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  “Seeing that would be well worth the trip,” Wolfe says. “Why don’t you show me that now.”

  Jaycee calls Frank on the office intercom. “We’re going to proceed with the demonstration now. Can you bring Cindy in?”

  In less than a minute, Frank enters the lab carrying Cindy. She is already wearing her gloves. Frank places Cindy in the Cube, next to her keyboard, and then joins Jaycee and the others near Jaycee’s desk.

  The photographer snaps a few pictures of Cindy. The flash momentarily startles her, and she shakes her head to get rid of the afterimage.

  Jaycee waits until Cindy is resettled and then says, “I’m now going to engage Cindy in a conversation. Her answers will appear in English on this computer screen here.” Jaycee points to the screen next to them.

  “Do you mind telling us what your first question will be?” Jannick asks.

  “I was going to begin by asking Cindy to tell us her name and to say hello to the congressman, but there is no prearranged format. I can ask her any question that would be appropriate for a four-year-old.”

  “Four?” Wolfe asks. He makes no effort to hide his skepticism. “You mean to tell me that this chimpanzee has the language skills of a four-year-old?”

  “Correct,” Jaycee says proudly. “Cindy has the cognitive age equivalent of a four-year-old human girl. Perhaps the congressman would like to give us a question for Cindy.”

  “Indeed, I would,” Wolfe answers. “Let’s ask her to name her favorite food. That seems about right for a four-year-old.”

  Jaycee smiles. She’s asked Cindy that question hundreds of times and the answer is always the same—peanut butter. “Of course. First, I will sign the question for Cindy and then you will be able to see her response.”

  “Actually,” Jannick interrupts, “if you don’t mind, Jaycee, I’d like to be the one to sign the question to Cindy.”

  Jaycee and I both see the trap Jannick has set at precisely the same time—and way too late. This was why he didn’t try to stop Wolfe; Jannick wanted Wolfe at the demonstration so he could make his point about Cindy to the one person who could kill any further discussion of the project.

  “That’s not the demonstration protocol, Scott.” Jaycee struggles to keep her voice calm.

  Jannick will not be put off. “But surely the person who asks the question shouldn’t matter if the language has been learned. The words are, after all, the same words regardless of who says them. I still sign pretty well, so it shouldn’t be an issue.”

  Jaycee glares at Jannick. “This is my study. Cindy is familiar with me. You can’t just step in and expect to be able to divorce the act of communication from the underlying relationship.” She turns to Wolfe and says, “Dr. Jannick has never worked with Cindy. It would be most appropriate for me to be the one to lead the interaction.”

  Wolfe’s aide whispers into his ear and Wolfe nods. “Perhaps Scott is correct,” Wolfe decides.

  Jannick doesn’t wait for further discussion. He takes three steps toward Cindy in the Cube. Cindy watches him closely. “Cindy,” Jannick says at the same time he signs, “what is your favorite food?”

  Cindy just stares at him.

  “Let me try again,” Jannick tells Wolfe. “What is your favorite food?” Jannick asks as he signs, this time more slowly.

  Still no response from Cindy.

  “Hmm. Did I get the signing right, Frank?” Jannick asks. “Did I ask her what I intended?”

  Frank, who looks like he would prefer to be anywhere but here, simply nods.

  “How about another question, then,” Jannick says. “A simple yes or no. Cindy, do you like peanut butter?” Jannick asks and signs.

  Cindy is painfully silent.

  “Perhaps she just doesn’t like you,” Wolfe tells Jannick half jokingly.

  “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time I was rejected,” Jannick says. “But we do know she likes Frank, right? He’s worked with Cindy since the beginning. What do you say, Frank? Give it a try?”

  Frank looks to Jaycee for guidance. They both know that Frank will be no more successful than Jannick. “This is very disruptive and unfair, Dr. Jannick,” Jaycee says. “Cindy has no reason to use your language with you.”

  “How about because I asked nicely?” Jannick asks. “What’s the magic word? Please? Okay, Cindy.” Jannick turns back to Cindy and says and signs, “Please.”

  Jaycee’s face turns bright red. “When you are done hijacking my demonstration, Scott, I would like to show Congressman Wolfe—”

  “—that your work cannot be replicated?” Jannick scoffs. “That you’ve spent the last four years of the government’s money creating a technology that no one else can use and, therefore, is proof of nothing? I warned you about this, Jaycee!”

  Jaycee spins on Jannick, forgetting Wolfe and the demonstration. “She speaks to me! Why isn’t that enough?”

  Jannick pulls out a folder and waves it in front of Jaycee’s face. “Because the grant agreement you signed says it’s not enough. Because the testing protocol you designed to ensure the validity of the experiment requires more. You can’t change the rules at the end of the game.”

  Wolfe’s aide whispers to him again, and Wolfe examines his watch with exaggerated deliberateness. “I’m going to need to get back to the city, Doctors. It’s been an interesting experience and I assure you, Dr. Cassidy, the committee will give your materials a careful vetting when I return to DC. Why don’t you join me for the drive down, Scott, and we can review budget issues.”

  Wolfe’s aide escorts him out of the lab and into his car before Jaycee has the chance to protest.

  In his now empty and silent office, Joshua begins the process of closing for the day. He does a last check of the animals in the back cages to make sure that everyone has enough food and water for the night and that all the post-surgical cases are stable. Then, moving to the front of the office, Joshua shuts down the computers and one by one turns off all the lights.

  Prince, an enormous tortoise-striped tom tabby, follows him around the office. Prince was the tiniest of strays when Joshua first found him. He was so sick looking and scrawny that no one wanted to adopt him. The fact that he had lost one ear and an eye in some street battle didn’t help his adoption chances, either.

  After a while, Joshua stopped trying to place the cat and accepted the fact that Prince was a fixture of the office. Every night before he left, Joshua put out a clean litter pan, a bowl of dry cat food, and a dish of fresh water and gave Prince roaming rights through the office. This arrangement apparently was agreeable to the cat, as he soon became a feline behemoth able to push open the heaviest of the office doors.

  Prince meows and rolls on his huge back on the reception desk. Joshua obliges him with a belly scratch for a few moments, but then something by the door catches Joshua’s attention. His hand freezes in midair. There it is, staring right at him, illuminated by one last, small light—the office name plate.

  Joshua walks over to it and, with a slow shake of his head, slides the wooden slat engraved with my name from its spot.

  With my name under his arm, Joshua turns off the remaining light and quickly walks out into the heavy shadows of a November evening.

  Prince meows loudly after him.

  Still dressed from the day that ended many hours earlier, David sits on the edge of our bed with the dogs and several of my cats asleep nearby. Although he grips a photograph of the two of us walking on the beach, he stares at the television, which is tuned to a station that has long since signed off.

  Our bed was a good place for us. Of course there was sex, but almost more than that, it held so many moments of non-physical intimacy because I was often already in bed by the time David got home. It was also the place where David was the least serious and defensive, and where his work life was the farthest from his mind.

  So bed was where we had late-night conversations about nothing more significant than which flavor of ice cream is the most difficult
to make and which melts the slowest, shared laughter at a TiVoed sitcom, or debated which one of us would get up in the middle of the night to let a cat in through the bedroom window and then, only minutes later, back out again.

  These are all the small interactions that fill the many, many hollows of married life.

  But David is not thinking about these memories tonight. I can tell that he’s not because there’s not even a hint of happiness recalled around his eyes. Perhaps he is thinking of a different bed—my hospital bed. There are no great—or even good—memories of that bed.

  By the time I was back in the hospital for the final time, I was mostly unconscious, hooked up to monitors that precisely measured the life leaving my body. We didn’t really need the machines to tell us what was happening. My pallor and sunken features spoke clearly that the time for hope had long since passed.

  David, pale and exhausted from lack of sleep, sat beside me hour after hour. He was supposed to share this vigil with Liza, my college roommate, closest friend, and champion, but more often than not he asked to be alone with me.

  Throughout our marriage, Liza’s contradictions had always irritated David. She smokes cigarettes before and after her yoga class, drinks wheatgrass juice with lunch and cosmopolitans with dinner, and can quote extensively from the Old or New Testament (she was a religious studies major before she became a psychologist), but would have a hard time identifying the governor of New York. And when it came to romantic entanglements, of which there were many, Liza had all the self-restraint of squirrel in a bag of peanuts. Still, she was fiercely devoted to me—and by association, my husband. Despite her idiosyncrasies, whatever comfort David found toward the end, he found in her.

  On my last day, Liza summoned David into the hallway outside my hospital room. David was on the brink of tears. “She’s still hanging on,” he told her. “This is torture.”

  “But that’s what you’ve been asking of her,” Liza said gently. “It’s all been about the fight to stay here with you. She won’t abandon you.”

  “That’s over now.”

  “Is it? Is it over for you?”

  “Do I have another choice?”

  “I think before she goes, she needs to know that you’ll be okay. Give her your permission to stop the fight and let go.”

  “Come on, she’s not even conscious. Don’t start with the new-age crap. I can’t do the Touched by an Angel thing right now.”

  Liza put her hands on David’s shoulders. “You need to say good-bye and release her.”

  David’s eyes flashed. “But it’s a lie! It’s all a damn lie!”

  “I know, honey. But sometimes lies are the only truth you’ve got.” David backed away from Liza, and her hands dropped uselessly to her sides. “I’m going to smoke. You need to go say the words and take care of business.” Liza kissed David on the cheek and walked away.

  I passed in silence four hours later.

  I was hoping that our good-bye would be an instrument of the understanding that had eluded me, that something would pass between us in those final moments. I was praying for the epiphany of closure—that we could be each other’s last, best teacher. Instead, as David sat next to me, I could almost hear his internal dialogue of doubt, fear, and self-deprecation—all the I should haves and I can’ts. I was unable to redirect him and so having him there with me, especially toward the end, was nothing short of agony. I became just another hard and futile ending.

  You never know who will turn out to be your greatest teacher until it all ends. In belated retrospect, I now realize that the most important lesson I’d ever learned about saying good-bye actually came from a six-year-old girl.

  A yellow Lab, humorously misnamed Brutus, had been brought to my office with a fractured pelvis—the consequences of his run-in with a Volvo SUV. I advised the dog’s family—a pleasant single mom and her young daughter, Samantha—that I probably would be able to repair the fracture but that there was a chance of serious post-operative neurological damage. I also told the mother that, in light of the cost of the surgery, the dog’s age, and the prospect that the dog might not fully recover, euthanasia also was an understandable option.

  The mother explained that Samantha had witnessed the accident that nearly killed the dog and that her husband had died two years earlier in a head-on car collision.

  “If there’s any way that Samantha’s last memory of Brutus can be something other than the accident,” she told me, “then I want to try to do that for her.”

  The orthopedic part of the surgery went well. Samantha and her mother came to visit Brutus at the hospital every day for at least a few hours. I can’t tell you precisely what the dog was feeling during these visits, but anyone who observed the dog when Samantha lifted his head and put it in her lap well understood that the visits were neither unappreciated nor unimportant. Anyone who says otherwise is either cruel or stupid.

  Unfortunately, my initial diagnostic hunch of nerve damage was spot-on. Brutus had no control over his back legs. Worse than that, he also couldn’t pass body waste on his own. This meant emptying his bladder with a catheter every three hours and subjecting him to an enema every twenty-four hours. For a large dog who has lived an independent life, the inability to pass waste on his own is something I can only describe as humiliating. You can see it in the downcast eyes, the ears that refuse to perk up, and eventually, in some cases, the refusal to eat or drink.

  On the fifth day post-surgery, Brutus stopped eating. On the sixth day, he stopped drinking.

  When Samantha and her mom came to visit on the seventh day post-surgery, I took the mother into an empty exam room to discuss options while Samantha stayed with Brutus in the holding area.

  “Yes, I can keep him alive with IV fluids,” I answered the mother’s question. “But you’ve got to start asking yourself toward what end.”

  The mother started to cry. “It’s not so much about Brutus. I just can’t tell Samantha that she’s going to lose something else that she loves. She’s been through—”

  We were interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Samantha. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was clear. “I think Brutus wants to die,” she said. “I think he wants to die so he can go to heaven and run again.” Samantha then turned on her heel and left the room, leaving her mother and me staring at each other.

  Samantha’s mother decided that her daughter didn’t need to see or know about the act of euthanasia. We ran through a short script of what I would tell Samantha later that day after I had ended Brutus’s life. Before Samantha and her mother left, that little girl hugged her dog as if she knew it would be for the last time.

  When I called a few hours later, Samantha answered the phone. I told her, “The angels came and took Brutus to heaven.”

  There was a pause of a few seconds. When Samantha spoke, there was a tremor in her voice. “You think he’s running again?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, holding back my own tears. “Like a puppy.”

  Samantha began to cry. “Then that’s good. That’s real good.”

  After that day, whenever I picked up the file for a terminal case, I prayed for better angels, for the truth, wisdom, and mercy that Samantha had found in opening the gates of heaven for Brutus. I guess during those last days with me in the hospital, David’s fear of being alone again forced him to pray for something else entirely.

  Four hours. Two hundred and forty minutes. Fourteen thousand four hundred seconds. I waited for David as long as I could. I suppose perhaps I still am.

  In our bedroom now, David drops the photo on the bed and reaches for the phone. I assume that, like me, he’s looking for contact, for sound, anything to stop the white noise that rings in his ears. He dials a number he now knows by heart. It rings a few times before Liza’s sleepy voice comes on the line.

  “David?” Liza yawns into the phone. “You okay? Never mind, don’t answer that.”

  “I’m really sorry to be calling so late.”

  “Don
’t even. What’s keeping you up?”

  “I never told her it was okay, you know? I never said good-bye.”

  Liza takes her time before answering. “I know, honey.”

  “Maybe I should’ve listened to you.”

  “I said it for you, not for Helena.”

  “Still…”

  “Have you slept at all tonight?”

  “It’s too quiet.”

  “I’ll get someone to phone in a scrip for something in the morning to help you sleep.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I really want to sleep.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “No. It’s just that every time I wake up, it starts all over again… the newness of her being gone… Does that make any sense?”

  “I think so. But if you don’t start sleeping, you’ll start circling the drain. Trust me. There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is a method of torture.”

  “I’ll let you know. What I really want—” David stops himself.

  “What?”

  “I just want to be able to cry until there’s nothing left—until I can’t feel a damn thing anymore. It’s like if I could stick my finger down my throat and make myself vomit, it would all come out and I wouldn’t be sick anymore. But I can’t get there. I haven’t cried since the funeral, but I feel everything. I know it sounds stupid.”

  “Not stupid. It just sounds like you’re wound pretty tight right now. I think if you can just get some sleep—”

  “—I heard you the first time, dear.”

  Liza knows that it’s time to get off the subject. “How’s the housekeeper search going? Did you find someone?”

  David laughs. “You don’t want to know.”

  “C’mon. Tell me.”

  “I wouldn’t trust any of them to wash Collette’s fruit, let alone take care of Skippy.”

  “Skippy can take care of himself. It’s you I worry about, doll. You’re going to need to choose someone.”

  “This I know.” David hesitates. “When do you think…” His voice trails off.

  “When do I think what?”

  “Nothing. I should let you get back to sleep.”