We hadn’t been back since.
Homer didn’t struggle at all now. He was still breathing, and he appeared to be awake. But whether he was on the floor or in his carrier seemed to be a matter of equal indifference to him.
Seeing his utter lack of resistance made the knots in my stomach tighten. I held him for a moment, pressing my cheek to the top of his head before gently lowering him in. “You’re going to be fine,” I assured him in a soft voice. “You’ll be just fine.”
It was the lunch hour—always a difficult time to catch a cab in front of our Midtown apartment—so Laurence walked a couple of blocks up while I huddled Homer in his carrier as close under my coat as I could, trying to keep him warm. With my cell phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear, I let the receptionist at the vet’s office know that Homer and I were on our way in with an emergency. As I hung up, I saw the blessed sight of Laurence in the back of a cab pulling up to us.
Homer didn’t budge or call out once during the entire ten-minute ride—also very unlike him—and I found myself unable to stop unzipping the top of the carrier just far enough to slip my hand in, to stroke Homer’s head and side and make sure he was still breathing. The traffic on First Avenue was too heavy for our cabbie to cross, forcing him to drop us across the street from the animal hospital’s entrance. I left Laurence to pay him and, like the true New Yorker I’d long-since become, darted into the street against the light, breaking into a run so none of the oncoming cars would have to slow to avoid me. I was slightly out of breath by the time I reached the receptionist’s desk and placed Homer in his carrier on top of it.
Reina, the woman behind the desk, knew me well. I’d been there at least once a month during the two years when Vashti and Scarlett were sick, and more recently when Clayton had to have his hind leg removed. Laurence and I liked to say that we’d probably financed a Cooper-Lerman Memorial Wing of the animal hospital, given our outrageous expenses there over the past few years. It was a joke, of course, but I don’t think I’d ever felt less like laughing than I did in that moment, finding myself yet again in that familiar waiting room.
“What happened?” Reina asked, making sympathetic clucking sounds at Homer through the mesh sides of the carrier.
“I don’t know. He just kind of fell over,” I told her.
Reina pressed a button on her phone that summoned a vet tech through the swinging door that led to the exam rooms in the back. She took the carrier from Reina but turned to stop me when I tried to follow. “You’ll have to wait out here,” she said kindly, but firmly.
“But I have to go with him.” My voice was calm. Just two reasonable people having a reasonable disagreement. “He’s blind, and he’s terrified of the vet’s office. I don’t think you’ll be able to handle him without me.”
She peered at Homer, silent and stone-still in his carrier. He’d always been a little guy, but now he looked positively frail. “I think we’ll manage.” She smiled reassuringly. “We have to bring him to the tech area for tests,” she explained, “and there are other animals back there. That’s why we need you to wait out here.”
I turned to Reina, who was also our pet-sitter when we traveled and knew Homer better than anyone else at the clinic, hoping for a reprieve. “He’ll be fine, mami.” Behind her, the vet tech had already disappeared with Homer back through the swinging door. “He’s so out of it, he probably won’t even know what’s going on.”
I TOOK THE seat Laurence had saved for me in the cozy, wood-paneled waiting area—made welcoming with posters of puppies and kittens, flyers for pet-sitters, and copies of Best Friends magazine—and tried to imagine what went on when a nearly unconscious cat was brought into a veterinary emergency room. My sole knowledge of what happened when someone was rushed unconscious to the hospital came from television and movies. Would they plop Homer onto a gurney and wheel him speedily into another room while a doctor called for CCs of this and tests for that? Would nurses cluster around trying to get blood pressure and pulse readings? I was heartsick, miserable at the thought of Homer—tiny Homer, weakened and terrified—being subjected to unknown probes and prods and lord-only-knew-what-else without me there to comfort him.
But, as it turned out, I was luckier than I realized. I wouldn’t have to wonder for long.
The tech area, where Homer had been taken, was all the way in the back of the building, and the waiting area was in the front. Separating them was a long corridor with exam rooms branching off from it. We were probably a good hundred feet away from Homer, with two closed doors (one at either end of the corridor) between us. Nevertheless, within a few minutes I heard what was going on.
Everybody heard what was going on.
Over the years, I’ve probably heard the full range of sounds that the average housecat is capable of making—the meows, burbles, and coos; the purring and deep-throated whines; the shrill, unforgettable screams of a cat who’s enraged or terrified. Homer himself had always had an especially rich vocal repertoire, with a series of highly distinct mews, yips, and growls meant to indicate things like, I can’t find you; I’m hungry; I’m coming over to be petted now; and This is irritating me.
What I heard now wasn’t any of those. It hardly even sounded like noises a cat should be capable of making—and, at first, I didn’t think it was a cat. I didn’t even think that the sound came from any natural source. For a second, I thought that maybe a nearby construction worker had started up a chainsaw. But, after the briefest of pauses for breath, it became clear that these were animal noises—the sound of some enraged wild beast fending off hunters or defending its territory. The vicious, furious snarls rose in volume to fill the entire waiting room, so deep now, so sustained, so impossibly loud, that they could only be described as roars.
It was lunchtime, the busiest time of day at the animal clinic, and the waiting room was packed. There were huge dogs and tiny ones at the ends of leashes, cats and rabbits in carriers, two cages containing a parrot and a parakeet. Every animal was accompanied by a human, and it was something of a miracle that Laurence had managed to score us two seats at all.
As the roars from the back of the hospital continued and grew in both volume and anger, the comfortable hum of conversation and scuffling animals in the waiting room fell silent. Reina, from her station behind the receptionist’s desk, put the call she was taking on hold and turned to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the door leading to the back. For a breathless moment, the entire animal hospital was dead silent except for the enraged clamor rising from the back. Then a hushed murmuring rose in the waiting room, as if everybody was instinctively wary of elevating their voices above a whisper. What the…? What’s going on back there? What is that? One woman, in an undertone, said something that ended with…a panther? The man she was with muttered darkly about the kind of idiot who thought it was okay to keep exotic pets in a New York apartment.
Two large dogs had begun to whimper and cringed behind the legs of their owners, while a smaller dog issued a low rumble, the hackles raised on the back of his neck. From the dark recesses of carriers, I heard hisses and growls. The parakeet twittered and fluttered frantically around his cage. I thought of my younger sister, who’d always shrieked so loudly and continuously when receiving childhood shots that every other kid in the pediatrician’s waiting room would break into terrified sobs.