better place to practice law or a better group of people to do it with. My very special thanks to Joe Baumgarten and M. David Zurndorfer for putting up with me all these years, being such good friends, and not telling me I was crazy (or at least not about the book). The late Steven Krane, a brilliant lawyer and animal lover, reminded us always that doing the right thing was not merely a process, but an end. I miss you, Steve.

  My thanks as well to anthropologist Dr. Barbara King at William and Mary College, the author of Being with Animals, for serving as my science consultant. The errors are still mine, but because of her review, there are fewer of them.

  Dr. Gay Bradshaw, the founder and director of the Kerulos Center, gave me invaluable information and insight as well as encouragement. Kerulos is doing remarkable work, and I hope their vision is not too long in coming—“A world where animals and their societies live in dignity and freedom in peaceful co-existence with humans.”

  More thanks to Herb Thomas, a kind and quiet man, who wrote a book called The Shame Response to Rejection and changed so many lives, including my own; Roma Roth, who made a remarkable movie about bonobos called Uncommon Chimpanzee, gave me the first encouraging words about my writing, and continued to be a source of encouragement throughout this process; and my dear friend Adrian Alperovich, who always gave me good advice.

  Thanks and love to my folks, who taught me to love books.

  To Skippy and my other animal companions who first opened my heart, I will never forget you.

  And to Amy, Isabelle, and Madeleine, who have filled it more than I could have possibly hoped for. There is nothing without you guys. Nothing.

  Prologue

  Every living thing dies. There’s no stopping it.

  In my experience—and I’ve had more than my share—endings rarely go well. There is absolutely nothing life affirming about death. You’d think that, given the prevalence and irrevocability of death, whoever or whatever put the whole thing together would’ve given a little more attention to the process of exit. Maybe next time.

  When I was still alive, a critical part of my job was to facilitate the endings. As a veterinarian, I was a member of the one healing profession that not only was authorized to kill, but in fact was expected to do so. I saved life, and then I took it away.

  Whether it was because I was a woman—and, therefore, a life bearer by definition—or simply because my neurons fired that way, the dissonance created by my roles as reaper and healer had been with me since my first day of vet school.

  Although I tried to convince myself that I always did the best I could for all in my care, I often worried that every creature I’d killed would be waiting for me at the end. I imagined a thousand beautiful, innocent little eyes glaring at me, judging, accusing, and detailing my failures. I didn’t do enough for them, those eyes would say; I wasn’t good enough. Or perhaps I gave up too soon. Or maybe, for some, I kept them alive too long when they were in pain—a mere shadow of their former selves—only because that is what someone else wanted for them.

  Of these offenses I’m almost certainly guilty. In the end, the responsibility of filling heaven is too difficult a burden for mere mortals like me. Yes, I had cared, but caring is not enough.

  As I became more ill, after the cancer traveled from my breasts to my lymph nodes, my worry turned into fear and, at the last, terror. My hands had been the instrument of too many deaths born out of the burden I had asked for but was ill prepared to shoulder. One of these deaths in particular began to gnaw at me until it filled me with such shame that my defenses of denial and rationalization abandoned me altogether.

  I came to believe that I could not face these failures without an offering of true and demonstrable repentance. For me this meant not just empty words of apology, but finding meaning in and justification for the decisions I’d made or, alternatively, finally admitting to myself that I wasn’t who I believed and that I probably had not mattered at all—not to my husband, my colleagues, my own animals, or those I tended to in life.

  In the midst of that search, just as I was beginning to weave some of the discrete threads into a broader tapestry of consequence, I ran out of time. The pain became unimaginable and the morphine drip remained my last best friend until everything just stopped.

  And so here I am, unable to retreat and afraid to move onward empty-handed. Instead, I watch and hope that what I see will bring me understanding or at least the courage to move on without it, before everything fades and my pages turn blank. I don’t know how much time I have before this happens or the consequence for me if it does, but I don’t think it’s good.

  If you believe my present predicament is merely the product of overreaction or perhaps cowardice, you may be right. But then I only have one question for you.

  How many lives have you taken?

  1

  The irony is that I didn’t understand the profound impact that death had on my life until I succumbed to its power. The signs were all there, but I guess I ignored them or had been too occupied with the act of living.

  I’d married an orphan—a child of death. In fact, death itself had introduced us.

  David had been driving too fast to get to an evening class at the law school. I was driving in the opposite direction half asleep from twenty-four hours at the Cornell vet clinic and completely lost in the memory of a chimpanzee named Charlie.

  A large deer suddenly jumped from the woods into the road and froze in the glare of our headlights. I cut my wheel and rolled down a small embankment, stopping near a dense stand
of trees.

  David and the deer were not as lucky. He stomped on his brakes, but he was too late by seconds. I heard the sickening thud of metal against soft tissue and then the sound of his wheels scream as he spun off the opposite side of the road.

  I quickly climbed the embankment. The force of the car’s impact had thrown the deer into the middle of the road. It was alive and struggling to stand on two clearly broken rear legs. I immediately thought through my options, none of them good.

  “Are you okay?” David called to me from across the way as soon as he got out of his car.

  I ignored him and ran toward the deer and into the road. The deer’s front legs gave out and it collapsed just as a pair of headlights rounded a bend on the hill no more than two miles down the otherwise pitch-dark oncoming lane.

  “No!” David screamed. “The cars can’t see you!”

  I reached the terrified deer in five seconds and tried to move it out of the road by tugging its forelegs. It was no use. The animal was too frightened and far too heavy.

  The approaching car was now only a mile away. David reached me and tried to pull me out of the road and back toward his car. “Come on, we need to get out of the road,” he shouted.

  I pushed him off. “I can handle this.”

  When I next looked up, the oncoming car was maybe half a mile away. I realized that David was right—because of the steep grade of the road, the car wouldn’t be able to see us in time to stop.

  David refused to leave me. He yanked off his coat and, after two tries, looped it around the deer’s forelegs up by its shoulders. He tied the arms of the jacket into a knot and heaved on the jacket while I pushed, but the deer moved only a few inches.

  The oncoming car closed in.

  A panicked hoof shot out and caught David on the cheek, carving a deep gash that immediately drew blood. David’s eyes glazed over and he stumbled on his heels. For one horrible moment I thought he was going to pass out in the road. I would never be able to move him before the car came through.

  “Get out of the road!” I screamed. He shook the cobwebs away, and I saw his eyes finally clear.

  He tried to get a better grip on the makeshift sling and said, “On the count of three, okay?”

  I glanced at the headlights of the oncoming car. It was too close. I nodded at David, but started to sweat despite the cold.

  “One, two, three!” If David said anything else, his words were drowned out by my own scream of exertion and the blare of the car horn.

  We pulled the deer clear of the lane and onto the shoulder just as the car passed. Then we collapsed. The car didn’t even hesitate as its horn faded into the distance.

  The deer struggled to lift her head and blood sprayed from her nose, splattering me and David and mixing with the blood already streaming from the cut on his face.

  David slowly got to his feet while I ran back to my car. “Where are you going?” he called after me.

  “Stay here.” Another car passed, narrowly missing me, as I ran across the road.

  I returned two minutes later with my bag and pulled out a deep pink vial of phenobarbital and a large syringe. Death comes in such a pretty color.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to kill her.”

  “Kill her? But we just—”

  “—she’s got massive internal bleeding. Her abdomen’s already full of blood. I’m a vet. Trust me, she’s done.”

  “When did you know that?”

  “As soon as I saw her in the road,” I said as I drew the pheno into the syringe like I’d done dozens of times before.

  “Then why’d we just almost kill ourselves bringing her out of the road?” David didn’t sound angry, just confused.

  “Because I want my voice to be the last thing she hears, not the sound of oncoming traffic. I want her to feel gentle hands as she goes, not the force of a car crushing her sternum. I’m sorry, but she deserves that. We all do.”

  David nodded at my answer. I don’t think he understood, but neither did he argue. “What should I do?”

  “I can do this by myself,” I told him as I turned toward the deer.

  David grabbed my arm. “I know you can, but you don’t need to. Let me help.”

  “Okay. Hold her down and as still as you can. I need to go into her neck.” David did his best to comply. The doe’s eyes were wide with fear and pain. I stroked the doe’s throat for a moment to give comfort, but also to find the major vein for the needle. I finally found it.

  I took a deep breath, jabbed the needle in, and quickly injected the contents of the syringe. The doe struggled for a moment, and then her lifeless head dropped into David’s arms. I took the stethoscope from my bag and listened for a heartbeat. “She’s gone,” I said.

  A tear rolled down David’s undamaged cheek as he stroked the head of the animal. His shoulders relaxed, his breathing deepened, and his teeth chattered. Perhaps it was the accident, or the pain from the deep cut on his face, maybe it was the accumulation of the events of his day or simply being witness to the act of taking a life, but this man I didn’t know was suddenly known to me.

  For that instant, David was again the lonely high school boy who learned that his father was gone, and whose mother left him so soon after. He was the responsible only child who swallowed his pain because there was no one to share his grief. Death had spoken to him in a secret language, and this act of communication had changed him and set him apart. He was both an innocent and damaged by experience.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered into the dead deer’s ear.

  We called the sheriff’s office from the Tompkins County Community Hospital thirty minutes later, reported the deer carcass, and requested a tow for David’s car. I held David’s hand while they put twenty-two stitches in his cheek and fed him antibiotics and painkillers. You can still see the faint line of a scar when the sun hits his face just the right way.

  After that night, without too much discussion and even less fanfare, David and I were together. Period.

  Such is the power of death. It can rip apart or fuse together. And now, sixteen years later, it sits on David’s chest, slowly squeezing the life out of him.

  We lived in a beautiful part of New York State—close enough to Manhattan that David could get to his office in seventy-five minutes, but far enough away that I could pretend I was a simple country veterinarian.

  Our house sits in the middle of a clearing at the top of a small hill. The house itself is modest, but the property is very pretty and provided more than enough room for all my creatures.

  We bought the house and moved north from the city at my request two years before David made partner at his firm. This was my first real demand during our marriage. I believe it was the right decision—for both me and him. In return for the additional stress of becoming a homeowner and a commuter, David gained a house full of life and love—until, of course, it wasn’t anymore.

  I hardly recognize our place now. A thin dusting of snow provides the only color to this otherwise steel-gray day. The grounds around the house are a mess—newspapers and small bits of garbage blow across the property. The source of the refuse, a trash bag torn open by a hungry raccoon, lies in the driveway next to two overturned plastic garbage cans. My Jeep is encrusted in snow and ice, its battery long dead. Several unopened FedEx packages marked URGENT and addressed to David Colden line the steps leading up to the house.

  I’m reminded by the scene before me that a home is an organism, and no organism gripped by death is particularly attractive.

  Right next to the house, a small wood-framed barn and a paddock fill out several acres. My two horses, bored and restless from lack of attention, paw the ground looking for fresh hay.

  Arthur and Alice were Premarin foals, unwanted by-products of the manufacture of a drug made from the urine of pregnant horses. We saved these two from the slaughterhouse within a month of our move north.

  With Premarin foals, you just never know w
hat kind of horse you’re going to end up with, and my two well make the point. Alice, who looks part Morgan and part quarter horse, is shy, sweet, and always up for a good scratch on the head. Arthur, my huge draft horse, is very smart and has little tolerance for any human contact except mine. Even now I believe he senses me; he stares right at the spot where I’m standing and snorts curiously.

  A second smaller enclosure abuts the paddock. Several years ago, I placed a large doghouse into the space. Now something moves within the doghouse and pushes mounds of old straw out onto the ground. The creature in the doghouse—a 375-pound pink pig—raises its massive head and grunts in my direction. This is Collette.

  We adopted Collette four years ago. She’d been abandoned with her twenty young brothers and sisters in a rotting upstate barn in the middle of winter. When the piglets were discovered, all but three were frozen to the barn’s dirt floor. Collette was one of the three.

  Collette is a survivor, a champion over death, but her early experiences have left their mark. She is moody and even on good days does not have a vast sense of humor. Today clearly is not a good day.

  In the house itself, there is some evidence of life—but just barely. Empty Chinese food boxes merge with condolence cards to form an odd sculpture on the hallway table. A dozen of the cards have cascaded off the table and landed on the floor. Several of these have been chewed to shreds.

  The living room curtains are drawn and, but for the glow cast by the dying embers in the fireplace and a dim floor lamp, the room is dark. Loose stacks of unopened mail and used wineglasses cover most of the flat surfaces.

  The wineglasses frighten me. David likes wine. In the few times that I’ve seen him seriously troubled, his wine consumption soared. He was never roaring drunk. To the contrary, the alcohol made him even more subdued and closed off to me. The wine deadens him and that, I believe, is his intention.

  I raised this concern with him perhaps twice, but the episode always passed before it escalated. The demands of David’s job require that he be 100 percent mentally focused, so his work invariably served as an outer limit for his alcohol intake. But without the daily burdens of the job? I don’t know. We’ve never gone there.